My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 30 June 2020

We need more arts graduates, not less

If the Morrison government expected its plan to alter university fees to favour the STEM courses to be greeted with universal approval it has sadly miscalculated. From far and wide has come strong disapproval of this half-baked scheme.

In fact we need more critical thinkers, not less. Humanities subjects deal with the enduring stuff of life and the culture that enriches us through economic ups and downs. Does our government really want to line up with the types of governments who don’t value history?

The answer to that question is that though Scotty from Marketing might pretend otherwise, the truth is that indeed the government doesn’t value the truth of history. Its support of a whitewashed and anti-worker version clearly demonstrates this.

From Humanities subjects come those best equipped to take a critical look at what the Liberal/Nationals coalition is up to. Those best able to pursue investigative journalism, for example, people we sorely need. Investigative journalists are not of course in favour with those currently forming our government.

A population with a wide cross-section educated in the Humanities would also of course be less gullible, less likely to accept the spin foisted on them by governments such as the sorry one currently in power.

This is not in any way meant to argue against the importance of STEM courses at university level. If we had more of the population with a good understanding of science, for example, we could put enough pressure on the government to convince it of the science of climate change, and so take action.

Now to the detail. Last week Education minister Dan Tehan announced changes that will favour maths, teaching and nursing units over humanities, commerce and law.

The Coalition will double university fees for some future arts students, and also raise them for commerce and law, to fund an expansion of 39,000 places and cheaper degrees for those who study in-demand courses such as teaching, nursing, maths, science and engineering.

The new fees are apparently designed to create more “job-ready graduates”.

Tehan says the student contribution for law and commerce units will increase by 28% and for the humanities by 113%.

The student contribution for a three-year humanities degree would jump from up to $20,400 to $43,500; while law and commerce degrees could increase from $34,000 to $43,500.

The small print of the announcement told us that the new policy effectively reduces the overall government contribution to degrees from 58% to 52%, with student contributions lifting from 42% to 48%. So as well as being an attack on the latte sipping inner city intelligentsia that the Lib/Nats love to denigrate so much, its also a move to further privatise our education system by making the user pay (even more).

Thankfully Australian authors and academics have savaged the Morrison government’s plan.

Award-winning author Richard Flanagan, who studied history at university, said he was tired of defending what other countries regard as the “bedrock” of culture and democracy. ” The government will save a few dollars today and Australia will pay a heavy price in the years to come.”

Clare Wright, a professor of history at La Trobe University and the author of books including The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, said the changes appeared to be “ideological, opportunistic and punitive”.

“The proposals threaten to turn the study of history, politics, anthropology and philosophy into a vanity practice,” Professor Wright said, “An indulgence of the elite rather than promoting the value of liberal arts training as the basis for any professional or creative practice.

Two-time Miles Franklin Award-winning writer Michelle de Kretser said “Australian historians are still doing marvellous work at uncovering uncomfortable truths about Australia’s past.

So there we have it. A university education looking more and more like the TAFE system the Lib/Nats have done so much to destroy. One that is now reduced to serving the needs of the big end of town.

But rather than equitably fund the humanities, we should be biting the bullet and make university education free. “Degrees should cost students zero dollars,” Greens spokesperson for Education, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, said in response to the “government’s pathetic uni fee hikes”. Well said, Senator Faruqi.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 23 June 2020

Let’s not deny the truth of history

As a follow up to my column last week, today I’ll focus on issues of white statues, slavery in Australia, and racism in place names, film and television.

These are controversial topics because many continue to deny the truth of history. That’s because, as Winston Churchill noted when he appropriated an anonymous expression, “History is written by the victors”. Or as Wagga Wagga City councillor Vanessa Keenan aptly commented in the Daily Advertiser, “History is often only told through the voices of privilege and white, powerful men”.

It is high time we listened to others, and acknowledged the true facts of the past.

Which brings me to the first point: statues. The toppling of statues overseas has quite rightly again raised the issue of who we celebrate here in our statuary.

The statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park is the usual example cited when this is discussed. Though he is a significant explorer I’d like to focus on the broader issue of how we acknowledge our past. Written history is not as problematic as statues, for the myths promulgated by white supremacist historians can later be debunked by the less biased ones. The Australian ‘Frontier Wars’ are a good example, for in the early 1980s Henry Reynold corrected the record.

