Saturday 30 November 2019

Machismo leads to masochism when parties refuse to give the slightest bit of ground to the other side

Analysis

Updated about an hour ago


If you opened a bank in which to put all the political capital invested over the years into not conceding a point to the other side and then lent it out at an exorbitant interest rates to political parties who suddenly realised they had sprayed quite a lot of the stuff against the wall, you would have a nice little earner on your hands.
It's one of those mysteries of politics that politicians so often dig in on some point — tactical, or policy — not because it is a point of high principle, but simply because they are not going to give the slightest bit of ground, nor make the slightest concession, to the other side.
It's been a habit on splendid display, along with the not-so-splendid results, in Canberra this week.
It encompasses everything from the continuing exercise in machismo that is the Angus Taylor/Clover Moore saga (which it is turning more into an exercise in masochism — but more of that later) to the Government's shock at its defeat in the Senate on industrial relations legislation.
Often new governments — and for that matter, new oppositions — start their terms in government promising to be sensible about how they conduct themselves: offering bipartisanship and civility where possible.
Most recently, consider the flak Labor leader Anthony Albanese got in his first few months in the job for agreeing to some pieces of government legislation.
But almost inevitably the civility doesn't last. Someone does something uncivil, and it is on for young and old.


The Coalition's embrace of machismo

But there is more elevated level of this whole game which both sides have played over the years and — it must be said — they have played to their own cost.
Here are a couple of examples. Paul Keating, as prime minister, decided to back his Health Minister Carmen Lawrence when she was under assault from the Liberal Party, which had even called a royal commission into her actions as WA premier.
He refused repeated calls for Lawrence to stand aside from her portfolio while the royal commission was under way.

On one level, you could say it was very noble of the Prime Minister to back someone under such political attack.
But there have always been tests other than actual wrongdoing associated with judgements about when ministers should stand aside.
These have been: is the ministers' continuing presence a distraction, or even a detriment to the government going about its work; and/or is the controversy in which said minister is involved a distraction from their work for us, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer?
These tests should still be the ones that are applied by prime ministers in making judgements about such things.
But in the past decade or so, the Coalition in particular has become very determined to not make concessions when its ministers are in difficulties.
And, too often, that has been based on the idea of not giving a "scalp" to the opposition, rather than on what is in the government's best interests — and for that matter the best interests of the minister involved, and the prime minister.
John Howard began his long time in the prime ministership upholding standards that seemed almost too high and at one point was losing ministers at an unseemly rate for what would these days seem relatively minor offences.
Having been so wounded, Howard erred in the opposite direction in his later years in office.

Coalition's tone plays into Labor's hands

The Coalition's embrace of machismo has gone even further though in recent years, particularly under Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
It doesn't just affect decisions over wounded ministers, but debating points too.
You sense it in the Coalition's still tortuous language about climate change and natural disasters.

And it seemed present this week in the conspicuous difference in the language being used about Westpac's extraordinary 23 million breaches of money-laundering laws, compared with the more hysterical tones of its language about the dangers posed by unions which needed to be reined in by its "Ensuring Integrity" Legislation.
In the wake of the Westpac revelations, the prime minister told ABC radio early in the week that the future of Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer was "[a] thing that the board and the management need to determine themselves".
"It's not for the government to say who should be in those jobs or not, but they should be taking this very seriously, reflecting on it very deeply, and taking the appropriate decisions for the protection of people's interests in Australia," Scott Morrison said.
"These are some very disturbing, very disturbing transactions involving despicable behaviour."

Labor, understandably, saw an opportunity, and Tony Burke asked Morrison in Parliament how could "23 million breaches of the law be a matter for the board if you're a bank, but legislation before the Parliament right now says that three breaches of paperwork can get you deregistered if you're a union".
It was Attorney-General Christian Porter who answered the question, saying: "when the opposition talk about paperwork, look at what this bill is actually being targeted towards — assaulting police, five times; assault by kicking, five times; wilful trespass, seven times; resisting arrest, five times; theft; attempted theft by deception; and intent to coerce, nine times.
"It's paperwork! And that was just one bloke. That was just one guy. That was just John Setka."

Spending political capital, and for what?

