Expecting the unexpected

When any disaster happens it is reasonable to ask: could we have foreseen this, and could we have done anything to stop it?

The deaths of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran have been disastrous for Australia. People who once disdained them have been confronted with the awful unspinnable finality and barbarity of death, and government-mandated death at that. Our search for meaning has kicked off debates over the death penalty, the criminalisation of drugs, prison as a place of rehabilitation - even quaint protocols like blindfolds, or having a spiritual advisor present, when facing execution.

All of those debates goes back at some point to public policy, requiring responses and planning and resources to be spent. The debates arising from these deaths are different from most public policy debates in this country, initiated by a government wishing to announce a solution they have already developed. There is very little engagement from public figures in these debates: policy wonks on drugs and prison reform will get a bit of airtime and bounce their ideas around until they die from lack of traction.

Yesterday there was a palpable sense that the government had let us down in some way, without any clear idea how or why. This morning, media outlets interviewed Barnaby Joyce on the issues arising from the deaths of Chan and Sukumaran. Whenever the Coalition want to introduce a red herring into public debate, they wheel out Joyce.

Hard-hitting, savvy journalists should be awake to the Joyce ruse. If they had any professional pride they would resent being played. But they aren't, and they don't: off they went, following Joyce's lead on reintroducing the death penalty here. Traditional media enjoys debates that are heated and which lead to absolutely no change that might require coverage and analysis. They are happy to spare themselves the hard work of wondering how this situation might have been handled better.

When President Widodo was elected last year, foreign policy analysts wrote vague articles about how he might not be well disposed toward Australia. Places like the Lowy Institute, fatuous commentators like Greg Sheridan, all pretended to know more than they did. Nobody seemed to foresee that he would stop taking calls from this country's government and turn a deaf ear to the very idea of clemency, not only to Chan and Sukumaran but to the mentally-ill Rodrigo Gularte.

Isn't it lazy to assert that this really be just another kerfuffle that blows over soon enough - or as with the passing of a cyclone, will the landscape be changed by the blowing-over? Was there really no way of knowing Indonesian politics would lead Australia to this desolate, unproductive place, or where we might go from here? One thing's for sure: it's a joke to say that "Indonesia's credibility is at stake".

In all the escalating calls that Something Must Be Done, all those the last-minute appeals, there was no consideration given to the public debate in Indonesia: they too have their death-penalty opponents, and their drug-policy absolutists, and there too they talk past one another. We have less clout in Asia than we imagined - we are to that continent what Tasmania is to ours.

With his blithe dismissal of Australia's feeble, ill-considered threats of diplomatic action, HM Prasetyo looks like an absolute prick - but no more so than Scott Morrison, or Eric Abetz. Populist politics can work well for governments, and for journalists who cheer them on, but when the same politics goes against them the populists squeal loudest - and journalists cover the reversals like they were unexpected, and unfair.

Nobody seemed to anticipate the fact that the executions were announced on Anzac Day, and how it was a calculated insult to Australia. I've grown up watching interviews of old diggers, when asked why they volunteered to join a world war, exclaim "I wanted to see the world!" - a sentiment echoed by members of the Bali Nine, and by me at times, and maybe even by your own self dear reader.

Foreign policy is predicated on a strict division between high matters of principle (big themes: global initiatives, multi-lateral agreements) and consular matters (petty themes: Australians breaching foreign laws); in this case, as with Peter Greste in Egypt, these supposedly parallel facets of our foreign policy collided. Could this reshape the way we conduct our foreign policy?

Nobody seemed to measure developments in Indonesia against Abbott's proposal for "Jakarta-centred foreign policy". Whatever that might mean, or have meant, it looks like yet another area of policy in which Abbott is hopelessly out of his depth but can't avoid. Waleed Aly's fourth point exonerates Abbott - but I'm not so sure. Who knows what, if anything, Abbott feels? Does the Prime Minister have no advisors - in the permanent public service or in his partisan office - who could have crafted a better message for a man who has been a spokesperson all his life, at such a time?

We need better coverage of policy because that is the only way for citizens/ voters/ taxpayers/ people to judge whether we are being governed well or badly. The press-gallery method of covering politics is bullshit: stuck fast in meaningless minutiae, too easily ambushed by 'events' which they can't understand except by being spoon-fed by those with an agenda; too easily nobbled.

When the traditional media act all surprised at foreseeable events it isn't thrilling hype - it's boring, and robs us of the ability to seek out better policy, and to hold policy-makers to account. It does traditional media no favours either.

Jonathan Green attempts to draw false equivalence between traditional media - which has a tradition of restraint and in-depth consideration of complex issues - and social media, which doesn't, and which (especially in the case of Twitter) is constrained by space issues. Social media is not obliged to pick up the dropped baton of well-informed, nuanced information about complex issues. It is out of control because it was never under anyone's control, something that can't be said of the top-down empires of traditional media. Perhaps Green's implication is all too accurate (reinforced by Mr Denmore) that we cannot reasonably expect traditional media to lift their game.

A badly-informed populace is something journalists should take less delight and bemusement in than they do. Brigid Delaney probably consumes more Australian media than anyone, yet she was surprised by the outcome in a way that no well-read person should be. It is proof that journalism, and all the resources devoted to it (including legal protections and feather-bedding in places like the press gallery) has failed, and failures have no excuse sneering at those no better than they.

Chan, Sukumaran and the other members of the 'Bali Nine' were arrested in 2006. We've been through three Prime Ministers since then, and Indonesia has changed President. There are wider issues about what our foreign policy even is, and how it is developed and executed - and the way it is reported, and the role foreign policy plays in the narrative over whether the incumbents govern us well or badly.

That said, what does democratic input in this area look like? No country manages its foreign policy on the basis of populism and democratic will - it is largely an elite preoccupation, one that tends to change little with political complexion. Policy-makers don't have the political tools to engage the public, especially where security agencies get involved. Journalists are easily fobbed off with the "operational matters" thing, especially with recent legislation against disclosure.

While policies themselves will come under less and less scrutiny, the results of half-baked policy will become increasingly clear. Debates over big issues will go on in different media and call for public resources. When previously trusted sources of information on public policy (traditional media and what are now major parties) fail, people will have to pick up the slack - but how, and with what? That's the challenge of our age. Spokespeople and their bemused observers overestimate their ability even to describe the challenge, let alone meet it.

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.

Capability, decency ... and the Abbott government

And for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
And I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
I thought I had found my golden September in the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

- Augie March One crowded hour

Traditional media reviews the performance of a new government at the hundred-day mark, and at the first anniversary of its taking office. The hundred-day reviews of the Abbott government catalogued how petty and nasty it was, overlooking the inconvenient truth of the gap between what it said it would do and what it actually is doing. It's too early for the anniversary, but bugger it, let's have the review anyway in light of current circumstances.

The Abbott government was elected in order to:

• Can the carbon pricing mechanism as its first order of business
• Can the mining tax too
• Stop asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat
• Run everything else pretty much as the Gillard and Rudd governments said they were going to, but with a bit of political stability

Since last September the Abbott government has:

• Finally abolished the carbon pricing mechanism, but with a lot of palaver and no credit for having done so
• The mining tax still in place (consider this: the persuasive skills of this government are so bad that they can't even persuade a mining billionaire, who campaigned against the mining tax, to abolish it. It's supposedly a massive impost on our economy, yet ten months later its abolition simply fell off the legislative agenda)
• Still dealing with asylum-seekers coming to Australia by boat, and there's no commentary about on-water matters until there is, and while Morrison is a minister in disarray the press gallery yearn to hear from him
• Botched everything else - education funding, interference in the national broadcasters, welfare, health, has been trashed to the point where you're entitled to believe everything this government says is bullshit; and last but not least
• Suddenly become destabilised. Unlike under the Gillard government, the press gallery is not implying that leadership tensions within the government are at fever pitch and that any moment now, the PM is going to be rolled. This means the government is stable, right? According to Madonna King, the leadership tensions of December 2009 have not been fully resolved, with Hockey, Turnbull and Abbott at weapons drawn like the warehouse scene from Reservoir Dogs. The press gallery had a) no idea about this LIBERAL SPLIT SHOCK or b) covered it up, before King embarrassed them for the higher cause of telling the truth about how we are governed plugging her book.

