MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

The jury is out on whether Chris Lilley's new ABC1 comedy Jonah from Tonga gives a free kick to racism and other forms of discriminatory behaviour. 

TV critic Giles Hardie says it is 'fantastic that people are accusing this show of being racist, because that is exactly the way to start the relevant and important conversation'. But Polynesian writer Morgan Godfery argues that Lilley empowers racism. '[He] reinscribe[s] the very stereotypes [he's] acting out ...   Whenever people dress in racial drag, they channel that history of racism.'

Critic David Knox borrows a theological concept when he suggests Jonah and Lilley's previous work should be judged on the basis of redemption. 'Showing an abusive character (particularly to an impressionable young audience) must service a point, which should also include the lesson-learning that the abuse is hardly acceptable to a reasonable-thinking person.'

Knox believes redemption in Lilley's characters does take place, but it's a case of too little too late. He cites the character Ja'mie becoming 'momentarily same-sex attracted after her tirade of "lesbian" insults'. But, Knox says, 'the risk is that before you reach that point the wider audience is potentially so offended that it does not stick around for that lesson'.

However the effort to avoid offence can also be seen as an attempt to deny reality in a way that creates a set of politically correct stereotypes that may themselves be discriminatory. 

Irish writer Colm Tóibín speaks in his recent lecture 'The censor in each of us' of the perceived need to deny the existence of behaviour that offends social aspiration. We choose 'images that are comforting and comfortable, images that cover the national or social or religious wound, or attempt to heal it'. Hence our politically correct depictions of racial harmony. Until the 1960s, we were comforted by images of 'white Australia'. 

Tóibín describes hostile demonstrations of political correctness outside Dublin's Abbey Theatre early last century. Inside were performances of plays that depicted Irish peasant women as 'earthy and sexually alive'. The protesters saw them as frustrating attempts to make Irish women 'seem more pure, more fully Victorian than their English counterparts'.

The prejudices in Lilley's Jonah are depictions of the wounds of Australian society, not the attempt of a far-right ideologue to promote a stratified nation based on race. Before the redemption can take place, we need to own our woundedness and moral imperfection. That is the theology of Chris Lillley.

In its own way, the Australian Catholic bishops' Feast of St Joseph the Worker social inclusion pastoral letter is as remarkable as the report of the Federal Government's pre-Budget National Commission of Audit that was released on the same day. 

It brings to Australian shores Pope Francis' radical economic thinking centred on the dignity of the human person. This is in stark contrast to the Audit Commission's putting efficiency and capital ahead of human need.

The Commission says it's the 'sustainability of the nation's long-term finances' that should guide government spending. The Bishops, on the other hand, believe it should be 'animated by a concern for dignity of workers and their families'. 

It's hard to imagine a more stark contrast in thinking about priorities for this month's Federal Budget. 

The Commission does mention the need to 'protect the truly disadvantaged', though there is no thought for those who are relatively disadvantaged. In practice it leaves intact superannuation concessions and other tax breaks for high income earners, while targeting payments for those who rely on welfare benefits. 

The argument of the Commission is that spending cuts that produce a balanced Budget will make us all better off because we will have a stronger economy and more jobs. On the other hand, the bishops quote Francis' skeptical assessment of such 'trickle-down' economic theories in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium:

This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralised workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

Those excluded include the young unemployed. The Commission envisages that they would be required to move away from family and friends to areas of high employment, or they will lose access to unemployment benefits. 

Forcing young people to leave home for the convenience of 'those wielding economic power' is not only an offence against dignity but a recipe for alienation and the drug addiction and other social ills that follow. Invariably business does not consider moving jobs to areas of high unemployment because economic efficiency is regarded as more important than preventing rootlessness.

It's possible that few of the Commission's recommendations will make it into the Federal Budget, but that it will instead provide an ideological blueprint for government policy in coming years. Perhaps we are just being softened and we will be grateful to the Government for imposing a $6 co-payment for visits to the GP rather than the Commission's recommended $15.

