En Passant

It says much about the politics of the Australian elite and their journalists that one of the big stories is whether Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister, and Peta Credlin, his chief of staff, made the beast with two backs. Who cares?

Well, lots of conservatives do, and not for the moralistic reasons you might think. Niki Savva in her just released new book The Road to Ruin uses the seemingly inexplicable loyalty of the PM to his Chief of Staff to explain a number of bad decisions, and the ruthlessness with which Credlin, protected by Abbott, could exercise power and alienate a large number of Liberal and National Party politicians.

To these troglodytes the only explanation could be that the two were lovers. It was thus all Credlin’s fault that the government was behind in the polls and had been for 30 months. If only Abbott sacked Credlin … This was the very argument Senator Connie Fierravanti-Wells made to Abbott two days before the February 2015 (numerically unsuccessful but politically successful) spill motion against him.

Yet this misses the point. It covers up the obvious. It was Abbott’s rotten policies attacking the working class and the poor that saw him and his government fall behind in the polls. His and Hockey’s 2014 Budget was a disaster for his government from which it never recovered.

Abbott has already said he did not have sex with that woman.

This ‘did they or didn’t they’ sideshow is about covering up the political sins of the conservatives and sustaining their delusions about cutting spending on the poor and working class and attacking our wages being the way to save the economy, by which they mean profits.

At 8.46 am on Tuesday 1 March I sent the article below to the opinion editors at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Canberra Times. It is about the Paul Sheehan affair and his repetition of lies from Louise about a rape in Sydney she blamed on Middle Eastern men. It was untrue.

I got an automated response from the SMH and the Age saying they received lots of submissions and if they hadn’t got back to me in a few days consider it rejected. (My words.)

Sixty hours later and not one of the opinion editors has got back to me about what I thought was an OK article highlighting the liberal racism of the Fairfax newspapers.
Here is what I sent them. It is an edited down version of an earlier article on my blog.

I just can’t for the life of me figure out why they won’t publish it, can you?

John

By now most readers will know the story. On Tuesday 24 February in the Sydney Morning Herald and online via The Age and The Canberra Times long time conservative Fairfax columnist Paul Sheehan wrote an incredible story of police neglect and a Middle Eastern culture of rape.

It turns out it was too incredible. The alleged victim, ‘Louise’, had made the rape story up. There was no rape; there was no Middle Eastern rape culture; there was no rape epidemic. A quick google would have revealed her story as a fabrication, given for example she had regaled Reclaim White Australia rallies with similar lies.

The offensive article now starts with an apology that isn’t. On Wednesday Sheehan too apologised, not to Muslim men for his brown men rape white women scare campaign, but to the Police for calling into question their professionalism.

The damage has been done. The edited story remains on the Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax media websites, as do the apologies that aren’t. The shit will stick.

Sheehan remains untouched and the edited article remains a travesty.

Australia’s mainstream media is a bit like Australia’s politics. It gives the impression of difference but in reality the two major newspaper outlets – News and Fairfax – disagree only on the detail. They agree on the overriding message and practice of neoliberalism and austerity. They agree too on creating a distraction from austerity. For Fairfax disguised and now not so disguised Islamophobia and liberal racism are good ways to do that.

Murdoch’s News media in Australia is like the Liberals. The loss making Australian newspaper is the key outlet for Rupert’s reactionary views about what needs to be done to fix the economy and to prop up and justify the conservatives and their world views. The Fairfax broadsheet stable is like the Labor Party, full of reassuring liberal and left of centre columnists who give cover for neoliberalism and racism.

Mainstream media doesn’t engage with its readership on the issues that impact on them, like low wages, job insecurity and other economic matters. And when it does engage it does so in ways that are top down, reflecting a bosses’ view of the world.

Surveys show voters well to the left of politicians on most issues. It is the same with newspapers, which are after all part of the ideological machine of capitalism. They are well to the right of their readers.

Of course Fairfax has left wing columnists. They perform a vital function for Fairfax media. They give a left face to an essentially neoliberal newspaper, much as left members of the Parliamentary Labor Party give a left face to the neoliberal Labor Party.

This is not to doubt their sincerity. It is just to try and understand their objective role.

To my mind Fairfax media has made a conscious decision to shift to the right, or rather become more open about it. This looks like it is an attempt to win some of Murdoch’s readers in the perhaps forlorn hope of winning a bigger market share of a shrinking market. It is a strategy similar to Labor’s. You beat your competitors by becoming them. It hasn’t worked for Labor and it won’t work for Fairfax.

Sheehan’s article and his kid glove treatment since then suggest that engorging racists is now part of the modus operandi of the Fairfax media.

Fairfax could employ a socialist columnist. After all the rise of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK suggest there is a big audience for socialist ideas in one form or another among ordinary people, and that audience exists too in Australia.

