My Daily Advertiser OP Ed column for Tuesday 26 January 2021

Australia fails in human rights report

This year I’ll forgo my annual remarks on Australia Day being more accurately described as ‘Invasion Day’, leaving commentary instead to Australian Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe, who pointed out that “There have been at least 270 massacres of First Nations peoples in this country in numerous frontier wars. Today, black deaths in custody only serve to remind us that this period of violence and injustice has not yet finished. That’s why, for Aboriginal people, January 26 marks a day of mourning.”

This day is also a useful reminder of the need for treaties with our First Nations peoples, as well as a constitutionally recognised voice to federal parliament.

So this year I’ll examine instead the just released Australian chapter of the Human Rights Watch annual report (‘UN puts spotlight on our human rights record’, DA 21 January). As Australia has not fared well it is deserving of commentary on our national day. 

The report noted that Indigenous Australians are significantly over-represented in the criminal justice system, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprising 29 percent of Australia’s adult prison population, but just 3 percent of the national population.

There were at least seven Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia in 2020 – four in Western Australian prisons, two in Victoria, and one in a Brisbane police watch house. 

Incarceration disproportionately affects Indigenous children: they are 21 times more likely to be detained than non-Indigenous children.

This is not an issue unique to Indigenous children. Across Australia, about 600 children under the age of 14 are imprisoned each year. The recommended international minimum age of criminal responsibility is 14 years rather than our 10. But even after a major public campaign for change, state and territory leaders have left it at 10.

The report noted that 2020 marked seven years since the Australia government introduced offshore processing of asylum seekers. Approximately 290 refugees and asylum seekers remained in Papua New Guinea and Nauru at the time of writing. Most have been there since 2013. Australia has rejected offers by New Zealand to take some of the refugees. 

The report tells us that a bill introduced to parliament in May would allow Australia’s domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), to question children as young as 14.

Limits to our freedom of expression is also an issue. Pretrial proceedings in the case of former spy “Witness K” and his lawyer Bernard Collaery continued, with both charged with breaching secrecy laws for exposing wrongdoing by the Australian government to obtain an advantage in trade negotiations with Timor-Leste.

A Deakin University report in September found that more than half of environmental scientists working for the government said they had been “prohibited from communicating scientific information.” They have been restricted from speaking out on threatened species, climate change, and logging.

Journalists have also been subject to police raids. In April 2020 the High Court ruled that a police warrant issued to raid the home of a NewsCorp journalist in 2019 was invalid because the warrant was “impossibly wide.”

We are also delinquent regarding disability rights. Research shows that between 2010 and 2020, 60 percent of people who died in prisons in Western Australia had a disability. Of that group, 58 percent died as a result of lack of support provided by the prison, suicide, or violence.

Our counterterrorism response also finds us wanting. A parliamentary committee approved a proposal that would authorize the home affairs minister alone to strip dual nationals of Australian citizenship if the minister is “satisfied their conduct demonstrates a repudiation of their allegiance to Australia and it is not in the public interest for the person to remain an Australian citizen.”

2020 marked Australia’s third and final year on the United Nations Human Rights Council. We were weak on many issues. Australia was the only Council member to vote against all resolutions seeking to address rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We rarely called out human rights violations in Southeast Asian countries and have been undercutting international efforts to resolve abuses against ethnic Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Australia exports military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, despite grave concerns about alleged war crimes by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

Definitely a fail grade.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 19 January 2021

Similarities between USA and Australia too close for comfort

Most of us will have been appalled at the result of outgoing US president Donald Trump inciting his followers to violence as we watched them attack the Capitol building.

This week I’ll use my column to point out that similar forces are at work here. Though a Daily Advertiser editorial last week noted that “We remain an island of relative calm here in our spot in the southern hemisphere” the similarities are too numerous for complacency.

I’ll begin by noting that PM Scott Morrison refused to condemn Trump for inciting the violence in the US Capitol. When pressed by reporters ScoMo said he would not offer further comment. When asked whether that was a responsible message from a world leader, he replied that it was not for him to offer commentary on the leaders of other countries. “I don’t do that, out of respect for those nations.”

Last week, as Acting Prime Minister, Michael McCormack bought into the argument, and had the gall to say that big tech companies should not be able to decide whose voices were heard. “I don’t believe in that sort of censorship,” he told ABC radio.

To add insult to injury McCormack equated “the events at Capitol Hill” to “those race riots that we saw around the country last year.” In the chorus of responses pointing out that was a fallacious comparison it was pleasing to see locals such as Uncle Joe Williams noting that the Wagga BLM rally “was super respectful, non-violent and from all communities”. Councillor Dan Hayes pointed out there was no comparison, as “One was an attempted insurrection, the other was a march against racism”.

