My ears were bristled firmly right against your mouth to hear… Could you convince somebody to vote Yes to the Voice?

When the Referendum is held to include the Voice in the Constitution, I will be voting ‘Yes’.  Why?  Because people I know and trust have been involved in the consultation processes and they think I should vote yes.  If Mirror Universe Mark teleported into the Prime Universe and said ‘Prime Universe Mark, convince me to vote Yes for the Voice’, what would I say?  Not everybody is one or two steps removed from those who were involved in the consultation process.  People are going to want something else to fill that trust gap.

For about a decade or so, we have had think piece after think piece diagnosing the problems in Australian political culture.  Despite all that ink, despite all those column inches, despite all the virality of blog posts, nothing has changed for the better.  If anything, it’s got significantly worse.  We have a political culture that does not prioritise promoting rational differences of opinion and, therefore, a culture that is thoroughly disinterested in convincing people who disagree with us.  Two forms of political cultural product dominate our marketplace of ideas: opinion pieces that repeat the audience’s views back to it, and opinion pieces that are so outrageously inflammatory that no reasonable person could agree with it.  Both are toxic.  I would argue that the former category is more of a problem than the latter category.  Most people treat the latter like it’s mere entertainment: we boo and jeer at the pantomime villains who laugh about stirring up the audience.  On the other hand, the former cosplays as intelligent thought and people pass off these imbecilic views as insightful commentary.

As fine a time as any to deduce the fact that neither you or I has ever had a clue… Review of @asunderland’s ‘Ten Rules of Reporting’

I fear a theme is emerging in my criticisms of the ABC that misrepresents my view.  The ordinary, reasonable reader could form the view that I am opposed to public broadcasting, and one eminent and professorial reader has formed the view that I am opposed to journalism itself.  Neither is true and I ought to be more careful.  The easiest way to understand my position is to think of Homer Simpson looking at the picture of a barbecue and then comparing it with the monstrosity that is actually sitting in his backyard. I think good quality, reliable information communicated effectively is essential for the sort of democracy in which I want to live; I don’t think contemporary journalism is providing us with good quality, reliable information communicated effectively.  And it’s difficult to have that conversation when the space is dominated by media professionals circling the wagons to defend against any and all criticism on the one side, and the increasingly unhinged keyboard warriors on the other who are upset that media outlets don’t repeat the audience’s views back to them.  Contemporary journalism and media structures are hurting us and making it harder to achieve democratic outcomes, but we don’t need to be ‘tribalistic’ in our perspective.  What we want is to understand what is going wrong and to think up ways to improve the information economy.

Alan Sunderland was the editorial director at the ABC for about half a decade until 2019.  Last year, the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism & Ideas published his The Ten Rules of Reporting and I picked up a copy looking to understand better the beast that I critique.  Here is a guy who has spent decades in Australian journalism and has been responsible for curating the current state of journalism at the ABC: how does he see journalism and how it should be done?

Though my memories have faded, they come back to haunt me once again… If ACMA can’t criticise the ABC, who can?

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is well-known to lack the powers it needs to act effectively as a content ‘watchdog’ in the Australian media landscape.  The primary mechanism for its powers comes from the issuing of broadcast licences: licencees have to play nice with ACMA or risk having conditions put on their licence.  The core problem is that this is basically the nuclear option and no ordinary breach of the licencee’s Code of Practice is going to merit conditions on the licence.  With the ABC and SBS, the powers are even more limited.  If ACMA is satisfied that the ABC or SBS breached their Code of Practice, under s 152 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, ACMA may:

by notice in writing given to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation, recommend that it take action to comply with the relevant code of practice and take such other action in relation to the complaint as is specified in the notice.

That other action may include broadcasting or otherwise publishing an apology or retraction.

So weak.  So weak.

The problem with having such a weak regulator is that it almost entirely depends upon broadcasters playing along and demonstrating at least some minimal level of respect.  It’s like high school basketball.  The poor bastard ref has literally no powers to make the players comply with the rules, but everybody learns to respect the ref and make their job easier.  Yes, as a teenager I was a referee for high school basket ball and, yes, I had to rely entirely on sheer goodwill in order to manage the game according to the rules.  It is an awful position to be in.

Shortly before Christmas, ACMA released a report into a two-episode series of ABC’s Four Corners that, in the view of ACMA, breached ABC’s Code of Practice.  Instead of accepting the ruling of ACMA, ABC instead allowed the presenter of the episodes, Sarah Ferguson, to write the most incredibly bad faith criticisms of ACMA.  Says Ferguson:

ACMA’s final report and its inflammatory press release raise questions about the regulator’s understanding of journalism.