Fairfax’s ideological blinkers mean they cannot do this. Even if they did it would merely add to the veneer of difference when their main game is austerity and hoodwinking workers with ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ and more obvious racism and Islamophobia.

Any reclaiming of the Fairfax papers for their readership ultimately must depend on the workers at Fairfax itself. Over to the unions and workers there.

We on the left can best contribute to the defeat of people like Sheehan and their agenda by building the anti-racist and anti-Islamophobic movements and defend refugees. Let Them Stay shows just a glimpse of what we can do and win.

John Passant is, among other things, a freelance writer. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on his blog, En Passant.

History records that John Howard’s Liberals won government 20 years ago, on 2 March, 1996.

His government had a ruthless class agenda, writes David Glanz in Solidarity, but it was Labor’s timid opposition that kept it in power.

To read the whole article click here.  20 years since his election: John Howard—class warrior for the rich

The government’s cruel refugee policies help to spread lies and xenophobia. The recent campaign to “Let them Stay”—over the government’s threat to deport 267 refugees—has shown that ordinary people will stand up against racist policy. Come to this Solidarity meeting in Canberra on Thursday to discuss how we can best fight together against racism in Australia.

1 pm Thursday 3 March. Meet in the Copland Courtyard of ANU to move to a nearby room.

I have a MasterCard. The interest on the card depends on which bank and which type of MasterCard you want, but low rate cards start at around ten percent and at the higher end they are about 20% on any unpaid balances.

Given that interest rates in Australia are at almost historic lows, the interest rates banks and other card providers charge is exorbitant. The Senate Economics Reference Committee released a report in December 2015 on credit card charges but its recommendations were anodyne and didn’t address the rip off that is credit card interest.

So, with all this ripping off of Australians, you’d expect MasterCard to make a big profit in Australia and pay lots and lots of tax.

Not on your nelly. According to Michael West in the Fairfax papers:

‘So it is that once you have trawled the database, stumbled upon the relevant entity and paid ASIC the requisite fees, you will find, for instance, that global credit card giant MasterCard last paid $4.3 million in tax to the Tax Office. That was for the year to December 2014. This is lower than the year before, when it somehow got $429,650 back from the taxman, which is nice work if you can get it.

‘The year before this, in 2012, MasterCard managed to claw back $3.4 million from the Tax Office. During the past three years then, this world-wide colossus has parted with a lazy half a million dollars in tax.

‘To be fair, let’s take it back another three years. From 2009 through 2011, MasterCard paid $33 million in corporate income tax.’

You can read the whole article here. Card giant MasterCard lowers local tax bill

So it appears MasterCard gets a lot of revenue from Australia and yet pays little tax here. It screws us with high credit card interest rates and screws us again by not paying much tax here. Shame on MasterCard and shame on our politicians for not addressing the high credit card interest rates or the tax avoidance.

By now most of my Australian readers will know the story. Last Tuesday (24 February) in the Sydney Morning Herald (and online via The Age and The Canberra Times) long time conservative Fairfax columnist Paul Sheehan wrote an incredible story of police neglect and a Middle Eastern culture of rape called ‘The story of Louise: we’ll never know the scale of the rape epidemic in Sydney’.

It turns out it was too incredible. The alleged victim, ‘Louise’, had made the rape story up. There was no rape; there was no Middle Eastern rape culture; there was no rape epidemic. A quick google would have revealed her story as a fabrication, given for example she had regaled Reclaim White Australia rallies with similar lies.

The more outrageous suggestions that Sheehan built on the back of this one false claim by Louise of a culture of rape among middle eastern men and gangs roaming Sydney to rape women have been removed. Interestingly Sheehan blames rape culture for the Cronulla riots and that predictably is still in his rotten article.

The offensive article now starts with:

‘APOLOGY: In this column Fairfax Media reported the details of an alleged sexual assault. A subsequent column published on February 24 headlined “The story of Louise: why the police have no case to answer, but I do“, acknowledged key elements of the original story were unable to be substantiated. An earlier version of the story below, which has been corrected, included aspersions against the Middle Eastern community and raised untested allegations of inaction against the NSW Police. Fairfax Media sincerely regrets the hurt and distress the reports caused to these groups, and our readers, and unreservedly apologises.’

On Wednesday Sheehan apologised, not to Muslim men for his brown men rape white women ‘story’, but to the Police for calling into question their professionalism. You can read it here.  The story of Louise: why the police have no case to answer, but I do

The damage has been done. The edited story remains on the Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax media websites, as does the apology that isn’t.  Louise’s lies, relayed by Sheehan, were shared over 11,000 times, no doubt further justifying in the minds of many Reclaim White Australia racists their hatred of Muslims. The shit will stick.

A week later and neither the SMH nor Fairfax more generally have taken any action against Sheehan.

