AUSTRALIAN

NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PHOTO JOURNALIST

SPEAKS IN MELBOURNE

John Rodsted discusses his experiences working on the international campaign to ban landmines, the creation of the cluster munitions convention, Australia’s backsliding in its ratification of the convention, and the role of photojournalism in this public discussion on ‘The Legacies of War’.

The Legacies of War

with John Rodsted

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With a career spanning 30 years, John Rodsted has worked in some of the most dangerous war-torn places on earth. Starting his photography career at 22 in a commercial studio in Melbourne, four years later John sold his business to travel the globe as a freelance photographer—the world has since become his studio. John is the official photographer for the Campaign to Ban Landmines and in this capacity was part of the team that won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. John played a major part in getting the land mine treaty finalised, available for signature and entered into force by March 1999.

John’s main subject is communities at risk—ordinary people trying to survive the continuing effects of war. John’s experience in post-conflict situations started in Southeast Asia in the 1980s. He has since worked in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia, in Cambodia and Vietnam, in Sudan, Mozambique, Algeria, West Sahara and Eritrea, and in Afghanistan. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide. Since 2008, he has been adjunct professor in photojournalism at Griffith University.

 Entry to the event is by a gold coin donation.

Refreshments will be served.

All welcome.

John is available for interview.

Dinner with John will be held after the discussion. If you would like to attend,

please email: magazine@arena.org.au. 

Few in the media put it better than Stephen Long, the ABC’s economics commentator. The key to the report, he wrote, is not in its carefully-guarded language but in its data from which one can justly conclude that ‘the public money that goes to elite private schools is subsidising the sons and daughters of the plutocracy’ and that ‘government schools (and quite possibly many Catholic schools) are significantly underfunded’.

‘It is also clear’, Long added, ‘that the decline in Australia’s school performance on international rankings coincides with a skewing of Federal Government money away from government schools and towards independent schools—instituted by the Howard government and continued under Rudd and Gillard’.

This picture of inequality, already much noted but so well drawn by Gonski’s charts and graphs, is a huge challenge to our national principles and particularly to our treatment of children. Our rhetoric promises the best for all young people. Our practice continues the selective ways of the past. During the century that embedded universal primary schooling (up to the 1970s) secondary schooling was open only to the wealthy and to meritorious others. The very spread of public secondary schooling was vigorously resisted by the schools of the plutocracy, with Christopher Pyne-like labels such as ‘creeping socialism’.  By the 1970s, however, universal secondary schooling was beginning to be seen as a public goal. It was unfortunate that in rescuing Catholic schools from collapse, the Whitlam and succeeding governments also chose to subsidise over-rich private schools, but at the time that did not seem to most to be counter to the ideal of good schools for all. It took a couple of decades for the libertarian doctrines of choice and market forces, bolstered paradoxically by the rhetoric of disadvantage, to undermine that ideal. But undermined it was, with the result that the old selective ways are still with us in slightly changed forms. An extreme notion of liberty has silenced the voices of equality and fraternity.

Can changes in funding do much to alter educational selection or counteract the worst side-effects of private capital and choice applied to schooling? Doubtful.  Gonski has proposed a persuasive simplification of the present obtuse funding system, in the hope that transparency might bring about a bit more justice, but he has been forced to pursue greater equality through a large increase of funds for schooling those who miss out, the so-called ‘disadvantaged’ groups, identified in the review (and for the umpteenth time) as either, or both, poor, indigenous, disabled, in remote locations or of non-English speaking background. Most of the new money recommended by Gonski—but not yet acknowledged by governments—would go to schools where the ‘disadvantaged’ congregate. Since disadvantaged schools are typically those avoided by families exercising choice, the idea is that extra money properly spent will improve the school’s performance, which is by definition low, and perhaps, but not necessarily, its image, which depends only partly on academic performance.

Educational disadvantage is not a new idea, as Gonski’s review of our schooling history demonstrates, but it is forcefully outlined and becomes an argument for putting more money where it’s needed.  Yet since being a ‘disadvantaged’ school has in itself become a disadvantage, it might be a good idea to break the idea down, rather than aggregate its elements, or perhaps to do away with it altogether. Are students with various disabilities, properly funded, bound to be disadvantaged in schooling? Why should we consider being bi-lingual, as most ESL students are, a disadvantage? Are either of these circumstances comparable to indigeneity or living in remote locations?  Which leaves poverty, a circumstance that can sometimes be remedied simply by money but which can also be associated with the more intractable circumstance of lack of educational drive or stimulus in the home. Rather than lump these together under the rubric of disadvantage, it seems to me better to refer to each as specific programs. This is after all the way extra funding should be allocated. Providing general grants for ‘disadvantage’ has not worked. Measures for properly funding a disabled student, running a top ESL program, reducing or compensating for the now considerable costs of schooling, do work. Where we lack ideas it seems is in educating indigenous students, students in remote locations and students with inadequate drive from home.

Let us imagine an urban school with few indigenous students and, obviously, none living in a remote area. Call it Pariah College because it has a lot of poor students and more than the usual number of disabled students, so that a lot of local parents avoid it. What can money do? Unless the local community changes its prejudices, it cannot expect a different mix of students. With enough money, however, it can have great provision for disabilities and a red-hot ESL program with a dispensation from the Anglocentric NAPLAN. It should also, as our forefathers promised, be free. It should feed its students and staff well, as happens in at least some other countries. Money could achieve these changes without having to imagine completely new programs.

After that we get into more difficult territory, requiring ideas and political will. Pariah College needs to be well run.  Everyone concerned with it, staff, parents, governors, bureaucrats, has to be optimistic, to think educable rather than disadvantaged.  Its governance needs to be much better connected to the community and to people of influence in it than the usual school council is. The council will decide whether to put all its faith in a principal or in a leadership group and should have the power in consultation with the school leaders to appoint and remove staff. Money doesn’t buy good teachers but it can be used to reward them. All staff should get extra pay simply because they commit to a school with seriously low performance. They should have time to pursue further knowledge and qualifications and to share their experience with teachers generally. They should have five-star accommodation, individual offices, the latest technology, a top chef, personal trainers, housing near the college if they want it and so forth, just as though they were in a rich school. They should also have aides to relieve them of a lot of routine jobs and help with tutoring individual students.  And so on—you get the picture.

Pariah College should be able to develop its own specific curricula. State, national or international frameworks should be seen as guides, to be used if they fit and ignored if they don’t. It should be lavishly staffed in areas such as arts, crafts, trades, sports, languages where options may be many and classes very small. In other words it should be staffed like a large, rich school, not a small, poor school—more like the elite schools that, as Stephen Long says ‘spend millions each year to give their students the best: top class sporting ovals and stadia, swimming pools, libraries, and in some cases music rooms replete with Steinways’.

Pariah College should also be responsible for its own testing and reporting, supervised and guaranteed by an expert external group provided (i.e. approved and paid) by state authorities and answerable to both state authorities and the school council. It may, indeed almost certainly will, need to break from the traditional straitjackets of school organisation and school times. Calculating so many teachers for so many students in standard class groupings is stupid. The proper measures are not class sizes and fixed time lessons.  Time on task and student grouping for particular tasks should determine both staffing and times. Some learning can happen in very large groups—watching a film is an obvious example, as is massed singing—some in groups of ten, fifteen, twenty or so, some in very small groups, some as individuals. School architects now seem to understand this, so someone must be briefing them, but it is not in the common consciousness, probably because it is not at all common in practice. Much the same can be said of time. For most at Pariah College the school day, indeed the school week, should probably be longer.

Whether these are useful or merely fantastical detail, the general picture is clear: Pariah College should be well governed, well led, well staffed, well organised, well taught, well resourced and responsibly autonomous. This is by and large what Gonski suggests about the internal life of ‘disadvantaged’ schools.

What of external influences?  Our college is after all a pariah partly because of government policies. Today’s governments praise selection, promote choice and publish figures that sort the alpacas from the sheep from the goats. In this world, low performance corresponds to ‘disadvantage’ as measured by socio-economic and language background (except in the handful of highly selective academic schools where the proportions of non- English speaking background students is astonishingly high: 77 per cent at Melbourne High, none indigenous, 89 per cent at MacRob, again none indigenous).

I don’t see this policy framework changing. Both major parties love it, parents look to it and appear to act on it, and in any case it confirms, or only slightly modifies, existing rumour and prejudice. In this context the promised implementing of a detailed national curriculum won’t improve the lot of ‘disadvantaged’ schools or their students.  It may worsen it. Thus, the biggest external improvement could be for the federal government to forget about educational policy and confine itself to handing over lots of money and collecting statistics (based in the case of performance on a wide variety of sample tests); and for state governments to encourage schools to run themselves. Money is usually a good substitute for policy.

Had the state departments already sorted out their ideas on funding, school staffing, school governance, school autonomy and school facilities, we wouldn’t have needed more from Gonski than a sensible streamlining of the way funds are calculated and distributed. Had the ALP not panicked by promising rich schools that they wouldn’t miss out, Gonski might have been able to recommend a bit less immediate spending, but it is extremely hard to work out how much money would be needed to correct our present serious inequalities.  Unfortunately, money is our only hope. The dysfunctional system we now have with its layers of private, public, parish, posh, pretentious, popular, and pariah is not likely to change all that much. Whether pariah schools improve their image, which tends to be what they now try for, is of minor consequence. Whether they continue to be named or avoided as ‘disadvantaged’ is also of minor consequence. The key task is to raise educational standards for everyone, but especially, as Gonski says, for those who presently miss out.  Money for people who see all students as educable, have sound ideas about how to educate them and the freedom to realise their vision could bring about some change for the better.

Bill Hannan was a teacher, textbook writer, union editor, curriculum innovator and senior official in Victoria until the 1980s. Some of his writings on schooling are in Democratic Curriculum (Allen & Unwin 1985) and The Best of Times (Lexis 2009).

With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation into performing harsh acts. (Milgram, Obedience to Authority)

As indicated in the epigraph above, Stanley Milgram’s famous, and somewhat infamous, social psychology experiments concerning ‘obedience to authority’ reveal a sad and sorry human tendency. Indeed, Milgram was initially appalled, if also fascinated, by the frequency with which his subjects would obey the order to apparently inflict ever-increasing levels of electric shock to the ‘learners’ they were instructed to ‘teach’. The capacity to resist authority by taking personal responsibility for one’s actions and their effects was far more compromised than he had anticipated. Milgram’s research, conducted in the United States in the early 1960s, revealed that most people would obey an authority figure when instructed to administer severe electric shocks as punishment for a failure to learn; up to the 450-volt level on the imposing shock generator they were required to operate. This brute fact of routine obedience is the way the Milgram study is usually reported. What this obscures is the recurrent attempts by many of the research subjects to reclaim responsibility as the experiment’s awful scenario unfolded. By re-visiting the Milgram studies, this essay aims to catch and reflect upon the drama of subjectivities in process as they negotiate responsibility in often partial, fragile and still-born, but sometimes resolute ways; always under the shadow of the chilling, often deadening, call to obey.

Initially Milgram’s research was conceived as a comparative study that had as its ultimate aim an analysis of the German character. In contrast with some other Western societies in which a democratic ethos was deeply embedded, German ‘obedience to authority’, so demonically enacted in the Holocaust, remained a continuing concern that warranted close attention. These comparative ambitions collapsed, however, as the research in the United States, which was anticipated to reveal a wide-spread capacity to resist authority, actually revealed something far more disturbing. In addressing this shocking revelation—the willingness of most people to obey authority, even in extreme conditions—notions of taking and shifting responsibility and being and feeling responsible or not, shadow as counter-terms the notion of obedience to authority that Milgram’s study foregrounds.