Another myth that needed correcting was the one that our First Peoples were nomadic hunter gatherers. Aboriginal historian Bruce Pascoe has shattered that myth in his ground-breaking work, Dark Emu, which presented irrefutable evidence of permanent agriculture and large settled communities.

So what to make of the statues of ‘privileged white powerful men’? There are several things that could be done, apart from removing them of course, which is one option. More palatable to those who like their history whitewashed would be to add plaques correcting the history.

Another option would be to add other sculptures that corrected the story. In Sydney that could be to add a sculpture honouring Aboriginal resistance to white invasion, such as a statue of Indigenous warrior Pemulwuy. Or we could simply put the current statues in museums.

Now to slavery. The Prime Minister tried to use all his ‘Scotty from Marketing’ skills to work his way out of his statement that slavery had never existed in Australia, but failed, for any true understanding of our past knows that slavery did exist, in the widely practiced form of First Nations peoples being forced to work for only rations, and of course the infamous practice of ‘Blackbirding’.

I was pleased to see the issue of local place names raised in the Daily Advertiser, noting that Wiradjuri man Mark Saddler said that Captain Cook Drive on top of Willans Hill was one name he would like to see changed.

The road was named Captain Cook Drive in 1970 “to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the discovery and exploration of the east coast of Australia”, as its plaque states.

I support Wiradjuri man and Wagga Black Lives Matter organiser Joe Williams, who said Captain Cook Drive should be renamed “after an Aboriginal resistance warrior”.

So on this topic it was pleasing to read in the Daily Advertiser last week that Greens MP Abigail Boyd has been able to prevent local NSW Legislative Council Nationals MP Wes Fang putting a street names motion to the upper house that “the history of our nation should be retained and acknowledged as a guiding light for future generations”. What disingenuous nonsense, Mr Fang.

Finally, but briefly, the equally vexed question of film and television. HBO was right to temporarily removed Gone with the Wind pending the addition of some contextual information that would point out that its depiction of slaves being happy in their servitude was a sign of its times. I couldn’t agree more, for young people new to it might think its racism was approved of these days.

The issue of blackface, such as used by Australian comic performer Chris Lilley is more complex, but surely it is time to acknowledge that blackface is deeply offensive to people of colour. In this day and age it should never be used, just as statues of privileged white men should not be left to stand unexplained and uncorrected.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 16 June 2020

432 victims are 432 too many

I felt privileged to have taken part in the Black Lives Matter march in Wagga on Saturday 6 June, and to write this column about the issue, for silence on such a topic would mean complicity. Like countless others, I do not wish to be complicit with such an appalling situation.

The march observed COVID-19 safety precautions. We wore masks, many were in family groups, and individuals practiced social distancing.

As the march was taking place came news that Police Minister David Elliot was planning to introduce new legislation giving the government powers to ban such demonstrations

“Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to address injustice, Minister Elliot is shamefully seeing it as an opportunity to increase police powers and crack down on
protest,” said David Shoebridge, a Greens NSW MP and the party’s Justice Spokesperson.

We must resist this move as at the same time we work to end the centuries of oppression we have meted out to our First Nations peoples, of which the most recent manifestation has been the 432 deaths in custody since the Royal Commission reported way back in 1993.

Its recommendations have not been acted on, hence the dreadful death rate.

The Australian marches came in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in the US. They were a call by tens of thousands of us that Australia must no longer ignore our brutal legacy of police violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In the USA the pressure has led to some action: four police officers have since been charged; the officer directly responsible has had his charges upgraded to second-degree murder; and tentative moves are also being made to change the culture and policies of policing.

We are not seeing this in Australia. When Aboriginal people die in custody, there is a national silence.

But it is not for lack of protest, or because there is no black resistance in this country.

But when families held rallies in capital cities, they were not usually well attended. The names of those lost are not repeated over and over so as to become ingrained in the national consciousness. And just as their names disappear in coronial reports, so do their stories.

They are seen by white Australia as “bodies” that are not worthy of grieving, even as their families and Aboriginal people across the country continue to grieve for them.

