The government appointed a committee to consult on methods of protecting human rights, headed by Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, early in its term. McClelland has now released the government’s response, which is a masterpiece of ambiguity and weasel words.

The Rudd government certainly hasn’t distinguished itself in the realm of civil liberties.

I find myself in agreement with the conclusion of Guy Beres’ post:

All things considered, it’s hard not to view the government’s performance on this issue as rather weak, and the outcome here as an indictment of the Rudd Government’s use of the public consultation as a mechanism for guiding policy. If you’re going to make public consultations part of your modus operandi as a government, you better well make sure that you provide a robust explanation for why you have flatly rejected the recommendations of the people you are consulting.

And also with this:

However, I am somewhat confused by the assertion that the introduction of a national act would be somehow “divisive” or would create an atmosphere of “uncertainty or suspicion”. Surely one could argue quite effectively that the absence of any legal bedrock on human rights in Australia is a fairly considerable source of division and uncertainty? A federal Human Rights Act would lay Australia’s human rights cards on the table for all to see.

Indeed. A Charter of Rights seems divisive only to hardline religious figures, conservative commentators, Tony Abbott and John Howard and NSW Labor hacks.

Elsewhere: Woolly Days, Andrew Norton.

The post, which appears below, was originally published here.

There are a range of good arguments against the Rudd government’s internet filter, some emphasised for persuasive or tactical reasons, some reflective of deeply held political and political positions. Among the latter, liberal and libertarian arguments tend to dominate. This is not necessarily to say that those advancing such arguments (which we might usefully summarise under the slogan ‘information wants to be free’) are liberals or libertarians in a consistently ideological sense, or on the political right. It’s more that the deep logic of the internet’s history produces an argument in terms of freedom, and that view seems natural to those who are passionate about the online world. In this article, I want to present a somewhat more sociological argument, and one that seeks to build on an alternative (though, in part, complementary) set of assumptions drawn from left and progressive thought and tradition.

In so doing, the target at which I want to aim is not the internet filter itself, or Stephen Conroy himself. To my mind, the personalisation of the debate has not been a helpful aspect of the campaign against the filter proposal. What I think is useful and important to understand is the underlying cause of the government’s move, which casts the argument around freedom in something of a different light.

What is at issue here is the desire to govern the private choices of individuals, a desire which has had its apogee in the communitarian aspects of New Labour governance in the United Kingdom. To adapt a judgement made by The Economist, thirteen years of New Labour government has seen the state grow, personal freedom greatly diminish, but the underlying social patterns of inequality little disturbed. The urge to shape and dictate private choices has been growing among Labor governments in Australia, with the long lived Bob Carr style state regimes leading the vanguard. Mark Latham tempered the communitarian rhetoric to a high flame during his leadership, and despite his repudiation by the ALP, the Rudd government has seemingly adopted a similar governing mentality, albeit at more of a simmer.

The causes of the desire to govern the soul are multiple, though interconnected and interwoven.

It’s no coincidence that an increasing drive to interfere with private decisions and choices accompanied the election of the first generation of centre-left governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History. The ideological climate where social democrats lost any sense of the capacity to transform, and the desirability of transforming economic and social relations lent itself to a statism without long term purpose, a statism that manifests itself in interventions to transform private lives rather than to transform national and global society. Stripped of the power, and the will, to restructure economic life so as to negate deeply structural inequalities in a globalised world, purpose and the will to do good manifests itself into a micro-level of intervention; what Michel Foucault called ‘biopolitics’ – a politics of governing the individual body and soul.

Reflected through the prism of the constant campaign, the spectacle of the symbol in politics, and the 24/7 media cycle, ‘bite-sized’ policies have the capacity to substitute for social change over the long term and to feed the drumbeat of moral panic sounded on a repetitive and moment by moment time scale.

Secondly, in a risk society, individuals are less trusted to make choices for themselves, governed by their desires, their use of private reason, and their consciences. The sub-politics of risk, to invoke the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concerns itself with the downside of modernity and complexity – the costs of the aggregation of private decisions to public finances and purposes. In areas like health, child development, and many others, the costs of perceived negative choices are transferred to a public purse unable to deal with them, and in a neo-liberal culture, the production of a docile and compliant workforce is key both to the legitimation of governance in a chaotic environment and to the reproduction of late capitalist patterns of work, consumption and distribution.