Apart from Setka's expulsion from the ALP blunting the potency of this attack, the very different tone of the language played into Labor's hands, and into the reasoning of the crossbench and particularly One Nation when it was finally time to consider whether it would back the industrial relations laws.
But more than anything else, the dogged determination to protect Taylor — at least until the Parliament rises — when the Minister has offered no rational explanation of how he came to be releasing doctored documents, defies not just common sense but self-interest.
Plenty of Coalition heads were shaking at the Prime Minister's approach on this issue, even before the storm broke about his call to the NSW Police Commissioner during the week.
Having dug himself into a difficult corner, Morrison went even further on to the attack, trying to rope in claims about police investigations into both Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten, but coming spectacularly undone on that by getting his quotes wrong.
Think about the two underlying messages of the government and opposition as the political year ends.

Whooping cough spike in Queensland prompts warning to pregnant women

Posted about 2 hours ago


Brisbane resident Stephanie Hall is expecting her first child, and like most first-time mothers, ensuring her baby gets the best start in life is her top priority.

Key points:

  • More than 1,500 Queenslanders have been diagnosed with whooping cough this year
  • Not enough people know pregnant women need vaccinating against pertussis, says expert Dr Andrew Redmond
  • Vaccination reduces a baby's risk of contracting whooping cough by 90 per cent

She said getting the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccination was a no-brainer.
"There's so much going on when you're a first-time mum and there's information overload," she said.
"For me it was really important to make sure that I had bub's health at the top of my list.
"I know that as a mother, having the vaccination means I'm protected and also bub's protected, but I think it is really, really important to make sure that those who are around bub in the first few weeks of life are also immunised."
Ms Hall is in the minority when it comes to her views on immunisation — Queensland Health said only 34 per cent of pregnant women are getting their recommended vaccinations.
Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital (RBWH) acting director of infectious diseases, Andrew Redmond, said Queensland is experiencing a spike in whooping cough cases.
So far this year, Dr Redmond said there had been more than 1,500 Queenslanders diagnosed.
Of those, 190 presented to the emergency department, up from 124 the same time last year.

"This year across the state we've had roughly a 50 per cent increase in diagnoses of whooping cough, which is really terrible news," Dr Redmond said.
"[It is] an unexpected and unwanted rise."
The condition causes severe respiratory problems and can be fatal for babies.
Dr Redmond said more education was needed to improve vaccination rates in pregnant women.

Whooping cough on the rise

  • Only 34 per cent of women take up recommended vaccinations in pregnancy
  • Respiratory infections are the leading cause of death in babies up to six months old
  • Pertussis (whooping cough) is the most common fatal infection in babies under two months
  • 42 per cent are babies hospitalised for pertussis are under six months old
Source: Queensland Health

"I think a lot of people engaging in good obstetric care know about it, but not everyone knows about it," he said.
RBWH obstetric physician and director of women's and newborn services, Karin Lust, said babies with whooping cough often got very sick with terrible coughing and reductions in their oxygen that could result in problems breathing and feeding.
"It's very tragic for families and obviously it is awful to see your child unwell, it is very distressing," she said.
Dr Lust said getting the vaccination while pregnant was the best protection, reducing the risk of infection by 90 per cent.
"Whooping cough vaccination during pregnancy boosts maternal antibodies, which are transferred to the foetus through the placenta, providing some immunity to the newborn baby until they can receive their first dose of vaccine around six weeks of age."
The vaccination schedule changed recently, meaning expectant mothers can get vaccinated earlier, from 20 to 32 weeks.
"It gives women a greater window of opportunity to actually have their vaccination so that they don't miss out on the protective benefits for their newborn baby," Dr Lust said.
"Also, it actually will afford babies who are born premature a level of immunity as well."

Climate change strike: thousands of school students protest over bushfires

Students in Australia gathered in Sydney, Melbourne and other capitals as part of the global 29 November climate protests
Student activists from School Strike for Climate Australia hold a sign saying 'Denial if not a policy'
Climate change protest: solidarity sit-down protesters outside the Liberal party office in Sydney on Friday 29 November. School students also went on strike in Melbourne and across Australia Photograph: Steven Saphore/EPA

A teenager whose family home burned down in the New South Wales bushfires has delivered a message to Scott Morrison at a climate emergency protest outside the Liberal party headquarters, saying: “your thoughts and prayers are not enough”.
Shiann Broderick, from Nymboida, said government inaction on the climate crisis had “supercharged bushfires”.
“People are hurting,” she said in a statement before the protest on Friday at the party’s Sydney headquarters on Friday. “Communities like ours are being devastated. Summer hasn’t even begun.”
The protests were part of an international day of climate strikes, the movement founded by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
Later, protesters chanting “fuck BHP” gathered around the mining company’s Australian headquarters in Melbourne.

