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Lucy Hamilton is Melbourne born and based. She studied humanities at Melbourne and Monash universities, until family duties killed her PhD project. She is immersed in studying the global democratic recession.

Prison hulks and river blades: fortress building in the climate-catastrophe era

News headlines featuring the cruel asylum seeker policies

Britain has commissioned a prison hulk to house immigrants, in a cruel re-enactment of history. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has implemented two strategies to stop immigrants crossing the Rio Grande into America: one is a floating barrier with razor wire and rolling motion that pulls people under the water; the other is an apparent order to push people into the river, including mothers holding small children.

One horrifying aspect for an Australian audience reading these developments is that we have been part of the inspiration for their increasingly horrifying treatment of the displaced.

Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer have both been consulting with the British about the best way to “deter” asylum seekers arriving by boat. The UK parliament has enough grotesque bigoted figures of its own to blame for the new Illegal Migration bill and ship “solution” to deterrence for us to blame Abbott and Downer for this idea. Both Abbott and Downer have also been participating in Western chauvinist Orban’s speaking circuit which fosters anti-immigrant extremism.

Our approach to migration is complex. Big Business supports it and wants high migration. Australia’s Coalition immigration regime barely fought slave labour conditions for temporary workers while turning all aggression against asylum seekers as political theatre.

America has always counted on a transitory population from over its southern border to keep labour and food prices low. The decision to aim to make the border impenetrable has had the predictable effect of causing people to try to stay on the American side of the border to send money home to family struggling to survive. Numbers approaching the border for safety have also been increasing with violence – much caused by American policy – and climate crisis desperation forcing people from Central America out of their home countries.

President Trump’s early telephone call with then PM Malcolm Turnbull was a shameful one. Trump exclaimed with admiration that “You are worse than I am,” when it came to treatment of those legally claiming asylum. Trump’s administration, led on this front by the white supremacist figure of Steven Miller, took our example and intensified the misery. Children around America remain lost to their parents after the brutal years when babies were literally snatched from their mothers’ arms to punish them for the “crime” of seeking safe haven. Now a Trump advisor on strategy is working for the Texas Governor, implementing cruelties that the federal administrative state blocked him from deploying.

Australia’s persecution of the few of the world’s displaced who reach us by irregular means continues in a less overt fashion. The nightmare we created in PNG continues. Our immigration department is stripped of institutional knowledge because the nation-building public servants left during the grim reign of the customs official incompetents and bullies. The new appointments under Minister Andrew Giles are slow to acquire expertise and perhaps still harnessed by a departmental leadership that shared the Coalition’s Western chauvinism. The reunion with vulnerable families will move at glacial pace for that percentage eventually being granted visas.

The surge in Middle Eastern and African displacement reached crescendo in 2015. Part of this was created by Western and allegedly Russian military interventions, recent and past. This was also the year that Trump announced his presidential campaign, launching it with demonisation of immigrants.

Part of the surge in numbers was the beginning of the climate crisis’s mass displacement. Syria’s internal crisis, for example, was in part fuelled by young people flooding to the city for opportunity after crippling climatic conditions killed the crops.

The resultant paranoia in Western nations drove a surge in white supremacist and Neo Nazi support. Disinformation made people in distant villages of Wales who’d not seen a refugee themselves believe they were about to be flooded with new and unfamiliar people. The same disinformation, allegedly promoted by Russian propaganda, led people to believe that these asylum seekers were a threat to Western safety, as terrorists or rapists.

Former conservative governments were already being radicalised by “think tanks” and a new generation of politician who had been honed by Dark Money’s strategies into an anti-democratic force.

Some Right-Wing politicians still genuinely believe that the climate catastrophe is a hoax, just as asylum seekers must be country shopping grifters and that our nations must be White. Others believe that both problems are insoluble, particularly by a party that doesn’t believe in government.

This problem is compounded by the fact that those displaced by the climate catastrophe are still denied refugee status.

Our Centrist parties speak the language of climate action, but as we see in Australia and America, their will to make functional change does not match the rhetoric. This defeatism is paired with state Labor governments joining in the war against protesters rather than polluters.

The prison hulks for asylum seekers in Britain together with Texas at the vanguard of American cruelty are the other face of that defeatism.

Any data-based government knows that millions will be displaced by the climate crisis in the coming decades. Beyond that, the numbers seeking safety will be far greater. Most will be internally displaced or move into their poor neighbour states. Some will make it to the wealthier world for rescue.

Rather than act in unity to work to cap the temperature rise and limit the catastrophes of famine, drought, floods, war and disease, governments are turning their states into fortresses at monumental expense. India and Eastern Europe are building literal fences against threatened regions. Australia has coast guard and naval vessels poised to chase off any making the attempt.

Britain and Texas are modelling the next grotesque step as the numbers rise: the cruelty shatters every claim we have to be ethical nations. We fail in the duty to stop our overwhelming contribution to the world’s carbon overload, and we turn brutal in our efforts to punish those displaced, substantially, by our acts.

Australia forged the cruel path of refugee torture combined with laughter at the fate of our climate-threatened neighbours. We must decide now if that is who we continue to be.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations

 

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Racism, the ‘No’ campaign and the Americanisation of Australian politics

There may be some Coalition politicians and Murdoch employees who are motivated by genuine racism to oppose the Voice to Parliament. Some might believe First Nations Australians are unworthy. Some probably believe in “reverse racism.” That, of course, is the belief that there is a correct direction for racism to travel.

Some undoubtedly believe in a myopic fashion that there is no inherent disadvantage to being indigenous in settler-colonial nations. There is endless research to establish how historical decisions and policy entrench disadvantage and foster social ills; it is not, as some Coalition politicians might argue, the result of a “bad” nature.

For many more Coalition politicians, however, one presumes the decision to oppose the Voice is strategic. They don’t care who is hurt in the process, just as they didn’t care about the escalated persecution that accompanied the plebiscite on marriage equality.

The Coalition and media friends are using the Voice (just as they used refugees) as an implicitly racist tool to galvanise their own vote, but more importantly to divide the electorate. It is part of our conscious echoing of the CRT argument that is burning through America, fighting acknowledgement of systemic disadvantage in that country.

CRT is “critical race theory.” This is a university law school discipline that examines the elements of the racist past that continue in current institutional structures. A Right-wing agitator, Christopher Rufo, stole this term for school studies to allow “conservative” parents to fight any attempt to teach a less bowdlerised view of history and society.

As is standard practice, Sky Australia, The Spectator and other radicalising organs borrowed the American CRT gambit for use in Australia. It can be deeply uncomfortable for Australians brought up on comforting patriotic myths to have their offspring bring home age-appropriate stories of the Killing Times and Blackbirding (sugar slavery). It is shocking to read the ghastly story of cold-blooded massacres of our First Nations people: it is estimated that we killed in various ways around 90% of the Aboriginal people here when colonisation began. It is chilling to envision Australians dropping kidnapped and enslaved Pacific Islanders in the ocean rather than bothering to return them home. Their unmarked graves are strewn across our sugar plantations, with 30% killed by the brutal conditions.

Forgetting can be even more crucial than remembering in the forging of a patriotic narrative.

Deploying race divisions has been crucial to American politics. White southerners were reconciled to the appalling conditions they were granted by the plantation-owning class by the certainty that the worst of them was better than the best Black man. The workers have been divided and disempowered by the resentment fostered between White and “Coloured” workers.

Such was the disgust for Black people that when legal changes forced the desegregation of public swimming pools built during the public works era of the New Deal, communities shut them down for years. They denied themselves the use of these communal facilities rather than share them with Black townsfolk. This dynamic continues in Republican state logic. Most Republican states refused federal money to grant the poorest Whites medical cover because it would aid Black people too.

America’s winner-takes-all capitalism fosters a “myth of scarcity.” This in turn promotes a resentful, zero-sum psychology where another group’s progress is “our loss.”

Australia’s economic model was not one driven by this model of capitalism. Our labour shortages made for a strong class of worker who achieved notable rights. We were considered a labour model in the early decades of the 20th century to the distress of capitalists who planned fascist revolutions. Our neoliberalism saw a less toxic negotiation between capital, state and worker.

In 1975, however, Milton Friedman brought his American winner-takes-all neoliberalism to Australia. His acolytes, like Peter Costello, founded “think tanks” including the HR Nicholls Society to destroy the strength of the Australian worker. The IPA followed them, turning from promoting Australian neoliberalism – Economic Rationalism – to the ultra-free market neoliberalism that so excited America’s richest.

Our society now displays the damage caused by decades of cynical “trickle down” economics and the crippling of worker strength. Just as in America, our chasm between rich and poor is at historic levels. Wealth is now generational, with the American model and our copycat version having almost destroyed aspirational dreams.

While the Labor Party continues to govern more for the nation, it has still embraced the truisms of this debunked economic model. The Coalition, by contrast, governs for the richest. This is the reason that it also copies the Republicans’ culture war battles, aiming to win a majority and government with grievance rather than sound policy.

Dahlia Lithwick described America’s Republican voters thus recently: the “majority of White Americans continue to vote against interest for parties and ideologies that directly contribute to their economic decline.” This is the position for most Coalition voters in Australia. As in America, the strategists are activating racism to promote this grievance.

The Voice to Parliament is not, as they lie, a “third chamber” of parliament or any other such threat to equality. It is literally nothing more than an advisory body to try to ensure that the best policy is deployed to reverse the deep disadvantage faced by First Nations people. It is placed in the constitution to ensure that cynical governments in the future cannot abandon it. The design of the body itself will be built by parliamentary consultation with First Nation representatives.

Some who reject the Voice do so because they believe it to be a sop. The depiction of it as a threat to land ownership is a pathetic and dangerous slander: it is, however, a handy distraction from the prospect of a wealth tax that could raise $29 billion a year.

The idea that society is a zero-sum enterprise where anything gained by anyone else is stolen from you is a distortion of fact and a miserable basis for community. We must not let a wealthy, self-interested elite divide us with racist lies to ensure their own continued grasp on our common wealth.

This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations.

 

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Lazy language damages our present and risks our future

Labels have power. They shape the way we know the world. They allow people to see actions with greater clarity or distort our understanding to make things unrecognisable.

When war involves “collateral damage,” the label strips the incident of shredded flesh and wailing orphans. By labelling the near elimination of abortion access a Pro Life position, conservatives elide the dramatic and deadly impact on lives caused by the denial of reproductive justice. Calling it a “state sanctioned forced birth” position recasts the nature of women’s experience in Republican America.

When Scott Morrison demanded that refugees exercising their legal right to seek asylum were relabelled “illegal maritime arrivals,” it became easier to persecute people fleeing hell without public horror. 

By depicting welfare recipients as fraudsters, Alan Tudge escalated the war on those who experience periods of struggle. And Robodebt showed how labels can even hide things from us. The Saturday Paper’s special podcast series “Inside Robodebt” illustrates that one of the key factors delayed recognition of the scandal emerging is that the illegal debt averaging process didn’t have a name.

“Inside Robodebt” also highlights that it was not journalists, by and large, who detected the program’s criminal disgrace. It was a loose group including a lecturer and Twitter commentators. No wonder the Coalition’s friends love to apply disparaging labels to their Twitter critics, conflating commentators’ valid critiques of a scandalous decade with the troll army’s vile bullying.

