Mike Rann:

Sean Hosking writes: Re. Yesterday’s editorial. Was today’s editorial serious? The list of reason’s listed by your correspondent Charles F Kane as to why Mike Rann was in all likelihood a liar were just a tad naive and simplistic don’t you think? “If nothing happened why is Chantelois so publicly asserting that it did” he writes. A convincing argument according to Crikey.

Following this line of logic, we could rephrase it this way: “If a person makes an accusation it must be true, since if it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t make the accusation”. This could revolutionise the whole realm of kangaroo court jurisprudence and get Alan Jones a seat on the high court.

There appears to be a problem coming to grips with the universal human trait of speaking untruths — indulged in from time to time from everybody from the tea lady to the Pope — and sometimes on matters that actually matter.

Despite recognising or seeming to recognise that the affair between two consenting adults had not one iota of public interest relevance, Rann is being judged on old testament grounds. Presumably It wouldn’t matter if it was about having an affair or not telling the truth if he broke wind in a cabinet meeting, Rann is a potential liar who’s gonna cop the full force of self righteous wrath and condemnation.

The irony is that your correspondent, invoking another of the 10 commandments, calls Rann an “adulterous politician’ when Rann was not married at the time of the affair. This, I’m afraid to say, constitutes one of those dreaded untruths. In the interests of consistency and avoiding the even more deadly sin of hypocrisy I hope that he subjects himself to the same scathing condemnation as he potentially subjects Rann. He has certainly ruled himself out of the always noble and honourable profession of politics.

Mary Seely writes: In response to your editorial on Mike Rann and his dear friend Michelle. People always say that politicians (and others in the public eye) have the right to a private life; that what happens in their private life doesn’t matter. Yet, if a question is posed to them about their private life, the politician is suddenly condemned if (s)he lies or perhaps doesn’t tell the whole truth. Which presents a conundrum.

If Michelle chooses to air her dirty laundry and Mike is forced to respond, he has a not very appealing choice of lying or revealing details about his private life.

Mike didn’t bring the alleged affair into play. I think it is widely accepted, and even Channel Seven have admitted, that the alleged affair has not affected his ability to govern. Yet because of the actions of two private individuals, the Premier’s right to privacy in his private life is exposed as the farce it is.

I might lie to protect myself if my boss if asked about an issue in my private life but this has nothing to do with whether I would lie in my professional dealings. In fact, I would say that anyone who hasn’t lied to protect their honour in the face of some indiscretion (however significant or otherwise) is probably lying to protect their honour. Yet that doesn’t mean we are dishonest, or at least so dishonest that we can’t be honest at times when it is important.

Surely we can all stop clutching our pearls and apply that standard to politicians.

Mathew Jones writes: It’s your disingenuous editorial that completely misses the point, and using the convenience of someone else’s opinion because you’re too hypocritical to express your own merely highlights the phoniness of your argument.

This matter is of no interest to anyone except those individuals involved. Mike Rann has a right to keep his private life — whatever it is — private. When he tries to protect that he’s accused of lying and that, so say self-styled arbiters of public morality like Crikey, becomes the issue.

Come off it. The issue is the media’s obsession with sex and scandal at the expense of anything vaguely insightful or meaningful. Trying to dress this up as a matter of public trust is absurd.

Bankstown Sports Club:

Senator Nick Xenophon writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (yesterday, item 7). I read with interest your piece on the Bankstown Sports Club yesterday. I don’t know who the “anonymous tipster” was but it read more like something spun out of Clubs NSW than any supposed TV insider. It also contained a number of factual errors.

For a start the Today Tonight yarn can’t be off the back of the SMH story because Today Tonight contacted me about being in the story weeks ago.

As for claims that the Productivity Commission made no recommendations that club tax concessions be changed, the anonymous informer can’t have read the PC report which is currently publicly available online.

Here’s a quote: “The Commission concludes that present tax concessions on gaming income  provided to clubs by governments breach competitive neutrality.”  The PC goes on to say changes to these dodgy tax deals should be phased in.

As far back as 1999 the PC basically concluded the Clubs were wasting the tax concessions they received stating :  “the Commission considers that the exemption of club mutual income from tax, combined with the inability to distribute surpluses to members, has the potential to result in excessive capital allocation in club facilities and other investments.”

As for claims that sports clubs provide virtually all sporting infrastructure in NSW, if that’s true (and it’s not) they’re doing a lousy job benefitting the community. NSW has the lowest level of sporting participation of any state in the country. The highest participation is in WA, and guess what? They don’t have pokie clubs and pubs littering the suburbs.  The machines are only in the one centrally located Casino.

