MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

As Child Protection Week begins, there are calls for the removal of NSW Family and Community Services minister Pru Goward for misleading parliament on her department’s chronic incapacity to protect children who are at risk of abuse. 

Awareness of the pressing need to protect children is at an all time high, partly due to the torrent of revelations of church sexual abuse and the setting up of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. We know that neglect and abuse within families is also rampant, and arguably much more difficult to act upon. The recent harrowing account of a day in the life of a DoCS caseworker  published in the Fairfax papers suggests the problem is out of control.

But maximising child protection measures is only one step towards providing for young people’s emotional and physical well being. In itself, child protection is like giving vulnerable young people a security guard. They’re less likely to be abused, but they’re also unlikely to be empowered to grow as self-reliant human beings. For that, we need to honour them with constant respect and, most importantly, teach people how to do this when they become parents.

Respect is something parents do when they pay attention to their children in a loving rather than controlling manner. They enter into their child’s world and listen to their perspective as seriously as they do that of their adult friends. If something has to be dismissed as improbable, it’s the idea and not the child that must be cast aside. Affirmation is often a particular challenge for parents who were themselves brought up in an abusive home environment where the rule of the stick prevailed.

In schools, it achieves little to control bullying by putting a protective wall around children who are vulnerable. Instead modern personal development programs are teaching them how to offer and command respect, from both adults and their contemporaries. This includes lessons about power and control, how to identify when power is being misused, and what they can do about it. For those who are not themselves involved in the bullying, there is the distinction between the passive bystander and the active bystander.

This week we celebrate one of the greatest milestones in the advancement of civil rights in the USA, Martin Luther King’s August 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech. It is remembered for its arresting rhetoric, and also its vision for a future in which his children would ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’.

The context was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at a time when opportunity was routinely denied to African Americans. The dream was that the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ guaranteed to all Americans in the country’s founding documents might indeed apply to all Americans regardless of skin colour. In a hopeful sign that dreams are rooted in reality, African Africans were progressively given opportunity and America now has its first black president.

King’s words have implications for the human rights of people all over the world, in particular those who are guaranteed rights by a particular convention or declaration but denied them by the political masters of the day. In Australia in 2013, it is relevant to the rights guaranteed to asylum seekers by the 1951 Refugee Convention but denied by political leaders of the two major parties.

If King arrived by boat seeking asylum in Australia today, his vision might be for a future in which his children would not be judged by how they got here but by the content of their character. He would be faced with the denial of opportunity to work and live freely by the harsh rules that apply to asylum seekers, especially with the likely revival of temporary protection visas.

In America 50 years ago, many whites associated African Americans with crime and delinquency, and consequently the content of the character was assumed to be poor. In cases where the character of African Americans was poor, it was invariably a result of their having been denied opportunity. Without jobs and freedom, human beings tend to drift towards lives that are held back by petty crime and drug addiction.

Asylum seekers dream of life in another country in which they can enjoy the rights that belong to them as human beings. Such dreams are in fact rooted in reality, as we know from the practice of previous decades when asylum seekers arriving by boat from Indo China were judged not by how they got here but by the content of their character. Several decades on, the good character of the arrivals has produced better opportunity for all Australians, with a stronger economy and population diversity.

We can go on acting as if the moral rectitude of our public institutions is intact when they have outrageously let us down. This week sport was once again in the spotlight, with esteemed Australian cyclist Stuart O'Grady admitting he was a former drug cheat.

O'Grady told the Adelaide Advertiser that he took a performance enhancing drug during the two weeks before the 1998 Tour de France. Within hours of his confession, the Australian Olympic Committee instructed him to resign from its Athletes' Commission. It said O'Grady would no longer be remembered as a 'fantastic competitor' but as an 'athlete who succumbed to the temptation of drugs in sport just to get an edge on some of his fellow riders'.

We routinely excuse young people who make poor choices for what appear good reasons. O'Grady said in theAdvertiser interview that as a 24-year-old in 1998, he felt he had to use the drugs to be competitive in the Tour de France during what he described as the sport's 'dirtiest era'.

Arguably this is consistent with the 'winning at all costs' personal ethic that he articulates in the biodata section of his Twitter feed: 'I do everything 100 per cent, otherwise it's not worth doing'. According to his thinking at the time, everything counted as preparation, and saying no to performance enhancing drugs would have put him below the 100 per cent standard he'd set himself. 

This 'whatever it takes' approach to the ethics of sport eschews the traditional personal integrity argument that it's taking part that counts, not winning. It calls to mind the legendary 'whatever it takes' approach to politics of former Labor numbers man turned commentator Graham Richardson. This still guides Richardson's thinking, and indeed it led him to heartily endorse Labor's PNG boat arrival solution in The Australian on Friday, when he described it as 'cruel, heartless, risky and politically brilliant'. 

