There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ’solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

“I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent”

Australians are rightfully proud of the good thing we’ve got going on here. We know that we live in god’s own country and most of us wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact I couldn’t agree with it more. However, one area in which we’re certainly not world leaders is self reflection. Most of us are pretty happy with our lot in life and don’t feel the need to risk it by asking too many questions of ourselves. As a result, we’ve made avoiding direct public discussions about the (relatively minor) imperfections in the Australian way of life an art form. It’s trite, but it’s the Australian way to dodge any issues that have the potential to make us uncomfortable with a dismissive ‘She’ll be right’ or ‘No worries’.

I had cause to reflect on this recently when I posted a bit of a spray about the inadequacy of the police response to the recent attacks on Indians in Melbourne on my Facebook profile. This deliberately direct comment provoked some very odd responses (both public and private) from ordinarily sensible people. While the content of these responses was extremely varied, they had one fairly consistent theme – a desperate avoidance of confronting the role that racism (subjective or structural) has played in these attacks.

I knew that Mark shared my frustration at people’s reluctance to confront the issue head on, so to try and keep up the momentum for addressing the core of this problem I offered to set out a factual basis for discussion and respond to some of the more common dodges that I’ve seen employed to avoid these facts.

Factual Basis for Discussion:

1. Media coverage of violence in which racial minorities are the victim has increased substantially over the last 18 months or so. I don’t have data for this, but I don’t think anyone’s really disputing it.
2. Assaults and robberies of people of Indian appearance increased by 5.4% in 2008-09 (a total of 1525 incidents).
3. People of Indian appearance are 2 ½ times as likely to be the victim of an assault as non-Indians (an assault rate of 1700 assaults per 100,000 people compared to 700 assaults per 100,000 people). It could even be worse than this; a number of Indians who have contacted me privately has suggested that there is chronic under-reporting of attacks to the police driven by a fear of losing visas and a belief the police are apathetic.
4. Representatives of the Australian-Indian community and the Indian Government have publicly stated their belief that these attacks are racially motivated.
5. The public response from the Police to this situation has been inconsistent. Public responses to incidents are provided on a case by case basis without reference to broader trends. On some occasions the Police have conceded a racial motivation for attacks while in others Police have publicly rejected race as a causal factor despite evidence to the contrary.

On the basis of the response I received to my original post, I’m sure people are already starting to object that nothing in the above necessarily equates to a problem of racism. So let’s examine the most common responses that have been prevalent online in the past few days:

Disavowal: “You Can’t Prove That These Incidents Were Motivated By Race”

By far the most common response to claims of racist violence basically boils down to a correlation v causation argument. Anyone with a little knowledge of statistics knows that correlation does not imply causation. In layman’s terms, the mere fact that Indians are two and a half times as likely to be victims of violent crime doesn’t mean that they are victims of violent crime BECAUSE they are Indian. There could well be another cause that isn’t a function of their race – the frequently cited alternative causes are Indians over-representation in poorer areas, more dangerous jobs and shift-work (Mark’s already covered the structural racism angle here so I won’t go over old ground here).

This is an argument that’s not limited to the online debate – variants of this argument have been advanced by people as senior as Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Peter Varghese, who recently complained that:

There is an unfortunate tendency in the tabloid media to equate anything bad happening to a person of Indian origin to racism. Then they focus on why you won’t admit it is racism, because they take it as a given that any attack has to be a racist attack.’

Unfortunately, this argument is one of those examples of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. As XKCD has put it, while correlation doesn’t imply causation “It does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.” Unfortunately, in Australia, when correlation points to racism, we don’t ‘look over there’ – we resolutely look the other way. The avoidance instinct kicks in and we latch onto another causal explanation, any causal explanation to avoid having to confront the presence racism.

This instinct to look the other way that leads to extraordinary logical contortions like the following chain of reasoning from a Victorian Police spokesman:

I think there was a mention where there was a comment similar to `why don’t you go home?’ but there was nothing more… They appear to take some delight in the actual assault. It’s very disturbing and their propensity for violence is quite shocking… I think the motivation would have been robbery.

Well, obviously.

I’d be happy if the Victorian Police were able to make the case publicly that racially motivated violence isn’t a problem. It would be great if someone could publicly show that that the correlation between Indian and being a victim of violent assaults is not the result of a causal relationship. Show me some data that shows that taxi drivers, night shift store clerks or people in other at risk occupations are equally likely to be victims of assault as Indians (in fact, before you do that you’d better show me that Indians actually are over-represented in these professions).

