Jason at Gatewatching advises a new report on Press Freedom in Australia is out and apparently there has been some headway. I haven't read it yet, but according to Jason the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance are looking forward to improvements in freedom of information over the next year.

The alert among us will have noticed that vital information has already begun to circulate more freely. I, for one, feel far more informed about grave issues than at any time since 9/11. Take this for example:

"Grave-robbers 'used skull as bong'"

Authorities in Texas have filed corpse-abuse charges against two men who allegedly removed a skull from a grave and used it as a bong.
One of the men allegedly told police they dug up a grave in an abandoned cemetery in the woods, removed a head from a body and smoked marijuana using the skull as a bong.

These guys should have been in the creativity stream at the 2020 summit.

The big news of the day though is Burma, where freedom of information is a problem and media has apparently had trouble getting in.

Jeremy Sammut, a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, has an op-ed in The Australian on health prevention, lifestyle illness and wellness tha tis based on his recent monographThe False Promise of GP Super Clinics, Part 1: Preventive Care He says that Australian governments have told us to quit smoking, eat moderately and exercise regularly, most memorably through the Life! Be In It campaign. We have listened, up to a point at least, and the easy prevention work has now been accomplished. He adds:

Many middle-class people are converts to the wellness cult: they have stopped smoking, improved their diet and started to exercise. But many others, particularly those on lower incomes, prefer to live for the day and have ignored the healthy lifestyle message. Recent reports on public health policy in Britain and Australia found that despite decades of spending on prevention programs, levels of physical activity have not increased and obesity levels have shot up. Obesity-related chronic disease already puts pressure on the health system and it will accentuate the challenges we face as the population ages.

Okay, that is pretty right. So where to next? What policy options do we have to address this?

Ted Mullighan's Report on sexual abuse in the Pitjantjatjara Lands in the north west of South Australia. Most of the sexual abuse of young children documented by Mullighan appears to have been carried out by indigenous people, principally men and older boys. His report will make unsettling reading for the APY communities that invited the inquiry on to their lands and co-operated to the extent that the fear of retribution allowed people to speak to Mullighan's investigators.

Girls exchanged sex for food, grog and marijuana. Social dysfunction caused by despondency, alcohol, drugs, petrol sniffing and gambling has already destroyed countless lives. Parents do not know how to care for and protect their children or have become unable to do so. There has been a failure of government agencies in South Australia who were responsible for children being left vulnerable to sex abuse in indigenous communities. The Rann Government has been negligent in providing the numbers of police and child-protection workers on the APY lands.

Mullighan proposed an interactive approach, including stationing more police in the communities, and boosting the over-stretched ranks of welfare workers. Night patrols, backed by police, should be re-instigated and access to pornography strenuously restricted, a measure that has overtones of the territory intervention.

This is Barak Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech delivered at the Constitution Center Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in March 18, 2008. The text is here. It was a major speech.---more than the soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations about change and transformation.

He focused on an uncomfortable topic that most Americans would rather leave unspoken. He turned the topic over and examined it from several different angles and made it personal, and sparked a conversation about race relations that doesn't invoke the spectre that haunts America: racial violence.

Ross Gittens has an interesting op-ed on economic growth in the Sydney Morning Herald. He says that for nearly all economists, business people and politicians the need to maximise the growth of the economy is a self-evident truth and should not be questioned. Those who do so, eg., Clive Hamilton, are treated with scorn by economic rationalists and libertarians, even though economic growth is commonly seen as a means to achieve the good life, rather than an end in itself.In short, there's more to life than money, and the more than is usually understood in terms of wellbeing.

Surprisingly, the 2020 Summit failed to question economic growth as an end in itself. One of their new ideas was to try harder to maximise economic growth---to increase "gross domestic product per capita so that Australia is among the top five countries in the world on this measure, with strong, stable economic growth."
How strange. I presume that it hasn't occured to them that one could have wealth but live a damaged life. A
damaged life in the sense of a loss of the full experiential richness of life at the hands of the “technological, schematized modes of human thought and power relations which dominate neo-liberal capitalist modernity.

As Mark Pesce observes that the cities we live in are no longer streets and buildings, but flows of people and information, each invisibly connected through pervasive wireless networks. Our world is already a wirelessed world and we use it to maintain our social networks, business and entertainment.

Free wireless in Sydney, which would have enabled a broad participation in the electronic life of the city by all participants, has been dumped by the NSW Government. So we are left the tariffed telco and IP networks and a few free wirelessed broadband hotspots.

