Our return to the dark side

The so-called “Pacific Solution” to Australia’s refugee issue is a fraud and a national disgrace.

 The politicians on both sides may have deluded themselves into thinking that they really care about the refugees, but its crap.

Their objective has nothing to do with refugees – it’s all about getting re-elected. It’s all about opinion polls.

The whole issue hangs on two flawed assumptions:

1.  We are being inundated with boat people.
2.  The rest of the world wants to come and live in Australia.

Compared to refugees around the world, the boats coming to Australia are an issue only to the politicians and the journalists who feed on them. The numbers are just not significant that is la verita.

That the masses in Australia should be ignorant and parochial enough to think that “this is the best little bloody place on earth” and therefore we must protect it from being overrun by the hordes is only natural. For the politicians to join in this delusion and feed it is unforgivable.

Very few people in this world ever want to leave their home – that is la verita.  Australia is a great place, but so is Disneyland. They are great places to visit on holiday.  But if you ask people from anywhere on earth where they want to be, where they want to raise their children, you will soon realise “there’s no place like home”.

That’s where they were brought up, that’s where their parents were brought up and that’s where their grandparents were brought up.

So don’t worry Aussie’s, they are not all planning to come over here to steal your telly.

We have some of the most poverty stricken people on earth living just off our shores – almost within swimming distance – but they are not piling on to boats to get to “a better life” in Australia. They want to stay home.

Boat people do not come from our near neighbours, they come from war zones.

So, with respect, Mrs Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, here’s an idea – if you really want to stop “boat people” coming here, then why don’t you stop bombing their fuckin’ homes!

If you really want to stop refugees, focus your efforts and your resources on ending the wars, and achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Now really, why the hell do I have to write this stuff? What has happened to our journalists?

I’m really busy right now. I left newspapers 15 years ago. I am just recovering from the flu and I was looking forward to having a nice easy day on the couch playing my son’s Xbox.

Then this morning, as our politicians are debating their “Pacific Solution” legislation in Canberra, I hear Richard Towle, UNHCR Regional Representative for Australia, New Zealand, PNG and the Pacific, reveal to Fran Kelly that he hasn’t yet been consulted.

Talk about ruin my day! I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it! What the fuck is going on!

Now the legislation has just passed the House of Representatives – well hoo-fuckin-ray!

And protesters have come out in the streets to object – well God bless them, but they haven’t got a chance. They don’t understand the political forces, the levels of delusion they are fighting against.

With no leadership in Canberra, most journalists out to lunch or out of a job, and both major parties now singing to the choir of xenophobia. the poor refugees haven’t got a fuckin’ chance.

Let’s be clear here, former Defence Force Chief Angus Houston may be an expert at creating refugees but he is not an expert at dealing with them -- Richard Towle is.

As Richard told Fran this morning he had “some concerns” with the Gillard Government’s “Pacific Solution”. Which is diplomatic speak for “it stinks”.

His idea of a regional solution would involve raising the standards of treatment in the region, not lowing Australia’s standards. That’s why he wasn’t consulted.

The fact is torturing refugees is not the way to solve the problem. Nor is it the way to thwart the people smugglers. The way you do that is make it safe for people to stay home.

And as for Tony Abbott singing the praises of the Howard solutions – and calling on the Prime Minister to apologise for criticising them – I would like him to explain to me why those responsible for implementing the Howard policies should not be charged under The Crimes Act with child abuse.

As Richard mentioned in passing this morning we are still trying to deal with the mental illnesses caused by the Howard policies.

I still shudder when I remember a child being returned to Wimmera Detention Centre against the medical advice (and protests) from the government phychiatrist, back in those dark days. Torturing refugees maybe a vote winner in this country, particularly in some marginal electorates, but it is also a crime against humanity.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m frankly too busy to look it up right now, but I would like Tony to explain to me why members of the government can be exempt from child-abuse laws – particularly given that the Immigration Minister is the legal guardian of unaccompanied minors.

If this had happened in Bosnia in the ‘90s, we would be pursuing them to the ends of the earth. So why aren’t we charging all those who knowingly inflicted harm on refugees, and all those public servants who sadly “were only following orders”.

That’s enough, it’s time to start treating refugees like refugees. Don’t make me have to tell you again.

Titanic – the greatest disaster in Newsland

I have always been fascinated by our fixation with the The Titanic sinking. It certainly was a very tragic event and a great story, movies etc. But since then there have been four worse peacetime maritime accidents. Who could name two of them?

