Uncle Watch XI

Tuesday, 18 November 2003, 10:20am

Procrastination makes the world go round, so here's another instalment of Uncle Watch.

Linking to an ABC story about wild Kangaroos in Paris, he complains that "A real kangaroo expert would know [they eat] 'buds, leaves, and roots'." It's a pretty weak indictment of the ABC as it is, but when you realise it's a wire story that was News Ltd as well, it becomes even weaker.

He also whines that Radio National is "not left enough". I guess it's pretty hard to prove left-wing bias at the ABC when the ABC is so determined to include right-wing opinions...

Coverage of David Hicks vs coverage of Wang Jianping also perplexes him. Noting that the two Australian citizens have been locked in foreign prisons, he's not happy that Fairfax and the ABC disproportionately reported on David Hicks' plight. Interestingly, he ignores News Ltd's Hicks:Jianping ratio, presumably because it's very similar. I guess it's more newsworthy when the great and benevolent United States uses an offshore detention camp to subvert human rights, than when a dictatorship locks up a suspected spy. At least China pretended to give Jianping a trial. America still hasn't charged Hicks, but it has signalled that he'll go to a dodgy military tribunal like the one in China.

And he takes a cheap shot at Justice Michael Kirby, who "hasn't declared his right to escape from lawful Chinese custody". If he had to rattle off a list of every degrading hellhole in the world, the High Court would have transacted very little business in the last week. He did mention Cambodia, though, so let's not pretend Kirby's complaint was Guantanamo-specific.

Deterrent or encouragement?

Tuesday, 18 November 2003, 9:20am

Robert McClelland -- Channel 9, 9 November 2003:

But what we've got to look at is the future, and in particular Amanda Vanstone has effectively said by excising the islands, the target now becomes Australia's mainland? In this case about another two hours sailing would have got them to Darwin or its vicinity.

Amanda Vanstone -- JJJ, 18 November 2003:

I think it's a fair thing to say, if you want to make a claim to stay in Australia, you've got to make it to the mainland.

Two hours' sailing.

It happened to a friend of a friend of mine...

Monday, 17 November 2003, 1:17pm

Have you seen those ads on telly that show a car bursting through the wall of a house as the family eats breakfast inside? Well, it happened to a friend of a friend of mine.

That's my friend Sarah's sister's house. The car smashed through the wall next to their front door, and did substantial structural damage to the building. The house will have to be demolished, but thankfully nobody (in the house, at least) was hurt.

On Howard-hating

Sunday, 16 November 2003, 11:03pm

The right wing's favorite pitch these days is that those of us on the left are irrationally consumed with blind hatred for [John Howard].

From [Tim Blair] to [Gareth Parker] to [Steve Edwards] all the way to [John Ray] (who knows a thing or two about hating), the rightwing pundits have been scratching their pits about this seemingly unsolvable riddle.

It's not exactly Fermat's Theorem.

Let's see. Where to begin?

Well, there's the [Tampa-based] election, for starters.

Then there's the trashing of the [refugee] and Kyoto treaties.

And the tax cuts for the rich. And the deregulation of corporations.

And the [fridge magnets], Guantanamo Bay, and the imprisoning without trial of [Australian] citizens.

Of course, there's this reckless, illegal war in Iraq that [Howard joined], using a pile of dry lies as fuel.

And then there was last week's [attack on gay marriage], with [George Pell] grinning behind the [Prime Minister's] ear.

That should be enough to solve the puzzle.

But now comes [Norman Hanscombe] of [Cassandra's Cave], writing ... that the left is now "frothing" as much as conservatives did when [Keating] was [Prime Minister]. ...

The article was by the great columnist Molly Ivins, who wrote, in her concluding section: "It's not necessary to hate [John W. Howard] to think he's a bad [Prime Minister]. Grownups do that, you know. You can decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred."

What she hates are [Howard's] miserable policies. She concludes her essay by saying, "If that makes me a [Howard]-hater, then sign me up."

I'm with Molly. [Howard] may be an affable guy, but he's a dangerous, disastrous [Prime Minister].

[With apologies to Matthew Rothschild.]

Home straight

Sunday, 16 November 2003, 10:37pm

I'm in the final stages of my honours dissertation. Preliminary feedback from my supervisor indicates that I'm not overlooking anything important, and that "there are no major structural flaws." That's a good thing.

Apart from the usual cosmetic changes that need to be made in the drafting process, I've got to shrink it. It's at about 26 000 words right now, and needs to lose over a fifth. That shouldn't be too much trouble, though -- there's a couple of sections that need to be considerably reduced, which will improve the overall flow of the paper.

