The News Limited papers have been pounding Stephen Conroy for having met Kerry Stokes while holidaying in Colorado, prior to the Rudd government’s hand out to free to air tv stations. [For the record, Conroy denies the two events are linked or that there's anything improper about his meeting.]
This afternoon, Crikey broke the story that Rupert Murdoch met Tony Abbott while he was in Australia for his mother’s birthday celebrations.
There’s now a simple test for News Ltd – whether it covers Abbott’s meeting with its proprietor in the same way as it covered Conroy’s, and whether it demands the same details of Abbott as the Sunday Telegraph demanded of Conroy – what was discussed and what hospitality did Abbott enjoy from Murdoch?
And, most of all, was there a deal made between the two for favourable coverage?
Those are good questions, though it’s a bit hard to imagine how Abbott’s coverage in The Australian could be any more favourable than it is already…
Update: Trevor Cook on Stephen Conroy’s defence of the licence fee decision.
Alex White has posted on what he describes as soul searching in the campaign against internet filtering about its direction. White’s post is replete with useful links, and is well worth a read. He disagrees with the focus on censorship, arguing that there are few points of connection with the lived experience of the public to shift opinion.
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.
Former Opera House boss Michael Lynch, who was praised by the Queen for transforming London’s controversial South Bank arts centre, and the academic, author and former ABC executive Julianne Schultz, will become directors for the next five years.
Mr Lynch said he had no time for accusations against the ABC of left-wing bias.
“I don’t believe that view — and I don’t see the role of the board is to be sitting there as lord high inquisitor on the politics of the individuals or the organisation,” he said from London.
“I think the organisation needs to be made, and I think these appointments will probably make the organisation, feel more secure — that every decision or every announcement by an ABC journalist or a part of the organisation is not getting itself into unending scrutiny from the board.”
A series of public forums about the internet regulation debate in Australia
The Federal Government’s proposal to block internet sites with a mandatory filter has drawn overwhelming opposition from voices across politics and civil society. So what are the real questions for policy-makers?
These forums explore the ethical, social and political questions raised by government regulation of the internet. With the growing intersection between technology, politics and media, how do existing and proposed classification regimes measure up?
Is filtering inevitable? Or are there better ways to regulate the world wide web?
Anyone wanting an update on how the federal government’s adventures into the wilds of citizen consultation via blogs [at the Digital Economy Blog hosted under the auspices of DBCDE] are going could do a lot worse than read these two posts from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion and Axel Bruns at Gatewatching. Bruns asks the very good question – “what if you do build it and they do come?”
It’s a bit of a hard ask to keep up with all the policy reviews the Rudd government has initiated. And they appear to be in the habit of releasing the results or closing deadlines for submissions well into the Christmas blah season – though whether that’s deliberate or not is another kettle of fish. Anyway, the response to the review of public broadcasting was by all accounts quite overwhelming. Some colleagues and friends of mine at QUT put in a submission – which you can read about here at Terry Flew’s blog.
The points made in Terry’s post might be enough to riff off, but I’d be interested in any case in opening a discussion on where public broadcasting should go. Continue reading ‘Future of public broadcasting’
Coverage of the Brisbane rally is at Nocensorship.info, and Skribe has uploaded a citizen journalism video report of the Perth event to YouTube:
Please feel free to add links or reports in comments.
It’s worth noting as well that the latest Essential Research poll found support for the censorship plan running at 49-40% [via The Poll Bludger]. Remembering that their sample is online and thus of internet users, there’s still obviously a way to go in turning around public opinion on this issue.
Telstra has been playing a high-risk strategy over tendering for the National Broadband Network, submitting a deliberate non-compliant tender which the government has now confirmed excludes it from the process. The brinkmansip game appears to have failed at the first hurdle, though the implication is that the government should reshape the tender process to its parameters after other bids are considered or face years of litigation. The inducement to the government to play the game Telstra’s way is the inevitable further delay of the construction of the NBN.
But Telstra has one friend – “free market” thinktank the IPA. IPA Research Fellow Chris Berg writes:
Governments are going to have to step back from micro-managing the telecommunications sector. Market forces need to determine the shape of such a quickly developing industry, not regulators.
Apparently that translates into support for a quasi-monopoly keen to destroy its competitors, avoid structural separation and gouge its customers. Intriguing.
