Archives for May 2009

I have a couple of micro-theories about the end of the Howard era and the rise of Kevin Rudd, which I've yet to come across in the recent raft of histories about the 2007 election. Nothing startling, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

The first involves the diminished influence in the run-up to the last election of the radio host, Alan Jones; the second involves the increased influence of ABC's comedy troupe, the Chasers War on Everything, which is about to make its long-awaited comeback after 18 months off-air.

During the Howard years, the Sydney breakfast radio host Alan Jones was arguably Australia's second most powerful conservative. Famously opinionated and crotchety, he prided himself on his influence in the halls of government in Canberra and New South Wales: there was supposedly a "Minister for Alan Jones" within the Howard government to ensure ongoing good relations.

The former Wallabies rugby coach regularly gave a platform to John Howard, then often reinforced and amplified his views. Commonly, he helped frame the national debating point of the day, and gave it a determinedly conservative slant.

When I arrived in Australia, I was struck immediately by John Howard's domination of the airwaves, and how a sound-bite delivered on a radio breakfast programme could almost monopolise the news agenda for the rest of the day. Here, Alan Jones was a vital ally and megaphone.

But three things happened in the run-up to the 2007 poll which undermined Jones' on-air authority and his off-air clout. The first came in October, 2006, with the publication of an excoriating biography, Jonestown: The Power and the Myth of Alan Jones, written by the ABC veteran investigative reporter, Chris Masters.

The second was a ruling in April 2007 by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). It found that in the lead-up to the Cronulla riots, Jones had broadcast material that was "likely to encourage violence or brutality and to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle-Eastern backgrounds on the basis of ethnicity".

The third came in June 2007, when Channel Nine decided to drop his morning editorial on the Today breakfast show, a slot he had appeared in for 20 years.

By the 2007 election, Alan Jones still had the ratings - to this day, he is Sydney's most popular breakfast show host - but could no longer boast the same power and influence. The conservative ascendency was coming to an end. Australia was about to enter Ruddville and leave Jonestown.

Then there were the Chasers, a constant thorn in the then prime minister's side as the election approached. Some of their ambushes of his early morning power walks rose to the level of performance art - one involved a silver Delorean sports car, a mad professor and the promise to take Mr Howard "back to the future" so that he could retire gracefully rather than be forced out by the voters.

It fast became a leitmotif for the entire campaign - and reinforced the sense that John Howard had done his dash.

Then there was the Apec stunt in Sydney, where the Chasers breached the supposedly water-tight security with a fake motorcade carrying an Osama Bin Laden doppelganger.

The Apec summit had been intricately choreographed by John Howard's image-makers as part of a last-ditch attempt to save his prime ministership. Instead, it became a showcase for the Chasers' madcap talent.

Why does any of this matter? Because the Chasers went off-air just as Kevin Rudd became prime minister. For the past 18 months, the Australian prime minister has therefore enjoyed the luxury of a fairly feeble opposition and a Chasers-free ABC.

The end of the Chasers' sabbatical comes at the very moment when the prime minister's Hawkie-like popularity appears to have dipped. Are the Chasers about to become a factor again?

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It is hard to think of two more dissimilar places than the French Riviera and Australia's Red Centre, but the two have this week come together with the film, Samson and Delilah, getting a much-deserved showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set in a hardscrabble indigenous community in the sun-parched outback of the Northern Territory, it charts the blossoming, though wordless, romance between two teenagers, Samson and Delilah, played by unknown local actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson.

Samson is a drifter and a petrol sniffer. Delilah spends her days looking after her grandmother, and assisting with her art. When her grandmother dies, the community blames Delilah, and she escapes with Samson to Alice Springs.

Samson and Delilah, which was written, shot and directed by the indigenous film-maker Warwick Thornton, has been described as one of the finest films ever to have come from Australia. I saw it last week and found it as enchanting as it is confronting.

Snapshots of Australia's multiplex national persona have long been found in the reels of film that comprise its cinematic canon, and this is an extraordinary and much-needed addition.

Margaret and David of ABC's popular At the Movies, Australia's foremost film reviewers, have both given it five stars - the first Australian movie to receive a maximum 10 out of 10 score (Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, Good Luck, and No Country for Old Men are the only other films with have got two five stars in the show's 23-year history).