I can understand why Clubs NSW is nervous about people waking up to the ridiculous tax benefits they receive and how little they really give back to the community.

These clubs, which rely on exploiting problem gamblers, are a house of cards that will inevitably come down.

The economic debate:

David Lodge writes: Re. “We’re not out of the woods … yet” (yesterday, item 1). Why Bernard Keane claims that the economic debate is leaving the coalition behind when Newspoll results show respondents prefer the Coalition on economic policy is beyond me, but alas, I will get to the point.

Keane claims that we’re now crossing over from the publicly supported growth to private growth, and therefore we’re “not out of the woods” (there’s no need for piss weak clichés from the PM so Crikey doesn’t need to use them either) except that neither the slowed spending prior to Christmas nor the negligible effect of building school halls and burning the roofs of houses has contributed to any upward trend.

All we know at the moment, is that our industrial relations frameworks are flexible enough (underemployment is better than unemployment, Bernard) to deal with downturns, and that consumer confidence is back up to what it was pre-GFC. Apart from that, billions have been spent yet “we’re not out of the woods” (inferring a gigantic waste of money), but we couldn’t possibly allow government to stop distorting the private sector because investment is so terribly weak.

So what is it? Was Rudd’s spendathon a giant waste of my money or should we allow more money to be spent being that “we’re not out of the woods” (hey, this is fun!)? Me thinks Bernard doesn’t have a clue and is siding with the incumbent for safety value.

Being that we escaped a recession, jobs advertising has vastly improved, confidence has returned and GST revenue is nowhere near as bad as forecast, I’m not afraid to say Rudd overspent and we have nothing to show for it, apart from some “hot chicks rule!” plaques around schools.

Abortion law:

Jenny Ejlak writes: Re. “Abortion, Queensland and a law unchanged since 1861” (yesterday, item 4). A great article by Caroline de Costa and shame on the Queensland government.

The proposition that Qld is somehow “different” is a nonsense.  I have been directly involved in abortion law reform in two states and observed it in two more — the issues are the same the world over.  The arguments and counter-arguments are the same, the evidence base is the same, the public attitudes are largely the same, the anti-choice tactics are the same, the way women suffer due to draconian laws is the same.

The Victorian Law Reform Commission (VLRC) process that Caroline referred to thoroughly investigated all the issues raised by the community and the various interest groups.  It provided evidence and explained its reasoning for all its decisions in its final report which can be found here.

While I would support any process that leads to decriminalisation, I also think a repeat process in each state is unnecessary.  The VLRC report uses national and international data and expert advice, not just Victorian.  I cannot see how any state based Law Reform Commission could investigate the same issue and not come to the same conclusion.

Qld women need to let their political leaders know that they are sick of being treated like criminals for seeking legitimate health services, and will vote for a politicians who support decriminalisation.

My School website:

Henrie Ellis writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (yesterday, item 7). The comment in “Tips and rumours” about schools playing fast and loose with the NAPLAN testing regime is common knowledge in educational circles. Last year many schools published results on the My School website were doctored by excluding students with learning difficulties.

In my part of rural Victoria some rather unsavoury practices have already reared their ugly head, and it not just the exclusion of students whose results might reflect poorly in the overall NAPLAN results.

In some schools principals have instructed teachers to “teach to the tests” and this means to the exclusion of other education activities. In another school some teachers were rumoured to have assisted students with the tests virtually giving them answers.  More disturbingly some parents are being encouraged to transfer their children to other schools on the pretext that the school cannot provide for their educational needs.

One principal is known to have addressed his staff in terms of the school’s reputation would stand or fall as a result of NAPLAN and that he would be judging teacher’s performance by how well students have performed.

Irrespective of the worth of NAPLAN in judging school performance, as some teachers associations have pointed out, the tests need to be administered by independent persons not just teacher administered.

Furthermore, there needs to be a rigorous audit regime of schools and tightened guidelines about who and who cannot sit the tests. Sadly these suggestions are likely to fall on deaf ears as Minister Gillard is not for turning.

Joint Strike fighters:

Peter Lloyd writes: I wish to reply to Gavin E. Greenoak (yesterday, comments), who argues that comparing the Joint Strike Fighter to its likely adversaries (and our country’s potential alternative acquisitions) is “downright adolescent,” and nothing more than a “my missile is bigger than your missile thing”.

I could disparagingly paraphrase such an attitude as the “why can’t we all just hug each other” argument, and tritely invite Mt Greenoak to contemplate how such an attitude might go down with Tojo’s Japan, Hitler’s Germany or, say a Chinese government that crushes pro-democracy demonstrators under obsolete tanks. Oops, I just did.

