Intervention
Ten days ago, I posted my take on Peter Costello’s “social capital” speech. I expressed cautious optimism about Costello’s words, not because I thought they signified some wholesale paradigm shift in Liberal party politics, but because they seemed to represent a first step towards a more imaginative and inclusive public policy debate.
Of course, if these ideas of Costello’s are going to make any difference, it’s important that he continues to be confronted with them. Otherwise, they could easily be cast aside, just another tattered set of noble thoughts to be trampled over when political expediency requires. It’s encouraging to find Matt whispering well-phrased reminders already.
Strapping
I’m standing backstage in the Palladium ballroom at the Crown Casino. It’s a big anniversary/reunion dinner for a posh Christian private school, and the darling graduate, a media-and-sports personality, is finishing up a fundraising auction with a few bottles of choice grog, which he succeeds in knocking down for a couple of grand apiece. We’re just about to re-emerge onto the stage to continue making background music for the Old Boys to keep reminiscing about being Young Boys (a noisy process which few in the room have found any reason to suspend during auctions or speeches). Before we step from the wings, though, the MC rushes up to the stage, slightly breathless, his excitement audible as the microphone distorts with the effort of projecting his voice over the babble. “There’s one more item for the auction … ”
It’s a strap. A bit of hard leather, about a foot long. Terrific, I think, nothing like an instrument of brutality to liven up proceedings and get everyone’s attention. “Whooee, I was on the receiving end of this a few times, I can tell you!”, spruiks the auctioneer, a trace of discomfort evident beneath his forced joviality as the bidding passes four figures. Maybe he’s media-savvy enough to realise that the celebration of corporal punishment in boys’ schools might be seen as a little tasteless. Or maybe he, like me, is wondering how many of the gathered alumni this thing has been inside.
Zappers
Via Gizmodo, check this out. It’s what the inventor calls a “Corporate Fallout Detector”. The idea is that you take it into the supermarket with you and use it to scan barcodes from products that you’re thinking of buying. The machine looks for the product on several databases (which the blurb says are online, but I presume they’re actually downloaded to the machine itself and used offline, since there’s no mention of how it might wirelessly access the internet) and ranks it according to the social and environmental performance of the company that made it. In a cute but fairly useless touch, the machine delivers its results in the form of bleeps and clicks, supposedly reminiscent of a gieger counter.
Obviously the usefulness of a gadget like this would depend on the strength or weakness of the database on which it bases its assessments. Still, I thought it was an interesting example of technology being used to enable a consumer to bypass marketing bullshit and make a buying decision based on his or her own predefined criteria. The inventor was obviously catering to particular criteria (having regard to the ethical performance of the company), but there’s no reason why the same (relatively simple) technology couldn’t be adapted to take account of all sorts of other things. For instance, you could program your dietary requirements into a machine, so that rather than having to trawl ingredients lists and nutritional information charts on each and every product you buy, you could just zap it and get that information easily. You could even get the machine to do comparisons for you, so you didn’t have to remember which can of baked beans got the best score.
Now, obviously not everyone’s going to lug this thing (which looks like something a James Bond villain would use to transport a nuclear bomb) around the supermarket. As I say, though, the technology is pretty simple, just a barcode scanner and a microprocessor and a bit of storage memory. I can’t see any reason why it couldn’t be easily built into, for instance, a mobile phone. Imagine how much more attention companies would be inclined to pay to their ethical performance if every other supermarket shopper was pointing his or her mobile at barcodes to decide between products.
Seems to me the biggest hitch with this plan is having a reliable, independently derived database to work from. If such a scheme became widespread, the owner of the database would be in a position of great power of the sort which seems to invite corruption. Maybe a statutory authority like the ABS could take it on as a side project …
UPDATE: As Suzette points out, if you go to the website I’ve linked, don’t bother downloading the demo video. It’s about as boring as they come.
Extensions
I’ve added an “About” page. I hated writing it, which is why it’s so short, but I thought one should, shouldn’t one?
Exodus
I lost a drummer last week. Not the end of the world, I thought, and had another one lined up pretty quickly. Rehearsal this week went much better. Things started to hang together, the balance was better, practice had been done. We planned a demo recording for next week, and the first gig was at the end of next month.
