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06–07 2010 ...... Nº 106
...... EDITORIAL ESSAY Where to find us Postal address: John Hinkson Matthew Sharpe Arena Magazine 2 TWO WORLDS 1 THOUGHTS OF AN ANTIPODEAN IN HELLAS New divisions as some seek prosperity without growth An ancient commentary on democracy and hubris PO Box 18 North Carlton 3054 ...... LEAD GRAPHIC COOPER’S LAST Web: www.arena.org.au 4 Fiona Katauskas Simon Cooper Tel: (03) 9416 0232 ...... 54 CULTURE, NIHILISM AND THE MARKET Barbarism beneath the new university Fax: (03) 9416 0684 AGAINST THE CURRENT ...... Nonie Sharp ARTS AND CULTURE Submissions 5 ‘TWISTED ARE THE HEARTS OF MEN …’ Arena Magazine Reflections on life on a new Earth David Melzer accepts unsolicited 44 THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY RADIO submissions for Guy Rundle How local is your radio? Community radio at a each of its sections: 7 GAZA AND THE WEST crossroads The flotilla and identity politics in Israel commentaries & debate ...... up to 1200 words; Gerhard Hoffstaedter REVIEWS essays up to 4000 9 BOAT PEOPLE IN THE MAKING? words; features up to What future? Refugees in Malaysia Kate Harper 3000 words; reviews of Jon Altman 50 TEARING THE FAMILY APART Recognisable perversions of the crime family books, film, art, theatre, 11 WILD RIVERS music and dance up A case for Aboriginal resources rights Sean Cubitt to 1200 words; photo Alison Caddick 51 INSPIRED CRITICISM essays; and poetry. Democracy, neo-liberalism and ‘communicative 14 GREEN FUTURES? capitalism’ A recent conference on greening the Left Please provide a brief Gillian Terzis biographical note...... LETTERS AND COMMENT 52 A NATION IN FREEFALL Send to: Neo-Keynesian solutions to the GFC [email protected] Ted Trainer ...... 15 WILL THE GREENS EVER GET IT? STORY Agreeing with Ariel Salleh: some green delusions Style Roger Rees We follow the AGPS Dennis Altman 49 MEMORY FLAGS Style Manual. 15 RESPONSE TO VALERIE KRIPS A young man exhorts his damaged brain to ‘work as A Serious Man misread well as you can’ The editors reserve Aurélien Mondon the right to change ...... titles and edit for space. 1 A FREE UNIVERSITY FOR MELBOURNE POETRY The emancipatory potential of education Refereeing ...... Susan Fealy 48 A SMALL TREATISE ON CAPTIVITY We formally referee any FEATURES TRANSLATION published article as Rod Beecham ...... requested by academic 17 MY UNIVERSITY authors. When education means increasing your individual PHOTO ESSAY Payment brand equity Jessie Boylan Arena Magazine does Taegen Edwards and Pablo Brait 27 A SELECTION FROM THE YOUTH OF GAZA not receive government 20 EVO, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE C-WORD SERIES funding. Published Bolivia’s exuberant alternative to Copenhagen ...... contributors are Carmel Budiardjo CARTOONS offered a half-year 24 PAPUA’S FALLEN LEADERS Matt Bissett-Johnson gift subscription to The terrible cost of leading your people Arena Magazine. Roland Boer 31 RED TORIES Beware the roots of this version of community Tom Nairn 35 GREAT BRITAIN TO LITTLE ENGLAND? The UK elections and democracy 2 EDITORIAL • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Two Worlds
The packed hall gathered to hear Tim Jackson—a leading of state indebtedness has flown out of control. Arguably UK researcher on sustainable economies—on the such indebtedness can be managed over time with a regime question of ‘Prosperity without Growth’ (also the title of of economic growth. But in our times at best this could his recent book). His lively presentation and general only be a solution at great cost. The powerful states of the grasp of the issues enthralled an expectant audience. It capitalist heartlands stand vulnerable and could not sustain is hard to convey what seemed a deep emotional need themselves in the face of another shock. But we have among audience members, as reflected in their entered an era where shocks are the order of the day. questions, concerns and statements on the night. When The shock of debt crisis in Greece in past months is one joined with the fact that an earlier talk was booked out kind of experience. The Greek government was forced by some days in advance, this seems to be evidence that the institutions of the EU and the IMF to slash welfare, Jackson is engaging a profound need for at least some public spending and workers conditions generally to reduce publics. Can one reasonably see in this a gathering deficits and maintain EU membership. This association of momentum related to a crisis of the most fundamental Greece and the EU had mostly generated positive kind in our social institutions, related to how we live? consumption benefits until the crash. Suddenly, in the Tim Jackson asks, through a critique of the core aftermath of the GFC, expansion and consumption growth commitments of society to economic growth, how it had inverted into debt, unemployment and the collapse of might be possible to build a sustainable economy that social security. The resulting turmoil on the streets made can avoid climate catastrophe. Among a large range of headlines around the world. But one would be hard put to concerns, he pursues this question by asking how we portray these events as those of a public seeking to live might come to radically different concepts of another way. No doubt there are sectors of the Greek polity ‘flourishing’ for individuals and communities, notions of that would take up this concern. And there are other flourishing that contrast with those offered by the features of the situation in Greece that are quite specific. apparently limitless consumption lifestyles of Nevertheless expressions of consumer frustration were to contemporary global social institutions. His portrayal of the fore in these events. the utter disaster that awaits us if we proceed down the Where people have been drawn into the world of the road of what is now called ‘Recovery’ is comprehensive consumer oriented to commodities and have lost their and disturbing. He knows any answer will take time and sense of mutuality with others—or think mutuality can be emerge out of practical endeavour, but a visceral need to found on Facebook—they respond in ways consistent with commence a process urgently is in the foreground of his that hyper-individual formation. We can expect similar thinking. For those who attended, this is where it is at. responses over the coming period in many a city in the In Perth in the same week our leading mineral West. As Mark Lilla argues in The New York Review of Books entrepreneurs led demonstrations against a resource tax (May–June 2010) in a discussion of the rise of the ‘Tea proposed by Kevin Rudd, a tax that would be used to Party Jacobins’, there is a new populism at large. Quite help reduce government deficits resulting from the unlike the populisms of the past, it is based in the new Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and related stimulus individualism which is constituted in the experience of the programs introduced to ensure Recovery. Neither the consumption lifestyle. entrepreneurs nor any of our political leaders—other But the loss of mutuality is more complex than this. than Bob Brown—would seem to be on the same planet ‘Facebook mutuality’ is real but it cannot distinguish as Jackson’s Melbourne audience. At the centre of their between technologically facilitated presence and presence political and entrepreneurial concerns is the pursuit of based in place, the senses and tangibility. And this economic growth and profit—and more generally the distinction lies at the core of the emerging ‘two worlds’. For core assumption that expansion is good—the same way the importance of locality, regional economy, generational of life that Tim Jackson convincingly tells us is doomed knowledge of others, together with the critique of the and can have no medium-term future. Rather, the global transport of people and commodities, compose some official political debate in Australia, excitedly promoted core elements of the emerging critique of global by the media, is a stoush between combatants over the development. To see this as an advocacy of a return to distribution of the spoils from toxic economic forms of domination and hierarchy embedded in history—a expansion. What might be sustainable over time could return, say, to an aristocratic conservatism—is to not be further from their thoughts. misunderstand the nature of the contradiction that now The tunnel vision that characterises mainstream faces us, one that has been discussed for many years in Australia takes a different form in Europe and the Arena Magazine and Arena Journal. United States, where Recovery is far from certain. In On the other side of the world another drama is shockingly Australia the dependence on China, and to a lesser underlining the contradictions of our times—the massive extent India, is stark and anxiety provoking, but for the eruption of oil 1500 metres below the surface of the ocean time being makes Australia look ordered and relatively off the coast of Louisiana. Far larger than the Exxon-Valdez prosperous. In Europe and the United States the levels spill and still not controlled, it will foul the fisheries and 3
• the coastline of the immediate East Coast— in the first instance is not especially socially • possibly much of the East Coast—of the United oriented. Rather it expresses profound dismay at Two Worlds • States. Ways of life and pristine environment will the implications of what has been discovered • be ruined on a monumental scale. Various causes about the environment and climate change under John Hinkson • • have been identified: corruption and cost-saving the impact of growth-oriented Homo sapiens. inside the corporations, poor technology and • The second thing to say is that while this could inadequate regulation. But most parties, and • support a more general ferment in the arts, • especially the media, ignore the dependence of humanities and social sciences, it has not done so • the global economy and way of life intimately, in as yet. It may be bubbling away and could well • endless detail on oil—from transport to food, suddenly take form. One can readily advocate • from packaging to building. If high tech frames • such because it is hard to see how there will be a the global Behemoth, oil plays a central role in its • sufficiently challenging social movement without growth. For at least ten years it has been known • such a development responding to the rising that our world of cheap energy is coming to an • concerns of the general population. • end. Dogmatic deniers aside, those who have • investigated its future availability come up with The third thing to say is that our universities • the same answer: it has no future. Heedless, a way have changed compared to the past and that this • of life desperate to maintain itself nevertheless change is almost certainly at the centre of • launches into dangerous exploration in the deep contemporary quietism in the face of • • sea, with what many see as predictable outcomes. fundamental challenges. (In this issue of Arena • One scientific commentator, feeling compelled Magazine see Rod Beecham and Simon Cooper for • perhaps to step outside his disciplinary a discussion of some of the issues.) During the • strictures, declared we have opened mythological upheavals of the 1960s, especially in the United • doors and that nature is now releasing its dark, States, the humanities and social sciences were • uncontrollable underside. This is by no means the outspoken while in the background the hard • only underside of the global juggernaut. sciences—or, more accurately, their practical • derivative the techno-sciences—together with • While President Obama is signalling university authorities were quietly developing • (unconvincingly) that the oil spill marks the end relations with industry and government—with • of US dependence on fossil fuels, barely capital. This relationship was founded in the new • believably but illustrative of the social divisions • cornucopia that was promised in and emerging that are emerging, others in the eastern states of • from the techno-scientific revolution. Two the United States are seeking to put aside the • generations on, it is this relationship that typifies temporary ban on off-shore oil drilling because it • the university. In other words the university as • is causing unemployment in the industry. institution has become a central player with • • Two social worlds are forming. There are many capital in the practical development of the global • spectators for the time being, but enough people economy and culture—to the point where • now know that global development is calling into capitalism per se is no longer an adequate • being the stuff of collective nightmares. description of contemporary society. The endless • cornucopia of material goods and individual Capitalism has encountered a number of social • lifestyles that lies at the heart of the and cultural movements that sought to block its • contemporary crisis is, unlike any earlier social • general development. There was Romanticism in crisis, closely interwoven with the university, and • the early and mid 19th century, socialism in the with this shift there has been an inversion of • mid and late 19th century through well into the institutional traditions and relations of power • 20th century, fascism and Nazism in the early • and influence. 20th century, and the counter culture of the • • 1960s and 1970s. It adds little to say that they all Every academic working in a university today • failed, but all have nevertheless had effects and knows in intimate detail what this has meant for • continue to influence social thought. They all the institution and how it impacts on them as • have to be learnt from in one way or another. thinkers. It does not mean that they are • necessarily contained as individuals by this In these instances there would have been no • development but practically speaking, to this movements of substance without a ferment • time, this has been the collective effect. Tim • developing in the universities and institutions of Jackson will testify to the way this has worked to • learning. Leading through broad debates about encourage silence. Until there is a ferment that • cultural choices, the universities made a crucial begins to target this core developmental • contribution to practical transformation. Are • relationship it will be especially difficult to there signs of a ferment in the universities • agitate for a different cultural and economic emerging today? • course into the future. • The first thing to say is that Tim Jackson is • If there are signs of two worlds developing on the himself a sign of an emerging challenge within • cultural stage, they have not yet taken a mature the institutions. That he bridges the humanities, • form within the universities. The need could the social sciences and the sciences is important. 06–07 2010 • hardly be more pressing. Nº 106 • But, to be precise, he comes out of the ecological • sciences, where a ferment that has been John Hinkson • developing over decades. This gathering ferment 4 LEAD GRAPHIC • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • / 5 AGAINST THE CURRENT
• • Fiona Katauskas • • • • • • ‘Twisted • • • are the hearts of men …’ • • Nonie Sharp • ...... • • • Reflections on life on a new Earth What are the predictions of other thoughtful • scientists? In his Requiem for a Species,Clive ‘Twisted are the • ‘So long, it’s been good to know you.’It’s Woody hearts of men …’ Hamilton cites the recent predictions of Kevin • Guthrie’s voice on Melbourne radio yesterday, but Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for • he’s singing about us now, about the planet we know: Climate Change Research. Put all too briefly Nonie Sharp • a farewell to an era from the legendary figure of the here, Hamilton is saying that with a 3 per cent • 1960s protest movement. Today another American • decline in carbon emissions—the maximum • citizen, Bill McKibben, thoughtful environmental rate consistent with continued economic Nonie Sharp is an activist of our time, says ‘yes’: we are saying goodbye Arena Publications • growth—the world has a 50:50 chance of only to the old earth. It’s a different place now. The planet editor. • a four degree rise by the 2070s or 2080s. • still looks the same, but soon it will look different. • • He, Bill, is speaking of ‘one of those rare moments, Bill McKibben became an activist some twenty • the start of a change far larger than anything we can • read about in the records of man’. Willy-nilly we are years ago. In 1989 he wrote The End of Nature, • saying farewell to the old earth. We may usher in the an early book on the advance of global • new one without the trumpet sound of joyous rebirth. warming. Himself down with dengue fever in • That’s why McKibben’s new book Eaarth: Making Life Bangladesh, he watched other people dying; • on a Tough New Planet depicts the dark green planet behind their sickness he saw a warming • with an emergent red-brown centre. Too strong for earth—and fever on the rise. ‘Something in me • snapped.’Writing books was not enough for • the faint-hearted; incomprehensibly pessimistic? him. He began an unfinished pilgrimage; • Inside Eaarth McKibben writes that the weather following the 2007 Arctic meltdown, he began • disturbances happening all around us today—rising • the organisation ‘350’ with a circle of college • floods, bushfires, storms—are not just the well- graduates and global action in 1400 places. He • known disturbances of ‘the old random and freakish is a man whose example, conviction, and • kind’. They’re something quite different. His words imagination calls others to his side. • speak to only some of us. They are incomprehensible • to many, many people today. And they speak Fortunately there are like-minded women and • important truths to a few … That balance I believe men are now aware that we’re speaking of ‘the • will change … Welcome to the era of an overheated habitability of the earth’, in Clive Hamilton’s • planet … words: an emotionally challenging task. • Knowing that truth behoves us to act • McKibben’s conclusions, which he puts simply and ethically; doing so ‘may redeem our humanity • solemnly, speak of the latest findings of leading before the future is taken out of our hands’. • world climatologists, especially those of James • Hansen, head of the climate division of NASA. The For Bill McKibben, Clive Hamilton, like • George Monbiot, many others, the • surprise melting of the Arctic ice cap in mid- Copenhagen meeting marked a turning point • December 2007 led Hansen to conclude that the safe • number of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in for the future of the planet; the last hope ‘to • the atmosphere had already been surpassed. In pull back from the abyss’ was lost there, and • December 2009 it was 387 parts per million. It was we face the grave outcome of the deepest of • at that moment in December 2007, Bill McKibben human failures. So for these writers the • writes, when he knew we’d never again inhabit the question now is how to make a life on a tough • same planet. In that ‘light bulb’ experience he new planet in the face of a rapidly warming • world. Clive Hamilton writes that being • himself changed irreversibly. mindlessly optimistic may be emotionally • Of course, if we stopped putting more carbon dioxide tranquilising, but it is also shockingly • into the atmosphere right now we could halt this • irresponsible. While hope is an eternal • descent into irreversible disaster. But we won’t. Most message of our social being, in circumstances • of us go on being simplistically optimistic. A few of looming catastrophe, blind hope is terribly 06–07 2010 • even say let’s just adapt to whatever temperature dangerous. Nº 106 • changes arise in the future. Both are immoral, and • both are lunatic … • 6 AGAINST THE CURRENT • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Sadly in our epoch ‘dark powers’ have come to possess us. Over spirit of co-operation, take on the character of moral time exploiting the earth as a resource has triggered an epochal virtues. Perhaps that’s where Tim Jackson’s transformation where techno-scientifically-based processes thoughtful if controversial answer to the fetish in can yield an open-ended material abundance and lifestyle that Prosperity Without Growth comes in: halt the latter shapes and refines an individualist ethos. For all its underlying and save the planet! complexities (and this is the subject of original scholarly work Of course, Jackson is aware of the challenge he is not my own) this transformation finds everyday expression in making. ‘Questioning growth is deemed to be the act the individual pursuit of freedom, the consumption of things of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But and places. In the name of individual freedom an invisible question it we must.’This is all too obvious to process reshapes what it is to be human. So the problem McKibben or to Clive Hamilton. Non-growth is becomes us: humans who go on wanting. Clive Hamilton and anathema to economists. In this era growth is others see this process as the growth fetish, ‘the creed of the anathema to ecologists. cancer cell’ in Judith Wright’s late words. At Copenhagen the facts were plain and the leaders
...... made their choices. And just as the leaders at Copenhagen turned their backs on the slowly Like-minded women and men are drowning low-lying states of today—the Maldives, now aware that we’re speaking of Kiribati and more—so, as the tragedy unfolds, will they find ways to ensure their descendants’ survival ‘the habitability of the earth’,in while the rest drown or just starve. Clive Hamilton sees that once the powerful grasp the seriousness of Clive Hamilton’s words: an the threat to themselves and their families they will emotionally challenging task. move to protect themselves and sacrifice the rest of us. This is just what happens in George Turner’s Knowing that truth behoves us 1987 literary fiction, The Sea and Summer, in the drowning towers of Melbourne after the Antarctic ice to act ethically; doing so ‘may caps have melted. redeem our humanity before the future is taken out of our hands’. McKibben believes we are not able to prevent hideous damage because ‘The momentum of the heating and the momentum of the economy that Even a couple of generations ago intermediate institutions powers it, can’t be turned off quickly enough to stood between us and the urge to pursue our individual desires. prevent it. We must then ‘build the architecture for They continued to play an active part in mediating, the world that comes next, the dispersed and sanctioning our actions, providing an intellectual and ethical localised societies that can survive the damage we framework through which people lived in and interpreted the can no longer prevent.’For a man who believes the world. Today that social fabric supporting a moral life has worst thing is to give up, this is the voice of deep receded with individual achievement, consumption (of places sorrow. But he concludes, we still must live on the as well as things), moving into the foreground. world we’ve created—lightly, carefully, gracefully.’ Fortunately though (but sadly too), the loosening bonds that A time to heed the wisdom of the ancients: ‘Twisted feed a sense of the common good have by no means entirely are the hearts of men—dark powers possess them’. A dissolved. Between the cracks left by the accelerated expansion Sanscrit text, probably from the Vedas, inspires of individual self-interest, fresh shoots can be seen where the Judith Wright’s late poem ‘Patterns’. She inscribes light shines in. Using less energy, turning away from fossil there a recent warning—from the atomic scientists fuels (energy descent) and transitional projects are young yet in the glare of a thousand suns … active: care for the earth, care for others are visible in a multitude of different places (as Bill McKibben and others perceive well). In the new circumstances energy descent, the
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• • ‘Twisted are the • hearts of men …’ • Gaza and the West • Nonie Sharp • Guy Rundle • ...... • • • The flotilla and a hardening identity consent of people living there, who were • subsequently cleared by indiscriminate Gaza and the West • politics in Israel civilian terror designed to create a refugee • Perhaps it was a mistake to subscribe to Melanie flight. It survives off Western aid, much of its Guy Rundle • military funds are hidden in foreign aid • Phillips’ RSS feed. The UK columnist, beloved of budgets, and both its government and its • Australia’s right-wing think tanks, is not known as ‘Mad • Mel’ for nothing. As a reliably hysterical proponent of global network of supporters draw on its Guy Rundle is a • Western decline, encapsulated in her book Londonistan,a Western origins as a source of legitimacy and consulting editor • near science fictive account of the city’s ‘takeover’ by claimed solidarity. Within the 1967 borders it for Arena Magazine. • radical Muslims, her blog is always entertaining. So has largely erased a two-thousand year Arab • when the Gaza flotilla was raided it was always likely heritage in a number of cities (the flotilla’s • that she would jump into action. To put it mildly. She arrestees were taken to Ashdod, a planned city • near the destroyed town of Isdud, depopulated • must have been at her desk for thirty hours straight; my by refugee flight and then expulsion), and the • email account eventually sent new entries to the spam • folder. ‘Peace flotilla? This was an Islamist terror West Bank territory is being carved up to • ambush!’,‘The truth about the Turkish terror convoy’,‘A make any sort of genuinely independent • global pogrom in the making’, and on it went. Like Palestinian state unviable. • someone painting a bridge, she appears to have started This comprehensive late-stage colonialism, • on a new post as soon as the last one was finished. • extended to cultural and historical revision on • It was impossible to believe that Phillips, an adamant the ground, and claims of legitimacy abroad • global warming sceptic and a believer in the discredited suffices to make the conflict one of particular • vaccination-causes-autism argument, was not focus. The Israel government’s and lobby’s • forestalling a certain degree of anxiety occasioned by the repeated special pleading on the matter— • Israeli government’s hairy-chested attack. Yet any pointing to the brutal suppression of the Tamils • by the Sri Lankan government, or even the • comfort/amusement one might have gained from • watching Israel’s supporters running round like chooks sinking of a South Korean naval ship by the • was inevitably diminished by the spectacle of many of North Koreans—is transparently ridiculous, • the flotilla’s supporters, for which the brutal and stupid the assumption of a legitimacy that is precisely • attack became a fresh occasion for the construction of a in question. Much of this is stating the • unitary and uniquely malign Israel. The rhetoric directed obvious, but it is worth restating the objections, • against Israel—that it had crossed a ‘line of civilisation’ if only to clarify the way in which they have • and such—was a mirror of the country’s overblown flowed into a construction of Israel that is as • obsessive and mythologising as the regime • claims to the threat represented by the flotilla. itself. To identify Israel and its vociferous • The event revived calls for a boycott of Israeli goods, • supporters as something to be relentlessly which began in an ad-hoc sort of way. In Turkey, the • challenged is one thing; to construct it as • justifiable anger at the killing of nine Turkish citizens some unique evil is something else entirely. • was accompanied by rallies at which the swastika was • reasonably prominent. In France things got weirder— There’s no doubt that at least part of this • one small independent cinema chain suspended the intensity arises from the need of an ossified • showing of an Israeli film, prompting the intervention of section of the radical Left for a clear moral- • the culture minister. And globally an already entangled political focus. Israel is a European colonial • debate was made crazier by the comments of veteran state, and its conduct towards the Palestinians • White House reporter Helen Thomas that the entire inside and outside the post-1967 borders re- • emphasises that character. But it is one of the • Jewish population should go back to Germany and Poland. last such situations in a world which offers far • The stymied debate over the flotilla, Gaza, and less clear lines of moral-political division. In • Israel–Palestine was an expression of the profound • this, the Left is entirely outdone by the pro- • impasse into which the issue has fallen—and the Israel Right, for whom the Zionist state has • consequent manner in which it has become a proxy fight become a fetish object sans pareil.For • for the Western Right and Left. On the latter side it has commentators such as News Ltd’s Greg • now become imperative to sort out the genuine critical Sheridan, the US-based National Review or the • case against Israel from the great deal of bad faith that UK ‘Churchillian’ historian Andrew Roberts, • has sprung up around it. Israel is a surviving remnant of a Western • • The clear anti-imperialist argument against Israel sense of militant purpose, one long since lost 06–07 2010 • remains: it is a country created on the land of an in the decadence of mini-skirts and skiffle Nº 106 • indigenous population within living memory, its borders music. There was always much talk of ‘plucky • created by a Western-dominated UN, without the little Israel’ (the phrase became so self-parodic • 8 AGAINST THE CURRENT • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • it was changed to ‘doughty’ some years ago) but in more important than the military in generating ‘an emotional the wake of repeated failure in Iraq and connection’ by Israelis and non-Israeli Jews to the state. The Afghanistan—wars, which, at their base, had a construction of such a trial would involve the demolition of a number degree of purposelessness in their projection of of Palestinian homes, with rehousing in modern apartments. power—Israel became the only game in town. Netanyahu also spoke of a number of Stephen Spielberg style movies to complement the trail. But for the battered neo-cons of the West, Israel became an increasingly tough customer to front It should be obvious to anyone that something is awry when national up for. Its centre-stage role in the drama of the purpose is held to depend more on kitsch theme parks and artefacts beleaguered West occurred at a time when the than a conscription army with a fabled history and a strong claim on country appeared to be losing its capacity for public duty. The destruction of actual homes and neighbourhoods for judicious self-interest in its military adventures. the historical retrojection of a tradition that is to some degree The 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the decimation in invented has less in common with Sabre and Chatila than it does with Gaza, and finally the flotilla attack all give the Disneyland or creationist theme parks in Kansas. The idea of provoking appearance of incidents in which the desire for real conflict for a campaign around imaginary matters is the exact spectacle, however bloody, has overtaken any reversal of previous strategies which, while perhaps opportunistic and judicious or proximate response to incidents such propagandised, were related to some real strategic gain. as cross-border rockets or kidnappings of The image politics of the ‘heritage trail’ can serve as a model of other soldiers. Nor is there much mystery as to why recent acts, which often seem to be restaged versions of earlier this would have developed. In recent years the incidents. The Dubai assassination of a Hamas operative was widely Zionist project has changed its character, slipping seen as inept, given that so much of it was captured on camera. The from a nationalist (or pseudo-nationalist) politics alternative possibility is that it was played, consciously or otherwise, into a politics of identity, which is quite a for the cameras—a restaging of the steely, secret post-Munich different thing. assassinations (or the Spielberg version thereof). The entirely The obsessive focus on the meaning of Israel in unnecessary and counterproductive flotilla raid has more than a few the United States, and in Israel, has come not echoes of the 1977 Entebbe raid. But the Entebbe raid was from a position of purposeful strength, but from meticulously planned; its moral grounding was unquestionable. The a reversal in the way the Zionist project is ineptness of the flotilla raid appeared somehow connected with the defined. Rather than as a positive (if naive and cloudiness of the moral and tactical imperative of the raid itself. chauvinistic) vision of ‘making the desert bloom’, Such repeated gestures are the leitmotif of an identity politics, which it has become increasingly defensive, defined has supplanted a material politics. Its other dimension is a degree of against the opposition to it, attached to an hypersensitivity to challenge. Every ‘other’ becomes an agent of uncompletable project of colonising to the Jordan annihilation. Every kidnapping is a pogrom, every tinpot missile an and, in the dreams of ancient Revisionists, all the Auschwitz. Lieberman’s Beitanu party, based around Russian way to the other side. immigrants, appears to be interested in pushing a politics with a whiff The shift is in part a product of changed immi- of totalitarianism, with a compulsory loyalty oath by all citizens and gration flows, increasingly drawing fundamentalist banning any marking of the national day by Palestinians as a Jews from the United States, and ever-larger ‘nabka/catastrophe’. numbers from the comprehensively anti-Semitic In the wake of 1948, once the hopes of a co-operative Zionism had southern part of the former USSR. The former been finally dashed, there was a degree to which the injustice of Israel’s are decisively fundamentalist rather than merely establishment could be acknowledged, even if it was claimed as a Orthodox, fleeing the anomie of contemporary necessary one to a ‘higher’ cause. Increasingly, any suggestion of this, America for the literalist vision of a promised either from the Left or Right, has become a subject for disdain, and an land, as dictated by various and increasingly astonishing callousness to the Palestinians. One could suggest that dodgy versions of early Jewish history. this imaginary politics is beginning to infect strategic choices, and that Far from fleeing pogroms in New Jersey, the new Israel’s actions are not that of a unified state, but the projection of a arrivals settling in the West Bank are coming to a struggle between an older Likud-style Zionism, secular and place of more danger and contestation, rather realpolitik, and an identity politics rooted in newer parties and than less—they are seeking out boundaries and populations. antagonisms by which an identity can be defined. The hysteria of the neo-con Right, like Melanie Phillips, is based in Earlier forms of Zionism regarded Arabs as junior part on an awareness that even Israel is ceasing to serve the purpose childlike partners in the project, to be raised up, of a political supercharge for Western resolve. There is no reason for and later as an enemy and adversary to be the Left to follow them down that path as a way of avoiding analysing vanquished. But even this latter formulation gave a messier political situation. The Gaza flotilla was an effective some measure of recognition to the other, to operation, but its single victory was in opening the Gaza–Egypt contesting claims of legitimacy—even if they border, and refocusing the issue on Arab solidarity. The rhetoric that were only honoured in terroristic violence. Now attended on it—like novelist Henning Mankell suggesting that he that the shadow of the Holocaust is distant, would ban Hebrew translations of his future books—is one way not to legitimation becomes harder won, and also more do politics in the 21st century. imperative to find. Thus the extraordinary energy given over to the creation of a ‘Jerusalem heritage trail’, a quasi- factual version of the city’s history, and one which Prime Minister Netanyahu has suggested is 9