Tomorrow I'm meeting my supervisor to discuss some specific changes, and I hope to have a draft in the vicinity of the target length by tomorrow night. (Mind you, tomorrow night's State Executive meeting is preselecting a good many candidates, so that might be pushed back to Tuesday morning.) Then it's fiddling with phrases and footnotes for the rest of the week.

Uncle Watch X

Sunday, 16 November 2003, 1:33am

At last, Uncle has stopped picking his navel lint and posted something substantial about the ABC. Unfortunately, his idea of "substantial" means selectively quoting from Senate Estimates Committee Hansard (pdf, p120 on). He has four points to discuss.

1. Media Watch and Alston's whinging

There are two parts to Uncle's complaints here.

First, he suggests that Media Watch should not ask questions about the political motivations behind Senator Alston's complaints. He doesn't explain why it shouldn't do so, but believes the investigations were not fruitful:

Having failed to prove that the Jews were behind Minister Alston's complaints, Media Watch slammed Alston because, they claimed, no-one was behind him!

That's an interesting take on the report, because I seem to recall a strongly-made point about exactly who was behind Alston:

So evidence of the groundswell amounted to this: a number of unlogged telephone calls and nine letters.

There was a tenth that actually named AM, its presenter Linda Mottram and a morning of reports that would provoke ten of those 68 complaints.

But that letter came not from a member of the general public, but the Federal Director of the Liberal Party, Brian Loughnane...

It was not the public complaining, it was the party and the government - a government with a war to fight and a war to sell.

Media Watch followed up leads, made FOI requests, and found out where Alston's complaints were coming from. Good job.

The second part of Uncle's complaint is that Media Watch didn't "deal with the substance of the bias detected in the AM program, and why Auntie's Complaints Review Executive (one of Biffer's underlings) couldn't find it?" The problem is, it did, as David Marr announced at the end of the report: "Our detailed analysis of the panel's findings ... can be found on our website".

The document (Word) expands on the points raised by the TV report; primarily that the ICRP did not give journalists a right of reply, even though it gave Alston the right to submit a new, secret and extended dossier of complaints.

2. Mottram should be spanked

Uncle points out that Linda Mottram has not been asked to change her habits. As I've pointed out before, the ICRP's findings of "serious bias" are laughable. A couple of words out of hundreds of hours of work, and she's supposed to change the way she works? Get real. Anyway, I noticed this farewell on Crikey recently:

Meanwhile, good luck to Linda Mottram who signed off from AM this morning and heads to London with her partner.

I guess the ABC has better things to do than cracking a whip over a departing presenter.

3. Balding stumbles in an answer

Here's Uncle, in full:

And now for something really finite.

Senator TCHEN—How far do you think the independence should go in the organisation? How far down the line?

Mr Balding—That is a very hard question. How long is a piece of string? It depends on the issue itself, but independence is independence. It is a finite item. You are either independent or you are not independent, so it is very hard to talk about how far independence should go.

I'm not sure what his point is, except that Balding gave a slightly confused answer. Considering Senator Tchen's attacking questions -- at one point he had a go at Balding because Balding was kept waiting for several hours by the Committee -- it is not surprising that the ABC chief might fumble.

4. Balding takes questions on notice

Uncle is under the bizarre misconception that because Balding is pretty senior in the ABC, he will be intimate with every word ever spoken by every reporter on every TV show. Apparently it is inappropriate for him to make a note of Senators' concerns and agree to get back to them later.

But perhaps more interesting is what Uncle chose not to mention. Like this discussion:

Senator MACKAY -- Let me give you an example. On the day that the Telstra sale bill was defeated, the abc.net.au article included quotes from Minister Williams, Senator Minchin, Mr Anderson and Senator Shayne Murphy. There was no quote from Labor. I am just attempting to counter some of this, so that is the first thing I would say. Inside Business has, as I understand it, interviewed the coalition communications minister three times in a row, but, sadly, there has been no interview with Mr Lindsay Tanner. Also, Alan Kohler’s soft interview of Daryl Williams last Sunday, when Alan Kohler effectively provided a dorothy dixer about the government being the owner and regulator of Telstra, was, one could say, evidence of ABC bias.

Senator SANTORO -- All you are doing is adding to my litany of complaints and bias. I thank you for your support.

