Hindu nationalist violence in Sydney

This post is similar in scope to one I put up five weeks ago about the farmers’ protests in India. Not all news is local. In the post you’re reading, however, there’s a strong local angle.

I began to look at this series of events on the same day that the Quad – a meeting of the leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the US – started to operate publicly. News of Hindu nationalist violence in Sydney appeared in my socials.

The Sikh community had been in the news. Not long before it announced a new private school would open in the city’s northwest.  This Sydney Morning Herald story contained details of the institution – designed to foster tomorrow’s Sikh leaders – in Rouse Hill. The story said:

It will teach students from kindergarten to year 12, and will have boarding facilities, sporting fields, a pre-school and a Sikh temple. It will cost an estimated $200 million, funded by members of the Sikh community.

Punjabi farmers had been visible in the public sphere in India because they’d been protesting a new agricultural regime. The government had used measures to silence criticism of its new laws, sometimes, as a deterrent, going so far as to put protesters in jail if they had a high profile. 

In Sydney, Greens Senator David Shoebridge was remarking in Parliament on the activities of far-right Hindu extremists.  

Shoebridge was referring to an incident in which a group of four young Sikh men were attacked after leaving a restaurant at night on February 28. Their car was surrounded by approximately a dozen assailants — whom the victims identified as Indians — and smashed with baseball bats, hammers, and even an axe. One victim identified at least one of the attackers as a participant in the allegedly RSS-BJP sponsored car rally from two weeks earlier.

It wasn’t an isolated incident, as another story reported.  

Amar Singh, President of Turbans 4 Australia, a Sikh charity organisation, says the Sikh community have never had “issues” with their Hindu compatriots in Australia. But when the Indian government, led by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), began stigmatising protesting Indian farmers as part of Sikh separatist plot, relations between the two religious groups made a dramatic turn for the worse.

Last month Singh answered a call from an unlisted number on his cell phone - which would turn out to be a threat against his life. 

“Modi is our god,” said the Indian accented caller. “If you don’t shut up, we will teach you a lesson. We will tie you up and burn you to death.”

The Guardian has got onto the story, publishing this on Friday.  I suspect that Prime Minister Morrison will not remonstrate with Narendra Modi on account of the Sydney violence. It’ll be far down on his list of priorities. But just as Scott Morrison is criticising the CCP on account of its anti-democratic policies being exercised in Hong Kong, the Australian PM should talk to Modi about groups that, in India, benefit from government support. 

The holy grail was always due recompense for use of News Corp content

It’s been 12 years – this 6 April – that the media giant’s Robert Thomson declared in an interview:

"Google encourages promiscuity -- and shamelessly so -- and therefore a significant proportion of their users don't necessarily associate that content with the creator.

"It's certainly true that readers have been socialised – wrongly I believe – that much content should be free."

It was a declaration of war for which the peace has just been announced.  

Under the new three-year agreement, Facebook will pay for news articles from publications such as The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun. Sky News Australia has also signed an agreement with Facebook.

Thomson’s negative animus with regard to Google had converted itself, over the years, into a motion by media outlets in Australia that turned into laws drafted and put to Parliament for debate. At the last minute, Google capitulated and began to sign agreements with media companies. Facebook refused, and historically blocked users from posting news articles to its website. Then the government changed some aspects of the laws and Facebook unblocked the news.

Now this.

The “free” bit is still true – most readers of news won’t pay for it. But this is changing. For some the alignment of the interests of the dreaded Murdoch media and IT giants such as Google and Facebook will seem disturbing. A new bogeyman to revile and slam in a thousand new acerbic tweets flung like refuse out of life’s virtual cage. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and smaller media companies will also benefit from the new regime.

But note the sunset clause. Such accord will be contingent upon both perceived return and on public opinion. In a way it’s still up to users what kind of dispensation exists in the public sphere, from an economic standpoint at least. If you think that IT behemoths should pay for the privilege of allowing you to share what you like on social media, then get vocal. And forget about your personal brand of politics. 

More is a stake than whether your favourite political party is elected to office. News Corp’s typically sustained activism over a large number of years – something that it specialised in as it works in various public spheres to get change made – has, in the present case, turned out to be a blessing for all news makers. Even a website as progressive as Crikey – which is run by a company named Private Media – can benefit measurably from Murdoch’s intransigence. No doubt its journalists would never have thought they’d see the day that they might be able to praise the feisty and conservative nonagenarian patriarch.

Keeping the bastards honest – Rudd and his crusades

There was something different about Kevin Rudd from the beginning. I remember being at an election night party in 2007 when Rudd led the Labor Party to victory. We all stood out on the balcony of a cute suburban home in Marrickville – veges on the boarder and chooks on the grass – and talked about social media and petrol prices. Rudd’d got our attention with his “greatest moral challenge” address to the National Climate Summit that year. 

But once in power, in 2010 Rudd postponed the introduction of an emissions trading scheme.  It was a stunning backflip that served – at one stroke – to erode the Labor Party leader’s credibility. It signalled a temporary pause on Rudd’s brand of politics, though Bill Shorten flirted with Rudd’s inimitable tendency to engage in virtue signalling. Bill’s EV policy in 2019 had something of Rudd’s messianic zeal about it but it, too, was not a winner and the electorate failed to embrace him. 

I think that part of the reason they did so is because of Rudd’s abiding awfulness. Not only was he a spineless coward – the electorate mused – but he was also a bully, verbally lashing out at subordinates in the most craven manner. From the front: smooth and deliberate. Behind the scenes: a chaos of unreconciled aggressions.

Anthony Albanese is shaping up to be a different kind of leader. Unlike Shorten with his ambitious EV policy – reducing to 105g/km the entire fleet of light vehicles (which would’ve required a total shift to pure-electric EVs for new car purchases) – Albanese is playing a more moderate game of waiting until the Liberal-National Coalition makes a mistake, then statesmanlike fronting the press to give Scott Morrison – the prime minister – a tongue lashing. Not the most effective speaker (like Joe Biden), Albanese sounds a bit diffident, a bit not-quite-there. 

Just like an Opposition’s pre-election policies. Albanese’s method has a lot in common with Barry O’Farrell’s. The Liberal Party leader in New South Wales ran a small-target campaign in the lead-up to the 2011 election and waited for the other side to make mistakes, then took the prize in the end. The Liberal-National Coalition has been in power in the state ever since.

Rudd, meanwhile, is on a new crusade: defanging the Murdoch press. This is a losing battle as nobody will be even remotely interested in repeating Julia Gillard’s loss of face in 2013 – when such reform of media laws was last attempted – a failure that was followed by Labor losing the election to the detestable Tony Abbott. 

The media for its part should be highlighting where Rudd is weakest, and deflect any criticism of Labor onto his shoulders. Doing so’d make it easier for Albanese – the anointed one – to shine, and to beat the L/N Coalition he’ll pretty much need to shine bright. The one good thing that can come of the unpleasant Rudd’s recent visibility is that it can serve as an opportunity to show how decent and electable Albanese is.