The worst of all time happened just 25 years ago. The Dona Paz sank in flames after a collision with a petrol tanker killing more than 4300 people – almost three times the death toll on the Titanic.

The difference between the two is that one happened in “Newsland”, while the other only happened in the real world.  I used to work in Newsland, it’s an amazing place. But it’s nowhere near as amazing as the real world. Today Newsland seems to be drifting off into space and I’m beginning to lose touch.

I few years ago I thought about the Dona Paz and why it never made it to Newsland.

I can’t wait for the Dona Paz 3D movie.

Letter to ABC's Mark Scott

Mr Mark Scott AO

Managing Director

The ABC

Dear Mark,

Please do not be too discouraged by the failure of the ABC’s first bold “data journalism project” looking at the coal seam gas industry – Coal Seam Gas: By The Numbers.

I think the ABC should be applauded for attempting this ambitious project. As the issues facing the human race become more complex we desperately need reputable news organisations like the ABC to guide us through the technical complexities and the noise of vested interests so that we, as a democratic society, can make informed decisions.

The intent of your data journalism project is just what we need. Its failure was due to problems plaguing journalism across the developed world.

I’m sure that Wendy Carlisle and her team are all excellent journalists. With your help and guidance I’m confident they will be able to learn from their mistakes and have another go and this topic.

But first, Mark, they will have to realise who they are. They are journalists, and all journalists – including you and I – are egotists. We are very good at talking to and about other egotists and this all makes very entertaining media and is the bread and butter of journalism.

Commercial media are forced to dance this dance. If a newspaper like The Age wants to talk about coal seam gas, it will seek a celebrity like Olivia Newton-John.

But Mark, the ABC is free from many of the commercial realities faced by other media. You can make a difference to this paradigm and you tried with this data journalism project.

However, in order to succeed in such a technically complex area, your egotists are going to have to speak to experts. It’s not good enough just to read the data put out by experts like Geoscience Australia, bureaucrats and energy companies. Egotists like us journalists do not understand the complexity – the algorithms – behind this data, as Wendy and her team, I’m sure, now realise.

As a daily newspaper egotist who wandered off into the energy industry about 20 years ago I can assure you, Wendy, and all the journalists at the ABC, that the experts aren’t so bad. In fact they are truly amazing and always more than willing to help. With issues like coal seam methane I strongly suggest you find an engineer to help you through the numbers. I always do this now and I wished I’d started 40 years ago.

I’m not involved with the coal seam gas business, but I am aware of the magnitude of what our Australian engineers are attempting here. They will be the first in the world to produce LNG from unconventional gas. This is a huge technical challenge, but if they succeed they will have achieved far more in the world’s efforts to combat climate change than any Canberra polices aimed at our domestic energy consumption.

This is a very important topic, Mark, and as a huge fan of the ABC I am looking forward to Wendy’s efforts to do it right. This will be a great milestone of modern journalism.

Yours sincerely

Leonard McDonnell

PM is right. We are being fed crap on climate change

The most effective way for me to reduce my domestic greenhouse gas emissions would be to kick my family out of the house and live alone. Then I could walk up and down the street waving my greatly reduced energy bills and proclaiming what a wonderful greenie I am.

It would be a fraud, of course, just like most of Australia’s attempts to tackle climate change.

Australia is shirking its responsibility in this global challenge because our policies are dominated be ignorant egotists who have deluded themselves into believing they are greenies.

We are not leading the world on climate change – far from it.

Ignorant, loud-mouthed, egotistical ‘greenies’ and deluded journalists and politicians are keeping this country splashing around in the kiddies paddling pool instead of assisting with the big issues in the deep end.

The climate change policies of both major parties are stuck in our domestic electorate. Climate change is a global problem. Australia is a minor energy consumer in this world, but we are a major energy producer and this is where our efforts should focus.

We are a major energy producer in the fastest growing region of the globe – Asia Pacific. There are hundreds of millions of people living in poverty across the Asia Pacific region.

I recently visited communities that have infant mortality rates that make even our worst Aboriginal communities seem like Shangri La. The reason is even remote Aboriginal communities have access to medical care when their children get really sick. In many communities in our region of the world there is no medical care, there is no Flying Doctor, no ambulance, no ‘intervention’. So parents regularly bury children, who die of routine illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhoea, or malaria.

