Brisbane Writers Festival: Clive Hamilton and The Dirty Politics of Climate Change

As the NSW government announces that water restrictions will be permanent due to climate change, it was fitting that one of the best sessions at the Brisbane Writers Festival yesterday was “The Dirty Politics of Climate Change” where the speaker was Clive Hamilton. Hamilton was at the festival to promote his new book “Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change” and his dispassionate and eloquent speech was a frightening wake-up call to combat government inertia on the subject of climate change.

The session was introduced by Chris O’Connell. O’Connell is the general manager of Channel Ten in Brisbane and sits on a number of committees dealing with the impact of climate change on community and business. He described Dr Hamilton as Australia’s leading enviro-economist will great expertise in the areas of climate change and environmental tax reform. Hamilton is executive director of the Australia Institute, an independent policy research body in Canberra. Hamilton has a BA in Maths, a bachelor’s degree in economics and a PhD in economics.

Hamilton then took the floor. He said he wanted to talk about the politics of science and the role of sceptics and then move on to observations about APEC and its implications. He began by discussing the role of advocates and how they naturally exaggerate to advance their case. He said environmental campaigns had often overstated cases of environmental decline in areas such as urban air pollution. They overstate their purpose in order to elicit a more emotional response – usually fear. And especially when their opponents resort to spin, they find this urge to exaggerate irresistible.

However one subject that is continually under-estimated is climate change. Yet Hamilton said the culture was one of refusal to face the facts. Environmental scientists are afraid to talk about the true effects of climate change. They know the truth is so frightening it tends to intimidate. Hamilton said there was a “cavernous gap” between the attitudes about scientists and politicians on the subject. Public concern is well ahead of the politicians but there is no real sense of the magnitude of the disaster that lies ahead. And apart from the US, nowhere is that radical disconnect greater than in Australia.

Perhaps that is not surprising, as the science truly is frightening. In the journal of atomic chemistry and physics, environmental scientist Doctor James Hansen concluded that a one degree raise in global temperatures would lead to severe disruptions to climate systems and a rise in sea level. Yet Hansen says that a two degree rise is “locked in” and that a return to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is simply not possible. Hansen said instead with the current levels of industrialisation and continued growth, a three degree rise is more likely, possibly rising to four or five. Few people have faced up to the facts of what Hansen and others are saying.

At two or three degrees Australia would face a doubling in the number of very hot days (over 35 degrees C) and long, hot summers would be the norm. Extreme weather events such as storms, cyclones and bushfires will increase. 95 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef would die due to coral bleach, half of the core habitat of eucalypti would be lost and 60 percent of the Murray-Darling would never flow again. Experts worry about "non-linear weather events" and “climate tipping points” are ignored when they say should go on a “war footing” against global warming.

But scientists around the world are pressured to tone down their findings in order to seek publication, even in academic journals. Scientists self-censor in the face of public criticism and the fear of seeming to ‘cry wolf’. No-one seems interested in facing the truth that there will be a disastrous multi-meter sea level rise in the next century. There is little evidence the world is prepared to do what is needed. And there is absolutely no sign the world is prepared to tackle the problem of greenhouse gases in aviation as that industry continually expands. Hamilton said that if Australia committed to a 50 percent cut in emissions, aviation alone would consume the other 50 percent by 2050. He said there should be a moratorium on airport expansion.

The recent demonstrations at Heathrow showed that some people are beginning to take the issue seriously. However the press painted the demonstrators as "anarchists" and "eco-fundamentalists" to undermine their argument. Sinclair himself has been attacked in the press for call for a moratorium on expansion. The Federal Government, Labor opposition and Virgin Blue have all condemned the proposal. Vested interests in continued growth will simply deny the truth and attack the proposers as “mad greenies”.

This is consistent with how John Howard’s government has treated the environmentalist argument when dealing with climate change. The government describes cutting emissions having “ruinous consequences”, would cause “massive losses” and would “destroy the economy”. James Hansen does say the measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions require a radically different energy use pattern – and this fact is unimaginable to politicians.

Hamilton said sceptics accuse climate scientists as being alarmist but the opposite is true: they are too afraid to tell the truth. Hamilton said this needed to change. He quoted Hansen again who said that scientists have a responsibility to the truth and future generations that is greater than the risk of personal vilification. And there is much to fight. Despite the Australian Government giving the appearance it is now serious about climate change, they still attack climate scientists’ predictions, bamboozle the evidence and create doubt in the minds of the public. Their climate change scepticism gives the impression that scientists are still not certain among themselves and therefore there is nothing to worry about.