Indeed, while Australians acknowledged with outrage black deaths overseas we have remained apathetic to the truly appalling situation here.

Yet if we saw the same kind of uproar here as in the US for every black death in custody, for every recommendation from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody that was not fulfilled, for every report that was ignored, would we have so many families still in mourning, still crying out for justice?

Though Prime Minister Scotty from Marketing denied any similarity between our situation and that in the US, the recent marches here have been a welcome acknowledgement, largely forced by Aboriginal people, that any form of solidarity must begin at home.

There is a brutality evident in the statistics that show black jailing rates in parts of Australia are the highest in the world, and they have continued to grow.

This isn’t news to Aboriginal people, and it shouldn’t be news to the rest of the country, wrote the Saturday Paper.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 27 per cent of the national prison population, while only making up 3 per cent of Australia’s population.

While the focus has often been on Aboriginal men, Australia has been locking up Aboriginal women, most of them mothers, most of them victims of violence, at rates that beggar belief.

Nearly three decades after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its report, successive Australian governments have made no attempt to address its recommendations. With law-and-order policies electorally popular, they have only made things worse.

The black deaths have not slowed.

There is a reason the violence inflicted on black bodies in this country is not seen a ‘shocking’. This is because it is ‘normalised’ violence, the violence we have become accustomed to seeing, with deep roots stretching back for over 200 years.

It is high time to right this wrong.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 9 June 2020

Government must restore ABC funding

Recent weeks have seen the closure of many media outlets, many of them local, but in reality none compares with the slow death meted out to the ABC by the Liberal/Nationals coalition government.

In contrast to this recent closure of many local newspapers, the ABC is a public media outlet. We own it, not the government, though unfortunately it controls the funding.

And in its post Covid-19 recovery plans the government must restore the stolen funding.

It sounds like a marketing slogan, almost a cliché, but in times of national crisis, Australians turn to the ABC. But over the past six months or so, it has proved profoundly true.

First came the bushfire crisis, when the ABC’s network of regional reporters distinguished themselves not just in reporting the disaster as it unfolded, but also warning those in harm’s way. No doubt this saved countless lives.

Then came the current coronavirus crisis.

In these dark times is that the ABC has stood out. The Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, which measure online interaction, showed that in December last year, on the back of its bushfire coverage, the ABC surged into second place with an audience of more than 10 million, passing mainstream commercial media.

By January, the ABC was No. 1 in the country, with an audience of 11.2 million, well ahead of the Murdoch news site. The most recent figures, for March, showed its audience up to 15.2 million, a 53 per cent gain in a single month, and almost three million ahead of its closest rival.

In one sense, this is unsurprising. Innumerable surveys over the decades have shown the ABC to be the most trusted media outlet, as well as being one of the most trusted institutions in the country.

On another level, though, it is remarkable that the ABC has done so well during these particular crises, given that it has been working while seriously wounded. Since the current government came to power in 2014, the broadcaster has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and about 1000 jobs.

In March, the organisation’s managing director, David Anderson, was to announce a five-year response to the latest round of funding cuts. It was expected job cuts would be in the hundreds, and major changes would be made to operations and programming.

But the coronavirus prompted a stay of execution. Anderson’s announcement has been put off until July, assuming the course of the virus permits.

A confidential briefing from a meeting with Gaven Morris, the ABC’s director of news, analysis and investigations, seen by The Saturday Paper, itemised several staff concerns, including the dropping of the Friday evening edition of The Business, the decision to run “best of” episodes of the arts program The Mix, and the decision to turn the Saturday edition of AM into a highlights package of the week’s stories.

There is no “fat” left to cut, says a senior ABC journalist. “So, we’re looking at hard cuts to permanent staff.”

The results are plain to see. Lateline has gone, along with the state-based versions of 7.30 on Fridays. The flagship radio current affairs programs The World Today and PM have been halved in length. Staffing at political bureaus has been slashed. The list goes on, and the cuts keep coming.

As well as program losses and an ever-increasing number of repeats, it seems that the ABC is kowtowing to Liberal/Nationals government pressure by adopting a much less inquisitive attitude. The guest commentators on the Insiders Sunday morning current affairs program, for example, seem to be a much more conservative bunch than they were in previous years, and Monday evening’s Q&A certainly seems to have lost its punch.