This traditional way of opposing military spending — which is certainly a wasteful drain on the nation — leaves the peddlers of junk hardware a free run.  Proper scrutiny of acquisitions is all too rare and that fact that the JSF has got as far as it has is indicative of this.  If we’re going to pour billions into weapons that have no beneficial uses and massive opportunity costs, entering the showroom in a cloak of wilful ignorance is disgraceful.

The other small problem is that as civilians we have a duty to our service personnel.  Dismissing the equipment they use as unimportant is an utter contempt.  In a future war they will die or, likely, be subjected to a captivity so brutal as to be beyond contemplation.

War is to be avoided, but once joined it is to be done properly.

Free TV handout:

Verity Pravda writes: Re. “The furphies fly in the Great Free TV Handout Debate” (yesterday, item 13). Bernard Keane repeats the line that the free to air networks were “given” 7 MHz of spectrum for the purposes of digital conversion.  He qualifies this by saying they didn’t have to “bid for it”.  The vast bulk of users of spectrum pay for it by administratively determined licence fees, not by auction.

The FTA networks pay for their spectrum in licence fees that are a progressive scale on revenue up to a rate of 9%.  It might have been reasonable to think of the additional channels as additional licences – but they weren’t.  That actually means the networks pay more because they are paying 9% of the small revenues they get from the multi-channels rather than the lower rate the revenues would qualify for o their own.  Issuing an additional licence would have raised less money not more.

The main users who have acquired spectrum through auctions (“bidding for it”) are the mobile networks.  Not all their spectrum was acquired that way – they pay a flat licence fee for the 900 MHz spectrum originally used for GSM.  If you project mobile industry revenues forward at the same growth rate as today a licence fee of less than 3% of revenue would have raised the same amount as the fees raised by auction.

So let’s just get the facts straight.  The FTAs are paying for their (temporary) digital allocation and they are paying more for it than those people who did buy spectrum at auction.

Human rights:

CRIKEY: Yesterday, in the item “Human rights not on the Rudd Team Jellyback’s agenda“, we incorrectly attributed the author as Adam Schwab. The correct author was in fact Greg Barns. We apologise for the mistake.

Justin Pettizini writes: Re. “Human rights not on the Rudd Team Jellyback’s agenda” (yesterday, item 15). What an interesting juxtaposition in Crikey yesterday. Greg Barns says that the real losers out of not having a Human Rights Act include “those charged under draconian anti-terror laws that criminalise speech and thought…”

In the immediately preceding article Mark Blumer (“Abbott’s Muslim comment shows the need for a Human Rights Act“, yesterday, item 14) had argued that a Human Rights act was needed to stop Tony Abbott from saying such discriminatory things as “the important thing is to make the borders secure and that way people will be happier that the right people are coming to our country.”

So if I understand this correctly we need a Human Rights Act both to allow hate speech by some and to prevent the most innocuous comments by others.

I said in my previous comment to one of Mr Blumer’s raves that on balance I supported a Human Rights Act.  On balance I’m starting to move the other way now.

Adam Coleman writes: In his article about the supposed benefits of a human rights act Greg Barns mentions several Victorians who have managed to obtain funding or services, to which they would not otherwise be entitled, by threatening to invoke Victoria’s rights charter. While no doubt good news for those who obtained the benefits, I don’t see how allocating funds on the basis of the threat of legal action is an effective or desirable method of public administration.

I, and many others, would argue that, in the absence of limitless public resources. it is most desirable that these resources be allocated by elected officials and their departments. A human rights instrument which undermines that would therefore not receive my support.

Happy birthday:

Veteran Queensland watcher Terry Towelling writes:  I have been pestering Crikey with my Queensland-centric rants, conspiracy theories and pedantic media quibbles for most of the past decade. Normally, anonymity is of critical importance to me in my otherwise credible, stable and highly respected role in public life.

However, given the occasion of Crikey‘s 10th birthday, I would like to ask Crikey to acknowledge the valuable contributions of the embittered, the cowardly, the ulteriorly motivated, the scheming, the politically driven, the conflicted and the disingenuously outraged, without whom so much of Crikey‘s agenda-setting record could simply not have happened.

We (and I speak for a number of other Crikey noms de plume) were worried when Eric Beecher appeared to be putting an end to our personal sh-t sheet, having enjoyed the balls-to-the -wall-damn-the-defamation-lawyers culture of SMayne and co.

Many happy returns.

The Breaker Morant Vietnam Afghanistan cagematch:

A spokesman for the Attorney-General Robert McClelland writes: Re. “War criminal to hero … a dangerous precedent” (Monday, item 19). The Australian Government does not have jurisdiction to review the legality of decisions made by British courts martial.

