Loosen curbs on our liberty

Comment from the publisher of "The Australian"

DAVID Marr's essay "His Master's Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard", weaves such a tapestry of alleged lies, deception, censorship, intimidation and persecution that, if we believed it all, Australians should be in a state of despair. While I agree with Marr some of the time, I can't accept much of his reasoning (in his article, published in Quarterly Essay Issue 26). Debate in Australia is vibrant and intense at all levels of society and through all media: newspapers, radio, television, at public meetings, through the internet and in journals like this.

The problem I see is the degree to which the flow of information that generates or fuels informed debate has been stifled. When information is suppressed, our right to know how we are governed and how our courts dispense justice is diminished. Our democracy loses some of its spark. Unlike Marr, I think there are many underlying causes and I am optimistic (they) can befixed.

Marr's passionate analysis of life during John Howard's 11 years as Prime Minister is undermined by the zeal and doggedness of his ideology and jaundiced by his dislike of the man. The problems we now face have occurred at the hands of Australian governments of all political stripes and at federal, state and local levels. Many hundreds of statutes, some federal, some unique to different states, have cumulatively created a wall of prohibitions (that hampers) what Australians can know about how our governments and courts function. It is, quite frankly, unhelpful to lay all the blame at the gates of the Lodge.

Some of the worst examples of the erosion of free speech can be seen in the adoption of spin at all levels of government and business. Debates on issues as important as this should be conducted with a view to achieving change rather than polarising positions so that problems simply become entrenched. Government decision-makers are unlikely to be swayed by rhetoric describing Howard as an evil object of derision. For example, Marr's statement: "After being belittled for most of his political career, Howard came to power determined public debate would be conducted on his terms." Belittled for most of his political career? Really? Only by his political opponents.

Marr applauds actor Terry Servio's "devastating" portrait (of Howard) in the stage show Keating! The Musical that made him "a figure of fun, but strangely unfunny". Do these observations advance the cause of free speech? Marr accuses the Government of discrediting its critics to undermine their arguments. Isn't Marr guilty of the same? Howard may well have come to power determined public debate would be conducted on his terms, but show me the politician who doesn't. There is no doubt he has deliberately built a public relations machine that ensures the "correct" spin is applied to stories affecting his Government. It rivals the propaganda machines of previous governments.

But it is disingenuous to suggest the erosion of free speech has come about as a result of a Machiavellian blueprint carefully implemented over just the past decade and by just one man. The erosion has been gradual, over at least three decades, and has occurred at the hands of commonwealth and state governments of all colours. Still, an event that happened halfway through Howard's tenure significantly compounded the problem: the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Marr contends that 9/11 was just one of a string of events, including the internet, that "changed everything". I believe 9/11 differed immensely because it was an attack on democracy and capitalism and on innocent human life that until then was inconceivable. The 9/11 attack created the climate of public acceptance that strong measures had to be introduced to counter the terrorist threat, and this was heightened in Australia by the Bali bombing and our participation in the coalition of the willing in Iraq.

These events led to a string of anti-terrorism laws that gave rise to intrusive surveillance, holding of suspects without charge and curbs on the security matters that journalists could report. While the Government regards this as a practical approach to extraordinary events and the public generally (sees) it as a necessary evil, there must be balance between security and preservation of civil liberties and the public's right to know. The recent Haneef saga is proof enough that even in times of heightened security, there must be an open process.

If citizens are to effectively participate in a democracy, form opinions freely and to protect their rights and interests, they need access to information directly or via the media on theirbehalf. But across all levels of government, this balance has shifted away from the people to governments, which makes today's freedom of information laws unworkable.

The incidents are numerous. Just recently in NSW, despite repeated attempts, access was denied to an Education Department report on violence in schools. We were also not allowed to know which pubs have the highest levels of alcohol-related incidents of assault and robbery. These surely are things that the public should be allowed to know.