Responsibility is a term that carries two related, but not mutually entailed, connotations. The first of these is self-regarding and concerns the preservation, protection or advancement of the self; caring for and taking responsibility for the self. The second is other-regarding and concerns acting responsibly in relation to others, especially those whose circumstances place them in need of the care and concern that flows from empathy and an understanding, usually implicit, of the shared vulnerability of human beings as both human animals and psychological and social subjects. Although we normally link these two connotations as if part and parcel of the one conceptualisation of responsibility, in fact they have diverged from each other under the conditions of late modernity. Contemporary democratic societies and the neoliberal economics which they promote, and on which they rely, presume that citizens are sovereign individualists who rationally calculate their own best interests and act accordingly. Anyone who fails that test of acting responsibly in one’s own interests becomes a problem who must be disciplined by the agencies of the welfare state, itself now in decline. Hence we find ourselves in a situation where being responsible for oneself is the sole mode of responsibility that is fully valorised by the state and its agencies, by business enterprises and by public institutions. Feeling empathy and taking responsibility for the plight of others is in decline as the new individualism takes hold. Richard Sennett has highlighted a similar divergence when noting that the culture of the new capitalism promotes shallow relationships involving ‘no long term’. Detachment from others and adherence to an instrumental logic on behalf of the self become the guiding virtues.

In parallel the preferred, if rather schizoid, self-understanding of the modern democracies involves a presumption that democratic modes of socialisation within the modern family and the broader society produce rational citizens who adhere to egalitarian principles and have cultivated a capacity to think and act independently. This notion became highly salient in the United States in the period following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War and in the ensuing cold war conflict with the Soviet Union and threat of communism. If obedience to authority was the hallmark characteristic of totalitarian regimes in both Germany and the Soviet Union, a strong individualism was to be expected in those societies that valued freedom and equality; especially the United States of America. Or so it was presumed.

It was this framing cultural assumption about the virtues of democratic societies that led Milgram to expect that his social psychology experiments on obedience to authority, conducted at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, would find a standard distribution of instances and degrees of obedience as against disobedience, rather than a clustering of responses at the obedience end of the distribution. The taking of personal responsibility would be evident in a good proportion of the individuals subjected to his ingenious experiment. He was soon to learn otherwise. Writing to Henry Riecken at the National Science Foundation, the funding body supporting his research, Milgram noted:

In a naive moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all of the United States a vicious government could find enough moral imbeciles to meet the personnel requirements of a national system of death camps, of the sort that were maintained in Germany. I am now beginning to think that a full complement could be recruited in New Haven.

Milgram had quickly learned that most subjects of his experiment obeyed instructions to administer increasingly higher voltage electric shocks, up to the highest register of 450 volts. This is the aspect of his research that has entered the public imagination. It is well-captured in the title of a recent intellectual biography The Man Who Shocked The World. The shock lay in the fact that Milgram had experimentally demonstrated the ‘banality of evil’, derived from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, as a disturbing yet common feature of humanity. It is for this reason that Milgram’s mentor, Gordon W. Allport, termed the obedience to authority research ‘the Eichman Experiment’.

Unlike Solomon Asch’s experiments with conformity, measured merely by agreement or disagreement about the length of a line, Milgram conceived an experimental design that was dramatic and non-trivial. As he explained in an interview from 1980:

One of the criticisms that had been made of (Asch’s) experiments is that they lack a surface significance, because, after all, an experiment with people making judgements of lines has a manifestly trivial content. So the question I asked myself is: how can this be made a more humanly significant experiment?

It seemed to me that if, instead of having a group exerting pressure on the judgements about lines, the group could somehow induce something more significant from the person, then that might be a step in giving greater face significance to the behaviour …

The experimental mise-en-scène that Milgram developed consists of a laboratory setting, with a large and complex shock generator mounted on the table in front of which the true subject of the experiment sits. The characters in this scene are a scientist or ‘experimenter’ dressed in a lab coat, a ‘teacher’, who is the actual and singular subject of the experiment, and a ‘learner’ who is actually a confederate of the experimenter, but is regarded by the teacher as another subject of the experiment. This illusion was achieved by a contrived drawing of lots to decide who would be teacher and who would be learner. Thereafter, the true subject of the experiment is given a sample shock of 45 volts—‘it’s only fair’—and instructed on how to proceed with the teaching and to administer ever-increasing shocks with each new mistake by the ‘learner’.

Alan Elms, who was Milgram’s research assistant, recalls the initial amazement at what he and Milgram were observing:

It was only when those first participants arrived at Linsly-Chittenden Hall that Milgram and I, as we watched from behind the big two-way mirrors in the Social Interaction Lab, began to realize that something truly unusual was going on—something quite different from the usual low-key social psychology experiment. Before that summer ended I watched approximately 100 participants, run one at a time, as they moved higher and higher up the sequence of switches on the shock generator … Milgram and I were astonished at both the intense emotional involvement displayed by most participants and their high levels of obedience to the experimenter’s commands.

There can be no doubt that this was shocking and confounded most people’s expectations about human behaviour in such circumstances. To underline this—to reveal the gap between cultural expectations and actual behaviour—Milgram described the experimental scenario to a few groups at Yale and then asked them to estimate what proportion of subjects would proceed to administer the strongest shock of 450 volts. A group of Yale College Seniors estimated that 1.2 per cent of the ‘teachers’ would go to the 450 volt mark. In fact approximately two-thirds of the subjects administered 450 volts to the hapless learners sitting, sometimes screaming and sometimes deadly silent, in the adjacent room. That these final year undergraduate students were so radically mistaken highlighted the vast gap between cherished illusions and observed behaviour. Moreover it wasn’t only undergraduates who shared these illusions. Every group Milgram spoke to was similarly mistaken in their estimates. Most mistaken of all was a group of apparent experts: the medically trained psychiatric residents at Yale–New Haven Hospital. They were ‘wrong by a factor of 500’, a fact Milgram, the social psychologist, took delicious delight in contemplating and reporting. Of course had those psychiatric residents relied on their knowledge of the psychoanalytic tradition, starting from Freud’s own work on group or mass psychology, they would not have been so surprised by Milgram’s findings. They would also, however, have looked more closely at the resistances as well as the observances of obedience to authority. As I will argue below, it is in this tension between obeying authority, and taking personal responsibility and acting responsibly towards others that the fuller significance of the ‘obedience to authority’ study lies—even when the attempt to reclaim responsibility falters or fails.

The Passionate Struggle between Obedience and Responsibility

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud developed his account of conformity to a shared ideal or ideology and the accompanying submission to authority, principally through deploying the concepts of identification and regression. He recognised that situational factors can produce a dramatic undoing of an already established psychic structure. This drama is presented as a battle in which a capacity for responsibility and autonomy is threatened by a tendency, in certain settings, to identify with a dominant or domineering leader or ideology. This amounts to an invasion of the mind snatchers, we might say. Through a displacement of an already instituted psychic structure the individual’s super-ego (or ego-ideal) and ego are shunted aside and forcefully replaced, through identification, by psychic attributes of other individuals or institutions. The net effect is a marked reorganisation of psychic qualities and tendencies and a radical diminution in capacities for individual responsibility. This is the moment of a group mentality and submission to authority.

In his account of ideology as interpellation and misrecognition Louis Althusser implicitly invoked and generalised Freud’s account of the group mentality, with the added dimension of a misrecognition that tricks conforming and obedient subjects into regarding themselves as entirely individual; as responsible agents who have chosen to accept the law of culture and the instituted symbolic order. We turn to the law to be recognised as responsible subjects and, in that movement, subject ourselves to its demands, without recognising this trick of ideology that we have helped play upon ourselves in order to appear to ourselves as responsible agents. Judith Butler reworks this account of the abject subject by emphasising that we can and must turn again and, thereby, turn against that initial series of interpellations or identifications through which our somewhat organised subjectivity was established. The drama of this second ‘turning against’ is fraught with tension. It amounts to a dicing with psychic death, as we repress those emotional attachments that we had previously clung to, identified with and relied upon in order to survive and thrive. This passionate dialectic between submission to authority and resistance to that submission constitutes the fuller story of the obedience to authority experiments, a story that is obscured by the usual way in which the study is reported. This fuller story only emerges when the statistical results reported by the social psychologists are complemented and disrupted by a case study approach that focuses on the process as each subject endures the demand to obey and submits to, or struggles with, this assault on his or her capacity for responsibility.

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm, who had pioneered research on authoritarianism while a member of the Frankfurt School, noted two less commonly observed features of Milgram’s research. First, he observes that although all forty subjects in the original research group obeyed up to the 300-volt level, thereafter fourteen of the forty, or 35 per cent, eventually disobeyed by discontinuing the experiment. Second, Fromm, like Elms quoted above, emphasises a feature of the experiment in process; namely that most subjects experienced intense emotions and anxiety, even if they continued to obey up until the ultimate 450-volt level. Milgram had initially presumed a wide distribution of capacities to take personal responsibility for one’s actions. Hence he presumed that ‘a subject would simply break off or continue as his conscience dictated’. Yet most subjects or ‘teachers’ continued to administer shocks after strong protests from the ‘learner’, the poor recipient of the electric shocks. Crucially, rather than simply breaking off or continuing according to conscience, the vast majority of subjects experienced great tension and distress. Fromm concludes his discussion by arguing that

the most important finding of Milgram’s study is the strength of the reactions against the cruel behaviour. To be sure, 65 per cent of the subjects could be ‘conditioned’ to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behaviour was clearly present in most of them.

Milgram’s subjects found themselves in a situation akin to the one Freud had explored in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. So powerful were the experimental conditions that their psyches were being reorganised in the here and now of the experiment in process. It is here, in the process of the experiment as it unfolds, that the tension of responsibility becomes evident and the case-like features of the research begin to open out. Confronted by powerful (the scientist-experimenter) and weak (the abject learner) interpellations and processes of identification (with the authority, with the abject), most subjects perform a passionate struggle between responsibility and obedience. They turn and turn again as the experimenter’s demand to inflict more punishment is obeyed or disobeyed. To highlight this, so troubled was he by the situation he found himself in, one subject during the experiment proposed that he should swap places with the abject learner. Trapped by his acceptance that he must submit to the authority of the experimenter, he was prepared, nevertheless, to take responsibility for his own cooperation by exposing himself to the effects of his decision. A more common response was literally to turn towards the experimenter in a mute, but sometimes also voiced, plea for reassurance that the subject, as teacher, should continue to administer ever more intense shocks despite cries and demands from the learner to be released (‘Let me out of here!’) or the dread silence that followed mistakes by the learner near the top of the 450-volt scale. When analysed with attention to the ways in which individuals negotiated the experimental conditions, the case study aspects of the research take on the fuller dimensions of a struggle between obedience to authority and the taking or surrendering of individual responsibility. To catch this struggle, close attention to the unfolding process is required—and a statistical analysis can only take you so far.

Transcripts of some individual iterations of the experiment are available in the book Obedience to Authority—although they are only segments. Rod Dickinson’s The Milgram Re-enactment, 2002 is an artwork in which several full individual iterations of the experiment were performed at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. These performances were based on transcripts of the individual interactions and set in an ‘exact facsimile’ of the Social Interaction Lab and with an exact replica of the electro-shock equipment. Fortunately three iterations were filmed and I can assure the reader that watching the film is harrowing—not unlike viewing Beckett’s Endgame, but without the relief of any wit or humour, or even a momentary achievement of shared significance. These transcripts and enactments add the complexity of the case-in-process to the rigour of Milgram’s elegant and dramatic research design. The assault on the cultural and individual narcissism of the leading liberal-democratic societies in an age of individualisation remains, but now complicated by the passionate struggle against, as well as the frequently troubled collusion with authority.

In what follows I will illustrate the double-sidedness of the obedience to authority study by looking closely at the ambivalence and resistances that often accompanied obedience. First of all, I consider the true exception. Gretchen Brandt, aged thirty-two at the time of the experiment, had grown up in Germany during the period of the Nazi regime and had migrated to the United States in 1956 and taken a position as a medical technician at the Yale Medical School. Throughout the process of the experiment she remained calm and self-possessed. On the first few occasions when the learner complained about being administered a shock Gretchen calmly turned to the experimenter and asked if she should continue. Receiving the standard response that the experiment must be continued, she complied. At the 210-volt level, however, she turned to the experimenter again and ‘firmly’ remarked, ‘Well, I’m sorry, I don’t think we should continue’. Thereafter, despite further instructions that ‘it is absolutely essential that we continue’ and the like, Gretchen refused, and stated that the ‘learner’, who had previously complained of a heart condition, should be the final arbiter of whether the experiment was to be continued. As she said:

I like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I’ll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn’t like it for me either.