The protest was organised by University Students for Climate Justice, one of the groups involved in a two-day protest of an international mining conference in Melbourne, which saw one protester trampled by a police horse, several hit with capsicum spray, a dozen people arrested, and provoked public criticism about the severity of the police response.

Swanson Street currently hosting a climate change march. They’re on their way to @bhp headquarters to make some noise outside. @7NewsMelbourne
The message outside @bhp is *pretty clear* (language warning) @7NewsMelbourne

Police stood by their actions, supported by the Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, but later said they were “disappointed” in the actions of two of the officers, including one who put a sticker on his body camera saying “EAD hippies]”.


Students at a climate change protest in Sydney. Sitting outside Liberal Party HQ. @abcnews @abcsydney
9:39 AM - Nov 29, 2019

Students in Adelaide gathered outside the South Australian Exploration and Mining Conference.
In Darwin protesters gathered outside the office of chief minister Michael Gunner and in Hobart a crowd rallied on the lawns outside state parliament.
The protests on Friday followed massive protests in September, when hundreds and thousands of people across Australia joined the school strike movement.
This time, the strikes were focused on the impact of devastating bushfires in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria in which six people have died and more than 600 homes have been destroyed.

They are calling for no new coal, oil or gas projects to be built in Australia, a transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030, and funding for a just transition for fossil fuel workers and communities.

Clive James obituary

The writer and broadcaster Clive James, who has died aged 80, once wrote a poem about visiting his father’s grave at the Sai Wan war cemetery in Hong Kong. His father, Albert, who had survived a PoW camp and then forced labour in Japan, died when the plane bringing him home crashed in Taiwan, and James later described this as the “defining event” in his life. The poem, My Father Before Me, ends:
Back at the gate, I turn to face the hill,
Your headstone lost again among the rest.
I have no time to waste, much less to kill.
My life is yours; my curse, to be so blessed.
James, who was six when Albert died, spent much of his subsequent life as a poet, essayist and broadcaster producing articles and song lyrics, many poetry collections and volumes of critical essays, four novels and five books of memoirs, as well as hosting umpteen television shows. That fever of busyness was to compensate not only for his father’s death, but for how his mother’s life fell apart on being widowed. “I am trying to lead the life they might have had,” he said in 2009. “It’s a chance to pay them back for my life. I don’t like luck; I’ve had a lot of it.”
James was born in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His mother, Minora (nee Darke), named her only child Vivian, after the male star of the 1938 Australian Davis cup team. It could have been worse. There was, James noted in Unreliable Memoirs (1979), a famous Australian boy whose father named him after his campaigns across the Western Desert: he was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris.
Vivian James was spared further feminisation when Gone With the Wind was released. “After Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara, the name became irrevocably a girl’s name no matter how you spelled it,” he wrote, so his mother let him become Clive after a character in a Tyrone Power movie.
A bright child with an IQ of 140, James went to Sydney technical high school, and studied psychology at the University of Sydney. While there he was not only literary editor on the student paper, Honi Soit, and director of the student revue, but also took part in the Sydney Push, a libertarian, intellectual subculture that flourished in pub back rooms and whose associates included Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. After graduating, he served for a year as an assistant editor of the magazine page at the Sydney Morning Herald before sailing to London at the age of 22. There, he shared a flat with the Australian film director Bruce Beresford, became friendly with Barry Humphries and spent three years paying the rent as a sheet-metal worker, library assistant, photo archivist and market researcher.

