Putting the mob in its place

The brutal suppression of a peaceful protest in Melbourne City Square on October 21 by riot police using attack dogs and chemical weapons signifies a changing relationship between government and governed.

A State government clinging to power by a single vote would not normally set attack dogs upon voters. But these do not seem to be normal times.

This month Australian business heavyweight Don Argus declared war on Australian shareholders unhappy with the average five million dollar paycheck for Australian corporate executives running top 100 companies.

The corporate gravy train is threatened by laws which give Australian shareholders the right to protest against excessive corporate pay packets. Shareholders can move to reject company directors salaries at annual general meetings. But according to Mr. Argus they should not.

Shareholders unhappy with executive remuneration could, he said, sell their shares. And Australians are selling their shares, driving equity markets to historical lows, while executive pay packets soar to new heights.

The town or city square is historically a place for ordinary people to meet and to sometimes protest. Melbourne's city square is an uninviting place surrounded by businesses paying exorbitant rent to trade in a people's place. It is difficult to think of any public space in Melbourne which has not been encroached upon by commercial interests, but our city square represents, after years of mismanagement by Melbourne City Council, the biggest example of an overly commercialized public space in Melbourne.

Don Argus and Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle have turned upon the Australian public who own what they, temporarily and at great expense, control, and there is very little ordinary Australians can do about it. Except vote them out at the next opportunity.

The strange rules of Australian corporate governance guarantee that a single vote against exorbitant executive remuneration is not enough. Shareholders have to vote against corporate remuneration policies at two annual general meetings in a row, to force a change. Company directors only need to vote once to increase their pay. Strange times.

Another strangeness about these times is that freedom has become divisible, with Melbourne's Lord Mayor suddenly acquiring the right to declare a time limit on free speech. This limit exists only in the Lord Mayors mind, and that of the Federal and State political class who endorsed his actions.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights says:

All human rights are indivisible, whether they are civil and political rights, such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to work, social security and education , or collective rights, such as the rights to development and self-determination, are indivisible, interrelated and interdependent. The improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others. Likewise, the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others.

The rights of corporations to profit seem to outweigh the rights of citizens to ask questions, to discuss, to assemble, and to protest, at least two to one. It is by any reasonable standard a situation which is probably not fair. It is certainly an indication that individuals have less social gravity in modern affairs than corporations. And that will be welcomed by the political classes, always on the lookout for ways to profit, and cling to power, and to demonize and brutalize what they have called "sheep" and a "mob" opposing them.

First Casualties

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 21: We are the 99 per cent.

indymedia.org.au October 21: There is a big lie being perpetrated on the Australian people.

Police Assistant Commissioner Fontana October 21: We have concerns that state wards are hanging around.

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle October 21:

Traders are suffering and events planned for the square have been disrupted.

Occupy Melbourne spokesperson Nick Carson October 21: People will be arrested.

Police Assistant Commissioner Fontana October 21: They are consuming alcohol and we are concerned that will lead to violence.

Erin Buckley Occupy Melbourne legal support team

October 21: Our observers have witnessed and been told of numerous incidents of excessive force and violence against the peaceful protesters...

Melbourne Age website October 21: Hundreds of people, including school children, are now lining Swanston and Collins streets watching the drama, with some chanting "the whole world is watching".

Unnamed policeman, to Melbourne Herald Sun October 21: Now they know we mean it. No more Christine Nixon stuff.

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle October 22: A mindless shriek of protest.

Melbourne Herald Sun October 22: victory for the boys in blue was never in doubt.

The Australian Editorial October 22: There is no meter running on freedom of expression. The internet and social media have their place, but, historically, the town square is in part a space for public expression.

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 22: Occupy Melbourne is part of a worldwide movement against the growing disparity between rich and poor, austerity measures and corporate greed. It is a movement for economic and social justice and real democracy. The richest 20% of households in Australia have 60 times the wealth of the poorest 20% of Australians. CEOs are getting huge pay increases and banks are posting record profits. We want a fair share for all Australians. The camp where Occupy Melbourne has been for the past week has been dispersed, but the movement against inequality will continue tomorrow.

Melbourne Age Editorial October 23: Really Lord Mayor?...Peaceful gatherings of this kind shouldn't be broken up in such a heavy handed manner.