The Daily Advertiser reported that a letter of protest from Wagga’s Wiradjuri Nation describing McCormack as demonstrating “’no empathy or respect for the First Nation people” in his electorate provoked an apology. Naturally it would, as pandering to the racist vote would inevitably come into conflict with those subject to such racism.

Of course, Messrs Morrison, McCormack et al blithely ignore the need for truth in social media posts. Unfortunately, politicians such as Craig Kelly and George Christiansen are allowed by their leaders to spout as many lies as they wish, just as the real Donald Trump did. Because such behaviour is allowed we can only assume it is condoned, and that puts us on the same dangerous path as the USA.

As the ABC noted, this raises the question of whether Australia’s Parliament might be vulnerable to some of the political pathologies which have hit the United States. Indeed, the Australian director at Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, said Trump’s role in inciting the assault on the Capitol was “a wake-up call for governments around the world including Australia”.

The Saturday Paper reported that Nationals MP George Christensen had an official fact-check placed on his Facebook post about “Democrat vote fraud”. Last week he posted that the violent insurrection at the Capitol was a “false flag” carried out by anti-fascists, before calling for Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to restrict the powers of social media companies.

Liberal MP Craig Kelly was warned by Facebook over his posts about unproven COVID treatments, such as the drug hydroxychloroquine. Morrison and federal health minister, Greg Hunt, failed to call out the fallacy of such nonsense. Kelly argued Twitter’s ban was a “threat to democracy”.

The Greens and Labor both called for Kelly to lose his position as chair of the parliamentary joint committee on law enforcement.

Then there is ScoMo’s contemptuous attitude towards the conventions of our democracy. In 2017 he named Trump as a political model. He then attacked his own party as a “muppet show”. COAG was a waste of time, and international climate meetings were “nonsense”.

He has a cavalier approach to Parliament, several times having misled the House, which in non-parliamentary language would more accurately be described as ‘telling lies’.

What matters is not just these individual events, but the way they mount up so that bit by bit our politics are becoming vulnerable to a loose alliance of fantasists, racists, and politicians only too willing to lie: a gradual accumulation of exactly the same factors that resulted in the violent attack on the Capitol. 

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 12 January 2021

No amount of tweaking will make Advance Australia Fair acceptable

To mark the New Year Scott Morrison’s government replaced the words “young and free” in the national anthem to “one and free”, picking up an idea floated earlier by NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian.

Morrison said the change was being made “for all Australians. It is time to ensure this great unity is reflected more fully in our national anthem.”

In a pitch to some conservatives who may be wary of change, Morrison emphasised that the planned rewording of the anthem was not radical. “Changing ‘young and free’ to ‘one and free’ takes nothing away.”

Of course, it could just as accurately be regarded as Scotty from Marketing doing nothing more than exercising the old advertising trick of changing the look of a product that isn’t selling very well by changing its image.

Truth be told, ScoMo’s symbolic change comes at a time when Indigenous Australians still face significant hurdles in achieving equal opportunities.

For example, the life expectancy of First Nations people is far lower than that of their non-Indigenous peers.

ScoMo’s government has disappointed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders by ruling out changing the constitution to enshrine the concept of an Indigenous “voice to parliament”, as recommended by the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Morrison was also highly critical of people participating in Black Lives Matter protests in Australian cities in June, arguing against “importing the things that are happening overseas to Australia”.

Presumably he skipped school when the history of the first fleet was taught.

He also must have been asleep when multinational mining company Rio Tinto destroyed 46,000 year-old artworks in the Juukan Gorge caves in Western Australia in May 2020.

The ABC reported that the PM claims to have been encouraged by the strong response to the change made to the wording.

True, Pauline Hanson, and some Indigenous leaders have welcomed the new wording. First Nations Foundation chairman and Yorta Yorta man Ian Hamm said the fresh line was important because, “‘One and free’ brings us together.”

Wagga local, Wiradjuri Elder Aunty Isabel Reid wasn’t quite as fulsome when she told the Daily Advertiser that “the change will be the start of meaningful change for Aboriginal people”.

Another local, Uncle Joe Williams, appropriately commented that “We aren’t all one, we certainly aren’t treated as one, and many, sure as hell, aren’t free”.

“To me, changing just one word with the view of inclusion does very little for actual inclusion, and does next to nothing for the hope of uniting a nation.

“I have long been an advocate of changing three things – the date, the song, and the flag.

Composer Deborah Cheetham is a Yorta Yorta woman who said the new wording was long overdue but changing the anthem “one word at a time is probably not the right way to go”.