Given all that, and the feigned surprise of the press gallery about how we've all been had (how could they possibly have known?), the crash of MH17 ten days ago and the Abbott government's initial reaction to it was something of a surprise.

Since the fall of the Fraser government, the Coalition has stuffed its foreign policy with warmed-over US Republican suspicion of the United Nations. Certainly this government's disdain for UN refugee protocols, and its contempt for Rudd's quest for a Security Council seat, is a matter of record. Yet, the government was right to recognise MH17 as a problem requiring concerted international action through established forums; it dispatched Julie Bishop to New York without stating up front exactly what she was supposed to achieve by going there, a breach of its standard practice. This meant anything she did achieve was a bonus.

Bishop got all the credit for that motion before the Security Council from pretty much all of the press gallery. Little credit was given to Australia's permanent legation at the UN, and you had to go to foreign news sites to see the significant input from Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. One day the whole, nuanced tale might come to light, but for the moment it is jarring when the Dutch and others make the big decisions that flow from what, apparently, was an Aussie diplomatic triumph. So much for the first draft of history.

The press gallery has been deaf to the shifting global power relations evident in responses to this incident. Do the press gallery, and the traditional media outlets that employ them (for the moment) not realise that Australians can access foreign news sources?

Bishop couldn't even credit Rudd, Gillard, and Bob Carr for having put Australia onto the Security Council, and apparently she is denying a DFAT briefing to the Opposition (how she howled when she was in the post Plibersek occupies today). The woman who ran down the clock on people dying from asbestos-related diseases is now bending over backwards for victims of a much more abrupt act of negligence. For all her flaws, this could well be her finest moment.

Putin has been a world leader for as long as Abbott and Bishop have been frontbenchers in Australian politics - there are no examples where Putin has caved to world opinion, and Abbott won't and can't change that. People like Campbell Newman or Joe Hockey insisting that Putin might not be welcome at the G20 in Brisbane later this year has the potential to more than negate Bishop's diplomatic achievement.

Russia does not have the ability to project power beyond its borders that the Soviet Union did. In Georgia and Ingushetia we have seen that Putin relies on bands of thugs, with Kalashnikovs in one hand and vodka bottles in the other, roaming around making the territory ungovernable but in some vague way 'loyal' to Moscow. This is how Russia denied an intact Yugoslavia to the West, by arming marauding Serbs and reducing other players in the Balkans to their level. This is what he's doing in eastern Ukraine: given what we know now the shooting down of MH17 makes no sense geopolitically, but only as a horrible error. The audio evidence from intercepted communications, and the sheepishness by the Russian government, point to that conclusion. Abbott was dumb to paint Putin into a corner, this piece was a little too cute in ignoring Abbott, and The Daily Telegraph dumber still for making it appear that Abbott forced concessions from Putin.

All that said, the idea of Tony Abbott being competent and dignified is pretty surprising, and without seeking to verbal him Tim Dunlop takes a similar position.

Imagine there was a vicious dog living in your street, and that pretty much every time you and your neighbours went past it the dog reared up and barked menacingly. Imagine your entreaties to the owners were met with abuse, or jeers at your powerlessness. Now imagine walking by that house and, instead of barking, the dog began singing Donna e mobile pitch-perfect and enunciated beautifully - this is what it's like watching random acts of competence from the Abbott government.

Commentators are expected to have a response to every situation, but sometimes slack-jawed mute amazement is most eloquent.

After the amazement comes one of two reactions: either embracing the new situation, or a retreat into denial. However much I disagree with the findings of so-called "9-11 truthers", I have some sympathy with their inability to credit disaffected Arabs with such an event and their insistence on bigger targets like the Rothschilds or the CIA. However, as I said earlier, Abbott killed his golden moment with overreach.

The idea of sending armed federal police into a conflict zone was dumb, though understandable given the Dutch army's role in Srebrenica. It should have snapped the press gallery out of its "universally agreed" praise and support for Abbott, and reminded even its most consistently worthwhile correspondent that it too can be guilty of overreach:

Death and tragedy reset the national political conversation.

Tingle refers to the all-too-brief lull following the death of John Gillard and the low "died of shame" attacks from Alan Jones, Joe Hockey, and Tony Abbott against his daughter. Does this mean Australian politics - and the reporting thereof - will sink to a new low over coming days?

There is a restraint in what issues journalists ask questions about. A sudden observance of appropriateness rules.

Not really. Tingle's press gallery colleagues speculate whether MH17 (and the unqualified press gallery praise for Abbott's response) will give Abbott a "poll bounce", even while the dead passengers remain unburied. This is ghoulishly indecent and reflects poorly on all members of the gallery, and their editors, lowering their behaviour to that of the Murdoch journalist who rifled through passenger luggage spread across the steppes because they just can't help it. It negates whatever propriety Abbott and Bishop showed in the hours after the incident.

So whatever else is said about MH17, it stopped the noise generated by the Senate and Clive Palmer in its tracks.

It just did the same thing in a different form. The "noise generated by the Senate and Clive Palmer" was all about applying pressure to implement the government's agenda, to save an already failing government from itself. By contrast, the unstinting praise surrounding Abbott's initial response to MH17 was all about applying pressure to implement the government's agenda, to save an already failing government from itself.

Context is also playing a grotesque game with the portrait of Joe Hockey painted in Madonna King’s new book Hockey: Not Your Average Joe.

See above - the idea that this government, for all its shortcomings, presents a unified front is no longer true, and given the effect that polls have in Canberra the centripetal pressures on this government will only increase. Abbott, Hockey, and Turnbull are each diminished. None has any real incentive to pull together for any cause wider than themselves. Ten months after it was elected to supposedly address a budget emergency, no budget has been passed, and even the crisis has evaporated.

Tingle goes on to describe a critique of health policy by the AMA, but such criticisms were eminently foreseeable after years of policy dereliction from Peter Dutton (now Health Minister, Dutton had been Health spokesman for most of the Coalition's time in opposition; he has apparently done no policy work to speak of, despite its significance to the national budget and political sensitivities, leaving himself and the government open to criticism long before Owler's speech. You want context? That's context).

It seems 'context' is the press gallery's way of asserting that its interpretation of events is the only possible interpretation, a point echoed feebly by Annabel Crabb and Murdoch pissboy and propagandist Simon Benson:

What Abbott has exposed this week more than anything is the complete vacuum of leadership Australia had been living under in the six years of Labor government.

Rudd, Gillard, Combet - and yes, Shorten - any of them would have done what Abbott did, without the overreach and without having to fend off frantic attention-seeking behaviour from Tony Abbott (and Simon Benson). The rest of Benson's piece, and his body of work more generally, might fairly be described as crap.

The competence and decorum shown by the Abbott government was shown to be an aberration, reverting as it is to incompetent policy and indecorous politics. Those of us who (generally) aren't impressed by this government can draw no vindication as there is no safe, capable, real alternative. The adults boxed Abbott in to accepting things like UN Security Council resolutions, and there is some hope that may yet be replicated in health policy.

This government can only be rendered competent when its other sneaky, half-baked alternatives are firmly closed off. The press gallery are not yet awake to this, and may never be - they are waiting pointlessly but earnestly for a "poll bounce", a return to their 'golden September' of last year. The polls are, as ever, beside the point. All we should reasonably foresee from recent developments is "the tenderness of patient minds/ And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds".

On a different plane

I love myself better than you
I know it's wrong so what should I do?
I'm on a plain
I can't complain
I'm on a plain

- Nirvana On a plain

The Federal Government is proposing to purchase a new aeroplane to transport the Prime Minister, his staff, and a gaggle of handpicked press gallery journalists around the world.

