MYRNA BULL

Myrna Bull at home, 12 October. Photo: Julie Clarke (2018

It's strange the things we recall. I remember way back in 1991 when I was at RMIT a young man said he thought I would grow old gracefully. I never really understood what he meant or how he arrived at that conclusion. More recently I have considered the word grace, which by 16th century definitions meant having pleasant or attractive qualities or the divine grace of god. In commonplace parlance it might mean to be free flowing in ones movements, gentle, soft, a quality we might associate with a classical ballet dancer. In my mind placing the words old and graceful together appear antithetical since most of the old people I've seen are rather slow and not necessarily graceful or elegant. Perhaps grace is what the individual exudes, some inner quality radiated, a characteristic that extends beyond the space of the self into the surrounding world. The notion of grace re-surfaced last week when I met a woman of note who imparted to me the quality of grace, however I still cannot pin down the word even though I think in Myrna's case grace is the glow of everything she has achieved in her life and the inability of her to contain the energy of that life within the tiny space of her body.

Myrna Bull, a mother and grandmother has a wealth of experience in management and human rights. As the Northern Territory’s Regional Director of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission she contributed to a range of policy initiatives that had a significant effect on the quality of life of the community. Myrna helped to establish the Northern Territory’s Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 while she was the Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity. Prior to that she worked with an Indigenous counterpart in the Aboriginal Women’s Resource Center which achieved a milestone in the history of the Uniting Church when her colleague was appointed the Center's Coordinator. She has been Assistant Commissioner, Conciliation in the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission, a management consultant, independent conciliator and investigator, and a workplace training and recruitment consultant. She developed and managed the volunteer selection and community education program for Australian Volunteers International, Australia’s largest volunteer recruitment agency, and most recently worked for Job Futures as the manager of its Victorian ex-prisoner and offender’s employment program.

It was a pleasure photographing her and her dogs were so well behaved.

On Photography - Piss Christ and Kulturkampf

I don’t believe in culture. Don’t believe artists produce it, for example, or that television advertisements create it. Analysis of culture, for example from a marxist perspective on capitalist monopolies, or from an epidemiological perspective on the causes of violence, require some initial leap of faith: you have to believe in culture as deterministic, cause and affect, a mechanism, or a force-field, when there is scant evidence of any of those.

In many theoretical perspectives culture is presented as a fog that needs peering through, an organisational chart, a guided tour rather than a lived experience. The word is a handy generalization, sure. You can look at the edges, borders and overlaps between geographies, histories, circumstances, and what those might have in difference or in common. But boundaries, epistemologies and zeitgeists are fluid, liminal, shifting, and no great help for getting to the heart of what's inside.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave what are popularly called the culture wars out of a discussion of modern photography. Conjoining culture and war leaves an impression in my mind of...something shapeless and vague, shadows in twilight perhaps, or Goya's giants endlessly bludgeoning each other.

Thinking about this is further complicated by the strategy I’m using that follows  Elaine Scarry’s critique of aesthetic critiques in On Beauty And Being Just. I’m using beauty in the sense of notability, like that black eye is a real beauty, or (from football) what a mark, you beaut!. Something notable, in other words, rather than something of beauty in the ordinary sense of being pleasing to the eye. Elaine Scarry wrote:

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.
and
The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.
(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)

Both arguments are in play in consideration of Andres Cerrano’s photograph Piss Christ. The photograph itself is described here, the artist’s website is here. I didn’t see the photograph when it was exhibited. I’m not familiar with the artist’s work, methods or rationale, or the series of photographs of objects in fluids of which it is part. My interest here is solely in the idea that its exhibition in Melbourne is storied as an engagement in a larger war of and on culture.

It will be no help referring to European statesman Otto Von Bismarck's difficulties with Catholicism in 1870s Western Europe, or referencing early twentieth century Italian Marxism, or the 1933 Säuberung.

I want to leapfrog those ideas into recent experience, into modern Melbourne. A further complication for me is some ideas from the study of macro economics. I have no background in the study of economics at all, but I am going to borrow ideas about exchanges from discourses on macro economics. My (limited) understanding is not all exchanges have to do with money, some are to do with ideas and associations and even making friends, but nevertheless play their part in a whole that is often, but not always, described as an economy.

The facts are straightforward. Pre publicity for an exhibition of Andres Cerrano’s photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 saw the photograph or its description included in prominent print and electronic media. The Catholic Church in Australia sought an order preventing the photograph from public display at the gallery in the Victorian Supreme Court, arguing precedents in both Canon and Common Law on blasphemous libel.

The Catholic Church argued "Both the name and the image Piss Christ not only demean Christianity but also represent a grossly offensive, scurrilous and insulting treatment of Christianity's most sacred and holy symbol. It is calculated to outrage the feelings of Catholics and other Christians."

The National Gallery of Victoria argued the photograph had been the subject of a television documentary, published in newspapers and books and its exhibition would not add to any perceived offence against the Catholic Church.

The Victorian Supreme Court rejected the application as having no foundation in law, and found no legal basis to prevent the exhibition.  "A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel," the court decided.

In the week after the exhibition opened the photograph was vandalised twice, leading to the arrest of three men, two of whom had acted in concert. Concerned that it could not prevent such determined attacks, gallery management closed the exhibition.

Using the term ‘calculated’ to describe the production and exhibition of this image places ideas about determinism, conspiracy, authenticity, and deception on the table. To paraphrase: blasphemous libel is a wrong social arrangement. In labelling the photograph art, including it in an exhibition, making it on object of sustained regard, the gallery is a willing accomplice to, or alternatively an unwitting element in, an overarching - devilish perhaps - subterfuge.

Holding the photograph in high regard certainly led to attempts to destroy it. But there is no evidence to support the existence of a calculating, conspiratorial, organized enemy force, no sign of an evil empire poised to make revolution for or against ideology, national self-determination or even religion. If it really were an engagement of a culture war there are no visibly organised protagonists beyond a few  ivory towers blasting away at each other’s values at megaphone volume.