But people don’t do this. Instead the default position of the Police seems to be to rule out a causal relationship, despite the overwhelming correlation and without any data of their own. Any honest evaluation of the statistical context of these crimes would lead someone to ask how the Police could possibly be justified in confidently ruling out racial prejudice as a causal factor in time for the next morning’s news.

It’s this automatic dismissal of a racial element to these crimes despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that’s causing so much resentment among Australian-Indians and the Indian Government. Neville Roach AO, the Chairman Emeritus of the Australia India Business Council hit the nail on the head when he said that:

Unfortunately, the seeming instant dismissal by local authorities of the possibility of racism being involved has created an impression of a nation in denial. This has seriously damaged Australia’s credibility and helped inflame public opinion in India and within the Indian community in Australia, who see the official line as indicative of an unwillingness to take complaints of racism seriously.

It is difficult to understand how the police are able to rule out racism completely and with such certainty. While a premature conclusion of racism would also be inappropriate, the apparent disproportionate number of attacks on Indians relative to other overseas students does suggest racism is a factor.

Quite. It’s not the people who are suggesting that racism is relevant here that have something to prove. It’s those who are denying it.

Other Countries Are Worse!

“Australians on the whole are no more racist than anyone else, and possibly less so than quite a few places”. This one is often accompanied by gratuitous assertions that because of this fact, if you criticise anyone in Australia for being racist you are an anti-Australian, latte sipping, left wing basket weaver (those who know me will know how deeply insulting I find that).

The rejoinder this is short an obvious: Yes, so what?

I have no doubt that Asian, American and particularly European countries are far more racist than Australia (anyone who disagrees with that is either ignorant of the OS experience or into pointless self-flagellation). There probably is no other country in the world that I would rather live in if I was of another race (or more pertinently, that I would rather my child to live in).

But so what? Racism isn’t a relative concept. It’s not less bad because others are worse. To put it another way, we wouldn’t stop trying to stamp out paedophilia in Australia just because we discovered it was more common in another country.

Further, putting false relativism to one side, Australia’s uniquely exposed to negative economic consequences of being perceived as racist (to wit see projections of declining Asian student numbers). We’ve got good reason to hold ourselves to a higher standard than everyone else.

All Violence is Wrong – We Shouldn’t Focus on the Racial Element

Violence is violence is violence. It’s repulsive in any form and there are strong laws against it in all forms so we shouldn’t fixate on the racial element.

A week ago I probably would have agreed with this. I was against hate crime legislation because I thought that was already adequately covered by existing criminal laws and anything beyond that was getting close to criminalising thought.

However, upon reflection in light of the incident that I experienced, I think I’ve changed my mind. I think violence with a racial element IS in fact different to other violence because it has a differential impact. Violence with a racial element has an additional, targeted intimidation impact on minority communities that general violence doesn’t have. I hadn’t really thought about this before, but sitting on that train the news reports of racially violent incidents came immediately to mind in a way that I think general reports of violence wouldn’t have in that situation. In this way, the broader intimidation impact of violence is greater when it’s targeted towards an identifiable sub-group.

Further, generalising the problem in this way can blind policy makers to presence of important causal factors specific to the racial subgroup. It’s a bit like saying to an Aboriginal that alcoholism is bad wherever it manifests itself, therefore we shouldn’t focus on alcoholism in remote communities, rather simply on the general, Australia wide problem.

Don’t Talk About It – It’ll Only Make It Worse

The common objection to confronting the racial element of these incidents is that even if it does exist, if you talk about it in public, one of the following things will happen:

* You’ll ‘fuel’ the problem by given racist louts the publicity they crave;
* You’ll provoke a ‘law and order’ bidding war between Labor and the Liberals; and
* You’ll undermine the operational independence of the Police.

And on top of that, it won’t change the behaviour of people who are already flagrantly disregarding the norms of society.

I have to say, this is the response that irritates me the most. It amounts to little more than the advocacy of sweeping the issue under the carpet.

I simply can’t accept this – Words matter.

Words matter even more when they are being delivered by the Police – the bearers of the Government’s monopoly on the use of force. The Police enforce our society’s laws and as such are standard bearers for our values. Their public statements and behaviour carry special force. You could probably run off half a dozen slogans of police road safety campaigns. When the Police speak, they speak with authority.