Right wing politicians and commentators have an additional label in their arsenal at the moment to discredit every person or idea that doesn’t suit their agenda. By calling something “woke,” it ceases to be a matter of morality or compassion or sound policy or good manners. It becomes something – or someone – to be derided and despised.

We deny ourselves the ability to choose our present circumstances and shape our future if we allow the lazy application of labels.

Mainstream journalists were supine in their acceptance and repetition of the politicians’ disgraceful mislabelling of vulnerable people during the Coalition decade. The public absorbed the idea that people could be “illegal,” that fake debts made ordinary Australians into criminals. Sometimes journalists were rushed and forced to fill pages with tweaked press releases. Sometimes, however, journalists were cynics ensuring access and front page leaks by playing the politicians’ games.

The most likely news source to counter the government’s narrative was the ABC, but that has been abused largely into complicity. Any ABC efforts to challenge and expose malfeasance continues to be discredited by the wholesale framing of the organisation as “woke” or “socialist” by the Coalition and the corporate media. Any exposé coming from it is thus made irrelevant.

Some on the Labor side had accepted the Coalition’s labels as valid and echoed the framing. Others gave up trying to frame the debate more accurately and tried to fight the battle along lines drawn up by the power players of the narrative.

Journalists have been the gatekeepers by which we understand the civic space. Their lazy acceptance of labels helps perpetuate distortions that damage individuals and society. We need journalists who understand that they share the blame with politicians and public servants for making the Coalition’s decade of shame possible. Without critical thinking skills, journalists betray the muckraking and investigative stars of their profession’s history; otherwise they can be much better paid as the spin doctors many seem content to ape.

The news media has struggled to describe the events of this era. Part of the problem is that they fail to appreciate the degree to which the Right is radicalising, bogged down in normalcy bias. Part is that the news sector bends excessively towards being balanced between positions: when the Right’s position is so extreme that to describe it aptly sounds like a judgement, the decision-makers struggle to cope with the new reality.

We need to understand our political labels at a moment when the Right is embracing ever more oppressive political ploys internationally. Robert Reich noted that American newspapers are finally beginning to label presidential contender Trump’s messaging as “authoritarian.” He spells out clearly, however, that it is technically better understood as “fascist.” Trump’s Republican Party is a ghoulish parody of its grand old past.

None of this is accidental. The cynical Americanised ultra free market Right does not believe in government’s role. It is funded and galvanised by the needs of the plutocrats: low tax and ever fewer protections – labelled “regulation”- to stifle their ultimate freedom to exploit. The same kind of cynicism has driven the Right in America to fight, since the Civil Rights era, to reverse the progress that withdrew the barriers to equality for persecuted and disempowered groups. The strategies to undo America’s democratic structures have been in construction at least as long.

Much of the plutocrats’ Dark Money has gone to strategists and spin doctors. The same ethics-free intent to achieve their goals at any cost pervades their political representatives. Robodebt’s egregious fraud perpetrated against citizens is the most striking Australian example; media advisor Rachelle Miller has revealed Alan Tudge’s spin strategies. When Scott Morrison took over immigration, he employed 66 spin doctors compared to PM Tony Abbott’s 39: “on water” secrecy and propaganda was costing us $8 million a year.

Journalists have been far too ready not to question their role in spreading this strategic toxic spin. In fact, they use that spread as the basis for further stories about artificial “controversies.”

Structural politics is illustrative of these orchestrated drifts. It only takes a brief look at the names of Australia’s two major parties to see how political labels can ossify, representing the history rather than the ideology of a party. Labor does not represent the labour movement that was its original constituency. The Liberal Party is not liberal, but neither is it conservative. The Liberal politicians who merited those labels have largely left in disgust at what the party has become. The rump is a radicalised Right mimicking the extremists dominating the Republican Party.

Parties represent a loose coalition of ideologies and goals aiming to contain personalities, priorities and the tactical decisions that might achieve them. Since John Howard’s era, Australians have seen how much these can change a party. Dragging the label “conservative” with them, the Right now depicts centrist policy as “woke” and “socialist” in a long Americanisation of the more worker-friendly Australian social contract.

The linear continuum by which we have attempted to understand our politics – from Left to Right – has always been an artificial construct too.

The rightly contested horseshoe theory shallowly suggests that the political extremes of communism and fascism are closer to each other than to liberalism. Kathleen Belew replaces that with the metaphor of a circle. She described the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline” where, since the 1970s, hippies and white supremacists bonded over such anti-government fights as the fluoridation of water.

The Red Brown alliance is a late soviet description of a much older phenomenon – the rough cooperation of communists and fascists in joint, nationalist loathing of liberal elites. Third Reich Nazis were often both “green” and yoga lovers.

These connections do not reflect true sympathies, but they do underscore the fact that we all have different concerns activated at key moments.

In the era of permacrisis, however, even the old approximations are crumbling.

Over covid, the far right exercised its usual cunning in coopting the conspiracy theorists emerging around an internet joke: QAnon. It also drew on the deep resentment that came from policies poorly explained or executed that harmed the precariat while the billionaires reaped massive profit. Belew’s “crunchies” (hippies) were absorbed over again into the White supremacist sphere in their antagonism to Big Pharma and a fear of government’s oppressive tendencies. In Australia, our Pastel QAnon yoga influencers and antivaxx mums joined the far right in their Convoy to Canberra in a complicated conspiracy smoothie.

QAnon has now seeped into the radicalised right space intermingled with Pentecostal cultish beliefs. These underly the application of the term “groomer” to anyone defending LGBTQIA+ existence on social media as a side note to the exterminationist rhetoric.

Online, influential men considered to be of the Left drifted towards the Right, often driven by resentment towards the age of consequences, more commonly labelled Cancel Culture. Their preeminence as mostly White men has been challenged by the demands that they share the microphone with minority voices. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, for example, suddenly started finding a better home on Fox News than subversive left-leaning platforms. The dirtbag Left and the Alt-Right (a label meant to elide the movement’s white supremacist core) share an ironic and provocative aesthetic that has helped draw these figures together in shared disdain for the prissy judgement of the bougie “woke.”

Younger American “conservatives” – many of them on the lucrative gravy train where Dark Money donations fund their early career – have turned old Soviet Nazbol politics into the new Nat Con movement. National Conservatism feigns support for the battler in a way that looks vaguely leftist while continuing the persecution of the most vulnerable combined with a “traditionalist” persecution of minorities for “patriotic” redemption. These elite youth frame an anti-American “elite” as an existential threat: their prestigious university education is not the same as the university education that they define as “woke” poison.

Presidential contender Robert Kennedy uses similar faux-egalitarian talking points to signal himself as meriting the destiny of a “Kennedy” while actively working with his tech bro plutocrat funders and spreading disinformation, labelling it “free speech.” He has now said that the Covid19 virus was ethnically targeted to protect Jewish and Chinese people.

These shifts in allegiance make pinning down “Left” or “Right,” “centrist” or “conservative” outrageously challenging. Journalists of integrity can be forgiven for missing the seriousness of the trajectory.

Such mislabelling normalises the dragging of “conservative” politics ever further towards fascist politics; it serves the far right by presenting their grotesque policies as a facet of business as usual rather than a radical change. Ignoring the trajectory outside their information bubble meant that most Americans missed the indicators leading to insurrectionist attack on the Capitol on 6 Jan 2021. Normalcy bias means journalists continued to quote Republican politicians reframing it as a normal tourist visit.

Climate scientists have struggled for decades to frame their messaging of the looming – potentially existential – crisis. Scientific communication that always conveys the possibility of new discoveries has been exaggerated to imply doubt about predictions. The profession of creating doubt to prevent regulation of industry was deployed by tobacco sector: the same strategies, and even the same people, translated into the fossil fuel sector’s destruction of our sense of a shared knowledge base.

At the end of the Obama era, those watching knew how fragile America’s democratic structure was, but few imagined the brink towards which the Republican Party could drive their nation in a single presidential term. It took one shameless conman to achieve it.

Australia’s Coalition is similarly disdainful of their opposition’s right to govern. They too showed that they had ceased to believe in the validity of the democratic contest over the last decade.

Australia is at risk of the Coalition finding that charismatic conman who will allow it to destroy the reign of the despised “woke” urban electorates. Just as so much of their agenda and strategy is defined by the Republican machine, their policy will likely come after the rights and freedoms that their mentors are destroying in the USA.

If journalists can’t label the moment in its true seriousness, we can’t expect the distracted public to recognise it.

 

A much shorter version of this was published in Pearls and Irritations as An American system of “state sanctioned forced births”?

 

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Panti Bliss and the war on drag and trans existence

One of the highlights of recent travel was seeing the Queen of Ireland, Panti Bliss, perform at the Soho Theatre. This esteemed drag performer was pushed to the fore of Ireland’s 2015 marriage equality campaign and came to lead it to its successful vote. 

Rory O’Neill, her creator, describes her as a “giant cartoon woman,” but her most recent performance is less “transgressive, punk underground” Jessica Rabbit and more Grande Dame. Panti is the glamorous aunt you wish you had.

The story that unfolds over the “If these wigs could talk” show is brilliantly crafted. It is a stand-up routine and monologue that makes the audience fall in love with Panti before sharing what it was like to grow up illegally gay in Ireland, and so much more that you must experience without spoilers.

O’Neill began his adult life in art school, but Panti became his living, breathing, evolving work of art. Far more influenced by the vaudeville spirit of British drag and the oral tradition of Irish drag than the glamorous and polished version commonly seen from the USA, Panti has a long history of outrageousness. O’Neill’s creation has also done more than most of her compatriots to foster the embrace of LGBTQAI+ existence in Ireland. Her Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre is one of her most, and justly, famous contributions.

In the documentary about Panti, Queen of Ireland, O’Neill describes the marriage equality campaign as the final battle for equality even though, at the time, he felt uncertain that the Queer world needed this badge of bourgeois normality. What O’Neill knew is that the worst brute could marry, but somehow Queer people were not considered worthy.

It is deeply frustrating that this recent achievement of legal equality in 2015 in Ireland and the USA, and 2017 in Australia, is not the final battle after all. Queer people are once more at the barricades – if they are paying attention – as the Christofascists emanating out of America and Europe lead the battle to erase LGBTQIA+ existence.

The ultraconservatives made it clear at the time that the sky would fall if access to marriage was broadened to same-sex couples. In fact, the sky remained in place, but the billionaire-funded groups that mobilised against extending access to marriage then are now funding the fight to ensure only “traditional” gender and sexuality are legal.

Their initial targets are an intentional conflation of two different categories of people: drag performers and trans people.

Trans people are their gender. Drag, by contrast, is a performance art. In mainstream representation it is largely carried out by cis gay men, but many drag performers and traditions are trans. Performative gender such as drag is at least as old as the theatre itself. And trans existence pervades history and societies; scientific research is illustrating that gender is much more complex than conservative faux-science likes to pretend.

Drag, however, can be outrageous and sexy. Trans people are a tiny minority and can be very visible making them an easy target for cowards. Fewer people know a trans person than know lesbian and gay people. All of these factors enable propaganda manipulating confusion to find fertile soil. Cis people, firmly embedded in their birth-allocated sex, can find it impossible to understand gender dysphoria.

This makes it easy for Christofascists to combine these two categories with all the lies and myths that were told to keep gay men persecuted. None of these categories are dangerous to women or children. Groomers and pedophiles are found in churches, scouts and youth groups, not at drag story hour. The primary threat to women, children – and trans people – remains bad cis men.

