We had an A grade example of the type of parallel universe Australia’s mainstream media has descended into late last week. A completely false story given prominence in the national media by The Australian, which was then picked up by various other Rupert Murdoch papers, but which sadly even made it beyond that – all without a single shred of fact, and all without anybody thinking to check, or even think about, the main line of the story being reported.
Better still it shows just how easy it may be to get a view into the public domain and have it picked up, with a mobile number, and a basic website splashing about a few logos, to create a Potemkin public ‘movement’. And from there we can get a sighter into the sort of desperado vested interests who’d go there to try and stoke public opinion.
The story began with the following piece which was plastered front-and-centre of The Australian on Thursday night:
Business and unions in rare alliance for Big Australia
Let’s start with the headline and the glossy of Sally McManus underneath. Any half-baked sentient thinker looking at that would assume that there has been some sort of major agreement signed by the Unions and Business on the subject of immigration.
Anybody remotely familiar with Simon Benson and his work can tell you he is a long term lackey for Rupert Murdoch’s Australian operations and has bounced around the Sydney Telegraph as a political codpiece, honing his act, before shifting to mission control last year.
The article is, in fact, highlighted as an ‘exclusive’ by the The Australian. So you would ordinarily think that for something being touted as such they would want to really nail their facts. Presumably Benson had some sort of information basis on which to write the story, and you would have thought that someone somewhere would have checked out something going into the The Australian proclaimed as ‘exclusive’.
Even more, if it is an ‘exclusive’ – did absolutely nobody at the Murdoch press think for a moment, ‘This is a major public announcement, and the idea of public announcements is to ensure the public knows, and if any organisation is making public announcements then it is in their interest to get it out as many media channels as they can. Why are we running this piece as an ‘exclusive’? Why isnt Fairfax, the broadcast channels and the ABC getting this as well? ‘
Alas, it appears we have two strikes from the ‘journalists’, ‘opinion leaders’, and ‘editorial processes’ at The Australian…….. (but it gets a whole heap better):
Big business has joined forces with the ACTU in an unprecedented compact to back a Big Australia, calling on the federal government to maintain current levels of permanent migration amid calls for the rate to be cut.
A stark statement to open the onslaught. A one sentence paragraph which is simply and utterly false – so false it is almost refreshing to see it as stark as it is for the plain and unadorned rubbish it represents.
There is no evidence anywhere to support it apart from an advertisement placed into The Australian on Friday (which we will get to).
There is not the faintest skerrick of evidence anywhere that the ACTU and its President Sally McManus have joined forces with big business on anything to do with immigration. There is no indication anywhere in their public pronouncements that the ACTU and its President Sally McManus have proclaimed, signed agreement to, funded or done anything to promote, a ‘compact’ promoting permanent immigration at its current levels, or any expansion or reduction of permanent migration levels.
The historic coalition of peak unions, employer groups and the ethnic lobby will release a united policy document today warning of the economic and social consequences of dropping the annual migration rate.
Well Friday came and went, and now the weekend too – and not a sign of any policy document uniting the ethnic lobby, big business and the unions came from anywhere.
The ACTU’s involvement comes as it embarks on a high-profile campaign to rein in employers’ access to temporary foreign workers.
Now for sure the ACTU has run a high profile campaign against temporary employees. And for sure the ACTU did on Thursday release, ‘Five-point plan to address unemployment and end exploitation of temporary visa workers’. But absolutely nowhere in that presser does the ACTU mention anything about any ‘compact’ with anyone on immigration numbers, and the need to maintain a high permanent level of immigration.
The first migration document of its kind in the nation’s history calls for the current goal of an annual intake of 190,000 to be retained, with long-term levels set proportionally to the population.
Now the bullshit quotient goes up a notch right here. Think about that paragraph for a second. No caveats on why we need an additional 190k per annum, no relating it to how the economy is going, no historical reference – and certainly no mention that the 190k figure itself is a massive historical ramp up on a long term average of about 75k per annum. And then, before you get past that there is a fine sliver of the choicest grade 24 carat bullshit right at the back half of that sentence – ‘with long-term levels set proportionately to the population’.
Think about that for a moment. Our 190k isnt an ideal, it is a starting point and it keeps going up every year “proportionately to the population”. If 0.76% of 25 million brings us to 190k in the first year, in ten years time that same 0.76% will bring us more than 204k.
And no mention of employment outcomes, wages, land usage and degradation therein, consumption, whether or not that makes any form of economic sense, and no mention of who we bring in, or what skills they bring, or what they are expected to provide. Just 190k plus in – every year as far as the eye can see. And we are expected to believe the ACTU has signed up to this with business and the ethnic lobby – without discussing it with Unions under its aegis, with their members, without a debate in the public domain.
The accord will see the ACTU and United Voice, one of the most influential unions in the country, sign a National Compact on Permanent Migration with the peak employer body, the Australian Industry Group.
But on the day of the announcement neither the ACTU or United Voice have any mention of signing a compact with the Australian Industry Group on the subject of immigration numbers. The AIG has a reference to it on Saturday – on the front of its web site.
If you click on that link we end up at a very strange website headed National Compact on Permanent Migration with a number of logos splashed about to make it look well supported. These include
Migration Council Australia
Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
Australian Industry Group (AIG)
Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS)
Welcome to Australia
Settlement Council of Australia
Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA)
United Voice (better known once as the LHMU or the Liquor Hospitality Miscellaneous Union)
Now at this point aspiring journalists would once have been asking themselves ‘What do these organisations have to say about the compact they have signed?’ and maybe even ‘What are they telling their stakeholders about why signing the compact is a good thing or not?’ I say ‘once’ because it often isn’t the case anymore, and the focus these days is being able to copy and paste a media announcement, or parts therein, into a piece being written, and just assuming that because there are logos and because there are links then it is all legit.
As a hat tip to the old timers I thought I would check out these organisations and what they have to say about the ‘compact’.
The Migration Council Australia – has no mention of any ‘compact’ or any tie in with the AIG or the ACTU or ACOSS on the subject of permanent immigration numbers. Their #the-economic-impact-of-migration-2015" target="_blank" rel="noopener">policy area makes no mention of it either.
The ACTU – has no mention of any ‘compact’ or any tie in with the AIG or ACOSS or migrant organisations on the subject of permanent immigration numbers. Their media section makes no mention of it either, apart from the Thursday press release on the subject of temporary visa employees.
ACOSS – has no mention of any ‘compact’ or any tie in with the AIG or ACTU or migrant organisations on the subject of permanent immigration numbers. Their news section makes no mention of any compact on immigration numbers.
Welcome to Australia – has no mention of any ‘compact’ or any tie in with the AIG, ACOSS or ACTU or migrant organisations on the subject of permanent immigration numbers. They have no news or press release or policy section referring to immigration numbers in any way.
The Settlement Council of Australia – has no mention of any ‘compact’ or any tie in with the AIG, ACOSS or ACTU or migrant organisations on the subject of permanent immigration numbers. They have no news or press release or policy section referring to immigration numbers in any way.
United Voice – has no mention of any compact or tie in with ACOSS, AIG, the ACTU or migrant organisations on the need to maintain a permanent immigration volume. Their news and media section makes no reference to any compact, or any consultation with members on immigration numbers.
So that currently leaves us with a website linked to by the Australian Industry Group, and referred to in a presser by FECCA as the substance of the compact which provided the basis for the ‘exclusive’ story being touted by The Australian on Friday. At the bottom of the page is a mobile phone number – 0499 991 098 – which if you ring gets to a voice message saying in a female voice to leave a message and someone will get back to you.
If you type that number into google however, you soon end up with this result – http://fni.org.au/author/fniadmin/ – for whatever the Friendly Nation Initiative involves. The only thing we need concern ourselves with here is that the contact number – 0499 991 098 – is the same one in play for the ‘Compact’ web page and refers to a media contact by the name of Alexander…..*drumroll*…….Willox. And he happens to be a Policy Officer at the Migration Council of Australia according to the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
So this tells us that our compact domain has been registered by some gent by the name of Scott Mills on behalf of the Migration Council of Australia. Scott could easily be a cleric or IT guy of some low level sort, and all he has done is the registering of the domain name, with the costs incurred not necessarily borne by him. As anybody with a domain name can tell you they aren’t hard or expensive to establish, and even that someone could establish a website on behalf of someone, without being connected to it whatsoever. For example I could go to a domain provider and register the domain www.utterbullshit.com on behalf of the Australian Prime Minister, and nobody at the domain provider will check to see if I actually do have anything to do with him.
But before we go there lets take a look at the Migration Council of Australia. In particular lets go to the Board, where amidst a sea of corporate players the very first name to greet the eye is Innes Willox.
Now at this point the lay reader thinking about contemporary Australia, as opposed to the journalist hurriedly trying to cut and paste an ‘exclusive’ together, may think to themselves our Innes is a man about town, for yea verily he is also the main honcho of the AIG, isnt he:
So from all this we can assume that Innes has his hands all over whatever is unfolding with any ‘compact’ and he likes his immigration numbers up, and he doesn’t mind a lot of bullshit, and he will have contacts in just the right places to be able to create a weird population ponzi website, is the father of the boy with the phone number listed – who just happens to be a Policy officer with the Migration Council of Australia, then link to such a website, and be able to get someone to whip up an article giving it just a whiff of public airing.
That stench you can smell, isn’t something on your shoes.
From there, it is worth going back to take a look at the ‘compact’ because you could reasonably assume that if the ‘journalists’ in Murdoch Press overlooked the above, then the actual compact may not have withstood much examination either.
And so it is. The National Compact on Permanent Migration is an ineptly written a document. From Australia’s immigration taking place as a program in the first half of the first sentence to being a scheme at the end. To a rushed set of exhortations unadorned by any logical or rationale that might easily have been thrown together in a liquid lunch (or thrown up afterward) to a weird collection of principles of which the only remotely measurable one is a need to keep permanent immigration numbers up – presumably where they are at around 190k per annum, though it doesn’t actually say that.
We affirm that Australia’s permanent migration program is essential to Australian society and our economy and do not support any reduction to the scheme.
Our permanent migration program has been central to Australia’s economic and social development and will be critical to Australia’s future as a productive and globally integrated economy and society.
Australia is a country based on multicultural values where migrants enjoy the equality of opportunity to participate and benefit from Australia’s social, economic and political life. As our economic opportunities in the Asia Pacific continue to advance and our population ages, Australia will need migrants to bring skills and youth to complement and develop our domestic workforce and to help to grow the national income needed to support our high standard of living.
We support the current planning levels for the permanent migration program and encourage future programs to maintain a level proportional to the population.
Migrants bring relationships, knowledge, skills and social capital that ensure Australia’s economy is well placed to trade and invest with the countries of our region and beyond. Many Australians in turn live and work in other countries during their lives. In this century, our people to people ties will drive our competitive edge and spread the benefits of our multicultural values.
The successful settlement of millions of people ranks among Australia’s greatest achievements as a nation. As a result, approximately one in four of Australia’s population today was born overseas and half of all Australians have at least one parent born overseas.
Migration is a two-way street that has helped Australia forge ties to every continent, country and culture. It has made our society more cosmopolitan and our thinking more open and dynamic.
Migration nourishes our cultural and linguistic diversity and is one of our greatest strengths in the contemporary globalised world. Our humanitarian program is an important reflection of our values and adds strength to the character of our nation.
We must plan for our success as a nation by supporting settlement services and programs that foster a sense of belonging, encourage social cohesion and enable economic participation.
We must ensure that all those who come are provided with the same rights and opportunities so that our values of equality and a fair go are maintained.
We agree that the following principles should form the foundation of Australia’s migration policy:
We affirm that Australia’s permanent migration program is essential to Australian society and economy and do not support any reduction to the scheme.
The permanent migration program should be set within a national strategy for well managed population growth that provides the community with the education and training, infrastructure, housing and other services needed to support growth and social cohesion.
Australia’s permanent migration program must be evidence-based and calibrated to meet Australia’s national interests taking account of the role migration plays across all our economic levers. Migration, along with education, training, retraining and a strong system of social supports is part of our long-term economic strategy.
Australia’s migration program must be selective but non-discriminatory in terms of ethnicity, national origin, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
All migrants have a right to live and pursue economic opportunities in an Australia free of racism, discrimination and exploitation.
Migrants must be given every opportunity to contribute and fully participate in all aspects of Australian life, supported by access to services that assist their capacity to build the skills and knowledge needed to chart their own future.
English language is recognised as critical to participation, both in the workplace and in the broader Australian community, and migrants should have access to free services to develop their English language skills where needed.
The temporary skilled migration program should be limited to instances of genuine skill shortages which are based on evidence–based assessments of the need for specific occupations in the labour market. Where temporary visa workers are necessary we must ensure a robust regime to monitor and enforce compliance with protections incorporated in the program for preventing exploitation of overseas workers and guarding against the undercutting of local wages and conditions as well as holding those who abuse the labour rights of workers accountable.
Encouraging and facilitating permanent settlement has been a key part of Australia’s migration framework and migrants should have a pathway available to seek permanent residency and citizenship.
The confidence of the Australian community in an effective migration program, with appropriate safeguards, is paramount to its success and is contingent on strong and bi-partisan political leadership.
We agree that the following principles should form the foundation of Australia’s migration policy:
Continuing to promote the importance of permanent migration to Australia’s sustainable economic and social development to the wider community.
Supporting efforts to make the migration experience positive for migrants and for the Australian community, free of discrimination and exploitation.
Promoting migration as a stand-alone portfolio function.
Around this utter tripe, Simon Benson crafted his exclusive. Imagine the scene if you will. Innes pops over to Simon’s desk and asks if he could write something on some utter bullshit he is conjuring up and Simon does not miss a beat.
Meanwhile Simon is not a man to question bullshit, Simon is a man to spread it around…….
But the unified stance is designed as a circuit-breaker to the increasingly heated immigration debate, which the signatories believe has become toxic, xenophobic and at risk of ignoring the economic benefits that underpin skilled migration.
The document, spearheaded by the Migration Council, signals the first time unions and employer groups have reached general agreement on temporary skilled migration but based on stricter policing of the program.
We can assume the unified stance has in no way pared the marginal propensity to bullshit, with the document signaling nothing more than the desperate straits the population ponzi lobby is now descending into to get traction in a world where everyone can now see Australian immigration has been run too hard for far too long. Of course, that is before we get to the not insignificant matter of there being no indication at all that any unions have signed up to the compact.
Simon (and Innes?) obviously decided a chart would help things along about here and threw up this one which did at least identify the ramp up in immigration numbers post 2006.
But even there it doesn’t really do justice to the insane level at which Australia has been running immigration numbers over the last last 12 years. Here is an accurate depiction of that:
Simon then works the Union angle some more……
#333333;">ACTU secretary Sally McManus told The Australian the country had a history of permanent migration for “most of the 20th century”.
#333333;">“That system was predicated on civic inclusion as an Australian ideal; the idea that if you lived and worked in Australia, paid taxes and abided by the law, you should also get a say in the content of those laws, as well as the chance at full participation in our social, economic and political life,” she said.
There isn’t anything to doubt about Sally McManus having said anything there. But there’s a lot to ask about how it relates to the ACTU signing up for a ‘compact’ upholding a level of 190k per annum immigration.
#333333;">The issue has divided government ranks, with cabinet ministers publicly at odds with each other over whether the annual intake should be reduced as first proposed by former prime minister Tony Abbott.
Simon is obviously a master craftsman who knows well to weave some factuality into your bullshit narrative so that the reader can feel that something rings true. If we assume that the Prime Minister and Treasurer bullshitted the public about whether Home Minister Peter Dutton took any form of proposal to reduce immigration numbers by even a small volume, then we can assume that there has been some tension on the subject.
#333333;">The business-unions compact follows the release of a report by Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs that backed a Big Australia and revealed that permanent annual migration was forecast to add 1 per cent to GDP growth each year for the next 30 years.
Well, we still haven’t seen any trace of the union side of the compact apart from a photo of Sally McManus so we could easily start that sentence with the ‘business-tooth fairy compact…..’ but our craftsman has some more fact in the narrative. Treasury has recently put out a report backing a big Australia which has been comprehensively debunked, dismantled, chewed, laughed at, snorted on and facesat at Macrobusiness.
#333333;">Signatories to the compact — announced today in an advertisement in The Australian — include the Migration Council of Australia, the Australian Council of Social Service, the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, the Settlement Council of Australia and migration lobby group Welcome to Australia.
Simon has at least got the names right (he is obviously a senior Murdoch ‘journalist’) but he missed the small fact that there is no sign of anyone signing anything. There arent any signatures on the compact site, and not a scintilla of evidence anybody on the union side of of the compact is even aware of it.
#333333;">It will also involve the Business Council of Australia in what the compact’s signatories claim is a “historic” agreement between business and the trade unions for the economic good of the country.
One wonders if the BCA actually knows of it yet. There is nothing on their website to suggest they do, and they certainly haven’t put out any pressers on the subject.
#333333;">The 10-point policy document sets out critical elements of the migration program including English language skills, evidence-based skill needs, national interest and selectivity at the same time as being non-discriminatory.
#333333;">“This historic national compact brings together civil society, business and our union movement in shared tripartite commitment to migration as part of Australia’s future,” the document says. “We affirm that Australia’s permanent migration program is essential to Australian society and our economy and do not support any reduction to the scheme.”
The compact, as can be seen above, is nothing more than a collection of motherhood statements in abysmal English.
#333333;">The government has argued that the 190,000 intake was a rigid target set by the former Labor government that was based on the “quantity rather than quality” of migrants.
#333333;">The Coalition reset the target to a “goal” that has been allowed to reduce to an expected 160,000 this year.
This is the blame apportionment line, but seemingly takes us towards a reduced number of immigrants arriving this year anyway, despite the compact ostensibly calling for no reduction. Did Simon or Innes read what they were writing, or were they a tad under the weather by this stage?
#333333;">Former Business Council of Australia head and current Migration Council of Australia board member Tony Shepherd said the compact was without precedent.
#333333;">“I welcome this compact and congratulate the signatories,” Mr Shepherd said. “Immigration is the cornerstone of our incredible post-war development. It remains vital to our prosperity and security given our ageing and small population.”
All of a sudden we are back with the BCA and another business gargoyle who is gracing the board luncheons of the Migration Council. He too is talking about signatories despite nobody having seen any sign of anybody signing anything , but he does lay in with two other oft exhorted placebo rationales for higher immigration which have been debunked more times than anyone would care to think about with ageing and small populations.
