Don't come between an Aussie and his gas-guzzling ute

Labor’s “announcement” of an EV standard is interesting in what it says about the party’s relationship with the public. In fact there was no announcement, just an announcement that an announcement would be made in the future. Instead of jumping into the water you stick your toe in and test the temperature. You get a cold toe instead of a shock to the system.

In 2019 it was different under Bill Shorten. The change reflects the differences in the leaders, with Albo more likely to take a cautious approach while Shorten believed everything he read on Twitter, equating the opinions of the most vocal Left supporters with the average Aussie.

They learned their lesson because we got Morrison for three years.

In 2023 instead of saying “we’re going to set the fleet emissions per kilometre travelled to 105g of carbon” like they did in 2019 (which would require all new cars purchased to be pure-electric EVs) they’re saying, “hey look we’re in the future going to set an emissions target for new vehicles”.

Chalk and cheese.

This new announcement is Albo doing a bit of market research. I imagine that he’s got the boffins doing surveys of ordinary Australians roped into contributing to the climate cause in a market where the specifics are totally different from, say, in tiny Norway or tiny Finland. Australia is a vast continent without charging infrastructure and the debate must be completely different here from how it’s conducted in Scandinavia. 

I don’t envy Albo the task but probably it has to be done before policy frameworks can be committed to. The optics don’t look good where the recent surge in pure-electric EV (PEEV) sales only brings the PEEV share of new car sales to 3 percent. It’s very hard to talk with your European counterparts about climate change when the realities on the ground in Coonabarabran or Cooma are so different from the way they look in minuscule European markets but the job has to be tackled if Australia doesn’t want to find itself penalised by trade commissioners.

I wrote this post mainly in April this year and since then nothing has been said to cement a carbon-emissions target for passenger vehicles in place. We see moves by state governments to bring in hydrogen-powered buses, and we see sales of EVs increase. Toyota has even announced in an ad that it’s selling a PEEV Lexus in Australia. But still no move from the government to do something concrete about car emissions. We know that the most popular cars in the country are both large utes, so we see the population sticking to its gas-guzzling guns. The government knows better than to come between an Aussie and his ute.

Twitter renaming won't change it but hopefully more is to come

In about 2016 Twitter had become fatally wounded in its current form. Other social media sites are now springing up because of Elon Musk’s changes but the fundamental ingredient of the monster is still the same. As long as people are involved the outcome will be disappointing.

I am not sure if it’s up to the proprietor to put in place “better” rules that can cope with the different ways people use to abuse their privileges. I’ve yet to see a social media platform that actually encourages worthwhile debate, though not being a Chinese speaker it’s possible that there is one out there. Perhaps a person who uses WeChat can advise. If anyone has a better idea let me know.

Musk just might be crazy enough to be able to tame the beast. He’s changed the parameters in every industry he’s entered and is nothing if not unconventional, and doing things the same way they’ve always been done is not going to give us the results we seem to agree we seek. I wonder though. If all the bad-faith actors using anonymous accounts were put together in a room and asked to put their hands up to say they wanted more civil conversations, how many would do so? Someone once said to me that the reason people are so aggressive on Twitter is because to speak politely would do violence to the extremes of feeling they experience when confronted by one or more issues. 

I can understand that but I also understand that in a pluralists democracy you are naturally going to get a range of opinions. If we all thought about every issue in the same way it’s be weird, so being able to challenge people whose natural bias is different from yours requires a degree of diplomatic skill. Perhaps people think it’s a “cop out” to speak in a civil manner? Perhaps they must speak strongly in order to honestly convey the strength of their feelings.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like it when people shout at me and we haven’t been introduced, haven’t established any ground rules for conduct. If I meet someone in a highway rest stop I’m going to be civil and courteous and guarded because I don’t want to be smashed in the face, but people on Twitter talking about a topic that interests them smash without talking and be damned because they’re in no danger of being hit down to the pavement.

It’s this lack of accountability that gives people license to behave like animals, or else like school kids scrapping and cussing in the playground after science class has ended. But then do we blame the teachers for the low tone of the entire school or do we blame the parents?

I think that politicians must accept some blame for the way things are turning out online. The incessant carping, the insulting dismissals of differing opinions, the inability or unwillingness to compromise are corroding public debate. It’s been going on for years but now it’s time to stop. Our system of government has a thing called Question Time when Opposition pollies can get a chance to launch difficult questions to the government, but the way the latter responds to the former is mostly unedifying. I want politicians universally to THINK for a moment about how their insults veiled and overt affect the wider community so that we can start to build a more sustainable public sphere.

Rhetorical standards being what they are, and politicians not being the most imaginative people alive, I won’t hold my breath. I just think this is a good place to start.

Albo tests the waters on EV sales

Labor’s “announcement” of an EV standard is interesting in what it says about the party’s relationship with the public. In fact there was no announcement, just an announcement that an announcement would be made in the future. Instead of jumping into the water you stick your toe in and test the temperature. So you get a cold toe instead of a shock to the system.