At the commonwealth level, News Limited is still smarting from our costly two-year battle between The Australian and the Treasurer, Peter Costello, for the release of details of the effect on taxpayers of bracket creep, and the first home buyers scheme. Costello believed release of this information was not in the public interest. The High Court agreed his decision should be final, but I believe the media's role is to lift the veil on exactly this kind of information.

Over the 25 years the commonwealth's Freedom of Information Act has been in place, decisions like this have chipped away at the integrity of the act. An entrenched culture of resistance to disclosure of information has developed and technological changes render it at odds with the way the modern media operates. It's time for a wholesale overhaul of the act.

Another way in which debate is stifled can be seen in the recent conviction of Herald Sun reporters Gerard McManus and Michael Harvey for refusing to divulge the identity of someone who embarrassed the Government by leaking information about the workings of Veterans Affairs policy. It has become commonplace for federal police to investigate journalists to identify leaks and to relentlessly pursue public servants suspected of being informants, even when the information they have leaked is patently in the public interest. The man charged in the Harvey-McManus case was convicted and later freed through lack of evidence, but he lost his job. This could be perceived as deliberate intimidation to demonstrate the consequences for any other public servant who might consider leaking.

Perhaps the worst case of trying to gag an issue followed The Australian's disclosure of lax security and organised crime at Sydney airport, which was found by an inquiry to be chillingly accurate. But rather than fix the problems, the Government unleashed the federal police to seek and destroy the whistleblower. It's my view that in a healthy democracy there would be no need for whistleblowers because governments would be transparent when it came to matters of genuine public interest. Unfortunately, there are times when governments get things very wrong and exposure is necessary. The security issues at Sydney airport were serious and exposure of them led to an inquiry and a $200 million upgrade. Was the decision by the whistleblower to expose the problems, or the work by The Australian to publish them, in the public interest or not?

Across all Australian jurisdictions, there must be a process and protection for public servants to make public interest disclosures. But given that, even with sound protection, some public servants will not use the process, it needs to be accompanied by laws that allow journalists to protect the identity of their sources in cases of public interest.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock's recent tinkering with the Evidence Act to give judges the discretion to decide whether to force journalists to give up their sources is inadequate. The new act does not provide real protection for journalists as the burden of proof remains on the journalist to show why they should not be compelled to reveal their source. It should be the other way around, where the prosecution must show why disclosure is necessary.

Judges must also take some responsibility for the lack of transparency. An important issue overlooked by Marr is the propensity for judges in all jurisdictions to close access to courts and suppress details of cases, often with scant reason. Our media is buckling under more than a thousand court suppression orders preventing publication of certain facts from court cases. Some of these, for example protecting the identity of an undercover police operative, are clearly justified, but many are not. For example, is it fair that a public figure may be protected from embarrassment by having his identity in a court case suppressed? And should an entire anti-terrorism trial be closed even though not all the information is related to national security?

It seems our courts increasingly view the media as a nuisance. No doubt we are sometimes, but shoving us away and denying us access to the workings of our justice system is dangerously short-sighted. Democracy relies on the fact justice is not only done but is seen to be done.

Recently the mishmash of Australia's defamation laws were made uniform. While not perfect, the defamation laws have improved vastly, and this leads me to be a much more optimistic man than Marr is. The significant progress made shows how, with leadership at the commonwealth level, improvement and consistency could also be achieved in areas such as suppression orders.

So how did the erosion of public debate happen? Marr believes it happened because Howard in 1996 set out on a deliberate campaign to cower his critics, intimidate the ABC, gag scientists, silence non-government organisations by threatening their finances, neuter Canberra's mandarins, curtail parliamentary scrutiny, censor the arts, ban books, criminalise protest and prosecute whistleblowers. I'm less paranoid.

