Delta is tempting us to trade lives for freedoms — a choice it had looked like we wouldn’t have to make

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Peter Martin, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National UniversityLast year COVID-19 seemed simple. It was horrific, but the arguments about what to do were fairly straightforward.

On one side were people rightly horrified by its rapid spread who wanted us to stay at home and stay away from school and work and socialising in order to save lives.

On the other side were people concerned about the costs of those measures — to jobs, to education, to freedom, to mental health, and to other lives (because if we used too much of our health system fighting COVID-19, other lives might fall through the cracks).

And through it all came a kind of consensus.

The concern about non-COVID deaths turned out to be overblown. Last year Australia recorded fewer than normal doctor-certified deaths, in part because the COVID restrictions stopped deaths from influenza, and in part because they snuffed out COVID-19 early, ensuring hospitals weren’t overwhelmed.

Last year, we didn’t have to choose

Concern about jobs also turned out to be overblown. By locking down hard and early, and paying employers to keep on staff (through JobKeeper) we ensured the lockdowns would be short-lived, with light at the end of the tunnel.

In none of the states for which there is data was there an increase in suicides.

The insurance company ClearView told a parliamentary committee this June its research found things were better than expected in part because of the universal nature of the pandemic. Everyone knew “everyone was in this together”.

Another reason was telehealth. It was easier to get help than before.

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And students returned to school sooner than they would have had the lockdowns had been weaker or started later, leaving much of their education intact.

The consensus was that by locking down hard and early we got the best of both worlds — near-elimination of COVID-19 and a quick return to normal life. Anyone who remembers Christmas last year remembers how normal it felt.

Economics is called the dismal science in part because it is about hard choices — situations where we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Last year it seemed as if COVID wasn’t one of them. Starving the virus early gave us both one of the world’s lowest death tolls and one of its shortest recessions.

Hard choices are back in sight

And then came Delta.

Far more contagious than the original, and with fewer immediate symptoms (making it harder to trace) the Delta variant became almost impossible to get on top of in the two big states where it took hold.

And without very high vaccination rates — in the view of the Grattan Institute significantly higher than either the NSW, Victorian or Commonwealth governments are targeting — it became all but impossible to reopen without condemning Australians to COVID deaths.

The new reality is plunging us back toward the territory economists call their own — the world of hard choices.

If the lockdowns don’t end (and there is no sign they can end any time soon without costing lives) education and mental health and jobs will indeed suffer.

Businesses can’t hang on indefinitely.
JakeOwenPowell/Shutterstock

There’s only so long businesses can hang on without pulling the pin.

We are getting closer to having to trade off lives against freedoms; getting closer to having to decide how many COVID deaths and how much COVID illness we are prepared to live with in order to return to something more like normal living.

Last week’s NSW “roadmap to freedom” implicitly made those tradeoffs.

Calculations prepared by the Treasury and the Grattan Institute make them more explicit.

There are few important things to note. One is that we might yet be able to get the best of both worlds.

We might yet be able to effectively eliminate the delta strand, restoring both health and freedoms (as we did with the earlier strand).

It won’t happen if we ease restrictions before transmission has stopped, as some states are planning to.

Lockdowns without end are unsustainable

Another is that unending lockdowns are untenable. While last year’s lockdowns didn’t do the psychological and health and educational damage that was feared, lockdowns without end would.

One type of damage clearly evident in the comprehensive report on last year’s lockdowns from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is family and domestic violence. The longer lockdowns continue, the longer elevated violence is likely to continue.

And another thing to note is that in a world where we have to make tradeoffs there are no particularly good options. Allowing the disease to spread in order to restore freedom of movement would itself curtail freedom of movement.

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An analysis across US states suggests 90% of last year’s collapse in face-to-face shopping was due to fear of COVID rather than formal COVID restrictions. That fear will grow if we lift restrictions and COVID spreads.

The Grattan Institute would lift lockdowns only when 80% of the entire population has been double vaccinated (not 70-80% of people aged 16+ as the NSW and national plans envisage, which amounts to 56-64% of the population).

Grattan believes its plan would cost 2,000-3,000 lives per year; a cost it believes the public would accept because it is similar to the normal toll from flu.

The NSW and national plans (Victoria’s isn’t spelled out) would cost much more.

No option is particularly good

The Commonwealth Treasury finds, perhaps counter-intuitively, that an aggressive lockdown strategy that saved more lives would impose lower economic costs (about A$1 billion per week lower) in part because it would end up producing fewer lockdowns.

They are the sort of calculations we hoped never to have to make.

There’s still a chance we might not. With a Herculean effort NSW and Victoria could yet join Taiwan, New Zealand and every other Australian state in being effectively COVID-free. But they are running out of time.

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Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cash or freedoms: what will work in the race to get Australia vaccinated against COVID-19?

Anthony Scott, The University of Melbourne; John P. de New, The University of Melbourne, and Kushneel Prakash, The University of MelbourneThe race to vaccinate Australians is heating up as the supply of vaccines starts to increase and lockdowns continue.

Labor this week suggested a A$300 cash payment for people fully vaccinated by December. Meanwhile, “Operation COVID Shield”, the newly published national COVID vaccine campaign plan, includes support for “freedom incentives” put forward by the Coalition.

Let’s take a look at how effective the evidence suggests these measures might be in getting more Australians vaccinated.

