The Queensland flood of 2011 – Bread and Circuses

Politicians and media conspire to turn tragedy into reality TV circus

This afternoon, idly watching some TV while waiting for my hamburgers to fry, I caught a station break that brought my blood to boiling point and dissolved the reserve I promised myself I would maintain about my contempt for, and disgust with, the way the entire Queensland flood disaster has been turned into a self-serving media circus, of benefit only to grandstanding but ineffective politicians getting free PR, and indolent, narcissistic ‘journalists’ looking to trivialize and cheapen the whole emergency by packaging it into a repulsive reality TV spectacle rather than reporting news.

The advertisement was for one of the commercial breakfast chatter shows nobly offering itself as the coordinator, in partnership with the ‘Queensland Government’, of mobilizing an ‘army of tradies’ for the State’s reconstruction.

Just in case it isn’t plain enough to anyone but me, it’s a crass and nauseating stunt.  The ‘army of tradies’ will naturally flock to where the work is without any coordination effort.  It’s called supply and demand and it’s worked without any help from the media or government for hundreds of years.

Those who nevertheless participate in the circus will be motivated mostly by the offer of getting their 15 minutes of fame.  The TV channel will get endless hours of cheap and nasty programming — no talent or production values needed or paid for.  The Bligh Government gets free publicity for ‘supporting’ the ‘initiative’, thus appearing to be doing something when it really isn’t.

I hope this repulsive trivialization fails miserably to attract the audience numbers being angled for, and that both the TV channel and the State Government get sued if and when shonky work is done by tradespeople whose only goal is to get onto TV.

The whole things reminds me again of how the entire disaster was turned into a sickening media spectacle by politicians, from whom that is to be expected, and by ‘journalists’, a profession that seems these days to be comprised largely of individuals who have had consciences, judgement and any sense of professionalism surgically excised.

During the emergency, when I was actually looking for useful information relevant to avoiding harm, helping others and planning ahead, I was struck by how little difference there was between the commercial news media and the public broadcaster, the ABC, in how tragedy has been trivialized by being abstracted into a series of cameos about heroes, villains, battlers and ‘courageous’ leaders.  Looking at that abstraction it becomes clear that the nation’s journalists are unable to make sense of the disaster without drawing on trite myths and stereotypes.  What is missing entirely is a sense of proportion, realistic assessment and reflection on the difference between rhetoric and clichés on one hand, and stark realities on the other.

In that way, ordinary people doing relatively sensible things, the way they always do, become heroes.  No gripe about that so much as the contrast that inevitably becomes necessary with ‘villains’.  People who dared to venture out into flooded streets despite being ordered not to by police.  The idea that we have all become passive bystanders paralysed and ineffective in the face of adversity clearly beyond anyone’s control, particularly that of the police, is a dangerous myth that creates and perpetuates that other self-serving myth: only the police are equipped to handle any kind of emergency, and therefore we need to fund ever greater numbers of them.

If there were villains, they all work in George Street and should be held to account for poor decision-making and leadership in the crisis.  And there are a small number of other villains, who deserve that label even when there is no emergency: opportunistic looters, who are most probably petty thieves and vandals even when there is no emergency to offer the opportunity.

Most irksome of all the myths drawn on was that of the great ‘wartime leader’.  Premier Anna Bligh invoked that myth with reference to herself, and the news media played along uncritically.  And yet, she never quite got her feet wet or ever acted to prevent or remediate any part of the disaster.  She has done absolutely nothing yet disclosed publicly to indicate that she showed any leadership at all.  Quite the contrary.  She has single-mindedly pursued her persistent goal of removing herself from responsibility or quick, decisive actions by establishing a statutory authority with an interim reporting deadline six months away, by not immediately recalling Parliament, and by deferring the intervention of a reconstruction taskforce until February.  It is a triumph of bureaucracy over rationality, and dithering over decisive action.

In this surreal environment of fairy tales, my personal vote for the most disgusting, but nauseatingly oft-repeated TV actuality of Bligh failing to lead was the day she blubbered about ‘they breed them tough North of the border’.  What was that?  We are supposed to define ourselves according to some standard set in NSW?  It’s pretty obvious that Queenslanders are a little less ‘urbane’ (or ‘pansy’, if you live in Bob Katter’s electorate), and, perhaps less likely to whinge than Sydneysiders.  But why was it necessary to bring up that comparison under the circumstances?  Perhaps because the Premier has an inferiority complex about being a Queenslander, maybe underscoring her ineffectiveness as a real leader rather than as a media show pony.

