‘People should be aware of what’s out there. And not believe what they read just because it’s written.’

Astro-turf creation expert ‘Sharepro’

The lack of imagination shown by the media and politicians about the upcoming inquiry into the Australian media is making my head hurt. How many more media proprietors and vested editorial interests will falsely equate a quality, free press with a commercial one when the examples of the BBC and ABC are staring them in the face? How many more journalists must we listen to, as they reel off numerous and significant problems with the way the media conducts itself, before sighing that nothing can be done? Isn’t the sustained analysis of an inquiry precisely what you need to know to decide what can or should be done? And if so, can someone please, please make all those insisting we have to know what an inquiry will conclude for it to be justified go away?

Terribly academic of me I know, but then, I am an academic, with the life scars of a completed Masters and Doctoral degree to prove it. Which gives me a vested interest in the argument I want to make about the importance of suitably-qualified transparently-labelled experts participating in national policy debates. But I’m going to say it anyway, because no one else is talking about the credentialing issue, which is an important corner of the truly zeitgeist discussion about Australia’s democratic decline.

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This is an edited extract of an address given to the Australian Society for Australians who feel fondly towards but are also a bit afraid of Scientists.

Good evening and thanks for having me. I’m not a climate scientist but I am an active participant in our healthy democracy and all of my opinions are based on facts and freedom of speech, so I ask you what is the difference? I’m not saying there isn’t one but surely all free thinking Australians would agree that there isn’t one.

As Australians, we must encourage each other to have opinions about Science, to engage in vigorous debate about facts and stuff, especially the facts that support the views I hold and I can prove this look at this graph.

I have been asked here today this evening to tell you what I think and if you simply read between the lines, even though there is nothing there, you would want to be on the side of decency and justice when everything goes to hell in a handbasket if it hasn’t already because what about the government who do they think they are?

To begin, let us start where we will all end, dead and buried and alone in a ditch with no one to mourn for us not even Science because it is busy with its lonely vigil looking to the stars, to the stars.

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So, a funny thing happened a few months back. In my own little way, I contributed to this country’s disturbing trend towards shutting down freedom of speech. Or something.

Here’s how the story begins. You’ve probably heard of Lord Monckton. Don’t get sidetracked by the whole thing about the title. Just make sure we’re thinking of the same guy. Tours the world; talks about climate change myths and one world government and stuff; a bit like a British anti-Al Gore.

Well, he was coming to Australia for another speaking tour. And someone who I knew online sent me a message. Some ivory tower types had prepared an open letter, asking the University of Notre Dame to reconsider their invitation for Monckton to speak on campus. Would I co-sign it?

My academic area isn’t climate science. My research and teaching work is in psychology — but as a blogger, first on my own site and then for Crikey, I had covered issues about climate change and I was familiar with the public debate and its main participants, including Monckton.

I thought about it for a while. I passed the link along to a few people for them to think about as well. And then I made my mind up, and I added my name to the letter.

This letter wasn’t exactly massive national news. But it did get some mainstream media coverage. It generated some opinion articles. It drew a response from some prominent academic leaders. And, on the other hand, it gave some ammunition to our local community of so-called climate sceptics, who bundled it into their conspiracy theories.

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Time is a mighty river, and I am an ominously unpiloted rental kayak floating past the picnic area.

It’s my first day at a new job, writing the content for a website that helps young people who’ve had an experience of psychosis. I’ve blagged my way into the job through a psychologist friend, and as I run down my hill past a bubbling, mooing foam of quantum farm animals to the train station, I am increasingly possessed by the belief that when I get to the office I’m going to be immediately fired for not knowing anything at all about psychosis.

On the platform, two minutes early, I pull out the thick sheaf of academic papers my boss sent me. ‘Just give them a quick scan,’ he had said. ‘No problem,’ he had said. He had also said, ‘They shouldn’t give you any trouble.’

The first one is called ‘Non-Orthogonal Factor Analysis Of Something You Can’t Even Pronounce Because You’re A Fraud And Also Ugly’. It’s full of tables, Greek letters and that symbol that looks like ‘less than’ but has an extra line underneath because it hates me.

I’m a Film Theory graduate. Right now, sat on a bench on a windy train station platform staring at the exposure of my deception, I see myself in a very long shot indeed.