"This is for me one of the most wonderful films this country has ever produced," said Margaret Pomeranz.

Others have likened it to New Zealand's Once Were Warriors, another extraordinary film, for its depiction of everyday life in indigenous communities. So it is a great shame that it is not on general release. Last week, it was being shown in just four Sydney cinemas.

"Indigenous affairs" is Australia's great fly-over problem. Most of us tend to view Aboriginal communities from the vantage point of 30,000ft as we jet off to Perth, Asia or Europe. This film brings a close-up depiction of many of the problems commonly found in Outback communities, and it is very unsettling.

The film cost $A1.6m (£800,000), a small fraction of the $A197m lavished on Baz Luhrmann's Australia. But this is a far superior film. I enjoyed Australia, but Luhrmann used imported American idioms, opted for hackneyed doggerel in much of its dialogue and chose a self-important title (which was not a particularly clever idea in a country where people bridle at fellow compatriots who get a little above themselves). Opting for his trademark heightened artifice, he also played with the history and the landscape.

Samson and Delilah, by contrast, is authentic and, in parts, dialogue-free.

This truly is Australia.

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I know that some of you think this blog can be a tad sports-obsessed at times. But isn't Australia? I have never lived in a country where the traditional separation between front and back page stories is so very blurred, and often so non-existent.

I have never lived in a country where sport is so frequently the gateway into so many weighty societal discussions. Arguably, sports-related phone-ins and discussion programmes are increasingly becoming the nation's "public square", the forum in which a broad range of moral and behavioural issues are thrashed out and argued over - although rarely resolved.

So the most recent rugby league scandal provides the context for a series of over-lapping debates, from the possible need to redefine what is meant to female "consent" (does a 19-year-old woman have the power to say "no" when confronted by a roomful of rugby players?) to what is implied by "mateship" (why haven't Matthew Johns team-mates, who were in that hotel room in Christchurch, come forward?); from homo-erotism in macho sports (why this fascination with watching team-mates have sex - a "bun", in the parlance of rugby league?) to the role of the media in these kind of controversies (could and should the original ABC Four Corners programme, Code of Silence, have offered a more complete and complicated account of the events in Christchurch?).

In recent times, sport has thrown-up discussions about gambling (with Russell Crowe's attempt to banish poker machines from the South Sydney Rabbitohs club); drinking (with the Manly rugby league club's drunken season-opener party); domestic violence (the prosecution of the rugby league player, Greg Bird, for glassing his girlfriend); and violent assault (the prosecution of the swimmer, Nick D'Arcy, for attacking his fellow swimmer, Simon Cowley).

Racism has been discussed in the context of the Bollyline series and the "monkeys" taunts directed towards the black all-arounder, Andrew Symonds. Discrimination against gays has come up with the suspicion that the diver Matthew Mitcham has not been the beneficiary of the kind of corporate sponsorship deals that an Olympic gold medallist could normally expect. Breast cancer has received an enormous amount of media attention partly because it took the life, tragically, of Jane McGrath, the wife of Glenn McGrath, one of Australia's most likeable sportsmen.

National prestige is often judged by the quadrennial Olympic medal haul. Corporate prestige is often judged by the quality of your sporting sponsorship deals (Qantas, the national carrier, goes for the Wallabies, the national rugby union team, for instance, and the Aussie Olympics squad) and appropriating naming rights on the country's sporting cathedrals (imagine the clash of the corporate titans if the MCG ever offered naming rights to the highest bidder?). When Rupert Murdoch locked antlers with Kerry Packer, it was over the right to broadcast rugby league.

On national days when there hasn't been an obvious sporting component, the sporting codes have eventually muscled in. The ANZAC Day rugby league and Aussie Rules fixtures, which only took their present, blockbuster form in the mid-1990s, are the most obvious examples. The opening of the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra is another. The then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser cut the ribbon on January 26, 1981 - Australia Day. Admittedly, this works both ways. After his retirement from international cricket, Adam Gilchrist accepted an invitation to chair the National Australia Day Council.