Australia has not fully descended into the US attack on LGBTQIA+ people broadly and the UK’s persecution of trans people. The fact that Neo Nazis have joined the women pretending to support women by demonising another vulnerable group alienates most Australians from this toxic bigotry. We cannot, however, be complacent: both Media Watch and 4 Corners recently platformed people of suspect reputation.

The right is more cunning than the centre and left. It sees that history is bending towards diversity and inclusion; it’s determined to fight that development with every word, act and dollar. It coopts the language of rights while aiming to rob everyone except themselves of rights. It exploits the media’s attempts to play fair and balanced by promoting disinformation-heavy bigotry and exterminationism as just another perspective.

Organisations in Australia illustrate the international blurring of goals in their efforts to drive us towards ultra-conservative social positions. The Australian Marriage Alliance body converted its pre 2017 focus on defeating marriage equality to its new manifestation – Binary Australia – which campaigns against any blurring of strict male and female categories.

Citizen Go has recently begun to include Australia in its global far right campaigns. It is a Spanish ultra-conservative Christian platform designed to counter progressive petition sites like Avaaz, Change.org or Get Up. Its funding and board boast a grim roster of figures. Its site shows that it is combining campaigns against the “UN’s LGBT agenda” with fighting against the Voice to Parliament (alongside other ultra-conservative Christian bodies).

Far right groups are eager to use unsuspecting women as gateways to their brutally patriarchist ideology to broaden support. We saw women drawn into the space over covid, combining concern about pandemic health measures with conspiracy stories of tunnels full of abducted children being farmed for hormones. These issues have been subsumed into a campaign based on disinformation about trans healthcare. These women often do not realise that their own human equality and independence is threatened by these far-right fellow travellers.

In looking back at the Irish marriage equality debate, Rory O’Neill joked that he hoped Queer people “don’t end up becoming as boring as everybody else.” The frightening developments that dominate the discussion now make that moment seem a golden age of acceptance. Panti Bliss is asking you not to allow these forces to win, driving us back into the dark ages of persecution of LGBTQIA+ people.

It’s now up to the rest of us to become radical, resistant and irritating. Don’t let the Christofascists drive Queer people back towards the disdained fringe, to exile, to suicide. Whether you are standing up for people’s right to live their gender or embrace their art, you need to be out there standing against the threat alongside those under attack.

 

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New coal mines and protests crushed: is Labor resigned to doom?

It is more shocking watching Labor governments implement draconian anti-protest measures than it is the right-wing parties. The latter are by definition opposed to Labor’s efforts to achieve a less-exploited life for the average citizen.

The workers that the labour parties nominally represent won a fairer life by the protests that the leaders are now banning. No wage labourer would have a 40-hour week, or a weekend, if the workers’ interventions had been forced to avoid “intentionally or recklessly” obstructing the “free passage of a public place.”

This wording from South Australian Premier Malinauskas’s rushed anti-protest bill is consonant with the work of governments around the anglosphere. In the hours leading up to the coronation in London for example, republican protesters were rounded up and arrested to avoid the spectacle of people in yellow t-shirts peacefully holding yellow signs along the procession route. The new measures were described as unnecessary and “deeply troubling” by the UN. King Charles III signed the anti-protest bill into law in the days before his coronation.

In America, Republican politicians are promoting the ability to shoot or drive into protesters.

For us, it is more often climate protests that promote this kind of overweening law that would hide protesters in dark alleyways where their message will not be seen. 

Protests must disrupt. 

The most important rights and protections are usually gained by highly inconvenient measures to disturb the thinking of those who accept the status quo. Women’s right to vote was won only after a number of troublesome and painful protests forced male politicians to cease withholding that civic engagement from half the population.

Conservative governments are by definition less likely to accede to change or to civil rights protests. Right wing politics that have supplanted the old conservatism are more authoritarian: reminders of the suffering of the masses are an inconvenience to executing the wishes of the powerful. It is only the bravest who continue to protest Putin’s invasion of Ukraine after the brutal crackdown on early protesters. Alexei Navalny’s fate shows what awaits those who contest kleptocrats’ extreme corruption.

Governments that represent the more progressive or labour movements seem at the surface level to be less compatible with protest-crushing legislation or draconian police intervention. They also mouth their acceptance of the fact that climate change is a dire threat to our continued survival.

It was a climate protest that provoked the South Australian rushed change to the law. This came just after an obsequious statement from the South Australian Labor minister for energy and mining made the rounds: “We are thankful you are here. We are happy to a be recipient of APPEA’s [Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association] largesse in the form of coming here more often…The South Australian government is at your disposal, we are here to help and we are here to offer you a pathway to the future,” Tony Koutsantonis said.

Why relatively progressive governments continue to introduce new coal mines, or waste time and money with the carbon capture and storage distraction is difficult to know for sure. There is certainly the pressure from donors to consider. Whether they also feel pressure from unions to slow the shift from fossil fuel extraction is worth asking. Australia’s Labor parties have no doubt learnt, if not over-learnt, the lesson from the mining sector which spent $22 million on antagonistic advertising to punish PM Kevin Rudd for his attempt to introduce a mining tax.

It is also possible to argue that Australia’s government remains an outreach division of the fossil fuel sector. All the tens of billions of profit made by fossil fuel companies netted Australia almost no tax. In one example, they paid $30 dollars in tax in 2020-21 on $164 billion in profits. In return, the taxpayer gifts these same companies, currently, $11 billion a year in subsidies. And the Albanese government’s continuation of the carbon credit program, barely changed from the Coalition’s scam model, is the only way that these companies are promising to cut emissions. The carbon trading program is, as Nick Feik describes it, a “frictionless profit machine” pervaded with senior fossil fuel figures, based on “phantom” credits as well as dubious-quality offset actions. The program is “state-sponsored greenwashing.”

It is possible that centrist political parties have also foreclosed the possibility that humanity can check the race to our destruction. It is easy to see why. The idea that Russian silovarchs and Saudi princes can work together with the corporatocracy of the (dis)United States seems a slim hope sinking into the rising seas. Competition for resources threatens climate-harming war. India and Pakistan, for example, depend on the meltwater of Himalayan glaciers for the survival of a billion people; the droughts that will supersede floods portend further conflict. Those battles, like the Ukraine invasion, will cost tonnes of carbon as well as human misery.

Our government might feel trapped in a politics shaped by short-term problems and solutions, and that economies and energy supplies secured in old-school ways are the price to be paid for reelection. Despair at the prospect of a world that looks to be fracturing rather than uniting to limit the crisis might reinforce this short-term thinking.

If that is a factor driving the centre/left parties, we are in deep trouble. 

We expect the radicalising right to have abandoned the well-being of the masses now, let alone into the future. Their military-industrial complex will sell nations and individuals weapons to protect resources from those desperate for survival. Late stage capitalism’s winners are buying their bolt-holes and calculating which people they’ll take to their luxury escape or doomsday bunker.

If the parties that claim to represent the people have given up in despair at the thought of doing better than mouthing platitudes and performative gestures, we have no chance of limiting the climb of temperatures in the decades to come. This matters: it is increasingly clear that every fraction of a degree we can prevent the temperature rising is a whole swathe of crises prevented.

Already our children are suffering. Black Summer babies were born premature, some with blackened placentas. Young children who breathed the worst that summer have damaged lungs and require constant medication. Children from flood and bushfire zones continue to live in emergency accommodation, with the all the disturbance that means. Trauma impacts are expected to require help for five years.

This abdication of ambition would make a likely motivation for Labor governments to join right wing parties in cracking down on protest. As the crisis worsens, so will public distress. Failure to act on pain over months of bushfire smoke in city air or rising food prices will push people onto the streets as the Black Summer bushfires did. Catastrophe-driven demands on our nations’ budgets will eat away at the services that governments provide.

Police are ill-equipped to manage the stresses they already face: increasingly we leave them to deal with the misery, distress and violence that is the end result of inadequate infrastructure and services. Police are militarising making them even less appropriate to deal with social crises and the public’s distress. These problems raise the threat from forces that have had little tolerance for those who dissent in an inconvenient fashion.

Labor parties must remember that the threat of community independent candidates will increase for ALP candidates if they continue to stonewall the majority of their voters. We voters need to be on the streets – and inconveniently so – to make sure the government knows this.

It is your children and grandchildren who will face the full catastrophe – and the crackdown if they protest the nightmare that looms.

 

A briefer version of this was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Centrist parties crush dissent, foreclose on race to avoid extinction

 

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Dan Andrews – and Murdoch crying wolf

Rupert Murdoch has done incalculable harm to the democratic experiment throughout the AUKUS nations and beyond. In Victoria, his propaganda campaigns have made him the magnate who cried wolf. The state’s integrity infrastructure is in perilous condition but Newscorp’s constant invective against Labor governments, and Premier Dan Andrew’s government in particular, has made it more difficult to fix.

In the recent spate of Australian elections, it appears that extravagant campaigns by Murdoch media were having diminished impact on the centre/left vote. Scott Morrison’s government received the thumping it had earned. Dan Andrews’ resounding win and NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s loss were the opposite of the outcomes Murdoch’s tools had fought to achieve.

Since, News Corp editors have not steered their platforms away from the hysteria that pervades their framing of news stories and opinion pages. The Voice to Parliament, for example, continues to receive breathless, distorted coverage aiming to deny Prime Minister Albanese the “win.”

For Victoria, the Murdoch news has become particularly toxic. The constant demonising of the Andrews’ government pandemic management was out of step with majority opinion and Murdoch’s fanning up of dissent made Victorians’ lives harder over those long months of lockdowns. The attacks on Dan Andrews in the lead-up to the November election reminded the radicalised right base of how much they loathed Andrews, but reinforced the majority’s utter disdain for Murdoch and his Dog Line of brimstone-breathing pundits.

The Victorian Liberal Party – the local political arm of the Murdoch project – has collapsed into chaos. Their echoes of News Corp messaging are treated with equal disdain. Radical right figures spouting Murdoch-ready messaging seem unelectable in this relatively progressive state; the more moderate old guard is struggling to keep them from destroying the edifice.

The media hysteria that has distorted every act by the Andrews government over the 2020s has now had the unexpected effect of inoculating that government from effective condemnation for genuine problems.

Despite mounting pressure over the first quarter of 2023 over integrity questions, Labor’s lead only appears to be growing, and Andrews’ personal approval has been barely touched. It remains to be seen whether IBAC’s special Daintree Report will have more of an impact. Victoria’s government integrity framework is in dire need of reform, but too many centre/left voters believe the news on the topic is just another Murdoch hit job.

The original strong design of the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) was nobbled by the Liberal government that implemented an anodyne version in 2011. The body was effectively designed to fail.

The model was improved in 2015 by the Andrews government broadening the definition of corruption to include misconduct in public office. Those reforms, however, were inadequate to allow it to do its job effectively. The situation has worsened since.

There are three main crises for IBAC. One is that it, like the Ombudsman, remains dramatically underfunded: this is a method that governments’ use to shackle bodies that monitor their performance.

The second is that its jurisdiction requires a criminal offence to be involved. This means that “grey corruption” of the kind discussed in the Daintree Report is not covered. The majority of Australians have come to believe that pork-barrelling and other ways of using taxpayer funds to achieve electoral advantage are indeed a form of corruption that must be addressed. This is in line with Transparency International’s benchmark definition of corruption.

