Labor tax policies that hit older people should be a source of shame

Let’s talk about inequality. I’ve been writing about inequality in various guises on this blog for a couple of years now, but the issue of taxing older people is probably the most disturbing because of the ways that parts of the community are becoming involved in it.

The poverty rate in Australia for people aged 66 and over is over 25 percent, which is the third worst result for any country in the OECD. Meanwhile, older women experiencing homelessness has grown 31 percent since 2011. "The number of older women accessing the private rental market increased by 45,000 in a five year period," according to a report by the National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group led by the Mercy Foundation.

The economic outlook for older Australians is pretty bad already. But you then have the Labor Party planning to make matters worse for this sector of the population with four new tax proposals (franking credits, negative gearing, capital gains, family trusts) that will disproportionately affect the elderly.

What hope have older people got when both sides of politics target them for a good fleecing? Both major parties supported the inclusion of assets in calculations made by Centrelink to figure out nursing home fees. Older people generally have little income but significant assets, so this was a perfect way to tax them so that the burden on the broader community is less.

You hear people talking in public about these policies in a way that evidences a complete lack of understanding of the underlying realities that older people live with every day. Sometimes the people making these comments are journalists or politicians, not just random plebs with a personal axe to grind. These people should know better but you only ever hear one side. This post gives you the other side of the equation.

One claim has a journalist giving the example of a retiree with $2 million in assets paying no tax on income earned. As though that were a lot of money. With the Reserve Bank talking now about lowering interest rates to spur investment due to the sluggish housing market, many older people will be having a sinking feeling in their stomach, especially if they have their money tied up in term deposits with major banks. When the cash rate goes down, the interest you earn on this kind of investment also goes down, with many people preferring term deposits because they are a low-risk option.

So, that $2 million suddenly isn’t giving you $60,000 a year in interest earned. Suddenly there’s less money to use to pay for things like council rates, food, and transport. A couple that has retired with this kind of investment might own some Telstra and CBA shares as well, and if so they will be directly impacted by the franking credits tax changes proposed by Labor. As will people with even fewer assets than this.

Incomes for older people are always like this. If you have your money in higher-risk investments such as managed funds (where you buy units in funds the managers of which use your money to buy shares in publicly traded companies) or if you directly own shares, the markets will determine how much income you have in any given year. The common wisdom says that shares give you a nine-percent return year-on-year but this is an average where the extremes are widely separated. One year you might get a minus-15-percent return and one year you might get a one-percent return. And there’s no way to predict how markets will behave, they are notoriously difficult to predict over the short-, medium- or long-term.

Older people can’t win, it seems, in the current environment, where there is a tendency to see taxation and redistribution as an unalloyed good, regardless of how such a view affects the wellbeing of people who live on the margins of society, as older people do. The trend seems to be powerful and it is disheartening for people who have paid taxes all their lives, contributing to the health of the community in many ways by working and raising children.

What is to come next? Death duties were abolished in 1981, but the way things are going they'll probably be reintroduced by one party or the other in due course. Labor was the party that in a more rational age introduced superannuation for the benefit of older people, but now it seems they are turning against that part of the community in a witless cash grab designed merely to please the mob.

Why the anti-encryption law would be unworkable

The following came into a thread I saw on Twitter from Peter Logue, who used to work as a journalist. I contacted Peter in a DM and with his son's help we produced this for publication. Peter says his son has worked in game development in Australia and China. His son then worked for a few years with Appster before setting up an IT consultancy called SixSix with Carl Rigoni, who ran an innovation division at Australia Post. His son deals with software development and encryption and security issues on a daily basis. Some of his son’s peer group are senior advisers on IT security to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Defence, and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

My eldest son has worked in IT and game development for over 15 years. He’s now a consultant to many major companies and works with software developers. Here’s what he says about the proposed anti-encryption legislation the government is trying to get through federal Parliament: It’s not actually possible to implement it in a modern software company.

To give you an idea of why it's not possible, picture the following scenario: I manage a software development company that is building some technology that uses encryption. This technology is being built for a client of mine that chose to work with my company because of our good reputation. With the new legislation, the government can contact one of my employees behind my back and tell them to build a backdoor into the software without my knowledge. If the employee tells me about it, they could be facing jail time under the new rules.

With my management tools though, I track every minute of their work and every line of code that they write is reviewed and automatically tested. If there’s anything unexpected in there it will cause the automated tests to fail, which will highlight the presence of the rogue code. Even if my tests don’t pick up on it, I can see that this developer is taking far longer completing the work than they should (because they are spending time working on features for the government). I ask the developer about this, and they can’t tell me about it, so I check the work that’s been done and see that the software is compromised. At this point I start jumping to conclusions, and I might think it’s a Chinese hacker stealing our work or something like that, and report the employee to the police. What happens then?

I don't think the people that wrote this bill understand how technology development works. That’s probably the reason why much of the wording of this bill has been left vague or undefined. If political parties want to get votes to prove they have robust cybersecurity policies, then enacting laws to make local cybersecurity weaker is not a good way to do it. It's arse-backwards anti-security and will undermine international confidence in the Australian technology sector.

This comment from u/Groovyaardvark on Reddit sums it up well:

One of the ways #AABill gets access to systems is by commandeering employees of companies to write backdoors. But they’re not even allowed to tell their employer, or face jail time. I went through the mechanics of this, and realised how out of touch Canberra is...

Peter’s son adds the following conversation to describe how the laws would apply in real life once they are enacted:

"Johnson, why are all of your tickets building up!? What are we paying you for?! We will need to discuss a performance improvement plan.”  

“But, sir, I've been working really hard on this err... other project...”  

"What project?"  

“Errrm....it's umm...I can't tell you."   

So the choice is, A: Get fired, B: Go to prison.  

“I'll pack up my desk I guess.” 

I wonder who will be the next lucky developer chosen to secretly undermine and destroy their employer’s products behind their backs?

UPDATE 7 December 2018 6.25am: The bill passed through both houses of federal parliament yesterday on the last sitting day before the end-of-year break.

Former Sydney Law School construction site

Back in late September I wrote about the brutalist building that used to be on this site. The site is now almost empty, in preparation for the construction of luxury apartments in the heart of the CBD. You can hear loud sounds coming from the site from behind the hoarding that surrounds it. The hoarding has a jaunty cartoon design painted on it. Tourists were standing around a tour guide who was speaking about convict architect Francis Greenway outside his St James church, which was just next to me across the street from the construction site, when I took this photo on a recent weekend.

Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation dinner, Wayside Chapel, Potts Point

The dinner took place last night. As well as supporters for change from the broader community, there were a number of notables in the crowd, including Canadian Senator Larry Campbell, Adam Searle, the Leader of the Opposition in the NSW Legislative Council, Peter Baume who was a NSW Liberal senator, John Nicholson who used to be a judge and who now helps run Rainbow Lodge, a service for people recently released from prison, Richard Di Natale the head of the Australian Greens, former Western Australian Premier Geoff Gallup, and Dr Alex Wodak AM, president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation. Brook Boney, a journalist from radio station Triple-J, was MC. At my table there were Judy and John who had come up for the event from Melbourne, where they live in North Richmond, the location for the just-announced medically-supervised injecting centre.

Boney said that the first drug bans in Australia happened in Victoria, NSW and South Australia in the 19th century against the smoking of opium, which was a habit of the Chinese workers in the goldfields. She added that, now, up to 60 percent of people in prison allocate the reason for their incarceration to a drug cause.

Peter Baume said that Margaret Thatcher opened the world’s first national needle syringe program, in Britain. In Sydney, the Wayside Chapel hosted the country’s first supervised injecting room starting in May 1999 as an act of civil disobedience. Ray Richmond was the pastor at the time. Ingrid van Beek (who is Geoff Gallop’s wife and who founded Australia's first state-sponsored medically-supervised injecting room, in Kings Cross) told the room that the Wayside Chapel facility became politicised in the runup to the 1999 state election. The 1999 NSW Drug Summit that was held at Parliament House over five days in May led to the opening of a medically-supervised injecting room in Sydney.

Van Beek said she hoped that evidence is what informs political decisions but admitted that recently in Victoria it had been deaths that had driven change. She recalled that in 1996 and 1997 Bob Carr visited the Kirketon Road Centre in Kings Cross where they had a syringe program for drug users but that he had said that would initially only set up a medically-supervised injecting room as a trial. The trial status was lifted eventually.

“Politicians will only act on these issues when the public is miles ahead of them,” Searle told the room.

When Boney introduced Campbell, she told the room that 64 percent of all Americans want recreational cannabis legalised.

Campbell first came to power in politics with the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE party) in the 2002 Vancouver municipal election. In 2003 a medically-supervised injecting room called Insite opened in Vancouver. He had worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and had seen what poor drug policies had done on the streets. He said that they had a higher rate of deaths in Vancouver than in New York City. He recalled for the room that there had been a group called the Vancouver Area Network of Dug Users in which poet Bud Osborn was involved. He had a talk one day with Osborn at a street corner. Osborn said, “We need a supervised injection centre,” he recalled. But the group had already operated a supervised injection centre for some time illegally. Campbell went there one night. He said that if someone overdosed they would put them out in back alley and phone the ambulance, then close the door and go back inside. Campbell recalled talking about the drug problem with Philip Owen, the mayor of Vancouver, one of whose major goals had been to open a medically-supervised injecting centre. They hosted 700 injections per day and had no deaths.

Now, at the federal level in Canada, the government has appointed Jane Philpot, a doctor, to be the health minister. Now, he went on, Canada is operating 22 injecting rooms. “They’re there as a health initiative,” he said. “I smoke and nobody’s hassling me, nobody’s threatening to put me in jail.” Next year Canada will be legalising marijuana. In the debates, he said, now the biggest issue for the politicians to discuss is how tall the marijuana plant is going to be. “The citizens are always ahead of the politicians,” he said. And he encouraged the people in the room to continue pushing. “You have to keep that pressure up.” A supervised injecting centre “is just a tool in the drawer”, he said. “We need treatment on demand. We need to educate children on what drugs are.” “It’s all about money. We have to put names and faces to the people we’re serving.”

Richard Di Natale got up to speak next. He said criminalisation of drug use was a great injustice that needs to be redressed. People might smoke a joint on the weekend, he said, or they might take a pill before they go out. He recalled that in 2009 Professor David Nutt, the head of the UK government's drug advisory body, compared the risks of horse-riding to taking ecstasy and lost his job. “We have policies in place that actively harm people.”

“The Greens are in support of removing criminal penalties for drug use,” he went on. “Sniffer dogs force young people to take drugs in ways that are dangerous,” he said. “We need prescription heroin trials.” He said that criminalisation diverts resources away from helping people but that the conversation in Australia is changing quickly.

Baume said, “My beliefs on drugs never hurt me within my party that I knew of.” He added, “We favour regulation of the illegal drug market and that’s a better option than what we’ve got at present.”

Above: Canadian Senator Larry Campbell addresses the room at the Wayside Chapel.

Big data and AI in the law

Today’s talk was part of the Information Innovation @ UTS seminar series, organised by the University of Technology, Sydney. One speaker was Carolyn Austin, a lawyer with law firm K&L Gates. Austin has worked in knowledge management for 25 years, and her talk was titled ‘Managing legal knowledge in the age of AI’. Also speaking was James Jarvis from Thomson Reuters and his talk was titled ‘From knowledge oriented projects to automated decision systems’.

Today we see the convergence of AI, big data, process design, and knowledge work, said Austin. There have been dire predictions of job-eating robots, and in the legal profession there are also pressures on the market from increased competition, and from new people entering the market. Austin said that it is up to law firms to be in the vanguard of new technology, because they are well placed to rise to meet opportunities. She also added that there is also an ethical imperative that should be driving law firms to embrace new technologies.

She mentioned Michael Olsson at UTS, who teaches in the field. In law, Austin said, knowledge management means leveraging collective expertise to better serve clients. Big data is about the four-‘v’s: volume, velocity, variety and veracity. It is also important to use data analytical tools, which are descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive (telling us what should we do). AI or cognitive technologies are used more and more frequently for tasks that normally require human intelligence. There is also now a lot of natural language processing in the legal profession. Expert systems can be applied to very complex knowledge domains. Austin also noted that legal knowledge work is rapidly and permanently changing.