This primacy of sport puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the men and women who run the various codes. Often they owe their positions to being brilliant marketeers, but increasingly they are being forced into the role of moral arbiters and moral enforcers. Sometimes, when alleged crimes are committed, the police and authorities step in. But in instances like the Christchurch sex scandal, where the New Zealand police decided that no crime had been committed, sports administrators and sports broadcasters are increasingly being asked to decide what is right and wrong.

One final observation on the recent controversy, and the search it has sparked for sporting role models. There is near universal agreement over one rugby league player who can comfortably perform that role: the Cantebury Bulldogs player, Hazem El Masri, a non-drinking, non-smoking Muslim, who arrived in Australia with his parents in 1988. Anyone care for a debate about multiculturalism...?

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"If I had a gun I'd shoot them right now. I hate them, they're disgusting. I want them dead."

These anguished words belong to a New Zealand women, whose interview with the ABC current affairs programme, Four Corners, has led to the public shaming of one of rugby league's most popular figures, the former player and Channel Nine commentator, Matthew Johns. Once again, the game itself, along with the misogynist subculture attached to it, is also in the public stocks.

The woman, who was referred to as "Clare" on the programme, told of the night in 2002 when she had sex with a number of players from the Cronulla Sharks, while others watched.

"I only remember one player definitely, it was Mattie Johns," she told the programme. "He laughed and he joked and he very loud and boisterous and thought it was hilarious and you know kept it going."

Five days after this incident at a hotel in Christchurch, New Zealand, the woman, who was 19 at the time, complained to police. As part of their inquiries, detectives interviewed 40 Cronulla Sharks players and staff, and were told that the group sex had been consensual.

No charges were brought, and the names of the players involved in the incident remained out of the press until late last week, when details from the Four Corners programme, Code of Silence, first started to appear.

So last Thursday night, Channel Nine's high-rating Footy Show started with a statement from an ashen-looking Johns.

Alluding to the incident, Johns told viewers: "For me personally, it put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment. It has once again, and for that I can't say sorry enough."

Crucially, however, he offered no apology to "Clare", nor any acknowledgment of her anguish. As Monday's programme would reveal, she had since become suicidal.
After the normally ebullient Johns had delivered his "mea culpa", his co-host Paul "Fatty" Vautin, another hugely popular figure in the game, patted him on the back: "Alright mate, well said. Alright, let's get on with the show."

This was far from the end of it, however. After watching Monday night's programme - something which until late this week, Johns himself did not do - David Gallop, the chief executive of the National Rugby League, said "a massive question mark" hung over his future.

Condemnation also came from within Channel Nine. Tracey Grimshaw, the host of the tabloid news magazine show, A Current Affair, was excoriating.

"Even though no charges were ever laid," she told viewers, "her experience should rightly redefine the notion of consent, and whether a star-struck 19-year-old could even be deemed capable of consenting to the scenario she ultimately endured.

"Unfortunately a man we all know - and I personally like - Matthew Johns has been heavily implicated in this event, and I believe he needs to step up, face some hard questions and talk properly about it, rather than just a few uncomfortable lines delivered on The Footy Show."

Just 24 hours later, Johns did indeed face some hard questions that were put to him by Grimshaw herself on A Current Affair . That afternoon, Channel Nine had announced that he had been stepped down indefinitely, and Johns had finally watched the Four Corners programme which had brought his career to such an abrupt and embarrassing end.

"Did it distress you to see her condition?" asked Grimshaw.

"Yes it did," said Johns, who was sat alongside his wife, Trish. "I made some comments last Thursday night at The Footy Show that I wasn't aware of what she'd been through and can say now, you know, that any trauma and embarrassment that she's gone through as a result of this incident, I'm extremely sorry for and I'm extremely sorry for, to my wife and my family as well, just the embarrassment and pain it's caused them."

You can read the interview here.

The story is a complicated one. A former colleague of "Clare" has now come forward, claiming that she bragged about the group sex in its immediate aftermath. There have also been calls for the other Cronulla Sharks players and staff who were in the room to step forward and explain themselves.

Not for the first time this season, the game of rugby league has been brought into disrepute. Last month, the former Cronulla player, Greg Bird, was found guilty of glassing his American girlfriend in the face, and then telling police that his flat-mate was to blame.

