Category: Features

• How We Can Join In The Fight Against Racism

  June 4, 2020 1:41 pm Comments Off on How We Can Join In The Fight Against Racism

  Recently, three African-Americans died at the hands of white police brutality. Their names were George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and they are not the only ones. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, police brutality is the leading cause of death for young black men in the United States. Violence committed by police against people of colour is rife all over the globe. 
  Here in Australia, we are not immune from this. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community have endured a long history of mistreatment by the institutions which are supposed to protect them but which inevitably cater first and foremost to white people. 
  When people think of racism, they often picture a white person yelling the “N” word at a person of colour, or shouting at someone to “go back to where they came from.” Indeed, these occurrences are prevalent. But its more pervasive, more insidious counterpart is institutionalised racism. This form of racism is implicitly committed by members of an institution, such as the government, the media, the education system or the criminal justice system. Institutionalised racism can appear in the form of passing over a person of colour for a job due to their “unusual” name, or selling foundation where the darkest shade is “medium.” Another example of this is police brutality, particularly against black and brown men. Feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak speaks of the concept of ‘White men protecting brown women from brown men’. Men of colour are so often depicted as dangerous and violent due to the history of Western cultures considering non-Western cultures to be “savage” – remember Pocahontas? 
  Racism, in the form of institutional discrimination and vilification, is alive and well. When I heard about the recent events in the United States, I felt deeply sad and helpless. But, there is something we can do about it. Institutions were, after all, created by humans. So, humans can destroy them, too. Sure, no one individual can single-handedly bring down white supremacy. But if we all do our little bit, we can begin on a journey towards a fairer, safer future for everyone. 
   
  Check your privilege
  Being asked to “check your privilege” is guaranteed to make you roll your eyes. But there is a reason why you are, and should be, asked this. Whiteness, in many respects, makes your life easier. 
  Of course, there are white people who are also poor, disabled, women who have been sexually harassed or queer* people who have experienced discrimination. White privilege doesn’t negate any of these other experiences. Middle-class, male, non-disabled and cishet privileges also exist. But in the fight to end racism, it is whiteness that we must focus on. In the specific case of police brutality, African-Americans are three times more likely than Anglo-Americans to be killed. This is due to the stereotyping of black men as “dangerous” and “uncivilised,” a stereotype to which white men don’t fall victim. If you are a white person, or even a white-passing or light-skinned person of colour, the risk of dying at the hands of the police is relatively low. Once you can see this, you will also be able to see just how far we really are from true equality. And only then will you be able to make a change.
  Another part of checking your privilege is working creatively with said privilege, and ideating ways to uphold people of colour. Unfortunately, people of colour are taken less seriously than white people when speaking about race. If you are white, people will undoubtedly listen to you. So, speak up! Try not to speak over people of colour, but in spaces where there aren’t any people of colour in the room you should take up the responsibility of advocating for the community. 
   
  Check your biases
  We are all biased. You might think, ‘I’m not racist’, but the truth is, you probably are. This is a hard pill to swallow –  no one likes to believe that they’re a bad person. But being racist doesn’t automatically make you bad, nor will your past racist attitudes necessarily define what you’ll believe in the future. You can change how you think about the world, so long as you put in the work.
  If you see a black man walking down the street, do you immediately swerve sideways? If you meet someone whose skin colour is different from yours, do you feel the need to ask them where they’re “from”? If your law lecturer is of Chinese heritage, do you automatically think to yourself, ‘Jee, their English is good!’? If so, that’s okay – I, despite being a person of colour, sometimes think these things too! What is important here is to be mindful of what you think, and why. If you think black men are dangerous, this might be because of the media you have consumed and the things you’ve heard certain politicians say that are untrue. Always be critical. We can all change. We can all do better by ourselves and by our community. 
   
