Disaster response will lose Beijing respect

Beijing’s initial miserly reaction to the Philippines typhoon disaster has lost it considerable prestige among its Asian neighbours, reinforcing perceptions that it is a ruthless and self-centred power whose rise is something to be feared rather than welcomed.

China’s original offer of $100,000 from the Government matched by the Chinese Red Cross was greeted with disbelief by the international community alongside donations from Australia ($30 million), the US ($20 million plus extensive civilian and military support), Japan ($10 million), United Kingdom ($70 million) and so on.

China later revised its contribution upwards to $1.75 million, mostly in tents and blankets, but still below totals from Taiwan ($4 million), Indonesia ($2 million), India (15 tonnes of medical supplies) and, perhaps most tellingly, the Swedish furniture chain of Ikea ($2.7 million).

So what is the reason for this poor treatment of the Philippines from the world’s second largest economy that has, in the past, been generous with similar appeals around the world? The answer appears to lie in the dispute between the two countries over a series of tiny islets in the South China Sea.

Beijing’s claim to various islands and atolls in the area has been well documented. It has also had disagreements with Vietnam and Indonesia, but it is the Philippines which has been most willing to challenge China’s claims over a formation known as the Scarborough shoal about 160 kilometres off the Philippines coast.

While Manila cannot hope to face down its giant neighbour militarily, it has taken its case to arbitration at the United Nations – and there it has a good chance of winning.

China bases its “indisputable rights” in the area to the fact that it has been fishing there since the fifth century AD, but as one maritime legal authority pointed out to me “the world has changed somewhat since the days of the Roman Empire and claims based on a practice 1600 years ago have to withstand 21^st century geopolitical realities”.

Leaving all that aside, it has been universally recognised in the past that when disaster strikes, political considerations are put aside in the face of the need to bring relief to human suffering. The fact that in this case China appears not to have accepted this is an indictment of those who wield power in Beijing.        

 

 

 

The decline of education

There is no doubt that higher education in Australia is in transition – some would call it crisis – as the pressure mounts for universities and their equivalents to be “relevant to modern society” and produce the workers who will “fuel the 21^st century economy”.

The words in inverted commas are not mine but ones I have seen in innumerable media releases churned out by Federal and State Governments – and because these Governments hold the purse strings, the places of higher learning have to take note.

I really wish however, that there was a little more “push back” from the leadership of the these institutions, pointing out that education should go beyond cramming for qualifications that will earn the right kind of job.

Sadly, many key figures in academia seem eager to acquiesce in this trend. The Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, Professor Stephen Parker, looks forward to the day when a great deal of his institution’s infrastructure will be redundant because students will come on to campus less often and for shorter periods.

In his vision students will do increasing amounts of their learning online, working with videos and text “reserving every minute of personal time of the teacher to smaller group encounters where students defend and discuss their work”. 

This sausage-machine mentality may produce the short-term results that politicians want, but there are so many flaws. One being the assumption that by 18, all young people know exactly what they want to do with their lives and therefore the courses they should follow.

I quote an academic from an American university who believes that in addition to providing its students with qualifications, higher education should be equipping them to answer four questions:

What is worth knowing? What is worth doing? What makes for a good human life? What are my responsibilities to other people? 

If the trends in Australian higher learning continue their answer to the first question would be: The information that gets me a job; to the second would be: My job; while the third and fourth questions would probably not be answered at all.

Higher education should be shaping a person to make a worthwhile contribution, not just to an employer, not just to the economy, but to the community, locally, nationally and globally. Above all it should teach that minds should be open to all influences, and to develop the maturity to judge them, to accept them, or to reject them.

It should teach them about compassion about justice and yes, about a fair go; it should point out to them that the society they have been raised in is just one among many on this earth. Part of that knowledge doesn’t come from the internet or even from the lecture hall, but from interaction on campus in all sorts of contacts, formal and informal. It comes from debate and discussion, not just about work, but about the world in general. What’s right; what’s wrong, what should be preserved; what needs to be changed.

If we don’t do that, we deserve to be judged as the generation that for its own, selfish, materialist ends sought to impoverish its young people by denying them the basic knowledge of what it means to be human.

China’s censors working overtime

China’s censors have been busy in recent weeks. Most recently there was the strange case of the car that somehow eluded the tight security that generally surrounds Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, crashing through barriers and exploding, killing the three occupants, two nearby tourists and injuring about 40 others.

Pictures of the incident taken from innumerable mobile phone cameras quickly blossomed on to the internet and were just as hastily removed from Chinese social media sites such as Renren and Sina Weibo. The sanitised Government version initially referred to the incident as a simple traffic accident and when that looked patently ridiculous, as a terrorist attack.

The names of the three people in the car identified them as members of the Moslem Uighur minority from the far west of the country, and five ‘suspects’ have since been arrested.  

There the matter, as far as the Government in Beijing is concerned, rests.

Chinese social media played its part in alerting Western journalists to another case, which otherwise might have gone completely unnoticed. A former street vendor, Xia Junfeng, was executed for killing two officials who were punishing him for operating an unlicensed shish kebab stall.