As such, the Government has forwarded the petition to the British Secretary of State for Defence for his consideration.

The Government has not conveyed any general or specific expression of support (or otherwise) for the subjects of the petition.

Jeff Sparrow writes: It was with a certain surprise that I learned in yesterday’s Crikey of Neil James’ proposal  (yesterday, comment) to imprison me for treason.

James took exception to two sentences in an article about, of all things, Breaker Morant. In that piece, I wrote, inter alia:

In Afghanistan at the moment Australia has authorised elite counterinsurgent forces to carry out targeted killings, in a strategy modelled upon the notorious Phoenix Program of the Vietnam War. A campaign of assassination of local leaders thought to be loyal to the Taliban contains an obvious potential for human rights abuses, especially since it’s almost impossible for the media to monitor what undercover troops actually do.

For James, I have slurred the troops. Therefore, I have assisted the Taliban. Any “reckless or worse assistance to the enemy our troops are fighting, by any Australian citizen,” is, he says, “an active act of disloyalty and well beyond the exercise of legitimate dissent from the Australian government decision to deploy them.”

The Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act, 2002, makes assisting the enemy a crime punishable by many years imprisonment. But James wants the law amended to ban even ‘reckless assistance’, which is what he says I’ve provided.

He thinks, in other words, that my article on Breaker Morant should become a terrorist crime.

No, seriously. That’s what he thinks.

Well, if I’m to be gaoled, at least I’ll have some company.

“The ADF does not,” says James, “undertake ‘targeted killings’ or ‘assassinations’ of either enemy combatants or other Afghans.”

Really? Gosh, that traitor Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston must have been on the Taliban payroll when he explained on the defence department website that “Mullah Qasim, a senior insurgent commander who had planned attacks against Coalition Forces and who controlled suicide bombers in Oruzgan province, was successfully targeted and killed on May 24.”

Targeted and killed? Clap Houston in irons!

Then, with the Air Marshall safely imprisoned, James could get to work clearing out the vipers in the ABC and those at the Australian, that mouthpiece of Talibanism.  Tony Jones has, after all, discussed ADF assassinations on Lateline; in the Oz in August last year, Mark Dodd described how “Australian special forces have killed a senior Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Karim [in] an officially sanctioned assassination designed to rid Oruzgan province of hardcore militants.”

More generally, it’s no secret that the counterinsurgency approach adopted in Afghanistan draws explicitly upon the CIA’s infamous Phoenix Program from the early seventies. If anything, it seems rather understated to suggest, as I did, that tactics modelled upon a Vietnam-era program responsible for widespread atrocities contain a potential for human rights abuses today.

But of course the issue goes well beyond those specifics, since James’ desire to gaol those who depart from ADF-approved talking points threatens, in principle, every journalist and editor in Australia. Any report on, say, the corruption and cruelty of the Karzai government, the civilian casualties produced by US or Australian operations, the thousands of Afghans detained without trial, or, in fact, anything much else about the ongoing occupation, could be said, in James’ menacing phrase, to “undoubtedly assist the Taliban and their apologists by providing propaganda quotes”.

The Jamesian logic constitutes a deliberate and explicit attack on civil society, one that would, apart from anything else, entirely criminalise the peace movement. If using the term ‘targeted killing’ assists the enemy, well, what happens if you say bluntly that the war is wrong, that it’s producing misery upon misery for the people of Afghanistan, and that it should be brought to an end as soon as possible? How many years do you get for that?

Half a million or more Australians rallied against the Iraq war on 15 February 2003: he’ll need quite a gaol to hold us all.

Rather splendidly, the Australian Defence Association website explains that Neil James “tries [every day] to put into practice his belief that vibrant and informed public debate is essential to Australia’s national security”.  Now, one could describe James’ desire to imprison political opponents in many ways (the word ‘insane’ comes to mind) but ‘productive of vibrant debate’ is not one of them.

For that reason, it’s tempting to dismiss James’ daily antics in the Crikey letters column as the harmless clowning of a professional buffoon. Except, of course, Neil James is a widely published defence pundit: somebody somewhere, you would imagine, must take his fulminations seriously.

Furthermore, the terrorism legislation contains exactly the phrases he says it does, criminalising anyone who intentionally assists, “by any means whatsoever”, a country or organisation that the ADF is fighting. More than that, it also proscribes those who “form an intention” to assist such a country or organisation.

Civil libertarians have long argued that such chillingly vague language (what does it mean to form an intention to assist someone by any means whatsoever?) provides the legislative basis to crush political dissent — and James offers a textbook illustration of the authoritarian mind’s Pavlovian response to legislative opportunities for repression.