This morning, I lost a guitarist. The recording’s off, the gig’s off, and I’ve spent the day reassessing priorities.
Music is, by its nature, collaborative (unless you’re a dance music producer who plies his trade with a PC and a pair of monitor speakers). It doesn’t really suit me.
Don’t get me wrong, I like playing music with other people, and I’ve got lots of great friends and respected colleagues in the business. I’m good at fitting in (musically and personally) with different bands playing different music, and I almost always enjoy it. If all I ever wanted to do in music was to play the sort of gigs that I do now, there wouldn’t be a problem.
That’s all pretty tradesmanlike stuff, though. Most musos have some idea going on while they’re doing all those workaday gigs. There’s usually something firing their imagination, a creative project that goes beyond the more utiltiarian, bread-and-butter stuff. I’m no different. The thing is, though, that having an idea is not enough. You also need people around you who share your idea, or at least understand it, and (importantly) have some enthusiasm for it.
Now, most of these ideas fit a model of some kind. Within the jazz world, most are based around a particular jazz god. People dream of playing like Coltrane, or Pat Metheny, or Bill Evans, or whoever. If that’s your dream, then you’re seldom alone. The recordings are out there, and plenty of people buy them and listen to them. There are always going to be other musicians around who know every note of every bar of every rambling improvised chorus on every CD, just like you do. I think most groupings of musicians coalesce around a shared enthusiasm like this.
It’s much harder when you have a crazy idea that’s a little out of the ordinary. Harder still if you don’t have the spin-doctoring skills to sell the idea to other people. All I’ve got is some sounds in my head and a vague idea that they might work and be good fun to play and listen to. Because they’re not the same sounds that everyone is used to enjoying, I rely on my collaborators to either hear the sounds or take it on faith that I can hear them. Unfortunately, there’s no way of guaranteeing that any particular player will do either.
It takes a lot of time and energy to get a project like this off the ground. It can take a while to gain any sort of return (financial or emotional) on that investment. In the meantime, you’re reliant on a rough assembly of characters to come through and do their part in bringing the idea to fruition. You can be as driven and inspired as you like, but without fellow travellers it all comes to nothing. That’s what I don’t like about it.
Much better to write a novel or something, surely. Much better to be able to follow through on your own convictions and ensure results on your own behalf. There’s a hell of a lot to be said for self-sufficiency when it comes time to take life by the balls and make something happen.
Freedom to Depress
Seems that Gareth’s made his attempt to reign some of the nastier commenters on his own blog. It’s raised a fairly predictable chorus of complaint, not all of it unjustified. Still, I think it’s important to distinguish blogs from other media when we’re talking about freedom of speech. Here’s why.
It goes without saying that a blog differs significantly from most of the other media in whicih opinion is shared. The startup and distribution costs are almost zero, and thus accessibility is almost universal. As a result of those two things, any interested person can have their choice of hundreds of thousands (maybe millions by now?) of blogs to read. A newspaper, by contrast, is a huge and expensive undertaking. The costs (along with a whole raft of other factors) have meant that no Australian city has more than two dailies. Partly as a result of that, each of those dailies has a mammoth readership when compared with any particular blogger.
If you’re editing one of those dailies, then, you’re getting to decide on content that will be read by hundreds of thousands of people who (and this is important) have few other similar sources to choose from. This represents a very significant degree of power, and I believe (along with many others) that there should be a responsibility associated with that in terms of accuracy and balance and so forth. Note that it’s only the unique position of newspapers within the society that creates this obligation, not just the fact that someone’s publishing something.
Bloggers, though, wield little power over anyone. While we might like to think of ourselves as little publishing enterprises (and as romantic as I find that thought), in fact a blog is just a technologically enabled soapbox. I’m pretty sure that there was no equivalent of Media Watch directed at Speaker’s Corner.