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 23: We are the 99 per cent.

How to make a tinfoil hat

For anyone troubled by the Australian mass media saying stuff you don't like, help is at hand. The Anything But Human Special Edition Tinfoil Hat is here, and in the great tradition of direct action, you can make it yourself.

You need:

1. Two squares of aluminum foil about 300mm a side.

2. A head.

Five-step assembly:

1. Arrange one bit of aluminum foil on the head, from front to back.

2. Pat the foil until it conforms to the head's shape and gently bend bits of the foil away from the eyes and neck.

3. Arrange the second square of foil on the head from ear to ear.

4. Pat the foil until it conforms to the head's shape and gently bend bits of the foil away from the ears.

5. Squeeze and fold the bits of foil you folded away from ears, eyes and neck into a flat shape that runs continuously around the head. Your tinfoil hat is now ready to use.

WARNING: Some media may require extra layers of tinfoil. You will know which when you see it.

Time to rattle the chains

Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains - JJ Rousseau

There is no better time than now for us all to stand up for the rights of people everywhere to say things we don't like.

Australians ought to at least have the right to get it wrong. When we talk about freedom of speech we often mean the right to speak freely about what is true. But what about when we get it wrong? Shouldn't we have the right to get it wrong? And what about stuff we don't like? Shouldn't newspapers have the freedom to print stuff we don't like?

As I write this today Melbourne's Herald Sun website is reporting

THE assumed right of unfettered freedom of speech was trumped by laws protecting against racial vilification this morning after the Federal Court delivered its decision on the controversial "white Aborigines" case of Pat Eatock v Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt.

I would normally link to that, but in a kind of newspeak News Limited websites are increasingly reframing and even deleting articles. News speak, I guess. Is that unfettered freedom?

The right of unfettered freedom of speech doesn't exist in Australian law, or in Australian common law. Why on earth would the Herald Sun assume it does? I knew a Melbourne writer who was imprisoned over a book he wrote. Remanded in jail during a criminal libel trial in 1950, he was eventually found not guilty by a jury and freed. Libel trials in the state of Victoria have been in civil courts ever since. A few years before that trial Australian author Max Harris faced charges of making obscene publications in a South Australian court. He was acquitted.

I knew someone whose dad was fond of libel proceedings against the news media. The family backyard contained the Packer swimming pool, the Murdoch Tennis court, and so on, all built with damages won from the respective media organizations in libel trials. Those media organizations had committed the grave, and expensive, sin of getting it wrong.

Since the seventeenth century English, and later Australian newspapers, have claimed the privilege to publish without submitting their copy for censorship. Instead, publications carry the name and address of publishers, who bear the brunt of any private or state interventions.

There is no such privilege for other Australians.

Of course anything broadcast on radio or television is subject to retrospective moderation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, a Federal body established to regulate those media after a campaign by, guess who, Australian newspapers.

Australian artists and film makers are expected to submit works to state censors prior to publication. My own work has been referred to censors for classification, because that's what you have to do before screening a film in Australia. An Australian senate inquiry recently recommended funding more censors, in more places, with stricter censorship guidelines affecting larger jurisdictions. The defense of artistic merit to obscenity charges has been dismantled in many jurisdictions after a campaign by newspaper columnists against Australian artist Bill Henson.

Almost everybody who works in Australian media has been affected, one way or another, by laws restricting free speech. I had to make excuses to the television regulators more times than I remember. I have been questioned by police twice, but never charged, after print and electronic media I was involved in came to the attention of authorities. Once after a conservative radio broadcaster complained long and loud.

There should be no mistaken assumptions here. Australians should have the right to speak freely, and to get it wrong. But we don't.

In the vast echo chambers that characterize Australian media websites the Australian media are doing everything right. And their constant opinion polling is telling them people want to hear exactly what they say. But clearly something is going very wrong for them, when freedom of expression is under siege at every turn.

It is time to rattle the chains. It is time for Australian newspapers to stand up for the unpopular but necessary right to get it wrong. It is time for newspapers to stand up for the rights of individuals to say unpopular things. It is time for newspapers to stand up for the rights of people to exhibit photographs some find obscene.