The third is the secrecy with which IBAC is forced to operate. The purpose of an integrity body is to discover, investigate and expose corruption. Without public hearings and reports, its work is crippled.

IBAC can only conduct public hearings in “exceptional circumstances.” Integrity experts argue that the test should be that public hearings take place when it is in the public interest. It is crucial that politicians and public servants know that they are being scrutinised and will be held to account. Hearings are not begun lightly: they are instituted after lengthy, in-camera investigation.

The definition of “exceptional circumstances” is vague and invites well-funded subjects of inquiry to contest the designation through repeated court hearings. That process then gives the well-funded an advantage, seeing the details of the investigation being conducted.

Victorians were unable to know the findings of several secret IBAC investigations before the November election because of another defect in the body’s legislation: the process granting a form of natural justice to those who will have adverse findings from the investigation. Contrasted to the streamlined version in NSW, the Victorian process is much more onerous and can end in the courts, already bogged down by Covid19 pressures.

Problematic also are the centralisation of power in the Andrews government and the army of ministerial aides whose allegiance is to Andrews and the party rather than the public interest. The public service is discouraged from giving frank and fearless advice, experiencing harassment from ministerial aides.

We saw in the May 2022 federal election that the rule of law is important to Australians. The processes of government must be pressured towards integrity by appropriate adherence to norms, systems and by scrutiny. Not only is there the likelihood of poor decision-making and the waste of taxpayer money in the short-term, but also the risk of the degradation of democracy itself in a government antagonistic to the inherent competition. We must strengthen our systems to protect against future governments’ wrongdoing as much as current risks.

Pesutto’s Liberal opposition is a threadbare bunch. The fact that Pesutto was unable to distance the party from Moira Deeming’s extremism when announcing her ouster – including having been an office-bearer in an organisation fighting for complete abortion bans – reinforces that his relatively moderate faction is under siege. As such, they pose little threat to Labor in the medium term.

Both Murdoch and the Victorian Liberal opposition supported the extremist conspiracy networks emerging on Melbourne’s streets to brawl with police over the pandemic. The politicians’ and media’s overblown critiques of the Andrews’ government and its pandemic handling became blurred with frightening figures bringing gallows to “freedom” rallies.

A discredited media and opposition are a problem for Victoria’s democracy if they cannot hold the government to account when necessary. Dan Andrews and his government must not scoff at calls to strengthen integrity measures just because the opposition is weak. The state deserves a great deal better.

 

This was first published at Pearls and Irritations

 

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Dark Money funding Weaponised Unreality

Billionaires fund bodies with excellent PR strategies to ensure they achieve their goals. Amongst the strategies, “astroturf” organisations use good-sounding names to confuse us in a chaotic information moment. We need help to know which organisations are reliable and which aim to deceive and distort the debate.

The weaponised unreality – or alternative reality – in which the right finds itself immersed has not developed by chance. It is the project of decades of constant work, and billions of dollars. Social media sprays it around the globe, now out of the control of the people who funded and designed the strategies.

The concept of “marketing doubt” was honed by the tobacco lobby from the late 1960s, deferring action on the science that had proved smoking was a deadly risk. Muddying the debate was enough to prevent legislators setting restrictions and courts imposing damages. It is estimated that, in America alone, 16 million people died from tobacco use over that period.

The fossil fuel sector initially pursued research into diversifying energy sources once the threat from excess carbon in the atmosphere became reasonably clear in the late 70s. In the 80s, when the sector decided this was too costly, they adopted the tobacco sector’s propaganda plan. Many of the same people transferred and refined the skills to delay action, forging what is now the climate emergency.

Now institutions like Fox News and Sky, together with their trashier and more radical imitators, fan up outrage about M&M spokescandies or an attack on apparently-beloved gas cooktops. Anyone arguing anything other than the current radicalised right orthodoxy is a “woke” and existential threat. More dangerously, any behaviour that doesn’t reconcile with patriarchal “traditional” sexuality is framed not merely as woke but as an existential threat to the nation.

In between effectively banning abortion and making it possible to take trans youth from supportive families, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on the Disney corporation threatening to build a prison on its doorstep to punish it for the mildest of resistance to his persecution of LGBTQI+ people.

Realist donors and strategists in America have begun to baulk at the culture war battles* that are alienating the majority of voters – not to mention impinging on the free market. Over decades they fought to have tax and regulations cut, knowing it would harm the mass of voters. Distractions were devised to immerse voters’ identities in cultural campaigns in order to wield enough votes to pursue the goals. For instance, conservatives learnt to believe utterly in their God-given duty to burn fossil fuels. 

Now the clear-eyed see the chaos that is the result.

The disinformation strategies began to develop in force with Anthony Fisher’s “think” tanks that drove the harsh neoliberal ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. These propagandist bodies devised plans to spread the plutocrats’ wish-list as though it was an orthodox and widespread academic argument. The most direct offshoot of his project is now the Atlas Network with over 500 interlinked bodies worldwide, including the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

The billionaire-enabled “think” tanks funded chairs and departments in universities that would give credibility to their ideology. They provided a gush of money to young “conservatives” who would pursue the goal of turning the law and politics towards free market goals, with schools and associations designed to mentor their progress in the professions. Their conservative social ideas became entangled in this ultra free market political economy.

The “think” tanks’ lobbyists directly targeted politicians. Conferences and speaking tours brought the acolytes together. The tanks and donors funded journals and “news” organisations. They organised the flooding of newspapers and journals with columns to have the message emerge from many voices.

One strategy that has been particularly powerful in confusing the media and politicians is the founding of a metastasising cohort of front organisations. These spread the messages that serve the donors’ interests, making it sound like there is a broad call for their policies. 

The groups have different models. Some are offshoots of the original “think” tanks. Others are directed at the average punter, faking “grass roots” support for policies ultimately aimed to benefit the wealthy: thus the name “astroturfing” – fake grass roots. And they have, to borrow satirist’s Bird and Fortune’s 2008 financial sector joke, “good names.”

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) sounds like a “good” institution at first blush. In fact, it is a source of virulent anti-immigrant propaganda founded by eugenicist John Tanton. One would sound reasonable quoting The National Policy Institute if the audience was not aware it was a white supremacist organisation. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) sounds reputable. Instead it is a factory churning out boilerplate oppressive laws for state Congresses’ radical right Republicans to table. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the real deal. The fossil fuel lobby created the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) to confuse audiences encountering their disinformation.

Other bodies have transformed in recent years. The Claremont Institute was a standard very conservative body funding research. In the last few years it has become a home of white supremacist talking points, with one of its senior members devising Trump’s election stealing playbook.

This disinformation is being promoted in an age suffering from a depleted news media. Its rushed and often inexperienced reporters cannot tell the difference between, say, Jewish peak bodies such as the Jewish Community Council of Victoria and an aspirant with a name designed to mimic their status. The Australian Jewish Association, which sounds reputable, is rather described as a “far-right, unrepresentative group” which has limited standing. It is a private advocacy group “on the margins” and should be noted as such by any journalist quoting it. Instead both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian quoted [paywalled] it as if it was a peak body.

Also copying the “think” tanks’ strategies, a number of groups quoted on the fabricated “moral” panic about trans people’s existence are collections of ideologues who have adopted an impressive name – or several. The American College of Pediatricians is a group devised to disseminate anti-trans messaging. The American Academy of Pediatrics is in fact that largest body actually representing American pediatricians. The good-sounding name of the former leads news organisations – and politicians – to quote them without understanding the skewed and unscientific nature of the group’s messaging. Gensect and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) are two more of a collection of ideologically-driven organisations that overlap with the same four activist members.

The agenda of these bodies and operatives is to create disinformation, easy in a world of fostered “radical ignorance.” It is hard to detect the truth when agents of chaos are “flooding the zone with shit.”

It should be basic practice that every journalist has a list of credible and discredited organisations by their workstation to aid them in discerning which groups have good names and which only “good names.”

Wikipedia and Sourcewatch can enlighten on many of the ideologues disguising their radical agenda as centrist and empirical organisations, but not all.

We must take every assertion by good-sounding representatives of good-sounding bodies with a grain of salt. Even Australia’s (depleted) best news organisations can’t tell the difference between masters of disinformation and real peak bodies. This is just how the money likes it.

 

*Almost certainly only the trivial ones. There may also be some pushback against the Religious Right Republican Party’s war on abortion, but Trump has made an attack on trans people central to his next campaign. There is little resistance on the Right to the attacks on LGBTQI+ people.

 

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Are Nazis running Victoria?

Currently the Neo Nazis who performed their Hitler salutes on Parliament House steps in Melbourne six weeks ago are effectively instructing Victoria Police which events the self-declared fascists will allow to take place in the state.

Premier Dan Andrews spoke out in horror on social media about the death threats made to councillors and others by the Neo Nazis. It is, however, the legal system and the police’s tolerance, at the very least, of these hateful figures that has led us to this point.

At the beginning of this year, the Neo Nazi making these threats avoided a jail term, instead being sentenced to 18-month community service after a disgraceful attack on a Black security guard outside Channel Nine in Melbourne. The attack was “brutal in its force, speed and repetition” on an unsuspecting victim. If the skin colour of the actors in this assault had been reversed, would the judge have left the assailant to walk free?

On the 18 March, the same man led a posse of threatening buffoons to join him in support of an English grifter’s anti-trans speech at Parliament House. The police kept the Nazis and the disinformation purveyors on the safe side of their activity, effectively protecting them while the fascists performed their Holocaust-linked signal. Meanwhile the small pro-trans justice crowd, emotional at this display of trans-exterminationism, were aggressively pushed around and teargassed by those same police.

These same far right figures infiltrated the conspiracy-world’s “freedom” rallies over the worst of the pandemic. The groups are loosely allied now in infiltrating this American campaign onto Victoria’s streets.

The new “crisis”?

A performance called a “rainbow story hour.” This is the grandchild of Dame Edna and the Panto Dame. Theatre has a heritage of “drag” performances as old and esteemed as the western tradition and beyond: Antigone and Juliet were both drag performances. A rainbow story hour is a glittery drag performance, where a child-friendly story is read at a ticketed event. It is no different to the clowns and fairies who perform for children too.

In America, however, the right has decided that these performances are the perfect event to turn into a grift and a culture war. It is an aspect of the war on trans existence that has brought into state congresses across America hundreds of bills aimed at persecuting a tiny, visible minority as the first step in erasing acceptance of LGBTQI+ rights. It is perpetrated by the same forces stripping reproductive rights and threatening to remove access to contraceptives and women’s right to no-fault divorce.

The attack on trans people is an unalloyed win for these groups in America. The evangelical/Pentecostal perversion of Christianity that has coopted the Republican Party is absolutely committed to “traditional” male and female roles. Complementarian marriage is the only choice: man will be masculine and dominant. Women will be feminine and submissive. Heterosexuality and breeding are compulsory. Any other action by anyone acts to prevent End Times and the return of Christ to rule for a Millennium. Climate change’s disasters tell them this event should be imminent if only humanity would be pure.

Their white supremacist colleagues are delighted to join the fight. They too loathe gender or sexual blurring as much as they hate “racial” blurring. The pink triangles that the Nazis affixed to the clothing of the homosexuals they sent to concentration camps are back in fashion as a symbol of resistance to this resurgence of fascist homophobia. 