Implicitly invoking the golden rule about doing to others only what you would have them do to you, Gretchen took responsibility for her actions and terminated the experiment. In the debriefing interview that followed she stated that she was ‘in no way tense or nervous’, and that believing that ‘the last shock she administered to the learner was extremely painful’ she ‘did not want to be responsible for any harm to him’. Milgram comments that Gretchen’s ‘straightforward, courteous behavior … lack of tension, and total control of her own action seems to make disobedience a simple and rational deed’. Tellingly he adds that her ‘behavior is the very embodiment of what I had initially envisioned would be true for almost all subjects’.

In almost all cases, however, whether obedient or ‘disobedient’, the subjects were anything but cool, calm or collected. And perhaps even Gretchen was more passionate than Milgram fully recognised. Her understated comment in response to a question about the possible influence of having grown up in Nazi Germany suggests as much. ‘Perhaps we have seen too much pain’.

Heightened emotion was far more common than Gretchen’s self-restraint. For instance, Elinor Rosenblum, a housewife and volunteer working with juvenile delinquents and the local Girl Scout organisation proceeded to administer 450 volts under instruction, while protesting all the way. At 270 volts she emphasised the correct answer from among the group of four words from which the learner was required to select the correct one, by accentuating her pronunciation of that word. She also beseeched the experimenter. ‘Must I go on? Oh I’m worried about him. Are we going all the way up there [pointing to the higher end of the generator]? Can’t we stop? I’m shaking. I’m shaking? Do I have to go up there?’ Despite these anxieties, Elinor proceeded to the bitter end. When informed in the debriefing that the learner was actually an actor who received no shocks, that it was all artifice, Elinor responded: ‘You’re an actor, boy. You’re marvellous … I’m exhausted. I didn’t want to go on with it. You don’t know what I went through here. A person like me hurting you, my God. I didn’t want to do it to you. Forgive me, please. I can’t get over this’.

Jan Rensaleer, an industrial engineer, was one of the subjects who terminated the experiment early on. When the learner complained and demanded ‘let me out of here’ at the 150-volt level, Jan turned to the experimenter and asked: ‘What do I do now?’ He was told to continue. From then on, however, he glanced at the experimenter more and more frequently until, at the 255-volt level, he pushed his chair back, stood and explained that he couldn’t continue. In the ensuing discussion the experimenter repeated the standard set of lines, culminating in ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’ and ‘You have no other choice’. Jan responded:

I do have a choice (Incredulous and indignant:) Why don’t I have a choice? I came here on my own free will. I thought I could help in a research project. But if I have to hurt somebody to do that, or if I was in his place, too, I wouldn’t stay there. I can’t continue. I’m very sorry. I think I’ve gone too far already, probably.

In the debriefing interview Jan was asked who was responsible for shocking the learner against his will. ‘I would put it on myself entirely’ was his response and he added that ‘I should have stopped the first time he complained’ and ‘I did want to stop at that time’. He continued: ‘One of the things I think is very cowardly is to try to shove the responsibility onto someone else’.

Unlike Jan most subjects weren’t able to resist authority by taking personal responsibility for their actions. This was not the case under all experimental conditions, however. In one of the experimental variations (Experiment 7), after giving the initial instructions in the laboratory the experimenter left and gave further instructions by telephone. ‘Obedience dropped sharply [by a factor of three] when the experimenter was physically removed from the laboratory’, Milgram notes. Just as interesting was a tactic some subjects used to surreptitiously disobey when circumstances, such as instruction by telephone, led them to believe they could do so unobserved. When possible most subjects administered low-level shocks while telling the experimenter that they were obeying instructions and increasing the shock level with each mistake by the learner. A related tendency across all experimental conditions, as with Elinor Rosenblum, was for many teachers to place special emphasis on the correct matching word in order to cue the learner and avoid the situation where they would be required to administer an even higher voltage shock. For many their own level of distress echoed the (apparent) distress of the learner. A less compassionate response was to hurry up as the shock levels increased, so as to get it over with more quickly.

These various forms of avoidance when possible, like the heightened emotional states experienced by most experimental subjects, point to the fact that

fraught and passionate struggles between obedience and responsibility are evident throughout Milgram’s study. He does a good job of presenting this tension in his case-like vignettes. Yet the study has typically been received as confirming the pervasiveness of Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’, an interpretation fostered by Milgram’s own rendition. This is clear from the conclusion registered in the epigraph above and in many similar statements made by Milgram and others. As I have argued, the brute fact of obedience is only part of the story, although clearly a highly significant one. It delivers a profound blow to personal and cultural presumptions about individual capacities for responsibility.

Such disenchantment can be of great value as a necessary correction to the many destructive illusions of the contemporary period, but not if presented as a one-dimensional brute fact that serves as a source of perverse pleasure in the craven abjectness of the human condition. In contrast I have stressed the multi-dimensionality of Milgram’s findings.  The potential for a generalised doubting of authority and taking on of personal responsibility is evident not only in the rather heroic resistance of individuals like Gretchen and Jan, but also, and more generally, in those fitful, often desperate, turnings to the experimenter by subjects like Elinor, who constitute the majority of research subjects. In their passionate pleas to stop now, their trepidation in the face of increasing shock levels, their minor collusions with the hapless learner and in their wilful avoidances when unobserved, these obedient ones hold out the hope of acting differently, even if it is a potentiality they cannot themselves seize and act upon. For while about one-third of Milgram’s subjects enacted an ethic of responsibility by refusing to continue, many more at least sensed and registered its call, even as they painfully submitted to the deadening demand of authority, presenting itself in its modern guise as champion of science, education and progress.

John Cash is an honorary Fellow in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. His recent publications include “Sovereignty in Crisis” in Unconscious Dominions (Duke, 2011) and “Sublime Intensity” in Force, Movement, Intensity (MUP, 2011).

References

Althusser, Louis, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,Monthly Review Press, New York, 1971.

Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin, London, 1977.

Blass, Thomas, The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram, Basic Books, New York, 2009.

Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997.

Elms, Alan, ‘Obedience Lite’ in American Psychologist, Volume 64:1, January 2009, pp. 32-6.

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London, 1953-75.

Fromm, Erich, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1973.

Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority: an experimental view, Tavistock, London, 1974.

Milgram, Stanley, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, (ed. Thomas Blass) Pinter & Martin, London, 2010.

Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton, New York, 1998.

* This article is from the book Responsibility edited by Ghassan Hage and Robyn Eckersley to be published 15 June 2012 (MUP). Available as an ebook and print on demand edition.

A century ago Chief Protector Neville insisted that Aboriginal people ‘have to be protected against themselves whether they like it or not’. It was this logic that gave Australia the Stolen Generation as tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were removed from their families sending waves of trauma through successive generations.

There is a similar deep vein of paternalism and assimilation in today’s extraordinary overreach by the Australian Government attempting to control for another decade so many aspects of the lives of Aboriginal people in the seventy-three targeted communities.

‘Should we call Jenny … “Protector Macklin”? I think perhaps she fits that role at the moment all too well and it’s a tragedy’, said the former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, at a gathering in Melbourne organised by the group, concerned Australians.

A growing number of eminent Australians including Traditional Owners, Church leaders, former judges, lawyers and over 33,000 citizens have signed a petition on a website, Stand for Freedom, opposing this poisonous political pact between Government and Coalition. Tens of thousands more have viewed the anti-Intervention documentary, Our Generation, and then complained that they have read so little in the Australian media about what could amount to fifteen years of Government assault on the most fundamental human rights of Aboriginal people. After screening that film in hundreds of cinemas and community halls, connecting the voices of Aboriginal elders directly with the Australian people, it is clear to me that mainstream television and newspapers are contributing to what W. E. H. Stanner called the Great Australian Silence. It is also revealing of the treachery of white politics aimed at Aboriginal people that Julia Gillard’s government and Tony Abbott’s opposition, so full of loathing for one another over most other policies, are nonetheless prepared to strike a devilish deal to continue and expand federal control over the remote NT communities beyond the end of the declared five-year emergency phase in July 2012.

Dr Djiniyini Gondarra, a Nelson Mandela-like Yolngu leader from Galiwinku, Elcho Island, had tears in his eyes as he warned Senators visiting the north that extending the Intervention would send many remote communities into a dangerous downward spiral with still more death and misery.

‘This legislation is going to kill us. We are losing nine or ten people every week. People can’t live. They have lost their will and all hope.’

After travelling with this brave elder statesman around the country through the years of the Intervention and having listened carefully to other highly respected Aboriginal leaders in the seized communities, I know that Djiniyini Gondarra’s sense of foreboding is shared by many others.

Rosalie-Kunoth Monks from Utopia, Djapirri Mununggirritj from Yirrikala,  Yananymul Mununggurr from the Laynhapuy Homelands, Diane Stokes at Muckatty Station, Maurie Ryan and John Leemans at Kalkarindji,  Reggie Wurridjal and Helen Williams at Manigrida, Joy White with the Larrakia mob in Darwin, Barbara and Walter Shaw in the Alice Springs Town Camps, Harry Nelson at Yuendumu, Dhanggal Gurruwiwi from Wallaby Beach and Matthew Dhulumburrk Gaykambayu from Ramingining … I want you to know these names and their homelands.  These are the voices of courage and conviction that rise up to challenge the Great Australian Silence.

‘I fear for the future of these people’, said Ian Viner, a former Minister of Aboriginal Affairs (1975–78) who still offers support to the remote communities. ‘This is not a fair go…The Northern Territory Intervention was un-Australian and the Stronger Futures legislation is equally un-Australian’.

With Orwellian irony, Protector Macklin calls the package of legislation that will bury genuine self-determination in the Northern Territory Stronger Futures.  Don’t be fooled. It is the Intervention wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The three bills are loaded with discrimination, crafted with brazen deceit and appear to be invalid in the light of Australian and international law. After years of Labor politicians blaming John Howard and his Minister, Mal Brough, for the top-down approach of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response launched in June 2007, Stronger Futures is unquestionably Protector Macklin’s Intervention. Its hallmark is the distinctly punitive approach.

With incarceration rates of Aboriginal people increasing at a frightening rate, the Government is adding prison sentences for the transportation of even small amounts of alcohol across these vast white protectorates.  As proposed by Protector Macklin and approved by the House of Representatives, carrying a single bottle of beer could bring a six month sentence or up to eighteen months jail for a six-pack. The Senate will resume debate on some amendments to these draconian penalties in May or June. Reducing the pattern of imprisonment by substituting infringement notices, on the spot fines for possession of small amounts of grog, might satisfy the politicians. But such fiddling with a heavy-handed policy would not change its glaring discrimination as an entirely different standard of law is applied to just one group of Australians.

‘This undermines that fundamental proposition that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law and it creates a dangerous precedent’, declared the President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, Greg Barnes, at a forum I chaired in the Parliamentary Theatre in Canberra on the eve of the vote on the Stronger Futures legislation.

The passage of Stronger Futures through the House of Representatives has been an exercise in contempt by most politicians for genuine democracy in Australia and especially for the rights of Aboriginal people. On 27 February 2012, the day of the Canberra leadership spill that isolated Kevin Rudd, the one Prime Minister to deliver a National Apology to Aboriginal people, only a handful of MPs were in a near empty House of Representatives as this extraordinary social engineering shaping the future for a whole era ahead passed without even a formal division in the Parliament.

Where were all the other hollow men and women? What does this say of the state of our democracy?

Frank Vincent, a former Justice of Victoria’s Supreme Court observed sadly that the legislation offended just about every reasonable view of what it is to be Australian.

‘They believe racism sells. They accept we have a racist society … but is that what we are really like? I hope it is not’, he said.

‘This is largely racist legislation … both major parties have sold out Aboriginal people … it’s a complete denial of democratic process’, added former Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson, one of the strongest legal voices opposed to the Intervention. Along with leading Aboriginal lawyers including Professor Larissa Behrendt and Nicole Watson, Nicholson has helped author a significant challenge to the government’s misleading attempts to pass off Stronger Futures as a form of so-called ‘positive discrimination’ based on ‘special measures’.

Listening but not Hearing, a lengthy study by Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, at the University of Technology Sydney, exposes the new legislation as unjust and ongoing discrimination. By showing that the government’s consultation process was a sham in the remote communities, the report establishes some of the legal grounds that lead Alastair Nicholson to believe that the High Court of Australia might well strike down Stronger Futures. ‘There is a very strong argument’, he said, ‘that this legislation is unlawful and … won’t stand up to a legal challenge’.