But to the extent that the Government owns and acts upon the recommendations of the audit report, it will be at odds with Pope Francis and all who value social inclusion.

In South Sudan, hundreds of innocent civilians were slaughtered earlier this month in a massacre based on ethnicity. Thousands are believed to have lost their lives since the December outbreak of a political dispute between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy president, Riek Machar. The recent victims had failed to find sanctuary where they were hiding, in hospitals and places of worship in the oil hub of Bentiu.

The UN's top humanitarian official in the country told the BBC that the scenes in Bentiu were 'perhaps [the] most shocking set of circumstances' he had ever faced. The 'piles of [bodies of] people who had been slaughtered' all appeared to be civilians.

Many of the rebels say they took up arms because of the murder of their relatives in the capital Juba at the beginning of this conflict. But significantly it appears it was hate speech broadcast on the local FM radio station that spurred them into action.

The UN deplored the broadcasts that insisted 'certain ethnic groups should not stay in Bentiu and even call[ed] on men from one community to commit vengeful sexual violence against women from another community'.

Its spokesperson called them 'especially regrettable and unfortunate, given what happened in Rwanda 20 years ago, when radio stations were used to broadcast the hate messages' that fanned the flames of tension, ultimately sparking mass ethnic killings in that country.

Radio is a particularly powerful means of mobilising a population for good or ill during various emergencies, including natural disasters and civil conflict. At such times, television tends to foster passivity, and the consumption of what is sometimes referred to as 'disaster porn'. But radio broadcasts are much more likely to fuel the imagination, transform hearts and minds, and encourage people to act.

In Australia, radio has been especially useful during bushfire and cyclone emergencies, but a curse when shock jocks have manipulated public opinion against the common good. This includes subverting action on climate change, but also fostering ethnic hatred. For Australians, news of the the role of radio hate speech in the South Sudan ethnic violence might in some way echo Alan Jones' famed message of encouragement to white Australians to take part in a 'show of force' against non-white Australians at Cronulla in 2005.

In South Sudan, the UN is doing its best to ensure the broadcast of hate messages is disallowed, with its spokesperson declaring 'we have called on relevant national state and local authorities to take all measures possible to prevent the airing of such messages'.

But in Australia, Attorney General George Brandis appears to be doing the opposite. He's in the process of establishing legal protection for those wishing to broadcast hate speech. Brandis recently asserted that 'people do have a right to be bigots', in his push to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, in the interest of allowing unfettered free speech.

Australia has its fair share of ethnic and religious animosity, but it remains largely under the surface. The recent South Sudan example shows the violence that can be caused by individuals with legal sanction to broadcast messages that wish ill on particular groups in the community. The UN says this is a freedom South Sudanese do not need. Do Australians really want it?

Last week's Game of Thronesseries four premiere revealed Melbourne as the pirate capital of the world. An analysis published on the website TorrentFreak shows Melbourne, followed by Athens and Sydney, as the top city in the world for downloading the show without paying.

It's debatable whether it is technically illegal to download media content from sites such as Pirate Bay, rather than purchasing, in this case, a $35 per month minimum Foxtel subscription. Choice magazinesays it's a grey area, but gives qualified sanction to consumers who circumvent the strategies of online media companies and retailers that play hard ball to squeeze consumers in small markets such as Australia, where it's easy to create monopolies. 

With this series of Game of Thrones, the Murdoch half-owned Foxtel negotiated exclusive, or monopoly, rights, so that it could charge what it wanted. But Foxtel knows that it doesn't really have a monopoly because it is competing against the likes of Pirate Bay. 

The downloaders make a 'people power' claim to moral legitimacy because they think Foxtel's business model undermines the access they believe they are entitled to. Meanwhile Foxtel corporate affairs director Bruce Meagher says 'that's like justifying stealing a Ferrari on the basis that the waiting list is too long or the price is too high (maybe it's because you don't want all of the features)'. 

Perhaps they're both correct. 

