O’Neill is apparently an alumnus of some Trotskyist group or other, and like other leftie turned righties (or Euston Manifesto Decent Lefties), has remembered how to use his time honoured bag of rhetorical tricks.

This sort of argument, or very loud and repetitive non sequitur, is now the stock and trade of right wing columnists more generally.

Just as Christopher Pearson, for instance, can argue, apparently seriously, that the timing of Kevin Rudd’s aorta valve replacement is all about his continued leadership ambitions.

It’s this reductio ad absurdum set of debating maneouvres that takes on a life of its own, and sometime reveals more than it intends. This febrile ‘win at all costs’ mentality – characteristic of the culture wars – is now almost dominant across the mediascape.

So, last night, we had Brendan O’Neill arguing that journalists had to be allowed their illegality. They’re the fourth estate!

The problem is that it’s not just left libertarian gadflies who believe this. O’Neill, far from being a contrarian, is actually reflecting back at twice the size the emptiness of the Fourth Estate We Hold The State To Account excuses of the media as it thrashes around attempting to escape democratic accountability.

So, we had all the usual “ZOMG! Press Freedom!” stuff we’ve come to expect, before O’Neill was unwisely pushed into speaking the secret hidden in plain sight out loud. The press actually believes that the law does not, or should not constrain it. Or, rather, if it does, it ought to be some sort of question for pondering in newsrooms and in the arcanae of journalistic codes of ethics. “How can we get our stories?”

Sadly, there are some Australian media commentators, and I’m not thinking of News Limited ones, whose blindness to questions of democratic accountability is such that they’ve actually aired this professional view in public. It’s characteristic of a profession stripped of meaning, of future, and of purpose, a machine blindly hurtling in the only direction it knows.

It’s more charitable not to name these people. They should know better.

This is premodern.

If sovereignty is about the decision as to when the law applies and when it does not, then it must stand above law, and stand above democracy. The media seems to arrogate to itself the position of King Louis. The Enlightenment actually existed to counter this arrogance.

We’ve gone beyond ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’…

What O’Neill and his journalistic colleagues appear to argue is that it is they who determine law and right.

That is rubbish, and should be called as such.

It’s all very well to prattle on about holding the powerful to account, but the media needs to be judged by what it does, not what it says. “By their fruits you shall know them”: hacking phones, murder pr0n, tawdry celeb exposes, casual but relentless Islamophobia, ad hominem attacks on critics, “campaigning journalism” that lies and distorts. That’s what we have.

Nor is it about ‘freedom’ or ‘censorship’. A considered, judicious and measured conversation needs to occur, and might well occur by way of public inquiry, about the danger the press Leviathan poses to democracy itself. That transcends questions, trite as they are, of ‘the future of journalism’ or the prevalence of the right wing noise machine. What it goes to is how we can protect ourselves from dying dinosaurs.

And so it was last night – an interesting range of panelists, no pollies, and a discussion about faith and ethics.

It was refreshing to listen to a focused discussion between people of faith and those with no religion (and the excellent point Eva Cox made about non-religious people having faith was one of the many sharp insights she and Susan Carland brought to the table). Cox’s disavowal of the Angry Atheists, and the general tone of the chat, showed that it’s possible to discuss religion, faith and ethics outside a frame characterised by biffo from fundamentalists on both sides of the equation.

One of the topics canvassed was the “brainwashing” of kids in schools. Virginia Trioli might have done better to clarify the difference between the role of chaplains (a program I oppose in the state system) and that of religious education, but, again, it was refreshing to see religious and non-religious interlocutors agree that classes which cover comparative religion and ethics teaching as an alternative to religious instruction are *a good thing*.

That’s an option that exists in New South Wales, for now. Coincidentally, Fred Nile today is threatening to torpedo Barry O’Farrell’s public sector wages squeeze if ethics classes aren’t abolished. I can’t even begin to list the ironies. But I’ll try.

If, for once, Qanda showed something of the free wheeling and rational debate that approaches the norm of Enlightenment discourse, and since that was once tied closely to the notion of open debate in Parliament, this sort of unethical horse trading shows the tendencies working against it at their starkest.

That it leads Fred Nile to (de facto) support for wage justice is only one of the strange results of fundamentalist passions overwhelming rationality.