• • Gaza and the West • • Guy Rundle • • Boat People • • • • • in the Making? • • Gerhard Hoffstaedter • ...... • • • Growing numbers of refugees in Many refugees become ensnared in the • politics of the cheap and exploitable labour Boat People in the • Malaysia indicate the need for a Making? of undocumented workers, which has • helped to drive Malaysia’s economy. They • regional response are tolerated when they are most needed Gerhard Hoffstaedter • Riding the monorail high above the streets of Kuala and expelled and mistreated when the • Lumpur, Matthew (not his real name), a Myanmarese • economy slows down. Unlike most refugee, looks around him and at every stop starts biting • undocumented labourers, however, Gerhard his lip. At any stop he could be picked up by the police, Hoffstaedter is a • refugees have nowhere to return to when immigration officers or RELA, the volunteer auxiliary research fellow • the economy takes a dive such as that with La Trobe • police, who patrol the streets and conduct occasional caused by the global financial crisis. They University’s • raids in areas where they suspect refugees live and work. simply lose their jobs and subsequently • Institute for Human ‘Sometimes they wait at the bottom of the stairs of the their housing, their access to food and • Security. His station. That way we cannot escape. They ask for soon their minds. research focuses • identification and money, sometimes the mobile phone. on refugee politics, •
They just take it and often let us go, less paperwork for ...... • ...... Islam in Southeast them’, he tells me. Asia and identity • politics. He is also • Matthew is just one of the thousands of refugees Many refugees become part of the • working illegally to make a living in Malaysia. As ensnared in the Melbourne Free • • Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee University project Convention and Protocol, it does not recognise refugees. politics of the cheap
government has declared Afghanistan safe and is The group of refugees in Malaysia had lived in exile in Iran for seeking to stop refugees from claiming asylum twenty years. Last year they were forced to flee after President here on the basis that they’re endangered there. Ahmadinejad began to crack down on illegal immigrants. Now they Most Afghan refugees are Hazara peoples, who are in a similar situation in Malaysia, with neither a home to have been subjected to systematic discrimination return to nor a safe place to move on to. in Afghanistan, and many are embroiled in blood Mailwagadum, a Sri Lankan refugee living in Malaysia, said he is feuds which will affect their families for awaiting a decision from the UNHCR about settlement in a third generations. Some also collaborated with the country, he hopes in the West. ‘I have a wife and child. It is for Soviets during the Soviet occupation of their welfare I am doing this. I must do it the legal way’, said Afghanistan, prompting them to flee to neighbour- Mailwagadum. Asked about paying people smugglers, he ing Iran after the fall of the Soviet regime. responded, ‘It is too dangerous and too expensive. If I drown, what of my family then?’ Although he admitted he had recently thought
...... about it. Another refugee, Abdul, was more frank. He had already tried to board a container ship bound for Australia. At the last The group of refugees minute, though, the people smugglers had run off with the AUD$8000 he had paid to transport him. These investments are in Malaysia had lived often equivalent to life savings, in many cases of the person’s entire village or family. in exile in Iran for When you ask refugees why they want to come to Australia, they twenty years. Last give three main reasons. Firstly, they say they want to be free: free to go to the shops, the city, the countryside, wherever, without year they were forced fearing police harassment. Secondly they say they want to work and become a part of the community, which they cannot do in a to flee after President country that does not legally acknowledge them at all. Thirdly, and clearly most importantly, they say they want to give their children Ahmadinejad began a better future than the lives they were living. Above all, they say they want their children to attend schools so that they can learn to crack down on and become all the things they themselves can no longer be, such as doctors or lawyers. For some, it is just to be able to read and illegal immigrants. write. Hearing these refugees’ hopes, it is striking how similar Now they are in a their values are to those of average Australians. Stories like Matthew’s, Mailwagadum’s and Abdul’s are part of a similar situation in growing refugee crisis in Southeast Asia. Numbers are continuing to rise as more and more people flee Myanmar, as well as trickle in Malaysia, with from other conflict areas. With the Australian government in the midst of a debate about refugees, from this vantage point it seems neither a home to clear that Australia can no longer go it alone when it comes to refugees. The problem is regional in scale and requires a regional return to nor a safe response. This may include pressure on Malaysia to rethink policies that are endangering refugee lives and the security of its place to move on to. neighbours. 11
• • Boat People in the • Making? • • Gerhard Hoffstaedter • Wild Rivers • Jon Altman • ...... • • • secondly, because the development project • As the Senate inquires into the proposed by Noel Pearson and the Cape York Wild Rivers • • Queensland Wild Rivers Bill, Jon Institute, and strongly supported by the Jon Altman • Altman argues the case for Australian state, is focused on transitioning • people from welfare to engagement in the • Aboriginal resources rights across productive market economy. • Jon Altman is an Australia The Wild Rivers Bill seeks to address this ARC Australian • resource rights situation in two ways. It Professorial Fellow, • The federal government and all states and territories Centre for • have recently committed to closing the gap in socio- proposes to protect the rights of traditional Aboriginal • economic disadvantage between Indigenous and owners of native title land within the wild Economic Policy • other Australians. Much of the focus of this policy is rivers areas to own, use, develop and control • Research, on remote Australia, where opportunities for that land and it seeks to limit any state • Australian National economic parity are most circumscribed. Since the government regulation of native title land in a University, • • 1970s, first land rights and then native title laws wild river area under the Native Title Act Canberra • have seen more and more of the Australian continent unless the traditional owners agree.
...... with a de facto right in the form of right of consent or right of veto provisions. This provided a form of leverage that Aboriginal traditional owners have since been able to use in The proposals in the negotiations with resource developers to achieve some negotiated mineral rents above the statutory royalties Wild Rivers Bill should guaranteed by this law. be strongly supported; Woodward’s rationale was politically pragmatic rather than based on legal principle alone. This is clear because but unless such subsequently, under the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983, mineral rights (except for gold, silver, coal and provisions are petroleum) were provided, together with land rights, demonstrating that there is no barrier to this under extended to the whole Australian law. Similar issues arise with other resources like fisheries and fresh water. As already noted, in most of Australia this situations Aboriginal people have customary rights to fish for domestic purposes only. Native title law seems to change will constitute protect that right, which is exercised by a significant 80 to 90 per cent of adults in remote Australia. Cape York-bioregion- In the aftermath of the National Water Initiative, fresh water is arguably the new frontier, and this is clearly specific legal important for Cape York. Aboriginal native title groups enjoy domestic use rights and possibly customary rights to exceptionalism. fresh water, but the Crown asserts ownership of water, especially ground water: Aboriginal people do not have Without resource rights, Aboriginal goals to either commercial rights in water beyond those that might be engage in market transactions or to earmark resources allocated by the state. Other new frontiers in resource for local and regional benefit are limited. There is also a rights might be carbon or biodiversity credits. But again great deal of inequity in land rights and native title legal there is a distinct possibility that the Crown may frameworks, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, across unilaterally assert ownership rights, even though Aboriginal Australia. As shown by the emerging conflict in the natural resource management might lead to carbon Kimberley over gas and onshore facilities, the right to abatement and the maintenance of environmental values. negotiate under the Native Title Act does not effectively The second issue raised in the Wild Rivers Bill is linked to give native title groups a right to stop a development. free, prior, informed consent of Aboriginal communities to Creating commercial opportunity in locationally resource developments, although here it is proposed that disadvantaged regions like Cape York will require the traditional-owner consent be sought before wild rivers are allocation of any existing commercial advantage to declared, rather than when commercial development on Aboriginal land owners, as well as the provision of Aboriginal-owned land is proposed. In Australia, free prior maximum leverage in negotiations, which can be informed consent provisions only exist under the provided either by ‘special law’ resource rights or free, Aboriginal Land Rights Act, and even here there are prior, informed consent rights. national interest override provisions (although these have In terms of Indigenous policy, the proposals in the Wild not been invoked in the thirty-three years since the law was Rivers Bill should be strongly supported; but unless passed). In other jurisdictions (except Western Australia) such provisions are extended to the whole of Australia under state land rights laws other specific forms of this change will constitute Cape York-bioregion-specific consultation and negotiation are possible. The Native Title legal exceptionalism. This would exacerbate the problem Act does not give native title groups free prior informed of regional variability—hardly appropriate given that the consent rights. Instead it gives, at best, only a right to Closing the Gap framework applies nationwide. negotiate (with a window of opportunity restricted to six months) and, at worst, a right of consultation. These rights Beyond Indigenous policy, there is growing uncertainty represent a weaker form of property than the de facto in the overlapping space between customary and property rights in the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. But they 13
• commercial rights in resources, which makes Commonwealth Native Title Act that needs to be • property rights increasingly unclear. This lack of amended to confer either full rights in all Wild Rivers • • legal certainty has the capacity to increase resources where claims have succeeded or, as a Jon Altman • transaction costs from legal contestation and will second best, to provide the free prior informed • result in inefficient allocation of resources, a consent provisions that currently exist under the • problem for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Aboriginal Land Rights Act to native title groups. • Australians. Unless there is concerted effort to In remote locations such as Cape York, • ensure greater consistency in property rights for Indigenous affairs policy, currently focused on • the myriad forms of Aboriginal land tenures Closing the Gap, will require Aboriginal people to • across Australia there will be ongoing, • be in a position to use their lands in one of three unproductive legal contestation over resource • ways: to use natural resources in the customary rights. • non-market economy; to use natural resources • The Act proposed by Tony Abbott has been commercially, either in Aboriginal stand-alone or • accompanied by a dominant media discourse joint ventures; or to be in a position to trade away • • promulgated by The Australian from late 2009. It commercial advantage for financial benefit in the • advocates providing Aboriginal landowners with form of a compensatory benefit stream. The 2005 • rights in commercially valuable resources on their Wild Rivers Act clearly limits this suite of • lands, but only in Cape York. Were the Wild possibilities focusing instead on the protection of • Rivers Bill to be passed into law we would see a conservation values in this bioregion. • fundamental change in the current workings of The Wild Rivers Bill is looking to empower regional • land rights and native title laws in Australia—the • Aboriginal native title groups to have a right to attachment of resource rights to native title lands • commercial development and to have real power to an extent that exceeds the current best case • in negotiations. It is clear that without resource situation in the Northern Territory on the • rights and leverage the current power imbalance • Aboriginal-owned terrestrial and intertidal will ensure that the resource allocation status quo • estates established by the High Court’s finding in will be maintained. It might be time to make the • the 2008 Blue Mud Bay case. • playing field a little bit more level on Cape York • While the proposal contained in the Wild Rivers and elsewhere if, as a nation, we are looking to • Bill makes good economic sense, attention is close some persistent socio-economic gaps. • focused on the wrong law: it is the • •
• ...... • • • Environmental Practices at Arena Printing • Paper Stocks • Our Environmental Commitment Availability of environmentally friendly paper is changing • We believe that sustaining the world around us is vital to all the time. At Arena we provide detailed advice on • everyone’s future. choosing the most appropriate environmentally graded • We are committed to environmentally responsible stocks to suit your printing needs. • printing and have clear procedures in place to achieve • this. These are regularly reviewed to ensure they are up Alcohol Chemistry • to date. At Arena we keep alcohol use in our presses to a minimum. • In choosing Arena, you can be sure your printed • products will be responsibly produced. Emissions and Credit Offsets • Arena eliminates and minimises Greenhouse emissions • Environmental Practices – at a glance rather than simply aiming for ‘carbon neutrality’ by • Power buying credits. However, Arena does hold 80 acres of • Electrical power at Arena is from 100% renewable land in Victoria’s central highlands which we are • sources. substantially re-foresting. • Environmental Credentials Further detail on our environmental practices can be • Arena is FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) certified. obtained by contacting Arena. • Our credentials for environmental printing are Put Arena to the Test • constantly being updated. To obtain a competitive quote on your next job, call us • Inks from Renewable Sources on (03) 9416 0232 • The vast majority of inks used at Arena are vegetable To talk to one of our team about your printing needs call • based. Bev on 0412 717 848 or email • Blanket Wash [email protected] • Arena uses Envirowash supplied by VARN, the lowest • To find out more about Arena email CFO (evaporation rate) blanket wash available. [email protected] or visit • Recycling • www.arenaprinting.com.au At Arena we recycle all our waste plates, chemicals and Arena • paper. • 2-14 Kerr Street Computer to Plate The mark of • Fitzroy Victoria 3065 responsible forestry Arena goes direct to plate from computer files, without 06–07 2010 • Phone: 03 9416 0232 SGS-COC-005694 the use of film and associated chemicals. Fax: 03 9416 0684 © 1996 Forest Nº 106 • • • ...... 14 AGAINST THE CURRENT • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Green Futures? Alison Caddick ......
The growing sentiment that if governments won’t act on climate would ten minute papers be considered an adequate change other civil society groups will was evident again in a recent presentation of the questions to hand unless all you conference: ‘From Global Crisis to Green Future’. Bobbing up in the wanted was a sample of opinions; why did every topic wake of Labor’s climate change backdown, it had in fact a long of left concern have to be covered (human rights, gestation, and was a major event for its organising body, the tick, democracy, tick, the struggle in the Philippines, Sydney-based Search Foundation. An organisation with historical tick); and then in simultaneous sessions which links to the Communist Party of Australia (which folded in the divided people into very small participant groups— 1970s after a long-time orthodox history then brief flirtation with participants around small-group topics, not the core Eurocommunism and the new social movements), and an ongoing issues. Part of the oddness was the mix of socialism brief in social research, some old connections into important trade and social work techniques for participation, and this unions and the community sector were evident. But coming out amongst an overall group of around 150 people. With green meant gathering a wider range of participants still, with the every one in small group sessions asked to make a serious intention of seeing a stronger confluence of left and green contribution and chairpersons enforcing this, the agendas. At the opening session perhaps the most striking primary intention seemed to be to affirm everyone’s indication of this particular hope and the stakes in play was the experience, though the effect was to say that well- AMWU’s Tim Ayres’ report that 80 per cent of Hunter Valley coal intentioned people already have the answers. families when surveyed wanted green answers to climate change. Conferences are difficult to organise and often That’s a stunning, hopeful figure but, also putting the finger on unpredictable. But there was an uncanny sense here the central contradiction of any ‘green Left’ (a post-modern idea if of a conference following a kind of ritual format. The ever there was one), it posed as many questions as it suggested lack of really probing core papers was writ large in answers. In fact as a companion lent over to say the figure meant the very conference format which in more ways than nothing—‘mere motherhood statements that the people one announced that the answers were known in themselves couldn’t act on’—Tim made the point loud and clear advance. Indeed disgruntlement around a pre- that the pitch of green lefties to ‘workers’ couldn’t be elitist or prepared policy statement (circulated by email for that constituency would be lost to them. A fragile allegiance at participants to add to before the conference, to be best and very little room to move. confirmed in a very short session dedicated specifically to that task) emerged as an area of All the same, of course a confluence of Left and green, trade substantive difference between at least some Search unions and ecologists is a laudable quest, and the Hunter Valley Foundation stalwarts. figure too means quite a lot—climate change poses the question for everyone about how we might overcome the divisions we know It broke out in a final session, strangely it may have are illogical or dangerous in the long run. Even those whose seemed, over the inclusion of the speaker from the livelihoods rest on coal itself ‘know’ something doesn’t add up. Philippines Communist Party whose ‘Stalinist’ The problem is finding an adequate way to grasp what this really orientation was passionately declaimed by David means and, having come to grips with that, what it might imply McKnight. David’s intervention was about the for future action. communist heritage and a plea for careful ethical reflection on the Left’s methods and means. But it More’s the pity then, that some of these central confounding also threw into relief the narrow, programmatic issues for green action within a productivist and hyper- nature of the conference and its decided lack of consumption oriented economy weren’t used as a real funnel and philosophical orientation or ‘big’ perspective on the focus of discussion. At some small-group sessions and within the driving forces of contemporary upheavals. This had larger ones, related issues clearly came up. There were short been clearly evident, and the source of frustration for presentations in small groups on steady state options and some, in the conference’s pre-prepared ‘conference sustainable economies. There was a major session on ‘strategy’, statement’. with the Search Foundation’s goal of a ‘green socialism’ something of a focus, with financial regulation and green sustainability goals I can’t see much difference in the substantive key elements in this vision of a functioning (for most still positions put forward by David over a long period capitalist) economy and fairer society. and the conference organisers in general as far as their overall goal of some kind of social democratic, But the focus was endlessly fragmented and any deepening sense managed, and ‘green’, capitalism. And this is the real of understanding either the problem or any potential solution question. As UK author Tim Jackson and others have remained always at bay. In fact the conference was odd, and pointed out, capitalism either expands or it ultimately dispiriting. It was an unhappy reminder, on the one collapses. If we are coming up against an absolute hand, of a kind of self-sureness that people on the Left already endpoint in the resources for capitalist expansion, have the answers (doubly false and worrying as the majority of the anyone offering versions of managed capitalism as a audience was over sixty) and on the other hand an insecurity or way forward must have more to say about a emptiness that can lead to an incredibly unproductive obeisance to transition to a different future. It would be good to sectoral and ‘rainbow’ concerns. When people are grasping after hear more from both sides of the above skirmish as ideas and possible solutions to an utterly fundamental issue, why to the sources and means of that transition. / 15 LETTERS AND COMMENT