Clive James in the BBC TV series Postcard from Miami, 1990.
Clive James in the BBC TV series Postcard from Miami, 1990. Photograph: PA Archive/PA Images
But the lure of literary London proved stronger. His byline soon appeared in the Listener, the New Statesman and other periodicals. In a self-penned obituary that he later included on his website, he wrote: “Clive James rapidly established himself as one of the most influential metropolitan critics of his generation ... The Observer hired him as a television reviewer in 1972, and for 10 years his weekly column was one of the most famous regular features in Fleet Street journalism, setting a style that was later widely copied.”
All this makes him sound insufferable, but he was read not as a literary titan, nor as a revolutionary newspaper critic, but as something more cherishable: a funny guy. He could eviscerate a subject with a few well-chosen words. Arnold Schwarzenegger was “a brown condom full of walnuts”. Barbara Cartland’s eyes looked “like the corpses of two crows that had flown into a chalk cliff”. He also skewered others’ literary pretensions, if not his own: “Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to jail, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”
Publicity for his books often warned that the contents should not be read in public “unless you are unselfconscious about shrieking and snorting in public”. A lot of people snorted and shrieked, in public and otherwise, over his collected TV criticism Visions Before Midnight (1977), The Crystal Bucket (1981) and Glued to the Box (1983), as well as his five volumes of memoirs – if not his collections of literary journalism or his many books of poetry.
He planned a sixth and last volume of memoirs, “the final chapter of which”, he told one interviewer, “will be dictated while I have an oxygen tent over my head. I wouldn’t like to spare the public my conclusions.”
James became, then, a paradox: at once a high-minded litterateur who taught himself Russian because he “could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded” and an avuncular TV bloke known for showing us clips of sadistic Japanese game shows. He came not to praise telly, nor to bury it like some fastidious antipodean approximation of George Steiner, but rather to revel in its absurdity, vulgarity and occasional charm.
He was once described as “a bald Australian Chris Tarrant, [who would] sit there smirking in a blue suit several sizes too small, while half-naked contestants were pelted with scorpions and dangled above snake pits”. Perhaps so, but that was the winning format for such shows as Clive James on Television (1982-97, ITV), Saturday Night Clive (1989–90, BBC) and others. He also fronted travel programmes (including Clive James Live in Las Vegas, 1982, for ITV, and Clive James’ Postcard from Miami, 1990, for the BBC), was one of the first critics on BBC Two’s The Late Show, and hosted shows about Formula One.


Clive James on Television, 1982-97, “a winning format”, with excerpts from the Japanese game show Endurance
“Television brought James the riches and fame he craved,” wrote one hostile critic. “But as far as his ambitions to have been an artist of merit are concerned, he squandered his talent, which is tragic.” Unfair: there was never a sense in which he sought riches, nor was his case tragic. There is an image of him going home after a show by tube, reading Tacitus in the original, which suggests that, rather than tragic, James was interestingly conflicted – or perhaps just culturally omnivorous. In any case, the man who made a TV series analysing the concept of fame knew what it took for a bald man with eyes so deep-socketed they were scarcely visible to have an enduring on-screen career. “The smartest move I ever made in show business was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as.”
Some made great claims for his literary talents. Writing under the headline As Good as Heaney in 2009, Julian Gough in Prospect magazine championed two volumes of James’s collected verse. But how could one take seriously a TV critic who wrote satirical verse epics such as The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem (1975) or Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World (1976), still less compare them to the Nobel laureate’s?
Gough argued: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.”
Perhaps. But questions remained. Would Endurance, the Japanese game show in which contestants were buried up to the neck, bitten by ants and licked by lizards and upon which James spent so much tittering airtime, be inside that protective barrier reef? And, more importantly, was James a highbrow hypocritically conniving at what he affected to disdain? Probably not. He wrote in the introduction to Glued to the Box: “Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays.
Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
James claimed to have an “ungovernable ego” but was quite capable of uxoriousness. He was married to Prue Shaw, a Cambridge scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Claerwen and Lucinda. James protected all three from media intrusion, though he gave an insight into his admiration for his wife when he produced her book on Dante for an interviewer: “That’s the real McCoy. That will always be there. The kind of stuff I do is more conjectural. I am still trying to impress her.” He once said: “I think marriage civilised me. It may sound sexist, but it is one of the roles of women to civilise men.”
He betrayed his wife by having an eight-year affair with a former model, Leanne Edelsten. When Shaw discovered the affair, in 2012, she threw him out of their Cambridge home, and he moved to a London flat. “I am a reprehensible character,” he told one interviewer. “I deserve everything that has happened to me.”
His mainstream TV career ended with the 20th century, but James was not done. He set up clivejames.com, billing it “the world’s first personal multimedia website of its type”. He did an internet show, Talking in the Library, including conversations with Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Terry Gilliam. He reviewed widely for the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the TLS, the New Yorker, the Australian Book Review and the Guardian, and wrote Cultural Amnesia (2007), a collection of biographical essays on mainly 20th century writers, artists and politicians. He made 60 broadcasts for the BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View (2007-09) and in 2008 performed two comedy shows at the Edinburgh festival.