The way that news.com.au reported it was interesting. The government is a victim of its own mixed messaging: if there really is a budget crisis, that is the very sort of expenditure item that can and should be deferred. The media is in a similar bind:

The bigger RAAF planes would also be fitted with the latest in global communications systems ensuring the Prime Minister is never out of touch with his cabinet colleagues and key officials.

At present the nation's leader is incommunicado whenever he travels on a VIP jet.

There is no reason why modern communications facilities must be installed on a larger jet. It would be a security risk having those facilities on an aircraft carrying a critical mass of personnel outside the government and the RAAF. As a justification for a new and larger aircraft, this is a non-sequitur.

Oh - and Abbott is the leader of the government, not the nation, as he himself made clear in the lead-up to the 1999 referendum.

The aircraft also lack modern day in-flight communications, such as those fitted to the US President's jumbo jet Air Force One, allowing leaders to stay in touch in transit.

The US President is the commander-in-chief of the largest military force the world has ever known; the Prime Minister of Australia isn't. The structure of the US military-foreign policy axis is such that the US President can never be incommunicado. There has never been a negative outcome from having the Australian Prime Minister incommunicado for a few hours, and it is hard to imagine any such development.

The BBJs were leased by the Howard government after then secretary of prime minister and cabinet, Max "The Axe" Moore-Wilton, convinced the government to force the media to make their own way to overseas events.

In 2007 media companies threatened to ignore official overseas visits altogether in the wake of the deaths of five Australians, including journalist Morgan Mellish, when the Garuda Airlines plane carrying reporters and officials crashed in Indonesia during an official visit by then ministers Alexander Downer and Phillip Ruddock.

"Our current position and that of Fairfax is that our editors and bureau chiefs will not send correspondents on commercial aircraft in countries where air safety is an issue, if there is no room for them on official aircraft," then News Limited chief John Hartigan said at the time.

Yeah, right.

First, nobody voted for Moore-Wilton; just because he advised something it didn't oblige the government to take that advice.

Second, as you'd expect, Hartigan's statement was empty. Neither Mellish nor Banham worked for him. Media organisations threatening not to cover meetings overseas is completely negated by government media tactics like this (thanks @NKW2). Journos shrieked that Abbott was avoiding their hard-hitting questions (thanks @Leroy_Lynch): this overlooks the fact that they don't do hard-hitting questions when it comes to Abbott, and that where they do his non-answers are not followed up.

Politicians dodge press gallery questions as a matter of course. Those questions are only ever followed up if the journos think the issue will spell the end of the career of the politician being asked; again, there is no fourth-estate public interest thing going on there.

A big new plane combining journos and the PM would not make for better reporting. They have no perspective and ask inane questions in Canberra, and neither altitude nor distance improves matters. Recall Abbott's dire Convoy of Maximum Offence around the Asia-Pacific soon after getting elected, and the insistence by the hand-picked camp followers that this disaster was in fact a triumph. Journos may hanker for relaxed off-the-record chats with the PM, but there is no fourth-estate justification for that as they don't make it into public reports.

Imagine you're a press gallery journalist sent on an overseas assignment with the PM. Imagine that for whatever reason, Peta is in a snit about you and/or your employer, and is playing no-speakies with you - or if something like this or this or that happens. Do you tell your employer not to pay the nominated fare? If so, what happens?

Should the Royal Australian Air Force really have to cover the costs of victualling this ferociously entitled bunch (the press gallery, not just the government) or should passengers be charged extra? Do not even get me started on how the press gallery selects its members and whom it excludes.

The Boeing 777 and Airbus A-330 each cost about $250 million and both can carry in excess of 200 passengers in VIP configuration.

Journalists are quick to tell you that the government charges fares on VIP aircraft, and that those fares are higher than commercial airline fares. Of course they are: commercial airlines fly set routes regularly to drive down the unit costs. Anyway, those fares confuses the issue of capital expenditure (the cost of acquiring something) with operational expenditure (the cost of running something once you've acquired it).

That's a quarter of a billion dollars, folks, at a time when the Australian dollar is depreciating at a rate of knots against the currencies of aircraft manufacturers, and at a time when it could it be better spent on - well, lots of things really. Do we have a budget crisis or not? Insert your own public-sector spending preferences for that amount here - how many mental health treatments for returning Afghanistan veterans, how many before-and-after-school childcare places, how many drunken clowns bailed out of pokey in Denpasar, etc.

The idea that press gallery journos are cool with the idea of One Big Plane, and have a reasonable fear that without it what happened to Morgan Mellish and Cynthia Banham might happen to them, is pretty silly. The idea that they are willing to trade off criticism of the government for the promise of a ride in such a plane is monstrous; not quite justification for shooting it down fully-laden, but getting there. There is no good reason why you couldn't have a commed-up smaller jet for the PM and staff, with a separate chartered jet for journalists also equipped with communication equipment, and for interaction to occur between the two in the air. Hell, why not send images straight back to Canberra, where all the facilities are already in situ?

There are dodgy parts of the world, to be sure, and if you ask an old foreign correspondent they will probably regale you with hair-raising tales of roughing it on Aëro-Dõdgi while being shelled, etc etc. You can bet, however, that the Australian Prime Minister won't be going to those places - too many potential asylum seekers for a start. A big damn aeroplane of the type being considered simply cannot land at airports other than with the most sophisticated equipment, which tend to be airports well covered by reputable commercial flights.

Foreign correspondents must laugh at their pampered colleagues in the press gallery, spoon-fed drops every day and demanding only the best travel should they be wrenched from their comfortable cocoons in Canberra. Imagine hard-bitten foreign corros refusing to go on any aircraft that doesn't comply with CASA standards or serve G+Ts on takeoff - then wonder no longer why the Australian media is cutting back its foreign bureaux.

At a time when even fewer people are concerned about politics than ever before, this one story reveals plenty about not only politics, but also the media:

Both Mr Howard and his successor Kevin Rudd pledged to take action but nothing has happened in the six years since the tragedy.

Of all the public policy issues left unresolved by the Howard and Rudd governments, this is not a priority for anyone outside the press gallery. The fact that the 'tragedy' does not apparently include the hundreds of other dead and injured fellow-passengers of Mellish and Banham is galling too. The opposition have been silent too, too silent. The prospect that the press gallery might trade off creature comforts in the air for a "truce" on the ground (and not limited to the aircraft), and hang the expense that they will never bear, is deeply revolting. It further reveals the redundancy of this sump of journalism, and only makes brighter the prospects for reporting on government once it is abolished.

A study in character

See this in its entirety: thirty minutes of your life you won't get back, but it's all about the context.

It is ironic that GetUp! achieved greater insight into the way our political system works through an accident than it has for many of its best-orchestrated campaigns.

When Simon Sheikh passed out on the set of the ABC's Q&A:

• The host, Tony Jones, just sat there (some host!)
• Lenore Taylor, a journalist, also just sat there
• Greg Combet MP, a government minister, stepped up and helped Sheikh
• Grahame Morris, a lobbyist, stood up at his desk and looked concerned; a man no longer accustomed to getting his hands dirty, Morris is used to having people scurry around at the sight of him doing something really dramatic like standing up at his desk looking concerned (or maybe he wanted to do to Sheikh what he advocated doing to the PM, and "kick [him] to death"), and
• Sophie Mirabella MP, who was sitting next to Sheikh, regarded him with revulsion and then, realising that others were making her look bad and that there was nothing she could do about it, put her hand on his shoulder.

This was a test of character for all concerned. The idea that they all deserve a free pass because "hey, that's just live television baby!" is just bullshit.

Combet showed himself to be a leader in our community, which is what you'd hope for from someone in his position. Some Coalition MPs would have stood up and helped in such a situation, and not just those with medical qualifications. Mirabella, who aspires to the job currently occupied by Combet, showed only that she must not be put in a position of any responsibility whatsoever and must be removed from any such position she now holds. Simply calling for help would have showed the humanity that is needed in her position, but which she clearly lacks.

Lauren Rosewarne thinks Mirabella was criticised for "failing to emote". She was actually and fairly criticised for failing to render assistance where assistance was required. It is stupid to accuse Sheikh of 'crying wolf' as some sort of invalidation for medical treatment.