James Jarvis in his talk pointed to the fact that the size of the digital universe today is 16 zettabytes (1 trillion gigabytes) which will increase to 163 zettabytes by 2025. There are more and more opportunities for lawyers than ever before, he said. Only 0.5 percent of data is currently analysed and this will increase to 1.4 percent by 2025. The amount of digital information available for analysis is equivalent to 40 trillion DVDs, or 26 zettabytes. He said that Walmart is currently processing 2.5 petabytes an hour for its store operations. At the present time, 30 percent of data is created by businesses, and by 2025 this will increase to 60 percent.

To illustrate how radically the world has changed, in 1986, Jarvis went on, most data was analogue, but now it is mostly digital. There are now over 6 million apps in the iPhone Appstore. But in 2017, 87 percent of law firms said that they are not using AI, although companies that use big data are making decisions 5 times faster than their competitors. There will be an impact on billable hours, floor space and organisational structure due to adoption of technology. Knowledge managers are design thinking strategists in the legal profession. There was $5 billion of investment in AI for law in 2016, and the trend over time is up.

Jarvis put up a slide on the screen at the front of the room that said that knowledge work automation would equate to $6.7 trillion in economic impact by 2025. That would equal the productivity of 140 million equivalent full-time workers.

During the question period, one participant said that some problems are too complex for automation. Jarvis said in response that you have to turn that into a business proposition. Carolyn added that you can’t oversimplify complex legal matters but that there are examples where lawyers have conversely said that the law needs to be simplified. Another participant asked what are the limitations of AI and big data. Is it a risk that lawyers will just use the routine route to finding a solution, and not be creative, if AI is adopted more in law? Iteration is important, said Jarvis. He also said that the aggregation of meaningful interactions with data teaches algorithms to do their work.

Another participant asked why lawyers are so slow in looking at AI. She was answered by another person in the room who said that lawyers are confronted by it. Jarvis said that a critical element in design thinking is to tell the right story for the audience, and that people have to be brought along on the journey. Another participant said that lawyers have no interest in automating their work because it’s competition for them. Jarvis said that you have to keep doing it by watching how people work. Austin added that lawyers are risk averse, too.

Above: James Jarvis with a slide showing software applications for the legal profession. Not all will survive.

Do we need to legalise illicit substances?

Today in the Sydney Morning Herald there was another story about drug gangs laundering cash through Australia's big banks. A few weeks ago the same charge was leveled at the CBA only but now it seems there are other banks involved as well. This is a major story, involving three journalists. The second story is from 2011, and it took two journalists to write it. It's about the State Crime Commission, and it tells another tale of dysfunction: of an unaccountable organisation that operates outside any democratic control.

On the one hand in NSW we're paying expensive public servants a ton of money to fight so-called "crime" - the drug business is a classic example of a market finding ways to operate despite obstacles put in its way - and on the other hand the criminals they chase continue to find ways to conduct their business.

Demand from within the community continues unabated, as we know from stories in recent years about water treatment authorities that monitor the contents of our household waste. These measurements are part of an official program of scientific surveillance, the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program, operated by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

It's ludicrous. We might scoff at the Americans and the virtual war they are prosecuting in Mexico - one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to operate in - but we are also wasting unimaginable quantities of resources in order to prop up outmoded ways of dealing with the use of "illicit" drugs. Drugs should be treated as a health issue, not as a crime.

Protective barriers, Pyrmont Bridge

This morning workmen were installing steel bollards on the western edge of Pyrmont Bridge. The barriers come after official decisions to change the streetscape to prevent terrorist attacks on pedestrians. The City of Sydney has already placed several enormous concrete barriers on the pavement in Martin Place. Such plans are taking shape in the wake of an attack in Melbourne in January this year, when a man drove a stolen car in a pedestrian mall, killing people, and equally destructive attacks in Europe in recent times that were linked to Islamic State.

Police cannot question image making in a public place

In Australia under most circumstances the police cannot object to the taking of photographs or video in a public place as it is legal to do so, the exception being in some cases when the subject of the image-making is a minor and usually only when a member of the public present objects to the image-making. However even that caveat isn't clear-cut.

Unfortunately, police continue to harass people making images in public in Australia, as we saw recently in Canberra at the Aboriginal march marking Anzac Day. That footage from SBS is valuable for us especially as it shows how the presence of a camera at such an event can have a positive effect, working to restrain over-enthusiastic police; you can hear members of the public at the march shouting "No violence!" as the police scuffle violently with resisting protesters. As the Taser is unholstered those shouts amplify but it's the presence of the video camera right on the spot - we can clearly see the faces of the policeman and the protester in dramatic close-up - that restrains an imminent assault with the device. Everyone present should be glad - seeing that footage - that the camera was being used there.

Later in the video you can also see the camera operator talking with police, who have clearly overstepped their authority and are somewhat buffoonishly trying in desperation to maintain a modicum of dignity by casting aspersions over the ethics of the conduct of the journalist. They attempt to imply that his use of the video equipment is ethically compromised, for example. Nevertheless it's clear that they have also tried to take away the equipment and we can hear him refusing to surrender it while furthermore insisting on his right to retire from the location of the discussion unmolested by them. He is clearly uncertain how they are going to react if he just leaves.

The ambit claim used by the police in this instance reminded me of a similar event that happened a couple of years ago in Sydney's Darlinghurst which caused some public reaction. It took place at the 2013 Mardi Gras where police were videoed assaulting a young man who was part of the crowd celebrating on the night. In that case, a police officer involved in the events asked the camera operator numerous times to stop filming and he was refused because the person with the camera had experience with media law.

It was shocking. But there's a link at the bottom of that blogpost to a short video Fairfax produced at the time which deals with the specific issue of filming in a public place. In the video a senior police officer publicly regrets the actions of the police on the night of the Mardi Gras. It's obviously worth looking at the video again at this point in time because it appears that the police have not learned their lesson and need to be continually reminded of the public's rights in regard to the making of images in public places.

Abbott should decriminalise drugs, not declare war on ice

On Wednesday, on the day after the Reserve Bank of Australia made its monthly announcement about the cash rate (it wasn't lowered), on what was reasonably expected to be a slow news day where there was no other major issue to occupy the public's attention, Tony Abbott appeared on TV at the offices of the Australian Federal Police and announced an inquiry into methamphetamines, or ice. It seems that whenever Abbott thinks he can get a bit of a boost in the opinion polls he's at the AFP's headquarters, on camera, spruiking some law enforcement initiative. Last time - as I recall - it was about the importation into Australia of guns. This time it was drugs.

