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2001: The Year that Was

Andrew Jakubowicz looks back at the year 2001, and asks: was it a good one for media and diversity?

Andrew Jakubowicz looks back at the year 2001, and asks: was it a good one for media and diversity?

In 2001, the Easybeats’ Friday on My Mind was voted the best Australian song from between 1926-2001 by the Australian Performing Rights Association.

Now I'm working for the rich man
But I'll change his tune one day.

The same year, George Bush, or The Man, took office just as John Howard’s electoral standing went as low as… Meanwhile President Wahid was impeached in Indonesia, the Euro took on its now-stumbling role as the common currency of Europe, the royal family of Nepal was massacred, and China entered the World Trade Organisation. That’s without children overboard, the Tampa affair, 9/11, the anthrax attacks or the war in Afghanistan. And before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or Web 2.0.

One of the major differences of life in 2001, compared to today, was that we lived in a world BSM.

Before social media there was the internet, there was email, there were even search engines. But the populace, the punters, were relatively passive recipients of the one-way flow of information, comment and opinion. The blogosphere wasn’t there to test the validity of claims made by governments that were uncritically replicated by media practitioners.

The year 2001 provides great examples of moral panics, how to build them and how the media gets sucked into playing along, or indeed how they become part of the fuel pack for the conflagration.

One way of figuring out whether or not the media served its role as the fourth estate that year - defending truth and democracy, and promoting critical self-awareness - is to pick the trifecta that bowled through Australia in early spring and dragged Howard from far behind into an unassailable winning position in the November election.

First, a bit of context. In 1998, the Howard Government commissioned research into Australian racism. This was during the height of Pauline Hanson’s influence, and amidst the national hysteria around Asian immigration.

One of the findings was a widespread desire for “community harmony”, anger at those who didn’t or wouldn’t “fit in”, and a fierce attachment to “commitment to Australia” as a core value. “Diversity” and “tolerance” didn’t rate, while nearly 60 per cent of Australians were described as strongly or moderately racist in their views.

While the report was suppressed (but finally released under Freedom of Information in October 2011), the information was available to the government and its strategists.

How to secure the support of all these racists, too many of whom had deserted the Coalition in the early months of 2001? Three key ideas sprouted in that spring and found a fertile soil, nourished by the humus generated by the media’s search for heat rather than light.

Idea 1: Australia is Not Australia

August 2001 - The Tampa provided two key opportunities to change our ideas about ourselves. While the Tampa was only brought in to rescue the 438 otherwise doomed passengers on the Palapa 1 after the Government couldn’t get the Indonesians to accept the boat (“turn back the boats” indeed), the moment was monumentally opportune.

With the “rescue” and the turn-back of the ship from Christmas Island, the Government moved to excise Christmas Island from Australia’s migration zone. This piece of geo-political necromancy embedded a new concept – that there were two Australias: one where people had rights, and one where they didn’t. That cleavage allowed another division to become embedded, unquestioningly conveyed by the media: people who had the full range of human rights and people who didn’t, and shouldn’t.

Idea 2: War on Terror

September 2001 - The Twin Towers/Pentagon attacks in the USA became the media event of the year, and also the decade. Everyone from Al Jazeera to the Peoples’ Daily rated it the top story of the year.

The idea it created was something else: there was to be a War on Terror, a Crusade led by The Man. In a blink, a world at peace became a world at war. The slowly dissolving euphoria that had greeted the end of the Cold War was now submerged in a sea of roiling hatreds and passions.

Idea 3: Children Overboard

October 2001 - Who could be more of a challenge to the core values of Australia than people who would use their children to blackmail honest Australians into letting them arrive “illegally”? It soon became clear that the images depicting asylum seekers throwing their children overboard were incorrectly framed and the explanations by the Government were concocted to fit the concerns it was already raising about Australia’s vulnerability.

The children overboard story has been pored over for years. The narrative ran first in the Murdoch press (surprise surprise), where it was wrapped in rhetoric worthy of a major seaborne invasion.

So 2001 was a good year for moral panics, and the creation of some key ideas that we cannot shake out of our heads. Did the media create them? Grab hold of them and puff them up? Or just report the reality?

Andrew Jakubowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and Co-director of the UTS Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Key Research Strength (Research Centre). He is a chair of the NGO Institute for Cultural Diversity. He has published widely in the fields of cultural diversity, social policy, refugees, Jewish cultural studies, media sociology, and new media. The website that he co-ordinates Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century is designed for teachers and students interested in cross-curriculum diversity perspectives, and is produced in conjunction with state education and arts bodies around Australia.

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2011: The Year that Is

Andrew Jakubowicz inquires into why the media is not inquiring into diversity.

Andrew Jakubowicz inquires into why the media is not inquiring into diversity.