Thirdly, the micro-government of the individual is a key point of contestation at the site where democratisation and authority clash. An increasing climate of openness from the 1960s onwards, and the democratisation of culture among whose effects is a resistance to assertions of authority, later supplemented by the growth of populisms both right and left combined to render the notion that policy is an effect of expertise shaky. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is something of a backlash. With politics denuded of big picture ideological conflicts, the void is filled with hordes of experts, who with the best will in the world, think that they know what’s good for us. Labor governments, stripped of any real transformational purpose, obsessed with symbolic campaigning and feeding the media beast, and concerned about the governance of risk, seize upon (and cherry pick) crumbs from the table of thinktank, private and public research expertise.

So, then, the internet filter is part of a bigger picture. It’s one more item, among the alcopops tax, the national testing regime in schools, and many others, of a form of governmental mentality which seeks to shape, or to dictate, choices to citizens, who are presumed to be unable to discern their own best interests. Evidence, research and policy step in, and electoral advantage is sought through the intertwined machine of political communication and media dissemination.

Yet, there is another left tradition.

That is the tradition embodied in movements for popular education from the 19th century onwards, in the habits of auto-didacticism of early trade unionists and activists, of the respect for reason and informed conscience and judgement imparted to English speaking socialisms and Labourism from the dissent of chapel and the world of workplace dispute and argument. This tradition is one of the cultivation of the capacities of all citizens to apply reason to human affairs, to make conscientiously good decisions in their private lives through collective learning and civic conversation, for opportunity to be opened up rather than to be circumscribed.

This fundamentally progressive attitude and set of dispositions seeks to expand the capabilities of ordinary folk and to enable and facilitate citizens’ desires for autonomy, self-government and collective government of communal and state institutions.

It’s part of a sweeping movement of democratisation, which popped up in another context at the height of the administered society in the 1950s and 1960s, in a desire for participatory decision-making and for individuals together to question the force of ingrained social norms. It’s part of an activist culture manifested in social movements such as feminism and other liberatory and transformational currents. At its heart, it represents a fundamental optimism, a philosophical anthropology foundational to left politics (and to liberalism, too) which holds that humans are thinking beings able to be trusted with choice, and whose choices deserve a basic level of respect.

The internet, as I alluded to at the outset, is part of that secular movement towards the democratisation of social relations; and of knowledge. It’s precisely because the internet affords so much promise for those who wish to decide their destinies in common, to learn, to form an informed judgement and habit of thought that its freedom from state interference is so important at the level of principle. I’m not so interested in the particulars of the reasons advanced by the Rudd government for this latest instance of the desire to micro-manage individual choices. I’m much more interested in opposing, in principle, anything that partakes in the disrespect for the capacities of individual citizens to decide severally and collectively how best to regulate their own lives. That’s a principle, in my view, that from a left and progressive position, is well worth fighting for.

I’m not sure I agree.

White’s alternative messages focus on the ineffectuality of the filter, and its expense. However, that’s not, in my view, a persuasive theme for a public campaign. A lot of what the government does is ineffectual and expensive, and pointing this out also doesn’t necessarily create a public. It’s really just akin to the everyday niggling of oppositions and newspapers.

Any campaign does need an overarching theme, and this angle should be a subsidiary message.

The other question that needs to be posed is that of the audience. It’s no doubt right that few votes will shift in the right places to enable an argument to be made about an adverse electoral impact on Labor. White cites Possum and Bernard Keane. More broadly, findings from the AES over many years suggest that even the biggest issues only account for a few percentage points in vote switching at elections. For instance, the final data on the impact of WorkChoices (an issue which connects with lived experience, if there was ever one) on 2007 voting patterns hasn’t been fully analysed, but it’s unlikely to have been worth more than a couple of percent of the vote to the ALP. Labor strategists and pollies are well aware of this sort of thing.

