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Martin Hirst, an old Trot (extreme communist), teaches journalism at Deakin university

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Sky sets up rival to ABC overseas

SKY News Australia is planning to launch an international news platform, called Australia Channel, which could replace the ABC’s embattled Australia Network if that service is cut in the May budget.

The Australia Channel, which could be launched without taxpayer funding within months, will have five channels of news, business, political and sports content available to 180 countries, including key markets of China and the Middle East.

Sky has not yet informed the Abbott government about its planned service, which will be delivered via IPTV, or internet-based television.

The ABC has a 10-year $223 million federal government contract to deliver the Australia Network.

The new venture will make it obsolete because such funds will no longer be needed to provide a service. It is understood the new venture would be produced and distributed at no cost to taxpayers. Sky submitted a tender for the service that was favoured by two expert recommendations but the Gillard government chose to retain the ABC.

The new proposal has come together in the last four months. All five channels will feature full Australian content, produced from the local Sky News operation, with one channel dedicated to business, particularly focusing on the Asian market, to encourage Australian investment in the region.

The channels will champion Australia’s business, trade and investment interests.

They will include a 24-hour sports channel, and all channels will feature live or current coverage. Parliamentary proceedings will also be broadcast. The service means Australian television content will, for the first time, be broadcast in North and South America, Europe and Africa.

Even with federal funding, the ABC’s Australia Network has been struggling. In February The Australian revealed the ABC had asked rival networks for content to show on its international broadcasts.

Australia Network television controller Patrick Emmett wrote to Sky to ask whether it could ­acquire and broadcast programs including Australian Agenda, Asia Pacific Outlook and the Switzer Show.

The Abbott government is looking at cutting the Australia Network’s Asian broadcasting service in the budget. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has questioned whether it was being trumped by the internet and whether it was an effective use of funds.

ABC managing director Mark Scott defended the service in a speech at Melbourne University last month, saying it was crucial to Australia’s soft diplomacy aims and ambitions, and was targeting Asia’s rising middle class. He said axing it would be a step backwards.

Tony Abbott has accused the ABC of being unpatriotic and said he was considering the network’s future.

Howard government foreign minister Alexander Downer, who had previously granted the contract to the ABC, said in February its programming choices were poor.  “What I had in mind was news and current affairs, not cooking shows, English-language programs and Bananas in Pyjamas,” he said.

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Call to get homeopathic remedies off pharmacy shelves

Pressure is mounting on pharmacists to stop selling homeopathic products after a major review found there was no credible scientific evidence to support the alternative medicines.

Despite scepticism about homeopathy among pharmacists, many pharmacies sell homeopathic products that are marketed for illnesses including migraine headaches, bleeding, persistent nausea and vomiting, coughs and colds, insomnia and arthritic pain.

But there are now increasing calls for them to abandon the products after a major National Health and Medical Research Council review of homeopathy concluded there was no reliable evidence it could treat health conditions.

The review, released earlier this month, also stated: "People who choose homeopathy, instead of proven conventional treatment, may put their health at risk if safe and evidence-based treatments are rejected or delayed in favour of homeopathic treatment."

While the review has been criticised by homeopaths who are appealing the finding, some doctors and pharmacists say it should make it unethical for pharmacists to continue stocking and selling homeopathic products.

Under the Pharmacy Board of Australia code of conduct, pharmacists are required to practice "in accordance with the current and accepted evidence base of the health profession, including clinical outcomes" and by "facilitating the quality use of therapeutic products based on the best available evidence and the patient or client's needs".

John Dwyer, an immunologist and emeritus professor of medicine at the University of NSW, said given pharmacists were currently lobbying to perform more healthcare, such as vaccinations and disease screening, it was time they put their ethics ahead of profits and stopped selling useless homeopathic products.

He said the increasing commercialisation of pharmacies had led many to stock a range of dubious complementary and alternative medicines, giving them an air of credibility that could mislead the public.

"One can only imagine that commercial reasons dominate," he said.

Grant Kardachi, president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, the professional body representing 18,000 pharmacists, said he planned to inform members about the review council's report because homeopathy did not sit well with their aim for pharmacies to become more professional "health hubs".

"I think we'd be saying you should seriously consider, if you are stocking these products in your pharmacy, what that actually means, and you should be looking at other products in your pharmacy to treat patients' health conditions where you know there is more evidence," he said.

Greg Turnbull, from the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, which represents pharmacy owners, said it did not plan to do anything with the review.

Taree pharmacist Ian Carr said he had never stocked homeopathic products and hoped his colleagues would follow suit. "I, personally, think that the professionalism of pharmacy is threatened by the selling of non-evidence based products," he said.

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The slow death of free speech

How the Left, here and abroad, is trying to shut down debate —  from Islam and Israel to global warming and gay marriage

Mark Steyn

These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:

In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’
In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.

At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.
In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.

In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.