Since writing this the SMH has apologised, unreservedly no less. The ‘apology’ says:

‘In last Monday’s paper, the Herald reported the details of an alleged sexual assault under the headline “The horrifying untold story of Louise”.

‘A subsequent column printed in last Thursday’s edition, “The story of Louise: why the police have no case to answer, but I do”, acknowledged key elements of the original story were unable to be substantiated.

‘The original story, which has been corrected, included aspersions against the Middle Eastern community and raised untested allegations of inaction against the NSW Police.

‘The Herald sincerely regrets the hurt and distress this report caused to these groups, and unreservedly apologises.’

Sheehan remains untouched and the edited article remains a travesty.

Compare that to the treatment of SMH columnist Mike Carlton. He wrote a column highly critical of Israel and its treatment of the people of Gaza, (Israel’s rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism). He told some readers to f&*k off. Carlton resigned when editor Darren Goodsir told him he was going to be suspended for a few weeks.

As an aside some years ago Darren approached me to write for the online SMH blog, the National Times. I even visited him in his workplace and he showed me around the floor. When he became editor of the SMH I suggested the paper could do with a real left wing columnist, like me. He rejected my approach.

Australia’s mainstream media is a bit like Australia’s politics. It gives the impression of difference but in reality the two major newspaper outlets – News and Fairfax – disagree only on the detail. They agree on the overriding message and practice of neoliberalism and austerity. They agree too on creating a distraction from austerity. For Fairfax disguised and now not so disguised Islamophobia and liberal racism are good ways to do that.

Murdoch’s News media in Australia is like the Liberals. The loss making Australian newspaper is the key outlet for Rupert’s reactionary views about what needs to be done to fix the economy and to prop up and justify the conservatives and their world views. The Fairfax broadsheet stable is like the Labor Party, full of reassuring liberal and left of centre columnists who give cover for neoliberalism and racism.

There is more than one way to skin we punters. The first and perhaps most successful neoliberal government in Australia was the Hawke Labor government. Labor is the wolf in sheep’s clothing, while the L-N P is the wolf in wolf’s clothes. Fairfax is the disguised wolf of the media world.

Its audience is somewhat different to Murdoch’s. It appeals to the more liberal sections of society. Its readership is declining. It would be correct to say it is under real pressure from the online world. (That includes, in a very very small way, bloggers like me. However on a larger scale imagine a thousand websites to choose from and you begin to get a sense of the challenge to hard copy newspapers.)

But it is not just new technology that is undermining the daily newspaper. It is also the fact that they don’t engage with their readership on the issues that impact on them, like low wages, job insecurity and other economic matters. And when they do engage they often do so in ways that are top down, reflecting a bosses’ view of the world. Surveys show voters well to the left of politicians on most issues. It is the same with newspapers, which are after all part of the ideological machine of capitalism. They are well to the right of their readers.

Of course Fairfax has left wing columnists. They range from liberal left to liberal left. These left columnists perform a vital function for Fairfax media. They give a left face to an essentially neoliberal newspaper, much as left members of the Parliamentary Labor Party give a left face to the neoliberal Labor Party.

That is not to doubt their sincerity. It is just to try and understand their objective role.

Clearly too to my mind Fairfax media has made a conscious decision to shift to the right, or rather become more open about it. This looks like it is an attempt to win some of Murdoch’s readers in the perhaps forlorn hope of winning a bigger market share of a shrinking market. It is a similar strategy to Labor’s. You beat your competitors by becoming them. It hasn’t worked for Labor and it won’t work for Fairfax.

Readers may know of the concerns I have expressed about my local newspaper, Fairfax’s The Canberra Times. Through not reporting on important rallies in Canberra, such as Let them Stay, Invasion Day and Grandmothers against removals, and with page after page of sympathetic reporting on reclaim white Australia racists, the Canberra Times may be becoming a paper of white supremacy.

Certainly Sheehan’s article and his kid glove treatment since then suggest that engorging racists is now part of the modus operandi of the Fairfax media.

Is there a solution? Well we can respond as consumers. (I won’t for example be renewing my Canberra Times subscription when it runs out in May. I will probably subscribe to the open enemy, The Australian, just to see what the fruitcake faction of capital and the centre right think.) Consumer boycotts rarely work, especially those by isolated individuals.

Fairfax could employ a socialist columnist. After all the rise of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK suggest there is a big audience for socialist ideas in one form or another among ordinary people, and that audience exists too in Australia.

If Fairfax had any sense that is one step they would take. But their ideological blinkers mean they cannot do this. Even if they did it would merely add to the veneer of difference when their main game is austerity and hoodwinking workers with nudge nudge wink wink racism.

There are of course alternative newspapers and magazines on the left, such as Solidarity, the one I write for and of which I am a member.