It was a craven piece of political theatre designed to make Abbott appear tough and competent and the media duly followed along and for a day or so they played with the ball, chucking it up and down as they ran down the field. There was never any questioning of the basic premise of Abbott's announcement - that criminalising some substances for which there is demand in the community is a good thing - and so the saga dribbled on until the journalists gave up in despair when they realised there was actually nothing to the story. It was, as so much of what Abbott has done since his leadership was challenged this year, a beat-up.

But the fact is that there is no evidence that criminalising drugs does anything to prevent people using them. It does however send drug use underground, where it cannot be observed by the more responsible members of society. It also works to fund criminal gangs and other undesirables, funneling billions of dollars into the bank accounts of thugs and crims.

There is no upside. It is all about perception. In places where such substances have been decriminalised we can see improvements in the treatment of the problem of addiction. People can use the drugs in the open, rather than hiding their use, and so friends and family members can see what happens and maybe help to control their use. People can talk about drugs in a more mature and reasonable way when they are decriminalised, as well. Addiction can be treated as a health issue, which is as it should be, instead of a crime issue. So let's bring substance abuse out into the open by decriminalising the substances that are now driven underground by society, to a place where they become playthings for gutless and desperate politicians who are just hungry for public approval.

Rupe's staunch lieutenants warn that the sky will fall

The picture on the right is how News Ltd editors see in their mind communications minister Stephen Conroy's proposed Public Interest Media Advocate, which is one legislative measure the minister announced yesterday in Australia. Flagship masthead the Australian today carries a whole slew of terrifying stories that make Conroy out to be some sort of Stalinist ogre intent on muzzling free speech in an uncontrolled Orwellian frenzy. Please note that all your freedoms will be severely curtailed from the point where Conroy's reforms pass through Parliament (if they ever do). Well, not, really. My advice to anyone who wants to know what the media reforms mean is to avoid a News Ltd paper entirely because there seems to be an excess of Chicken Littleism running around their offices since Conroy went public with his legislative agenda. I would read the stories but the outraged tone and the convoluted grammar it produces are too difficult to negotiate in comfort. So go instead to the Conversation, where you can read some views owned by experts in Australian media.

Conroy's proposals stem from the Convergence Review and from the Finkelstein Inquiry but they seem pretty mild, especially when compared to what Finkelstein recommended. With approximately 70 percent of Australia's print media, News Ltd no doubt has a few worried managers thinking about what Conroy's proposed public interest test means for them and their boss, octogenerian Rupe, who also owns part of Sky News Australia (pay TV channel) and Foxtel (pay TV service). Rupe's son Lachlan sits on the board of free-to-air TV channel Network Ten; Ten has been running a fair amount of editorial sourced from News Ltd offices in the recent past and this is likely to increase. With a lot to lose News Ltd can hardly be blamed for running violently counter to Conroy's views, but it's just not journalism. It's made up of text but if you read the fine print on the label you see that it also contains nuts.

The ABC has been more measured, even though their story is a bit misleading as it seems to suggest Conroy plans to implement two media oversight bodies, where in fact there is only one. Fairfax has put up a reasonable story that initially focuses on whether the government is really committed to the reform package going through Parliament. Compared to the News Ltd assault, Fairfax seems to have no opinion for or against the reforms, which is refreshing.

One thing that keeps cropping up in these stories is the existence of media diversity in Australia as a result of the internet. It's true that there are a number of online news sources such as Crikey, Independent Australia, New Matilda - to name just those involved in the areas of politics. But their traffic remains weak compared to the established majors. Compare traffic at Fairfax's Brisbane Times, which is effectively a start-up in a city that also has the News Ltd vehicle the Courier-Mail, a player for generations, with traffic at the Sydney Morning Herald. We're talking an order of magnitude different. (You can compare traffic at these Fairfax sites because the company's new website design shows pageviews for leading stories on a daily basis.) Legacy converts to volume, there's no question. The influence of a newspaper like the Daily Telegraph strongly overshadows that of a website like New Matilda. It's just not a point that you can reasonably contest.

From what I can recall there are about seven parliamentary sitting weeks before the federal election in September. Labor's cross-bench allies have voiced concerns about the proposed legislation, and we'll see if Conroy and Julia Gillard can get their critical approval before tabling the laws in Parliament. It's all up in the air at the moment. Besides, it's a lot less than many people have been hoping for. 

One law for the cops, one law for everyone else

"Stop filming."

It was announced last night that NSW Police would conduct an investigation into an event at the Sydney Mardi Gras that involves allegations of brutality (YouTube link). The Australian reported yesterday that:

"The NSW Police force is aware of the vision and an investigation will be conducted into the circumstances surrounding the incident," [a spokeswoman said].

The Towleroad blog contains a report that includes a recount of the event apparently by the cameraman who shot the vision despite repeated requests by police to stop filming:

As a press photographer I knew I was completely within my rights to film police officers in a public space, doing nothing wrong and breaking no laws, so I refused. You will notice I ask multiple times why I am not allowed to film and what laws am I breaking and receive no response.

The police officer at the time of the fracas repeatedly asked the cameraman to stop filming. In the meantime the police officer shown in the picture posted along with this blog post is clearly using excessive force to immobilise a young man who can be heard in the video asking again and again what he had done wrong. Then he starts to cry as he is being held on the ground under the policeman's foot. There was no response from police to the young lad but only repeated orders to the cameraman to stop filming.

Photographing and filming in a public place in Australia is completely lawful, and this video shows how important it is for someone who is asked to stop taking vision in a public place to know their rights.

This morning Alex Greenwich, the state member for Sydney, tweeted:

Last night I called for an investigation into the police incident at Mardi Gras, today police have launched one and share our concerns

Greens leader Christine Milne tweeted last night:

I have just seen [the video] and will take up issue.

Let's hope that the politicians in NSW and federally who have a conscience will also ask police why an officer thought it appropriate to tell a man with a video camera to stop filming. These kinds of stories come up from time to time, on a recent occasion involving police using force to take a smartphone from a member of the public after he had filmed them carrying out their duties. Police sensitivity is justified if they continue to use undue force to do so. But there cannot be one rule for the police and one rule for everyone else. Such a situation would be intolerable. Queenslanders know well what it means for police to consider themselves above the law; here's a quick plug for Queensland author Matthew Condon's latest book, Three Crooked Kings, about the state of the force in that state during the bad years under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

UPDATE Wed 7.30am: The Daily Telegraph reports: "NSW Police said they had issued an 18-year-old man with a Field Court Attendance Notice for assaulting police, resisting arrest and offensive language following an incident at the intersection of Reilly Street and Oxford Street, Surry Hills, during Mardi Gras on Saturday 2 March 2013."