Medical emergencies always happen quickly (or, as Rosewarne put it, "Under. One. Minute."). It's part of your civic duty to find out how to help people who need help, and wait with them until the professionals arrive (or, as Rosewarne put it, "Florence Nightingale mode"). Medical emergencies transcend gender politics, and if her failure was not at the heart of this issue the very first person to assert this would be Sophie Mirabella.

Let's give the benefit of the doubt, if not congratulations, to off-camera staff at the ABC studios that night. Their actions, unseen by viewers outside the studio, may explain the (non-)actions of Taylor, Morris and Jones. The latter may think it's his role to keep his head while all about are losing theirs, but I still think there is more to it.

Sophie Mirabella failed the basic moral test of refusing to assist someone who needed it. Having wound herself up she couldn't get over herself in order to render basic assistance. Everyone on that panel is judged on the same basis, regardless of gender; most found wanting. Lenore Taylor hasn't done much emoting today over this matter, but so what? Practical assistance, and the need thereof as required, is much more important than irrelevant disquisitions on "emoting".

It's probably more important to be able to help people when they need it than it is to enrol to vote, but at the time of writing I am too pissed off to even think about that. This is partly because I have just reviewed the earbashing that Mirabella gave the nation once again. Along with Macquarie Street troll Peter Phelps, a piece of jetsam swept up in a king tide, Mirabella embodies that perverse strain of the worst, Pellite notion of conservatism: that you are entitled to deference by sheer assertion/gall and the occupation of titles, but that none dare expect any from you. That's why this doesn't work:

Lindy Chamberlain. Casey Anthony. Joanna Lees. Women who were each publicly vilified based on the weakest and yet most damning of evidence: the failure to appropriately – to femininely – emote.

Weak, yes, but hardly damning. Lees emoted like billy-o when it suited her and Chamberlain didn't just sit by and watch her baby being dragged to death. Whatever point Rosewarne might have is stranded by the sheer fatuity of her parallels and her simple inability to perceive the situation on which she commented (click the link at the top of the page, Lauren, and watch it). That, and the fact that Sophie Mirabella has spent what passes for her life sneering at "do-gooders" (of whatever gender, Lauren) who render aid to others completely flouting Randian teachings.

Mirabella did express emotion towards Sheikh: the emotion was disgust.

There isn't a question anyone could have asked that so clearly demonstrated who stands where, who can be relied upon and who can't. As a telling moment about those who would govern us it was up there with Joe Hockey's moment of weakness/moral failure on gay marriage with Penny Wong.

The civic-minded among us can get first aid training at a location near you from Australian Red Cross or St John's, or other organisations I'm sure. Get some. This blog will still be here when you get back - and yes, I have, and do - and stuff any "Florence Nightingale" bullshit. Some good thing has to come from this sorry and absurd episode.

From rescue to recovery

The Opposition claim to have fifty fully funded and costed policies ready to go, according to this paywalled article I read via Google News. Immigration isn't one of them as you can see from another paywalled article you can access for free via Google News.

Scott Morrison believes "the time for talking is over" because he has run out of ideas. Immigration is such a contentious issue in the Liberal Party that the only way it can keep a lid on the internal debate is by reverting to the Howard government's policies, and a time when concerns about humanitarianism could be and was shunted to the margins. The fact that the Howard government was voted from office is a technicality that hasn't sunk in yet, or which can be ignored in the hope of reversing it.

The small number of votes to be had from intolerance and deterrence of asylum-seekers is easily quantifiable by mouth-breathers like Mark Textor, whereas the wider credit accrued to people like Malcolm Fraser for resolving actually exising problems in a humane way is just too hard for poll jockeys like Morrison and Abbott. Appeals to humanity and the national interests are wasted on those guys for that reason.

Morrison has no real idea about his portfolio. The only suggestions he offers are like the worst discussions of defence policy, a focus on hardware specs with "redeployment of naval assets ... and potentially expand our aerial surveillance capacity" etc. Lumping asylum-seekers in with piracy and drug-running is stupid (when a small fortune in China White goes to the bottom of the Arafura Sea, it does not need or get rescuing by the armed forces). He stumbles upon the idea of a regional solution but again focuses on military assets rather than the much-needed comprehensive involvement of governments, NGOs (including the United Nations) and private firms which have something to offer.

Nauru is not a solution because no asylum seekers start their journey to Australia from there. People would have to be taken there by Australian authorities. It is more accurate to describe this as a costly charade rather than "the Coalition's proven policies", particularly if you don't give the Coalition credit for "stopping the boats" during the time of relative peace and prosperity around 2005.

My favourite part was this:

The survey area and the frequency of surveillance must also be expanded and include the Indonesian coast, to enable vessels to be tracked more regularly, even from their point of departure. Where necessary, we should seek agreement from Indonesia for such surveillance.

But only where necessary, mind you. If we absolutely had to respect Indonesia as a sovereign nation, then Scotty can probably rustle up a bit of respect from somewhere. Seriously, which country is going to give up control over its territorial waters to that extent? You know that he hasn't even had a conversation with anyone in Jakarta about that. The insult to our neighbour is compounded by the blithe way in which he raises this: oh yeah, and we might discuss it with the foreigners if we must. And we're expected to have this guy as a minister in our government?

Now do you see why the Coalition's Asian languages announcement is a joke?

My least favourite part was the passive-aggressive way in which Morrison put his refusal to deal with his fellow Australians in the incumbent government:

• "Sadly, this government has become the problem ..."
• "Regrettably, I have no confidence that this government can fix this problem. Too much has happened ..."

If he can't deal with his fellow elected representatives in the Australian Parliament - if the harsh words of Judi Moylan, Russell Broadbent and Mal Washer within the Liberal Party room fall as boiling oil upon his head - then he has bugger-all chance in dealing effectively with people who come from completely different countries and have totally different priorities. Sadly. Regrettably. Pfft.

There are three major issues with the Liberal immigration policy that Morrison would need to deal with, and fast, if he faced real scrutiny from the media as well as a minister with his eye on the ball:

• He still hasn't worked out the contradiction between his professed concern for human rights protections in Malaysia, which hasn't signed the UN refugee treaty, and his lack of concern for those same rights in Indonesia, which also hasn't signed the treaty; and
• Morrison hasn't worked out the contradiction between the Liberals' domestic agenda (a professed concern for those with pluck and courage in business and a scorn for those who just sit back and fill out forms and want help from the government), versus his position on asylum seekers (scorn for those with pluck and courage in getting to Australia by any means necessary, and a professed concern for those who just sit back and fill out forms and want help from the government); and
• Just what sort of deterrent is Australia supposed to put up? We're dealing with people who have been driven from their homes, families and communities by really significant disincentives. Short of machine-gunning people in the water there is no real disincentive you could put up to make refugees stop coming here. It's those darn "pull factors", Scott! If you think this country has gone to the dogs, wait until immigrants stop coming.

If Chris Bowen was not so overrated he would have torn Morrison apart over these contradictions, and in doing so revealed the Coalition as less prepared for government than Paul Kelly and others would have you believe. If journalists were exploring Morrison's lazy, muddle-headed approach to policy detail and his glib approach to serious big-picture international issues, it might actually be a bad thing for so many to be downsized.

The government should quarantine a minimum of 5000 places for the offshore special humanitarian program, in addition to the 6000 for mandated refugees through the UNHCR. The balance of the program should be available for onshore applicants. Where the quota of 13,750 permanent visas is exceeded, only temporary visas should be provided until a place under the program is available. If someone is going to wait for a permanent visa, it should not be those who are so vulnerable they cannot afford a bus ticket, let alone a plane to Jakarta and a boat to Australia.

The time for talking is over.

That paragraph is full of administrative arrangements that are eminently suitable for negotiation among people of sense and goodwill: 6000 of this and 13,750 of that and various programs and classifications, the very sort of horse-trading that pollies do all the time. The declaration that follows, at the start of Morrison's final paragraph, is just another attempt to make obstinacy look like decisiveness.

