ABC

Update, 28 Sep: More lies from your ABC. The title of an ABC story, published on 25 S

On Australian ABC's Q & A, 28 July 2020, "Fight of our lives," Bill Bowtell[1] alone seemed able to conceptualise the biological restructuring of our economic environment, although Gigi Foster, economist, NSW, seemed to know instinctively what she needed to combat in order to keep the global, privatised economy going. She advocated allowing people to die from COVID-19, Swedish-style, in order to maintain business more or less as usual. However, when it was put to her that this would make everything less predictable and also incapacitate our health-care system, with no end in sight for the virus, she could draw a logical conclusion, which was, "[...] If we keep our borders closed, until there is a vaccine, we have to restructure the industrial mix in Australia." But this conclusion, anathema to her ideology, seemed ridiculous to her.

Not so to Bill Bowtell, Adjunct Professor, UNSW and Strategic Health Policy Adviser, who has a history of success in policy-making and promotion in the HIV-AIDS pandemic. He said, "The greatest enemy here is nostalgia and looking backwards. The Australian economy, the 30 years of the boom, have gone. They have disappeared. They were the product of a plan that came in in the 1980s, the Hawke-Keating government and the subsequent reforms. That's gone. The assumptions that underlie that plan have evaporated. The globalisation, the international economy functioning as we used to know it. So now we need Plan 3. The third plan since the war. And that will take all of the intellectual capacity that we have in Australia, the committment of the Australian people - they've got to buy into it - and the economy that will be born now will be very different than the economy that we have been used to. We can do it. We can make a better economy. The question of borders - Look, in the world, the Coronavirus caseload is going up like a rocket. There will be no opening up of international borders, as people seem to think there will be. We saw, in the last few days in Europe, where they opened up the southern borders in Spain, and then they had to shut them down again, because, guess what, the virus kept going up. Now, we have problems also with the Australian borders. I cannot see the outlying states opening up to a situation where we have Coronavirus cases at the level we have in Victoria and New South Wales. I don't see Western Australia doing that. The Federal Government is in court at the moment trying to force the West Australian Government [to open (?) interruption by compere, saying time running out and gives opportunity to another panelist to make final comment.]"

Karen Soo, Executive Officer at the Haymarket Chamber of Commerce, said, "I think this is a time for universal pause enables us as a society to really review what's important, and I think, as all people, I think it's really created a lot of equity and parity. So, everybody's now looking at the homeless, it's looking at multicultural societies, it's looking at everybody to say, 'How do we work together? How do we move forward? And how do we ensure that everyone can have a future together? And I think, it's going to hopefully be - I am quite optimistic - I think it's an opportunity that businesses will review and innovate and work together - local communities will be very market-driven until the borders are open once we are safe enough to function in a new way. Like, there's going to be a new way to operate in business."

NOTES

"Bio:
Mr Bill Bowtell AO, Executive Director, Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. Bill is a strategic policy adviser, with particular interest in national and international health policy structures and reform. He trained as a diplomat, with postings in Portugal, Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe. As senior adviser to the Australian health minister, Bill Bowtell played a significant role in the introduction of the Medicare health insurance system in 1984. He was an architect of Australia’s successful and well-regarded response to HIV/AIDS. Between 1994 and 1996, Bill Bowtell was senior political adviser to the Prime Minister of Australia. He maintains a close interest in the potential impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the other communicable diseases, on the social, economic and political development of the Asia-Pacific region. Since 2005, Bill was Director of the HIV/AIDS Project at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and, since 2009, the Executive Director of Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. Pacific Friends is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In these positions, he has sought to increase knowledge and awareness of the challenges posed globally, and to the Pacific region, by the three diseases. He has written and broadcast extensively on these subjects and participated in many international and Australian conferences and seminars especially in relation to HIV/AIDS." Source: https://kirby.unsw.edu.au/event/kirby-seminar-mr-bill-bowtell-international-and-australian-perspectives-three-decades-hivaids.

This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the ABC has departed from its growthist mantra, allowing its reporters to describe the problem and really let the public know how bad it is. "We need to focus on corruption, population to halt biodiversity loss." Researchers say targets for biodiversity loss ignore key drivers such as human population and corruption." Article by ABC Science, environment reporter Nick Kilvert. First published here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-03-27/corruption-population-impact-biodiversity-loss/9586556

Both Dr Ritchie and Professor Bekessy cited the death of the last male northern white rhino earlier this month as a reminder that we need to be doing more to halt the loss of species worldwide.

Professor Bekessy said she believes people may not realise how much their day-to-day decisions can impact on species loss.

"Whether we choose to have beef or vegetable for dinner, or what sort of coffee we choose to have in the morning, all of these things lead to the survival or extinction of species," she said.

"Extinction is something that people understand. All the media attention around the last white rhino — it was heartbreaking because it was really personal.

"I think, [we need to make our goal] no more extinctions."

When listing high-immigration bias at ABC and SBS, we tend to forget the many ABC shows now aimed at the younger demographic (where the ABC had been losing audience dramatically). The ABC have hired a lot of youngish talented comedians out of the vast pool of stand-up comedy talent among young Australians. It’s mostly smart-arse stuff without much pretence to news value, but there are some shows like The Chaser and Planet America that hybridise comedic style with serious debate on current affairs. These are in effect part of the ABC News stable, and their biases matter more.

The problem is that the ABC seems to have selected its comedians for having the right political and social views. One reason these comic shows seem a bit dull, especially to anyone over 30, is that there seems to be almost no difference of opinion or political stance among these comedians. Think how much more interesting it would be if the comedians on these panels actually had different points of view, instead of merely having different comedic styles!

When listing high-immigration bias at ABC and SBS, we tend to forget the many ABC shows now aimed at the younger demographic (where the ABC had been losing audience dramatically). The ABC have hired a lot of youngish talented comedians out of the vast pool of stand-up comedy talent among young Australians. It’s mostly smart-arse stuff without much pretence to news value, but there are some shows like The Chaser and Planet America that hybridise comedic style with serious debate on current affairs. These are in effect part of the ABC News stable, and their biases matter more.

The problem is that the ABC seems to have selected its comedians for having the right political and social views. One reason these comic shows seem a bit dull, especially to anyone over 30, is that there seems to be almost no difference of opinion or political stance among these comedians. Think how much more interesting it would be if the comedians on these panels actually had different points of view, instead of merely having different comedic styles!

Yesterday (Friday 2 February 2018) on Planet America the presenter, Chas Licciardello, produced an absolute rant in favour of high immigration, primarily in the USA, but by implication in Australia too. He had clearly got hold of a stack of dubious statistics from high-immigration sources, including our old favourite myth, the “ageing population” scare.

It is far from the first time this program has done tendentious stuff like this, but this time I have taken the trouble to transcribe it.

I’ll leave it to the experts to pick apart Chas’s errors, but they clearly include some well-known tricks of our own Australian high-immigration spruikers. e.g.

1. Selective assumptions: Chas assumes that we (i.e. the US and by implication Australia too) are heading for a terrible lack of workers, though there are many indications (such as stagnant wages) that both countries have the reverse problem.
2. Selective alarmism. The rather high US birthrate of nearly 2 children per woman, which in fact ensures a surplus of births over deaths, at least until the population is considerably older, is represented as a disaster. Why? Similarly, the staggering rise of the USA’s working population from 45 million in 1950 to around 150 million in 2015 rings no alarm bells, yet a possible decline of just 7 million by 2035 is represented as a disaster. In fact this may be too small a drop, if automation and robots mean that only a much smaller workforce can be kept in work.
3. Misunderstanding of the “dependency rate”. Traditionally this term means the ratio between the number of people of “working age” (traditionally 15-65 years, but today that might have to be raised to at least 20-70 years) to those either too old or too young to work. The trick is to get the naive hearer to imagine that only old people are “dependants”, and that everyone over 65 is on the pension. In fact the dependency rate was often worse in the past, when people had large families and the population was more full of “unproductive” children than it is now.
4. Forgetting that to have a high percentage of the population within “working age” is only good if there is work for them. If not, the extra “workers” just add to the number of persons on social security. And a working age breadwinner without work often means a whole family on social security, whereas a retired person has very likely already paid for their retirement, and may be financially supporting younger dependants.
5. Caricature and moral grandstanding: e.g. assuming that people who dislike high immigration must “hate” immigrants.
6. Ill-defined and contentious statistics: How rigorously was “innovator” defined, for instance? Do we really know how many US patent applicants are by immigrants?
7. Forgetting that the brain-drain of doctors and surgeons and of top graduates into rich countries, which certainly occurs, has cruel effects on poor countries. “All our doctors are in America.”
8. GDP worship, and belief that growth can go on forever. E.g. Chas: “ . . . to slow annual GDP growth by 1.2% this decade! That is a lot.”

No doubt demographers and economists will find further and probably larger holes in Chas’s rant. What a great target its complacent self-righteousness would make for an astute ABC comedian—if only the ABC employed comedians with diverse views!

Below is my transcription of it:

Planet America program, “Episode 1” 2018
ABC TV channel 24. Screened on 2 and 3 February 2018
c. 38 minutes into program as stored online at http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/planet-america/NC1814H001S00

Chas Licciardello’s “Deep Dive into US Immigration”

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION by Mark O’Connor:
This is a monologue, with pre-prepared slides, spoken by presenter Chas Licciardello in his trademark emphatic manner with dramatic gestures. Latter part is sub-titled by the program itself, with emphasised words in capitals. Earlier, my under-linings indicate heavy emphasis.

Chas Licciardello: “We spoke earlier about Trump’s immigration framework, which tries to tilt the balance of legal immigration more towards those with particular skills rather than family connections or pure diversity. But the truth is the immigration pool is skilling up anyway. Let’s go deep!

Logo appears: THE DEEP DIVE (sound effects))

Chas Licciardello: “Immigrants are becoming more educated. 38% of native born Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree. But immigrants over the age of 25 who arrived in the last 5 years, 48% of them have a college degree. What about African immigrants? 41% of them have a college degree, even though they most of them arrived on diversity visas. Finally, what about Asian Immigrants? A whopping 75% of 25-34 year old Asian immigrants have college degrees.

Logo appears: Source: Census Bureau, Migration Policy Institute, Pew Research.
Logo: 25-34 y Asian Immigrants 75%

Chas (continuing emphatically): Immigrants are innovators. 35% of US innovators are immigrants, with European or Asian immigrants

Logo: Europeans/Asians = 5x native-born innovators

Chas (continuing): . . . being 5 times more likely to have created innovations than a native-born American. Between 2000 and 2010, immigrants filed about 200 thousand American patents

Logo: 194,600 patents (2000-10)

Chas: Immigrants were twice as likely to be entrepreneurs as native-born Americans.

Logo: 28% of entrepreneurs (= 2x native-borns)
Logo: Source: Information Technology and Information, 2015 Kauffman Index, National Foundation for American Policy.

And immigrants founded over half of America’s 87 $billion start-up companies.

Logo: Skilled Immigrants: founded 44 of 87 $billion start-ups

Chas: In fact 50% of Silicon Valley workers aged 25-44 are immigrants.

Logo: 50% of Silicon Valley workers (25-44)

Chas: And so are 28% of America’s doctors and surgeons. So they are bringing the skills already!
But I don’t want to debate who immigrants should be or where they should come from, because those are questions of opinion. I’d like to focus more on the numbers of immigrants, because that (dramatic hand gesture) is a question of economics. You see, America is AGING! (dramatic fast-paced music)

Logo: Graph labelled Projected US population over 65: (Source: UN World Population Prospects 2008). Graph shows the percentage over 65 rising from about 7% in 1950 to about 12% in 2010, kinking up to about 21%by 2040, and then largely flattening off at around 22%.
Chas (dramatically): This is the percentage of the population that is over 65 today. [Graph shows about 14%]. And this is the percentage of the population that will be over 65 in 15 years time. [Graph shows about 20%.] And the aging of the workforce [sic] [dramatic gesture] is projected by Rand Corp . . .

Logo: The effect of population aging on Economic Growth, the Labour Force, and Productivity
NBER July 2016 “Our results imply annual GDP growth will slow by 1.2 percentage points this decade.”

Chas (continuing): to slow annual GDP growth by 1.2% this decade! That is a lot. Of course as the population ages, there’s going to be less workers, unless you have immigration. For instance, current rates of immigration . . .

Logo: US Working-Age Population (Pew Research Center)
Graph showing US working-age population moving steadily up from around 45 million in 1950 to c. 150 million in 2015.

Chas: ... the working-age population will grow 10 million by 2035, but without immigration it will shrink by 7 million. And by the way, the places that would die[sic] the fastest without immigration, are rural cities [dramatic finger-point at viewers]—Trump country! [double-eyelid wink]

But why does it matter if the working population shrinks? Well, according to the Labor Secretary in 1917 . . .

Logo: Medicare’s hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2029
The Washington Post, 13 July 2017 “Labor Secretary Alexander Accosta pointed out that in 1960 there were 5 workers for every Social Security recipient. By 2035 there will be only two workers for every beneficiary.”

Chas [reads this text, varying the ending to]: for every social security recipient, but by 2035 there will be only TWO workers for every beneficiary, so that each worker has to carry a bigger load. And Medicare is gonna be even more expensive, which is how you end up with headlines like this, about Medicare running out of money.

Logo: Dramatic red flashing arrow point to the Post headline: Medicare’s hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2029

Chas: Well what about America just having more kids, then? [dramatic eye-widening] Too late! America’s fertility rates haven’t been high for decades! And they are just getting worse[sic].

Logo: American Fertility Rate: Source National Center for Health Statistics: Graph showing births per woman falling from nearly 4 to around 2.

Chas: So, bottom-line: whether restrictionists like immigrants or not, America needs to take a heap of them.

Logo: [A visual clip showing an abusive British celebrity chef.]

Chas: Well, probably not THAT one.
[Program Wrap-up]

The absurdity of Australian news reporting on Syria would be funny if it were not for the disastrous consequences of such reporting for the people of Syria. I happened to see the end of a report from Matt Brown on 7.30 Report on the subject of chemical weapons in Syria. If it depresses me, think how the Syrians feel about our mindless repetition of war-crimes propaganda against Syria's army when that army is the only thing protecting most Syrians from foreign-backed terrorists.

"Diplomatic battle over Syria's chemical weapons program", Matt Brown, 7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 21 October 2016.

There was hardly a second in Brown’s dramatic production that was true or real. Even the supposed results of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into Ghouta were misrepresented.

I’ve been shocked recently by the failure of the ABC, on radio at least, to even mention Syria other than briefly in news bulletins. I only watch SBS world news, which is of course just as bad. Instead of Sophie McNeill and Matt Brown, and Anne Barker, SBS has Nastasya Tay, whose propaganda wrap-ups are just stunning.

On October 23, for instance, reporting about the humanitarian pause in Aleppo, she showed the buses waiting to take residents from East Aleppo, but said, with what seemed like a sort of pleasure, that no-one took them, and that the Syrian army had fired on people trying to leave! Yet what happened was that the ‘rebels’ refused to give in, and fired on the relief route, forcing the buses to drive off at speed. Meanwhile they showed photos of people in the streets dancing and holding up Free Syrian Army (FSA) flags, and shopping at stalls of vegetables.

At the same time, over in Mosul, in Iraq, the boot is on the other foot, while the US claims to do just the same thing the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is doing in Aleppo, with a slight difference. To be clear, in Iraq the US claims to be fighting terrorists in order to defend the Iraqi government, but in Syria it is defending terrorists (which it calls 'moderate rebels') in order to fight the Syrian government. Meanwhile, it isn't stopping ISIL from fleeing Mosul into Syria.

It’s the silence on what is really happening that drives me crazy! Did you hear any interviews with politicians about whether Australia supports more sanctions against Russia, or supports the Turkish army killing Kurds, or supports the Iranians fighting to liberate Mosul for Iraq – or anything!

Even when it was happening it wasn’t happening...

Once upon a time I would have tried to have put the ABC right, but to be honest, I think it has gone past the point of thoughtful analysis, with Brown’s propaganda, and that of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the ‘doctors’ in Istanbul (!)

The fact is that the stories about ‘barrel bombs’ with chlorine are total fabrications, not because the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) didn’t use them, but because they would have absolutely no reason to use such a stupid weapon as ‘Chlorine’. After all, there is almost no evidence that Sarin was actually present and used in Ghouta, and I know of no evidence at all of Chlorine use other than some silly photos showing a cloud of Nitrogen oxides from a fertiliser bomb.

Note that in all such footage there are White Helmets present – so we may assume that these films are not true. President Bashar al Assad noted that the White Helmets are ‘Al Qaeda with a facelift’ in his interview on Swiss TV on the 19th of October, 2016..

Today, (22 October 2016) as the UNHRC report is released that claims proof Syria used Chlorine in March last year, the abandonment of any impartiality in this conflict by the UN is now complete.

Not only was the supposed use of Chlorine in an attack on Sarmin south of Idlib never established as fact with any real evidence, but its timing was completely suspect. It occurred just before or just after the launching by Saudi Arabia and Turkey of a force of thousands of militant jihadists, under the banner of the Army of Conquest – Jaish al Fatah – who swept south towards Lattakia and Hama and killed thousands of soldiers and civilians before they were finally fought all the way back by the Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces six months later.

So while our media carried on about this stupid story, in which supposedly a ‘grandmother’ and three children died, they completely ignored the rampages of the army of terrorists, for instance in their truck bomb assault on Jisr al Shughour hospital. This is just a pre-echo of what is happening now with Aleppo – that while the UN and Western leaders talk about the ‘slaughterhouse of Aleppo’ in the most extreme terms, the terrorists are on the rampage south of Idlib with their US supplied weapons, fighting the Syrian army and its allies.
If Matt Brown wants to see what ‘our allies’ are doing in Syria, like he does in Mosul, why doesn’t he get embedded with ‘Jabat Fatah al Sham’ – al Qaeda, south of Idlib?

And if Sophie McNeill is interested in the problems for children’s schooling in refugee camps in Erbil (reported on last night’s Lateline), why doesn’t she go to visit some suburbs of Lattakia or Damascus and see how all the refugees from the terrorists are managing there?

Not that the Syrian government would ever give her a visa...

I don’t know what to do about the ABC. When I hear their reports I get furious and think of phoning, but then I remember the last time and the time before, and how they have only got worse...