UPDATE Wed 10.05am: ABC News 24 interview just completed with two senior NSW police officers sees the organisation working hard to affirm "strong relations" with the LGBTI community in Sydney. NSW Police has begun internal investigations into the incident this blog post refers to, and in addition into another incident that occurred a bit later on Saturday night. In regard to orders from the police talked about in this blog post for a cameraman to "stop filming", in today's TV interview Assistant Commissioner Murdoch said that it is not police policy to stop members of the public filming in a public place.

UPDATE Wed 11pm: Fairfax Media has put together a useful video that talks about your rights with regard to making vision in public places. Click on the video at the top of the story to see it.

Australian cinema-goers don't want to be embarrassed

Director Travis Mathews and actor
James Franco.

American actor James Franco has made a short flic addressing the Classification Board because it banned a movie he acted in called I Want Your Love (2012) directed by Travis Mathews, an American. The movie was to be shown to cinema-goers at the Sydney Mardi Gras Film Festival but the screening was cancelled due to the ruling. According to the Age:

Melbourne Queer Film Festival director Lisa Daniel says that in her 15 years at the festival, I Want Your Love is the first film that has been refused an exemption. It has been seen in many festivals around the world, and its distributors have told her this is the first time it has been banned. Mathews is a well-known filmmaker, and the decision is an embarrassment for Australia, she says.

There is an online petition underway for those who would like to contribute and protest at the banning of the film at both the Sydney and Melbourne festivals. In part, it says:

We the undersigned believe that your decision to refuse a "film festival exemption" for Australian queer film festivals to screen Travis Mathews' film, I Want Your Love, is wrong.

The SMH story just says the film "was considered by the Classification Board to be too explicit in its sex scenes". There is no information for the public from the Board about its decision on the official website.

In his address, Franco notes how so many violent films receive classification in Australia. Which is relevant. But what he does not talk about is the long history in Australia of state censorship of artistic works that push the boundaries of public taste. But some people have been talking about it, most recently Nicole Moore in an ABC story from August last year. Moore has also written a book about Australia's woeful attitude toward artistic license, titled The Censor's Library.

"The main reason in Australia for censorship was 'offensive obscenity' as it was classified," she said.
"More than 90 per cent of titles were banned for obscenity and the rest were banned for sedition or blasphemy, although the number of titles banned for blasphemy in Australia has actually been very few.
"We can break that down to all kinds of representations of intimacy and sexuality, that for many contemporary readers now seem like ordinary parts of our lives."

Moore is not alone. Thankfully, universities in Australia have been able to take a more nuanced view of what constitutes obscenity, than the largely unaccountable Classification Board, a secretive body made up of people chosen from the community. They are the inheritors of a grand and unedifying tradition in Australia of stymieing innovation in art that includes the heavy-footed plods who banned Lady Chatterley's Lover, that midly erotic 1929 novel by D.H. Lawrence, until 1965. The book had been on sale in the UK since 1960. Of course, Lawrence's main target in his novel was not sex but intolerance, class, and the social forces that mold individual behaviour in different contexts. Oliver Parkin and Lady Chatterley might frolic playfully in the pouring rain, naked, but their relationship can never be admitted to. The same theme appeared in the 1970 film The Go-Between which was based on a 1953 novel by English novelist L.P. Hartley. These films explore ideas of class, of power relations, of social strata. And sex is one way to illuminate the real nature of these things. Sex can be revealing in ways that other types of interaction between individuals, cannot.

Which gets back to what Franco said in his address to the Board. In art it's not the sex per se that should be important but rather the use to which it is put. If Mathews has made a film that deploys sexual relations in an innovative and meaningful way, then it is hard to see how sex in the film can be confused with pornography. These issues pop up from time to time. In the meanwhile we are treated to the stylistically obtuse versions of sex that regularly appear in movies. There's the hungry, lingering lip-touch. The girl flung on top of a kitchen bench. The legs wrapped passionately around his waist. The coy bosom-shot as the camera follows his head down her chest. And the morning-after scene where she discretely pulls the sheet up to cover her resplendent breasts. On and on, again and again we are given such unrealistic and inarticulate ways to understand sex. This is not us we're seeing. This is a filmic version of sex that has been developed to cope with censorship rules.

It's just embarrassing. The kinds of attitudes regular actors routinely strike in filmic scenes that show sex have little or nothing to do with my experience of sex in real life. If Mathews has tried to go beyond these stylised displays of incomparable but unconvincing passion, then good on him. I wonder how the thinking goes that stopping a group of adults from seeing gay sex in the setting of a film festival can impact on the frail morals of society? At the very least the Board should front up and make a public statement that can then be judged, criticised publicly, and weighed in the balance against other types of entertainment that do receive classification in Australia. It's the unaccountable nature of the Board that is most offensive, and their unwillingness to engage with the people who they ostensibly represent. Just how close to the tastes of gay film-goers does the body of the Classification Board approximate?

A-G Roxon set to recast idea of freedom of speech

Roxon.

I guess this is what happens when you complain too much. Rupert Murdoch's flagship broadsheet, the Australian, has long been at loggerheads with the government over concerns that changes to media laws stemming from the Finkelstein enquiry, which played out publicly last year, would impinge on media freedom. The newspaper recaps those gripes at the end of this story on its website today. But it's what comes earlier in the piece that should worry all Australians, not just media moguls and their minions. Personally, I agree with the ideas about independent oversight that Finkelstein recommended, because there is clearly bias in some parts of the media, notably in the pages of the Australian. But what attorney-general Nicola Roxon has in mind with new anti-discrimination laws - to make it an offense to offend someone - is not just tinkering at the edges, but in fact is a wholesale redrafting of the laws in this country that enable anyone - not just the media - to perform public speech.

[Media companies] argue that satirical material, political commentary and informative programming on matters of historical or religious sensitivity might be offensive or insulting to some but are part of the national conversation that is "essential for fostering robust social and political debate, and therefore to ensuring a healthy democracy".