#333333;">The AiGroup, representing 60,000 businesses, said it was critical that the migration program retained the confidence of the public. “The benefits of migration are felt across every sector of the Australian economy and the skills migrants bring are vital to the development of future industries,” AiGroup chief executive Innes Willox said.
#333333;">“Migration has helped Australia maintain our long record of uninterrupted growth and has assisted us in building our national infrastructure and skills base. It is important that we come to a consensus that migration is a key part of Australia’s future prosperity.”
Innes works himself into the story with a few comments. Innes is probably part of the world which has seen Australia shed economic diversity and sell out Australian employers with Free Trade Agreements. Could he tell us why we need more immigrants if all we do is spread around the wealth from mining operations?
#333333;">Carla Wilshire, the chief executive of the Migration Council who drove the agreement, said migration was one of Australia’s greatest strengths.
#333333;">“Migration has been central to our nation-building story and the national compact creates a platform to build consensus around the importance of migration to Australia’s future,” she said.
All of a sudden we slip a new character in at the end – another Innes flunky from the Migration Council. She is described as ‘driving’ the agreement, rather than a compact, which leads us to wonder if she was taking dictation at lunch with Simon and Innes.
#333333;">The peak union body recognised the need for a temporary skilled migration program on the condition that it was based on a robust compliance regime, restricted to genuine shortages and used “evidence-based” assessment of specific occupations.
#333333;">Yesterday the union issued its own briefing paper demanding more stringent labour market testing for temporary workers claiming there was an over-reliance in some regions.
Surreally the piece concludes with reference to the one thing the ACTU has clearly stated this week – to the effect that temporary employment visas have been abused.
So there it is.
It’s a compact, it’s an agreement, it’s been signed and it involves business, unions, immigration bodies and ethnic councils and social service providers, and it argues for maintaining a high level of permanent immigration – just that it consists of nothing but a web page with some logos, and three quarters of the organisations behind the logos have not even mentioned any agreement or compact.
Maybe The Australian would like to verify whoever paid for the advertisement which appeared in The Australian on Friday and their connection with the Migration Council of Australia? And maybe the Migration Council of Australia may want to clarify with a statement that whoever has paid for that advertisement has been duly authorised to expend monies on its behalf, and that it considers the advertising of the ‘compact’ an efficient use if its resources?
That of course is before we look at Rupert Murdoch’s world and ask ourselves if his minions write ‘exclusive’ pieces based on advertising connected with its own opinion writers, touting websites which are closely connected with that writer.
It has Innes Willox’s fingers all over it. And it stinks.
Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.
Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.
This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part Two of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Explains how Syrian society is secular, how women have freedom there, and that it is predominantly secular. For her it is very comparable to Australian society. So why don’t Australians know this? Furthermore, the Sunnis in Syria, who are in the majority, do not welcome the extremism that is being brought into the country.
Mystery of mass media’s motivation in supporting false government narratives
JEREMY SALT: Relates the problem back to the mass media again, ( as in Part One of this series). What people know about Syria is what the media chooses to tell them. There is a huge question about media ethics. Balance, objectivity are very big questions, which relate to media-ownership and the way the media operates generally. If we think about Australia, something close to 70 % of the print media is owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch. And we saw from what happened in England, how corrupt the Murdoch organisation can be, with the wire-tapping, the phone-tapping and all the rest of it. Murdoch himself is ultra, ultra conservative, very pro-Israeli. He is anti all the things we’re talking about and Murdoch runs his newspaper in the same way. The Australian newspaper, for example, is more or less like a free market Pravda.. It’s tightly controlled. There are gate-keepers. So all of this fits into the general context of the questions you are asking about why the media does what it does. The media will not say those things you are talking about - of course it won’t – because it disrupts the narrative. It doesn’t want people to know that women have freedom in Syria and that Syria is way ahead of most Middle Eastern countries in terms of women’s individual freedoms. Of course, if you are involved in political activity against the government, you’re in trouble. We know that. Well there is a good reason for that. Syria has been under siege for a long, long period of time. So the media is not going to bring out those positive aspects. But the interesting thing is, why does the media pick up a government narrative and reproduce it? Why? This is the real mystery. Why? I mean they did this over the Iraq war. It was seamless. 2003. It was very obvious that what Bush, Blair, Colin Powel were saying was without any factual basis. It was all propaganda. Blair’s dodgy dossier, all the statements they made about weapons of mass destruction, had absolutely no evidentiary basis. And, if you were a journalist, you should have been able to see that. I mean, a child could have seen it. So, where is the truth here? There is no truth. They couldn’t prove it, and yet they went with this government narrative. And then we have a war, which resulted in the destruction of a country, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and dispossession of many, many others. And at the end of it, when they’ve hunted for their weapons of mass destruction, and haven’t found them – because they weren’t there – the two papers I know of, the New York Times and the Washington Post, said, ‘Oh, we were wrong. We’re sorry.’ But this was another lie. Because they weren’t wrong. That wasn’t the explanation. The reason was they did not ask questions about the government narrative.
And so, after that incredible propaganda operation, I thought, well, that’s got to be it. Then along comes Syria – and they do the same thing all over again!
Why does the media do it? How does it interest the media to portray the Syrian war in such a fashion? The Guardian, for example, which is one of the worst culprits, why was the Guardian’s reporting up to this point so shocking? Anything a ‘rebel’ (so-called) or ‘activist’ said, the Guardian would snap up and publish. So why is the Guardian doing this? Does the Guardian have the same kind of antagonism towards Syria that the British Government has for its own strategic reasons? Because England lies with [?is allies with] America and America wants to bring down the Syrian Government, partly because Israel wants to bring down the Syrian Government – all these reasons. But why is the media going along with it? What are they getting out of it? Are they getting money? Why? How is it in their interests.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Is it because it’s a 9-5 job and …
JEREMY SALT: No, it’s not that. It’s something to do with the culture. It’s very hard for me to put my finger on it. Why they would do this. But it’s a pattern. That’s the whole point. It’s a pattern. It’s not an incidental thing. It’s not an aberration [….] And [they] will do the same thing with Iran. It’s like they have bought the government line in America and in England, on a whole range of issues.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Do they also help determine the government line?
JEREMY SALT: Well, there’s always interplay. […] But we have to ask the question about responsibility in the media. What is their responsibility? Where does it lie? What is the media there for? Well, it’s there to make money. To make a profit. If it doesn’t make a profit, it’s not going to survive. That’s one thing. But what else is the media supposed to be doing? The old-fashioned idea is the media was the watchdog of the public interest. And possibly that was more true up to about the 1970s, 1980s, than it is now. And then the newspapers started to go downhill, partly because of the internet, because people weren’t reading so much. They were watching television. They were doing social media, and all the rest of it. So, the quality of newspapers declined and they started – to keep up sales – they were doing different things. Infotainment. Celebrity gossip. All the rest of it. The quality of analysis and reporting fell. But we’re not really talking about that so much as we are talking about what should be reasonably good quality newspapers, like the Guardian, like the Washington Post. Why do they run this line on Syria? Why? Obviously what they’re saying is not true and, at the very least, is not balanced. Why did the Washington Post or the Guardian never report what the Syrian Government was saying?
SUSAN DIRGHAM: It gets back to money?
JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know. I seriously don’t know why. And with a paper like the Guardian I have to ask questions. Well, the Guardian can’t make all that much money. Maybe it does. I don’t think so.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Sponsors?
Mass media as a business
JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I really can’t explain this: why the media does this all the time.
So, when we talk about the media, what we are actually talking about is media as business. Business is money. And, you know, the diversification of ownership of the media. Like in America, for example, a number of very large corporations have media ownership. Like Westinghouse. Westinghouse is one of them, only one of them. Murdoch’s interests go all across the print media into film, into cable television, into fibreoptics – the whole thing. And the media has always worked closely with government because of this give and take. The media wants things from the government. It wants licences. And the media will give things to the government. It will give them [government] favourable publicity. In Australian or in England we know that politicians are very very quick to try to curry favour with the media magnates – with Murdoch, for example. They might fall out, but they do their best to stay on side with him. So the media functions as part of the business sector – fundamentally. And the business sector has close relations with the government. So there are interlocking systems, of which the media is part. I think this partly explains the kind of narrative we see about Syria and what we saw about Iraq. It’s pumping out a line.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Also, I was an activist during the Vietnam war – we’ve got some other activists here – and what we spoke of about then was the ‘military industrial complex’. That’s still alive and active. Can we also talk about the ‘media industrial complex’ and are there links?
JEREMY SALT: Are you talking about America?
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Generally, but America in particular, of course.
JEREMY SALT: The media industrial complex. Can you just explain what you mean by that?
SUSAN DIRGHAM: It means that people don’t really have a voice; that you do have – as you are suggesting – companies that have this power that can determine what the narrative is. For example, on Syria. So you don’t get that balance. Journalists don’t have the freedom to present a balanced picture.
The ‘free’ press.
JEREMY SALT: They don’t. If you work for a big news corporation, you cannot write what you want. It might be just coincidental that your views are the same as Rupert Murdoch’s. That’s really nice. But if they are not the same as Rupert Murdoch’s, you’ve got to make sure that, pretty much, they are. Otherwise you’re not going to have much of a future. You can’t just wander off and write whatever you want. But the thing about the media is – a lot of people take these phrases for granted – like ‘free press’ – so forth and so on. Well, free for whom? Who has the right to speak? Who has the right to write in the media?
It’s very carefully controlled. It does vary a little bit from news organisation to news organisation, but basically it’s controlled. Some people have access. A lot of people don’t have access. I mean a lot of people in Australia who don’t have any access at all to the mainstream media at all. They’re very well informed, they’re very intelligent, they’re articulate, they’re experienced, they know their area, but they’re not going to be given any space in the mainstream media. Because they’re going to say things that the mainstream media – for whatever reason – doesn’t want people to hear.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: If you worked in the mainstream media today, and you wanted …
JEREMY SALT: Well I couldn’t –
SUSAN DIRGHAM: …and you’re a person of courage, what would you do …
JEREMY SALT: Well, I wouldn’t last. I wouldn’t last. I couldn’t last.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Even moving to another area? You wouldn’t be an ABC Middle East correspondent if you …
JEREMY SALT: I don’t … no, I wouldn’t …
SUSAN DIRGHAM: …integrity and courage…
JEREMY SALT: No, I wouldn’t because I would go to Syria and I’d want to go to the Syrian Government and get their take on what’s going on.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the people…
JEREMY SALT: …and I’d want to go to the West Bank …
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the women. Don’t forget the women.
JEREMY SALT: Alright, okay, I’d talk to the women.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: The women of Syria…
JEREMY SALT: If I were in Palestine, I’d go to the West Bank and I’d talk to people there and I’d do it in a much more forceful way than the ABC would allow. So, therefore, someone like me – well, let’s not talk about me – someone like me is not going to be given the freedom to speak. Right? You’re sidelined. I know lots of people here, in this country, who are very well informed about the Middle East, about Syria, about Iran. They’ve no place in the media – and they’ve tried, but they’re shut out. And so the space is given to Greg Sheridan, for example, in The Australian, and… who was it, who wrote… Derryn Hinch!
SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Laughs softly).
JEREMY SALT: In the Age, wrote this silly piece about…
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Comparing Assad to …
JEREMY SALT: Yes!
SUSAN DIRGHAM: To Pol Pot!
JEREMY SALT: Yes! So what is a quality, so-called ‘quality’ newspaper doing with Derryn Hinch on the Middle East? When there are many, many people in this country well-qualified to talk sensibly, and they use Derryn Hinch.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: I think Derryn Hinch was probably using his heart and he was going to the shallow analysis…
JEREMY SALT: But
SUSAN DIRGHAM: … of the mainstream media, and he just thought, well, Assad’s the criminal; he’s a brutal criminal; he’s killing his own people; he must be like Pol Pot.
JEREMY SALT: But why use Derryn Hinch for this anyway?
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.
JEREMY SALT: He can write a letter to the editor…
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.
JEREMY SALT: ‘Derryn Hinch of Armadale, Worried Reader’, whatever he wants to describe himself.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why don’t they ask you and me to write about it?
JEREMY SALT: Well, not me. Forget me. Just leave me out of it. There are a lot of other people who can write intelligently about it. Why do they go to Derryn Hinch? And the whole thing about the media is that the news is an artefact …
SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Joking) We’ll have a fight soon.
JEREMY SALT: No, we’re not going to fight. News is an artefact. It’s something that people who read newspapers might not necessarily be fully aware of. I mean they do generally or not. The newspaper is one dimensional. There it is, but there is a whole kind of, like, hive of activity befor that. So the raw news is shaped by the reporter, by the editors. It’s shaped according to where it’s placed in the paper. It’s shaped according to the headlines. It’s honed and whittled and refined. Until it gets to you. And you’ve got to think of the mass of information that comes into the media every single day, whether you’re talking about newspapers or television, immense mass. And what you are seeing is a tiny fraction. So ‘news’ should be put in quotes. News is something that the newspaper or television station wants you to know; chooses for you. It’s not unmediated. And then, the other part of that, of course, is the politics of it and the way that things are reported. For example, in the case of Syria, why Syria is reported in such a negative fashion and such an unbalanced fashion. Why have none of these news organisations seen as their business to try to be fair? This is what the so-called rebels are saying – let’s hear what the Syrian Government and people who support the government have to say and what the families of the soldiers have to say. We’ve seen nothing of that. Nothing whatsoever. So, it’s completely lopsided.
And, we go back to that basic question: Why do they [the mainstream media] do it? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for them? And there’s something grey here that I can’t really put my hands on.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: At the moment, and the people in this room know this, because I’m asking them to help me, I’m working on a complaint letter to the ABC because they had a program on in December, on Radio National Earshot program, ‘The Drawers of Memory, Ahmed’s story.’ And the protagonist in this program was a ‘freedom fighter’ in Syria; someone who was running round …
JEREMY SALT: Described as a ‘freedom fighter’?
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Well, he says he supports freedom, and his ‘friends’ the insurgents based in Damascus, who support ‘freedom,’ he reckons they will win in the end. And maybe they will; they’ve got so much ‘support’ from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar – Apparently he was a money-runner, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s money. But he is presented on the ABC as someone that’s credible. And the victims of these insurgents – ordinary people like us that live in the suburbs of Damascus – are just ignored. But, what I discovered when I did a little bit of research on this story is that this is basically an unofficial ABC policy, to present this side of things. As we’ve been discussing, basically. So you get MediaWatch saying, ‘Assad is a brutal dictator. Assad is a war criminal. Assad has used chemicals against his people …’ So, if Mediawatch says this, what mainstream journalist dares present another narrative, dares present the side of the Syrian people?
JEREMY SALT: Why should we use the word ‘dare’? What is the problem in reporting Syria in a more balanced way? I mean, Australians would like to know for sure. They would like to have a different picture. Why does the media pump out this completely lopsided view? Why are they doing it? What are they frightened of? Why are they buying this narrative in this fashion? This is really what I can’t understand. You know, they’re not being told to do it by the government. The government’s not issuing an edict, ‘Please report this situation like this’. No-one’s doing that. So, exactly, how does it work out like that? That they will just report the situation in this kind of grossly unbalanced fashion.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: People get intimidated. They don’t realise their power. Individuals don’t realise the power and influence they have.
JEREMY SALT: If you were – I imagine that if you were an editor of a mainstream newspaper and you suddenly had a rush of blood to the head and decided to report Syria what you or I would call ‘fairly and objectively’, you probably wouldn’t last. But why? Why would they not allow you to report Syria in a more balanced fashion? This is the mystery that we keep coming back to. Why does the media do this? I mean, no-one’s going to punish them if they report the Syrian war – I would think – in a more balanced fashion. Why do they do it? And this is happening all the time. This freedom fighter: ‘I’m a freedom fighter’, ‘I love freedom.’ Oh, great. Okay. Well, so do I.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: So do the Syrian people.
JEREMY SALT: Congratulations. We all love freedom. Freedom’s a really nice thing.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: But what is freedom? What is free?
JEREMY SALT: It’s a word. That’s what it is. It’s a word: ‘I love freedom’.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Freedom to live.
JEREMY SALT: Yes. ‘I’m going to kill people, but I love freedom.‘
SUSAN DIRGHAM: ‘And I’m going to kill them for Saudi Arabia, for America.’
JEREMY SALT: And this has just one on and on for the last five years. And it doesn’t stop. And the latest thing we have is this situation in this town of Madaya, north of Damascus. And the media is reporting Assad forces, or Assad loyalists, or Syrian Army – what are they saying – usually the first two – besieged this town. And we have the reports of the civilians starving – and all the rest. I’m quite sure they’re having a terrible time.
Susan Dirgham of AMRIS talks with Middle East and propaganda scholar, Jeremy Salt, about the history of western interventions in the Middle East and in Syria. She asks why the mainstream press don't tell westerners how Syria is secular and has good women's rights; women got the vote there in 1947. This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part One of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East
Jeremy Salt begins by talking about 19th century history of interventions in the Middle East, then about intervention in Iraq in 1990s. The UN ran this nominally, but really England and United States did. Two UN humanitarians objected to the inhumanity of economic sanctions against Iraq, possibly even mentioned ‘genocide’: they were Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck. [1] To Susan’s question, Dr Salt agrees that UN personnel no longer speak out. On the subject of the 2003 ‘weapons of mass destruction’: The use of no-fly zones to conduct aerial bombardments. [2] Libya. No-fly zone fig leaf. Syria: they wanted to get a UN resolution for a no-fly zone, but Russia and China blocked this with the UN. Next best thing [sic] was to pull down the government of Damascus by using armed gangs – mercenaries. From 2011 until now and still [the west]have not reached their main objective, which is the destruction of the government in Damascus, but they have destroyed a large part of Syria. This is similar to the Sandinista template of mercenaries used in Nicaragua.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why do these people choose to fight for/align themselves with western governments when they can see as clearly as you and I can see that these western governments are out to destroy Arab societies?
JEREMY SALT: [Ed: Not exact quotes always; some paraphrase] But we don’t know who these people are. Initially some of them were Syrians, but a lot were from Iraq. Because, in many ways, the war in Syria is the Iraq war exported. The Saudis and other Gulf states have pumped money into Sunni Muslim groups in Western Iraq to destabilise the government in Bagdad, which they didn’t like.
The whole protest movement in Syria was wildly exaggerated [by external war-mongering forces] who were waiting to seize just such an opportunity to make their move against Syria. We’ve seen this happen in Latin America, the Middle East over many, many decades. It happened in Chili, Iran, Ukraine. When the people begin to protest, you come in from behind and you turn those protests to your advantage.
