Q&A is BS.

Q&A is probably the dumbest show on television. Yes, dumber than MKR, dumber than Dating Naked, dumber than American Pickers.

The first thing to be clear about is that Q&A is not a current affairs program - it is the political equivalent of The Footy Show.

Its formula is simple.

Step 1. Get a collection of people on a panel, raise an issue and ask for their opinions.  But be careful. This could be interesting if, for example, you had a couple of senior politicians or public servants, policy makers, scientists, legal advisors, foreign affairs experts - whatever - in a one-on-one or even a three way discussion. That runs the risk of being informative. But Q&A doesn’t want to convey information. It wants a fight. So make sure your panel includes people who have nothing to do with the issues but have strong feeling about them. Get in some all-round but irrelevant intellectuals like Germaine Greer, perhaps a novelist or poet, and even a bad wannabe comedian.

Step 2.  Get members of the audience to ask questions of the panel. To get this in perspective, think of all the public lectures you have even been to where they “opened it up for questions” at the end. Do you recall ever hearing an intelligent question from the audience? No. I didn’t think so. People in the audience never ask intelligent or interesting questions because they don’t really know anything about the topic. That’s why they’re in the audience instead of being on the stage.

Step 3.  The coup de grace. Invite people to Tweet responses to the show and actually put these idiotic comments on the screen.

So why does the ABC put this garbage to air?

Do they imagine is the modern equivalent of the old Monday Conference with Robert Moore, because it isn’t.

Do they think that it is their version of SBS’s Insight because it certainly isn’t that either.

The first and most obvious answer is that it is cheap. None of the people on screen is being paid, so it’s really only the cost of the production staff. And Tony Jones' $330,000 salary.

There is however a more troubling reason lurking in the background which has to do with that bete noire of the Left - the notion of authority.

Back in the ancient mists of time, the ABC was set up to be an “intellectual” broadcaster. It was envisaged that it would transmit programs on scientific, academic, cultural and political topics delivered by professionals in the field. In that model of broadcasting, journalists themselves became part of that echelon of professionals and for many years, current affairs broadcasting was mediated by experienced journalists who knew what questions to ask, which answers to accept and which ones required further interrogation. The ABC still conducts this sort of journalism in the 7:30 report, and specialist programs like The Business. The word which we might apply to these forms of journalism is “authoritative.”

But Q&A is not about this at all. Q&A is a product of the modern, post-modern, anti-authoritarian idea, that everyone should have a “voice.”  In its on-air promotions the ABC invites everyone to “Join the conversation.” as if the ABC was one big chat room. The ABC website, which could be, if it wanted to be, a premier news site, is substantially taken up with opinion pieces written by the Usual Suspects – Jonathon Green, Greg Barnes, Julian Burnside etc – followed by hundreds of stupid comments from armchair experts and fervent partisans.

The ABC apparently feels that in some way it is practising a form of “media democracy.”

But of course, organisations that purport to be anti-authoritarian always have their own form of authoritarianism working in the background. The “conversation” which people are invited to join on the ABC is limited to a specific range of topics and attitudes. While Q&A purports to be an open forum for views, anyone who expresses an unpopular opinion is quickly interrupted and cut-off by the moderator. Views that the hand-picked audience agrees with are applauded. When the ABC is criticised by the government for having inappropriate guests in the audience, the Managing Director makes it clear that it will not cave in to authority – in doing so establishing the ABC’s own authority. So, as usual, an anti-authoritarian stance is just a way to establish one’s own authority.
 

The SBS program Insight is an example of how a panel with audience program can work. It takes large scale issues and concentrates on them through a range of views and experiences. Those views and experiences tend to be complementary rather than adversarial. The interaction with the audience feels intimate and genuinely interpersonal. Most importantly, Jennie Brockie is very good at guiding the conversation through the key points. No sense of The Footy Show here.

In other words, the format can work, so why doesn't it work with Q&A. In the end, the program that is made up mainly of people expressing opinions succeeds or fails on the quality of those opinions. In short, Q&A is unwatchable because so many of the people on the panel, in the audience and watching at home are simply dumb.