I don’t imagine he will really succeed in shipping me out to Barwon prison. But if I were, say, Sheik Hilaly, I’d be a little more worried. In the right climate, in the midst of a tabloid beat-up against an unpopular Muslim leader, well, the old cry of ‘disloyalty to the troops’ might well find a resonance.

Yes, in different circumstances, it might be funnier to receive threats from someone like James, apparently keen to prove himself the ADF’s enforcer: part Colonel Blimp, part Chopper Read. In today’s context, however, you’ll forgive me for not laughing.

Robert Johnson writes: With any luck, Neil James will publish his own Alan Kennedy/Dante’s Cove apology (yesterday, comments) today (“I so bored myself writing yesterday’s letter-essay on ‘Breaker’ Morant that I must’ve hit the send key as I dozed off and didn’t mean a word of it; sorry guys”). But probably not, so I must comment.

I didn’t want to have to re-read (again) James’ letter yesterday, but I think I got the core of his argument.  Taking issue with Jeff Sparrow for the “technique” of using comment on Breaker Morant to comment on the current Afghan occupation, James takes the opportunity of using his response to Sparrow’s comments to claim that “Sparrow and others” are — at the least, likely — guilty of what he long-windedly points to as either treason or of what ought to now be defined in Australian law as treason.

And he goes on to infer that such (surely legitimate, constructive and necessary) debate about the nature of Australia’s engagement  in Afghanistan constitutes “intentional assistance to an enemy”.

For James, the “and others” would seem to include Guy Rundle and Charles Richardson, given that their comments on the Vietnam war extend into drawing parallels with present-day operations in Afghanistan that James apparently considers give at least the “reckless” assistance to the enemy that he advocates should now come within the scope of treasonous acts under anti-terrorism legislation.

If I’ve understood James — and the rambling verbosity of his letter suggests that he may not want to be clearly understood when engaging in his own form of (Rundle is better placed to insert here whatever is the appropriate far-right variant on “1930s communist agitprop”) — then farewell debate and dissent should his views prevail.  He must surely be amused that Crikey gives him oxygen when he is seeking to deny it to others under the guise of it threatening “the lives of our  diggers”. This sort of very serious threat to democratic principles and freedoms needs a strong and vocal response before he has it outlawed.

Furthermore, given that he is speaking on behalf of the Australia Defence Association (“Australia’s only truly independent, non-partisan, community-based, public-interest guardian organisation and ‘think-tank’ on defence and wider national security issues”), the extremely serious claims about “Sparrow and others” and associated policy advocacy in James’ letter demands official comment.

Hopefully Crikey can ensure such response; hopefully Stephen Conroy can at least serve as a good example in this regard.  And, as easy a target as he makes himself, hopefully First Dog won’t reward James with an unwarranted moment of fame.

Guy Rundle writes: My good friend Charles Richardson (yesterday, comments) asks me to admit that the North Vietnamese were intent on establishing a dictatorship. I already did, and I’m happy to agree — they saw it as part of the process of creating an independent and unified Vietnam.

Any suggestion that that can be philosophically proven to be a lesser form of freedom than a few individual liberties in a US client state is simply circular reasoning from a contingent political choice.

Any comparison between Marxist-Leninist north Vietnam and the NLF on the one hand, and the coalition of clans, militias and religious-political movements conveniently labelled as “the Taliban” on the other, is so abstract to be of no intellectual or political use whatsoever.

Bill Thompson writes: I was in South Vietnam in 1969 when Ho Chi Minh died. The Vietnamese population’s grief over the demise of this venerated historical figure was obvious and heartfelt.

He was considered the great Vietnamese patriot, and the fact that Ho Chi Minh was communist was considered of no moment to the ordinary people of the South.

The ancient enmities of China, given its recurring historical invasions of Vietnam, the later colonial occupation by the French and the following Japanese invasion, is the context in which the Vietnam peoples, North and South, considered their future. The subsequent post World War 2 re-colonisation by France (with the assistance of 2nd Australian Imperial Force units sent to Vietnam at the behest of the British Government, which in turn was in response to a request from France), perpetuated the colonisation of the country.

The involvement and later intervention by the United States from 1960 (and Australia from 1962 and New Zealand from 1965) meant that Vietnam had been wracked by war for forty years before the Americans withdrew in total by 1975.

The communist bogey is resurrected by the vanquished only to assuage their guilt. The Vietnamese people must be allowed freely to fashion their future, and in their own good time.

The Vietnamese were fighting to free themselves from foreign occupation and aggression. The failure to recognise Vietnam’s desire for independence is to the great shame for those imperial powers that chose to bully the Vietnamese.