So, for the question of why local people would support western-aligned interventions, the level of true support is unknown. This is not a civil war. This is a campaign against Syria orchestrated by outside governments, who want to destroy Syria and are using a protest movement. Infiltrating it.
You might remember the first week of that protest movement in Dada, in Southern Syria. We are told that the Syrian military started firing into peaceful protesters.
What the media didn’t report was the number of civilians and police who were killed by armed men in that week. And we were told by the same media that there were snipers on rooftops firing into peaceful demonstrators. They said, ‘government snipers’. Almost certainly, they were not. They were provocateurs, stirring as much trouble up as they could. Since those days, we know full well, that the number of foreigners coming to Syria has turned into a flood.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Jeremy, the thing you mention about snipers; I was in Damascus in April 2011, just one month after the start of the crisis, and I met a young man who had been to an anti-government rally just that morning and he said that two people were killed at the rally and others were shot. There were police at the rally with arms, but they did not draw their weapons. So it was just a mystery, who killed these people and Syrians know this.
Taksim Square Massacre template
JEREMY SALT: Once again, this is part of a template. This happens in many situations like this. Where you send your undercover agents into a situation. They open fire from a rooftop or from round a corner. No-one really knows who does it, but that’s the opportunity that the enemy wants, and its media wants, to portray the government as being brutal and oppressive – to killing its own people.
So, what we are seeing in Syria is just another repeat of what we have seen in many, many other countries. We had this in Istanbul, in the Taksim Square Massacre. There was a Mayday march and people started firing into the crowd. They were obviously agent-provocateurs. Turning the whole demonstration – disrupting it – turning it into a panic-stricken kind of riot. 'Cause people didn’t know what was going on.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: One thing that people don’t know is that there was the CIA-orchestrated coup in Syria in 1949. The first CIA coup ever. The CIA had just been recently set up. This was in Syria. So Syrian people know their history, know their enemies –
JEREMY SALT: The whole thing is people in the Arab world generally have a very strong grasp of history and, you know, the people who suffer, who are the victims, remember the history. The people who do bad things to them; they want to move on, want to forget it.
So, of course there is a [?known] history. And it’s not just 1949; This goes back to the end of the first world war.
Syria has been ‘under siege’, effectively, all that time, up unto the present day. So, 1949, yes, that coup, Husni al-Zaim was put there by the CIA, and then he’s followed by a second man, Sami al-Hinnawi, then Adib Shishakli. And Shishakli, whether he was actually put-up to it by the Americans, is not clear. He probably wasn’t, but what he did, the Americans liked. Because, one thing that he didn’t like was a proposal to unite the fertile crescent. To bring Syria and Iraq together.
Iraq was under the domination of the British, so, if that had happened, it would have held a wonderful advantage for Britain – and the Americans didn’t want that. Because, beneath all of these things that we are talking about, all through the 20th century, up to the present day, there were these subterranean tensions between these outside powers.
Britain and France were wartime allies in 1914. Once the war was over, they were rivals.
And the British did what they could to limit French gains. And why did the French leave Syria in 1946? Because the British put pressure on them. Made them leave, because France was, relatively speaking, in a weak position. Britain was weak, but not as weak.
And we see, in the 1950s, Britain and the United States, this same sort of subterranean tension playing up because Britain’s fading as an imperial power, America’s moving into the region and doesn’t want the British to regain lost ground. So this is all part of the picture.
Secular society and women’s rights in Syria: if people knew the truth…
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Another bit of history going back to those times, is that women were given the vote in Syria in 1949. And what disturbs me greatly is we [Australians/westerners] don’t really know what Syrian society is like. It’s hidden behind that ‘brutal dictator’. So our media is presenting a ‘brutal dictator’ versus ‘rebels’ and, behind that ‘brutal dictator’, you’ve got the army - a secular army - and you’ve got a secular society, and you’ve got women, who have extraordinary freedoms. Do you think, if we knew …?
Western governments and media do not want us to know the truth
JEREMY SALT: Yes, of course, if we knew; if people went there. I mean Syria had a quite reasonable tourist industry before this war broke out. We all know that Syria’s a fantastic country. A wonderful place, right. So, a number of people who go there would see that for themselves, but what the others have to rely on is what the media tell them. And the media doesn’t tell them the things that you’re saying. And the media wasn’t saying these things about many, many other countries.
The media will pick up a story, a narrative, which fits in with what they and the government wants. As it did over Iraq, as it has done with many other situations. So Syria becomes a target to be destroyed, therefore it’s not in the interests of the government or much of the media to talk about positive things about Syria. Not to talk about a secular society, freedom for women, and all the rest – because people would say then, ‘Well, why are we taking Syria? Why are we going for Syria?
And so the narrative over Syria has been shocking from the beginning. There has been no balanced reporting whatsoever about Syria. I mean, one or two reporters file reasonable reports from time to time, but 95, 97% of the coverage has not conformed in any way to the standards of proper journalism. It’s been completely biased. You haven’t seen the other side.
If you are a journalist the primary responsibility is what they call ‘balance’. You’re never going to achieve perfect balance, but in a situation like this, even if you want to report what the rebels are saying and doing - even if you and I don’t think they really are rebels – let them have their say. Let people think about it. But you have to report what the others are saying. You have to go to the Syrian government.
You’ve got to go to the victims of the rebels. They are very good – the media – for the last five years has talked about the ‘victims of the Syrian army’ – as they say it – but they haven’t paid any attention at all to the victims of these armed groups. And if they did, then naturally, people would get a very different idea.
If they [journalists] talked to the government and were able to see what happens in families who’ve lost young men. I mean, how many young men have died in Syria fighting these [‘rebel’] groups? Sixty thousand? Something like that. Plus all the others – tens of thousands – wounded.
If that were shown, the whole narrative would be disrupted. But it can’t be shown. It can’t be shown. You cannot really show the victims of war. This is common in all wars. They don’t like to show the gruesome detail.
We saw the other day how Obama was wiping away tears for children who had been shot dead in America. Well, this is the same Obama who has been ordering missile strikes in Yemen that have killed children.
Now if you show the victims of those missile strikes in Yemen – actually show the bodies – well then, the American public would do a double-take: ‘What on earth are we doing? Dead children! We’re killing children in Yemen.’
No, you don’t see those photographs. And the same in Syria. You don’t see the gory detail of what the armed groups are doing. It will be played down. But when the government does something, or the military does something, it’s magnified to the ultimate degree.
So there can’t be any trust in the mainstream media now, there cannot be. After the absolute pinnacle of propaganda about Iraq; Syria is even worse.
NOTES
[1] Denis Halliday - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Denis J. Halliday (born c.1941) was the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from 1 September 1997 until 1998. He is Irish and holds an M.A. in ..."
Economic Sanctions "Hit Wrong Target," Says Former U.N. ...
" “Economic Sanctions “Hit Wrong Target,” Says Former U.N. Humanitarian ... Iraq,” warned former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Hans von Sponeck, .... Commonwealth Club of California held at the swank Westin St. Francis Hotel in .."
[2] Use of ‘No Fly Zones’: The way this works is to accuse a government of bombing its own citizens then for external powers to declare a ‘no fly zone’, which is somehow interpreted to mean that those powers can enter the zone and bomb government planes which may actually be trying to defend themselves against armed takeovers that imperil citizens. So this stops a country from defending itself militarily and enables outside powers to take over, beginning with the airspace.
Video and transcript inside. Second in series. First one, on Bashar al-Assad, is here.The third one is here.Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty, & Dr Jeremy Salt, Middle East scholar and former journalist discuss news reporting on the Middle-East: Do we live with false assumptions? Bruce Petty and Dr Salt knew each other when they both worked for Australian newspapers and Bruce asks Jeremy for his recollections about mistakes in reporting on the Middle East. Jeremy Salt is the author of The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, (University of California Press, 2008). Until recently, Dr Salt was based in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he ran courses in the history of the modern Middle East, in politics and in politics, propaganda and the media.
BRUCE PETTY: Ah well, Jeremy we should talk about where news comes from, whether it ever gets corrected, do we live with false assumptions? We both worked for The Age, we probably contributed to some … I certainly did as a cartoonist, contributed to some misunderstanding, or very sloppy history and analysis, because that’s what cartoonists do, fine tricks in the thing. You wrote about important subjects [JS: and edited], and edited. Do you recall some terrible errors we made in reporting the Middle-East?
JEREMY SALT: Well, I’ll tell you what, well, just apart from the Middle-East, I mean, I think cartoonists in a way it’s direct – you do the cartoon, you draw it, you give it to the picture editor or whatever, it goes to the newspaper. But news is an artefact, it’s fashioned, shaped, honed, it passes from one hand to the other, like the first step is: Who selects the news? The second step is: Who edits the news? The third step is: What they leave in, what they take out, OK? And so forth and so on – that’s a process. So what the person reads in the newspapers or sees on television is quite different from the raw material. And we both know the quantity of news that comes here to the daily newspaper or to a television station is enormous. The pictures as well, you know, so what they actually pick from that is a fraction of the total, you know, and that depends on the inclination, the temperament of the person who’s doing the choosing, alright? So the whole process is very contingent on a whole lot of things so when people look at a newspaper they don’t actually see what is behind it this immense three-dimensional world, alright. It really is like a beehive with lots of people labouring to produce this object called ‘news’.
BP: So it’s a sort of space problem in a way because you could analyse the moment, the moment that we’re discussing, which has come through from a correspondent or a consulate [Yes] but then somebody’s got to say, What are the origins of this puzzle that we’re looking at?
JS: Yeah, and someone’s got to make choices about, particularly on the editorial desk or subs’ desks, what you’re actually going to write, what you’re going to include. And I can remember I worked on The Age foreign desk and we’d get bundles of stuff in, we’d get a breaking story, you’d get a kind of a series of updates, leads, from morning to afternoon, OK? And you’d go through the file and you’d pick up what you thought were most important, and then you’d go through what you were getting from your own correspondent and often there’d be huge gaps, alright? Now if you tacked on what you’d got from the agency file to what the correspondent’s writing, you mightn’t like it, alright? It doesn’t fit into what he thinks the new situation is and you know, the editor might not like that. I mean I’ve been in that situation where Graham Perkin picked me up and said, I’ve had this message from so-and-so – I won’t tell you who it is – he went through this long letter, single spaced typed from one of our esteemed correspondents, single-spaced typing on three pages, and he says this and he says this, and he says this, and he says this, and he says, here I think we’ve got a left-wing saboteur on the subs’ desk.
BP: So, we’re going to lose readers if your piece goes in without …
JS: Well no, you, you’re going to get into trouble. [Oh OK, yeah.] If you tamper with the news like that, if you’re trying to present what you think – and of course your own judgement is just as suspect as anyone else’s – but if you try to present what … a balanced view, it might go against policy, it might go against the view of the correspondent, it can go against a whole lot of things. And you can get into trouble. You can get into strife over it.
BP: So obviously, a small magazine, not looking for great circulation will give you a better version of an incident or a situation than a big broadsheet with [inaudible] circulation.
JS: Probably, probably a small magazine has hundreds of people to write for it. They’re not going to pay. You know, if you don’t get your money, that’s fine. You’ve got to accept what you … [BP: Just write for a few people …] Yeah, but the newspapers have a line. Generally speaking they’ve got a line and there’s a whole lot of things that I’ve written for newspapers that have never seen the light of day, and this goes back many, many, many decades. And I think the reason would be that my view of the Middle-East, which is the area I do, is radical – in their view – or extreme. I had this experience with, actually, The Australian. I had a friend there and I wrote a piece on the peace process, so-called, all process, no peace. And this is about 1995, two years after it started, and I wrote a piece and sent it to The Australian. And occasionally I did, even though I don’t like The Australian. I’m sorry Bruce, I know it was your home for a while … and um, the person I sent it to, was on the Foreign Desk. He rang me and said, ‘We’re not going to run this’. He said, ‘I ran it past so-and-so’ and I said, ‘What did he say?’ ’Well, so-and-so said …’ and he stopped and I said ‘Said what, that I’m an extremist?’ and he said, ‘Yes, not to put too fine a point on it’. And so-and-so told me to tell you, that they will never run you on the Middle-East. Right? Right?
BP: So the Cold War was still operating.
JS: Well, we know The Australian’s editorial line is rightwing, OK? Sure, but even you know, mainstream papers like The Age or the SMH on certain issues are very conservative, on the Middle-East, most definitely.
JS: What I was writing in 1995 was that the so-called peace process between Israel and Palestine was finished, two years after [it began]. For me obviously, it was a waste of time, and that’s what they were not prepared to run. Of course, ten years later everyone’s saying it’s a joke, you know. But you know, extremists from their point of view.
JS: Bruce, did you ever have a cartoon rejected?
BP: Oh, not on political grounds and not international grounds, but ones that they didn’t like were anything corporate [OK, right] because they do our advertising [of course], we can’t live without them. So you don’t name anybody, you know you can do it in a general sense that they’re all, you know, pretty devious, but you can’t say, ‘Thisguy is a crook’.
Almost everyone pays directly through taxes to be lied to by the ABC and SBS news services (and the British pay with their taxes, for much of the rest of the world as well as themselves, to be misinformed by the BBC news service). Some pay through direct purchaseorsubscription to be misinformed. Few who watch commercial television news services don't pay indirectly to be lied to. They pay additional costs added to the prices of their purchases to pay for advertising.
One of the almost countless examples of lies about Syria in the Melbourne Age and other Australian newsmedia is the editorial A surprise outbreak of diplomacy over Syria of 11 September 2013 (emphasis added):
At last, Russia ... might appease the United States over Dr Assad's despicable actions in gassing Syrian civilians last month. ... Russia's call [to have Syria's chemical weapons destroyed under international control ...
... would ... remove the immediate justification for US military action against the Assad regime.
... There is too much at stake for the region, and for the Syrian people in particular, to let this ruthless dictator off easily. Ultimately, Dr Assad must be brought to justice to answer for this crime.
The evidence emerging, now that the U.S. has stalled its war plans, is that the terrorist opponents of the popularly supported Syrian government, supplied by the United States' ally Saudi Arabia, launched thechemical weapons. Special UN investigator Carla del Ponte had in April found that it was more likely that Syrian rebels and not the Syrian government had used chemical weapons. Subsequent investigations by Russian chemical weapons experts confirmed Carla del Ponte's findings.
The United States, has itself repeatedly used chemical weapons and other WMDs in the numerous wars it has fought since the middle of the twentieth century. Given that Syria has also faced the threat of nuclear attack from Israel since the 1960's, it would seem prudent for Syria to have possessed one means to deter the Israeli government from launching those weapons agains Syria.
It is not Syrian President al-Assad that needs to be held to account, but the Age newspaper and its editors for lying to their readers about Syria.
The corporate criminals, their government glove-puppets and their newsmedia outlets have vast resources to pay their journalists and editors to misinform the public about world critical events like the Syrian conflict.
Much has been achieved in recent years to counter such lies thanks to the great levelling effect of the (still) free Internet journalists and researchers who have made their work freely available to Internet users.
However, if this is to continue, we cannot continue to rely upon unpaid volunteers or others, with paid employment, working late into the night or on weekends. Those who produce informative Internet content are entitled to remuneration for their valuable work.
Virtually all the independent Internet news services are struggling to make ends meet. These include the Boiling Frogs Post web-site of FBI whistleblower Sybil Edmonds. An appeal for more funds is appended below.
Other Independent news services that also need financial support include GlobalResearch and Paul CraigRoberts. (Curiously, I wan't able to find any appeal for financial support on three other immensely valuable web-sites, Voltaire Net, the Land Destroyer Report and the Corbett Report, but we should be ready to help them out should they suddenly face unexpected financial difficulty in future.) (Candobetter, which is currently also produced by volunteers giving their time for free, could also use professional staff who are able to work full time.)
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The way The Australian writes him up, Tim Flannery, who once wrote so articulately in defense of our land and its ecology and our place in it, now seems reduced to a quasi-apologist for extreme mining technologies. The Australian writes in such an unbalanced way. See also "Fracking Democracy..."
The article reads as if Tim Flannery, (famously author of The Future Eaters), alarmed at the roughshod being run over Australian farmers' rights and the environment, is trying to get higher standards in the mining industry.
He is reported to have said that, "similar arguments applied to mining generally, and called on government and industry to do more to regulate and rein in poor performers."
The Australian cites him as saying that mining is utterly necessary for modern life.
It fails to balance its argument by giving the case for allowing population to downsize and relocalise and for people to be more self-sufficient in a slower economy to allow the planet time to heal. No attention is given to how we all work harder for less and how many of us don't see the point in producing all this short-lived 'stuff' that finishes up in land-fills. Yet it is only in order to continue producing all this stuff that extreme technologies like gas-fracking can be artificially politically justified. In the end the only reason to go on producing more and more stuff is to keep a few undeserving greedy people at the top in the positions to which they have become accustomed.
Completely different perspective operates outside our system, but we don't know of it
Here is the comment I sent to the Australian regarding their article:
"France recently passed a law in parliament to make fracking illegal. The law rescinds rights previously granted and put any schale-mining for gas on hold pending new and safer technologies. Source: JT, Edition du Mercredi 13 Avril 2011, http://jt.france2.fr/20h/ Since then a further report was released and covered on the news for France 2, Monday 3 October 2011, which said that the French Government remained unconvinced by the latest techniques proposed by fracking concerns. All permits have been cancelled. High on the list of reasons against fracking in France was the risk of contamination of water supply and its impact on agriculture and human health.
This parliamentary decision is yet more evidence for those aware of different legal systems, that the Napoleonic system in France and Europe is far more democratic - in protecting peoples' rights and communal (and national) assets and vital resources - than the anglophone systems in their various forms in Britain and her current and ex-colonies."
Let's see if they publish that.
Murdochian only spoken here
Generally, it seems that, if you want to have your opinion published in the mainstream press you may only express it in so far as it fits their paradigm. So Tim Flannery, who once wrote so articulately in defense of our land and its ecology and our place in it, now appears to be reduced to being portrayed as a quasi-apologist for extreme mining technologies. It is hard to believe that he is really behind gas-fracking. One gets the impression that he is now interfacing, on behalf of numerous committees, with a monolithic industrial mining front that speaks uniquely in Murdochian.
It is as if our press and government have rendered us incapable of imagining any other way. France's parliamentary decision to ban gas-fracking is yet more evidence that the Napoleonic system in France and Europe is far more democratic - in protecting peoples' rights and communal (and national) assets and vital resources - than the anglophone systems in their various forms in Britain and her current and ex-colonies.
Australia's mass media and government keep her citizens in the dark and feed them B.S.
