Upmarket department store David Jones is taking the Australia Institute to court, accusing it of misleading or deceptive conduct for describing DJ’s advertising of children’s clothes as ‘corporate paedophilia’. According to the Australia Institute, the department store’s catalogue posed child models in sexually provocative ways, something David Jones denies strongly. Whatever the merits - or lack thereof - of David Jones’ claim there is some irony to be enjoyed here. In his 2005 book Affluenza Australia Institute Executive Director Clive Hamilton includes a ‘Political Manifesto for Well-being’ that declares:

‘advertising codes of conduct should be legislated so that irresponsible and deceptive marketing is outlawed’.

An adverse finding for Hamilton will see him punished by legislation he thinks should be strengthened and enforced much more vigorously. Be careful what you wish for…

Irony enjoyment aside, I think this is a regrettable action by David Jones. The best course of action here was a debate over the value of the Australia Institute’s claims, which indeed occurred last year. Clearly the Australia Institute was engaged in hyperbole (otherwise the DJ’s advertising people would be behind bars), but there were divided views over whether their advertising in question went too far or not. But if people didn’t like the advertising, nobody is forcing them to shop at DJ’s.

Given his persistent opposition to freedom of commercial speech it’s going to be hard for Hamilton to credibly play the free speech martyr. But perhaps this will be lesson to him in the virtues of not regulating speech via the courts. There are widely differing views about what constitutes acceptable speech, and this diversity has been dealt with via a mix of social norms as to what it is and is not acceptable to say and show, and helping people avoid what they don’t want to see or hear via ratings systems or self-help. Generally, censorship has been limited to extreme cases where there is little disagreement or clear harm flows from publication (though with exceptions such as vilification laws). If you think DJ’s catalogues are offensive, just put them straight into the bin (or the recycling bin, as Clive would insist). The alternatives - censorship or heavy-handed legal action - are worse than the original problem.

Never in the history of think-tanks has a research proposal received so much publicity. Starting, so far as I can tell, in The Guardian, it spread through the world, including the front page of this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald. The problem (according to The Guardian):

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

Professor Q, who has joined the chorus of criticism, has also tracked down a copy of the original letter (pdf) the AEI sent to prospective authors.

It really is hard to see what the fuss is about. There is a political consensus that something needs to be done about climate change, not because we are necessarily 100% certain about the science, but because policymakers cannot do nothing in the face of potentially catastrophic risks. Few decisions are made with perfect information. But I cannot see that there is anything to be lost from continuing to hear from the sceptics, and that the sponsoring body once took some money from Exxon or has staff that once worked for Bush tells us little that is useful.

Like most of the right-wing think-tanks the AEI does not do hired gun research and does not get itself in the position of leftist NGOs of having a dominant funder that can influence their public statements. It only gets 17% of its annual funding from corporations, suggesting that the capacity of any one company to have an influence would be very limited even in theory, and probably near zero in practice.

As I have said in many posts, arguments stand or fall on their merits, and the claim that (as the AEI letter asserts) the IPCC process has biases or that the AEI has taken Exxon money alerts us to potential issues with each, but does not spare us the effort of actually listening to what they have to say. The AEI was not offering $10,000 for quick spin. It was offering $10,000 for 7,500- 10,000 words by December 2007. It’s hardly a huge sum for a long paper from an expert.

The charge of McCarthyism is terribly over-used, but launching such a prominent and widespread attack on research that hasn’t even been written is resonant of Senator McCarthy’s attacks on those he suspected - sometimes correctly, often not - of being communists.

If Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison are to be believed, the chapters of their edited collection Silencing Dissent: How the Australian government is controlling public opinion and stifling debate

paint a picture of Australian democracy in serious jeopardy….The longer term picture is even more worrying: authoritarianism can only flourish where democracy has been eroded.

As with the critics of political correctness claiming through the mass media that they were being censored by feminazis etc, this book suffers from a self-refuting quality - how silenced can be dissenters be if their book is released by a leading publisher and has lengthy extracts published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald?

And it is bad timing when a book claiming there is an

The wacky Christian sect the Exclusive Brethren has been in the stocks this week. Some of the attacks, like today’s story in The Age about covering up child abuse, are fair criticism - even if offences by someone who has already been thrown out of the Brethren and convicted of his crimes are hardly front page lead story material.

But other stories reflect as badly on those generating the news as on the Brethren - if not more so. They document attempts by Greens Senator Bob Brown to use instruments of the state to get at a religion he does not like.

Brown started this off with (another) attempt to have a Senate inquiry into the Brethren. Their offence? They had written to the Attorney-General proposing changes to family law. These were not sensible suggestions and as The Age reported:

Mr Ruddock’s response to the Brethren’s approach gave them little joy. The Government’s changes would “emphasise the rights of the child and the right of the child to know both their parents,” he wrote.