By way of conclusion, let me list the things that I am personally NOT interested in watching on TV.

Panel discussions that jump from topic to topic. (Q&A)

Comments and questions from people in the audience. (Q&A)

Comments on political and economic topics from people in the arts. (Q&A)

Journalists interviewing other journalists (The Insiders, The Drum.)

Journalists delivering long editorials to camera. (The Bolt Report)

Tweets.

Especially tweets.           

Unfortunately these are the things that television current affairs programs currently consists of.

1-7-2015

 

It's not just gun control that the US, or any of us, needs.

Many people have immediately pointed to gun control or, to put it more accurately, lack of gun control, as the key factor in the Charleston massacre. Others allege that the crime is a symptom of a fundamental and eradicable vein of racism at the heart of America, especially in the South.  John Stewart sombrely lamented that the Confederate flag still flies above buildings in South Carolina.

What these explanations are at pains to contradict is the notion of the solitary deranged shooter as the sole cause of the tragedy. They seek to lay the blame on more deep-seated social problems.
Of course we cannot simply dismiss the implication that this shooter was deranged in some way but, in understanding events like this, we have to look at the interaction between multiple factors.

The strict definition of a “cause” is something that it is a sine qua non which means “without which, not”. That is to say, if it had not occurred, the outcome would not have occurred. In this case we can define three separate causes - three separate essential factors - leading to the Charleston massacre.

The first is the ongoing, deep-seated, residual racism in the southern states of America. Now, of course there is racism everywhere to some degree in the U.S. and the world in general, but the South, which had slavery until 165 years ago and bitterly resented losing it, where people still drive cars with Confederate stickers, where racial integration had to be enforced by Federal troops as recently as the 1960s, and the Ku Klux Klan was a significant political force well into the second half of the 20^th century, and perhaps still is, continues, like a diseased organ to harbour the infection of racial prejudice and hatred.  Still, bigotry and prejudice alone do not lead to massacres.

The next cause, over which we unfortunately seem to have little control, is the seemingly random occurrence of young men with a pathological disposition toward violent acts. These acts are often simply an expression of mental illness involving isolation, resentment, frustration, sometimes messianic or megalomaniac delusions and even hallucinations. Others seem to be inspired and informed by hate-filled political, religious and racial theories. These are sometimes seen as different from the “suicidal loner” type of killer but they are in fact substantially the same. The difference is that killers like Anton Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, weave a political, historical or religious theme into their delusions. Breivik declared his murders to be a justifiable response to Norway’s immigration policies. Would Breivik have ended up killing dozens of people even if Norway was not accepting immigrants from the Middle East? Would he, like Martin Bryant, the Port Arthur killer, have committed mass murder simply as an expression of his inner state. Probably not. He almost certainly, however, would have found some other cause that he could use as a justification for violence. Breivik led up to his crime, like Haron Monis the Lindt café murderer, with a long period of immersion in political and religious propaganda, both reading and writing it. Extreme racist, religious, political or other social propaganda deals, by its very nature, with fear, paranoia and concepts of superiority and immortality. So, while some mass murderers act without the catalyst of a racist or other extreme ideology, crimes like those of Breivik and the Charleston killer, are clearly, as indicated by their selection of the targets, the product of both a deranged mind and a deranged social doctrine.

But there is still one missing factor. Even the most hate-filled neurotic racist cannot do much harm if they are unarmed. The final component in the equation is weapons.

It is reported that the accused in the Charleston murders was given a 45 calibre handgun by his father for his 21^st birthday. The Sandy Hook murderer Adam Lanza killed 20 school children with a gun provided by his mother.

While it is clear that someone who wants to commit a murder can and will find some sort of weapon with which to commit it, the ease with which these mass murderers have been able to access weapons, some of them high-powered and semi-automatic, is truly astonishing.