Australia's lack of information and news from Western Continental Europe keeps us in the dark about other ways other possibilities, and notably enduring forms of democracy that retain local powers. We only get an Anglophone perspective on matters of importance. America, Canada, Australia are among the least democratic countries in the world, with vast and growing differences between the haves and the have-nots, in legal systems which cannibalise and destroy their own community, citizens and resources. The reason that these countries are not yet obviously reduced to the poverty of Haiti is that their citizens started out with more resources per capita. As commonwealth is transferred more and more into private hands in those systems, people who have to date been able to survive, will not survive. The growing numbers of homeless and hopelessly endebted are indicators of the social unsustainability of the current economic and legal systems in Australia, America and Canada. In France and the rest of Europe, it is virtually impossible for citizens to be left without shelter unless they voluntarily opt out - as some homeless do - albeit with every attempt made to shelter them each winter.
That this same system was able to appraise and legislate against a threat to its peoples' way of life in response to their protests is an indication that their system is more democratic and more flexible than ours.
The Age is a constant source of propaganda for population growth in Melbourne. Jake Niall's article today is another flagrant example. Melbournians need strong minds and hearts to fight back against their runaway parliaments and reclaim their natural rights to self-government. Age Sports-writer Jake Niall promotes the thinnest of arguments for overpopulating Melbourne as if they had real authority, on behalf of The Age, Melbourne's newspaper for the middle classes. The Age owns a massive international property dot com and represents a moneyed power-elite that relies on overpopulating Melbourne against residents' and electors' wishes and all commonsense. Its role seems to be to suppress protest through the massive weight of continuous propaganda, whilst maintaining a thin pretence of counterbalance by publishing mildly dissenting letters to the editor from time to time.
Whilst insulting Melburnians' intelligence, in "Big Melbourne isn't to be feared, you might find it'll grow on you," (April 23, 2011, The Age), Jake Niall nonetheless adds to the crushing weight of commercially backed propaganda. Presumably this is how awful power-elites like the Nazis eventually overrode all objections and hypnotised a confused public as they harnassed the masses to their big-business-backed tyranny.
Melbournians need strong minds and stomachs to survive this assault on their democracy and community long term, but survive and defend themselves and the truth, they must. If they do not there is nothing to stop Melbourne (and every other green bit of Australia) from becoming like Hong Kong or coastal China. There is actually no end to how bad it can get. Residents groups in Hong Kong now lie down in front of bulldozers merely to protect their high-rises from shadow.
We must not forget the history of our leaders' and press's machinations against our collective welfare. Lest we fall weakly for the various excuses that their representatives trot out.
Niall describes Melbourne's growth as 'unexpected' when it was solicited and promoted by the Kennett government and Bracks governments, then shamelessly continued by the Brumby. The Australian and The Age were involved hands-on in the population growth promotion and constant marketing of lame defenses for growth as if they had substance for anyone but anti-social land-speculators. (See chapter 6 of The Growth lobby and its Absence for the history.) The Victorian government, under Bracks, relied on unsavory business characters to market this growth, notably Steve Vizard and Richard Pratt, who were involved with APop and OzPop and US housing investment promoters.
No way was Melbourne's growth unexpected. This is marketing to deflect responsibility away from the perpetrators of a heinous affront to democracy by successive Victorian parliaments. Let us not forget, either, that neither the Socialist Alliance, nor the Greens, stood up for peoples' rights. These smaller parties have participated in the cover-up, along with the newspapers, which benefit financially through their corporate (housing, building materials etc) investments and ability to manipulate perception of market performance.
Our system needs to change and we might start by looking at the Napoleonic system that Europe has inherited, where democracy is somewhat more robust and population growth is treated as a cost, rather than have its profits artificially isolated from its impacts and costs (which the rest of us pay).
According to yet another article in Mr Murdoch's Australian newspaper by self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt,
Australia "quivered when a passing Japanese submarine lobbed shells into the eastern suburbs of Sydney in May 1942: property prices plummeted."
You can find the article, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in the business and property section in The Australian. A sort of where to buy and invade section, I guess. Here Salt advertises Australia as an easy target for any enemies. Pretending that he is writing for a mythical Peoples' Army in Bernardistan, he plots entry via the Kimberleys.
Why Salt's antics here are not seen as treacherous and inciting invasion would be a mystery to anyone seriously subscribing to the Axis of Evil myth. More sophisticated readers may wonder, however, if the property development industry is so worried by the Australian public's louder and louder calls for population stabilisation, that they must have decided to ask Mr Murdoch and Mr Salt to try provoke a full-on invasion.
Mr Salt probably realises that conducting a military invasion of Australia (rather than the economic immigration one) is not as easy as his imaginary character pretends. What may still be possible, however, is to misinform elderly Australians (members of the property lobby and readers of The Australian, for instance) via one of our only two national newspapers, and panic them into calling for a bigger population. Either strategy could work and, without an invasion - of immigrants or armed forces - the Colonel Blimps (and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann) of the Property and Development Lobby are doomed. A welcome extinction, in the view of many ecologists, which would prevent so many sad ones.
Australia Overloaded author, Mark O'Connor wrote recently in response to Bernard's attitude which seems to be that Australians are complacent cowards and the country needs more of them:
"If the Australians of our fathers' or grandfathers' generation had been as faint hearted as Mr Salt, back when our population was only a third of what it is today, Australia might now be a province of Japan."
(O'Connor was responding to an article, "Australia told to grow or risk invasion", in the Canberra Times, 31/3/2010, p. 6 which was reporting on what seem like Bernard Salt's attempts to commercialise fear and ignorance in yet another forum.)
James Sinnamon commented on the facts:
In fact, Australia achieved self-reliance in 1942 and stood a very good chance of being able to defeat a Japanese invasion. That is why the Japanese Army in March 1942 vetoed the Japanese Navy's plan to invade.
The reason why the Japanese Army vetoed the Navy's invasion plans is explained in detail by Andrew T Ross in Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945 Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, on pages 408-418:
By June 1942, the earliest date an invasion force could have been assembled, Australia would have 8 fully equipped divisions in the field as well as an air force capable of denying the Japanese total air supremacy. To win, they would have had to capture a deep water harbour in order to enforce a blockade to prevent Australia being able the resupply itself with some of the very few materials with which we were not self-sufficient (including petroleum). The northernmost deep water harbour was Newcastle.
Mr Sinnamon, who obviously has no serious investments in housing or infrastructure or bank shares, continued:
During the Second World War Australia was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, a technological edge we have largely lost since then thanks to Australia having allowed its manufacturing sector to be destroyed as mandated by free market orthodoxy.
Of Australia's contribution to the Second World War, US President Truman said to the US Congress in a report on Lend Lease (including on Australia's reverse Lend Lease to the US during much of the Pacific War) on 27 December 1946:
"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." (Andrew T. Ross, Armed and Ready: the industrial development and defence of Australia, 1900-1945, Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p 427)
Sinnamon asks,
Why would Bernard Salt wish to deny this, as well as this country's impressive military achievements, by focusing on only two episodes in the war?
In the case of the bombing of Darwin, the attacking Japanese force exceeded that which attacked Pearl Harbour, so I would think that the panicked response by some Australians was understandable.
Well, I guess it doesn't matter to Mr Salt's objectives whether his statements are accurate or fair. The aim of the article seems to be to generate enough fear to overcome Australians' democratic desire for a small and stable population. This means we can expect many more articles like this one, sigh.
And the battle to invade and subdue Australia is half-won anyway. As Bernard Salt knows and Greg Woods writes, we are already well on the way to being a nation of disorganised captives to propaganda and consumerism.
So why would having a lot more of that kind of Australian serve to defend us against the tens of millions in some Bernardistan?
What The Australian wouldn't print
As Greg Wood writes:
Pray tell Mr. Salt, how would even tenfold more Australians, wedged into the alienating fringe of suburbia and the high-rise catacombs of your ambitions, and beguiled into apathy by myriad imported electronic eclectica, be of any practical assistance against this massed force from your imagination? As an audience to watch the news-feeds and up the ratings of the conflict perhaps?
Your narrow and convenient account of WW2 Australian response to Japanese attack is simply bad history. In fact the response was broadly self-sacrificing and heroic. That earlier time exhibited remarkable social identity and spirit, which acted as the glue that draws together the resistance your argument so disingenuously questions. That character is now largely lost as recent decades have seen genuine neighbourhoods sacrificed as commodities for trade in the game of property speculation and growth-for-profit that you advocate.
And the futility of your proposition sucks one’s breath out. Why bother to invade Australia when it is already for sale world-wide on the internet to the highest bidder with the strongest exchange rate? N.B. 80% of Australians (and growing) need not apply – insufficient funds!
Well, that's right, Greg. And the Property marketers of the Growth Lobby want more customers with ready cash. For some reason they think that the Peoples Army might have the ready. (After all, armies are where a lot of foreign aid ends up and big spending goes on.) So Bernard is getting the message to them, via Mr Murdoch's Australian that it would be a doddle to invade Australia. While they're perusing our topology on GoogleEarth, they can also have a look at property on Mr Murdoch's www.realestate.com.au
But Greg continues, referring to the treacherous conduct of The Australian as a 'community sell-out' in printing an article that purports to give fail-safe directions to invade your country:
Harking back to WW2 and what it truly does take to secure freedom, a community sell-out of this magnitude would have earned a bullet in the back of the head from the French Resistance. Or does your curious brand of history see them as an extremist terrorist group?
However, if you peruse the emailed responses to Salt's article, it really isn't so easy to invade Australia. Perhaps, in fact, Mr Salt was just using the Peoples' Army as a kind of code for the elderly tax-payer army that supplements the Growth Lobby's continued purchase of power in this country.
At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses in The Australian:
ID Langford Posted at 6:13 AM Today
Bernard, you are entirely out to lunch... Consider the SE Asian archipelago that you navigated down to get here...you don't think we will see you coming? Consider the vast interior of the Australian landmass that you will need to penetrate in order to project military force into our decisive areas...does it remind you of the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in WW2? Or Napoleon's attempt a century earlier?? Consider the logistics involved in forcing entry onto Australia and then sustaining it...consider the wet season which prohibits movement in northern Australia for much of the year...go read some the Defence of Australia foundational documents that are out there. Most of us are complacent about history; some of us however, are students of history and understand the efforts required to lodge and deny access to an area the size of the Kimberley would be a truly monumental task. It took over 205 German Divisions to invade the Soviet Union and even this massive war machine failed. Have a real think about it...who can even closely imitate this force structure today??
Jason Ransome of Basel, Switzerland Posted at 7:29 AM Today
Fantastic article! But did you take into account our anzus treaty with America. Let's not forget Australia is a huge country, you can start from the west and move east but our army will come from behind and cut your supply routes every time, so you better bring enough personal to protect those supply routes. If it was so simple to invade Australia then it would of been tried by more than just the Japanese Good luck with your invasion, your going to need it
I like this one - short and to the point:
Mr Squiggle of Melbourne Posted at 9:58 AM Today
What an odious little article this is. China's population is 1.3bn. Indonesia's is 231m. Even if we increased our population size four-fold tomorrow, we would still be strategically outnumbered. Just let it go Bernard, we'll never create national security by ramping up our population. The starting gap is too large.
neil of melb Posted at 11:05 AM Today
The problem with invading Australia is purely logistical, How may countries have the capability of transporting 150,000 soldiers, equipment and ongoing supplies over 1000's of km of ocean? The only countries that could conceivably do it are the USA because of their military power and Indonesia because of their proximity. But Indonesia does not have the capability to destroy our air force or stop it being reinforced from allies. They don't have the capacity to land 10's of thousands of paratroopers. We would have control of the skies and the resulting carnage inflicted on a marine invasion would catastrophic. Military strategists run simulations on these scenarios constantly, this is why we are spending billions on long distance radar, aircraft and submarines rather than a huge army. A war would be fought in the Pacific or Indian oceans or Timor sea, not on Australian soil.
Rhetorical Question to the Elites who make money out of the rest of us through war and housing games
Is The Australian in fact un-Australian? Didn't the diggers die to preserve free speech? How come only Mr Salt and his doyen get to say whatever they like?
NOTES
[1] Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character created by Sir David Low (1891-1963), a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Low was a self-taught cartoonist. Born in New Zealand, he worked in his native country before migrating to Sydney, Australia in 1911, and ultimately to London (1919), where he made his career and earned fame for his Colonel Blimp depictions and his merciless satirising the personalities and policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and other leaders of his times. Source, Wikipedia
Recently, the Murdoch press have continued their campaign of climate denial and delay by giving front-page prominence to a five-day-old story attacking the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions of glacial melt in the Himalayan-Tibetan ranges by 2035.
Drawing on a 13 January New Scientist story by Fred Pearce reporting on a debate amongst glaciologists about the IPCC's claim, "The Times" (UK) and subsequently "The Australian" and other Murdoch papers have tried to shift from a debate about TIMING to a questioning of global warming.
Opposition leader Tony Abbot has now used the reporting to attack Labor's climate policies and again questioned the need for climate action.
While there is unequivocal peer-reviewed science on global warming and its impact on the glacial melt in the Himalayan region, the IPCC left itself open to attack by basing its time frame for a major loss of the glacial ice sheets on a previous "New Scientist" reporting of "speculative" statements by an Indian scientist.
There is much to criticise in the IPCC's 2007 report, in particular their low predictions of sea level rise this century for example, for the report is based on old science (pre-2005) and is too conservative in its predictions of the timing and extent of many climate impacts. Hence the deep for updates such as the Copenhagen climate science congress in March 2009.
But instead of examining these problems, "The Australian" and "The Times" have chosen to focus on one unsubstantiated prediction contained in the report to throw into question concerns about the Himalayan big melt and climate change more generally. This is despite the unequivocal evidence of substantial glacial loss and warming in the Himalayan-Tibetan region.
Glacial retreat on the Himalayas/Tibetan Plateau is well documented from satellite observations and aerial photography. Glaciers around the world are melting and thinning at an increasing rate, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service. Himalayan glaciers have been retreating more rapidly than glaciers elsewhere and has intensified in the last 10 years. For example, the Imja glacier retreated at an average rate of 42 metres per year from 1962–2000, but 74 metres per year 2001–2006. A study of 612 glaciers in China between 1950 and 1970 found that 53 per cent were retreating. After 1990, 95 per cent of these glaciers were measured to be retreating.
Last year, we compiled a report for Friends of the Earth Australia that reviewed the climate impacts in Australia. While it included a reference to the IPCC claim, it also outlined a substantial body of evidence on warming and glacial melt that is still valid. It also examined the catastrophic impact on the Asian region of substantial glacial melt, in particular the threat to the water security of over a billion people. You can download the report: HIghstakes: climate change, the Himalayas, Asia and Australia.
As climate policy analyst Joseph Romm said this week "Good news: The Himalayan glaciers will probably endure past 2035. Bad news: If we don't reverse our emissions trend soon, their disappearance is likely to become irreversible before then." His blog entry is worth reading in full.
Predictions about the timing of climate change impacts are the most imprecise of the many aspects of climate science. Ice sheet dynamics are particularly difficult. The loss of the Arctic sea ice, for example, is occurring seventy years earlier than IPCC predictions.
So while there is no doubt the IPCC got it wrong when it gave so much weight to this reference, we should not let a debate about timing undermine our acceptance of the fundamental threat of the loss of the Asian glaciers.
On 18 December 2009, Queenslander's were greeted with yet more bad news by Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper in the story "Monster power price hike" (in 19 December printed edition):
The Queensland Competition Authority (QCA) has just announced a draft decision that would see prices rise by 13.83 per cent between 2009-10 and 2010-11.
The decision would add an additional $276 to the average annual household bill of $2000.
It is the fourth successive jump in electricity costs since the State Government claimed deregulation of the industry would put downward pressure on prices.
The heavy price, already paid Queenslanders for former Premier Peter Beattie's decision, made without their consent or any electoral mandate, to privatise the retail arm of the state owned electricity utility, continues to climb.
It began by appearing to empathise with, but at the same time diminishing the grounds for outrage against this decision.
PRICE rises, particularly when the hand of government is involved in some way, are always going to be politically contentious.
As such, yesterday's draft decision by the Queensland Competition Authority ... sparked the predictable howls of protest from consumers and the Opposition, and grumblings from the Government.
Then it immediately proceeded to provide its own wholely predictable justification for the increases.
With the massive investment required to maintain and expand Queensland's electricity network to cater for a growing and increasingly power-hungry population, rises such as this were always inevitable -- ...
If price rises were 'inevitable' as a result of population growth actively pursued by both the Queensland and Federal Governments, then why weren't the people who are now being made to pay the costs, first asked?
As we have shown in other earlier articles, the Courier-Mail newspaper like the state Government has been playing a double game with the Queensland public on this issue.
The editorial makes sweeping claims about how such population increases will be of enormous indisputable benefit to all, but, of course, no-where does it mention the environmental, social and economic costs that Queenslanders are now being made to pay for population growth. No-where does it warn that charges for services such as electricity, gas and water will rise as a consequence.
For their part, the Courier-Mail's reporters and editors write of the effects of population growth as if unaware of the role played by the Australian in bringing it about.
If it chose the Courier-Mail could use, very effectively, its voice towards stopping population growth and the consequent harm, only one example of which that this editorial addresses. I have demonstrated that it has shown that it is able to on other political questions in the article "Courier Mail spins news of 79% opposition to fire sale to reveal its privatisation colours" of 11 Dec 09, but in regard to population growth, it chooses not to.
It lets off the hook the politicians whose undemocratic unpopular decisions have so harmed the public interest and continue to do so. In regard to former Queensland Premier Beattie, the editorial Courier-Mail's editorial contines:
... and former premier Peter Beattie was foolhardy at the time of the Energex retail sell-off to talk up the prospect of cheaper power.
The possibility that Beattie's long since discredited promise of cheaper power, rather than having been 'foolhardy' may have been judged necessary to achieve his goal of bludgeoning public opinion into accepting the deregulation and privatisation of the retail arm of the state's electricity utilities sector, is not considered.
Beattie's claim is only one of many examples of similarly baseless claims of the benefits of privatisation made by politicians. The possibility that claims made by Premier Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser today in support of their current bid to flog off $15 billion worth of public assets may be similarly groundless is, of course, never raised by the Courier-Mail with its readership.
The editorial argues against aginst any direct Government intervention to reject or curtail the price risese approved by the QCA:
Not only would this undermine the authority of the QCA itself, it would also be a recipe for disaster for commercial entities in Queensland's power sector, many of whom are operating on very thin and competitive margins as it is.
In fact, such a move would likely drive away participants from the sector, resulting in less competition and ultimately even higher prices.