The photograph did not produce a force field that compelled individuals to act in these ways. The artist didn’t produce a predetermined train of events. With no epidemiology of violence to trace, and no rapacious capitalist to blame, or media personality to boycott, the episode has become a muted controversy over artistic and curatorial freedom. But it is explicable in terms of spontaneity and self-organisation, terms often used to describe market economies and a free exchange of goods, or in this case ideas.

Arguments for and against exhibiting the work became more sophisticated. The second act of vandalism was more determined and certainly more complex, and through use of distraction and concurrent action, demonstrably more innovative than the first. These might not be predicted in theories of culture, but they are predicted and comprehensible in theories of markets. I guess the absence of any concrete transaction, for example money for service, undermines an economic perspective. But call the events a series of exchanges, rather than transactions for profit, with outcomes the result of self-organisation rather than any centrality of planning, and you get a glimpse of a free population testing, contesting, reformulating, rejigging, muddling through, as one economist I read put it, one way and another, the limits of its own freedom.

It just might be, from a secular Australian perspective,  that is all the culture wars are.

The last post in this series is here

On Photography - damned either way

Public interest in wrong social arrangements are the heart of most photographic controversies.

Two images come to mind in particular that illustrate tests of public interest,  one far too ordinary, the other not ordinary enough. Both were said, by contemporaries, to distract from, or amplify, somehow, wrong social arrangements.

There is a photograph archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of  Alexandra Feodorovna, Anastasia and Olga Nikolaevna bathed in light, women of the Russian royal family in 1915, seemingly unposed.  The family are busy with needlework, one has her feet up, relaxed, ordinary, familiar even: there is a wrinkled rug in the foreground.  It feels candid, unforced, intimate, real, a photo from a family album, although it is not any more.  It is a moment and a history all at once, and now part of a greater story the library's collection frames - revolution, dislocation, suffering, murder. But perhaps "rare" is a somewhat misleading description: after the Soviet Union disbanded an estimated 150, 000 photographs of the Russian royal family were discovered in secret government archives, suppressed,  in the public interest, from public view by their communist successors for nearly 100 years

There is a photograph of film star Julia Roberts by Mario Testino for a L'Oreal cosmetics advertising campaign in 2010, happy, bright-eyed and unblemished. The photograph  and advertising campaign was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from Scottish  Liberal Democrat member of parliament Jo Swinson that the images were digitally altered, and "not representative of the results the product could achieve." Swinson is a long time campaigner against what she describes as overly perfect and unrealistic images of women in magazines and advertisements.

Communist political parties are, of course, long time campaigners against royal families. But it seems to me that the absence of any regal trappings in the photograph, the ordinariness of the setting and the commonplace and all too human appearance of the Russian royal family posed the greatest threat to the new russian ruling class.  Demonising a ruling elite is one thing. Disappearing women that look like someones sister, aunt or wife is something else altogether. The humanity of the women that belies perceptions of wrong social arrangements had to be disappeared as well.

In modern times it is "overly perfected and unrealistic images of women", and the "deification of beauty", that must be disappeared. Photographs of supermodel Christy Turlington and actress  Rachel Weisz have also disappeared from English magazines. Ms Swinson told the UK Daily Mail  there was sound medical evidence that faked - airbrushed or photoshopped -  images cause harm. "There needs to be much more diversity in advertising – different skin colours, body shapes, sizes and ages."

What was ideologically impermissible somewhere a century ago is essential to the public interest somewhere now. In parts of the world such contradictions are avoided by suppressing images of human bodies altogether. In Western tradition, the human body is central to our humanist  heritage and what we think and say about ourselves, although depictions of it are often contested.


Upon the Protestant reformation the Catholic Church compiled and circulated huge lists of forbidden books, and demanded the censorship of painting:

... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust...

Seventeenth Century poet, polemicist and propagandist John Milton is often quoted arguing against clerical censorship:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (1644)

Ironically, by 1744, Samuel Johnson was observing that a century of democratization of writing and publishing had rendered traditional systems for evaluating their worth shambolic. It was easy to publish and obtain books but difficult to trust their contents.

There are echoes of Johnson's world-weariness in controversies on photography today, and echoes of the old religious and political dogmas in conversations about them. Ironically, it may be that the failure of both religious dogma and political ideology to solve problems of wrong social arrangements that keep those controversies relevant.


The Australian Christian Lobby argued

...it is problematic to measure community standards by the number of complaints generated by a a particular broadcast or telecast. It would come as news to a great number of people within the community to learn that their view of the contemporary media environment was judged solely on their formally complaining...  (2011 Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme pp10)


Historian Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Canberra Times

...the fact that an image or a bunch of words may offend someone and is therefore a reason to ban or severely restrict them is a Draconian and intolerant position. I'm offended by lots of things these days - Question Time, alcohol and cigarettes sold in supermarkets, reality TV and religious fundamentalism - but I don't use this as a reason to try to ban these things merely because it's just my opinion.

A very modern case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - An Angry Country?

Much has been written about the 2008 seizure of Australian artist Bill Henson’s photographs, and their subsequent restoration to his Sydney dealer, innocent, along with the artist, of overwrought allegations against them.

Child protection campaigners labelled Henson’s images of a nude thirteen year-old pornographic. Art critics argued the images were, well, art. Ultimately the independent Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the images a PG (Parental Guidance advisory) classification, and State prosecutors advised the child pornography charges against the artist would not succeed.

Watching an art gallery’s contents emptied into a truck on television I was grateful to whoever had thought the operation through: the police seizing artworks weren’t visibly armed. Later, as Henson’s photographs disappeared from the walls of Australian public spaces I wondered for how long?

There is, rightly, a great deal of sympathy and support for child protection campaigners. And like any other special interest involved in the political process those campaigners are expected to vigorously prosecute their agendas. However, as noted by sociologist Frank Ferudi and others, populist policy actors of all colours who adopt child protection agendas as their own simply cannot be trusted to act upon anything except self-interest, in the end. There have been some notable witch hunts in modern times that have ended without any beneficial outcomes at all, save for the self-advancement of those involved.