Nonetheless here I’d like to record our collective indebtedness to the ABC and its profound contribution to our collective wellbeing and the social fabric of our society.

Scott Morrison has nevertheless ruled out any change to his government’s policy of eviscerating the ABC. The reason for the Coalition’s emnity was summed up by John Howard’s former chief of staff, Grahame Morris, who described the national broadcaster as “our enemy, talking to our friends”. That serious, intelligent, evidence-based journalism is perceived as “the enemy” tells us a lot more about the Coalition than it does about the ABC.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 2 June 2020

Government’s energy road map still favours fossil fuel use

The proposed “technology investment roadmap” recently released by the Liberal/Nationals coalition government will not only retain but also expand the role of fossil fuels at the centre of the Australian economy.

This is very bad news for our attempts to mitigate climate change. It also delivers big wins for major Coalition donors such as Santos and Origin Energy. It is very disappointing to see such a naked example of fossil fuel vested interests buying government policy, and as Greens NSW Senator Mehreen Faruqi noted ”The government is bending over backwards to please the fossil fuel lobby. It’s no coincidence these are the businesses and players who have donated enormous amounts of money to both the major parties over decades”.

What this is all about is the discussion paper released last week by the scandal-plagued Energy Minister Angus Taylor. It elevates gas to the centre of Australia’s energy strategy, while also endorsing the thoroughly discredited carbon capture and storage technology, not to mention ridiculously expensive and very dangerous nuclear power.

Mr Taylor argues “switching from coal to gas can provide ‘quick wins’ for global emissions reductions and has the potential to reduce electricity sector emissions by 10%”, echoing claims by Scotty from Marketing earlier this year, Crikey.com reported.

But more accurately Greens Parliamentary Leader Adam Bandt said the government’s energy roadmap will set Australia on “a pathway towards destruction”.

So let’s have a closer look. Though Mr Taylor claimed that “There is no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia that does not involve the greater use of gas as an important transition fuel”, in fact gas extraction, storage and distribution produces significant climate damage via emissions such as methane that are much more dangerous than CO2.

And ScoMo’s claim that gas is central to Australia’s “energy transition plan” (if such a plan exists) has been repeatedly discredited, even by the Australian Energy Market Operator. In fact the role of gas in energy generation has been rapidly declining in Australia.

The Business Council of Australia, of which a number of global fossil-fuel companies are members, has also strongly pushed for policies to reverse gas’s role in Australian energy production.

Taylor’s discussion paper also embraces carbon capture and storage (CCS). Yet the Australian Institute calculates more than $1.3 billion has been spent trying and failing to prove CCS in Australia in the past 17 years. In short, CCS doesn’t exist, and isn’t likely to.

Taylor also opens the way for nuclear power. True, this is a proven technology, but is subject to very environmentally damaging mining, severe usage risks, prohibitive delays, cost blowouts, and is uncommercial in Australia without a carbon price. A snowflake in hell would have greater chances of survival than would a carbon price of being introduced by the Liberal/Nationals coalition government.

Angus Taylor, who has a history of opposing renewable energy, particularly wind power, continues to argue that the existing technology is inadequate to meet our future power needs. This is simply a lie. There have been many studies to show that solar panels, wind turbines, pumped hydro and batteries are not only able to provide 100% of our power needs, but are cheaper than fossil fuel based alternatives, and are expanding at a greater rate. All of the above are proven technologies. The only real need is to upgrade the existing distribution networks to meet the needs of generation areas not currently served, and to accommodate distributed generation.

Adam Bandt called on the government to invest further in renewable energy. “Australia has to end its addiction to toxic methane gas which is heavily promoted in this report. Gas, coal and oil are the major causes of climate change and swapping one for another is not the answer,” he said.

“What this report proposes is using public money to fund new gas infrastructure. Now that is taking money from schools and hospitals and putting it into fossil fuels at a time when we’re told we have to quit fossil fuels within the next 10 or 15 years at most otherwise we’re not going to stop the climate crisis. Taking money from schools and hospitals and giving it to gas is like taking money from the health budget to give to asbestos”, Mr Bandt concluded.