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Paying Australians $300 to get vaccinated would be value for money

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Vaccine hesitancy

Vaccination is a key weapon in our armoury as we navigate the pandemic. We know it’s very effective in protecting people from illness and death, and also reduces transmission of COVID-19.

At this stage, only 19.8% of Australians over 16 have been fully vaccinated.

Although insufficient supply has been the main reason for the slow rollout to date, vaccine hesitancy is an increasingly important issue as we strive for herd immunity.

The latest data from our Taking the Pulse of the Nation Survey shows vaccine hesitancy in Australia has fallen to 21.5% since the recent outbreaks, from a high of 33% in late May.

Among that 21.5%, 11.8% of Australians remain unwilling to be vaccinated, while 9.7% are unsure.

So can financial or non-financial incentives bring these figures down and in turn speed up Australia’s vaccination rollout?

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Just the facts, or more detail? To battle vaccine hesitancy, the messaging has to be just right

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Splashing the cash

The government has proclaimed cash incentives will have minimal impact on vaccination rates — although the review of the evidence they conducted hasn’t been published.

There is in fact evidence from a range of settings showing cash payments do have one-off effects in terms of persuading people to visit a health professional.

Our survey research has shown 54% of those willing to be vaccinated, but waiting, said they would get vaccinated as soon as possible if offered cash.

Cash incentives are likely to encourage people who are willing to get vaccinated, but haven’t done so yet.
CDC/Unsplash

Further analysis shows those willing and eligible to be vaccinated (people over 50 at the time these data were collected) were more likely to respond to cash payments if they were male, and if the amount was at least A$100. Overall, half said they would get vaccinated sooner if offered A$100 or more. So Labor’s plan of A$300 would be effective for this group.

However, for people who are unwilling or unsure about vaccination, cash payments may make only a small difference. Just 10% of this group said they would respond to cash.

This is because there are many reasons people may be unsure or don’t want to get vaccinated. These include a lack of access to unbiased advice and information, strong beliefs about vaccination including around vaccine safety, and medical conditions. To increase vaccination in this group, we need to consider different approaches.

Vaccination as a ticket to freedom

We’re likely to see non-financial incentives offered to fully vaccinated Australians as time goes on. These might be in the form of exemptions from health restrictions, or more lenient rules, around, for example, travel and social activities.

We know holding our vaccination records in our smartphones might provide us with more freedom, earlier. The United Kingdom now allows fully vaccinated travellers from the United States and the European Union to enter without quarantine, accepting the risk that even people who are vaccinated can still carry and spread the virus.

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Incentives could boost vaccine uptake in Australia. But we need different approaches for different groups

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Our survey found roughly 70% of Australians think fully vaccinated people should be allowed to participate, without restriction, in sporting events, concerts, interstate travel, religious events, going to restaurants and movies, and the like. Around half believe those who remain unvaccinated once vaccination is available to everyone should be banned from these activities.

Slightly fewer think international travel should be unrestricted even when fully vaccinated.

Of people unwilling or unsure about vaccination, 18-28% stated they would get vaccinated if they were banned from these activities. This suggests that, compared to cash payments, non-financial incentives might be more likely to work for those who are unwilling or unsure about vaccination.

Where to next?

Both Labor’s and the Coalition’s incentive policies would have some impact on vaccination rates, but the devil is in the detail.

Cash payments are likely to be effective for those who are already willing to be vaccinated, but have not yet done so. This would speed up the rate of vaccination.

Cash is less likely to influence those who are unwilling or are unsure, though it could still work for some of these people.

Allowing fully vaccinated people more freedoms will likely increase the vaccination rates among those yet to get the jab, including those who are unsure or unwilling.

Reaching this group is the holy grail, giving us a better shot of attaining the elusive, but crucial, herd immunity. Incentives matter.

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Read more:
Media reports about vaccine hesitancy could contribute to the problem

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Anthony Scott, Professor, The University of Melbourne; John P. de New, Professorial Fellow (Professor of Economics), The University of Melbourne, and Kushneel Prakash, Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fight for freedom: new research to map violence in the forgotten conflict in West Papua

BAGUS INDAHONO/EPA

Camellia Webb-Gannon, University of Wollongong; Jaime Swift, University of Oxford; Michael Westaway, The University of Queensland, and Nathan Wright, The University of Queensland

Indonesia has recently indicated it is considering investigating the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in the 1965 “anti-communist” purge under authoritarian leader Suharto.

If the inquiry goes ahead, it would mark a shift in the government’s long-standing failure to address past atrocities. It is unclear if they will include other acts of brutality alleged to have been committed by the Indonesian regime in the troubled region of West Papua.

According to Amnesty International, at least 100,000 West Papuans have been killed since the Indonesian takeover of West Papua in the 1960s.

While the number of killings peaked in the 1970s, they are rising again due to renewed activism for independence in the territory. In September 2019, as many as 41 people were killed in clashes with security forces and Jihadi-inspired militia.

Clashes between security forces and the West Papua National Liberation Army have escalated since January, which human rights groups say have resulted in at least five deaths. At least two other civilians were killed in another incident.

The latest violence was sparked by racial attacks on Papuan university students in Java last year, which prompted thousands of Papuans to protest against the government. The protests brought renewed media attention to human rights violations in the region and Papuans’ decades-long fight for autonomy.