"Whilst these and similar topics may be offensive or insulting to some viewers, this does not make them discriminatory," the joint submission says. "No other liberal democracy has a human rights or anti-discrimination statute proscribing conduct which merely offends or insults."

This is from earlier in the Australian's story, and it's dead right. In the new age of social media, where practically everyone can publish their own speech, the ramifications stemming from this ridiculous and anti-liberal draft law will materially impact on millions. It is simply an unmitigated disaster. So, good on Roxon for poneying up to the bar and taking on the campaigning editors working in the media of the Right, but rack off Roxon if you want to overturn hundreds of years of social progress that has enabled people to speak freely and without fear - the chill factor - in public. It's no joke.

Media companies say in their submission they support the overall objectives of the plan to simplify anti-discrimination legislation, but parts of the exposure draft provide cause for significant concern, including because in defining discrimination the bill appears to use a subjective test of whether someone feels offended or insulted by published and broadcast content.

While SBS was able to successfully defend a 2006 claim under the Racial Discrimination Act that a documentary on the Armenian genocide in the early years of the 20th century was offensive to Turkish people, under the proposed new anti-discrimination laws the outcome would have been "dramatically different".

SBS had demonstrated that academic and historical experts believe the former Ottoman Empire was engaged in genocide.

How on earth Roxon thinks that this kind of law is good for anyone, I cannot fathom. Let's reintroduce the Inquisition, then, as a further step in this draconianisation put forward by the Labor Party. If it's a crime to offend someone in print then it must be a crime to even think of offending someone in private. Roxon cannot see that, if the new law passes through Parliament in its present form, not only the tone of debate will change in Australia but also the content that is allowed to emerge in public. Editors and journalists will be routinely terrified that a simple statement of fact - the Turks killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century - can be twisted around and turned into a weapon for the purpose of attacking the publication that made the statement.

And this would affect everyone, not just media companies. Media companies have resources that allow them to defend themselves in court, but not so for the millions of people using Twitter, Facebook or a blog, like this one, to engage in the public debate.

Our ancestors fought long and hard for the right to speak the truth. It's simply irresponsible of the A-G to want to overturn reasonable laws that have been tested in the community for generations, and put in their place a law that would stifle the public conversation and protect individuals, organisations and institutions that a reasonable person would want to see are able to be challenged in public.

ASIO powers: We can't judge what we cannot see

ASIO wants more power to scrutinise
Australians' online communications.

Last week I had a bit of a jaundiced spray against ASIO, Australia's domestic spy agency, in which I said that the organisation is unconstitutional because its activities are invisible to the public. If effective government requires freedom of political speech - as the High Court has decreed - then ASIO can have no part in government since its activities are never talked about, or if talked about then not in sufficient detail. Therefore it is unconstitutional. Apart from that, it appears, ASIO's powers represent an "assault on civil liberties", according to UNSW law professor George Williams. Williams "was speaking at the NSW Council for Civil Liberties dinner in Sydney where a national campaign to roll back the nation's anti-terrorism laws was unveiled".

The anti-terrorism laws have sunset clauses which come into effect in 2016. At that time they can be repealed, amended or made permanent.

The national campaign aims to force decisions of intelligence agencies, which negatively affect human rights, to be subject to a merit review and to ensure any future laws are scrutinised by the community before they are enacted to stop further erosions of civil liberties.

(Emphasis added.) Well, that would be nice wouldn't it? But it falls short in the practicality stakes because, once more, there will never be any publicly-available information about decisions taken by intelligence agencies due to their restrictive secrecy policies. Forcing decisions of intelligence agencies to be "subject to a merit review" could, of course, entail some form of secret cabinet of appointees tasked with reviewing the decisions that have been taken by an intelligence agency. It doesn't necessarily follow that such a review would be a public one. And scrutiny of proposed laws "by the community" may indeed involve public access to information about any such laws, but it will be impossible for the community to have an informed opinion about their merits or otherwise because the public would not have access to specific information about how similar laws had been used - or abused - in the past. Due to the same secrecy policies of intelligence agencies. Checkmate.

So what do we have? We have a bland headline pointing to a talk given at a dinner held by a group of well-intentioned individuals by a university professor who says that ASIO has too much power. (Stifles yawn.) Goodness me, knock me down with a feather. How compelling is that? How likely is such a story to engage the community in such a way as to spark the kind of broad-ranging debate that is required for people living in Australia to understand how ASIO is using all the powers given to it - largely by John Howard, the man who took the nation to war on the strength of a bald lie? I'm sure that ASIO head David Irvine and his senior officers are simply trembling in their shoes at the thought of what could happen as a result of this story being published by Fairfax.

I respect Williams' views, of course, and I wish that when those sunset clauses in those laws kick in the laws will be repealed. But I don't see this kind of story making any difference. There are too many other things to occupy peoples' attention, such as doping scandals in the cycling fraternity and kiddy fiddling perpetrated by Catholic priests. So this story just brings me back to my original point: that ASIO cannot be legal because it is secret. It is not enough to ask Australians to tolerate this agency simply on account of the vagaries of any kind of trust. If ASIO is asking for more powers to avoid "intelligence failures" in addition to the unwarranted powers that it has been granted by governments, then it must come clean and demonstrate exactly why it should be given such powers. In order for that to happen, it is necessary for ASIO to disclose to the public the ways in which it is currently using the powers is already has. Failures must be aired, discussed publicly, and freely. Only in this way can people living in the community be confident that the organisation is not abusing the powers it has, and will not abuse any powers that a government might see fit to grant it in future.

Is ASIO unconstitutional?

The answer to this question can only be based on an assessment drawn from my own acquaintance with the constitution which is, I admit, pretty meagre. My knowledge of the agency is even slimmer, naturally. What I do know, though, is that the constitution requires representative government. The High Court has created a doctrine of "implied freedom" of speech, where in order for representative government to exist the electorate must be adequately informed. From Wikipedia: "freedom of public discussion of political and economic matters is essential to allow the people to make their political judgments so as to exercise their right to vote effectively".

In the ASIO annual report for 2011-12, we find the report's authors relying on the threat of war to justify the agency's existence, as in: "Well developed national capabilities take considerable effort to build and are difficult to re-establish in an emergency." It's a warning that prudence requires the existence of a secret arm of government in case Australia enters into a war against a foreign nation. After all, the CIA was established after WWII, as was MI5. The FBI dates from WWI. Secretive law enforcement agencies tend to rely on international conflict and the shenanigans that opposing sides get up to in order to achieve total domination, to justify their existence. But clearly ASIO is an arm of the civil authority.