With the latter, it increasingly looks as if the proposed fibre to node (FTTN) broadband network will be one with competition at the services level, but little competition at the infrastructure level. The national broadband infrastructure will be provided by Telstra, as it looks uneconomic to provide a duplicated infrastructure.

If Telstra is the only option for building the national broadband network (NBN), then it does not appear likely that Telstra will be structurally separated into a wholesale business and a retail business to prevent monopoly behaviour. It also looks as if the private investment in broadband will be for the metro areas, with the national government required to subsidize broadband for rural and regional Australia.

The implication of these political and economic realities is that national retail broadband prices will probably rise should Telstra construct a monopoly-owned FTTN network. Telstra will act to feather its own nest. The market logic is clear: a privatised Telstra would pursue its shareholders interests, the goal of which would be to maximise its monopolistic position in the market to ensure a good return on its investment.

Will Obama deliver the knockout blow to Clinton in the forthcoming primaries in North Carolina and Indiana? Obama is expected to take North Carolina. If he can pick off Indiana - and its precious white working-class vote - then he could finally land Clinton a mortal blow.

Can he do so in the context of the media love affair with him being over, the fallout from pastor Jeremiah Wright in the media and the race tinged edge of the contest.

What will probably happen is that the US mainstream media will continue its degradation of the political discourse with personality smears, trash talk spun to them by political operatives and gossipy chatter about non-issues (eg., John Edward's haircut).

Has the Iemma government left it too late to privatise its electricity assets (generators and retailers)? Though Costa and Iemma suffered a humiliating 702-107 vote against privatisation at Labor's state conference on the weekend, they are determined to proceed with the sale despite entrenched union opposition.

Will the government and the unions keep talking? If they do, the only realistic position is the compromise of some kind of public-private partnership in charge of the industry along with guarantees on jobs and future pricing.

Is this standoff a sign that the unions traditional influence over the parliamentary wing, with conference as the supreme policy-making body, is becoming history. What does business require in order to invest in new electricity generation--two new base load power stations and retro fit the old power stations--- under an emissions tradiing scheme?

Can you psychoanalyze a nation and its people? Many are tempted to give "definitive" readings of a national character obsessed with masks, betrayals, violent penetrations, unconscious fears and death. They continue to think in terms of what the trauma means for our national psyche.

And so it is with Austria, incest and the case of Josef Fritzl, who had seven children by his daughter, whom he had confined to a cellar for 24 years:

What we usually end up with its myth from attempts to psychoanalyze a nation as an individual in order to bring its problems into the foreground or consciousness. We could say that conservative Austria suffers from a psychological disorder because it has not confronted its Nazi past.

Poverty and racism are a problem in the United States and it is addressed by Black Liberation theologians and the black church as part of a critique of the white Christian church:

Black Liberation theology, as expressed by Reverend Wright, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, is based on classic Christian principles:

Luke 4:18 -- "Preach the Gospel to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, set the captives free, offer sight to the blind and liberate those who are oppressed" is one verse that is central to the black theology of liberation. Another one is Matthew 25:40 -- "As you have done unto the least of these, you have done it unto me."

Black Liberation theology is both an attempt to interpret Scripture through the plight of the poor--- to eradicate poverty and to bring about freedom and liberation for the oppressed---and an aggressive approach to eradicating racism---black people's troubles are a result of racism that still exists in America.

David Barstow in the New York Times disclosed how the Pentagon information apparatus has used friendly military analysts in a publicity campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. This group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.

David Barstow offered an unparalleled look inside a sophisticated Pentagon campaign, spearheaded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which at least 75 retired generals and other high military officers, almost all closely tied to Pentagon contractors, were recruited as "surrogates." They were to take Pentagon "talking points" (aka "themes and messages") about the President's War on Terror and war in Iraq into every part of the media -- cable news, the television and radio networks, the major newspapers -- as their own expert "opinions."

These military analysts made tens of thousands of media appearances and also wrote copiously for op-ed pages (often with the aid of the Pentagon) as part of an unparalleled, five-plus year covert propaganda onslaught on the American people that lasted from 2002 until now.

The official story from the economic policy elite used to be that China ensured that Australia was firewalled against bad times in the global economy, and that working families (Howard 's battlers rebadged ) would be okay. The good times would continue and the commonwealth government was looking after working families. All was well in the world. Not so any more:

The political talk is now "sharing the burden" of economic slowdown and rising inflation and those people on modest incomes are entitled to a fair go.