Hamilton said the media have been complicit in this downplaying of the scientific evidence in favour of human-caused climate change. He brought up the case of the recent ABC screening of the Great Global Warming Swindle. Filmmaker Martin Durkin had already categorised environmental ideology as irrational in his previous work. Called “Against Nature” it caused an outcry in the UK as it claimed that environmentalism had its roots in Nazi Germany and it now causes suffering in the third world.

George Monbiot exposed Durkin as someone who consistently “misled” his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes”. He is also linked to a Trotskyite splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party who take a contrarian position on positions such as climate change, support of Serbia and Rwanda’s Hutus and are opposed to the ban on landmines. The Great Climate Change Swindle was denounced by the prestigious Royal Society (Britain’s academy of sciences) who said those “who ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game”.

ABC defended their right to screen the program citing the need to promote “a full range of views” but Hamilton asked is this really true. Would they, for instance, broadcast the conspiracy theories of Lyndon Larouche? He said the ABC’s criteria for screening programs should not just be entertainment but should include a modicum of credibility and a minimum of journalistic standards.

Hamilton then went on to discuss the example of the 9 August front page story in the Australian. According to its exclusive, the head of the world’s leading body on climate change, the IPCC, had publicly backed John Howard’s decision to defer cuts in emission targets while on a visit to Australia. The article was written by the newspaper’s new environmental reporter Matthew Warren. Prior to joining the Australian Warren had been the PR director of the NSW Minerals Council, the state's peak mining body.

Embarrassed IPCC head Dr Rajendra Pachauri was called into many embassies in Canberra to explain his position. One lobbyist at the conference he was attending was so surprised to hear Dr Pachauri had endorsed Canberra's position, she asked him about it at a lecture the next day. She wasn't the first to question it. Pachauri publicly denied supporting the Australian position and he wrote a letter of complaint to the Australian. ABC’s Media Watch accused the Australian that it misrepresented an interview. The Australian did not publish the letter or offer any retraction. Instead they repeated the assertion two days later in another story.

Hamilton finished with some observations on APEC. Abroad and now finally at home, the Howard Government has suffered for its implacable opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. The Government has tried to provide cover for their position by conjuring up alternative solutions to make it look like they are doing something. Howard has made some environmental deals in its bi-lateral agreements with fellow Kyoto-holdout US. But the AP6 initiative has proved, in Hamilton’s words “a complete flop”. Then a year ago, the Government announced that the APEC Summit would be its trump card and they would be able to announce a grand “Sydney Declaration” on climate change.

But as the summit approached, other nations blanched at Australia’s plans. Apart from the US, the other nations had all ratified Kyoto and wanted any future plans to be an extension of that. The G8 meeting in June gave a “remarkably explicit” endorsement to work through the UN process. The other APEC countries told Australia they would not sign any deal in Sydney that would undermine Kyoto. Alexander Downer then had the audacity to claim he was disappointed that Sydney could not achieve a more ambitious deal. Malaysia put Australia in its place when its Prime Minister said Australia has no credibility to negotiate anything on climate change.

The countries eventually signed an “aspirational” target without any legally binding targets for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. On the day of the declaration, the front page of the Australian said that China and US’s acceptance was a “sweeping victory for John Howard on climate change”. Hamilton said that newspaper reaches “new levels of absurdity every time I open it”. But, he added, despite the Howard spin, the Declaration was not without merit. It reaffirms the UN objectives on greenhouse gas emissions and implicitly endorses the Kyoto Protocol with its call for “post 2012 international arrangements [which] strengthen current arrangements” and long-term targets. The Declaration was a final defeat for Howard’s isolationism.

Brisbane Writers Festival – The Crikey Guide to the Election

The subject of the 12:40 slot this afternoon on the sunny terrace of the Queensland State Library was the “Crikey Guide to the 2007 Election”. Crikey is a successful daily email (and website) with 15,000 subscribers. The session was chaired by lawyer and Crikey commentator Greg Barns and featured Crikey’s chief political correspondent Christian Kerr and another occasional Crikey commentator Mungo MacCallum.

Barns introduced the session by noting how boring this election was. He asked wasn’t a political contest supposed to be about ideas? Barns harked back to the 1993 election when Liberal leader John Hewson released his Fightback package; a prescription of tough, economically "dry" measures, including a radical overhaul of Medicare and Industrial Relations. Barns described it as possibly the most comprehensive package ever devised by a western political leader. Opposed to Hewson was Paul Keating who stood for a demonstrable set of values. It was a genuine contest of ideas.