I also have trouble accepting Marr's analysis of the Australian character. He believes Australians project themselves as easygoing larrikins with contempt for authority, when in reality he says they passively accept it. He traces this to the mood of the British settlers from whom most of us descend. He says those who settled America did so to secure freedom in a time of repression, hence their preoccupation with freedom. Meanwhile, those who settled Australia were content with British law and customs and compliance with authority. But then he makes the extraordinary claim that Australian children are taught not to speak. "It's a big part of our upbringing, learning to shut up, to listen, to wait until we're spoken to," he says. "Somehow the habit of holding back has been drilled into the character of the nation." He continues: "Perhaps at some obscure level we still think keeping quiet will do us good when Canberra tells us what we can say, what we can know, when we can speak."

I grew up in a different Australia. The one I see encourages children to think and talk and develop self-confidence and be part of a vibrant open multicultural and prosperous society. And the evidence of this is everywhere. In Australia we talk, we question, we read, we listen to dissenting views and we work for change. We're doing it now: three months ago, an unprecedented coalition of Australia's major media organisations formed to work for improvements to free speech. I'm proud that News Limited is part of that coalition and I'm confident that we really can effect change.

Of course, freedom comes with responsibility and we must continually strive to ensure that our media deserves to represent the public in its right to know. I accept that we haven't always been as careful and responsible as we should be in our reporting. But errors by the media should not allow us to lose sight of the far bigger issues at stake and we should all accept that a healthy democracy is also a place where people argue, disagree, criticise and speak out fearlessly when they believe it's important to do so.

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The know-nothing generation

This is a pretty clear proof that the educational system no longer teaches the basics

The last time Neville Wran sued The Sun newspaper it was over a picture that cast him as Adolf Hitler. The news shot, circa 1982, captures the then NSW premier with dark, slicked hair and square-rimmed glasses, speaking from a lectern with a bulbous black microphone. The microphone looms over Wran's upper lip like a Hitler-style moustache. The accompanying story speaks of Neville Hitler and Adolf Wran and a matter of rising interest rates. Back then it caused outrage on Macquarie Street. It also cost the now-defunct Sun some serious cash.

These days it makes a humorous case for students of media law. Yet each time I show the clipping to a university class, I have to explain who Wran was. I choose not to explain who Hitler was, but it would not surprise me if some students needed reminding.

For centuries universities have been held up as hallowed halls of light and learning. Even in this country, where a decade of budget cuts has crippled classics departments and left research funding pools in drought, universities are valued for their contribution to intellectual debate. They are also seen as a salve for unemployment and social disharmony. But Australian educators face a serious problem: how to enliven a student body that thinks googling a wiki is a serious academic endeavour. In a world swamped by information, many students have little interest in accessing it. We have law students who have never read a case, English students who do not read books and journalism students who do not buy newspapers. Don't laugh, it's true.

Each semester I ask my students how many of them buy newspapers. Five at most raise their hands. The showing is even more dismal when it comes to listening to radio. Television and online news sites are more popular. But when I ask how many get their main news from headlines on their Yahoo! webmail there is a round of sheepish laughter. For journalism students in particular, the past month has been a great time to be following the news. First there was Rupert Murdoch's controversial take-over of The Wall Street Journal. Then there was the biggest ethical issue since the cash-for-comment debate, when the ABC journalist Michael Brissenden broke an off-the-record agreement with the Treasurer, Peter Costello. The sad reality is that many students do not know who Murdoch is. Let alone Brissenden and Costello. Cash for comment, huh?

When the information technology revolution crashed onto our shores, educators were excited about the possibilities of online learning. They saw the internet as a way of moving learning into the 21st century and online forums as a way of bolstering flagging classroom discussions. Instead, what we have experienced is an information tsunami. Too much data is as dangerous as too little data. We're drowning, not waving. And students have simply tuned out. One NSW lecturer recalls asking a class of second-year law students to name a radio station on the AM band. Not one could. Another law faculty lecturer recalls how her discussion about Nixon and Watergate drew a blank. No one had any idea about either. A health sciences lecturer recalls how she played her students a YouTube clip of geriatric musicians covering the Who's My Generation. "My students had no idea who the Who were," she says. "And no idea why it was significant that the single was recorded at Abbey Road."