1. It’s the Jerry Springer show for people with degrees (and twitter accounts)
2. Rather than ‘enhancing democracy’, it’s about providing 2 sets of numbers for the ABC’s auditors and Senate Estimates committees: the first showing that the number of partisan commentators are equal on ‘both’ sides; and the second that a large number of #qanda tweets are generated each week, itself a sign of engagement with the show and thus a justification for its continued existence in its current format.
3. This actually diminishes democracy.
4. Rather than embracing interactivity for the sake of it through twitter, the show could be vastly improved by having *actual* expert panels discussing issues relevant to their expertise. For example, you could have three panels: one discussing the government of disaster relief in Queensland, one discussing a particular aspect of the Egyptian revolution, and a third discussing climate change and natural disasters. Some panel would invariably include politicians with expertise in that area to the extent that the shrill demands for ‘balance’ needed to be met to make the format viable.

But that’s perhaps by the by.

I think one of the most interesting things that came out of Q&A tonight was the way it made me think that the debate over the internet filter is thoroughly misframed, or rather it fails to engage altogether with the issues that underlie it.

Australian Sex Party President Fiona Patten was asked a very interesting question about the way that exposure to sexual content habituates people to a very instrumental view of sex, stripped of its intimate contexts and wrenched out of any sort of human relationship. Whether or not its representation is becoming more violent, I can’t say. But I do think that most of what we see under the guise of “adult content”, and its extenstion into the sexification of everything, has very little to do with:

(a) Mungo McCallum’s view that pr0n is something that people resort to in order to spice up their sex lives – he’s almost certainly completely wrong that it’s not something that people casually consume over their morning tea;

(b) Freedom of expression or civil libertarian arguments.

Stephen Conroy’s gesture, echoed by Sophie Mirabella, that adults can make their own informed choices harks back to some sort of older framing of the censorship debate. We might think of radical Italian cinema, or the Marquis De Sade, or the bowdlerisation of Greek texts, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The censorship battles of the 50s and early 60s were largely about a certain notion of high art, a culture of classical humanism opposed to one of wowserism. Similarly, the ‘free love’ aspects of the 60s sexual revolution had at least the aspiration of expanding human pleasure and obvious links to liberatory movements and impulses.

But we don’t live in that world today.

The nonsense that we’re bombarded with – day in, day out – and here Conroy was right about the ubiquity of it and the fact that it can’t be neatly confined to a “family space” to be filtered out – is something quite different, that doesn’t sit neatly into a liberal versus wowser frame. I’m not just talking about pr0n here but about the insanity of every single mag at the supermarket checkout queue screaming about bodies, bikinis and plastic surgery, and all sorts of other stuff. It’s the marketisation of the body, its commodification – what we’re talking about is the colonisation of the libidinal by capitalism.

There’s a neat circle, then, between social liberalism and economic liberalism, which show both up for what they are. I think we need to confront that before we start jumping up and down about “freedom” when what we actually mean in practice is the right of capital to impose particular body forms and modes of apprehending sex and relationships through relentless repetition.

At the same time, the individualisation of social relationships makes them much more disposable, makes sex much more of an object of assessment and judgement rather than an expression of love. Not that I want to argue that there’s some sort of pristine act of love being deformed, but I think it is incontestable that sex is more and more thought of in a very decontextualised way, even within relationships.

What is to be done?

I don’t know, but I think we need to start talking about commodified sexual culture as it is, not in terms which were set in a very different social formation.

[Just to be clear, I'm not making a pro-filter argument. I am saying a lot of the affect that underpins it comes from elsewhere than the reasons articulated for and against, and that we're missing something very serious if we think only in terms of liberties or the rights of adults.]

If the premise is that Twitter, Facebook and other social media enable politicians to enter into dialogue directly with voters, then, as he says, that’s unlikely. I’d add to the reasons Farnsworth enumerates that those Tweeps who discuss Australian politics are a micro-public, not “the public”. That is to say, as for instance the #ausvotes crowd became more of a community, barriers to entry also arise, and I’d observe that Twitter’s social ecology particularly lends itself to hierarchisation. In any case, we’re talking about a very very small proportion of the electorate, and probably, a much more partisan population than the citizenry as a whole. I’m not sure whether anyone has attempted to gauge just how many people joined in election related talk on Twitter, but I expect that might be one of the outcomes of an interesting research project my former colleagues at QUT, Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, are conducting under an ARC grant (research results are regularly updated and discussed at Mapping Online Publics).