That election stands in stark contract to the paucity of debate in 2007. While the Liberals hounded Mohamed Haneef out of the country, the shadow minister for Immigration stayed silent for three weeks. It was typical of the fact that Labor would not stick its head out on any issue it thought the government might wedge it on. In an absence of policy debate, there was very little difference between the parties.

Barns said this was an extraordinary situation and not very helpful in a democracy. As for the election itself, Barns (who lives in Tasmania) saw the two Liberal Tasmanian seats of Bass and Braddon as crucial. If they fall to Labor, they will win the election. This is why the pulp mill debate has been so important. Labor, as usual, have kept quiet on the issue, while the high profile Geoffrey Cousins led push to make it a federal election is likely to backfire; Australians don’t like being told by celebrities what to do.

Christian Kerr spoke next. His was a rambling speech of political interludes, calculated as he said “to lower the tone of the proceedings”. Kerr began by saying that until 1955 the marginal Tasmanian seat of Braddon was known as Darwin for some strange reason. (The actual reason was that Charles Darwin's famous ship the Beagle dropped anchor on the north-west coast to replenish supplies of fresh water during its voyage to the Southern Ocean). In 1985 a man wearing a chicken suit walked into the federal parliament and sat on the government front bench before being removed.

Kerr then did a cook’s tour of assorted political characters starting with the current “firebrand” Liberal member for Indi Sophie Mirabella who was appointed chair of the Australian parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters despite failing to disclose her own interests including that of Big Tobacco. Then there was early Prime Minister Alfred Deakin who reported anonymously for the London Morning Post while still in office. Kerr also found time to discuss William Jack who was a NSW sitting member for 17 years in which he only made five speeches. There was also Billy Hughes who was a member of four political parties (Labour, Nationals, UAP and Liberal) as well as an independent during his time in parliament. Kerr’s final point of obscurity was that John Howard’s childhood home is now a KFC.

Mungo MacCallum was the final speaker. He said Labor’s problem is the same one it has always had: while the polls favour them, no-one can be sure if the swing is general or particular. Will Labor gain ground in some areas and not do so well in others. Labor needs to win 16 seats to win Government. And Peter Beattie hasn’t made it any easier for them. Labor were on track to win up to eight seats in Queensland before the council amalgamation debate reared its head. Now they are looking at winning possibly five. MacCallum believed Labor would pick up Bass and Braddon in Tasmania and win three or four more in South Australia. They won’t lose any in the West and may pick up another one each in Victoria and NT. That still leaves them short and dependent on what MacCallum called “the imponderabilities of NSW”.

MacCallum said Rudd is right – the election will be close. The problem will be sustaining momentum to the end. But, he said, if the swing is really on, it’s on. If we see the kind of national swing we saw in 1972 and 1996, Labor will “breeze in”, he said. But if the swing is partial, it will be very tight. MacCallum said his own feeling was that the Coalition is in an awful state at the moment and unlikely to pull out of it. Howard will leave it to the last conceivable date to call the election but the Coalition are “sufficiently stuffed” for Labor to win, he said.

Brisbane Writers Festival – Politics and the Internet

Woolly Days attended today’s session on “Politics and the Internet” at the Queensland State Library. Jose Borghino introduced the session with the speakers Christian Kerr, Greg Barns, Graham Young and Margaret Simons to follow. Borghino writes for New Matilda and lectures on Literary Journalism at the University of Sydney.

Borghino began by discussing the experiences of Kevin Anderson, the blogger-in-chief at the Guardian. Anderson discussed how during his time at the BBC they gained knowledge of the war in Iraq from Iraqi bloggers and how they also sourced local knowledge at the time of the Mumbai bombings and Kashmir earthquake. For these events the BBC relied on ‘citizen media’ with the technology to observe local events. Blogs have meant there is a quantum increase in the quantity of news but not the quality. Borghino said bloggers were ‘not real journalists’.

Borghino admitted the old media were in trouble. He quoted Philip Meyer, who based on extrapolations on current circulations predicted the last newspaper would appear in April 2040. Newsrooms had lost 20 percent of their staff in the last 20 years. Bloggers were now claiming the space left by journalists. The model is shifting away from a profession. Anyone with a digital camera could be a photo journalist. Every blogger aspired to be a journalist, making it part of the ‘psychological repertoire of the 21st century’. Rupert Murdoch predicted a bleak future for newsprint in the era of on-demand news and entertainment but also said “great journalism will always attract readers”.