In my classes, eyes glaze over when I talk about Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus and the case for journalistic shield laws. There are yawns when I question whether Fairfax journalists should have pounced on the Kevin Rudd strip-club scandal first. And when I argue the importance of leaks in the Mohamed Haneef case, I see the worried brows before me. Mohamed who?

Recently, ABC TV's Media Watch took issue with a Today Tonight story in which Chinese students were interviewed about Australian values. The story, dubbed "Passing The Pavlova Test", featured two young women who admitted they had never eaten pavlova and did not know Don Bradman. Sadly, it is not only international students who admit a gaping lack of general knowledge. Spelling among local students is atrocious. Plagiarism is rife. Academic references include wikis and lecturers' notes. Cut-and-paste technology has made libraries redundant. Many students do not know where the library is and some leave their laptops only reluctantly to attend classes. Some academics believe that in an industry worth almost $10 billion, as many as one in two students are cheating.

It must be said, this is not a criticism of students. Students for the most part are doing it tough. Most full-timers work part-time jobs and all part-timers arrive straight from work. International students are grappling with homesickness and language barriers. What must be addressed is the ideology of the ignorance. Students know what needs to be done and they'll be damned if they'll do any more. One colleague pointed me to the book Age of Extremes, in which the historian Eric Hobsbawm recalls a student asking whether the description "World War II" meant there had also been a first world war.

Contemporary curriculums must move with the times. Completing the assessment and working through the required readings is not enough. If we require students to consider the past, we must also allow them the opportunity to consider the future. Neville Hitler and Adolf Wran would both probably have something to say about that.

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Antisemitism was once accepted worldwide -- including Australia

Recently I was involved in one of those conversations most parents end up having. I had to try to explain to a young person how the Holocaust could have occurred. For me it involves not just what was unique about Nazi Germany, but what was not unique about it. It seems to me that unless you realise just how widespread anti-Semitism once was around the world, it's almost impossible to comprehend the road to the death camps. Of course it existed in Australia, too. The problem is that it's very hard to explain this today, because we've done a pretty good job of removing anti-Semitism from our society. It's so remote from most young people's experience that it's difficult to make it real for them.

But there are traces of the way things used to be, and a while ago I came upon a striking example in an old copy of this very newspaper. It was a letter to the editor, published on October 16, 1940. It's not a letter that would be published today, and the fact it was published then says a lot about the different public values of the time. The writer was the artist and critic Lionel Lindsay, and it was inspired by a visit he'd just made to an exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society. Lindsay, who like his good friend Robert Menzies had traditional tastes in art, was ropable. "The Australian public is perhaps yet unaware," he wrote from Wahroonga, "that modernism was organised in Paris by the Jew dealers, whose first care was to corrupt criticism, originate propaganda . and undermine accepted standards so that there should be ample merchandise to handle. It was Uhde, the Jew art critic, who proudly boasted that three-fourths of the art dealers, critics and collectors were Jews." Lindsay claimed that one-third of the artists in the exhibition had foreign names, due to the "influx of refugees", and observed that "true art grows like a tree from its native soil, and not from the sludge of decadent civilisations".

That the letter was published at all is a sobering indication of the extent to which anti-Semitism was tolerated by many of our ancestors at the same time Europe's Jews were about to be murdered. The good news (and this is part of the picture the young need to see) is that not everyone shared Lindsay's prejudices. There was a vigorous response in the Herald the next day from Peter Bellew, honorary secretary of the Contemporary Art Society. He wrote that Lindsay's letter "is unlikely to achieve any more than an enthusiastic 'heil' from the inmates of our internment camps, and maybe an autographed watercolour from Hitler".

