Put your fate in your hands, take a chance, roll the dice… The Australian Research Council is not worth saving, @ARC_Tracker

[This is a heavily redacted version of my original draft]

Australian academics were given a free kick in the research funding policy debate recently.  The acting Minister for Education, Stuart Robert, rejected the recommendation from the Australian Research Council (ARC) to fund a handful of research proposals.

Unlike nearly everything in research funding policy, it became headline news.  People from beyond the academy had more than a passing interest in what was going on, and it was an opportunity to bring the public on board for extremely overdue reforms of the ARC.

Instead, we blew it.  Describing the decision as a use of a ‘veto’ (which it isn’t, but poetic licence for advocacy is forgivable), Australian academics began describing the Minister’s decision as using ‘God-like’ powers, a violation of the separation of powers doctrine, and–most surprising of all–a threat to liberal democracy.  It was embarrassing, and academia made itself look unnecessarily feeble, pathetic, and precious.

If making decisions on funding recommendations is a ‘God-like’ power, we truly have reimagined the Lord as a mere conjurer of cheap tricks.  And if deciding funding outcomes is a ‘God-like’ power, do we really want the ARC making those calls instead of an elected official?  More importantly–as I’ll argue here–do we really want either Ministers or government panels telling universities how to spend research funds?

Quick Post: Getting the intuitions right about the Hillsong ‘breach’

When you adopt a police-first strategy for dealing with the pandemic, you need to declare what is now an offence.  This can get tricky because what you really want is for people to use their good commonsense and to limit the possible spread of the disease by asking themselves ‘Should I do this thing that might spread the disease?’  Unfortunately, you don’t get to make an offence ‘Doing something that defies basic reason’, and so you have to specify, fairly clearly, what it is that you want to have as an offence.

In NSW, this is done through Public Health Orders.

When you see a big, flashy news story that says ‘So and so was a prize idiot and did something that completely defied commonsense’, people want to intuit the content of the relevant Public Health Order instead of having a good old read.

We be the colours of the mad and the wicked… Are we becoming scared of protest?

Last year, I argued that Australia was developing a new standard for political protest: the ‘Theatre Kid Threshold‘.  If you rocked up to a political protest with a gallows that looked too good, you were no longer protesting but, instead, advocating violence.  I argued that this was a bad intuition, radically expanding what we understand to be a death threat and the apprehension of harm.  I also argued that–let’s be serious–what was driving a lot of the discussion was opposition to the message of the protest.  Which is fine and I agree with that intuition, but we might want to use other legal methods for achieving that end instead of inflating what counts as advocacy for violence.

I touched very lightly on the idea that the protest was a form of terrorism, an idea that gained some traction in the week surrounding that protest.  It’s an idea that has gained significantly more traction in the past week following the protests at Old Parliament House.  Perhaps more interesting from my perspective is the Othering of the protestors: right wing commentators have described the protesters as left wing; left wing commentators have described the protesters as right wing; there have been very disturbing denials of the Indigeneity of some of the protesters; there was one very incorrect use of the term ‘stochastic terrorism’ by an author who recently wrote a book about the alt-right.

A boring version of this blog post is me patiently working through the relevant law to explain why the protest at Old Parliament House wasn’t terrorism.  A slightly less boring version of this blog post is an argument that we should use ‘terrorism’ as a label of last resort and that contemporary popular uses of the term are missing the ‘terror’ element.

But I want to start 2022 with a blog post that really gets the blood pumping.  I’m going to sledge Sami Shah.

We have a knack for turning days into weeks… ‘Individual responsibility’ shouldn’t be controversial

It’s 2017 and you’re getting ready for work.  You notice that you’re not feeling crash hot. Bit of a scratchy throat.  Maybe a bit congested.  You wouldn’t say no to a few more hours of sleep.  You have a bit of evidence in front of you to suggest that you’ve got the ‘flu–more precisely, you don’t know that you’ve got the ‘flu but there is a significant risk that you have it.

So what do you do?  You have a lot of work deadlines coming up.  You can’t really afford a day off.  Maybe you’re casually employed or otherwise precarious.  You weigh it up based on a range of options.

In 2017, there were 1,181 laboratory-confirmed deaths as a result of the ‘flu. Despite this, we still treat it as a matter of personal or individual responsibility to assess the risk.  What’s the alternative?

Fifty feet tall and revved up too high… Should there be a legal response to those gallows?

In 2012, there was a protest in Sydney inspired by the film, Innocence of the Muslims.  The most notorious image from the protests was of a child carrying a sign that said ‘Behead those who insult the Prophet’.  There was political condemnation and calls for the child to be taken into protection from the parents.  To their credit, NSW Police largely deescalated the topic.  They checked that the kid was okay and mostly left everybody alone.  To the best of my knowledge, no counter-terrorism offences were made at the protest; just the usual biffo with cops.

We all know this dance.  Protestors protest.  One side of politics calls for cops to crack down on the protestors; the other side tries to argue that the protest isn’t that big a deal.  The cops usually do the right thing, and then we all swap sides for the next protest.

What’s thrown over the fence and into the garden every day? … Is the paranoia about Murdoch unhinged?