But author of the Murdoch Archipelago Bruce Page said Murdoch’s plans don’t include investigative journalism. He said Murdoch’s vision of the future of journalism is a lot like fast food (easily packaged and readily available). Borghino said we are already well down this road with 40 percent of Murdoch’s papers’ stories relying on only one source, usually government or authoritarian. Democracy needs to see the hardhitting journalism of Watergate and Chris Masters. The challenge is to find a new model of journalism that allows this to prosper.

Christian Kerr spoke next. The Crikey journalist said the online daily email was now seven to eight years old and regularly faced the criticism that it is not as good as it used to be. Kerr’s answer was simply that the novelty value had worn off. Crikey still values new voices and breaks more new stories than any other online media in the country. He said blogs were yet to break a major story and blogging opinion in Australia was dominated by the same 250 or so voices. They sneer at the mainstream media in what Kerr called an ‘inverse snobbery’. Citizen journalists need to overcome this and take advantage of what the technology makes possible.

Kerr said the media has lost sight of its mission to inform in the face of commercial imperatives. He said the online Sydney Morning Herald was reduced to a ‘Lindsey and Paris’ role and the broadsheets most read article for two weeks was “Dwarf Penis stuck in Vacuum Cleaner”. It was lowest common denominator journalism.

Kerr harked back to his days as a political staffer for Robert Hill and said the hardest questions did not come from the likes of Laurie Oakes or the Canberra press gallery but from local newspapers. They had specific questions on specific issues he could not easily bat away. While bloggers could also fulfil this local role, the issue for internet journalists was how to make it pay.

Greg Barns spoke about how the rivalry between traditional and new media was changing and maturing. Barns brought up the case of Mohamed Haneef. The Haneef case was an hour-by-hour development for a couple of weeks. Barns said he wrote commentary on the legal issues that were unfolding which he was familiar with from defending a terror laws case in Melbourne.

Barns worked closely with Australian journalist Hedley Thomas whose good contacts with police and Haneef’s defence team gave him the lead in the story. Barns wrote immediate commentary based on Thomas’s reports which were published in Crikey that day. Barns saw this as addressing the gap between news which was published on the first day and informed opinion which was not published until the following day. The fact that Barns could publish opinion within an hour of Thomas’s reports was a synergy between old and new media which were doing very different jobs.

Graham Young spoke next. Young is chief editor and the publisher of e-journal On Line Opinion and a former vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party. Young said On Line Opinion has been going for seven or eight years and was set up to achieve things that couldn’t be done using traditional media. They are still experimenting with citizen journalism for the next election with limited government funding and a mandate to publish their findings in academic journals.

Young asked the question why was political opinion worse in Australian blogs than overseas. He quoted the Drudge Report, the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post as examples of the US blogosphere’s rude health. Young also cited an online organisation in Korea that claims to have 50,000 citizen journalists and was credited with bringing down the government in the next to last election. In the UK, the BBC and the Guardian lead the on-line field while bloggers were first to debunk the Government claim that the London bombings were an accident.

Young said that that in Australia key old media players such as the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC dominated the field. Vested interests wanted to be protected from ‘disruptive technologies’ that would potentially destroy their returns on capital. Yet Young claimed that Australian bloggers had often beaten traditional media at their own game. He quoted the story about how Jennifer Marohasy refuted the Greenpeace claim their boat was rammed by Japanese whalers which was printed in the Age. Young concluded by disagreeing that newspapers would be extinct by 2040 but could not vouch for how healthy internet political reporting would be at that time.

Author and journalist Margaret Simons was the final speaker. Simons said we were at the end of the age of the media empires. Like any post-colonial era that meant things would be different and chaotic and not necessarily for the good but it also meant we could focus more on our own resources. But she acknowledged that the old emperors Murdoch and Packer at least cared about what they published. Murdoch supported the loss-making Australian for many years and the paper broke most of the stories that now embarrass the government. Packer supported the loss-making Sunday program. Now Channel Nine is owned by private equity which really doesn’t care about content.

The other big changes we are facing are technological: the rise of the internet and digital broadcasting. These lead to fragmented audiences and the question of how do you pay for journalism? Journalism is a skill involving the ability to find things out and that needed to be paid for to do it well. Simons described three business models. The Free to Air model demands big audiences to sell to advertisers. The Pay per View model is a user-pays model of which the purest is the book publishing business. The advantage of user pays is more independent and more varied content. The newest model is the gift economy based on free time and charitable donations.