  Listen
  When you hear a person of colour talk about their experience with racism your instinct might be to say, ‘But racism is over! You can vote! Slavery is over!’. This is understandable. There are certain experiences that people of colour have had which white people haven’t had. This can make it hard for white people to empathise with a person of colour’s life. But it isn’t impossible! 
  If you feel yourself becoming defensive after hearing a person of colour talk about racism, stop for a second. Listen to that voice in your head, the one that says, ‘They’re wrong and I’m right’. Read what they’ve written, or listen to what they’ve said, properly. Try and put yourself in their shoes and if you still don’t believe them, ask them to clarify. They might not respond to you – after all, people of colour aren’t responsible for educating others. But if they do respond, listen again without judgment. This is how empathy is built, and empathy is necessary to fight racism. 
  It’s worth mentioning here that at this point in time, the focus of discussion is on the black community. They are the people who are suffering the most right now. If you’re like me, a person of colour who isn’t black, you might feel the need to advocate for your own community. Again, stop and think for a little while. There’s no question that all people of colour have their unique challenges that come with living in a white supremacist world, and we will talk about these challenges eventually. But for now, in respect of the people who’ve recently lost their lives, try to keep the discussion to the black experience. 
   
  Educate yourself
  I believe that a significant contributor to racism is ignorance. “Ignorance” simply means, ‘A lack of knowledge’. A lack of knowledge is likely to come from a lack of education.
  You don’t need to take a sociology class to learn about society! In the digital age, there is knowledge everywhere and if you have access to the Internet, you can find it all. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch TV shows…whatever you fancy. One of my favourite books is Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. In this book, Eddo-Lodge discusses politics, history, feminism and more, all through the lens of anti-racism. While the focus is mostly on racism in the United Kingdom, what with Eddo-Lodge being a Brit herself, much of the content is applicable to much of the Western world. It’s important to note that Eddo-Lodge has requested via Twitter if you were to buy her book that you should match what you paid to donate to nonprofit organisation Minnesota Freedom Fund.
  Other great resources include Instagram account @nowhitesaviours and YouTube videos ‘why black people are angry and tired’ by Vee Kativu and ‘White Moderates, Cowards, John Boyega + Black Lives Matter’ by Claudia Boleyn, both British people of colour.
   
  For more resources, go here.
   
   

  Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.

  Phoebe Lupton

• All Tip and No Iceberg: Ceremonial Economics in Australia

  March 12, 2020 11:07 am Comments Off on All Tip and No Iceberg: Ceremonial Economics in Australia

  What is something ceremonial? Shiny objects like orbs, crowns and sceptres? Or grand and powerful characters such as the Governor-General, the Pope or the Queen? They are highly revered, and beautiful to look at. However, too close a step can offer a glimpse beyond the façade and reveal the idleness beneath the surface. The power of ceremony is that it can distort the true meaning of things with fancy rhetoric and hyperbole. The Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom, while beautiful and famous, is still an object. The Pope, while admired and worshipped, is still human. 
   
  Ceremony is also present in our politics and economics. Over the past 40 years, countless governments and oppositions have coated simple phenomena and concepts in spin and hyperbole to distort their meanings for personal benefit. They have created ceremonial economics in order to sell political narratives to voters for political gain. 
   
  Today, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s surplus is the best example of ceremonial economics. If, as the Liberal government has promised since they were  elected in 2013, there is a return to surplus this year, it will not mean what the government wants us to believe it means. Morrison will spin it as a return to the predictable and prosperous fiscal discipline of the ‘Howard years’, and as an indication of a healthy and rot-free economy. It will be presented as a sign of economic and political success that belies its actual significance and implications. A budget surplus now has a conferred ceremonial power which alters its true meaning. 
   
  The creation of ceremonial economics has had alarming effects on our politics and public discourse. As the state of the economy and fiscal management are key concerns of Australian voters, real political outcomes are decided on the basis of distorted meanings and ceremony, while meaningful substance is neglected. 
   