Nicholson and others, including Associate Professor Eva Cox, have studied transcripts of ten of the community consultations, concluding that the process was unethical, that the new legislation was based on the government’s pre-determined policies and that Aboriginal people had not given ‘free, prior and informed consent’ to a ten year takeover of their lives.

When the Intervention was launched by then Prime Minister John Howard it was so replete with discrimination that a government, unconcerned with constitutional niceties, and a cowardly opposition that did not want to risk losing any votes by being too soft on Aboriginal people, shamefully removed all of these citizens from the protection of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). This prompted strong condemnation by the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva as well as visits to Australia and highly critical reports by the UN Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya and the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Dr Navi Pillay. Both international law authorities insisted that the government’s Intervention was in breach of Australia’s commitment to honour the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other human rights covenants.

Protector Macklin’s response in late 2010 was to feign reinstatement of the RDA but then plunge ahead with the same discriminatory policies tricked up with a few cunning political amendments.  By extending to some other unfortunate communities the compulsory income management scheme and the punishing of parents whose children missed five days of school, the Government hopes Australians will believe that this is no longer aimed overwhelmingly at Aboriginal families.

The ruse of adding income management ‘trials’ in Bankstown (NSW), Shepparton (Vic), Playford (SA), Rockhampton and Logan (Qld) is a highly dubious attempt to avoid the charge of discrimination, so much so that Protector Macklin has refused to reveal her legal advice from the Solicitor General’s Department.

‘In my experience’, former Chief Justice Nicholson said, ‘the courts of this country, particularly the High Court, are not stupid’. The discrimination is obvious and the government’s claim of ‘special measures’ benefiting Aboriginal people and of ‘free, prior and informed consent’ clearly would not stand up in court when the available evidence of transcripts from the consultations showed such widespread opposition to the continuing Intervention.

After their own legal assessment, the Greens in the Senate prepared a dissenting report on Stronger Futures with Senator Rachel Siewart observing that the legislation is deeply flawed and discriminatory, does not reflect the wishes of the Aboriginal communities and therefore must be opposed by all fair minded Australians. Senator Siewert noted that Canberra’s persistence with the ‘top-down approach’, criticised so readily last year by both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, now continued to undermine and disempower Aboriginal people. She called on Jenny Macklin to abandon the expensive failure of the punitive approach.

There is no chance of a change of heart because the Protector’s big stick is about to come down even harder on Aboriginal families. The discriminatory use of a Basics Card to quarantine the spending of meagre welfare payments will have an added nasty edge when Centrelink officials are given the power to slash three months welfare money from parents whose children skip school. Punishing families by cutting money for food on the table was never a solution put forward by Aboriginal people or school principals. Leading education reformers, such as Dr Chris Sarra of the Stronger, Smarter Institute, insist that engagement with parents and students, the hard work that requires patience and persistence, is the only method of improving and sustaining attendance in remote school communities.

Aboriginal children have a right to attend a school that is truly part of their community and the test of that is whether the system of the Chief Protector values Aboriginal Cultures and their ways of seeing the world. Bi-lingual education, learning first in your own language, is today shunned in the Northern Territory even though this is set down as a fundamental human right in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This is an area where I have worked closely with Aboriginal students, teachers, parents and principals for almost twelve years in some of the very communities subjected to the disastrous Intervention approach.  I guarantee that ‘Strong and Smart’ school leadership—making children feel valued and safe, respecting their right to learn their languages and be proud of their Culture, welcoming their families and Aboriginal elders into the school community, and ensuring that teachers are culturally competent and well trained for this most important education work, are the keys to the success of the best schools.

The government continues to send contradictory messages to Aboriginal children and their families.  There is constant talk of Closing the Gap but then these large blue signs appear in the targeted communities shaming Aboriginal people and telling the country that these children must be subjected to special laws and punishment. This has been crushing. Such appalling discrimination will have long-lasting effects, just as Chief Protector A.O. Neville’s break-up of families created damage still visible today.

If the government had any evidence that the Intervention is improving the lives of Aboriginal children, Malcolm Fraser said in a challenging speech to concerned Australians, then surely Protector Macklin would be singing loudly about this triumph.  Instead there are alarming signs that the wellbeing of children, supposedly the government’s reason for the Intervention, has actually declined.

In evidence given to the Senate Committee on Communities and to a Parliamentary Inquiry in Darwin, Northern Territory Children’s Commissioner, Dr Howard Bath, reports that 70 per cent of these children suffer from the serious and often painful learning disability of otitis media, anaemia rates have climbed to around 40 per cent and almost 60 per cent have multiple developmental disabilities.

Most disturbingly, Dr Bath warns that the Northern Territory is now experiencing a terrifying escalation of youth suicides, particularly hangings.  In the 1980s there was no discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous suicides in the Territory and the youth suicide rate was about the same around the country.  But a complex combination of community stresses and conflicts, Dr Bath says, have made this fearful contagion far worse in the Top End.

Instead of punishing young people in genuine distress and shaming and blaming their parents, surely these families have some fundamental needs and rights that are now being ignored. The Little Children are Sacred report (Anderson and Wild, 2007) insisted from the outset that genuine consultation and involvement of Aboriginal communities was essential to improve wellbeing.

The fundamental mistake of the prolonged Intervention is that it alienates and disempowers the families and communities who are plainly the only ones who can bring about improvement in the lives of thousands of Aboriginal children. The  evidence confirms this but is ignored by the great white Protectors.

In the Howard years when the Culture Wars raged fiercely, academics like Professor Helen Hughes, the disgruntled cabal of the Bennelong Society and a considerable number of weary anthropologists, came to see Aboriginal Culture as a significant part of what was so often described as the ‘Aboriginal problem’. Aboriginal parents were judged incapable of responsibly caring for their children. Aboriginal organisations, Land Councils and even the Northern Territory Government, were viewed as part of a ‘failed state’.  Federal Intervention was deemed the answer.

Under Stronger Futures Protector Macklin will emerge with far greater ultimate power to control development decisions on community living areas and in town camps.  The Parliamentary website explains that the legislation will facilitate possible moves towards private home ownership.  Access for future mining or pastoral development could be dictated from thousands of kilometres away in Canberra.

Traditional Owners and Aboriginal Lands Councils will surely be divided and conquered, as Djiniyini Gondarra warns, unless they find a new unity with other Australians to oppose the federal grab for land and power.

Musicians including Jimmy Little, Archie Roach, Shellie Morris, Shane Howard and John Butler are calling on us all to raise our voices and insist that we will not live with discrimination.

Put yourselves in the shoes of one of these children. Unless they live in one of the Northern Territory’s twenty growth towns, positioned  nicely alongside large mines or new discoveries of iron ore and uranium, most of these children will be living with discrimination, judged to be worth less of our care, less education, less health, less housing and less opportunity.

The development agenda has always been clear across Northern Australia but is there any coherent Australian agenda for the children of the Intervention?

The architects of this fatal assimilation have never been honest, hiding still behind the lie that Aboriginal people must be protected from themselves, whether they like it or not.

Dr Jeff McMullen AM is a journalist and film-maker, CEO (Honorary) of Ian Thorpe’s Fountain for Youth, an associated producer of the film, Our Generation and active campaigner in Australia and overseas on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

As the five year anniversary of intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory nears, and as the federal government brings down its Intervention Mark II in its Stronger Futures legislation, we see the wholesale trashing of the idea of cultural self-determination and, relatedly, a massive shift in the esteem with which Aboriginal people are held in mainstream Australian society. Both these shifts are contradictory and hard to plot; and they go both to the heart of the contemporary neoliberal restructuring of life across the board and to a more hidden, much older kernel of settler colonial attitudes towards Indigenous people.

As one reads The Australian or views television one might believe that esteem for Aboriginal people has shot up: those gorgeous ads in Western Australian coastal settings with beautiful young Aboriginal people happy to be engineers and miners; Nicholas Rothwell’s beautifully crafted paeans to the North, respect paid to those he meets along the way. But pure ideology and romance aside, of the seventy-three prescribed communities, we still hear virtually nothing, and certainly few straight answers have been forthcoming from this government, or John Howard’s, about the fulfilment of the Intervention’s explicit goals. Even more to the point, as Jeff McMullen points out in an article in this issue, we don’t hear from the Aboriginal people themselves from these communities; neither in the press nor indeed via costly government-held consultations that, one must presume, were meant exactly for such dissemination.

Morbidly fascinating from a certain point of view is how, for most non-Indigenous Australians, the Intervention and its modus operandi has passed into a space of indifference and normality. The implicit goals of Minister Mal Brough’s ominous military phrase ‘Stabilise, normalise, exit’, accompanying and part justifying intervention, have never been achieved; the seventy-three communities are radically de-stabilised, Aboriginal people widely pathologised, and the white managers and officials have never left, indeed have become structurally embedded. Now the intervention rolls on in Jenny Macklin’s Stronger Futures legislation for another decade. What has been normalised is the technique itself, and likewise the ‘new’ object of intervention, in white consciousness as least: the Aboriginal person who must now, for their own good, accept the kind of strenuous moral disciplining that development through violent social change requires. In other words, grotesquely, ‘normalisation’ for Aboriginal people has been normalised for a vast number of the Australian, largely non-Aboriginal, public.

As mentioned, the picture is complex. But let’s not be deluded by the ‘pro-Aboriginal’ campaigns of media outlets (media outlets so intriguingly at the centre of intervention thinking), or by the good heartedness of many, especially sections of the old ‘moral middle class’, who have gone over to the Peter Sutton and Noel Pearson versions of Aboriginal suffering. In all of these cases compassion is offered, often writ large, and respect for Aboriginal people is certainly professed. But it is the ways in which, and for what, respect is or will be given, and the role compassion plays, that are in question.

Peter Sutton’s appeal to his broad audience in his The Politics of Suffering was its moral seriousness and self-conscious ethical stance. He could speak movingly of Aboriginal suffering, which he had experienced at close hand, and felt himself (the latter a large component of his appeal). But compassion here took the route, or was hitched up to a larger picture, in which the compassionate attitude in general was fundamentally to take on a suspect aspect. The easy recourse of southern latte-sipping liberals, compassion can’t get you to the bottom of the problem, and Sutton and others’ new diagnosis was what was really at stake. The high-moral remonstrance is hard to ignore at any time: in this case, it asked people to also face up to a reality that he told his interlocutors they had largely created through a naïve celebration of Aboriginal culture. Put together professed suffering for the suffering of others and high-minded moral remonstrance and you are quite likely to generate a passionate conversion.

Noel Pearson’s attack on self-determination, after and simultaneously with many similar ones from deep within the intellectual Right in Australia, was similarly to put the cat among the doves of the ‘moral middle classes’ and ‘southerners’ generally. It challenged them, like Sutton’s appeal, to get the backbone to face an unpalatable truth: here the said failure of the welfare model in remote communities and, what might seem a contradictory policy within that, self-determination, which he took to be another example of warm and fuzzy southern ideology: a convenient White lie that hid a descent into poverty and social disarray that he reported existed in (some) remote Aboriginal communities. If Sutton’s role was one of a kind of moral-emotional catharsis for White supporters of Aborigines, Pearson’s was the Black imprimatur, along with the influential statements of Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine, that sealed the package. Without this imprimatur it is doubtful that the Intervention could have generated the widespread support it did, and seems still to have. (It was of course instrumental in solving John Howard’s problem of appearing to be a racist, and in converting the right-wing to Aboriginal development in the north.) A philosophical and moral framework from ‘authentic’ sources was provided for the action of government; while White Australia came to have an articulate Black conscience. In the face of a concerted media campaign that backed up the Pearson/Sutton view of Aboriginal culture as vulnerable to alcohol, violence and sexual abuse, Aboriginal culture per se came to stand for dysfunction, while compassion was to be actualised through new means of instilling self-control and individual responsibility on the way to prosperity.