But, the good news is things are improving. Countries are working hard to raise their living standards to levels we take for granted. The bad news is achieving this requires capital and energy – lots of it. As a result Asia’s energy demand is growing at roughly the equivalent of a new ‘Australia’ joining the region every 18 months.

Naturally these countries are going for the most affordable energy and that is coal. Australia, being the world’s largest coal exporter, is therefore doing OK out of all this humanitarian endeavour. It helped us dodge the GFC.

When I hear the Australian Government pledge to reducing our domestic greenhouse emissions by five per cent, I say ‘so what.’

We are going to increase the amount of renewable energy in our power generation to 20 per cent – big deal. We might as well pour money into Morris Dancing – at least it would create more jobs.

If we really believed that climate change was serious, if we really believed that it required urgent action, we would stop wasting money on mirrors and propellers and instead concentrate on trying to improve coal-fired power generation.

If we could develop a one percent improvement in the world’s future coal-fired power generation this would dwarf anything Australia did in our puny domestic market. Yet the Gillard Government’s latest climate-change policy had nothing in this area.

And when a company in Victoria, HRL, embarked on an ambitious project to build a pilot-plant to attempt to prove technology with the potential to reduce emissions from coal-fired power by 30 per cent, so-called “environmentalists” turned on them like rabid dogs. Where were our politicians or journalists who could have put this outrageous attack into perspective?

If this project has been killed, then it is not beyond credibility to say that those responsible have dealt a severe blow to the world’s efforts to combat climate change. They clearly believe that their own egotistical agenda is more important than truly tackling climate change. They have no awareness of the real challenge and are quite content to just ‘kick their family out of the house’.

Climate change exposes a fundamental flaw in our democratic system – policies are formed by egotists. However, tackling climate change requires technically sophisticated collaborators – engineers.

They are essentially excluded from the debate.

This is a multi-faceted, complex, technical problem -- we won’t get the answers from focus groups.

We can measure our way to 'la dolce vita'

From the 27^th to the 30^th of this month (October) global experts will gather in Busan, Korea, for the OECD World Forum. Although this event has much greater potential for influencing the future of the world than the Copenhagen Conference on climate change, it has been all but ignored by the world’s media.

Every key player and informed commentator knows that at best Copenhagen will result in a lot of politicians making well-meaning promises they can’t keep – just like Kyoto.

Busan, on the other hand, is about getting results. It’s about the “Global Project on ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’- hosted by the OECD and run in collaboration with other international and regional partners - it seeks to become the world wide reference point for those who wish to measure, and assess the progress of their societies”.

It’s a cause that has been embraced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to his credit.

But his initiative has largely been treated with ridicule by the media. Knowing the media as I do, this is not surprising. What is been attempted at Busan is way outside the popular media’s vocabulary.

Our journalists are far-more at home with the finger-pointing, accusations, arguments and emotional rhetoric generated by climate change. This sells papers. Results-driven constructive initiatives like the OECD’s Global Project, or the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, just don’t have anything to offer the media. They lack the strong emotions the media needs to attract customers like you and me.

Tracking effective measurements is one of the most powerful means of bringing about change. I once asked an engineer how he had achieved such remarkable results in improving the energy efficiency and reducing the greenhouse emissions from his industrial plant. He said it was just a result of measuring and tracking theses parameters of our business. “Once we established benchmarks and then tracked our progress as part of our everyday business, the plant operators starting finding all sorts of ways to reduce energy waste,” he said.

This is what the OECD, as well as credible organisations around the world, have been doing for years. But they will never achieve their full potential until they are adopted by the mainstream media.

We do it for anything to do with money, such as share markets, GDP, consumer sentiment, but if it does not relate directly to money we ignore it.

The media goes into a frenzy whenever interest rates move. Here in Australia, particularly since the last election, we saw all sorts of claims and accusations about which party, Liberal Coalition, or Labor, were best at keeping interest rates low.

But do interest rates really present a credible measure of a government’s worth? The merits of debating levels of interest rates under Liberal or Labor leadership is so spurious given the impact of international factors on Australia’s economy.

And anyway, Governments are not just elected to steer the economy – we are a society not just an economy.

According to pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim, it’s another issue floating around in the public debate lately that is a much more accurate measure of the health of a society than money – it’s suicide.

Durkheim believed that the only true way to gain empirical evidence of our society’s health and wellbeing was by counting how many of us decide to check-out early.

So how do our historic Liberal and Labor Governments go on suicide rates?