Introduction by candobetter.net editor: This article reflects interviews with Frankston natural scientist, Hans Brunner, who has spent decades of his life trying to save the southern brown bandicoot, as many of those who know Hans are aware. Here the ABC takes up Hans's argument about the $20m promised by the State Government to be spent protecting bandicoot habitat that was threatened by Peninsula Link was never used as promised for a fox-proof fence. "Peninsula Link dutifully spent $20 million of taxpayers' money on the underpass, and handed over $1.6 million to Parks Victoria for the fence. But Parks Victoria never built the fence. At the completion of the freeway in 2013, and with only a single bandicoot hair detected two years prior, Parks Victoria chose to direct the money intended for the fence to bandicoot programs near Cranbourne..." in an area now allocated for a projected housing development. This is totally outrageous by Parks Victoria and by the government with which it is too closely aligned. Surely the current Parks Victoria Board should be sacked. Planning documents from 2011 show wide reserves with predator-proof fencing. But a 2012 revision made them a dotted line — an option if Federal Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt required it. Mr Hunt failed to do so. His dereliction with regard to this unique creature in the world, the southern brown bandicoot, seems to be his support for by Melbourne's [over]development. A Dubai conference recently named Greg Hunt 'the best environment minister in the world' seems a reflection of extreme cynicism or a calculated insult to the Australian public. Good on the ABC for promoting this investigation. Article by Sara Phillips, first published on http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-28/survival-of-rare-melbourne-bandicoots-under-threat/7181580

Photo:
The southern brown bandicoot once thrived in the Melbourne region. Now the Melbourne population is down to the 400 or so inside the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens. (Supplied: Hayley Davis)

Map:
Cranbourne 3977

Wildlife corridors that experts say are crucial to the survival of Melbourne's last remaining population of southern brown bandicoots may not go ahead if documents from the Victorian State Government are any guide.

Revisions of state planning documents for a new housing development near the bandicoots' stronghold in the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens downgraded the wildlife corridors planned for the suburb to a "contingency project".

The Victorian Government's own bandicoot strategy said the corridors were not cost effective.

Development is yet to commence, but bandicoot lovers said the Government has all but written off the species within Melbourne city-limits.

The small brown marsupial is listed as nationally endangered. They were once abundant across Melbourne and they are found scattered throughout Victoria and South Australia in small pockets.

For bandicoot enthusiast Hans Brunner, the threat to the Cranbourne bandicoots is a case of history repeating.

Bandicoots once thrived at The Pines Flora and Fauna Reserve, a patch of bush in the back blocks of Frankston on Melbourne's urban edge, just 10 kilometres from the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens.

Mr Brunner campaigned to save The Pines' bandicoots as urban development, feral foxes and cats took their toll. When help finally came it was too late.

The Pines was split by a freeway in 2010. Federal environment laws aimed at protecting the bandicoot dictated that an underpass must be built for the bandicoots and a predator-proof fence installed around the 220-hectare reserve.

Peninsula Link dutifully spent $20 million of taxpayers' money on the underpass, and handed over $1.6 million to Parks Victoria for the fence.

But Parks Victoria never built the fence.

At the completion of the freeway in 2013, and with only a single bandicoot hair detected two years prior, Parks Victoria chose to direct the money intended for the fence to bandicoot programs near Cranbourne.

Chris Hardman, regional director for Melbourne for Parks Victoria said: "With so many pressures on that small parcel of land, it's really difficult to secure a species. And that's why I think the investment in [the Cranbourne area] will better secure the future of the southern brown bandicoot than we could possibly ever achieve than in such an impacted landscape as The Pines."

Mr Brunner was outraged that $20 million was wasted because of the failure to spend a fraction of that on a fence.

"$20 million of our money has been spent and now they've abandoned the bandicoot plan completely for The Pines and this money's just wasted. Public money's wasted."

But Mr Hardman said the area from the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens to Westernport Bay has a larger population of bandicoots, more space to work with and a fighting chance of securing their long-term survival.

Wildlife corridors were planned to run through the proposed Botanic Ridge housing development, aiming to allow bandicoots in the Gardens behind predator-proof fencing to breed, slip out through special bandicoot gates and spread into nearby suitable areas.

"Linking landscapes is a really important thing to do and that's one of the great opportunities with the Westernport reserves, that we are much easier able to link those landscapes with large parcels of land," Mr Hardman said.

Terry Coates, a bandicoot expert who works at the Cranbourne Gardens, agreed that corridors were key to the species' long-term survival.

"We've been very keen to see those corridors leading away from us out into the surrounding landscape, not to see our population isolated and locked up," he said.

But the corridors favoured by Mr Hardman and Dr Coates are looking increasingly unlikely, meaning the future for this endangered species is far from guaranteed.

Planning documents from 2011 show wide reserves with predator-proof fencing. But a 2012 revision made them a dotted line — an option if Federal Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt required it.

When asked whether the Minister had required the corridors, a spokesperson for the Federal Department of Environment said Mr Hunt had "endorsed the Program of the Victorian Government for Melbourne's urban growth".

These Victorian documents from 2014 included the option of corridors but noted that the corridors were "less cost-effective than alternative conservation measures".

The Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning was unable to provide further details on the future for the corridors.

Dr Pia Lentini, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, said governments have a responsibility to protect Australian wildlife.

"They have a mandate to protect these species and make sure they don't go extinct. And in order to do that they need to consider more carefully what's going in Australian cities and towns," she said.

Cities are surprising refuges for endangered Australian species, according to recent research from Dr Lentini.

"If you pick a random point across Australia if it's in a city you'll find about 10 threatened species and if it's outside a city you'll find about three," she said.

"At the moment there seems to be a bit of a perception that cities are a bit of a write-off for threatened species conservation — that populations in cites are too far gone or a too small.

"But our analysis really shows that if we put in a bit of effort we can make a big difference just by focusing on cities."

I thought the issues in this matter would be obvious from the background of the actual event itself and from the Wikipedia link I provided re Zaky's actual background in my article, "Zaky Mallah and the Zombification of ABC Australia". Public response elsewhere indicates that this is not the case. So I'll make this effort to present them explicitly.

1) Zaky's background:

He had his passport revoked in 2003. He sought formal appeal against this decision. He was refused access to the 'evidence' upon which the decision was made and the decision was upheld.

He was greatly upset by this and made a fair bit of public fuss about it. Zaky readily admits some of his response at the time was over the top, but he also submits that he was only 19 and that he can be a bit of an idiot.

The Australian and Alan Jones picked up on this and, for whatever reason, gave some public bandwidth to Zaky and his concerns.

Quite probably as a result of this publicising of Zaky and his gripe, an ASIO agent posed as a reporter and sought to induce Zaky to enact a siege upon ASIO staff and give him the 'scoop story'.

At some point in this induced farce Zaky made a death threat toward this ASIO agent. On the face of it, this sounds understandable.

Zaky was then arrested and charged for his threat. He was held in solitary at Goulbourn prison for 2 years and eventually tried under newly enacted terrorism laws that were not even in place at the time of his arrest.
The judge and jury found him not guilty of the terrorism charge. The judge allowed admission of the evidence regarding the death threat even though it was illegally generated via entrapment and should not have been admissible. Zaky pleaded guilty and was convicted.

2) The current event:

Zaky appeared on Q&A and asked Minister Ciobo how he would be dealt with under the new pending legislation to rescind citizneship. Clearly this question is vital to him and anyone in the community like him. They all pay their 8ç for the ABC just like we do and are fully entitled to be heard and to hear on the matter. More broadly though, the question and the answer provide a vital measure to to all of us who might want to better understand exactly what this new legislative bundle may or may not actually mean.

Ciobo's answer was revealed the chilling reality that decisions would be based upon visceral reflex and not any objectively considered merit. No surprise really but usefully shocking to have it out in the open.

Zaky observed that the Minister's attitude, and thereby it can be presumed the Government's, would help mobilise vulnerable local sentiment toward ISIS rather than away from it.

At that point the world melted down. Utterly unlikely allies, beginning immediately with Tony Jones, all worked together from that point to completely obscure these stark utterances of ugly truth beneath an incendiary mob attack upon Zaky and upon the ABC, which has offered itself up for sacrifice either out of stupidity, cowardice or complicity toward the weirdly horrible status quo that we are being steadily conscripted into.

3) Zaky's misogynous tweets:

He did not tweet about women per se. He tweeted about two particular journalists who happen to be women.
The gist of his tweet was that they were whores. Personally I find his concern for their particular behaviour, and his character analogy of them, quite compelling.

I am not about to insulate myself from the useful truth and meaning of his communication simply because he frames it in the language and imagery that is common to a youth from the western suburbs of Sydney. Why is elitism any better than so-called misogyny? Both are divisive and marginalising. Moreover, persons fortunate to have an education should be better able to rise above such failings rather than seek advantage in their own 'elevated' form of it.

3) Fundamentalism:

Zaky is a prominent and repeated denouncer of ISIS and advocate against Moslem youth joining them.

Due to this he has received personalised death threats directly from Mohamed Elomar, an active Australian ISIS operative in Syria.

Zaky has continued his anti-ISIS advocacy despite these threats.

Maybe those anti-ISIS identities who are denouncing Zaky might like to compare their own effectiveness and bravery regarding the task with his.

4) Why this is an important issue:

It reveals the innate character and implementation of a very severe, potentially far-reaching new 'security'' regulation.

It reveals the innate character and purpose of the Govt. implementing that regulation.

It reveals the ruthless and coordinated intent of a media and community sector in prosecuting this socio-political character and purpose.

It reveals the gormlessness of the rest of the media and the community toward objecting to both the actions and the purpose of such obvious manipulation. In fact, with some rare and largely muffled exception, they are all falling over themselves to not be seen as being in any way obstructive or oppositional to this purge toward an acceptable national orthodoxy. Any particular minority group or point of view (population and growth management?) should be extremely worried about this dynamic.

It suggests that the Government's purpose is, at best, careless toward the actual effect it might have upon vulnerable Moslem youth and their communities, and, at worst, it might actually seek to provoke young moslems to subscribe to ISIS et al. This serves to keep the domestic electoral fire on National Security alive for the Coalition and it helps maintain middle Eastern instability, which has been instigated and maintained as a western Geo-political agenda from the beginning. This in turn keeps the domestic border security issue alive. Deliciously cynical isn't it? Keep the refugee source ignited and then make a big electoral deal about keeping our shores safe from their consequent flow. Personally I find such abysmal futility utterly sickening, even if only stubborn stupidity is at the nub of it.

But no, say the crowd, this is all a meaningless distraction orchestrated by an attention-seeking misogynistic fundamentalist.

Yeah, and endless economic growth is good and population increase is both inevitable and beneficially productive. Essentially the same narrative and source, isn't it?

[Candobetter.net Editor: Updated with spelling corrections and some links on 2 July 20145.] My reaction to the short drama between Mr Mallah, Mr Ciobo and Tony Jones on the Q & A program of June 22 is different in some ways from Greg Wood's in his article earlier today, "Zaky Mallah and the Zombification of ABC Australia", although I agree with much of it.

Firstly, I have been pleasantly surprised at the mix of participants and topics in the last few Q & A programs. I thought the program of the 22nd June 2015 was really great. I thought it was fantastic to get a man acquitted of jihadist terrorism on to raise the issues that we all know exist in Australia's terrorism laws.

I was glad that Tony Jones and his team, whoever was responsible, allowed a citizen who had been at the margins of society to speak in this forum. With my own fairly extensive knowledge of interview techniques, I thought I recognised Ciobo's tactics as calculated to shame and inflame Mallah. Effectively Ciobo's personalisation of a legal issue caused Mallah to have to defend his 'face'. (You lose 'face' if you are attacked in public; it is much harder to deal with if a powerful figure tries to shame you in front of a crowd.) Very few ordinary people could have seen that one coming, nor could they have dealt with it any better. Perhaps only a seasoned politician could maintain apparent equanimity at such a public insult. Then again, maybe Ciobo was blowing off some steam he had accumulated after taking a drubbing from Antony Hegarty (Singer of Antony and The Johnsons) and Linda Tirago , (American anti-poverty campaigner). I think his response to Mallah probably even took Tony Jones by surprise, although I would have to review the podcast to know, and I'm not inclined to get into things that far.

Mallah's retort may or may not have been meant seriously and it may not have really made sense. Maybe he did mean, "Well, if you're so unforgiving and rude to a once extreme Islamist who has since tried to reintegrate and become a positive influence and make amends, that might reinforce the decision of others who are contemplating joining violent Islamist sects."

Or maybe he just retorted the first thing that came into his head, like a slap response to a public slap.

It is also shocking that Ciobo accused Mallah of having got off 'on a technicality' if, as Anne Aly, 'Counter Terrorism Expert' insisted on the next show, on 29th June, he was well and truly cleared.

But I also have to say that the whole government rhetoric which we live daily and which formed the context of the controversy on Q & A seems to me like an exercise in hypocrisy and a subtle encouragement for people to go to Syria and join 'rebel fighters'. It is our government and its slimy billionaire mentors in the United States and NATO who demonise the Syrian Government as an excuse to continue to rape and pillage a whole swathe of countries in the Middle East, in a fine old tradition begun at the beginning of the 19th Century in the Great Game.

You don't actually have to be a marginalised muslim immigrant with poor education to be taken in by the 'reforming the brutal Assad 'regime' (which is actually an elected government, not an illegitimate 'regime') spin. Plenty of apparently educated and intelligent people simply believe whatever Mr Abbott, Fairfax and Mr Murdoch's team tell them, which I find amazing.

The variation that probably occurs with some young muslims is that, as well as hearing about the 'brutal Assad regime' they also hear of how the West is raping and pillaging the Middle East. And they hear from religiose Arab sources, (sponsored by the Saudis, Turkey, Qatar for instance - Australia and NATO allies) ranging from The Brotherhood through Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, to ISIS, that Bashar al Assad's government is too secular and is repressing people in possession of religious truth. They rarely hear of how that government is the only one that provides Palestinians with effective citizenship and housing, nor that Syria has taken in a huge number of refugees from the surrounding countries wrecked and disorganised by western interference.

It must require extreme learning curves of sophistication and self-control for people who work out for themselves in the field that ISIS and various religious 'revolutionary armies' are actually led by crims, nutters and/or cynical politicians, often armed and financed by oil-states, the US and NATO, to then find some good in our own government and press, which endorse and amplify a host of transparently inadequate reasons to keep on bombing, invading and interfering with the Middle East.

Apparently Mr Mullah has also said some very nasty things endorsing sexual violence towards women. Well, I hope he learns that that is a pretty stupid and scurrilous attitude sooner rather than later. Now that everyone knows, let's hope girls stay well away from him.

Back to the ABC. Q and A did nothing wrong, in my opinion, in inviting a citizen with an unusual experience of notable relevance to the terrorism laws being debated on the program. Mr Ciobo, who is the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Trade, should be called out publicly for the way he addressed Mr Mullah. As Greg Wood (in Zaky Mallah and the Zombification of ABC Australia) implies, Mr Steve Ciobo sounded as fundamentalist and inadequate to foreign affairs as an infuriated Mr Mullah; he just had a nicer suit.

But the clash over terrorism and dual citizenship was only a cherry on a multi-tiered cream cake. Three guests, Grahame Morris, 'Political strategist' and Steve Ciobo and Joel Fitzgibbon (shadow minister for Rural Affairs, right wing NSW ALP) came off the worse as they were bluntly and skilfully challenged on issues of class entitlement, privatisation, poverty and environmental and social responsibility by Antony Hegarty and Linda Tirado.

Was that why the government really got so mad? Because the blokes on its side were so woefully inadequate to their ideology being challenged?

On the 22nd the Q and A program had as a guest Mr Paul Kelly, long time editor of The Australian. One felt as if one were in the presence of Mr Murdoch himself, as Mr Kelly articulated what strikes me as a delusional corporate media belief that the ABC is massively left-wing biased. My impression was that Kelly and another guest, Tim Wilson who is a former Director of the IPA and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs[1], were there more to claw back the lost face of the people from their political side of the fence who had been trumped the week before by Hegarty and Tirado. In the context of the Prime Minister's sublimely inappropriately themed recommendation that 'heads should roll' their poe faces were kind of scary.

In my view, the Government and the ABC management should step right back from any punitive or even finger wagging exercises against Q and A, which really does an excellent job of mixing right wing with left wing and 'academiccy' with business, ordinary or even marginalised. At candobetter.net we are often justly critical of the ABC, including Q & A, but not in this case.

Good job Tony Jones. Keep at it.

NOTES

[1] Now he is the Human Rights and “Freedom” Commissioner, serving under its President Professor Gillian Triggs.

Material has been added to this article on 1 July 2015. The general deception and essential horror active within the current bullshit storm being unleashed around the ABC and Mallah is fully revealed by simply reading the factual account of Mallah's background, linked below, and then considering what was actually said in the Q&A program in context to that factual background.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaky_Mallah

As stated at the outset by ABC chief Mark Scott, Mallah had a democratic right to ask the question that he did on that program. Beyond that though, every Australian citizen had the right, and a vital and pressing need, to hear Mallah's question and the Minister's answer to it.

In true fact and context, it was Ciobo's answer that was horrendous. His reflex response was steeped in ignorance, intolerance, exclusivity and malice. It flashed a stark, Freudian insight into this current government's purpose and will toward our national 'Freedom and Security'.

But having correctly established Mallah's democratic right, the ABC Chief then immediately resiled from his base position to also acknowledge that 'it was a mistake' for Q&A to have Mallah on the show.

What the hell? How? Why?

That weak-minded contradiction gave the hounds of fascism ground to swerve around the sound bulwark of Scott's fundamentally correct, crucially important argument. This avenue of circumvention allowed the rabid attack to proceed unabated; upon the ABC, upon Scott's compromised 'defence', and upon democracy itself and the free social dialogue necessary to its healthy function.