Over the last year there have been a number of events where rainbow story hours were targeted by militia and thugs and conspiracy theorists in America. The most dramatic vision emerged from Columbus Ohio last week, where a group dressed in red and black chanted, “There will be blood” outside one such event, while waving a swastika flag.

Donald Trump is using the attack on trans existence as a prominent part of his presidential campaign of retribution.

The attack on trans existence is America is very clearly the first wave of a campaign on LGBTQI+ existence. Acceptance of LGBTQI+ rights and existence is repeatedly targeted in the bills being introduced. There is talk of the death penalty for being gay.

The same nonsense talking point that led to so much violence in the past is being indiscriminately applied to LGBQTI+ people again now: they are wrongly accused of being a pedophile threat. One of the more unpleasant drongos attached to Australia’s conspiracy-right movement labelled Andrews a “groomer” as a result of his condemnation of the fascist threats to councillors.

The campaign coincides with attacks on women’s rights and on people of colour.

So Melbourne’s Neo Nazis are threatening the lives of people associated with LGBTQI+ events now. What will be the next form of event that these men – or their conspiracist associates – decide is intolerable?

Victoria Police have repeatedly “advised” councils that they cannot protect them from the Neo Nazi or conspiracist threat and that the event should be cancelled.

One Monash councillor fairly suggested the Neo Nazis’ actions could “reasonably be understood as terrorism.” Dan Andrews stated that “This Americanisation of our politics has no place here,” and nor do the bigots’ “hateful views.” The vast majority are in agreement, as the Coalition parties are finding.

That leaves Anthony Carbine, Victorian Police Minister, to work with his government colleagues and police leadership to decide how long the small group of Neo Nazis will be allowed to decide what Victorians can do. It won’t end with rainbow story hour.

 

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Weaponised Unreality

Australia’s Liberal politicians – and their media friends – need to be very careful. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has helped create such a crisis of trust in America that there is no way to contest the unreality in which its audience so stubbornly believes.

Weaponised unreality is a term devised to capture the idea that conspiracies aren’t just spreading organically but that they are used, often by the rich and powerful, to entrench their interests. Trickle Down economics can be seen as one unreality promoted so widely that it gained unmerited credibility. Instead we have, unsurprisingly, a crisis of inequality and a substantial minority across the west who have lost faith in the democratic project. Support for strong man leaders is one growing solution to governments driven by donor interests.

Brexit was a propaganda campaign deploying lies and bigotry. It allowed corporations to push for deregulation to America’s lax standards on food safety to make a trade deal possible. The Tories, who created this atomic weapon imploding their own nation, have been fighting for limited tax and regulation ever since: the most dramatic moment was captured in the Truss-Kwarteng debacle. The fact that the rich and their “think” tanks have been fighting so hard to create consensus reality on these matters makes other conspiracies about the elite more plausible: hard Brexit did not fend off EU tax evasion controls for Britain’s wealthy despite this powerful rumour. Such rumours are destructive of critical thinking too.

The facts are that Britain has faced the “worst fall in living standards on record,” only Russia is performing worse in the G20, and the UK has lost on trade and foreign investment. Life expectancy is falling for the poor. Simon Kuper’s report in the Financial Times (20/4/23) makes grim reading. To distract the base from its misery, the Tories are firing up bigotry and transphobia while enacting anti-democratic measures to counter the electoral threat of being loathed.

The Tories are now fighting to exit or reform the European Convention on Human Rights at the expense of both refugees and citizens. 

Politicians and their co-coconspirators are not just spreading different interpretations of reality; instead they shape a fantasy world. Right wing manipulators are harnessing the confusion and grievance of white men in particular as fuel for this movement: the loss of status as the central identity that defines meaning is felt as theft. The actual theft of the nation’s wealth by plutocrats is camouflaged as other identities stealing the white man’s inheritance.

This account suggests there was more coordination amongst notorious figures in the creation and fostering of the QAnon conspiracy that pervades Trump’s MAGA base. The outcome of Trump’s election was tax and regulation cuts for the top, as required by those behind the curtain, and metastasising catastrophes for the dying middle class and poor. The timing of the Covid19 pandemic turned out to be a gift for those who either made or seized on the QAnon game: the result has been a chasm driven between those who pursue the facts to understand their world and those who believe they are resisting a black and white apocalyptic struggle between a demonic centre/left and their heroes on the far right. The perverted Christianity of the Pentecostal churches threading through the movement means there is no negotiation possible with the fantastical narratives on the other side.

In 2004, satirist Jon Stewart appeared against Tucker Carlson on CNN’s Crossfire – a political fight show, more “pro-wrestling” than debate. He asked the hosts to stop hurting America. He told the media that they had a “responsibility to the public discourse,” and they “fail miserably.” While Crossfire ended soon after, the problem has only escalated as the internet caused news’s financial model to fail, and algorithms funnel audiences deeper into a faction’s worldview. From the 1960s, Richard Viguerie showed the power of mailed newsletters to grandmothers, fostering terror of demonised Democrats. These fantasies have grown into a contagious international cyber-world.

Media commentator Chris Hayes recently focused on a 2009 video clip: talk radio megastar Rush Limbaugh was expounding his influential message that the right wing media-sphere was the only source of information Americans should trust. The Universe of Reality (where Rush and now Trump live) is reliable. The Universe of Lies is made of the Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science and the media. As Hayes points out, having spent decades inculcating the base in this poisonous nonsense, there is now no external authority to which right wing media can send their audience when the lies become troublesome.

In 2023, Republican politicians and media bodies alike are trapped by this audience’s parallel universe. There Donald Trump is the bravest of honourable men, saving America’s democracy from the corrupt, and children from pedophile elites. For many, his status is religious. His virtuous battle against evil was brought to a halt by the demonic left which stole the 2020 election for the Democrats. Any Republicans that spoke out against the attack on the Capitol were soon chastened back into line by death-threats from the base.

In the reality-based world, Donald Trump is a loser and a corrupt businessman who made much of his status laundering money for American and international criminals, and whose claims to heroism are a fairytale as laughable as the bone spurs that his prevented his military service. His reputation as a successful businessman was manufactured on “reality” TV.

This radicalisation of a base into monomaniacal supporters of a conspiracy-laden narrative is problematic for its own side as much as the rest of us. As illustrated in 2022, Trump and his followers are popular in the primaries stage where the most radical right candidate is often selected, but they were not electable in 2022 in the midterms. While donors and Republican mainstays might wish for a more palatable candidate, voters at the primary stage will not cooperate.

Murdoch’s Fox has committed to its first huge payment for amplifying the lies that have done so much to undermine America’s fragile democratic project. More are expected to follow. Fox’s support for Trump’s election Big Lie came in the face of its twin efforts to reject Trump, but their audience abandoned them when they tried it.

The fact that Fox has now sacked Tucker Carlson, the network’s most successful and powerful talking head, sends an ambiguous message. It could be that the network is preparing to fall into line behind Trump as the likely Republican candidate in the 2024 election; the court case’s documents reveal many examples of Carlson’s true loathing for Trump, and it is possible the Murdochs think that will become a liability in the next 2 years. There are also rumours that Carlson’s disdain for Fox management played a role in the decision, as well as abusive relationships with staff on the show. The most convincing argument is perhaps the one that the Murdochs do not retain figures who come to believe themselves bigger than the network.

There is an outside chance that Fox acted to end the reign of its king of disinformation, chastened by the Dominion settlement, but that doesn’t fit with the corporate trajectory.

Whatever the reason, the departure of Carlson may cost Fox more than the settlements. It lost more than $690 million in value in the hours after the announcement. It remains to be seen how the MAGA base will respond: this moment in history is not the same as when Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck were sacked and replaced.

The failure of authority beyond the wild fantasies of the right wing ecosphere is an existential crisis. The fossil fuel lobby, like tobacco before it, has overwhelmingly funded the collapse of knowledge and our ability to separate true threats from imaginary. Without drastic action on shared facts to enable action on the climate, human civilisation is at stake. The right wing media bubble has inoculated its base against fact. Genuine factcheckers are disdained as a weapon of the elite. When Fox aimed to factcheck its audience after the Trump loss, its chief executive described this as “bad for business” while a senior vice president asked if it was betraying the audience.

The failure of corporate and national media to identify and adjust to the threat of weaponised unreality is a disaster. With normalcy bias and lazy false equivalence, they have refused to acknowledge the threat posed by a side of politics that has abandoned its commitment to democracy, and any belief that a shared fact-base is crucial to a functional society. Stenographic reporting of lies without context is professional negligence.

The Washington Post finally named Trump’s escalating rhetoric about his role as messianic retribution against a fictionalised version of the elite. The 21 April headline described his vision as “authoritarian.” If we don’t label the scope of our crises accurately, we will struggle to defend ourselves against them.

It is obvious that the nation is harmed by weaponised unreality. Evidence in the US and UK suggests that the damage also hits the forces that aim to ride the wave. Australia has time to halt this civic damage: the Albanese government must act more firmly on challenging lies if the right will not reform itself.

A briefer version of this was first published in Pearls & Irritations

 

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Dutton: pedophile hysteria and child protection

Dutton is the right politician for the post-QAnon age: in fact the radical right zeitgeist caught up with him. His decision to drum up (another) pedophilia crisis to stain the referendum on the Voice to parliament is both grotesque and on trend.

In the QAnon conspiracy everyone in power on the progressive side is a pedophile – or pedophile cannibal – running a massive child abduction and persecution ring. As it has diffused into radical right and religious right politics, the accusations have centred on anyone not-heterosexual being a groomer of small children.

It’s a rare politician that believes the QAnon conspiracy, but many have exploited the underlying ideas to co-opt its adherents. It is easy to draw in a wider “conservative” audience to believe in threats posed to children by, say, LGBTQI+ people. Disdain for people who allegedly hurt children is quick to muster.

Threatening people’s children is the most visceral threat that can be made and one likely to promote violence. The ludicrous Blood Libel (that Jewish people sacrificed children) was used to promote violence through the centuries. One would like to say culminating in the Holocaust, but the same tropes are linking Jewish people into the threatening “elites” demonised by the International radical right. The use of the Blood Libel remains in play with the QAnon conspiracy.

The threat to children in general is one of the most powerful that people can use. Harm to children is far more emotional than harm to adults; no retribution is excessive for people who harm children.

This is why, when children were being desperately harmed by our immigration policies, Australia’s contractors mostly executed it on small islands far out of sight. The Coalition government knew that if Australians saw what was truly happening on those distant places, there would be outrage. Instead complicit media was sent to take staged photographs and tell offensive fairy tales about island paradise.

Until arguably tortured children were finally dying of Resignation Syndrome, immigration minister Dutton’s immigration contested (almost) every evacuation case in court. The risk of too many children dying overwhelmed the commitment to reject mercy. Families were split during these terrifying illnesses with the intention to force the family to reunite again on Nauru after the child was “cured.”

When stories of abuse of adult refugees and asylum seekers made it into the press, immigration minister Dutton made vague allegations about the cohort containing pedophiles, rapists and murderers. Clearly any number of people seeking safety from genocide and persecution could be further harmed to keep out any individual cases of apparently identified criminals.

The video clip of Barrie Cassidy pressing Dutton on stories of asylum seekers causing a “disturbance” by tempting a Manus child into their compound is circulating once again on social media. It is clear from Cassidy’s fine interview technique that Dutton’s story bears no relation to the facts supplied by Manus’s police commander. It is also clear that the facts will not be allowed to get in the way of his narrative.