Another figure enters that shot, sees me and my papers and walks over.

‘Hello,’ he says.

He is standing one millimetre too close to me. His smile is one millimetre too jolly. He is wearing one too many scarves. Oh God, I think, I’ve got a ninety-minute train ride between me and failure and I’m not going to be able to read all these papers on mental health, which are my only chance of bluffing my way through the day, because here, to accompany me, is a nutter. I don’t believe in a higher power influencing our lives, but if I did I’d be cursing its perverse sense of poetic justice right now. Curse you, Batman.

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King Henry I of England, known to later generations as Henry Beauclerc, the Lion Of Justice, succeeded his flamboyant brother William II under deeply suspicious circumstances. However, over the thirty eight years of his reign he created the Chancellor of the Exchequer and presided over the beginnings of the Common Law justice system and the rise of the Roman Church’s power in England. A deeply pious man, much respected by clerics of the time, he also holds the record for siring the greatest number of illegitimate children of any English monarch.

Henry I (1069 – 1135) was the youngest of the four sons of William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard because he was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Normandy and a tanner’s daughter. William inherited the Dukedom of Normandy, which at the time covered about a third of modern day France and then famously conquered England in 1066.

After the Conqueror’s death, the oldest son, known as Robert Curthose because of his short legs, was given the Dukedom of Normandy. The second son had been supposed to inherit England, but died when a stag in the New Forest misunderstood the rules and killed him while he was out hunting, so the third son, William Rufus (because of his red face) became the King of England. Henry was given 5,000 pounds in silver and told to figure his future out for himself.

It’s a sardonic line but a cautionary tale: the internet is the place where men are men, women are men, and 14 year olds are the FBI.

It’s indisputable that we should be alert to and protect ourselves from online fakery. Much effort is devoted to safeguarding our privacy, our finances and our children from this risk. Others cast the net more broadly. Some suggest the use of anonymity or pseudonymity online, particularly in the online exchange and debate of ideas, can distort or even stifle free speech.

There is, however, another type of online misrepresentation that concerns me. They’re the people and organisations that seek to influence political and other public debates but aren’t quite what they claim to be. I call them Synthetic Supporters and Friendipendents.

Synthetic supporters are an extension of astroturfing, or fake grassroots support. Both are based on the principle that the public are more likely to believe someone from their own community or peer group than a politician, businessman or activist.

Stop The Boats. Great Big New Tax. Moving Forward. Working Families.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

On second thought, I take that back. On third thought, I don’t take it back, I just append to it ‘unless you’re going to actually say something for once’.

Which, on fourth thought, would render most of our politicians silent most of the time and our TVs and radios deliciously mute, or at least casting around for another few episodes of Big Fucking Bang Theory.

We’ve all been bitching for years about ‘soundbite politics’, where a complex issue, like tax reform or how the hell do ciphers like Craig Thomson get pre-selection, is boiled down to a few words at a presser.

Soundbites came into existence as politicians realised that they would only get a couple of sentences on the news so they had to make sure they were the right ones. Reporters liked it, because it made their jobs easier both from an editing point of view and in terms of not taxing their intellects by having to decipher a press conference for the rest of us who, mercifully, weren’t there.

Most economics reporting is about things we can measure: interest rates, inflation, the All Ordinaries index, the unemployment rate, the way the economy is rated by various agencies like Moodies, consumer confidence indexes, business confidence indexes, the exchange rate, GDP, balance of trade and, of course, the deficit.

These inevitably become scoring mechanisms in the media, and journalists tend to cheer when, for example, the exchange rate goes up, or boo when growth comes down. A deficit is nearly always seen as bad and a surplus as good, and we hang breathless on what the ratings agencies say, no matter how discredited the agencies themselves are.

This is not to say that such measures are not useful or important in and of themselves, but it is to say that as ways of keeping ‘score’ they are hopelessly inadequate. Such reporting obscures as much as it reveals because it oversimplifies the hugely complex way in which a globalised economy like Australia’s actually works. Our reliance on them, along with our tendency to back our favourite teams — whether they be political parties or economic ideologies — blinds us to the fundamental shifts in economic and social practice that are disrupting some of our most basic relationships.