  Since Morrison came to power in 2018, he and his treasurer have emphasised the government’s determination to return the federal budget to surplus in the 2020 to 2021 financial year. In the 2019 federal budget, the centrepiece of Josh Frydenberg’s speech was restoring ‘fiscal discipline’, announcing that Australia’s gross national debt had steadily decreased, and that there would be an $11 billion surplus in the coming year.
   
  Federal budgets, while officially a statement to the public about the state of the national accounts, are always political. The return to surplus was qualified with the assertion that ‘only one side of politics can do this’, with a casual reference to former Prime Minister John Howard and former Treasurer Peter Costello’s paying off Labor’s ‘debt’. Neither in the speech, nor in the election material that followed, was there any exploration of what paying off Labor’s debt would mean for voters. Instead, the Coalition used the misleading ‘surplus’ to convince voters that it had saved the Australian economy. And it worked. They won the ‘unwinnable’ election, and proved that in elections, economic management is always supreme. 
   
  Despite this victory, and the surplus we will no doubt see within in the next three years, the Australian economy continues to sputter, one painful limp at a time. In October of last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that the economy had grown just 1.7 per cent in 2019, and would only grow by 2.3 per cent in 2020. This was before the catastrophic bushfires that have devastated much of NSW and Victoria. This makes 2019 the worst year for the Australian economy since the Global Financial Crisis 11 years ago. Given that a healthy growth rate is considered to be between two per cent and four per cent, there is considerable cause for concern. 
   
  The government has reassured people that despite ‘economic headwinds’ the ‘fundamentals’ of the economy are strong. What these fundamentals are, if wages are stagnant, trade tensions are rising, and interest rates are dangerously low, is unclear. A budget surplus in the near future will not solve these problems. At a time when the Governor of the Reserve Bank has pleaded with the government to spend to stimulate the economy and prevent recession, a manufactured surplus might be the last thing we need. In fact, it will be window dressing, the much anticipated delivery of a political promise made in 2013. The Coalition will use it as evidence of their prudent economic management and remind the electorate of how long it took to clean up ‘Labor’s mess’. This is despite the threats that Australia faces and the deep structural imbalance of our economy. 
   
  The $11 billion question is why, at a time of great economic uncertainty, is this surplus, the result of inaction and political points-scoring, so celebrated? Why isn’t it seen for what it is? Why is it all tip and no iceberg?
   
  The answer is, ceremony. For decades both sides of politics have painted one another as incompetent economic managers, and pronounced themselves as the only party that can be trusted with the economy. This has led to 40 years of spin and ritual. Simple economic phenomena have been dressed up so much that their significance has become distorted and their meaning malleable, if not broken altogether. Through endless attacks, rhetoric, and tricks, a lack of fiscal discipline has become deadly in Australian politics. Politicians have conferred a type of nominal power on economics, resulting in its purely ceremonial meaning. 
   
  In 1975, former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and his government, the first Labor administration in over 20 years, werewas removed from office in a crushing electoral defeat after just three years. Despite their sweeping social reforms, the Whitlam government was plagued by chaos and economic mismanagement. The Coalition argued that Labor had failed to control inflation, led the country into an oil crisis, and induced a recession. This, compounded with the many scandals of the Whitlam administration, was enough to remove Labor from office. The failures of the Whitlam government became the foundation of a narrative that economic mismanagement is always linked to internal chaos and instability. 
   
  In 1983, the newly-elected Hawke government turned the tables on the Coalition by publicly revealing that the deficit left by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was $3 billion larger than what was stated during the campaign. This deficit of $9.6 billion (around $31 billion in today’s dollars) meant that the incoming government would have to cut most of its spending plans for its first term. The blame was used to paint the outgoing government as fiscally incompetent, unbalanced, and untrustworthy. This cycle was repeated in 1996 when John Howard inherited a $14 billion deficit (roughly $24 billion in today’s dollars), which was significantly larger than expected. Howard also came into office with the national debt approaching 20% of GDP, the highest level since Whitlam. 
   