I spent my whole childhood dreaming of racing for Australia and every moral gene in my body was anti-doping and anti-cheating ... Then all of a sudden I was on my own in Europe getting my arse kicked and knowing it was around you (which) opened the option for bad judgement.

The decision to tighten fringe benefits tax (FBT) rules is causing grief for the Government, with struggling car manufacturers and more than 320,000 affected voters crying foul. To fund the bringing forward of the switch to an emissions trading scheme, those with salary packaged motor vehicles will need to log and declare the proportion of their driving that is for business. 

Contrary to the spirit of the tax system, many FBT claimants use their cars for mainly private purposes. The existing formula-based calculation gives them a significant financial advantage that amounts to a legal tax rort. They will lose under the new rules. On the other hand, those who use their cars almost exclusively for business will come out ahead. That is how it should be.

Currently Australians on high and middle incomes benefit from the fortuitous nature of the existing rules. Some relatively lower paid workers rely on the loophole to balance their family budgets. Smaller businesses could suffer under the change, with the logging requirement likely to prove a costly burden. But essentially the existing system is stacked against those who are struggling. The poor are subsidising an unintended tax concession for the better off, as they do with debatable but intended tax concessions such as superannuation incentives and the negative gearing of investment losses.

Much media attention has been given to the plight of workers in the salary packaging and car manufacturing industries, some of whom are already losing their jobs as the sectors are reported to be hit hard by the announcement of the new rules. It seems churlish to think of the prosperity these industries have enjoyed due the FBT legal loophole as 'ill gotten'. But there is an argument for that if we consider the spirit rather than the letter of the tax law. Perhaps it would be fairer to put it that they have operated under a business model that is based on profiting from a loophole that they should have anticipated might one day be closed, and that day has come.

The industries resented not being consulted about the change. But as treasurer Chris Bowen said very succinctly when he shrugged off the criticism: 'This is a matter of the integrity of the tax system.' A tax system that makes compromises with sectional interests is by definition corrupt and turning its back on the common good that it has been set up to serve.

In the midst of widespread disillusionment with Australian politics, there is suddenly hope for improvement. Contest is a vital ingredient of democracy, and the ALP's recent change of leadership has suddenly made the party competitive during this year's federal election campaign. 

In a further surprise, the contest is likely to be enriched by a standard of truthfulness that we have not seen in many years. This is the promise of new fact-checking websites, including The Conversation's Election Fact-Check, former Fairfax editor Peter Fray's PolitiFact, The Australia Institute's Facts Fight Back, and the fact checking reports to be presented by journalist John Barron on ABC news and current affairs programs. 

But while the fact checkers will promote a new element of rigour in the campaign, the quality of debate will remain compromised by a lack of scrutiny on what determines the political agenda, which is the necessarily limited range of topics that are debated. It is one thing to be able to trust facts that we are presented with, but another to know that they are relevant to our wellbeing as a nation. 

It is pleasing that PolitiFact is able to demonstrate that foreign minister Bob Carr's claim that boat people 'are not people fleeing persecution ... they are coming here as economic migrants' is 'mostly false'. But even if Carr's claim was mostly true, how does discussion of the comparatively small number of economic migrants justify its place on the agenda, compared with issues such as the mental health of Australia's youth? 

Which of these two issues has more bearing on our future wellbeing? While mental health has largely fallen off the agenda, others — such as inheritance taxes — are kept off the agenda. It has to be asked whether this is by design, and whose design it is.

We would set ourselves up for a better future if we allowed academic researchers to become more influential, as they are able to challenge old assumptions and set out blueprints for new possibilities. Popular media, on the other hand, too often hold us back.

We only need to compare the list of articles in The Conversation — set up to communicate university research findings — with the rundown of Ray Hadley's morning show on radio 2GB. Hadley's agenda is no doubt informed by the 'common touch', which in itself is a positive. But it is not equipped to map the nation's future in the way the academic research is.

One of Kevin Rudd's key points of difference with Julia Gillard lies in his determination to project a business-friendly image for himself and the ALP, which may have something to do with his decision to dump former parliamentary secretary Andrew Leigh from the front bench. Although Leigh was a Gillard backer, he is a former ANU economist who is regarded as Australia's leading inequality expert and unsympathetic to the demands of big business on government.

Coincidentally he has just published a book targeting income inequality, Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia. In media interviews during the week, he pointed out that since the 1970s, 'we've seen the top 1 per cent double, we've seen about $400 billion shifted from the bottom 99 per cent to the top 1 per cent. CEO salaries have gone from an average of $1 million to $3 million in the top hundred firms, and we've seen stratospheric increase in consumption in the things the super-rich enjoy, like waterfront homes, Porches, Maseratis, even cocaine.'