Clive James interviews Ruby Wax for his internet series Talking in the Library
In his later years he worked harder than ever. He told one interviewer: “You get into what my friend Bruce Beresford calls the Departure Lounge, and two things happen: suddenly time really matters, you can hear the clock, and also you have all these freedoms, because you’ve got more of life to reflect on.”
In January 2010, he was diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. One of the greatest annoyances his cancer and its treatment caused him was that he was not allowed to fly – thus stopping him visiting his beloved homeland. But he kept writing, including a weekly TV review for the Daily Telegraph for three years until 2014.
An Indian summer of writing was just beginning, long after the valedictory interviews were done. He wrote a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2013), a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 (2014) and an analysis of the radical change in TV viewing habits, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (2016).
In 2015, he published a volume of poetry, Sentenced to Life, that expressed the loss and guilt he felt for his infidelity and betrayal of his wife and daughters. This book and the Dante translation became bestsellers, and both were dedicated to Prue, with whom he had reached a reconciliation. In the poem Landfall he wrote, “I am restored by my decline / And by the harsh awakening it brings”. The poem Event Horizon ends with the following reflection:
What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live, or else nowhere.
That year he published a further collection of literary essays, Latest Readings (dedicated to “my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge”) and found a new berth as a columnist, with Reports of My Death, in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, which ran until 2017. He also released an album with his longtime songwriting partner Pete Atkin, The Colours of the Night, and went on to produce another poetry collection, Injury Time (2017) as well as the epic poem The River in the Sky (2018).
He was appointed CBE in 2012 and AO in 2013. In 2008 he was awarded a George Orwell special prize for writing and broadcasting, and in 2015 he received a special award from Bafta for his contribution to television.
He is survived by his wife and daughters.

Clive Vivian Leopold James, writer and television presenter, born 7 October 1939; died 24 November 2019

The doofus roll call: Scott Morrison’s worst week as prime minister

Scott Morrison
‘Perhaps the prime minister doesn’t care about the inconvenience of his actions having consequences, because on current form this will be everybody else’s fault.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Diplomacy has never been a particular talent of mine, and there’s no need to deploy it on this occasion.
Scott Morrison has just chalked up a howler, his worst week in the prime ministership, in part because of circumstances visited upon him – like Pauline Hanson doing the government like a dinner in the Senate on the union bill, denying Morrison his Great Victory of the week – and in part because of his own misjudgments.
The signature prime ministerial swagger turned to petulance on Thursday as various pressures bore down.
Morrison was grumpy on Thursday that Labor just kept asking questions about Angus Taylor (imagine, an opposition, asking questions, when there’s an ongoing police investigation); grumpy Labor hadn’t complained in the chamber when he first telegraphed his intention to speak to the New South Wales police; grumpy, inferentially, that they hadn’t stopped him from being a doofus.
Well the prime minister was a doofus, all on his own.
Let’s whip through the doofus roll call of the week. Morrison could have insisted Taylor step aside for the duration of the police investigation, in the process blunting the rolling interrogation of the parliamentary week. Instead he elected to keep the minister in his position, in full public view, paralysed by a police investigation, because Labor couldn’t be given a scalp.
Then Morrison called the NSW police commissioner, by his own account, to find out whether or not there was a police investigation into Taylor, perhaps momentarily forgetting he had at his disposal a whole private office staffed with competent people and a whole department of professionals who could have made that inquiry in an entirely appropriate way on his behalf.

"We have washed up in the post-truth era, an untethered hell of our own making, a hall of mirrors"

This overreach was the wrong thing to do on a number of levels, some of which I’ve already ventilated, but perhaps the worst of the misjudgment is the shadow it casts across the entire process.
Just think about it.
In the event the NSW police come back next week, or whenever, and report that Taylor and his office have no case to answer, there will be an ongoing public debate about whether or not this has been a proper and thorough investigation, or whether it has been tainted by politics.
This debate will happen in large part because Morrison rushed to the phone, rather than just taking a quiet minute to think whether the government needed a prime minister or a saviour right at that moment.
Now perhaps the prime minister doesn’t care about the inconvenience of his actions having consequences, because on current form this will be everybody else’s fault. Labor’s mostly. Probably Guardian Australia, too, for … how did he put it on Thursday? Pulling Anthony Albanese’s chain.