Ferguson’s response was grossly unprofessional and did not accurately represent ACMA’s findings.  Worse, the host of ABC’s Media Watch, Paul Barry, responded to a news story covering Ferguson’s attack on ACMA with:

Just FYI, if @ABCmediawatchwere on air we’d be agreeing with this 100%.

In the background to the commentary is a larger issue: many at the ABC, former journalists at the ABC, and broader community supporters of the ABC feel like the ABC is under attack.  To some extent–especially with regard to certain members of the Coalition and other right wing parties, and with regard to critics from News Corp–this sentiment is justified.  Some of the criticisms of the ABC are manifestly absurd.  The problem is that there is a significant subset of that amalgamation who thinks any criticism of the ABC is inherently unjustified.  Sure, Paul Barry is allowed to criticise the ABC for not platforming enough transphobic views (I wish I were kidding), but any other sort of criticism is roundly rejected.  Audiences were even accused of being ‘ageist’ when they complained that the ABC was investing in a chat show vehicle for rusted on ABC veteran Fran Kelly instead of investing in new talent. We talk about culture wars a lot, but there is a sense that the ABC seems keen to dish it out but feigns a glass jaw when it’s served back to them.

Be famous, but still technically fine… What is ‘stochastic terrorism’ and is it real? (Spoilers: no)

As a person who studies national security law, I have tried to improve my ability to explain to non-experts why national security law is so weird.  It’s an area of law where the vast majority of people are factually wrong about its content and how it works, and yet a large number of people have strong opinions about how it should work.  Newspapers are full of discussion about terrorism and how to manage the threat.  What they’re not full of is basic explainers so that the audience has a fighting chance of participating in the discussion.  Instead, the public develops their understanding of the law from movies and television, resulting in this weird situation where discussion about national security law doesn’t have a specific jurisdiction.

In an 2020 article for Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Paul B Rich echoed the common refrain that the public has a selective memory when it comes to terrorist events, and that memory is shaped by media–both news media and popular culture.  In that article, he focused on media that presented terrorism as an external threat that was overcome by masculine action heroes and argued that this helped shape public imagination in a way that made activities that fit within the legal definition of terrorism seem less terroristy: most notably, the long history of activities of the Ku Klux Klan designed to intimidate and coerce sections of the community.

Being in Australia, our public discussions about terrorism are often dressed in secondhand clothes from the US and UK.  We are a net-importer of political dialogue rather than a producer–possibly a market-based punishment for giving the world the Murdochs and 1980s evangelical creationism.  As a result, a lot of our public rhetoric makes more sense in the UK and US contexts and significantly less sense here in Australia.  The recent discussion about the Queensland shootings being ‘domestic terrorism’ is an extremely good example of this: the category doesn’t exist in Australian law and yet we have very odd Australian news articles claiming that experts felt QldPol was wrong not to designate it a ‘domestic terrorism’ event (it turned out that one of the experts is being quoted out of context).

‘Domestic terrorism’ does exist as a legal concept in the United States; it doesn’t here.  Most Australian discussion about ‘domestic terrorism’ is simply confused.

The latest phrase to be imported into Australian public rhetoric is even weirder: ‘stochastic terrorism’.

It ain’t always what it seems when you cling onto a dream… Elon, doxxing, and discussing banned content

For the last little while, I’ve been pondering a legal policy problem about censorship.  To spoil the punchline of this post: the puzzle is how to facilitate a discussion about banned content with the wider public without disseminating the banned content itself.  I have been playing around with Twitch on my LegalReckoning profile for precisely this reason, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult as the recent Elon drama demonstrates… in a weird way.

And they will shake their heads and wag their bony fingers… Why are Australians so thirsty for cop violence?

The events in Wieambilla this week which resulted in the deaths of six people are devastating.  No matter which way you cut the story, it must be horrible for the friends and family of the people who died.

In particular, it’s impossible not to have enormous sympathy for the family of the police officers who were shot dead this week.  For all the extremely negative press that the police get (a lot of it extremely warranted), the reality is that it is a high risk job dealing with an extremely violent slice of the public.  There are people who disagree with this as a starting point but–with only a few exceptions–they tend not to be intellectually serious people.

This week has shown where this starting point leads in the wrong direction very quickly.  Within hours of the events, we had a lot of information pumping the intuition that the people who shot the police officers and the bystander neighbour themselves deserved to die.  Within a day or two, we had public rhetoric about ‘domestic terrorists’ (a nonsense term in Australia) and hyperpartisan commentary about who was to blame.  One notorious blow-hard blamed Daniel Andrews for his government’s approval of paramilitary gear for VicPol; others swamped One Nation Senator Malcolm Robert’s mentions to hold him responsible for what happened.

Importantly–importantly–no information has been made public that has demonstrated that the use of lethal force was appropriate.