However, because the international media have been prohibited from entering West Papua, the broader conflict has received relatively little attention from the outside world. (This week’s feature by ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in Australia was a rare exception.)

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New project to map past atrocities

Late last year, we embarked on a project to map the violence that has occurred in West Papua under Indonesian occupation.

This was in part inspired by the massacre mapping project of Indigenous people in Australia by the Guardian and University of Newcastle, and the Public Interest Advocacy Centre’s mapping of violence in Sri Lanka.

Our aim was to bring renewed attention to the protracted crisis in West Papua. We hope that by showing the extent of state-sanctioned violence going back decades, we might encourage the kind of international scrutiny that eventually led to intervention in East Timor.

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The map only documents some of the massacres that have taken place in West Papua since the 1970s, as conditions in the territory make it difficult to accurately record and verify deaths. The challenges include a lack of resources for record-keeping, internal displacement and frequently destroyed properties, and a fear of reporting deaths. Others have disappeared, and their bodies have never been found.

We also encountered a relative dearth of data from the 1990s to 2010s, in part due to few journalists reporting on incidents during this period.

For the purposes of our project, we relied largely on reportage from the Asian Human Rights Commission and the International Coalition for Papua (both of which have strong connections within West Papua), as well as research by the historian Robin Osborne, Papuan rights organisation ELSHAM, Indonesian human rights watchdog TAPOL and a comprehensive report by academics at Yale Law School published in 2004.

Among the most recent attacks is the torture and murders of scores of protesters on Biak Island in 1998, according to a citizens’ tribunal held in Sydney. Some estimates say the death toll may have been as high as 200.

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Though far from complete, our mapping project reveals several broad trends.

• The majority of massacres have taken place in the West Papuan highlands, the region with the highest ratio of Indigenous to non-Indigenous West Papuans

• many killings were committed while Papuans were peacefully protesting for independence from Indonesia

• given the numbers of troops posted to West Papua and the types of weapons at their disposal, the government should have had full knowledge of the extent of devastation caused by attacks by security forces and militia groups. (Indonesian security forces are generally known for being out of the government’s control)

• in the vast majority of killings, the perpetrators have never been held to account by the government.

The government claims the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) is conducting inquiries into some of the more recent incidents, although there are concerns the body doesn’t have sufficient powers and the government has previously been reluctant to accept findings of abuses.

Why has the world stayed silent?

Both Australia and New Zealand have been hesitant about intervening in human rights crises in the region, particularly when Indonesia is involved.

In 2006, Australia signed the Lombok Treaty, which assured Jakarta it would respect the sovereignty of the Indonesian state and not support “separatist movements”.

However, Australia – and the rest of the world – did finally act when it came to the independence referendum in East Timor.

Australian troops serving on the East Timor/West Timor border with the UN peacekeeping force in 2000.
Dean Lewins/AAP

In his memoir, former Prime Minister John Howard mentioned East Timor independence as one of his key achievements. However, in office, he showed very little appetite for supporting East Timor independence and ruffling Indonesia’s feathers.

It was largely the diplomatic intervention at the international level by US President Bill Clinton, alongside the deployment of Australian Federal Police (AFP) working as unarmed civilian police for the UN mission in East Timor, that eventually secured the referendum.

Co-author Jaime Swift serving in East Timor in 2006.
Author provided

Media coverage played a critical role in persuading the world to take action. In West Papua, the media have not had the same effect.

This is in part due to what the Indonesian security forces learned from East Timor on how to control the media. The Indonesian government has frequently cut internet services in West Papua, enacted a complete ban on foreign journalists and denied requests from the UN Human Rights Commission to investigate human rights violations.

Despite this, mobile phone videos of abuse continue to leak out.

In the absence of extensive media coverage, Papuan pro-democracy advocates and their supporters have been calling for a UN-sanctioned human rights investigation. There is also significant support from human rights defenders in Indonesia for such an inquiry.

As it now has a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia should fully support such a move. However, the military retains considerable influence in the country, and holding commanders suspected of human rights abuses to account remains politically difficult.

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In fact, President Joko Widodo last year appointed as his new defence minister Prabowo Subianto, who himself has been accused of human rights abuses.

Given these challenges, what will it take for the world to show enough moral courage to force change in West Papua?

The right way forward is clear. As a member of the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia needs to put an end to the media ban in West Papuan, support an independent UN investigation and hold accountable those responsible within the government for violent acts.

If Indonesia does not take this course of action, then diplomatic pressure from the world will be required.

Camellia Webb-Gannon, Lecturer, University of Wollongong; Jaime Swift, DPhil (PhD) candidate, University of Oxford; Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, and Nathan Wright, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There are differences between free speech, hate speech and academic freedom – and they matter

Academic freedom protects free speech, but also sets conditions.
from http://www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND

Dominic O’Sullivan, Charles Sturt University

Last week, posters appeared at the University of Auckland inviting young white men to “assume the mantle of re-taking control of our own country” and to confront “anti-racism ideology”.

The group was obviously unaware of the significance of the British High Commissioner’s expression of regret, in the same week, for the killing of several Māori people during their first encounter with the English explorer James Cook in 1769.