Eric Harris and Dylan Kelbold who shot 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999, bought handguns and shotguns from older friends who had bought them from gun shows and private sales. During the massacre, Klebold was armed with a 9mm military grade handgun (originally designed as a submachine gun) with 28, 32 and 52 shot magazines: Harris had a pump action shotgun and a 9mm carbine (also an assault weapon) with 13 ten-shot magazines.  They had no political agenda but seemed to trying to experience a real-life version of a computer game, or Matrix-type movie.

Despite the fact that Jared Loughner who opened fired on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, wounding her and killing six others, was found unfit to stand trial because two psychiatric evaluations found him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, he was still able to buy a Glock semi-automatic pistol with a 33 round magazine. Loughner was influenced by right wing polemics denouncing "liberal-leaning" politicians. The local sheriff expressed concerns about how the “vitriol that comes out of certain mouths” could affect “unbalanced people.”

In 2012, 20 year old Adam Lanza entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot dead 20 children and 6 staff. Lanza who had problems with sensory co-ordination, had been diagnosed at 13 with Asperger syndrome and displayed obsessive-compulsive behaviour, had drawn up a huge spreadsheet of over 500 mass killings with their respective death tolls. He watched videos about the Columbine High massacres and the Norway attacks. Lanza’s mother was reported to be a "gun enthusiast" who took her sons to rifle ranges to learn how taught her sons to shoot. They had four guns and a safe containing 1400 round of ammunition. He began his massacre by shooting her in the head four times.

A massacre such as the one in Charleston is thus the product of a chain of causes, as clear, and almost inevitable as in the synthesis of a chemical.

1. Take an ideology – that is to say a body of political, religious or other doctrine – that is loaded with aggressive, fearful, and hostile assertions about conspiracies, threats, concepts of superiority or power.

2. Add a disturbed individual, preferably a young man who feels unfulfilled, directionless, isolated, possibly disliked or mocked who compensates for their lack of real achievements by immersing themselves in fantasy literature, games and on-line discussions, delusionary political theories about evil individuals, corporations, governments or races.

3. Finally, give them a gun. Not some single shot rifle or even a six shot revolver. Give them a 45 automatic with an 8 shot magazine or buy some military grade assault rifles and keep them in a safe, but make sure this disturbed young person can easily access it.

What is important is that none of these three factors is any less important than the other two. Improving gun control will do nothing as long as mentally troubled people are being drawn into extremist ideologies. Eradicating those ideologies (even if we could) will not stop those deranged people from getting guns and using them for hate crime.

These are three different social challenges that require three independent campaigns to combat.

So far, American society has no strategy to tackle even one of them.

The Killing Season - Our own homegrown Game of Thrones.

The Killing Season

If you thought the bloodletting and betrayals of Game of Thrones were shocking, they are possibly trumped by the real- life drama in the ABC’s doco on the political assassination of Kevin Rudd. This series tracks the trajectory of Kevin Rudd from the lofty ascent of his victory over John Howard to his ignominious fall from grace and replacement before his first term was even over. It is a portrait of delusion, panic, mistrust, frustrated ambitions and naked self-interest that rivals anything going on in King’s Landing. 

In fact, Rudd’s story is not that unusual. Every so often political parties find themselves in a position of not having a candidate who is sufficiently “presidential” to lead them into the next election. In this situation it is not unknown to field a charismatic rookie, someone who might seem breath of fresh air, someone not tarnished by association with the old brigade. The Labor Party did this in 1983 when, after deciding that Bill Haydn was unelectable, they brought in Bob Hawke, perhaps the most famous Labor personality in Australia but not actually an MP. More recently the LNP in Queensland parachuted Campbell Newman, a former Lord Mayor of Brisbane into the party as leader.

There are however problems with importing a dynamic, fresh face cleanskin from either the backbench or outside the parliamentary wing to be party leader.

The first one is that choosing someone who has had little or no parliamentary experience puts a lot of noses out of joint, particularly those who have served the party over a long period and are expecting at least an chance to go for the top job. It is clear, for example, that Paul Keating, a powerful and ambitious young politician in the NSW branch, resented the Victorian Bob Hawke being brought in as leader ahead of him and only supported the move on the understanding that he would be up next in the not-too-distant future.