It is time for Australian newspapers to rattle the chains. But, gripped by populism, and conflicted about free speech, even to save themselves, will they?

Barbarians at the gate

So it is true, there are no girls on the internet!

Internet activists The Pirate Party won 15 out of 130 seats in elections for German State Parliament yesterday, with 8.9% of the popular vote. But all fifteen are male.*

“Gender politics has not arrived for the Pirates yet, and that is not a step forward but a step backward,” Berlin Mayor and Social Democrat Party heavyweight Klaus Wowereit told German media.

The Pirate Party are anti censorship, pro file-sharing, and support transparent government by Wikileak.

The rise of the German Pirate Party represents a much larger threat to media and entertainment conglomerates than the Green-sponsored Finklestien inquiry into Australian political comment does.

The Pirate Party opposes privately owned monopolies, especially in media markets, and supports strengthened privacy statutes and civil protections. Media monopolies and the governments they influence are characterised as enemies of the people. Ordinary people are everywhere oppressed, they say, by invasions of privacy by media conglomerates with excessive influence on the State, and by the criminalisation of legitimate private activities like, for example, file sharing over a peer to peer network, by governments urged on by the same multinational media conglomerates that install them to office.

The New Zealand Government has recently legislated to restrict internet access to individuals caught file sharing by private investigators working for media corporations. Internet traffic through New Zealand dropped ten percent when the new laws took effect.

The Pirate Party wants to abolish international copyright protection for media corporations, especially those it labels monopolistic. The Australian Pirate Party is pro hactivism and anti internet regulation. It champions unhindered access to the internet, and by implication unfettered bit torrent downloads of copyright media, as a fundamental human right.

Australia has been spared, so far, the public spectacle of teenagers and broke and unemployed mums hauled into court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars compensation to mega corporations for sharing popular music tracks on torrent trackers. But Australian Julian Assange and his wikileaks website is at the centre of international debate over corporate and State transparency issues.

Any political party strong enough to flex its muscles will, and short of a collapse in the Australian Green Party's vote we can expect the Greens to muscle up to what it thinks are their opponents more. But the emergence of organised opposition to communications monopolies in the European Green's own back yard illustrates how out of mainstream, and out of touch with grassroots sentiment, the Greens have moved since their early parliamentary successes in Europe and Australia.

I remember the late media boss Kerry Packer shaping up to a Parliamentary inquiry in the early 1990s, telling astonished parliamentarians "I don't think you have any power to regulate me". The Australian Greens might disagree, but the up and coming Pirate Party may be much more in touch with the preoccupations of mainstream internet users, and media consumers in general, and much more likely to take on media bosses about issues people actually care about.

* I was wrong - Susan Graf, a 19 year old member of Berlin's Chaos Computer Club, was elected as a Pirate Party member of Germany's Berlin State Parliament last week, along with 14 male colleagues.

Very Happy Birthday South Sudan

Live long and prosper, South Sudan, Africa's fifty-fourth and Earth's one hundred and ninety-sixth nation.

you want facts with that?

time travel to the review for real, a month or so later

I was going to review The Bolt Report, News Limited Columnist Andrew Bolt's new television program on the Ten Television Network.

That was before the news broke that the Australian National University in Canberra had increased security at facilities where its climate scientists are working after receiving many death threats aimed at the scientists and their families.

If Andrew Bolt didn't exist we would need to invent him. The News Limited political commentator has for many years been a lightning rod for Australians with dissenting social and political opinions, and his columns are widely read, and commented upon, from a broad spectrum of political perspectives.

Bolt has an opinion on almost everything, and if you don't like those, he has plenty more. Bolt waves what Frank Hardy used to call the finger of scorn at public policies and political figures, a single-digit bullshit detector working overtime.

But today, just as I sit to write a review of the four episodes of his television program I watched, Bolt writes

Global warmists are terrified of debate. No warming activist or Labor minister has agreed to come on The Bolt Report to discuss their claims. Almost no global warming scientists here will agree to debate sceptical ones.