It appears Meagher fails to appreciate that the human act of telling and listening to stories is essentially organic, and that the ability and right to buy and sell stories cannot be assumed. Since the beginning of human civilisation, stories have defined our identity and brought us together as social animals. Stories are not a cultural form of terra nullius, and human nature will not allow them to be wholly appropriated by business interests.

What the downloaders don't understand is the difference between a story and its telling. Story tellers don't own the stories but they should be paid for telling them. 

The commodification of stories is in itself a product of human industry and the dignity of work. It's fair to expect us to pay a reasonable price to access particular 'tellings' of stories. Media production creates work for actors, writers and producers, and expands our horizons with a greater range of stories. It is a matter of regret that globalisation has killed many languages and folk traditions, but a fact of life that mass media products such as Game of Thrones have displaced ancient forms of story telling in the lives of small groups and tribes.

Regulation needs to ensure that everybody has access to the telling of stories that are considered culturally significant — including pop culture — at a readily affordable cost. Given the mass global interest it has generated, this would have to include Game of Thrones. 

Until now, the Federal Government has used its anti-siphoning legislation to ensure that certain sports events remain accessible to all by stipulating that they must be shown on free to air rather than pay TV. Unfortunately these rules could be scrapped by the Abbott Government's proposed media regulation changes. Anti-siphoning should instead be expanded to include other culturally significant genres such asGame of Thrones. If it's not, the people power of the downloaders will prevail.

Federal Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson has called on the Government to increase the GST, by lifting the rate above ten per cent and broadening its scope to include some essential services such as health care. He also wants to see a cut in personal income tax.

The thinking, which is backed by Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens, is that it will provide us with an incentive to work harder. We need to do this because our standard of living is threatened by weak productivity growth, as well as falling commodity prices and an ageing population.

Traditionally governments facing fiscal challenge have responded by hitting those who can afford it most. Past federal treasurers have increased income taxes and relied upon 'bracket creep', which forces workers to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes as their wages increase and they can cope with it.

Such 'progressive' means of taxation are equitable, but they discourage individuals from boosting national productivity by working harder. 

This is because bracket creep requires them to pay a disproportionate amount of their extra income to the government in taxes. The reasoning is that cutting income taxes and relying instead on an increased GST will make us do more work. It will serve the worthy goal of increased productivity and benefit the nation as a whole.

The problem is that it imposes an unfair burden on the jobless and those on low incomes. An increase in the price of goods and services will force them to put less food on the table and diminish their lifestyle. It won't make any difference to those in work, especially those on higher incomes, because the increased GST is balanced by lower income taxes.

The problem with the argument of Parkinson and others is that they do not mention the range of generous tax concessions enjoyed by those on high incomes. Sometimes referred to as tax avoidance strategies, they include superannuation concessions, negative gearing and trusts. There is also a lack of will to countenance an inheritance tax, which has been on the list of political unmentionables along with an increase in the GST. 

Now that the GST is apparently on the table, is it surely time to discuss taxation issues that wealthy Australians find unpalatable. Cassandra Goldie of the Australian Council of Social Services has signalledthat welfare groups are willing to countenance an increase in the GST if there is also discussion of reining in tax concessions enjoyed by high income earners:

'We need to take a long hard look at the unfair superannuation tax arrangements which cost as much as the age pension, at the inconsistent way different kinds of investments are taxed — including negative gearing arrangements — and at the ability of people with high incomes to avoid tax using private trust and companies.'

The bottom line was articulated by the Prime Minister himself in the Coalition's election policy platform Our Plan — Real Solutions for all Australians. It refers to 'a decent and respectful society that gives a 'fair go' to all and encourages people to thrive and get ahead'. This goal must be at the fore in all discussion of tax reform.

In the 20 years before the Productivity Commission started its work on the not for profit (NFP) sector, there was a near unanimous call from sector leaders for a single national regulator. The Industry Commission took note of the sector's concerns, and its support led to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), which the current Federal Government is now moving to abolish.