The second is that, while the fact that the candidate is seen as beholden to traditional factions and power-blocs is a positive to the voters, it is a handicap in the daily practice of government. The imported candidate either ends up governing virtually on their own, or has to select a small team of other “neutral” advisors and ministers with whom to work.  That entire group will then, itself, be seen as a threat to the existing factions and powerbrokers. Rudd was seen as operating a little “gang of four” and Newman was seen as creating his own little coterie of “outsiders” to run the government.

The third, which was most conspicuous in Rudd’s case is that, if you market someone as a messiah, you shouldn’t be surprised if they start thinking that they are one. Rudd, in particular, regarded his victory in 2007 as a mandate to pursue a number of crusades – most notably on climate change – rather than running a consensus cabinet.

The root of the problem is that Australian politics, particularly at the Federal level, has become an uneasy mixture of British and American politics. In the Westminster system, the Prime Minister is the head of party which has won a majority in the House of Representative and only governs with the support of that party. In contrast, the US President cannot be removed by a vote from within his or her party (and technically does not even need a party) and has quite considerable executive power even though constrained legislatively by the Congress. Australian Federal elections are increasingly presidential with the preference for Prime Minister now arguably equal to or even overtaking allegiance to a party as the main factor in the polls. Surveys now quote statistics for “preferred PM” more frequently than "preferred party."

This puts our parties in a bind. On the one hand they need to field dynamic, charismatic, inspirational, trustworthy candidates as future PMs. At the same time, if those candidates win office, the party power brokers have to find a way to make them do as they’re told.

Clearly, judging from The Killing Season, many members of the Labor party thought they had created a monster in Rudd, and they possible had. The problem is that Rudd was, and continues to be, a very strange man. Characteristics that seemed quaint and almost endearing early in the piece gradually started to become worrying later on. The blank expression which would suddenly erupt into crinkly smile; the mono-tonal voice that seemed to over-intellectualise everything. The oddly pedantic manner. Underneath the floppy boyish fringe and pink Billy Bunter cheeks there seemed to be a strangely detached academic.  He seemed to be a man who had colleagues, but no friends.

Gillard on the other hand was as common as a pie and chips. She was a sheila you could take to the footie. (Carn’ the Doggies.).  Underneath, however, there was Thatcher-like steel. Clearly, some people saw her as a better bet for leader because she seemed to be everything Rudd was not. Though intelligent, she was not an intellectual. Her accent and language were naturally Australian while Rudd always seemed like an middle class nerd throwing in a few Australianisms ("Fair suck of the sauce bottle") to try and be one of the blokes. While clearly ambitious, Gillard was not messianic but had some talent as a speaker in the House. In fact, Gillard’s debating style suggested that she might at some stage have wished to be a barrister. Her debating style was unreservedly adversarial and she approached debate in the House very much like a it was a trial, relying on clever turns of phrases, personal attacks, considerable sarcasm and generally playing to the gallery. 

What The Killing Season confirms is that Gillard’s tactical ruthlessness was not confined to her debating style. Her path to leadership was executed with careful determination, cloaked right up until literally the last minutes by “plausible deniability.” She still sticks to the story that she didn’t want to challenge Rudd but in the end everyone insisted that she had to and, for the sake of the party, she just couldn’t refuse. At the same time she makes it clear that she thought Rudd couldn’t govern and of course, by implication, she could. 

In contrast to Gillard’s protestations of innocence, however, several other Labor politicians seem only too willing reveal themselves as conspirators, betrayers, assassins and fools. Tony Burke, for example, cheerfully relates details of his involvement in the fiasco as if somehow dissociated from his own actions. Most amazing is the man, whom Rudd most relied on, who turned against him in order to maintain his own position as Treasurer. The perpetually surprised looking Wayne Swan denies any part in the whole affair, almost to the point of denying any knowledge of the matter. At one point he offers a staggering self-contradiction. When asked why he didn’t warn Rudd that people were talking about challenging him for the leadership he answers to the effect “Because I didn’t think such a challenge was likely” then adding “And besides, I took steps to head it off.” It was a moment that begged for a lawyer like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men to “But if you felt there was no likelihood of a challenge, why was there the need to head it off?”