Of course, the free speech discussion at hand doesn’t concern the right of a blogger to post whatever he/she likes. It concerns the question of whether or not it is cool to interfere with comments that others make on one’s own posts. It’s a slightly more complex question, but I certainly don’t think that any right is being violated when a blogger decides to remove a comment from his/her own blog. A newspaper editor who decides which letters to publish should maybe have to account for that decision, because a rejected letter cannot be published elsewhere in a similar medium. The web, by contrast, is open to anyone who has a rant they want to make. No-one has to rely on another blogger’s comments box in order to make their voice heard.
The only real issue here is one of credibility. If a blogger presents their blog as a venue for the free exchange of views, and then deliberately removes particular examples, it would be fair for that blogger to be held up to criticism. And again, opportunities to publish criticism abound.
In Gareth’s case, I think getting rid of the random insults is quite reasonable, although I think he should (for credibility’s sake) do it in a transparent way. It’s up to him to decide what his comments boxes are there for, and if trading barbs is not cool by him, then it’s not cool. Likewise, if a group of friends decided to use my comments boxes as a handy way to discuss cosmetics (assuming that I hadn’t originally posted about cosmetics, and it should be said that I harbour no secret fascination for mascara), then it would surely be reasonable for me to remove the discussion.
Built-In Concessions
In a comment on his own post, Ken Parish caught my eye by referring to a
“Law”, whose name I can’t presently recall, that says a person who throws a Hitler/Nazi analogy into any debate is (a) effectively ending that debate, and (b) signalling that they know they lost it.
Hmm. If there is such a law, where does that leave Andrew Bolt? (Thanks, Angus).
Catharsis
There’s some soul-searching going on in the sphere of Australian political blogs at the moment, and I seem to have been involved in a tangential way. Matt tells the whole story (which is one of a discussion getting out of hand as partisans go for the throat), and refers to a post that I made on my experiences of a similar discussion. He also includes links to other posts on the same subject, including this one from Ken Parish, who gives my blog a plug along the way.
I did find my discussions about the Stolen Generations upsetting, for reasons that I’ve blogged about recently. It would be wrong, though, to say that I was unduly distressed by the name-calling nastiness. It’s easy enough to ignore some wanker who wants to hurl insults. What really shits me is this sort of stuff (from “d”):
Like it or not, Dan, the reason was a genuine one to ensure that had better homes and lives, following many were in danger if they remained in the tribes.That testimony and evidence just confirms that point really does make the `stolen generation’ line a heap of twaddle.
In other words, everything you’ve read is wrong, everything I’m saying is right. I’m not going to present you with any of the evidence I claim to have, I’m just going to bully you with the assumption that it exists. And then:
Which school did you go to Dan, there a lot of bad ones around, and dork unis too
Translation: you’ve been preconditioned by the education system to believe something that’s not true, so nothing you say should be believed. I, on the other hand, am a source of enlightenment, speaking truths that you would see plainly if you weren’t so sadly indoctrinated.
Well, it should be pointed out that during the whole course of that discussion, only two participants presented any evidence whatsoever. One was me. The other was a guy called Antony, who claimed that a Northern Territory court case supported the case of the deniers, when in fact it very explicitly said the opposite. I’ve done much more reading since, and if it all started today I’d be much better equipped, and would probably take a stronger position than the one I did. I should be grateful, really: Gareth Parker, Andrew Bolt and all the assorted voices of denial have inspired me to become much more familiar with a chapter of our history about which I had been fairly ignorant.
Incidentally, for anyone who’s still flirting with the views of Andrew Bolt on the Stolen Generations, read Robert Manne’s In Denial, then read Andrew Bolt’s (very brief) published responses (neither of which is online, sorry). Manne exposes as false, with the help of strong, detailed evidence, a number of claims that Bolt has published earlier. Bolt responds with no argument in his defence, he just repeats his lies over again (perhaps confident that his readers will never pick up Manne’s book to judge for themselves). They are the same lies that Bolt is still repeating. Not unlike his supporters in the blogosphere.
Hoping
I’ve been doing some thinking about Peter Costello’s speech to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday. I think it’s more significant than a lot of people have suggested. How significant remains to be seen, but I think we will be talking about this speech for some time to come.
After John Howard changed his mind about retirement, Costello said this in a press conference:
I want to see Australia be everything it can possibly be. I want to see it prosperous and strong and secure and tolerant …
According to the Sydney Institute speech, Costello
did not think at the time that talking about a tolerant country would prove controversial. But … [it] … produced a big reaction. It turned out to be a verbal bunker buster.