The Coalition declared that both the carbon price and the mining tax were dire threats to the economy and the nation. In a hung parliament they failed to stop either. The Coalition declared that Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper should not stay in their positions, and that Kathy Jackson and James Ashby were heroic for speaking out; they failed to remove the former and the latter have (to say the least) let them down. They can't win a trick.

In tonight's news Abbott was photographed chatting amiably with spoilt boy and convicted thug Nick D'Arcy, and was later reported to have done to a fat guy who owns the LNP something similar to what he did to Mark Riley. Peta Credlin is really losing her touch. This is the very time in the electoral cycle when deep, entrenched attitudes that can't be shifted in an election campaign take hold. No wonder Abbott wanted to fast-forward straight to election day.

Morrison was sent out to play the hits and memories of a non-policy that apparently strikes a chord. It has attracted all the votes it is going to attract. Those who are opposed are becoming less sullen and silent, as Malcolm Fraser demonstrates, and is starting to repulse those who are unsure. It also feeds into a wider narrative that Abbott is an insensitive dickhead, and that if Morrison is any example then the whole Coalition government will be like that. Imagine Morrison encountering in one of his talkback radio appearances an Australian who "cannot afford a bus ticket", and consider how far his humanitarian pose would extend.

Morrison thinks he's whacking a piňata of popular support but he's really flaying a beehive, and is unprepared for what seems inevitable. Being incorrigible doesn't negate this silliness, it compounds it. There is a need for a regional agreement, but any joint command arrangements follow, not lead, such an agreement. Morrison and Julie Bishop have shown that they lack the flexibility to develop such an arrangement.

In NSW Bob Carr showed himself a past master at taking credit for what the Coalition hinted at dimly and pulling it off before they could weigh policy options with their limited skills and attention spans. Unless he's lost his touch, Carr has what it takes to carry the dead weight of Bowen with him, and give the Prime Minister another of those get-out-of-gaol-cards that she gets instead of credit.

Having declared that "enough is enough" and "The time for talking is over", it's puzzling that Morrison complains that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Immigration haven't called him. They haven't called me either, Scott. Must be all that governing they are busy doing.

This is not to say that the Gillard government will do a great job with asylum-seeker policy (particularly under the current minister) but the Coalition definitely can't and won't.

On drugs

The series of articles on drug laws and the need for reform in The Sydney Morning Herald has been positive, arising from the Australia21 report on the issue. The SMH have much to show their News Ltd colleagues about fostering a debate rather than running a campaign. While it's telling that so many major figures have come out against prohibition, with Mick Palmer not the least of them, this has been a debate that's been part of our lives more broadly. Drug law reform can't and shouldn't succeed until its scope is broadened; it is a shame that both Australia21, and the SMH, have overlooked that.

There's more to the drug debate than just prohibition vs decriminalisation. You can see that in the debates going on elsewhere that both Australia21 and the SMH has rigorously quarantined from its coverage of drug law reform. Perhaps they have done this in an attempt to bring clarity to what everyone agrees is a complex issue. I disagree that it will be effective or desirable in either securing drug decriminalisation, or in mapping out what might or should happen once drugs that are now illicit become legalised.

People want drug addiction to be seen as a public health issue. Let's do that, and in so doing let's look at a public health campaign that has been hard-fought and almost won, and which is not at all unrelated to the debate on other drugs: tobacco.

The first thing to remember is that tobacco is a more serious health problem for Australians, in themselves and in terms of costs to taxpayers and the economy more broadly, than illicit drugs. The cost of prohibition should take account of the averted costs of its alternative, rather than simply being written off as some sort of dead loss.

The second is that, just as the tobacco industry faces the prospect of sinking to its knees under the weight of plain packaging, it faces the prospect that decriminalisation will not just throw it a lifeline but open a cornucopia of commercial opportunities. All of those charges levelled at tobacco and alcohol companies about marketing to minors will come back with a vengeance when tobacco growers get a licence to grow cannabis, and when smaller companies that form part of the tobacco distribution network see the opportunities in now-illicit drugs as compensation over the government's war against tobacco. Big companies will sneak their special-treatments in with the smaller ones, and government will give them. Those hoping for additional funds to be spent on healthcare can only watch the money flow away from them as "incentives" for those who have waged war on public health campaigns.

You may think that your local neighbourhood drug dealer sidling up to the kids after school with a collection of little baggies is A Threat To Our Children, if not to Our Way Of Life. Wait until the perfectly legal, expensive and sophisticated marketing campaigns hit full stride. Look at the success that junk food has had over a younger generation, and imagine how successful similar campaigns for illicit drugs would be. Now contrast that against the odd junkie scuttling into the shadows for their hit in terms of the length and breadth of a real social problem, and ask yourself whether you are really making things better.

These companies will make the case that they can take the illicit trade out of the hands of thugs - subjecting them to taxation and regulation - just as legalisation did for gaming and abortion. They will be right, too. Do not doubt that those interests will prevail over those who would tightly regulate those drugs that are now illicit, as per the Australia21 report.

Purists will maintain that illicit drugs should be reserved for medicinal purposes only, e.g.:

• Pure heroin for use in safe injection environments, as part of programs to work addicts off the drug, or
• Distillation of those chemical compounds within cannabis that stimulate appetite and create feelings of well-being to counter the ravages of chemotherapy.

Setting up this new regulatory environment will require a great deal of expenditure on the part of government with little or no offsetting income. There will be adjustment difficulties that make government look stupid. It will still require the enforcement of prohibition against those who desire drugs and have the means to pay for them, but who have no need for them as determined by medical programs operating within government regulation and budgets.

Peter Baume was a moderate Liberal who was Health Minister in the Fraser Government for less than a year before it lost office, the last Federal minister in that portfolio who didn't have to deal with Medicare. He was a factional opponent of John Howard and the Liberal right and he retired from the Senate ahead of the boot as the party changed around him. Many of the arguments that appear in the Australia21 Report are those which he tried to push through the Liberal Party in opposition, including trying to push through the Young Liberals during my time there. The moderates were under such sustained attack that to support Baume was a factional stand in favour of a pluralism that has now gone. Baume became tetchy when challenged, even by moderates, which detracted from messages like this:

Heroin was legal and could be prescribed by doctors in Australia until 1953. That is, heroin became a problem after, and not before, it was prohibited.

In 1953 authority had a greater hold over the population than it does today. The campaigns against the non-medically sanctioned use of opiates in the nineteenth century still applied in 1953: it was something that was the preserve of Asian people and was proof, for those who sought it, of their inferiority to White Australia.

Baume has been impeccable against race-baiters, and I defer to his understanding of the dimensions of heroin addiction as a real public policy problem; but in an age where Authority in general is much diminished there is no equivalent social repellent to turn Australians away from a dangerous drug. Public health campaigns against addiction have the appearance of make-work schemes, doing worthy work but too little against a problem that can only grow.

The first group of Australians to experience heroin addiction as a significant problem were much overlooked in their time, especially in terms of their health. They were the first Australians who travelled to and from Southeast Asia in their thousands: Vietnam veterans. They had problems with alcohol and Agent Orange exposure too, and these problems were simply and flatly denied. The fact that heroin was illegal, that alcohol wasn't and that nobody went out sculling DDT is to ignore the lessons of that time.

Simply legalising and containing heroin addiction within health programs is an inadequate response to a much wider problem. It's foolish to graft on yet another health program to the ragged patchwork already in place and expect any benefit beyond the marginal, at a cost that will have to be massive in order to be realised. Let's not even talk about co-ordination of other policies beyond law-and-order and health (e.g. housing, welfare payments).

Baby-boomers weren't politically powerful in 1953. Decisions were made on their behalf by a waste-not-want-not people, in the parliament, in the bureaucracy, in pharmacies and doctors' clinics and police stations, and in the community more broadly. They pushed for drug decriminalisation in their youth for lifestyle reasons, and now as they enter their dotage they appeal to medicine and palliative care. The political question is, do baby-boomers still have the power to command public resources for a policy that suits them, and won't necessarily benefit the rest of us? Will they tolerate health funds being diverted toward younger people, away from them?