Pretty noticeable, too, in the media reportage, was that all the hard-nosed assessments of the flood crisis came from overseas journalists and agencies.  What we got at home was melodramatic pap without any critical analysis at all, and, as I remarked at the outset, so little information that might have been of real value to people about to be swamped, or having just survived being drowned or crushed by debris, that one wonders whether our journalists didn’t actually prefer death and destruction to resilience and survival.

With media attention returning to the expected circus in Canberra, where the Prime Minister is massaging the public to prepare the ground for higher taxes and charges, I can only hope that there are still some journalists left who are not too inept to distinguish between those lies and subterfuges than the ones about the flood.

See the entire series of Queensland flood blogs at http://peterstrempel.zxq.net/omnium/index.php.

Grotesque WikiLeaks overreaction undermines rule of law

Why Gillard’s attack on Assange made me ashamed of the Australian Government

Let me be perfectly clear at the outset that I have deep misgivings about Julian Assange’s stated motivations for his actions, about the actions themselves, and about the potential effects of the WikiLeaks revelations on international relations. I can’t declare myself a supporter of leaking this kind of information, nor of publishing the same. But I most certainly cannot support the way Assange and WikiLeaks have been attacked by senior government figures.

The American perspective on this is somewhat different to our own because of the constitutional litigiousness that forms part of the American political process. In any case, my concerns are principally parochial as far as this comment is concerned. In Australia a consideration of the government’s response to the latest WikiLeaks revelations doesn’t need to get past the test of the rule of law.

Julian Assange: world pariah?

Notionally Westminster democracy has been based on an explicit recognition that the executive, parliament and the judiciary are bound by law just as much as the ordinary citizen, thus acting as a principal check on tyranny since that principle was written into the 1689 Bill of Rights in England. The principle underpins everything that is valuable about our common law system and carries the strongest guarantee that the liberty of citizens cannot be infringed arbitrarily by the state. Put another way, the rule of law makes summary or arbitrary persecution and condemnation unlawful. According to that principle Assange and WikiLeaks should either be charged with an offence under law or left alone to pursue their lawful business.

If there is any argument that the WikiLeaks activities are so unprecedented that no law has yet been created to prevent their asserted undesirable consequences, the principle of the rule of law demands that new laws be created to deal with these circumstances, but that these cannot be applied retrospectively.

In other words, charge Assange and/or WikiLeaks or shut up.

For the Prime Minister of this country to so crassly abuse her power as to try and condemn Assange by media is an indictment of her character, of the degradation of the office of Prime Minister, and of the present government that should have any half-way morally responsible parliamentarian cringing with embarrassment, if only for being too cowardly to contradict the PM on behalf of Australia and in the eyes of the world.

It is difficult to find adequate comparisons outside known tyrannies like Iran or China for Gillard’s actions, though the historical precedent of the American McCarthyist anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s and the disgrace of the Menzies Government revoking Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s passport in the same decade come to mind; as a nation we seem to have learnt nothing from these perversions of our much vaunted free and democratic system.

I say ‘we’ because Gillard is hardly the only one guilty of this tyrannical abuse of power. In case the word tyranny seems clichéd or extreme, let’s recall that it means the ‘cruel and arbitrary exercise of power’. To condemn a man without due legal process, and to consider making him stateless seems an unusually cruel punuishment, delivered arbitrarily by our PM outside and pre-emptive of due legal process. No charge has been laid against Assange or WikiLeaks in Australia under Australian law. It is not, never has been, and never should be the prerogative of the PM or any other politician to conduct trial and condemnation by media no matter what public or personal opinion suggests.

The only appropriate comment from our PM on the matter should have been that the matter had been referred to the Attorney General for consideration. Her decision to pass public judgement ensures only that if any charges are ever laid, Assange’s lawyers will have grounds to argue he can never receive a fair trial anywhere in Australia after having been pre-emptively found guilty of an unstated misdeed by the PM. How can such grotesquely irresponsible behaviour ever be retracted or nullified?