This sportification of economics, much like the horse race-calling that passes for political analysis, is of particular concern at the moment because the whole nature of economic activity is going through a once-in-a-hundred-year shift; if ever there were a time to step back and look at things afresh it is now.

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If I had to nominate the biggest challenge facing the world today, it would be: problems. Problems today are at near-historical highs, and it’s getting to the point where, if drastic action is not taken to arrest this problem epidemic, we may be doomed to live our lives with the spectre of problems hanging over us forever.

But what can we do with these problems which beset us? Well, I favour an old-fashioned approach, and I think the best way to deal with problems is: solutions. I realise this may not be a popular stance, but I say horses for courses, and in my experience, the most efficient and timely way to address problems is with solutions. It’s not the only way, obviously — there are other time-honoured methods of tackling problems, such as hysteria, swearing loudly, and sword-fights — but I maintain it’s the best.

Now I realise some of you might be saying at this point: hang on Ben, we can’t just apply ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ as if tossing a large blanket over the head of a rowdy buffalo. You’re saying, all of the problems we have are distinct and unique, and they require separate, targeted solutions, a different solution to each problem rather than this all-in-the-same-chum-bucket approach. ‘Solutions’ is no solution, you cry — we need to get specific!

You are saying these things, of course, because you are very stupid. That’s not your fault — your mother probably took a lot of Prozac — but nevertheless, dull-witted and dribbly-brained as you are, you are totally failing to grasp the nub of the issue. And admittedly nubs can be hard to grasp, especially for chubby fat-fingered imbeciles like you.

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Everyone’s talking about gambling these days. Poker machines are at the middle of a war between the Federal government and just about everyone else, bikini-clad girls and voodoo dolls are flogging mobile betting apps, and sports betting (especially the aggressive in-game promotion on a certain channel for a certain company during a certain grand final held on a Sunday) and pissing off the majority of the population. Yet for all the fuss, there’s a couple of important points that need to be remembered.

Firstly, poker machines and sports betting are legal. Love them or hate them, they’re playing by the rules, even if they are bending those rules as far as they can. And secondly, changes are coming to both of them that will fundamentally alter their place in Australia’s gambling landscape.

But there’s another gambling option which, in this country, is somewhat analogous to the old wild west. The laws are few and were made to be broken, cowboys operate without fear or responsibility, and once you’re there, you’re on your own.

I’m talking about online gambling. More specifically, I’m talking about online casino games: poker, roulette, pokies, blackjack... you name it, you can find it online. These virtual casinos currently account for a small slice of the pie in terms of dollars gambled in Australia, but that slice is growing rapidly. And that’s a real concern.

Being a woman is difficult in 2011. Sure, it’s not like we have to cram our corseted bustles through the one-way turnstile in a cholera ward any more, but still — there are umpteen thousand messages and indicators coming from countless different directions telling us how to behave. To truly embody all that womanhood is, in all its daringly independent, lip-lined, booby glory, I don’t know which bits to ignore and which bits to pay heed to. Sexy, sexy heed. Or wait — unsexy, forthright heed. Ribbed heed for my pleasure? Shiny, bouncy, radiant, fifty percent more beautiful hee — LOOK, I JUST DON’T KNOW.

My pointers (and I don’t mean my boobs, unless that sort of humour is considered enlightened and spunky) come from the media, social networking, peers, parliament and periods. Well, not so much that last one, but we all know I had to give menses a mention at some point, so let’s just get that out of the way.

The kind of sheila I am depends on which chick bits I cherry-pick from society and culture, and unlike a set of perfectly symmetrical features, they don’t all line up. See:

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‘If an election were held today...’ is probably the most oft-repeated phrase in political reporting after ‘stop the boats’ and ‘people smuggler’s business model’. Weekly polls and the slightest irrelevant movement therein are reported breathlessly by the media and picked over by both sides of politics. They’ve ceased to be a reflection of political views and become instead a driver of them. Even worse, irrelevant polls, taken years out from an election, have become so all consuming that they’re used as political weapons, dangerous enough to threaten even a popularly elected Prime Minister.

It’s understandable that polling is journalistic crack for the Press Gallery. It creates concrete figures out of the unwieldy mass of varying opinions and allows nuanced responses to be reduced to a simple yes/no, for/against, capitalist/communist result. Much easier to deal with than policy analysis or objective assessment of government performance, but it’s lazy journalism.