“We know who’s pulling his chain”: Scott Morrison says Anthony Albanese only became concerned about his phone call to the NSW police commissioner regarding an investigation into Angus Taylor after “he read it in the Guardian”. Follow live: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2019/nov/28/morrison-albanese-coalition-medevac-taylor-politcs-live?page=with:block-5ddf3aae8f087410d987421a#block-5ddf3aae8f087410d987421a 

2:00 PM - Nov 28, 2019

Dear, dear. Boo hoo. I mean, seriously? You’d say grow up and stop sulking – because being in power in 2019 is hard as hell, and the price of entry to government is being accountable for your actions – but what would be the point of the counsel, well intentioned as it is, when Scott knows best, about everything?
The other more than mildly disturbing element of the week was Morrison’s preparedness to be sloppy and unrepentant about being sloppy in full public view, from the call to the police commissioner, to misleading the chamber on four separate occasions over the past couple of days – really quite brazen behaviour I haven’t seen in Canberra before.
We have washed up in the post-truth era, an untethered hell of our own making, a hall of mirrors. Emboldened by opportunity, a number of politicians around the world are seeking to govern in a consequence-free universe, not seeking to trouble the discourse with facts or stabilising conventions.
The mark of the post-truth politician is the preparedness to pit themselves against their own institutions, to trash the lot in an effort to fly free, saying all the things, feeling all the feels.

Until this week, I’ve felt that comparisons between Morrison and Donald Trump have been way overblown. Now, I’m not so sure.

This government must be held to account on press freedom. It's not to be taken lightly

We might not feel the erosion of a free press, but we will certainly know when it’s gone
This year, for a brief moment in the history of Australian journalism, every significant news organisation in this country put its competitive instincts and its differences to one side and united as one voice to stand against an unacceptable step down the road to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism unchecked can lead to fascism. Fortunately in this country we’re a long way from that yet, but a study of history amply demonstrates how fascism begins. Freedom is usually eroded gradually. It might happen over years, even decades. Its loss is not necessarily felt day by day, but we will certainly know when it’s gone.
So far the Morrison government has resisted the industry’s appeal for fundamental protections of a free and robust press to be enshrined in legislation at the very least – not placing journalists above the law but enshrining in a practical and meaningful way their special place as a crucial pillar of democracy.
Perhaps the government is intending to wait us out, waiting for the issue to go away in the hope that most people in this country are so consumed by bread and butter issues, so consumed by their own lives and personal struggles and challenges, that they won’t care enough, when the chips are down, to support something as abstract as the spirit of democracy or the spirit of freedom – because you can’t cash in the spirit of something at the bank, as you might a tax cut.

"So far the Coalition has resisted the industry’s appeal for fundamental protections of a free and robust press"

That is why we have to remain resolved to keep this campaign going, and not let it go, even after a few months, because those of us who have witnessed and experienced and reported on repression in other countries, some of them not too far from our own shores, understand the solid reality of democracy as well as the strength or weakness of its spirit. Some of our colleagues have paid the ultimate price for exposing abuses of democracy, and lost their lives.
Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, recently chastised China on its human rights record, observing that “countries that respect and promote their citizens’ rights at home tend also to be better international citizens.”
I would add to that: countries that don’t respect and promote their citizens’ rights at home are living in glass houses and have diminished their right to be taken seriously when they try to preach to neighbours from a high moral ground they have surrendered.