At least 1,300 academics and students signed an open letter, arguing that racism and white supremacy have no place at the university and challenging the Vice Chancellor’s initial position that there is no justification for removing the posters.

This week, the Vice Chancellor changed his position, telling staff that a debate about free speech should be put to one side for now, as the most important matter was the “real hurt and sense of threat that some people in our university community feel in response to these expressions of white supremacist views”.

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Free speech vs academic freedom

Neither the Vice Chancellor nor the signatories to the open letter bring academic freedom into the debate. But minister of justice Andrew Little, a former president of the New Zealand University Students’ Association, argued that there is “no principle of academic freedom” that says white supremacy ought to be protected.

Free speech, hate speech and academic freedom are related but different. And the differences matter.

Free speech is the right to say whatever one likes. It is unconstrained by the disciplines of reason and objectivity. It doesn’t require factual accuracy. As with academic freedom, it doesn’t matter if one’s opinion is unpopular. Both free speech and academic freedom are essential to democracy.

Free speech belongs in universities as much as anywhere else. It is the right to hold opinions and to challenge the opinions of others. A Chinese student in New Zealand once asked me if it was alright to criticise the prime minister in an essay. This underscores the importance of free speech, but also the need for great caution in setting its limits.

Academic freedom protects free speech on the one hand, but conditions it on the other. Universities cannot support the unrestricted pursuit of knowledge if one cannot think freely. But knowledge cannot be tested and doesn’t advance if there isn’t also a duty to be well informed and reasoned – and willing to have one’s ideas scrutinised by others.

In a university, the test of a reasonable opinion is higher. One cannot say whatever one likes and call it academic freedom.

Hate speech as a limit

Both free speech and academic freedom are limited by hate speech.

According to the United Nations, hate speech is:

any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.

When people say that they want to “reclaim” a country as their own and contest “anti-racism” they are saying overtly and unapologetically that they don’t want others to have a democratic presence. They are saying that they don’t want others to have free speech. Nor do they want academics who are not “young white men” to have academic freedom.

These aren’t democratically legitimate differences of opinion because “toleration is not the solution to intolerance”.

There are differences between what is wrong and what is intolerably wrong. There are some views that a free society can’t tolerate.

Racism is intolerably wrong because it denies some people human equality. It creates a hierarchy of human worth and causes serious harm to its targets.

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A ‘right to be bigots’

In Australia, free speech is restricted under the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 which provides that:

It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:
(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and
(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.

There are significant qualifications to these restrictions. But, in spite of these, in 2014 the attorney general told parliament that the act imposed unreasonable constraints on people’s “right to be bigots”.

The conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs claimed in 2018 that university policies curtailing free speech had dramatically increased in the preceding two years. The University of Sydney’s Vice Chancellor argued that robust processes “ensure that freedom of speech from all parts of the spectrum is alive and well on our campuses”.

But earlier this year, a government-commissioned inquiry found that “claims of a freedom of speech crisis on Australian campuses are not substantiated”. The review also found that universities should not allow visitors to use their premises to “advance theories or propositions … which fall below scholarly standards to such an extent as to be detrimental to the university’s character as an institution of higher learning”.

Defending a right to bigotry, or to express hate speech, trivialises what the denial of both free speech and academic freedom can really look like.
In China, for example, the state has warned against the presence of “mistaken views” in universities, including the study of constitutional democracy, civil society, economic liberalisation, freedom of the press, challenges to socialism with Chinese characteristics and discussion of universal values including academic freedom.

In the case of the white supremacy posters, it would seem that University of Auckland academics, not the Vice Chancellor, had the stronger argument.

Dominic O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Media chiefs unite on press freedom, but will it result in any action?

News Corp Executive Chariman Michael Miller (left), Nine Chief Executive Officer Hugh Marks (centre) and ABC Managing Director David Anderson (right) stressed unity in their fight for press freedom.
Rohan Thomson/AAP

Colleen Murrell, Swinburne University of Technology

In a rare show of unity, the heads of Australia’s biggest news organisations – the ABC, Nine and News Corp – have called for stronger legal protections for press freedom in the wake of this month’s police raids on journalists.

Sharing a panel at the National Press Club in Canberra, the media chiefs outlined several key demands:

• search warrants to be contestable before the arrival of police
• better protection for whistleblowers
• a limitation on the number of documents being marked secret by various government bodies
• a review of freedom of information laws
• an exemption for journalists from being prosecuted under national security laws

First to address the lunchtime crowd was the ABC’s managing director, David Anderson, who called the fact that he was seated alongside News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller and Nine chief executive Hugh Marks “an unlikely coalition of the willing.”

But he underlined that unity was imperative because “the stakes are so high.”

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Anderson made a passionate speech that stressed the ABC’s record of “speaking the truth to the community”. He listed the many investigative reports by ABC journalists that led to royal commissions, from Chris Masters’ 1987 “Moonlight State” report on corruption in Queensland’s police force to more recent ones in banking and aged care.

He also referred to the work of ABC journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark on a series of stories called the Afghan Files, the reporting that led to the AFP raid on the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters in Sydney.

Anderson argued that it was difficult for the media to do its job with the “patchwork of laws” in place and whistleblowers running the risk of “being cowed out of existence”. Most importantly, he stressed that

decriminalising journalism is a mandatory first step.