Dutton does not have a good record on First Nation’s children either.

In 2008, he boycotted the apology to the harmed children of the Stolen Generation and their descendants. He has now apologised for this.

Dutton was part of the Abbott Cabinet that “cut more than $500 million in funding to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services, and another nearly $80 million to Aboriginal and Child Family Centres that supported our vulnerable children and families.”

The harmful Northern Territory intervention, was based on later debunked claims of pedophile rings operating in Indigenous communities. The government of which Dutton was a minister did little to fix the problems that underlay the hyperbolic propaganda that provoked it. The social cost outweighed the few benefits that it brought: the rates of youth suicide and self harm spiked by 500% under it. (Labor governments made small changes but did not overall improve the damaging Intervention.)

We continue taking Indigenous children from their parents rather than working hard to help solve the problems that cause family dysfunction. It is hard to imagine the pain of Indigenous parents in the Intervention, fully aware of the Stolen Generation past, watching their children over-policed and taken away in greater numbers again. This new colonial project aimed to integrate Indigenous Australians into the capitalist project or punish them for wanting self-determination.

Now Dutton has decided to oppose the Voice to parliament, a body supported by 80% of First Nations Australians. Given that it’s a rare policy indeed that has 100% support by a population, that’s a strong showing in its favour.

The Voice aims to bring together the advice of the accumulated groups representing and working with First Nations people around the country so that any policy or program that affects them is designed with them, not in their absence as the destructive Intervention was.

The problems of a community harmed by colonialism, poverty and marginalisation in Alice Springs are the very reason we need a Voice to make sure that the best possible ideas are brought to bear to help the young people in trouble and ease the crises that lead to problems.

It is appalling that Peter Dutton has chosen to drum up another pedophilia scandal, condemned widely by relevant authorities, to discredit the Voice to parliament. The Intervention showed how much more damage such “moral” panics inflict on young Indigenous Australians.

You should be the one to judge his record on protecting children.

This was first published at Pearls and Irritations as Grotesque Dutton drums up another pedophilia crisis

 

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The AAT: abolishing a system of indefinite torment

The abolition of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) is a crucial part of Attorney General Mark Dreyfus KC’s integrity platform. In the last decade of Coalition governments it had become overwhelmed by partisan appointments, creating a bedlam of incompetence and politically-motivated decisions.

Many of these Coalition appointments were unqualified, with no legal training or experience: there are rumours that AAT librarians had been asked on occasion to write findings. To pour salt on the bleeding wound, salaries of up to $385,000 were granted these politicians’ friends.

The term “competitive authoritarianism” describes the path from an elected (if flawed) democracy to illiberal democracy or authoritarianism. One of the key ways that an elected government can tilt the playing field is to own the referees.

An egregious act by Tony Abbott’s Coalition government in 2015 was the abolition of the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) and absorption of its role into the AAT. Expert adjudicators with an understanding of the crises faced by asylum seekers were squandered and replaced by people sympathetic to the Abbott government’s western chauvinism. As a result, roughly 70% of the AAT’s cases tested the claims of refugees refused by an immigration department determined to fast track white au pairs and to reject people it defined as “non-white” seeking safety from genocide.

These decisions carry grave weight. As the ASRC’s Principal Solicitor, Hannah Dickinson, summarised: “Administrative review bodies like the AAT make decisions that have extraordinary significance for people’s lives: whether they face indefinite detention; whether they are deported to death or torture; whether they will be separated from family or community forever.”

The Abbott AAT ran a twin-track system of appeals. Those who came by plane have access to the AAT proper and a chance of justice. Those who came by boat until July 19 2013 endured the Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA) offshoot of the tribunal which was designed to deny justice wherever possible.

The validity of people’s right to refugee status after Abbott and Scott Morrison’s reforms was now judged by public servants expected to reject as many as they could get away with in a Fast Track process that was designed to fail them. Some individual Home Affairs case officers would vouchsafe justice, but find their decision to grant someone protection was then overturned by the National Office in Canberra. 

Access to Legal Aid for asylum seekers was cancelled in March 2014. Some filed paperwork or came to interviews unrepresented, and others came represented by migration agents, not all of whom are as scrupulous or expert as one might need facing being forced home to torture.

The notorious IAA was their appeal pathway. It was a place of justice-denying limitations and aggressive ignorance. Only very limited new information could be brought or clarified. People still physically crippled by torture were assessed by these Coalition appointments to be in no danger on being returned home to their persecutors. Rape was not recognised by this body as a weapon of war, and thus dismissed. Evidence was determined to be fake despite its authenticity. 

In the public interest, findings were posted on the internet. The IAA redacts only the names, making the cases easily recognisable to foreign nations’ security forces, placing family still at home in great danger of retribution.

Immigration, AAT and IAA findings of the right to protection were made largely on the basis of the foreign affairs department’s Country Reports. These can be a poor basis for decision making, three Upper Tribunal judges in the UK found, in a “scathing” rejection of the appalling Sri Lankan report’s use. DFAT has political and diplomatic motivations to write reports in a particular light. Often the reports are formed on the basis of local employees’ information, with many coming from the ethnic majority that does not recognise the rights or stories of the minority community fleeing the country. Expert advisers giving a more accurate picture of the appellant’s fate were disdained by the partisan appointees of the IAA. Tamil Sri Lankans in particular have faced terrible injustice because of the use of this Country Report.

The replacement body for the AAT is being workshopped around Australia at the moment, hearing submissions and accepting reports. It is critical that justice for asylum seekers and refugees is part of the deliberation. As Lord Bingham, former British Lord Chief Justice, said, “asylum decisions are of such moment that only the highest standards of fairness will suffice.”

Australia must recommit to the Refugee Convention. A dedicated body such as the RRT must be reconstituted. This works to remove the unnecessary burden of cases from the AAT (and the courts) to an expert appeal tribunal. The IAA must be disbanded in disgrace.

Resources must be allocated to both bodies: years-long delays are a denial of justice.

There must be training of the tribunal members to understand the impact of trauma on memory, to understand cultural sensitivities about revealing such horrific information to interrogatory strangers. There must be support staff to aid in the mitigation of the pain of reliving a person’s worst horrors, compounded by the fear that they will be living through similar pains again if their story isn’t believed. Interpreters must be carefully selected, with an eye to ethnic tensions in the homeland.

It is essential that new information can be introduced and DFAT Country Reports must be replaced by a more accurate assessment of an appellant’s safety in their homeland.

The 12,000 people in the legacy caseload (pre July 19 2013) are in limbo, many stuck in expensive legal appeals against unjust findings from a broken process. This is a pressure the courts cannot sustain alongside the covid-era backlog. The frustration of professionals and volunteer supporters is immense: even those now out of options and due to be sent home have ominous fates looming.

Australia is determined that the “offshore cohort,” who came after the arbitrary date of July 19, will go elsewhere. Their last decade’s fate was decided by the whim of Border Force. A painful life of limbo in Australia or the grotesque torments of the Manus and Nauru prisons might depend on which side of a Border Force official’s arm they stood in a room, to be split from family and friends.

Unfortunately there are few options for them available since most countries are dealing with their own more generous intake already. Every political undertaking is changed as circumstances shift: Rudd’s “no chance” promise is unnecessary in an era of boat push-backs. 

Both cohorts are being used to balance the slow mercy granted the 19,000 whose visas will be transitioned to permanent safety. The legacy and offshore groups are being sacrificed to the culture warrior bigots.

It seems that outside the courts, immigration minister Andrew Giles plans to review each case separately to see which deserve a Ministerial Intervention. This appears an outrageously labour-intensive process for a cohort where 90% have consistently been found to be genuine refugees. An amnesty, which Giles rejects because a small number come from places with no record of persecution , seems a much better option than continuing to torment these individuals and families kept in limbo.

Our politicians and complicit media have performed outrage about the relative few refugees who made it to our distant shores, as a racist distraction from their unpopular policies. In fact our intake has been measly. During a similar crisis of displacement, Australia took 70,000 refugees in a year. The post WW2 refugees, however, were largely European and somewhat less challenging for a white supremacist people.

It is great news for our democracy that the shambles of an AAT is being replaced. As part of this process, we must ensure that we provide justice for the relatively few refugees who have come to us for safe haven rather than persecuting them in the hope that their genocidal home becomes preferable to our indefinite torment. 

There is no place for that crime in a healthy democracy.

Originally published in Pearls and Irritations

 

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Secrecy is the enemy of democracy: whistleblowers are heroes

One of the most hated aspects of the Morrison government was the secrecy. Over and again, we continue to shock to revelations of hidden wrongdoing long after their defeat last May.

It was a crucial aspect of the Coalition government’s efforts over a decade to diminish our democratic structures, shifting us towards competitive authoritarianism, and minority rule. It was integral to the malfeasance that caused us to sink 12 points – equal with illiberal Hungary – on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

Scott Morrison’s deeply secret 5-ministry scandal was partly orchestrated to keep still more secrets.

In one manifestation, Morrison stood as the only permanent member of a cabinet committee so that any meeting with others could be designated cabinet-in-confidence. Documents were wheeled into cabinet meetings or stapled to cabinet reports to grant cabinet-level secrecy.

The Coalition aimed to make acts of journalism and whistleblowing liable to up to 20 years imprisonment in 2018. AFP raids on journalists and media organisations took place as a result of the government’s fear of transparency.

Repeatedly the public has asked why people did not reveal the offences and norm violations.

Part of the problem was draconian restrictions and punishment imposed on people in the public service and working for contractors. 

Australia has 849 secrecy restrictions criminalising the release of various kinds of federal government information. The publication of “government information is restricted by 11 general secrecy offences in the criminal code, 542 specific secrecy offences contained in 178 separate commonwealth acts, and 296 non-disclosure duties in 107 commonwealth laws.” Breaching any of these attracts criminal liability. 

The point of sending asylum seekers and refugees offshore was in large part to keep Australians from seeing that these are people like us, particularly children with whom we might more easily empathise. The appalling abuses and crimes perpetrated against them, leading to children almost dying of Resignation Syndrome, were amongst the Coalition government’s darkest secrets.

The immigration department set the AFP on “Save the Children” workers who had made a covert submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission regarding the fact that they believed “the children have been subjected to multiple violations of their human rights and wrongdoing from multiple parties.” Workers had been blocked from speaking out by draconian confidentiality provisions in their contracts imposed by the immigration department.

Morrison devised the label of “on-water matters” to keep so much about our disgraceful disregard for international law and convention secret. Journalist Paul Farrell was pursued by the AFP at immigration department instruction for revealing Australian security boats’ incursions into Indonesian waters as part of repelling asylum boats.

Many of the best people in the public service have left a career where they had come to be treated as a servant class to political whims and ideologues’ missions. The fine people of the immigration department, with their nation-building role, left in droves over the Morrison and Dutton years, replaced with customs personnel who worked to keep out any potential non-white citizen as if they were pest-bearing woodwork. These small minds flaunted their new paramilitary uniforms and pointless medals, just as Scott Morrison did his grotesque trophy celebrating (wrongly) that he stopped the boats. 

Most of the people working in immigration by the end of Morrison’s government had nowhere else to go, and many should face investigation for implementing inexcusable instructions. Obeying orders is never a valid excuse for human rights abuse.