It's a basic flaw of the Australia21 report that it focuses on heroin overdoses and other drug deaths. It refers in passing to incidental crimes committed by addicts to fund their habits, but there is more to the drug problem than that and costs from widespread, normalised drug use should have been factored in, even if funding for the report did not allow for detailed modelling. I'd be fascinated to see the soil degradation, runoff and other environmental impacts from an industrial-sized cannabis crop (what do you mean, no modelling has been done?).

Australians in particular mix drugs. Australian policy must relate to Australians. "Social smokers" who consume tobacco when under the influence of alcohol, and who combine alcohol with drugs of varying legality and chemical composition, show that demarcating illicit drugs in the name of 'clarity' or 'focus' are chasing a mirage and doing the country a disservice. The report skates over mental illness in drug use, particularly for those abused as children, but it needs to be part of a bigger solution than decriminalisation. Anyone who thinks that illicit drugs is so different to pokies, alcohol etc. can shove their apples and their oranges; those issues are more similar than different.

The other fundamental flaw with the Australia21 is a misreading of the political system. The report is predicated upon an assumption that bipartisan support for their position is desirable and even achievable, despite a sop of realism to the pressures on politicians to avoid controversy. This is so wrong that it completely undermines the report, and is puzzling from a board that has operated at the highest levels of government.

Led by Tony Abbott, the Coalition have trashed bipartisanship. The changes to the Liberal Party that forced Peter Baume into retirement have continued to the point where a latter-day Baume would flee from his first branch meeting, and would have no hope in a preselection. There is no way that the Coalition as currently configured can or will consider legalising now-illicit drugs. Any individual Liberals who might have considered it are keeping their heads down and toe-ing the Abbott line (e.g. Joe Hockey, Marise Payne), or are marginal figures (e.g. Mal Washer), and put together they couldn't actually change policy and spend additional money.

Consider that Peter Dutton has been shadow health minister before and since the last election, and this is the nearest thing he has produced to a policy. His most substantial policy after all that time is reaction and denial about an issue from the fringes of significant public health issues affecting this country.

If ever there was a field where the status quo of 2004 is inadequate for 2014 (which is the central message of the whole Howard Revival), health is it. Dutton has not contributed in any meaningful way to health policy debates: the former health minister was promoted, whereas if Dutton was an effective shadow she should be political roadkill. A new minister is firmly established in the portfolio free of any challenge from her "shadow".

Dutton seriously regards prohibition as a good idea that has never been fully tried. This is a clear indication of:

• His ability to address issues in the community;
• The quality of the man as a future minister; and
• The sheer futility of expecting, or even hoping for, bipartisanship on this issue.

The Coalition clearly regards illicit drugs as a law-enforcement issue (supposed concern for addicts is so much mealy-mouthed bullshit waiting to be scythed in expenditure review - c'mon people, am I the only one who has learned how Abbott works?). Like Dutton, Brandis grew up in Queensland under Bjelke-Petersen; he'd know all about drug prohibition. The silence from the alleged shadow attorney general on this issue - a normally voluble man who goes on and on about much lesser legal issues - is deafening.

Forget the Coalition. Forget bipartisanship.

The only hope for an enlightened drug policy, with a carefully thought-out public health response and a sound communications strategy, rests entirely with Labor. It would have to be led by a strong and progressive leader such as we have not seen in a generation, and the prospect of which is indiscernible to those who watch federal politics closely. That leader would have to be prepared to go all out to secure their policy against both internal opponents (who would want scarce health resources spent on anything else). That leader would need the courage to prevail against nervous nellies inside their party (including those armed with polls and conference-floor delegates), go the polls with a consistent policy, defeat a prohibitionist Coalition and divert health funds away from baby-boomers in order to ease druggies off their addictions.

Nope, me neither.

I'm sure that the Australia21 board and supportive contributors to the SMH are aware of the current political situation. I share their optimism that it is a passing phase - not only the defeat of an Abbott government but also President Obama defeating the US Republicans this November will hopefully break reaction as political strategy. However, I've been wrong before, and so has Peter Baume; the prospect that the future of Australian politics lies in the major parties emphasising their differences (while "playing it safe" with the status quo in drug law) should not be discounted.

Look, I dare you, at the shambles that is the regulation of poker machines and alcohol in this country. Know that this is the fate for the regulation of drugs. Listen to the cries of alcoholics and pokie addicts in their more lucid moments, and of those who care for them despite everything. Know that those travails can and shall be compounded by the direct and indirect victims of legalised drugs. Forget policy that makes things harder rather than easier.

For those who like the personal touch injected into this debate, my late brother was an alcoholic who died in a motorbike accident. Readers can take comfort in my assurance that this is not the start of a campaign to ban alcohol, nor motorbikes for that matter; as the report points out, alcohol is also a much greater issue than all illicit drugs put together. I realise that piecemeal efforts against drugs that are now illicit are inadequate, but the alternative is worse because it hasn't been thought out properly.

Proponents think they are being clever by separating drugs off from other problems like pokies, alcohol, tobacco etc., but I'd suggest they are not being clever enough. Like the republicans of the 1990s they are mistaken in thinking that they are being clever in proposing a small reform and selling it as a big one. There should be linkages across disciplines among people doing good work and making whole-of-government NDIS-style solutions. I am just not interested in any policy that will detract from efforts against real problems, and the prospect that they might add to them leaves me cold. I am sick to death of rallying behind well-meaning but ill-considered policies and getting run over by the foreseeable.

Denial is not a river in Egypt

In July 1789, as everybody knows, there was no Twitter, no al Jazeera, no David Burchill, although there was a lot of half-baked historical determinism that ignored contemporary reality. It is creepy that Burchill insists that "We are hypnotised", we are this and we are that (except for opinions held only by lefties with pot-plants), and then he disowns those opinions due to factors that are no longer particularly relevant.

There have been only two popular ideologies of consequence in the Middle East since colonialism's squalid death in the 1950s: Soviet-style authoritarianism, with its specious liturgy of anti-colonialism, and the grand, exultant nihilism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow extremists.

Neither of whom, David, featured in Tunisia or Egypt to any real extent. The MB are scrambling to take credit for the Egyptian uprising but people want things that they can't deliver: real jobs in a real economy that provides those lacking political connections with a greater range of possibilities than starving, or just getting by.

Even today informed observers are hard-pressed to name consistent Egyptian voices for liberal democracy and the rule of law ...

Because they're in prison, David, or floating face-down in the Nile.

... and to find them you have to scour the Egyptian media for lonely coracles of sanity in a vast ocean of paranoia, where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion masquerade as established fact, and the historic failures of a rich region are forever passed off as somebody else's fault.

Yep, and what did you expect from media controlled by a dictatorship - lifestyle supplements? Spinster politicians yearning for love? When you scoured the media of East Germany there was bugger-all reference, flattering or otherwise, to Angela Merkel or Yulia Timoshenko or Vaclav Havel.

The fact that there is no leader of the Egyptian uprising is encouraging. Mohammed El Baradei is presented as a figurehead acceptable to the West. It is to his credit he is smart enough not to throw his weight around; it is to the credit of Egyptians that they aren't fawning over him as any sort of saviour. They seem to want a government that will allow them more opportunities - economic, civic and otherwise - than they have had (or can get) from Mubarak-Sleiman. They want more than the MuBros or even Burchill's communists (if there are any) could possibly imagine.

When you see images of burqa-clad women throwing themselves at armed police (and not in a sexual way), it's mildly interesting from a cultural studies perspective to ask how passive can these oppressed beings really be, and to watch Western journalists fail to wedge them into any sort of cliched narrative. The narrative, however, is not their problem; if they can throw off a beef-witted dictatorship they can make us think differently about who they are and what they want. A people wanting to be recognised for their efforts and talents can't focus too hard on keeping women in the kitchen. This isn't to say that this uprising promises all things to everyone (except David Burchill), but it is fair to give people a break.