‘Balance too weighted towards secrecy’

Marks claimed that press freedom had been eroded in Australia due to a mix of technological change, bad legislation and over-zealous officials. He said it was now

more risky and it’s more expensive to do journalism that makes a real difference in this country than ever before.

Like Anderson, Marks also emphasised the important investigative public interest journalism carried out by Fairfax and Nine journalists in recent years, including work by Laurie Oakes, Adele Ferguson, Joanne McCarthy and Chris O’Keefe.

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He argued that media freedom was under threat because “governments and institutions are becoming more secretive” and that national security was sometimes invoked to shut down debate on spurious grounds. He believed

the balance is too weighted towards secrecy.

Marks took issue with various current laws, arguing that defamation laws didn’t achieve what they were meant to and the huge rise in suppression orders and complexity of Freedom of Information laws led to an “obstacle course of legal hazards”. Bearing this in mind he said:

This would be the stuff of pantomine were it not so serious.

Miller drew attention to Australia’s slide down the 2019 World Press Freedom Index to number 21 – below Suriname and just ahead of Samoa – and commented that Australia should instead be “leading by example”. He believed that two AFP raids in two days, plus “strong information that other raids were planned” equalled “intimidation not investigation”.

Miller said News Corp had called on Attorney-General Christian Porter to make sure that its journalist, Annika Smethurst, doesn’t face criminal charges after the raid on her home.

He said many of the faults in our laws could be “easily corrected to reset the balance between security and the right to know”.

But there is a deeper problem – the culture of secrecy. Too many people who frame policy, write laws, control information, and conduct court hearings, have stopped believing that the public’s right to know comes first.

More action, fewer promises

The most interesting part of the discussion came when ABC’s Matthew Doran asked the panellists if they thought the public would get behind changing laws to suit a group of privileged journalists. Marks said it was a start.

Freedom of speech feels very personal to me. We have to make it feel personal for the public.

But there were some in the room who appeared less reassured by the rhetoric on display. The Guardian’s Katherine Murphy pointed out that when these laws were passed “tranche by tranche” in recent years, there was not much media focus on these changes.

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To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage – and an overhaul of our laws

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Sky’s David Speers also seemed unimpressed that the media chiefs weren’t calling for a parliamentary inquiry, asking to whom they were speaking in regard to change. Miller’s reply was that they were releasing a document outlining their key demands and that the three of them being there together indicated the importance of the issue.

At the end of the day, perhaps the presence of all three media chiefs united together was singular. Immediately following the event, press freedom campaigner and University of Queensland Professor Peter Greste said “that rare show of unity is hard to understate” and that the AFP raids had

created a rare moment of opportunity that we need to seize.

Nonetheless, he thought it

deeply concerning that none of them seemed to have had any meaningful commitments to action from the government.

News Corp is taking its battle to the high court as it believes that the search warrant on Smethurst’s house was vague and incomplete.

The ABC, likewise, is challenging the police raid on its premises in federal court. Anderson would like the ABC’s downloaded data returned and wants there to be a “threshold test” regarding the justification for when the police can enter media premises.

The publicity from this unified initiative is no doubt positive, but it is entirely possible that a newly elected government could sit back and wait for these legal cases from News Corp and the ABC to pass through the courts before taking any action.

There is little pressure on governments to make concessions to an unpopular press in an era of suspicion of the media, whipped up by populist movements around the world.

–

Colleen Murrell, Associate Professor, Journalism, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Young Australians champion ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ in designing constitutional change

Many high school students are politically engaged. But how would they change the preamble to the Constitution?
AAP/Lukas Coch

Benjamin T. Jones, CQUniversity Australia and John Warhurst, Australian National University

When the Australian constitution was written in the 1890s, the authors did not envision an independent nation, but a self-governing dominion of the British empire. As such, the preamble does not contain flowery language about national values. Instead it is a dry, legalistic introduction simply noting that some of her majesty’s “possessions” have federated. One unsuccessful attempt to change it was made in a 1999 referendum.

In March 2019, 120 high school students from around Australia met in Canberra for the 24th National Schools Constitutional Convention. Their mission was to write a new preamble, with the authors of this article serving as facilitators. Over two days of lively debate, sometimes heated but always civil, a final version was drafted.

In a referendum-style vote, a majority of students and a majority from each state ratified the preamble (83 “yes”, 34 “no”, two voted informal, one abstained). The students’ preamble was presented to the federal Senate on April 2 and entered into Hansard.

The referendum result.

The students’ preamble

We the Australian people, united as an indissoluble Commonwealth, commit ourselves to the principles of equality, democracy and freedom for all and pledge to uphold the following values that define our nation.

We stand alongside the traditional custodians of the land and recognise the significance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in shaping the Australian identity, their sovereignty was never ceded.

As a nation and indeed community, we are united under the common goal to create a society catered to all, regardless of heritage or identity.

We pledge to champion individual freedom and honour those who have served and continue to serve our nation.

As Australians, we stand for the pursuit of a democratic state that upholds the fundamental principles of human values as set out by this Constitution.

The student’s preamble differs enormously from the one written in the 19th century. It is noteworthy that it includes the words “democratic” and “freedom” twice – neither are in the current preamble or the constitution. From the students’ preamble, three elements emerge that young people want to see enshrined.