However, when the Police simply ignore the overwhelming correlation between being Indian and being a victim of violent crime, they send the message that it’s ok for the rest of the community to similarly look the other way when confronted with racial prejudice. By equivocating in the face of overwhelming evidence of racially motivated violent incidents, the Police send the message that the broader community is also equivocal in the face of racism. When this prejudice is unchecked in the public debate it creates the impression that there is room for this in our society. And they send a message to the Indian community that they are not taking the issue seriously.

Let’s Face Facts and Act

It was this feeling that the representatives of law and order in our society, the Police force, were letting down the Indian community by not being honest about the issue that prompted my extremely minor contribution to remedying the problem. It was as much an act of absolution of guilt as community service (though there are international precedents and a strong public policy argument in favour of such an approach). I decided to start mapping incidents of racial violence and any consequent law enforcement response because I wanted to try to face the facts and see the scale of the problem for myself. I haven’t gotten far and I’m shocked that it has received the attention that it did, but I’ve already learnt more from people’s response to the idea than I probably expected to learn from the exercise itself. It hasn’t changed my view that Australians in general aren’t racist. But it’s made me realise that we’re more ‘actively complacent’ about it than I ever expected.

Elsewhere: Hoyden About Town.

A PERTH doctor is unable to recover his $200,000 Lamborghini after it was seized by police who caught his mechanic driving it at speeds up to 70km/h over the limit.

The mechanic was allegedly clocked driving the luxury vehicle at more than 160km/h in a 90km/h zone in Perth’s east yesterday.

The doctor who owned the car had left it in the care of the garage where the mechanic worked.

Under Western Australia’s anti-hoon laws, police can impound any car exceeding the speed limit by more than 60km/h, even if it is not the property of the driver.

[snip]

The Lamborghini’s owner did not have extraordinary circumstances which met the criteria for the car’s early release.

“We try to be fair, without favours, so whether it’s a Lamborghini or whether its a Kingswood or a Holden Commodore, we judge it fair, case by case,” Mr Gregson said.

“This case did not meet the grounds of an extraordinary hardship.”

I guess innocent unless proven guilty should not be an extraordinary circumstance, although sadly I don’t think that’s what they mean. It really doesn’t matter whether the guy has one car, or a hundred cars. It’s not about hardship. It’s about the fact that he is being punished for someone else’s crime (a crime which, I might add, has not yet been proven in a court of law).

This must be how we keep Hitler out power.

I think there is no doubt that hate crimes occur in Australia, and that it would be futile to deny that racism is a real problem in this nation.

However, there are a few issues around these events worthy of comment.

My impression, and it’s only that, is that the majority of these crimes appear to have occurred in Melbourne. I don’t think that’s because there’s a particularly high proportion of Indian students studying there. It may be higher, but there is certainly a large number in Brisbane. Is there something particular to Melbourne that may account for this?

Secondly, I wonder, above and beyond educational measures universities and others may have implemented to advise new students about safety, what can be done? The response to this, and previous incidents, seems to me to carry a demand in its wake that the government take action, but it’s not at all clear to me what action would be desirable or effective. I am sure, though, that the disavowal of racism, which cannot be unrelated to other issues in the Australian-Indian bilateral relationship, and concerns about the image Australia projects more broadly, is not helpful.

Elsewhere: Senator Sarah Hanson-Young at GreensBlog.

Update: New post.

The Forgotten Australians are the child migrants who were shipped out to various church-run institutions, deprived of connection with their extended families, and in many cases subjected to physical and sexual abuse.

Both Rudd and Turnbull expressed a commitment to ensure that children in state care are never again subject to such abuses. That’s the hard part, of course. The Herald Sun has recently run a series of articles (strangely not online) claiming that Victoria’s youth training centers are “dysfunctional”. The solutions proposed are straight out of the tabloid “tough love” textbook, of course, but if there’s any substance to the claims in the stories we’re still a very long way from adequately protecting all children in the care of the state.

CORRECTION: The apology was to all of those in state care of the era, not just the child migrants.

There does appear to be some positive developments in this discussion paper, with sedition disappearing as an offence at least in name. But there’sof areas in the discussion paper that are of concern on first glance, notably giving police additional powers to conduct warrantless searches. There’s also this:

The Government also wants to press ahead with controversial plans to make it a crime to urge attacks on someone based on their nationality or religion.

The Attorney-General says he has seen intelligence and phone tap logs that back the need for this law.