Possibly worse than the serious abrogation of her duty to comport herself with the dignity of her office was the deafening silence from other politicians, and from media commentators about her abuse of power. All those who know better but remained silent today are collaborators in that tyranny and guilty of subverting Australian democracy by their silence; that much should have emerged as the lesson of Nuremberg in the 1940s. Moreover, if any internet hosting companies or network providers have acted or will act, except by legal compulsion, to censor WikiLeaks, they too should be seen, and treated, as collaborators.

Perhaps most disappointing about the entire affair is that I cannot honestly say it came as a surprise. The Rudd Gillard Labor Party has shown itself entirely comfortable with the Rudd philosophy of rule by autocratic fiat outlined in his essays, and most particularly in the sinister Rudd-Conroy internet censorship regime that is still on the table despite being so deeply flawed that the otherwise implacable foes, the Greens and the Liberal/National Coalition, joined in opposition to it since its inception as a legislative proposal.

One can only wonder whether the censorship regime, had it been in place, would not have been used instantly to shut down the WikiLeaks sites in Australia without any legal process whatsoever, and despite the repeated claims by Labor that the regime was aimed only at child pornography. Given the scant regard the PM has for the rule of law, how could she or any other politician be trusted to refrain from arbitrary censorship of any and all information without due process once the mechanism for doing so exists in law?

The whole spectacle of Gillard’s thoroughly undignified conduct unfolding in the news media didn’t quite make me ashamed of being an Australian, but it certainly made me ashamed of being governed by as a feckless and loutish a bunch as those who endorsed this subversion of our freedoms.

As a consequence of these conclusions, and in light of my earlier comment on WikiLeaks, I think it’s already too late to prevent a full and public analysis of the leaked documents. The only appropriate action for the Australian government now is to seek expert opinion on whether our security has been lax, and if so, what we can do about it. Assange should not be persecuted any further.

As an aside, I think it’s quite obvious that the material released so far might be embarrassing for key figures in many states around the world, but nothing in the leaked documents is really all that surprising. You’d have to pretty naïve to believe that governments don’t routinely spy on each other, or that sensible Arabs, like anyone else, don’t want lunatics in Iran to possess nuclear weapons. Surprise, surprise.

It seems that the Americans, who appear to be the most ebarrassed about the leaked information, do not have laws that make Assange guilty of anything — not even bad manners.

It is still not clear whether any of the diplomatic cables leaked originated from an Australian source, or cited an Australian spokesperson. However, if our diplomatic corps is half as incompetent and careless as our PM, the chances are that all Australian diplomatic cables are already routinely intercepted and yawned at derisively by low-level intelligence clerks in Tehran and Beijing well before they are ever read and ignored by their intended recipients in Canberra.

(From my regular blog at http://peterstrempel.zxq.net/omnium, see also my previous WikiLeaks comment.)

The Burqa is confronting, but must not be banned

The artificial nature of the burqa debate notwithstanding, there appears to be no end of illogical argument about the issue, coming both from the proponents of outlawing the garment, and the defenders of the freedom to choose it as every-day attire.

I declare right now my close affinity with the latter position, but not without, I think, deeply offending the sensibilities of many of its proponents.

I call the debate in Australia artificial because it is my observation that it was manufactured by bored journalists attempting to bait one or another of our under-exercised politicians into making an injudicious comment about the proposition that some people might be ‘confronted’ by the sight of someone covered from head to foot in black or blue cloth.  The underlying assumption, the bait in this trap, that agreeing with that proposition is inherently wrong, is exactly what is so dispiriting about the ploy.

What sort of a fool would argue against the observation that it is confronting?  In Western culture a clear line of sight to the face is taken for granted as a subconscious adjunct to personal communication, as a means of gauging mood, intent, sincerity and attention.[1]

The absence of clues about a person’s focus or intentions is regarded as discourteous, sinister and suspicious.  Anyone who wishes to argue that this is religious discrimination rather than reflexive behaviour based on survival instincts should dress up that way and approach a dog, a cat or their next door neighbour and take note of the reactions they get.

Let’s move on.  Does this mean governments should legislate against such garb?  Absolutely not!  No democratic government should ever be in the business of dictating dress standards.  It is worth noting here that the burqa is already banned in some countries, including predominantly Muslim ones, but such a ban is not a demonstration of liberty and democracy.  Quite the opposite.  It is always an instrument of political control, and as such an infringement of personal liberty, no matter what the excuse might be.[2]

Is feeling ‘confronted’ by the sight of a person wearing a burqa evidence of intolerance?  This is where matters become rather more complicated than the politically correct crowd would have us believe, because it is at this juncture that we must look beyond the rather stark masquerade and more generally at what it represents.