Simons said that some of the analysis in the world of blogs is better than the mainstream media. She cited Mumble as providing better analysis of opinion poll data than the newspapers who commissioned the polls. Simons said we are living though changes that are equivalent to the age of Gutenberg. Almost anyone who wants to be a publisher can do so. No-one knows what that means in the long-term. Most of what will be published will be rubbish, but the question will be what is worth paying attention to? What blogs do better than the mainstream media is conversation. The challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs.

The case of Abdul Bari Atwan: A disgrace for democracy in Australia

The Australian Government dealt another hammer blow against free speech in this country when it refused a visa for a journalist to speak at a Brisbane festival today. Audiences at the Brisbane Writers Festival were denied a chance to hear respected London-based journalist Abdul Bari Atwan speak at a festival event. Atwan is the Palestinian-born editor of the prestigious London based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi and he was due to share a session called “Is Balance a Delusion” with renowned Australian journalist David Marr. Atwan was expected to talk about journalistic balance and also promote his critically acclaimed new book “The Secret History of al-Qa'ida”. Atwan interviewed Bin Laden in the Tora Bora Caves in 1996 but his book categorically rejected supporting the methods used by Bin Laden’s organisation.

Festival director Michael Campbell told the audience that Atwan had applied for a visa in London on 16 August and it was referred to Canberra a week later. Atwan and Campbell then queried Australia House on a weekly and then daily basis on the status of the request. They got conflicting reports that said variously it was in progress or it was not on file at all. Campbell rang the office of Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews and was stonewalled. Eventually Atwan ran out of time and had to cancel his invitation to Australia.

Journalist and writer David Marr then spoke. He said this was “another day of censorship in this country”. Marr spent much of his day yesterday on the phone to Atwan and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (the aptly acronymed DIC). He found out that DIC’s Character Section had sent Atwan’s visa request to ASIO. Marr said this was done for political not security reasons. It was done for two pre-election fear mongering reasons. Firstly to remind the electorate how frightening terrorism is (even though Atwan merely reports on it, not engages in it). And secondly to wedge the Labor Party into a “soft on terrorism” position if it opposed the government action. And indeed Marr and Campbell could elicit no response from Labor Immigration spokesman Tony Burke on the issue.

Marr said the freedom to engage in public debate has been deteriorating since the draconian anti-terror and sedition legislation (pdf) was passed in 2005. The government was enraged when ACT Chief Minister John Stanhope published the proposed legislation on his web site. Prime Minister Howard and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock were furious that the public could know what was in the security laws. Drafted in the wake of the 2005 London bombings, Australia passed laws that were more restrictive than those in the UK.

The legislation includes a clause that outlaws “association with terrorism”, a power that the government has used widely and with little scrutiny. Meanwhile the state governments were foolishly persuaded to pass the sedition laws on the condition that the Law Reform Commission would examine them in 2006. Ruddock has shown no inclination to act on any of their tabled recommendations.

Marr also condemned the refusal to remove academic studies from the scope of the legislation. In 2006 respected Monash University lecturer in security studies David Wright Neville reported that police had interviewed his students because they were buying and borrowing books about terrorism. Ruddock supported the police saying genuine academics ‘had nothing to fear’. But an Adelaide academic with a $1m grant into terrorism research was warned off talking to Hezbollah leaders.

In July 2006, the Government banned two 1980s texts on jihad after a heavily publicised moral panic campaign by the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Though the Tele described them as “books of hate”, Marr said they are still available on the internet and would not incite anyone to slaughter. Universities have removed books about terrorism and jihad from their shelves. “How are we better off for not knowing what they do?” wondered Marr.

Ruddock is not yet finished. In the last two weeks of parliament he has tried to introduce wider censorship so that anything that advocates terrorism or illegal activity can be banned. As well as jihadi texts this would include instruction manuals on how to make ecstasy. The wording around ‘advocates’ would be anyone ‘who directly praises terrorism where the risk that a person of whatever age or mental impairment might be encouraged to commit terrorism’ (Hansard 15 Aug). Marr suggested that no-one can begin to guess what texts a lunatic might use to commit terrorism. In any case, terrorists are usually not mentally impaired – just really angry.

Marr suggested that if the audience wanted to see Abdul Bari Atwan, they should go to Youtube where they can see Atwan debate the Iraq war with Richard Perle (architect of the Afghan invasion) on a PBS documentary. Marr said that unlike Australia, the US still had a high regard for debate. In the US the culture is to answer questions, here the culture is to avoid answering questions. Atwan told Marr this is the first time he has been refused entry into any country in the world.