Over at Catallaxy, Jason Soon links to Kerry Miller’s article in Spiked about Clive Hamilton’s influence in the propagation of the idea of the “Clean Feed” web censorship plan. There are some strange alliances around this issue, and Miller, who writes for the Maoist site Strange Times (formally, as The Last Superpower, about the only actually existing Australian example of the pro-Bush “Decent Left”) can’t resist a side swipe at us “pseudo-leftists” even when we’re on the same page. There’s also a bit of a contradiction in her piece. She argues that Hamilton is a “communitarian” – which I think is to give him too much credit and in light of his views on other issues, somewhat inaccurate. But nevertheless, the moral authoritarianism of communitarianism is certainly in play in the censorship stakes. Miller claims:
The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were.
I think that’s far too broad a statement, and could be contradicted with evidence from other policy domains. And needless to say, there were enough Howard Ministers – Tony Abbott being one who immediately comes to mind – who could trump almost anyone when it comes to sanctimonious authoritarianism. It’s more accurate to say, in my view, that the arguments of “communitarians” provide useful cover for left ALP ministers (for instance, Gillard, Tanner and Macklin) to sign on to an agenda which actually derives straight from the Catholic right, and which has more than a little political calculation behind it – both in terms of Senate numbers (and the cohesiveness of the ALP Senate caucus itself) and also in terms of skimming some votes from churchgoing socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.
A very similar dynamic is observable with regard to the arguments of the Noel Pearsons and Warren Mundines of this world – in that they provide cover for authoritarian interventions in Indigenous affairs (and increasingly in social policy more generally). The basic mindset is the same – worrying about the breakdown of norms and the absence of community. The communitarian stream of political philosophy – which largely developed in the 1990s and has strong affinities with “Third Way” politics – generally bemoans the alleged fracturing of moral values and shared ethics and places the duty on the state of recreating community in its absence. Very often, the practical and political application of such views has more than a tinge of racism about it. The goals set can never be achieved (which is useful politically for the more canny operators), and a lot of the concern is misplaced and wrongly framed, but a lot of damage can be done along the way by state intervention. Also writing in Spiked, Guy Rundle is much more sensitive to the real political dynamics of moralistic social democracy than Miller.
[Via Public Polity] There’s a rally protesting the Clean Feed internet censorship plan in Brisbane Square on Saturday from 11am to 3pm.
I support the cause, but I won’t be there. I’m aware of three other protest rallies and marches in Brisbane over the last month or so, and participants reported a condition close to heat exhaustion, no matter how behatted and water bottled. Saturday’s maximum temperature is forecast to be 33 and it’s bound to be over 30, with probably very high humidity all through the rally (and what’s with a four hour rally, anyway?). I just walked home from the bus stop – about three minutes’ walk – and even with a bit of shade and a slight breeze, at 28 degrees with a searing sun and very muggy conditions, that was an unpleasant three minutes. I was arguing in various activist communities as early as the mid 90s that the rally/march model had had its day. With all due respect to the organisers, no one sane would advise anyone to stand around for an hour in the middle of the day at the height of Brisbane summer. Shade in Brisbane square is about nil. There are actually serious health risks.
Surely net-savvy folk can find much more creative ways of making their point, and as I do recognise that it’s often worth gathering people together in physical space, whatever’s wrong with a night time vigil or sunset gathering on the grass? At best this rally will achieve a short grab on the news. Activists need to think much more innovatively, and also take into account the bloody climate!
Dave Bath reports that the government has an official blog on their digital economy plans. This has been in the works for some time; a government Lindsay Tanner’s welcome post (which is worth reading in its entirety) explains the idea:
As some of you may be aware, I’ve been talking about our plans to trial consultation blogs for some time now. This is the first of what will be several consultations taking place over the next six months, supplementing existing policy development processes.
While the primary aim of this blog is to get your feedback on aspects of the digital economy, we also want to use this opportunity to explore the mechanics of government blogging and hear your thoughts on how we should interact with you online.
There are a couple of very interesting contributions today about the Obama experience online and where it goes to from here – from my QUT colleagues Axel Bruns at Gatewatching and Barry Saunders at ABC Opinion. Saunders also has some acerbic comments about Stephen Conroy and the “inane internet censorship proposal”, which certainly seems completely contradictory for a party ostensibly attempting to harness the power of online participation, among its many other demerits.
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