Rugby league's on-field product has rarely been better - some of the recent games have showcased a breath-taking range of skills. But the cumulative effect of these off-field incidents is testing the loyalty of even its most die-hard supporters.

Last night on the Footy Show, Phil Gould, a former coach and one of the big men of the game, broke down in tears as he spoke of his worries for his mate, Matthew Johns, and his fears for the health of the code: "This to me was the sledgehammer to the back of the head that the game deserved, and that we needed.

"That, for so long, we've been sitting on panels like this and having incidents whether it was drugs, or alcohol, or abuse of women, and we all walk away and say: 'Well, that was a wake-up call, that was a wake-up call', but no-one wakes up."

PS With apologies for the plug, but if any of you happen to be in Sydney on Friday 22 May, and fancy talking US politics as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival, then this might be of interest.

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So a big night in Canberra - yes, there is such a thing - with the government revealing its long-awaited and heavily-leaked budget.

Broadcast in the east coast evening, the annual budget is the closest thing Australia has to the State of the Union address, although the treasurer takes centre stage rather than the Prime Minister.

Wayne Swan is a nervy and hesitant figure, and not a natural prime-time performer. So for television viewers, whose normal programming was interrupted for the night, this was less "Australia's Got Talent" and more a case of "Australia's got a whopping deficit." Or perhaps "I'm a Deeply Indebted Treasurer, Get Me Out of Here".

The budget has gone from a $A22 billion surplus to a $A57 billion dollar deficit, the biggest year-on-year turn-around in the nation's history - though ludicrously the treasurer did not use the word "deficit" throughout his 3,700-word speech.

This is a famously plain-speaking and straight-talking land. Surely people are grown-up enough to cope with the word "deficit".

As elephants in the room go, this one could hardly be much bigger after all.

Much of the post-budget commentary has focused on Mr Swan's projections that Australia will be back in the black by 2015-16, and the optimistic growth forecasts that assessment is based on. Though he predicts the Aussie economy will shrink by 0.5% over the next financial year, he reckons it will rebound to 2.25% growth the year after.

The dean of the Australian political press pack, Paul Kelly of The Australian, notes: "This budget is a portrait of an optimist in the middle of a nightmare. The world faces its worst economic contraction since the Great Depresssion, but Wayne Swan is a convinced optimist who has produced a budget for optimists" The paper labels it a "Wing and a Prayer" budget.

Peter Hartcher, The Sydney Morning Herald's political editor, suspects the country can look forward to "indefinite indebtedness", while Piers Ackerman of The Daily Telegraph suggests the Rudd government has "drifted into fiscal fantasy".

Here are some of the other headlines:

• unemployment is expected to rise to 8.25% next year, and 8.5% the year after. Currently it stands at 5.4%.

• skilled migration takes another hit, with a reduction of a further 25,400.

• the retirement age will be lifted progressively, reaching 67 by 2023.

• there will be an extra A$ 1.3 billion over the next six years to combat people smuggling.

• Sydney is the big loser in terms of infrastructure spending, which picks up on previous blogs. There's a suspicion that the Labor government in Canberra simply does not trust the Labor state government in New South Wales to deliver major infrastructure improvements.

You can get the full details at all the major news websites. ABC, for instance, has now launched an Australia in Recession special site.

Overall, the budget was nowhere near as tough as the government had warned. As George Megalogenis wrote in The Australian: "No voter, other than someone on more than $A150,000 a year, can look at last night's savings measures and say: 'Wayne Swan is coming after me'."

PS: The story which threatened to overshadow the budget was the revelations contained in the ABC Four Corners programme broadcast on Monday night (you can watch it on the web ) which has embroiled the game of rugby league in more scandal. I'll blog on that later in the week....

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We need to talk about Canberra, the landlocked capital of this coast-hugging land.

I should state from the outset that I don't happen to agree with the hoary old joke that the best view of the city comes in the rear-view mirror as you head back to Sydney or Melbourne. Parts of it are stunningly beautiful.

But on a national scorecard that is replete with green and gold stars, you are left with the feeling that Canberra merits only a "could do better".