True to type, the ABC journalist group have since let these baying hounds set the parameters of the ensuing media 'conversation'. Every attack dog from every available right-wing brood kennel has emerged to swell a lobotimised howl for the ABC'c blood. The cacophony is now so loud, so pervasive and so disturbing that even moderate liberal puppies like John Hewson apparently feel they also have to join in with harmonic yelps, lest they be found socially and personally wanting in some indeterminable but viscerally uncomfortable way. To my mind, Turnbull has established beyond all doubt that he is utterly amoral and unable to control the fascist horde he sleeps with, or that he has fully resigned himself to being a part of it as the pragmatic mechanism for best maximising his own personal achievement. Labor and the Greens are both absent from the fray regarding the truth on this matter.

Faced with this unmoderated, slavering onslaught upon their own character, and quite possibly their own professional existence, the ABC journo group has proven unable to execute a competent and forensic examination and prosecution of the pertinent facts and context of the situation. No wonder they fail so abysmally on critical issues that are removed from their direct, immediate personal well-being, such as population, housing affordability, etc. They can't even effectively argue the case for their own professional freedom and identity. How then can they possibly act in any useful way to mediate due protection of our rapidly diminishing democracy, social equity or resource sustainability. Especially now that they have gone down so badly in this ugly episode of media and party political gang rape. PTSD now forthcoming or what?

Things are not at all well in this Nation at present. Very clearly our democracy now depends heavily upon citizens acting to inform themselves and each other. The mainstream media cannot be relied upon.

Footnote:

Within all of this it is also imperative to recognise that the frenzy and consternation of this attack upon the ABC has served to utterly obliterate any useful attention toward the nature of Government intent and character that was revealed by Minister Ciobo in his interchange with Zaky Mallah. Maybe the ABC is not in fact the primary objective of the current political exercise. Rather it is a subsidiary victim for the aggressors, although a desirable one nonetheless.

Notably, and perhaps shamefully, Tony Jones initiated this cover-up of spontaneous, 'pants-down' revelation of awful truth when he immediately declared that Zaky's final incisive observation be 'struck from the record'. What on earth did he mean? Zaky's comment can't be excised from the public record as its recording is not limited to a contained, formal transcript from which it can be simply and completely struck. It is recorded on public, readily reproducible media. It would have to be blasted out of its public domain existence by a campaign of mis-information and intimidation, which is exactly what has now been achieved.

Surely Tony's declaration at the time wasn't the invocation to begin this ensuing spiritual cleansing. Rather, was he simply prescient of its imminent arrival and reflexively at pains to be not too far on the wrong side as it unfolded? Which begs the question, just how well trained are the ABC cohort? Are they Pavlov's reporters, conditioned to familiar non-threatening ground by the constant bell-ring of the baseless but unchallenged accusation of them 'all being lefties'. My god! Why do they fail to challenge this inaccurate, essentially meaningless and effectively limiting generalisation of themselves as a work-group? Do they actually embrace the wistful but practically disabling and pathetic romance of it? Where might such a high profile embodiment of meaning render a real 'leftie'? As a pathological nut-bag or extremist? No wonder then that the parameters of social discourse have mutated so far to the right. And so excruciatingly clever to employ the self-absorbed narcissism of 'authentic' and wannabe celebrity journo's as vectors to deliver this mutation.

If the ABC journo group do actually embody the contemporary definition of being 'lefties' then I am indeed down a deep, dark rabbit hole and am in desperate need of the right drugs and/or implements to get back out again... and quickly please. Mind control is not the product of compulsion by the aggressor. It is one of submission by the victim. However no one person is an island. At some point within the labyrinthe of perceived reality and illusion we all need to access, and also to provide, some collective help. 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' is an old film with a modern message in this regard. I've no doubt that Zaky could certainly do with some collective support right now. He deserves recognition of the merit of his basic position, and for his stoic courage and relatively calm consistency in the face of persistently mendacious attack, unreasonable accusation and confected collective hate being variously levelled at him by the voices of political neanderthals and 'progressives' alike. In this regard, Waleed Aly should very particularly bow his head in shame over his own efforts interviewing Zacky on a recent episode of The Project.

Thanks Zaky. Your effort has helped me to understand things more clearly than I did. However, with that understanding I also do feel more endangered, not by you, but by the horrific nature, breadth and scale of the social response to you. By many real measures, this country is not as safe as it once was. The enemy is how we think, or are lead to not think, about important things.

"We live in a time when compassionate rhetoric is used as a weapon of state-corporate control. The rhetoric focuses on ethical concerns such as racial, gender and same-sex equality, but is disconnected from any kind of coherent ethical worldview. Corporate commentators are thereby freed to laud these moral principles, even as they ignore high crimes of state-corporate power." (Media Lens editor David Edwards)

See: other articles which refute claims that the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against its own people.
The ABC World Today 'report' can be found here.

Australians who are alarmed at the situation in Syria have today expressed disappointment and concern at the emotive bias and poor research shown in ABC World Today 17 April 2015 report, "Syria chemical attack: UN ambassadors 'moved to tears' by video of child victims" on renewed investigations into purported use of chlorine and sarin gas on civilians in Syria. As noted in the interview, there would indeed need to be very strong proof of the government's use of such gases, and there is not._{#fnAbcSy1" id="txtAbcSy1" style="font-size:120%;"> 1}  It should by now be well known that the chlorine necessary to make gas is available everywhere as a household chemical, but also that chlorine gas is an ineffective poison to use in war. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has repeatedly denied using such a gas and no-one has been able to come up with wholly convincing arguments that such a gas was used by anyone in any effective manner, let alone the Syrian government. There is evidence of the use of sarin gases in Syria but these have also not been convincingly linked to the Syrian Government, but they have been linked to 'rebels'. The Syrian Government surrendered all chemical weapons stocks in 2012. You can read a very detailed analysis and correspondence on how the facts have been tested and sifted here: The Red Line and the Rat Line, Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels
Why does the ABC persist in entertaining the reinvention this barrel-bomb-chemical-weapons story? Has it no memory of how the United States has run this line before as an excuse to destroy several states? Have the reporters concerned no sense of pity or responsibility for the consequences?

How long do they think that Syria can survive an assault funded and driven by world powers? Syrians voted overwhelmingly for Bashar al-Assad in an election monitored by UN observers last year. See "Attacking Syria is simply illegal". We are not talking about a 'regime' here. We are talking about a very popularly elected leader by a population determined to save its country even as that country is reduced to rubble by US, French and British arms whose public relations people weep crocodile tears for their victims - and blame Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian government is the only protective force left in Syria. It is the only force capable of routing ISIS and other 'rebel' forces out and bringing populations to safety.

Even if Bashar al-Assad were using gases or 'barrel bombs', given that his government is the only chance of survival for his people, why would the US/NATO and allies try to remove him except to destroy Syria and raze its people from the earth? For this seems to be in train via the numerous so-called 'rebels' supported and unleashed on Syria with funding and weapons supply from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United States and Turkey (see Turkey's latest here)- to name a few war criminal states.

Tell me, how does pursuing Bashar al-Assad to the end help anyone?

And how can the ABC and the awful people it allows to rehash the chemical weapons furphy support the brutal Saudi Arabia dictatorship - whose dreadful religion is the prototype for ISIS doctrine - and damn Bashar al-Assad, who presides over a secular Arab state where women may wear what they want and go about their business, where there is free education and health care for all, and the home of millions of permanent refugees_{#fnAbcSy2" id="txtAbcSy2" style="font-size:120%;"> 2}  well before al-Assad became 'the enemy' and the only permanent home to Palestinians in the Middle East?

#appendix" id="appendix">Appendix: Other articles which refute claims that the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against its own people

OPCW, Julie Bishop set up Syrian government for invasion by the United States? (14/9/14), "West blocks naming Syria chemical attackers": US backed terrorists committing atrocities (2/10/13), Tony Cartalucci, James Corbett, Michel Chossudovsky demolish mainstream media chemical weapons lies against Syria (18/9/13),
10 Questions about Syrian chemical weapons (4/9/13), Syrian Girl refutes chemical weapons lie, calls upon Australians to attend rally against war tomorrow (30/8/13) - includes embe3dded Syria CW "Evidence" by "Brown Moses Blog" Debunked (29/8/13), Breaking news: UK Parliament to oppose Syrian war until after weapons inspectors' report received (29/8/13), Feigned indignation over Syrian chemical deaths a cover for invasion plans (23/8/13), 'Rebels' not Syrian Government using Chemical weapons - doctors, witnesses, UN investigator says (8/5/14).

Footnote[s]

#fnAbcSy1" id="fnAbcSy1">1.#txtAbcSy1"> ↑  For those who immediately go to Wikipedia, I can tell you that you will find that journalists mostly get their opinions about weapons in the Middle East from a blogger in Britain called Elliot Higgins who has learned through following events on the internet. If you go right to the end of the article, you will find a short paragraph entitled, "Criticism": "Richard Lloyd and Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated that "although he has been widely quoted as an expert in the American mainstream media, [he] has changed his facts every time new technical information has challenged his conclusion that the Syrian government must have been responsible for the sarin attack. In addition, the claims that Higgins makes that are correct are all derived from our findings, which have been transmitted to him in numerous exchanges." Note 16 will take you to The Red Line and the Rat Line, Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels If you click on the link this will take you to a very comprehensive analysis of Higgins's observations in the light of much more varied sources. You might also take the time to listen to some interviews with Bashar al-Assad on you-tube, where he argues his case very logically. The most recent is by Charlie Rose of CBS News, 30 March 2015. (The complete video below is also embedded, with the transcript, here on candobetter. The full transcript can also be found on the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA). - Ed)

#fnAbcSy2" id="fnAbcSy2">2.#txtAbcSy2"> ↑  Including 1.3m Iraqis who fled the illegal sanctions and wars of 1991 and 2003 and against Iraq in which Australia was complicit.

The function of Australian mass media seems to be to inveigle listeners into complicity in the terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to 'choose' between distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B.

I am fed up.

I am fed up with the fact that nearly all the air time on local ABC radio is filled with discussion of the symptoms of rapid population growth and human overpopulation with scarcely a passing reference to the actual cause. For example, today I caught a discussion of wind farms on the Basalt Plains in Western Victoria. A woman called Jon Faine’s program with a concern that there are only 500 brolgas left in the area and that wind farms impinge on the birds’ territory by around an 8kms margin from each wind farm. Host, Jon Faine as devil's advocate pointed out that the brolgas could go somewhere else as the wind farms were not really taking up a lot of space. The next caller ridiculed the brolga advocate with the opposite argument that if coal continued to be used to generate electricity then there would be no environment for brolgas or anything else. Neither caller mentioned that with increasing population, more and more electricity needs to be generated either by coal or by wind farms or whatever will do the trick. The human environmental footprint in Victoria is growing from a size 10 to a size 14 with no end in sight.

I’m also fed up that the Leader newspaper was delivered to my letter box this week with the front page headline “Please ease squeeze” plastered over a photo of South Yarra railway station exit/entrance presumably at peak hour in the afternoon as the crowds are walking away from the station. According to the article the station is a daily bun fight with too many passengers for the capability of the station. Prahran State Greens MP, Sam Hibbens “has lodged a Freedom of Information request with the department of transport to find out what improvements are being considered for the bustling hub.” This same MP in 2010 as a Federal candidate was invited to reply (both in writing and by phone) to a questionnaire on population for Sustainable Population Australia but no reply was received. In a nutshell, Hibbens is calling for improvements in the station to accommodate an “extra 5000 people expected to move into the Forest Hill precinct adjacent to the station in the next 15 years.” I feel exasperated to know that it is already overcrowded, so the improvement would have to provide an enormous increase in capacity if it were to accommodate the continuous increase in population which is expected. This increase in population ensures continued discomfort and stress for passengers. This is a big deal as it is an essential part of their daily lives and we only get one life each, as far as I know. Governments don’t seem to be about improving lives at all, only talking about it, staving off complaints, and controlling what should be uproar about the completely avoidable destruction of the reasonable lives we used to lead and could have continued to have led.

I am equally fed up with the articles in the daily media such as The Age in Melbourne (several this week) about booming population growth as though it is news. To me it is just a constant feed of reminders to the readership of a decreasing quality of life due to socially engineered population hyper-growth.

Turning to the radio, the function of chat shows especially on the ABC seem to be to inveigle the audience into complicity in this terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to feel they are being heard by calling in with suggestions and their views on whether they’d like distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B. Alternatively, the programs feature trivial topics as a brief distractions from the reality of where we are heading. (As I write this, the program I can hear is dedicated to personal coincidences.)

I’d love to know what instructions the columnists of the daily newspapers are given to guide them in their articles on population growth. It must be something like “Make sure that you don’t let anyone know that high population growth is a government choice. Make it sound like a trend you are following and reporting on that has no rhyme or reason."

I recently attended an ACF meeting. As the oldest environmental NGO in Australia they are doing a road tour seeking support. These people are fighting against the inevitable destruction of the Australian environment, which the ABC, our public broadcaster, on whom so many Australians rely for serious information, fully sanctions using pro population growth extremism. Unfortunately the argument put forth is akin to one where a driver, because he is wearing a seat-belt, believes that he now no longer needs to worry about travelling at high speed without brakes.

The ACF are unable to mention population growth in any of their 11 core campaigns, apparently because they are confused about what to do and how to do it. The ABC, on which Australians rely for much of their information, has partly driven this confusion through destructive propaganda which seeks to suppress discussion of the scientific truth about population growth.

Typically such Environmental NGO meetings are a combination of over 50s and younger people. A significant proportion of the older people recognise the population problem because they have the wisdom of the experience of rapid change iThe 20 somethings just can’t see how rapidly the degeneration is occurring because they lack that experience and remain uninformed by important broadcasters like the ABC.

I rang the ABC's RN Breakfast line yesterday again making a plea for impartial coverage of the population growth issue. A cause I have supported for the last 8 years and more.

I explained that refugees, migration and population growth management are related, but completely different, issues. What appeared to be a bigoted ABC fool on the other end of the line said she didn’t agree. To me this betrayed the reality of intolerance, prejudice and ignorance endemic at the ABC. Ever since the Pauline Hanson debacle the ABC has sought to confuse population growth management, which is a humanitarian and environmental issue, with anti refugee and anti migration attitudes.

Refugees are created by overpopulation, degraded environments and conflict over resources.

Migration, in Australia, is a government policy based on an outdated belief in population growth and a ‘populate or perish’ mentality that is a relic of a mid-20th century world with no limits to growth. Apart from the US and Canada, there are no other countries with longstanding mass migration policies. Such policies are in conflict with refugee policy. For example Australia's planned migration intake for 2014/15 is 190,000 while refugee intake is 13,750. And this is happening in the context of annual unemployment growth roughly 60% higher than annual population growth. The US has 50 million people below the poverty line and is arguably one of the most environmentally destructive, inhumane examples of capitalist malpractice on earth. Canada is similar to Australia because there is a delusion of no limits to growth there too; despite the evidence to the contrary.

Population growth management is essential for achieving for humanitarian and environmentally sustainable objectives. This is not a political issue; it is a scientific fact; just as global warming is a scientific fact.

Australia’s economy, in deteriorating more rapidly under the extreme population growth scenario, provides the proof of the unhumanitarian and unsustainable nature of extreme population growth. I have written at length about this scientific fact, explaining that Australia displays contempt for the risk management of this issue that any Australian business entity would be legally bound to apply based on WorkSafe legislation. All multinational corporations, including large mining and oil companies, follow guidelines similar to WorkSafe. The basis for these risk management strategies is based on maximising safe outcomes in an environment (the business environment) where there is a physical (and financial) limit to the available resources. This risk management strategy, if practiced by the Australian government, would lead to the following:

• Immediate evaluation of the impact of population growth on the economy to determine whether lower rates of growth would lead to better holistic financial outcomes
• If the evidence supports this conclusion this would lead to more money available for domestic and foreign aid to promote quality of life and family planning in the developing world (and in Australia)
• The simple risk management conclusion may be that moderating Australia’s rate of population growth will serve the greater good. This is why confusing such a strategy with anti-migration or anti-refugee attitudes is so destructive.

One analogy is a driver in a car wearing a seat belt. The seat belt represents renewable energy. The car represents population growth. The car is currently driving towards a brick wall at 100 km per hour. Unless the car slows down the seat belt will be of no use.

Or another driver in the car. The seatbelt represents government capacity to balance the budget. Same car, same population problem, same brick wall. Population growth denial doesn't work.

There have been many economic studies supporting the conclusion that rapid population growth is economically unsustainable due to the high cost of infrastructure expansion. Here is one example: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0

The argument about reducing carbon footprints of the developed world is one thing. But if you are wearing a size 11 shoe in Melbourne you will need a size 0.08 shoe 200 years from now based on the current rate of population growth. That is because the current trend population growth in Melbourne will change today’s population of 4.25 million into 593 million in 2215.

We don’t have enough time left to continue with confused and bigoted ABC propaganda driving population growth denial.

Video and transcript inside: Dr Karen Hitchcock: "My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position." Congratulations to the 7.30 Report, Karen Hitchcock and Quarterly essay for criticising the appalling depiction and treatment of Australia's elderly, implicitly and explicitly advocated by the growth lobby in the mainstream media and government. See, for instance, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" The negative message about the elderly has been so overwhelming that most of us find it exhausting to fight. The ABC has often also carried this message uncritically. Perhaps it took a woman-led news commentary program - the 7.30 Report - to try to break this mould. Dr Karen Hitchcock (who is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a large city public hospital) is a very effective ambassador for the elderly, although she is a young woman herself. Her work deserves our collective support and promotion.

Video and transcript originally broadcast and published from the ABC 7.30 Report at http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4196703.htm on 12 March 2015.

Elderly 'have internalised' message they're a burden on society, says physician Karen Hitchcock

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: By 2050, about five per cent of Australia's population will be over the age of 85, with many of us expected to live to our mid-90s. The challenges of the ageing population are something we've been hearing a lot about in the past couple of weeks, since the Federal Government released its Intergenerational Report. The message is that more old people and falling budget revenues are going to put a huge strain on our health and welfare systems. But now one doctor is raising concerns about the way we're discussing the ageing population. She believes we're sending older Australians a message that they're an intolerable burden.

Karen Hitchcock is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a major public hospital in Victoria and she's written the latest issue of the Quarterly Essay. It's entitled Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly, she joined me from our Melbourne studio.