Any reclaiming of the Fairfax papers for their readership ultimately must depend on the workers at Fairfax itself. Over to the unions and workers there. A group of senior leftish columnists and journalists could approach management and suggest life might get difficult for Fairfax if Sheehan isn’t sacked, reprimanded, whatever and if the case against racism and for refugees isn’t made more loudly in the pages of The Age, The Canberra Times and The Sydney Morning Herald.

How we can best contribute to the defeat of people like Sheehan and their agenda is to build the anti-racist, anti-Islamophobic movement and defend refugees. The Let them stay campaign offers a glimpse of what we can do and in doing that we can shift the debate to the left and give hope and guidance to all those workers looking for ways out of the neoliberal stranglehold they are caught in.

In a recent article in socialist magazine Solidarity inspired by the Let them Stay campaign, Amy Thomas says among other things:

‘If unions refuse to co-operate with any deportations, it will create a serious obstacle for the government. And any stance against the removals would get wide community support.’

She goes on to say:

‘This is one of the most promising and inspiring developments in the movement to free the refugees we’ve seen in a long time. Keeping up the momentum, and deepening the support, is essential.

‘The government has flagged moving Asha and her parents to community detention. But that would leave them more vulnerable to the Immigration Department and being moved to Nauru.

‘There is only one place that Asha, her family and all of the 267 can get the safety and protection they need—and that is to be free in the Australian community. One child—one person—in detention, is one too many.’

The question for me now becomes how to link the wonderful words of support from union leaders to actions in defence of asylum seekers and refugees; how to ‘keep up the momentum and deepen the support.’ As Amy says, I think we need to be highlighting the industrial action Lady Cilento staff took as one example of the way forward. At the ANU the NTEU called a photo-shoot protest to let them stay and some staff joined the union as a result so the issue has resonance with workers.  We should also I think begin discussing civil disobedience as another part of the way forward. Close down Melbourne to close down Manus.

To read Amy’s excellent article click here.  Lady Cilento Hospital workers show the way to win

There is a growing recognition that Australia’s immigration detention centres are concentration camps, and no amount of denial by various apologists for the brutalisation of asylum seekers and refugees will change that reality.

Hitler’s first concentration camps were set up soon after his election in 1933 to lock up and destroy the left in Germany. He imprisoned tens of thousands of socialists, communists and trade unionists. In doing this the Nazis borrowed the idea from the British in South Africa during the Boer War. The US in the Philippines and the Spanish in Cuba had also set up concentration camps.

Around the globe today there are many concentration camps operating. For example, the Sri Lankan government, Australia’s close ally in brutalising asylum seekers, jails many Tamil people in concentration camps.  Gaza is an Israeli concentration camp.

The Greens have combined with the Turnbull government to push through Senate reforms that will effectively silence the Senate voice of those who are not supporters of the big four, the Liberals and Nationals, the Labor Party or the Greens (plus Senator Xenophon in South Australia.)

At the moment the Senate has not only those big party representatives but a hodge podge of former Palmer United Party senators, a former Democratic Labor Party member, a Family First person, a Liberal Democrat, Xenophon and a car aficionado.

Ricky Muir, for example, from the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, received 0.39% of the Victorian Senate vote on first preferences but won a quota (16.67%) and hence a Senate seat because of preference deals with other minor parties.

The Senate is an undemocratic institution, even by bourgeois standards. Thus for example, Tasmania, with a population of about 516,000 elects 12 Senators, the same number of senators as New South Wales with a population of 7.5 million, almost fifteen times bigger.

The reforms will make the Senate even more undemocratic. The three million Australians who do not vote for the big 4 plus Xenophon will have no voice whatsoever. Of course preference whispering means that people and parties with very different views agree to share their small number of votes to create a unified vote big enough to win a seat.

The 3 million might be unified in not voting for the big four but they aren’t united in who they vote for. Ricky Muir or Jacqui Lambie do not represent that 3 million. Electing someone whose initial support is less than one percent on the basis of support fro other parties and people whose policies and views might be diametrically opposed is not democratic either.

Is there a solution, this side of revolution? Abolishing the Senate is the first step in democratising the bourgeois institution of Parliament.

The second would be to have a proportional representation system so that those whose vote reaches a certain low level (say 2%) win a seat or seats.

The third step would be annual elections, held for example in the period after the government hands down its Budget.

These demands might sound outrageous but abolishing upper houses used to be Labor Party policy. It is why for example Queensland has only a single House and has had so since 1922.

The great British working class democrats of the 1830s and 1840s,the Chartists, demanded annual parliaments. This might lead to some extent to representatives interested in reflecting the economic will of workers, not big business. That is one of the reasons why the bourgeoisie hate it and instead prefer much longer terms where they can spend a few years attacking us and then give a few scraps from the table in the last pre-election year. .