An educated and engaged citizen in today’s Australia might be confronted equally by the invisibility of the person under the cloth, and by its symbolic reminder of a radical Islam and the brutishly misogynistic, patriarchal attitudes it perpetuates towards women.

Seeing a burqa in Australia is evocative of an entire theocratic discourse and might well confront us with a number of questions related not to the burqa itself so much as that broader discourse.  An example that occurred to me was: what would I do if I had to choose between respecting religious beliefs or helping to prevent a forced ‘female circumcision’ by parents coercing their daughter to have her clitoris cut off so she could never derive pleasure from sex.  I regard this is an uncomfortably confronting thought indeed, and I hope I would have the moral fibre to stand against this barbaric practice if ever I were called on to do so.

In that vein, I think it reasonable to suppose that when ordinary Australians see a burqa they might see in its very severity the symbol of a radical Islam that breeds and shelters unprincipled terrorist killers of innocent people, that conspires to commit treason in Australia, that fosters the people who bombed Bali nightclubs, that empowers the people who put bounties on the heads of those who dare to disagree with them, that sent the men who destroyed the World Trade Centre for reasons still not quite plain, and that inspires the hatred which continues to kill our young men in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The burqa is a symbol of these things not because all Islam is evil or an enemy, but because the burqa is so uncompromisingly, mediaevally severe, and so inextricably associated with the extremes of radical Islam.  It is less a conservative mode of dress, being unusual even in most Islamic countries, than an in-your-face reminder of the barbarism, violence, fear and intolerance preached by the same clerics who mandate it as a uniform for all Muslim women.

As an Australian I ask myself whether I am not entitled to say I feel confronted, if not indignant at having my nose rubbed in the subversion of this nation’s democratic ideals by the very people who came here to leave behind the unpleasant realities they now seek to import into Australia.  I might also ask whether all of this deserves silent toleration, or whether I should speak my mind in dissent to the popularly servile ‘multicultural’ mantras of surrender to every demand for tolerance and understanding.

In that context it occurs to me that if the devout of Islam say nothing to oppose the extremists in their religion, they help to perpetuate the most negative stereotypes of a rampantly militant and hostile Islam, and by their silence indicate tacit consent to and complicity in the hateful activities of Islamic fanatics.  Whether it’s fair or not, this is why there is good reason to suppose that many Australians might indeed feel ‘confronted’ by women wearing burqas in Australian towns and cities.  And why this subject should not be shied away from in public debate for fear of being labelled racist or xenophobic.

In a democracy we ought to be free to discuss issues that confront us, we should be free to oppose the symbols of oppression and tyranny for what they are, and we should be free to look forward to a future in which Australian citizens act like they are Australians, not a potentially subversive vanguard seeking to impose imported hatreds or the politics of divisiveness.

In this scheme of things there is plenty of room for the devout of any faith to put their case and persuade us all that they are not the public face of dangerous zealots, but they cannot demand that we change our minds about these matters without being persuaded by compelling reason and by actions that demonstrate goodwill and undivided loyalty to Australia’s democratic tradition.

Contemplating the political context in contemporary Australia, I’m forced to conclude that my point of view is at odds with the vision described by John Howard with his ‘relaxed and comfortable’ remarks, which speak of an apathetic population surrendering itself to policy by those who think they know better, nor is it the Kevin Rudd vision of a prostrate and forever apologetic Australia which avoids grappling with all uncomfortable realities altogether.  I say Howard and Rudd because I have no idea whether Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard have a vision on this issue, or whether they are proxies for the Howard and Rudd legacies.

I suspect that the expedient political strategy for dealing with these uncomfortable questions is to say nothing without relying on polling numbers to suggest what people want to hear.  Likewise, I suspect that there’s a swathe of social democratic centrists who would delight in pontificating about the need for tolerance and respect in our ‘multicultural community’.  Indeed.  I’m bound to say, however, that there are some parts of some cultures we’re better off without.