Karen, we've been talking a lot recently about the economics of health care as the country deals with an ageing population and declining budget revenue. When you listen to economists and politicians talk about the ageing population and the growing pressures on the budget and sustainability and so on, as a doctor, what do you hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK, PUBLIC HOSPITAL PHYSICIAN & AUTHOR: What I hear is that the fact of our ageing population is an overwhelmingly negative development. The elderly are portrayed as being a burden on their families and on the state and a drain on the economy.

LEIGH SALES: And what message do you think that the elderly hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Oh, I think that they've completely internalised this message that they're a burden. I see evidence of this every day on my hospital ward. Patients, elderly patients apologise for being sick, for being in hospital, for taking up a hospital bed that should be apparently for somebody else.

LEIGH SALES: How does that translate then in terms of the type of care that they want?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well, I think that sometimes it can mean that they feel reluctant to accept the care that they need.

LEIGH SALES: Like, give me an example of, say, a patient where you've seen that.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, well, I've - there's a lot of patients, but recently I looked after an elderly gentleman who said that he wanted to die and that he didn't want to be in hospital and that he was a nuisance and when I sat down and talked to him, it turned out that his wife had recently died, his dog that was his remaining companion had died and he felt that he had no place in society anymore and that he was a burden.

LEIGH SALES: And so how, as a doctor, did you address that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I called him a couple of weeks after he left hospital, given that he had said he never wanted to come back to hospital, just to try and work out a plan for him and he said to me that he says silly things when he's sick. Of course he wants to come back to hospital and that he was very, very happy because he'd managed to get another dog, go back to his part-time work.

LEIGH SALES: What's your attitude towards advanced care directive, which are documents that people sign giving instructions about the sort of treatment that they would like if they're faced with potential end-of-life issues, which of course is often things that older people sign?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: They're being heavily promoted at the moment as something that should be universally adopted and I think that they do have a place, particularly if people have advanced malignancy and are going to die imminently or particularly when people have particular treatments that they don't want to have. But I think that saying that every single citizen in Australia should have an advanced care directive is dangerous and I think that to say that they're unambiguously good sort of relies upon an understanding of the human subject that is breathtakingly simplistic. People change their mind. It's very difficult for us to know how we're going to feel as we become increasingly dependent and debilitated. I mean, my grandmother, for example, she was a fiercely independent woman who, in her 80s, developed a lung disease that meant eventually she was house-bound and oxygen dependent. And if someone had've asked her a year prior to that development whether or not she would rather die or be house-bound and oxygen dependent, she definitely would have said she'd rather be dead. But when it came down to it, she was very happy with her life. She still had her family. She said that she would play in her memories. She was very happy to be alive.

LEIGH SALES: So if you see this idea that we are giving elderly people the impression that they're a burden as being a problem, how would you like to see the debate around some of these issues and the discussion reframed?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well I think that our focus should be on how can we improve the life of our elderly patients, not that we should be so keen to offer them death.

LEIGH SALES: And so, practically, how would you go about doing that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, I think that we - it would be really helpful if we could somehow integrate medical and social services so that we can encourage elderly people to remain independent and in their communities. If we could somehow integrate services and offer preventative treatment before people need to come to hospital, that would be a really great development and there are international examples of care programs like this where there are community-based, what's called medical homes, that are staffed by GPs and specialists and full allied health to enable people to stay in the community longer and to stay well and independent.

LEIGH SALES: How about the interaction between nursing homes and hospitals, how well does that work?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: It works very poorly. Many elderly people come to hospital as a result of medication side-effects, having too many tablets or etc., and they come to hospital, we stop their tablets and they're discharged back to their nursing homes and they have to continue on the tablets that they were on prior to coming to hospital, sometimes the tablets that caused them to come to hospital, until they can get a doctor to come to the nursing home and rechart their medicine.

LEIGH SALES: You are a busy doctor, yet you've taken the time out to write this lengthy piece of work around these issues. What is the core message that you're hoping to get out there based on your experience working in hospitals?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position.

LEIGH SALES: Just before you go, Dr Hitchcock, there's been a lot of discussion around this week about sexism in medicine. A senior surgeon raised some concerns around the issue of sexual harassment and whether or not raising that impacts on female doctors' careers. Just in your experience, do you think that there is a problem in medicine with sexism?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I've obviously not worked with every doctor in every hospital in Australia and I'm sure there are individuals. However, one thing I do know is that there is certainly not a pervasive culture of sexism in medicine. I've never been discriminated against because I'm a woman in medicine. In fact I've been enormously supported and encouraged.

LEIGH SALES: Dr Hitchcock, thank you very much.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Thank you.

What really drove the so-called leadership crisis in the Federal Government, which has gone on for about three years? Tonight, as Julia Gillard steps down, who really benefits, and how?

Tonight many of us have been watching, with some horror, the latest awful changes in the Federal Government.

So, what was the policy agenda that supposedly drove Rudd's challenge to Gillard? In fact, no policies were mentioned, as many media commentators have just acknowledged.

There may, however, have been a barely iterated agenda - that of the mainstream press - to have an earlier election.

How would that advantage the power elites? Well, in these days where real debate is possible on the internet, a long election lead-up might just have led to some real democracy - obviously the last thing that the corporate press, which also leads the ABC, want.

Julia Gillard just showed herself to be as capable a leader as any male politician I have seen in over a decade of federal politics.

The following two interviews, in addition to the interview embedded here from PressTV below and the Sunday Times interview of 3 March 2013 are only four of many interviews of President al-Assad available on YouTube. It is perplexing that a national leader, who is so prepared to be critically scrutinised in the media, is held, even by some active and outspoken opponents of the terrorist war against Syria, to be 'corrupt' and a 'dictator'. In comparison to the way many of the West's formally democratic politicians have mis-ruled their constituencies, for example, Australia's Foreign Minister Bob Car (pictured), who mis-ruled the State of NSW from 1995 until 2005, President al-Assad appears remarkably able.

All the evidence seems to suggest that, to the contrary, President al-Assad is a courageous and humane national leader who has capably led his country against the foreign terrorist proxy invasion since March 2001. Had Syria been less capably led, the cost to the Syrian people by now would have been even greater than the already terrible death toll, put at more than 70,000 by most estimates. In all probability, the Syrian government would have been overthrown, Syria would have been partitioned and bloody sectarian strife similar to what occurred in Iraq after the United States and its allies invaded in 2003, would now be under way.

President al-Assad, in charge of a nation threatened with invasion, has repeatedly faced close media scrutiny

Above video of 33 minutes, 36 seconds duration can also be viewed here.

Video of 4 minutes, 13 seconds duration can also be viewed here.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr echoes media lies against Syria

Readers may be interested to compare President al-Assad's words with those of Australian Foreign Minister Bob Car 10 months ago in July 2012 in an interview with SBS television's Anton Enus. In that interview, both Bob Carr and Anton Enus predicted the imminent overthrow of the Syrian Government and made claims, contrary to the known evidence of the time, that the Syrian Army and 'pro-government militias' had committed atrocities against the Syrian people.

Video of 5 minutes, 57 seconds duration can also be viewed here.

It is striking that while, on the one hand Russia and China are criticised by Bob Carr and Anton Enus for vetoing motions for military intervention against the Syrian Government on the United Nations Security Council, on the other hand the tragic consequences for the Libyan people of the failure of Russia and China to veto the resolution for a "no-fly zone" in 2011, are not even mentioned.

No mention is made either of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which Australia participated. That invasion was found by the UK Government Chilcot inquiry to have been in breach of international law.

Assad will not willingly allow Syria to suffer fate of Iraq

Many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result and President al-Assad is rightly resolved not to let the likes of Carr and Obama and the governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and other criminal entities on the international arena do the same to his country.

#BobCarr">Bob Carr's misrule of NSW, 1995-2005

Australia's current Foreign Minister, Senator Bob Carr, ruled the state of New South Wales from 1995 until 2005. Unlike President al-Assad, whose country has, faced threatened invasions of Syria for much of the time since he assumed office, he was formally democratically elected Premier of New South Wales in 1995.

However, many of the policies Carr imposed or attempted to impose --- privatisation, the massive expansion of global-warming coal exports, enabling the trashing of bushland in Western Sydney against popular protest, etc. -- were harmful to the public and the environment and benficial to vested wealthy corporate interests. Had President Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria as ineptly and unconscionably as Carr ruled New Sout Wales, he would have been removed from office a long time ago.

In recent months, the pathologically greedy bankers who run the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and corporations have demanded of European Governments they inflict financial misery on millions of Europeans to supposedly restore the fiscal 'health' of those economies. The measures include the reduction of government services and the sacking of public servants who provide those services.

Fed up with that austerity, dictated by bankers and other big corporations to governments that were supposedly elected to represent their best interests, people of Germany and Spain have taken to the streets in large protests and clashed with police.

This was reported on the 7.00PM ABC news bulletin of 2 June 2013 (emphasis added):

The report went on to put the justification given by the European Governments:

Ordinary Germans and Spaniards have not accepted this excuse by greedy bankers and their government glove puppets to impose an economic recession and destroy their livelihoods and have taken to the streets in protest.

According to on ABC report, Is microeconomic reform on its way back? of 29 May 2013 Australia Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is hinting that he may well also find excuses to slash and burn government services should he be elected to Government on 14 September. He will consider reviving the Hilmer report of 1992-94 which made it obligatory for state and federal governments to privatise assets and services.

Below are reports from Russia Today of the protests of 2 June 2013 in Germany and, before that, of 31 May.

Frankfurt riot police charge into marching Blockupy activists, scuffle with protesters

Activists of the anti-globalist Blockupy movement scuffled with dozens of riot police who charged into a marching crowd to disperse protesters, reports RT's Peter Oliver. The march has been reportedly stopped.

What was supposed to be a march through the middle of German's financial capital by anti-austerity demonstrators really lasted only about 500 meters, when several hundred riot police in full kit came among the crowd.

The protesters started throwing paint-filled objects at the police so puddles of paint are here and there, RT's Peter Oliver reported. Later the paint filled bags were confiscated by police.

The organizers maintain there are tens of thousands of protesters and Peter Oliver witnesses a whole column of protesters going around the ECB headquarters.

The police force has split into two groups now. They do not let anybody through so the demonstration is not moving anywhere, as police and protesters are locked in a stand-off.

Water cannons arrived at the scene of a peaceful protest, Oliver reports.

Riot police officers have already used pepper spray several times and some people have been taken away, but it is not clear if they have been arrested.

RT's crew working at the scene has been separated by the riot police dividing demonstrators. The crew reports the use of fences and barbed wire by police.

Protests in Frankfurt-am-Main started on Friday when some 3,000 'Blockupy' protesters, clutching signs demanding "humanity before profit", blocked the main entrance of the ECB, the organizers announced that the coalition has "reached its first goal" of the day.

The anti-globalism march was called to celebrate the anniversary of the 'Occupy' rallies by blocking the European Central Bank.

The protesters moved to city's downtown from activists' camp in the Frankfurt suburbs, set up earlier.

Police reported that though some protesters thrown stones and there were some clashes at the barricades, several people were detained on Friday.

The ECB, which has headquarters at Kaiserstrasse 29, in Frankfurt-am-Main, has promised to remain operational during the planned demonstrations.

Blockupy activists lay blame for the debt crisis in Europe with the banks and in particular the ECB for its role in imposing austerity measures on EU citizens.

The austerity measures proposed by the so-called troika, consisting of the ECB, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission have not reduced the national debts of the European countries. An increase of taxes and cuts of governmental social programs they promote have actually worsened the situation, deepening recession and increasing unemployment in the EU dramatically.

Hanno Bruchmann, an anti-austerity activist, believes that "There have been many capitalist crises before, but now it is happening in the US and Europe, the financial crisis has transformed into a debt crisis, and now is the moment in which this has become a permanent capitalist crisis on a big scale."

"The fact that the protest is taking place in what's supposed to be the most advanced country does show the level of the problem" Antonis Vradis, of the Occupy London movement told RT.

A demonstration in German's Frankfurt-am-Main is expected to gather up to 20,000 protesters. Several European capitals are set to see large rallies later in the day.

In a separate rally in Berlin people are protesting in solidarity with the Taksim square demonstration in Turkey now into its second day of violence with tear gas and water cannon being used

Appendix: Thousands blockade European Central Bank in Frankfurt

From Russia Today, of 31 May 2013, 3 days ago

The entrance of the ECB is blocked by over 3,000 'Blockupy' protesters in a march against austerity. 'Blockupy' has announced the coalition has "reached its first goal" of the day.

Anti-capitalist protesters have taken to the streets of the financial heart of Frankfurt a day ahead of Europe-wide gatherings planned for June 1 to protest leaders handling of the three-year euro debt crisis.

"We call up everyone to join our protests."

The ECB spokesman told The Guardian that the Blockupy protests have not disturbed day to day operations at the bank, but would not specify how many bankers managed to come to work.

Apart from those who amassed outside the ECB, a smaller demonstration took place at the nearby Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) headquarters, where around 50 police vehicles had been deployed. The protesters set off by midday.

The crowd, estimated at 2,500 by local authorities, clutched signs demanding 'humanity before profit'.

Rain-soaked and dressed in ponchos, the crowd is equipped with a wide array of protest props- vuvuzelas, yellow wigs, pots and pans, and mattresses with the spray-painted slogan 'War Starts Here'.

'Blockupy' has become a top-ten Twitter trend in Frankfurt, and at 10:09am (08:09 GMT), user Enough14 tweeted, "Strong Powerful blockade at Kaiserstr. Not one banker will come through here," in reference to the ECB headquarters.

Police reported some protesters had thrown stones and there were some clashes at the barricades, but so far the protests are being conducted peacefully.

The mass of protesters first gathered early Friday morning in the rainy financial center of Frankfurt, in an effort to block roads leading to the ECB and Deutsche Bank headquarters.

The crowd was met by police decked out in riot gear accompanied by large Alsatian dogs. Helicopters hovered above and water cannon trucks were on standby.

Many of Frankfurt's banks have urged staff to take Friday as a holiday, following a state holiday on Thursday.

Spokesman Martin Sommer said Frankfurt's financial district could be occupied by as many as 20,000 who believe the Troika -- the ECB, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund -- is imposing an "austerity dictate" on financially troubled countries they have bailed out.

Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, have received bailout loans and Spain has received loans for its banks.

Blockupy spokeswoman Frauke Distelrath said the protest was not aimed at bank employees, but at its role "as an important participant in the policies that are impoverishing people in Europe, in the cutbacks that are costing people their ability to make a living."

The protesters have been granted permission to demonstrate at the airport by a court on Thursday, even after the airport operator requested the group be kept outside of the terminal.

Blockupy assembled outside of the airport at 1 p.m. local time local time to protest against German immigration policies and what activists have decried as an "inhumane deportation system." Fraport, the airport operator, has advised passengers to arrive early for their flights.

The court said if the number of protestors in the terminal exceeds 200, police can break up the gathering. Felix Gottwald, a pilot, tweeted that security had been stepped up at Frankfurt airport in anticipation of the arrival of Blockupy protesters. Passengers at the airport have noted the heavy security presence, saying that only those who show a valid boarding pass can enter the building.

Activists are tweeting that anywhere between 200-800 protesters are currently blocking Frankfurt Airport Terminal 1, although those number remain unconfirmed.

In last year's protests police shut down Frankfurt's city center in anticipation of the demonstration.

Eurozone employment hits record high to 12.2 percent in April.

The demonstration is taking place almost exactly a year after police detained hundreds in a four-day march against a temporary ban on protests in Frankfurt last June.

Blockupy protesters are also protesting against other issues, including food price.

On Tuesday 24 of July I phoned Jon Faine's ABC local Melbourne Radio 774 program in an attempt to put a view about Syria to his listeners that was different to what had so far been put to them by Jon Faine and the corporate newsmedia. I was eventually told to ring back tomorrow. I intend to do so, but have decided to also put this letter to Jon Faine on the public record on the Internet. Updates: Jon Faine does not have a view on Syria!? does not consider Syria important!? - 8:40AM; My anti-war views censored by ABC 'talk-back' radio, 10:00AM See also: Who is fighting in Syria? of 24 July by Thierry Meyssan on voltairenet.com, US Prepares For Direct Intervention in Syria of 22 July by Tony Cartalucci on candobetter.

On Tuesday 24 of July I phoned Jon Faine's ABC local Melbourne Radio 774 program in an attempt to put a view about Syria to his listeners that was different to what had so far been put to them by Jon Faine and the corporate newsmedia. I had phoned once earlier in the morning and was told to ring back at 10:20AM. When I did I was put on hold for 20 minutes until the listeners' open line ended at 11:00AM . I was then told to ring back tomorrow. I intend to do so, but have decided to also put this letter to Jon Faine on the public record on the Internet.

Dear John Faine,

On your ABC Local Melbourne Radio 774 Morning program you have depicted the long-running conflict in Syria, as you did the Libyan conflict of last year, as a popular uprising against the supposedly brutal supposed dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.

For my part, I have extensively researched the Syrian conflict, for example on the site Global Research, the URL of which I texted you on Wednesday 18 July[1]. I have found all of the claims made against the Syrian government to have been fabrications conjured up on behalf of the US Government, NATO, Arab dictatorships, Israel and the corporate interests they serve.

The truth about Syria is that its government enjoys the support of most of its people. It seems more than likely to me that this is because, unlike the governments of its enemies including the US, Canada, and their European NATO allies, the Arab dictatorships and Israel, it has acted in past years to put the interests of its people ahead of international corporations.

Given that the leaders of the countries sponsoring the so-called "Free Syrian Army" (FSA) terrorists in Syria are known have lied repeatedly[2] through the past two decades in order to provide pretexts to wage illegal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan in which many hundreds of thousands have died, I fail to understand how you have come to so uncritically accept the latest collection of fabrications by these same proven liars.

Even if you are unable to see through the lies against the Syrian government at least you cannot be unaware that others, including me, hold views which are different to yours. So why not give others a chance to express a different view to your listeners and let them make up their own minds? Surely, if you are confident that your own point of view is backed up by evidence and logic then what have you to fear from free and open discussion on your program?

See also

Who is fighting in Syria?

of 24 July by Thierry Meyssan on voltairenet.com

Though the Western press portrays the Free Syrian Army as an armed revolutionary group, for more than a year Thierry Meyssan has affirmed that it is on the contrary a counter-revolutionary body. According to him, it would have progressively passed from the hands of reactionary monarchies in the Gulf to those of Turkey, acting for NATO. Such a non-mainstream affirmation needs demonstrative proof...