To reassure the electorate of ASIO's legitimacy the annual report is full of comforting language. There's a fair bit of stick, of course, such as the bit about "violent jihadist ideology" that comes up early in the section on terrorism. This section headlines Part 1 of the annual report, 'The security environment 2011-12 and outlook'. That's a pretty loaded phrase, right there. After all, "jihad" means "struggle", so it's hard to see how a jihad can be an ideology. A method, certainly. Yes, sometimes Islamic extremists are violent, there's no question about that. But a jihadist can equally be viewed merely as a voluntary participant within the activist element of pan-Islamic identity politics. ASIO's report is generally full of bland managerial material aimed at putting a positive, professional spin on its activities, and at deftly demonising social elements that it is focused on disrupting. It should be the kind of report that a journalist reads with one eye half closed out of a sense of caution.

Anyone can read this thing, it's public and available. Of course, most people won't bother, or won't bother finishing it (like me) because it's chockers with the kind of bureaucratic, self-referential language that has excessive significance for the initiated but means zip to a member of the general public. Most of the acronyms are ones the average citizen will never have heard of. There are no points of reference apart from those that are carefully inserted in the text in order to generate the enemy the agency requires to justify its existence. Your eyes glaze over helplessly as you ineffectually scan through line after line of impenetrable prose that is designed to reassure and terrify at the same time.

Getting back to the implied freedom thing, if we don't know about ASIO's activities how are we able to gauge its effectiveness, its rasion d'etre, or its legality? Even whether it is legally carrying out its activities, or ethically following either the law or professional codes of conduct? ASIO's status as a statutory authority MUST be a matter of parliamentary - and public - scrutiny, if it is to be constitutional. Simply put, we can't know about it so we can't talk about it. Oh, sure, from time to time there is a story in the media about ASIO and persons it deems to be of interest. There was one a couple of weeks ago about ASIO's activities with regard to an Islamic bookshop in suburban Melbourne. But apart from that we are forced to rely on something called the 'Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security' who it seems oversees ASIO's activities. Maybe (how would we know?). Then there's Nicola Roxon who is reponsible for ASIO as part of her portfolio. But the one person is never talks about ASIO in the media and the other person never talks about ASIO in Parliament. And if the media is not talking about ASIO, in my book, it's not constitutional.

The agency is to publish a book about its past, in 2013. How revealing will that be? We know from reading Wikipedia that there was a Russian infiltration of ASIO some 40 years ago and we can therefore assume that this will be discussed in the book. But it's likely to be a whitewash. You can imagine a lackey in some sweaty foreign secret service bureau going to Amazon to order the book and, with his fingers trembling feverishly on the computer mouse, clicking through to his checkout basket, intent as he is on securing access to vital information about Australia's security apparatus. Or not.

For Australians it comes down to trust. The burden lies with Australians to trust the agency, since the agency does nothing to substantiate its role or justify its existence in the public eye. But all sorts of things can happen that we can never know about. The risk of extortion, for example, is extremely high. An ASIO employee can access information, transport it out of the office, and use it to persuade a person to fork out money under threat of the release of information that might be incriminating in an ethical or reputational sense, but that cannot reasonably be used to prosecute that individual for a crime. There is also the risk of employees selling information to foreign agencies.  There is also the risk of excessive zeal. I worked for a NSW crime commission for a year as a sub analyst and I know how much "rubbish" data is carefully collected, collated, and entered into a searchable database on a daily basis. You have police officers taking things from the premises of suspects and handing it over to junior clerks, who go about processing the material - pieces of paper, notebooks, airline ticket stubs, receipts - and using that information to populate a database that can be accessed remotely from multiple, isolated locations. Even Stella Rimington, the ex-MI5 chief-turned novelist, in her memoir talks about how junior clerical staff in MI5 were tasked with creating files on suspects and populating them with "relevant" information.

It's not hard to find examples from the past of excessive zeal. Oh, sure, the McCarthy era is SUCH a long time ago now (and things are different, I hear voices say, today), but in those days people were investigated by ASIO simply because they expressed an interest in socialism or belonged to a book club. And even when you get to see the files created in those days, which have been declassified in recent times, there are parts blacked out, including names of informants and other details, that keep you wondering about what really happened. Read the history of the CIA written by Tim Weiner a few years ago, and the document trail ends some 40 years ago. Anything more recent than Nixon remains classified, and not available for public scrutiny.

And these guys ask us to trust them. Really, they do. ASIO is essentially an un-democratic agency of government where there is no guarantee that the government even knows what is going on in the street in our name. There is zero scrutiny by government or by Parliament or by the media. As a result, the electorate cannot know what the agency does or assess dispassionately whether the people it is targeting deserve to be targeted, or whether the methods used to target them are legal or ethical. This complete absence of transparency commits me to declaring that I think that ASIO is unconstitutional, and should be scrapped immediately.

Melissa Tankard Reist's Quadrant July-August 2008 piece on child sexualisation would seem to be 'of a piece' with her other public writings.

Website unbelief.org "has her number" and makes a long analysis of her participation in the public sphere, which started to kick in, the page says, when - as a cadet journalist - she won a "Rotary Foundation Scholarship to study journalism in the United States".

Naturally, Quadrant is going to publish her words, you think. But ironcally the article following Reist's, by Leonie Kramer, begins with her noting that Lady Chatterley's Lover was the "first book [she] asked for when [she] became a reader at the Bodleian Library".

Reist is about my age and appears to be a healthy, generously proportioned woman. Like me, again (not the 'woman' bit). Reading her piece today - 'The Pornification of Girldhood' - I get the impression that she's mainly interested in protecting children from a predatory capitalist system.

Depending on your social bias, this is not a difficult conclusion to reach. But the painful reality is that any current 'player' in the public sphere will know where she stands on the spectrum and treat the argument accordingly.

Or perhaps she needs this issue more than it needs her. Perhaps Reist has, now, entered an arena where there is no need for debate, where an association of sexualising imagery pairs off inevitably in the popular consciousness with pedophilia.

If so, case closed.

Reist's article is definitely worth reading. She has more time than most people to (a) research and (b) assemble data that may, indeed, be available to all. Unfortunately, not everyone has time to go looking.

