Crispin Hull

The John Brogden story reveals Australian journalism in a state of moral confusion and publishers easy prey to manipulation.

Brogden resigned as Leader of the Opposition in NSW a month after events at the Hilton Hotel. These events – insulting the former Premier’s wife and touching up and propositioning two women – were heard and witnessed by half a dozen journalists and the two women were themselves journalists.

Why did it take a month for the story to get to the public?

The journos cannot have it both ways. They might have thought that on July 29, the date of the events, that the conversations and actions were essentially a private matter. After all, the public says it is sick of the media intruding into private lives even if it is the private life of public person and even if it shows that person in a bad light.

If that was the case on July 29, surely it was still the case in late August.

If it was not the case in late August, then it was not the case on July 29. In that instance it means the journalists and their publishers failed the people of NSW by making them endure a man not fit to be alternative Premier for a month longer than necessary.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 3 sep brogden journalism”

Thousands of Australian war veterans have two journalists and a public servant to thank that their entitlements were not slashed by the Federal Government last year by $500 million.

The public servant – obviously disgusted at the meanness of the Government — leaked the proposal to Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus of the Herald Sun who promptly published.

The Government – without the help of spin and misleading advertising campaigns – was caught. It had to abandon the scheme. But it did not abandon the witchhunt against the leaker and the journalists which moved one pace ahead this week in a way that could develop into a major test of freedom of speech in Australia.

The Government sent in the cops to find the source of the leak. The valuable resources of the Australian Federal Police, which would be better spent chasing terrorists or even speeding motorists in Canberra, were unleashed to chase a public servant who embarrassed the Government. There were no questions of national security or threat to life or limb – just a threat to the ego of the Howard Government and its pervasive media management.

The police trawled the records of several thousand emails and phone calls and they charged Desmond Patrick Kelly under the Federal Crimes Act with leaking official information.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 27 august 2005 journo privilege”

Surprise, surprise. Australians have not taken up digital television. It was inevitable from the late 1990s when the Government set up its digital-television policy. The policy was a dud from the beginning, and I and others pointed out its obvious defects. The policy pandered to the big end of town – the three commercial networks at the expense of the viewing public.

Where are we more than four years after the beginning of digital transmission? A mere 500,000 out of 7.8 million households have digital television – a little over 6 per cent. In Britain the figure is 70 per cent.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan acknowledged the low take up this week and said something should be done. The House of Representatives Committee of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts might well be miffed that Coonan’s statement came as it is conducting hearings into the question. Coonan said that the analog system could not be turned off in 2008 as the original policy envisaged. She said also that no one had made a case for a fourth commercial network.

Those statements might well have pre-empted what the committee might find. For a start, turning off the analog system sooner rather than later might get more people to go digital – but voter outrage would prevent it. But adding a purely digital fourth network might encourage digital uptake because viewers would at last get some value out of digital.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 20 august digital television”

Beware politicians meddling with electoral matters. Invariably they change the rules to suit their own side.

Chief Minister Jon Stanhope wants to do exactly that in his attempt to increase the size of the Legislative Assembly.

He makes some solid arguments about why the size should be increased, but on the configuration of the electorates and seats his arguments happen to suit the Labor Party.

At present we have two electorates of five members and one of seven, making 17. Stanhope wants five five-member electorates, making 25.

On the voting patterns of the last election, this would very much favour Labor. In the two five-member electorates, Labor averaged 48 per cent of the vote and got 60 per cent of the seats. In the seven-member electorate it got 45.5 per cent of vote and 42 per cent of the seats.

It would be appalling for the Greens. In the five-member electorates they got 7.5 per cent of the votes and zero seats.

(Incidentally, I am rounding to the nearest half a percent for ease of reading).

The Liberals and the Greens want three seven-member electorates – for equally self-serving reasons. In the seven-member electorate the Greens got 11.5 per cent of the vote and 14 per cent of the seats. The Libs got just 32.5 per cent of the vote and 42 per cent of the seats – a richly undeserved result.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 13 aug 2005 size of ass”

In 1942 Australia was fighting the Japanese for its very existence as a nation. In that war, all the values and institutions that Australians hold dear were under threat.

The terrorist attacks on London transport, in Bali nightclubs, the New York World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were horrific, but they were not nation-threatening.

In that year Robert Menzies, later Prime Minister, gave a series of broadcast essays called the Forgotten People. The one that Prime Minister John Howard likes is the one in which Menzies extols the virtues of the middle class – “salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on”.

But, in the light of this week’s revelations about Guantanamo Bay, Howard and his Attorney-General Philip Ruddock should read the other essays.

In one, Menzies wrote, “At this moment our men are fighting for our hearths and homes. Yes, but also for a free Parliament, for open and incorruptible courts of justice, for the even administration of laws freely enacted and honourably obeyed.

“If we think with horror and repugnance of Nazi tyranny it is because, under the brutish practices of the Putsch and the Gestapo, the law is no man’s protector, and the judges, ceasing to be his defenders, become the agents of oppression.

“Do not let us begin to think lightly of the law. Its rule, its power, its authority, are at the centre of our civilisation.”