US Prepares For Direct Intervention in Syria of 22 July by Tony Cartalucci on candobetter.

#updates" id="updates">Updates

Unsuccessful attempt to put my anti-war view to ABC listeners

8:40AM, 25 July 2012: I have posted this open letter to the ABC radio contact form. Then I phoned 1300 222 774 and spoke to Jon Faine's telephone receptionist. I was told again to ring the open line at 10.35AM unless Jon Faine chose the Syrian conflict as a topic of interest for discussion on his program before then. My name and the topic I wished to discuss would be listed on his computer screen and should Jon Fain decide that Syria was of interest I would be given an opportunity to speak. I pointed out that people who wanted to discuss topics that I consider far less pressing than the threatened breakout of war in Syria, which could easily cost tens of thousands of lives, had been selected by Jon Faine in preference to me yesterday.

If the Syrian Charge D'Affairs Jawdat Ali -- has been expelled from Australia as a consequence of the fabricated claim that the Syrian government had committed the massacre at Houla and if Australia has applied economic sanctions against Syria how could Faine consider the Syrian conflict not of concern to him and his audience?

She also claimed that Jon Faine had not expressed a personal view on Syria, an absurd claim in my view given that he has uncritically conveyed to his listeners misleading reports about Syria and has, so far, only allowed people who supported the mainstream media deception to speak on his program. A specific example is a Syrian Australian "Michael", who repeated the mainstream lies about Syria. Members of the Syrian Australian community who support their government have not been able to put their views on Jon Faine a far as I am aware. According to Blogger #comments">Syd Walker Syrian Australians who have expressed support for the Assad government have face death threats and drive by shootings.

Anti-war views censored by ABC 'talk-back' radio

10:00AM: As instructed, I phoned in at 10:38AM and was put on hold. As I feared, Jon Faine did not allow me to speak. Instead, during the ensuing 18 minutes until the 10:00AM news he spoke to: past Olympic gold medallist, Cathy Freeman, four people about the problem of foxes in urban Melbourne, one person about the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games.

Footnotes

[1] I texted to Jon Faine on the 18 July: Why not inform yourself & and your listeners of the facts about Syria @ globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=newsHighlights&newsId=55 ?

[2] Two such lies include the incubator babies' lie of 1990, which was used to gain public acceptance of US plans to wage war against Iraq in 1991 and the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction lie used to provide a pretext to launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (Of course, it is beyond the pale, in the respectable circles in which Jon Faine mixes, to even dream of questioning the pretext used to justify the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.)

The ABC is to screen a documentary about kangaroos. It is scheduled for television on ABC1 channel will this coming Tuesday evening 21st February 2012 at 8:30pm
It is set in Canberra, Australian Capital Territroy, alias the 'Taijin' of kangaroo slaughter.

The programme is entitled #10;">'Kangaroo Mob'

But the prior promotional trailer includes snippets of interviews with those seeking to sell their sick desire for mass slaughter of Australia's native kangaroos.
Is this documentary really disguised propaganda by a locally struggling trade in Australian wildlife?

The ABC is to screen a documentary about kangaroos. It is scheduled for television on ABC1 channel will this coming Tuesday evening 21st February 2012 at 8:30pm
It is set in Canberra, Australian Capital Territroy, alias the 'Taijin' of kangaroo slaughter.

The programme is entitled #10;">Kangaroo Mob'

The ABC promotional trailer reads:
'In the second of our new strand of Wild Ones natural history documentaries, we meet the mob of 'street smart' kangaroos moving into Australia's capital city and the ecologists following their every move.

Over the course of one drought-stricken year we follow mob leader Black Spot and kangaroo mum Madge with her two young joeys - mischievous Sonny and tiny pouch-bound Alice.
Learning to be an urban 'roo is tough for little Sonny, who must negotiate busy roads, and avoid cars and dogs in order to find food. When the city announces a kangaroo cull, his life is in serious danger.
Thanks to the latest scientific technology we uncover surprising new animal behaviour whilst delving into the controversial issues that arise when sharing your backyard with a large wild creature

Kangaroo Mob is a warm and entertaining look at what happens when human development encroaches on wildlife habitat and two very different species are forced to co-exist.'

The ABC promotional trailer also disturbingly includes snippets of an interview with those seeking to sell their sick desire for mass slaughter of Australia's native kangaroos.

Is this documentary really disguised propaganda by a locally struggling trade in Australian wildlife?
We shall be watching the programme with animal rights scrutiny.

This programme is recommended viewing for anyone concerned about the plight of wildlife everywhere.

Background reading:

1. 2011...Another Very Bad Year for Canberra's Kangaroos!

2. Canberra Kangaroos

On Ockham's Razor on ABC Australia, today, 30 October 2011, hundreds of thousands of people would have heard 24 year old Fiona Heinrichs blast the mainstream media's failure to provide a voice for the younger generation and its promotion of of an ideology of unending growth. Fiona also delivered a blistering critique of Bernard Salt's unscientific promotion of population growth and his failure to respond to her challenge to debate him, which was recently the subject of an article on OnLineOpinion. This is the text of the talk. You can also download the podcast here.On Ockham's Razor on ABC Australia, today, 30 October 2011, hundreds of thousands of people would have heard 24 year old Fiona Heinrichs blast the mainstream media's failure to provide a voice for the younger generation and its promotion of of an ideology of unending growth. Fiona also delivered a blistering critique of Bernard Salt's unscientific promotion of population growth and his failure to respond to her challenge to debate him, which was recently the subject of an article on OnLineOpinion. This is the text of the talk. You can also download the podcast here.(This introduction by Sheila Newman)

Text of Fiona's speech on Ockham's Razor

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’d know that Professor Robert Manne’s Quarterly Essay Bad News greatly upset The Australian. Manne argued, persuasively in my opinion, that on many topics of key national importance The Australian lacked journalistic objectivity. In particular on the topic of climate change, he sees the paper as pushing the skeptics’ view of the received scientific position.

The Australian responded to Manne’s critique with a near booklet of articles. Seriously, cut them all out and staple them together if you don’t believe me. I don’t recall an essay or a book being subject to such an intense critical reply in any newspaper. A nerve was no doubt struck by Professor Manne, and struck at the right time, following in the wake of the British News Ltd scandals.

However as useful as Professor Manne’s essay is, it does not address the main weakness not only of this newspaper, but all other Australian papers such as The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and so on. So this is where I come in, finishing up where Professor Manne left off. I wish to discuss today two subjects that particularly bother me as a gen Y female: First, the lack of voice to my generation in these papers (and I will focus on The Australian), and second, the religious faith in the possibility of unending growth. On the denial of the limits to growth, The Australian is more hard-line in my opinion than say The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald, but in general the major dailies push this line, especially with respect to immigration and population issues. So lend me you ears, I implore you, for what I have to discuss today affects not only human beings, but every single species on the planet.

Okay, firstly let’s start with Bernard Salt. This columnist for The Australian serves as a good example of an ageing baby boomer who is a supporter of big Australia and the ‘growth is good’ philosophy. His book The Big Tilt, published a few months ago brings all of these themes together. Each week his columns in the business section of The Australian develop his theology of growth. Of course, sometimes he relaxes and writes an amusing news item. One such piece was about ‘hotness delusion syndrome.’ This supposed disorder is where men in their forties have an inflated sense of how ‘hot’ they really are; on the basis that there are 15 percent more single women than men at that age. This, I suppose, is Salt’s type of human interest article.

The modern day woman is a common theme in Salt’s writings on demographic issues. Thus he is concerned at the social trend of women not marrying and conventionally having children. The family for him seems to be the conventional nuclear family. I can’t recall any worthy discussion of gay relationships and alternatives to the nuclear family.

Salt’s writings on my generation are even more flawed. He sees gen Y as self-absorbed, indulgent and preoccupied with technology – mobile phones, iPods and the like. This generation is very well off, he says, and has a great time ahead. But in recent articles he has moved to take a different line for Australia as a whole, because with the rise and coming global dominance of China, Australia will be ‘attendants’ to the Chinese empire providing services that the Chinese want. So if Australia doesn’t shape up – watch out!

Now there is no objective statistical attempt in Salt’s book The Big Tilt or his articles to justify his generalisations about gen Y. Where is the index of ‘indulgence’? Where is the empirical research such as survey work actually measuring levels of indulgence, compared to a control group, like his own generation of ageing baby boomers? One attempt by Salt to back such claims involved his observations from the KPMG Nine Rewards Lifestyle Survey. Supposed evidence from this survey that gen Y is reckless in its spending included findings that people aged 18-24 are most likely to eat out at a café or restaurant. Hmm, yes, because treating yourself to a $15 chicken parmigiana and chips is so indulgent isn’t it? The same indulgent students struggling to afford the petrol to fill up their second hand car they drive constantly to get from uni to a part time job and somehow squeeze in enough study to pass the course somewhere in between. The other indicator of supposed excess was that people aged 25-29 are most likely to take a holiday. Come on, we’re talking Bali youth hostels here, not the penthouse suite in Paris. Such simplistic summations are hardly evidence of reckless spending.

Salt’s columns in The Australian describe him as a ‘demographer’ but he does not have a PhD in demography and apart from his popular books, he does not have a research record of publications in high impact factor peer reviewed demographic journals. Demography is a scientific study of population, but Salt’s approach is merely ‘pop’ demography.

Salt has recently focused his writings on the virtues of good manners, expressing anger and frustration towards people who don’t respond to messages. He assures us that he is ‘normal’ not engaging in such rudeness, even creating the manners-minded Facebook group Society for Normal People which has been heavily spruiked on television, radio and in the print media. Yet apparently such rules for politeness do not extend to people of different beliefs, for I have both publicly and privately challenged Bernard Salt to a debate regarding his world views. To date, he has not responded to my challenge. Silence. The words ‘pot’, kettle’, ‘black’ come to mind. Now before you say, ‘But wait, maybe he didn’t receive your message?’ And offer the following explanations such as: ‘Maybe it went to the spam folder? Or maybe his inbox was clogged that day with dozens of messages? Or maybe it didn’t even send properly at all?’ The answer is still unfortunately ‘No’. Even if Salt somehow didn’t receive my email, I also wrote the same message on his public Facebook wall. In fact, it’s quite interesting that my wall post was one of the very few with absolutely no response. Now I know what your next question is, ‘How can we trust that you wrote a courteous, dignified message that was deserving of a response?’ I assure you the message was perfectly civil; if you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself. Go on, add ‘Bernard Salt Demographer’ to you Facebook, scroll down the page and read my message for yourself. Last time I checked it was still there. Okay listeners, I know what your final question is, ‘why make such a big deal out of this?’ Well other than the outrageous hypocrisy, it’s simply unethical that such figures in their ivory towers continue to get away with these misleading articles while well researched counter-replies are ignored. The public has an inherent right to hear both sides of any argument. So I offer again: Come on Bernard, don’t be scared of a 24 year old female uni student – I won’t bite! In fact, I propose we hold the debate at the Society for Normal People function room.

My generation is sick and tired of being stereotyped. Many of us are students not yet employed or are unemployed and desperately searching for work. Rather than being self indulgent, gen Y is actively involved in charity work while deeply concerned about the environment and the prospects of human survival.

This is the other area where The Australian is particularly bad as I document in my online book Sleepwalking to Catastrophe. The idea that there are no limits to growth, that both economic activity and human population numbers should continue infinitely, is received doctrine. Almost all of the journalists writing for The Australian (with the exception of Phillip Adams) follow the Julian Simon mode of thought in his The Ultimate Resource, that the human mind is just that, therefore humans can solve any problem. Reality check: World population is likely to multiply by 1.5 by 2050 but if the rich countries maintain their present resource/consumption and other countries replicate it, resource consumption for the world increases by a factor of around 8. As Ted Trainer points out in his recent book The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, if all strive to the standard of living of the West at a 3 percent growth rate, then by 2070 resource consumption increases by a multiple of 60! Even the attempt to reach this level of resource consumption is likely to exhaust irrecoverable coal, oil, gas and uranium. Some petroleum geologists believe that peak oil, for example, has already occurred in 2010, and if this is so, modern society is moving awfully slow to deal with this challenge.

The Global Footprint Network has estimated that humanity’s demand on the ecological services of the Earth is now such that it would take 1.5 Earth’s to ‘generate all the resources humanity consumes and absorb all our CO2 emissions’. An ecological overshoot has occurred such that it now takes 18 months for the Earth to regenerate what was used in 12 months. The Network has further observed: ‘The urgent threats we are facing today – most notably climate change, but also biodiversity loss, shrinking forests, declining fisheries and freshwater stress – are symptoms of this trend.’

This message is not to be found in The Australian in journalist comment. The paper may give small news item coverage to such reports, but most of the words in the paper are devoted to justifying and glorifying growth, global capitalism and the love of money, wealth and affluence. A lavish magazine regularly comes with the paper aptly called Wish, a glossy celebration of high priced consumer goods that only the rich could afford and that ‘wannabe’ consumers are to merely lust over. This makes no ecological sense, it is simply wishful thinking.

In dark moments I suppose that the corporate elites and those who scribble for them really do know that the party is over. But they talk on as they do because they intend to make the most of the limited time they have left. They will party on as the Titanic slowly sinks and the icy waters of ecological reality start to consume them. They will be in defiance to reality to the bitter end. Ironically, as they pass through the void they are the lucky ones as they won’t have to face the full consequences of the environmental crisis that lies ahead for my generation and those that follow. I personally am determined to show leadership through this catastrophe by giving gen Y the much needed public voice it deserves.

Other sites with this article:

http://globalpopulationissues.blogspot.com/2011/10/sleepwalking-to-catastrophe.html
http://www.populationmedia.org/2011/10/27/sleepwalking-to-catastrophe/

"Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Bob Brown are in a position to change the political, social and cultural landscape in Australia once and for all. They find themselves in the unique position of having the community support they need to stop the parliamentary puppet masters dictating parliamentary policy. They find themselves in the position to uproot the few stunted perennials that blight political, social and cultural debate in this community and let a thousand flowers bloom by passing parliamentary legislation that forces media monopolies to limit their media holdings to 10% of the privately owned media outlets in a community. They are also in a position to pass parliamentary legislation that alters the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s guidelines so that a variety of opinions, not just the major political parties’ opinions, are brought to the fore in Australia in the publicly funded media sphere." Joe Toscano Anarchist Age Weekly, Number 940, 18th July – 24th July 2011 So, what's stopping them from doing the right thing by Australia?"Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Bob Brown are in a position to change the political, social and cultural landscape in Australia once and for all. They find themselves in the unique position of having the community support they need to stop the parliamentary puppet masters dictating parliamentary policy. They find themselves in the position to uproot the few stunted perennials that blight political, social and cultural debate in this community and let a thousand flowers bloom by passing parliamentary legislation that forces media monopolies to limit their media holdings to 10% of the privately owned media outlets in a community. They are also in a position to pass parliamentary legislation that alters the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s guidelines so that a variety of opinions, not just the major political parties’ opinions, are brought to the fore in Australia in the publicly funded media sphere." Joe Toscano Anarchist Age Weekly, Number 940, 18th July – 24th July 2011 So, what's stopping them from doing the right thing by Australia?

Ed. Sheila Newman: This article is based on my transcription from Joe Toscano's seminal podcast about the Australian media and government, to which I have added headings. I have removed some 'you knows' and small repetitions and elisions for clarity. Any mistakes in transcription are my own. You can listen to the original by podcast anytime. It is actually an hour long. The transcribed part is just the media inquiry part.

Power, Wealth, Parliament and the Mass Media - Joe Toscano:

"It's about power and wealth. What's the point in having all the power in the world if you don't have the wealth to make the decisions you've made a reality? And that's what we have in a parliamentary democracy. We go through the ritual every four years to elect representatives to make decisions fo us. Unfortunately what the representatives can and cannot do is determined by the parliamentary puppetmasters. That's all sections of society that owns the means of production, distribution, communication and exchange.

Now it's quite interesting how the Gillard government, facing oblivion at the next election by media sharks who are tearing pieces off its lifeless carcass, can continue wallowing in its own blood until what little credibility it enjoys is completely gone. Or it can bite back.

And those regular listeners in the Anarchist World this week will know that for some time I have been pushing the idea of holding a Royal Commission into the role the Murdoch Empire plays in this country. A royal commission into how the Murdoch media empire actually subverts the will of the people by subverting parliament.

Proposed Inquiry: What Gillard wants and what the Greens want

And I have noticed that now that Ms Gillard's little tête a tête with the Murdoch senior editors has kind of come asunder that she is once again looking at the possibility of holding a media inquiry - a general, nice, little, media inquiry that looks at privacy issues. Yes, you may as well pack it up, put it back in the drawer and forget about it.

Now I notice that, obviously the Greens, who have been one of the major victims of the Murdoch monopoly in this country - I mean, before every election we have huge headlines about the drug addicts running the Greens - how they'are going to subvert the country. You know, it just goes on day in day out. They [the Greens] would like something a little bit wider. They would like a media inquiry into the ownership.

Are newspapers growing too irrelevant to pose much of a threat?

Now people say to me, "Why worry about newspapers, Joe, they're irrelevant."

I'm afraid they're not. Newspapers are not irrelevant in this country. And when you've got some major capital cities with only one
newspaper, and that's a Murdoch newspaper, and you've got other capital cities where you've got two newspapers, it's not irrelevant.

Because, although there may be a decreasing number of people actually reading newspapers, there are more people reading the same papers on the Net. And, more importantly, what newspapers do is they actually set the political agenda for the day. Because, if you think television and radio set the political agenda, they don't.

Television and radio are very, very, very understaffed pieces of technology and they take their running every day from what's printed in the newspapers that morning. And if you want to know what's going to be on you local radio stations that morning or television station that day and that evening, just pick up a newspaper and you will see that, as far as political commentary is concerned, and social and cultural commentary is concerned, that 95% of commentary that occurs on television and radio is directly purloined from the major issues raised by newspapers, and the same major issues are then aised in parliament at the state and federal level. So newspapers still play, although there may be fewer people actually buying the oadsheets and the tabloids, it still plays a significant role in setting the social and political agenda in this country.