The major beef that inner city liberal types have with Reist (I won't say "and her ilk" because that would destroy my own argument instanter) is such associations as hers with NSW Right to Life.

The following graphics appear in a scrolling banner on their website. Images such as these are highly polarising. Althought Reist, herself, is on record defending lesbians against attacks, groups like Right to Life do not have this latitude.

They must keep onside their core constituency. Reist worked with Tasmania's infamous Brian Harradine for 12 years, so she must be aware of the kind of attacks people in his situation endure from groups on the other side of the political fence.

Being associated with Right to Life cannot help her case, which is why I think she needs the issue of 'corporate pedophilia' more than it needs her. Obviously, from the article, she is pairing herself off against Catharine Lumby.

What she says is true, but for some reason it reminds me of the 19th century debate about novels. OK, I know this is not original. Others have used the same analogy. But what about the other significant heresy - access to the English Bible?

Back when Shakespeare was still just a gleam in Anne Hathaway's eye (the left one, we hope), it was only 'sad' men (meaning 'sober'; no women - please!) who were deemed eligible - by Henry VIII's censors - to have a copy.

A few years later this became moot when he opened the floodgates as a result of wounded pride.

Now I love reading Quadrant and I hate it when politicians such as Morris Iemma feel compelled to criticise people operating on the far-left fringe of society - people who ordinarily band together for protection, and who thus fortify the ancient left-right divide due to wounded pride.

So when I read Reist's excellent article in the magazine, I am compelled - Google gives us an almost-synchronous ability to classify - to condemn her affiliations because of the dishonesty implicit in the images below.

These images damage her standing in the community because the people who put them on the Right to Life website are as dishonest as rapacious magazine editors criticised in the article.

It is also true that conservative Christians are very much as one with capitalism. I listen to 103.2FM on many mornings during my commute and so I am very aware of the clear bias in favour of entrepreneurism.

Which is what the magazines Reist criticises are very much a party to.

Following New Zealand's lead, in 1895 South Australia permitted women to vote. Unlike Victoria and Queensland, it was never part of the colony of New South Wales. Property is significantly cheaper than in Sydney, where mortgage stress (more than 30 per cent of after-tax income goes to pay the mortgage) is experienced by many. It seems like a nice place to live.

But a man can't be in two places at once and, right now, I work in Sydney. Another area New Zealand seems to be leading is in legislation as Arjun Ramachandran notes in today's The Sydney Morning Herald. A police officer says "the person on the street" is "a customer" (note the indefinite pronoun).

It's all about a wiki the NZ police are using to allow individuals to "contribute to the drafting of the country's new policing act". The old, 1958, act was becoming "anachronistic", say the police. Ramachandran quotes a pundit, Laurel Papworth, who talks about "participatory legislation". On her blog, Papworth's dinkus shows a grumpy-looking, dark-skinned, large-eyed girl with violet hair.

The blog also shows her Facebook details, including a mobile phone number and photograph. On her page, you can learn that she is a "Lecturer at the University of Sydney in Social Media/Networks". She gives courses via the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE). Her name doesn't appear in the uni's phonebook (online).

"The wiki version of the Policing Act will be viewed by New Zealand parliamentarians, before an official bill is introduced into Parliament," writes Ramachandran.

The wild West is with us still, according to a story the national broadsheet, The Australian, has been running this week. TV broadcasters have not felt it required coverage. Which is a pity, because it is a rollocking yarn any novelist would be pleased to claim as a fictional invention.

The attorney-general (the sheriff) in WA has decided he dislikes Paul Armstrong, the editor of The West Australian (the renegade), which is one of the few metropolitan papers owned neither by Rupert Murdoch or Fairfax Media, the two giants of the Australian print media.

Due to this enmity, Jim McGinty refuses to enact legislation that would protect journalists' sources against prosecution, and protect journalists from prosecution for refusing to reveal their sources. Such laws have been in place in New South Wales for a decade, and other states are following suit.

The federal attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, "has promised" to introduce them in federal parliament. "However, these [federal] laws will mean little if each of the states does not enact similar legislation," according to Elizabeth Gosch, also for The Australian.

There is no way in the world such a situation as we are seeing in the west, could happen in either New South Wales or Victoria. I could see it happening in Queensland, though. What this shows is that the West has yet to catch up with the south-east in terms of propriety and accountability. It has yet to "grow up".

For a legal officer of the crown to behave in this way is preposterous, and should not happen in a democracy.

For Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia is a book by Roberta Perkins and Frances Lovejoy that includes some material that might shock some people. The Australian picked up on a particular aspect of the study, for which the authors interviewed "about 200" prostitutes.

Half of them had had sex before the age of 16 and "15-16 per cent of the prostitutes they surveyed had had penetrative sex before the age of 12, but that only a few described this as rape".

They also report that 14 per cent of prostitutes had their first penetrative sex with a relative or family friend, but did not regard this as "necessarily a negative experience".

The authors received "almost $80,000" from the National Health and Medical Research Council to prepare their study.

In Japan, it's the girls who are taking matters into their own hands, reports Jun Hongo for The Japan Times.

When Asuka Izumi was 12 and doing a photo shoot "the director asked her to put on a string bikini".

"It wasn't a big deal. The director asked me to do it, and I did it because I wanted to," says Izumi, now 14. Her Web site shows what she's willing to expose for her career. Kotomi, her mother, "said she once found her daughter's work displayed in a hardcore porn shop in Tokyo's Kabukicho district, but it didn't bother her".

"I feel that anyone who buys Asuka's work has the right to do whatever they want to do with it."

Tim Priest, an ex-detective and "close associate of Alan Jones" will sue Chris Masters over Jonestown, the controversial expose of the powerful radio shock jock. The story on The Australian's Web site (books page) does not appear in the print version of the newspaper.

This is the beginning of the litigation, I would venture. If this case, which will be heard in the NSW Supreme Court on 2 March, is successful, I would expect others, possibly even Alan Jones himself, to formally lodge objections to the book's content.

As the Wikipedia article notes, Priest gave a talk at a Quadrant dinner in 2003. The transcript shows that he is articulate and feisty.

It is, of course, no surprise that a Quadrant fellow-traveller should be the first out of the posts in the race to condemn Masters in a formal proceeding. The magazine is famous for its right-wing stance and is also, says academic Martin Krygier, obdurately contrarian.