Worse, rapists have had their sentences cut, and victims brought to tears and bewilderment as newspapers seek to increase circulation with name and shame gambits. Criminal investigations, especially those involving crimes against children, have not been well served by regimes of continuous speculation. And there is evidence - for example the labelling of corporations as pedophiles - that the current panic over child protection serves only the political ends of ivory towers. Frank Furedi wrote:

Mention the word ‘child’ and people will listen. Raise the moral stakes by claiming that a ‘child is at risk’ and people will not just listen but endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’. For instance, campaigners against poverty understand that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause by focusing attention on what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if abstract socio-economic injustices are simply not compelling enough on their own terms: they have to be recast as something afflicting children

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill writes: 

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays lip service to it...This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, especially freedom of speech, are being undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the idea of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

It seems fair to say that contemporary Australian creatives: artists, photographers, writers, publishers, film makers, polemicists, poets, and their audience, regard each other with suspicion. Photographs, web pages, television programs, newspaper articles, internet cartoons, broadcast pranks, speeches and even privately expressed opinions have all been discussed, dissected, boycotted, divested and otherwise sensationally prosecuted during the past few years.

There is a mood to compel the media to act for the public good, an expansion of media regulation to include public interest tests put to parliament (but defeated), a looming general election contested in part on issues of public interest and in part upon issues of free speech.  Where once free speech and public interest seemed inextricable, polemic is inexorably wedging them apart.

Newspapers’ circulation has fallen off a cliff.  Newspaper journalism is routinely outsourced overseas, our commercial TV networks are two-thirds owned by foreign banks, our commercial radio networks caught in spirals of cost-cutting and falling audiences. And Australians have turned their collective backs on government-approved and financed Australian films.

It is as if people can only bear to see and hear what is already known and agreeable.

The speed at which issues are churned online is overtaken only by the almost instantaneous coagulation of opinion around them. The occasional scholarly article lamenting, for example, media coverage of climate change issues, is liked and twittered and decontextualized and resignified at breakneck speed, contested and deconstructed and decried at length and likely to be of historical interest only long before any old fashioned op-ed or editorial response appears in the next edition of a daily tabloid or weekend broadsheet.

The sclerotic nature of internet discourse has been noted by many, an interesting counterpoint to what is  otherwise imagined as fluid lines of communication. To venture an opinion, for example on a blog, is to risk deletion. Anything you say can be held against you. Simultaneously, anything you say can be turned into something else - fixed! Somehow, it all seems to make sense, even if your original post had nothing to do with cats.

Durning the past few years Australians have campaigned for sackings, boycotts, internet filters, seizures, closures, divestments, damages, apologies, corrections, and even arrests over cultural artefacts, published words, pictures, videos, sounds, that for one reason or another became controversial. Alongside the large mass media outlets other, lesser, publishers have come under pressure: notably film festivals but also art dealers and even the management of assorted privately owned and operated public venues, like those hired for controversial Dutch politician Gert Wilders and British climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton.

But while there is a mood to allow the display of those publications, artworks, photographs, books, magazines, films, ideas, only if they are in the public interest, there is next to no clarity about what the public interest might be. Outrage has replaced clarity in so much of public discourse we can start to think about crossing out lucky and substituting angry in front of country.

At the very moment the freedom of unlimited communication beckons we rush to shackle ourselves in chains of mindless rage.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - Eyes In Skies

There is a scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner which goes something like this:

Deckard: (pretending to be from the American Federation of Variety ArtistsConfidential Committee On Moral Abuses)  Oh yeah. I'd like to check your dressing room if I may.
Zhora: For what?
Deckard: For, uh, for holes.
Zhora:  Holes?
Deckard:  You'd be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a beautiful body.
Zhora: No, I wouldn't.

Although it seems a little redundant to say so, the AustralianOffice of The Information Commissioner says there is a high level of community awareness of the use of surveillance cameras in our public places.

Former Assistant Privacy Commissioner Mark Hummerston says it is difficult to offer a single, consolidated figure of the number of surveillance cameras in Australia.  There are already 53 fixed surveillance cameras and 2 mobile camera-equipped vans operating in public places in central Melbourne alone.  Last year the Victorian State Government offered Melbourne local councils three million dollars to install more. At 30,000 dollars each, that’s an extra 100 to add to the unknown quantities already installed in public places.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance told ABC news last year “There’s a study out of the UK which shows, certainly in London, surveillance cameras have been responsible for solving one crime for every thousand cameras.” The Victorian Government recently ordered Victoria Police to audit the number and type of surveillance cameras in the State.

Despite Australian national privacy principles requiring that, where practicable, consumers must have the option to transact anonymously, every Melbourne taxi, automatic teller machine, train, tram, bus is camera equipped and many retailers photograph their customers. The Office of The Information Commissioner says concerns about surveillance cameras include misuse of stored photographs or videos, loss of anonymity, discomfort about being watched and the effectiveness of surveillance cameras achieving  their stated goal of crime prevention. Around eighty percent of people responding to surveys about surveillance cameras expressed no concerns about them at all. Five percent were 'very concerned.'

Last year the Melbourne Age newspaper bemoaned the spread of surveillance cameras as undermining “the sense of liberty that is part of the fabric of this city and this nation” (Saturday Age Editorial September 29 2012)  Brenna Krenus wrote a few days later that more cameras: “will not engender feelings of safety: they will heighten feelings of fear” (The Age October 2 2012).

Despite their ubiquity surveillance cameras do not unexpectedly present “an intentional intrusion (whether physical or otherwise) upon the situation of another (whether as to the person or his or her personal affairs) where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy; and the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities” (D Butler '(2005)'A Tort of Invasion of Privacy in Australia?’  Melbourne University Law Review 11)

What does present as intrusive, invasive and unexpected is a new generation of cheap, lightweight airborne cameras mounted on surveillance drones. There is a good example of their capabilities here on youtube

ABC journalist Mark Corcoran told the Sydney Morning Herald "The day is fast approaching where the small personal drone will be an obligatory part of the tool box for journalists, photographers and bloggers"

The Australian Privacy Foundation worried that Kate Middleton “and many other people besides can rest assured that their bare breasts are fair game, anywhere, any time,” after Australian Woman's Day published candid photographs of the pregnant Duchess in a bikini. It is legal to operate a remotely piloted drone in Australia below four hundred feet for non commercial purposes.  In Victoria it is illegal to knowingly use an ‘optical surveillance device’  to record a private activity without consent.