In 2019 it was different under Bill Shorten. The change reflects the differences in the leaders, with Albo more likely to take a cautious approach while Shorten believed everything he read on Twitter, equating the opinions of the most vocal Left supporters with the average Aussie.

They learned their lesson because we got Morrison for three years.

In 2023 instead of saying “we’re going to set the fleet emissions per kilometre travelled to 105g of carbon” like they did in 2019 (which would require all new cars purchased to be pure-electric EVs) they’re saying, “hey look we’re in the future going to set an emissions target for new vehicles”.

Chalk and cheese.

This new announcement is Albo doing a bit of market research. I imagine that he’s got the boffins organised doing surveys of ordinary Australians roped into contribute to the climate cause in a market where the operating specifics are totally different from, say, Norway or Finland. I don’t envy him the task but it probably has to be done. The optics don’t look good where the recent surge in PEEV sales only brings the PEEV share of new car sales to 3 percent. It’s hard to talk with your European counterparts about climate change when the realities on the ground in Coonabarabran or Cooma are so different from in Scandinavia.

Epidemic of social media abuse being fuelled by bleeding hearts

Whenever I hear someone attack the attackers they point the finger to the right wing trolls, but let’s be frank the right wing is typified by trolling. You don’t expect a Nazi to be nice, but the woke left who want social justice and human rights are playing with the same language.

This is clear, the left are just as bad as the right when it comes to online abuse, and in the left’s case it’s not excusable. If you promote peace and forgiveness you’d better be prepared to practice what you preach or else you just end up fuelling the sort of vicious spiral that saw Lisa Millar from the BAC ‘Breakfast Couch’ program quite Twitter in disgust.

The ABC is in an unenviable position because their charter stipulates they must be balanced. If this means giving air time to those on the right of the political spectrum then so be it, but there are thousands on the left WHO WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS. They criticise the ABC for even allowing people whose views are different from theirs to be on-camera, they attack journalists (most particularly in the context of Int’l Women’s Day, which was yesterday, female journalists), and they lower the tone for everyone allowing more bad language to proliferate.

You are responsible.

It’s not some nameless goon in a suit who profits from the hate, it’s people you celebrate because their views consone with yours. It’s not a big corporation that makes money out of the poor conduct, it’s you. Just stop it.

The thing with social media is that there’s no consequences for poor conduct. People use anonymous accounts and raise the bar to the highest pitch BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER if someone disagrees with them. If they’re in a pub and start carrying on like a pork chop they might get floored by a punch in the nose, but not online. Online they can say precisely anything they want.

Putin can say anything he wants because there’re no consequences. Trump taught him how to bend the rules so far they threaten to break. Trump was nothing without Twitter, and when Twitter closed his account he stopped being a threat. Now that he’s back in the loop we’d better be careful.

But everyone has a way to stop the abuse, stop the lies, stop the spoken hate. We can all work to raise the tone of social media, but where’s the incentive. People “like” tweets that take the most extreme position, the platform celebrates hyperbole and ridicule, so how do we stop the rot? It’s up to all of us to take a private stand. Not because it’ll make us popular, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Mastodon booms as Twitter enters turbulent time

It’s been strange watching some people go a bit manic as Twitter enters a turbulent time. Many are going across to a new platform and then telegraphing the fact probably hoping that others will go there too and follow them so that they can keep up-to-date with the scintillating content that made Twitter such a hellsite in the first place.

Trump is not the problem and Musk certainly isn’t, but it’s doubly odd to think of a company where the individual stakes of all the participants are considered to be so important that people will go to this much effort – working out how the new technology functions, setting up an account, making a note of the password, tweeting the address – just so that they can abuse others with impunity as they’ve done for the past five years.

Or however long Twitter has been a bonfire of epic proportions.

It’s both sad and amusing to be witness to the mass exodus as people realise that what they’re spent so much time investing in is threatened with disablement or worse: complete annihilation. All those hours sitting in front of the computer screen or staring at the mobile phone, all those “likes”, all those retweets, all that patience exhausted, those yearnings finally rewarded – and then it’s going to be taken away in a flash.

It must be horrible to have put so much of yourself into something that SOMEONE ELSE OWNS in its entirety, your activity discounted because you don’t possess the master sign-on details (or whatever the technical terms is for the main access key).

Your life taken and played with by a hyper-capitalist with a taste for supersonic vehicles. Your life. All those people who follow you and retweet and “like” every tweet you send out filled with your infinite wisdom. All your wit and aggression made subservient to a man you’ll never meet. Parts of you made into an object, a resource (human resources), a statistic, a “handle”.

Though you never got a blue tick.

I can’t really imagine the feelings of such a person because for years I’ve been complaining on a different blog about how Twitter operates to privilege the most extreme expression, the most outrageous words, the most terrible ideas. Surely Musk is only wanting to celebrate this characteristic of the website? Surely he’s making it into the reason for its existence. 

Surely you’d want to be part of that because all of your followers love you for that reason. What is there to complain about if your wishes have finally turned into reality? What more could you possibly want? Do you want to be given the main access key (techno-specialists help me out here)? 

Why not indeed? What else is there to try?