My response to the centrists would be that respect is always earned, and can never be won by demands, threats or violence; that the values of liberty and equality mean that I am free to form and express my opinions, and that I don’t need to be anointed an ‘expert’, or to emasculate my language, or to gloss over any ugly truths, to call a spade a spade when it’s clearly not a shovel.

I would go on to urge any critics of these views to give their reasons rationally and logically, not with the presumption of unstated a priori rules, and certainly never with threats or rage.  Who knows, by the power of their intellect and reason I might be persuaded to change my mind.  This has been known to happen.  And that’s how things ought to be done in a democracy.

Saying and doing nothing is always equivalent to tacit consent for what is said and done, no matter how obtuse or moronic.  As such it carries no weight of reason or persuasion.  For that reason the burqa debate, once begun, must be open, fearless and championed by all who hold strong views, but with reason and judgement, not just passion.

I believe I have made my passion plain enough. Let me restate my proposition that while I think the sight of people wearing burqas in Australia is confronting, it is not the proper domain of government to legislate dress standards.

To defend that position on the basis of reason and considered judgement I now draw attention to the fact that my logic is based in part on the Burkean and Hayekian apprehension of an undefined and undefinable body of normative Western cultural practices and mores that places value on a clear line of sight to someone’s face; and partly on the Kirkegaardian conception of the ‘being-in-the-world’ experience that informs me about my situation in my specific socio-political environment; and, finally, partly on my existential recognition of myself as psychologically and materially opposed by an ‘other’ which chooses itself as different to me and, sometimes, as hostile and with murderous intent.

I do not naturally arrive at a Marxist interpretation, but I am aware of the potential for an alienation of Australian Muslims from their society, though I’d be more inclined to argue that the location of this social rupture is in the country most Muslims who wear burqas in Australia have left behind to start new lives here.  Flowing philosophically, if not altogether logically, from a Marxist perspective is a feminist analysis of the circumstances, which I would assume, would unequivocally recognise the burqa as a symbol of the oppression of women by means of a mysogenistic theocratic ideology proposed and enforced predominantly by men, but only obliquely justified by rather obtuse interpretations of the words that can be found in the Koran.[3]

In arguing that, despite my distaste for the burqa in an Australian context, my allegiance to liberal principles of freedom from the tyranny of even a majority (JS Mill), the absolute right of an individual to obey no one’s conscience but their own (Tom Paine), and the fundamental principle of religious toleration (Hobbes, Locke, et al), mean that I choose the Voltairean stance: I disagree with the wearing of the burqa in public in this country, but I will defend the right to choose and wear that garb, though perhaps not to my death.

My personal, unguided reason adds to these arguments my opinion that it is incumbent on the champions of the burqa in Australia to engage in any debate about this issue in a logical and rational fashion to change any misconceptions that might exist about the burqa, about Islam, and about the nature of the debate itself.  It is not enough to demand religious toleration when the religion in question is so widely and often rightly associated with intolerance itself.

See other comments by me at http://peterstrempel.zxq.net/omnium/

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[1] I am not at all comfortable being of a like mind on this point with Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, who also touched on some other issues I raise here, but whose approach is altogether too populist and simplistic for my liking (see his opinion piece in The Brisbane Times at http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/for-australias-sake-we-need-to-ban-the-burqa-20100506-ubun.html, accessed by me on 5 August 2010).

[2] In this regard I am much taken with The Sunday Times (of London) columnist Dominic Lawson’s point of view that British-style democracy has fostered a deliberate ‘live and let live’ attitude towards religious tolerance, though I would not support all of Lawson’s arguments in his (her?) column, ‘Banning the burqa is simply not British’, 24 January 2010, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6999908.ece, accessed by me on 5 August 2010.

[3] In terms of a feminist perspective I am most happy to concede to more eloquent statements of such a position, and I tend to see merit in the argument put forward by Canberra-based ABC news presenter Virginia Haussegger in her Sydney Morning Herald column, ‘The burqa is a war on women’, 21 May 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-burqa-is-a-war-on-women-20100520-vnp3.html, accessed by me on 5 August 2010.  I am particularly taken by Haussegger’s formulation of the following point: ‘Those who wear it, and those who insist it be worn, subscribe to an ideology in which women are inferior sexual temptresses, whose female form is a problem and must be covered. This is based on the contradictory proposition that men are both superior and yet unable to control their sexual urges if they see women in their natural human state. If this wasn’t deadly serious, it would be funny.’