And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in ‘striking the balance’; they’ve drawn the line and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: ‘“Shut up,” he explained.’

A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

The examples above are ever-shrinking Dantean circles of Tolerance: At Galway, the dissenting opinion was silenced by grunting thugs screaming four-letter words. At Mozilla, the chairwoman is far more housetrained: she issued a nice press release all about (per Miss Alcorn) striking a balance between freedom of speech and ‘equality’, and how the best way to ‘support’ a ‘culture’ of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusiveness’ is by firing anyone who dissents from the mandatory groupthink. At the House of Commons they’re moving to the next stage: in an ‘inclusive culture’ ever more comfortable with narrower bounds of public discourse, it seems entirely natural that the next step should be for dissenting voices to require state permission to speak.

At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s ‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor.

White feminist Germaine Greer can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine’s standards, Ms Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of ‘cultural identity’: ‘One man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation,’ as she puts it.

But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of ‘one man’s mutilation’ and lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too ‘hateful’ to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism, everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on the role of women.

That’s another reason why Gay Alcorn’s fretting over ‘striking the balance’ is so irrelevant. No matter where you strike it, the last unread nonagenarian white supremacist Xeroxing flyers in a shack off the Tanami Track will be way over the line, while, say, Sheikh Sharif Hussein’s lively sermon to an enthusiastic crowd at the Islamic Da’wah Centre of South Australia, calling on Allah to kill every last Buddhist and Hindu, will be safely inside it. One man’s decapitation is another man’s cultural validation, as Germaine would say.

Ms Greer has reached that Circle of Tolerance wherein the turkeys line up to volunteer for an early Eid. The Leveson Inquiry declaration of support signed by all those London luvvies like Emma Thompson, Tom Stoppard, Maggie Smith, Bob Geldof and Ian McKellen is the stage that comes after that House of Commons Science and Technology Committee — when the most creative spirits in our society all suddenly say: ‘Ooh, yes, please, state regulation, bring it on!’ Many of the eminent thespians who signed this letter started their careers in an era when every play performed in the West End had to be approved by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. Presented with a script that contained three ‘fucks’ and an explicit reference to anal sex, he’d inform the producer that he would be permitted two ‘crikeys’ and a hint of heavy petting.

In 1968, he lost his censorship powers, and the previously banned Hair, of all anodyne trifles, could finally be seen on the London stage: this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Only four and a half decades after the censor’s departure, British liberals are panting for the reimposition of censorship under a new ‘Royal Charter’.

This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: new blasphemy laws for progressive pieties. In the New Statesman, Sarah Ditum seemed befuddled that the ‘No Platform’ movement — a vigorous effort to deny public platforms to the British National party and the English Defence League — has mysteriously advanced from silencing ‘violent fascists’ to silencing all kinds of other people, like a Guardian feminist who ventured some insufficiently affirming observations about trans-women and is now unfit for polite society. But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?

Nick Lowles defined the ‘No Platform’ philosophy as ‘the position where we refuse to allow fascists an opportunity to act like normal political parties’. But free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out.

Free speech, wrote the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson last week, ‘buttresses the political system’s legitimacy. It helps losers, in the struggle for public opinion and electoral success, to accept their fates. It helps keep them loyal to the system, even though it has disappointed them. They will accept the outcomes, because they believe they’ve had a fair opportunity to express and advance their views. There’s always the next election. Free speech underpins our larger concept of freedom.’

Just so. A fortnight ago I was in Quebec for a provincial election in which the ruling separatist party went down to its worst defeat in almost half a century. This was a democratic contest fought between parties that don’t even agree on what country they’re in. In Ottawa for most of the 1990s the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was a chap who barely acknowledged either the head of state or the state she’s head of.

Which is as it should be. Because, if a Quebec separatist or an Australian republican can’t challenge the constitutional order through public advocacy, the only alternative is to put on a black ski-mask and skulk around after dark blowing stuff up.

I’m opposed to the notion of official ideology — not just fascism, Communism and Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘climate change’ and ‘marriage equality’. Because the more topics you rule out of discussion — immigration, Islam, ‘gender fluidity’ — the more you delegitimise the political system. As your cynical political consultant sees it, a commitment to abolish Section 18C is more trouble than it’s worth: you’ll just spends weeks getting damned as cobwebbed racists seeking to impose a bigots’ charter when you could be moving the meter with swing voters by announcing a federal programmne of transgendered bathroom construction.

But, beyond the shrunken horizons of spinmeisters, the inability to roll back something like 18C says something profound about where we’re headed: a world where real, primal, universal rights — like freedom of expression — come a distant second to the new tribalism of identity-group rights.

Oh, don’t worry. There’ll still be plenty of ‘offending, insulting or humiliating’ in such a world, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Mozilla CEO and Zionists and climate deniers and feminist ‘cis-women’ not quite au courant with transphobia can all tell you. And then comes the final, eerie silence. Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage.

So what’s to talk about? Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

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