Ministers receive lots of letters with crackpot ideas (I used to have to coordinate responses to some of them). But the remedy is not punishing their senders by hauling them before Senate inquiries. It is polite letters explaining why the government cannot take up their proposals. Every citizen has a right to put their views to government without harassment.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to see the film Viva Erotica be grateful for federalism. The Sydney Morning Herald puts the situation this way:

AS SEX films go, Viva Erotica is tame: 28 minutes of sex and no violence. But because the sex is real, it is classified X18+, a rating that means it is banned from sale in all states.

All states, yes. But not all territories. Our-not-quite-so-conservative-as-it-seems federal government has declined to use its power to over-ride territory laws permitting the sale of X-rated videos or to instruct its wholly-owned corporation Australia Post not to deliver them around the country. But porn peddler Adultshop is seeking to overturn the X classification of Viva Erotica on the grounds that it does not offend ‘community standards’. After all, R-rated real sex is currently showing at your local art house cinema in Shortbus. But under the Office of Film and Literature Classification guidelines (pdf) Shortbus’s real sex is not the same as Viva Erotica’s real sex because the former has bothered with a plot and the latter has not.

To help its case, Adultshop had ACNielsen conduct a survey.

Explicit erotic films: Films and videos primarily involving various forms of actual sex, including close-ups, involving consenting adults, with no coercion or violence. In the ACNielsen survey, Australian Adults were asked: Do you personally find this content offensive (ie does it cause feelings of outrage and/or disgust)?

Read the rest of this entry »

It comes as no surprise that Malcolm Fraser is again criticising the Howard government. He wrote in The Age yesterday:

Today, for a variety of reasons, but not least because the Government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. Too many have taken the easy path and accepted the Government’s contentions that Muslims aren’t like us and therefore it doesn’t matter if discrimination occurs and if access to the law does not apply. We have forgotten that discrimination once it starts, spreads.

Fraser is so busy reading between the lines of what the PM says that he has forgotten to read what is actually on them. If you go to Howard’s website and do a search you can find his statements on the Sheik Hilali affair (and indeed on previous Sheik Hilali affairs), along with his statements on Islam in Australia. Howard’s views can be summarised as follows:

* it is important for Islamic Australians to be integrated into Australian society
* that integration is threatened by a minority of members of the Islamic community with repugnant beliefs and unacceptable behaviour (on the treatment of women, on terrorism)
* he stresses that these are minority views, but they colour general perceptions
* Australians should be tolerant of other religions (eg on women’s head covering, opposing violence, not the government’s job to decide who should head religious groups)
Read the rest of this entry »

Pru Goward, the (thankfully) retiring Sex Discrimination Commissioner, has suggested that something she calls ’sex vilification’ be outlawed. She

believes Australia needs sex vilification legislation to curb the proliferation of degrading and offensive images of women in the media and on television. “The one thing that unites a broad spectrum of women, from the very conservative to the very radical, is that they all hate sexual vilification, whether it is in advertising, TV or in magazines and newspapers. “And they all want something done about it,” she said.

But I am not sure that these ‘degrading’ images ‘ constitute anything like the racial vilification to which she compares them. The Victorian legislation on the subject states:

(1) A person must not, on the ground of the race of another person or class of persons, engage in conduct that incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of, that other person or class of persons.

But do any images of women incite hatred, contempt, revulsion or severe ridicule of women in general (a ‘class of persons’)? I think that’s unlikely. There are so many different images of women, from real life as well as the media, that at most we might form an image of ‘that other person’ - but even then, we probably would not, because we know that she is just being paid to do whatever ‘degrading’ thing she is depicted as doing. And if it is degrading of ‘that other person’, who do we charge, given that the ‘degraded’ person was in all probability willingly involved? Shouldn’t she, rather than Ms Goward, be the judge of whether she has been degraded or not?

And what about men? ‘As a man’ (to paraphrase the feminists) it would never occur to me that depicting ‘degrading’ scenes of other men was degrading to men generally. Perhaps Mark Latham’s ‘metrosexual knobs and toss bags’ are more sensitive, though I doubt it. Or maybe Latham would face Ms Goward’s vilification tribunal for his remarks?

The idea of sex vilification becomes even less plausible when we look at the examples given in The Age’s editorial:

while it is illegal to refuse to employ a woman purely on the grounds she is “a dumb blonde”, it is perfectly legal to display a billboard with a blonde bursting out of a bikini (or, for that matter, a a man bulging out of a loincloth: vilification goes both ways).

But images like this are not designed to incite hatred, contempt, revulsion or severe ridicule. They are designed to incite lust, or perhaps simple appreciation of physical beauty. The Age’s views are closer to the Taliban’s notion that men cannot control their sexual desires and women must therefore be covered from head-to-toe than those of a once ‘progressive’ newspaper.

Goward’s claim turns more on the fact that she personally - and other women she claims to speak for - finds some images of other women offensive. But even the overkill racial and religious vilification law doesn’t give us a right not be to offended. That falls into a different area of the law - old-fashioned censorship. And John Howard is accused of wanting to take us back to the 1950s…