While we hear so much about polls in the media, we hear very little about the mechanisms that give us the results. So here are the basics on the major polling organisations and some common tactics.

I used to think multiculturalism was the bee’s knees. Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful Australia has an official policy that recognizes cultural diversity under the umbrella of loyalty to our nation. Unlike Europe, which is struggling with how to conceive of the French identity of Algerian-ancestry migrants, or the German identity of Turkish-ancestry migrants, true-blue Aussies have come from many different ethnic backgrounds.

Who could deny the Aussie credentials of singer John Farnham; NSW Governor Marie Bashir; AFL legend Ron Barassi; TV presenter Ernie Dingo; and comedian Magda Szubanski even though they all come from a range of different ethnic ancestries and some (Farnham and Szubanski) were born overseas.

But while multicultural accurately describes Australians, multiculturalism has its share of critics, including Andrew Bolt, who, upon losing his racial vilification case, argued that ‘multiculturalists’ have silenced his critique (Herald Sun 29/9).

The problem with multiculturalism is that it means different things to different people. Opinions on the concept vary from severe criticism on the one hand, to promoting multiculturalism as a substitute for national identity, on the other. For Bolt, it seems, multiculturalism threatens Australia’s social cohesiveness.

Words are powerful things, far more than we realise most of the time. Public debate can be led or changed simply by capturing the words that bring a visceral reaction and claiming them for our own. So much so, that when it’s done properly, we don’t even realise that it happened.

Cuckolding the Media

Recently a certain prominent newspaper columnist, much loved down at the stagnant end of the gene pool, was found guilty of racial vilification. The tsunami of columns, blogs and editorials written on the subject since fall into one or more of the following four categories: 1. Joyous schadenfreude from detractors and ideological opponents. 2. Wails of outrage from rusted-on supporters and ideological allies. 3. Bipartisan support of the ruling by those who feel that freedom of speech is trumped by the rights of the individual. 4. Bipartisan objection to the ruling by those that see any impediment on freedom of speech as deleterious to a truly functional democracy.

We can safely discount the first two categories as unworthy of consideration for the sake of this exercise, as they obvious fail even a cursory litmus test of objectivity. The remaining two categories are notable in their balanced and nuanced regard for the subject matter and their seeming disparity with regards to social and political divides. When you have David Penberthy of News Ltd and noted Left academics like Tad Tietz and Antony Loewenstein all united — not only in their revulsion at the subject of the columns in question, but in concern over the ruling — you can be forgiven for thinking that the world has turned on its head. This is clearly not an issue that can be cleaved neatly between ‘left’ and ‘right’.

The famous scholar Archimedes is claimed to have said ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world.’ This wasn’t just an expression of his understanding of physics, but a statement about the power of the individual to change the world. Every day we are bombarded with messages from our employers, our peers, our spouses, our parents and the media that we should be on a path of goal oriented personal advancement. We’re supposed to be useful, prosperous and busy, but what about the value of laziness?

Laziness gets a bad wrap. It’s seen as an insult, a sin, a mark of a person who has given up, but I think that it deserves more consideration before you accept the conventional wisdom. There are plenty of reasons why we should embrace laziness and some of the rewards that come with it.

The most obvious advantage to laziness is avoiding the crap that you don’t want to do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something menial, or a demand placed upon you by someone else, there are hundreds of things that we’d rather not do, but still go through with due to a feeling of obligation. When you apply a bit of laziness to these problems you end up finding one of three things. You find an easier way to deal with the problem, someone deals with it on your behalf, or it turns out that the problem simply wasn’t worth dealing with.

The Libs are riding high in the polls, but they didn’t get there with careful planning and detailed policies. They did it by implanting into the media, and from there into the electorate, fear and relentless negativity towards the Gillard government. Despite the screeching about boats and carbon, however, the issue that matters most to people, the one that is most likely to dictate their vote, is employment and job security. And on that particular issue, the Libs have nowhere to go. Like the person atop Mount Everest, any step they take in any direction — left or right, forward or back — will be a step down.

They’ve been burnt by the business community, who abandoned them over WorkChoices in 2007, but they can’t credibly promise a system that will protect people’s jobs without getting business even further offside. They’ve been vindicated in their approach by high polls, but in policy terms they’re stuck. Whether they can stay stuck and win is an open question, but, in my opinion, it’s highly doubtful.