Marr said the reason Atwan was not allowed to come to Australia was purely political. If he came here he would have been the focus of media attention. His support of the Palestinian cause and his opposition to the war in Iraq would have achieved a wide audience in the lead-up to a general election. Atwan was not only due to speak at intellectual forums such as the Brisbane Writers Festival and ABC Radio National but also on high-rating media such as Channel 9’s Today Show and the Alan Jones radio show. Marr said there was a political dividend to the government to keep him out. “This is a very sad day for the country and I’m disgusted to be a witness to it”, he said. Marr finished with an unambiguous description of the decision makers: “These people are scum”.

new Ebola outbreak in Congo

UN officials are desperately rushing in supplies and doctors to south-central Congo to contain a new outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus. More than 150 people have died so far in Kasai province and the World Health Organisation (WHO) is aware of another 372 cases. Congolese ministers are going on radio and television to educate villagers about the crisis. “We are extremely concerned,” said Dr. Benoit Kebela Ilunga, secretary general of the Congo Health Ministry. “But we also have experience dealing with this.”

Makwenge Kaput, Congo’s health minister, said the outbreak of the Ebola virus occurred at Mweka, a village outside the Western Kasai provincial capital of Kananga. The WHO regional office is supporting the Kinshasa health ministry in the field at the location of the outbreak. However the presence of dysentery in blood and urine samples is complicating diagnosis and treatment.

The WHO has confirmed the presence of Ebola virus in samples taken from cases associated with the outbreak after laboratory analysis at the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville (CIRMF), Gabon, and at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. They are now sending Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to the area and Médecins Sans Frontières (Belgium) has deployed clinicians, water and sanitation experts and logisticians to set up quarantine facilities.

Following the announcement of the outbreak, the Health Ministry of neighbouring Uganda has issued a red alert to all border posts. Although Kasai is 2,000kms away, medical experts say the threat of the virus spreading is serious. "We are always concerned that is why we have issued a directive to all border posts to be vigilant," said Dr Sam Okware, the Ugandan commissioner for health and chairperson for the Ebola Task Force. The last outbreak in Uganda in 2000 killed 160 people.

Ebola haemorrhagic fever (EMF) is one of the deadliest pathogens affecting primates, killing up to 90 percent of infected people. The virus is endemic to Africa and the Philippines. There is no known cure. In severe cases, victims haemorrhage and bleed from body orifices before dying. There are four identified subtypes (pdf) of Ebola virus. Three of the four have caused disease in humans: Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, and Ebola-Ivory Coast. The fourth, Ebola-Reston, has caused disease in nonhuman primates, but not in humans.

Ebola is an animal-borne highly contagious virus that causes high fevers, diarrhoea, vomiting and often severe internal bleeding, has killed hundreds of people in Africa, where diets include primates. The virus is transmitted by direct contact with the blood, body fluids and tissues of infected persons. Transmission of EHF has also occurred by handling ill or dead infected chimpanzees.

Although the disease is named after a river in the Congo, it was first recognised in a western equatorial province of Sudan in 1976. There it affected 284 people over half of whom died. A few months later, there was a second outbreak in Yambuku in Congo (then known as Zaire). 318 people were affected in the Congo and a staggering 88 per cent of those who contracted the virus died. There have been sporadic outbreaks, mostly in Africa, since that time.

The latest outbreak is the worst the world has seen for several years and is likely to have serious repercussions. It started three months ago when people started falling sick from a mystery virus in several villages around Kananga. Although several villages remain under quarantine, the WHO is saying there no need for any restrictions on travel or trade with the Democratic Republic of the Congo for now. That could change quickly with WHO warning of a “possible concurrent outbreak of another etiology [cause]".

Sympathy for the Devil: the story of Satan

In a speech on the weekend about Iran’s nuclear threat, Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Satan. Addressing delegates at a conference organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre's Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), Netanyahu encouraged the use of military action in the event that Iran’s nuclear program comes to fruition. Netanyahu said he believed Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel, adding that the Iranian leadership called for Israel to be wiped off the map. "But we are only the small Satan, the great Satan is somewhere else remember that," he said.

Netanyahu did not elaborate who the great Satan was. But his speech raised the question of where the idea of a Satan emerged from, whether it be great or small. Though it was not what Netanyahu meant, the idea of an ultimate evil genius did originally emerge from Iran. Around 600 BC, a Persian teacher named Zoroaster reduced the large cast of Gods to just two. According to Mary Boyce, the sect he founded, Zoroastrianism, is the oldest of the revealed world-religions, and it has probably had more influence on mankind, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith. Zoroastrianism has a cosmic dualism between two gods; the all powerful and good God Ahura Mazda and an evil spirit of violence and death called Angra Mainyu who opposes him. It was Zoroastrianism that invented the concept of an afterlife of hell for those who lived “bad lives”.