Acknowledging First Nations

During the debates, the most contested issue was whether to explicitly recognise First Nations people and if so, how. Ultimately, the students, including a representative group of Indigenous students, voted strongly in favour of constitutional recognition. In particular, the phrase “sovereignty was never ceded” is significant.

It is a rallying cry for many First Nations people and a rejection of assimilation. Indigenous Australians are still fighting for self-determination and the right to be heard. The Voice to Parliament put forward by the Uluru Statement is still being debated. Constitutional recognition that sovereignty was never ceded is a more radical proposal. It suggests that Indigenous justice is important to young Australians.

Egalitarianism is still key

The egalitarian ideal has a long history in Australia. The concept of the “fair go” is mythical in one sense, but a cherished part of the collective imagination.

The first line of the students’ preamble commits the nation to the principle of equality. The third line stresses the importance of a “society catered to all”.

Although not explicitly stated, the word “identity” suggests the LGBT community was in mind. Young Australians overwhelmingly supported the same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017. The government is currently considering new religious freedom laws in response to the sacking of Israel Folau by Rugby Australia.

It is significant, then, that young Australians place such value on society being catered for all, “regardless of heritage or identity”.

Values matter

What permeates through the students’ preamble is the message that values matter. Unlike the original constitutional writers, young people want their preamble to be a mission statement that articulates the “values that uphold the nation”. The trident of “equality, democracy and freedom” are highlighted.

The preamble also notes the twin priorities of a free state that sit together though sometimes in tension. As the third line notes, Australia is a “nation and indeed community”. But the fourth line tempers this with a commitment to “champion individual freedom”. The ideal democratic state for these young Australians places value on both the individual and the collective.

Dr Benjamin T Jones addresses the convention.

Time for change?

At the 1999 referendum, Prime Minister John Howard, despite being against a republic, campaigned in favour of a new preamble. The one he and republican Les Murray authored did not gain much popularity. But it is significant that even an ardent monarchist like Howard was convinced the preamble needed to be updated.

The authors of the students’ preamble were mainly in Year 11 and too young to vote in the May election. Nevertheless, they are thoughtful, intelligent citizens and the future of our democracy. Their voice is worth listening to.

Benjamin T. Jones, Lecturer in History, CQUniversity Australia and John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage – and an overhaul of our laws

This week’s police raids have forced us to think again about the role of the media in a democracy.
David Gray/AAP

Peter Greste, The University of Queensland

A few days ago, Waleed Aly asked a not-so-rhetorical question in The Sydney Morning Herald. He wondered how many Australians were worried about the fact that the Australian Federal Police had spent a good portion of this week raiding the offices and homes of journalists who’ve published stories clearly in the public interest.

His conclusion? Not many. He went on to argue that it is because we have developed a culture of accepting excessive state power, with no real thought about the consequences for civil liberties or the functioning of our democracy.

Sadly, I would have to agree with Aly, but as with so many surveys, the answer you get depends on the question you ask.

What if we asked, “Hands up who feels comfortable with relying on the Facebook posts and Twitter feeds of our politicians and departmental spokespeople for information about what our government is up to? Who thinks that is a good way to run a democracy?” Then, I bet you’d get a very different answer.

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Read more:
Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy

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I agree that Australian media are hardly trusted by the public, but I am also convinced that most Australians recognise the need for some kind of independent watchdog keeping track of politicians and the government on our behalf. It might be imperfect and messy, but a free press has performed that role well enough to keep us broadly on track for much of our history.

Earlier this week, my colleague and fellow University of Queensland researcher Rebecca Ananian-Welsh laid out the intricate web of national security laws passed in recent years that collectively serve to straight-jacket journalists and threaten legitimate whistle-blowing.

In a number of research projects, we have been looking at both these laws and their impact on reporting, and while we still have a long way to go, the early results suggest something deeply troubling.

While they may have helped shore up national security, the laws have also led to a net loss of transparency and accountability. It has become harder for journalists to reach and protect sources and keep track of wrong-doing by government officials. It has also become harder for them to safely publish in the public interest without risking long years in prison or cripplingly expensive and traumatic court cases.

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Read more:
Five reasons terror laws wreck media freedom and democracy

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An overhaul of Australia’s legal landscape

My organisation, the Alliance for Journalists Freedom, has published a white paper that offers a better way of balancing those two crucial elements of our democracy – national security and press freedom.

The most important of its seven recommendations is a Media Freedom Act. Australia has no legal or constitutional protection for press freedom. It isn’t even formally recognised in law; the High Court has merely inferred that we have a right to “political communication.”

That needs to change. The AJF is proposing a law that would write press freedom into the DNA of our legal system. It would both prevent our legislators from unnecessarily restricting journalists from doing their jobs and give judges a benchmark they can use whenever they are adjudicating cases that deal with media freedom issues.

That alone isn’t enough though. The second recommendation in the white paper calls for changes to the national security laws themselves.

Currently, many of the current laws that Ananian-Welsh laid out in her article include a “public interest” defence for journalists. But as we have seen in this week’s raids, that does nothing to stop the AFP from trawling through journalists’ documents for sources and forcing everyone into court.

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Read more:
Media raids raise questions about AFP’s power and weak protection for journalists and whistleblowers

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Instead, there should be an exemption for journalists and their sources when reporting on matters of public interest.