Anxieties about surveillance technologies are often expressed in the same vein as general concerns about photography: a potential loss of anonymity, discomfort about the photographic ‘gaze’, misuse, for example through publication, and the offensiveness of the images themselves. In one notorious case photographs of a dead child were obtained from a helicopter and published without the family’s knowledge.

The grieving parents wrote:

"We are not arguing the fact that the media have an important role to play, what we want is the media acting in a responsible, sensitive and ethical manner for grieving families such as ours and many others...At the time of Molly's loss of life we would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share with the media in our own time and in our own words the story of her life”

As if to confirm the worst of general anxieties about photography, so-called ‘body scanners’,  cameras that see through clothes to the naked human body, are installed at eight Australian airports.

The Australian Government says The current generation body scanner is equipped with automatic threat recognition technology. This removes the need for screening officers to view detailed or ‘naked’ images and instead highlights areas of concern on a generic ‘stick’ figure. In addition, the body scanner is not able to store personal information about passengers or the screen display generated from individual scans.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - In Trouble?

A woman meets relatives in a busy inner city shopping strip. There is banter, hugs, and before they say their goodbyes, a moment to take a couple of photographs. Later, she relaxes over a coffee in a nearby cafe, peeking at the photos on her camera’s liquid crystal display.

The woman, a friend, a respected artist/photographer, writer and academic, had her camera out again several days later when she was approached by the cafe's owner, who said he'd had complaints from four other patrons that she was 'photographing children'  Being a mother herself and a woman of standing, she was naturally upset and confused by what sounded to her as an accusation and was prompted to write this account:

...I was thoroughly shocked, insulted and offended yesterday when a Manager/Owner of a coffee shop in Camberwell said when he saw me with my camera, that if I brought out my camera again then they would not serve me. Apparently (according to him) he'd had four complaints from people saying that they didn't want their children photographed...

We often speak of transformative technology breathlessly, as if it were a desired, rather than lived, experience. Perversely, the lived experience of transformative technologies is often a negative one.

Anxieties about cameras are as old as the manufacture of film. The tools of photography are notionally extensions of natural, embodied phenomena - the camera a prosthetic eye and the photograph an augmentation of memory - that provided the basis for modern visual communication and began to globalize human experience long before the internet.

The incident itself bears the postmodern imprint of internet-speed culture. Something is remarked upon, there are likes, a critical number is reached, a moderator implements a ban - fixed!  In a spasm of autonomic reflex an artifact with no place in the social body is ejected, and the symbolic order of things restored.

The internet changed photography. Analyses of contemporary photographic practice give next to no account of the wirelessly interconnected lenses embedded in and peeking from everyday artifacts. Everywhere you look, they look back. From doors, walls, cars (both inside and outside), telephones, tablets, television screens and more, existing predominantly not to augment human bodies, but to make and store and categorize recordings of them.

Anxieties about surveillance are as ancient as writing itself. We live in times where old fears are magnified at every turn by experiences of photography as command and control. Those experiences are not novel in Western culture. Whole categories of people, for example those with disabilities, suffer forms of surveillance for the whole of life. The experiences are not novel but have become much more common, and have brought the invisible aspects of photography, the composing eye and controlling hand, to prominence in discussions about photography.

Where the photographer was previously almost invisible, a tabula-rasa upon which events imprinted themselves through an indifferent mechanism, now the question of what is not in a photograph is as salient as the question of what is. The composing eye is inexorably linked in culture on the one hand with expressions of power, and on the other with perversions of it. Chris Munroe writes, in Tracker, of Norman Tinsdale famous 1930s photographs of Aboriginal peoples:

Critics suggest the forlorn expressions staring back at the camera tell a tale of a sorrowful people treated like museum exhibits, firstly measured, weighed then forced to pose awkwardly for photos whilst clutching serial numbers. Many have compared the exploitative look of the images to those of police mug shots. A closer examination of the Tindale genealogical photographic collection reveals almost none of his subjects are smiling at the camera or seemingly engaging at all in the compulsory process either. They look resigned and defeated – an enduring reminder of the dark days of mission life and the Protection Board era.

There is a photograph by Bettina Rheims of style icon Kate Moss, bare-breasted, part of Rheims's Modern  Lovers series. In 1989, when the photograph was taken, Moss was 15. News columnist Andrew Bolt poses a problem with Rheims's photograph better than most:

Hear how Moss herself has described the pain that is the reason for laws to protect children from being forced to expose themselves for the sexual pleasure of others.

and

...This is art, we are told, not pornography. Perfectly fine to stare in a state gallery at a picture not too different from those for which a Melbourne stalker now faces jail. So ogle away, dear art lovers...

 (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Thursday February 14 2013 pp15)

Despite previous controversies over the works of Bill Henson and Ella Dreyfus, the Art Gallery of NSW said it had ''no issue'' displaying Rheims's photograph of Moss. "We exhibit art, not pornography" the gallery told anyone who asked.

Controversies over photography often inhabit a kind of cultural underbelly and are often conducted at megaphone volume between contesting ivory towers. We have all seen politicians, for example, falling over each other on the way to denounce the latest photographic outrage. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for instance, denouncing a photographic exhibition he hadn’t seen by an artist he’d previously never heard of discussed in a newspaper column he hadn’t read. While many claim outrage, few talk sense, and I think Chris Munroe and Andrew Bolt succinctly express cultural anxieties about who is  watching and why.

Here then are a couple of peaks, or ivory towers, landmarks in the cratered landscape contemporary photography finds itself labouring over. Cultural tensions over history, power, privacy, nudity, art versus porn - a battle some cast as ultimately between good and evil extremes.

Professor of Aesthetics Elaine Scarry provides a substantial contribution to the controversy, from an academic ivory tower, in On Beauty and Being Just

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.

and

The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.

(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)


I'm interested in the first axis of argument because it directly states (but does not solve) a problem often raised. It seems to me that wrong social arrangements are at the heart of Andrew Bolt’s critique of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Beauty has the capacity to wound, not only others but also is itself at risk from the attentions it draws. This line of inquiry goes directly to the heart of anxieties over photographs of children. To paraphrase, innocence is at risk of destruction from the attentions of photography.