Julian Assange
‘This government could demonstrate its commitment to a free press by using its significant influence with its closest ally to gain Assange’s return to Australia.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images
This also comes at a time when the spirit of freedom of information laws, if not the letter, is being abused and there are more allegations of corruption being investigated officially than ever before.
There’s another inconsistency that needs to be called out. This government is fond of saying, as it did in seeking to distance itself from the decisions by Australian federal police to raid the ABC and the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst that it can’t interfere in police operational matters. Yet, in seeking to assuage the concerns of media companies and journalists after the raids, the attorney general, Christian Porter, promised that he would actually be prepared to become involved in the process to the extent of insisting on the director of public prosecutions getting his personal consent before seeking to prosecute a journalist.
Sorry Mr Porter, that is not reassuring. The judgements you might bring to bear will not be independent of the government’s own self-interest, and we all know that self-interest of any stripe, political or otherwise, can be a powerful deterrent from doing the right thing. That is not understanding the spirit or the concept of free speech, nor materially guaranteeing free speech or a free press.
But we have to practice what we preach. Our work across the breadth of all media and all communities should speak for our integrity – from the smallest story to the biggest. Individually and collectively. And if it doesn’t that should make us uncomfortable, in the very least. Because if we are going to stand on our dignity and defend press freedom as a fundamental pillar of democracy, then we have to be sure that our actions are defensible, that we do what we say we do. And at the heart of the Walkley Foundation’s work is the protection and promotion of integrity in journalism.
There is one other issue I want to acknowledge tonight. In 2011 Walkley judges awarded a Walkley to Wikileaks, with Julian Assange as its editor, for its outstanding contribution to journalism. The judgement was not lightly made that Assange was acting as a journalist, applying new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup”. Those inconvenient truths were published far and wide in the mainstream media. As we sit here tonight, Julian Assange is moldering in a British prison awaiting extradition to the United States, where he may pay for their severe embarrassment with a life in prison. Again, this government could demonstrate its commitment to a free press by using its significant influence with its closest ally to gain his return to Australia.
Another challenge our industry faces is the trend towards the polarisation of our craft – the attempts by some to paint us as either of the left or of the right – which has to be resisted, because I firmly believe that for the vast bulk of us, that is not how we practise our trade. We do not arrive in the nurseries of journalism as budding ideologues of left or right, nor do the vast bulk of us become that way as we develop.
I absolutely reject the Roger Ailes view of the world, that if you’re not on the right then you must be on the left.
For journalists to call out the powerful of any political colour for their abuses of power is not about ideology. It is simply journalists doing their job, practising their craft.
Adele Ferguson was not reflecting some personal ideological hatred of capitalism when she called out corrupt behaviour within our banking and financial sector, forcing a royal commission on a reluctant government. And nor were the whistleblowers who helped her being ideological. They saw a wrong and followed their conscience with great courage to reveal it, paying a heavy personal price in the process.
There was nothing ideological about Chris Masters’ determination to bring into the light of day serious and deeply disturbing allegations of war crimes by elite Australian military forces in Afghanistan, first in his book and then with Nick McKenzie in further sustained investigative reporting. It was strong, compelling journalism of integrity.
When Hedley Thomas gripped the world with his Teacher’s Pet podcast, forced the re-opening of the Lynette Dawson case, leading to the arrest of her husband, was he driven by ideology? Of course not.
Or when Anne Connolly forced another royal commission, into aged care, with her exposes of the sickening abuses within that industry?
Joanne McCarthy wasn’t under instruction from some secret socialist cell or driven by a hatred of Christianity when she exposed the pattern of endemic sexual abuse and attempted cover-ups perpetrated from within the Catholic church in the Hunter region.
Kate McClymont wasn’t acting as a servant of either the conservative right or the Labor left when she doggedly and courageously exposed the entrenched corrupt practices of Eddie Obeid.
Abuse of power is abuse of power, no matter who the abuser is. Corruption in this country is corruption, no matter who the corrupt are, no matter what their politics.
This is a time of serious challenge for our craft across a broad front, at a time when democratic societies like ours are losing their trust in institutions pretty much across the board. The integrity reflected in the work we’re about to celebrate tonight is our bulwark against that erosion of trust and a reminder not only to the citizens of this country, but importantly to ourselves, of what we’re capable of, and of what we aspire to be.
Thank you.

Kerry O’Brien is a journalist, former editor and host of The 7.30 Report and Four Corners on the ABC, and chair of the Walkley Foundation. This is an edited version of his opening speech for the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism in Sydney on Thursday

Countries from Siberia to Australia are burning: the age of fire is the bleakest warning yet