Charities wanted more so-called red tape because it would help to establish themselves on a more professional and protected footing, even though many had operated successfully for more than a century. The changes would include increased transparency and better accounting, and would lead to greater public trust.

In the midst of the current government's move to repeal the ACNC legislation, it's worth remembering that the analysis and consultation carried out by the Productivity Commission between 2008 and 2010 was rigorous. The Commission's report distilled many of the findings of the previous 20 years. In particular, these highlighted that the impact of Australian NFPs was being systematically hampered by the lack of a single, national regulator.

This was followed by an extensive Treasury consultation with the sector and two parliamentary inquiries before the process of consultation linked to draft legislation was pursued by the former government.

The NFP sector is diverse, and it's not surprising that there are contrasting views on the value of the ACNC. Melbourne Catholic Education executive director Stephen Elder sees it as an extra layer of red tape that takes attention away from funding and delivery of services. But St Vincent de Paul CEO John Falzon believesit is a 'move towards a more supportive and less burdensome regulatory system'.

Catholic Health Australia CEO Martin Laverty and the Catholic Bishops' General Secretary Fr Brian Lucas favour compromise. Lucas recognises the necessary expertise in charity law offered by the ACNC but is worried that the construction of a 'league tables' style public portal containing financial data is open to simplistic and misleading interpretation, particularly by the media. He told Eureka Street: 'Transparency is mediated, which is the problem. The public doesn't get the full picture.'

While it is not surprising to see such a variety of views across such an exceptionally diverse sector, there has rarely been such an extensive period of consultation and legislative in Australian history. Caritas Australia CEO Paul O'Callaghan has had extensive experience with a number of NFPs. He told Eureka Streetthat three independent surveys conducted since the ACNC came into being also demonstrated the vast majority of sector leaders want to retain a single, national regulator which is independent from the Australian Tax Office.

'We all recognise that a new government has the power to act as it wishes. The question is why it would proceed on the path to repeal the ACNC in the absence of any evidence that it has failed and at a time when the vast majority of Australian charities remain very strong supporters of the existing legislation. For so many charities this will simply lead to a steady increase in their red tape costs over the coming decades.'

It is believed that 80 per cent of NFPs support the ACNC. But despite many requests, the Federal Government has yet to explain why it has decided to deny the overwhelming push for more than 20 years from the sector's leaders for a regulatory body. Vinnies' John Falzon describes it as 'ideological opposition'. We will never know whether he is right until the Government moves from its culture of secrecy and gives clear explanation of the policy imperatives that are driving it to dismantle such an extensively considered piece of legislation.

Fingers have been pointed from both sides of the arts sponsorship debate. There are the nine artists who boycotted the Sydney Biennale because it would be accepting money sourced from Transfield's morally repugnant contract to run the Manus Island detention centre. Meanwhile Federal Arts Minister George Brandis and other critics have described the artists as a 'lynch mob', suggesting the board of the Biennale had allowed itself to be 'bullied' by the artists when it decided to reject Transfield funding.

The fiasco has humiliated the much respected Belgiorno-Nettis family, who have been regarded as generous and principled supporters of the arts for many years. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull denounced the 'vicious ingratitude' of the boycotting artists and their supporters. Biennale board chair Luca Belgiorno-Nettis tended his resignation and said he and staff members had been 'vilified'.

Belgiorno-Nettis described the protests as 'naive'. Gabrielle de Vietri, the artist leading the Transfield campaign, said other companies profiting from the policy of offshore detention centres would also be scrutinised. Artists know that they need financial support but realise that accepting donor funds implies a certain acceptance in the public eye that common values exist between them and their sponsors. 

It is a fact that supporting the arts gives moral respectability to corporate entities such as banks and mining companies, which often have a reputation for greed and exploiting people and natural resources to improve their own bottom line. Most artists have a well developed sense of moral purpose that is integral to their work, and this can be compromised by their acceptance of funds from sponsors involved in morally dubious activities.