At least, unlike Game of Thrones, we don’t have wait a year for the next nail-biting instalment.

The West's choice: invade Iraq now or fight a 100 year war against IS.

Fundamentalist Islam is not new. The Moslem Brotherhood was formed in 1928 and has worked since that time to bring all the countries of the Middle East under Islamic religious law. It has been seen variously as an ally and an enemy by Arab regimes since that time. Its progeny, Al-Qaeda came into being in 1989 committed to ridding Moslem countries of both the Soviet Union and Western influences. It also committed itself to establishment of a world-wide caliphate. It has only been relatively recently however, with the rise of IS, also called ISIS, ISIL or Da’ish that we have seen a large number of young Moslems in countries like Britain and Australia travelling to the Middle East to fight with extremist forces or plan mass attacks on their home countries.

So what makes IS different?

The answer is victory.

What IS has done, which has taken it beyond the achievements of the Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda is to forge what looks like a plausible military force out of a mish-mash of Syrian rebels and successfully invade, and conquer, about a third of Iraq. They say nothing succeeds like success and, while the September 11^th attack on New York inspired a number of young Moslems to carry out terrorist acts in Western countries, the achievement of IS in capturing entire provinces, including major cities, in Iraq has served to provide ongoing inspiration to potential recruits worldwide.

While individual terrorist attacks such as New York and Madrid inspire copy-cat attacks in the immediate aftermath, media reports of IS atrocities provide enticement and appeal for would-be jihadists on a daily basis. The success of IS also offers a different sort of invitation to potential recruits. Where Al-Qaeda invited people to commit individual, often solitary, acts of martyrdom such as being suicide bombers, IS invites them to join an army and fight side by side with comrades in a "Band-of-Brothers" situation where the primary aim is not martyrdom but actual military victory.

As long as IS keeps winning battles in Iraq it will continue to be an inspiration and an attraction to young Moslems keen to commit to a heroic cause.

In addition, seizing of large tracts of Iraq has not just increased Islamic State’s appeal and reputation, it has also increased their revenue. Massive income from selling oil, “taxation” in occupied zones, sale of antiquities and straight-out extortion means that IS can conduct a worldwide Internet campaign via websites, Facebook and Twitter inviting people to “join us.”

What this means it that the half-hearted approach by the West in dealing with IS is an invitation to disaster. The current dictum that “It’s the Iraqis’’ problem, they should deal with it” is only going to ultimately create a worse problem for the western powers. It has already been demonstrated that the Iraqi army is unable to recapture territory permanently from IS and can only hope, at best, to prevent Baghdad falling.

Even if the Iraqi army can drive back IS, which might take a generation, so much more damage will be done in the meantime. IS will  continue to be an inspiration to wannabe fighters around the world even if it only holds onto the territory it has already occupied. And it will also have time to radicalise another generation of people within those occupied areas.  

In 2005 Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein revealed the 7 step Islamist “master-plan” as explained to him by Al-Qaeda head al-Zarqawi. In this plan, which so far the Islamists have followed almost exactly, the 5^th step, scheduled for 2013-2016, was the declaration of an Islamic caliphate  - which IS has done – and the breaking down of Western and Israeli resistance in preparation for a  massive all-out confrontation in Step 6.  What is concerning is that, even if this plan turns out to be over-ambitious – in, for example, anticipating world victory for Islam by 2020 – its failure will not mean that the Islamists will give up. Several Islamic militants have declared that they are prepared to fight for 100 years to establish Islam as the world religion.

