Norway:

Cameron Bray writes: Re. “Rundle: into the abyss of the Norway massacre” (yesterday, item 2). The reprehensible reportage of the Norwegian massacre as “Islamic terror” in the absence of any evidence whatsoever is a sorry reminder that some portions of the press can’t let facts get in the way of the of clash of civilisations narrative. The most recent data (well covered here) shows two things:

  1. That terrorism in Europe is declining; an
  2. That Islamic terrorism is an infinitesimally minor problem. For 2009, the most recent year of data, “Islamic” terrorists were responsible for one attack in the EU. Just one. The same number as the Comité d’Action Viticole, a French group that wants to stop the importation of foreign wine.

This disgraceful episode reinforces what we all know about the banality of 24-hour “news” and the tabloid cycle. The media has the memory of a goldfish. The need to fill space in the absence of fact leads to pointless conjecture based on a vacuous set of default assumptions. And most corrosively of all, the media never needs to apologise for getting it wrong. It just swims on like a whale shark, scooping an undifferentiated krill of facts, conjecture and lies into its mighty maw. Except without a whale shark’s moral capacity, kindly nature or brains.

Its noteworthy that, in the same edition, you identify the continuing News International shenanigans as contributing to a decline in public confidence in the media. I would suggest the malaise goes far, far deeper than that.

Katherine Stuart writes: The story of a Norwegian colleague brought the massacre chillingly close to home: two of her three children were on the island at the camp but managed to escape the gunman by swimming to the mainland. But many of their friends are dead. And a front page article in this morning’s Swedish press describes how some who made the swim across returned to the water, terrified of those attempting to help them out.

Rundle is right to remind us that Europe has a very long and nasty history of violent racism all its own, and inward-looking xenophobia still gets plenty of open support in some parts of Europe. Sixteen years after the Balkans war there are still serious ethnic divides in places like Kosovo. Getting Europeans to live peacefully together was a major reason for starting the European Union after WWII.

Against the background of nationalistic populism impacting the actions of many governments in the EU in recent times — just think of the recently established and probably illegal Danish border controls, the result of some political horse-trading by the Danish government with the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) over a pension scheme! — the actions of this clearly insane Norwegian man look like the very sharp and pointy end of something we should all be very concerned about.

Andrew Dempster writes: I’ve noticed that the right-wing Christian terrorist in Norway had some violent video games and the usual suspects are drawing the usual conclusions, calling for a ban. A violent maniac likes playing violent games? Quelle surprise! Surely we’d be better off banning right-wing politics? Or Christianity?

The National Broadband Network:

Grahame Lynch, founder and director of Communications Day, writes: Re. “Politics of NBN pricing: comparing potatoes and pomegranates” (yesterday, item 3). Stilgherrian yesterday labelled the media’s coverage of initial NBN pricing as “rubbish”. The same could be said of his own shallow analysis.

His argument that initial NBN prices generally match legacy ADSL pricing misses the point — the NBN was supposed to deliver more performance for less or the same price. But the actual ISPs that are delivering NBN services are the ones pointing out that the NBN will not conform to the rosy Crikey view. Exetel CEO John Linton, writing on his blog last week, said:

“… the monthly port cost of the lowest speed fibre service and the ‘back haul’ cost is higher than even Telstra Wholesale charge for an ADSL2 service … and is almost double the cost of an Optus ADSL2 service … and the fibre cost is going to get much higher once the ‘trial phases’ end and the points of interconnect move to their planned 121 locations instead of, as they now are, in CBD major data centres.”

Internode CEO Simon Hackett said on his website:

“… the National Broadband Network is the subject of promises from the government that consumers will pay comparable prices to current day ADSL2+ and phone service bundles in order to access entry level NBN based services, and that NBN based retail pricing will be nationally uniform. Unfortunately, a number of pressure points in the wholesale pricing model exist which will make these promises (from the government) untenable in practice, unless serious issues with the underlying pricing model are addressed by NBNCo and the ACCC.”

Stilgherrian chose to ignore this sober narrative, instead preferring to lash out at media who presumably would seek to confuse and cause “stress” to the community for merely echoing and amplifying these genuine observations. Anyone with a passing knowledge of telecommunications will realise that the NBN will charge the same or more for same and more for more. Current local loop prices are regulated using cost models developed by the ACCC.

These value the Telstra copper network at about half the value forecast to be invested in the NBN. If the NBN is to return its costs, as is promised, it is obvious that it must extract a greater share of its customer’s wallets than is currently extracted by today’s broadband providers. Whether there is a substantial willingness to pay meaningful premiums for greater speed is a big unknown — there is certainly little international evidence to support this case. NBN Co certainly hopes so — it forecasts increasing revenue per user over its project life, which is contrary to most experiences in competitive telecommunications markets where per user revenues tend to fall as markets mature.

If Stilgherrian had read some of the NBN Co literature he would also realise that the project’s projections are partly predicated on the willingness of retailers to accept margin reductions approaching half today’s totals. It might not conform to certain ideological preferences, but there is really little to separate private monopolies and public monopolies in practice — especially when the latter is operating off twice the cost base of the former.

Carbon tax:

Andrew Whiley writes: Re. “Miliband, Gillard and the moral posturing ties that bind” (yesterday, item 14) Putting aside Brendan’s more overblown comparisons regarding Miliband, Gillard, Murdoch and carbon pricing, he seems to be implying Australia’s response to climate change should be predicated on “giving priority to what the little people want” and in this case since they seemingly don’t want a carbon tax, the PM should cease trying to give them one. Hear-Hear for democracy at large! Or is this democracy writ small?

Unfortunately the electorate cannot vote for climate change to disappear, no matter how often they are told they can, or how hard they may try via the ballot box. Encouraging the electorate to undertake the equivalent of -closing their eyes, sticking their fingers tight to their ears and sing la-la-la! in the hope that it will all go away is deceptive, dangerous and corrosive to our democracy. The current opprobrium and hostility directed at our own climate scientists is but one manifestation of this fantasy perspective.

Wishful thinking and alternative realities can only last for so long. Denialist humbugging sophistry will probably be around forever.

Possibly Brendan could ask the “little people” of Bangladesh or other low lying regions of the planet whether our dinky-di Aussie democracy should place a higher value on their long term needs for environmental security over our short term want not to be distracted from getting this weeks footy tips in on time. Let’s count the votes together.

Retail:

Niall Clugston writes: Re. “Kohler: Gillard’s incurable retail affliction” (yesterday, item 19). Alan Kohler’s analysis of retail decline is purely anecdotal: “Everywhere I go people talk about the amount of shopping they are now doing online”. Statistics, however, show that online purchasing is minimal.

What Borders and Colorado had in common is not principally the ease of internet alternatives but the discretionary nature of the shopping they existed on.  As losses incurred in the global financial crisis have hit home and the federal stimulus has stopped, consumers have closed their purses and wallets.

Depression has spread over the world, and Australia is simply the last domino to fall. In past years the mining boom covered up the downturn in the rest of the economy, and dismal figures from NSW were blamed on the past Labor government. But this facade is wearing thin, and the woes of the world are about to break through.

China:

Charles Richardson writes: Niall Clugston (comments, yesterday) is quite correct to point out that democracies have overlapping territorial claims as well. But note something about all his examples: none of them have led to war, whereas China’s claims in the Paracels did, just like Argentina’s claims in the Falklands/Malvinas.

Democracy doesn’t make such conflicts go away, but it does have a very strong tendency to lead to them being handled peacefully, and that was my point.