By definition artists are compromising their principles whenever they accept funds from business. Those who believe they can accept sponsorship and remain pure are, as Belgiorno-Nettis says, naive. If we accept this, we can focus on cultivating the best possible relationship between the artists and the sponsors. Crucial to this is the quality of the conversation that takes place between the two parties. 

Sponsors can start out with a preoccupation on how their 'investment' in an artist or arts event can help to improve their bottom line. But conversation with the artists can lead them to consider that their financial 'investment' can contribute to a better world for all by making the moral vision of the artists more far-reaching and sustainable. For their part, the artists can learn from the sponsors how to bring home their message and their work to a wider public.

Joanna Mendelssohn of the University of New South Wales alludes to the opportunity there is for conversation between artists and sponsors: 'The great value of visual arts events is that it is easy to have conversations while looking at art — opera and theatre tend to demand silence except at interval.'

The threats and name-calling of recent weeks have been a conversation killer, a setback for both artists and business. The artists were correct when they declared that the mandatory detention of asylum seekers was 'ethically indefensible' and consequently it was not fitting for them to be associated with Transfield. But it would have been better to have brought it up in the form of person to person informal conversation between artists and representatives of the sponsor. Artists could then withdraw if the conversation did not bear fruit.

Aside from discussion of the fate of Section 18C, there is no question that news media are becoming more powerful as players in our democracy and that they will continue to act as staunch free speech advocates. That is not surprising because free speech principles enshrined in law give investigative reporters and shock jocks alike the legislative freedom they need to do their job.

However if media organisations are arguing for a change to the Racial Discrimination Act, they need to match their free speech demands with rock solid accountability in regard to accuracy in reporting. Currently it's largely traditions of professional practice such as journalists' fact checking that is holding them to account. These are mirrored in the codes of the government and industry regulators such as ACMA and the Press Council, which offending media often treat with derision.

In this context, it is regrettable that there are demands for less — rather than more — accountability for accuracy in reporting. During the week, the Australian Financial Review covered demands for a weakening of accuracy codes, by a lobby group representing the half Murdoch owned pay TV operator Foxtel. 

The Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association (ASTRA) made the demands in a submission to the Contemporary Community Safeguards Inquiry that is being undertaken by the government media regulator ACMA. ASTRA claimed that it is often difficult for 24 hour news channels such as Sky News Australia to assess the reliability of information in a fast-moving rolling news coverage. 

The old days of verifying information through several sources before publishing are gone. This calls for a new form of accuracy, including transparency about the state of knowledge, the nature of any source being relied on, as well as the capacity to clarify information as a story develops.

ASTRA is correct. Unverified YouTube video of atrocities in Syria may be all a news channel has to go on. However it only misleads viewers if an apparent atrocity is reported as fact, or even probable fact, when the video may have been planted on YouTube by one side of a conflict bent on manipulating international public perception in its favour. 

ASTRA's proposal is that unverified reporting can be done with qualifiers such as a statement that the video is from an unverified source. This is common practice already and it doesn't work because visuals — verified or not — speak more loudly than words. 

With regard to changing Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, there's a strong argument for the status quo, in order to protect the right of individuals and groups from vilification. But if the Federal Government insists upon changing the law to give preference to free speech, it must include robust legislation to penalise journalists and media organisations who get their facts wrong. 

orrect in its determination to be unsentimental in its attitude to financial assistance for Qantas. At the time of writing, it appears to have discarded earlier ideas of assisting the struggling airline by means of a debt guarantee. Instead it is pushing for Senate support to level the playing field through an amendment to the 1992 Qantas Sale Act to allow substantial foreign ownership.

The level playing field is certainly the only way to go if we cannot articulate and justify why we need a national carrier. So far Labor's attempt to do this has been quite fatuous, with shadow transport spokesperson Anthony Albanese focusing on the idea of Qantas planes in the sky being an advertisement for Australian tourism. His leader Bill Shorten has simply criticised the Government for the loss of 5000 jobs and made the facile suggestion that 'we would be the bunnies if we just waved goodbye to an Australian icon'.