At first sight there seemed little unusual about the incident in a country that routinely executes hundreds of its citizens every year, but the execution of Xia touched a raw nerve among members of China’s massive blogosphere.

Many who followed the case believed that the evidence at Xia’s trial had been rigged to show him in the worst possible light and that he, in fact, killed the officials, known in China as chengguan, in self defence while they were beating him up.

However, the greatest anger was directed at comparisons with the another killer before the courts, Gu Kailai, the wife of a disgraced Politburo member, Bo Xilai, who was convicted of poisoning a British businessman, but was given a suspended death sentence. It is likely that she will be released from prison within a few years.

A professor at the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, Tong Zongjin, summed up the mood when he said that if Gu could escape the death penalty after killing someone with poison, Xia should not have been put to death.   

Once again the censors struck and within a few hours all comments on Xia’s execution were swept clean. The official record of his death, among thousands of others, is all that remains – another example of the fact that in this socialist paradise there is still one law for the powerful and influential and another for the masses.   

 

Tallest statue sparks giant row

A plan to build the world’s tallest statue in the Indian State of Gujarat is fuelling controversy throughout the nation and may yet feed in to next year’s national election.

The project has been instigated by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and will honour Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the country’s first Deputy Prime Minister and one of the founding fathers of the Indian Republic.

The 182-metre tall memorial, about twice the height of New York’s Statue of Liberty, has been named by Modi as ‘The Statue of Unity’. He says as well as attracting visitors from all over India and the world, it will be a long-overdue tribute to one of the nation’s foremost statesmen.

But there is far more to it than that.

Modi is almost certain to be the leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s general election, due in the middle of 2014. Opposing him will be the incumbent Congress Party dominated by the Gandhi family. It is still quite possible a member of the latest generation, Rahul Gandhi, will be Modi’s opponent for Prime Minister, although he has denied it. 

Patel served as deputy to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is Rahul’s great-grandfather. While the two were Cabinet colleagues, they were often at odds, most fundamentally over the fledgling country’s economic path. Nehru favoured a socialistic planned economy, Patel was a free marketeer.

Nehru also sought close relations with China, believing the two Third World giants could dominate Asia in partnership; Patel warned that China would only see India as a dangerous rival, a fact borne out by the short-lived war between them in 1962.

Patel is also credited with doing the hard work that forged India into a single State out of a ramshackle collection of principalities. He is often referred to as India’s Iron Man.

With Nehru’s socialism long abandoned and India’s economy booming under a free-market system, many historians now believe that the country would have been better placed today had Patel been Prime Minister in those early days.

Add this to the fact that Patel came from Gujarat and is revered there, and Modi appears to be on to a winner. When the Federal Environment Ministry announced that they would investigate the statue project – which also includes a visitors centre, garden, hotel and convention centre – veteran BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu hit back, saying the intervention was inspired by the Gandhis who did not want to see Patel memorialised.

Naidu went on to list 450 schemes, projects and institutions that are named after various members of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The massive statue will not be completed for four years, if at all. Well before that the BJP will be hoping it will have done its work in helping to propel Modi to the leadership of the world’s biggest democracy.   

Tony Abbott – a man for his people

There are many things I don’t like about Australia’s 28^th Prime Minister, but there is one quality which I have to concede to him – his honesty.

Tony Abbott is not afraid to hide the fact he has a particular vision for the kind of society Australia should be - and feels he has a mandate to achieveit. He might well agree with the words of former American President George W. Bush: “You are either with us, or against us.”

Abbott recently hosted a media party at the Prime Minister’s residence in Canberra. Invited were journalists and commentators such as Piers Akerman, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine, all resolute pumpers of the Abbott message during the election campaign. In fact News Corp was overwhelmingly represented while the ABC was absent.

The lopsided guest list was an accurate reflection of the Abbott philosophy. “There tends to be an ABC view of the world, and it’s not a view of the world that I find myself in total sympathy with,” he was quoted as saying.

“But others would say there’s a News Limited view of the world.”

After more than four decades of reporting on election campaigns in several different countries I have become heartily sick of the routine victory speech by winning leader in which they say they intend to govern for all, including those who opposed them.

It is a ritualistic reaching out to defeated opponents which means nothing and is forgotten after election night; the first election promise to be broken. Governments govern for their supporters, for the policies and philosophies they espouse and those who don’t like it can go hang. If there is any compromise, it will be forced upon them by political realities – such as in Australia’s case, a hostile Senate.

The Abbott Government will not be governing for people who want curbs on fossil fuel mining; who want a moratorium on logging in old growth forests; who want a continuation of the carbon tax or its replacement with an emissions trading scheme.

He will not govern for those who want a super-fast fibre optic broadband system; cheaper tertiary education or an increase in overseas aid; not for the supporters of Sea Shepherd, those who believe Australia should have a fast train network rather than more roads, or for those who believe gay people should have exactly the same right as heterosexuals to marry.