He noted that Lindsay's maths was out, and only 17 of the 72 exhibitors carried foreign names. And most of them were not refugees, but had been born in Australia. Unpersuaded, Lindsay went on to write a book called Addled Art, published by Angus & Robertson in 1942. The book's cover showed a monkey, drawn as a caricature of a Jew and dressed as an artist, throwing rotten fruit at the Venus de Milo. The fact that a book like this could be put out by Australia's leading publishing house at such a point in history is worth pondering. Naturally each of us likes to think he or she would have been appalled by the publication. But on the whole our ancestors, people much like ourselves, weren't.

Lindsay was a conservative who believed modern art (by which he meant the work of most of the big names after the impressionists) was caused by "the age of speed, sensationalism, jazz, and the insensate adoration of money". Like many conservatives, he was incapable of admitting that lots of people had enthusiastically embraced the art that grew from these developments, so he assumed they must have been duped. This is where the Jews came in, for Lindsay shared the common belief that they were unusually interested in money. He believed the Jews, "the shrewdest race in the world", had seen the opportunity to promote an art that matched this new spirit, and Jewish dealers had forced it on a "defenceless public" by paying critics to praise it.

Like many a true conservative, Lindsay was not at ease with 20th-century capitalism, including advertising. He thought advertising had been given a big boost by the propaganda efforts of World War I, which showed just what could be done on a grand scale. Postwar the Jews, he said, applied this new expertise to art at a time when the public craved novelty, another manifestation of the spirit of the age. They did it well, in the process debasing public taste. "Now every kind of folly flew from the asylum cage," Lindsay wrote. "Cubism, purism, constructivism, neoplasticism, vorticism, expressionism and surrealism - to name but the leading creeds . how proverbially shrewd was the confraternity of Jewish dealers, who added the pleasure of 'taking down the Goysher' for immensely overpriced works of ultimate questionable value to forcing the painters of their race on the credulous Christian."

We tend to remember only those ideas from the past we find inspiring, or which seem to have contributed to the way we think today. But there is an argument we should also teach the young about some of the bad old ideas. After all, like smallpox, they're still out there somewhere.

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"Protester" update



Seventeen protesters were arrested and two officers left injured after clashes between police and demonstrators during today’s anti-APEC rally. Police said one officer suffered a head wound when hit with an iron bar while another was hit in the head with a dart during the protest which attracted about 5000 demonstrators.

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said that it was unfortunate that a few people decided to become violent. “I am extremely happy with the police operation and the fact that the majority of protesters complied with the wishes of police,” Mr Scipione said. “That said, I am not happy that police were targeted and assaulted in such a violent manner.” The 17 protesters arrested will face charges of assaulting police, offensive behaviour and resisting arrest.

NEWS.com.au witnessed two men being slammed onto the ground after police spotted them in the middle of the angry, vocal mob as it headed along Park St towards Hyde Park. However, the majority of the thousands who took part avoided any violence, and the gathering took on a carnival atmosphere upon reaching Hyde Park North. Police had feared a full-scale riot could break out and riot squad officers were out in force, fanning along the entire march route. Police dogs and the water cannon were stationed on side streets.

As the arrests were made, other protesters began shouting, "The whole world's watching, the whole world's watching." In the first arrest, a shout of "Watch out for that man" was heard before police sprinted nearly the entire length of a city block to crash-tackle him into the gutter. Other protesters rushed over to watch the action. In the second arrest, police again rushed into the crowd, dragging a tall man wearing a black mask from the middle of the road and slamming him heavily onto the footpath. He was then marched to a waiting police van. A third man - wearing nothing but a nappy - was also arrested and taken away.

Another four arrests took place at Town Hall station, while another was person was arrested by plain-clothed officers near the southern exit of Hyde Park. The protesters gathered at Sydney's Town Hall from about 9.30am (AEST) before proceeding along Park Street on the route approved by police following a court action banning access to Martin Place.

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