So, the fabulous competitive energy market is apparently economically unviable, that is unless it is allowed to charge massively more than what the previous Government owned electricity retail arm charged for the same service!
Instead, the editorial argues that the Government act to modify consumer behaviour:
As was demonstrated during the water crisis, a concerted public information campaign can result in an enduring behavioural shift when it comes to consumption patterns.
Our love affair with airconditioners and other power-hungry appliances has resulted in average household consumption rising from about 6400 kilowatt hours to 11,000kWh in the past decade. And in the past five years the network has been expanded to cater for an extra 4200 megawatts of electricity at times of peak demand -- enough to power South Australia and Tasmania combined.
This additional capacity does not come cheap, and the costs must ultimately be passed on to the end user – and these are consumers who, on average, have increased their electricity consumption by 70 per cent in only 10 years.
Of course, the Courier-Mail now conveniently forgets its own past role in encouraging ever greater per capita consumption of energy and other resources.
One of the principle reasons for "our love affair with airconditioners" as the editorial puts it, is the shoddy designs of housing crammed together on sprawling suburban developments with little tree cover in between the concrete, the often black-coloured tiled rooves, guaranteed to absorb the maximum possible amount of heat and bitumen roads. Whilst the Courier-Mail clamoured to expand the housing development industry and the importation of customers for it, the Courier-Mail showed little leadership of which I am aware, towards at least ensuring that what was built would not be so energy inefficient.
Now people who paid so dearly to buy these dwellings may have be forced to swelter without air-conditioning in the summer heat or pay probibitively for it.
Before the Global Financial crisis, the Courier-Mail fed to Queenslanders expectations that the economic boom would last forever and, not that long ago it was considerably less circumspect in its support for population growth. It openly clamoured for ever greater numbers of people to move to Queensland to fill what it insisted were critical labor shortages as I described in the article "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of Jan 07.
Now we have discovered, to our cost, that this state never had the unlimited capacity to cater for new arrivals and ever higher per-capita levels of consumption that the Courier-Mail insisted that we did have, the Courier-Mail's own past consumerist propaganda, at least in some respects, is turned around 180 degrees.
The editorial concludes:
Without altering our behaviour, the only way to keep a lid on electricity prices is via government subsidies. And then we all end up paying more -- no matter what our individual usage -- through higher taxes.
Of course, we know better than to expect of the Courier-Mail to argue to end reckless Government policies of population growth and privatisation that created the shambles that the electricity secore has been turned into.
Instead, we are expected to fix the mess by reducing our consumption whether through smart means or by brutal means which will reduce our livng standards.
But even if we achieve this, it can only provided a temporary reprieve until we achieve population stability.
Continuously increasing mass immigration leading to population of 35 million and beyond is now official Australian state dogma. In other words, 14 million people - more than the 12 million that was the population of this country when I was a child in the 1960's - are to be deliberately added. The evidence of harm already caused by past population growth to the existing population, exactly as our normal intuition and common sense would have predicted, is overwhelming:
Our roads are congested, our buses and trains are packed tight, often leaving many waiting at bus stops and stations. The costs of all basic services -- electricity, gas, water, council rates, vehicle registration, parking, etc. -- are climbing through the roof.
Our governments openly justify these cost imposts on the basis that they are necessary to pay for the replacement and/or expansion of existing infrastructure to meet the needs of additional people, but they don't admit that they are responsible for inviting those people.
Where our taxes once paid the full costs of roads and bridges, people are now forced to pay the order of well over a hundred dollars each week to commute to and from work through toll roads, toll bridges and tolled tunnels.
Bligh arguments chase their own tail
Premier Anna Bligh even defends her Government's deeply unpopular $15 billion government asset fire sale on the grounds that it is necessary to pay for population growth. In a letter to me dated 9 Jun 09, the Premier stated:
... a State with a rapidly growing population can't afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community.#main-fn1">1
Yet, the Queensland Government continues to advertise for people to move from interstate and from overseas to Brisbane and, last weekend Premier Anna Bligh actually welcomed the 'challenge' that further population growth would provide.
Absurdistan quality of life in Brisbane
The purchase or rental of secure, free-standing housing in areas close to work and amenities is completely beyond the means of most Australians, even in double-middle-class income households, where wealth has not been inherited.
Many renters have little choice but to share the same roof with possibly incompatible strangers.#main-fn2">2
In one case, during the 2008 Queensland state elections, I even met two Brisbane women who, had not known each other only months earlier but now shared the same bed in a boarding house. The reasons were completely unromantic: Neither could by herself afford to pay the full rental of the one-room furnished accommodation. It was an arrangement of urgent necessity.
Despite the constant mediatised government propaganda that tries to normalise overpopulation, many Queenslanders must have been shocked to read in the papers of as many as 37 foreign students sharing a single house in an outer southern suburb of Brisbane#main-fn3">3. That story was a chilling reminder of what the government expects ordinary people to put up with in the government-driven competition for space on the rental market.
The cramming of ever more human beings closer together in high rise units in Australia, is even causing residents to complain of being exposed to passive smoking by neighbours smoking cigarettes on nearby balconies.
High immigration pushes wages down and costs up
Instead of business and government sharing the responsibility of training and retraining new workers, the Australian government is making it easier for Australian businesses to import newly skilled immigrants. The cost of self-education is rising like other costs that were previously provided through our taxes. Now mature Australian-born workers, many with degrees, who once enjoyed well-paid occupations, earn marginal incomes in low-skilled jobs, replaced in their old positions by waves of recently skilled young immigrants. Some go into hock to try to keep up, or cash-in their superannuation to retrain, with no guarantee of any job-security.
In an increasingly casualised workforce, the breaking down of Australian conciliation and arbitration law and the state award system, the mass-import of ever more workers from overseas, many studying bogus courses, inevitably pushes wages downwards.
All this population growth makes the cost of living (land for housing, housing prices, rent, water, electricity, petrol) outpace any wage rises.
In Queensland, I know of how one cleaning contract company that paid its workers decent wages to clean a hotel a few months ago, lost the contract to another company which employed foreign students at bare minimum wage rates. I have been told that the security at the August Brisbane Royal National Show (aka the 'Ekka') was handled by a contract company that employed students, again at bare minimum wages.
Not surprisingly, as pay is reduced to the basic wage and sometimes even lower in casualised private industry, competition is high for the diminishing number of jobs where the requirement to provide relatively decent pay and conditions remains. In my own experience, even entry-level clerical positions in the Queensland public service now attract large numbers of applicants. Perhaps only those prepared to spend days or weeks arguing on paper their suitability for the job in the arcane jargon of the advertised selection criteria, exhaustively targeting their letter of application, stand a chance. Many who don't have the temperament to repeatedly devote hours of their days to this demeaning and, to my mind, socially pointless activity simply don't bother and miss their small chance in this employment variation of lottery.
Wildlife, green spaces and farmland destroyed for infrastructure and expansion in less-than-zero-sum game
Natural habitat is being cleared to such an extent that the koala, among Australia's most iconic species, is expected to be extinct in SouthEast Queensland in as little as two to seven years. Many other species are also threatened. Farm land is daily sacrificed to more housing. But not only farmland - entire rural communities such as in Queensland's Mary Valley - are threatened with complete destruction through inundation to provide water for our involuntarily growing population. And even then, for all the obliteration of good land, loved wild places, social histories and memorials, the water in the resulting dam - if it even accumulates - still won't do for Queensland's growing population if the government is not stopped from continuing to aggressively invite more people to come and live here.
Where have the people given Governments their consent for massive population increases?
In a democracy the people affected should expect to have the final say in whether or not to continue with such clearly harmful policies. So corrupted have our political institutions become, however, that our official political rulers show no more sign of understanding their obligation to the electorate than their friends in the corporate elites and the newsmedia. The government's obligation is to get the clear consent of the affected taxpayers at every stage of planning massive new developments and if it intends to engineer changes in population growth. Government should not go ahead without clearly informed consent. It is not enough to 'consult' if this only means telling the affected population what you have already contracted to go ahead with.
Instead of accepting the will of the people, however, Australian governments, state and federal, blithely pretend, despite our overwhelming experience to the contrary, that population growth is self-evidently and unquestioningly of great benefit to us all. Not content with dragooning the taxpayer into paying for ever more vast infrastructure and population expansion debt, they also expect us to pay for the coercive spin. An example is the taxpayer funded full page advertisement of 8 December 2005, signed by then Queensland Premier Queensland Peter Beattie, also reproduced here.
This advertisement, "Four million Queenslanders tomorrow," marketed the dangerous ballooning of Queensland's population to 4 million the next day as an unquestionable and incontestably positive achievement, as if it would be welcomed by all. Four million represented the doubling of Queensland's population since 1974.
The advertisement concluded with the words:
To all Queenslanders, I encourage you to warmly welcome our new arrivals.
Who, you ask, other than a life-hating, stick-in-the-mud, could possibly not have been moved by these cheerful words from Queensland's obviously life-loving, well-intentioned leader?
The role of the news-media in packaging and delivering Australian population policy
The implicit unstated lie contained in that advertisement was that the Queensland Government has carefully thought through how they would prepare Queensland to cope with the influx they encouraged. In subsequent years, Queenslanders were to learn to their enormous cost that it had not.
Now, in 2009, many of those same Queenslanders who, heeding their Premier's advice, may have extended welcoming arms to new arrivals from interstate and overseas, find themselves homeless, living in precarity, or on a grind of wage-slavery and debt, even if they are professionals, to pay rising rents and purchase costs. Ruthless landlords have taken advantage of the outrageously increased demand for shelter to regularly jack up the rent and the rhetoric of finance and real-estate media jocks - replacing real opinion - shamelessly inflates the already ballooning cost of housing.
Yes, Australia's newsmedia overwhelms us with propaganda dressed up as news in support of high immigration and population growth. The leading population growth pusher is Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group.
Every Murdoch newspaper doesn't peddle population growth in exactly the same way though.
Whilst the national daily newspaper, the Australian openly proclaims that population growth is inherently good for Australia, its Brisbane counterpart the Courier Mail treats the issue more ambiguously.
Perhaps this is partly because Courier Mail readers tend more to be working class than the Australian's readers, and therefore less likely to celebrate notional investments in the unaffordability of the national private estate. The Courier Mail is also a state paper, concerned with state legislative responsibilities, and these include land-use planning. It therefore is more obligated to report news of the consequences of population growth, which most obviously affect land-use and costs. A few years ago the Courier Mail did stridently beat the drum for population growth. Pretending there was a labour-shortage crisis, it called for more people to move here to work in the mines, orchards and hospitality industry, so that the state could grow faster and faster.#main-fn4">4
The Courier-Mail's implied pretence that Queenslanders cannot question population growth, let alone stop it
The Courier Mail has since changed tack to simply reporting population growth as if it is inevitable.
So, these days, rather than overtly proclaiming massive population growth is inherently good, along with much of the Australian media, the Courier Mail implies that massive and inconvenient population growth is inevitable.
Again and again the Courier Mail's reports include statements that population will grow, exactly as if it were stating that we will all pay taxes and will all grow old and die. In doing so, it dishonestly implies to its readers that population growth is not a result of a decision consciously made by the Australian Federal Government through its high immigration program, with the full encouragement of the Queensland and other state governments, along with Rupert Murdoch himself, to whose tune Governments in Australia seem to have been dancing for years. The Courier Mail avoids pointing out the simple fact that in a democracy, people have every right to expect the Government to change course, should they decide that population growth is not in their best interests.
In "Workers welcome", (15 May 2008), the Australian enthusiastically endorsed Immigration Minister Chris Evan's announced increase in immigration.
"The Government's decision to increase the skilled migration program by 31,000 places a year from 2008-09 is a move to help ease the critical labour shortage in many parts of Australia. Together with a big influx of temporary workers under the 457 visa program, the increased migrant intake should also help to lessen the threat of a wages breakout and inflationary spiral."#main-fn5">5
A brief pretence at concern for the adverse consequences for housing affordability was made:
More migrants will inevitably cause pressures in other areas of the economy, including the tight housing sector where a shortage of stock is leading to rapidly rising rents.
But that minor concern was immediately swept aside in the next sentence.
But the economic case for more skilled migrants is clear. ...
So the trusting reader is led to believe that the editorial writer has weighed up the pros and cons and worked out that on balance we will be better off. However, as we have seen above, the "pressures in the ... tight housing sector" have since almost literally enslaved significant sections of Australian society. On top of that, the economic analysis that purported to show the benefits of immigration clearly failed to predict subsequent hikes in all kinds of Government charges to pay for the cost of immigration, in addition to the decline in our queality of life all as mentioned above.
Minister Evans's also announced plans to import workers from Pacific islands.
"Next month cabinet is expected to endorse a pilot program based on the New Zealand model for guest workers from Pacific nations. The Prime Minister wants this for foreign policy and economic reasons.
Evans says: 'The debate about temporary migration, quite frankly, is over.' His threshold point is that the immigration debate is no longer just about skills, though skills are vital, but has become a debate about labour. There is an unspoken agenda: aware that the abolition of Work Choices risks higher wage pressures, Rudd and Swan are using higher migration as a device to boost labour supply and limit wage inflation." #main-fn6">6
The Australian reported a furor of protest against the Pacific Worker plans, but little against the sheer numbers and the uncontrollability of the impacts, on wages and housing costs.
(One can see another angle here. If a paper only reports protests against immigration if they relate to ethnicity or 'race' then this will serve the spin that Australians are racist in their attitudes to immigration but not concerned about any other impacts. This impression should serve to put people off protesting against high immigration from anywhere, for fear of being labelled racist.)
At the time I also posted an e-mail #UnpublishedLetter" id="UnpublishedLetter">included as an Appendix to the Queensland Courier Mail in response to its reporting of that issue. The letter was not published and it breathed no word of any of this furor about immigration policy, presumably subscribing to the illusion that State governments have no responsibility or power in ramping up or stabilising population numbers, which, if you have read this article, or others, such as this one about the Victorian Government, "Melbourne 2008: Life in a destruction zone", you will now realise is not true.
In October 2009 as the Australian stridently once again beats the drum for boosting our population all the way up to at least 35 million, the Courier Mail, this time, has given the issue some coverage, instead of imposing the almost complete blackout that it did in May last year. However the coverage is still relatively low key. One article by Dr. Paul Williams#main-fn7">7 on Monday 19 Oct 09 was critical of population growth, but by Saturday it had all been forgotten. Oblivious to that and oblivious to reports of chaos, rocketing costs and declining living standards, reported in its pages virtually every day of the week Saturday's Courier Mail editorialised:
While Commonwealth Treasury secretary Ken Henry's pessimism at the thought of a 60 per cent increase in population in less than 40 years (and more than 100 per cent for southeast Queensland) is understandable, we should not shy away from the challenges and opportunities this brings.
If authorities at all levels of government can work together, planning for the required increases in services, infrastructure and facilities, there's no reason the community should not be able to cope with the inevitable demands. ...#main-fn8">8
'No reason', except for the woeful failure of the Queensland Government to cope with the 'inevitable demands' brought about by the recent population growth it has already imposed on Queenslanders. As Greater Sunshine Coast Council Mayor Bob Abbott commented last week, "You can't go on doing the same thing and expect a different result."#main-fn9">9
We can only conclude that somehow the 'same result' is fine by the Murdoch Press, Bligh, Rudd and the ALP investments in property and finance, such as Labor Resources P/L and Labor Holdings P/L), not to mention the government's and the Labor Party's corporate friends.
The editorial continued:
... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is right to say this is good news for the country. Let's work together and make it happen.
Perhaps, instead, it is time we all "work[ed] together" and and let Rudd, Bligh and the Murdoch Press know that they are not acting on our behalf and that they continue to act with such high-handed disregard for our welfare at their own peril.
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1.#main-fn1-txt">↑ See Appendix 3 of "Privatisation - let the owners decide : an open letter to Anna Bligh" of 3 Jun 09.
#main-fn9" id="main-fn9">9.#main-fn9-txt">↑ I couldn't find the story on line, but I read these words from Bob Abbott in a story in the Courier Mail of aroun Thursday or Frday last week. I will endeavour to add taht detail to this story.
#UnpublishedLetter" id="UnpublishedLetter">Appendix: Unpublished letter sent to Courier Mail regarding Pacific guest workers
Emailed: 16 May 08.
If the Pacific Island guest worker scheme works, as Steve Lewis ("Guest workers a foreign policy challenge", 16 May) claims it will, it will, in effect, be an apartheid labour scheme. If it breaks down as many fear, it will result in a further permanent increase to our population and make worse all the resultant problems which fill the pages of the Courier Mail almost every day of the week - traffic congestion, housing unaffordability, the water, health and eduction crisis and the ever growing financial costs of fixing them.
If we accept claims about there being a labour shortage, then why don't, we instead of further degrading our quality of life, change our priorities as a society. For example, must we dig up all of our mineral wealth now, when it is clearly making global warming worse? Indeed reducing our mineral exports and generous foreign aid programs, including aid for birth control, would be far better ways to help Pacific islanders.
The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program.
The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book "The March of Patriots," which chronicles the Prime Ministership of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio station's "Conversations" program.
"Conversations" is hosted by former Doug Anthony All Star Richard Fidler, who is now a Radio Presenter in Brisbane.
Tired old platitudes
The tired old platitudes that Kelly and other pro-corporate journalists have long used to sell these two discredited leaders to the Australian public -- "what you see is what you get", "a Prime Minister of conviction", etc. -- were lapped up uncritically by Richard Fidler in an astonishingly dull interview lasting almost an hour. Fidler challenged none of the 'free market' premises that Paul Kelly has used to justify the economic, social and ecological carnage wreaked on this country by Keating and Howard.
The central, supposedly controversial, thesis of Paul Kelly's book, is that today's wonderful, modern, prosperous 'free market' economy was created from a tired, outmoded, overly-regulated, protected, public-sector-dominated economy, through a common 'struggle' by these two leaders at different times.
Until now, many of us had naively assumed that both these men had been working to counter eachother's political agendas.
In reality the supposed 'struggle' amounted to these two men imposing a neo-liberal free market agenda on the Australian public with full cooperation and support from Paul Kelly and others in the Murdoch Press.
Shock doctrine techniques
The techniques used by the ex-prime ministers resemble those Naomi Klein describes in her towering work of political analysis, The Shock Doctrine of 2007. The Shock Doctrine documents cases where the neo-liberal project was imposed through trickery and deceit in apparently democratic states, rather than through outright military dictatorship. Although The Shock Doctrine does not contain any chapter on Australia, readers are still likely to gain a vastly better understanding of what happened to Australia under Keating and Howard than they will from reading The March of Patriots.