Perhaps Musk can assign control of the platform to a different influencer for a year in turn to see how the site performs with different management. Wouldn’t this be a more democratic solution to the problem of how to manage Twitter? King for a day.

King for a year.

King for the rest of your life, like President Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Master of the twitterverse. Sovereign. In control of your own destiny. Wordlord. Moster. God.

While politics becomes more polarised the bush comes to town

When ‘Q and A’ got shuffled off to 8.30 on a Thursday night I felt vindicated. Years before I’d stopped watching this unpleasant show, with its combative political operatives and quasi-debate, its copying of the flame wars found all too often on Twitter and its loud voices intent on just niggling the opposition into further cornfluffle. 

I needed to coin a word for the almost meaningless vociferations that get read by thousands at all times of the day on social media. The carriers of sarcasm, the producers of temporary victory – moments that lead to nothing but a hunger for something to offset the savage pull of the ravenous vacuum – and the bringers of shame to the angels who might, if they moderated their speech, be able to take part in a process they watch enviously from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, farmers are using social media in creative ways to engage with their customers in the cities, both through TikTok videos produced on mobile phones and through the unnumbered cooking shows that grace our screens. Wherever you turn you see a cooking show where there’s a camera capturing a key ingredient – salt, say, or extra virgin olive oil – being added to a frying pan or bowl as show hosts, busy at 4pm helping viewers get through to dinnertime by making a cake or a stir-fry, talk about the produce they rely on. There’s one show where most of the cooking is done on barbeques, in the field, with scenic backdrops adding colour to what is mostly, in fact, simple fare. 

I watch many of them. We seem to harbour an insatiable appetite for content that features food being made, and so farmers should know that consumers take food personally. We’re getting pork belly hamburgers just as we’re getting Master Chef in the umpteenth season to satisfy our hunger for new flavours. Multiculturalism ties in with this dynamic because one of the first ways anyone will experience a foreign culture is through its signature meals. 

PETA demonstration, Pitt St Mall, 1 September

We can express our political affiliation by avoiding dairy and we can even express things about our politics by saying that we like pad see ew or butter chicken. The other day I discovered by talking with an Indian friend that “masala” just means “spice”, and this conversation raised an understanding of a place that I will probably never visit but that is becoming more and more important as the forces of globalisation continue to operate on our fractured world. 

Food gives us access to the Other, to alternative ways of living, and hence it can enrich our lives even if all we do is buy a takeaway that a member of the precariat brings to our front door on his motor scooter. Food is a highway and a forest, both, and farmers who venture to make content aimed at metropolitan audiences might be surprised by what they can achieve. 

It’s not just the immediate financial spin-offs that matter, it’s the way that such engagement can lift the brand and lead to industry-wide profitability. Reputation matters, and it’s not enough to rely on elected representatives to do the PR heavy lifting. People have to do it for themselves.

Peter Greste talk on a media freedom law sponsored by Macquarie Uni

Last week I went along to a talk and discussion in the centre of town on one high floor of 123 Pitt Street above Martin Place, where I waited the view over the skyline and the harbour was very scenic, the sound of glasses clinking in the background accompaniment to the spectacle I took in from a comfortable seat. I felt privileged to be so high up I was able to see the water. A helicopter flew from left to right and the grey water rippled.

Greste has ideas about a media freedom law and it would take the form of a system in order to address the problem of complacency in a community where the reputation of journalists is low. How to get support from government and people when journos are sort of like pornographers in the reputation stakes? Greste’s response to this issue is a certification process where instead of accrediting specified individuals on the basis of their place of work, or on the basis of the number of hours a week they practice the craft, you get a panel of experts to certify the process they use. This would allow bloggers and random tweeters to have the same access to protection under a potential media freedom law.

Greste also talked about the “grey zone” where meaningful conversations occur, and he says it is diminishing. He pointed out that ISIS had quoted George Bush admiringly where he says, “You’re either with us or against us,” in the aftermath of 9/11, and noted for the record (two cameras were operating at the back of the room, aimed above attendees’ heads) that most laws in Australia that restrict media freedom had been introduced since 2001.

It's in the interest of everybody to have a free press, and Greste described how public costs invariably go up where there is no media oversight. The relationship between the media and politicians is inextricable, he said, the two sets of people being intimately bound together so that the role of either one is unimaginable without the other.

Fran Kelly was on the panel after Greste’s talk and she highlighted the difficulty of getting support for such a certification board. I sort of agree with her, the way the public sphere operates today the nuance and subtlety of Greste’s ideas would be erased by flame wars and people would merely object to another faceless institution having power over their destinies. Politicians would have a key role to play in furthering the public interest in the face of such debates.

The man who invited me to the event arrived almost at start time and the university’s VC was there to give moral support to Greste, whom he praised. A range of people were in attendance, men and women, and there were a number of questions from the audience to lend variety to the evening. I left to get the train home without staying for refreshments, saying goodbye to my friend in the foyer, but thought about how journalists might improve their standing in the community by being more intelligent as to how they go about their business. Instead of following the herd they might be more selective and ignore party platforms. Instead they might look to the future taking the long view, and be more transparent.