Around the same time the Art Gallery of NSW was organising school tours of its new photographic exhibition, Chi Magazine published photographs of a bikini-clad, pregnant, Duchess of Cambridge.

The controversy over those photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge turned upon ideas about public and private moments, privacy versus surveillance. In the photographs themselves the subjects are unaware and unposed, the (anonymous) photographer concealed from their view. The British Royals were reportedly “outraged”, inside their  white-walled palace.

"They are images of such unexceptional normality that there is only limited mention of them on the cover of the magazine," Chi's editor, Alfonso Signorini, told the BBC.

There was, however, many lengthy mentions of the photographs on the covers of other publications. I don't know how many covers above normal circulation a bikini clad aristocrat is good for, but you can bet that every editor who published those photographs worked it out beforehand. Style sells, celebrity sells, and I want to place by example in this geography of mind a market, not in any particular point,  but one which can displace the landscape anywhere, inconveniently, like a blemish upon an already cratered and pockmarked cultural underbelly.

Australian Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly told News Limited she had no qualms about running the photographs of the Duchess, claiming they were taken by a fellow holiday maker on the Caribbean island of Mustique rather than a paparazzo. "It wasn’t a hard decision to run these photos," she said, and  "we are sensitive to photos that shouldn’t be published, for instance I haven’t laid eyes on the nude photos of Kate."

Nude photographs of the Duchess, also covertly obtained, were published in Grazia Magazine earlier this year. Designer Bella Freud, speaking to Vanity Fair last December about her time as a stylist with a large fashion retailer, describes walls and mood boards pinned with pages torn out of Grazia Magazine of daily sightings of (Kate) Moss. “Whole clothes lines have been made out of one look she put on one morning.” Grazia is typical of many such style, scandal and surveillance pictorial magazines sourcing photographs from long-lensed paparazzi and advertising from the fashion industry. Nudity sells, and what it sells is, paradoxically, apparel.

It seems to me that objections to these photographs are along the lines suggested in Elaine Scarry's second axis of argument, that when we stare at the beautiful Duchess, make her an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the Duchess. The immediately visible destruction is of her privacy, but that is only the beginning. Publication of private moments pose a danger to her moral integrity as well, and none more serious than to the childlike Kate Moss.

Fashion ivory towers Vogue Magazine and Cosmopolitan have traded blows over what Connolly described as sensitivity to photographs of Moss that shouldn't be published.

Corinne Day’s photographs, styled by Cathy Kasterine, of Moss for British Vogue “showing how we all wear our underwear when we’re hanging around the bedroom” as Kasterine put it, were described by competitor Cosmopolitan’s outraged editor as “Hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the pedophile market. If I had a daughter who looked like that, I would take her to see a doctor”. Moss herself shoots back “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.” But Moss has described herself as depressed, and pressured to bear her breasts for the cameras as a sixteen year old in the famous Calvin Klein heroin chic advertisements. New York is a beating heart of uber capitalism, and Moss’s work experience there frames one of the best arguments I know for unionism and the formation of industry associations dedicated to protecting members from moral exploitation.

Photography polarizes opinion at every turn. Worse, dialogue about moral issues are from a distance between the vested interests in ivory towers that sense some worth in their being conducted at megaphone strength. Photography is in trouble. Part of the problem is discourse. At the very moment the camera became ubiquitous, leaders of public opinion, who might be expected to step up and fulfil their self-proclaimed roles as authorities of specification and delineation, are divided and defensive behind the walls of their ivory towers.

Photography is in trouble. At any moment a photographer’s work might be seized, even photographs that previously hung with pride in public spaces, as happened to Bill Henson’s works in recent times. Or a child might be declared a sex offender for life, for posting a naked picture of someone somewhere from their phone, or downloading one to it in an email.

At any moment a woman with a camera in her handbag might become the object of scurrilous whispers and unwelcome attentions. Since one way or another we all carry cameras with us now, the problem can only get worse.

Beginning with this and continuing in the next few few posts on the topic, I'm going to attempt to sketch what I see as marking the boundaries of the problem, and the pathways to them, a geography of mind pursuing the tangled landscape of Civilization itself.  And I'm hoping against hope that it does not follow a trajectory of the photograph from treasured memory to the scene of a crime.

Beauty, and of course, its opposite

Everyone who lives in Melbourne would know how hot it was on Thursday and Friday (temperatures ranged between 37.5C one day and 41C the next). Thankfully it was cooler yesterday, which allowed me to engage domestic duties without feeling totally washed out. The best thing about the hot weather was that it gave me an opportunity to take photographs of some of the flowers in the garden and to finish reading The Harp in the South, Ruth Park 1948, which is beautifully written and reveals the strength of many poor people in post-war Australia. Ruth Park manages in her writing to make the ordinary seem so extra-ordinary.

Last night I watched the documentary on Kirstie Mills Tancock, a twenty one year old who was born with cystic fibrosis and nearly died before receiving a lung transplant. She displayed such courage and her plight must certainly put any minor health problems that we have into perspective!

As I look at these flowers above I wish that everything could be as beautiful. I wish that women in India weren't being gang raped and murdered. I wish that young girls in South Africa could live without being systematically sexually abused from a young age in a rape culture that is considered the norm! Unfortunately desiring change won't make anything happen! Sorry to end on such a negative note, but with all recognition of beauty there must be an equal recognition of the ugliness in our world.

The Malaysian Solution not to be confused with the Final Solution.