When John Howard introduced WorkChoices in 2005, he argued that a prosperous business sector would produce more jobs and benefits for ordinary Australians. Leigh says that while inequality does boost economic growth and the nation's GDP, the increased wealth does not trickle down to those at the bottom to any significant extent. His view is that inequality is socially divisive and demands serious policy attention. 

Increasingly it is recognised as a public health issue, and that it demands a political response. Epidemiologist Robert Douglas ponders the political implications of our comparatively high levels of mental disorder, suicide, lack of trust, mortality, communal violence and teenage pregnancy. 'Could the preoccupation of the Coalition with deregulation of labour markets and market solutions make matters worse? And could the Australian Labor Party, with its traditional concern for equity and redistribution, make things better?'

Other epidemiologists have contributed to the debate, most notably Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their controversial 2009 popular academic work The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, which was based on a study of the top and bottom 20 per cent of income earners in 21 rich developed market economies. They found that 'bigger income differences lead to bigger social distances up and down the status hierarchy, increasing feelings of superiority and inferiority and adding to status competition and insecurity. Some of the causal links are known: the effects of chronic stress on the immune and cardiovascular system.'

While Leigh has some doubts about such arguments, he is certain 'we need a government that has means-tested social security, that invests disproportionately in improving the education of the most disadvantaged, and which rigorously tests social programs ... using randomised trials, rather than just say-so and ideology'.

Possibly inconvenient advice for a business-friendly prime minister.

When he was first prime minister, Kevin Rudd lost the support of the people when he put off legislation for a carbon emissions trading scheme. He'd shirked what he had identified as the 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. Facing that challenge was part of the mandate given to him by electors, who had also embraced Rudd's wider moral project, which included the apology to the Stolen Generations, the wind back of inhumane asylum seeker policies and the repeal of WorkChoices.

As we know, he was spooked by the Coalition's sudden populist change in direction on climate change, and lost his nerve. But three years later, he's back. Moral purpose has once again become part of the agenda, at least in the sense that he said in his statement on Thursday that he is 'resuming' with 'humility and honour' the task given to him by the Australian people in 2007. 

Commentary in the past week from Rudd supporter Maxine McKew suggests as much. She argues that, with regard to charting the course for the nation's future prosperity, Australians could well be ready for Rudd's 'moral dimension', and the burden-sharing and self-sacrifice that involves. 'The recent ready acceptance of a mandated levy to pay for the country's National Disability Insurance program suggests Australians are perfectly capable of signing on to sensible proposals that are seen to benefit the wider community.'

That is certainly consistent with the moral goodwill that was in evidence when the Australian people elected the Rudd Government in 2007. But it also belies the wisdom accepted by many political leaders that they must demonstrate a harsh attitude to asylum seekers or face an electoral rout in Western Sydney and elsewhere. 

This is reflected in an early clear signal of Rudd's new policy intentions. He told colleagues during the week that he would not 'lurch to the left' on asylum seekers. Subsequently, foreign minister Bob Carr was on message when he said on Lateline on Thursday that the situation has changed and most boat arrivals are now economic migrants rather than genuine asylum seekers. 

No doubt that is just what the voters of Western Sydney need to hear before deciding to give their Labor local members another chance. 

Significantly the 'change' has occurred in the interregnum between the two Rudd prime ministerships. Therefore it is possible to morally justify Rudd's 'lurch to the right on asylum seekers' now in a way that such a shift could not be sanctioned when Rudd criticised Gillard's apparent resolve to move in that direction on the night he lost office to her in June 2010.

Rudd skeptics such as the ABC's Scott Stephens regard the Rudd moral purpose narrative as a furphy. Time will tell whether he is right and Maxine McKew is wrong. 

There's a view, expressed byacademics and Mark Lathamalike, that Kevin Rudd's years in public life have been driven by a desire to create his own media celebrity.

His rise from backbencher to the ALP leadership in the five years to 2006 was facilitated by his sustained weekly presence on the high-rating 'Big Guns of Politics' segment on Channel 7's Sunrise. 

It was here that he was able to create 'a persona seen as ordinary, trustworthy and familiar to the point of intimacy'. But he lacked the ability to work with people behind the scenes to get things done for the ordinary Australians who regarded him as their 'mate'.

In the modern age of celebrity, public esteem has more to do with media construction than ability. It's questionable whether the winners of MasterChef and The Voice are as talented as we're led to believe. They are part of a long line of TV contests that gave us the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s.