Paradoxically, the initial stages of the economic neo-liberal project began during the Whitlam years. In spite of Whitlam's many other economic nationalist policies, some manufacturing tariff barriers were reduced. The Fraser Coalition Government which followed in the late seventies and early eighties allowed greater rights to foreign concerns to buy Australian mineral wealth and companies. These policies were given a boost with Keating's sudden embrace of financial deregulation and his floating of the Australian dollar when he was Federal Treasurer, shortly after Labor won office in 1983. During the 1985 election the then opposition leader, John Howard, announced a hit list of twelve publicly-owned enterprises that would be sold off by a Coalition government if it won.
Howard lost that election, but by the time he won government in 1996, of the twelve on Howard's hit list, only Telstra remained in public hands. The other eleven, including the Commonwealth Bank, QANTAS and the national satellite company Aussat, were all disposed of in a Labor Government frenzy of privatisation.
Similar agendas - Howard and Keating
The other key plank of economic neo-liberalism implemented by Keating was the privatisation of retirement income, otherwise known as 'superannuation reform'. This was first undertaken by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Not even the corrupt, cravenly pro-corporate Bush regime dared try to put that one over the American public, but the Keating 'Labor' Government did so to Australians in the late 1980's and we are all reaping the terrible whirlwind this decade with the global financial meltdown.
Howard's policies since 1996, with the possible exceptions of his attempt to break the Maritime Union in 1998, and his imposition of his so-called "Work Choices" legislation in 2005, were merely continuations of Labor's policies.
Hardly 'news'
None of this would have been new to critical observers of these two leaders, so Kelly's 'revelation' that Howard and Keating had worked in office to achieve virtually the same economic and social goals is hardly news.
Even though a good many of both leaders' policies were deeply controversial and strongly opposed by many Australians - often a majority in the case of the privatisations of Government assets - Richard Fidler failed to put any of this to Kelly. Other awkward topics not raised in the inteview included:
The numerous lies peddled by both Howard and Paul Kelly's Australian newspaper to win public acceptance for the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and
The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) scandal in which AU$296million in bribes were paid to the very Saddam Hussein Government that John Howard would tell us in March 2003 posed such a mortal threat to world peace that we were left with no choice but to invade immediately.
Boat people
One incredible assertion from Paul Kelly that Fidler accepted uncritically was that Howard's motive for taking a strong stance against boat people in the Tampa and "Children Overboard" affairs of 2001 was not electoral advantage, but rather his strong desire to maintain the integrity of Australia's borders. In fact Howard later loosened entry requirements and ramped up immigration to record high levels as the Sydney Morning Herald's economics editor reported in the story "Back-scratching at a national level" of 13 Jul 07.
The program, far from being a probing interview that Australian taxpayers should rightly expect from their ABC struck me as little more than free advertising for Paul Kelly and the Murdoch media.
Sugaring dubious medicine
Another consequence of the publication of Kelly's new book and the attendant marketing, in which the ABC is now participating, could be a normalisation in retrospect of the Keating and Howard Governments' unpleasant and undemocratic policies. Such a representation of political history could then be used to deter citizens from questioning new asset-stripping, austerity and wealth transfer programs, whether under the current Rudd Labor Government or under a new Coalition one.
The following e-mail was sent at 11.30PM, which would have been approximately 25 minutes into an interview lasting roughly 55 minutes.
Date: Monday 21 Sep 2009, 11:30:21 am From: James Sinnamon To: Richard Fidler
Paul Kelly's 'revelation' that both Keating and Howard both helped to bring Australia to what it is today is hardly news.
The interview has, so far, proven to be even more dull than #comment-235107">"Keating the Musical".
Have you read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Docrtine"?
Even though it doesn't have a chapter on Australia, it gives a much more accurate picture of what happened to this country than what Paul Kelly is giving.
A lot of us dispute that deregulation, privatisation, removal of trade union rights, etc, has been beneficial.
The GDP measures that economists use to prove that this has all been beneficial are flawed and capable of presenting massive declines in quality of life as increases. As an example, just ask yourself why at least two incomes are now necessary to buy even a modest dwelling when one was easily sufficient barely more than a generation ago.
Could you please consider questioning the economic neo-liberal premises of Kelly's glowing tribute to these two abysmal political misleaders?
sincerely,
James Sinnamon
This e-mail had no noticable impact on the remaining part of the interview. No reply has been received so far. If one is received it will be posted below.
Greenpeace is running a site takeover of the home pages of The Australian and Courier Mail websites today, featuring a protester walking out of the ad and spray painting a slogan on top of news stories.
The ad, masterminded by DraftFCB, as part of the group’s anti-coal lobbying, will run for one day only on the News Ltd sites.
Peter Novosel, interactive creative director at DraftFCB, said “The idea needed to be disruptive to capture the attention and imagination of millions of eyeballs all in the space of one day. We’re ecstatic about the work and the response.”
Chris Washington-Sare, head of fundraising for Greenpeace said: “This is the first time Greenpeace Australia Pacific has launched an integrated campaign of this nature.”
We'll keep saying it until we're blue in the face: Stop givingNews Ltd. your supporters' money.
News Limited is a company that has done inestimable wilful damage to democracy, journalism and the environment in Australia in Australia and throughout the world.
If you absolutely insisted that you need to run your advertisement with News Ltd., they should pay you for lending them credibility they do not deserve.
Would it kill you to focus on any other medium (such as billboards, local television, independent publications - even APN or Fairfax press - at least they are Australian owned)?
Contents: #Why">Why the sudden need for an early election in Queensland?, #Misreporting">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling issue, #Disagrees">Even the Australian sides with the 'uninformed agitators' against the Courier Mail, #NoAberration">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling no aberration, #Putsch">Courier Mail seeks electoral putsch in Queensland, #NSW">The Australian's attempt to manipulate the NSW Parliament, #What">What can be done?.
#Why" id="Why">Why the sudden need for an early election in Queensland?
The Courier Mail's editorial "Time to put an end to early poll speculation" of 29 December 2008 stepped up its campaign to pressure Queensland#main-fn1">1 Premier Anna Bligh into calling an early election date in either February or March against earlier commitments to serve her full term. She made this promise on 20 March this year#main-fn2">2. The editorial essentially re-states what was written by assistant editor Craig Johnstone on 4 December in the "Viewpoint" article "Early election".
So, what's changed since 20 March? Why the sudden urgent need for both the Courier Mail and Premier Anna Bligh to suddenly reverse their previous stances against early elections?
As the editorial argued "... the Government's behaviour, particularly in the latter half of the year, showed that its political horizon was growing closer and closer."
Anyone expecting that the Courier Mail was objecting to Anna Bligh's goals, announced earlier this year, to triple the already massive level of Queensland's coal exports by 2030 or that it would demand that she take effective measures to protect Queensland's natural environment, were to be soon disappointed. The editorial continued:
"Moves such as the ban slapped on shale oil mining in the Whitsundays and the scrapping of North Bank were early signs that the Government was finessing its policy stances to put itself into the best position to attract Greens preferences."
If, indeed, that was Premier Bligh's motivation, then one would have at least expected the Courier Mail to concede that that was a good thing in regard to the North Bank project, a self-evidently mad plan by Anna Bligh to extend an ugly concrete pontoon half-way across the busy and scenic Brisbane River to allow massive high-rise apartment blocks above the northern half of the Brisbane River adjacent to the Central Business District,. After many months of public outcry and a total lack of public support from any credible architect or town planning professional, the plans were scrapped late in 2008.
#Misreporting" id="Misreporting">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling issue
Whilst the editorial writer seemed prepared to grudgingly tolerate those decisions, more recent policy reversals by Bligh went beyond the pale:
"But the decision to indefinitely hold off adding purified recycled water into southeast Queensland's drinking supplies, thereby ensuring the $2.5 billion Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme would not be used for the purpose for which it was built, gave the game away as far as the Government's thinking was concerned.
"That Ms Bligh would back down to a few uninformed agitators on the fringe of political debate in Queensland showed that the Government was more concerned about the next opinion poll than the next policy challenge."
Craig Johnstone's article also complained of Anna Bligh's "sudden conversion to the environmental well-being of the Mary River Valley". Most probably that example was omitted from the editorial because it would have been judged too difficult to also portray the entire Mary Valley community and other opponents of the Queensland Government's planned environmentally reckless Traveston dam as "uninformed agitators".
In fact, the 'uninformed agitators' opposed to water recycling won the overwhelming support of the Toowoomba Community at a referendum held in September 2006. Initially Toowoomba Mayor Di Thorley attempted to impose water recycling without any community consultation, but agreed to the referendum when put on the spot at a public meeting. After that referendum was defeated, the then Premier Peter Beattie promised to hold a poll throughout all of South East Queensland, in early 2007. He intended that the outcome of this poll be used to over-rule the expressed wishes of the Toowoomba community, but subsequently abandoned the promised poll claiming that the then severe water crisis had tied the Government's hands.
Snow Manners, one of the Courier Mail's 'uninformed agitators', at a public meeting attended by 250 people on Saturday 15 November, put the case against recycling and described the campaign he helped to lead against water recycling in 2006.
Contrary to what Peter Beattie claimed at the time, no other community in the world uses recycled water in the way that it was proposed to be used in Toowoomba. In Singapore, recycled water must be fed into houses through separate pipes and in Britain only the shire of Essex has recycled water, and that is intended to be used only in times of drought#main-fn3">3. A document released under Freedom of Information laws revealed that when talking amongst themselves, water recycling proponents referred to Toowoomba as a "living laboratory" contrary to Beattie's assertions.
Mr. Manners also pointed out that water recycling was ready to be introduced by 1996, but the proponents of recycling delayed the introduction, judging that they could only succeed in overcoming community objections during a perceived severe water crisis.
Other 'uninformed agitators', although not specifically targeted on this occasion, included anti-water-fluoridation campaigners Merilyn Haines, Dr. Doug Everingham, former Health Minister in the Whitlam Government and Dr. Andrew Harms, past President of the South Australian Branch of the Australian Dental Association. Both Doug Everingham and Andrew Harms were previously active proponents for fluoridation.
Merilyn Haine's sister suffered inexplicably from dermatitis when she moved to Townsville, a North Queensland city which has fluoridated water and inexplicably recovered whenever she left Townsville for any length of time. Merilyn Haines, who describes herself as normally pro-Labor, will be standing against Premier Anna Bligh as an independent campaigner as a result of Bligh's decision to impose fluoridated water on Queensland.
#Disagrees" id="Disagrees">Even the Australian sides with the 'uninformed agitators' against the Courier Mail
Many of the Courier Mail's readers may be surprised to learn that the national daily newspaper the Australian also owned by Rupert Murdoch, in fact sided with the 'uninformed agitators', if equivocally. The editorial "Far from Armageddon" cited warnings from two senior Australian National University academics that the Australian had reported in previous days (see below) about the dangers that recycled water posed to public health that the Bligh Government had not taken account of. This, together with the fact that the dams of South East Queensland had filled again meant that there was no longer an urgent need for recycling. Whilst the editorial saw a role for recycled water in industry and did not rule out the drinking of recycled water in future, the editorial concluded "The Bligh Government would be wise to hasten slowly."
This otherwise reasoned and balanced editorial was marred by its support for the environmentally reckless Traveston Dam. Nevertheless, it would appear that even the Australian disagrees, on this occasion, with the Courier Mail's view that Queenslanders have been poorly served by a Government which has too much regard for the views of Queenslanders.
Some of the reporting upon which the Australian's editorial was based was:
"(Australian National University emeritus) Professor Troy said the safety of recycled water had not been proved in any long-term epidemiological studies.
"It will not be possible to remove all biologically active waste molecules from the system," Professor Troy said.
"The probability is that something like 8 per cent of these impurities will get through, and that is assuming the system is working properly."
"Professor Troy said residents with allergies would be particularly at risk of infection. 'What's happening here is that the authorities are playing Russian roulette with the health of the population,' he said.
"It is a scandal that former premier Peter Beattie promised the people of southeast Queensland a say in a plebiscite and then backed away from that promise.
...
"Professor Troy said the 'hugely expensive' recycled water project was unnecessary and a waste of public money.
" 'This is all being driven by a technological obsession that big engineering projects offer the only solutions to water shortages,' he said." (the Australian, 29 Oct 08)
"ONE of Australia's leading infectious disease experts has claimed technology does not exist to prevent recycled sewage from contaminating the water supply of 2.6 million residents in southeast Queensland.
...
"Professor Collignon said viruses that could contaminate the water supply ranged from bugs that caused gastroenteritis to potentially fatal infections leading to encephalitis and heart disease.
"Test results for hazardous bacteria such as E.coli would not be available to authorities for at least a day, he said. "By the time the results come back, the water is already in the reservoir." (the Australian - 30 Oct 08)
"THE bureaucrat charged with safeguarding the health of Queenslanders was not called on to approve the adding of recycled sewage to the drinking water of the state's southeast.
"The Bligh Government left Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young out of the approval loop on the Western Corridor Recycled Water Project.
"Instead, the scheme was given a health clearance by the Office of the Water Supply Regulator, an arm of the state Department of Natural Resources and Water.
"The revelation came as Dr Young's department admitted it did not know how much hospital waste would be recycled.
"Queensland Health said yesterday it was now helping to conduct research to find out how much hospital waste would be in the 60 megalitres of treated sewage a day pumped into Brisbane's main storage, the Wivenhoe Dam, from February. ..." (the Australian, 4 Nov 08)
None of this reporting reached the pages of the Courier Mail#main-fn4">4, even though the issue would have been even more relevant to its readers than to the readership of the Australian. Only on 20 November, when the Queensland Government had decided to defer recycling did it make it to the pages of the Courier Mail in the story "Recycled water plan may be postponed, says John Bradley" by Patrick Lion. Interestingly only two out of the seven readers' comments to that article were in support of recycling. Four opposed it outright, whilst one other said that the question should be put to a referendum.
#NoAberration" id="NoAberration">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling no aberration
The Courier Mail's treatment of objections to water recycling is far from an aberration. On virtually every major
controversy in recent years in which powerful vested interests stood to gain in the face of strong community objections regarding costs to ordinary citizens, the environment or democracy, the Courier Mail has come down on the side of the former:
The Suncorp Stadium, which has scarred the skyline of the inner north of Brisbane and forced locals to endure parking restrictions and be periodically overwhelmed by crowds attending large sporting and entertainment events, was built at the cost of tens of millions of dollars at a time when former Premier Peter Beattie complained that he didn't have sufficient funds to act against tree clearing in outback Queensland.
The planned cruise ship terminal on Southport's Spit, fortunately defeated by a concerted community campaign
Road, tunnel and bridge building projects which are criss-crossing Brisbane. These are necessitating the requisition of hundreds of dwellings and destruction of open spaces. They include: the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, the Northern Link, the Airport Link and various other major roads;
Former Premier Peter Beattie's forced local amalgamations enacted at the behest of the Property Council of Australia against overwhelming opposition from those whose councils were to be forcibly amalgamated;
The privatisation of Telstra opposed by 70% of the Australian public when the Senate past the legislation in September 2005;
The Howard Government's "Work Choices" which stripped workers of many of their entitlements and protection from unfair dismissal. This was never put to the electorate in the 2004 election and was roundly rejected in the 2007 election.
#Putsch" id="Putsch">The Courier Mail seeks electoral putsch in Queensland
The Courier Mail editorial continued:
"After more than a decade of Labor in power, this is not where the Bligh Government should be. Certainly, it is an uncomfortable place from which to forge hard policy decisions. At the start of a year likely to contain some of the toughest economic challenges that governments have had to deal with for decades, Queenslanders need the state in sure, confident hands. During her time as treasurer and infrastructure minister, Ms Bligh cultivated a reputation for putting policy ahead of short-term politics.
...
"But the overall impression is of a tired, timid government feeling its way, not a good look when the state needs firm leadership to steer it through uncertain economic times.
"All of this suggests Queensland will be well served if, when Ms Bligh returns from leave next month, she calls an election for either February or March. With a grim outlook on jobs and investment staring it in the face, the state does not need a government flitting from one decision to the next as it constantly calculates its electoral chances."
However, judging from the well-founded backdown of the "tired, timid (state) government" on the issue of water recycling (if not water fluoridation), Queensland appears to have been far better served by that government, for all of its serious flaws, than it is likely to be if it ends up in what the Courier Mail considers "sure, confident hands."
#NSW" id="NSW">The Australian's attempt to manipulate the NSW Parliament
To add weight to its case for an earlier election Craig Johnstone's earlier article the editorial cited the example of the Rees Labor Government in NSW:
"The idea that governments should always run their full term has been blown out of the water by the performance of the Rees Government in New South Wales."
This opinion appears to derived from the Australian newspaper, which extensively covered and, indeed, stridently attempted to influence the political developments in NSW under Premier Nathan Rees and his predecessor Morris Iemma.
Unlike its reporting of the issue of water recycling, the Australian's coverage of NSW politics was most unbalanced.
In August 2008 NSW Parliament was recalled at a cost of $500,000 because Treasurer Michael Costa and Premier Morris Iemma saw an opportunity to rush through their privatisation legislation, a cause the Australian newspaper had stridently championed since November 2007. However, when the Liberal/National Opposition announced its intention to join with the Greens, Independents and a minority of the Labor caucus in voting against the legislation, Michael Costa failed to put the bill.
Whilst this was not what was expected of the Liberal and National Parties who on most occasions in recent years have supported privatisation, it was in accord with the principles of democracy and accountability. As many as 86% of the NSW public opposed privatisation at the time. Iemma and Costa had undertaken not to privatise before the 2007 elections, privatisation had been roundly rejected by the NSW electors when the Liberal Party had campaigned on the policy in 1999 and the NSW Labor Party Conference in May 2007 voted 702 to 104 against privatisation. In short, the NSW Government had no mandate, by any stretch of the imagination, to privatise.
For the crime of voting in accord with the will of the people of NSW, the state Opposition were damned by the Australian on that day and at every possible opportunity since.
As a consequence of their failed privatisation bid, Iemma and Costa were, unsurprisingly, deposed from their respective ministerial posts by the NSW state Labor Caucus. For the Australian, the failure of the NSW Labor Parliamentary caucus to stand by leaders, which in the Australian's view had exhibited such strength of character for having defied the will of the people of NSW, the Labor Party and the trade union movement, was also unforgivable. This was bizarrely held by the Australian as reason why the NSW Labor Government did not deserve to serve a full term. In the Australian's view only a Government that is truly prepared to ride roughshod overall public opposition is worthy of retaining power.