Of course the miners’ ads’ idealised images of openness, individual achievement and money (consumer goods not far away) have as their historical backdrop and internal contradiction how the Intervention has actually operated. On a daily basis it has largely been about restriction, restraint and control (income quarantining, alcohol policy, external management), not to mention dispossession (land tenure, threats to homelands) and destruction (of functioning policies in employment like the Community Development Employment Projects program). The perfect beauty of the mining dream and of development in the North in general that are now firing up the Australian imagination, and central to various players’ agendas, including The Australian’s plans for Aboriginal Australia, in this sense have a dirty secret. This is not to say that the Intervention is necessary to the mining boom as such; but the Intervention’s remit vis-à-vis the reshaping of Aboriginal persons and a recasting of the value of Aboriginal culture and land sits well with the terms of the mainstream vision for the north: essentially white large-scale development, de-culturation of the land, a workforce of flexible employees intent on wealth and consumption. If nothing else there is a harmony of interests and identities in the emergent story of the north born of a broad base of change and upheaval: economic (mining), military (see Richard Tanter’s article in this issue) and socio-cultural (a concern with the soul of the subject of development, especially acute in the case of Aboriginal people).

If there is bipartisan neoliberalism operating in government across a broad range of areas (see Arena Magazine 116), bipartisanship is strongest indeed in relation to the solution to Aboriginal culture, and there is little demurring in Australian culture at large. From Brough’s militaristic formula to the Labor government’s more equalitarian-sounding and technocratic ‘Close the Gap’, the approach on the ground of normalising and assimilating Aboriginal culture to the latest vision for White Western development is more or less the same. As White Australia tried to come to grips with what Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton were saying over the past five years, was it that they missed, or rather simply implicitly recognised and integrated the neoliberal message (or potentiality) at the heart of what was being said?

In this issue of Arena Magazine Tracey Banivanua Mar reviews James Heartfield’s book on the history of the British Aborigines Protection Society. This avowedly humanist organisation with powerful connections and a vast reach across the British Empire was dedicated to ‘protecting’ indigenous peoples caught in the maelstrom of early colonisation. But far from protecting anyone from the depredations of White development, ‘protection’ often shadowed that development, or helped to legitimise it, or as James Boyce has shown in the case of Melbourne, hastened through its humanitarian concerns the demise of the very people it purported to act for. The attitude of there being a ‘problem’ in Aboriginal culture goes back a long way – in fact to the earliest justifications for colonisation, and post-hoc rationalisations for settlers’ rapacious behaviours. And so it would seem that the case for developing the Aborigines that lies at the base of the (humanitarian) intervention model is over-determined in contemporary Australian culture: neoliberal development of the land and the soul, and a settler colonial predilection for exactly that in relation to Indigenous inhabitants and their problematic, savage cultures. Aboriginal people may no longer be rounded up and shot, or officially divided into full bloods, half castes and quadroons, but they will undergo a process of individualisation and de-culturation in this new stage in the settler colonial project.

The issue of culture is an intriguing one in the contemporary setting. As Aure Mondon points out in his article in this issue on the upcoming French election, one of the ways that the Le Pen family has been able to go mainstream, which is to say, be stridently anti-immigration  yet profess a non-racist orientation, is to insert ‘culture’ wherever  ‘race’ might once have been the actual or implied term. It’s something like the Andrew Bolt defence: he’s not a racist because he would never let the colour of someone’s skin interfere with his appreciation of the person – as an individual. These are variations on a theme, their common basis the banishing of biological racism from respectable discourse and the use of new explanations offered as realities of the neoliberal context, for example, the radical individuation of persons and their disembedding from deep cultures based in group, rather than networked, forms of social relation. As a number of commentators have remarked, in the period of late capitalism culture became an ambiguous category; at the same time as it exploded in and as popular culture, culture as deeply embedded meanings and shared life-ways seemed to become matters of choice for radically individualised subjects. In that guise ‘culture’ has become a dirty word, a derogation that has fanned out across all the social groupings and in the case of White Australia’s dealings with Aboriginal Australia neatly dovetails with deep strains of settler colonial propensities for social and moral violence.

*The next issue of Arena Magazine will mark the five year anniversary of the Intervention and the beginning of Stronger Futures with essays and commentaries. In June too, the next Arena Journal will be released with an issue devoted to the theme of settler colonialism. 

Time: 6pm til 8pm.

Location: Arena Project Space, 2 Kerr St Fitzroy 

The Melbourne Campaigner’s Network is a monthly gathering for campaigners, activists, and organisers to discuss ideas, exchange resources and discover new approaches to social change.

Four great speakers confirmed:

• Tom Civil, community graphic designer and artist
• Arlene TextaQueen, Australia’s felt-tip super-heroine
• Van Thanh Rudd, artist and activist
• Jessie Boylan, photomedia artist

The March MCN will explore the connection between art and campaigning. Come along to:

• Explore how art can be used in a campaign – to make injustice visible, raise awareness, amplify concerns, gain support, build the movement and put pressure on power-holders.
• See examples of how art has been used effectively in past campaigns.
• Hear from artists producing work in support of struggles for social and environmental justice.
• Find out how to work with artists to improve the effectiveness of your campaigning.

The session is a collaboration between Melbourne Campaigners’ Network and Arena Project Space and includes display of political artworks, a panel of artists, and the usual discussion and networking.

Location:  Arena Project Space, 2 Kerr St Fitzroy
Time:  6pm til 8pm.
Date:  Thursday 15 March
Further info:  Holly Hammond – call 0421 508 446 or via the Contact page.
Twitter:  #melbcamp   @Holly_PTW

The EWP addresses questions central to the supply and use of energy in Australia and points to strategic priorities for the government in the face of expected challenges over the period to 2030. The answers it comes up with are as strikingly beneficial to fossil fuel industry interests as they are disdainful of the growing importance of renewable energy and the reality of responding to global warming.

The vision put forward in Ferguson’s EWP is one of a nation continuing to expand its fossil fuel use and exports, albeit under the Orwellian banner of a ‘clean energy transformation’. As the EWP proudly notes, ‘Australia is currently the world’s largest coal exporter, third-largest uranium producer and in future years will be the second-largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter’. Ensuring major, ongoing growth trends in fossil fuel exports, particularly to Asia, is a significant theme of the paper. Domestic energy supply will continue to be met by coal, made less emissions-intensive by the assumed commercialisation of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, and will see an increasing reliance on gas, which is expected to account for 44 per cent of Australian energy supply in 2050. Some diversification into renewable energy sources is envisioned, with qualified support for the potential of large-scale solar, geothermal and wind power. At the same time, the paper suggests the introduction of nuclear power should be considered. The EWP’s vision is also one of a fully privatised, deregulated energy sector, in which protecting the sanctity of the market is prioritised over the promotion of zero emissions technologies.

To begin to understand the EWP’s outcomes, it is worth noting the reference group that Minister Ferguson put together to help write it. The group does not include one person with any expertise or exclusive interest in renewable energy. There is also not a single representative from community or environment groups. Instead, the list of those invited to the table reads like a roll call of the usual suspects: BHP Billiton; Rio Tinto; Xstrata Coal; Woodside Energy; Caltex Australia and so on.

In many ways, the EWP is a typical neoliberal document in the tradition of the last few decades of Labor and Liberal party policymaking. It calls for the privatisation of all remaining government-owned energy assets and full deregulation of retail energy pricing. The EWP also sets the scene for the scrapping of policies designed to support the deployment of renewable energy, lending weight to the view that carbon pricing is considered a sufficient, catch-all response to emissions reduction by the Gillard Government. During his launch of the draft EWP, Minister Ferguson underscored this point by announcing the scrapping of the Government’s promised emissions standards for new coal-fired power stations, no longer seen to be necessary given the passage of the carbon price legislation.

Also in Ferguson’s sights are the various feed-in tariff schemes introduced by state and territory governments to support the uptake of solar panels. According to research presented in September 2011 at a renewable energy symposium in Taiwan, feed-in tariffs have been responsible for 64 per cent of wind energy and 87 per cent of solar energy installed worldwide. Rather than giving due credit to this effective policy instrument, the EWP dismisses it as a ‘market distortion’. In the meantime, the distortionary implications of support for the development of controversial carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, assumed in the EWP to allow coal to continue to play a major role in Australia’s energy future, is not brought into question. Nor is the over $10 billion in fossil fuel subsidies already supplied by taxpayers annually.

The introduction of a low carbon price and the absence of policies to support renewable energy deployment will ensure the increasing exploitation of fossil gas, including gas from non-conventional sources such as coal seams. Widespread community opposition to the emerging coal seam gas (CSG) industry is treated in the EWP as a minor hurdle. Rather than legitimise concerns about what the destructive impacts of this industry and what its planned expansion will mean for farming, water supplies and greenhouse gas emissions, the document merely notes that effort will need to be applied to build community support. More fundamentally, the assumption that gas is a ‘clean energy’, creating lower emissions than coal may not even be true, particularly when it comes to non-conventional sources with high uncertainty around fugitive emissions. Very little research has been done on the life-cycle emissions of gas, with at least one recent report suppressed by the gas industry.

The EWP displays a rose-coloured glasses approach when it comes to the future price of fossil fuels. Dismissing outright the potential for peak oil to occur between now and 2035, the EWP predicts an oil price of US$120 a barrel (in real terms) in 2035. That amounts to an approximate increase of 54 per cent on 2010 prices over twenty-five years, which seems especially naive considering the 300 percent oil price increase over the last seven years acknowledged by Minister Ferguson in his speech to launch the EWP.  Ferguson also admitted that the eastern states of Australia will be exposed to global gas prices once the export terminal in Gladstone is complete around 2015, which is likely to see gas prices triple and become as volatile as oil prices are currently.

Modelling included in the EWP also exposes Minister Ferguson’s questionable grasp on the price of renewable energy. Research by the University of Melbourne’s Energy Research Institute, commissioned by Ross Garnaut in May 2011, showed that the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism was consistently overestimating prices for renewable energy. In the case of rooftop solar panels, the study showed that they are already cheaper than the prices Ferguson’s department predicted they would fall to in the year 2030! Despite publicly acknowledging this data and promising to note changes to the cost of renewable energy, the EWP reflects continued use of outdated figures. One week after the EWP was launched, finance analysts at Bloomberg revealed that the cost of wind power had been exaggerated by 50 per cent, and the price of solar power by 300 per cent in EWP modelling.

Leaving aside these flaws in the EWP it is worth asking, more fundamentally, what a strategic, long-term energy policy for a wealthy, emissions-intensive country like Australia should look like, given what we know about global climate change and energy trends.

A forward-looking energy policy not tainted by vested interests would recognise the twin realities of the urgent need for emissions reductions and the favourable economics of a switch to renewable energy. It would recognise that these transitions require strong government leadership and support.

Policies built on this analysis do exist. One example is the Danish Government’s recently released package of initiatives, Our Future Energy which clearly emphasises the need to ‘avoid becoming trapped with inefficient and non-renewable technologies… [and] caught with an expensive and outdated energy sector in 30-40 years’. The investment required to meet its target of 100 per cent renewable energy in national energy supply by 2050, expected to amount to a net cost of less than 0.25 percent of that country’s GDP in 2020, is considered a necessary insurance policy to avoid higher costs in the longer term due to increasing prices of non-renewable energy.

The EWP contains no such vision. Instead, it shows that there is a contradiction at the heart of the Gillard Government’s climate and energy policies. On the one hand it fought to get the carbon price through parliament in 2011, while on the other Australia’s planned fossil fuel export projects will generate at least eleven times as many annual emissions as will be saved by the Clean Energy Future package. As Guy Pearse recently calculated, these projects will also contribute a staggering one eighth of the global carbon budget to avoid 2 degrees C global temperature rises (which, as many have explained, may not avoid disastrous impacts) between now and 2050.

The EWP claims to be working towards a ‘secure, resilient and efficient energy system’ and one which provides ‘accessible, reliable and competitively priced energy for all Australians’. Looking beyond motherhood statements, it contains policies which, if implemented, appear more likely to entrench energy insecurity, expose Australian energy consumers to ever-increasing fossil fuel prices, and completely contradict national efforts to abandon our greenhouse gas emitting path towards catastrophic climate change.

Taegen Edwards is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Pablo Brait is General Manager at Beyond Zero Emissions and Convenor of Yarra Climate Action Now. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisations the authors work for.