He went on to say that most of those who wrote to him supported the idea of a tolerant country. He quoted briefly from the minority of dissenters.
So why was the reaction so intense? Neither “prosperous” nor “strong” nor even “secure” provoked a large response, but “tolerant” did. Costello’s quotes seem to ridicule those who wrote to him opposing “tolerance”, but what of those who wrote supporting it? Why were they moved to write in such large numbers? Steve Edwards had a lot to say about it:
Tolerance is a word that has been so badly misused in public discourse that it bears virtually no relation to its original meaning – that is[,] to basically get along with one another. [… T]he definition of tolerance became something as such:
1. To support the continuance of family reunion migration as the largest component of the non-humanitarian immigration stream.
2. To support a treaty with, and an apology to, the indigenous peoples of the Commonwealth of Australia.
3. A firm belief that all cultures are morally equal and should not bear any form of discrimination whatsoever.
4. The act of an individual or collective engaging in refugee rights activism.
5. To maintain unaccountable statutory commissions, involving the provision of more than enough funds to meet their extortionate demands.
6. Opposition to Christianity and reflexive promotion of any alternative religion.
7. The denunciation of any dissenter to one or all of the above as “racist” or “fascist”.
[… I]t is not a word, but a missile. When Costello used it, the ideological vultures were already circling …
Well, I think he’s wrong on most counts. It’s true that “tolerance” (or its antonym) is a word that comes up frequently in discussions of the Howard government. Perhaps some people have co-opted it to describe the whole of their belief system, in the way that others have done with “freedom”. Perhaps Edwards has heard them and, being of a partisan bent himself, imagines that the word’s misuse by some on the “left” can be extrapolated to include all of his political opponents. I don’t know. I do know that in the time I’ve been following politics in this country, “tolerance” has tended to be used with reference to much more specific concepts. Clearly racism is high on the list (which Edwards seems to brush on as his point three. I won’t go into some of the darker connotations of what he seems to be saying). Tolerance in this context tends to mean agreeing to live side-by-side with, and not to discriminate against, people of differing appearance/language/religion/cultural traditions etc. on the basis of same. And, contrary to what Edwards suggests in his point seven, I think that tolerance has frequently been used in a free speech context. Many of us who were the most vehemently opposed to Pauline Hanson’s policies were also vehement advocates of her right to speak her mind. Maybe it’s confusing that “tolerance” could be invoked both as a reason for attacking her views and as a reason for supporting her right to express them.
I think what made Costello’s “tolerance” ring so loud was that it stood out so starkly against the general background of Howard government rhetoric. Other people might be able to point me to examples of Howard or one of his ministers talking about a “tolerant Australia” or something similar, but at this point I’m not aware of any. Presumably Edwards doesn’t find that surprising – after all, why would Howard use a word which has been so corrupted by his opponents? I think that the corruption is Edwards’. By telling his opponents what they mean by “tolerance”, he avoids having to deal with the government’s culpability according to its original meaning. It’s not unlike the way in which supporters of Howard’s policy on asylum seekers are inclined to tell their opponents what they really mean (“open the floodgates”) when they talk about compassion. (cf Edwards’ point one, and my earlier comments on the subject). The elephant in the butter that Edwards ignores is the fact that tolerance in its original meaning has been so conspicuously off the government’s public agenda for so long that you could almost hear the intake of breath when Costello mentioned the unmentionable.
(As an aside, I don’t think that Howard and his ministers are themselves intolerant people. Their public announcements, particularly those relating to asylum seekers and aborigines, have been stripped of anything that could be construed as compassion or tolerance, but I put this down to cheap political populism on their part, which is at least one step removed from actual malice.)