This explanation may be surprising to those who believe the devil originated in the Judeo-Christian Old Testament. There is a Satan there of sorts, or rather Ha-Satan - The Satan (in Hebrew “the adversary”). Ha-Satan is not a demon and doesn’t live in Hell. Instead he is servant of God, an angel who does God’s dirty work. He appears in the Book of Job to argue that Job is only pious because he has a good life. Ha-Satan is an archetypal Devil's advocate. God agrees for the Satan to inflict suffering on Job to test his faith. Job continues to believe in God and the Satan loses the argument.

But Persian ideas slowly made their way into the Judaic texts when Israel was conquered during the reign of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. Then after Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, Greek ideas also filtered into the Middle East. Among their pantheon of Gods is the black-bearded Hades, dark god of the underworld who wields a two-pronged sword for blasting his enemies. Many of Hades characteristics would be passed on to today's Devil.

What the legend of Hades lacked was fire. That element of the legend was provided by the city of Jerusalem. In the Gospels, Jesus warns his followers to avoid the fate of Gehenna. Gehenna was Jerusalem’s smouldering and stinking rubbish dump. It was periodically set alight to burn the bodies of executed criminals. The fires would last for weeks at a time and Gehenna was regarded as a supernatural place. Eventually Gehenna provided the myth of hell with its flame.

By the time of the Christian Gospels at the end of the first century AD, Satan had become a powerful symbolic figure in a battle against new conquerors. Jewish lands were ruled by the Romans. Persecuted Jews and Christians alike saw Satan as the evil force behind the power of Caesar. In the Book of Revelations, Satan is described as the Beast with his human number “666”. Many scholars believe this number is a code which refers to the emperor Nero (the sum of the numerical values of the name ‘Nero Caesar’ in Aramaic is 666).

Despite this dubious numerology, the modern image of Satan was now emerging. Satan was the personification of evil. In the earliest extant pictures he has the black skin of Hades, the wings of a fallen angel and inherited the talons of a dragon, the ancient symbol of evil. Satan was no timeserver. He was busy working with enemies to create mayhem.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, the once persecuted religion slowly began to gain real power. Church leaders claimed that those who disagreed with them were sinners working with Satan. And heresy was the worst sin. Heretics who worshipped other versions of Christianity were clearly in league with Satan and had to be exterminated. The first executions of Christianity’s enemies started around 450 AD and would not stop for a thousand years.

Among the popular pagan religions that needed to be rooted out was the worship of Pan. Pan was a serious threat to early Christianity. He was the god of such goodness as music, happiness and lovemaking, but with Christian propaganda he was demonised and became a goat-headed satyr. Satan inherited Pan’s features of hairy cloven hooves and horns on the head. The sex angle was also exploited by St Augustine. He warned about two flavours of satanic helpers that were wreaking havoc with godfearing people. Augustine said male demons called incubi seduced women at night while saintly men were also in danger from succubi who forced them into lewd sex acts.

By the Middle Ages, the Church has convinced its followers Satan was real and a powerful force of evil. The Gnostics took this further and believed that everything on Earth was evil. The Gnostic group known as the Cathars saw everything materialistic as evil. This was a dangerous notion to a now wealthy Church. Pope Innocent III announced a Crusade against the Cathars in 1209. The crusade lasted 45 years and killed 100,000 people, many of whom believed Satan was even more powerful than the Church said he was.

Crusading was rather fashionable around the turn of the millenium and the powerful Muslim Middle Eastern empire was also in the firing line. Both the Christians and the Muslims inherited their beliefs from the ancient Persians and both believed Satan was fighting on the side of their enemies. One of the many terrible legacies of the Crusades is the Inquisition, whose sole rationale was to root out heretics. The Inquisition was a hell on earth where accused were guilty until proven innocent. Anyone who questioned its work was immediately suspected of being in league with the Devil.

In 1307 King Philip IV (Le Bel) of France used the new powers against witchcraft to accuse the wealthy Knights Templars of worshipping Baphomet, a pagan idol. In reality, it was an excuse to destroy the Templars to gain access to their vast financial resources. On Friday the 13th of October 1307 (the reason the day traditionally carries bad luck) Philip got the long knives out and had all the Templars in France arrested on a variety of charges and accusations.