Mr McClelland says it is the kind of law that could have been used against people involved in attacks on Indian students if nationality, race or religion was the driving force.

Don’t we already have laws that make it a crime to urge attacks on other people? If so, what do we need more such laws for?

Police allege a suicide terrorist plot had been formed to enter military barracks in Australia with semi-automatic weapons and carry out a sustained attack on military personnel.

The four men, who are Australian citizens of Somali and Lebanese descent, were arrested in a joint counter-terrorism operation in Melbourne this morning.

AFP acting Chief Commissioner Tony Negus says if the attack had been carried out, it would have been the most serious terrorist act on Australian soil.

There are of course a number of questions to come out of these events. The first is how in the heck The Australian got such detailed and prompt coverage of the story, to the annoyance of Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland, who stated that:

“It’s had the potential to place my staff and the staff of the AFP and other agencies involved at some risk,” he said.

“The fact that this was made public before the warrants were issued is an obvious concern, that the story was leaked is an obvious concern.

“That’s clearly a problem that we’ve got and we have to acknowledge that and we have to deal with that. But I think that I am particularly concerned about anything that puts my members or other law enforcement officers’ lives at risk.”

The Australian has responded here.

The second question that comes to mind is whether McLelland’s recent comments on changes to terrorism laws were at all inspired by the circumstances surrounding this case.

Anna Bligh certainly wasn’t exaggerating when she observed that Queensland Labor had a bad week. Nor has this week started off well for her, with a Galaxy Poll showing her approval rating plunging to 33%, just barely ahead of a disastrous Labor primary of 30%. Nor, seemingly, are many disillusioned ALP voters parking their votes with The Greens. The Liberal National Party scored a 48% primary, and all this washes through to a 59-41 two party preferred lead for the LNP.

As William Bowe notes at The Poll Bludger (where he also has more detail on the poll), the numbers may be inflated precisely because of the beating Bligh took over recent days. But there’s enough evidence around (including a poll commissioned by the ETU on the privatisation of public assets) that the Queensland regime’s support has collapsed very quickly.

Galaxy asked a range of questions stemming from Tony Fitzgerald’s accusations last week about corruption and cronyism, and found a large majority of Queenslanders disillusioned with both their government and the Queensland Police Service. Bligh would have taken cold comfort only from Wayne Goss’ favourable comparison of her with her predecessor Peter Beattie in remarks he made recently, given that Goss also pointedly referred to the dangers of long term incumbency in creating a climate where ethical lapses flourished.

It’s unsurprising that comparisons have been made with the last days of the National government, which Goss himself swept out of power almost two decades ago. But a better analogy for Anna Bligh’s current plight might be the re-election of the Keating government in 1993.

Keating threw away the trust of electors by raising indirect taxes in his first post-election budget, tearing up the basis on which he’d come to power — opposition to John Hewson’s GST. Anna Bligh’s credibility was one of the few things the ALP had going for it in the March state election. Her opposition to the dictates of ratings agencies was a hallmark message. The announcement after Labor squeaked back in that the fuel subsidy would go, that public sector wages would effectively be frozen and jobs disappeared through efficiency dividends, and, particularly, the plans for the sell off of state assets have seen the trust the electorate had in Bligh collapse.

Fully 86% of Galaxy respondents oppose the privatisation plans.

This is the political context for the corruption and cronyism crisis. Bligh may well have acted quickly, banning consultants from reaping success fees, pre-empting a CMC enquiry by prohibiting Labor MPs from attending “pay for view” business fundraisers, and ratcheting up the pressure for full public funding of elections. But the public aren’t inclined to credit her for decisive action — because the basis of trust that existed between citizens and their Premier has already dissipated.

So it’s the backflip on Bligh’s election promises, and rhetoric, which has proved fatal to her chances of handling the Fitzgerald backlash effectively, no matter how skillfully she responds to public concerns. The LNP could always self-destruct, but the smart money at this stage would have to be on a change of government at the next election.

If that comes to pass, Bligh and her advisors will rue the day that they decided the Queensland public would cop a complete backdown on the policy stance they took to the people in 2009.

Mr McClelland says because an attack has not happened yet here, Australians may be becoming a little too comfortable and relaxed.

“I do think there is a danger of complacency and I do see evidence of complacency,” he said.

He says he is about to unveil a raft of changes to Australia’s counter-terrorism laws, including one targeting those who radicalise people, then try to tip them over the edge into launching an attack based on political views, ethnicity or religion.