Do you want to hear about how Rupert Murdoch lactates black oil for politicians to suckle?  There’s a podcast for you.  Are you currently subscribed to News Corp news but don’t know how to cancel your subscription?  The Chaser set up a service to cancel your subscription for you.  Do you think that Rupert Murdoch has too much power over The Australian media?  Well, former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and previous GetUp! campaign director, Sally Rugg, have a campaign to establish a Royal Commission inquiry into Rupert Murdoch just for you.

At some point we should ask if something that looks like an unhinged, irrational obsession actually is an unhinged, irrational obsession.  After all, holding inquiries into media companies that say things that we don’t like is usually more familiar in repressive autocracies rather than liberal democracies…

In a passion it broke, I pull the black from the grey… Skip @Atlantic_Ctr’s ‘A Descending Spiral’

John Johnson was a shy child.  He was doing well at school until his father lost his job and became a violent alcoholic, and then his mother died of tuberculosis, and then the local saw mill closed down, pushing the entire region into an economic depression.  As Johnson grew up, he made friends with the wrong kind of kid, and he self-medicated his shyness with drugs and petty thefts.  Then, one day, Johnson was walking along the road humming a jaunty tune, when he accidentally tripped over, tied up eight people, and shot them all in the back of the head.  He was sentenced to death.  The appellate court refused to mitigate the sentence, noting Johnson had previously been convicted of a string of aggravated sexual assaults and two other murders.

If the above paragraph convinces you that the death penalty is wrong and should be abolished, then you are going to love Marc Bookman’s A Descending Spiral.  Anecdote after grisly, unrelenting anecdote about absolutely horrible crimes motivated by the unexamined assumption that the stories show that the death penalty is wrong.  For literally everybody else in the world, this is a frustrating, irrational, and emotionally exhausting series of stories written in a ‘true crime podcast style’.

I was cautioned to surrender; this I could not do… When should allegations result in resignations?

Forget ICAC and the Register of Member’s Interests, for a moment.  Let us distract ourselves from questions about Gladys Berejiklian and Christian Porter.  The recurrently anachronistic King Arthur sits at his round table with knights whom he has appointed for their outstanding character, noble virtues, and exceptional integrity.  King Arthur himself feels that he can govern only if he maintains unimpeachable moral authority, and it is on this basis that he has been able to resist challenges from those who wish to claim the throne.

One day, a meeting of the Round Table is suddenly interrupted: a man bursts into the room and makes astounding allegations about Sir Lancelot.  Should Sir Lancelot resign his position?  Should King Arthur sack him?

There’s a lullaby for suffering and a paradox to blame… Sales is right about Twitter, but it’s not the full story

It is difficult to disagree with Leigh Sales’ opinion piece.  The hostility on social media is out of control:

[T]he bullying and harassment now comes, not in an occasional phone call from a real person, but at a furious pace on social media from politicians’ acolytes, lackeys, fans and proxies, mostly — but not always — operating anonymously. It is non-stop, personal, often vile, frequently unhinged and regularly based on fabrications. It has the effect of an angry phone call from a politician magnified thousands of times over.

Sales complains correctly that ‘it is overwhelmingly left-leaning Twitter users who are targeting ABC journalists for abuse’, and queries ‘if whether the treatment of journalists, in particular female journalists, on its platform is acceptable’ to Twitter.  The sort of abuse that female journalists suffer on social media is deplorable.  It is disgusting.  We need to think about how we can improve the quality of public discussion.

Sales’ opinion piece about the atrocious quality of discussion on social media was posted at 4.57am.  Twelve hours and one minute later, imagine everybody’s surprise when the Institute of Public Affairs Tweeted:

Blackened roar, massive roar, fills the crumbling sky… No, Australia was not offered ‘millions of doses’

The Federal ALP lodged an FOI request to obtain the documents relating to meetings between the Commonwealth Government and the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer.  There had been reports in the Press–all stemming, it seems, from the ABC’s Norman Swan–that Pfizer had offered Australia a sweet deal to be an early trial site for Pfizer.  The story made absolutely no sense, and everybody from the Commonwealth and Pfizer denied that the story was true.  Despite that, it lived on in folk memory among the extremely online crowd.

The documents obtained by the Federal ALP under FOI were provided to Nine and News Corp media outlets (scroll to the bottom and then work your way up the documents).  Pfizer asked for a meeting with the ‘Minister and/or Departmental leadership’.  The public servant in charge of the whole of government strategy, Liza Schofield, attended the meeting as requested.  After accepting the invitation, Pfizer asked for a non-disclosure agreement to be signed.  Generally (and I speak from a lot of experience here) the practice is not to sign up to non-disclosure agreements for fairly obvious reasons (they can conflict with duties of public servants).  Pfizer said not signing the NDA would be fine: they’d modify the meeting to be at a lower level of confidentiality in response.

Nothing so far is unusual or odd here.  What is unusual is that the word ‘millions’ does not appear in the documents released in this package.

Apparently, in a letter dated 30 June–right at the start of the exchange about having an exploratory meeting–Pfizer wrote to the Health Minister and said:

We have the potential to supply millions of vaccine doses by the end of 2020, subject to technical success and regulatory approvals, then rapidly scale up to produce hundreds of millions of doses in 2021.

And this has caused journos to lose their minds.