Menzies was arguing that even in the midst of a nation-threatening struggle, the rule of law must prevail – in that instant that the High Court should determine whether the Federal Parliament had acted within the Constitution, but also more broadly.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 6 august 2005”

When I was in Year 10, our history teacher, Loring Hudson, came into class one day and, before even saying good morning, bellowed in Arabic: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.”

“Rocky”, as he was inevitably nick-named, was eccentric, but at this we thought he had gone quite mad.

“Write it down,” he said, and spelled out the transliteration and then the translation.

He followed this with lessons about the rise of Islam in the sixth century to it zenith in the 15th century. “Rocky” – an American Renaissance man — was keen to tell us why it happened, as well as what happened. He was that kind of teacher.

In Year 12 we studied World War II. “Rocky” made us write a list under the heading The Causes of the Second World War. It was at the height of the Cold War. History was seen in the context of wars between nation states. The question was: why do nations go to war? These days a better question is: why do individuals resort to violence?

It is hardly surprising that the answers are similar.

Under the heading The Causes of the Second World War we wrote something like:

1. The harsh Treaty of Versailles forcing Germany to pay huge war reparations which sent its people into poverty and increased resentment among Germans against the victors in World War I.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 30 july allah why”

An enormous flag dominates the skyline of Aqaba – the town at the tip of the right-hand prong of the Y at the head of the Red Sea.

The casual observer would assume it is a Jordanian flag – black, white and green horizontal stripes with a red triangle at the staff containing a seven-pointed star. But the star is missing and the stripes are in the wrong order – the white is at the bottom instead of the middle.

In fact it is a huge version of the flag hoisted in 1917 by T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) when his Arab forces captured the fort of Aqaba from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

The British were delighted – anything to hinder the Turks who were on the side of the Germans in World War I. Ambiguous promises were made to the Arabs by the British that they would get independence in their lands – including Palestine — after the war. The British also gave ambiguous promises to the Jewish people that they could have a homeland in Palestine after the war.

After the war Britain and France divided the spoils. Britain took Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait and several strategic areas around the Red Sea and France took Lebanon and Syria. Saudi Arabia went its own way.

The Arabs of the former Ottoman empire have been divided ever since. Even the mid-world-wars influx of Jews into Palestine and the creation of Israel could not unite them, in nationhood, policy, economic development or even attitude to Israel.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 23 july 2005 mid east”

Oh little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie.

Bethlehem is no longer a little town, but it is certainly “still”.

Shops are shuttered. Many of the Palestinian population have left, unable to survive the virtual drying up of tourism since the second intifada (or Palestinian uprising) began in 2000.

The fourth century Church of the Nativity was almost empty when I went there this week.

Before 2000 it was invariably packed with long queues to get in.

In Jerusalem, just 20 minutes away, it is different. Tourism and pilgrimages – along with their foreign money – are returning now the worst of the intifada appears to be over.

Adnan Al-Korna, sitting in his deserted shop in Bethlehem asks, “Why?”

No doubt the families of the victims of the London transport bombings are asking the same question.

I landed at Heathrow on the day of the bombs on my way to Amman, Jordan, and then across the River Jordan into the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Friends and relatives in Australia said I was mad going to the Middle East for a holiday. The official Australian Government travel warning says the same thing.

“Australians in . . . the West Bank should leave,” it says.

No such advice for London. Yet George Bush’s war on terror has made the whole world – not just the Middle East — less safe. We should be more even-handed in our scare campaigns.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 16 july 2005 west bank”

As an Australian, it did not trouble me greatly to listen to a senior Irish barrister dissect the worst elements of Australia’s human rights record at a recent conference in Dublin.

Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer have often said that Australians should not have to feel put down or bad when under attack from international do-gooders over government policy affecting human rights.

In a way they are right. The sort of people alert to human rights know that individuals should not be condemned on the basis of their government’s policies.

Irish barrister Bill Shipsey, SC, did a point-by-point job on Australia’s recent human rights record at a joint Australia and Irish Bar conference. It was the usual stuff: refugees, Aborigines, David Hicks and the failure to ratify the torture treaty.

It was more a lament than an accusation. The lament was that a country like Australia which was at the forefront of concern for international human rights for so long could now be failing in so many ways.

“Australia appears to be sending a message to the world that international solidarity and international law can be jettisoned just at the time when the world needs countries like Australia,” he said.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 9 july human rights”

Now the Coalition has control of the Senate we know it will revisit rejected laws on industrial relations and the privatisation of Telstra.

But other bills were also rejected by the earlier hostile Senate, including some affecting the ACT.

The vexed question of the ACT leasehold system is likely to be put back on the national political agenda, especially because one of the senators who now make up the Coalition’s new majority is Senator Gary Humphries, Chief Minister of the ACT for a tad over a year from October 2000 and ACT Minister for Land and Planning from 1995 to 1998 when Kate Carnell was Chief Minister.

Now, when ACT leasehold is put on the agenda, put your inconsistency humbug alert on. Neither side of federal or territory politics can claim high principle here.

First to some history. In 1997 the ACT Government had persuaded its federal Liberal colleagues that the ACT leasehold system was holding back development and something should be done – bearing in mind that the ACT had suffered economically from public-sector cuts by the Keating and later, more severely, by the Howard Government.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 2 July 2005”