• ...... constantly tell us that the you do through the many days • technology to solve the problems when there is no sun or wind Green Futures? • comment • ...... exists, would not cost much across a whole continent? (Stern said only 1 per cent of Alison Caddick • We are a very long way from GDP), and all we need is • general recognition that • Will the individuals to move to green capitalist society cannot be • lifestyles and governments to fixed. Unfortunately the green • greens ever implement the available movement also fails to grasp that • technologies. • get it? the big problems of • However, Salleh did not discuss environmental destruction, • Ted Trainer the most important assumption third-world deprivation, armed • built into this conviction that conflict and social breakdown are • technology can solve the caused by the obsession with • Ariel Salleh’s commentary on problems. This is the affluence and growth and can • four recent major sustainability Will the greens ever • documents dealt well with the unquestioned faith that only be solved by transition to a get it? • failure to face up to the renewable energy sources, geo- simpler way. • sequestration and nuclear energy Ted Trainer fundamental causes of the For the calculation of energy • can replace fossil fuels. Green problem. Even most people in needs, go to Sustainability (Zed, • could never be extended to all ...... ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/>. 1995) and • the world’s people, and are now ...... Renewable Energy • impossible for technical advance Prestigious Cannot Sustain a • to solve. They do this in the face letter Consumer Society • of facts and figures all of them green agencies ...... (Springer, 2007). He • must be quite familiar with, such is developing • continue to Pigface Point, an • as that the Australian footprint Response to alternative lifestyle • is 8 ha of productive land while pour out analy- educational site • the per capita amount that will near Sydney • be available to 9 billion people in ses which take Valerie Krips • 2050 will be only one-tenth of it for granted Dennis Altman • this amount. It should be • transparently obvious that the that there are • Christopher Isherwood used the problems cannot be solved • technical fixes expression ‘annihilation by • without vast reductions in the blandness’ to describe polite . • amount of producing and and there is ways of discriminating against • consuming going on. homosexuals. Unfortunately this • no need to is exactly the term that should • For decades a few of us have Response to • been trying to increase question high be used to describe Valerie Valerie Krips • recognition of the fact that Krips’ discussion of A Single • global sustainability is not ‘living Man, which was based on Dennis Altman • possible unless the quest for Isherwood’s 1964 novel. One • affluence and growth is standards’ or could read her entire piece and • abandoned, but in my view we not realise that the whole point • the consumer- Dennis Altman is are further from this goal than of Isherwood’s story was to point • Professor of we were in the 1960s. Just about to George’s anomalous position Politics and • capitalist everyone in government, media, as a bereaved gay man. Only at Director of the • system. Institute of Human • the economics profession and the end does she mention ‘sexual Security, La Trobe • within the general public refuses preference’, but if one knew • to even think about the issue. As neither the book nor the film University.. I recently calculated that to • Salleh shows, prestigious green that could well describe a provide the quantity of energy • agencies continue to pour out predilection for spanking, • needed through a winter month analyses which take it for children or indeed Catholic • in 2050 we would need so much granted that there are technical clergy. • plant that the annual investment fixes and there is no need to • cost would be more than thirty I assume Krips took George’s question high ‘living standards’ • times the present proportion of homosexuality for granted, but • or the consumer-capitalist GDP. Many important cost in so doing she totally missed • system. • factors were not included in this the point of the story, and George’s 06–07 2010 • Thus it is no surprise that analysis. There would remain a sense of isolation. Nº 106 • Worldwatch, Amory Lovins and much bigger problem, one of • Green parties are popular. They intermittency; that is, what do • 16 ...... The Melbourne Free University (MFU) University does not claim to be comment was created in part under such a unbiased: it stands for radical ...... principle: one can learn if one wants to. equality, the a priori belief in The role of the teacher is therefore to universal equality and the facilitate this realisation, not to impose possibility of emancipation. A Free their own knowledge on a student. The Our first semester offered four MFU was the result of the belief that seminars over two days. In May two University for many elements in the contemporary seminars offered various interpre- education system prevent such equality tations of contemporary Australian Melbourne from being acknowledged, which in turn issues, and more particularly of limits the universal potential for Australia’s role in the world and race Aurélien Mondon emancipation. relations in Australia. A second French philosopher Jacques Rancière For many, education and by a perverse series of seminars took place in June based the premise of his book The extension knowledge in general, are and discussed ethics and morality in Ignorant Schoolmaster on a little more than commodities, little the 21st century and what role truth groundbreaking experiment led by more than tools for a simpler, more and religion play in contemporary Joseph Jacotot in the early nineteenth practical life. Universities have become society. increasingly outcome-oriented and it century. Jacotot was forced into exile by The second semester will be more seems only the diploma and the the counter revolutionary forces in 1815 like a university semester. Four six possibility of a job on its completion and went on to teach at a Dutch week courses will be offered over are rewarding. The potential for university. While his Dutch-speaking thirteen weeks: two courses, two personal emancipation is left students were eager to hear what the evenings a week. The first hour will unexplored and the thirst for French-speaking scientist could teach allow an expert to present on the understanding often limited to the them, language became simultaneously subject and the second will be basics necessary to pass exams. In this what prevented them from dedicated to discussion and open context, the MFU aims to offer space communicating and, more importantly, dialogue between all those present. the inadvertent precursor to a great for personal, self-motivated experiment in emancipation. To engagement in areas as diverse as Courses for the second semester attempt to understand each other, philosophy, politics, history, sustainable include Australian studies, inter- Jacotot gave his students a bilingual development, geography and many national studies, philosophy and version of a book, asking those truly others. The only limitations on our sustainability. Lectures will interested in his science to come back a future curricula will be dictated by the eventually be put online, along with few weeks later, once they had mastered motivation of those who decide to further readings, offering the the French language. To his surprise, a participate. possibility of deeper research into the topics introduced over the few weeks later, many students came The MFU does not offer diplomas. It semester. We hope that in time our back with an impressive level of French. does not offer anything but the courses will link in with external This left the teacher with revolutionary satisfaction of knowledge for its own projects. questions: ‘Was will more important sake and the realisation that one can than ability? Was every man virtually learn if one decides to. No We welcome help and are looking able to understand what others had qualifications are required to for anyone interested in done and understood?’ participate. The project is open to participating in any way possible. It This experiment proved the possibility anyone and everyone who chooses to is our hope that in the mid-term the of reversing the oppressive order participate. Additionally, the MFU does project will become self-sustainable. not ask for any form of commitment. It present in the teacher/student Finally, the limitations of the MFU is not necessary to register interest, nor relationship; it disproved the common project are clear to us. We recognise to participate in courses in their assumption of explanation being that its potential can be constrained entirety. necessary. In fact, explanation theories by elements as diverse as location were uncovered for what they mostly Another obvious consequence of the and time. We are aware that despite were: tools of domination. ‘To explain commodification of knowledge has been our commitment to advertising the something to someone is to imply they the price put on its acquisition. project to as many people as are not able to understand it on their University degrees have become possible, participation may be own.’The explanation was the mythical increasingly expensive, and other forms limited. Yet, while a practical cornerstone ‘of a world divided into of education are rarely free. Central to enterprise, we believe the MFU to be learned and ignorant, able and disabled, the MFU project is the fact that it is first and foremost a symbol. A intelligent and stupid minds’. free of charge. The MFU upholds the symbol that the acquisition of Acknowledging will as the key to ability principle of ‘no money in, no money knowledge can be for its own sake made the inherent equality of out’. The cost of running the project is and that emancipation is there for intelligence a logical conclusion. If covered by in-kind, anonymous anyone to take. Jacotot’s students were able to learn donations. This point is directly linked Knowledge, like freedom, is not French, it was because they had the will to the absolute autonomy of the MFU. given, it is taken. to understand what Jacotot had to say, We remain autonomous from any but more importantly the will to political party or organisation, partake in a conversation, in an equal government, private body, university or conversation. NGO. Yet the Melbourne Free / 17 FEATURE • • A Free University • for Melbourne • • Aurélien Mondon • My University • Rod Beecham • ...... • Aurélien Mondon is • a PhD Candidate at • La Trobe University. phenomenon and because, as numbers, they • The reductio ad absurdum of His research can be produced at will to provide ‘scientific’ • focuses on Commonwealth education policy • evidence in support of a policy decision. populism, racism, • The Commonwealth Education Minister has been nationalism and What students thought of their teachers, how • equality. He is co- reported as saying that she wants tertiary they performed in standardised tests and • founder of the students ‘to make decisions about where they whether they completed their courses of study • Melbourne Free want to study on the basis of robust information • tell us nothing beyond what they thought of University project. about the quality of education provided at each • their teachers, how they performed in institution rather than on hearsay, inference from • standardised tests and whether they • entry requirements or prestige’. I think that’s a completed their courses of study. The number • splendid idea. I am at a loss, therefore, to of journal publications by a given academic • understand how she imagines she is furthering and the frequency with which his/her work • the cause by introducing a My University website. has been cited tells us nothing beyond the • number of his/her publications and the • The indicators of ‘university quality’ have not, it frequency with which they have been cited. To My University • seems, been finalised but, in relation to teaching • quality, mention has been made of completion imbue such data with any further significance Rod Beecham • and attrition rates, the results of satisfaction is immediately to make assumptions, and • surveys, and the performance of students in rather large assumptions. • standardised tests. For research quality we have • heard noises about journal publications and ...... Rod Beecham is an • independent • citations. Education Advisor Australian universities • The point has been made again and again that Quality of Teaching is based on ‘truth’ as a ‘core value’, and leads to • • A trawl through the websites of Australia’s ‘innovation’. The University of Melbourne • My University thirty-nine universities reveals a significant presents numbers for the year 2008: ‘produced • level of reticence on the part of the 117 articles or reviews of impact factor greater • Rod Beecham institutions themselves about what they do. than 20 in which collaborative country addresses • The University of Sydney suggests that it numbered 267 from 55 countries’. The University • ‘creates leaders’. The University of Melbourne of Queensland wants ‘to achieve excellence in • purports to sell ‘academic knowledge’,‘career research and scholarship, and to make a • outcomes’ and ‘lifelong connections’. The significant contribution to intellectual, cultural, • • University of Queensland asserts that its social, and economic life at a local, national, and • graduates are ‘in demand’. The University of international level’. The University of Tasmania • Tasmania suggests that it will ‘expand your mentions its ‘internationally recognised research • knowledge’ and allow you to ‘discover your profile in marine and Antarctic science, • place in the world’. The University of Adelaide agriculture, forestry, food science, aquaculture, • alleges that it ‘could change your life’. The geology and geometallurgy, and medical research.’ • University of Western Australia asserts that it The University of Adelaide, under the heading • has ‘the highest quality undergraduates of any ‘Research Achievements’, lists its research • • university in Australia’. income, its Go8 per capita income, its numbers of • publications and numbers of higher degree by These claims scarcely begin to illuminate what • research completions. The University of Western it is you are buying when you pay your course • Australia asserts that an emphasis on research fees. They do imply, though, that you will be a • and research training is one of its defining • better person for the experience, as if a characteristics, indicating that it has ‘determined • university is a sort of ‘character factory’, like six strategic research areas and several emerging • the Boy Scouts or the traditional English and seed priorities to provide appropriate focus • public school. The claims suggest that a • and direction’ to its activities. university’s input is its students who, the • university asserts, will undergo some kind of • transforming experience that will convert ...... • them to output (by the time they graduate, we • If analysis of Australia’s • must assume). • Let us assume, further, that this output takes economic position indicates • the form of young people trained to contribute • that we need more school- • effectively to perceived areas of national teachers, how will comple- • importance such as medicine, agriculture, • engineering and so on. How will the My tion and attrition rates, • University website measure the quality of this student satisfaction surveys • output? Completion rates tell you nothing • beyond what proportion of students and standardised test results • completed their courses. Student satisfaction assist the Commonwealth • surveys tell you nothing beyond whether the • • students are enjoying their experience at the government in assessing our • time: they can’t tell you whether the students universities’ response to the • are going to be good doctors, agronomists or • structural engineers. Performance in perceived need? • standardised tests means little unless the tests • are administered after graduation in • discipline-specific areas. These claims suggest that the nature and meaning • of ‘research’ is less important to Australian • I suggest that the minister needs to think a universities than creating an impression of • little harder about what it is she is trying to vigorous research activity. A discernible • • achieve with a My University website. A young undercurrent in these web promotions is the person who wishes to become a doctor, an • notion of commercially applicable research, or • agronomist or an engineer is hardly going to ‘knowledge transfer’, as the University of • be in a position to make an informed decision Melbourne calls it. The Vice-Chancellor of the • about where s/he wants to study on the basis University of Queensland, in an elegantly • of completion-rate statistics, student satis- expressed introduction, uses the term • faction surveys and standardised test results. ‘translational research’ as a way of collapsing the • traditional distinction between ‘pure’ and • • Quality of Research ‘applied’. In other words, the ‘research’ undertaken Teaching, of course, is only one of the things a • by the universities is designed to attract • university is supposed to do. How do the conditionally released funding. • mooted quality measures relate to the other • It will be recalled that journal publications and major activity, research? • 06–07 2010 citations have been suggested as ways in which The University of Sydney states that its • Nº 106 the quality of this research might be measured. • research ‘spans all areas of human endeavour’, • FEATURE 19 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Again, we see proxy variables in action. The quality of government in assessing our universities’ response to someone’s research cannot be measured according to any this perceived need? If the number of corporate pre-existing standard because the purpose of research, failures suggests that we need more skilled auditors properly defined, is discovery. The whole history of human and forensic accountants, how will completion and advancement was written by people who tried something attrition rates, student satisfaction surveys and new or looked in a new way at something apparently standardised test results assist the Commonwealth familiar. To measure research quality by numbers of peer- government in assessing our universities’ response to reviewed publications is to assume that all publications are this perceived need? The answer, of course, is that of equal importance and that a correspondence exists they won’t assist at all. There is no correlation between research quality and volume. Albert Einstein might between what is measured and the ostensible reason have scored well on this criterion in 1905, when he for the measurement. published four papers in Annalen der Physik that were, quite literally, epoch-making—but he wasn’t working in a ...... university at the time. In any case, he would have done much less well in subsequent years, which suggests that With their funding cut and excellence will be penalised under this rating system. If you propose energy quanta, a stochastic model of Brownian their financial viability motion, a special theory of relativity, and the equivalence increasingly dependent on fee equation (E = mc2) all in one year, it seems unlikely that you will be able to sustain such a level of output in subsequent revenue from overseas years, meaning that the ‘quality’ of your research, as students, Australian universi- measured by publication volume, has declined. ties must present themselves The other suggested measure of research quality, citation of your work by others, seems vulnerable for similar reasons. as places where prospective We have every reason to be grateful for the discovery of young ‘professionals’ can penicillin, but Alexander Fleming’s paper on the subject in the 1929 British Journal of Experimental Pathology was little increase their brand equity. noticed at the time. His university career may have come to an inglorious end if his ‘performance’ had been judged according to the number of citations by his peers. Will the proposed measurement of research output help? Let us suppose that Australia’s economic Implications performance is adversely affected by the outbreak of The Commonwealth government suggests that the a new strain of influenza in our major trading universities educate our future ‘professional’ workforce, partners, leading to trade embargoes to reduce the create future ‘leaders’, and drive much of our economic and risk of the infection spreading. Will the regional ‘success’. The website of the Department of Commonwealth government re-direct all research Education, Employment and Workplace Relations says that funding into virological research and immune universities play ‘a key role in the growing knowledge- and responses? Would it make any difference? Suppose innovation-based economic health of Australia’. there is a revolution in Chile, causing the base metals operations of BHP Billiton in that country to be These statements, I think, go far towards explaining the suspended, with a flow-on effect on commodity vagueness and incoherence of our universities’ own stated prices and the value of BHP Billiton shares. How will reasons for being. With their funding cut and their the number of articles contributed by Australian financial viability increasingly dependent on fee revenue academics to the Journal of Futures Markets or the from overseas students, Australian universities must International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing present themselves as places where prospective young Technology indicate the quality of our universities’ ‘professionals’ can increase their brand equity. Teaching, response to the problem? therefore, is to be measured in terms of customer satisfaction, and research is to be measured in terms of The utter incoherence of stated higher educational productivity—meaning publication and citation volume policy and the stated purpose of universities is a and, in the national context, commercial applicability. consequence of measurement being made into an end in itself, a transferable process indifferent to subject. This is wrong not so much because it has the effect of The purpose of a quality management system, as any marginalising and destroying humanities disciplines such manufacturer knows, is to ensure that the input to a as literature, history, philosophy and classics, and pure given system is converted to the desired output as science disciplines such as physics and chemistry—this efficiently as possible every time. The proposed destruction can always be justified on the grounds that measures of university quality, however, do not even such disciplines are not ‘useful’—but because it has the begin to do this. The urge to measure has supplanted effect of separating educational effort completely from the the reasons for undertaking measurement. Quality, ostensible reasons for which it is undertaken. It is the as a consequence, has lost its meanings, which must inevitable consequence of proxy variables. always be contextual, and become instead a floating If analysis of Australia’s economic position indicates that abstraction to be associated with whatever proxy we need more school-teachers, for example, how will variables are expedient. The reductive fatuities of the completion and attrition rates, student satisfaction surveys My University website are a paradigmatic example of and standardised test results assist the Commonwealth the process, and would simply be funny if they weren’t so likely to increase the sum of human misery. 20 Evo, Climate Change and the C-word Taegen Edwards and Pablo Brait ...... Morales was determined to focus attention on the • A report on the World People’s • structural causes of climate change. On stage, and Conference on Climate Change • Evo, Climate true to style, he did not beat around the bush in • Change and the and the Rights of Mother Earth explaining the driving factors he had in mind: ‘We • C-word cannot have equilibrium in this world with the • A wave of appreciative chuckles rippled through current inequality and destruction of Mother Earth’, • Taegen Edwards and the 20,000-strong crowd packed into the open- he told us. ‘Capitalism is what is causing this • Pablo Brait air Tiquipaya football stadium. Bolivian President problem and it needs to end.’ • Evo Morales was on stage thrusting plastic plates • A flick through the conference program’s list of • and disposable ponchos into the air as he made Taegen Edwards is a his case for the superiority of the lifestyles and seventeen official working groups gave further • • Research Fellow at products of the Indigenous Andean peoples in insight into the way the climate crisis is viewed in the McCaughey Bolivia and how discussions would be framed at this • comparison to imposed Western alternatives. • Centre, Melbourne event. Among those groups focused on familiar hot Speaking to a sea of chequered rainbow pan- • School of Indigenous Andean flags he was on a roll, topics in global climate negotiations such as forests, • Population Health, explaining how rice has nothing on quinoa, how technology transfer and the Kyoto Protocol were • University of you’re much better off drinking chicha, the local others convened to look at establishing an • Melbourne, and a member of Yarra corn-based alcoholic drink, than Coca Cola, and International Climate Justice Tribunal; planning a • World Peoples’ Referendum on Climate Change; and • Climate Action how it is clearly for dietary reasons that so many Now. Westerners are bald. drafting a Universal Declaration on the Rights of • Mother Earth. • It was April 20 and we were in the tiny town of • Pablo Brait is • Tiquipaya on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Mixed Expectations Director of Bolivia, for the official inauguration of the World • Strategic Planning As Australians, we were keen to extract signs of hope • People’s Conference on Climate Change and the at Beyond Zero to inject into a weary scene of climate activism back • Emissions and a Rights of Mother Earth. Beyond the impressive home. Despite unprecedented activity in community- • member of Yarra colour, ceremonial burning of offerings and based climate campaigning, the last year had been • Climate Action general Latino boisterousness, the mood was spent trapped, fly-like, in a web cast by the Labor • Now. expectant. The conference had saturated Bolivian Party rejecting the fundamentally flawed and • • newspapers for days. Morales had caused a splash ineffective Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and The opinions • internationally when he announced the event in expressed in this dismayed by the frightening traction and spread of • early January 2010, pulling no punches in article do not scientifically baseless climate denialism. After the • declaring it the antithesis to failed global climate necessarily shambolic Copenhagen talks put the icing on the • represent the talks in Copenhagen. Rather than locking it out, cake, we figured a people’s gathering and some fiery • views of the this conference would welcome civil society with Latino rhetoric might be just the thing to put • open arms. Indigenous voices, drowned out in so • organisations the Australian concerns into perspective, to draw on new authors work for. many other arenas, would feature strongly energy and to strengthen links with the international • • amongst those of citizens from around the world grassroots movement for climate justice. in Cochabamba for four days of all-in • deliberations on what is needed to tackle the But as we sat listening to Evo under the hot • • climate crisis globally. Cochabamban sun, we had mixed feelings. On the one hand, we were more than happy to bask in the • Aside from the welcome emphasis on grassroots • hour-long rant of a democratically elected world • attendance and participatory processes, this leader who appeared to actually grasp the extent of ‘Peoples’ Conference’ represented another • the climate crisis and not be delusional about the • fundamental departure from climate talks fundamental shift in thinking about human–nature • convened under the United Nations Framework relations needed to address it. On the other, it was • Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). clear that it was not just languages that would need • Whereas the UNFCCC has evolved into a forum • to be translated if we were to bring the messages of 06–07 2010 for competitive and self-interested nation-states this conference home to Australia. Declarations that • • to lock horns over emission reductions targets we must choose between ‘capitalism or the Earth’, Nº 106 and exemptions, financing and carbon markets, • • FEATURE 21 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • enigmatic ‘system’ for catching buses between Cochabamba and the Universidad del Valle in Tiquipaya, where most of the conference activities took place. Two-thirds of participants were from the host country, reflecting an apparent high level of engagement with climate change amongst everyday Bolivians from both urban and rural areas. On the first day we sat down for afternoon tea with Heriberto, an Indigenous man from a small farming village in the La Paz region. He was one of about twenty that his community had sent to the conference. When we asked him whether most Bolivians were aware of climate change he nodded quickly, the dangly bits from his brightly coloured beanie dancing around his ears. ‘Of course they are. They have their eyes open. You can see it.’ The conference had a jam-packed agenda with open forum panel discussions, information-sharing workshops and working group streams all running genuine acceptance of Indigenous lifestyles as a viable simultaneously. We roamed between all three. The panel alternative to the Western model, and an insistence on the sessions featured high profile speakers including Naomi need to protect the rights of Pachamama—or ‘Mother Earth’— Klein, Bill McKibben, Dr James Hansen, Vandana Shiva are simply not present in mainstream climate change discourse and a range of Latin American activists and politicians. in Australia. Morales’ repeated reference to them only served to Coming largely from the politicians, jibes at el underline how different things were here in Bolivia and the imperialismo yanqui were common and popular with the shallow nature of climate policy debate in Australia. There was audience. The Ecuadorian Environment Minister drew also a nagging question about relevance. No matter how deep strong applause when she announced that Ecuador was their analysis or exciting their proposals, who is listening to offering to pay the Obama Administration $2.5 million Bolivia? to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the same amount that the United States withdrew from Ecuador in climate aid Perhaps more to the point, who is listening to Evo Morales? when they refused to sign onto the Copenhagen Accord. Those familiar with the Morales story will know it is an When asked what foreign activists should do to help the understatement to say that his election in 2005 represented a Bolivian people suffering from the impacts of climate significant shift to the Left for Bolivia, among the poorest of change the Bolivian Vice-President said the most Latin American nations. An Aymara himself and, famously, a important thing was to go home and take over our former coca-leaf farmer, Morales became the first Indigenous governments. person to be elected president in a country where approximately 60 per cent of the population are Indigenous There were literally hundreds of workshops run by (mostly Quechua and Aymara). In a recent affirmation of his Bolivian ministries, international and local social domestic popularity, Morales was resoundingly re-elected to a movement groups, and NGOs. Many were purely new five-year term in December last year, just days before informative—we heard, for example, about programs to heading off to Copenhagen. emphasise the value of local traditional agricultural knowledge, the deployment of solar cookers in Bolivian Copenhagen was as good an example as any of the fact that villages without electricity and the ambitious initiative Bolivia is not taken seriously in global climate talks. Morales of the Ecuadorian Government to solicit payment from was certainly not invited into the room with the ‘big boys’ from rich countries to leave the oil reserves in the Amazonian the United States, Europe and the BASIC countries (Brazil, Yasuni National Park in the ground. Others had a more South Africa, India and China) during the farcical, eleventh- practical emphasis on building skills such as how to hour construction of the Copenhagen Accord. He subsequently more effectively target corporations or strengthening refused to sign (which prompted the United States to cut off $3 networks and support for the 350.org and other existing million in climate change related aid money to Bolivia), international campaigns. preferring instead to begin planning the People’s Conference. Though panel sessions and workshops were often lively Conference Activities and a People’s Agreement affairs, they had nothing on the deliberations that took While at least fifty-six world governments sent official place through the seventeen working groups, which were delegations to the conference, there was a notable absence of open to anyone to attend. After elbowing our way into a world leaders. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close packed university classroom we sat in on the highly- political ally of Morales, was the only other head of state to focused deliberations of the working group tasked with attend although he was joined by vice presidents of Cuba and establishing the conditions for an International Climate Burundi and a range of other officials including UN Justice Tribunal. It was a decidedly grassroots affairs, representatives. with facilitators trying to hold focus while juggling contributions from the floor that jumped from minor Official reports put the conference attendance at over 35,000 rants about how realistic the whole idea was to people. Since only 12,000 had been anticipated, the numbers passionate debate over specific wording of the presented some organisational challenges which manifested in recommendations. While probably imperfect, the long, motionless queues to register, last-minute venue changes process seemed underpinned by a level of mutual (spread almost exclusively by word of mouth) and a rather respect. 22 The outcomes from each working group were these demands across broader elements of global • presented publicly in a series of concurrent civil society, is likely to help align, mutually • • Evo, Climate Change plenary sessions where anyone could ask reinforce and further legitimise these positions. • and the questions and suggest changes. Some cognitive • C-word dissonance within the Venezuelan delegation On Rhetoric, Action, Agency and the Moral • became apparent, as one woman expressed High Ground • Taegen Edwards and concern at the sharp emissions reductions Morales’ posturing to a global audience and • Pablo Brait recommended because they threatened advocacy for much stronger action on climate • Venezuelan oil exports and the funding of that change does, meanwhile, leave him open to • country’s Bolivarian Revolution. The Venezuelan criticism for his handling of environmental • • man sitting next to us immediately began concerns at home. Monitoring this is also the • bitching about the hypocrisy of his fellow space of civil society and many Bolivian activists • countrymen that wanted to have it both ways—a have drawn attention to the need for scrutiny of • social revolution funded by oil money and a safe Morales’ action to rhetoric ratio, particularly in • climate future. This loyal Chavista also wasn’t the context of conventional policies relating to oil • convinced that socialism would provide an and gas exploration and exploitation, burning • ecologically sound alternative to capitalism. ‘In coal, and building environmentally-dubious dams. • capitalism’, he told us, ‘the individual imposes These concerns were reflected at the conference • • himself on nature. In socialism, the collective by the presence, both physical and in local media, • imposes themselves on nature. It’s the same of the ‘Mesa 18’ or unofficial 18th working group. • exploitative relationship’. The convenors of Mesa 18, importantly, pointed • to the Bolivian government’s unwillingness to • legitimise and give space to these neglected • ...... voices among all those others so enthusiastically • invited to participate in the People’s Conference. • Morales did not beat around • the bush in explaining the So, how well is Pachamama being looked after in • Bolivia itself? The question is absolutely valid but • driving factors he had in it begins to pale in significance when you • consider the global nature of climate change and • mind: ‘We cannot have • the options open to the Morales government. On equilibrium in this world • the one hand it is easy to say Bolivia cannot go • with the current inequality around hyperbolically blaming ‘the system’ and • calling for a maximum 1 degree temperature rise • and destruction of Mother (a goal scientifically considered unachievable • Earth’,he told us. ‘Capitalism without an immediate combination of zero net • emissions and rapid draw-down of carbon from • is what is causing this the atmosphere) without halting emissions- • • intensive projects and exemplifying an alternative problem and it needs to end.’ • system at home. On the other hand, how is it • possible for Bolivia to make radical changes • On the last morning of the conference, the domestically, to convert to 100 per cent • working group recommendations were presented renewable energy, for example, given the extreme • to a mass gathering of all the government officials poverty faced by much of its population and its • and a few chosen representatives from social lack of access to funds and appropriate • movement groups. These recommendations were technology? Consider this and then add the lack • • then synthesised into one document, dubbed the of power or any bargaining chips—associated • ‘People’s Agreement’. with being an emerging high polluter—to • influence global agreements. The People’s Agreement (see text box), which the • • Morales government will now take to the UN, It is a dilemma familiar to those versed in global • unsurprisingly locates the climate crisis firmly climate justice issues and it is why Naomi Klein • within a damning critique of the capitalist model. described the underlying provocation and mood • It calls for a return to 300 parts per million of of the event as ‘rage against helplessness’. While • carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, demanding the Morales government can drive dramatic • that wealthy nations cut emissions by 50 per cent transformations in Bolivia by nationalising key • on 1990 levels by the end of the first post-Kyoto industries, giving new respect and opportunities • period (2017) without the use of any carbon to Indigenous people and promoting the concept • • offsets or international carbon markets. of vivir bien—‘to live well’—above the capitalist • imperative to always seek ‘to live better’, they are On paper the People’s Agreement simply adds • keenly aware of the fact that their fate lies in the further detail to the Morales government’s pre- • hands of others. This is not to let Morales off the existing positions on climate change, regarded as • hook, but merely to point out what a great • somewhat renegade in UNFCCC circles. However, example Bolivia is of a country facing the • the direct contributions of grassroots social unfortunate combination of very high stakes, • 06–07 2010 movement representatives, as well as the significant moral weight and a distinct lack of • Nº 106 potential for post-conference association with • agency. • FEATURE 23 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • At Home, Now What? Back in the ‘lucky country’, we can’t help but ask what our Key elements of the People’s Agreement own prime minister would make of all this. After Copen- hagen, while clearly not satisfied with the outcomes, Rudd • Capitalism, and its model of endless growth, was quick to sign its Accord. In April, while Evo was busy is incompatible with life on a finite planet. asking the deeper questions at his conference, Rudd was (There was agreement about the need to change making a decision to put his only major climate policy (a the capitalist model of production, but not that weak and irrevocably compromised effort in itself) on the socialism would be an appropriate alternative.) backburner, implying it was all too hard for Australia to do We need to choose a path that establishes anything at all. The approach of his government, like Howard’s harmony with nature. before him, is an embodiment of what is wrong with stalling, deadlocked global climate negotiations, summed up • A call for the formation of an International neatly by the mantra that Australia, a rich, developed Climate Justice Tribunal with the capacity to country with perhaps the world’s highest per capita emissions, warn, judge and sanction states, businesses and will do ‘no more and no less’ than the rest of the world. people who pollute and cause climate change by action or failure to act. We also wonder who would listen to us here if we were to start echoing Bolivian calls for the need to ‘live in harmony • A call for the United Nations to adopt a with Mother Earth’ and ‘destroy capitalism’. In Australia, as Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother appears to be the case in other turbo-capitalist Western Earth, outlining obligations of humans to societies where competition, greed and exploitation of preserve and take care of natural systems. resources are revered and have blurred into ‘just the way things are’, debate about the structural causes of climate • Announcement of plans for a Global change occurs only on the fringes. The lack of informed Referendum to take place on 22 April 2011 popular debate around systemic drivers of our high levels of to determine agreement with issues including pollution leaves us with an unspoken (and unproven) the need to change the capitalist system and implication that we can deal with climate change simply by redirect current military budgets towards putting a price on carbon without needing to interrupt defence of the Earth. fossil fuel exports, let alone consumption and growth • A demand that the United States sign the patterns. Anyone who bothers to look at the big picture Kyoto Protocol and that commitments of quickly understands that the equation does not add up, but developing countries under Kyoto limit global the majority of people just avert their eyes. emissions sufficiently so as to return And finally we are struggling with what, if any, implications atmospheric carbon dioxide to less than 300 we can draw from the Bolivian conference for the climate parts per million. movement in Australia and where it should focus its efforts. This is not an easy question to answer, not least • A demand that the UNFCCC’s Annex 1 because the movement is not particularly homogenous. (developed) countries commit to emissions From the larger NGOs to the tiny community climate action cuts of 50 per cent by 2017 on 1990 levels, groups, there are a range of views on what needs to happen without the use of any offsets or international if we are to transform into the kind of society where carbon markets. climate change isn’t a problem. It is certainly true, though, • Recognition of climate refugees and demand that few dare to mention the c-word. As Ariel Salleh (Arena that developed countries should take Magazine no. 105) points out in her critique of a range of responsibility for them and grant them refugee ‘green new deals’ being proposed in Australia and other status in their countries under a special climate Western-dominated contexts, ‘today, even unionists and refugee category. conservationists appear to believe that capitalism can be rendered sustainable’. • A call for the creation of a fund made up of 6 At Morales’ conference in Bolivia we were surrounded by per cent of developed countries’ gross the diverse voices or implied ‘others’ that Salleh rightly domestic product (GDP) to unconditionally identifies as missing from the development of policy papers pay back the climate debt to countries already presented by some Western-based NGOs as climate facing severe climate impacts. ‘solutions’. The People’s Agreement captures the demands of many who have no reason to make excuses for, let alone • A rejection of free trade agreements which seek to protect, the capitalist model under which they have have put the rights of profit-seeking seen little benefit. Central to the emerging consensus from corporations above the rights of people and the Morales government, and elements of the global climate nature. movement, is the understanding that solutions to the climate • A rejection of the definition within the crisis that aim to maintain and protect the status quo in UNFCCC of tree plantations as forests and a rich, consumerist societies are not real solutions. This was rejection of the REDD (Reducing Emissions the overwhelming message from Cochabamba. It is a from Deforestation and Degradation) scheme consensus we support and hope to see gain further momen- which rich countries are using to avoid tum through the leadership of Morales. We will need to work emissions reductions at home and is causing harder to see this message better understood and more the further theft of Indigenous people’s lands. explicitly reflected by those advocating for strong climate action, not to mention broader society, here in Australia. 24 Papua’s Fallen Leaders Carmel Budiardjo ...... Anyone who emerges as a announced that he and four other detainees had escaped • from prison, but this so-called escape had been arranged • • Papua’s Fallen leader of the West Papuan by the authorities. Military authorities regarded Ap as • Leaders people is setting out on a ‘extremely dangerous’ because of the activities of his • Mambesak players and wanted him sentenced to death • Carmel Budiardjo dangerous path or given a life sentence, but they couldn’t not find the • Since the murder of cultural leader and necessary evidence for him to be charged in court. • • activist Arnold Ap in April 1984 and the On 21 April, a Papuan police officer unlocked the cell Carmel Budiardjo is kidnap and murder of Theys Hijo Eluay, • the founder of doors of the five detainees and ordered them out. They • chairman of the Papuan Presidium Council, TAPOL, a UK-based were driven by a Kopassandha officer to a coastal base • NGO that works to in November 2001, Papuans who have camp. One of the detainees managed to escape and later • emerged as leaders have had their lives cut promote human fled to Papua New Guinea where he described what had • rights, peace and short by assassins from the security forces. happened. The remaining detainees were told to swim • democracy in Democracy in Indonesia has not changed out to a boat. One was struck on the head, stabbed in • Indonesia. She was Jakarta’s treatment of West Papua. • a political prisoner the neck and thrown into the sea. The others, including • Arnold Ap, took shelter in a cave. Four days later, when in Indonesia under The Assassination of Cultural • the Suharto regime Ap left the cave to urinate, the area was surrounded by • Activist Arnold Ap and an Amnesty elite troops. He was shot three times in the stomach and • International Arnold Ap was the curator of the stabbed in the chest. He was taken to a hospital where, • Anthropological Museum in Jayapura and a prisoner of according to a nurse, he said that if he died his ring • conscience. member of a group of musicians called should be given to his wife. Other hospital staff said • Mambesak, who promoted traditional that he was dead on arrival. • Papuan music and broadcast a popular • weekly program on the local radio. Ap was Arnold Ap’s attempts to foster the traditional arts and • arrested by troops of the elite corps crafts of the Papuan people as a way of safeguarding • • Kopassandha (now known as Kopassus) on their identity and enhancing their dignity was not • acceptable to the security forces, and was even seen as a 23 November 1983. After being • interrogated and subjected to threat to their integration within the fold of the • maltreatment, Ap, with four other Indonesian Republic; for this he paid with his life. • detainees, was transferred to the • headquarters of the regional military The Mysterious Death of Dr Tom Wainggai • command. A month later, the five men Dr Thomas Wainggai was a lecturer at Cenderawasih • were handed over to the intelligence officer University who made no secret of his rejection of West • Papua’s annexation as a province of Indonesia. On 14 • of the local police. • December 1988, he led a ceremony at the Mandala • When he heard that Ap was under arrest, Stadium in Jayapura to unfurl the Kejora, the Morning the rector of Cenderawasih University in • Star flag, replacing the Indonesian red-and-white flag • Jayapura temporarily dismissed him as which had been pulled down. The event was attended by • curator on the grounds that he had been scores of people, including Protestant ministers. Dr • arrested on suspicion of subversion. When Wainggai proclaimed the establishment of the West • the Indonesian daily Sinar Harapan Melanesian Republic. While the ceremony was in • reported that Ap’s family were being progress, troops charged the crowd, beating many of • • denied contact, the newspaper was publicly those present. reprimanded. • Many people were rounded up and charged with • After being held in police and military rebellion (makar). Dr Wainggai was found guilty of • custody for three months, Ap was rebellion and sentenced to twenty years. His wife Teruka • transferred to the public prosecution • was sentenced to eight years for sewing the flag, while • authorities, creating the impression that others at the ceremony were sentenced, some up to six formal charges would be laid. On 14 April • years, for handing out song sheets. When Dr Wainggai’s • 06–07 2010 1984, he was seen on campus being trial began, large crowds gathered outside the • Nº 106 escorted by an officer. A week later it was courthouse, eager to follow the proceedings. In order to • • FEATURE 25 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • prevent further demonstrations, the trial was moved out of extreme coercion from the military—voted to Jayapura. remain within the Indonesian republic. In January 1990, Dr Wainggai and his wife were moved from Following the fall of Suharto, which ushered in a Jayapura to prisons in Jakarta; he was taken to Cipinang Prison period of greater freedom, the Papuan people held while she ended up in Tanggerang Prison on the outskirts of the a widely supported congress in early 2000. This capital. Teruka Wainggai was released in 1993, after serving half was followed by a second Papuan Congress in her sentence. May and June of that year, which was attended by many thousands of people from across the In March 1996, it was reported that Dr Wainggai had died in territory, who voiced strong support for the idea prison. According to reports from the prison shortly before his of Papuan independence. The congress created an death, he complained of severe pains in the stomach. Fearing that executive body called the Papuan Presidium his food had been tampered with, he refused to eat the prison food Council (PDP). Theys Eluay, a tribal chief and a but his condition failed to improve. On 14 March, his condition highly-respected community leader, was elected worsened; he was taken to a police prison but was found dead on head of the PDP. Although the PDP had decided arrival. His family called for an autopsy by the International Red to pursue the path of dialogue rather than violence, Cross but this was refused. The prison doctor said that he had died army intelligence set up a special taskforce, which from a heart attack but few people were prepared to believe this. targeted members of the PDP, including Theys. ...... On 10 November 2001, Theys received an invitation to a celebration of Indonesia’s Heroes’ Dr Wainggai led a ceremony at the Day at the headquarters of Kopassus in Hamadi, on the outskirts of Jayapura. On the way home, Mandala Stadium in Jayapura to his car was ambushed; Theys’ driver was forced to unfurl the Kejora, the Morning flee and the car was driven away. The driver, Aristoteles Masoka, rushed back to Kopassus Star flag, replacing the Indonesian headquarters to report what had happened. After red-and-white flag which had been entering the complex, he was never seen again. On the following day, Theys’ body was discovered pulled down. While the ceremony some fifty kilometres from the place of his was in progress, troops charged abduction, in an upturned vehicle that had been found close to a ravine, creating the impression of the crowd, beating many of those an accident. The victim’s face was black and his tongue was hanging out, which suggested present. strangulation, and an autopsy concluded that he had died of suffocation. His funeral was attended There were several days of confusion about where Dr Wainggai by more than ten thousand people coming from should be buried. The army wanted the funeral to take place in all over West Papua. Jakarta, fearing that large crowds would gather in Jayapura to pay News that Theys had died under suspicious their last respects. However, perhaps fearing that this would create circumstances led to outrage not only in West greater problems, the army returned the body to Jayapura. When Papua but also from the international community, the coffin arrived at Sentani airport, a large crowd of people were which forced the Indonesian authorities to bring waiting, intending to carry the coffin the 35 km to Cenderawasih those held responsible to trial. Seven Kopassus University so Dr Wainggai’s former colleagues could pay their last officers were tried, found guilty and sentenced to respects. However, the coffin was transferred from the aircraft to derisory sentences of three or three and a half an ambulance and driven away at high speed. This so infuriated years, while a senior Indonesian army officer the crowds that they vented their anger by attacking government hailed the convicted men as ‘heroes’. Nothing was buildings, burning vehicles and pelting shops with stones. The ever established about who had ordered the crime. unrest continued for several hours and, according to Republika, the Jakarta daily, Abepura was ‘in control of the protestors for an hour The Murder of Kelly Kwalik or more with protestors carrying banners bearing the words “OPM The most recent of Papua’s fallen leaders is Kelly Freedom” and “West Melanesian Freedom”’. Kwalik who was fatally shot on 16 December On the day of the funeral, thousands gathered outside the 2009, shortly before the end of Susilo Bambang Wainggai family home where the funeral service was conducted. A Yudhoyono’s first term as president. huge crowd followed the cortege to the Kayubatu cemetery. Kwalik died from loss of blood after being shot in Commenting on the unrest, Bishop Munninghoff at the Jayapura the thigh by members of the infamous police diocese warned that the situation in the province was ‘highly anti-terror unit, Densus 88, a unit that has combustible’ and could easily ignite. On 20 March, Republika received training in the United States. Initially it wrote: ‘We could face yet more trouble in the coming days if, like was reported that the wound only ‘pierced his East Timor, this most easterly province turns into an international skin’, meaning that they were not life-threatening. issue’. The results of the autopsy have not been made The Assassination of Theys Hijo Eluay public and calls for an investigation have been ignored so the chances of anyone being called to In his early days, Theys Hijo Eluay was a member of Golkar, the account are remote, given the impunity enjoyed official party during the Suharto era; in August 1969, he was a by Indonesian security forces for decades. signatory of the Act of Free Choice which unanimously—under 26 Kwalik’s sister-in-law Yosepha Alomang security forces, forcing villagers to flee their homes and • and other relatives were denied access to causing much loss of life. • • Papua’s Fallen his body. ‘Why was he shot to death?’ Kwalik attracted international attention in 1996, when a • Leaders Yosepha asked. ‘He was not a thief. You team of anthropologists from Cambridge University on • police did not search for him in the jungle Carmel Budiardjo an expedition in West Papua were kidnapped by the • but killed him at his home.’Rev. Herman • OPM in Mapnduma and held hostage for five months. Saud, former chairman of the General • Although the International Red Cross (ICRC) was Synod of the Papuan Protestant church • planning to handle the prisoners’ release, the (GKI), said that Kwalik should have been • organisation came under pressure from a Kopassus taken into custody and asked to explain • commander, Prabowo Subianto, son-in-law of President • what happened. ‘Central and local Suharto, to withdraw from the area and leave the • A selection from governments should have the courage to military in charge. When a helicopter arrived to collect • the Youth of Gaza enter into dialogue with those on the other the hostages, some villagers approached, thinking that • series side of the fence because they too (are) • ICRC personnel were on board. Instead armed men citizens of this country.’ • Jessie Boylan opened fire, killing several people on the ground. Kwalik • had fled, having been warned of a betrayal, and the • ...... hostages were met by Kopassus soldiers. Both before • Jessie Boylan is a and after the hostages’ release, there were reports of the • photomedia artist, Seven Kopassus officers • killing of villagers. One of the hostages later told a documentary • were tried for Theys’ Dutch newspaper that they had ‘met entire village photographer, • communities, men, women and children, on the run.’ community radio death, found guilty and • producer and During the crisis, TAPOL had called on Kwalik to release • freelance journalist sentenced to derisory • the hostages but Kwalik wanted to draw attention to based in Melbourne. • sentences of three or Papua’s neglected struggle. Indeed for the first time news- Jessie believes in • papers around the world took a critical look at conditions three and a half years, • photography’s in West Papua and its annexation by Indonesia in 1963. • capacity to create while a senior Indonesian The fate of a small group of foreigners had aroused • change and educate army officer hailed the significant international interest while thousands of • people about human Papuans had died in numerous incidents since 1963 • rights and social and environmental convicted men as ‘heroes’. without the international community batting an eyelid. • • injustices. She worked Nothing was ever Since 2002, there have been several attacks by gunmen • in Palestine and Israel established about who on personnel working for Freeport, resulting in several • documenting the deaths, including of foreign employees. On each • aftermath of the 2008–09 Israeli war on had ordered the crime. occasion, the military have blamed the OPM under • • Gaza; the experience Kwalik’s leadership, without acknowledging the need for of Gazan youth; and an investigation. Following an incident July 2009, when • Keletus Kelly Kulalok Kwalik was from the • the plight of internally an Australian employee of Freeport was killed, the police Tsinga people, part of the Amungme tribe. • displaced Palestinian The Amungme people lived in the chief of Papua, General F.X. Bagus Ekodanto, met Kwalik • Bedouins in Israel. mountain region which has since been and was assured that he was not responsible for the • She also spent six taken over by the US mining company PT shooting. However, a few days later the military • months working for commander of the Cenderawasih military command said • Inter Press Service Freeport-Indonesia, whose operations have reporting and turned their mountain into a crater. The that the shooting ‘looked like’ the work of Kelly Kwalik. • • documenting in devastation caused across Timika by Finally, the police anti-terrorist unit Densus 88 attacked • remote regions in Freeport was always an integral part of Kwalik in his home, shooting and fatally injuring him. • Mozambique, Malawi Kwalik’s resistance to West Papua’s Hundreds of people lined the route from the Mimika • and Tanzania. Since 2005 Jessie has been annexation by Indonesia. He studied at a legislative building, where the body had lain in state, to • continuing a body of Catholic teachers’ college before joining the the cemetery to mourn Kwalik’s passing. • Papuan freedom organisation OPM • work around the impact of uranium (Organisasi Papua Merdeka) in 1975. He held Shortly before his death, Kwalik said: • mining, atomic various command positions in the movement In the thirty-four years I have been defending this • • weapons testings and in Timika and in 2007 became head of forest and country, I have climbed many hills and the nuclear industry mountains, I have walked many valleys and wetlands. • TPN/OPM, the OPM’s military wing. • on Indigenous and For thirty-four years I have defended the forest, I have • non-Indigenous In 1977, major Indonesian military crossed many lakes, rivers and seas. I have endured people in Australia operations were conducted in the Central • many days that have baked my skin, I have endured • from the 1950s until Highlands, an area dominated by Freeport’s the cold and freezing of my body from snow, to defend • today. mining operations. Resistance fighters our glorious heritage and to restore justice so that • under Kwalik’s leadership took action truth, love and peace will reign in our glorious land. • against the company; their most successful • strike caused the destruction of a section Now I pray, and I shout with all my breath: ‘My God, • of the pipe taking the copper from the take away all the copper, gold, oil and gas, fish, all the • Grasberg mine to Amamapare on the coast, animals and other things that make this island rich. • • 06–07 2010 and huge financial losses to the company. But all the things you have given us, take them away and give us only what we need today and give us • Nº 106 This led to retaliatory operations by • tomorrow what we need then. • PHOTO ESSAY: YOUTH OF GAZA 27 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 28 • • • Ayman Jamal • Mghames, Palestinian • Rappers, Gaza, • June 2009 • • • • • • • • • • Khaled Harara, • Black Unit Band, • Hip-hop group from • Gaza City, June 2009 • • ‘I have been rapping • for five years. We are • the second generation • of hip-hop artists in • Palestine. We sing • hip-hop here in Gaza • because we believe it • is a way to protect • ourselves from the • war and the • occupation, because • we believe the words • and the lyrics are • stronger than all the • bullets and the guns • and the shells. We can • fight if we want to but • we choose and we • want the peaceful • way. We love all the • people around the • world, but we hate the • governments who • work against the • people. We also know • that there are a lot of • good people inside • Israel who want peace • with us. We don’t just • sing about the • occupation, we sing • about problems • inside Palestine, like • the civil war [between • Hamas and Fatah], we • sing about love, about • ourselves, poor • people, we are the • sound, the voice of • people here.’ • • • • • • • • • 'The first thing is that we’re facing a lot of problems here, we have a horrible situation here in Gaza and Palestine… I have a • horrible situation from the recent war, because I lost my home and lost my dad, so now my voice is going somewhere else. • Before the recent war I was thinking about going out, living my life, getting out there, but now after the recent war, everything • 06–07 2010 has changed, I belong to this place more and more each day, and I don’t want to go out, even if all the borders open, I’m not • Nº 106 gonna to leave, I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna say what I think, I’m gonna say what I see, I’m gonna keep rapping ...' • • PHOTO ESSAY: YOUTH OF GAZA 29 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 30 • • • Mohammed Wafy, • Black Unit Band, • Gaza, • June 2009 • • • • • • • • Red Tories • • Roland Boer • • • • Roland Boer is a • writer and a critic • based at the • University of • Newcastle. His • intellectual • background is in • theology, political • philosophy and • Marxism. He is • finishing a five volume • series called The • Criticism of Heaven and • Earth (Brill and • Haymarket). • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ‘All for one and one for all. 'When I go outside I want to decide how to live, how to die. I want to fly, so tell me why not, why not? • A human has lost all the meaning of the human, The home is the safe side of the street It’s the strength, it’s the plan, This place • protects us from all the suffering and shit in this world Now is the time to raise up and get your rights, To put your goals all in • 06–07 2010 front of you, Time to forget the suffering, forget the past, If the door doesn’t open for you, break it, and enter, If the door stops • Nº 106 you from getting your goals, you must fight, and never forget.’ • • FEATURE 31 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Red Tories Roland Boer ...... New idea or conservative mood music? Left) into the self-centred libertarianism of the 1960s, and then the seduction (now of the In the lead-up to the 2010 UK election, an apparently new idea was Right) by laissez-faire economics. In short, being floated by the conservative leader, David Cameron. We need to liberalism, the Left, libertarianism and laissez- recover the ‘big society’, he argued, which has the truly conservative faire are among the many enemies of the Red values of locality, family, moral economy, virtuous elites and common Tory faith. If the first couple of betrayals popular customs. But he did not pull these values out of thin air, for provide the two terms of his grand opposition, they were supplied by a man at times called Cameron’s ‘philosopher the betrayal by the right is the most egregious king’—Phillip Blond, leader of the think tank ResPublica, proponent of all, since ‘advanced capitalism’ embodies of the doctrine of ‘Red Toryism’ and sometime theology lecturer. For this opposition within itself: it is, according to a couple of years now, Blond has been urging the conservatives to Blond, both ‘individualist’ and ‘monopolist’, value the local over the global, family over its discontents (gays, single the latter using the rhetoric of the former to parents, promiscuity), virtue over cynicism, common custom over advance its agenda. bland commercial labels; in short, he seeks a return to the progressive, communal values of conservatism. But what, in more ...... detail, is Red Toryism and is it really new? Economic analysis A rather simple In a nutshell, Red Toryism seeks to decouple conservative politics from its dirty little relationship with (neo-)liberal economics, an pattern operates affair most successfully consummated by Margaret Thatcher and her ilk. Always an ill match, the end of the affair was bound to happen in Blond’s analysis: sooner or later. But rather than make it is a bitter and rancorous separation, the Red Tories wish to make a virtue out of the break-up, monolith versus seeking a return to the conservatives’ old and trusted partner of many years hence—an ancient, well-nigh medieval collection of economic fragments, practices that have been lost in the rush to capitalism and industrialisation. monopolisation Red Tory economics may easily be organised in terms of a diagnosis versus of the current malaise and a prognosis of its cure. The relevant sources are a string of online newspaper and magazine articles, but disintegration, especially an early essay authored by Phillip Blond called ‘Red Tory’ from 2008, which lay the groundwork for the much-delayed and centralisation tortured book by the same name from 2010. versus Diagnosis Blond analyses what conservatives call ‘broken Britain’—one of atomisation. Blond’s empty and empirically mistaken slogans taken from the conservative think tank the Centre for Social Justice, run by the former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith. Beneath the bluster a rather The problem for Blond is that this relatively simple pattern operates in Blond’s analysis: monolith versus original narrative is undermined by the fragments, monopolisation versus disintegration, centralisation unoriginal parts of his analysis. I restrict versus atomisation. On the one hand, we have a massive monolith— myself to two points. First, the tension the centralised state or monopoly capital—and on the other the between monopolisation and fragmentation atomised life of individuals. While the former suck in all power and has been identified as a crucial feature of wealth, the latter lead lives of meaningless and futile consumption. capitalism again and again since at least the There are both unoriginal and original elements to the way Blond 19th century. Capitalism generates an deploys this schema; the catch is that the unoriginal dimensions undo oppressive uniformity by rendering every the original ones. individual the same; yet it simultaneously produces all manner of fragmentations Let us begin with what initially seems original. Blond argues that this (Taylorisation) through the process of opposition—both political and economic—is a result of certain commodification and reification. Hegel, Marx, developments in the 20th century United Kingdom. Apart from a Zizek, Hardt and Negri—these and more have brief laying of the blame at the feet of the French and American recognised and fruitfully engaged with this Revolutions, he identifies three key moments: the embrace (especially fundamental contradiction at the heart of by the Left) of the welfare state after 1945, the slide (again by the 32 capitalism, not least of which is the role of the church in everyday village life, and even the • point that in the very act of each absent lord (of both a spiritual and physical forms) who acts • • Red Tories individual pursuing his or her own in a benignly paternal and somewhat absent fashion. • agenda, that individual contributes to As for the practical suggestions, Blond proposes that • Roland Boer the collective project of liberalism. localism be fostered through the reallocation of state funds, • • If this well-known tension within revising both the tax structure and patterns of banking • capitalism has been recognised since finance for housing and business. For example, state • the 19th century, then Blond’s curious funding (without seeing the rampant contradiction here) • 20th-century narrative is simply should be earmarked for local groups and initiatives— • misdirected. The same applies to the schools, voluntary organisations, families, mutual societies, • political side of his narrative, now cooperatives, worker control—rather than being delivered • operating in terms of the monstrous through centralised programs. Restructuring taxation would • and centralised state over against the provide assistance to traditional families, especially those • • pulverised individual. Is this too a wishing to set up a family business rather than work for a • product of 20th-century developments? multinational. And revising the way banks lend money • Not at all, for it was first identified by would enable people to become owners of some realisable • Hegel and then developed by Marx: or tradable asset, small owners of capital in a way that • while human life under capitalism was would generate genuine ‘wealth’. On this score, he proposes • increasingly fragmented into religious, a version of assets welfare, with at-cost and mixed equity • political, economic and private spheres, loans to ensure a property-owning democracy. • the state itself became abstracted as an • What can be said about these proposals? Many of them are • ideal and all-pervasive form. stunningly unoriginal, for local resistance to the global has • So the problems Blond feels he has characterised country towns and alternative movements for • identified are by no means new to the at least the last half century. They are also extremely • • 20th century, nor even to the United parochial, not merely in terms of small-town attitudes, but • Kingdom. They are endemic to also in terms of what Blond calls ‘patriotic capital’. • capitalism itself and to the bourgeois Campaigns for people to buy products of national producers • state as it has developed under have come in waves for well over a century, most of them • capitalism. This would mean that the clever marketing ploys to increase sales. Further, it is what • only means to overcome what can be may be called a time-lapse approach; as with so many • only be called systemic economic and movements of apparent resistance to (the worse effects of) • political alienation is to do away with capitalism, Red Toryism has simply opposed one form of • • the system in question and start anew. capitalism with another, or one level with another—small • Is this what Blond proposes? business versus transnationals, local farmers versus • agribusiness, the corner shop versus the supermarket. • Prognosis In response, Blond et al. would agree: localism is by no • By and large, no. At times, Blond hints • means new, for it harks back to the theological doctrine of that the whole system in which these • subsidiarity, in which no function should be performed at oppositions are endemic must be swept • any level that could be performed by a level below it, so aside and that we need to begin again. • much so that the highest level should perform only those • But those moments appear as a return actions that cannot be handled below it. In its more • to something lost, to a precapitalist economic form, subsidiarity becomes distributism, which • mode of economics that can only be has appealed and continues to appeal to diverse groups such • called feudal. More often, however, as the Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day, the proto-fascists • select features of an idealised and • and Mussolini admirers G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, romanticised form of feudal social and • the British National Party, and Mondragon in Spain. economic existence are deployed to • However, the theological form of subsidiarity, with its ameliorate the sharp edges of life under • emphasis of family, local church and voluntary association, • capitalism. is not quite as ancient as Blond et al. would have us believe. • All of which is captured in the keyword, It appears first in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and was • localism. In essence, Blond proposes a subsequently elaborated in Quadragesimo Anno by Pius XI • postmodern return to the iconic, (1931). Four points are worth nothing about these texts: • • idealised—and medieval—English they established the tradition of Roman Catholic Social • village. Here we find communities of Thought in reaction to the rapid successes of the socialists • citizens, meeting to deal with everyday in the 19th century, they are feverishly anti-socialist, they • concerns of the village, markets where defend private property and they assume a hierarchical • produce from the land thereabouts is system as the basis of subsidiarity, for one must have a • sold, guilds where tradespeople may ladder of command in order to move down to the • seek work and protection, families of at appropriate rung. We will see this structural hierarchy • least a nuclear but preferably an appear in other elements of Red Tory doctrine, especially in • • extended form (and definitely its invocation of virtue and benevolent paternalism. • heterosexual with both parents More substantially, however, Blond’s proposals should be • 06–07 2010 present), voluntary organisations like seen not as a cure but as a symptom of global capitalism in • Nº 106 the Lions or the cricket club, the vital • its current form. Rather than seeing localism as a resistance • FEATURE 33 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • to the uniformity of transnational capital, localism is actually one good, while multinationals, wealthy shape such late capitalism takes. In the dialectic of globalisation and individuals and mass culture are evil. Barely localisation, the more globalisation becomes a reality (and we are only concealed within such a moral terminology is just beginning to see that final reality), the more localism takes off. a theological coding that Blond owes to the Witness the regional claims of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall; or theological school of radical orthodoxy and his Quebec’s consistent push for independence from Canada; or the push teacher, John Milbank. In a nutshell, radical for regional identities in the former USSR, or indeed the Balkans orthodoxy seeks to turn the clock back to the (Blond’s approach may be described as a ‘Balkanisation of Britain’). medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, arguing The value of such localism is that it supplies the raw materials and that all that has followed—modernism, research arms for capitalism’s perpetual search for what is new— capitalism, liberalism, Marxism and so on—is style, fashion, taste. really heresy and responsible for all our ills. Milbank has made it clear that in his opinion Indeed, Blond strikes me as a city-slicker who one day happens upon Red Toryism is the political wing of radical a village in the hills. Struck by the impossibly idyllic nature of the orthodox theology. place, he visits the real estate office and finds that the office is full similar types and that most of the sales—now with inflated prices— Three features of Red Toryism are due to its are to those like himself full of Arcadian myths of ‘Merrie England’. roots in radical orthodox theology: moralising, (But then, if he should buy a place and happen to move into town, he re-enchantment of the world and benevolent will soon find that bucolic bliss is impossible without village idiocy.) paternalism. As for moralising, I focus on a combined piece from The Guardian (27 January ...... 2010) called ‘No Equality in Opportunity’. In this article, Blond and Milbank argue that a The problems Blond feels he has proper return to virtue will recognise that people are born unequal (the target is, not identified are by no means new unexpectedly, liberalism) in terms of talents, capabilities and opportunities: ‘By virtue we to the 20th century, nor even to mean here a combination of talent, fitness for the United Kingdom … The only a specific social role, and a moral exercise of that role for the benefit of wider society’. They means to overcome what can be are after a ‘justifiable inequality’ that seeks ‘to link social and economic prestige with virtue’. only be called systemic economic A properly egalitarian society will recognise and political alienation is to do such inequalities, they argue (fully cognisant of the oxymoron), enabling people to realise away with the system in question their potential within those strictures. Some will find that fulfilment in sweeping the and start anew. Is this what he streets or cleaning toilets, while others will proposes? realise their virtues in government, the control of financial institutions and education. This is a deeply theological argument, relying In the midst of all this rehashing of old ideas, there is a glimmer of a on the ‘analogy of being’ (analogia entis) of truly radical proposition. In setting up the proposals for making Thomas Aquinas: all life may be seen as everyone the owner of a tradable asset, Blond points out that wages located on a descending scale from God, down are ‘no longer enough to secure the fundamentals of life’. But, on the through the angels to the pope and clergy to verge of a breakthrough, he does not take the next step and argue that the rest of human beings and then eventually wage labour itself is a problem, that it embodies a pattern of exploita- the animal and plant kingdoms. According to tion in its very structure and should therefore be abolished in any this divinely ordained hierarchical schema, alternative system. Or that private property—to go a step further—is some are simply better placed when the the real blockage in the system and must be abolished for any virtues were first handed out. Virtue, then, is communal ownership to succeed. Instead, he offers some limp half- not merely an abstract idea or collection of measures that involve some tinkering here and there but leave the noble qualities to which we should all aspire. system itself in place. At moments like these, the ‘Tory’ is typed in It has everything to do where God appoints us ever larger and bolder letters, while the ‘Red’ fades into minuscule in terms of birth, wealth and class. type. Their analysis also fails to answer the Moral and theological analysis question as to who decides on the virtuous Thus far I have been following the key essay from 2008 called ‘Red and the unvirtuous. Perhaps a hint comes Tory’, itself the basis of the book of the same name. Towards the end from the informal title given to Blond in the of the essay and the book, Blond turns to what he calls the revival of lead-up to the UK elections in 2010: the ‘civil society’, embodied in his new hero David Cameron. For Blond, ‘philosopher king’ of the Conservative leader, ‘civil’ means good manners, high (as in ‘quality’) culture, moral values David Cameron. Such a pompous and self- and virtue. aggrandising figure was, of course, proposed by Plato as the ideal ruler, the only one with No matter what the topic—medicine, education, evolution, Islam, wisdom and virtue enough to do so. Like abortion, gay marriage, multinationals, banking, unemployment, Plato, the philosopher king was also elitist, immigration or the pope—Blond deliberately invokes the terminology aristocratic and a passionate enemy of of goodness and virtue. Needles to say, locality, family, community are democracy. 34 Apart from moralising, two other deep influences of Conclusion • • radical orthodoxy are relevant here: re-enchantment and Much more remains to be written in analysis, • Red Tories benevolent paternalism. Time and again, Milbank has not least of which is the British exceptional- • argued that capitalism, secularism, liberalism, communism ism of Red Toryism. It is closely tied in • Roland Boer and Protestantism (this one more recently) have led to with the idiosyncratic cycles of British • disenchantment in the world. This argument is as politics in which ‘New Labour’ had by 2008 • unoriginal and it is wayward, for it assumes a prior and 2009, after thirteen years in office, • enchanted state and neglects that the very narrative on worn out its welcome and in which the • enchantment-disenchantment and re-enchantment is Conservatives were sprucing themselves • • produced by the very modernist, secularising tendency for power. In this context Blond became • it seeks to overcome. For Blond and Red Toryism, how- one of a number of peddlers of opinion, • ever, it translates into the politics of nostalgia that is deft manipulators of think tanks (Blond • embodied in the sense that an elusive golden age has past. runs ResPublica), and the buzz that seems • to accompany those who flock to a shift in • Great Britain to the power base. This is also the context for • Little England? ...... • the false apocalyptic sense of fin de siecle Tom Nairn and a new dawn that seeps through much • Red Toryism is far more • Red Tory rhetoric. The problem is that it • assumes the particular concerns of the Tory than Red. No • Tom Nairn is a United Kingdom are also those of the rest • Research Professor surprise in such a verdict, of the globe—a problem that bedevils • in the Department many former imperial centres. • of Politics at but at least it highlights • In the end Red Toryism is far more Tory Durham University, • England, after being the very awkward marriage than Red. No surprise in such a verdict, • for some years but at least it highlights the very awkward • Professor of between conservatism and marriage between conservatism and • Nationalism in RMIT liberalism in which liberal economic policies • University’s Centre liberalism in which liberal are wedded with conservative social policies. • for Globalism • Red Toryism seeks a hasty divorce so that Research. He is a economic policies are • Fellow of the the conservatives can go it alone. But as • they do so, they may find themselves in Academy of Social wedded with conservative • Sciences in bed with other partners, for the great • Australia. Tom social policies. heroes of Blond are G.K. Chesterton and • published The Hilaire Belloc, or ‘Chesterbelloc’ as George • Break-up of Britain Bernard Shaw first called them. Both • back in 1977, and All of which leads to benevolent paternalism, manifested sought to apply Roman Catholic • has now returned • in an increasing support of the pope and assertion that theological doctrine of subsidiarity into to Scotland where only a ‘Catholic’ position is correct. The only path to • he is working on a the economic practice of distribution, both • peace, it is argued, is through a recovered Christendom constructing a mythical idyllic medieval collection of essays • provisionally that knows what is best for everyone. Blond is also England with its wholesome villages and • rumoured to be in favour of monarchy for the same entitled ‘Break-up lush countryside. But Chesterbelloc was • of Britain, Part 2 reason. Indeed, such paternalism imbues the whole also anti-democratic, or rather, against any • (continued)’. project, from the development of localism to form of parliamentary government, • determining who is virtuous. The deep problem with favouring a hierarchy of virtue and the • • advocating such a wholesale recovery of the ‘catholic’ return of the aristocracy, and thereby • ideal is that in its traditional sense ‘catholic’ operates finding in Mussolini a great champion. • through a universalism of exclusion rather than • inclusion, that the very definition of ‘catholic’ relies on Indeed, in The Cruise of the Nona, Belloc writes of Mussolini: ‘Meeting this man • excluding heretics (mostly liberals), Jews, Turks (as • after talking to the parliamentarians in Muslims used to be called), women, gays and so on. • Radical orthodoxy is no different. other countries was like meeting with • some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after • However, the last word on the matter of benevolent an afternoon with racing touts; or it was • paternalism falls to John Milbank, who, in his essay like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean • Liberty Versus Liberalism, invokes nothing less than The village after compulsory draughts of marsh • Lord of the Rings in his politics of nostalgia: water in the mosses of the moors above, • And in this way Christ is now King upon the earth during some long day’s travel over the • and so it follows that there should be always also a • range’. He goes on to say, ‘Society in Italy • secular fusion of democratic dispersal with monarchic had to reach the point of acute peril before • liberality and objectivity. Indeed this should run that reaction took place which saved the • almost in the direction of monarchic anarchy, as country; but what a fine reaction it was, • clearly recommended by Tolkien in the Lord of the not only in its virtues, but, what is more • Rings (no law in the Shire; but the orderly echo of important, in its spirit! What a strong • 06–07 2010 remote kingship). Or (to use the local example), critical sense Italy had shown!’ Change • perhaps in the spirit of Robin Hood … Italy for England and the last quotation • Nº 106 • may well have come from Blond. • FEATURE 35 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Great Britain to Little England? Tom Nairn ...... Who knows how far Alice will fall in Nation’ survey in Scotland’s Sunday Herald: ‘This election was a kind of punishment for the UK political Britain’s topsy-turvy state? leadership, for the expenses scandal and the banking And what the dead had no speech for, when living, crisis. The people wanted a change—well, now they have They can tell you, being dead, the communication it. The political system is broken, but we don’t yet know Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of if anyone has the tools to fix it’. That’s the job of the the living. incoming coalition government, and we’re still finding Here, the intersection of the timeless moment out day by day just what the tools are, and how likely or Is England and nowhere. Never and always. unlikely will be the restoration of the historic United Kingdom. T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets,1944 The Missing Link The G-B Election So far one thing has to be taken for granted: the absence So the Great-British General Election took place, on the 6th of an English polity capable of asserting itself of May, 2010. And on the 7th of May the voters woke up in democratically, on behalf of its 85 per cent UK majority. Alice’s Wonderland: ‘Down, down, down. Would the fall No non-democratic or dictatorial alternative is yet never come to an end! “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen presenting itself. Yet what is happening is an odd sort of by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere dictatorial solution: a power system imposed by near the centre of the earth.”’She worries about arriving absence. Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and other among the ‘Antipathies’ on the other side, but the White peripheral opinion (for example the Isle of Man) are Rabbit keeps reappearing and, in between nervous glances bound to react, but with no real option except one or at his watch, reassures her things will soon be sorted out. other version of actual nationalism. In that sense, the Today the White Rabbit is Nick Clegg, leader of Britain’s latter turns out to be founded less on swelling separatist Liberal-Democrats, summoned by ‘the Duchess’ (the tides than on the hopeless breakdown of the centre, Conservative Party’s David Cameron) for grotesquely Westminster Britishness. Straightforward political unlikely talks about common policy over staging the Mad reform, like proportional representation and federalism, Tea Party: dealing with Britain’s gigantic deficit without has been put off too long. And today no time is left. turning the Pound Sterling into funny-money, being That is, no time for anything but panic and hasty simultaneously for and against the European Union, and so makeshifts, manifested in the notion of a gambling- on. Though uncomfortably like an accord between Albert table deal between Deep-South Toryism and ‘civic’ Schweitzer and Gengis Khan, the deal does appear Liberal Democracy to keep catastrophe at bay. This is inevitable for the time being. The Conservative Party won break-up, nor are we out of it. New Labour, 1997–2010, most votes, and the Lib-Dems have advanced sufficiently to was the last chance saloon, and towards the end of it claim a place at the power-table—or at least, for as long as six-gun Brown couldn’t even draw his shooter. Today we Labourism continues to sink in the choppy wake of the find him retired, but still leaning on the old bar without departing Gordon Brown. Most recent reports indicate so much as a decent wisecrack to amuse the remaining water-level rising near deck-level and threatening the soaks and newshounds. Bridge. However, what choice have the living but to seek an Couldn’t Labourism vote in another less party-bound exit from zombiedom, however difficult? leader, and set up a different bar-room deal with the In most countries another election would be the answer. Lib-Dems and the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists on But this is Wonderland. A second contest might push all-round constitutional change—in effect, move everything still closer to the centre of the earth. Isn’t the towards some kind of confederal replacement for the ancestor of democracy succumbing to advanced Alzheimers, United Kingdom? Possibly, but how many years would it and capable of results even worse than May the 7th? Hence, take? The Britannic ancien regime is founded on the the urgent task (‘national interest’ etcetera) boils down to unthinkability of things like that. So it will have to getting rid of a millenary tradition in a few days: time to at emerge in fits and starts like those we are going least to consider disposing of the Mother of Parliaments through—over the wreckage of Gordon Brown’s and ‘first-past-the-post’. Reared to worship such timeless Britishness and David Cameron’s smart new ways to icons, today’s Royal Subjects find themselves placed under keep the old Union going. Open Democracy and like- brisk orders to bin the lot and re-equip themselves for minded organs have been arguing in that general boring modernity. Two-partyism has joined the Dodo and direction for decades already, preaching to the largely the ‘caucus race’, in Dodgson’s famous portrait of unconverted. Now suddenly everybody has experienced Englishness. As Iain Macwhirter concludes his ‘State of the a five-minute conversion—forced on them by the simple failure and incapacity of the traditional regime. The 36 question has turned from whether or not to be presents, and could probably only have been • ‘radical’, into just which version of radicalism will effaced by military defeat and occupation— • • Great Britain to best fit the new times. Against the grain of followed by more ‘typical’ rebirth and • Little England? Britishness and most of the secular odds it imposed, identification. • a stalled evolutionism has ended by setting the stage • Tom Nairn for political revolution. Liberation from Pomland • I returned quite recently from some years in • Conscious of approaching doom, Cameron’s first Melbourne and, oddly enough, the • move as premier was to Scotland, where he Cameron–Clegg program may be more • commiserated with that country’s Conservatives on comprehensible from the Antipodean angle: • their single constituency victory, and held awkward • what the ‘Antipathies’ have got round to talks with Liberal Democrats and Nationalists. It was • perceiving is, approximately but rightly, the as if Kevin Rudd had rushed to Perth immediately on • dying complex of attitudes identified in assuming office in Canberra and warned West • Australia as ‘Pom’ or ‘Pommy: that is, ‘English’, • Australians against relapse into 1930s separatism. not in the typically modern sense of ethnicity, • Everyone is aware that the ruling Scottish language or genetic origins but in that of • Nationalists want a referendum on independence and superiority, the inheritable (and probably • an end to the United Kingdom. He has repeatedly eternal) distance of improved customs, • stated that he doesn’t want to go down in history as • outlook and exportability. This was an the last Prime Minister of Great Britain. But he also • ideology naturally borne and transmitted by insists on a regime of ‘respect’ for the devolved • United Kingdom empire and population governments. To mean anything, ‘respect’ entails • transfer over more than two centuries. Though • equality, or the pretence thereof. But there can of comparable to other exports by competing • course be no such equality between Britain and its powers like Spain, France, the Netherlands and • ‘component’ parts. Unequalness is written into any Portugal, one need only list these to see an • union between an 85 per cent majority and assorted • important difference. The English version has minorities with varying ethnic, linguistic and • lasted much longer, without the defeats and societal natures and ambitions. Standard-issue • other setbacks that were to affect its North- international relations are founded upon formal • Atlantic neighbours. ‘Anglo-Britishness’ (as it respect among such unequal entities—which of • might be more accurately titled) has survived • course entails the common ground of independence, remarkably intact, and since World War II • recognition and statehood. even been reinforced by a curious ‘special • In the British case such mutuality is inconceivable in relationship’ with the ascendant power of the • • the absence of an English ‘component’. Regrettably, United States. The Cold War refrigerator • the Conservative–Lib-Dem regime is based mainly preserved it until the 1990s, and finally New • upon street-walker conservatism—the new vendor Labour carried it forward into another century. • on the block, wearing a new-new brand to reassure Australians are familiar from recent • everyone the essence of the ancient statehood is safe, • experience with dubious right-of-centre with a bit of good will. Some minor reforms are • Coalitions. John Howard and the Liberal Party suggested, an Australian-style preferential voting • accomplished the trick over eleven years, via system, an elected Second Chamber, and enhanced • their alliance with the National Party. Yet that • ‘local government’ to divert popular energies and endured so long only because of a crucial • attention. The ship was badly holed, admittedly, after factor that no longer applies, even in Great • thirteen years of New Labour mediocrity. However, Britain. Wonderland characters like Cameron • sales staff can still argue that it’s not yet doomed— and Clegg may want it to be there at the end • provided that the new Cameron–Clegg • of Alice’s fall; but actually it has become administration shows itself to be one of adequate • another bit of Dodo nonsense. I refer to the travelling repairs and replacement, guaranteed to • mystique of capitalist growth-fetish known as restore seaworthiness without English nationalism. • neo-liberalism, the supposedly permanent • The question is complicated by the odd location of exorcism from history of left-wing • English identity in the wider story of world philosophies like socialism and equality. • nationalism. In her Nationalism: Five Roads to Howardite Liberalism flourished near the crest • Modernity (1992) Liah Greenfeld insisted that of the neo-liberal wave, in the nineties of last • • England had been the prime mover in the formation century. But Cameron–Cleggism has arrived • of nationalist modernity. The original ‘-ism’ arose as far too late, and can only scrabble along in the • a series of responses to English expansion and ebbing tide. The only reason they aren’t • overseas threats, from both France and (later) trans- already washed into oblivion lies in the • oceanic colonialism and empire. However, the miserable oppositions they face: exhausted • originator of the process could never itself become forms of post-Labour that spend decades • simply another episode in its history. It was destined over-ingratiating themselves into a supposed • to remain the ‘first-born’ or model, a first ‘road’ realism of (pre-crisis) capitalist expansion. • • unable to exemplify all the characteristics of the This is how the present battle of zombies was • routes that came to compose modernity over the generated, claiming life-in-death in the name • 06–07 2010 18th to the 20th centuries. Primordiality in that of one or other has-been creed. • Nº 106 sense was a fate that would last into successive • • FEATURE 37 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • A measure of nausea is surely in order here. England is unsparing analysis of the British Labour Party, arguing failing to get its act together; but the resultant after-life of that it had turned into a vehicle for the dilution or even Britishness means all archipelago inhabitants are being outright betrayal of socialism. Miliband