Put another way, if cities were cars then Melbourne would probably be an Audi (a European feel, well designed and well engineered) and Sydney would probably be a 1970s MG convertible (a bit flash, fabulous in the summer, but prone to occasional breakdowns).

Canberra has something of the Skoda about it, albeit with some pretty fancy add-ons, like the new Parliament House which celebrates its 21st birthday this very week.

Canberra strikes me as oddly unAustralian, to use that dreadful expression. It isn't by the sea (in locating the capital, there were concerns about possible naval bombardment in the event of invasion... which brings to mind what Betjeman said about Slough).

It isn't a whole heap of fun and is devoid of much personality. In fact, large swathes of it are so very quiet it seems almost as if they have been hit by a neutron bomb, eradicating all the people but leaving the buildings intact.

Its original design was the brainchild of an American, the Chicago landscape architect and Frank Lloyd Wright-protege, Walter Burley Griffin.

Its post-war expansion was left to the British town planner, Sir William Holford, who based it on the soulless British "new town" concept.

No wonder Canberra is often called a group of stray suburbs looking for a city.

Fabulously, prime ministers, like Barton and Deakin, have suburbs named after them. Others, presumably, only rise to the level of cul-de-sac.

Not for Canberra the polished marble and Doric columns of Washington DC, which memorialises its fabled presidents with brooding statuettes.

Even the parliament relies on the "Washminster" system, a hybrid of the British and American models. It comes with a House of Representatives and Senate, but also with a Question Time and dispatch boxes.

Fair dinkum, as they say. Canberra has come a long way from being "a bush-capital in no-man's land", as it was described in 1909, when the compromise was reached between Melbourne and Sydney over where to site the capital.

But it has not quite lived up to the boast at the time that it "would rival London in beauty and Athens in art".

But at least the name works. When suggestions initially were canvassed, they ranged from "Olympus" to "Paradise", from "Spamb" to "Tasmelbawalqueen", a devilishly clever acronym, I think you will agree, of the states or the state capitals.

Does any of this matter? To many Australians, I suspect, not at all.

But Canberra may be one of the many reasons why Australia can be a surprisingly fragmented and stunted country - with intense rivalries between the states and angry arguments still over what constitutes the "national interest" (just look at the management of the Murray-Darling basin).

If Canberra engendered more of an emotional or awe-inspiring pull - or captured the national imagination in the same way as, say, Washington DC (another compromise capital) - then Australia might be more cohesive.

Instead, the country has a few rival capitals and vital centres of power: Melbourne (sporting and intellectual), Sydney (cultural, hedonistic, media and, arguably, business) and Perth (resources).

Some might think this complete tosh. Others might agree with Christian Kerr, a political reporter with The Australian: "The city that was supposed to be a focus for the nation has no focus at itself.

"Canberra does not represent the nation. It is a place most Australians neither know about nor care about. And with good reason, too."

ECONOMIC INDICATORS OF THE WEEK: The head of Macquarie Group, the fabled "millionaire's factory", took an almost 99% pay cut because of a 52% slump in profits. Unemployment went down rather than up. 5.4% in April from 5.7% in March. Economists had predicted a 6-year high of 5.9%.

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Do you protect the planet or safeguard your prosperity? That is how the climate change debate in Australia has increasingly been framed, as the Rudd government has grappled with its plans for an emissions trading system designed to cut emissions whilst at the same time protecting Australia's status as a mining and energy powerhouse.

Then there are the overlapping and complicated issues of how to get the plan through parliament when you do not have a majority in the upper house, the Senate.

And how to appease green-friendly governments in Europe who have long viewed Australia as something of a "greenhouse ghetto": the country with the highest per capita emissions in the developed world, and a massive exporter of pollution, mainly through thermal coal, the country's number one export commodity (it accounts for around 10-20% of export income).

A "diabolical" policy dilemma is how the Rudd government's climate change advisor, Ross Garnault, memorably described it - and that was before the global economic downturn, and the end of the Australian resources boom.

Last week, I was in Canberra meeting the head of the Minerals Council of Australia, Mitch Hooke, who reckoned that the carbon emissions trading scheme would cost 30,000 jobs in the mining sector alone. Similar concerns were echoed by other big business lobby groups.