For my part, I didn’t take that much notice of Costello’s original comment. Yes, it was unusual to hear a conservative politician speaking in those terms, but the guy had just had a kick in the guts over his leadership ambitions, so it wasn’t surprising that he would stray temporarily off-message. (For those who are about to respond that tolerance was always a part of the government’s message, I’d welcome any examples.) Wednesday night’s speech was Costello’s chance to clarify what he meant, and I would have expected, along with many others, that he would hop quickly back into line. There was some of that. I don’t know that the Iraq issue was ever one of tolerance, or how many people wrote to Costello suggesting it was, but whatever the case, that wasn’t what he meant. I suspect he included it more as a segue to later discussions. Fair enough. A lot of his speech was about volunteer work:
Engagement in … voluntary groups produces a direct outcome [but also b]y-products like friendship, belonging, tolerance and trust – and forms the basis for relationships which can be extended to other worthwhile causes.
Also fair enough, but hardly controversial. Welfare got a Guernsey:
A person who receives income support without engaging in the social activity of work misses all the side benefits of that activity, and the positive benefits of self-reliance.
I’ve never heard work-for-the-dole justified in quite those terms before. Costello tactfully ignores the much more pejorative justifications that have been thrown around by his government in the past. Perhaps if the government could steer clear of the bludger-bashing and keep its rhetoric positive and constructive like this, such initiatives would be easier to support. Of course, it’s tad paternalistic. And contradictory by Costello’s reasoning, since he’s just finished saying that
These social networks are neither established by, nor controlled by government. They are voluntary. That is their strength. […T]he Government cannot establish these associations and should not force engagement.
(Yet those on the dole should be forced to engage via mutual obligation so that they can experience the “positive benefits of self-reliance”).
Schools get an odd little parable:
Suppose the Government decided that it would offer a grant to each school of the precise amount it raised by way of the school fete, on the condition that the school did away with this as an annual fundraising activity. That way the school would be no better and no worse off in a financial sense. The parents could save the time they spend planning and conducting the fete. Would the school be just as well off? No. Although it would lose no money it would lose all those voluntary hours of common purpose and commitment. It would lose the association the parents have made with each other and the teachers which is just as valuable as the funds that are being raised.
Well, yes, but so what? Schools build valuable social networks, absolutely. But what’s this about a grant that’s conditional on a school ceasing fundraising? There are no such grants, and I doubt there ever will be. What government policy ever requires the breaking down of social networks? To say that such a policy would be wrong is really proving nothing. Of course, a grant could be provided in addition to fundraising, maybe even matched to fundraising, and the social networks would remain intact (maybe even enhanced, in the latter case). Why not suggest that? Answer: because he didn’t want the schools to interpret his speech as a promise of more cash. By constructing an impossible (and thus meaningless) scenario, he guarded against the possibility that his comments might be taken literally. As a result, he wasted a paragraph.
On public liability insurance:
… if the cost of insuring against the compensation threatens the viability of the local sporting club or the pony club or the scouts then it will threaten an important dimension of our society. It will undermine social capital.
Yes, agreed. Of course, this sentence is hardly controversial. No-one wants to see the scouts have to shut down because of insurance premiums.
The speech has copped a fair bit of criticism. Michael Duffy calls it “empty and boring.” Adele Horin is not so kind:
[Costello] showed no sign of the social conscience some believe lurks within. What we see instead is a Treasurer playing at having a social conscience. It’s the don’t-talk-about-the-Aborigines, don’t-talk-about-the-refugees, don’t-talk-about-the-marginalised kind of social conscience you have when you don’t seem to have one.
[…]
Costello is talking social policy but it is easy, woolly stuff. Those hoping for sharper insights or signs of his social conscience will have to wait.
I’m not sure what she was expecting. Costello was never going to come out and contradict Liberal policy. I also think that Dennis Shanahan was wrong when he wrote that the speech was
dogmatically correct[,] and the only glimpses of the more philosophical Costello were of a conservative and free marketeer.
I think there are glimpses (albeit only glimpses) of more than that. I think the most important paragraph is the last one:
The view I am putting is that there are non-monetary things that add to the wealth of a society. Civic engagement and the values which it promotes like trust and tolerance are some of those things. You can call them social capital if that is conceptually easier. It might help with the idea of building them up, running them down, adding to our wealth, or detracting from it. But a society which has these things should be careful not to let them run down. Once they are gone it takes a lot of effort to get them back again.