So, faced with that dilemma, when one player owns 70% of the newspapers, you can actually see the significant impact it actually has on peoples' thinking and the way issues are approached. And the thing about the Murdoch empire is, as far as I'm concerned, is it's a cancer on civil society. Because it is so huge, all-encompassing, all-powerful. And anybody who thinks holding an inquiry into privacy issues in the media, or even holding a parliamentary inquiry, into media ownership in this country is going to break the back of this monster, they should think again.

We need a royal commission

What we need, and what the Liberal and the Labor Party and the cross-benchers and the Greens should be discussing and negotiating on, is holding a royal commission into the impact that the Murdoch empire has on debate, has on discussion, has on political decisions in this country. Now, you'll see over the next few weeks, the media crying about the fact[2] that there's some Clayton's media inquiry's been set up into privacy issues in the media.

Well, the reality is they're the first ones who jump up and down about holding inquiries into this and into that. I mean, it's about time
the fourth estate [3] was dissected and we had the opportunity to ensure that a thousand voices are able to be heard in this country. Not the same, stunted, old, pathetic arguments, which we hear day in and day out, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Arguments, you know, which support capitalism as the be-all and end-all of economic activity. Activities which media outlets, which actually promote division within this country, which act as a cheer squad for that small section of society that owns the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication, which continues to act as the parliamentary puppetmasters in this country.

I mean, facing political oblivion if the government continues to square dance with the parliamentary puppetmasters, it is time that they turned off the music, isn't it? Isn't it time that they turned off the music and launched a direct legislative assault on the corporate world?

Corporate world really unpopular with Australians

If there is one group that's more unpopular than the Gillard government, it's the corporate world. Australians are beginning to realise the abysmal state of public health, public education, is due to the domination of the economy by a shrinking number of powerful corporations.

Any government, any political movement that is willing to wrest power back from the parliamentary puppetmasters, especially one that currently has a snowflake's chance in hell of being reelected, if it continues on its current political projectory, will earn the respect of an electorate that is becoming increasingly tired of seeing its institutions and its children's future sacrificed on Mammon's altar. And that's what it's about. That's the bottom line that we all forget! That's what the fourth estate is about! It's about creating profits built on other peoples' suffering. It's about creating ever-increasing profits, irrespective of the human, social and environmental costs.

And when you have the fourth estate singing the praises of the corporate world because they are owned by the very same people that dominate economic and political activity in this country, you begin to realise why there is such a lack of debate in this country about any issue, except the very superficial issues that have no bearing on the power of that small section of society that owns the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication is able to exercise.

Obviously we have 'stop presses' and 'exposees' on things which are of little importance to most people, but when it comes to actually looking at the foundations of the society, when it comes to actually questioning the assumptions this society is based on, when it comes to the idea of tackling the major problems that we face as individuals, and as communities within this country, well then, there is no debate, there is no discussion, and those people who put their heads above the parapet and attempt to raise issues that go beyond issues that are currently broached, find themselves being shunned, or worse still, being lampooned, or, worse still, being branded as 'un-Australian', 'terrorists'.

Let's create the momentum to break down the media plutocracy

So, media inquries ... forget about an inquiry!

Let's have a royal commission. Let's watch them squirm. Let's see what happens. Let's create the momentum to break down the media monopolies that exist in this country, whether they'are Murdoch or Fairfax or any other media monopoly that exists in this country. Let's break them down. Let's have legislation passed through parliament that ensures that no one group of people, or an individual, can own more than 10% of the media outlets in one city. And then, maybe we will see those thousand flowers bloom in that stony garden that needs to be fertilised by a range of ideas.

Now, let's move on to the ABC. Because, we've concentrated on the media today, and the reason I've concentrated on the media is very simple, because the thing about living in a technologically savvy society is everybody is exposed to the same set of opinions minute by minute by minute by minute by minute. And we're told in this country that we have the private corporations running the media, well the government gelded the ABC.

The ABC has become a commercial clone

And people say to me, "Well, Joe, what are you complaining about? I mean, forget about it. The ABC gives us an alternative viewpoint."

The ABC is there to do these things but people have forgotten what happened to the ABC during the Howard era, what happened to the ABC during the Hawke/Keating era. They've forgotten that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has basically become a commercial clone.

Obviously there are a number of programs which continue to exist - not for very long - which provide alanced analysis. But as far as the majority of the information, debate, analysis programs which occur in the government-gelded ABC you find that most of them you can actually find in the commercial setting.

Now, I know this is old news, but you may find it a bit interesting, because I want to draw an analogy here. I remember in 1999 when I had a weekly spot on ABC local radio that examined the week's news from a radical perspective, it didn't take long for the presenter to be asked to get a conservative voice on the half-hour segment. Within two months of one of the most conservative politicians in this country, the former Senator Julia McGorren had been appointed to cross swords with your's truly. The segment, and the presenter, who conducted an overnight show on-air for the ABC for over a decade was also taken off-air. This is during the Howard era. She was never offered an on-air position again and continues to work in the dungeons of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation because she wasn't on a short-term contract.

Lucky her!

Australia's Arts Community

It's no surprise that the Arts community now finds itself in the very same position. The Hoard Government succeeded in destroying the independence of the ABC by ensuring senior managers were appointed that reflected its world view. And the Howard Government openly stacked the ABC Board with some of the most conservative and reactionary figures in Australia, including Mr Windshuttle.

These changes transformed the ABC from a source that provided independent information analysis to an entertainment-focused organisation that needs to focus on ratings. It's all about entertainment. If we want entertainment, there are a million areas we can look for entertainment.

Why did Rudd and Gillard leave Howard's appointees in place?

The Gillard and Rudd Government found themselves in a difficult position because they left all of Howard's appointments in their jobs when elected. They left them all. And that's the tragedy of the 2007 Rudd victory, that all the senior bureaucrats, whether it's the department of immigration and refugees as we are seeing now, whether it was the taxation department, whether it was Human Services, whether it was the ABC. Everyone of those political appointments which were made during the decade that Howard was in powe were left in positions of authority. Left in positions of authority!

So, instead of cleaning out the ABC's Augean stable, they left everything in place. It's one thing having your hands on the levers of
government, it's another thing being forced to use the coordinates of a bureaucracy appointed y Howard and his cronies to steer the ship.

And that's the dilemma! Although the government may have a different agenda, as fa as the senior political appointments that were made by the Howard Regime, they continue to set the coordinates that determine government policy. It's no accident the Gillard Government is faced with a neverending litany of disasters, despite overseeing the 'best economy in the western capitalist world'. I mean, leaving your political enemies in positions of power when you own a position to exercise power is a recipe for disaster. And this is what we've seen in the ABC - although the government changed, senior political appointments, both on the board and the managerial area, didn't change. They continued to push the conservative reactionary agenda. And what we are seeing is even the arts programs are now coming under the axe. We are seeing the ABC lose what little independence it has.

Hardly any local content produced by the ABC

No wonder the ABC has been transformed into a commercial clone that has put people on short-term contracts, turned the ABC into an entertainment-focused organisation that actually relies on outside contracts to provide content - even local content. There is hardly any local content being produced at the ABC. It is produced by privately-owned outside companies that are given contracts to provide content.

And the few ABC in-house programs that have managed to survive over the past two decades are now on the chopping block, because the ABC has been transformed into a paper tiger, into an entertainment-focused organisation that Removes from its programming line-up any program that doesn't meet its board and managers' one-dimensional conservative social and political agenda. And that's the key.

So if you have a private corporate media which acts as a cheer-squad for its owners, promoting corporatisation, deregulation,
globalisation, the corporate sector, and you have a government-gelded ABC, where do people obtain independent analysis and information?

Not everybody has the time to spend hours and hours and hours surfing the net. People like their information in little packages. And what we find is the same, seedy, reactionaries continue to dominate the political agenda in this country - to dominate the social agenda in this country, to dominate the cultural agenda in this country - while the rest of us are expected, you know, to gratefully accept the crumbs that are occasionally pushed our way to stop people from protesting about what's actually happening, not only within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but within a corporate-controlled media network which sets the political, social and cultural agenda in this country."

NOTES

[1] Joe Toscano speaks for the Anarchist society and each week, on his show at 3CR he demystifies anarchist principles with this useful definition: "Anarchist society is a voluntary non-hierarchical society which is ased on political and social structures which are based on direct democratic principles. The people involved in decision strong>make that decision and then elect or appoint delegates to coordinate decisions at local, regional and national levels of society. Wealth is held in common and used for the common good."

[2]See, for instance, what passes for intellectual commentary in the Australian Financial Review (owned by Fairfax)in the editorial for the weekend of 17-18 December 2011. The editorial suggests that the basis of the inquiry is exclusively political with the Greens and the Government trying to neutralise criticism. "Any attempt to rein in freedom of the press should be vigorously resisted. Politicians have many avenues to redress perceived bias, not least through Parliament, the wider media and websites. Instead the government would have been far wiser to invest its limited political energy and capital in an inquiry into the much more pressing national economic issue of lagging productivity." Yes, well, if we tried to have an inquiry into how Australia's production is kept uncompetitive on the world market due to the cost of land, as boosted by the Murdoch and Fairfax owned property dot coms and their media-generated mass immigration fueled-demand, those papers would use every weapon they had to suppress, distort and punish debate. They suppress, distort and punish all other debates except the most destructive and puerile. That is why we need to break the media monopoly, so that we can actually have a free media rather than a corporatised commercial media which promotes its own investments against the common interest.

For a good example of suppressing, distorting and punishing debate, see ABC's Media Watch Episode 31, 12 September 2011. Media Watch generally goes after rabbits when it could take down elephants (metaphorically speaking) but this episode was very relevant to central problems of media interference, for corporate commercial reasons, in public debate:

Here is the transcript of Episode 31, 12 September 2011

Biting the hand that feeds

Over in the commercial media, times are tough. Especially in newspapers.

Here's an excerpt from an email sent out by a News Ltd executive in Western Australia.

"Last Sunday we published an article in our real estate section that failed Journalism 101 ... As the Managing Director of The Sunday Times I unreservedly apologise for the article.

— Jason Scott, Managing Director, The Sunday Times, 24th August, 2011"

Goodness! The managing director, no less - it's usually the editor who worries about editorial content. Managing directors of newspapers worry about money. And usually, that means advertisers.

And to whom was this grovel addressed to?

"To our valued real estate clients

— Jason Scott, Managing Director, The Sunday Times, 24th August, 2011"

That's right. Real estate agents. Who, thanks to those endless house for sale ads, account for a sizeable chunk of the Sunday Times's revenue ...

Not to mention what they contribute to realestate.com.au, by far the leading property website in Australia, which is 60% owned by News Ltd.

So what was this abysmal journalism that Mr Scott was apologising for? It was a double-page spread in the Sunday Times's

"Weekend Property

— Sunday Times Weekend, Property, 21-27 August, 2011"

"Home Alone

It can cost more than $20,000 to sell your home through a real estate agent. We speak to two vendors who decided to go it alone.

— Sunday Times Weekend, Property, 21-27 August, 2011"

No! Without an agent? And look at them ... They're positively beaming ...

"Being able to talk directly with the buyers ensured queries could be answered quickly and efficiently

— Sunday Times Weekend, Property, 21-27 August, 2011"

"We saved about $17,000 and put in about 19 hours work in five weeks.

— Sunday Times Weekend, Property, 21-27 August, 2011"

Well, you can imagine how the Sunday Times's 'valued real estate clients' reacted to that piece.

Actually, you don't have to imagine it, because we can show you.

It was kicked off by investment property specialist Mark Hay, with an email addressed to pretty much every real estate agent west of the Nullarbor. It was, as they say, heavy with irony ...

"Fellow Colleagues,
For those of you who use the Murdoch-backed Sunday Times you will have no doubt noted the huge push they gave us as agents in their wonderful article on page four and five this weekend!

— Mark Hay, Investment property specialist, 23rd August, 2011"

Mr Hay didn't mess about.

"Can I encourage you to boycott the paper in light of this, or better still this is a perfect reason why we as agents should build our own web site to challenge realestate.com.au and the others who keep putting the squeeze on us. Anyone interested?

— Mark Hay, Investment property specialist, 23rd August, 2011"

Lots of people were ...

"I am interested in a change from this

David Whiteman
Ray White

— David Whiteman, Ray White, 24th August, 2011"

"It is heartening to see ... the discussion around creating a new industry owned and controlled website.

Geoff Baldwin
RE/MAX W.A.

— Geoff Baldwin, RE/MAX WA, 25th August, 2011"

"The Davey Group would be behind a move to advertise through REIWA.com only.

Andrew Davey

— Andrew Davey, Davey Group, 24th August, 2011"

Mark Hay was over the moon ...

"Wow, the response has been overwhelming! ... By far the huge majority confirm we should crank up REIWA ...

— Mark Hay, Investment property specialist, 24th August, 2011"

REIWA is the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, which has long had its own property ad website ...

"Feature Properties for sale

— reiwa.com.au"

And has recently teamed up with the Sunday Times's rival, The West Australian, to produce

"WestRealEstate.com.au

— WestRealEstate.com.au"

The West is spruiking its new website for all its worth ...

"WestReal Estate

This exciting new site is offering vendors a free listing when their agent is a current REIWA subscriber ...

— The West Australian, 25th August, 2011"

No wonder the Managing Director of the Sunday Times was freaking out at the thought of all those 'valued real estate clients' jumping ship. Hence his crawling email ...

"I give you my personal guarantee that The Sunday Times will work hard to restore our relationship to the mutual good health and prosperity that we have achieved together over many years.

— Jason Scott, Managing Director, 24th August, 2011"

The problem was, wrote Jason Scott, that the Home Alone piece was unbalanced, because it ...

"... did not contain any response from agents or real estate industry groups and nor did it look at vendors who had tried to sell their houses privately who had then appointed an agent and got the right result.

— Jason Scott, Managing Director, 24th August, 2011"

Well, that's true. And it was a bit of a puff job for one particular do-it-yourself consultancy.

But some of the offended agents weren't going to be fobbed off with a private apology.

Glenn Buckley of Think Pink Realty - yes, that's its name - wrote back to Mr Scott, in a nice pink font ...

"Your apology is noted. However, what is clearly required here is a full rebuttle (sic) in this weeks issue of your newspaper...

— Glenn Buckley, Think Pink Realty, 24th August, 2011"

Well, he didn't get that. But what he did get, in that Sunday's Weekend Property, was a full, double page puff job for real estate agents ...

"Agent wanted

Why are agents worth the money? Following last week's article on private selling, we look at the other side ...

— Sunday Times, Weekend Property, 28th August, 2011"

Three happy clients, and no fewer than seven deeply sincere real estate agents. And why was that published, we asked the acting editor ... well, naturally,

"To balance the one-sided feature that appeared on August 21.

— Bill Rule, Deputy Editor, Sunday Times, 2nd September, 2011"

Balance. The essence of sound journalism. No mention of that other principle of newspaper management: safeguarding editorial from advertiser pressure.

[3]The term, "the fourth estate refers to the media and mass media. It comes from the French Revolution, where the first estate was the nobles, the second estate was the clergy and the third estate was the common people.

Whatever you think about 9 11, this story is so revealing of the contempt our public media and our Primeminister have for public opinion and free expression and for that reason needs to be promoted. (Ed.) The interview by Jon Faine of Kevin Bracken about 9/11 on 20 October 2010 was "possibly the most biased ever heard in Australia on radio broadcast by the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This attack by Faine of Bracken's questioning the 9/11 events included a torrent of ad hominem slurs and an absolute refusal to discuss any evidence that the events were anything but what we have been told by our governments. Interesting to note that John Faine is now complaining that the ABC has been swamped by 9/11 activists and it may take the ABC many weeks to deal with the massive amount of complaints and comments they have received. Many of these I know to be formal as I have received many courtesy copies of the complaints to the ABC accusing them of breeching their charter and broadcast policy."

Whatever you think about 9 11, this story is so revealing of the contempt our public media and our Primeminister have for public opinion and free expression and for that reason needs to be promoted. (Ed.).The interview by Jon Faine of Kevin Bracken about 9/11 on 20 October 2010 was "possibly the most biased ever heard in Australia on radio broadcast by the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This attack by Faine of Bracken's questioning the 9/11 events included a torrent of ad hominem slurs and an absolute refusal to discuss any evidence that the events were anything but what we have been told by our governments. Interesting to note that John Faine is now complaining that the ABC has been swamped by 9/11 activists and it may take the ABC many weeks to deal with the massive amount of complaints and comments they have received. Many of these I know to be formal as I have received many courtesy copies of the complaints to the ABC accusing them of breeching their charter and broadcast policy."

The particularly good report that follows on the Faine/Bracken interview is by John Bursill, of 9/11 Truth Australia, and was originally published as Visibility 9-11 Welcomes Australian Union President, Kevin Bracken – A True Working Class Hero!

Listen here: http://visibility911.com/blog/?p=1785

To many the name Kevin Bracken is a new one in regards 9/11 Truth. The reality is that Kevin has been a champion of the 9/11 Truth cause since 2006 by disseminating information throughout the Victorian Union Movement and the Maritime Workers Union of Australia. He has distributed DVD's, shown films and shared information regularly with his associates and the people of Melbourne and he achieved motions calling for a new investigation from both the Victorian Trades Hall Council where he is the President and the Victorian branch of the Maritime Union of Australia of which he heads as Secretary. Kevin has also attended numerous conferences on 9/11 and has been the facilitator of such in Melbourne, Australia. Over the years Kevin and I have developed a close working relationship, both striving for the truth 9/11 to come out to bring end to the wars and to get our rights back that have been eroded since 9/11!

This is the motion passed on the 28th of March of 2008 at the VTHC;

"That this meeting of VTHC Executive Council calls for a thorough, independent enquiry into the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11.

The events of that day have been used to start pre-emptive wars "that will not end in our lifetime". They have been used to attack civil liberties and legal principles that have been the cornerstone of civilized communities.

There is an urgent need to reassess the way we view the world after September 11 and we call for proper investigation into the events around that day."