It's time that defenders of the need for a national carrier produced substantial arguments to counter the growing acceptance that its time has passed.

The idea of a national (or 'flag') carrier is a legacy of the time when governments took the lead in establishing airlines to serve their populations because the high capital cost of doing this was not attractive to business. Now we have large overseas carriers such as Emirates that are much better equipped to take the financial risk and provide affordable air travel because of their economies of scale. They can provide comfortable and efficient international flights to Australia, and offer extensive domestic services through their equity in Virgin Australia.

It is also important to disentangle talk of a national carrier serving the national interest from the often ugly phenomenon of nationalism. Underlying mention of Qantas as an 'Australian icon' could be the sentiment associated with the 1990s resurgence of nationalism and its racist undertones.

We had Pauline Hanson's warning that Australia was 'in danger of being swamped by Asians'. A few years later there was John Howard's 'Fortress Australia' response to refugee arrivals and his popular vow that 'we will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come'. Now both sides of politics talk about nationalism in terms of sovereignty and border protection.

We can possibly interpret the results of an Essential Media poll released last Monday as an indication that the large number of Australians who want the Government to 'stop the boats' would also like to see Qantas re-nationalised, at least in part. It is true that the timing and execution of the re-nationalisation strategy worked for Air New Zealand after it nearly went out of business in 2001. But times have changed, with the rise of the airlines from the Arab Emirates. An amendment to the Qantas Sale Act would be Qantas' best hope for survival.

If, on the other hand, a foreign owned Qantas is not palatable, we need to move beyond the current jingoistic (and arguably racist) arguments for proper government support. 

Health minister Peter Dutton hassaid he would like to ‘start a national conversation’ about how to meet Australia’s spiralling health costs. Many believe he is really saying that a $6 ‘co-payment’ fee for GP visits is on the table and likely to be announced in the Federal Budget in May.

Nobody denies that the government needs to do something to address rising costs. The $6 co-payment is a quick and easy temporary fix that would put off the day when the government has to tackle the vested interests that are arguably the major cause of the inefficiencies that have made our health care system prohibitively expensive.

Just one example of these vested interests is the pharmaceutical industry, which supplies 86% of the medicines that are available in Australia under the Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme. (PBS). A Grattan Institute study has demonstrated how the industry body Medicines Australia has been able to manipulate compliant governments to inflate prices to the extent that Australia is paying sixteen times more than the UK and New Zealand for seven key drugs.

Supporters of the $6 co-payment argue that 80 per cent of patients are bulk billed and make unnecessary visits to their GP because there is no financial disincentive. The problem is that the co-payment would also act as a disincentive to necessary visits, especially for the poor. Co-payments already account for 18 per cent of Australia’s total health funding, and a 2012 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey found that one in 15 sick Australians has put off seeing a doctor because it cost too much.

More than $100 billion of public money goes to fund health services each year. Clearly a significant proportion of the amount is not going to where it’s needed most. It’s up to governments to ensure certain groups cannot legitimately derive excessive remuneration for their provision of health care services while ill taxpayers are denied value for money. 

Experts argue that the system needs to be better organised to give more priority to preventative health, and to rein in waste and duplication. Why subsidise private health insurance when insurers such as Medibank Private are making annual profits as large as $185 million? How can we justify the existence of nine separate government health care bureaucracies in a country of 23 million people? It’s not fair to the Australian people to overlook these questions while giving priority to dubious easy solutions like the $6 co-payment.

For their part, all those involved in the health care sector may look into their hearts and examine their motivation. What does the ‘care’ in health care mean to them? Are they more attracted by the substantial economic benefit (available to some but not all), or do they have a genuine vocation to care for their fellow human beings who have fallen ill? 

In his message for the World Day of the Sick earlier this month, Pope Francis seemed to propose the Good Samaritan as a role mode for health care providers. The Good Samaritan did not have personal financial gain on his mind when he opened his heart and bandaged the injured man on the road. Not even a co-payment.