When he appeared on the Bolt Report's first episode Federal Opposition and Liberal Party Leader Tony Abbot wasn't asked a single question about climate change, even though he is (in Boltspeak) a "warmist". "I believe", Abbot told anyone who would listen earlier this year, "that climate change is real and that human activity is at least partly responsible for it". Australia's alternative leader has, in fact, budgeted to take twelve billion dollars from government expenditure for programs to mitigate climate change over four years, a fairly activist putting-yer-money-where-yer-mouth-is political position. The Bolt Report's host might have questioned Abbot's wisdom, given a golden opportunity to, for Andrew Bolt is on the record as believing Global Warming is a great fraud perpetrated by scheming scientists and green enterprises grasping for wads of government money like the twelve billion dollars Tony Abbott proposes to hand out.

The Bolt Report is driven by belief. In a comment on the Victorian State Government's decision to make Welcome To Country Ceremonies optional, where they were obligatory under the previous Labour Government's protocols for state-sponsored events, its host asserts "These welcome events seem very traditional, but were in fact invented by popular Actor and TV presenter Ernie Dingo, and my next guest, distinguished didgeridoo player and artist, Doctor Richard Walley."

"Well, you don't invent welcome to country, the welcome to country has been here for thousands of years amongst Aboriginal peoples themselves", Walley replied.

There followed some banter about us being all Australians, and the whole welcome to country, and Aboriginal thing in general, being so divisive.

"Whatever happens to Aboriginals affects Australia. Whatever happens to Australia affects Aboriginals", Walley observes dryly.

"Well, thank you very much for coming on the show to put your point of view, I don't agree with it but I'm glad you are here to say it", the host wraps up.

Well, hang on. Point of view? Was it a matter of fact that the Welcome To Country events "were in fact invented by Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley", in the host's words?

It seems to me that The Bolt Report suffers from post-modernity's great melancholia of uncertainty. Bolt's other media ventures find their audience in a generation swept aside by mighty change, multiculturalism and workplace restructuring, with little left to sustain them beyond belief and shrinking pensions. Uncertainty resonates with the 55-64 demo displaced and made redundant by rationalization and globalization.

But is it fair to assert that someone made something up, and to then disagree with a matter of fact that he did not on the basis that the fact contradicts a belief?

Until the news of death threats to the academics at the ANU and their families I would have said, unreservedly, yes. Let everyone have their say. And encouragingly, Australians are turning to opinion-driven media to find a voice. The Bolt Report's capital city averages are around the same as for many opinion-driven programs on the Community TV stations around the nation.

Now I read reports that Australian media regulator, the Communications and Media Authority, has begun an investigation into a Sydney radio station's coverage of the climate change debate with a degree of trepidation. The last time they did that, Australian commentators were revealed to have been taking money to talk about stuff they didn't believe in as if they did.

So I'm going to reserve judgement on The Bolt Report, for now. It is just possible that I'm old fashioned enough to be entertained by facts alone, and don't need them filtered through a bunch of beliefs, no matter how entertaining, or off-the-wall.

The Bolt Report is on television Channel 10, Sundays at 10 AM. I watched episodes 1 to 4.

Look in your own backyard America!

I hold a strong belief in collective action sometimes called people power. The union movement is an excellent example, collective bargaining creates better outcomes for workers. Many unions in the USA are fighting for survival and people are joining together to defend their rights. The following two quotes are from Mike Moore, the well known film maker, discussing those defending and those opposing people's democratic rights.

The scene in Madison is nothing like what they are showing you on TV or in the newspaper. First, you notice that the whole town is behind this. Yard signs and signs in store windows are everywhere supporting public workers. There are thousands of people out just randomly lining the streets for the six blocks leading to the Capitol building carrying signs, shouting and cheering and cajoling. Then there are stages and friendly competing demos on all sides of the building (yesterday's total estimate of people was 50,000-70,000, the smallest one yet)

Governor Snyder, once elected, yanked off his nice-guy mask to reveal that he is in fact a multi-millionaire hell-bent on destroying our state and turning it over to his buddies from Wall Street.

In just 8 short weeks he has:

* Gotten the House and Senate to pass bills giving him "Emergency Management" powers such as the ability to appoint a corporation or a CEO who could literally dissolve town governments or school boards, fire the elected officials, nullify any local law and run your local governmental entity. That company then would have the power to immediately declare all collective bargaining contracts null and void.

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The USA is keen to "police" democracy overseas when it suits , but not in it's own backyard.