It is time not only to think the unthinkable, but to speak it: the world economy, civilisation, and maybe our survival as a species are on the line
On any day, between 10,000 and 30,000 bushfires burn around the planet.
Realms as diverse and distant as Siberia, Amazonia, Indonesia, Australia and California are aflame. The advent of “the age of fire” is the bleakest warning yet that humans have breached boundaries we were never meant to cross.
It is time not only to think the unthinkable, but to speak it: that the world economy, civilisation, and maybe our very survival as a species are on the line. And it is past time to act.
It isn’t just fires. It’s the incessant knell of unnatural (human-fed) disasters: droughts, floods, vanishing rivers, lakes and glaciers and the rise in billion-dollar weather impacts.
It is the spate of extinctions, the precipitous loss of sea fish, birds and corals, of forests, mammals, frogs, bees and other insects. It is the march of deserts and the waxing of dead zones in the oceans.
It is an avalanche of human chemical emissions poisoning our air, water, food, homes, cities, farms and unborn babies, slaying nine million a year.
It is the probability there will be no Arctic before the end of this century and rising seas expelling 300 million from their homes.
It is the ominous seepage of methane from the world’s oceans, tundra, swamps and fossil fuels, threatening runaway heating of 7 to 10 degrees or more.
It is the drift of billions of tonnes of soil from lands that feed us into the blind depths of the ocean, placing food security on a knife-edge as farming systems fail amid a turbulent climate and degraded landscapes.
It is the rising toll of noncommunicable disease killing three people in every four.
It is the $1.8tn spent weaponising nations for the true “war to end all wars”. Unchained by political malice or blunder, robot weapons of mass destruction commanded by artificial intelligence will choose who lives and who dies.
Yet a global citizen movement of scientists, youth, elders and women is demanding urgent action in the face of a growing risk of collapse. Its scientific warnings, Extinction Rebellion and the school strike for climate are flooding the streets of the world’s cities.
Pope Francis plans to add “ecological sin against the common home” to the Catholic catechism. The Bank of England’s governor, Mark Carney, warns of “abrupt financial collapse” due to climate change. In its annual assessment of catastrophic risks the Global Economic Forum sees mounting danger.
Prof Jem Bendell, of the University of Cumbria, UK, is among voices warning that the collapse of civilisation may have begun. Because we cannot easily predict its pace, trajectory or magnitude is no reason for inaction, he says. His paper, Deep Adaptation: a Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy, predicts: “There will be a near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of [citizens].” Catastrophe is “probable”, it added, and extinction “is possible”.
Yet so far only a handful of countries – France, Canada, Britain, Ireland and Argentina – have declared even a climate emergency. Most governments continue to move at glacial pace and turn a blind eye to the nine other mega-threats threats menacing humanity. Why?
Because a worldwide counter-revolution is under way, intended to paralyse action on climate, environmental loss, extinction, toxic air water and food. It is financed by “dark money” from a terrified fossil fuels sector through shady institutions. It pours hundreds of millions of dollars into global propaganda to discredit climate and environmental science, seduce government and deceive the public.
More sinister still is the growing control of the fossil fuels lobby over governments and the world media – not only in floundering western democracies, but also Russia, China, Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia.
Now a new UN report says fossil corporates plan to ramp up carbon emissions 50% to 120% by 2030 beyond the limit for a safe human future (1.5C degrees). Despite the renewables boom, fossil infrastructure investment has rebounded in 2019 after three years of decline, the International Energy Agency says. On the face of it, the fossil lobby has turned the tide.
There are only three motives to so hazard civilization: greed, malice and ignorance. Either the returns are so great that fossil executives are willing to cook their own grandchildren, or they are blind to the risks. Since these are technical people, the latter does not ring true: oil majors like Shell and ExxonMobil have revealed in court they understood exactly what they were doing to the planet for nearly 50 years. Ignoring it, they then sought to deceive humanity while ramping up carbon output.
The world is dividing into two opposing movements: the concerned “survivors” – the young, the old, the wise, the educated, the informed and the pragmatic – and the cynics backing the very global system that will precipitate collapse.
Some scientists’ estimates for how many lives collapse will cost range from 50%-90% of the human population. The number is not knowable because human behaviour, as war, cannot be foretold. The process starts with famines and water crises, both already in evidence, leading to refugee tsunamis and multiplying conflicts.
As this truth sinks in, the part of humanity committed to survival is seeking legal redress. Columbia Law School documents more than 1,640 ongoing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies and/or governments. But the law is slow, and justice can be bought.
It is time to speak the unspeakable.
Without urgent action to terminate fossil fuel use, return the planet to a state of ecological health and address all 10 mega-threats in an integrated way, our worst fears will become our fate. Collapse becomes inexorable.
Doing nothing or too little sentences humanity to collapse – economic, societal, even existential. It is time to discuss this, openly, honestly, truthfully.
We have only one rational choice: to choose to survive.
This demands all necessary actions – although they spell the end of existing systems of energy, food, water, money, defence, transport and politics – and their replacement with new ones, universally dedicated to a viable, just and sustainable human and planetary future.

  • Julian Cribb is a Canberra-based author