  In both these cases, highly unpopular governments were swept from power in dramatic fashion. Fraser in 1983 and former Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1996 were both vehemently disliked, and avoided answering questions about the deficit and the net debt accumulated during their time in office. In both cases, fiscal mismanagement was linked to untrustworthy, unpopular, and chaotic administrations. 
   
  Conversely, Howard was able to marry economic prosperity, rising wages, and low inflation to surplus after surplus. After the 1997 to 1998 budget, all but one of Peter Costello’s next nine budgets were in surplus. Howard and Costello won four successive terms and governed for over 11 years. In the minds of the electorate, stability and general wellbeing went hand-in-hand with a balanced budget.
   
  A crucial element of Labor’s successful campaign in 2007 was painting themselves as ‘economic conservatives’ who would not spend big as Whitlam and Keating did, but would follow Howard’s prudent fiscal management. However, Labor was forced to erase Australia’s budget surplus, and spend to avoid a potential recession brought on by the Global Financial Crisis. Despite the fact that Rudd’s policies likely prevented a recession, the opposition used this to convince the public that Labor could not manage the economy. This was not helped by the instability that plagued Labor from 2010 onwards: a minority government, a midnight coup, and spill after spill followed by deficit after deficit. Once again, economic mismanagement followed chaos and instability. 
   
  Whitlam proved that governments live and die on their management of the economy. Hawke tied together unpopularity, failure, and untrustworthiness with a massive budget deficit. Howard married political stability and economic prosperity with unbroken rivers of gold flowing from the treasury. As the Rudd/Gillard government ate itself alive, the public again saw headline after headline about a rotten budget and a sky-rocketing national debt. Gradually, the meanings of economic terms hadwere been eroded, and all that remained was their raw political value. Because a surplus must be good and a deficit must be bad, their significance is lost. Instead, the budget is smothered in ceremony as complex economics are reduced to ritual talking points on breakfast television programs Sunrise and Today. Both sides of politics have used the state of the federal budget to attack each other and promote themselves, to the point where a surplus has become the jewel in the crown of competent economic management. Like a crown, when removed from ceremony, it becomes irrelevant.
   
  The problem is that the state of the budget is so much more than just a shiny object. The finer, but more important, implications of budgets and economic phenomena are so often lost in political noise. 
   
  As the last four decades have made the national accounts purely ceremonial, the government is chasing a budget surplus to try and once again marry a balanced budget with prudent economic management. However, a political, at-all-costs surplus is the last thing the Australian economy needs. All signs point to a global slowdown and stagnant growth in the very near future. A recession is more than possible. Interest rates are at historic lows, and monetary policy has run out of room. If the government continues to chase a surplus it will be unable to stimulate the economy, resulting in a recession for the first time in 25 years, rising unemployment, falling revenues, and years of recovery. It would be a surplus that Australia could not afford.