The Robodebt Royal Commission revealed how desperately battered the Public Service in Canberra has become after years of Coalition disdain for their function. Professor Glyn Davis of the Thodey panel investigating the public service crisis described it as transforming away from a partnership with politicians to a “command and control system” where “public service becomes the delivery arm of political goals.” 

Too many appointments were political. Too many senior people narrowed their focus to the task in front of them, to politicians’ demands, and ignored their duty to the nation. Too many people intimidated those who asked whether what was happening was legal or ethical.

Morrison ignored the findings of the Thodey report setting out the importance of a strong public service able to give frank and fearless advice. His government had little interest in policy supported by empirical evidence or the general good. As John Hewson said at the time, the government’s intent seemed to be to “consolidate political power.”

In the face of these threats, the last decade’s whistleblowers ought to be greeted as heroes. Public servants who strode against the humiliating tide of capitulation by their peers ought to be treasured.

Instead, only one of the whistleblowers has been rescued from continuing persecution in the processes set in motion by the last government. AG Mark Dreyfus felt that the persecution of Witness K’s lawyer Bernard Collaery was unconscionable and intervened. Public servants Richard Boyle and David McBride continue to suffer the financial, emotional and psychological pain of the system’s retribution. If convicted, they face lengthy prison terms.

Richard Boyle attempted to impress upon his superiors his concerns about the ATO’s “aggressive debt collection tactics.” When that failed, he went to the inspector general of taxation. There was no action on his justified complaints. The whistleblowing that followed the system’s failure to act on its own brokenness is still being vindictively pursued. We can only wish that Robodebt’s agents would have acted with such courage, but his persecution hints at why they didn’t.

David McBride, a former military lawyer, will be tried this November unless Dreyfus chooses to intervene. The revelations that he ultimately took to the ABC, when the internal system failed him too, became “The Afghan Files” revealing war crimes accusations. We need further military whistleblowers if soldiers did not merely, allegedly, act on their own bloodied impulse.

As Kieran Pender of the Human Rights Law Centre details, “Australia is a better place because they spoke up when they saw something wrong.” He has said, the failure of the Public Interest Disclosure Act to protect these men shows that the law is “utterly broken.” AG Dreyfus could act at any time but apparently does not want to be seen repeatedly to interfere with the actions of the courts.

We know there are 849 secrecy provisions in federal government because of an Albanese government report revealing it last month. Mark Dreyfus intends that to be the basis for extensive reforms.

Dreyfus has spoken about the crucial role of the public service in its ability to offer expert frank and fearless advice to politicians and their staffers. He has promised to extend whistleblower protections as part of his integrity framework. All this is admirable. It is not acceptable, however, for reforms to take so long that two of the best public servants continue to be tormented in the courts because of the Attorney-General’s department’s slowness to act.

A crucial part of extending whistleblower protections must be swift action to end these two prosecutions. Every politician and public servant must act knowing that they will be able to hold their heads up in the face of public scrutiny: secrecy is our enemy.

 

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Victorian MLC Moira Deeming: the pretty face of a scary ideology

“I can’t wait until I’m legally able to hunt you down.”

This curse was said to an American trans women in the streets of Oklahoma last year. It’s far from the only murderous threat in the US. Preachers and politicians are discussing ways to make being LGBTQI+ – and gender diverse in particular – punishable by death. YouTube and social media influencers spew it in angry vernacular. The right-wing media sphere echoes the same trans (and LGBTQI+) exterminationist rhetoric, but in voices dangerous precisely because they sound intelligent and authoritative.

It’s probable that Victorian Liberal politician Moira Deeming and JK Rowling do not understand the forces for which they provide a polite facade. When a young woman was murdered by other teens in an English park earlier this year, almost certainly for being trans, it is hard to say if Rowling had any influence or whether it was mostly the impact of vile misogynist and homophobic influencer Andrew Tate (currently locked in a Romanian prison awaiting trial for human trafficking). The point is that it doesn’t really matter. Together, women like Deeming, Rowling and the tomato-souped Posie Parker have given a faux-respectable face to the movement that would rip the rights and equality from women born as women too. It will kill trans people outright.

Deeming and Rowling make it apparent in different ways that they don’t seem to care what damage is done to straight women alongside trans people. Deeming is an abortion abolitionist and deeply religious: she combines American religious right beliefs on sex-based divisions with the British faux-feminist fear-mongering about trans people. Rowling endorsed the work of American pundit Matt Walsh who is one of the most extreme trans exterminationist – and misogynist – figures on the American media’s right. For the right, the two hatreds are combined: feminism is the gateway, apparently, to the destruction of sex difference, family and the nation. LGBTQI+ rights are the extension of this asserted toxic divorce from tradition. It’s also intertwined with racism.

Matt Walsh currently works for Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire as a content producer. The Daily Wire is the home of widespread trans demonisation in 2023, and its hysteria levels are escalating every month. Shapiro has been a social media influencer of young Australian men for a decade now, so it is not wise to disregard this as an American problem.

Walsh depicts trans people, wrongly, as an overwhelming threat to the nation: he rages at “what these people have done to our country, the devastation they have wrought on a generation of children and adults alike, the bleakness and ugliness of their worldview, the moral and intellectual chaos they leave in their wake.”

The Wire’s hyperbole is of the dehumanising kind that aims to breed fear and loathing. It is the kind that precedes genocide: the Lemkin Institute, named for the man who invented the term genocide, and working to combat genocide around the world, calls this propagandist and legal movement in the US genocidal: it “believes that the so-called “gender critical movement” that is behind these laws is a fascist movement furthering a specifically genocidal ideology that seeks the complete eradication of trans identity from the world.”

The Lemkin statement notes the soft-soaping of this in mainstream articulation as eradicating the ability to be trans, or the right’s invention of a thing called “transgenderism”, as akin to “following a genocidal logic similar to the US, Canadian, and Australian boarding schools that sought to ‘kill the Indian, [and] save the man’.”

One of Walsh’s colleagues, Michael Knowles, declared in complete contradiction of science, history and anthropological knowledge that gender diverse people do not exist: “nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they’re the wrong sex, but they’re mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”

Walsh and his ilk can be less careful to skirt the line of calling for mass murder: “But is a word like eradicate over the top? Does it have a needlessly militant tone? No, definitely not. The tone may be militant, but not needlessly so. We are, after all, in a war and lives are at stake. We are in a war against the most deranged ideology ever invented by the human race, plain and simple. We are fighting to eradicate the ideological equivalent of a parasitic infestation. And the parasite, gender ideology, seeks to not only brainwash a generation of children, not only degrade and appropriate womanhood, and manhood by the way, but also and most fundamentally, it seeks to eat away at truth itself or if it cannot devour the truth, then at least it will destroy our ability to recognize the truth for what it is.”

Walsh also – wrongly and dangerously – portrays trans people as “coming after” children, and implies that violence is demanded: “when it comes to my children, the children that I cherish more than my own life, if you think mean words go too far, then you would be very shocked to hear how far I would really go to protect them. Trust me, words are the least of it. So, yes, my words reflect anger because I am angry. But the problem is not that I’m angry, the problem is that you aren’t nearly angry enough.” There are few better ways to incite violence than to foster the idea that children are in danger from (mythical) “pedophiles” or murderers; the Nazis used the Blood Libel to dire effect against Jewish millions.

Both Knowles and his more famous colleague Candace Owens depict trans people as a demonic crisis. This is not new: extreme homophobia in the US (similarly to Putin’s Russia) is depicted as a battle against the demon Jezebel. In American radicalised right discourse, this description has literal intent.

The Daily Wire is a small and radical organisation. These voices on the right are funnelled into relative respectable and mainstream territory by Fox News. Tucker Carlson, its current star performer, has been channelling anti-trans vitriol for years, apparently having inherited a loathing of trans people, alongside his misogyny, at home. Not content to dehumanise and demonise trans people, Carlson encourages fathers to beat up LGBTQI+ teachers.

Tucker Carlson is reported by the New York Times to report directly to the Murdochs. He is also apparently required viewing for News Corp’s Australian editors for insights into the Murdoch line.

We cannot ignore the language that precedes genocide in our AUKUS partner. It is not just US social media that pervades here, but ultimately its political economy bleeds over too. The threat to hunt down trans people is not just a cruel intimidation. The Speaker of the Texas House intends to introduce a bill to create a combined civilian and professional militia with legal immunity to hunt down (and theoretically deport) “illegal” immigrants. America is its own dystopian horror film.

If we don’t pay attention to the fascist politics that literally target this minuscule group of people, then we don’t see the context for Moira Deeming’s political posturing. If we miss that, we don’t see the context for the Neo Nazis and “Christian Lives Matter” thugs channelling fascist American and European homophobic and misogynist violence onto our streets.

Bad men remain the true threat to women, children, and trans people.[1] Women spreading disinformation asserting that trans people are the threat are (unknowingly?) sanitising the fascist politics destroying America and fostering violence and hate in the UK.

 

[1] The two cases of shootings that allege gender diverse perpetrators are complex and unclear. Of the 172 shootings in America that killed more than 4 people over the last 55 years, 168 shooters were men. Two of the four women acted alongside men. NYT 28/3/2023.

 

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Nazis on our streets: don’t judge protesters by politeness

On some level, it is straightforward for a Neo-Nazi protest to be easy for police to handle. As we saw on the streets of Melbourne last weekend, and repeatedly over recent years, a high five for white supremacist protesters is an easy gesture for some police officers.

It’s not just that there can be shared ideology. Certainly, some police are sympathetic to the white supremacists’ cause. These share a loathing of non-white people or leftie issues. The “woke,” as they now call progressives, are a disgusting, dirty rabble who make trouble. Some police are highly conservative and repulsed by difference. Some sought out a police career because it gave them the odd chance to thump an enemy. Active ethno-nationalists join police forces and armies around the world, often to gain the military training they need for the race war they seek. Not all are filtered out in the selection process.

On the streets though, Neo-Nazi protesters can be easy to handle. They appear, give or take their presence at freedom rallies through COVID-19, in small enough numbers to know they can’t institute direct violence – so far. So they play to their personality.

Most of the young men who step onto the path to Neo Nazism are aggrieved at having lost centre stage to women and others who ought to know their place. Core to that step too, is the spirit of trolling.

A certain kind of young man loves the opportunity to shock and appal those around him. There is laughter to be achieved at the pain of the target and the horror of empathetic bystanders. Your tears are their glee. Your softness is their signal for a boot in the guts. On the internet, active Neo Nazis have used cruel jokes and memes to tempt teens and young men from this path of bullying hilarity to ethno-nationalism. Message boards, of the sort that spawned the QAnon joke, have been used to radicalise youth who don’t get the respect – or girlfriend – they deserve as a man, and white.

This isn’t to say there isn’t pain and passion amongst the Neo-Nazis. There is. Resentment and bigoted loathing fill many of them. Others are more there to shock and bully those they designate as “weak.” Some truly believe that white, straight men are the most powerless of identities at this moment, overwhelming evidence to the contrary unseen because it is the static landscape of our lives.

Knowing the far right is a minority, the clever minds amongst them deploy democracy’s weaknesses to end it. Libertarians emphasise the utmost freedom of speech and association implicit in the concept of western liberalism. Some argue that toxic speech is best seen rather than kept hidden, best shrugged off as a minority position rather than given undue emphasis. This suits Neo Nazis very well indeed. The problem with this for the rest of us is that community grievances (and conspiracies) can be harnessed to the mission. Thus we see incels (involuntary celibates) melded into the far-right cause over shared misogyny.