#Prognosis" id="Prognosis">The prognosis for Queensland if the Courier Mail gets its way
The treatment of the NSW public by the Australian as well as the past treatment of the Queensland public by the Courier Mail should warn Queenslanders about what to expect if Anna Bligh accedes to its demands to call an early election.
With the election out of the way and the expected deepening of the financial and economic crisis, we can expect the Courier Mail to similarly demand of whatever Government is in office, whether Labor or Coalition, the implementation of its pro-corporate agenda: the resumption of plans to introduce water recycling as well as the construction of the Traveston and other dams, the slashing of state government services and the further raising charges, freezes on public sector recruitment or even outright retrenchments. Above all, we can expect the Courier Mail to push for further privatisation.
In recent years, the Queensland Labor Government has privatised the retail arms of its publicly owned gas and electricity suppliers, the Golden Casket lottery, the Dalrymple Bay coal loader, the State Government Insurance Office (SGIO - now known as SunCorp Brisbane Airport, the Mackay Airport). The Government never obtained any popular mandate for any of these privatisations. The full privatisation of the already partially privatised SGIO was directly against a 1998 election commitment of former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie. On top of that the practice of building ever greater numbers of bridges, roads and tunnels through Public Private Partnerships is effectively no different to privatisation.
Queensland Rail, which has already been split up and corporatised and water infrastructure are two of the most obvious candidates for privatisation.
What the Courier Mail is calling for is effectively an electoral putsch. An early election would make it harder for supporters of minor parties such as the Greens and community grass roots independents to raise their concerns before the wider Queensland. This will make it harder for them to win seats of even to gain significant electoral support. For its part, judging by its coverage of previous elections the Courier Mail will not be making any effort to put such policies before the public.
Of course, this won't prevent the Courier Mail from subsequently claiming that the Government had a mandate to enact these policies, just as it absurdly did in regard to the forced Council amalgamations of 2007 as one example. With the next elections three years away, it would take an extremely determined mass movement to stop these policies from becoming reality.
Expose Courier Mail's blatant manipulation of democratic processes
The first thing to be done is to show up the Courier Mail's push for an early election for what it is -- a blatant attempt to manipulate Queensland's democratic processes to serve what appears to be its own narrow sectional corporate agenda at our expense. We must demand of our elected leaders to not hold early elections at the whim of the Courier Mail, nor for that matter, for their own electoral advantage.
The first thing to be done is to show up the Courier Mail's push for an early election for what it is -- a blatant attempt to manipulate Queensland's democratic processes to serve what appear to be its own narrow sectional corporate agenda at our expense. We must demand of our elected leaders to not hold early elections at the whim of the Courier Mail, nor for that matter, for their own electoral advantage.
One way or another the ability of newspapers such as the Courier Mail, beholden to a single overseas proprietor to manipulate our political processes must be ended.
Laws which strictly limit the number of media outlets that any one individual or corporation can control must be reintroduced and those with excessive ownership of Australian newsmedia such as Rupert Murdoch must be made to divest much of their ownership.
Furthermore, genuine alternatives to newsmedia which only pushes corporate interests must be established. A good start would be to re-establish the ABC as a truly independant broadcaster. As such it should be required to report objectively, to effectively and fearlessly scrutinise our business and political leaders and to report all sides of the debates on matter of public importance such as water recycling, water fluoridation, population growth, immigration, housing unaffordability, the environment, etc. As it is, the ABC differs little from the Murdoch newsmedia on most of these issues.
Government sponsored independent daily newspaper alternatives to the corporate newsmedias could be established along the same lines as an independant ABC.
Community groups or anyone with a different perspective to offer should be given access to the these government-sponsored media or they should be assisted to set up their own.
If this were done, we would stand a much greater chance of being able to elect political representatives who will properly represent us.
Demand that politicians put all their major policies to the electorate
Contact all candidates in your electorate and ask them where they stand on these issues, particularly privatisation. Demand that they either put these policies to their electors during the course of the forthcoming elections or undertake not to enact those policies until they have obtained a mandate through a referendum.
Demand direct democracy
Too many policies, harmful to our interests, have been enacted in recent years, because the public opposition to those policies has not been reflected in the vote in Parliament. Ordinary citizens must have the right to both put forward legislative proposals or oppose legislation emanating from their elected representatives as referendum questions.
Oppose four year Parliamentary terms!
The Courier Mail is correct, even if for the wrong reasons, in its new-found opposition to four year state parliamentary terms. When there are no other checks and balances to prevent our elected politicians doing whatever they like regardless of what they said at election time, even three years is too long. If any proposal to extend the term of the Queensland Parliament is put, it must be voted down.
Stand for Parliament
Either seek pre-selection from a minor party which supports democratic pro-environmental anti-corporate policies or stand as an independent. If another candidate with similar policies stands make sure you recommend that those voting for you give him/her your preferences or even consider standing aside in order to help that candidate.
Support democratic pro-environmental anti-corporate candidates
Actively support any candidate who stands on a democratic pro-environmental anti-corporate platform. One such candidate, is Merilyn Haines, who, as mentioned above, will be standing against Premier Anna Bligh. You can consider distributing leaflets, handing out how-to-vote cards, writing letters to the paper, calling talk-back radio, posting comments to online forums including this site, writing articles and publishing them on the web, including here, or even establishing your own blog.
Whatever profile is gained from such a campaign can only better position the campaigner against the likely anti-democratic agenda that will follow the elections even if the candidates don't succeed in winning office.
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1.#main-fn1-txt">↑ . Queensland is a State of Australia located in the North East.
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2.#main-fn2-txt">↑ . On 20 October she made another commitment, but only not to go to the polls until 2009. The headline of the ABC story was "No early election: Bligh", whilst the headline of the Brisbane News story of 23 October was.
#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3.#main-fn3-txt">↑ To that brief list should be added Windhoek capital of the arid African nation of Namibia. The Australian article "Disease expert warns on recycled sewage" of 30 Oct 08 reported:
"(Australian National University microbiologist) Professor (Peter) Collignon rejected claims by the Queensland Government that the project was comparable with recycled water schemes overseas.
"Singapore, one of the examples often cited by Queensland, had a "very different" system, he said. Waste water was pumped through a pipeline separate from Singapore's reticulated system - unlike in southeast Queensland - and accounted for less than 1 per cent of the city state's dam capacity.
"Professor Collignon said the Namibian capital of Windhoek, located in a desert, had the only comparable system.
"'Brisbane has many times the rainfall of Windhoek,' he said. 'There's no need for Brisbane to be putting sewage into drinking water. There is nowhere else in the world where a large population is being forced to accept a situation where 10 or 25per cent of their drinking water is recycled sewage.'"
#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4.#main-fn4-txt">↑ I can't rule out the possibility that there may have been other reports, but I can't definitely recall having noticed them, even though I scan through the Courier Mail looking for such stories almost very day. A google news search with term "recycled water site:news.com.au" (omit quotes) won't show up any other articles from the period 29 Oct-4 Nov either.
Analysis of the reporting of electricity privatisation initiatives in New South Wales brings disturbing confirmation that the major Australian newsmedia does not accurately report essential facts on issues of vital concern to us. Indeed, it often acts as a conduit for propaganda against our best interest.
Throughout NSW's struggle against a push to privatise electricity, barely any of the newsmedia paid regard to the fact that the NSW Government had no mandate whatsoever to sell electricity assets. Facts acknowledged in hardly any of the reports included:
In the face of relentless propaganda in favour of privatisation, opposition to privatisation stood at between 79% and 86% according to opinion polls.
Morris Iemma had explicitly promised not to privatise prior to the March 2007 elections.
In the 1999 state elections NSW electors voted against the Liberal/National Opposition which stood for full privatisation.
On 27 August, the day before the privatisation legislation was to be put before the NSW Upper House The Australian's Imre Saluzinsky shared with his readers his high expectations of NSW state parliamentary Liberal Party and leader of the state Opposition Barry O'Farrell in his article of 27 August "O'Farrell won't do a Debnam". There were, of course, those in the Liberal party opposed to privatisation, who were described by Saluzinsky, incredibly, as, at once, both "machiavellian" and "conspiracy buffs to the bitter end" who apparently had paranoid delusions that Labor would use the proceeds of the sale to pork-barrel their way back into office in 2011. Nevertheless, he predicted that O'Farrell and the Opposition would come good:
O'Farrell can either outsmart himself with such conspiratorial thinking, or demonstrate the Coalition is ready to govern. On previous form, he'll choose the latter path.
In response to this article, one reader responded:
Where does political morality lie in your equation, Imre? Both major parties ruled out power privatisation before the last election, and merely months later it becomes a 'must do'? Through their mismanagement Iemma and Costa need the money from the power sell-off for their political survival. Handing them the keys to the vault by aiding and abetting their political fraud will only prolong an inept Labor government. That is the reality facing the entire business community in NSW.
Saluzinsky did not answer.
When Barry O'Farrell failed to follow Saluzinsky's script, two days later Saluzinsky turned on him with a vengeance. On Friday 29 August in "O'Farrell's shame worse than Iemma's", He wrote:
The collapse of the latest reform push is a condemnation of the political class in NSW.
It shows the nation's largest state - over a third of the national economy - in the grip of reform paralysis. And it leaves the credibility of both Iemma and NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell in tatters.
... O'Farrell shifted ground. He sought independent advice, which backed the sale strategy, then he ignored it, preferring to maintain a united front with the Nationals rather than securing the state's electricity supply.
The Australian's editorial "NSW Labor and Libs are unfit for power" appeared critical of both the Government and the Opposition, however the latter was the main recipient of its venom. It began:
NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell has just done the unthinkable. By scuttling Labor Premier Morris Iemma's push to privatise the NSW electricity sector, he has raised the serious question of whether the Liberal and National parties can ever be fit to run the nation's largest state. After 13 years of do-nothing and scandal-soaked government from Labor, it is truly remarkable that the Coalition can't bring itself to support the one positive item on the Iemma agenda.
Here, the editorial writer is hardly being fair to the state Labor Government. Former Premier Bob Carr tried earnestly to foist electricity privatisation on the Labor Party in 1998 only to have it rejected by the Labor Party conference. In 2006 the Iemma Government attempted to lead the Federal and Victorian governments to privatise the Snowy Hydro scheme. Iemma could hardly be held to blame if the Howard Government, faced with a public outcry and the late Federal Independent MP Peter Andren's determined opposition, decided to pull out the rug from under privatisation. Clearly, in terms of The Australian's own world view, the Carr and Iemma governments had attempted to do other 'positive' things, which The Australian should have acknowledged.
This year, Iemma went one step further than Carr was prepared to go. He ignored the Labor Party conference vote. He also ignored public opinion and his own 2007 election commitment. What else, short of declaring martial law and jailing NSW upper house members opposed to privatisation, would the The Australian have had Iemma and Costa do?
The editorial goes on to ask, "And for what?"
Anyone placing their trust in the judgement and good will of the editorial writer would have gained the impression that O'Farrell had not provided any justification for his actions. In fact, he had supplied justification in a media release that day. Upper House leaders Michael Gallacher (Liberal Party) and Duncan Gay (National Party) both also provided reasoned and detailed arguments against the privatisation legislation in the Parliamentary debate before it was abruptly closed by an embarrassed Government.
Whilst the editorial was prepared to trust a Government it had itself labelled as 'inept', O'Farrell was not. In his media release, he wrote:
Furthermore, the Iemma Labor Government has an appalling record of dealing with the private sector ? it has failed the public in deals ranging from the Cross City Tunnel to the building of the new Bathurst Hospital.
Given their record of incompetence, Morris Iemma and Labor can?t be trusted to deliver a good result for taxpayers and consumers.
To many, these would seem reasonable concerns. In addition O'Farrell pointed out that there was uncertainty about the implications of the Federal Government's carbon trading scheme and that privatisation had not been put by Iemma to the NSW electors in 2007.
The editorial then moved on to stronger ground:
It is not even clear that Mr O'Farrell's obstruction passes the cynic's test.
Indeed, it had not. That test was being passed with flying colours by the editorial writer himself. The majority of the state Labor Party Parliamentary caucus, which had resolved to ram through the privatisation legislation in defiance of popular opinion, and the state Labor Party conference, has also performed exceedingly well in this regard.
In one small sense, the Opposition's stance may have been due to its instincts for self-preservation, if only because of the Murdoch press's own record of unprincipled opportunism. Had privatisation proceeded, it is hard to imagine that The Australian would not have quietly forgotten the Iemma Government's legendary incompetence and, instead, have begun to sing its praises once more.
The editorial writer then assailed the reader with facts and statistics that would have left him/her in no doubt that O'Farrell, or anyone else who may have wanted to hesitate for longer than five minutes before allowing privatisation to proceed, was stark raving mad.
[Because O'Farrell] "continues to ignore economics 101 ... the Australian would be unable to recommend a vote for a change of government in NSW."
This begs a number of obvious questions: If sound economic practice really required electricity privatisation, why couldn't the policy simply have been put to the electorate in March 2007? Why had it proven so hard to make the public, the trade unions and the NSW state Labor Party see this? Why had the public rejected privatisation in 1999 and remained adamantly opposed to it all along? Clearly neither The Australian nor Iemma deserved the public they had been stuck with.
Murdoch's Daily Telegrapheditorialised on 31 August :
Mr O'Farrell ... also has a huge question mark hanging over his head after his performance last week.
...
Mr O'Farrell could not resist the lure of a cheap political victory to wound his opponent when NSW was crying out for some far-sighted leadership.
Presumably by 'NSW', the editorialist meant the small shrill chorus of bankers and investors.
In Murdoch's Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper, one article, which seems to have since disappeared from the web, even referred to Barry O'Farrell as "O'Fool".
Against this torrent of condemnation O'Farrell was able to write an opinion piece on 1 September in defence of himself in the (Fairfax press) Sydney Morning Herald.
Astonishingly, even the debate in Parliament which had been recalled at a cost of $500,000 to the NSW taxpayer was ignored by electricity privatisation reporting. Facts revealed in the debate, but unreported in the media, included:
Prior to the March 2007 elections "the Iemma Government issued emphatic denials that any such sale would take place". On 20 February 2007 Michael Costa stated "There are no plans to sell our retail electricity businesses". (Upper House Opposition leader Gallacher's speech)
On 9 May 2007 Premier Morris Iemma, when referring to the Owen Review, ruled out any "sale of electricity generation, transmission or distribution."(Gallacher)
In a Sydney Morning Herald article dated 25 May 2007 Iemma was reported as stating in a letter to Unions NSW that "The privatisation of the State Government-owned energy companies is not on our agenda".(Gallacher)
On 23 November 2006 Michael Costa stated "There is no energy crisis in New South Wales - In fact, New South Wales has surplus energy."(Gallacher)
Treasurer Michael Costa, as Secretary of the NSW Labor Council, had in 1998 and 1999 moved motions in opposition to former Premier Bob Carr's privatisation legislation(Gallacher)
For 13 years up until the 2007 elections Treasure Costa and his predecessor Egan had boasted that NSW had healthy budget surpluses due to their sound financial management. "Treasurer Michael Costa told New South Wales taxpayers before the last election that they had nothing to worry about." (Gay)
The Owen Inquiry report, which is the Government's principle justification for privatisation, has never been debated in the NSW Upper House. (Kaye)
In this light, why had the media not turned on Iemma and Costa, if it was truly concerned with reporting the truth?
#EarlierMisreporting" id="EarlierMisreporting">Earlier misreporting: Iemma exhorted to ignore Labor conference, public will
Monday 5 May, 2008: The Australian's editorial "Rudd has a stake in NSW power sell-off", published after the NSW state conference voted 702 to 107 against privatisation, urges the NSW Parliamentary Labor Party to ignore the conference.
"Kevin Rudd has a lot riding on NSW Premier Morris Iemma's having the courage to defy Labor's state council and push ahead with the $10 billion privatisation of the state's electricity industry. To his credit, Mr Iemma says he is standing firm. ...
If electricity privatisation can be defeated because unions representing a few thousand electricity workers don't like it, how difficult would it be to stare down union interests to overhaul health and education?
...
The electricity debate is a classic example of the labour movement attempting to bully the government into making a decision that is not for the greater good. Mr Iemma must demonstrate that he is prepared to govern for all people and ignore the demands of state conference."
The editorial writer did not seem to have a problem with fact that 79%-86% of "all people" on whose behalf Iemma and Costa were supposedly governing, happened to agree with the "unions representing a few thousand electricity workers" and state conference.
"The rare record of an exceptional political victory came after Morris Iemma emerged from a post-conference meeting yesterday with the backing of his entire caucus for his plans to privatise the NSW power industry.
The Premier was so impressed by his coup - rendered by endorsements from even his rebel MPs as they filed out of the marathon meeting - that he celebrated by updating his Facebook site with the glowing new images.
'I'm very happy,' he said after giving a rare post-caucus briefing. 'There was nothing to vote on.'
An emboldened Mr Iemma then strode into Question Time and accused Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell of being 'dumb', 'stupid', 'gutless' and having his head 'up his backside'".
Wednesday, 7 May: In a report "Iemma's caucus triumph" by Imre Saluzinsky and Andrew Faulkner, it was noted that Premier Morris Iemma's approval rating had dropped to 28%. Nevertheless the article confidently predicted:
"However, he is likely to receive a bounce in the polls from his display of strength in recent days."
In other words, the NSW public, would respect the 'strength' of a Government that had blatantly defied its will on the question of privatisation more than it would respect those who were intent on forcing Iemma to respect that will. This bizarre prediction was not realised and was quietly forgotten.
#WhatCanBeDone" id="WhatCanBeDone">What can be done about this?
The material described and quoted above represents only a small fraction of many months of misreporting. Luckily the public weren't fooled this time. Luckily, a majority of their elected representatives also chose to represent their will in Parliament and to uphold basic principles of democracy and accountability, this time.
But it so easily could have turned out differently. More often than not such mass media misinformation campaigns have achieved their goals in the recent past.
It is in similar contexts that nearly all the other state governments in Australia have managed to privatise the people's electricity assets. It was in such a manner that Keating got away with privatising the Commonwealth Bank, despite a specific election promise not to. This is how all Australia's state-owned banks and insurance companies were privatised. This is how Howard got away with privatising Telstra. In the same way, Australia was dragged into the Iraq War, in spite of the most massive popular protests since the Vietnam War. This is how "Work Choices" was implemented and continues to dominate as law. That is how a slew of expensive, inappropriate and environmentally damaging infrastructure projects have been imposed against heated community objections in almost every part of this country. This is how successive governments have been able to impose high immigration levels on an uninformed and unwilling public. This is the way that local governments have been forcibly amalgamated in Queensland, NSW and Victoria.