The second point to make here is that because Twitter is the media’s favourite social medium – as Farnsworth says because of its utility in driving link traffic, but also because it aids in “branding” journos and the media organisations that employ them – we can observe some of the same network effects in operation as those which restrict the discussion of politics to a small circle. Insofar as it’s more porous, than, say, letters to the editor, it still tends to centre around particular nodes – the regular #qanda commentary, #qt when parliament is in session, and comments about and to particular journos who have a high profile on Twitter (@annabelcrabb being a good example). In a textually restricted medium, moving oneself closer to the key nodes (through retweets, gaining more followers, or a mention by a leading Tweep) is often a matter of making a 140 character joke or witticism, or acting as a catalyst for conversations which start to involve a significant number of others. What’s going on is very interesting indeed sociologically, but it’s not either deliberative debate nor, I strongly suspect, particularly influential.

Incidentally, one of the other claims about social media – its ability to aggregate distributed knowledge and to disseminate it quickly, is also I think proved largely false. As Farnsworth rightly observes, the only gain in information during the Gillard/Rudd leadership contest was probably knowing the result about a minute or so before everyone else, and a lot of what was purveyed turned out to be wrong. Twitter probably best lends itself to these sorts of fast developing events, but in terms of citizen journalism, a political event is something very different from, say, a natural disaster, as people aren’t reporting on what they see or know directly, but speculating on snippets of information – and manipulated snippets – from the core inside actors.

Funny how political philosophy is being invoked in an actual political context.

And it was funny to hear Rob Oakeshott skewer the piffle on Edmund Burke served up by Professor Kenneth Wiltshire in The Australian yesterday.

You really wonder what purpose these op/ed pieces serve; except maybe to annoy the people they’re supposedly addressing.

Just by the by, while we’re on the topic of News Limited’s partisan campaigns, does anyone expect “ELECTION NOW!” to carry on if the Independents support the Coalition (which, it goes without saying, Goddess forfend!)…

The representatives of both wings of the political class – Nick Minchin and Peter Beattie – looked like going into meltdown as Christine Milne and Bob Katter, for somewhat different reasons, denounced the free trade and deregulatory neo-liberal consensus that has dominated our politics for decades.

Minchin came as close as I’ve ever seen him to passion: on the topic of not having tariffs.

(It was also interesting to watch his finger tapping as Bob Katter denounced the Coalition’s record on agriculture. And it was choice to see Katter set Minchin a reading list of De Tocqueville and Mill.)

Minchin’s argument of last resort was to invoke cheap food.

To return to my early 20th century British politics parallels, the Liberal party came to power in 1906, after much agitation for agricultural tariffs from within the Tory party, on a cry of “cheap bread”. At the same time, of course, that line resonated because wages were stagnant or falling, employment insecure, and the legal rights of trade unions under attack.

It’s always worth asking precisely why cheap food is such a pressing concern.

I watched last week’s Q&A on repeat – I turned it off last Monday when the first question was a stupid iteration of the Penberthy Line – ZOMG! It’s so undemocratic for Independents to decide! (Note to #qanda – lose the balance of Young Liberal/Labor/Green/CEC/Whoever hacks idea and the extremely unspontaneous questions based on MSM or partisan talking points, please). I ended up watching it partly because I was curious about Jessica Rudd.

That’s by the by – I found John Keane’s comments interesting. Keane, the author of an acclaimed history of democracy, has recently taken up a Chair at Sydney University. Aside from the fact that he seemed to have caught the “must be witty for Qanda” virus, what he had to say was quite different from the usual issues of the day fodder we get.

Among other things, Keane said:

I think this is a black swan moment in Australian politics. I think that we’re at the end of the road of stage managed two party politics. It has collapsed in every other Westminster model. This is the last one where it has collapsed…

In part, that reflects the point made here at LP a while back about the fact that all Westminster parliaments in the major countries where they’re part of the political fabric have no majority, and that’s something that is inconsistent with the political model they were designed to achieve – after single member constituencies were entrenched in the Third Reform Act in 1886.

Keane goes on to discuss the end of industrial era and modernist politics, which is perhaps a structural cause of the breakdown of the prevalent political mode. Mark made some quick observations about that on the Monday after the election. It’s a big theme, and one to which we should return.