When Labor looked like losing the 1996 elections the labour movement were shouting out warnings that a Howard government would be disastrous for Australian workers. They couldn’t make that stick because union membership (as a measure of unions’ credibility) was in free-fall, and because Howard’s persona was all about reassurance, stability and certainty. The rise of skilled manual workers as independent contractors meant that people once considered solidly Labor were more inclined to vote Liberal through self-identification as independent entrepreneurs, with all the tax breaks and other incentives attached to such status and, naturally, they were less likely to be union members.

The waterfront confrontation was an aberration that proved the wider point: the union won a symbolic victory over dogs and balaclavas, while the government’s legislation remained in place and waterfront productivity went up. Everyone, apparently, was a winner.

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Gay and lesbian issues are quite popular in the Australian media right now; some would even say it’s all a bit sexy, as celebrities, politicians and a range of activists bang the drum for or against marriage equality As this debate heats up, with the ALP National Conference looming in December, folk like Miranda Devine and Jeff Kennett continue to twist the debate by spruiking the benefits of children being raised in a heterosexual home.

A clear ideological division has emerged with one camp believing that homosexuals have the same familial rights as their heterosexual counterparts whilst others believe that heterosexuals are a superior class and that only they have the right to marry and raise children. The battle lines have been drawn in a straightforward fight for equality, as gay and lesbian Australians move closer to achieving this right.

I grew up in a pretty good time in Australia, I reckon. Oh, the media, as it always will, would disagree, telling me all manner of terrible things about the mid-Seventies to early Eighties, but like so many increasingly frustrated Australians, I don’t believe what the media tells me.

As I made my neurotic way into my teens, I began to take an interest in politics. I was born just days after the Whitlam dismissal and every time it was dragged back to public awareness I would look into politics again, with the vigour one had to have in those pre-Internet days.

We were also enjoying the Hawke-Keating years and all of the eccentricities that entailed. I was disgusted by the election of Nick Greiner’s Liberal government in NSW and its horrendous gutting of the NSW school system. Then when Howard got in, I thought the world had gone to hell in a hand basket.

Before Howard, the thing I most remember was that politics seemed important and that politicians tackled the big issues. The arguments seemed to be over things that mattered, like, you know, the future of the country. Yes, there was a bit of aggro over stupid things and the beginnings of talk of ‘the public interest’ when someone wanted to embarrass Bob Hawke about his drinking or womanising, or Andrew Peacock’s wandering… um…peacock.

There are days in my life when things go swimmingly.

I find the right number of coins in my purse to feed the parking meter. The sun peeks out on my one and only laundry day. Sydney’s roaring traffic suddenly clears to give me a clear run home on a stormy night.

And then there are other days, like the one I had this time last year, when my sister passed away. Black is the only colour to describe it.

But do not fear. I am not about to ruin your double-shot macchiato with a tale of immeasurable sorrow.

Stanley Kubrick isn’t the first filmmaker to explore that which, in essence, unites mankind. But, with Dr Strangelove or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), I’d say that he is the first to suggest, with equal measures of cerebral political satire and derangement, that what unites mankind is our blind submission to fear and the orders established by authoritarian rule to both perpetuate and abate it. If you think Kubrick’s interpretation is somewhat absurd, slightly ludicrous or downright convoluted then you’ve either seen the film before or you’ve got an inherent grasp on the major themes and overarching tone of Dr Strangelove.

Australian blue mussels are at their best between July and February. Readily available from fishmongers, it is not worth the risk collecting mussels yourself. Cultivated mussels are farmed in clean environments and benefit from the same nutrients as wild mussels, as well as the useful commercially operated purging processes, which remove most of the sand and grit from the shells before market. The flesh of mussels should be plump and very tasty. Like all shellfish, mussels are best consumed as soon as possible after harvesting, so local is best. Store fresh mussels loose in a large bowl under a damp cloth in the refrigerator for no more than a day or two.

Justin's cryptic crossword is, from what we hear, making our readers quite cross. So to give you all some inspiration, the first person to tweet or email us a photo of the correctly completed crossword will win a free subscritpion.

Enjoy.