When news of this measure first broke, it caused a stir with some defence lawyers arguing that the laws are already too wide but Mr McClelland says the risk of incitement is real.

“The reality is the Government isn’t contemplating this law out of a vacuum. We are contemplating it in light of knowledge that we have,” he said.

Nobody has died in a terrorist attack in Australia since 1986 – and in that case, the only person who died was the bomber. Given that the government has doubled the size of ASIO, and passed a whole raft of fairly draconian laws relating to terrorism, don’t we have the luxury of asking, at a measured pace and with actual public debate, whether the threat really merits further restrictions?

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.

Beyond that, it’s hard to figure out what the hell kind of game is being played here. However much Australia, and the developed nations, may “need” China, they “need” us too. And throwing citizens of Western countries into what is going to be perceived as arbitrary detention, which could theoretically go on for years is going to have rather a chilling effect on business ties. That’s in no-one’s interest, least of all the Communist Party leadership’s. So what’s really going on here?

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?

Just what is it with Victorians and their adoration of violent criminals, drug dealers and standover merchants? The same people who ring into talkback radio or post on news websites to froth about our crime epidemics and complain about too-soft sentences for drug addicts, dealers, burglars and “gang violence” (always “ethnic” gang violence), are all too happy to talk Desmond Moran up as a great guy who was just like one of us, really!.

His mother had a terrible job getting him to come in for tea. Putting his little boot in he’d be, bless him. All the kids were like that then, they didn’t have their heads stuffed with all this Cartesian dualism.

The traders are mourning “Tupps” – a “good guy” one insisted, as she watched the boys from forensics sweep up the street, inch by inch, shoulder to shoulder, working their way to Ascot Pasta and Deli-Cafe, where Moran had gone for his regular coffee. He’d sit on the street there most days.
No, she doesn’t want her name in the paper. But she wants someone to write that he had lots of friends and plenty of respect in this neighbourhood. People knew who he was, what was said, but they took him as they saw him.
“He was always the first to one to put his hand out to anyone who needed a hand. He’s been in the area for years and years, a lot of people will be very upset.”
Whenever she saw him sitting having his usual at the cafe where he died, just down the road from her shop, she’d get a “g’day, love”.

Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.

As the police and others have pointed out, the media focus on the “gangland identity” angle has spawned a grotesque celebrity, epitomised by the “Gangland Matriarch” Judy Moran and the photos of her extensive wardrobe in the press. Life is imitating art. The men have been adopting Sopranos-like black suits and dark glasses at the many funerals that are a frequent event that world. Some of them, it seems, aren’t quite sure where Underbelly ends and their lives begin.

This is lapped up avidly by the same people who would be howling for the stocks to be brought back if they caught one of the poor wretches at the bottom of that food chain selling drugs to their schoolchildren. But then, the Morans and Williamses and Kanes are such lovely, old-fashioned folk at heart!

Mrs Simmel: Oh yes Kipling Road was a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other’s houses with each other’s property all day. They were a cheery lot.

I don’t know if this celebration of (white) criminality is more rife in Victoria than other states. Maybe it’s because when we think of (white) criminal gangs we think of the Kellys (Scenery! Horses! Interesting cyberpunk armour! Robin Hood!) rather than the Rum Corps. The younger ones have Chopper Read, who has his own website, book deals and stints on talk shows. And then we wonder why some of the Yoof see crime as a viable way of life.

His alleged crime? Drink-driving.

These events are appalling on many levels, but, worst of all, the previous (Labor) state government had known about problems with the vans since October 2006, and didn’t do anything about it.

How are we supposed to achieve reconciliation with Australia’s indigenous people if we continue to treat them in ways that would result in a prison sentence if done to a dog? 20 years after the deaths in custody Royal Commission, no less?

Glen Milne claims that ethics have been thrown overboard in government attacks. Possum at Crikey says that you’d have to be a lead poisoned crackhead to believe this. Denis Shanahan believes that the fate of Rudd, Swan and Turnbull is out of their hands.

Over at Fairfax, Peter Hartcher thinks the controversy will leave a question mark over the Prime Minister, and Phillip Coorey reminds us that there’s no such thing as a free ute, someone will have to pay for it.

In the Telegraph, red herring email stenographer Steve Lewis gives us his version of events and Malcolm Farr wonders just who will fall off the back of the Ute.

Do I have an opinion? Sure. Does it matter? Nope.

As is usual, when it comes to press gallery and political types, truth is the first casualty. It’s going to be a long and interesting day.