I watched with interest last night the ABC TV coverage of the House of Representative debate on the bill proposed by Mr Rob Oakeshott in regard to asylum seekers/refugees/boat people being pushed through parliament in the wake of Monday's boat disaster off the Australian coast. The Bill allows asylum seekers to be sent to the 46 countries for offshore processing as part of the Bali process on people smuggling, and includes Malaysia. After many hours of debating, which included an impassioned plea by Joe Hockey that no child should be sent unaccompanied to Malaysia because of possible maltreatment, Tony Abbott's plea for an amendment to the bill to include 20,000 more refugees over three years and Bob Katter's endorsement of the *Malaysian solution* because it would be a deterrent to refugees who at the moment are drawn to Australian because compared to where they currently live, Australia is perceived as paradise. His rationale is that of instead of people smugglers enticing refugees with the possibility of being able to eventually live in Australia that instead they would be living in oppressive conditions and have long waits before being considered. After about six hours of debate the bill was amended to include a sunset clause, meaning that the government could proceed with their *Malaysian solution* for one year and then it would be reassessed. The bill, as amended was passed through the House of Representatives and will be debated in the Senate today.  The Malaysian solution is basically that Malaysia accepts 800 “boat people” from Australia, Australia takes 4,000 “genuine refugees” from Malaysia and resettles them into the community. If, as Katter suggests Australia has vasts amount of land and refugees could be housed there would this not form a kind of ghetto in which 'undesirables' would be kept separate from 'us' so as not to threaten our life and liberty?

The Malaysian Solution, should not to be confused with Germany's Final Solution (1939-42), which included geographical separation so that those considered diseased were separated from pure Aryans, and is a way for us to deal with people who arrive on our shores by boat rather than potential 'refugees' who come here by aircraft on tourist, student or business visas. It is generally agreed that those who come by boat are genuine refugees, so why are we so afraid of them and why is there so much hatred?

In 2009 this was the breakdown of the top seven countries where refugees to Australia emanated from: China (1,186), Afghanistan (940), Sri Lanka (553), Zimbabwe (344), Iran (303), Iraq (288) and Pakistan (256). Is it simply that 9/11 and the horrors associated with it are still firmly planted in the minds of many afraid of terrorism, afraid of anything that challenges christian ideology?

The program that followed the televised debate in the House of Reps was called Dumb, Drunk and Racist, which partially charted whether or not Australians lived up to this stereotype and unfortunately with the inclusion of footage from the Cronulla riots (Cronulla beach near Sydney)  in 2005 in which members of the *white* community inflicted violence and abuse on non white people encouraged by radio personalities such as Alan Jones who called the people responsible for the attack on the lifesavers 'Middle Eastern grubs' this stereotype appeared to ring true for it displayed the nastier side of Australians - a hatred of anyone not white, not a true (whatever that means) Australian. I remember when I was a child that it was Italians and Greeks that were under suspicion, and later 'we' thought that Asians were taking our jobs, now our fear and loathing is directed towards Muslims or others from the middle east.

Having said all that, I'll just add that I totally support Australia being humanitarian and mindful of the human rights of those who seek shelter in our country, however, I would like to see Australians and in particular the Australian government be more humanitarian to the people already living here. Approximately 105,000 are homeless and  about 622,000 are unemployed, living off a meager 'new start' allowance and or disability support pension or other pension, doled out by a government and a basically well off nation of people who really do not give a damn about anyone else.
See also other opinions of mine on this topic and this.

Thoughtcrime?

My son sent me a link to a recent article by John Pilger entitled You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it? Pilger states that because Echelon exists and identifies words associated with terrorism that we may all be considered terrorists if we use any of these words in our electronic communication with others. This is such old news! I remember in the 70s provocatively using the word 'bomb' or 'explosion' in my telephone conversations, knowing full well that any intelligence system in place would have to be going on more than words to identify someone as a potential threat to the security of a country or people. We are NOT all suspects as Pilger suggests! Basically he uses emotive language to attack America, to defend the actions of Julian Assange and to criticize Julia Gillard -  again, old news.
But it's not any of the above which concerns me, it is his question What are you going to do about it? that fills my thoughts. He gives absolutely no clue as to what the ordinary, everyday person can do and if even they really want to 'do anything' about such surveillance systems, instigated to protect them against potential threat of those who wish to cause damage to person and property & who would, if allowed, destroy personal freedoms by disrupting our hard won, peaceful life. Fact is, that what Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) says in A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner,1992) is true: 'We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns'. I'm not saying that I like living in this kind of world, I'm just stating facts.
Newer weapons in the arsenal against our real or perceived enemies include surveillance systems. However,regardless of the thousands of CCTV, video surveillance systems, spy satellites and signals intelligence systems operating to monitor human communication and behavior, if you're not a terrorist and not planning to commit a crime then there's nothing for you to be concerned about. Sure, it might be a bit unnerving to think that a mechanical instrument can track your movements and take a photograph of that pimple on your nose from space, but other than that, this 'Big Brother 'world is not going to go away anytime soon and no amount of signing petitions on Face Book is going to make any difference!
I think the worry is that many of us have read 1984 (George Orwell) and we think, like Winston that we might be arrested and persecuted for 'facecrime': 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. (Book 1, Chapter 5).
I for one am glad that large shopping complexes have CCTV, which can help identify an individual who has unlawfully absconded after abducting a small child, or the security mirrors in place so that you know that you can go to an isolated toilet area and a least feel that you have a level of safety. But really, we cry about our lost freedoms, but we bought into the convenience of EFPOST, even though it records electronic information about our location when we made that financial transaction and would, if necessary, aid police officers if we suddenly went missing. We enjoy our email, social media sites, new technology, iPhones, GPS tracking devices, but cry out that our personal freedoms are being infringed upon! Give me a break!
Pilger writes his article amidst a background of person freedoms, when he knows full well that we already have limited personal freedom. We can't just do what we like, especially since our behavior impacts on the welfare of others.However, having said all this, if we ever get to a time, described in 1984 in which thoughtcrime is punishable, then I'll be careful to avoid surveillance and start wearing a mask!

Mars - not a teat!