In Western societies demonstrations have to be organised, usually by pissants with no ability to translate massed narcissism into meaningful social, political and economic reform. People like Danny Cohn-Bendit, Tariq Ali or Richard Neville are neutered politically by their celebrity, but celebrity was all guys like that ever wanted anyway. Western observers viewing demos are right to be suspicious, but only if they fail to imagine a society so radically different to their own that to be conservative is to be in thrall to an unsustainable fad. When the stakes are both higher (in terms of an economy that must grow to sustain its population) and more personal (there must be food on the table and meaningful work for people to do), the sort of pissantry that so often fuels demos is so overwhelmed that it can't even bob to the surface let alone waddle toward the avant-garde.

The openness brought about by contemporary media (and the fact that media space is no longer so limited that it can be hogged by wankers or commandeered by despots) is like oxygen to the fires that threaten the despotic regimes of northern Africa and the Middle East. Mind you, news from Tunisia these days has been hard to come by. Gaddafi and the Algerian regime have been very, very quiet - too quiet. Not a lot of news out of Southern Sudan, either. Because they're not putting out press releases, yer modern journalist is pretty much ignoring them.

From an Australian point of view, it's heartening that the media have started to focus on Australians with friends and relatives in Egypt. It's great that the journosphere is trusting academics to explain what is going on, recognising the limitations of their profession (and denying the arrogant notion of @tzarimas and others that "a well trained and exp[erience]d journo can do anything!" - anything but save their own 'profession'). It's interesting that the Foreign Minister should contradict the Prime Minister without a press gallery meltdown - could they be getting some perspective on an issue that's bigger than Gillard's earlobes? How willy did altPM look when he "hoped" the situation could be resolved "without violence" when twenty souls lay beastly dead? We should be grateful that Julie Bishop has apparently kept her trap shut.

Time to bring forward the release of any Wikileaks relating to Mubarak, or they'll lose currency. It will be interesting to see how the boofhead government of Israel reacts to them, and how the US will go about building bridges with people they've apparently observed so closely yet do not understand.

It will be fascinating to see what sort of societies come from these uprisings. Fascinating to see what sort of leaders, too: can I just say, in the fullness of time, they are unlikely to be the kind of stage-managed dullards we get here. They are also unlikely to be the sort of knuckleheads indulged purely for their "commitment to the revolution", like Castro or Mbeki. A few basic measures to keep the peace and secure the positions of investors will see foreign capital pour into those places. For those of us far away from these tumultuous places, all we can ask the media is to keep bringing the piccies and the analysis from those who'd know - and for the cliche-mongers, the desperate I'm-really-smart-I-am tools like Burchill or Greg Sheridan, just shut up and piss off.

Disaster on Christmas Island

The disaster on Christmas Island weighs heavily upon us all, and it should be a pivotal event in our history.

If we were in a time where we relied more heavily on the sea than we do today, it would be as significant as the wrecks of the Dunbar and the Malabar were to nineteenth-century Sydney; probably equivalent in impact on people individually and collectively to 11 September 2001. If a hundred or so whalewatchers, ferry passengers or surfers were dashed against cliffs it would be a tragedy. What compounds it here is how desperate these people were for the sort of freedom that whalewatchers, ferry passengers and surfers take for granted: how far they came to escape real danger, how they hoped for better from us, how close they came to getting it.

This event isn't quite the bankruptcy notice for the entire "remote processing" model, but hopefully it helps set things moving in that direction. The political response is fittingly sombre but beyond the deaths of the individuals concerned politicians are clearly, as it were, floundering. At yesterday's press conference with the Acting PM, some clown of a journalist asked him a question about banking reform that would have been inane even in context.

There is something in this for both sides. First of all, those people who scrambled down the rocks doing as much as they can demonstrated where Australia's attitude to refugees is really at, something that Scott Morrison and Phillip Ruddock cannot imagine let alone understand. Those who regard undocumented arrivals by boat as something that can and should be stopped, and those of us who regard boat arrivals as inevitable and deserving of better treatment than they experience, can all be sad about what has happened. Then comes the anger: you can be angry at the idea that lax government policies leading people to a false sense of security, or you can be angry that lives have been wasted because insistence on the fantasy of a "queue" overtakes the reality that people at sea need basic humanitariian assistance before they need "processing".

Surely the anger at "lax government policies" and "queue-jumping" should be balanced by acceptance for those who make it through the rigorous and time-consuming assessment system, and compassionate treatment of those going through it. Using this incident as another stick to beat Julia Gillard with in the absence of such compassion is stupid and wrong, and if the emotion behind such denunciations is confected then so too are notions of a "queue" or "assimilation"; and if your immigration policy is based on layers of bogus assumptions then perhaps such a policy ought not be imposed upon the way this nation is governed.

Now is the time to test the assumptions that we have about asylum seekers, and from that testing develop a policy that addresses what works for those who are genuine, and for Australia; and what works against those who aren't and those who merely profit from people-smuggling. It may be too much to ask any sitting politician to do a frontal assault on notions of bigotry, because you can't defeat a notion (just as you can't go to war against 'terrorism' or 'illiteracy').

It is not too much to ask them, however, to stop referring to those who arrive by boat without documentation as "illegals", or to pretend that they pose more of a threat to this country than a drunk and sunburned detachment of the Barmy Army - who has arrived by plane with documentation in order, like that matters - who roam the streets of our cities looking for a fight and a chunder. The perpetrators of September 11 arrived in the US by plane and had all their doco down too.

It is not too much to ask to stop referring to notions of a "queue" that can be "jumped". We are within our rights to, and we must, work out the bipolar relationship our government appears to have with the UN in deciding who is a refugee and who isn't, and how applications can be prioritised and expedited. It is not too much to ask to regard detention in the same way as a prison sentence or an enforced stay under medical treatment rather than a state in which one's rights are suspended indefinitely, guilty until proven innocent. We have a right to clear away notions underpinning government policy that bear no relationship to reality.

Let's get away from sleigh bells, let's get away from snow
Let's make a break some Christmas, Dear, I know the place to go
How'd ya like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?
How'd ya like to spend the holiday away across the sea?
How'd ya like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?
How'd ya like to hang a stocking on a great big coconut tree?

How'd ya like to stay up late, like the islanders do?
Wait for Santa to sail in with your presents in a canoe.
If you ever spend Christmas on Christmas Island
You will never stray for every day
Your Christmas dreams come true.

How'd ya like to stay up late like the islanders do?
Wait for Santa to sail in with your presents in a canoe
If you ever spend Christmas on Christmas Island
You will never stray, for every day
Your Christmas dreams come true

On Christmas Island your dreams come true.

- Jimmy Buffett Christmas Island

The disaster on Christmas Island isn't limited to the wreckage of one boat. The whole idea why the Howard Government put asylum seekers on Christmas Island was to keep it out of the public eye - and when it had to be in the public eye, to control access and pictures via the limited transport links with the island. When that decision was taken, all of a decade or so ago, mobile phone cameras were unknown. The internet hackers who brought us Wikileaks were, if not unknown, certainly underestimated in terms of their capacity to inflict reputational damage upon politicians and government.

The 'positive' reasons for locating a prison processing centre there are gone. The negative reasons - far from healthcare and a sizeable Australian community within which to find employment and other amenities of social life - are not only still there but brought into awful reflief by this incident.

By the time MSM get there, only mawkish talking-head shots and driftwood will be available to them: it is a story they can only follow, not lead. Perhaps this is why Jonathan Green's response is so perplexing:

This was of course a tragedy ... The details are still sketchy.

We're allowed to feel sad for those who have died, but we may not ask wider questions until the journosphere are good and ready to supply them. Until someone from Channel Nine puts a microphone in front of some bedraggled survivor who has lost their family and asks "how does it feel?", we do not have any right to form any opinions whatsoever based on the information before us, nor may we compare/contrast it with information gained from other sources.