But none of this will matter because he will lead a Government for the people who voted for him and will be doing his level best to make sure they get as much as he can give them to keep them happy between now and the next election.

It is the way all Governments have played the game since Federation. In many ways it is an inevitable part of any democratic system.

At least Tony Abbott has the courage to admit it.   

Information management at new heights

Journalists who deal with public institutions have been used to information management or ‘spin’ for many years now, but in recent times, especially it seems among conservative administrations, it is taking on a more aggressive and distinctly sinister form - to the point where the ultimate result could be loss of freedoms and the undermining of democratic traditions.

Before I am accused of paranoia let me present a few examples, in Australia and around the world.

In Queensland NGOs have been told it is a condition of receiving State Government funding that  they do not criticise the Government in their area of expertise. So an organisation, say a regional art gallery, which has its annual grant cut in half, can’t go to the media to complain because it is still receiving the smaller amount of money and if it speaks out could end up with nothing at all.

In Canada, a survey by the Professional Institute of the Public Service has found that 90 per cent of Federal Government scientists feel they are not allowed to speak freely to the media about the work they do.

The Institute found that 86 per cent of the scientists, faced with a departmental decision that could harm public health, safety or the environment, thought they would face censure or retaliation if they spoke up.

According to the survey, nearly half (48 per cent) were aware of actual cases in which their department or agency suppressed information, leading to incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading impressions by the public, industry and/or other Government officials.

Institute President Gary Corbett said the scientists were working in “a climate of fear”.

In the United Kingdom dozens of local councils are bypassing traditional media and putting out their own newspapers. These are far more sophisticated than the occasional newsletters of the past, appearing in newspaper form and at frequent intervals.

Inevitably, the councils who produce them portray themselves in the most favourable of lights.  

The Government at Westminster has been critical of these ‘Town Hall Pravdas’, saying they are a waste of ratepayers’ money, but to date has done nothing to halt the practice.

There are more subtle – and widespread – ways of ensuring ‘inconvenient truths’ don’t get into the media, the main one being to stonewall. Calls are not returned; information is withheld. When a reply is made it is often by email couched in dense, bureaucratic language that could mean anything, or nothing.

In the past this would not have mattered so much when skilled journalists cut though the blather, found other sources who were willing to give the real story and threw the rubbish back in the faces of its presenters. But today media outlets are under unprecedented pressure as declining circulation, ratings and advertising forces cutbacks in staff. Often media releases and statements are taken at face value with little or no critical examination.

Ironically, one of the reasons UK councils give for the Town Hall Pravdas is that mainstream journalists are no longer available to properly cover local affairs.

As a result, the initiative for generating ‘news’ is shifting from traditional media to the sources of news themselves and that is a very disturbing trend to anyone who believes our national institutions need to be held to account.  

 

 

 

  

Print revival? Afraid not

I have come across an article written a few weeks back by Eric Spitz, part owner of an American media company whose flagship is the Orange County Register based in Santa Ana, California.

I was intrigued by the headline – ‘US in the midst of a print revival’ – news to me, but worth a read.

As it turned out, the only evidence of this ‘revival’ was at the Register itself which, under Spitz and his business partner, Aaron Kushner, has undergone something of a renaissance. According to Spitz in the past 12 months the Register has hired 350 people, established 25 new sections, revamped its weekly community papers and launched a weekly set of magazines.

He states there has been a rise in both subscription and advertising revenue, although he doesn’t give exact figures, and on the basis of that makes two assertions. One I have sympathy with, the other I must reject.

Spitz says that media companies the world over made a huge mistake when, with the advent and growth of the internet in the early 1990s they put their content on line for all to see – for nothing.

“I don’t know many industries that can survive pricing their core product at zero,” he says. Quite right: Media companies were sucked in to the early internet hype and thought they could use their webpages as shop windows for their print editions. It didn’t work and when networks such as CNN and, in Australia the ABC, began to put all or most of their content online for nothing, newspapers felt they had to follow suit.

As a result while consumers are quite happy to buy everything from groceries to motor cars online they have become used to – and expect – to get their news for free. Good luck to Spitz and the Orange County Register if they feel they can turn back the tide. As examples of the successful use of paywalls Spitz quotes the Wall Street Journal (specialist news unavailable in the same content or quality elsewhere) and Groupa Reforma, which apparently is the largest media company in Mexico (hmm..). We shall see.

Maybe the bolting online news horse can be persuaded back into the stable, but Spitz’s other assertion, that newspapers will remain the prime location for advertising, is completely wide of the mark. He maintains that digital advertising does not work, that people almost never click on to online advertisements, while overlooking the massively popular websites that sell cars, homes, relationships and 101 other things.

I spoke to a real estate agent quite recently who said he now does all his business online. A survey taken last year shows that 80 per cent of prospective home buys go first to allhomes.com.au

It is the classifieds - the ‘rivers of gold’ - rather than display advertising, that are lost to newspapers, probably for good. It is a body blow to the industry that may not be fatal, but will certainly change it radically in the years to come.