was a premature sucked back into the graveyard. The peripheral populations revolutionary; he saw Parliamentarism as the formula mentioned above need the ‘autonomy’ (I would prefer to say that had changed the means into practically an end in ‘independence’) to think differently, come to diverse itself: the corporate body of the Royal British state or conclusions, and invent a future going beyond the corsets of ‘Establishment’, accepting both monarchy and the House ‘devolution’. Devolution was a recipe for forestalling and of Lords as obligatory compromises along the road to taming emergent political expression, by simultaneously power. Labourism had begun by colluding with Royal- conserving and re-imagining British-state traditions and British state-nationalism, and ended as another culture. What it brought in the end was the present subject—even as its most enduring prop. This is why I stalemate and incapacity. We’re supposed to stay ‘British’, can’t avoid a pressure of the heart today, imagining how and thus go on sparing the English majority from undue he might feel on seeing his sons competing in still self-appraisal and renewal. The basic instinct is that under another exhumation of the corpse. Will this never end? Westminster ‘democracy’ could itself accomplish rebirth But of course the question in another sense suggests its without the painful parturition of reforged national identity own answer: it is only because the regime is ending that and self-discovery. ‘Britain’ has by self-definition stood such spectacles are possible. above ‘that sort of thing’: it inherits ‘bigger-than’ by The problem of post-British readjustment is not in fact transmitted ectoplasmic continuity, the underlying spirit of too daunting. One of its odd features is relative imperial outreach, and its successor, North-Atlantic Special modernity: it rests in practice upon a political accord of Relationism. We simply cannot break down into ‘little’ the early 18th century, not a prehistoric popular fusion England, Scotland (and so forth) because the Great-societal or conquest. Great Britain’s occupation of Ireland was DNA rules it out. certainly a specimen of the latter; but that was of course largely resolved in the 1920s, to leave behind only the ...... somewhat distinct question of a partitioned, mainly Labourism began by colluding Protestant Northern Ireland. The English conquest of Wales was also a ‘typical’ metropolitan takeover or with Royal-British state- subjugation. Nonetheless, the backbone of the United Kingdom has become the accord with the largest British nationalism, and ended as Isles minority, the Scots. And there was nothing typical about that. It was an early-modern political treaty another subject—even as its between parliaments, confirming a joint monarchy and most enduring prop …Will the prospective common endeavour of overseas expansion: the empire of the 18th to the 20th century. this never end? But of course Revocation of such an agreement had been impossible within the former Westminster system, based on 1707’s the question in another sense fusion of representative bodies; but of course this was suggests its own answer: it is replaced by the New Labour government’s devolution of parliaments after 1998. only because the regime is These reforms didn’t shift the foundation of ending that such spectacles ‘sovereignty’. They were designed to forestall any such change after the rise of peripheral nationalisms in the are possible. last third of the 20th century. But such a reaffirmation of centrality could work only by acknowledging the emergent ground-plan. This was for a different kind of The customs of Pom-land are deeply entrenched, and the union, or association, among the various nations of Cameron–Clegg regime will try to revive them with the ‘those islands’, naturally including England. Scale is famous strategy from Count Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The secondary for such designs; but it was not allowed to Leopard, 1958): ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things appear so for a second by the unbending protagonists of will have to change’. The true Sicily will never change— ‘Britishness’. To the latter, scale remains all: the although its leopards and lions may have gone, to be standing of the United Kingdom first and foremost, as a replaced by jackals and hyenas, who think of themselves world player rather than a ‘nothing’; and after that (by nonetheless as the salt of the earth. An earlier Labour implication) stress upon sufficient internal cohesion and Premier, Harold Wilson, once declared that Britain had to assent, the social support structure sustained by post- remain great or else be ‘nothing’. Cautious electoral reforms 1707 over the mainland and as much as possible in post- will probably be undertaken to make the system seem 1922 Ireland. ‘fairer’—I would have thought, more likely an Australian Preferential Vote than outright, all-round proportional What such bombast both manifests and conceals is representation. As for a leader, the Labour Party will be essentially the quandary of English national identity: hard at work for some time trying to find one. compensation for occlusion by over-emphasis upon the most available ‘imagined community’ of the past and Bizarrely enough, two of the announced contenders are the dread of ‘little England’. Though exhibited in extreme brothers David and Edward Miliband, sons of the late Ralph ideological forms by the British National Party (BNP) Miliband, the author of Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of and the anti-European United Kingdom Independence the Politics of Labour (1961). This was a corrosive and Party (UKIP), the emotional attitudes are widespread 38 and comprehensible. Britishness was a strong drug, New Conservatism may at last usher in • unavoidably fostered by many aspects of both the electoral and constitutional reform. Unable to • • Great Britain to Little educational system and popular media culture, and choose constitutional reform, the United • England? also by today’s weird combination of pro- and anti- Kingdom has fallen backwards into it. An • Americanism. Resentment of the Afghanistan Australian-style federal answer is unlikely: the • Tom Nairn involvement (for example) has become very units are too unequal, and too socially • widespread; but what Gordon Brown (and now his distinct—as Labour’s survival in Scotland, • successors) counted on is equally common alongside nationalism, has vividly • acknowledgement of the special relationship, demonstrated. • • supposed to entail support of whatever they deem The new regime ‘Queen’s Speech’ was • deeply significant. broadcast while these last paragraphs were • What we find now is that servitude is still preferred composed. This is the ritual whereby Her • by the political ruling class to contraction: the Majesty reads out the list of policy proposals • • dwindling echo of Greatness appeals more than any given her by the prime minister she has just • sobering admission of ordinary nationhood, and confirmed. The new forecast is for possible • redefinition of the accompanying collective identity. reforms of the voting system, most likely in • Iraq didn’t finish off the post-Great neurosis—will two years time (once ‘thoroughly debated’ • Thoughts of an Afghanistan be more effective? Elections are due in etcetera). Given the sloth of Commons • Antipodean in Hellas Scotland and Wales in 2011, and for Alex Salmond’s procedures, plus the opposition of many • SNP government this is an opportunity to attempt a Conservatives to any change whatever, all one • Matthew Sharpe referendum on independence. Recent poll surveys can say is that an ‘Australian’ order might then • • indicate a majority still clinging to the Union, but arise in the homeland. A preferential voting • the British parties will do all in their power to stop it system could be chosen as a safer alternative • Matthew Sharpe happening: they know that a principle is at stake— to proportional representation, conserving • teaches political the right of the smaller nations to decide on their two-partyism in a more presentable fashion • philosophy and future ... and of course, behind that, the spectre of and allowing a fairer system for any Second • psychoanalytic ‘little England’ coming, at last, to claim its separate Chamber replacing the House of Lords. But • studies at Deakin • University. He is the (shrunken) future as well. one may reasonably doubt whether it will be co-author of books on in time. In a world where, as the authors of a • • the Howard recent study of Indian nationalism point out, Confederation? • government, Cameron’s London coalition of ‘Con-Dems’ has given ‘There are at least 2500 potential nationalities • psychoanlaysis and rise to a whole discourse of confidence trickery and in the world waiting to stake their claim to • Slavoj Zizek, and his condemnation, the instinctive speech of zombieland. full nationhood’, it appears unlikely that the • present research Aggravated by the analogy with ‘condoms’, it already populations of Wales and Scotland will wait • interests include the makes it difficult to spell out the formula for post- patiently for future reassignment. At this • history of different conceptions of the 2010 development in the post-United Kingdom. This moment, 2011 looks the most likely date for • university, education can only be in the direction of confederation, and has serious commencement of the Scottish • • and critical thought, been neatly expressed by Scottish commentator independence initiative, very likely to be • and their relations to Gerry Hassan in a recent instalment on the followed by that of Wales. If the existing • the good society. OpenDemocracy website: Westminster coalition government endures, • The familiar templates and landscape of the British and whether or not its half-hearted • political system is cracking and falling apart; the constitutional reforms reach the statute book, • world of ... a two party adversarial system is no the breaking-up (or reconstitution) process • longer how our politics are shaped. In the last will then take its course. • decade alone, the Conservative/Labour hold on our • • political system has vastly weakened and retreated, Useful references: • to a degree as yet not understood by the Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to • Westminster village. The 2010 election is further Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992). • evidence of this, even if it is true the Lib Dems did • Open Democracy: not quite live up to the hype! Then there is also • To Marion Tapper, en philia contradictory of political words at the heart of our divided Western inheritance. Part 1: An Embarrassment of Riches Every city or town you visit in Hellas will have its Today’s weary pilgrim can take shade for as long as s/he ‘Plaka Eleutherios’ (Freedom Place) and its Odos wishes on the leafy Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios at the north-west Eletheurios (Freedom Way), together with its ‘Odos corner of the sprawling ancient Agora (market place) at Athens. Demokratia’. It goes without saying that the name of Its long-fallen columns were erected by the Athenians to the national airport (Eleutherios Vassilidis) includes celebrate the Greeks’ unlikely victory over the Persian Empire the word. Even the beautiful Orthodox Chapel you in 480 BCE. Soon afterwards, they echoed with the talk of the stumble upon when you inevitably get lost in the philosopher Socrates and his students. Socrates is known to heart of Athens’ modern agoras north of Syntagma have frequented this place. It was at this very spot that the Square is called the ‘Agia Eleutherios’—although world’s first free inquiry into the rational bases of moral and what its theology could be I am not qualified to say. political life took place. What is it, then, that the traveller can learn today Today, in midsummer, all you will hear is the noise of the from this land of self-proclaiming freedom, ancient cicadas, thick as syrup, and the gentle rustling of the wind and modern, whose classical wonders draw tourists through the trees. At 7.45 in the evening, it is true, the sworn from the four corners of the known world, now as in guardian will appear, whistle in hand, to move you gruffly on the days of the Caesars? In a way, as Antipodeans, we your way. are perfectly placed to appreciate what the two But when this happens, you need only pass through the north Greeces, ancient and modern, have to offer. From a gate of the Agora. Then turn left and walk down the paved, place, as we are, nearly free of European history, we café-lined street which runs parallel the Agora’s north side. have an innocence about these things which the About one hundred metres down the way, take a seat to your locals find difficult to understand. left, looking towards the Acropolis. For you will then be sitting ‘You like Athens?’ our tourist guide queried, amazed. overlooking the foundations of the ancient Royal Stoa (Stoa ‘… Really?’ Then, when there was a delay with a Basileos) which once stood there. And although you wouldn’t booking, thinking on her feet: ‘Have you visited the know it, it was on this very spot in 399 BCE that the same Acropolis?’ (The thought had not crossed our Socrates was brought to trial and condemned to death by the minds!) ‘What should I do with my last day in Athenians for pursuing his free inquiry into the bases of their Athens?’ I asked a Greek colleague as my stay drew ways of life. towards its close. ‘Leave Athens’, was his wry You can take your time as you take all this in. For this secular response. Golgotha is wholly free of pilgrims. The floods of tourists The modern Greeks, if truth be told, seem somewhat which daily choke the gates of the Acropolis will file past in at a loss concerning the truly incredible cultural dribs and drabs. But they will not stop. The modern Athenians, heritage bequeathed to them. These ancient ruins having run an electronic train line over the Royal Stoa’s dot their modern metropoles and countryside as Southern foundations in 1891, today do not even mark the site incongruously as some proverbial neurotic’s with a legible sign. symptoms, and—were it not for the tourist’s If you set out from the same Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios the dollar—they would have as little to do with the life other way (south), you pass first the remains of the Assembly of the modern nation. (Bouleterion) where the Laws founding the world’s first It is not that today’s Greeks, or their government, are democracy were passed in 508 BCE. But no need to get too embarrassed about their extraordinary cultural misty-eyed. For just next door, barely twenty strides closer to inheritance. Far from it. The opening of the New the hulking shadow of the Acropolis, stands the ‘State Prison’, Acropolis museum received a national telecast. This or Demestherion, of the 5th century BCE. In this building, was then followed by a telecast of how other little more than a hundred years after the Kleisthenic reforms countries around the world had covered the event. of 508 BCE, the restored democracy asked its patron Nor are the modern Greeks at an economic loss philosopher to kindly take the hemlock, and his free inquiries, about their cultural riches. If they can’t always to Hades. savour its cultural or aesthetic values, they are at ‘Eleutherios’ in ‘Zeus Eleutherios’ means ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’, least acutely aware of the monetary price it fetches as you discover when you travel to Greece today. For the on the global tourism market. Nearly every street country is obsessed with this most enticing and most corner shop in Athens sells miniature busts of 40 ancient greats at bargain prices, together with postcards Keramaikos (ancient cemetery), the • and posters of the classical wonders. The traveller can Theatre of Dionysus, Pnyx hill (the ancient • • Thoughts of an still meet all manner of Aristophanic scoundrels waiting assembly) and the Sanctuary of Zeus of • Antipodean in Hellas to generously fleece them below the slopes of the Olympus to the Acropolis’ south. Nearly • Acropolis. Strepsiades and Peithestratos today speak the entire area of the ancient walled city • Matthew Sharpe fluent English and trade in busts, bookmarks, and surrounding the Acropolis is cordoned off • painted pottery of Aristophanes, his contemporaries and from any through-traffic. The Plaka and • the Olympian pantheon. Monasteriki, the two suburbs on the • Acropolis’ north side, have kept their • Once you leave the flea markets and the Plaka, though, shuttered houses and paved medieval • you can be surprised at how indifferent today’s Greeks • streets, not made with a view to the seem to be to the ancient wonders that gird their • modern automobile. streets. But how, after all, could they not be? They • commute, work, eat, drink, fight and love in their • • shadows every day, as insouciant as the Sydneysiders ...... • about their Harbour Bridge and Opera House. The traveller can still • In Athens, you can park your car at the front of the • Roman Agora any day of the week, astride the remains • meet all manner of • of the Emperor Hadrian’s Library, or in the shadow of • the Imperial Tower of the Winds. In the baking summer Aristophanic • heat, the attendants of these and other sites sit down to scoundrels waiting • their vigil with all the enthusiasm most Anglo- • Australians evince sitting down to dinner with their to generously fleece • extended families. Many sites, like that of Socrates’ • failed defence the Stoa Basileos, are left to stand as they them below the slopes • • will, unremarked. of the Acropolis. • Take, for instance, the site of the ancient Assembly on • the Pnyx hill overlooking the Acropolis, scarcely five Strepsiades and • hundred strides away. This remarkable natural platform, • Peithestratos today • due west of the Parthenon, played host to some of the • most renowned figures in Western political history— speak fluent English • Thermistikles, Kimon, Perikles, Alkibiades, Kleon, • Demosthenes. Today, it is frequented by Athenians and trade in busts, • taking their evening constitutionals, walking their dogs • or jogging, and young couples canoodling on the marble bookmarks, and • remains. • painted pottery of • Just outside the city of Argos, which boasts that it is Aristophanes, his • ‘the oldest city in Greece’, if you climb the hill towards • the Frankish Fort there, you stumble upon the remains contemporaries and • of a Roman Sanctuary spanning several hundred metres • • of the slopes. Amidst the overgrown dry grass, you can the Olympian • trace out the seats and stage of a magnificent theatre pantheon. • looking down over the valley to the sea, a Temple and • Stoa, a large (now-graffiti-covered) stair, and the • bathhouse where Marc Antony bathed, still strewn with • Perhaps the first thing that will strike you the seashells brought there by Romans two thousand • about the ancient Athens is its size. All of years ago. • the ancient sites are concentrated, with the • Or again, in Gortyn, on Crete, you can find an even Acropolis at their geographical and • larger Roman complex, completely unattended. Gortyn symbolic heart. The ruins of the ancient • was once one of the largest Roman centres in Greece. To walls that are still extant at the • this day it houses the Gortyn Law code etched in stone, Keramaikos, Zeus Olympian, and near the • • the oldest remaining in the Hellenic world. Today, parliament are nowhere much more than a • however, its magnificent Temple of Apollo, Praetorium, modern kilometre from the Acropolis. Well • and Fountain complex presides in silent majesty over a might Pericles have said that Athens was • captive audience of olive trees, amidst acres of red soil, an education to all Greece. In modern • strewn with broken stones. As you piece your way back terms, it was not much bigger than one of • towards modern civilisation along the dirt path on the our ‘big 8’ universities. At 30,000 male • north side, the only noises you hear are the heavy bells citizens, its population was also scarcely • of the local goat herds and the whistles of their keepers. larger. Yet this remarkable place, scarcely • • more than five kilometres square, was by • Part 2: Of Freedoms, Ancient and Modern 450 BCE the centre of an international • Whatever the complacency of today’s Greeks about their empire. Furthermore, as we can hope will • 06–07 2010 antiquities, the Athenians have done a generally terrific continue to be taught in schools and • Nº 106 job of preserving the Agora, the Acropolis, Areopagus, academies in future even down under, it • • ESSAY 41 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • was also the birthplace and cradle of the theatre, Even now, as the object of a million tourists’ idle stares, Iktanos’ of history, of political democracy, and of philosophy. masterpiece still speaks eloquently to the magnificent vision Thucydides records in Pericles’ famous funeral speech in 430 BCE, Everywhere you go in this small space, if you look to honour Athens’ first dead in the war with Sparta: up, you will see one thing. The Acropolis and the Our form of government … does not copy our neighbours’, but is Parthenon at old Athens’ heart preside over the an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for places below like a crown or shining marble the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the conscience. The Acropolis itself is a great thrust few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their of rock, whose prow at either end drives forward private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and into the blue of the sky like some great ocean when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the liner. On a midsummer’s day, the heat and light public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of on that platform of living marble are almost merit ... There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our overwhelming. From the Acropolis’ top, you can private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry see perhaps sixty kilometres in all directions, with our neighbour if he does what he likes ... While we are thus save those where Attica’s framing mountains unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence block the view. Out past the port of the Pireaus, pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by down the Saronic Gulf, you can see the straits of respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular Salamis sheathed in white haze, where the Attic regard to those laws which are ordained for the protection of the fleet faced down and defeated the invading injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the Persians in 480 BCE. The city below glows and transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment ... reflects in white; the Attic countryside around it To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas. is a sea of ochre and dry red soil. It is little wonder that such magnificent words and works, backed The Acropolis itself is today largely a work site— as they are by a concentrated century of cultural achievement today as in the 440s when the Parthenon and probably unmatched in history since, have meant that the legacy smaller Erechthion on the north side were built, of Athens—or even of ‘the Greeks’—has remained a political prize after the older temples were razed by the Persians for which many have wanted to claim ownership. in 480 BCE. A worker there asked how old I was, and when I answered I was in my early thirties, he In our own time, for instance, the father of the New Right, told me there would still be cranes here when I Friedrich von Hayek, has claimed to see in Athens’‘liberty’ and, in died. The truth is that the mathematics of the her rebellion against the tyrants of the 6th century BCE, the Parthenon in particular are so precise that to forefathers of economic liberals’ vocal rebellion against the ‘big rebuild it even to the limited extent the Greek state’ today. Athens, a port city, was also a centre of trade, whose government hopes is no easy thing. Remarkably, cultural dynamism was a sure reflection of its peoples’ wily for one thing, there are no exactly straight lines economic enterprise. In this first ‘market society’ public to the Parthenon. To beguile the viewer’s eye, the bureaucracy was considered beneath the dignity of free men, eight by seventeen Doric columns each taper unlike in the age of our ‘nanny state’. The many public duties we slightly, to a maximum girth at exactly two-fifths regulate from Canberra were regulated in classical Athens by of their height (a visual ruse called entasis). The slaves. lengths of metopes, triptychs, and steles above But there is surely something silly in trying to find in the ancient the columns also curve minutely, to take into world an exact prescriptive model or apology for our liberal account the angles below from which the temple democracy today, or any other system of government. For one is seen. There are certain angles upon the longer thing, for every virtue we should want to celebrate in Athens’ western and eastern sides where the lines of culture there are as many features of her life which we would seventeen columns seem to merge dizzyingly into hesitate about: the fact that to be a citizen you needed to be able each other, creating that uncanny effect which to own and bear arms; the fact that the leisure for public modern philosophers call the mathematical participation of the citizens was based in the slavery of many sublime. others, and the indispensable economic role of migrants without But the aesthetic wonder of the Parthenon is only access to the franchise; the complete political and cultural part of the story. This superb edifice remains marginalisation of women, whose glory lay in their silence, as today an immense embodiment in stone of Pericles agreed with Homer, and Aristotle a century later. Periklean Athens’ civic pride and ‘confidence in Those who, with an eye to today’s debates, would see in Athens a freedom’, despite the ravages of the centuries, the vindication of their own one-dimensional vision that political Christians, the British and the Turks. On the autonomy is grounded in the economic liberty to buy and produce pediments and in the metopes, the odd piece of goods, though, need particularly beware. The great liberal thinkers sculpture (here a rearing horse, there a whose ideas founded our modern market societies were more processional figure) still peeks out, a reminder of historically aware, and more careful. Like the New Right today in the building’s original devotional calling. Before it action, they saw and feared in direct democracy a recipe for became a tourist trap, it is well to remember that economic inefficiencies and a sure-fire recipe for the mob to the Parthenon was a grand temple to the city’s trample upon the hard-won private liberty of the prosperous to patron virgin goddess, Athena. The democratic peaceably enjoy the fruits of their economic transactions. How general Pericles had the Parthenon erected from indeed could we have maximised our national wealth and the spoils of Athens’ naval empire in the 440s economic ‘freedom’ when the heads of each household were BCE, in the interregnum before the Peloponnesian expected to spend nearly half the day at the public assembly, with war, the plague, and her long defeat at the hands an eye to the ‘public good’? And how could we have concentrated of Sparta. 42 on private business and maximising returns if, on a boundless fields for her expansion and • rotating basis, each of us had to spend a month out of exploitation. The possibility that is now • • Thoughts of an every ten as the modern equivalent of a senator, and one emerging, that the limitless economic • Antipodean in Hellas day as the ancient equivalent of the prime minister or growth that has resulted is undermining • speaker of the house? the natural preconditions of our collective • Matthew Sharpe lives, was then scarcely imaginable. • In the light of these demands, most of us would be more Whether it be climate change, rising sea • like the characters in Aristophanes’ plays who take every levels, peak oil or peak water, it is these • chance they get to complain about their public duties unprecedented challenges that will define • and long for the good old days, when they didn’t always the next era of our collective history. • have to go to the assemblies. In truth, and for what it is • worth, we are much closer today to the Athens of the • ...... 