Eleven o’clock pressers provide distraction

Many people are truly suffering because they’re doing the right thing. For me, lockdown hasn’t changed much as I mostly sit on the couch reading books – which is what I did before the restrictions were put in place, and it’s what I’ll be doing after they’re relaxed – so not seeing people isn’t much of a hardship. But for many it is very difficult. I can understand that people need company to make them feel whole, to take their thoughts away from unpleasant resorts, or to distance them from other urgent things like paying bills that pile up even as income is cut off. 

No wonder the daily eleven o’clock press conferences the state premiers hold are so welcome for people sitting at home with little to do. One friend put up an image of the TV tuned to the news and commented as though it were, for him, an occasion to break out the popcorn. It’s the signal event that marks the weekly rhythm, the bass note that gives the day its form, the place people go to in order to feel, for a few minutes, that they’re in control of their lives, and not some bizarre new illness come out of Wuhan like a new horseman of the Apocalypse.

“Poor Johnny lacklustre lock down,” commented one friend, “no play dates, just the existential crisis of corona virus and media saturation, here is hoping this chapter of our lives can end soon.” This shows that some people have come to resent the eleven o’clock presser. The federal government has been the main loser from the notoriety of the presser, its approval rating sliding alarmingly even as people stock up on intellectual comfort food while seated on the couch. My friend John will no doubt be applauding the opinion poll result, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the government, its stars hung so high until recently, and nothing that the Opposition did seemed able to lay a finger on it. Now, it lies like a Coke can crumpled in the gutter, ready for binning. For all of its sinning.

Nikki Savva to write a column for Nine Newspapers

In 2016 Savva published a book about Tony Abbott and the small coterie of insiders who helped him to govern. In it, she talks about Abbott’s problems. I wrote at the time:

One of the main ones was that all decisions seemed to emanate from a small group of select people in the leader's office, including his chief-of-staff. The type of collegial consultation that members of Parliament are apparently used to in a Westminster democracy were thrown out the door. A tiny clique was doing everything to control the message, but when the leader's popularity failed to turn around people outside that group turned on the leader and replaced him just like that.

That chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, now writes a column for The Australian, where Savva used to run her words. Savva also used to work for Nine Chairman Peter Costello, so the current move is as cosy as Abbott’s counsellors were.

Savva is best known to the general population for her appearances on the ABC’s Sunday chat show, ‘Insiders’, which gets talked about at length on social media. One thing Savva didn’t talk about in her book was the one-term government we’ve seen so much of in recent years in Australia. As I wrote at the time of her book’s appearance:

But this phenomenon of one-term governments is something that the commentariat will have to one day really take a close, hard look at. So far noone has really made the attempt. I think it has something to do with the new public sphere in the age of social media. But a lot of people would despise me for even suggesting something like this.

It'd be very interesting if Savva could turn her attention to such things as these because so far the quantity of discussion about the shiftiness of politics in this country hasn’t percolated through the community to any significant degree. People are aware that something’s changed, but they are not all saying the same thing. Awareness is limited to responses to journalists and politicians who castigate the broader community when debate turns ugly. The common people revel in the icy sobriquets thrown out by the wounded.

YouTube and the problem of veracity in the news

Just this morning I finished a conversation that had started the day before. It was about an allegation that children in the Democratic Republic of Congo were being used for mining cobalt, a metal used in the manufacture of batteries. Obviously such a resource would these days be worth a lot of money, and with some evidence – from one video that had been loaded to YouTube – that Chinese companies were involved, I took interest. 

The statistic that had been bandied about by one person was 40,000. In other words there were – allegedly, mind you – 40,000 children according to UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund) in an unsourced clip that started to infect the conversation I was having with two people overseas who might be expected – living as they do in developed countries – to be outraged by a fact of this nature. If it were established unquestionably to be true it would be a human rights violation of the first order. 

So why had no-one declared it publicly to the world? One “documentary” which had ostensibly been put up by Sky News (one man was confused about nomenclature because he’s unused to the media industry – with YouTube you get an odd assortment of real and unreal, or reliable and bogus, but the platform doesn’t tell you which is which) contained inconclusive evidence. The footage just didn’t seem accurate. A 4-year-old girl being used to sort through rocks? In other parts of this and other clips the soil was just being loaded into sandbags. The Sky News clip also showed a mine shaft with holes dug into the sides to allow people to descend into the bowels of the earth. Evocative footage – but was it real? – in other videos mining was done in open-cut fashion, a hole in the earth being occupied by workers putting ore into containers. And in the Sky News clip the children sounded like they were speaking Portuguese – instead of French.

All suspicious, but the two men who’d decided that I was a good candidate for well-intentioned indoctrination had by this time turned to sarcasm, a favoured method people use when they are unable to get other types of persuasion to convince you of whatever cackhanded idea they’ve got in their heads. I told one of the men who’d suggested – being a journalist – I should make my own story:

I'll buy a ticket to DRC tomorrow and pay $20000 to make a story in a dangerous country where there's no rule of law and where the virus is doing how much damage? Anyway too old for that sort of thing. I'll wait until someone younger and better resourced makes a credible story.