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/mars/olympus_mons.jpg

Watching the night sky as I do, last week I noticed the planet Mars - easy to spot because it glows red. For as long as I can remember Hollywood has had a passion for the planet Mars and has exhibited not just a fear of those 'little green men' - a stereotype of extraterrestrials born out of alien sightings in the 1950s, but a general xenophobia of all things alien.  Recent photographs of Mars and America's continual search for 'life', has prompted me to consider what they actually mean by 'life'. I've always liked Margaret A. Boden explanation, which is that ‘Metabolism is a criterion’ (1999:231). Metabolism being 'a type of material self-organization which…involves the autonomous use of matter and energy in building, growing, developing, and maintaining the bodily fabric of a living thing’ (1999:237) and further that it 'involves material embodiment – embodiment, not mere physical existence‘ (1999:240). However, since all life is used in some fashion, I'm wondering if America's search for 'life on Mars' evidence by the half a million photographs taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), a multi-band camera on the NASA Mars Odyssey is less a philosophical concern about life itself and our human place in the universe and or whether or not Mars is colonized, and more to do with how they can eventually exploit any potential life form and make a land grab before any other nation. The fact that they are investigating safe landing areas and monitoring dust activity tells me that they intend to invade this planet at all costs. But why? Apparently Mars is an extreme planet with changing weather patterns and its terrain is likened to that of Death Valley in California or Siberia. The best thing about NASA's photographs is the absolute beauty and terror of the planet, which we would not otherwise see. My view is Mars should be considered an amazing body. Am I old fashioned in my viewpoint? I'd like to think that we humans can appreciate something from afar without having to invade and destroy it, which bring me not so subtly to Q & A last night and a comment made by Germaine Greer about the fact that America did eventually get its act together about land rights for Inuit Indians, but that Australia has yet to work out vital issues in regards to land  rights with Indigenous Australians. That strangely beautiful image above, tells me that Mars is not a teat on which America can suckle - look, don't touch!

____________

Margaret A. Boden (1999). 'Is Metabolism Necessary?' British Journal of Philosophy and Science, Oxford Uni Press, 50 pp. 231-248.

Nietzsche, the Cardinal, and a leap of faith

It was interesting to read a Thomist argument in a daily paper this week. The Australian published an address to the Global Warming Policy Foundation by leading Australian Catholic, Cardinal George Pell. Cardinal Pell invoked the spirit of Thomas Aquinas in a vigorous prosecution of the case against global warming. I don't care one way or another about the polemic but I'm always intrigued by Thomism. The speech is here (pdf)

Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth century friar whose life's work was the partial reconciliation of fragments of Platonic and Aristolian thought. In the (somewhat unkind) words of contemporaries, Aquinas and his followers laboured mightily to reconcile in death those who never agreed in life. Drawing from Platonic and Socratic traditions, Thomist philosophy in part underpins modern, secular ideas about universal freedoms and rights. Following Aristotle, Thomist doctrine asserts the necessity for accurate observation that underpins the scientific method.

Thomism teaches that a thing is not necessarily so just because a majority says it is. It is up to individuals to see for themselves, and to work out what is true and what is not. And Thomism teaches that not everything is knowable. Where things are not knowable through observation, Thomism teaches an intellect is sustained by faith, because faith does not end in a true or false proposition, but rather in a reality beyond knowing.

Thomism offers a model of mind as a continuum of knowing and believing, a model rejected by both modern positivism and its postmodern adversary, post structuralism. The modern positivist model of mind is a discontinuum of knowledge and ignorance in which believing depends upon knowing, and ignorance is a kind of poverty of mind, to be pitied and where possible cured. The postmodern, post structuralist position abolishes both objectivity and belief, substituting a continuum of subjective uncertainty, a phenomenological shell game of deceived and deceiving minds. Thomist thought is a handy antidote to both.

I don't care one way or another about the dispute over weather forecasts that preoccupied the Cardinal . The intrigue in the Thomist world view is, for me, the model of the individual human mind as a continuum of knowledge and belief. Classical skepticism, after Pyrrho of Elis (c360-270BCE) tried to develop methods of continually testing knowledge and belief. Old school skeptics were comfortable with what they comprehended as the limits of their knowledge, although those boundaries continuously changed, and promoted methods of suspending, rather than passing, judgement. An age later, Descartes introduced the idea of absolute certainty only after declaring he believed that God would not allow his eyes to be deceived, a leap of faith any Thomist might have taken.

The model of human mind as a continuum of knowing and believing is evident in the self-belief of Nietchze's ubermensch, in Thomist metaphysics, in the origins of the scientific method itself. There is always some tension between knowledge and belief. I believe in freedom. I believe in free speech. I can't objectively prove those exist, somewhere, as universal archetypes. But neither could Plato. Or Descartes, for whom the leap of faith - that God would not give him eyes only to cruelly deceive them - preceded rather than followed any evidential trail.

In Thomism I can see an answer to Nietzsche's call to grow long legs, to see further and to leap from peak to peak. Before I know anything else I need faith in at least myself. Faith I can survive the ordeal, belief I won't fall into the chasm between what is spoken and what is done.

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.

Very Happy Birthday South Sudan

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

taxing hot air

I would rather sit in a dentist's chair than have lunch on an inner Melbourne footpath. So the tax on local restaurants using outdoor heating introduced in my 'hood to "discourage the use of outdoor gas heaters" won't change my alfresco dining habits one bit.

But I am interested in the reasoning behind the introduction of a tax on hot air. One commentator writes:

Diners who choose to dine outside on very cold days should wear appropriate attire instead of using external gas heaters installed by the business owners. Most of the heat is wasted in warming up the open air, and only small proportion benefits the diners. Such inconsideration reflects on the naivety and hypocrisy of the diners on climate change and global warming argument.

Scrutiny of dress and behaviour, the preoccupation of moralising writers since ancient times, places this tax on outdoor heaters in a moral sphere. Lacking experience, wisdom and judgement, diners are not conforming to moral standards or beliefs to which they profess to aspire. Like wayward children, diners at restaurants that use outdoor heating will be encouraged to act morally by adopting uniform attire, in this case a government issued blanket.

“I would like to start to build a culture in outdoor dining areas of people using a blanket rather than a heater,” one local official told Melbourne media.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd labelled what the correspondent I quoted refers to as the global warming argument the greatest moral issue of our time.

Around seventy cafe's in the 'hood use outdoor heaters on footpath dining areas. Those heaters are estimated to produce fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, around three-quarters of a tonne per cafe per year. By contrast, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, which supplies around a quarter of the electricity used in my 'hood, produces sixteen million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, capped at a net four hundred and fifty million tonnes over time. If global carbon dioxide emissions are changing the weather, as seems likely, common sense suggests that some kind of debate over what to do about that must follow. But I doubt that framing the debate in moral terms will produce any useful outcome.