4th century, a prosperous city of specialisation and • declining public spirit, whose stages had been emptied • • of tragedies, and whose ‘new comedies’ are even the One day spent • distant predecessors of today’s ‘romcoms’. looking at the stately • But the greatness of 5th century Athens reflects the way ruins of this place, • ancient Greek culture was obsessed with competition, • • our modern defenders of ‘freedom’ would rejoin. The and the extraordinary • great stadiums at Olympia and Delphi held around • 30,000 spectators. The Greeks competed in almost beauty of their • anything, from Homeric times to the days of Pericles: surrounds, is enough • naked wrestling and charioteering, drinking bouts and • the composition and production of tragedies, comedies to intimate power- • and satyr plays. But it is the height of philistinism to • • say that this patented agonism was primarily rooted in fully the truth of • free trade—every bit as ridiculous as to say that a what Albert Camus • people who would adjudge all things in terms of • exchange value should ever produce buildings as once said: that if • beautiful as the Parthenon, the Erechthion, or the • contemporary Temple to Poseidon over the waters of modern Anglo- • Cape Sounion. • European culture is • To measure our distance from this place, and its sense • of eleutherios, it is enough to compare Pericles’ words the son of Greece, • concerning political freedom with the extraordinary • poverty of the words of the recent leader of the free we are her renegade • world, who when asked to define the freedom he sought • child. • to export militarily around the globe answered like a • bashful schoolboy, reciting lines learnt by rote: ‘If I have • By contrast with our leading ideas, Greek something to sell and you also have something, no one • else should be allowed to interfere in our trading’, or thought from the start took its stand upon • words to that effect. To cite the funeral oration again: the notion of limit. In the pre-Socratic • ‘We do not say that someone who keeps to himself philosophers like Anaximander or • minds his own business here. We say that he has no Heraclitus, justice (dikaisyne), for instance, • business here’. was held to set bounds on the natural • world itself. Socrates, when asked to • So, despite the ideologues, is there no political lesson defend his life, would similarly only • • that we can learn today from a visit to the homeland of identify his highest wisdom with a proud political democracy, as we are drawn to ‘fix our eyes • acknowledgement of ignorance and self- • upon the greatness of Athens, until we become filled limitation. • with the love of her and … the spectacle of her glory’? If The idea of tethering our culture’s ships to • anything, this place speaks against the hubris of our • attempting any such thing. One day spent looking at the the idea of economies (and hence societies • stately ruins of this place, and the extraordinary beauty and populations) that would grow • of their surrounds, is enough to intimate powerfully the indefinitely, without any external limit in • truth of what Albert Camus once said: that if modern nature, would have been madness to the • Anglo-European culture is the son of Greece, we are her Greeks. They would have identified it as a • • renegade child. barbarian notion, most akin in their experience to the expansionary intentions • of the Persians who they fought to the • Part 3: Hubris and Limit • The philosophies that today overwhelmingly govern our death at Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis, • public life, despite the temporary rock of financial and Plateia—and who incidentally bought • recession, are philosophies of limitlessness. The the allegiance of many Greek cities with • philosophy of free trade was conceived in the world of the promise of unmatched economic • 06–07 2010 the 17th century, at the very time that Europe’s plenty. Nothing in the kosmos can grow • Nº 106 • discoveries in the new world opened up seemingly infinitely, they would have warned us. • ESSAY 43 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Our Western culture is of course today not unaware produced the sanctuaries at Delphi or Olympia knew nothing of of the transitional point that we are collectively any such need, and would have scorned it. approaching. We live in a period of widespread If there is indeed a fault with the Parthenon, it is that its very size scepticism, and the absence of any wider, positive bespeaks a sense of grandiosity that borders on becoming deeply vision—some, more dramatic than this author, call un-Greek. Pericles’ political opponents called him ‘Olympian’, and this nihilism. This is why we have been so totally it was not a term of love. The nigh-Egyptian proportions of this delivered over to philosophies that can conceive of monument scoffs at the Delphic wisdom of ‘nothing too much’, no higher goals than ‘efficiency’ or ‘growth’ to orient every bit as much as Pericles’ proud boasts that no poet could ever our public life—in truth, the most callow and sing Athens’ praises, so surpassing was her greatness. aimless of gods yet invented by human beings. And lest we forget, little more than a decade after the Funeral Even the postmodern relativism lamented today by Oration, Pericles’ own adoptive son Alkibiades was to lead the city the political Right can only be understood as a on a pointless, near-Persian exercise in imperialist excess: the shocked response to the excesses of a modern world, Sicilian expedition. Her inevitable failure in Italy would ensure and the wider sense that the West has lost its Athens’ defeat by the Spartans, and in this way, that the city’s direction. Yet postmodernism misdiagnoses the justly celebrated golden age lasted little more than one hundred problem. It is not ‘Western rationality’ or ‘Western years. A century more, and the entire Greek peninsula has lost her civilisation’—very many-faceted things—that are autonomy under the heels of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, holus bolus to blame for the horrors of the world and Greek culture began its Hellenistic decline. wars, the gulags, the camps, and now the increasing exhaustion of the earth. Nor will we find our Perhaps in this story of overweening hubris, then, we can take salvation in the vaguaries of ‘difference’,‘becoming’, something like a lesson today. The Greeks never denied that ‘the Other’,‘the infinite’, and so on held up by the mortals could, and would, press against and violate the limits of postmodern prophets—all so many names for their condition, fondly imagining that their god-like powers further freedom from all rational constraints, when proved them already to be gods. They only insisted that, when we what is needed is a new basis for these constraints. do this, Nemesis—God of moderation, not of vengeance—will demand the price. Today, ironically, it is our scientists—those All this, I grant you, sounds terribly like edification. former paymasters of progress—who deliver us this Greek And edification is a million miles away from the message, their graphs and reports prophesying changes in our dusty remains of the ancient Attic Agora, or the biosphere whose political consequences can only be profoundly splendour of Sounion in the fierce sunlight of a mid- destructive. Whether we like it or not, our culture now needs to summer afternoon. My point is only that all the reconsider its relation to the natural world, and forego the ages- redoubtable mathematical perfection and long conviction that somehow we are in, but not of, this technological virtuosity of the old Greeks’ temples biosphere. Courageous and wise political leadership will be are not there to set these edifices apart from or needed, and continual struggle with those who will continue to above the natural world, or to speak to the profit from ‘business as usual’, including their vocal apologists in surpassing wonder of man alone. The Greeks’ myths the now unprecedentedly concentrated global media industry. populated the natural world’s mountains and groves with gods and daemons, and it is to honour these But we will also need to produce new ideas. As we seek for these that their temples were first erected. It was the new ideas, and specifically a new conception of our limited, if Christian world which first turned its back on the potentially destructive, place in the natural world, the recollection natural world. So the modern ambition to master and of the Greek world whose ruins you can still visit today—a culture subdue nature—turning it into so many natural which ‘carried nothing to extremes, neither religion nor reason, resources, which we are now exhausting—is much because it denied nothing, neither reason nor religion … balancing more Christian than it is classical, however proudly light with shade’—can speak to us perhaps with more clarity and ‘secular’ we take our culture to be. The culture that urgency than ever...... Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia Edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson On 21 June 2007 a national emergency was declared to combat child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory. 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Contributors: Jon Altman Ian Anderson Judy Atkinson Larissa Behrendt Kay Boulden Maggie Brady Tom Calma David Dalrymple Megan Davis Michael Dillion Michael Dodson Patrick Dodson Bill Fogarty Raimond Gaita John Hinkson Melinda Hinkson Ernest Hunter Melissa Johns Michael Mansell Joe Morrison John Morton Gregory Phillips Tristian Ray David Ross Tim Rowse Guy Rundle Mathew Ryan Will Sanders John Sanderson John Taylor William Tilmouth Pat Turner Nicole Watson Rex Wild Arena Publications 2007, RRP (AUS): $27.95 Inq: [email protected] Ph: 61 (03) 9416 0232 Fx: (03) 9416 0684 ...... 44 ARTS AND CULTURE • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The Future of Community Radio David Melzer ...... For all the successes of community A Short History A look at the history of community broadcasting in broadcasting, the sector is at a crossroads Australia highlights its purpose and value. Australia leads the world in many areas—some good and some … Community broadcasting, catering to expressed well, some may be best not to jump up and down about. Which needs of sections of the Australian population, has ones stand out for you? For me: Longest Surviving Culture stands developed as a complement to the other two out, something to be check-this-out proud of. Unfortunately, the significant broadcasting sectors in the country. What sustainability of that boast is threatened by our mistreatment of is unique about Australian broadcasting is that all Indigenous people. We are really very good at digging iron ore, three major sectors—commercial, government- lead and zinc out of the ground and shipping it out—but I’m not funded (ABC, SBS) and community—are large, well- sure how sustainable that is either or whether it’s really developed and well-supported. The United Kingdom something worth boasting about. Australia can also claim to be a has only recently started licensing community recent world leader in house-price growth as well as time spent stations, so has only two mature broadcasting per capita on social networking sites (it IS a big country after all). sectors. But the development of which we can all be extremely proud is Broadcasting in Australia developed rapidly from community broadcasting. We lead the world in terms of number, 1923, when the first four radio stations were licensed. diversity and quality of licensed community-controlled It developed into a hybrid of models in the United broadcasting stations. Australia is in the healthy situation of Kingdom, where all broadcasting was government- having more licensed community radio stations (358) than the owned (commercial radio did not start in there until number of commercial (274), ABC (65) and SBS (4) stations put the 1970s) and the United States, where there are no together. Melbourne is the heartland for Australian community government-funded radio stations. radio with nine (the most of any Australian city) well developed Government funded radio started in Australia when and supported stations. On the smell of the proverbial, it became apparent that the private sector would not community radio gives access to the airwaves to people who are service regional areas as there was no ‘business case’ otherwise denied it—young people, old people, Indigenous people, for doing so. In 1927, a Royal Commission into ethnic people and those interested in alternative views and non- broadcasting directed the Post Master General (PMG) mainstream music. to take control of a number of radio stations, with a Community radio (and television) stations are licensed by the brief from government to extend radio into country federal government when communities express a need for them. areas. The PMG contracted the Australian They can be geographic (70 per cent of community stations are in Broadcasting Company to make programs for the regional areas) or communities of interest. Some fine examples service. In 1932 the Australian Broadcasting are: SYN-FM in Melbourne, constitutionally restricted to young Commission (ABC) was established, funded by people under twenty-six, which in one corker of a year trained licence fees. Forty years later another development in 4000 young people in how to broadcast; JOY-FM, the only radio Australian electronic media occurred when station in the world operated by and for the local gay and lesbian established services again failed to meet the needs of community; and Goolarri Media in Broome, active in media and a section—or rather, many sections of the Australian music production and in providing training and employment community. opportunities for Aboriginal people in their community. In The origins of community broadcasting—or ‘public’ Melbourne, also think RRR, MBS, PBS and CR; think KND, ZZZ broadcasting as it was known until the ABC and RPH—all treasures. appropriated that term in the 1990s—is not Community stations are generally operated by volunteers; 23,000 traceable to any one single movement. During the people are currently actively involved in operating the 300 plus 1960s and 1970s four distinct and unrelated threads stations across the country. There are stations on Christmas of political, cultural and social movement, and then Island (growing audience) in the west, Palm Island in the east, two more, came together to weave the fabric of Thursday Island up north and Kangaroo Island down south—just community broadcasting in Australia. Educators, about the four corners of the country—and everywhere in protestors, migrants and, oddly, classical music between. Most importantly, community broadcasting allows all enthusiasts made strange bedfellows, stranger studio those people to be part of decision making and ownership of mates. Not long after the start of community stations—but maybe not for much longer. Community broadcasting, Indigenous communities and people broadcasting is hot national infrastructure with a racy past but a who could not use print media also wanted access to doubtful future. the airwaves. 45 • The first identifiable group seeking access to transmission range. Monash University hosted 3PR • broadcasting was classical music enthusiasts. People’s Radio and Melbourne University had 3DR, Draft The Future of • Community Radio • Peaceful, relaxed and pensive, you might Resistor’s radio. Several people involved with the • think—hardly the types to storm the Melbourne stations, particularly those with technical David Melzer • barricades of the broadcasting regulators. But expertise, joined forces to start the Community Radio • not so. In 1961, when the government closed Federation (CRF) in 1974. • down experimental FM stations, allocating the • Each of these four groups had one thing in common. David Melzer was spectrum to television, disappointed classical • They challenged how broadcasting operated in Australia. living in the Otways music fans formed the Listener’s Society of • They wanted control of the airwaves and they lobbied in western Victoria NSW and the Music Broadcasting Society of • when he became for it, leading to the establishment of the third tier of • Victoria. Their objective was to establish FM enthusiastic about broadcasting in Australia. • radio stations to play fine music. what was then • The history of community broadcasting in Australia called public Educators made up the second group, with • parallels the changing face of the country’s social, broadcasting. He some universities lobbying for licences to • first volunteered at political and cultural environment, changes which began • broadcast educational material on air. They 3YYR in Geelong in in the sixties and achieved a critical momentum over the • had witnessed the Open Universities in the 1988; later he was next two decades. • United Kingdom and the educational stations employed as part- • time manager. He in the United States. In 1961, the University of Historically, Indigenous communities were badly served • went on to manage NSW was given a licence to broadcast lectures by and portrayed in the media. Indigenous aspirations • 3ZZZ in over a non-broadcast frequency. were not part of the agenda of mainstream media. The • Melbourne— importance of maintaining Indigenous languages and • The third prong of the movement came from surviving the cultures only emerged as a policy objective in the 1980s. • politics of a station ethnic communities. In the wake of post-war • that broadcasts in migration, the media lagged far behind in In 1980, Australia’s first Aboriginal owned and • sixty-five languages. meeting the needs of Australians whose first controlled radio station, the Central Australian • He and his family language was not English. As a result of Aboriginal Media Association’s (CAAMA’s) 8KIN, • then schlepped to • migration, the country’s population had started broadcasting, producing videos and making Fitzroy Crossing in • almost doubled in twenty years. music clips. Not long after, some Indigenous Western Australia’s • communities in remote Australia started to adapt low- Kimberley region, Al Grassby, later a minister in the Whitlam • cost video, videoconferencing and radio services to suit where the ABC government, worked in agriculture in southern • employed him to their needs, and some, such as those at Yuendumu and • NSW in the 1950s. Up to 60 per cent of local work with the local Ernabella, started pirate community television stations. • people had a first language other than English. Aboriginal board to • Grassby started broadcasting European music With a Labor Government, elected in 1983, talking self- establish an • on 2RG in Griffith, interspersed with determination in Aboriginal policy making, and with independent • station. He spent segments in Italian for local farmers on topics bureaucrats like Charles Perkins and Eric Willmot • ten years back in like ‘How to spray your earth mites’. By the driving the process, Indigenous communities were to • Melbourne 1970s, Grassby was Minister for Immigration officially gain control of media at a local level through • managing 3MBS, and started a fledgling SBS through small the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities • with a stint once • stations in Sydney and Melbourne. The Scheme (BRACS). With the launch of Australia’s first again in the • burgeoning political power of migrants domestic satellite in 1985, remote Indigenous Kimberley, • ensured that ethnic broadcasting burst out communities had access to telecommunications, managing the ABC • around the country. Brisbane hosted the first broadcast television and radio for the first time. The station in Broome. • full-time ethnic community radio station, launch was seen as both a potential advance for He has spent many • satisfying hours 4EB, in the late 1970s. There are now Indigenous communications and a threat to the • hundreds of languages spoken on community maintenance of an already diminished language and volunteering at • community • stations around the country, many catering to culture. stations, including recent arrivals such as those from the Horn of • When the BRACS project was first funded in 1987, as a 3CR, 3RRR, 3PBS Africa and the Middle East. • Bicentennial gift to Indigenous communities, these and 3YYR. He is • The fourth group seeking access to the media communities had the potential to use media to sustain presently Acting • CBOnline Manager, • was the politically active ‘Vietnam generation’. their culture for the first time. BRACS gave Community • The desire for a more open media was communities the ability to produce their own video and Broadcasting • exemplified by the draft resistors and their radio programs and re-broadcast or ‘embed’ this material Association of • supporters in Melbourne and Sydney who ran in mainstream programming by turning off main signals Australia. • pirate broadcasts. In Brisbane Springbok rugby and transmitting their own programs locally. • tour demonstrations in 1971 and their Then came the blindfellas. Radio that meets the • coverage by the mainstream media led • information needs of people with a print disability dates students to form their own radio station • back almost as far as community radio itself. From 1975 (ultimately 4ZZZ). As the wave of anti- • a community group in Melbourne presented a regular Vietnam War moratorium marches spread • weekly news and information program on 3CR. • throughout the country, in 1971 students at • two Melbourne universities were considering Members were aware of the radio reading services then • their response to the government’s crackdown developing in the United States. In 1978, at Bathurst’s 06–07 2010 • on civil liberties and the right to protest. The community radio 2MCE, station manager John Martin Nº 106 • answer was two pirate radio stations. But felt that reading the local newspaper on the radio would • these were a token gesture with limited • 46 ARTS AND CULTURE • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • provide a service to people who could not access print media—not connect or create communities and for more just vision impaired people, but others with literacy problems and accurately representing our social and cultural those who could not physically handle books and newspapers. One diversity than other media. of a young Andrew Denton’s first media experiences was reading The achievements of community broadcasting are out local newspapers on-air at 2MCE. ‘Andrew’s description of the many. Community broadcasters pioneered FM frocks (from the social pages) was magnificent’, Martin has said. technology when no one else wanted to touch it. Overtures were made to the minister for post and They have pioneered new programming formats telecommunications for access to the broadcasting spectrum for supporting local musicians, alternative news, current the provision of reading services—to become known as Radio for affairs and information, programs in languages other the Print Handicapped. In July 1978 the minister permitted ‘The than English and positive stories about Indigenous establishment of a special radio communications service for the culture. Community radio, more than the ABC, blind and other people with reading difficulties’. provides strong support for Australian music. Musicians like Paul Kelly, John Butler, The Saints, During the 1960s and 1970s changes in political, social and Boys Next Door, to name a few, received their first cultural horizons led to changes in the media landscape. The six airplay on stations like RTR in Perth, DDD in very different groups who pressured government for access to and Adelaide, Edge FM in Hobart, ZZZ in Brisbane, PBS control over the airwaves were joined by others and twelve initial in Melbourne and SER in Sydney. Almost 100 stations multiplied as a response to communities expressing a Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Stations (the old need for and a capability to operate their own radio and television BRACS) are operating in small communities in stations. outback Australia. These are communities where Aboriginal people want to sustain their culture, The ABC language and sense of community. When community needs have become apparent, as they did in the early 1970s, Labor governments have tended to expand The Challenges government services. 2JJ started when young people demanded a For all the young people trained by SYN-FM, for all different approach to music than the American Top 40. When the Indigenous issues covered by the twenty-six full- classical music enthusiasts became strident about hearing Mozart, time Aboriginal radio stations across the country, for Beethoven and Schubert on radio, the government responded with all the thousands of hours of non-English ABC Classic FM. When ethnic communities demanded more than programming broadcast every week in over one English language programs, the government initiated what has hundred stations across Australia and for the become SBS. hundreds of local musicians supported by their local Despite the degree to which our national broadcasters are community radio stations, the sector is at a cherished by people who value independent media, they are not crossroads. enough. Despite the degree to which they are resourced, they The immediate challenge for community cannot cover the diverse interests that have developed in this old broadcasting is the proliferation of platforms on and new country. And despite the high quality of service, they are which people can express themselves. The days are undeniably national broadcasters; government broadcasters: no gone when licences issued to community stations matter how much they try to dress themselves up as ‘local’ or were beacons around which people rallied in a heavily ‘community’ radio, they are not of the community. regulated media landscape. The internet can deliver Recently, the ABC received a massive injection of funding to New York and New Delhi for your listening pleasure. provide what they described as ‘town square’ services— How do community broadcasters sustain engagement community hubs where people can contribute content. But with their communities in the face of this deluge? If Australians generally won’t fall for that. Despite the ABC calling massive media empires like Fairfax and News Limited itself ‘local radio’, people in Cairns know when the overnight can’t work out how to maintain readership of their program on ‘their’ local radio is coming from Melbourne. Without daily newspapers, what hope have community radio ten times the funding, the ABC just cannot be local enough. stations? The ABC is a wonderful service, but despite its intentions, it Community broadcasting has developed strategies to cannot cover all media bases in this country. It should stop acting address these challenges. By returning to its origins, like it can and stop trying to shut out other media from public the days when a microphone, turntable and events. National broadcasters and commercial radio can’t serve the transmitter and a bit of training could turn needs of remote Aboriginal communities. It can’t serve specialist enthusiasts into media players, community music lovers. Will the ABC provide a service as basic as reading broadcasting can offer people who believe in newspapers? How many people interested in working in the media independent media, social justice and serving their do the ABC or commercial radio train each year? The number is a own communities, pathways to digital literacy and lot closer to zero than the hundreds trained by community digital economies. The community sector has broadcasting. developed a vision that re-invigorates the community broadcasting role in local communities The Achievements by enabling them to leverage the rollout of digital Today a significant proportion of the Australia population listen technology. Community stations can provide the to community radio. McNair Ingenuity Research figures found in facilities, training and infrastructure for people who 2008 that 57 per cent of Australians over fifteen—9.5 million support their ideals to connect with digital media. A people—listen to community radio every month, an increase of 10 level of initial funding support is needed to establish per cent since 2006. Qualitative research showed that people like this vision. community broadcasting for local news, for offering the ability to 47 • All politicians in the upcoming election campaign offered the other sectors on the new digital • will be asked to support infrastructure development transmission platform. The Future of • at community stations around the country to enable Community Radio • Digital radio transmission has enough local communities to better develop new and • challenges for all players—commercial David Melzer engaging local programming. This will be achieved • stations are yet to establish a business case • through the provision of digital production facilities and the internet is flooding listeners with • and digital media training for thousands of stations from across the planet—without the • volunteers. The outcome will be a 25 per cent government putting community broadcasters a • increase in volunteer participation, a doubling to mile behind the starting line by reducing its • 2000 of the number of jobs in the sector, and a huge • access to spectrum. Community broadcasters increase in local program making. • are least equipped to handle the steep rise in • costs associated with generating new program • ...... streams on new technology. • • Just as community radio stations in the capital • This federal govern- cities of the mainland states take the giant • and unknown leap into digital transmission, • ment and its pre- they are effectively being chopped off at the • • knees. This federal government and its • decessor have taken predecessor have taken active measures to • diminish and erode more than forty years of • active measures to development of Australian community • broadcasting by over 100,000 volunteers. • diminish and erode • Why would governments want to destroy • community broadcasting? Is it by simple • more than forty neglect and lack of knowledge of the many • benefits brought by the sector to the millions • years of development of Australians who listen to it? Or is it by • design, and what could that be? Either case is • of Australian unfathomable. For community broadcasting, • • the next couple of years will determine • community whether or not the decades of development • will be squandered. • broadcasting by over • Relevant website and sources: • 100,000 volunteers. Australian Communication Media Authority: • the cage hen crouched on flimsy legs with stubby beak she sang inside her cardboard box and fell over when she saw the sky. the cage hen looked sideways with golden eyes scratched up mountains and rollicked her feathers in pools of mud. the cage hen stirred her wings and surprised herself over the fence. silent, with open fangs, the dog: she ran as if she had already lost her head. the cage hen looks sideways with one golden eye beats her ragged wings inside her pen and waits for me to let her out. *Cage hens never see the sky. Up to 20,000 hens reside in large sheds, under artificial light: each tiny wire cage contains two to five ‘debeaked’ hens. Leg muscles atrophy. Translation Yet why not say what happened? Robert Lowell Two days into Spring and the Wajeha video arrives. A slim woman in a head scarf, black binds her eyes, a black stripe covers her mouth. She paints on an easel in a pleasant, well-lit room—and something slowly grows. She is painting a portrait of herself: a sky blue veil, a youthful face, blinded by black, a black stripe replaces her mouth. She cannot sing; her brush strokes cannot release her mind. All she sees is that she cannot speak. And then the words: there is no life without freedom of expression. *Wajeha al Huwaider is a Saudi Arabian journalist banned from writing by her government. Susan Fealy / 49 STORY • • a small treatise on • captivity • • Translation • Memory Flags • Roger Rees Susan Fealy • ...... • • • Susan Fealy is a ‘I look the same as before, but now I • A story about memories lost and Melbourne-based just forget; sometimes I don’t know • clinical recaptured, the knowledge of a lifetime • where I am and words won’t come’, he psychologist and • says. ‘I’m sure I know your name poet. She won the held by paper and string • because we’ve met before but…’ Henry Kendall • Seeking change in his fortune and the renewing of hope, a Poetry Award 2010, He stares at me. ‘Okay’, he says. ‘Tell me • young man wanders among homemade flags in his ground and her poetry has • floor suburban flat. Paper flags, some neatly cut, some torn, your name and I’ll write it down, make recently been • some white, some green, haphazardly carry names of places another flag … hang it on the line … published in • there’s a space over there.’He points to Etchings, Meanjin, (Adelaide Central Market, Rundle Mall, Glenelg, Tram Stop, • a small gap in his line of flags. Eureka Street and Melbourne, Sydney, Tathra, Bangkok), people (Angela, • The Best Australian Michael, Courtney, Phillip), objects (door, window, shower, • The young man exhorts his damaged Poems 2009. chess set, drafts, sculpture, garage), phrases (on table, under • brain to ‘work as well as you can’. His • roof, Angela’s smile, forget words) and the occasional mind is sick with longing for the return • sentence (I am tired, I can’t remember, he is happy, it’s a long of his memory. He suffers an endless • time, I want to leave). desire for the restoration of his mental • These ‘memory’ flags are strung randomly on thin string at life. As despair grows he can wake in • the night at the slightest sound. Then • head height across his dining room, lounge and part of his • kitchen. They flutter below a creaking, slowly rotating fan he says he gets up and switches on • in the spacious flat. He says that since his accident he lights in order to look at his flags. But • cannot recall even the smallest words. Simple words such as the beautiful fulfillment of a fluent Memory Flags • work, rest, drive, ride. Sometimes even basic words such as memory is lacking; that fulfillment lies • man and woman are on the tip of his tongue. But his ability with the flags fluttering under the Roger Rees • to speak these words, whenever appropriate, rarely occurs. creaking fan. • • His passion for reading his flags is ...... Roger Rees is • exhausting. He’s in a maddening Emeritus Professor • He hopes that his flags, just like situation. Every day he reads the flags, in Disability • his eyes on a name, a new word, a Research at • phrase he remembered yesterday but • the prayer flags he had seen in Flinders cannot remember today. He has never University's School • Nepal and Tibet, will bless and • read before with this degree of passion, of Medicine. but the hope for a return of his memory 'Memory Flags' is an • nurture his memory. Nepalese fails despite his intensity. And so he is exerpt from Out of • flags, printed on