That isn’t to suggest that journalists should be immune, though. Rather, the onus should be shifted to the authorities to show why the public interest defence should not apply. It is also important that the exemption include whistleblowers.

Beyond national security, there are a host of other laws that have contributed to a wide culture of secrecy at odds with the principles of open government.

Payouts under defamation laws now routinely run to millions, potentially destroying news organisations and chilling further investigative work. Shield laws that allow journalists to protect their sources in court are also inconsistent across states and need to be strengthened.

Suppression orders that judges use to smother reporting of certain court cases are being applied with alarming frequency and urgently need review. And whistleblower legislation needs to be strengthened to encourage and protect anybody speaking out about wrongdoing in government or elsewhere.

While the raids of the past week have been shocking, they have forced us all to think again about the role of the media in a democracy. If it leads to better legislation that both protects national security and media freedom, then some good might have come out of it after all.

Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How information warfare in cyberspace threatens our freedom

Information warfare in cyberspace could replace reason and reality with rage and fantasy.
Shutterstock

Roger Bradbury, Australian National University; Anne-Marie Grisogono, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Dmitry Brizhinev, Australian National University; John Finnigan, CSIRO, and Nicholas Lyall, Australian National University

This article is the fourth in a five-part series exploring Australian national security in the digital age. Read parts one, two and three here.

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Just as we’ve become used to the idea of cyber warfare, along come the attacks, via social media, on our polity.

We’ve watched in growing amazement at the brazen efforts by the Russian state to influence the US elections, the UK’s Brexit referendum and other democratic targets. And we’ve tended to conflate them with the seemingly-endless cyber hacks and attacks on our businesses, governments, infrastructure, and a long-suffering citizenry.

But these social media attacks are a different beast altogether – more sinister, more consequential and far more difficult to counter. They are the modern realisation of the Marxist-Leninist idea that information is a weapon in the struggle against Western democracies, and that the war is ongoing. There is no peacetime or wartime, there are no non-combatants. Indeed, the citizenry are the main targets.

A new battlespace for an old war

These subversive attacks on us are not a prelude to war, they are the war itself; what Cold War strategist George Kennan called “political warfare”.

Perversely, as US cyber experts Herb Lin and Jaclyn Kerr note, modern communication attacks exploit the technical virtues of the internet such as “high connectivity” and “democratised access to publishing capabilities”. What the attackers do is, broadly speaking, not illegal.

The battlespace for this warfare is not the physical, but the cognitive environment – within our brains. It seeks to sow confusion and discord, to reduce our abilities to think and reason rationally.

Social media platforms are the perfect theatres in which to wage political warfare. Their vast reach, high tempo, anonymity, directness and cheap production costs mean that political messages can be distributed quickly, cheaply and anonymously. They can also be tailored to target audiences and amplified quickly to drown out adversary messages.

Simulating dissimulation

We built simulation models (for a forthcoming publication) to test these ideas. We were astonished at how effectively this new cyber warfare can wreak havoc in the models, co-opting filter bubbles and preventing the emergence of democratic discourse.

We used agent-based models to examine how opinions shift in response to the insertion of strong opinions (fake news or propaganda) into the discourse.

Our agents in these simple models were individuals who each had a set of opinions. We represented different opinions as axes in an opinion space. Individuals are located in the space by the values of their opinions. Individuals close to each other in the opinion space are close to each other in their opinions. Their differences in opinion are simply the distance between them.

When an individual links to a neighbour, they experience a degree of convergence – their opinions are drawn towards each other. An individual’s position is not fixed, but may shift under the influence of the opinions of others.

The dynamics in these models were driven by two conflicting processes:

• Individuals are social – they have a need to communicate – and they will seek to communicate with others with whom they agree. That is, other individuals nearby in their opinion space.

• Individuals have a limited number of communication links they can manage at any time (also known as their Dunbar number, and they continue to find links until they satisfy this number. Individuals, therefore, are sometimes forced to communicate with individuals with whom they disagree in order to satisfy their Dunbar number. But if they wish to create a new link and have already reached their Dunbar number, they will prune another link.

Figure 1: The emergence of filter bubbles

Figure 1: Filter bubbles emerging with two dimensions, opinions of issue X and opinions of issue Y.
roger.bradbury@anu.edu.au

To begin, 100 individuals, represented as dots, were randomly distributed across the space with no links. At each step, every individual attempts to link with a near neighbour up to its Dunbar number, perhaps breaking earlier links to do so. In doing so, it may change its position in opinion space.

Over time, individuals draw together into like-minded groups (filter bubbles). But the bubbles are dynamic. They form and dissolve as individuals continue to prune old links and seek newer, closer ones as a result of their shifting positions in the opinion space. Figure 1, above, shows the state of the bubbles in one experiment after 25 steps.

Figure 2: Capturing filter bubbles with fake news

Conversation lobbies figure 2.
roger.bradbury@anu.edu.au

At time step 26, we introduced two pieces of fake news into the model. These were represented as special sorts of individuals that had an opinion in only one dimension of the opinion space and no opinion at all in the other. Further, these “individuals” didn’t seek to connect to other individuals and they never shifted their opinion as a result of ordinary individuals linking to them. They are represented by the two green lines in Figure 2.

Over time (the figure shows time step 100), each piece of fake news breaks down the old filter bubbles and reels individuals towards their green line. They create new tighter filter bubbles that are very stable over time.