The actual target for the No Clean Feed campaign needs to be non-Labor Senators. There, the issues of civil liberties and censorship are well chosen for their resonance with small l Liberals and The Greens. It’s also necessary to demonstrate that concern exists in the community beyond those who are active in the campaign itself, but this doesn’t need to be a clincher argument about seats falling in droves, which no one would believe. Rather, a point of connection with the messages particular parties want to send is necessary, and the best way to find that theme is to test it via polling and focus groups rather than speculate in a vacuum. The dilemma, though, that this causes for the campaign is that the most germane themes may not be the ones that resonate with activists in the campaign itself. So that needs to be balanced as well.

It’s a bit of a case study on the limitations, as well as the benefits, of crowdsourced campaigning.

Update: Colin Jacobs of the EFA responds on LP.

A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.

There has been a certain feeling in the air of deja vu over the past fortnight in Queensland. The jailing of a former Minister, allegations that government was far too close to business, a government sinking rapidly in the polls while making “tough decisions” and, the piece de resistance, the exposure of systemic misconduct in the elite Armed Robbery Squad of the Queensland Police.

The timing of this sequence of supposedly unlikely events was interesting. Much is being made of the 20th anniversary of the release of the Fitzgerald Report. The date falls this Thursday, and Tony Fitzgerald QC himself will be commemorating the occasion with a public lecture at Griffith University.

So is something again rotten in the state of Queensland?

Lurid stories of convicted criminals wining, dining and bonking on dodgy day release jaunts supposedly to gather intelligence for the coppers dominated local press coverage. This a week after revelations of the jailed Gordon Nuttall’s bizarre plans to make himself premier — shades of Russ Hinze perhaps.

The reality, though, is more prosaic.

Premier Anna Bligh claimed that Nuttall’s sentencing and the CMC report into police misconduct were proof that the system was working. A new Queensland would shed light on the malfeasance of a few. A number of voices were raised to accuse Bligh of dangerous complacency.

There’s merit in that claim.

In truth, as veteran civil libertarian lawyer Terry O’Gorman argued, echoed by a chorus of retired judges, the impetus behind the anti-corruption agenda had begun to dissipate long ago. Landmarks were the amalgamation of the Crime Commission and the CJC into the CMC, and the practice of outsourcing inquiries into misconduct back to the departments concerned. The CMC conducts few investigations, and a huge majority of complaints against police are referred back to the QPS’ Ethical Standards Command. The watchers are watching themselves.

The CJC, and it successor, the CMC, have never been popular with pollies. Signs that the Fitzgerald agenda was being watered down go back to the Goss era. The cavalier practice of using the corruption watchdog as a pawn in the political chess game hasn’t helped matters. Nor has, some would suggest, the secrecy surrounding the CMC itself.

Openness and transparency are key to an ethical political — and police — culture. The Bligh government has taken some steps in this direction, but much could still be done. Fitzgerald pointed to the faults of a supine media in his report. In the two decades since, Brisbane’s print landscape has narrowed to one paper, the Courier-Mail, whose tabloidisation is mirrored by the current affairs coverage on ABC Local Radio. The state based 7.30 Report has long gone, and there’s no new Quentin Dempster to put the pollies and coppers under the microscope. Brisbane media over the last fortnight has concentrated on the sensational aspects of the scandalous revelations at the expense of hard-headed analysis and investigative reporting.

That probably won’t change.

So it’s even more important that Bligh and her government ditch the soundbites which appear to come naturally to a government on the ropes and attend to the culture of complacency that has grown up. We don’t need another Fitzgerald Inquiry — things aren’t that bad. But we do need some serious thought and analysis about opening up the Queensland political and police cultures, and about reform of the CMC itself.

Amongst other things, this act permits “eligible judges” (hand-picked by the Attorney-General of the day) to proscribe organizations based on evidence which is not disclosed to either defendants or their lawyers.

I don’t have anything to add other than thanking Ken for drawing this to our attention. Why is it that every time we turn our backs on them, police forces are forever trying to acquire more powers, and supine governments are all too eager to hand such powers to them?

Yet how is our own Government’s behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation’s establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/lindsay-rnc.jpg"

What I found interesting about the reporting of these incidents is that there’s a great use of citizen photojournalism from Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise. Beyerstein was there, and she’s posted this photo – of the Poor People’s March – on her blog, with the telling caption:

Do these people look like a ravening mob to you? A few minutes later, the police tear gassed the whole block after pushed the crowd back about a block or two.

You can see all Beyerstein’s photos of the march at her Flickr page.