  Elliott Merchant

• A Story About Cricket and Climate Change

  10:46 am Comments Off on A Story About Cricket and Climate Change

  A few years ago, a number of Australian academics wanted to focus their expertise in media and communications studies on the issue of climate change and sports media. In an article for The Conversation, they stated their goal was “to try to move beyond needlessly partisan political debate by investigating the capacity of professional sport – arguably the most popular form of media on the planet – to communicate environmental issues and awareness.”
  They were encouraged by many high-profile examples elsewhere such as the Olympics, and the simple fact that Australia is a sporting nation. Understandably, they saw great potential in using the huge platform that is our sports media as a way to help Australia in the face of serious ecological challenges.
  It’s a simple idea, tapping into what’s popular to promote a message, but doing so can be highly effective. As such, it might not surprise you to learn that when these academics applied for government support through the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant process, their project was approved. Titled Greening Media Sport: The Communication of Environmental Issues and Sustainability in Professional Sport, their project was given $259,720 to cover the costs of research staff, and a green light to proceed.
  For most researchers, winning an ARC grant is a big deal. For one, the process is gruelling and highly competitive, so it represents an achievement in its own right. Winning a grant also reflects well on a university, and by extension, its employees, so it can be a career booster too. As many academics will attest, however, it is often things beyond the prestige that matter most. Financial support is the lifeblood of research, and often the only way to pursue topics of interest and importance. With this project, the necessity and urgency of their work is difficult to understate. Unfortunately, though, not everyone saw it that way.
  Having gone through the arduous approval process, won a grant, and now being on the cusp of beginning some sorely needed work, these academics eventually discovered that their project had been personally rejected by then Education Minister Simon Birmingham. It was among ten others that he had disapproved. Notably, these rejections were all focused on just one of the eight panels he oversaw: Humanities and Creative Arts. If new criteria were being attached to funding these projects, it was not communicated to applicants. Indeed, the entire process was opaque, and it took almost a year for applicants to even realise that they’d ultimately been rejected – a year many people spent wasting efforts on a doomed project.
  In their public quest for answers from the Education Minister, it’s clear to see that these researchers care more about helping with climate change than they do about this project’s cancellation acting as speed bumps in their personal career trajectories. It’s equally clear to see that they are deeply concerned about the lack of transparency in this process. Birmingham’s decisions were made according to some unknown criteria, and his successor, Dan Tehan, declared that future projects would need to pass some kind of ‘national interest’ test.
  This is standard right-wing theatre, folks: needlessly invoke nationalism, while simultaneously fanning the flames of culture war between ‘everyday’ Aussies on the ground and the detached intellectual elites up in their ivory towers. You can see it permeating Tehan’s idea about ‘national interest’ and the way he spoke about the rejections:
   “The value of specific projects may be obvious to the academics who recommend which projects should receive funding but it is not always obvious to a non-academic.”
  In other words, Tehan doesn’t think that these projects pass the ‘pub test’. It’s not really about the national interest though; it’s about ivory tower elites not ‘getting it’. Usually, in these narratives, the worst offenders are the same ones who were targeted here: academics in the arts and humanities. Despite its irrelevance, they’re invoking nationalism because that particular posture plays well with their political base, especially when they’re trying to play ‘ordinary Aussies’  against academics.
  In reality, ARC applicant rates have sunk to historic lows of around 10 per cent. The process is becoming increasingly competitive. It’s difficult to see how a grant makes it through without somehow serving the national interest already. Looking at our sports media article, it seems to tick many boxes: national interest, industry partnerships, and sport.
  Yet, here’s Simon Birmingham on Twitter defending his decisions: “I‘m pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like ‘Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar’.”
  Again, the narrative that they’re trying to push here, as with Tehan, is that the research canned was esoteric academic bullshit that most people wouldn’t value, and they, as ordinary Aussies, can see past all of that. But of course, he reached for one of the more esoteric projects of the 11 that he canned. He cherry-picked, in other words. Remember, too, that this intervention was only in the arts and humanities discipline, the same area often attacked by right-wing critics as being out of touch with reality. Birmingham’s tweet with its selectively used data is a clumsily crafted lie, but to many casual or fleeting observers it is one that is convincing enough on the surface and that plays easily into well-established and well-accepted ‘us versus them’ narratives.
  Imagine trying to write the same tweet, except this time it’s about having the odd climate change advertisement run between overs of a cricket game. It’s not a ridiculous concept, nor is it hard to understand. Worst of all, if it were done in the right way, it might even be accepted by their political base! Likely for these reasons, Birmingham never referred to this project, and it may be some time now before we ever see anything like it.
  To me, that’s a great tragedy, and a missed opportunity of potentially gigantic proportions. Despite things like this happening all the time, it’s hard for us to notice these missed opportunities. By their very nature they are invisible. We can’t see the things that never happened. They only exist in hypotheticals now. But one key motivation in writing this was to lament what could have been. 

  Nick Blood