Information warfare is a threat to our Enlightenment foundations

These are the conventional tools of demagogues throughout history, but this agitprop is now packaged in ways perfectly suited to the new environment. Projected against the West, this material seeks to increase political polarisation in our public sphere.

Rather than actually change an election outcome, it seeks to prevent the creation of any coherent worldview. It encourages the creation of filter bubbles in society where emotion is privileged over reason and targets are immunised against real information and rational consideration.

These models confirm Lin and Kerr’s hypothesis. “Traditional” cyber warfare is not an existential threat to Western civilisation. We can and have rebuilt our societies after kinetic attacks. But information warfare in cyberspace is such a threat.

The Enlightenment gave us reason and reality as the foundations of political discourse, but information warfare in cyberspace could replace reason and reality with rage and fantasy. We don’t know how to deal with this yet.

Roger Bradbury, Professor, National Security College, Australian National University; Anne-Marie Grisogono, Visiting fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Dmitry Brizhinev, Research Assistant, National Security College, Australian National University; John Finnigan, Leader, Complex Systems Science, CSIRO, and Nicholas Lyall, Research Assistant (National Security College), Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Australia doesn’t have a constitutional right protecting freedom of the person – it needs one

Migration legislation does not require judicial authorisation for a person to be deprived of their freedom.
AAP/Dean Lewins

Bede Harris, Charles Sturt University

The recent wrongful detention of two Australian citizens by immigration authorities highlights that our Constitution offers inadequate protection for freedom of the person.

This is not the first time Australian citizens have been unlawfully detained. In 2001, Vivian Solon, who had suffered a head injury, was deported even though she told immigration officials she was an Australian citizen. In 2004, Cornelia Rau, also an Australian citizen, was held in immigration detention after she was unable to identify herself because of mental illness.

The government could do this because migration legislation does not require judicial authorisation for a person to be deprived of their freedom. The Solon and Rau cases were found to be only two of more than 247 instances of unlawful detention that had occurred over the previous 14 years.
The extent of the government’s power was revealed in 2015, when the Department of Immigration announced Operation Fortitude. This would have involved stopping people randomly on Melbourne’s streets to check their migration status. The operation was cancelled only after mass public protest.

So, anyone who is walking in the Melbourne CBD and speaks with a strange accent, or has suffered a brain injury, or is experiencing mental illness and cannot demonstrate a right to be in Australia, is liable to detention at best – and deportation at worst – without recourse to the courts.

Where the Constitution lacks

The reason the government has this power is because Australia’s Constitution does not adequately protect individual liberty.

In 1992, the High Court held that separation of powers means that only courts can declare people guilty of crimes and imprison them. It therefore held that parliament cannot enact laws authorising the government to do that.

However, the court said that parliament can authorise the government to order so-called “non-punitive” detention – for example, detention for immigration purposes or in cases of communicable diseases.

Section 75(v) of the Constitution allows someone to challenge government decisions on administrative grounds. However, the High Court has held that this section does not allow the courts to decide whether the exercise of power is reasonable. On this basis, it found it would be lawful to detain someone under the Migration Act forever.

The court has also held that there may be many other – undefined – circumstances in which people can be detained without court approval.

The concept of “non-punitive” detention is vague. It is also oxymoronic: all detention is surely punitive to the person who experiences it. It leads to the bizarre situation that the law provides you more protection if you have committed a crime than if you have not.

It is fundamental in a free society that the law should not allow the state to deprive a person of liberty other than through due judicial process.

What a protection could look like

The Liberal Party proclaims its belief in “the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples” and a “just and humane society”. Yet it marked the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta – the founding document protecting rights in western democracies – by drafting legislation authorising deprivation of citizenship without the need to go to court.

Labor has been no less resistant to the idea of constitutional rights. The Rudd government’s terms of reference to its inquiry into human rights specifically excluded consideration of putting new rights into the Constitution.

Opposition by politicians to constitutional rights is obviously self-serving, and it is often absurd as well. Former NSW premier Bob Carr objected to a Bill of Rights on the ground that it would create a “lawyer’s picnic”.

In a free society, it ought never to be lawful for a government to detain people by executive order alone.

The only effective way to protect liberty of the person is to deny the government the power to detain, unless it can demonstrate to a court that there are reasonable grounds for deprivation of liberty. And the only effective way to prevent the government from enacting legislation to give itself that power is to create a constitutional right protecting freedom of the person.

This right could be phrased as:

Everyone has the right to due process of law and not to be unreasonably deprived of personal liberty.

In a system where the burden appears to lie on the individual to prove they are lawfully in Australia rather than on the state to prove they are not, we are all vulnerable to deprivation of liberty.

The right to individual liberty is also a basic requirement of human dignity. That a person has been deprived of a right by a democratically elected parliament does not diminish the assault on their dignity.

The concept of a free society inescapably requires that limits be imposed on the will of the majority. That is why the power of parliaments has to be restrained.

This is what opponents of rights who trot out the objection to “unelected judges” overturning parliament’s will fail to grasp. It is precisely because judges are independent of the will of political majorities that ultimately only the courts can effectively protect individual freedom.

Bede Harris, Senior Lecturer in Law, Charles Sturt University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Egypt: Media Freedom