If we think back to the last term, it’s difficult to argue against the proposition – just on the surface – that stability wasn’t much in evidence on either major party side. Labor had two Prime Ministers, the term itself was truncated, while counting John Howard, the Libs went through four leaders.

All sorts of narratives abound about what this means.

But let’s make one point – in one way, the election result makes sense as a rejection of partisanship itself. Think about the fact that for a large part of the term the Liberal party struggled to get over 35% in the polls, and then things massively swung around to a position where Labor struggled to get much above 35%. Both parties had a blip upwards at the start and in the middle of the campaign, but one thing we can say is that there was a very large proportion of voters throughout the term – probably close to a third – who were to greater or lesser degree disattached from a partisan identification with the majors. That was disguised a bit by the Kevin07 hegemony, but its rapid erosion and then failure to resolve into a Coalition majority proves the point.

So, beneath all the froth and bubble, there was a lot of instability bubbling along.

Whether or not a post-partisan Labor minority government could change things, I don’t know. It won’t be a land of milk and honey, but it’s worth thinking about, nevertheless.

NB: This is not a general thread to discuss anything to do with the hung parliament, or negotiations about the formation of a government. Please just don’t leave a comment here because it’s the most recent post. Any general comments should go on the most recent roundtable or please comment on a topical thread if what you have to say is germane to it.

Any comments I consider to be off topic will be deleted.

Something similar will operate for electoral and donations reform.

To the degree that these processes are positive, and of course they’re obviously conditional on the ALP forming government, they have the potential to move beyond purely procedural improvements to the working of Parliament (for instance, time-limited answers and supplementary questions in House of Representatives Question Time) towards a more deliberative style of policy formulation. That holds true for private members’ bills, wrongly characterised in some media as merely an opportunity for local interests to be debated. Actually the presentation and debate of bills on such issues as same-sex marriage has the potential to widen the scope of debate and policy action beyond the very narrow set of concerns walled off usually by the politico-media complex.

(As an aside, I found it extremely interesting indeed that same-sex marriage became a fairly prominent issue in the campaign through a combination of agenda setting by The Greens and civil society movements, and media attention through question and answer forums such as Q&A and the Rooty and Red Hill events.)

So I think we can definitely see signs of what I pointed to in a previous post: a real widening of the hitherto circumscribed boundaries of political debate and policy action.

We can take this one step further by advocating for a holistic approach to donations reform. It’s properly seen as not so much a corruption of the democratic process (although it certainly is) but, more significantly, a privatisation of the public commons of political action.

It’s all interlinked. The professionalisation of politics rests on the existence of career paths which take major party members from staffer to Member to lobbyist, or straight from staffer to lobbyist. “Government relations” or “public affairs” staff grease the wheels which are further oiled through donations, and the existence of Labor or Coalition aligned consultants, think tanks, economic advisors, law firms and so on. The media uncritically reports a host of advocacy research, done only because it provides talking points intended to influence the policy process through both personal contact and framing public debate. And so it goes on, making a mockery of both evidence based policy and the public interest.

If we were to ban all donations from corporate groups (including unions, as Senator John Faulkner has advocated), and utilise the Parliamentary Budget Office agreed on by the Labor Party and The Greens to validate or invalidate “studies” done by industry lobbies and thinktanks seeking to influence public policy, there’s potential for a powerful shift away from the privatisation and corporatisation of our politics.

That’s a matter of process, then, but one that holds out the possibility of enabling a more open and genuine politics.

Elsewhere: Left Flank.

TONY WINDSOR: Well, I think the media have got some degree of responsibility in relation to some of the things that went on, as well, but the – this is the worst political campaign that I’ve ever seen… But I do believe that the media – this is the worst campaign that I’ve seen from the media. I think some of the senior commentators were actually creating news out of nothing. They weren’t giving – and maybe the leaders weren’t prepared to give of their best but the media commentators in some cases were as appalling as the campaign.

[I've edited out a bit of his answer where he discussed the two party leaders - the full transcript is here.]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one on the panel really reacted to this observation, one with which I’m sure many of us would agree.

It was interesting to see Janet Albrechtsen’s usual brand of bile and snark almost completely marginalised.

Anyway, it’s probably a good time to reflect on the media’s performance in the campaign – Media Watch’s analysis last night is also a good discussion starter.