The difference

The difference between the Australian response to the war with a barely organised rabble in Iraq and the response coming from other countries is important, and it reflects badly on us.

US President Obama, UK PM Cameron and other world leaders have made it clear that Daesh are a foreign entity to be degraded and disrupted before their influence spreads.

Tony Abbott has explicitly linked the activities of Daesh to goings-on in Australia, that it represents an internal threat as much as an inexternal one. He has invoked the recruitment of Australians as a reason to go to war with Daesh that does not seem to be present with other multinational operations that cause death and destruction in this country, and the prospect that trained and experienced killers might return and create havoc. No other national leader has done this - not even those from majority-Muslim countries closer to western Asia, which have a far more substantial and pressing problem on both counts.

He even addressed the UN about an incident hours old, involving a messed-up teenager whose links to Daesh were neither strong nor clear. Mental health facilities in this country are full of people who want to kill the Prime Minister, or who think they are Prime Minister, and/or who see persecution everywhere.
Cuts to those services mean that police have to deal with those people, without training or resources. Tony Abbott has misled us on so much for so long, with so little challenge that I would not be surprised if this incident turned out to be bullshit too.

As if Abbott was going to talk about climate at the UN. Are you stupid? Do you think anyone following Australian politics for longer than a week is even sillier than you are?

You would only call for Muslims to denounce Daesh if you haven't been listening to what they have said and done, or if these people have to jump when you bid them to. Daesh are not representative of Muslims, and only Murdoch headline writers think otherwise. Every significant new wave of migrants has faced similar pressures to 'fit in'.

The reason why Brandis canned a revision of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, despite upsetting part of its base, was to maintain relations with Muslim communities to thwart or monitor Australians joining Daesh. A wise government would take action against those who think they have a licence to harass people they perceive as Muslim. This is a start. Police don't need any more powers/resources than they have already to enforce existing laws. If this really isn't a war against Islam generally but against Daesh-addled ratbags in particular, the first step - the sine qua non - is to stand against harassment of Australian Muslims.

The Fairfax press published the wrong picture of the person concerned, which is important for a number of reasons:

• Bad journalism used to be limited to simply quoting press releases and speeches, like Latika Bourke does. Now, bad journalism includes sloppy combing of social media. Crap MSM journalism, not internet or Young Warwick Fairfax or whatever, is what's killing traditional media.
• There is no link between that image and the apology. The guy in that picture will miss out on opportunities because future searches will link him to terrorism. If Fairfax had injected him with asbestos or had him install roof insulation without training, they could hardly have set him up worse for life.
• Journo culture in Australia is so toxic that the guy in the photo and the impact on him will be belittled relentlessly and ignorantly. If he complains he'll be some unreasonable whinger. Yes, it was an easy mistake to make; but big-mistake-little-apology is just one of those MSM traditions that must die, along with the careers of all those who would defend it.
• Nobody is calling for the severed head of the Fairfax Media Picture Editor, but (yes I'm going to go there) Peter Greste is not rotting in an Egyptian prison for the sake of some untrammelled right to fuck up to such an extent, and get away with it.
• If it's easy for Fairfax Media to make a mistake, why is it no less easy for ASIO, the Federal and/or Victorian Police - and even George Brandis or Tony Abbott or Bill Shorten - to also make mistakes? And if you accept that they make mistakes, why treat their words with more gravity than they may warrant?

Any journalist who thinks I simply have some inexplicable hatred of the MSM is free to just piss off, and probably will when the next rounds of sackings come through.

Tony Abbott has never been a champion of freedom. In Battlelines, in other utterances and publications, he has consistently said that freedom and security are opposites and that he supports more of the latter than the former. It is one of the few things he has been consistent about, one of the very few issues on which he can be trusted. Tony Abbott is ambivalent at best, and at worst hostile, to your freedoms. He wants a society where you beg him for indulgences and are pathetically grateful for whatever he might deign to dispense.

The same applies to Brandis, as I've said elsewhere.

Journalists should have been awake to this when helping us, and themselves, decide whether Abbott would make an effective Prime Minister, and by extension Brandis an effective Attorney General.

Instead, we have people like Paul Farrell and Jonathan Green decide that Abbott's moves against freedom are something of a surprise. Green is right to say that Brandis, the buffoon of travel rorts and bigots' rights, has not suddenly become the wise and firm protector of the common weal. Green is wrong, though, to imply this has come about all of a sudden, that it was not foreseeable before last September; close and privileged observers of public affairs have been negligent in failing to point it out.

Belatedly, Farrell has stirred:

Really, we can only blame ourselves. Could all journalists, collectively, have done more than throw together a handful of submissions? Most major news organisations in Australia raised concerns about the bill and the new offences. But there was no concerted campaign, no unified push to stop these disclosure offences succeeding. We’re now stuck with these laws, probably until someone is made an example of to spur journalists into action.

There is a small comfort in all of this and that is that the laws simply won’t work as a deterrent. They won’t discourage whistleblowers. And they won’t discourage fearless journalists from reporting on our intelligence agencies when it is in the public interest to do so. The disclosures by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning – and the reporters who told these stories – have shown us that people are willing to take extraordinary actions, at great personal risk, when they believe it is necessarily to do so.

It will just mean that some of them will go to jail.

Yep: Australian journalists regard Peter Greste, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning as them, not us. There are no fearless journalists in the press gallery, just sad little dropseekers who occasionally stumble over something big and then pretend it never happened. They gave Tony Abbott the easiest ride to the Prime Ministership since Whitlam; after a few pantomime slaps over the budget emergency/non-emergency, this pattern has continued.

The press gallery is unconcerned about these laws because anything that isn't in a press release, won't be covered by them. Some of them might have their photos taken with tape over their mouths (unless Brandis' press sec ticks them off for doing so), but that's about all.

This post was considerably longer than it was, before I read this by Katharine Murphy. Yes, that Katharine Murphy, the self-confessed press gallery herd animal. It's unusually good. Impressive, even, for the most part. The best traditional-media piece so far on this topic.

She is spot on in her insistence that journalists can and should go into the details of what's going on, rather than just ripping a press release off the telex and zooming out to Endeavour Hills or wherever. You can't present the work of police officers or politicians or other non-journalists in a sensationalist, simplistic way, and then insist that journalists:

• are hardworking
• are sensible and sensitive
• balance moral/ethical dilemmas
• are under stress
• do their best to get it right, and
• when if they don't get it right - well, fuck you.

In an article concerned about framing, Murphy lurches back a decade to frame society as a three-role drama: government, media, and a passive public that cares little for either. She won't or can't even acknowledge social media, let alone credit it with informed critiques as well-made or targeted as hers. However unwittingly, she exposes the fallacy, the sheer emptiness of the traditional media notion that you have to be in journalism to be able to criticise it (and even then you have to pull your punches, as Murphy duly does).

The comments on Murphy's piece are worth reading too. Journos are told never to read the comments: they transmit to an imagined audience but block reception from the real one.

Our country has the wrong government. We have the wrong media reporting on its activities. Both of these things must change.