A credible story would be one that would get the global news industry motivated to fix a problem that – being so outrageous and manifestly unjust (40,000 children?) – engaged the world. If the Guardian or the New York Times were able to get a team of reporters and a photographer to Africa and make one story that verified that even 100 children were being used to mine cobalt. If the Sydney Morning Herald were to syndicate such a story on its website for subscribers such as myself to read. If a hashtag were to start up that promoted this single, reliable story instead of a few random mouth-breathers rigid with indignation at me – not the exploiters of said alleged child miners – for daring to disbelieve what they were privileged and – hear the heavenly choirs! – chosen to share with their grateful followers.

But no, not one story. Just a United Nations allegation and a random number (40,000!) picked out of the air by some functionary in order to shock the comfortable Western middle class into feeling guilty about using a mobile phone to message family and friends. You can see how potentially irresistible such a story would be to millions of social media users. Everyone in the world who uses a mobile phone – billions of people – could collectively suck in a mouthful of air, immediately killing all wildlife. The combined exhalation of human-produced CO2 – not produced by those wretched child miners, mind you! – could fuel the growth a trillion righteous saplings. 

The tweets of course didn’t stop even after I’d stopped talking on Twitter, with a Canadian with an Indian name triumphantly posting a link to a story from the UN’s website detailing the hideous crime. 

It was time to stop. Time to put this baby to bed. The misinformation industry is legion. Even politics is infected by the disease. What the above shows is not a crime being perpetrated against children in Africa. We’re dealing with a Wild West of global proportions, where any bad actor or any fool can use completely fabricated and false information to achieve diverse ends. We saw it in the 2016 US presidential election where thousands of dedicated Russian trolls manufactured stories designed to bring about a planned result. The media is not just under attack from thieves who purloin stories and repurpose them, publishing the rewritten article on a new web page alongside their own chosen ads. It’s being eroded by the internet itself. What people once thought of as a liberating influence is turning out to be a prison for the gullible.

A challenge for culture warriors is keeping the community engaged

American broadcaster NBC has said it won’t screen the Golden Globes Awards for a while because of underrepresentation of minorities in the voting panel. This comes on the back of revelations that the number of people watching the Oscars had halved in the last year. Just as Netflix had started to capture a quantity of gongs commensurate with its reach, people had started to abandon awards nights, and even traditional allies had turned sour.

This reflects a wider problem with awards of all kinds. I’ve written before elsewhere about how, in literature, there’s a too-small pool of talent choosing who wins prizes. Everyone knows everyone else and no-one’s honest so the same people keep getting accolades. We need to make sure the pool of talent used is as wide as possible, but we should be careful not to be complacent and just award prizes to the products that tick all the right ideological boxes but that are otherwise ordinary.

When Elon Musk came out with his “Aspergers” revelation we saw the community respond mostly with positive comments. Some people were not happy but most people said nice things about the billionaire, and whatever you might think about moneybags like Musk taking credit for being a little different the episode showed us how important identity is for the way that people value cultural products. 

If Musk is anything, he’s part of popular culture. If Andy Warhol were alive the artist would make a screenprint of Musk’s face for use on T-shirts. Responses from RW culture warriors to the NBC story, however, show that a backlash has already started – even before the project has fully worked itself out. Many people are unhappy with the “woke” factory that parts of the industry have become. This path is still unrolling itself along time’s bright axis so it’s too early, now, to give a definitive answer based on evidence, but I predict that the two sides will continue to bicker online until someone sets up a “Just Art” award committee somewhere that has as its overt focus the ignoring of ideology as a criterion for valuing such things as books or movies. 

“The Purelys” might be given each year to TV shows that are good despite the use of a wide range of gender-identifying types from many ethnic backgrounds, but who will be on the panel of judges? A random cohort of Twitter users, chosen on the basis of their visibility on the Netflix hashtag, perhaps. Or else a committee of university academics, following the Nobel’s methodology. Who gets to choose what is “good” and what is merely pedestrian? Do we allocate value on the basis of dollars alone, or do we wait, like patient children, until posterity tells us what is worth caring about?

Prime minister set the tone for coverage of Prince Philip’s passing

Early on Saturday the news channels were full of the big story of the day, but it wasn’t until Scott Morrison took to the podium in Sydney to give his address to the nation – and to its sovereign head, the Queen – that the tone was set. Newscasters had been tiptoeing around the evident failures of the prince’s life and, especially in the light of recent scandals in Canberra, his frank and robust manner. I sensed that for many of the TV presenters the issue of how to deal with Prince Philip’s vagrant tongue – he was well known for making casual and inappropriate remarks – was testing their equipoise.

The front held, however, but when Morrison took the line that Philip was staunch in supporting the Queen, more analysis became unnecessary. Pictures of the prince playing with children whose marriages would eventually fall apart showed on the TV screen, filling up the interstices between things. On Facebook friends who wouldn’t normally comment positively on the royal family gave their best wishes on the occasion. 