White supremacists use Christianity too to whitewash their ugly bigotry (just as other ethno-nationalists around the world are using their dominant faith). Christianity, like white men, is becoming challenged as the societal norm, and this shift is portrayed as being “under siege.” Thus loathing of Jews or Muslims can be depicted as an honourable defence of the Christian tradition. Old bigotries can be made pure by depicting an assault on women’s equality, or LGBTQI+ erasure, as obeying God’s laws (as the radicals define them). By depicting Queer existence or feminism as a threat to children’s welfare, the radical right can make themselves seem the protectors of the innocent.

The best disguise for these ethno-nationalists is the adoption of a progressive veneer. Even from its origins in the mid-twentieth century, a defence of the environment was inherent to fascism. An attack on the scientific knowledge about trans existence was one of the great book burnings carried out by the Nazis, and homosexuals joined Jews and Gypsies and dissenters in the concentration camps. In the modern world, this presents as a faux–progressive movement notable in feminist circles that would define a woman by her biology. (Didn’t we just spend centuries overcoming that limitation?)

In the world of internet partisanship and the lightning travel of conspiracies woven together to shape a created world with only a passing resemblance to the real one, it is easy for the disaffected to be drawn into the far-right sphere. The pandemic has given a masterclass in how yoga mums and Neo Nazis could become part of the same movement, bonded by “saving the children” from mythical elite cannibals. A joke for the white supremacists became a mission for deluded women.

By contrast, refugee activists see their friends in Australian indefinite detention suffering hideous torments, since indefinite detention alone is defined as a form of torture. Our leaders and their contractors compounded that torture at every turn. Refugee supporters are passionate about the pain we see in nightly conversations with people driven to the brink (or beyond) of suicide that we can’t help.

Climate activists too, tend to be passionate, even desperate. We see the damage in Lismore and Pakistan, in roiling wildfires and rising prices of food. We know that our future looks bleak. The intransigence of government, just as with refugee policy, in the face of this knowledge is infuriating, frustrating and frightening. Government panders to short-term budgetary concerns and the pressure of lobbyists while we see the trillions of debt accumulating from the permacrisis and the millions displaced, thousands even here in Australia already.

Many in the LGBTQI+ community, and particularly those who are gender diverse, see their own current oppression becoming their extermination in the very near future. The models emerging from America, compounded by the bigotry spewing from British women, make this an immediate and justifiable terror. Depicting LGBTQI+ people, wrongly, as a threat to children, and trans people, wrongly, as a threat to women and children, is a powerful way to provoke violence against them. This is already being codified into hundreds of laws in America. American models are followed here; we must not disregard it as a foreign perversion.

So climate protesters, LGBTQI+ protesters, refugee activists – all will be deeply passionate and frightened about very real and immediate harms.

By contrast, Neo-Nazis are there as much for the banter and the chance to intimidate those they define as weak. Both can be deployed to recruit new young men (and sycophantic women). There is no downside for them in these protests so far. A bit of a joke with some sympathetic police officers is a given. The jokes that make them easy work for the police act as recruitment.

The cunning recruitment tactics help them build into a danger. That’s why we saw “feminists” supported by and chatting with, Nazis on Melbourne’s streets.

Victoria’s police leaders and government need to communicate how they will handle the presence of Nazi memelords on our streets, and the confusing fact that they are easier – currently – to handle than protesters who are frightened and angry about real and immediate harms.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Why do police high five Neo-Nazis?

 

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Murdoch’s Zero Sum games: divisive propaganda meant to break us

The Murdoch media drives resentment with propaganda as constant as drums of war. The pounding message for its audience is that every development is a zero-sum game, one that only defrauds this “conservative” base.

The unspoken subtext for all these battles is the idea that everyone comes from a place of roughly equal opportunity. The concept that anyone might be disadvantaged (or advantaged) by decisions that we make as a society is anathema. The knowledge that history can trap people is inadmissible. Any attempt to mitigate harm so that we can all benefit is dismissed as social engineering, a slippery slope to socialism.

The poor, the welfare dependent, women, non-white people: any action to diminish barriers to their achievement is portrayed as theft. The idea that a society where most can flourish is a flourishing society is poison to this narrative. Equally, the benefits of upper/middle class birth are obscured: the successful achieve through grit and determination. Anyone can replicate this if they try, the story declaims. The default identity is middle-class, white man. Any other status is an “identity” to be deplored as divisive.[1]

Sometimes News Corp targets refugees, who are rarely depicted as the fellow builders of this nation that they have been. Instead, they are deplored as taking from us, either our wealth or our safety. The recent announcement that “boat” people can apply for family reunion in the years ahead (replacing the painfully destructive decade’s separation from vulnerable family) is presented as inviting people smugglers. Actually that “business model” is prevented by the boat turnback policy: the last decade of human rights abuse by the Coalition government was wanton cruelty.

The Voice to Parliament is now the primary front of the war. The Voice is in actuality little more than a token. The Discussion Paper outlines the intent: it will allow “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people [to] have more of a say on the laws, policies and services that impact their lives.” There is no power to compel government or ensure that advice is incorporated into the ways Indigenous lives are impacted by Canberra. It is incorporated into the constitution in order to recognise the weight of the fact that this land was theirs for over 65,000 years before we took it, unceded, over the last 200 years.

The Northern Territory intervention showed the worst ways that outside interference could impact groups traumatised by history: “any possible benefits to physical health [were] largely outweighed by negative impacts on psychological health, social health and well-being, and cultural integrity.” The idea is not that the Voice should replace concrete strategies, but that it should help tailor them to be more effective. The hope is that the damage done by the colonial project can be better mitigated by a more thoughtful and appropriate series of strategies achieved through consultation.

We have shown ourselves to have the capacity to continue hurting First Nations people more than any other population, from the beginning when we eliminated an estimated 90% of their population to this moment where we continue to attempt ham-fisted “solutions” to the problems born of poverty, intergenerational trauma and marginalisation. We owe them more thoughtful, consultative solutions.

Instead of the truth about this feather duster of a body, Murdoch’s audiences are told that it is “third” chamber in parliament and poses a dire threat to white Australia’s autonomy. Andrew Bolt described it as a “new apartheid” with just one “race” benefitting from the racism, equating it to the White Australia Policy.[2] He also labelled it an “undemocratic farce.”[3] He depicts many of the Indigenous Australians it will represent as “Fakes, frauds and rent-seekers,” in his repeated efforts to discredit the Aboriginality of claimants.[4] Henry Ergas describes the prospect as entrenching “racial separatism” and denying “political equality” to white Australia, akin to disenfranchisement of French Jews before 1789.[5] Albrechtson depicted it as “preferential privileges”[6] and “a radical shift in power.”[7] A typical letter-writer describes the Voice as singling out one group for “special treatment” and scuttling equality by putting them above the rest of the population.[8] Peta Credlin depicted it as a “trojan horse” to usher in “Aboriginal states.”[9]

Chris Kenny of all people warned Dutton in November, buried deep in a long column, not to risk being seen as a “a political anachronism, a flint-hearted curio” by pursing the smear campaign on the Voice, a body that can do “no significant harm to the nation but could provide considerable benefits.”[10] The Australian published the account of the nitpicking stress testing of the wording of the amendment by a mixed panel of constitutional heavy-weights from one of its members. George Williams makes clear that there is no veto power over parliament. There is no requirement that government listens to the Voice. There are no special rights conferred.[11] This is why some First Nations’ activists are dismissing the body as a sop.

Any other claim for inclusion is treated as a threat to the mainstream’s ownership too. Marriage equality took nothing from “traditional” marriages and yet this was the framing that throbbed through News Corp. Janet Albrechtson recently expressed that JK Rowling ought to be woman of the year for her attacks on trans existence. Albrechtson performed horror that the word woman “is being erased.”

This distortion of the facts is not freshly concocted by the columnist. It is a standard trope of the women’s right-wing space (even though not all declaring it realise the provenance). It emerges from the idea that various groups in the LGBTQI+ community have asked that language includes them. When a lesbian couple have a baby, one of them is the “birthing parent” since both will be mothers. Nobody is eliminating the term “mother;” it is just that our language is able to open out to include other experience where relevant.

Leaving language open for professionals to address people as required is not an erasure of women’s existence. The controversial term “chestfeeding” has been devised purely to speak to people for whom breasts aren’t relevant. It is not a replacement for the term breastfeeding. The lesson is merely asking midwives to be thoughtful about the needs of the individual recipients of their instruction. Change is complicated and messy. We make mistakes. Solving the inherent problems is our task.

The result of this campaign is deadly violence.

The only recent battle where News Corp’s audience arguably does stand to lose something, rather than cowering in fear of manufactured monsters under the bed, is the tantrum over Jim Chalmers’ The Monthly essay. The opinion and letters page of The Australian[12] was filled with outrage over his “socialism” expressed in a work that asks, as Katherine Murphy puts it, “in conciliatory terms that capitalism should (brace yourselves readers) be tethered by values.” He continued the focus on economic growth as the solution to our ills, despite concern that this is a dangerous path.

In fact, the idea that these readers stand to lose in capitalism balanced with regulation and government programs is a myth created by the plutocrats who believe life truly is a zero sum game.

Robert Reich detailed in a February essay that the “free market” is a poisonous lie that has created massive inequality, dysfunction and disaster. There is no such thing as a free market, he points out: markets are designed by judges, legislators and government agencies for a party, either “to advance public purposes or monied interests.” As servants of the monied interests, our right-wing political parties have become circuses filled with clowns and jerks, or zombie parties, gutted by deceptive free market ideology. Nativist populist creeps and campaigns are winning and damaging countries in predictable ways. Britain is paralysed with rolling strikes after years of neoliberals starving infrastructure of funds. The “antiwork” movement represents workers’ growing disgust at the exploitation laid bare by the pandemic.

Murdoch’s Dog Line treats a request to be included in our societies as though the target is digging up the graves of our ancestors and stealing our inheritance. Politics based on this resentment and rage can only damage us. It is crucial that those who continue to follow Murdoch’s “news” do so in the full knowledge that his zero sum games are a dangerous distortion intended to distract us while the monied interests take everything.

 

[1] Sheridan, Greg “Identity politics the real risk in voice,” The Australian 7/2/2023

[2] Bolt, Andrew “Architects of new apartheid,” The Herald Sun 31/10/2022

[3] Bolt, Andrew “Giving voice to an undemocratic farce,” The Herald Sun 19/1/23

[4] Bolt, Andrew “Whose voice is being heard,” The Herald Sun 14/11/2022

[5] Ergas, Henry “Voice to entrench racial separatism,” The Australian 27/1/2023

[6] Albrechtson, Janet “Oratory is no substitute for cool, hard-headed analysis” The Australian 5-6/11/2022

[7] Albrechtson, Janet “Conventional approach to real debate in voice” The Australian 8/2/2023

[8] Needham, David “Terrible irony of attempt to right historical wrong,” The Australian 2/2/2023

[9] Credlin, Peta “Voice a Trojan horse,” The Herald Sun 12/2/2023

[10] Kenny, Chris “Sound the alarm, Mr Dutton” The Weekend Australian 26-7/11/2022

[11] Williams, George “Expert stress tests show the voice is not a threat” 23/12/2022

[12] Letters The Australian 1&2/2/23)

This was originally published in Pearls and Irritations as The Voice: News Corps dangerous zero sum games 

 

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