She said Kutcha Edwards and Judith Durham’s 2009 anthem, Lyric for a Contemporary Australia, was more appropriate.

It includes the words: ” Our land abounds in nature’s gifts to love, respect and share, And honouring the Dreaming, advance Australia fair. With joyful hearts then let us sing, advance Australia fair.”

It is certainly an improvement, though for my money The Seekers’ “I am Australian” fits the bill very nicely. If we must have a national anthem at all, that is, a point I’ll come back to later.

But federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese, said “Changing a single word in the national anthem while First Nations people aren’t even recognised in our national constitution is simply not good enough.”

MP Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the House of Representatives said “The real issue is a constitutionally enshrined voice.”

Australian Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe tweeted, “Replacing ‘young’ with ‘one’ in the anthem is straight up claiming the ancient, intimate connection between First Nations on this continent and their lands for the imperialist, land thieving nation of Australia”.

I also wonder if the emphasis on ‘one’ isn’t problematic because urging any population to be ‘one’ historically has been the work of fascism. Far better to celebrate diversity.

Which leads me to question the need for a national anthem. They have traditionally been used to ramp up populations for war, hardly something to be encouraged. _______________________________

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 5 January 2021

Net zero emissions by 2050 not sufficient to prevent climate damage

Last week the ABC revealed that Australia’s reputation took a significant hit with its main trading partners after last summer’s Black Summer fires. This was because of perceptions of our climate policy, an Austrade survey reveals.

This news comes at the same time as new evidence shows that a target of net zero emissions by 2050 will not be enough to contain global warming to an acceptable level. More on that later, but let’s firstly look at the reputational damage our inaction has caused.

“Perceived ineffective disaster management practices and inaction on climate change were also contributing to negative perceptions of Australia,” Austrade’s Global Sentiment Monitor report found.

Austrade, Australia’s trade and investment promotion agency, said the biggest reputational impacts came in south-east Asia, with 31 per cent of people surveyed in China forming a worse perception of Australia due to the fires; the survey results were 27 per cent for South Korea, 20 per cent for Japan and 15 per cent for Indonesia.

In the US, the bushfires spurred a worse perception among 13 per cent of people, and 18 per cent in Britain.

Only 53 per cent of respondents would buy Australian produce, down from 62 per cent in July 2019; 60 per cent would trade with Australia, down from 65 per cent; and 49 per cent would still travel to Australia, down from 57 per cent.

University of Melbourne Asia Institute research fellow Melissa Conley Tyler said Australia’s international reputation was a financial asset and “negative perceptions have a real-world effect”.

“We have to remember that all those foreigners are constantly making decisions about where they travel, what they buy and where their kids study.”

The election of Joe Biden to the US presidency puts further pressure on Australia to follow suit with more ambitious policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate. Australia’s five largest export markets, covering 70 per cent of trade, have net zero targets for 2050 or 2060. These markets comprise the US, China, Japan, South Korea and the UK.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, “Biden’s climate goals turn up heat on Morrison” after the former Vice-President’s victory. “Australia will face mounting international pressure to commit to increased long-term emissions cuts after US President-elect Joe Biden vowed to rally America’s allies for greater action on climate change”.

Former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull said Mr Biden’s election should provide a catalyst for the Morrison government to set long-term climate change goals – an issue that contributed to both leaders’ demise.

“Use this change in Washington to swallow your political pride and get real on the mid-century target of carbon neutrality,” Mr Rudd said on ABC television.

Mr Turnbull said, “Morrison’s concern is that the combination of the right wing of the Liberal Party and the National Party and the right-wing media, mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch, will go after him, as they went after me, if he is seen to do anything that suggests he is taking climate change too seriously.” 

The Australian Industry Group urged the Morrison government to commit to a 2050 net zero emissions target. “Putting climate adaptation on the front-burner is vital,” said the lobby group’s chief executive Innes Willox.

As I researched more on this topic, I discovered that top scientists were now saying that for Australia to honour the Paris Agreement we must reach net zero emissions before 2050.

I found that new research shows that the 2050 target for net zero emissions will not solve the problem. Greens Leader Adam Bandt released the new analysis showing that because pollution has increased so much since the Liberals repealed the carbon price, Australia’s emissions reduction targets would now need to be at least a 48% cut on 2005 levels by 2030 to be consistent with the Paris Agreement. To limit global warming to the Paris goal of 1.5 degrees, the analysis finds that Australia’s target would have to be a 75% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030.

Accordingly, Mr Bandt announced that the Greens have adjusted their climate targets to reflect this new analysis. They have announced a new policy of 75% cut on 2005 levels by 2030, and net-zero emissions by 2035. This is exactly what we need.