Yeah, I want the most but I’ll take the least… Gendered analyses of political culture are necessary, but incomplete (a response to @JennaPrice)

Let’s be really clear from the start: women cop a shocking amount of abuse online.  It’s such a horrific state of affairs that I am more surprised when I hear from female friends and colleagues who have somehow missed an outpouring from the sewer.  In the Canberra Times, Dr Jenna Price wrote:

I am not sure when all this started to happen. Was it the advent of social media? Nah, I remember handwritten letters filled with hate and handcut headlines. I’m assuming it is a function of both massive self-importance, a deep, deep hatred of women and that social media makes the abuse cheap and handy, with targets very accessible. I often wonder if the people who share lives with these losers know what they do in their spare time.

The point of her piece was to reflect on a few recent data points: criticism of the ABC’s Louise Milligan, the abuse directed towards Brittany Higgins, and an interview with the Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher, about the need for strategies to combat this toxicity.  Dr Price concludes by making a confusing call to arms for women to become ‘citizen feminists’, which is both unclear and–I suspect–not a fully formed idea, but it’s not consequential to the overall discussion.

We want to interrogate this argument because Dr Price uses a range of different dynamics and, accurately, identifies gendered abuse as a commonality to the examples but, in doing so, obscures other important dynamics.  The dynamic I am most interested in is scope creep and the way that powerful people use this frame of analysis in order to defend quite appalling behaviour.

Quick Post: Don’t Tinker with the ARC–abolish it (a response to @DrPeterBentley)

Very, very quickly.

The Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Higher Education Policy & Management, Dr Peter Bentley, posted a thread on Twitter noting, correctly, that Australia does not really have a national postdoc funding scheme.  The scheme that is supposed to occupy this place, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (‘DECRA’) is increasingly leaving a gap between the award of the PhD and a researcher’s stable career.  This gutter between conferral and tenure largely filters out talented researchers who simply cannot play the high stakes game of contract-to-contract life in the hope of eventually landing a more permanent position.  Little (if anything) to do with merit, and significantly more to do with the life circumstances of the researcher.

Bentley makes the same mistake that nearly every person stumbling into this policy space makes: look for solutions.  Bentley proposes a few:

1. Scrap DECRA and have universities administer a postdoctoral scheme.
2. Retool DECRA into a ‘mentor model’ where a junior researcher would ride on the coattails of a senior researcher.
3. Maintain DECRA but require universities to place DECRA recipients on tenure-track.

Of these, (1) is the best option.  Hand money to universities and say: ‘With this money, hire postdocs.’  The other two options listed here are terrible.  (2) is a recipe for abuse: under the old APD system and the current pseudo-APD system under Discovery Projects (positions are funded out of project funds), you had junior researchers entirely dependent upon the ongoing good relationship with the senior researcher for their career.  Needless to say, that resulted in absolute disasters when the senior researcher was unreasonable and had junior researchers trapped with them.  (3) simply does nothing to address the identified problem and creates a financial disincentive for universities to apply with external candidates.  Under (3), universities will only put up candidates who already have tenure-track positions (this is, indeed, what happened when research management staff in some universities spread a rumour that the ARC would insist on tenure-track.

The Information Action Ratio is the place to go… A monarchist’s take on the death of the Queen

Nobody was expecting much from public debate, and we seemed to get less than even that.  By the time we had a Senator telling another Senator to go back to Pakistan, we should have known that we’d reached a new low point.

The public discourse about the death of Queen Elizabeth II passed through several phases quickly.  First, we heard that she was under observation.  Then we heard she was dead.  We moved quickly to how the death of a 96 year old who recently lost their partner was actually an example of a failure of pandemic policy.  And then rapidly to who could write the most tasteless shitpost on social media.

Quick Post: Notes on housing, residential tenancy law, and property managers

A rather good article by Slate and thread on Twitter by Henry Grabar about the housing crisis in the United States prompted me to procrastinate with some notes of my own about the situation in Australia.  The unifying theme between the Australian and North American arguments is the need to think through the history of how we arrived in our situations.  There is a tendency to look at housing problems as a ‘view from nowhere’ problem: a problem has emerged and now we need a solution.  The Grabar article and thread show part of the pathway to the current situation in the United States, and also show how things have worked (to greater or lesser extent) in the past.

The history of residential tenancy law in Australia is very different from that of the United States.  The United States has had a history of extremely varied living arrangements that we have not really seen in Australia.  The history of tenancy law in Australia, on the other hand, was about controlling rents and evictions; it was comparatively recently that tenants were considered consumers who should enjoy consumer protections.  Between 1978 and 1999, States and Territories began to codify residential tenancy law with greater protections for tenants.  Tenants were paying for a service; there should be protections that recognise their status as consumers.  Recent shifts in discussion about residential law reform have had a focus on improving the lot of long-term tenants, but I think this overlooks the unfinished work of consumer protection.