Arena Magazine is to be congratulated for publishing two critical pieces on the media: Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s revelations (‘Poisonous Media’) on the environmental dangers posed by toxic media hardware such as computers and mobile phones, and Justin Clemens’ article in the same issue. Most Australians are not used to reading or hearing lively intellectually and politically engaged critiques of the Australian media. Rather, we are offered prominent but ultimately conventional media critics such as Margaret Simons or Jonathan Holmes who dish up insipid and often feeble analyses. Clemens by contrast, raises significant questions and prompts readers to think about the state of our media even if his analysis is seriously flawed. To better understand why the dystopian dead-end that Clemens arrives at is no real political alternative to liberalism, I will discuss the two central arguments of his article.

Thesis one: questioning the champions of free speech

In the first part of his article, Clemens deals with the contrasting and complicated roles of three individuals: Andrew Bolt, Julian Assange and Robert Manne. Each claims to be a defender of democracy, reason and free speech. Surprised at what he sees as Assange’s fatuous defence of Bolt in the Fairfax press, Clemens observes that the phenomenon that both Assange and Bolt ‘agree—or at least pay lip service to the same ‘principles’—that is, absolute freedom of speech, open and vigorous debate, and the quest for truth, probably shows that these are now essentially theological terms from which no one is permitted publicly to demur’. (p.23)

What does it mean to criticise the new theology of absolute free speech? Should we do so from a fundamentally liberal perspective or from a radical anti-capitalist perspective? Although Clemens asks how the very structure of the media serves ‘established interests’ (p.23), one is never sure whether he just means vague ‘ungovernable centralised’ global media processes (p.26) or a specific range of capitalist industry sectors, ruling classes and capitalist state apparatuses.

The problematic relationship between free speech, truth and democracy is conducted via an examination of three flesh and blood media personalities, their modes of writing and rhetoric. Clemens’ judgment of their political personas is in marked contrast to the impersonal characterisation of the ‘system’ that informs his second thesis.

Beginning with Andrew Bolt, Clemens rightly derides Bolt’s claim that he is a champion of free speech, a ‘victim’ who has supposedly been ‘gagged’, yet can’t seem to shut up. Bolt is an easy target. With Assange and Manne, the approach is different and far from convincing.

Clemens successfully shows Assange to be an innocuous, dogmatic defender of absolute free speech who, unconsciously identifies with the angry male narcissist (Bolt) when threatened by government legal action (p.23). Yet, in his second thesis, as I will later show, he claims that it is Assange who has not only best understood the politics of the ‘network society’, but who also holds the key to breaking down the ‘system’.

If Bolt and Assange are shown to be far from shining knights defending free speech and democracy, Robert Manne is presented like a modern Don Quixote who will ride into hell for a heavenly cause. Clemens is genuine in his praise and careful admiration of Manne but ultimately rejects his rational method as less effective than Assange’s sabotage of the ‘system’.

Clemens describes Manne as twice voted the ‘most influential public intellectual’ in Australia and ‘an indefatigable critic of denialists of all kinds’ (p.23). Part of Manne’s authority, he asserts, ‘is surely due to his long-term reliability … he has never really deviated from what’s essentially a classical liberal position, constitutively hostile to mass ideologies of all kinds. Like Malcolm Fraser, another uncompromising moral voice in the Australian twenty-first century, Manne remains a Burkean conservative for whom established governmental and non-governmental institutions, the division of powers, the rule of law, free debate and moral discussion remain paramount’. (p.23)

As a Burkean conservative, according to Clemens, it is no surprise that Manne is incensed by the practices of the Murdoch media, especially the campaigning role of The Australian under editor Chris Mitchell. After citing the main arguments in Manne’s Quarterly Essay ‘Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation’, Clemens admits that he was utterly staggered by the response unleashed by the right-wing ideologues and editors at The Australian.

Like Clemens, far too many people innocently took the battle between Manne and The Australian at face value and lost sight of the ‘war of position’ in the Australian media and Manne’s historical role in this war since the 1980s.

From both my personal acquaintance with Robert Manne and familiarity with his writings over the past thirty years, I have no hesitation in describing him as a highly ethical and courageous person who has borne the brunt of much abuse from the Right and the Left. While I still believe that his political economic perspective is far too conservative, given the enormity of the domestic and global problems we face, nevertheless, on a range of crucial domestic issues his views are progressive, welcome, and of course, infinitely preferable to those promoted by the Murdoch media.

In contrast to Clemens however, I do not have a naïve appreciation of Manne’s contradictory place in public life. For example, I do not place value on media polls about Australia’s top public intellectuals. For it is not solely the fine quality of Manne’s writing that saw him come top in a Fairfax newspaper poll. If a News Limited paper had run a poll the result would probably have been quite different. Importantly, the very concept ‘public intellectual’ is itself testimony to the absence of mass oppositional political movements and the reliance in recent decades on substitute ‘tribunes of the people’ who wage battle in the establishment media. Like incessant surveys of the world’s top universities—which, we would agree, are more about marketing brands rather than education—polls about influential ‘public intellectuals’ merely tell us who has privileged access to the media, which topics are legitimate or verboten, and which commentators media businesses can promote as part of ‘their team’, rather than the quality of views expressed. It is no surprise to find few radicals on any of the survey lists.

Clemens argues that part of Manne’s authority ‘is surely due to his long-term reliability’. Unfortunately not. Since the end of the Cold War, Manne has flip- flopped on many issues that have nothing to do with Communism and anti-Communism. First he was opposed to multi-culturalism and now he is for it; first he voted for John Howard in 1996 and now champions Paul Keating; first he opposed economic rationalism and now believes he was wrong; first he supported the invasion of Afghanistan but then opposed the equally disastrous and senseless war in Iraq; first he opposed the Pacific solution but now supports offshore processing of refugees on Manus Island.

Part of the reason for Manne’s inconsistency is that he has jettisoned a lot of his old conservative baggage. He is to be admired for being so candid about these changes. However, the fact remains that he has not yet fully developed an overarching perspective that links his passionate environmental concerns to a compatible economic and political position. Witness the consequences of first naively trusting Howard in 1996, then putting his faith in Kevin Rudd in 2007 (then turning highly critical of him by 2010 and yet promoting Rudd again in 2012). Manne now lauds Paul Keating, an advocate of the very neo-liberal policies that continue to wreak pain and havoc globally. These neo-liberal policies are completely incompatible with Manne’s concern for environmental sustainability.

What Clemens does not highlight is that Manne is simultaneously a critic and a player who wants to help shape government policies. Manne is influential precisely because he is an ‘insider’ with an extensive network. This network was built up from early days with Quadrant conservatives through to established columns in The Australian, Fairfax papers and regular appearances on ABC radio and TV. It now extends to the Greens. As an ‘insider’ Manne has never desired to be a radical critic of the system. It is a sign of how far to the Right Australian political culture has moved in recent years that a mild reformer such as Manne can be the target of vilification by market fundamentalists and crazies. Imagine how different Manne’s access to the media would be if he had just started to advocate radical views without his historical network or the support of Black Inc publisher Morry Schwartz? How many people get Quarterly Essays to write or all the space they can use in The Monthly or The Age and Sydney Morning Herald? This does not detract from the genuine courage it took to write Bad News knowing that he would be subjected to a torrent of abuse from The Australian and the political Right across the country.

Imagine, by way of contrast, if by some miracle, I (or perhaps Clemens) had been offered the opportunity to write a Quarterly Essay on The Australian and had requested an interview with Chris Mitchell and senior editors and journalists? We would have been told politely to piss off and the Murdoch press would have largely ignored our intervention. Yet, Manne (accompanied by Schwartz) enters the enemy stronghold and is accorded access to all the top ideologues. Only an insider (like a Papal inquisitor) could gain such access. In fact, Umberto Eco could have updated The Name of the Rose and cast Manne as the modern William of Baskerville who enters the monastery to conduct an investigation into how truth was murdered at The Australian. Like William, who demonstrates the power of deductive reasoning, Manne refuses to accept the conventional monastic explanation that the editors of The Australian are possessed by demons. Instead he undertakes a meticulous forensic empirical analysis of the culprits who killed, and continue to kill the truth.

There are two main reasons why I expected The Australian to launch a ferocious attack on Manne. Firstly, Manne’s Quarterly Essay coincided with the most serious political threat ever experienced by the Murdoch Empire. Following the News of the World scandal, plus public criticisms of The Australian by Gillard government ministers, not to mention Murdoch’s need to secure Sky Television’s tender to run the Australia Network, the stakes were, by any standards, high. News Limited knew that in a war of position, Fairfax, the ABC and other players would seek to capitalise on Manne’s scathing report. It was necessary for the editors to attempt to salvage their reputation against Manne’s accusations of a form of political thuggery ultimately designed to destroy the Greens and the Gillard government.

Secondly, Clemens’ focus on rhetoric and style—The Australian’s ‘unhinged ferocity’ versus Manne’s calm and ‘magisterial’ approach—captures an important aspect of the conflict but overlooks the psycho-political dynamics of Mitchell and company’s fury. As the old aphorism states: ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. Just as factions within the ALP, for example, often hate one another more than they hate the Liberals, so too, the editors of The Australian felt that Manne was a Judas who betrayed his former political colleagues.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to think that personal feelings are major obstacles to running media businesses. Despite their furious attack on Robert Manne, The Australian would love to have him back in their stable to prove that they are ‘pluralistic defenders of free speech’. In the parochial backwater of the Australian media ‘club’, people regularly circulate between the handful of private and public media organisations. Take for example, Michael Stutchbury. Within a month of attacking Manne as Economics editor of The Australian, he became Fairfax editor of the Australian Financial Review. Does Stutchbury have different views because he now works for Fairfax instead of News Limited? Hardly.

Decades ago, revolutionaries referred to the mainstream media as the ‘bourgeois press’ and assumed that the latter would lie, distort and promote dominant business and government interests at the expense of workers. Despite significant cultural, technological and economic changes during the past fifty years, fundamental power relations remain unaltered even though the term ‘bourgeois press’ is unfamiliar to most people.

Ironically, there is no necessity for The Australian or other Murdoch papers to engage in Fox TV style extreme campaigns. The Fairfax papers, Eric Beecher’s Crikey or Black Inc do a very successful job keeping the main institutions and policies of capitalist Australia going in a polite and seemingly pluralist manner. They know that the Greens and the carbon tax do not threaten the survival of capitalism and neither do most of the Murdoch media’s other pet hates: Indigenous welfare, asylum seekers or the cultural liberal Left.  Similarly, the ABC defines ‘balance’ in such conservative and narrow terms that all its flagship TV and radio current affairs programs do a sterling job on behalf of the status quo by regularly excluding a multitude of alternative voices.

Importantly, what is striking about the key spokespersons across the media in Australia – from News Limited and Fairfax right through to the Seven, Nine and Ten networks, the ABC, Crikey and Black Inc—is not just the narrowness of their political, economic and cultural world-views, but the way they respond to external criticisms. Like other industries that champion neo-liberal forms of ‘self-regulation’ (in other words, a license to resist delivering durable, safe, non-toxic and non-exploitative goods and services), it is no surprise to see the media owners and most commentators singing from the same songbook about the dangers of media regulation. Not for them the need to introduce severe penalties for grossly distorting and fabricating news stories or harassing people day and night with media ‘dogs’. Not for them the loss of their licenses for regularly failing to allocate funds and program time necessary to fulfil their charters, not to mention an extensive list of other malpractices. Oh no, they spuriously claim, this would destroy free speech. If the necessary breakup of Murdoch’s control of 70 per cent of the press ever succeeded, how could it be effective if the new owners (like existing media) were not regulated and allowed to perpetuate current abuses?

Thesis Two: rational critique is futile in a world of excessive ‘ information’.

In his discussion of reason, truth and democracy, Justin Clemens unwittingly repeats Herbert Marcuse’s defence of Plato but with quite different political consequences. Between the 1930s and 1970s, Marcuse attempted to rescue Plato and Hegel from their use by Fascists and Stalinists as well as from Karl Popper’s defamation of them during the decades of the Cold War as ‘totalitarian’ enemies of the ‘open society’. Marcuse devoted much of his energy to exposing how a new form of ‘repressive tolerance’ devalued genuine democracy in Western capitalist technocratic societies that were based on rampant consumerism and market individualism. Conversely, Clemens appears to offer a radical critique, but quickly succumbs to illusions about the power of contemporary technology. Sadly, he espouses a deluded hyper-individualist solution to what he calls ‘the corporate state’ and the ‘network society’. How so?