A pattern was being set but the old-school manner of Philip is not what’s needed, now, at a time when the world is assuredly and finally coming to grips with past mistakes. Not surprisingly, Morrison made no mention of his predecessor Tony Abbott’s knighting the prince – a final flame-out of the old guard before it was completely extinguished by the catcalls of the Left – but took refuge in the words of the old national anthem: “Long may she reign over us, God save the Queen.” By repeating these words, Morrison took a middle line between poetry and tradition, and struck a nice balance on the international stage.

In London the ABC had two reporters on the ground, making crosses at different times (see above, outside Buckingham Palace). Floral wreaths being left by locals despite a sign asking that this not be done. The household put out a request that donations should be, instead, made to charities.

The media really comes into its own on occasions such as this. As does the PM. Morrison reliably avoided tears while speaking to the cameras, the microphones set in front of him at Kirribilli in front of his residence on the harbour, and many would have been thinking of the elapsed period of a month or so marking the time since Philip had been admitted to hospital for a pre-existing heart condition. It takes a long time for anyone to die, if they die in their beds. 

Not like princes of old. “Duke remembered as champion of environmental causes,” went the strapline on ABC News channel. “Prince Philip’s Duke of Edinburgh Award a lasting legacy.” But it was strange – considering what this man was really known for – that nothing at all was said about his faux-pas, his indiscretions, his gaffes. We remove a tangible mechanism for change when we censor ourselves at the time of someone’s passing. This silence surrounding Philip’s failings speaks of our own cowardice, an unwillingness – when we, too, pass away – for the truth to be spoken. Are we so guilty in our minds?

Social media authentication regime would be a face too steep to climb

The Sydney Morning Herald reported three days ago that a report had been tabled in federal Parliament regarding safety and domestic violence, in which there was a suggestion it 

called for users to be required to present 100 points of identification – which could include a driver’s licence, birth certificate, Medicare card, or passport – in order to open or maintain an existing social media account with companies such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

At about the same time, a federal minister announced that she used an anonymous account to conduct some discussions with the community. What might’ve surprised the government – which did not, it must be remembered, make any policy announcement in response to the committee’s report – was the reaction of that respected (but never respectful) community. 

It was, of course, utterly offended. Not that the community is ever short on expressions of hatred aimed at the government. It seems that the outrage mill that runs 24 hours a day is always switching its allegiances, taking up for a few hours one issue or another in its endless cycle of bonding and othering, a relentless attempt to satisfy our collective vanity. 

But let’s think about this briefly in the cold light of day. It’s Easter Monday, after all, and we’re probably all sick and tired of talking with family and might need a break to draw us back to the real world of work and politics, the world away from photos of pets and appeals for sympathy on account of a chocolate overload.

If the government is having a hard time getting vaccinations into people’s arms, and has (we’re told) fallen short of its goal by a wide margin, how much more complex to make each and every person who uses each and every social media platform – submit genuine IDs at a government-run office. And how much more unlikely that Service NSW (for example) or Centrelink would be able to gauge the authenticity of the documents thus tendered for scrutiny by one bleary-eyed functionary or another.

Even if you did get all the correct documents put before the censor and a message sent via an official channel to Twitter’s head office in California, as soon as you’d gotten the routine up and running there would be a news story about a fraud. A woman assaulted by a former partner who’d used subterfuge to get hold of her residential address, a late-night murder perhaps (in the worst case) carried out by an old lover with an axe to grind and with an anonymous account that the government had (incorrectly) said was really a school lteacher.

And what of anonymous accounts? What of the federal minister? Wouldn’t she be able to operate anonymously if she wanted to, given that opening and operating that account would require the use of ID? Why shouldn’t a prominent person who finds the rough-and-tumble of Twitter a bit hard to take – even on the best days – opt for a less bruising method to engage with the demos? If ID were required, surely you’d still be able to have an anonymous account?

The scale of the operation is what’s missing from accounts like that published by the SMH. When the government opened up its purse at the beginning of Covid’s remake of the public sphere, all you had to do was go to Centrelink and report the fact that you were out of work. The money came directly thereafter into your bank account – registered with the authorities for just such emergencies. There was no scrutinising. There were not delays. You weren’t asked to sign a statutory declaration stating that you’d lost your driver’s licence. You didn’t have to go to the post office and apply for a passport.

A passport? Takes two weeks to get a new one if you have all the necessary documents on hand. But say that you have to go to Births, Deaths and Marriages and ask for a new birth certificate? What then? More delay? Meanwhile, in your absence, Twitter continues to spew out a tone of rebarbative bile each and every second, a flow making a mountain of unwatched – except to a few – messaging. A rugged butte made of aggression and spite. A headland of reheated verbiage that quotes TS Eliot and Camus and Orwell at a more than alarming rate. A cornucopia of derivative cliché. A cascade of bumptious kitsch.

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.