Australian racism and its regurgitation through the media, unfortunately, is failing to register on the radar of the Government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Instead, we’re hearing two things: that the Fourth Estate has gone feral (viz Murdoch’s hoons hunting for vulnerabilities wherever they can sniff them out), or that the Fourth Estate is nobly speaking truth to power and nothing should be changed (Murdoch’s champions defending their stalwart Australian independence and advancing the cause of freedom of the press).

Both are true, of course, or contain ribbons of truth, running like muscle fibres through the fat of self-promotion. The Australian media have proliferated extraordinarily over the past decade – or rather the media that Australians use have grown dramatically.

Where a decade ago we were primarily connected through newspapers, radio, four free-to-air TV channels, a small Foxtel network and internet web 1.0 (websites and newsletters), we are now in a dramatically more irradiated and interactive world.

The advent of web 2.0, with its opening up of user-generated content, has transformed the way in which information is collected, collated, processed and retransmitted. We are now each of us part of huge networks of association about which we are barely conscious. With 10 per cent of the world on Facebook and everyone no more than an average 4.7 degrees of separation apart, you may be closer to your most feared Other than you would ever guess.

But some things haven’t changed. Australians still have problems with cultural diversity. We are less interested than we were 10 years ago in learning languages other than our own family’s. Our antipathy to Muslims has grown and our confusion over the moral order and the future of the universe has deepened. We are fed up with wars that seem to go on forever, climates that keep getting more unpredictable, governments and oppositions that seem to have thrown their moral compasses overboard, and money that dissolves into tissue paper.

Our wealth is washing away as our mortgages increase. Our debt is rising, but so are our savings. Our cities are more polluted, more congested, more wearisome. Nothing seems to be solid – everything melts into air. Gold, US dollars, the Euro – none of it seems bankable. Parents know that their children’s futures are far less secure than they once might have been.

Why isn’t Australian racism and its regurgitation through the media a major issue for the Finkelstein inquiry? Why did the Australian government, when signing on to the European cyber-crime convention a couple of months ago, make the conscious decision to NOT sign on to the anti-racism addendum, leaving cyber-racism to rush unchallenged through the homes and schools of Australia? And why did it take me 13 years to get the Immigration Department to release (under Freedom of Information) its 1998 study of racism and Australian attitudes?

I’d say both questions elicit the same answer – one that Andrew Bolt, recently found to have racially vilified a group of Australian Indigenous leaders in his Herald Sun column and online, was able to pin down in 2001.

While he wrote in a caustic and dismissive style, Bolt’s insight allowed him to frame it rather too well: “…a land of heartless racists … we need a Republic because we’re ashamed of our racist past … Howard won the election because he’s a racist who got millions of racists to vote for him. Nasty country. Nasty voters.”

Bolt, of course, didn’t mean what he said, but he may have said what he secretly, unwillingly, realised.

We now do live in a world of instantaneous multi-directional communication. Most young Australians have Facebook pages, nearly all have SMS and web-capable smart phones. Fewer people under 30 read the press or watch “hard” news on ABC, SBS or the commercial networks, than get their “reality” fix from Biggest Loser or Master Chef.

According to Nielsen, young Australians spend longer on social media and the internet each month on average than young people anywhere else on earth; their cells are saturated from their immersion in the information/cyberbabble breaks on which they surf.

Some people in the mass media recognise that there is really no such thing as free speech – rather there’s a series of barriers and hoops through which people must stumble in order to be heard. Some ideas, values and voices get through fairly easily (mainly wealthy white males). Some voices rarely if ever are heard (poor immigrant or refugee women of colour).

In the new world of social media there are almost no barriers to entry – you can say anything. However, there may be an audience of only two: you and your shadow.

While the old media parry and thrust to protect their privilege, the new media have become a dangerous borderland. As the Finkelstein inquiry grinds on, some things and people will not be front of mind. Poor old Andrew Bolt, you were right, Australia today is not a pretty place.

Andrew Jakubowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and Co-director of the UTS Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Key Research Strength (Research Centre). He is a chair of the NGO Institute for Cultural Diversity. He has published widely in the fields of cultural diversity, social policy, refugees, Jewish cultural studies, media sociology, and new media. The website that he co-ordinates Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century is designed for teachers and students interested in cross-curriculum diversity perspectives, and is produced in conjunction with state education and arts bodies around Australia.

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2021: The Year that Will Be

Andrew Jakubowicz takes a stab at what the media and diversity landscape will look like in 2021.

Andrew Jakubowicz takes a stab at what the media and diversity landscape will look like in 2021.

It is now almost 10 years since the first minority government of the decade’s Convergence Inquiry reported its findings. The report recognised that with the National Broadband Network fibre-optic system likely to be overwhelmed and renewed with new technologies within a decade, the local access nodes established under Culture Minister Simon Crean’s national cultural policy little more than burnt-out stumps, and privatisation of the internet creating a new ‘Digital Divide’, there would be a vast infrastructure full of masses of low quality mind pap.