Paul Dibb makes a good point in an op-ed Sydney Morning Herald about national security:

National security is a greatly abused concept. Threats to our national security should be restricted in definition to events that could seriously undermine our territorial sovereignty, democratic freedoms and rule of law, and basic economic prosperity. It is not good enough to invoke generalised threats that could inconvenience us, such as illegal people movements or transnational crime, or challenges that could erode our standard of living such as climate change

Cardinal Pell was doing the conservative attack on human rights at the Brisbane Institute, last night. Even though he argues for absolute moral truths against liberals and relativists Pell argued that rights are best determined by common law and parliaments according to the mood and flavour of the time.

This relativist argument was underpinned by an appeal to parliamentary sovereignty, which was justified by the following argument:

The push for a charter of rights springs from a suspicion of majority rule, a preference for judicial decision-making on fundamental questions, the imperatives of the particular social and political agenda that a charter of rights serves, and the elitism of privileged reformers — not all of whom are lawyers. And the problems with such a charter are increased by the inability of contemporary law and philosophy to agree on a secure foundation for human rights, freedom and truth.

Maybe there is some movement on water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin under the Rudd Government. I see that Penny Wong, the Water Minister, holds to the view that we have been taking too much water out of the basin for far too long, that we have overdrawn the Murray and that we now need to restore the balance. The Rudd Government is going to address this by both spending $3 billion to buy back water rights in the Murray-Darling Basin, and saying that there will be no cuts to existing programs.

This only matches the amount committed by the former Howard government. The chance to spend more on buybacks has been passed by. So we still have ratio of $6 billion allocated to water infrastructure and just $3 billion for water buybacks.

What is new is the $1.5 billion in new spending to honour Labor election commitments: including $1 billion for urban water programs, including desalination, $250 million for water supplies in towns with a population of fewer than 50,000, and $250 million on improving the use of rainwater and grey water.

I see that the Rudd Government has placed a heavy tax on alcopops, the ready mix alcoholic drink that tastes like soft drink and is primarily marketed to teenage women. The excise on pre-mixed drinks, or alcopops, almost doubled on Saturday, from $39 a litre of pure alcohol to $67. The change means the price of alcopops such as Bacardi Breezers and Vodka Cruisers will increase by between 30c and $1.30 a bottle, depending on the alcohol content.

This kind of policy is in the tradition of taxing cigarettes to help reduce their consumption. No doubt the libertarians will mutter about the nanny state and individual freedom and teenagers will shift their alcohol consumption back to beer and wine. No doubt the AFR will do its populist sneer routine whilst going about competition, productivity, infrastructure and tax reform.

The justification for the tax rise is that a "significant proportion" of the revenue would be directed to the new black in health funding, preventative health programs. So something has come out of the 2020 Summit, in which each section had to come up with one big idea, and three policy ideas, including one that came at no cost.

If it's true that Australian universities are in on the conspiracy to overturn western civilisation and turn us all into terrorists, then recent developments suggest that we're totally stuffed. Nobody can save us now.

That worthy outfit known as the Australian Federal Police, the Keystone Kops, Keelty's mob and various other titles were reportedly routed in their attempts to nail a terrorist when Kevin Andrews spoiled it all by cancelling Haneef's visa. A wonderful opportunity for trying their surveillance techniques was disappointingly ruined for political reasons. Why any coalition source would think now would be a good time to leak this is anybody's guess. Maybe they're trying to get it out of the way while things are as bad as they can get.

Or maybe someone at Keelty's end is responsible.

A simple image but it does show how reportage in the mass media is embedded in narrative. That narrative is the media's own, and it indicates how the media engages in politics as a player. Of course, the media deny this as they hide behind the old liberal "fair and balanced", "neutrality" ethos or the positivist one of "reporting the facts" as distinct from commentary.

No one outside the media is fooled by the hollow pipe interpretation even if they unconditionally reject the conduit metaphor of the Old Left. If communicative media were hollow pipes there would be little purpose in analyzing their narrative potential; any kind of narrative could be fitted into the pipe and restored to its prior shape at the end of the transfer. The news or reportage is a form of story telling.

Apparently leader Brendan Nelson's future is "in his own hands", according to the Liberal Party drip feed to Shaun Carney at The Age. I'm attracted by the Spooner image of "in his own hands" because I've been visiting so many wild rivers in New Zealand recently:


Spooner

You would have to be pessimistic about Nelson's chances of surviving--despondent if you were a Liberal. Nelson's public profile-- persona--- is that he rides a motorbike, had his ear pierced and can play the electric guitar. The guy was rock'n'roll. He has the street cred, you see. But policies? What does he stand for? What does the Liberal brand mean these days under Nelson and Bishop? Are they waiting for the Budget?