The article’s second thesis is a modern extension of Plato’s critique of democracy. It is not that Plato is opposed to free speech and democracy because he favours tyranny. Rather, Plato wants reason and truth to prevail but democracy cannot deliver this because, as Clemens notes, ‘democracy is servitude to the tyranny of opinion, that is, to the media’. (p.25) Furthermore, ‘the new media undermine democracy today in ways that go far beyond anything Plato could have envisaged. If ancient democracy certainly had to deal with a variety of media, from public heckling to graffiti, these are small fry compared to the contemporary globalised post-convergent online media environment’. (p.25)

Thus, for Clemens, contemporary media simultaneously: ‘1) transform all forms of interaction into ‘information’ due to their technological conditions, 2) massively proliferate the modes of dissemination of information, 3) massively proliferate the quantities of information, 4) massively accelerate the speed of transmission of information, 5) necessitate that everybody purchase or at least have access to the technological devices for interacting with such information, 6) condition an unprecedented centralisation and control of the ownership of the means of representation’. (p.25)

Echoing writers such as Evgeny Morozov (The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom) on how social media help dictators control protest movements by tracking every dissenting keystroke, Clemens also makes some important observations on the proliferation and dissemination of ‘information’. However, he parts company with neo-Marxists such as Marcuse and moves from potential radical critique to dystopian technocratic pessimism.

In ‘Killer Drones’ Clemens is more preoccupied with the technological transformation of symbols and forms into ‘information’ rather than with how the media shape institutional policies or are in turn influenced by social struggles. Hence, his argument is a variation of the old theme that the medium is the message (that is, endless ‘information’). Clemens, paradoxically, sounds closer to the Catholic conservative Marshal McLuhan even though he places much emphasis on the centralised ownership and control of the new medium of ‘information’. Forsaking the Enlightenment tradition, he ends up pinning his hopes on an anti-democratic and anti-rationalist theory of toppling ‘the system’ by disease-induced ‘dieback’.

Just as Cervantes depicted Don Quixote’s chivalry as being superseded by emerging market relations, so Clemens sees Manne’s rational critique as historically obsolete. Against the new technology, he laments that not even the ‘heroic democratic attempts of Robert Manne’ (p.26) can hold back the ungovernable tide of centralisation of ‘information’. The explosion of ‘opinion/information’ neuters democracy and makes local criticism futile as it is just more fodder for online fibres. Despairing, he proclaims: ‘We now live in a world that is the bastard love-child of 1984 and Brave New World’. (p.26) Clemens’ melodramatic images appear to reduce our options to either accepting our fate as technological cyphers or committing suicide.

But wait, Clemens has an answer to this so-called ‘ungovernable centralisation’. Inspired by Julian Assange, he argues that Assange’s ‘method is not, despite appearances, one of democratic debate, of revelations of embarrassing secrets, of truth against corruption. Rather, it involves a systematic flooding of the system itself … Accelerate the barrage of information, accelerate the resources needed to deal with it—dieback as a non-linear informational tactic in the current war of humanity against the corporate state’. (p.26) He concludes that the ‘odds are that Manne’s classical model of critical debate won’t prove determining for our world, but Assange’s informational practice of dieback will’. (p.26)

To imagine that Julian Assange’s Wikileaks tactics can be repeated to such a degree that they lead to a breakdown of ‘the system’ not only exaggerates the impact of Wikileaks, but also is a phantasy that betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of capitalist societies. Even anarchists are more realistic, as confirmed by the title of an anti-terrorist pamphlet from the 1970s: ‘You can’t blow up a social relation’!  Like terrorists of the 1970s who believed that their isolated actions would trigger a revolutionary upheaval, Clemens advances no theory of mass politics because the social and the economic are either absent or crudely depicted in his analysis.

In fact, social and political movements appear to be irrelevant to his vision of constructing a new society. This is because Clemens sweepingly pronounces: ‘even if every single person seemed to be discussing public events with enthusiasm and energy, democracy has been neutered—for control of the means of discussion themselves have now literally been taken from their hands and mouths’. (p.26) Yet without mass citizen activism how will society be persuaded to give up smart phones, the Net and all other forms of new technology that he says have neutered democracy?  In other words, inducing dieback by flooding or jamming the political system with information is a delusionary authoritarian solution that is both impractical and unreal! Sadly, no new ideas or images of alternative social relations that could seriously challenge existing media businesses are on offer here.

Part of the reason for this technocratic pessimism is that Clemens presents a very conventional notion of democracy (existing representative democracy) which is itself at odds with the potential and actual proliferation of infinite numbers of new grass roots communities and network communities. Of course the new social media are full of inane forms of communication. But that is definitely not their only character or potential. Despite Clemens’ prognosis, no ungovernable centralised media ownership can completely control these proliferating social interactions.

Finally, Clemens no doubt supports the recent upsurge of movements such as the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Occupy’. Yet the implications of his analysis can also be read as diminishing the thousands of protesters struggling locally and losing their lives to overthrow authoritarian regimes. If ‘ungovernable centralisation’ is impervious to local criticism, does Clemens also fatalistically advise all kinds of oppositional movements to abandon hope of an alternative to either existing limited forms of representative democracy or to dictatorial regimes?

It is true that within Australia and other OECD countries there are currently very weak oppositional movements. The fact remains, however, that very serious destabilising economic and environmental scenarios confront the world. Only the shortsighted could believe that many existing businesses—whether in the media or other industry sectors—will have guaranteed futures in ten or more years’ time.

One thing we can predict is that neither public intellectuals, nor dieback saboteurs, can change the world on their own. This is precisely the time when a new political imagination and new forms of activism can help construct a more responsive and more democratic media. Hyper-individualist action heroes save Gotham city from corporate crooks, only in comic books. Aside from a few mass protests in the past (such as those outside the Melbourne Herald and The Australian during the 1970s for their anti-Labor bias), the media in Australia has always thought that it is a law unto itself, and untouchable. This contemptuous attitude will only last as long as the rest of us remain silent.

Professor Boris Frankel is the author of several books on contemporary Australia and is an Honorary Fellow in the Melbourne School of Land and Environment at the University of Melbourne.

For a fuller discussion of the media that is still highly relevant, see ‘The Threat of Cultural Enclosure’ in Boris Frankel, Zombies, Lilliputians and Sadists: The Power of the Living Dead and the future of Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004.

It seems pretty clear that for many of the reasonsonly revealed at the time of Rudd’s prime ministerial demise, those who would be his ministers again, seriously don’t want him, and retrieving their loyalty if he were to win would likely be a very basic problem. Minister after minister has recently come out saying his style of leadership was/is inappropriate: arrogant and self-centred, and ultimately ineffectual on so many of his key claims to power. Gillard, on the other hand, seems to inspire in them a degree of loyalty; theirs’ seems to be a genuine celebration of a certain strength: her determination in pushing through an agenda, the achievement of a working minority government, her approachability as a leader, and so forth. No doubt apparent elements of older style labourism and the Labor program also satisfy many in Caucus. She’s not only a doer but what she does isrecognisable: work, education, health.

For them Rudd’s whole modus operandi was wrong. Labor has long been a technocratic, social engineering kind of Party, with an aspiration to social democracy, and individualism a burgeoning element of its erstwhile class identification since Whitlam at least. But the spirit of opposition has lingered long in its self-identityas the working people’s party; the trade unions remain powerful sources of support and social opposition; and that oppositional spirit flowed into many people’s understanding of why Labor would take up women’s, gays’ and environmental ‘interests’. Even if these elements of Labor too have misrecognised not only the role of labour, in contemporary society, but also their own technocratic transformation as part of the neo-liberal consensus, a social concern with roots into times past has pervaded much of what those supporters have tried to do, or believed they were doing.

The problem was that Rudd’s wasn’t just a technocratic approach, but an intellectualist one, and priggish at that; the corporatism and sectorial wheeling and dealing of labour-style post-war technocracies was reduced to a super brain processing detail at the nerve centre of government; feeling, sentiment, the meaning of a common history―all those important elements of making friendships and welding together a corporate identity, of that horse-trading and the instincts of the political animal, just aren’t the matter of the super brain. What Manne and others still hope for from Rudd is exactly this elevation above the political fray. Yet as others have reminded us, this dodgy mix of super brain and prophet aren’t disconnected from Rudd’s previous incarnation as ‘Doctor Death’; from self-assuredness to unsentimental execution of the tenets of neo-liberal government, the job losses he engineered are still remembered by many in Queensland as his defining moment. They seem not to be willing to believe that Rudd is capable, even under Manne’s moral injunction to pay attention to his self, to change those particular stripes.

The problem is not one of self or person; it’s not even one right now of policy, or policy difference; Labor, and no representatives ofit, can escape theeffects and moral implications of the fundamentally transforming force of neo-liberalism and its poorly understood sources in the culture and economy of late capitalism.There may now be a panic about an Abbott victory and the need to avert the apparently unthinkable, and indeed the prospect is not a pretty one. But the fact is that whatever the differences between Gillard and Rudd or their supporters, they have all been party to the neo-liberal consensus, which is now displaying some of its specifically political costs.Who could have thought that right-wing ideology would ever have spoken this loudly, and often viciously, as in The Australian, with prospects perhaps just as vicious on the ground (think only of Alan Jones’s appearance firing up the crowd outside Parliament House, or the general reaction, on the other hand, to the Aboriginal demonstration against Abbott, in much the same space)?

One is tempted to say it is a little bit like appeasement: step onto neo-liberal terrain, and you will find the ground beneath you moving. Try to stay the momentum and you’ll find you are already caught up in how that ground is defined; its shifts more predictable that you thought. But that would actually be a lie. Although many Labor supporters might feel the shifting ground scenario to be their own history, Labor in Australia was the first party in government to embrace neo-liberalism. Whether through Hawke and Keating’s financial reforms, Dawkins’ university reforms, or state and federal Labor’s intensive zeal-filled transformation of public administration and obsession with managerialism, they were intent on being better managers of the new opportunities of late capitalism than their opponents―a once common refrain in the sphere of work and industry was that old-school Australian capitalists were inefficient; Labor would do it better. (Hubris has not just been a Rudd problem.) Of course in so doing, so the idea went, work would be assured and conditions guaranteed. Education and welfare, though both themselves transformed, would, through this management of the free-market, remain humane and affordable.

This latter ethical sense, the view of work, education and welfare, was what set Labor apart from what was to emerge as the vigorous Johnny-come-lately zeal of Howard and the whole shift in the political culture out of Labor’s hands and into a much more heightened and uncertain right-wing, more directly ideological context. But even as they spoke about their commitments, it was already in the realm of spirit and justification rather than bearing much resemblance to what was happening in real processes in educational institutions, welfare organisations and workplaces.

And today it is no different. Bill Shorten, who does seem capable of shifting his alliance to Rudd, despite his key role in knifing him a year and a half ago, was effusively selling the Gillard line on work, work, work only the other night after sackings and various projected job losses were in the news. There are more people in work in Australia than ever before, he said; a fact pure and simple to be widely celebrated. But it is a double lie: as if all work in contemporary circumstances is the same (was he meaning to include the three hours a day of the female bank teller, or the three hours a week of the sessional ‘lecturer’) as if work per se is thesupreme value (what of the single mother forced off benefit and into paid work instead of childrearing, or the fly-in fly-out social and environmental obscenity of work for the mining boom)?

Even more disturbing, and sitting at the core of Labor’s incapacity, is climate change and environment. Core because neither old nor new Labor can within that term ‘labor’ possibly attend to the principal contradiction today that is contained in the notion of growth (already a distinctly high-tech version of such) and our environmental capacity for,or the moral-cultural desirability of, such. On the one hand read Alan Roberts in the issue of Arena Magazine on the still slim possibility of, but all the same possible, geo-engineering ‘solution’ to global warming. On the other read Pablo Brait and Taegen Edwards on Martin Ferguson’s Environment White Paper. Read them both and weep.