thin and fading Calamity, an as yet • wearing himself out. To make things unpublished book • muslin, flutter in Himalayan worse he is out of work and his partner of true accounts • has left. He manages somehow to live about people who • winds, seeking long life, on his disability allowance. He borrows • experience trauma, here and there and just gets by. He is • transformation of bad to good adjust and reinvent degraded, has lost his friends and his themselves. • fortune for their people and • social standing. He is alone so he talks • renewal of hope for the world. to his adored flags, exciting himself • when a word, read the day before, • returns with just a glance towards a The words are hidden, distorting the actions and manner of • flag. Then he smiles, acquiesces and his life. He starts to forget who he is. Now he hopes that his • takes himself to a suburban café to • flags, just like the prayer flags he had seen in Nepal and drink alone for an hour or two, • Tibet, will bless and nurture his memory. Nepalese flags, consumed then by the temporary • printed on thin and fading muslin, flutter in Himalayan effectiveness of the fluttering flags. • winds, seeking long life, transformation of bad to good • fortune for their people and renewal of hope for the world. His memory is lost almost completely, • as though it never existed. How does a • The man’s flags renew his hope for a change in fortune. • man survive? But he still hopes. His accident was a late night ambush by unknown • ‘Thank you, flags,’he mutters. ‘Brain, • assailants as he left the city casino after successful work now as well as you can!’ 06–07 2010 • backgammon play. Robbed and left bleeding and Nº 106 • unconscious, with a serious head injury, he has now lost his • memory. • 50 REVIEW • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • film Tearing the Family Apart review by Kate Harper ...... Animal Kingdom, David Michôd institution in the process. Thus, as an urban crime drama with the family at its centre, Animal Kingdom works especially well as a genre film in the (dir.), 2010 Australian context as well as clearly having antecedents in American film A garish embossed-bronze wall hanging comes traditions. into view. On it a powerful lion is depicted Following from these generic strains of influence, Animal Kingdom zeroes standing atop a large stone, flanked on either in on audiences’ fascination with the intimate familial sphere that serves side by two crouching lionesses. The film’s as a breeding ground for crime. This voyeuristic allure may be due to a title—Animal Kingdom—appears boldly paradox that arises when watching these films: the families we witness through the middle. From here a slow-motion are both strange and yet familiar. That is, the values that form the black and white montage shows CCTV-style foundation of every action and reaction of the crime family are the same images of people robbing banks in crudely principles aspired to by the ‘ordinary family’—loyalty and love. In fact, made balaclavas. All this is done in tableaux to the crime family just takes to its logical and violent extreme the an ominous score by Sam Petty—a strange but traditional principles that define the family unit—closeness and affective mix of 80s synthesisers and sonorous dependability serving as defences against potential harm or calamity. In piano organ. This is the opening title sequence essence, the criminal family takes ideological idealism at its word and to writer and director David Michôd’s first says, because I love my family absolutely I will protect it by whatever means feature film, and the ensuing thematic drive of necessary. Thus the family’s number one function here is to protect the Animal Kingdom is all there in the symbolism continuation of the institution itself while fearfully observing (shifting) of the Franco Cozzo-inspired wall hanging: the power relations between its members. King of the jungle survives by dominating the weaker members of his pride. Synonymous with the crime family in film and literature is a rigid hierarchy—everybody has a well-defined role to play within the domestic Animal Kingdom is a fictional tale of organisation. Animal Kingdom is no different, with Weaver playing the Darwinian survival of the fittest—not Cody family matriarch, affectionately known as Smurf. A ‘whited surprisingly, given its title—set amidst one sepulchre’, she is no more a Smurf than Chopper Reid is a Care Bear. In Melburnian crime family in particular, the fact, she is the real venom of this family and its most powerful member. Codys. Make no mistake though: the Cody In a retrospective voice-over narration early in the film J says that Smurf family of this story are a far cry from the ‘just seemed to wanna be wherever the boys were’. Protective and economic and political power of Corleone ruthless, we soon realise that she will do whatever it takes to protect her dynasty in Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy, the ‘boys’. Weaver says Smurf ‘bred these three psychopath sons’, and indeed film most celebrated for marrying the term the film quite clearly suggests that she is responsible for the Cody boys’ ‘crime’ with ‘family’. We enter Animal criminal behaviour. Her role here at the epicentre of a violent horde of Kingdom’s distinctly Melburnian criminal men brings to mind another Australian film about a dangerous familial landscape through 17-year-old Joshua ‘J’ Cody, tribe—Rowan Woods’ terrifying The Boys, of 1998. played by James Frecheville. When his mother dies of a heroin overdose, J is taken in by her Animal Kingdom thematically evokes this earlier film. Both dramatise the estranged family and quickly embroiled in the snowball effects of a masculine pack-mentality within families that are escalating dysfunctions of this violently marked by absent fathers and burdened mothers. In fact, while watching defensive clan. In many ways the film is a rite- Animal Kingdom it feels as if the ineffectual mother of Woods’ film of-passage narrative for J as he is forced to (played by Lynette Curran) has finally said, ‘I’m tired of being the confront familial hierarchies and to assert his punching bag. I’m doing the punching from now on’. Unlike the position in this ‘animal kingdom’. Alongside powerless mother of the Sprague men in The Boys, Smurf guides the Frecheville, Michôd has assembled a violent direction of her family and implicitly encourages her sons’ excess formidable ensemble cast, including Ben of masculine energy, while never allowing them to dominate her. All this Mendelsohn, Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton and is done in such a sickly-sweet, predatory sort of way that she is basically Jackie Weaver. a less histrionic version of the controlling Oedipal mother, so adored in horror films as a figure of masculine reproach since Norman Bates Genre films set within the criminal milieu uttered, ‘mother … isn’t quite herself today’. have been popular since cinema’s infancy. From the ‘gang films’ of the 1930s, American Positioned above Smurf—in name only—is eldest son and patriarch of genre films have explored the psychology of this family, Andrew, appropriately nicknamed ‘Pope’ and astonishingly the criminal and the social world they inhabit, realised by Mendelsohn. Physically Mendelsohn has undergone a rather necessarily evolving in style, form and wonderful transformation in the last five years: his face and body have thematic emphasis to both accommodate and come to express what we might call an aesthetic of hard-knocks. Gone is suggest shifting socio-historical the approachable boyishness that made him so adorable as Lewis in Cosi; circumstances. Our own national mythology his face now appears as though he dedicated years to drowning that has been especially interested in outlaw former cub in bottles of scotch. All this is to say that Mendelsohn’s figures while our films have consistently taken physicality is a perfect match for the hardened and ageing character of place within the realm of the family—often Pope. Indeed, Michôd says he wrote ‘the character of Pope with Ben dismembering the ideological sanctity of the Mendelsohn in mind because I knew that Pope needed to be the 51 • charismatic alpha male of this particular family’. In one while at the same time suggesting that • scene notable for its affective silence and inaction, Pope threat of violent crime they embody is Tearing the Family • Apart • stares out through heroin-soaked eyes, bands of wrinkles dispersed out of the purely domestic • laddering his neck, appearing at once entirely depleted and sphere and into the streets. Unlike The Kate Harper • utterly resolved, like one of Darwin’s ancient turtles. Pope’s Boys, in which the violence was • embodiment of a fatigued masculine dominance, which claustrophobically contained to one house • refuses to give up on an increasingly fatal brand of ‘family before devastatingly spilling out, Animal • Kate Harper values’, is written all over his face. Kingdom constantly suggests that the • completed a BA Codys are ‘among us’. • Amidst the seething danger, Animal Kingdom is punctuated with Honours in • Cinema Studies at by genuinely funny moments that expose the everyday Ultimately, Animal Kingdom is a genre film • the University of banalities, worries and foibles of this violent horde. For in which every element of the production • Melbourne and is instance, when J goes to leave a public toilet without first has been carefully thought through and is • now working as a washing his hands, Pope’s best-friend and crime buddy, forcefully delivered. To be sure, Michôd • freelance writer. ‘Baz’ (played by Edgerton), proceeds to dish-out a lesson on has taken his time considering and crafting • • thorough bathroom hygiene—‘get some soap … work it into the project, spending seven years in • a lather …’—as he monitors J’s every move. The irony that creative utero while he worked for industry • Baz expects rigorous personal hygiene to be maintained magazine Inside Film (IF). All this • while they are all morally covered in shit, so to speak, is peripheral toil by Michôd has effected a • laugh-out-loud hilarious. Moments like this in Animal compelling film, obviously made by • Kingdom not only provide tonal light and shade but also someone with an intimate knowledge of • assist in creating more dynamic characters. In fact, Animal the workings of the Australian film • Kingdom makes a point of individuating its many characters industry and the difficulties in enticing • • so that, even though we may never like them, we take a local audiences to see local productions. • keen interest in what happens to them. Animal Kingdom, however, will presumably • have few problems finding a local Michôd has said that he used a large cast to signify ‘the way • audience—it is already an international in which the criminal world filters through regular society • success, having won the Grand Jury Prize and brushes against us constantly, even though we don’t • at the Sundance Film Festival amid rave realise it’. In practice, however, this sense of criminal • reviews. And although the television series • activity occurring within the everyday, rather than in exotic Underbelly, set amidst Melbourne’s • locales discrete from the world we live in, is achieved ‘gangland wars’, is far more fetishistic in • mainly through interactions between characters in space. style and character, its popularity in • Michôd’s characters inhabit a wide variety of locales across • Australia will no doubt have a positive Melbourne—Footscray, Richmond, Ivanhoe, the corner of • impact on Animal Kingdom’s spectatorial Little Collins and Exhibition streets, to name only a few. • success. Fingers crossed. • This mobility makes them appear ordinary in one sense, • • • • • book Inspired Criticism • • • review by Sean Cubitt • ...... • • • Jodi Dean, Democracy and and civilisation. But in Dean’s account, the claim to demo- cracy has become a hallmark of neo-liberal imperialism, Inspired Criticism • • Other Neo-liberal Fantasies: at home and abroad, especially in the United States Sean Cubitt • Communicative Capitalism and where she lives, works and pursues her politics. • • Left Politics (Duke University Though perpetually blind in one eye (the House of Saud • never seems to appear among the undemocratic Sean Cubitt is • Press, Durham, 2009) regimes), the House of Bush has made a calling card of Director of the • Unlike so many books of political theory, Jodi the idea of democracy. It has brought the benefits of Media and • Dean’s is 90 per cent inspiration and 10 per democracy to Iraq which, in March 2010, President Communications • cent perspiration, and the perspiration is a Obama could proudly boast of as being the only Middle- Program at the • Eastern Islamic country with free and fair elections (you University of • result of frustration rather than plodding prose Melbourne. • (never a problem in the book). But let’s start can only wonder what has been achieved in Afghanistan, • with the inspiration. Democracy and Other and whether Pakistan is excluded on purely geographical • Neo-liberal Fantasies is inspiring because it principles). The fact that Obama is the boaster points to • calls for action on a new terrain. The critique the central thesis of Dean’s book: that democracy, • of democracy was historically a prerogative of though entirely a construct of the Right, has become the • cry of the Left as well. As a result, she argues, the Left 06–07 2010 the Right, the Matthew Arnolds and T. S. • Eliots terrified of the vulgar mob and the great are perpetually weakened by a ‘me too’ political line Nº 106 • which leaves them perpetually running behind the • unwashed, shoring up their decaying regimes • with promises of elite delights of literature hegemonic principles of neo-liberalism. 52 REVIEW • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The argument is subtle. Contemporary capital presents itself as a market There is only room to sketch some of Dean’s where everything is on offer, and where the governing principle is choice. themes; the abbreviated chapter titles running Democratic politics has followed suit, presenting us with limitless as crossheads on the pages give a sense of opportunities to choose between competing products. The popularity of what she is about in this analysis: Technology, what we have come to know as the Centre is proof that the parties only Free Trade, Democracy, Resolve, Ethics, and offer what we want: the little parties of the Extreme are unpopular Certainty. A finely wrought argument because only insignificant numbers of punters choose them. But Dean is challenges the Left’s belief (associated with concerned with another thesis: that the political is ‘the terrain upon political philosopher Judith Butler) that which claims to universality are raised and defended’. The problem of certainty is a characteristic of tyranny. Dean what she designates ‘communicative capitalism’ is that what has become argues that condemning and denouncing don’t universal is communication, accompanied by a rhetoric of universal need to come from religious conviction: they access which, however, far from securing radical democracy, supports and are methods we might (but fail to) use to start constantly builds the infrastructure of an economic regime which, she off ethical and political debate, debate that contends, consistently steers money and power into the hands of a tiny also involves our own racisms, bigotries and minority while blasting the global poor and the planet itself into misery. complicities, and which concerns in the last analysis the object of politics. What So, she asks, what happens if instead of a world of universal debate and constitutes the good life? What future do we discussion, we have a world where we always already doubt the words of want? The breadth, originality and incisive governments and advertisers? In a brilliant analysis of 9/11 conspiracy passion of her arguments are a joy to read, and theories, Dean makes the case that we are in such a position. We know an inspiration to take up progressive politics what we know already—but our certainty (that the US government again. destroyed the Twin Towers, for example) is itself unstable, not to say unhinged. We thought that the triumph of the 18th-century republics The 10 per cent frustration arises, for an was a triumph of transparency: openness today is instead the driver of Australian reader, from the understandably ever more pervasive instruments of communicative capitalism. US-centred theme of the book. Dean gives short Characterised by the imperative, now deep-seated in every unconscious, shrift to the reconceptualisation of democracy to enjoy—to consume, to have fun, to have great sex and great holidays as conflict in recent European thought (Rancière, and wonderful kids and loving friends—communicative capitalism veers Mouffe); avoids the radical ethics emerging in between a language of facts that speak for themselves (and cannot be the wake of Hannah Arendt (Baudrillard’s late disputed) and a language of doubt so profound it veers towards the work The Transparency of Evil, Badiou’s Ethics: psychotic. ‘Networked communication technologies’, Dean concludes, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil); and attri- ‘materialize democracy as a political form that formats political energies butes near-universality to neo-liberal capitalism as communicative engagements’. We sign and forward instant online against the evidence of, among other things, petitions when we could be actively engaged in the hard world of political the anti-globalisation and ecological movements struggle. and their articulations with the hacker underground. Instead she hitches her wagon to The world turns upside down. Where the doctrine of Friedmanite the admittedly fascinating but nonetheless economics was to expand the market and shrink the state, today we have unworldly and over-generalised psychoanalytic the contradictory phenomenon of the strong neo-liberal state. The two- politics of Zizek. But even so, this is a rattling way flow of networks implies not only a right to speak but an obligation good yarn, one that shivers the timbers and to be heard—by anyone, especially the automated surveillance systems of inspires this reader at least to cut loose the paranoid security apparatuses and commercial databases: the state anchor and set sail for new horizons. defended against its citizens, corporations against their customers. book A Nation in Freefall review by Gillian Terzis ...... Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall: correcting markets—the very assumptions that have seemingly led us to the economic foxhole we’re in. Conservative economists hold America, Free Markets, and the an inexplicable degree of faith in markets to yield desirable Sinking of the World Economy economic outcomes, dismissing government intervention as inept and inefficient. But when the markets were broken—with the (W. W. Norton & Company, once-mighty United States staring into an economic abyss—the New York, 2010) clarion call to arms was clear. Urgent reform was needed. In the midst of the crisis no one (apparently) saw The time was ripe for Joseph Stiglitz—Nobel Prize-winning coming, Chicago school disciple Robert Lucas economist and former chief economist at the World Bank—to made a stunning declaration: that perhaps we are showcase his impeccable neo-Keynesian credentials in his latest all ‘Keynesians in a foxhole’. Stunning, of course, tome, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World because it was a sentiment that was anathema to Economy. One of the leaders of the vanguard against market the neoclassical nostrums of efficient and self- fundamentalism and its uncritical deference to mathematical 53 • modelling and rationality, it is unsurprising that he lobs a appointments, as Stiglitz points out, • heavy-handed (but extremely articulate) J’accuse at the are not consistent with the objective of Inspired Criticism • • usual suspects: Wall Street, The Fed and the flawed achieving radical reform. With these Sean Cubitt • responses enacted by both Republican and Democrat two economists at the helm—in • administrations. Stiglitz doesn’t pull any punches with his addition to Obama’s moderate • grim assessment of America’s path to recovery: it will be sensibilities—a return to corporatism is • slow, marred by a ‘larger legacy of debt … and more imminent. This, however, is not the • vulnerable to another crisis’. Predictably, an attempt to reform Stiglitz is after. • undertake significant financial-sector reform will inevitably Stiglitz offers a range of policy • be thwarted by the corporate elephant in the Congress • suggestions for economic reform; some room. Thus far, his predictions have proved correct. • more feasible than others. His • The global financial crisis, described by Stiglitz as the suggestion to break up big banks, • Great American Robbery, certainly makes for a compelling regulate derivatives and discourage the • narrative. Bankers were cast as the primary villain, with securitisation of mortgages would be • • collateralised debt obligations as their weapon of choice. met with an enthusiastic public • Poorly informed consumers didn’t stand a chance. But response, particularly given the • predatory lending practices didn’t just happen overnight. antipathy directed toward Wall Street • The problems were part of the flawed incentives that induce and the big banks. However, Stiglitz • bankers to engage in these practices. Indeed, one of begins to drift away from solid • Stiglitz’s catchphrases in Freefall is ‘incentives matter’. Of economic argument to improbable • particular pertinence is the presence of those institutions wishful thinking. This is encapsulated • deemed ‘too big to fail’; the ones whose failures would in his call for a new, global reserve • • wreak utter catastrophe on the economy. Stiglitz makes a system with a neutral currency—an • convincing argument that because these firms are idea that seems a logistical • guaranteed survival by taxpayers, there is a greater incentive impossibility. His plea for a more • for these firms to engage in high-risk, high-reward progressive taxation system is well- • activities. And therein lies the problem: capital gains are intentioned, but unlikely to win broad • privatised but the losses are socialised. These examples of public or even party support. At one • moral hazard stem from information asymmetries in point, Stiglitz strays into dangerously • financial markets, which is precisely why Stiglitz argues for self-righteous territory when • • ‘re-regulation’ and a greater emphasis on the transparency comparing Bhutan’s notion of gross • of financial information. The reason why such high-risk national happiness with the United • behaviour had escaped the attention of regulators was States’ focus on gross domestic • because of a peculiar conflict of interest: federal banking product, and the residual ‘moral deficit’ • regulators in the United States were paid by the very banks that stems from acting in self-interest. • they are supposed to regulate. Faced with declining revenue, However, it is a small blemish that, • some regulators began to market themselves as more lax thankfully, doesn’t detract too much • than others. Without those checks and balances, Stiglitz from the rest of ’s nuanced • Freefall • figured it was only a matter of time before the US brand of arguments. unbridled capitalism devoured itself. The United States’ • There is no doubt Stiglitz has a gift for • economic dynamism was reduced to no more than a myth, demystifying the dismal science, • propagated by an unsustainable housing bubble and a debt- providing trenchant analysis that is • inducing consumption binge. • fuelled by a strong sense of conviction. • Stiglitz is quick to point out that no economy is ever His arguments are consistently backed • beyond repair, but economic recovery is contingent upon up by rigorous research, and the tone is • the actions of the Obama administration. A lengthy chapter spirited rather than snarky. Indeed, one A Nation in Freefall • entitled ‘A Flawed Response’ details Stiglitz’s thoughts on feels that Stiglitz’s arguments are • the $800b stimulus package, in which he criticises the size somewhat constrained by his doctrinaire • Gillian Terzis and design of the package. Not only does he believe it was approach to Keynesianism, as Freefall • • too small (he suggests $1 trillion over two years), but he could have provided the opportunity for • believes there is too much money directed at tax cuts and Stiglitz to formulate new ideas in Gillian Terzis is an • corporate welfare masquerading as ‘investment’, when there economic thought. Nevertheless, occasional writer • should have been greater compensation packages for Freefall is an intelligent cautionary tale and a Commerce/ • working and middle-class families and struggling state against unfettered markets and provides Arts graduate of • governments. Stiglitz is equally dismissive of Obama’s a considered evaluation of the the University of • appointment of Larry Summers (chief economic advisor) challenges facing developed economies Melbourne. • and Timothy Geithner (treasury secretary), as illustrated in in the post-GFC era. • • this pointed quip: ‘President Obama, who had campaigned • on the promise of “Change You Can Believe I”’, only slightly • rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.’ • • The fact that Summers has strong ties to Wall Street and 06–07 2010 • was one of the architects of the deregulation of derivative Nº 106 • markets under the Clinton administration could be • something of a sore point for Stiglitz. But these • 54 COOPER’S LAST • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Culture, Nihilism and the Market Simon Cooper ...... Peter Carey’s recent comments about the fate of books knowledge, to create an artificial regime where scholars and reading on Q&A and at the Sydney Writers’ festival compete with each other. That this has distorted the notion of provoked an enormous amount of vitriol on the part of what makes worthwhile knowledge has been much commented right-wing pundits across the country. This in itself upon, and is elsewhere in this issue of Arena Magazine.Yet marked a shift. Not so long ago one would have expected while destructive, such auditing schemes at least allowed claims about the importance of ‘high culture’ to have scholars to find some way to legitimise what they were doing been mocked by elements of the postmodernist Left. in an increasingly hostile environment. Now there are signs Instead Carey’s suggestions that people read less than that even these auditing schemes may be unable to defend they used to, that the novel was in crisis, and that knowledge against the nihilism of the market. reading habits were dumbed-down, were dismissed as The case of the philosophy department at Middlesex elitist and arrogant by the Right. Andrew Bolt and University in the United Kingdom seems on the face of it Miranda Devine had a go at Carey but Gerard Henderson nothing out of the ordinary. In April it was announced that the went furthest arguing that as well as being a snob Carey department would be closed. Why? Because the philosophy was simply wrong. More people were reading than ever. department at Middlesex was doing everything right, according His evidence? Literacy rates were rising. to all of the measurement schemes put in place by government. The argument that as long as people can read it doesn’t Student numbers were healthy; the department’s Masters matter what they read, or indeed how much they read, Program was the largest of its kind. More importantly the marks a shift in how we understand knowledge. The department had consistently scored highly in all the research intrinsic value of knowledge is increasingly questioned; ranking exercises over the last two decades—in 2008 instead the value of knowledge is framed in market Middlesex philosophy was the highest-rated subject of its kind terms: as a set of skills that allow greater varieties of in the country. Home of the influential journal Radical consumption. An oft-repeated claim by the Right in the Philosophy, the department had become an important conduit culture wars has been how the perceived relativism of for the public discussion of difficult and challenging ideas, cultural studies and postmodernism undermines the staging events at places like the Tate Gallery. values that underpin our civilisation. Yet once we shed For Middlesex’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, the measurement the link between knowledge and a sense of value outside criteria amounted to nothing; the department would close of the market we inevitably move towards nihilism. because it made ‘no measurable contribution’ to the university. However it’s not merely the right-wing commentariat What makes this case so significant is that it reveals the that is hampered by questions of cultural value. One inevitable result of tying knowledge to the market. Despite only has to look at the culture of book reviewing, meeting all of the criteria for scholarly value, impact, value to typically a domain of the liberal-Left, to see the collapse the community or institutional reputation, the only real of culture into the commodity. Book reviews in ‘contribution’ is financial. Knowledge is only valuable if it can newspapers have disappeared or shrunk to text boxes make money. that replicate the book-jacket blurb. Programs like the This final stage, starkly revealed through the Middlesex case, First Tuesday Book Club are framed by the dictates of the has come about rapidly. Not so long ago it was inconceivable to market, the choice of books governed by publishers’ lists imagine the university without a philosophy department. And of latest releases, or touring writers promoting their while knowledge has long had a potential commercial value, latest work. The discussion of the book’s importance is this existed alongside the understanding that knowledge confined to whether the reviewer enjoyed it; the fostered other values—self-understanding, cultural decision to exclude academics as potential reviewers, interpretation, social critique. The humanities are cheap to replacing them with media celebrities, largely prohibits run, their importance, if often marginalised, was always any extended examination of what might distinguish a acknowledged. We are now facing a situation where their good book from a mediocre one. While different in tone necessity is openly questioned. Like novels, which are deemed to the right-wing punditry attacking Carey, much of redundant in an age of mega-literacy, the significance of the what passes for book culture confirms that reading is humanities recedes, replaced by a general commitment to now little more than a question of managed intellectual training. consumption. This warped understanding of knowledge clearly endangers Henderson’s implication that the content of knowledge figures at one end of the spectrum—novelists and academics— is irrelevant, and that what counts is the capacity to but it’s worth noting how the students have been similarly consume knowledge, goes beyond debates about the transformed. The student as consumer—once a contestable novel, extending to the university. Universities are notion—has become so normalised that universities issue expected to produce knowledge of primarily commercial student identity cards that also function as credit cards. The value, while teaching is directed at the student- culture of risk-avoidance now dominates teaching—classes consumer whose knowledge ‘outcomes’ include an have to be narrowly tied to assessment criteria, knowledge has identifiable ‘skill set’ at the end of their degree. to be imparted as transparently as possible. 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