On the 20th of October 2010 Kevin was asked to ring into ABC 774 Mornings with John Faine although Faine disputes this. This was following an email that was sent to Faine by Kevin questioning 9/11 in the context of Australia's ongoing support of the Afghanistan occupation. After the recent Australian Election it was demanded by the Australian Greens in a "balance of power" deal that the Australian involvement in the Afghan War be debated in parliament in it's first sitting. This debate had been going on this week and it was the first time any such debate had happened since 9/11, which is simply outrageous.

This interview by Faine was possibly the most biased ever heard in Australia on radio broadcast by the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This attack by Faine of Bracken's questioning the 9/11 events included a torrent of ad hominem slurs and an absolute refusal to discuss any evidence that the events were anything but what we have been told by our governments. A reasonable explanation of what happened and also with attached audio can be found here. This story titled "Trades Hall president Kevin Bracken Stands by his 9/11 Conspiracy" has been reported all around the world and included a poll which started off running at around 50/50 asking if Kevin's questions about 9/11 were "reasonable" but has continued to move in his favour ending up at the time of writing these notes at 75% in favour of Bracken.

Kevin has received literally thousands of thank you's from around the world for his brave stance for 9/11 Truth! Standing his ground even after being directly verbally bashed by the Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard saying he was "stupid and wrong" and having his own leadership comrades buckle at the knees if the face of unfounded ridicule. Rather than running for cover Kevin with his chin in the air has reiterated his position defying any to debate him on the issue! As usual all media presstitutes have refused, as there is obviously "no debate to have". It seems that the vast majority of the public disagree and would like to see such a debate but none of the so called "journalists" dare to tread such a path.

Interesting to note that John Faine is now complaining that the ABC has been swamped by 9/11 activists and it may take the ABC many weeks to deal with the massive amount of complaints and comments they have received. Many of these I know to be formal as I have received many courtesy copies of the complaints to the ABC accusing them of breeching their charter and broadcast policy.

The battle for 9/11 Truth is far from over and as long as the fools in power maintain their policy of occupation of Afghanistan they will remain exposed and at risk of criminal prosecution due to the lies of 9/11. Lets hope it comes soon or they realize and stop the bloodshed.

#appendix1" id="appendix1">Appendix: YouTube presentation of 'your' ABC's Jon Faine's persecution of of Kevin Bracken for speaking the truth

YouTube broadcast, originally created by A Lawson (alawson911) can be found here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE3pMPObcGU). For your convenience, we have reprinted A Lawson's accompanying comments below.

Listen to an overbearing gatekeeper, Jon Faine, attempt to rubbish the genuine concerns of an Australian trades unionist, Kevin Bracken, in an attempt to stifle any debate about the many anomalies in the official 9/11 story.

Seldom have I heard anyone, who obviously wants the issue to go away, do more to attract attention to it. He did this during a phone-in on the publicly-owned Australian Broadcasting Commission's 774 ABC Melbourne radio station.

A small amount of sound editing was necessary, but the integrity of the conversation was retained. The unedited sound file of the conversation can be found on this Internet page.

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2...

The following web page has more background.

Trades Hall president Kevin Bracken stands by his 9/11 conspiracy
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/vict...

John Faine refused to debate Kevin Bracken, a caller to his Melbourne ABC 'talk back' show on the September 11 terrorist atrocity, after which Faine, in seeming league with Labor and Coalition politicians and the corporate newsmedia, whipped up what almost became a national witch-hunt against Bracken. However, they got more than they bargained for when public opinion swang behind Kevin Bracken. We have transcribed in full, with comments, one of Faine's videoed "defences" of his conduct, so that readers can judge for themselves.

See also comment Jon Faine baits, refuses to debate, Kevin Bracken, Gillard, Faine, disdainful of reasonable doubt on 9/11

9/11 conspiracy theorists swamping talkback: Faine

And welcome to the Friday wrap-up. It is a bit chaotic today. We've got Di Fingleton, Bill Mc Innes and a cast of thousands.

It's been an extraordinary week , too.

(Inaudible response to Jon Faine.)

I don't want to talk about 9/11 conspiracies theorists and the like. Well, I kind of do, but I don't. I don't want to start it up again.

Editorial comment: After refusing to debate Kevin Bracken and starting what came close to becoming a national witch-hunt against Bracken for his supposedly outrageous questioning of the official account 9/11, Faine tells his listeners that he, himself "kinda do[es]" "want to talk about 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the like." Perhaps he should explain to his listeners why he thinks he should judged any less harshly than he judged Kevin Bracken for raising the taboo topic of questioning 9/11 on his 'talk-back' show.

We are clearly being targeted now after what happened on Wednesday afternoon when Kevin Bracken from the Maritime Union and the President of the Trades Hall chose to call in_{#main-22oct-fn1">1}. We didn't call him. He called us. ...

Editorial comment: It's a talk-back show, I would have thought. What is Jon Faine trying to say? That he thinks that a member of the public, such as Kevin Bracken, with a view about the principle justification for this country's, so far, nine year intervention in Afghanistan, is not entitled to ring up a talk-back show in order to put that view?

... He said you can't have a parliamentary debate about Afghanistan unless you are prepared to talk about what really happened and the truth of what happened at the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September and off it went. ...

Editorial comment: So Jon Faine believes that the principle justification for the war in Afghanistan should not be discussed by the very same body which voted to send our soldiers to fight in that war?

...And now it's Friday and I have probably countless e-mails, text messages and phone calls. We are clearly being targetted now, by all the people who think there is more to it than we've ever been told and "the media" (with a gesture with both hands indicating quote marks) are part of the conspiracy. And having just got a little crack in the door open, we're getting phone calls from all around Australia. We're getting e-mails from around the world. People are saying "Uhh! Here is a point where we can have our claims fully explored. It's been a very intense week because of that. Ahh! On the other hand, I stuck my neck out. I've called them loonies. I've had a go.

I think this is corrosive of peoples' trust in the rule of law and democracy. I still believe that. I don't resile for a moment from anything I've said. , but in the background you can see that --- There's John Standish, one fo my producers -- dealing with all the complaints of people saying that we're arrogant, we're high-handed and we're dismissive and that's not our role here at the ABC and that will take weeks for us to deal with. Such is life!

Footnotes

#main-22oct-fn1" id="main-22oct-fn1">1. #main-22oct-fn1-txt">[back] See also PM story "Vic union leader says September 11 attacks a conspiracy" for some of the dialogue and my comment. As with the dialogue show above the actual words of a person, baiting someone for having expressed an honestly held opinion about an important issues do that person making those remarks no credit.

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s3043700.htm

See also comment Jon Faine baits, refuses to debate, Kevin Bracken, Gillard, Faine, disdainful of reasonable doubt on 9/11

Jon Faine refuses to debate justification for continuing 9 year old Afghan war -another 10 years. As of 10:00AM this morning a Herald sun poll is showing that over 60% of respondents agree with Union leader Kevin Bracken's view that the official explanation of 9/11 does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Republished from 911oz.com. See also: comments Jon Faine baits, refuses to debate, Kevin Bracken and Gillard, Faine, disdainful of reasonable doubt on 9/11, 'Anti-racists' silence on the most racist lie of all

Update, 31 October:

ABC radio 'talkback' host Jon Faine refuses
to debate justification for continuing
9 year old Afghan war another 10 years.

Let us know your opinion! Please leave a comment

As of 10:00AM this morning a Herald sun poll is showing that over 60% of respondents agree with Union leader Kevin Bracken's view that the official explanation of 9/11 does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. _{#main-23oct-fn1">1}

Radio host John Faine previously attacked Bracken's views on air over two days, describing him as a nutter and an extremist, and stating that his views were "offensive".

In Parliament on Wednesday Australian PM Julia Gillard stated that Bracken's views were "stupid and wrong".

Herald Sun poll clearly shows that Kevin Bracken's views on 9/11 are now mainstream

Republished from 911oz.com. See also: comments Jon Faine baits, refuses to debate, Kevin Bracken and Gillard, Faine, disdainful of reasonable doubt on 9/11, 'Anti-racists' silence on the most racist lie of all

Update, 31 October:

Footnotes

#main-23oct-fn1" id="main-23oct-fn1">1. #main-23oct-fn1-txt">[back] Editorial comment: In an earlier comment I reported that 46% of the respondents to that poll had agreed with Kevin Bracken and had disagreed with thought policeman Jon Faine. Since then, the proportion in agreement with Kevin Bracken has grown to 66.34% (to 33.6%). The numbers of votes were 4740 to 2405. The fact that the majority of the public oppose Faine's edicts on what they can think on the September 11 terorist attacks shows just how out of touch Jon Faine is. Even if the figure had remained at 46% opposed to Jon Faine with a majority in support, the listening public surely have every right to expect of hosts of 'talkback' shows to allow those views to be publicly expressed. If Jon Faine is right about the views of September 11 "conspiracy theorists" being so absurd, this would surely be demonstrated very quickly very in any fair debate on his program, and the harm that Faine claims that such discussion will cause will be limited and quickiy put behind us. In fact, there has not been one fair debate in the Australian newsmedia, least of all on Jon Faine's own program in the 9 years since the attack. Surely, those, like Faine, who have prevented debate should not be surprised that the raising of this issue, in Faine's own words, causes "corrosion of peoples' trust in the rule of law and democracy". Faine, no doubt, prefers his listeners to have unquestioning trust in a system of 'democracy' that allows bloody and destructive wars lasting decades to be waged without their claimed causes being scrutinised by our newsmedia.

Today, on Geraldine Doogue's "Saturday Extra" (ABC radio national), the wrong impression was given by a British-accented commentator that the GST had been brought in in Australian in a fair and reasonable manner. This is infamously untrue and misleading on election day. Wide-eyed talk of how people oddly resent 'change' ignores the fact that change initiated by the people is resisted adamantly by the press and the politicians.

Geraldine's Saturday Extra on Election day 2010

Today, on Geraldine Doogue's "Saturday Extra" (ABC radio national), the impression was given by a British-accented commentator that the GST had been brought in in Australian in a fair and reasonable manner. This is infamously untrue.

History of Howard's Goods and Services Tax (GST) whitewashed

Howard won the 1996 election promising that he would never never introduce the GST (which had rightly been made such poison by former prime minister, Keating.) After Howard was elected in 1996 he set up a sham parliamentary inquiry to look into supposedly reforming Australia's tax system. One person on the inquiry, Paul Zammit, resigned because he was interested in serious alternatives but found that Howard had planned for the inquiry to ram through a GST. Howard used this inquiry to pretend that an independent inquiry had recommended the GST, weeks prior to the 1999 elections. As a result of a confusing campaign, Howard clawed back into power in 1999, whilst losing the popular vote. On a two party preferred basis, the Liberal Party lost 49.02% to 50.98% [1]. Had more been understood about the GST, the loss would have been greater. Nevertheless, and in spite of a Senate majority opposed to the GST, Howard claimed a mandate to introduce the GST. He was able to get the Democrats leader, Meg Lees, to vote for the GST against the wishes of most Democrats and most of the Australian public. This history shows that the GST was introduced deceptively and against democratic objections.[2]

Change is good?

The election commentary this morning is full of how strong politicians supposedly inflict pain on the electorate for a greater good which the electorate is too stupid to understand. There is also wide-eyed talk of how people oddly resent 'change', but of course people resent change because they have no control over the results and they have adjusted, to their benefit, to what is. Change initiated by the people is resisted adamantly by the press and the politicians.

What a grab-bag of last-minute propaganda surfaces in these desultory election 'commentaries' on the ABC.

Footnotes

1. The two-party preferred vote was originally given as "48.5% to 51.5%". I have since discovered from these pages that that figure was wrong. It was in fact 49.02% to 50.98% - our apologies. 49.02% to 50.98% is still a substantial loss of the popular vote. That was a substantially larger margin than the 1990 two-party preferred margin of 50.10% to 40.90% against Labor. For having lost the 1990 election Howard was depicted a victim of injustice by the Australian newsmedia. - JS, 14 Oct 11

2. For discussion on the GST, see also #comment-98088">comment to John Quiggin's article Core Promises of 8 May 2008. See also SMH article Let's have the honest truth, once and for all of 18 August 2004 by Alan Ramsey which was #comment-98057">quoted in that discussion. Note that the evidence of John Howard's dishonesty was not challenged on that forum discussion by any Howard apologist.

It's about time! In the decades since Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke decided to impose "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration", ordinary Australians have been given little access to the mass media in order to be express their opposition to population growth.

On the rare occasions when immigration has been discussed on Australia Talks, conspicuously lacking from the panel have been knowledgeable and articulate opponents of population growth. Tonight, for a change, Mark O'Connor, co-author of "Overloading Australia" will be a panel guest on Australia Talks.

So, please listen and be sure to phone in to express your opposition to the Rudd Government's anti-democratic imposition record high immigration.

When: Tonight (Monday 12 April) after the 6:00PM news Phone: 1300 22 55 76

The details from the Australia Talks web site are as follows:

There's growing unease about Australia's rapidly rising population, with a forecast of 36 million people by 2050. The prime minister's responded by appointing the nation's first Population Minister. It's shaping up as a hot election year issue, with the Coalition calling for immigration cuts. So what numbers can the country sustain? Should we be aiming for a big Australia? How much does our economic growth depend on migration?

Transcript:

Panel discussion on population, Radio National Breakfast program
Friday 9 April 2010, 8.10am – 8.23am
Interviewer: Fran Kelly
Panel Members: John Coulter (SPA), Bob Carr, Nick Minchin

Fran Kelly: This week has definitely been about the politics of population. With the appointment of Tony Burke as population minister on the weekend Labor has 12 months to come up with a national population policy. Australia’s never had a formal national population policy or target. So we thought we’d discuss this morning what that policy should look like and also explore why the politics of population is so fraught with danger. To help us answer those questions we’re joined by three guests who all support a contained population for Australia and have tried for many years to put the issue on the map. The call for a smaller Australia was backed up by a Lowy poll this week which showed that 69% of us think that 36 million Australians by 2050, which is the Treasury projections released earlier, is simply too large, too many people.

Dr John Coulter is Vice-President of Sustainable Population Australia and a former leader of the Australian Democrats. Nick Minchin is a former Finance and Industry Minister in the Howard Government and he’s set to retire from the Senate next year after 18 years in that chamber. They both join us in Adelaide this morning. Also on the panel today Bob Carr, Premier of NSW between 1995 and 2005, he’s in our Melbourne studio. Good morning to all of you.

I want to ask all of you what a federal population policy should look like. Nick Minchin, Senator Minchin, can I ask you that first, what should it include, a population policy for this country?

Nick Minchin: Well what I don’t think it would be would be to say we want a particular nominated numerical target in a particular year and when we reach it we’re just going to stop. I don’t think that is realistic but it should be a very deliberate and clear framework within which decisions affecting the population are made. And it should be responsive to both inevitable trends that are not responsive to levers, like the birth and death rates, and certain givens in the immigration rate, but it also should be proactive in trying to influence outcomes, and it should be about the sustainability of particular rates of population growth, and I think the problem we have at the moment is that in the absence of any formal population policy all we have is a responsive component which simply seeks to respond to whatever goes on with the natural increase and the immigration rate. So I think we need a much more proactive component in a formal population policy.

Fran Kelly: Proactive in trying to influence where our population policy heads?

Nick Minchin: Yes. Exactly.

Fran Kelly: OK we’ll come to that in a moment but first let me ask all our panelists this simple question, what should a population policy look like – John Coulter?

John Coulter: A population policy should begin with a recognition that Australians are not living sustainably now, environmentally sustainably now, either with respect to the Australian environment or with respect to the global environment. Moving on from that there needs to be a recognition from all governments that the drivers of this unsustainability are continual population growth and economic growth and both those levers need to be tackled. There is no magic number, I agree with Nick on this, there’s no magic number to which we should be aiming by a particular date because of that reciprocal relationship, so the shape of it should be a direction rather than a particular number.

Fran Kelly: OK, and Bob Carr to you now just on that particular number the Minister Tony Burke did make it clear yesterday that Labor will not be coming up with a target, no number. He says a population policy target is not central to that, he agrees with John Coulter that it should be more about direction than number.

Bob Carr: Yes that’s my position as well, I think though the population policy has got to detach us from the idea of endless growth because the only policy we allow for now has been more – M-O-R-E. I think it’s got to acknowledge that there’s some validity, some truth in the notion of the carrying capacity for a continent with Australia’s characteristics and I think there’s an opportunity to link population growth to a number of variables – I’ll give you three: energy efficiency, limited or cautious population growth until we cease to be such a major emitter of carbon. And that could await the arrival of nuclear fusion for example or another endless non-polluting supply of baseload power. Water – the efficiency with which we handle water, the advent of new technologies for desal, again, a cautious approach on population growth, or restrained approach on population growth, until we make progress on that front. And I think the third very quickly is urban consolidation until cities like Perth and Brisbane achieve the urban consolidation rates that Sydney’s got, i.e. the ratio of apartment dwelling to single detached cottage dwelling I think has got to be linked to population growth.

Fran Kelly: OK so all three of you think we don’t need a target, but all of these things are contingent on numbers, aren’t they? Bob Carr as you said there, a notion of a carrying capacity that is just a target by another name, isn’t it?

Bob Carr: I think we’ve got to discuss the context in which carrying capacity constraints cut in. We’ve got to say carrying capacity constraints are there until we’ve achieved the levels of water efficiency, energy efficiency and efficiency in land use that are desirable. I think that’s a way of dealing with that and of linking that to policy outcomes.

Fran Kelly: Nick Minchin the point you made in your initial answer there, we need to be proactive in trying to impact where our population is headed – what do you mean by proactive? That’s presumably pulling some levers and not others. What would you be proactive in?

Nick Minchin: Well obviously the rate of immigration is the most amenable lever available to governments. Despite Peter Costello’s colourful rhetoric I don’t think governments do have levers over the birthrate and they certainly don’t have and shouldn’t have levers over the death rate. So the natural increase I think is largely a given and not amenable to the government, but the immigration rate is definitely amenable and I’ve sat round our Cabinet table for 10 years where we had the annual discussion of the immigration program and that is entirely within the hands of the government. And I don’t want to be party political today but Mr Rudd just saying ‘Oh well 36 million it’s just going to happen and we just have to work out how to deal with it, that’s ridiculous because the rate of immigration is entirely a function of federal government policy and is a direct lever over which it has all the authority it needs.