It is in this context that we can only applaud the young people and old who have recently taken to occupying streetsand squares in Australia, perhaps in lesser numbers than in Europe and North America where circumstances are dire, but who here have had the special foresight and moral energy to take action now. Indeed we need to build that response into a larger, more general manifestation of disapproval. But there remains a great deal to talk about. Activism is a key response. The work of GetUp, for instance, has proven effective in some immediate campaigns in recent years. But without insight into one’s hopes and programs, and the vehicles one employs, unintended consequences are just as likely in the activist camp as in the Labor Party (see Adam Brereton’s article in this issue). The small ‘l’ liberal hopefulness of the Rudd supporters, the energetic but often unexamined actions of some youth groups, the still rigid old-Left categories of some Occupy activists, the remaining hopes of Labor supporters―they all need to be put into the melting pot of reflection and debate if the model of life and value bequeathed by bipartisan neo-liberalism and its distinctive underpinnings are to be seen for what they are, and resisted.

But if we’re honest in our historical memory, we’d recall that Cambodia was previously a holiday destination. Jackie Kennedy and Catherine Deneuve swanned about on the palm-fringed beaches of Sihanoukville in the late 1960s—evidence of a prior history when Cambodia was a pleasurable sojourn for jaded tourists. Today, tourism is once again thriving in Cambodia.

No tourist would ever lead a revolution, of course, so they are still welcomed in oppressive regimes (Burma anyone?) and kept safe by governments keen on safeguarding the foreigner. Dictators don’t rule Cambodia nor is it oppressive, but it has a compliant government keen on following neo-liberal programs, competing in the global economy while tightening police and army into the party apparatus. Tourism fits nicely into this paradigm by bringing in foreign currency and some favourable PR (a glance at weekend travel supplements is proof enough). Hun Sen’s Cambodia People’s Party (CPP) is committed to reminding tourists of Cambodia’s raw holiday potential (Phnom Penh’s cultural clout is evident in the gilded palaces, likewise in the bespectacled intellectuals playing chess at sidewalk cafes), but balks at acknowledging the UN War Crime Tribunals to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. But as a youthful nation (the average age is twenty-two) emerging from its horrific past, do Cambodians need to be reminded of past traumas by the West’s conscience?

Tourists visit Cambodia’s shrines of remembrance out of curiosity and respect—a form of disaster tourism pioneered by Chernobyl. The Choeung Ek genocidal site that focuses on one major Killing Field showcases nine tiers of densely packed skulls, bones and bloodied rags in a memorial tower. Surrounding pits used for disposing corpses have been reclaimed by tufts of overgrown grass, with the occasional butterfly weaving an aerial danse macabre.

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Tourism can handle irony, so I wasn’t that surprised by blurbs about ‘unforgettable experiences’ accompanying pictures of saffron-robed monks beside bombs on brochures advertising neighbouring Laos. The People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, a compact landlocked country ruled beneath the fluttering flag of the hammer and sickle, has become an example of controlled capitalism rather than heavy-handed communism. Having avoided a civil war, Laos is more developed than Cambodia; it is influenced by the Thai economic model, meaning commercial and tourist development is a priority for the fifty-year governing Pathet Lao Communist Party. In truth the government acts as a centralised state corporation exercising monopoly power, with an obvious zeal for telecommunications, constructing roads to access the verdant jungle, and advertisements for skin-whitening creams. Any indication of an Orwellian closed society is immediately quashed by numerous satellite dishes beaming fifty international and domestic channels into the thatched huts of far-flung villages (some so aged they seem to have rusted in the countryside).

The country’s attempts to become a hydroelectric power have been shelved, with the Xayaburi project—consisting of eleven major dams and reservoirs along the Mekong—stalled by Vietnamese objections. That’s a saving grace for the next decade because if there is a more enchanting country than Laos, I have yet to see it. Sheer limestone karsts jut upright; the mist swirling around the peaks resembles a mink stole around the neck of a grande dame. I completed overnight treks in Luang Prabang, as well as Luang Namtha in the north, and inland around Nong Khiaw. At the latter, the silky Nam Ou River drifts past geological formations that rise like totems in the morning haze.

But Laos is also the most bombed country per capita in the world. Between 1964 and 1973 half a million US sorties dropped two million tonnes of ordnances on unarmed Laos. ‘The Secret War’—sanctioned by that diabolical duo of Nixon and Kissinger, bypassing Congress approval—meant the indiscriminate bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines. Carpet bombing, saturation bombing—call it what you like—occurred in abundance  in the Xieng Khouang province. Maps dotted in red ink to indicate dropped ordnance show a severe rash along the border of Laos and Vietnam. The exploits of the fighter pilots responsible are documented with glee by Christopher Robbin in The Ravens. Robbins portrays gung-ho mercenaries, high on adventure but short on conscience, acting in covert operations in something of a freelance air force. The pilots dropped cluster bombs that split in two in mid-air to scatter ‘bombies’ (tennis ball-sized mines) or defoliants on the unarmed civilian population, destroying lives—and also livelihoods when one accounts for the slaughtered livestock and poisoned agriculture. An annual average of 350 casualties continues to this day from mine-related mishaps, causing disabilities that require attention in the capital Vientiane.

And yet in Luang Prabang you might find pamphlets—devoid of any irony whatsoever—advertising ‘bomb trekking tours’. Perched on the elevated banks of the Mekong, Luang Prabang is an elegant town that maintains its sophisticated French ambience. From here it’s a six-hour drive east to Phonsavan, a major target for US bombing raids due to its 130 km proximity to the Vietnamese border. Phonsavan was destroyed twice: first it was bombed by the United States; then it was re-built by the Soviets. A dusty main street contains double-storey buildings with a slab-like socialist aesthetic. Drab shops sell mobile phones and state-of-the-art TVs, and also advertise the ‘latest photocopiers’.

I stayed at the King Keo Guesthouse, adjacent to a disused airport shadowed by a defunct transmission tower. My room was at the end of an abandoned runway. At reception I was handed a key attached to a brass shell one finger in length, with the bullet and gun-powder removed from its nose. Mortar shells pierced light down the hotel corridor; overturned cluster bombs, split in two, served as metal benches. The surrealism of place was furthered by the patio’s panoply of artillery better used by Rambo: a crisscrossed cartridge belt displayed beneath a helmet next to a rusted bazooka. War occurs first as tragedy, second as kitsch?

In Phonsavan everyone is in on the act. At Dokkhoune Hotel downtown they’ve dressed up the foyer as part museum, part theme park, and a dizzying array of weaponry is displayed. Types, serial numbers and countries of origin are imprinted on their cold metal casings: BLU 42, BLU 61B, M127. There are green, yellow and blue bombies; UXOs (unexploded ordnances) courtesy of China, the United States and the USSR including missiles, hand grenades, mortars, rockets, ‘pineapple’ mines, projectiles, parachute flares and fragmentation bombs. Perversely, these instruments of death were finely crafted out of high-grade metal and resilient alloys. Military contractor Honeywell was a creative industry of the time, specialising in this dark science of design and destruction. Next door to the hotel, the British-based Mining Advisory Group (MAG) displays its own artefacts of the Secret War including plastic defence guards (forerunners of bullet-proof vests) with ‘PLACE IN FRONT OF ENEMY’ boldly stated lest combatants wore them back to front (so-called grunts were US youths with little education).

We began our bomb trek on Route 7, the highway paved by the French. MAG’s red and white markers demarcated a safe corridor bounded by unseen, sunken bombies. We walked for two arduous days, enjoying spectacular vistas while side-stepping mines. Not only was there genocide and eco-cide in Laos but culture-cide and religio-cide as well, with gold-filigreed pagodas and the Plain of Jars also bombed. The latter are a must-see for the cultural tourist: these ancient vessels in Ban Phakeo bear monkey and turtle designs on their lids, but their uses still remain unknown.

In Ban Tajo, an impoverished village of no more than twenty families, they’ve made use of the bombs in enterprising ways. Cluster bombs have been erected upright to create a long fence; others have been filled with earth and used as vegetable patches flower beds. And so Laos reclaims its history by incorporating its recent past.

Arriving in Ban Khai we saw enormous craters hollowed out in the parched earth. At fifty-six strides in diameter, their size corroborates with local stories of decibel-breaking howls from the sky as bombs rained down to crush Pathet Lao guerrillas in this zone (now completely treeless as defoliants cleared out the jungle entirely). MAG’s de-mining programs, along with support from NGOs in Australia and New Zealand, are providing personnel and resources to clear mines left over. It’s a daunting task. Of the 250 million bombies dropped from the sky, approximately 30 per cent remain unexploded, and it’s estimated that at this rate it will take 250 years to rid the area entirely.

The United States spent $7 billion to drop bombs over Laos. It’s spending a paltry $3 million a year to clean them up. That Henry Kissinger still can parade the world as an elder statesman pitching his geopolitical views is a measure of the West’s selective memory, no less hypocritical than Hun Sen’s reluctance to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice.

In downtown Phonsavan’s Craters Cafe—where upright missiles form a faux Chinese portal—youngsters seemed more interested in the ‘all Stallone’ weekend on TV. Soft power still does what hard power couldn’t: Laos resisted US imperialism but allows it to re-appear via the back door, or rather an open window with fifty channels. A communist nation in thrall to Hollywood? The skin-whitening creams perennially advertised throughout Laos were beginning to make disturbing sense.

If Phonsavan’s setting is strange, so is its calendar. New Year celebrations occur over four days in April, with festivities reaching fever pitch as the ‘water wars’ are enacted. Battles, duels, fights and surprise attacks delight the young and old, Laotian and foreigner alike. Toyota utes packed with water barrels ferry a teen army out for skirmishes against opposing vehicles equally armed, and telecommunications firms sponsor various colour-coded teams. The fun lies in dousing pedestrians or pelting powders of purple, green or yellow on every unsuspecting farang in sight. Westerners participate, particularly backpackers, having bought their brightly coloured weapons at stores selling Mickey Mouse merchandise. Armed with plastic pistols, do they see any irony? This war played out as farce is a reminder of Phonsavan’s strategic location for US attacks on the Pathet Lao.

To evade these antics I joined a trek visiting the Hmong hill tribes, a few hours’ walk into the evergreen jungle. More remnants of the Secret War were common in this small village centred by a communal well and an ancient mill. Pigs poked their snouts in cluster bombs used as troughs. I slept in a bare wooden hut, drank lao-lao at midnight to fire up the body (it has a 50 per cent alcoholic content) and conversed with youngsters by gestures. They assumed I had strayed out of the TV powered by the village generator and refracted via the ubiquitous satellite dish.

It was only from the Hmong that I heard any dissent regarding the one-party system that Laos has endured over the past forty-five years. Yang Xang, our Hmong tour guide, summed up neatly: ‘Loyalty is to our tribe first. Then our country’. Ever keen to keep foreign aid coursing through the state coffers, the Laotian government makes all the right gestures by protecting its hill tribes, celebrating ‘minority people’ in smiling billboards. Originating in Mongolia, and escaping as refugees from Burma, in Laos the Hmong have made advances to protect their culture. Their presence here and in Thailand is a reminder of the geo-politics of Southeast Asia that causes entire people to cross borders that only seem real on maps.

I admired the Laotians in their shyness and their robust sense of mischief. How they deal with their memory of hardship is significant: they recognise it and seek to disarm it by incorporating it into daily life in an ever-present reminder of the past. Bombs used as flowerpots or metal forged into utensils turn the tables on the war industry. By contrast, Cambodia wants to get over its traumas by not opening up old wounds for fear of destabilising the nation. Behind the ever-smiling Cambodians is a fragile society. Chacun son gout, I guess—to each their own—but my money is on Laos emerging from its past with greater strength.

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The Cambodian beach resort of Sihanoukville was as alluring as brochures promised it would be, and the Ream National Park a small gem of nature. Greater resources for rangers monitoring the reserve have minimised deforestation over the past years. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Cambodia’s islands. Some are earmarked for tourism by Russian developers, and have been sold off in lots over the past five years by CPP Cabinet Ministers. Only the GFC has stalled the bulldozers’ cull of old-growth trees. Tourists who visit these islands savour the moment—it’s a pleasure that will soon sour, as it has already on Thailand’s islands in recent decades. But having conveniently forgotten the Dead Kennedys’ rant, I enjoyed my holiday in Cambodia. The crystalline beaches of Otres, Hawaii and Serendipity on the Sihanoukville coast helped sooth the soul after a detour to the Killing Fields.

Jorge Sotirios’ South American odyssey Lonesome George, C’est Moi! will be published by Big Sky Publishing in 2011.