Green clearly regards himself as a journalist in online exile rather than a practitioner of his occupation in a different medium. I always wonder what journalists mean when they talk about "the blogosphere" - Green clearly regards it as a sideline, subordinate to the MSM, the same way his site is and the same way Bolt-Blair are adjuncts to core business at News Ltd. The ABC usually takes great care to not position itself as a leftwing lightning-rod for News Ltd but pieces like Green's don't help, and nor do they lift the debate to a point where Bolt-Blair are shown to have little to offer. Yes, there are some boofhead commenters on those News Ltd blogs just as you'd find on talkback radio, but strangely this doesn't lead commentators like Green to condemn radio out of hand.

This blog, however, is not part of any wider media enterprise. It isn't printed in a newspaper and nor is it cross-promoted on radio or TV - therefore, according to Jonathan Green and hence The Drum and possibly even the ABC or even the MSM more broadly, we here at The Kidney Of The Nation are officially outside the "blogosphere", and thank goodness for that!

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
'This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.'
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from publick haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

- Shakespeare As You Like It Act II Scene I

Merry Christmas everyone, and may 2011 be better for us all.

Israel and Palestine

I believe that Israel has a right to exist, and I'm an admirer of the plucky little Israel that beat off the meddling Poms in 1947, which beat the Arabs in 1967 and '73, which held to the Camp David Accord and which bent over backwards to find peace in Oslo.

I wish Palestine had that greatness of spirit. First, it took a generation to articulate any sort of political response to its stateless predicament, and when it did it came in the all-rhetoric-no-responsibility mendacity of Yasser Arafat and Fatah. Now, Palestinian politics is imported from Iran and operates like an organised crime outfit, where squalor is leavened by small mercies on condition of absolute fealty to Hamas and its hierarchy. Where is its Mandela, someone who can stand up for Palestinians without swaggering - or caving in?

The game-breaker can only come from the Palestinians. The Israelis are showing all the fractious brittleness that conservatives call strength, but which the historian knows precedes the end of regimes. Netanyahu is a fool and nobody in that country's elite has the standing to call him out (except the extremists who bray that he hasn't gone far enough).

I've long believed that the flotilla idea, and not an embargo, is what the US should use against Castro in Cuba. Even if the Israelis found weapons or other contraband on that flotilla now, nobody would believe them; the return of Private Shalit is further away than ever.

The two-state solution is now a given; Israel-only is a position that can no longer be sustained, but the Palestine-only push is only made easier if Israel discredits itself. This is the piece that best sums up my attitude toward the recent flotilla - I find it hard to disagree with a single sentence, especially this one:

The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution.

... and this:

It is hard not to conclude from this Israeli action, and also from other Israeli actions in recent years, that the Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks ... This is not defiance, it is despair ... This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.

That despair has traditionally been the preserve of the Palestinians: Entebbe and Munich, the contemptible murder of Klinghoffer, walking away from Oslo. It is the death-wish of an insurgent opposition, of wreckers and vandals.

Those who support the Palestinians must believe that real leadership exists among the Palestinians, capable of realising a state which serves those people well and would have them live in peace among their neighbours and enjoy prosperity. It doesn't, and so supporting Palestinians is just another expensive and pointless folly, like the various strands of socialism last century, or anarchism before that.

in our time Jewish pride has a disturbingly parasitic relationship with Jewish lachrymosity

No comfort can be taken from the fact that the Palestinians too wallow in victimhood and try to turn that base metal into the gold of righteousness. So too the Serbs and Croats, the Fenians and Ulstermen, Mugabe and Ahmedinejad and North Korea and the Basques. No cause can be right that resorts to this. Only those who can build more than they destroy can have their destruction forgiven and accepted, and allow that which is built in its place to remain standing.

A real “Freedom Flotilla” would have sailed for Gaza to liberate it from its rulers.

Perhaps they thought they were, or that Palestinians would be grateful. The problem is that a reasonable Palestinian leadership has no-one with whom to deal: a Hamas racketeering organisation; an Israeli government that is disingenuous at its best (fleeting) moments; a United States that is not sufficiently engaged to even hear such voices, let alone support them; and Arab neighbours who are afraid of their own moderates, let alone anyone else's.

If there's no latter-day Begin or Palestinian-Sadat to produce a moderate, two-state solution, then to hell with them all: and stop using our passports to prosecute and perpetuate all your bullshit.

Update 10 June: Why have two former News Ltd copy girls gone after some old lady who's been sacked? The media aim to render complex situations simple, but if it is tre that acid tongue sinks veteran scribe, then what's her-name and Caroline Overington are doing us all a disservice by writing the same beef-witted article framing this as a culture war thing. When people write like that about them, they think it's mean; when they dish it out, they are just, um, doing what they do (which is, get ahead of themselves).

Blood lust and resistance

Eugene Terre'Blanche lived a violent life, and his life ended violently. His life is complete but the futility of that life is not clear to those who regarded him as anything but pitiful and absurd.

Terre'Blanche fought for a white homeland for the Boers after forming the Afrikaans Resistance Movement in 1973 with six others to oppose what they believed were moves towards majority rule by the apartheid government.

That effort failed, everyone in South Africa and beyond is better off for that, and hopefully in a few days he will be seen for what he was: a man who bet it all on the wrong outcome, and lost.

AWB commandant Pieter Steyn ... [said] "We're not racists. We just believe that you should stick to your race,"

Too stupid for government, some people.

To imagine what an AWB-run country would look like (a kind of reverse Bantustan) look no further than Zimbabwe: where silence is the effective substitute for well-run government; where terror is currency, law and national discourse; and where a doddery dictator's ramblings replaces local culture to the point where the country repels the world.

Several AWB supporters had to leave their firearms with security at a press conference held by the minister of police on Sunday, with one elderly man kissing his reclaimed revolver as he exited the meeting.

The organisation, which uses a swastika-like emblem, believes Terre'Blanche's murder is linked to a controversial song urging people to "shoot the boer" sung by ruling African National Congress (ANC) party youth leader Julius Malema.

Two court rulings have banned the use of the slogan but the ANC has vowed to fight for its use, saying the song is part of South Africa's liberation struggle.

Firstly, clowns who kiss inanimate anti-personnel weapons need to have a good look at themselves, and not in an admiring way. Second, Julius old son: if you're going to make it as a politician, choose your music a bit more carefully. Leave the nostalgia trip for the oldies, the lesson of South Africa is that they got everything they wanted for your country - and your generation in your country - without having to kill the boers.

Emile Coetzee, a historian at the University of Johannesburg who specialises in white nationalism, travelled to the farm to assess the atmosphere and told AFP that Terre'Blanche's followers live in fear.

"AWB supporters are living a lifestyle of fear, not knowing when any perpetrator might break into their houses and do the same thing which these two murderers have done to Eugene Terre'Blanche, their leader," he said.

People like F W de Klerk got there first - they realised that a nation divided against itself has no future and that cranking up the fear with explosive rhetoric makes things worse, not better. If Terre'Blanche can be wiped out then clearly racial violence makes nobody safe. Bury him, and bury the AWB with him. Black people breaking into your house is the least of your worries: being bullied by the likes of Terre'Blanche and Steyn every day for the rest of your life is the real worry, and with the death of the former that threat has lessened.

At the centre of the AWB logo is a design that some have likened to a swastika, but which I think looks like a triple boomerang: Terre'Blanche tossed that triple boomerang out there and now it has smacked him in the head. Sometimes you can worry about something so much that it becomes more real for your worrying: get back to work and stop whingeing.

As for all these "calls for calm", such calm is the norm in a free society. It is only possible in an environment of depoliticisation, where benefits flow from hard work and reading the market astutely rather than various kind of toyi-toying (the AWB can't complain about bloodthirsty ANC songs because of their own bloodthirsty rhetoric). The most effective weerstand/resistance is one where people just get on with it, a situation not possible where extremists want to "organise" people - or destroy them - to lessen their unslakeable feelings of worthlessness. Feed some worms, Terre'Blanche, and create something positive in death that you never could in life.