According to the World Health Organisation, it’s the Liberals who hold the record for suicide rates in Australia. But not just any Liberal Government, it’s the Liberal Party’s icon, Sir Robert Menzies. He managed to increase the suicide rate by an astounding 37.6 percent to almost 15 per 100,000 people – an all-time record – in a decade and a half of Government.

Most remarkably he managed to increase women’s suicide rate into unprecedented double figures by the mid-‘60s.

Between 1950 and 1965 our female suicide rate went from 4.7 per 100,000 to 10.8, climaxing with an astonishing 42.6 percent increase in the first five years of the swinging ‘60s.

What could have happened to create such a dramatic spike? Looking at the statistics from a high altitude you could not miss the fact that this was a period of tremendous social change in the role of women. This was the epicentre of women’s liberation as they burned their bras and came out of the kitchen and into the workforce.

Does this mean that many of our mums and daughters chose to put their heads in the oven rather than leave the confines of the kitchen?

A quick look through Wikipedia reveals that in January 1961 The Pill went on sale in Australia, April 1964 saw Melbourne woman Judy Hanrahan appointed as the first female teller in the Bank of NSW since the War. In the same month Menzies refused to ratify the International Labor Organisation convention on equal pay for women.

As our suicide rates neared their peak, Donald Horne published The Lucky Country. But then, coincidentally after Sydney’s Philip St Theatre staged its famous comedy revue, A Cup Of Tea, A Bex and A Good Lie Down, the tide turned. Menzies handed the reins over to Harold Holt and female suicide rates began to decline. However, it wasn’t until 2003, with John Howard as PM, that they returned to their 1950 rate of 4.7.

There is no question that according to Durkheim’s measure, the Age of Aquarius, peace and free love was not a happy time. As our society lifted her skirts and let down her hair, and the beautiful people indulged in drugs and sex and rock and roll, women in the English-speaking world were killing themselves in record numbers. But it has to be said that the UK and US rate for women never came close to our double figures.

Our rate for men, on the other hand, lives in double figures.

The title for achieving the highest suicide rate for men goes to Labor icon Bob Hawke. In 1990 it hit an unprecedented 20.7 per 100,000. This was just as the country was heading into Treasurer Keating’s “recession we had to have”.

Durkheim’s mission over a century ago was to find uncompromised data to measure and study social trends, because our intuition is often very misleading.

For example, we like to think of ourselves as “the greatest little country on earth” – land of beautiful beaches, sunshine and “she’ll be right mate”. So then how come, according to the OECD, our suicide rate is nearly twice that of those “whinging”,” whining” Poms?

Sociology has come a long way since Durkheim’s day. We now have a wide range of sophisticated measures such as Cantril-ladder-type questionnaires to test how we’re doing as a society. But, as I said earlier, for some reason we choose to ignore them unless they are linked to money.

Experts agree that suicide rates and the epidemic of depression that has been sweeping the post-war industrial world seems to be linked to breakdowns in social cohesion. In short, it has to do with the “ME” generation. Anything we can do to turn our “ME” upside down to make a “WE” society will improve our outlook and reduce our suicides.

In the past communities grew around a cathedral, synagogue, temple or a mosque. Today we worship the bourse. Our daily news outlets report on the Dow Jones Index, the FTSE, the Nasdaq, the Hang Seng, the Nikkei, the All Ordinaries, the S&P, CPI, GDP, the dollar etc, etc, etc.

As Robert Kennedy said in 1968 – ironically, as American women were killing themselves in record numbers – we measure “everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”. Three months later he was shot dead.

So the 3^rd OECD World Forum on “Statistics, Knowledge and Policy” (October 27-30) will feature its Global Project on "Measuring the Progress of Societies". Although it has been embraced by President Sarkozy who is developing a measurement template “for every interested country or group of countries” for now it looks like the world media’s attention is elsewhere.

However, the success or failure of these initiatives – and therefore our success or failure in achieving our goals including tackling climate change – will depend on the media.

So come-on editors and producers, step away for the sheep and start making real progress.

Here is a sample of some of the human-factor measures you can choose from. They are all tried and tested.

• The Gallup World View
• World Happiness Database
• OECD Measuring the Progress of Societies
• Community Indicators Victoria
• World Bank Development Indicators

This is only a few and each of these have links to many more.

If we are serious about winning the "War on Terror", if we are serious about building a better world for our children and grandchildren, then we will measure the things that matter most and we will report the results along with the weather, the stock market trends and the value of the dollar in our newspapers and on the evening news.