Fran Kelly: In fact, let’s stay with that it is a direct lever, a lever that governments pull. It’s our only formal population policy we’ve had really from one year to the next is alterations and changes in the immigration policy. Earlier in the program we spoke to ANU demographer Peter McDonald, he’s given advice to the federal government that the immigration intake in this country should be around the annual intake of 180,000 people a year in order to be able to economically support our ageing population. Let’s have a listen:

Peter McDonald: Yes we have given that advice to the government. Obviously it’s not 180,000 every year, that can’t possibly work. But broadly in the range of 160,000 to just over 200,000 averaging out at about 180,000. This result produces the best impact upon ageing in the population and that then contributes to growth in GDP per capita for Australia.

Fran Kelly: Nick Minchin do you like that number, do you like that advice?

Nick Minchin: No I don’t I think that’s ridiculous. With great respect to Mr McDonald he is well-known as a high immigration guy and none of what he said has any foundation. We all know that the ageing of the population is not amenable to change by dint of the immigration policy because immigrants by and large come in at an age profile not dissimilar to the current profile of the Australian economy.

Fran Kelly: That’s not true for the large number of temporary entrants?

Nick Minchin: No but by and large, every study that’s ever been done on this shows that you’re not going to change the age profile of Australia in any realistic way by altering the immigration program in any realistic way, so that’s nonsense. And the productivity commission has made quite clear that … the real economic determinant for me is real GDP per head. That’s the economic variable in all this, and for Mr McDonald to say that will be maximized by 180,000 is also nonsense according to the Productivity Commission which shows that high rates of immigration will not enhance real GDP per head. That is 50% more, 180,000 is 50% higher immigration than the average under the Coalition government of around 125,000 so it is a massive increase in the immigration rate we’ve had for the last 10 or 15 years.

Fran Kelly: John Coulter, what’s your response to that advice that Peter McDonald has given the government. 180,000 immigrants per year.

John Coulter: Look I agree with you Fran and I’ve looked at the figures which came from the ABS just a couple of weeks ago on per capita growth of gross state product and in fact states that have performed worst were Queensland and Western Australia with a minus 2.3% and WA with a minus 2.1% growth and that was simply due to the very rapid rate of population increase. And if you look at that over a longer period of time you find exactly the same thing. Could I just pick up on what Bob Carr was saying – whilst it is highly desirable to use various technological techniques to try and improve our energy efficiency and find alternative means of energy and to improve the efficiency with which we use other resources, unfortunately humanity over the last couple of centuries has always taken those improvements as a way of increasing its population so the total impact on the environment was actually increased. So while we do those things it is absolutely vital that we recognise that we are not living sustainably now and consequently we need to do those things now which will reduce both the per capita impact and also the number of capits. And picking up on one of the things that Nick Minchin has said in relation to the birth rate, in fact the Howard government followed by the Rudd government has provided a very large baby bonus and that has certainly had some impact on the fertility rate. That should be removed, we should not be rewarding people in Australia for having babies, particularly when we have the highest emissions per capita of greenhouse gases in the world.

Fran Kelly: OK now these are real political hot button points, now John that you’re saying. Bob Carr do you think any politician would willingly suggest we need to cut our birth rate?

Bob Carr: I think it’s quite feasible for politicians to say that. I think Australian people are responsive to the argument that we are not serving the country’s environmental or economic interests by running such an ambitious policy of population growth. And look I agree completely with what’s been said about ageing of the population and immigration. Every study I have seen has made it absolutely clear that you’d have to run immigration at absolutely unsustainably high levels and for a very long time to have an impact on population ageing profiles.

John Coulter: You’re putting it off to the future

Bob Carr: Yes, you’re putting it off to the future. My challenge to the people who support a big Australia, a constantly growing population on both fronts, immigration and natural growth, is this: when are you satisfied? Are you satisfied when a population of 50 million or 60 million, all the east coast of Australia, every last inch of it, is urbanized? Because that’s what this debate is about. In land use patterns, in terms of planning, the idea of a bigger Australia, a population of 50 million, is a concept for the total, heavy, intensive urbanization of the east coast of Australia. That’s what this debate is about. The idea that we’ve got a population distribution that remotely resembles that of north America – we’ve got no Chicagos, we’ve got no Oklahoma cities or Kansas cities, we haven’t got sizeable population centres in inland Australia and given the water and other constraints, the aridity of the land we never will.

Fran Kelly: OK, we’ve only got a couple of minutes left. I’ll come to all of you one more time before we go but Bob Carr just a political question to you from all your experience is it possible to have an immigration debate in this country without it becoming overloaded with racist overtones. Already again this week it’s got muddled up with asylum seekers.

Bob Carr: Absolutely. The Australian public have got the highest political IQ of any electorate in the world and what we’ve seen in the last six months since this 36 million figure started to alarm people and render them anxious is a sophisticated debate where people haven’t opened up the issue of multiculturalism or where migrants come from. There’s been no Hansonite element whatsoever in this, it’s been a debate about population targets, about carrying capacity, about water and energy use, about planning the shape of our cities and these super ambitious immigration targets that governments have signed up to. This is a debate not about the value of immigration but about the costs of surging levels of immigration that Australians find very disturbing.

Fran Kelly: OK Nick Minchin a final question to you, I’m wondering what you make about the hints that our Population Minister Tony Burke is putting out there about our two speed economy and the answer to our population programs might be a greater spread of population? This has been tried before and has failed hasn’t it?

Nick Minchin: Well I was going to say, every immigration minister in living history has said oh what we need is a better distribution of the population. In a country that doesn’t have internal passports it is of course utterly ridiculous. You might give concessions to people to go to Kalgoorlie but they can hop on a bus to Sydney the very next day. That’s an absolute nonsense and we’ve heard it all before and it won’t work.

Fran Kelly: And John Coulter we’ve heard from you, you keep making the point that we’re not living sustainably. The fact is however we’re living here, the world is populating at a massive rate. Human population will increase from 2 billion to 9 billion in a single lifetime, with that sort of potential overload, it’s almost irrelevant what policy we opt for here and more people will ultimately come anyway won’t they?

John Coulter: No, I don’t think so, and I’ve held this view for the last 40 odd years that Australia should be deliberately setting itself on a course towards a sustainable future, not in isolation but being very very prepared to share its knowledge and its technology and its success and its failures with other countries. And just picking up on the issue of racism, the most racist policy we can possibly pursue is this one of high immigration. Because what we’re saying to the rest of the world is ‘You bugger off, we’re going to just continue to consume more and more and more, and we don’t care what happens to the rest of you’. So it’s the high immigration people who are in effect the most racist people.

Fran Kelly: That sounds like a great place to leave it. John Coulter, Bob Carr, and Nick Minchin, thank you very much for joining us on Breakfast.

On ABC TV Jan 28th 7.30 report the Australian PM appears to have backtracked on the idea of a "Big Australia" for which he said previously that he would make "no apology"

Are stages of governmental and media spin and treatment of forced population growth akin to the stages of grief-predictable and identifiable?

See also: "Rudd facing a Queensland backlash" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 30 Jan 10, "Rudd cools on a 'big Australia'" in the Age of 29 Jan 10, "Rudd on a 'big Australia'" on the 7.30 Report of 28 Jan 10, "Future Australians could face starvation: Dick Smith" on ABC online of 25 Jan 10, "Population debate needed: opposition" in the Mackay Daily Mercury of 25 Jan 10 (also published in the Shepparton News), "Poll shows Australians do not share rudd's vision for 'Big Australia'" of 10 Nov 09 by Bruce Billson MP, (former) Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities, "Population to now hit 35 million by 2049" in the Australian of 18 Sep 09.

On ABC TV Jan 28th 7.30 report the Australian PM appears to have backtracked on the idea of a "Big Australia" for which he said previously that he would make "no apology".

Are stages of governmental and media spin and treatment of forced population growth akin to the stages of grief-predictable and identifiable?

1. Most of us would be familiar with the 5 stages of GRIEF:
2. Denial (this isn't happening to me!)
3. Anger (why is this happening to me?)
4. Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...)
5. Depression (I don't care anymore)
6. Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes)

With respect to Population growth in Australia , media and government spin goes through stages too but there are twice as many of them as there are for GRIEF ! One could identify them as follows:

1. Denial-Newspaper articles and politicians talking about our population plummeting - whilst all time it climbs -( during this stage maybe 10 years ago whilst driving past a new outer suburban housing estate my innocent passenger exclaimed "but where all the people coming from?"
2. Propaganda and indoctrination - Peter Costello a prime example talking up the population and encouraging a higher birth rate - a sickening article in the Herald Sun last Friday harked back to PC 5 years ago holding 6 babies with a look of glee -reunited with 4 of them the day before, another photo and of course "no apology" in the Rudd-ian sense of the expression.
3. Recognition - Pollie rhetoric and media speak is as though amazed and surprised (after the population supposedly being in "free fall) that the population is in fact rising but no acknowledgement that this has anything to do with government policies or advertising.
4. Convincing - the public that much of what they have always held dear to them about Australia- its democratic processes , its relatively egalitarian and relaxed way of life, has to change to make way for a socially engineered higher population and overcrowding.
5. "Consultation" with the public who is having great difficulty keeping up with changes in the environment and way of life- This stage involves meetings , forums, butcher's paper and submissions to government Green Papers as the long suffering public does the work of government- trying to find the best solutions and the least damaging ways of adjusting to at least twice the rate of population growth we would otherwise have- with no guarantee, no matter how much of citizens precious time and brain power is taken up with these processes that any heed will be taken.
6. Concealment and denial of any part governments play in the cause of the problems that beset our daily lives because of rapid population growth.
7. Garnering expert opinion to support what governments are doing - pushing population growth.
8. Embracing what's happening and what the next generation will have to deal with as though it has some abstract hidden benefit ("I'm in favour of a Big Australia" Kevin Rudd).
9. Underplaying it at a dose just less than lethal (Kevin Rudd says 35 million by 2050 but if the current rate of growth continues it will be nearer to 50 million) to prepare Australian for what will be even worse.
10. Backtracking and backpedaling when it is clear that one has gone too far in force feeding this issue to an unwilling public and in the face of warnings from independent experts. (Kevin Rudd on 7.30 report).

When we reach 50 million and head on to 100 million possibly 35 years later, if the environment has not already totally collapsed we can then collectively go through the 5 stages of grief of the loss of what could have been a beautiful country to live in for both people and wild life.

See also: "Rudd facing a Queensland backlash" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 30 Jan 10, "Rudd cools on a 'big Australia'" in the Age of 29 Jan 10, "Rudd on a 'big Australia'" on the 7.30 Report of 28 Jan 10, "Future Australians could face starvation: Dick Smith" on ABC online of 25 Jan 10, "Population debate needed: opposition" in the Mackay Daily Mercury of 25 Jan 10 (also published in the Shepparton News), "Poll shows Australians do not share rudd's vision for 'Big Australia'" of 10 Nov 09 by Bruce Billson MP, (former) Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities, "Population to now hit 35 million by 2049" in the Australian of 18 Sep 09.

Film: Writer and environmentalist, Mark O'Connor says that this is the first time since the mid 1990s that the ABC has interviewed someone from Sustainable Population Australia for the environmental view on population problems in Australia. I can't wait for them to interview someone from Candobetter.org. In the mean time:
See also poll in The Age: "Suburban sprawl: Is a pause in extending Melbourne's boundary a good thing?" (Obviously the answer is "Yes").

The poll is obviously a response to public fury about DACS. In the Age today (Tuesday 5 January 2010) "Rethink on Outer Suburban Expansion" carries the news that Minister Madden appears to have done a backflip on the Extension of the Urban Growth Boundary. Don't hold your breath though: he will still try to build upwards and more densely, which is also unacceptable. Basically the government and developer induced growth must stop altogether.

Back to last night's ABC news

As numerous articles on candobetter.org attest, the ABC usually presents the population numbers in Australia in a biased way, which gives big business members of the growth lobby a free kick and assists the continuing decline of democracy in Australia as governments dispense with consultation and dance the growth lobby tune. Indeed, the amount of real-estate and property growth investment people frequently invited to speak on the ABC makes it look as if someone in the know is pushing growth via the ABC, perhaps taking advantage of the usual presenters not realising the vested interest of their interviewees.

On this interview, ANU demographer, Graeme Hugo appears. This makes a nice change from the usual ANU Demography talking head, Peter McDonald, who always talks up population growth, often in association with Australian ATSE, the Multicultural Foundation, the Scanlon Foundation. Hugo is usually good on the need to brake our population growth for environmental reasons. Here he talks about us 'needing to replace the aging population', but adds that in the long-term he expects immigration to be cut back for environmental reasons. I've heard him speak much more strongly against population growth.

We have yet to hear anyone official showing concern about democracy and forced population growth except the amazing Victorian environmentalist MP, Kelvin Thomson, who was not interviewed by the ABC news. Kelvin Thomson is standing up for democracy and the environement and kindness to our indigenous fauna, in a one-man crusade completely counter the Lebensraum-for-developers-uber al-ALP-culture. See more here. Thomson is a Federal MP in a Victorian electorate that is densely populated with old and new immigrants and they give him plenty of support!

Nicolas Howe has been watching how the Fairfax, Murdoch and ABC media are treating alternatives to the population growth scenario of 35m plus. He finds that they are not giving them due representation and therefore biasing the debate. Letters not published. Rights of reply not balanced. His article confirms others on candobetter.org which have found this to be a consistent pattern with Australia's commercial mainstream media. They publish material to normalise population growth. They belong to the growth lobby. They have vested interest in population growth. As for the public media, the ABC - as has been pointed out before, it employs a number of ex-Murdoch journalists and allows professional property developers and other members of the growth lobby to dominate debate. Propaganda Watch Growth Lobby

Article by Nicolas Howe

The Age

I have concerns about the commitment The Age has made to engage in the population debate. There were no letters published in response to Kevin Andrews call to reduce immigration. [1]

On the same day that the article was published there was an opinion piece written by Julie Szego condemning the call by Kevin Andrews.[2] Julie Szego also criticised Kelvin Thomson's position on population. Kelvin's right of reply was limited to 200 words in the general letters section of today's Age.

If The Age were truly serious about engaging in the debate they should have allocated at least as much space to Kelvin Thomson (federal politician with well thought out platform on population) as Julie Szego had been allocated to express her strange opinion on the issue.

I get the impression that The Age is going through a process of "manufacturing consent" or having the Australian public accept that an increase in population, despite the policy options available, cannot be avoided.

The last time The Age spoke seriously on this subject was in an editorial on 11/11/2009. That editorial expressed an opinion of acceptance of 35 million by 2050. It belittled Tim Flannery's call for an independent authority to administer population policy. The editorial suggested that the authority would determine immigration levels on "the whim of technocrats".

I responded to the editorial of 11/11/2009, as I guess so did many others. However no letters were published. The Age has closed down the debate despite a commitment expressed in the editorial of 19/9/2009.

The ABC

I am witnessing a pattern here. It looks like the mainstream media are purposely not talking about population. During one episode of ABC TV's program Q & A, two of the panelists started discussing a topic in the context of population growth. The host of the program, Tony Jones (who normally I consider a tough and intelligent journalist), quickly changed the topic. I felt that I sensed some anxiety in his behaviour, as if discussion on population was off limits.

The Australian

The Australian newspaper is particularly biased. They regularly run a column written by Angela Shanahan who is dismissive of any calls to reduce population. The logic of these opinion piece's does not stand up to scrutiny. Angela Shanahan is a mother of nine children. I imagine it is almost impossible for her to express a reasoned view on population growth given her fecundity and religious conviction. Angela Shanahan is also a regular panelist on ABC's Q & A.

I think there is a determined effort being made by a group (or groups) of people with influence who are determined not to see democratic debate exploring small population options in the mainstream media.

Nicholas Howe

Notes and comment provided by Candobetter Editor

[1] Misha Schubert, "Andrews call for debate on slashing immigration," The Age, December 11, 2009.
This article was based on a telephone conversation that Schubert had with Kevin Andrews, ex Minister for Immigration with the Howard Government, currently Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services. It reported that Andrews had "called for a debate on slashing Australia's immigration from 180,000 people a year to a ''starting point'' of just 35,000." Andrews reportedly pointed out that 60% of our growth is via immigration which could be reduced. Andrews reportedly disapproved of Kevin Rudd's 'Big Australia' and described or agreed with the description of immigration levels as 'plucked out of thin air'.

''If you look at the 2008 data, you would need about 35,000 immigrants on top of births to replace the population (for that year). So I say the starting point should be replacement levels of population, then ask what additional population we need so the country can be economically and otherwise sustainable and growing,'' he said.

The current Australian immigration minister, Chris Evans, reportedly accused Kevin Andrews of hypocrisy since, when in Government Andrews and Howard had authorised a jump to 158,800 planned immigrant intake for 2007-08. Evans claimed to have long term policies on numbers.

[2] Julie Szego Article ‘Migrants Enrich our way of life’, The Age 11/12/09. (Feedback can be sent to: http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/submit)

This article also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald as, "Wake-up to the opportunities in population growth", December 11.

In this article Szego talks about the Scanlon Foundation, which is linked to the commercial growth lobby uncritically as a philanthropic organisation, and cites one of its surveys in support of high immigration.

"A social cohesion survey by the philanthropic Scanlon Foundation released this month showed only one in 10 Australians held strongly negative views about immigration, while 37 per cent of the 3800 respondents thought our immigration intake was too high - a result that tallies with similar polls and is pretty encouraging given it was taken in the aftermath of an economic downturn."

To cite this source as a valid comment is naive.

Szego also writes, with remarkable puerility, "Policy should instead amount to a pep-talk on how more people are simply a wake-up-call and an opportunity, not a problem."

Although there was only one letter in the hardcopy Age the day after Szego's article, there were many e-comments of which the great majority lambasted her. Of the one or two who thought her article was okay, this one caught my eye due to its organically egocentric focus and mad overvaluing of a single remote concern:

" Djinn | Sydney - December 11, 2009, 9:36AM

Thanks Julie for telling it how it is. Arguing against immigration is usually a fig leaf for xenophobia and selfishness. Every person in Australia is an immigrant. Besides, there is one simple question that none of the critics of immigration can answer - "Who is going to wipe your bum when you're old?". Answer: Nobody, if the likes of Kevin Andrews have their way."