Senator MACKAY -- The ABC kept a story on Simon Crean’s leadership on the Internet politics site for weeks before the opposition rang up and asked for it to be removed because it was not news. I think it would be true to say that this kind of attack, this sort of McCarthyism that is being shown here, is starting to have an impact, from our perspective, on the independence of the ABC. I am not necessarily blaming the ABC; I am blaming this mob over here on my left.

Mr Balding -- I am more than happy to have a look at those instances, but I would be very disappointed if that was the case.

Bias at the ABC goes both ways. If they're pissing off both sides of the legislative chambers, then they're probably striking a reasonable balance. If only Uncle would realise it, he'd save us both some time.

Justice denied

Friday, 14 November 2003, 4:52pm

Here we go:

The head of Sydney's western suburbs Islamic Association, Dr Ghulam Akbar Khan, went to the High Court to have the men returned. [...]

However Justice Ian Callinan rejected the application, finding Mr Khan does not have the authority to act on their behalf.

Justice Callinan said he was not satisfied the matter requires the intervention of the court at this stage.

Is anybody surprised? This is the same Justice Ian Callinan who yesterday asked, "Why can they not be detained [indefinitely, even until death] so that they do not work and take jobs from Australian citizens?"

(He's ignoring the fact that they often "take" the jobs that nobody else will do, and his later complaint that "[t]hey live in detention at the expense of the Australian taxpayers" is surely an argument in support of releasing them.)

This is a disappointing decision. As I've alluded to in the past, the Government's excision regulations might be illegal. Callinan won't allow a legal challenge because the men are not here to represent themselves, but that's exactly what the legal challenge would be opposing!

Mary Crock, of Sydney University's law school, sets out the strong arguments against the legality of the regulations in today's AFR. It's subscribers only online, but here's the gist:

There are substantial holes in the formal legal justification of last week's actions. Australia is a party to the UN refugee convention ... but it seems to be picking and choosing which parts of that instrument it will honour. ... For convention purposes, presence within territory is a key trigger for entitlement to full protection. However, if Australia is permitted to redefine its territory every time someone attempts to assert a right, the concept of signing on to the treaty in the first place becomes meaningless. It certainly seems to fly in the face of the general principle of international law requiring states to observe their treaty obligations in good faith. [...]

At the very least it could be argued that regulations passed retrospectively were ultra vires (ie unlawful) because they were made for an improper purpose. This is because the regulations were made to deny individuals rights they had accrued under the Migration Act (to apply for and have any rights to a visa determined).

Indeed, the incident echoes another in Dawin in the late 1970s when regulations were made declaring the whole of the Cox Peninsula to be a suburb of the territory's capital (so as to defeat a local Aboriginal land claim). On that occasion the High Court ruled the regulations out of order on the grounds that they had been made for an improper purpose.

This is why Amanda Vanstone and Alexander Downer were so keen to deny the men had attempted to claim refugee status -- the legal basis for excising Melville Island from the migration zone is quite possibly nonexistent. It was subsequently revealed that the men had not only asked for asylum, they even "brandished an English-Turkish dictionary and pointed to the word 'refugee'."

Callinan has ensured -- at least in the short term -- that the Government's tricky attempt to ignore people's fundamental human rights will go unchallenged.

Congratulations, Matt

Thursday, 13 November 2003, 5:10pm

As the academic year draws to a close, deadlines approach with increasing rapidity. Somehow Matt Keogh, usually a slow-moving sort of fellow, has finished and submitted his honours thesis a full week ahead of schedule.

Some of you might be interested in reading it. It's called Campaign Finance Regulation in Australia: defender of democracy or protector of parties?, and it deals with a number of topical issues, including public funding for election campaigns and the use of slush funds to pursue opponents. You can download it from Matt's site as a PDF document.

Now, I hope you'll excuse me: I've got some catching up to do.

Lest we forget

Tuesday, 11 November 2003, 1:15pm

[Thanks, Slatts.]

Uncle Watch IX

Saturday, 8 November 2003, 11:51pm

I know, I know. This Uncle Watch business is getting a bit tedious, but he's just so irritating. I suppose it's a bit like Gummy Trotsky and John Ray -- you know you should just ignore them, but somehow you can't look away. They're like the victims of a horrific car crash. So here goes.

A complex issue, and a simpleton's response

Uncle's commentary on the 7.30 Report interview conducted on the day of the Sydney Peace Prize ceremony is interesting. When it comes to Arab-bashing, he can set aside his usual prejudices and describe Kerry O'Brien as "almost-adequate". But then it's business as usual: misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the public record.