It is time we challenged the right of newsmedia proprietors to act so blatantly against our interests.
If the newsmedia continue to serve the public so poorly, it must, itself, become the focus of popular protests, and progressive pro-democratic political parties must pledge to legislate to prevent the newsmedia from continuing to abuse their powers in this way.
At the elections of 15 March pro-developer councils were trounced in Redland City and on the Sunshine Coast, but this popular rejection of over-development means little to the State Labor Government of Anna Bligh and the property developers she serves.
On Thursday 5 June the Bligh Government announced its intention to push aside objections from the Redland and Sunshine Coast Councils in order to fast track developments in 17 South East Queensland sites purportedly to “improve housing affordability”. Of course, the obvious measure of selling land directly to the public in order to spare them the cost of extravagant developers' margins, as suggested by at least one correspondent to the Courier Mail recently, has not been taken up.
On 9 June Anna Bligh announced further measures to clear impediments to housing development in South East Queensland. The Courier Mail article Green Space Land Grab reported:
The Bligh Government is set to take the brakes off urban sprawl by making it easier for developers to build on South East Queensland's precious open green space.
Just three years after the Beattie government put protections in place to control rampant development in the region, a review of those controls is now flagging big changes.
Among them is a proposed expansion of the so-called “urban footprint” in a move that would allow new housing and commercial developments to sprawl beyond the existing boundaries.
Against previous undertakings to allow local communities plenty of chances to have their say on future planning, it was announced that discussion of the expansion of SEQ's urban footprint into surrounding green spaces would be kept secret until the release of a draft plan in December, supposedly because this knowledge is “commercially sensitive”.
The office of Urban Management, which was set up with the stated goal of keeping rampant development in check, has been abolished. (The link to www.oum.qld.gov.au returned with the Google search term "Office of Urban Management" is now redirected to www.dip.qld.gov.au/seq.)
This accelerated development is proceeding well ahead of infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate the extra population. Earlier on 5 June it was reported in the Bayside Bulletin story Transport projects “too far away” that Redland City Council had raised concerns over the long wait for public transport and road upgrades which could be 10 to 20 years away. On 2 June the Bayside Bulletin story Call to upgrade roads reported growing traffic congestion in the Redlands area and increasingly long travel times along the major routes to Brisbane.
On 5 June, on hearing of the new state Government mandated developments in the Redlands area, a local taxi driver in a post to the Bayside Bulletin wrote:
Our state government has learnt absolutely nothing about infrastructure being in place before known growth - pushing for SE Thornlands development 11 years before an upgrade of the Cleveland-Redland Bay Road in 2019 is absolute stupidity. Redlands voters will have much to remember, none of it good, at the next state election.
Sunshine Coast Mayor Bob Abbot said it was “madness” to turn big areas of land into housing estates when proper transport links had not been established.
The expansion of the urban footprint was made in spite of assurances only two years ago that there was already enough land within the existing urban footprint to acommodate growth.
Bligh claimed that the fast tracking of the review was prompted by the new population forecasts showing that the region was likely to be home to an extra 1.5 million people within 18 years.
The ‘new population forecasts’ undoubtedly were the direct result of Federal Immigration Minister Chris Evans' announcement on 14 May of a massive increase of the annual immigration to 300,000. Both the Queensland Government and the pro-population-growth Courier Mail have been curiously silent on the increased immigration rates. As one example, for a whole week following from Friday 16 May, when a single opinion piece in favour of Pacific Island guest workers was published, there was a news blackout in the Courier Mail as its pages were full of stories about the chaos caused by existing population growth. This was in marked contrast to the reporting in The Australian (the national newspaper) which, like the Courier Mail, is owned by US citizen Rupert Murdoch. All along The Australian has stridently pushed the pro-immigration barrow.
It's as if both the Queensland Government and the Courier Mail don't want the Queensland public to draw the link between high international immigration into Australia and the resultant inter-state immigration which Bligh insists makes her trampling over the rights of Queensland communities necessary.
Labor Senator-elect Doug Cameron is the only Federal politician, so far, to have summoned up the courage to raise a critical voice against the Government's recently announced plans to raise the annual immigration level to 300,000. For this, he has earned the wrath of The Australian newspaper.
An editorial Closing the shop of 21 May 08 did not even attempt to dispute Cameron's warning that immigration will depress the wages of Australian workers, rather, it welcomed the prospect:
Mr Cameron's worries about migration most likely stem from fears that accepting unskilled workers from the Pacific islands and elsewhere will put downward pressure on wages for union members.
His comments reflect the fact that unskilled migration may be used to offset the inflationary impact of scrapping the Howard government's Work Choices legislation.
Those who have followed The Australian's pushing of the immigration barrow in recent days will know that, in the moral Universe inhabited by News Limited, the only right and proper end, towards which any responsible Labor government can work, is not towards controlling housing hyper-inflation, rising water and electricity charges, council rates and—all driven by population growth—but rather towards controlling 'wages inflation'. Because the Rudd government has been so enormously generous to unionists in having scrapped aspects of Howard's "Work Choices" legislation, they are now beholden to unquestioningly accept whatever other means the Rudd government decides to use in its place to erode their standard of living, including the raising of immigration levels.
The editorial raises the familiar spectres of xenophobia and the White Australia policy in order to place itself indisputably on the high moral ground:
… the immigration debate has already pricked the raw nerves of xenophobia and self interest that lie just below the surface of many within the labour movement. …
It is a rerun of the views that underpinned the ALP's support for the discredited White Australia policy, which grew out of a deal between labour and capital to protect Australian jobs from Chinese immigration.
Of course The Australian's editorial writers, who clamoured to have this country join the war to seize Iraq's oil assets, is, in contrast to ‘self interested’ Australian workers, fearful of their living standards being destroyed by the further crowding of this country, are acting only out of pure altruism and love for for their fellow human beings.
Mr Cameron's comments are held to be “proof that the extreme Left and extreme Right arms of politics join hands around the back.”
It is not known whether Doug Cameron, himself, would accept The Australian's labelling of him as ‘extreme Left’. In any case, this ignores the fact that most of the Australian far left are in agreement with The Australian's support for high immigration. For decades, anyone on the on the Australian far left who would have dared question immigration in the way that Doug Cameron is now doing would have found themselves very quickly ostracised. Members of the wider community opposed to population growth also encounter irrational opposition. #harrassment" id="harrassment">For instance, the Victorian branch of Sustainable Population Australia encountered a demonstration outside Prosper Australia and members were publicly defamed and threatened with violence by members of the Socialist Alliance and others in 2004 until they ceased to associate there.
It is to be hoped that Doug Cameron will stand up to the Murdoch newsmedia and resist the pressure to become corralled with all of his fellow Labor Parliamentarians into supporting Chris Evans' high immigration program.
Until I saw the date of publication, 1 April 2008, the Australian newspaper's article Population soaring across country, purportedly 'celebrating' Australia's current record high rate of population growth of 1.53per cent, up from 1.48 per cent the previous year, had me mystified.
The 1.53 per cent increase represesented an extra 316,000 in 2006-07. This comprised 10,000 extra births (273,000, up from 263,000) and 31,000 extra people gained through migration (178,000, up from 147,000), but also 1000 more deaths (135,000, up from 134,000).
The article features “Bernard Salt”, who I now realise is not real, but rather an invented and extreme caricature of a pro-population growth demographer. Salt implausibly tells of a rivalry that has developed between Sydney and Melbourne, the respective inhabitants of which want to outdo each other in efforts to have the most congested traffic, the longest average commuting times and distances, the highest per-capita tollway charges, the most crowded trains, the highest number of stranded bus passengers, the highest water charges, council rates and electricity bills and longest hospital waiting lists.
In this competition, Sydney which only grew by 51,000 people last year has fallen behind Melbourne, which grew by 62,000. However, Sydney appears to be making up a lot of ground as it grew by only 36,000 the previous year. Mr Salt said, "They love their rivalry, Sydney and Melbourne, and it'll be interesting to see next year if Sydney keeps growing and can get back in front."
However, in relative and not absolute terms, the Gold Coast and Brisbane remained the fastest-growing areas, with an extra 17,000 and an extra 16,000 people respectively. Brisbane residents can now boast at having exceeded one million and eagerly look forward to the pleasures of shared room rental accommodation when they achieve their next million.
The
nutty Mr Salt
rejoiced over what every thinking adult in this country recognises as a demographic and environmental disaster:
“It's everything coming together at the same time.
“Generation X has finally realised they can have babies; migration is very high, mainly because of the skills shortage and the need to fill jobs to keep the mining boom going; and the baby boomers aren't dying yet.”
The Australian's efforts to employ humour in order to draw the public's attention to the threat of over-population is to be applauded.
In the article "Bring in the Chinese", of 14 May in The Australian newspaper Robert Leeson proposed what would effectively be an apartheid system involving imported chinese labourers. These workers are said to be needed to build necessary additional infrastructure. This infrastructure would enable Australia to help China further pollute its environment and fuel global warming with our mineral exports.
This article is yet another addition to the almost deafening crescendo preaching the necessity of yet more immigrant labour.
Chinese companies are expected to soon be awarded contracts to build some of the planned infrastructure, but to do this, Leeson argues, they will need to import Chinese labor as happened with the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, which was built by Chinese capital and labour.
If this is not done, he implies, an economic opportunity for Australia will be lost.
Leeson proposes a number of conditions to be met which he would have us believe answer all possible objections to the scheme:
the projects must be subject to rigorous cost-benefit analyses;
the contract winners might have to provide their own infrastructure (temporary accommodation etc);
the winning tenders would have to abide by Australian health and safety standards;
the tenders would have to include an incentive mechanism that would minimise the chances of imported workers overstaying their contract (for example, partial payment in the country of origin);
the trade union movement would have to be persuaded that these arrangements were temporary responses to full employment, rather than a permanent source of competition to their members. Former ACTU president, Simon Crean is ideally placed to "perform an ... educational role with respect to infrastructure".
What Leeson is proposing effectively amounts to an apartheid system in the same way that 'immigrant' black workers from bantustans within South Africa once provided cheap labour for South Africa's mines and factories. However, if Leeson's plan fails, then it is not hard to imagine how this could lead to an effective invasion of parts of Australia. In the event of any future conflict with China, having such large numbers of foreign citizens on our own soil, would well pose a serious threat to our national security. An alarming statistic provided by this article, is that there are currently 150 million internal migrants in China, enough to overwhelm the current Australian population many times over. (Of course, because we are mostly Europeans and not Tibetans, drawing attention to this fact practically guarantees that this country's opinion-moulders will dismiss objections to Leeson's scheme as coming from an old troglodyte "yellow peril" school of thought.)
Solutions to the claimed labour shortage problem, other than that proposed by Leeson, could include:
simply leave the raw materials in the ground, at least until such time as the necessary labour from within Australia can be found, or
if we must dig up all of our minerals now then cut back on immigration and use the labour freed up from building the necessary houses to instead build the additional infrastructure. Another area of the economy which could be wound back is tourism.
However we eventually solve Australia's supposed economic difficulties, a calm discussion, in which all possible options are rationally considered taking into account all the environmental, social, economic and geo-political factors, will first be necessary.
The editorial writers of newspapers from Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, including the Courier Mail and The Australian, are not shy in showing their contempt for public opinion whenever it runs counter to the powerful vested interests they represent. Examples from recent years include their support for:
Naturally, in 2007, with local governments such as the Douglas Shire Council and the Noosa Shire Council receptive to the wishes of their constituents to stand up to developers, the News Limited editorial writers gave their full support to the Queensland government's forced local government amalgamations inspired by the Property Council of Australia#main-fn2">2.
However, the hopes The Australian held out for in these amalgamations came unstuck when, on Saturday 15 March, anti-development candidates standing in the amalgamated shires were able to overcome the additional difficulties posed by their having to campaign in larger shires and were able to defeat candidates backed by developers. These included the Cairns City Council into which the Douglas Shire had been forcibly amalgamated and the Greater Sunshine Coast Council into which the Noosa shire had been forcibly amalgamated. In at least two other large local government regions, the Gold Coast City Council and Redland City Council, anti-development tickets won control in spite of extravagant developer-funded advertising campaigns against them.
In response, on 18 March an editorial entitled "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development"#main-fn3">3 was published. It commenced:
Queensland's local government elections demonstrate the difficulty that beset public administrators trying to manage the competing demands of population growth.
The 'difficulty' being that electors in those council areas were not prepared to put up with the further degradations to their quality of life necessitated by continuous population growth. As has become the established practice with the Murdoch Press, the question as to whether population growth is an issue over which affected communities should have any say, is not even posed, rather population growth is treated implicitly as a given over which no power in Heaven or on Earth can have any control:
... the Queensland (state government) must grapple with an influx of thousands of new residents each week and deliver, health, education and other public services.
In fact, the choice is being made, but instead of it being made by the affected communities, it is being made by politicians, like Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who serve the same vested interests as does the Murdoch media. They include principally the aforementioned Property Council of Australia, whose members gain from population growth, through land speculation and property development, at the expense of the rest of the community, the environment and future generations.
To be sure, there is a moral ambivalence to this issue as many who oppose today's population growth were part of yesterday's additions to the population to those areas and the editorial writer seeks to gain from this the high moral ground:
... much of the growth comprises city refugees making a sea change to what they consider their own piece of paradise. From Cairns to Coolangatta, it was easy to detect a determined anti-development flavour to much of the voting on the weekend's election.
A 'flavour' that the editorial writer makes clear he/she wishes to be ignored by the state and federal governments. It is interesting that The Australian is silent on what the sea changers were seeking 'refuge' from, namely the over-crowding of Australia's capital cities, which has been greatly encouraged by the Murdoch media through its past promotion of population growth.
Of the triumph of Val Schier over the long-serving pro-developer Cairns Mayor Kevin Byrne, the editorialist opined, this "will test the state Government's willingness to use independent panels to make decisions on development applications". Supposedly 'independent' panels are made up of people who, unlike popularly elected councillors, are not accountable to the residents who will be affected by their decisions. In this way it is hoped that the opposition to over-development can be swept aside.
The editorial acknowledges that the "new batch of local leaders can legitimately argue that they have a mandate to resist change." It, nevertheless, concludes:
Amalgamation has happened, but given the weekend results, the reform push is clearly unfinished business.
Can we come to any other conclusion from this editorial except that the 'reform push' is expected to be 'finished' by the use of dictatorial state government powers to over-ride the democratic wishes of Queensland communities?
The Australian newspaper, came out in its editorial of Tuesday 8 January in favour of the dam across the Mary River to be build at Traveston. This dam is fiercely opposed by the local community which faces destruction if its farms comprising some of the most fertile soil in South East Queensland were to become inundated with water. In the face of evidence of turtles and fish being mutilated by equivalent measures at the earlier failed Paradise Dam (see below), the editorial proclaimed that "the ingenuity of science and technology should ensure that the endangered Australian lungfish, the world's oldest vertebrate animal, can continue to flourish".
The editorial also cited the high rate of inter-state immigration into South East Queensland as a justification for the dam. Typically, it never posed the question as to whether the residents of the Mary Valley, or the rest of South East Queensland should have any say in the population growth which has been encouraged by both Federal and the Queensland state Government and The Australian itself.
This editorial prompted Cate Molloy, the former state member of parliament for Noosa who was expelled from the Labor Party for supporting her local community against the dam to write a letter to The Australian on 5 January to correct its misinformation. This letter is reprinted below.
Cate Molloy's Letter to The Australian
Dear Editor,
Could I have my letter published in your letters section please?
With reference to your article "New Dam Essential - Lungfish will flourish with plenty of water" your complete argument is false. The damming of the Mary River will only destroy the natural habitat of the Queensland Lungfish. These fish require a specific breeding habitat not found in dams. The dam will also destroy an agricultural food bowl, an economy of $40 million, displace whole communities with the inherent social trauma, impact negatively on the Great Sandy Straits, and the whale, dolphin, dugong and fish stocks. The dam will also see the extinction of many already endangered species despite such Government sweeteners as promises of research facilities to co-opt vocal academic critics. Moreover, the Qld government's misguided effort to protect endangered species by building fish ladders is also farcical. These are already proven failures on Paradise Dam. When such ladders operate, turtles and fish are only mutilated {evidence based observations}. When all is considered, the nature of changing rainfall patterns, the proposed dam's shallowness, the concomitant massive evaporation loss feeding Greenhouse gases, to say nothing of the environmental damage to the Great Sandy Straits, the dam will be a failure on every front. Instead of pursuing such environmental vandalism with outdated 1950's technology (Qld government's own words), Premier Bligh should instead focus on the industrial water guzzlers down in Brisbane and inform the community of the progress being made on that front since Premier Beattie announcing a Water Emergency in 2006.
Cate Molloy,
Former State Member for Noosa,
Peregian Beach, Qld
07 54483248
cate.molloy|AT|gmail.com
0408729499
We had an A grade example of the type of parallel universe Australia’s mainstream media has descended into late last week. A completely false story given prominence in the national media by The Australian, which was then picked up by various other Rupert Murdoch papers, but which sadly even made it beyond that – all without a single shred of fact, and all without anybody thinking to check, or even think about, the main line of the story being reported.
Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future. 
Susan Dirgham of AMRIS talks with Middle East and propaganda scholar, Jeremy Salt, about the history of western interventions in the Middle East and in Syria. She asks why the mainstream press don't tell westerners how Syria is secular and has good women's rights; women got the vote there in 1947. This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part One of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East
Video and transcript inside. Second in series. 
The way The Australian writes him up, Tim Flannery, who once wrote so articulately in defense of our land and its ecology and our place in it, now seems reduced to a quasi-apologist for extreme mining technologies. The Australian writes in such an unbalanced way. See also 
The Age is a constant source of propaganda for population growth in Melbourne. Jake Niall's article today is another flagrant example. Melbournians need strong minds and hearts to fight back against their runaway parliaments and reclaim their natural rights to self-government. 
Age Sports-writer Jake Niall promotes the thinnest of arguments for overpopulating Melbourne as if they had real authority, on behalf of The Age, Melbourne's newspaper for the middle classes. The Age owns a massive international property dot com and represents a moneyed power-elite that relies on overpopulating Melbourne against residents' and electors' wishes and all commonsense. Its role seems to be to suppress protest through the massive weight of continuous propaganda, whilst maintaining a thin pretence of counterbalance by publishing mildly dissenting letters to the editor from time to time.
(Illustration: For more on Colonel Blimp see "Notes" [1])
On 18 December 2009, Queenslander's were greeted with yet more bad news by Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper in the story 
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