The platform principles of the deep ecosophy movement (which I have been rather painstakingly working through on this blog for a while now) attempts to frame the debate in rational terms. Those who subscribe to the platform principles "have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes." Taxing fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions smacks of tokenism, and a lack of intellectual rigour, in what ought to be a debate over human interference in nonhuman life. It is simply not good enough to frame this earth-shaking debate as a moral argument, and rail against the hypocrisy of those who are hungry and cold. We need to do better, and I fear we are incapable of rising above the condemnatory rhetoric of everyday moralising, inevitably a domain of the intellectually bankrupt.

ipad in custody

I guess everyone knows by now that Fairfax journalist Ben Grubb was detained by Queensland police seeking evidence in a Facebook security breach case yesterday.

Grubb tweeted I've been arrested by Queensland police for a story I wrote today. They've also seized my ipad.

Grubb had reported for Fairfax news websites on a BSides Australia event on Sunday associated with the gathering of internet security professionals at the 10th annual AusCERT Information Security Conference at the RACV Royal Pines Resort on Queensland's Gold Coast.

Queensland police told a UStream feed at a press conference this morning that arrest was a technical term, and it didn't mean Grubb was or would be charged with anything. Queensland police argued that while they couldn't comment on what was described as an ongoing investigation, people in possession of photographs taken from the Facebook website without its owner's permission might be charged with receiving stolen goods, as if someone had a stolen television in their possession.

Fairfax has since removed a photograph from its SMH and AGE websites.

We live in times when just walking down the street with a smartphone turned on might expose individuals to arrest. Most smart phones will connect with any wireless hub they can, and if a smartphone is connected to a push media service, information will be sent to the device without further solicitation from a user. Given the propensity of smart devices to cache any data that might be in the air in which they happen to be, millions of Australian smartphones might now store the very evidence that got Ben Grubb arrested.

The theme of this year's annual AusCERT conference is overexposed. According to AusCERT's press release, the theme reflects the increasing exposure to information security risks that people, business and society face.

Queensland police told the press conference that the internet and its use posed significant challenges for law enforcement. Of course police are entitled to look for evidence wherever they can reasonably expect to find it. And a Queensland police spokesperson told this morning's press conference they had very little latitude in the way their inquiries were conducted.

So perhaps it is time to turn the push settings on your 'phone, 'pod and 'pad to OFF. Like most things in life, media consumption can be a matter of considered choice, not automata. It will be liberating, perhaps, to decide what to consume, and when. And it might save you from a life of crime, especially, it seems, in Queensland.

Free or not?

Books routinely banned, publications arbitrarily removed from libraries, radio and television broadcasters monitored by bureaucrats, web sites covertly blocked, digital media prohibited, booksellers raided by police, artworks confiscated from galleries, individuals prosecuted for showing films, and authors subjected to courtroom interrogations.

Germany in the 1930's? Russia in the 1950's? South Africa in the 1980's? Libya 2011? No, that is Australia, now.

There is no absolute right to freedom of speech in Australia. Commonwealth, State and Territory Parliaments may, and routinely do, restrict speech through censorship and other means.

In 1942 an Australian Constitutional Convention recommended amendments to the Australian Constitution to prevent the Commonwealth or a State passing laws which curtailed freedom of speech or of the press. The proposal was not included in a subsequent referendum in 1944, when other constitutional amendments went to a vote.

In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly, of which Australia is a member, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations".

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers (Article 19)

Article 19 of the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Australia is a signatory, says (in part)

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

To incorporate declarations and covenants into Australian law, Australian States and Territories and the Commonwealth must pass Acts of Parliament enabling them. No Australian government has implemented the free speech provisions of the United Nations declarations and covenants and therefore they are not enforceable by Australian courts.

Since 1992 Australia's High Court has protected some freedom to discuss some political matters. The Court has consistently ruled that freedom of communication is not expressly stated in the Constitution, but that given the nature of representative government, and Australia's political history before Federation, it could not be doubted that Constitutional provisions for free elections implied a right to free speech on political matters affecting the outcome of elections.

The Australian High Court has consistently affirmed, since 1992, that the freedom of communication implied in the constitutional requirements to hold free and fair elections is not absolute, but is limited to communications necessary for the effective operation of representative and responsible government.

…sections of the Constitution necessarily protect that freedom of communication between the people concerning political or government matters which enables the people to exercise a free and informed choice as electors (but) those sections do not confer personal rights on individuals. Rather they preclude the curtailment of the protected freedom by the exercise of legislative or executive power.

Until the Australian Constitution is amended, or Territory, State or Federal parliaments act to provide it, free speech in Australia remains an ongoing negotiation between its peoples, parliaments and courts, rather than an absolute right.

No answer is no answer

Living in a high rent inner city 'hood for the past thirty years I can see that the price of housing in the area is out of reach of Australians on the minimum wage of around $30K. And I can see that some kind of fuss ought to be made about it. And I imagine an average family would welcome all the government grants for home buyers. And be grateful. But for a minority of us a permanent address will be always out of reach, and I can't help but think that government help should go to those least fortunate first.

There are always a couple of hundred people sleeping rough on any given night in my 'hood. A couple of hundred more are in emergency shelters, and a couple of hundred more are in short-term accommodation. Add those with the two hundred or so that are imprisoned or otherwise institutionalized, that makes it eight hundred or so people from my 'hood who have nowhere permanent to call home tonight.

Bridges, car and other parks, alleys, corner store doorways, and riverbanks in my 'hood have been the semi-permanent shelter for around eight hundred people since unofficial counts by social service organizations began some years ago. Those who do find refuge in motels, alleys, caravan parks, railway stations, cars, squats, sheds and beaches are more likely than any other Australians to come to the attention of police.

I have no answer for this, only questions. Why is the government still handing out taxpayer money to people buying homes in my 'hood? Apartments are selling for a million dollars, but if it is your first home, the government will subsidize the cost.

Naturally, thousands of new apartments are being built. There are hundreds in my street. And the next street. And the next. So what's the story? Why is the government subsidizing million dollar apartments in the inner city? When there are so many sleeping rough on the streets? I have no answers, only questions. But that's no answer.