Now, in the context of the speech, it’s clear that Costello has a fairly narrow view of which things contribute to social capital, namely voluntary and community organizations. His choice of examples (pony clubs, scouts, Rotary, Lions, churches, synagogues, schools, RSL clubs, book groups, Neighbourhood Watch, political meetings, get-togethers with neighbours) suggests an unsurprisingly conservative line. There’s no suggestion, though, that his list is supposed to be exhaustive. They might not have sprung to Costello’s mind, but his reasoning would seem to be consistent with support for a whole host of other, less white-bread activities (student activism, rock concerts, dance clubs, mardis gras, community radio, perhaps even blogging, etc). All of them can build the trust and tolerance that Costello claims to advocate, so if he chose to make exceptions of them, he would need to explain why. If he (rightly, I think) identifies a social capital benefit in the case of Rotary clubs, it would surely be too inconsistent for him to deny a similar benefit in the case of, say, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy or a Critical Mass bike ride. He hasn’t explicitly supported these things, but I think he’s laid down the philosophical basis to do so, and that’s a start. (In fact, it could be argued that my examples carry more social capital benefit because they tend to involve a more diverse sample of society. Learning to tolerate people who look and act exactly like you is not quite so significant.) Look, I think it’s refreshing just to hear a conservative acknowledge the value of social goods, because it provides a basis for advocating policies that fall outside the strict boundaries of economic rationalism and social individualism.
If the importance of social capital is to be stressed in the case of voluntary associations and leisure activities, surely there are all sorts of other areas of public policy in which it can also be emphasized. For instance, the maxim stating that
… if Government has a choice between delivering services in a way that enhances engagement and one that does not, then, all other things being equal it should prefer the former.
could be applied to argue that, for instance, improvements to public transport should be preferred to freeway construction (since the former provides much more opportunity for engagement). It could also be used to highlight the negative impact on social capital that occurs when, for instance, leaders make pronouncements which can be seen to demonise outsiders (I’m sure you can think of your own examples).
I’m not naïve enough to imagine that much will change as a result of this speech. I’m sufficiently optimistic, though, to be encouraged by what I’ve heard. It does at least give me a glimmer of hope for life after John Howard, without having to rely on the ALP to either a) win an election, or b) do any better than Howard has done. For the moment, I’m taking what Costello has said at face value. Time will tell whether that’s appropriate.
Resolve
I’ve been a bit plagued by sadness and anger since my encounter with the forces of darkness that I blogged about a few days ago. I’ve been upset by right-wing nutcases before, but never quite as seriously. Being of an introspective bent, I started to wonder why.
The funny thing is, I’ve trawled my way through some pretty shocking stuff. I’ve had something of a ghoulish interest in internet hate sites for a while, which might have been what led me to Gareth’s in the first place. Maybe it’s just that I like seeing people who I disagree with make fools of themselves. Maybe it’s more benign, an attempt to understand where these people are coming from and how their worldview came to be so twisted. I don’t know. Whatever the case, none of the material was engaging enough to keep me up at night.
There’s something about Stolen Generation deniers, though, that is different. Why is it that I’m able to laugh off the ramblings of Holocaust deniers, yet I instinctively bridle at this uniquely Australian brand of revisionism? I’ve found a couple of reasons.
The first is that David Irving is not being published in the Herald Sun. None but the most lunatic of lunatic fringes could ever take him seriously. Andrew Bolt is different. He writes for a newspaper which has the by far the highest circulation in Melbourne. People read what he has to say, and it’s fair to imagine that quite a few of them believe it.
Truth has a way of asserting itself, though, which brings me to my second point. I know quite a lot about the Holocaust. I’ve seen the evidence and it’s irrefutable. That’s what makes it so easy to ignore David Irving, and presumably it’s why so many people do. I know much less about the Stolen Generations. I can certainly look at the arguments of Andrew Bolt and compare them with those of Robert Manne and say which is the stronger (which is not hard considering that Bolt’s columns are generally logically inconsistent as well as being morally objectionable). What I can’t do, though, is claim to be an expert. I haven’t looked at the issues in much depth. I can’t spend months buried in state archives (like Robert Manne did, and Andrew Bolt didn’t), but I plan to do a lot more than I already have.