Indeed there have been questions surrounding the legitimacy of Harrison Craig's victory in The Voice last week after the humble 18-year-old had overcome his stutter through singing and won over fans.

For example, on Thursday a desperate 2DayFM used a technicality to apply to the Federal Court for an order to restrain the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) from continuing its investigations into the 'royal prank' phone call that led to the suicide of nurse Jacintha Saldanha.

ACMA's preliminary findings suggest the radio station is in serious danger of losing its broadcast licence over the incident, but 2DayFM is claiming that ACMA is going beyond its remit. It seems the station considers it deserves its licence as long as ratings hold up, and listeners remained loyal to the station after the royal prank call.

Possibly Facebook's greatest disservice to the online community has been its 'like' button, which has become so ubiquitous that it has sanctioned superficial evaluation of individuals and their performances everywhere. I can 'like' or not 'like' a person or what they've produced without having to give a reason, let alone make an argument to justify my support or lack of support.

Collective likes or dislikes can and do have consequences for peoples lives, and they are often based on prejudice rather than rationality.

On Wednesday, ABC managing director Mark Scott (pictured) warned Senate Estimates that content diversity would suffer if the ABC was privatised. This follows the Victorian Liberal Party's recent revival of public discussion of selling the ABC and SBS to help retire public debt.

Diversity of content refers to program material that caters for those who might be called the 'media poor'. That includes audiences in rural and regional Australia, or with specialised cultural or educational interests that commercial media deem unprofitable.

The ABC has a charter obligation to serve these 'unloved' audiences, and to 'take account of the broadcasting services provided by the commercial and community sectors' by not duplicating what they offer.

Scott said accepting advertising 'fundamentally changes the nature of the content you create, the content you purchase and deliver and fundamentally it dilutes the impact and the quality of the broadcaster'.

But it's more than that. Maintaining the distinction between ABC and commercial content is just as fundamental, because the ABC's own efforts to compete with commercial media can undermine the diversity of its content. 

Yet ratings are a significant influence in ABC programming decisions, and their increasing prominence in the news affects the public's perception of whether the ABC is successful and should be maintained. Currently there is no comparably robust and prominent measure of the diversity of the content. 

If ABC and commercial media management use the same tool to measure the performance of their content, it follows that the programs are likely to become similar. A good case will emerge for selling the ABC because it is not focused on offering alternative non-commercial content.

Critics of the ABC have a point when they urge the removal of 'a government-funded goliath that is interfering with the market in the media landscape'. The ABC, they argue, 'has overstepped its raison d'être'.

In its early decades, it was usual to refer to the ABC as 'the National Service', with the implication that its programs were broadcast in the national interest. 'National' distinguished the ABC not from local broadcasters, but from the commercial stations whose legitimate business it was to maximise audiences and make a profit.

The future of media in Australia will be much different to what we know today, and if the ABC has a future, it will be about serving the common good rather than competing for audience share. 

Sorry Day has been on the calendar since 26 May 1998's first anniversary of the tabling in Federal Parliament of the Bringing them Home report. The report documented the forced removal of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families for much of the 20th century. The children who were removed have come to be known as the Stolen Generations.

There are a number of commemorative days that focus attention on the needs and rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, such as National Close the Gap Day in March and Mabo Day on 3 June. Paradoxically Sorry Day is not one of them.

It is instead a day for non-indigenous Australians to dwell on themselves and their failures. To think about such important issues as how we can improve Indigenous health in this country is always a good thing. But actually it defeats the purpose of Sorry Day, which, if we are non-indigenous Australians, is all about us.

As an exercise in secular soul-searching, former Prime Minister Paul Keating's 1992 Redfern Speech does exactly what Sorry Day encourages all non-indigenous Australians to do. Its most memorable lines are not about Indigenous Australians at all, but the Europeans who stole their land, their children and their dignity.

We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. 

Keating says 'the plight of Aboriginal Australians affects us all'. By 'affects', he means that it penetrates not only our minds, but our hearts as well. So our action to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians is not based in ideology or something we think we should do to pay our dues. It's much deeper, something we want to do for the fulfilment of our own lives as well as those of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Importantly Keating implores non-indigenous Australians to acknowledge their guilt and then to quickly move on and 'see the things which must be done — the practical things'. Guilt on its own, he says 'is not a very constructive emotion' because 'what we need to do is open our hearts a bit'.

It is significant that Sorry Day comes at the beginning of Reconciliation Week, not the end. Timing and sequence are important. Those familiar with the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius will know that the First Week's dwelling on sinfulness is only a means to the end of making the person on retreat ready to be of service to others.

It's similar for National Reconciliation Week — Sorry Day is getting us ready to take whole-hearted constructive action that will help close the gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.