Update [dk.au]: Email found. It’s fake.

Update [by Kim]: The focus turns to Malcolm Turnbull’s ethics and judgment.

“The Author of A Blog” cited as the claimant was the pseudonymous author of a blog known as “Night Jack”. He was a police officer whose blog provided an inside view of police procedure, the seamy side of life and the law. In April this year, the Night Jack blog received the Orwell Prize for political blogging. However, after this, Patrick Foster, a journalist from The Times, determined to work out the identity of the blogger using internet research. Foster has justified his actions on the basis that the Night Jack blogger “was…using the blog to disclose detailed information about cases he had investigated, which could be traced back to real-life prosecutions.”

The blogger sought an interim injunction to restrain Times Newspapers Ltd from publishing any information that would identify him. Although an injunction was granted up until the time of judgment, the High Court ultimately refused the claimant’s application. The officer has been revealed to be Richard Horton, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary.

Legal Eagle draws an interesting inference from all this about Foster’s motivations:

I can’t help finding the action of The Times rather petty and malicious. For some reason, some journalists seem to despise blogging and bloggers (eg, an article in The Australian the other day to which I can’t even be bothered linking). There’s a suspicion in my mind that this journalist thought to himself, Let’s bring down a blogger who is writing something that is interesting and exciting.

Our loss is also a loss for the City of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality heath care despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.

Statement from Dr. George Tiller’s family.

I hesitated to post this, because I don’t want it to look like we’re using it to score a political point. But while I am incredibly sad for Dr. Tiller and his family and friends, I am also angry at an act of terrorism aimed at preventing women from exercising their legal rights by making people too frightened to continue working with family planning organisations. It’s good that “mainstream” anti-abortion groups have condemned the killing, but what does it say about them that they knew they had to? What do we really think will happen when law-abiding doctors are called nazis and mass-murderers whom the legal system can’t or won’t stop?

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in march. “Dear Sara,” it read. “It is our information that you are currently an employee of Women’s Health Care Services, a facility that provides abortions.” It went on to suggest that Sara Phares, an administrative assistant at the clinic in Wichita, Kansas, quit her job and repent her sins. “Please know that we are praying for you,” the letter concluded. It was signed “Troy Newman, President, Operation Rescue West.” A week later, hundreds of Phares’ neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. “Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these.” The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as “Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies” and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper’s ransom note, that neighbors “beg her to quit, pretty please.” The third postcard dispensed entirely with pleasantries: “Sara Phares is not to be trusted! Tell her to get a life!”

The National Director of Priests for Life makes the “abortion industry” sound like the mafia; the fact that women flew to Dr Tiller’s practice from all across the US apparently does nothing to prevent them from spinning the line that abortionists are “killers for hire”. If it is such a lucrative career then why aren’t there thousands of Dr. Tillers across the free market-loving United States?

No, most anti-abortionists aren’t murderers, and I have no doubt that most are also horrified about Dr. Tiller’s murder. But as Jill Filopovic points out:

Since 1977, there have been at least 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery and three kidnappings (pdf) committed against abortion providers in North America. Tiller himself survived an assassination attempt in 1993.

Promoting fear and hatred is not pro-life.

Update: More proof that terrorism works?

Well, here’s an idea. Let’s take these poor sods – who’ve been sitting in Gitmo for seven years for no good reason – as a simple matter of humanity. To keep the nervous Nellies amongst the Tories happy, let’s use some of the 1500 ASIO agents Australia now employs – to be 1800 by next year, triple what it was back in 1996 – to keep an eye on them in the unlikely event one of them does pose a threat. Perhaps they could could spare some of the agents who clearly don’t have enough to do, given their interest in chatting to people holding up banners outside coal-fired power stations (as discussed by Senator Scott Ludlam in Senate Estimates recently)?

Luke was stabbed five times by a group of men outside the 7-Eleven store at the corner of Brunswick Road and Royal Parade about 2am yesterday as his sister-in-law and her friends watched.

The men had followed him to the store after Luke broke up a fight in which they had been involved outside a nightclub about two blocks away.

Whatever the full story of this incident is (and it seems to my possibly naive eye that there must be slightly more to it than has currently been released to the media), it’s certainly put the frighteners up Brunswick locals. I know I’ve always thought Brunswick was immune to the kind of thing you see in the CBD or Prahran. It seems like, at least outside some venues, it’s arrived.