The smartest thing that the Western powers could do right now is send a massive multi-lateral force into Iraq and remove IS completely from that country. That would limit IS's operations to its involvement in the Syrian civil war and would massively reduce its income but, more importantly, suffering a massive defeat would substantially reduce its reputation and appeal to young people world wide. A series of trials for captured leaders would also demonstrate the West’s lack of tolerance for terrorist movements.

Unfortunately, the West, in particular the US under Obama, have a strong aversion to sending American troops to the Middle East which is a pity because if they don’t do so soon, they will be forced to fight a much greater war, both in the Middle East and at home, for many decades to come. 

Should "conscience votes" override the will of the people.

So, we have is a predictable debate in the Liberal party over whether there should be a “conscience vote” on the subject of gay marriage. On both sides, Liberal and Labor, there are arguments that the party should formulate an official, binding position on the issue as set by the party's membership and its various governing committees and the electorate itself. 

This raises several question, and misconceptions, about how democracy works – or is supposed to work.

One letter to the paper recently said, to paraphrase, “I didn't vote for my local member to vote for what he or she thinks is right, I expect him or her to vote for what I want.”

In a similar vein, at least one Liberal backbencher has said, again in paraphrase, “It’s not up to the front benchers to decide what they think is right – they are supposed to abide by the policies as agreed on by the party organisation.”

Okay. So let’s get a couple of things straight about democracy.

Democracy is not about electing politicians to do whatever the electorate wants. It is about electing people who will act wisely and honestly on the basis of the best information available. In other words, they are people elected on their ability and their character: they are not just delegates charged with voting in a particular way. Yes, of course politicians campaign on the basis of specific policies and promises. It has become increasingly necessary for politicians to employ a “try before you buy” approach to electioneering where they foreshadow the policies they will or will not endorse. This is however a poor basis for electing someone. For a start,  the issues that are topical at the time of the election will change their complexion over time and most politicians will eventually be forced to dishonour or heavily modify the promises they made on the hustings. More importantly, although they might be elected on one issue, members of the Parliament are required to vote on all the bills that come before the house. As we have seen recently, single-issue parties and candidates are often dangerously out of their depth when it comes to general legislative matters.

Of course, the idea of a parliament of wise, honest independents considering each case on its merits is all but impossible under the party system. The party system evolved because it became clear that, by joining into alliances with others, politicians could get their bills passed via mutual tit-for-tat support - you vote for my bill, I'll vote for yours. But parties require funding and support and therefore need rank-and-file (i.e. non-elected) members.  Australian electoral rules require parties to have minimum membership to qualify for registration. If the members of the party were there simply to run raffles and staff information booths, politics would be simpler but, as it has turned out, the members of the parties have come to believe that they make the policies of the party. I have heard members of political parties explicitly state “We make the policies and the parliamentary wing is just there to carry them out.”

And that is a scary thought.

I cannot imagine a more frightening situation than the elected members of the Liberal, National and Labor Parties being held to the policies formulated by their parties’ rank-and-file members.

The reason for that is simple. A lot of the members of political parties are simply nuts.

People join political parties for many different reasons. For some it's a social club; for others a chance to make business contacts; because they hope to stand for election; because they are passionate about some cause, or just concerned over the way things are. Whatever ideas people might have when they join a party, if they are among the few that are elected to the parliament, they learn that government is the art of compromise, moderation and incremental change. To win government in Australia you have to win the middle ground and that means forsaking extreme positions. This is why, inevitably, the policies of the major parties are much more similar than many of the rank and file members on either side would like them to be. The parliamentary wings of the parties, for example, realise that they that dare not criticise the other sides' policies too much because they might have to adopt those same policies at some point in the future.

Before politicians convince the electorate of the necessity for many policies, they first have to convince the members of their own parties.

The notion of elected representatives echoing the majority wishes of their electorates is not democracy, it is just mob rule. And the idea of those elected members obediently carrying out the will of their parties’ memberships and back-benchers is also not good government. A conscience vote is not some sort of anomaly running contrary to the principles of the Westminster system. Just the opposite: it is one of the few times a parliament acts as it might in an ideal world.