Seemingly, the prime minister has listened, and announced that the emissions trading scheme will be delayed for a year.

"The worst global recession since the Great Depression means we must adapt our climate change measures, but not abandon them," said Mr Rudd.

But this will be seen by many as a victory for the mining and minerals sector, and a reminder, if any were needed, of their political clout. (As a historical aside, it is worth remembering that Australia's first industrial policy was drafted by an executive of BHP, the forerunner of BHP Billiton.)

As a sop to environmental groups - namely the Australian Greens, whose support he needs to get the measure through the Senate - Kevin Rudd has said he plans to adopt more ambitious emissions cuts.

Originally, he set a target of 5-15% by 2020, which, by European standards, is on the lower end of the scale. Now, he proposes to aim for deeper cuts of 25% over the next decade, depending on the outcome of the all-important UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, which will thrash out a post-Kyoto global deal.

But the Greens have already slammed the proposals, saying they are worse than the Rudd government's original scheme. Mitch Hooke at the Minerals Council is also unhappy saying, in effect, that it offers only a stay of execution.

The Liberal Party, meanwhile, is calling this a "humiliating backdown". The leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, noted: "Only a few months ago Mr Rudd said that any delay in the start of an emissions trading scheme would be reckless and irresponsible both for the economy and the environment."

Kevin Rudd came to power promising to put Australia in the forefront of green diplomacy. His first act as prime minister was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol - a deal, first lauded and then lambasted by the then prime minister John Howard, which actually allowed Australia to increase its emissions, something that is often forgotten.

Though famously sceptical on the subject of climate change, John Howard planned to introduce an emissions trading scheme by 2012. Kevin Rudd's proposals will come into effect in 2011, if he manages to get the legislation through parliament.

So has Kevin Rudd brought more continuity to his approach to global warming than change? Has he protected the Australian economy at the cost of the global environment?

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"Fortress Australia" is very much in vogue, whether if relates to boat people, swine flu or the nation's long-term defence plans.

So too is the "China syndrome", the wariness in this part of the world about the rise of Beijing.

The two have come together in the 140 pages of the long-awaited Australian defence white paper, which has promised a massive boost in defence spending and which notes that "the pace, scope and structure of China's military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern if not carefully explained."

Two big strategic thoughts appear to underpin the review. The first is that China could become a belligerent power, as it looks to assert its influence in the region. "A major power of China's stature can be expected to develop a globally significant military capability befitting its size," the paper warns.

Certainly, Australia is not predicting a confrontation with China, but it is planning for that worst-case eventuality.

The second major strategic thought is implied rather than explicitly stated: that Australia might not be able to rely on America to underwrite its security, as it has done pretty much since 1941.

So stout self-defence and self-reliance are the watchwords - hence the massive investment in doubling Australia's submarine fleet, and its fighter capability. The navy and air force, which are the linch-pins of the nation's defence, are the main winners. The army, which tends to get used in more offensive situations, is the loser in terms of the allocation of resources.

Welcoming this move, the Sydney Morning Herald has editorialised: "Australia must expect to take a more independent position from time to time. A defence doctrine that emphasises self-reliance is an important expression of that independence."

There are a few delicious ironies here. Australia's Sinophile Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is usually criticised by the opposition for being too close to China. The Mandarin-speaking PM is sometimes called the "roving ambassador" for Beijing in public, and "the Manchurian candidate" in private.

But Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the opposition, has criticised the review for being based on "the highly contentious proposition that Australia is on an inevitable collision course with a militarily aggressive China." He notes: "China has shown no inclination since the 1970s to export its ideology."

There is another irony. As Australia rethinks its defence needs in response to the rise of China, its ability to foot the bill for this build-up has been compromised by the slowdown of China.

The end of the resources boom, and the massive tax revenues which flowed from it, has meant that gone are the days when Australian military could splurge of expensive luxuries - the Howard government's orders for US Abrams tanks come to mind. It now has to be far more choosy about how it spends its defence money.

The government has not yet indicated how it will pay for the increased defence spending. A return to the halcyon days of the resources boom would certainly help. So paradoxically, China's continued rise will help Australia defend against the China's continued rise.

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