For the Creative Nation dreamed of by a previous ambitious generation in the 1990s, the internet had yet to produce a huge quantum of ”value add”.

One of the key tensions that had become obvious during the 2010s could be seen in the three-way tug between government, corporate and community media. The unified National Broad and Online Caster OzPop (formed out of the ABC, SBS and a number of community broadcasters after the agglomeration of corporate ownership in 2015) saw the new OzTenSky win Australia’s global satellite contract. Moreover with its access to the vaults of Fox Cinema and the Alan Jones “morgue” of popular opinions, OzTenSky has come to dominate the small remaining free-to-air business, as well as holding a big chunk of the holocable. Its national interactive holographic service serves up instantaneous holograms on the super broad band; they now captivate us as we sit on the football/netball/soccer/AFL/NRL field and the players swoop around us.

What does it mean to be a national broadcaster when the nation’s boundaries have been permeated by global infosystems, the nation state has been fragmenting into its composite regions or global diasporas after a decade of weak and compromised national rule, and audience dispersal/prosumer growth means the old one-to-many model no longer holds true almost anywhere?

In a recent speech, the cross-bench Minister for Human Rights and Digital Equity Haji Graham “Freckles” Ibn Mahmoud pointed to the challenges for older Australians of the new post-NBN world. “Just as they had worked out how to plug their LCD panels into the NBN hub, a service provided to all pensioners by their caring government, they are having to grasp the intricacies of framing their Holoskype signatures to allow them to access their local libraries. For people who don’t have English as a first language, or Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi or Korean, the provision of Government information needs to be fine-tuned for their cultural and linguistic preferences”, he said.

“We are also trying to ensure that the default position for holographic communication does not mean people with dark skin disappear into the ether. With voting and referendum choices, interaction with local members of parliament, information accessing at the local Council and so many more of the e-government preferences now programmed into the unique citizen chip (UCC) embedded in people’s fore-arms, missing the chip can mean social exclusion, marginalisation and even cessation of private-public provided services such as education, transport, health and recreation.”

The global FruitMedia, the conglomerate successor to News Corporation, Apple Computers and Orange Communication, now offers over 1000 different news channels, in over 200 languages, instantaneously translated from whatever the original language of production. Its iGloTrans chip now permits anyone anywhere to speak to anyone anywhere, projecting a mini-hologram of the speakers in the language of the listener. It is as though we have been flung back into the golden age of the Silent Era in Hollywood on Cinecitta or Berlin, where actors voiced unheard words in their own languages, which then became “sound” through the subtitle insert screens. Now they say what they will and we hear what we can.

With the print newspaper now effectively gone, the last hard-copy edition of the Sydney Morning Herald had been produced in 2017 for that year’s double dissolution Federal election, tablet-based multimedia communication units now carry instantaneous news updates tailored to individual pro-sumer profiles.

For the poor and unemployed, (the latter now over nine per cent of the urban population) Ibn Mahmoud’s reference to the Digital Divide comes especially close to home. While basic communits and core access costs are provided as part of monthly welfare parcels sourced on the basis of weekly Lotto numbers through CoolLink (the Coles Woolworths CentreLink coalescence that took over the non-cash provision of social support), nutritious food and access to high value online content are not commonly available to them. So loss of job or income, social exclusion, or mandated ostracism from their religious group can and is diabolically destructive.

Without access to the services, information and the means of communication (not the short range monitored Government hand-out communits) that comes to free and funded citizens, marginalised individuals gravitate towards the information underground for the very scared unregistered people, the unlawful and unobserved. There they buy short-burn under cards on the black market, and use them to trick autovenders into admitting them for a session into the local libraries, where they can plug away in the galleries of Googlebooks. Under the freeways they can also be found rummaging through skips full of pages from hard copy books, spines shredded and dumped there by universities cleansing their information vaults of paper texts.

But the Convergence and Finkelstein inquiries would be far more optimistic, no?

Andrew Jakubowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and Co-director of the UTS Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Key Research Strength (Research Centre). He is a chair of the NGO Institute for Cultural Diversity. He has published widely in the fields of cultural diversity, social policy, refugees, Jewish cultural studies, media sociology, and new media. The website that he co-ordinates Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century is designed for teachers and students interested in cross-curriculum diversity perspectives, and is produced in conjunction with state education and arts bodies around Australia.

About the SBS CQ Forum

In the context of heated national debates about asylum seekers and immigration, as well as the (predominantly polarising) commentary that followed the announcement of this year's federal multiculturalism policy, it is timely to host a discussion on the media’s role in these debates and in reflecting Australian diversity.

SBS CQ seeks to feed into this space with intelligent debate, new perspectives on our media environment. In this forum media practitioners, academics, politicians, community advocates and commentators reflect on how media shape and represent our views and values.

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