Templars weren't the only ones in danger. Fear that necromancers and witches abounded swept across Europe. In the Irish town of Kilkenny in 1324 Dame Alice Kyteler (pronounced Kettler) was accused of witchcraft, heresy and having a demon mother. Kyteler was a rich widow and a landowner who had outlasted several husbands. The Church wanted to claim her wealth and lands, so they had the Inquisition accuse her of poisoning her husbands. For good measure, she was also accused of having nocturnal meetings with the Devil. Dame Alice escaped the clutches of the Inquisition and fled to England. She was one of the lucky ones.

Women were seen as vessels of the devil and more susceptible to temptation. In 1486, two German Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, published Malleus Maleficarum, (Latin for ‘the hammer of witches’) a textbook for Inquisitors on how to identify witches. It was a handbook for witch-hunts; a dummy's guide to identifying witches and what they did. Witches had the mark of Satan on their bodies, wrote the monks. They could fly and they worshipped Satan at covens. With the rise of the Gutenberg Press, Malleus Maleficarum quickly became a best seller.

30 years after Malleus Maleficarum was published, Martin Luther emerged from Wittenberg to lead the Protestant Reformation. Luther believed Satan was attempting to prevent him from doing God's work which he identified with the wrongs of the papacy. But Both Catholics and Protestants believed the other was inspired by Satan and used the Malleus to identify its enemies. Hysteria about Satan swept the continent.

When the Puritans went to North America on the Mayflower they brought their ideas Satan with them. By 1688 the Irish servant girl Mary Glover was hanged as a witch. Three years later in nearby Salem, the testimony of three young girls believed to be under the spell of witchcraft led to a mass execution. In the Salem witch trials, 150 people were arrested, 19 were hanged or crushed to death and 17 others died in prison.

The 18th century enlightenment began to banish religion, superstition and ideas about witchcraft. But a new devil arrived to take the place of the old. He was a heroic lonely figure, a rebel battling against the cruelties of fate, and challenging the imperious power of God. The Devil began to be admired in folk tales. Thanks to the humbling influence of these tales, the Devil was No longer feared or hated. The 20th century devil became a figure of fun. Thanks to the power of marketing, he was neither better nor worse than the people he had to deal with.

Things changed again with the counter-culture of the 1960s. In 1968, occult showman Anton Levay founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco. It was part religion part money-making venture. It attracted a great deal of media hype, much of which was created by the publicity-conscious Levay himself. Despite his charlatanism, he attracted a cross section of society who were attracted to the idea of Satan the rebel. In turn, Middle America was outraged.

At the height of the controversy generated by Levay, the good ship Hollywood stuck its oar in. In 1967, Roman Polanski released his masterpiece “Rosemary’s Baby” based on Ira Levin's book about devil worshippers in Manhattan. The heroine’s apparently innocuous neighbours turn out to be a coven of witches who steal her baby and her husband has struck a Faustian pact with the Devil. The film is an unexpected hit. Five years later, the Exorcist is another monster Hollywood hit bringing the idea of good versus evil onto the screen and into popular culture. Hollywood’s discovery that it could make a lot of money with stories of devil worship began a paranoia and moral panic about Satanism that swept America. In the 1980s this hysteria was called the “satanic panic” most of which was proved to be totally groundless.

Most modern Satanists say that the Devil is not evil but stands for a spirit of change. They say Satan represents opposition and balance. It means simply becoming the Devil’s Advocate and looking at different ways of doing things. Yet opinion surveys show that over half of the US’s population believe the Devil is real. Recent events such as 9/11 have re-enforced this belief. The Bush administration saw it in stark terms of a battle between good and evil. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech said “evil is with us and must be opposed”. It is a dualism that stretches back to Zoroaster. If the White House is to be believed, Angra Mainyu is still very much alive.

Farewell to the tart: Peter Beattie resigns

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie announced his resignation today effective Thursday. 54 year old Beattie was the longest serving Premier in Australia having gained the top job in 1998. Announcing his decision, he said he accomplished most of his goals during his tenure and he felt privileged to serve the people of Queensland. "I want to thank the people of Queensland,” he said. “You put your faith in me and my Cabinet colleagues and I thank you for that.”

According to a Queensland government media release today, Beattie has anointed his deputy Anna Bligh as his successor. He believes his main achievement was the creation of the Smart State initiative and he hopes that commitment to the Smart State remains at the core of future Governments “regardless of their political persuasion”. He finished by saying “all I have ever tried to do is my best for Queensland”.

Educated as a lawyer, Peter Douglas Beattie served his political apprenticeship in the 1970s as Queensland Railway unions secretary. He was State Secretary of Queensland Labor Party from 1981 to 1988. He was elected to parliament in 1989 and served as chair of the Parliamentary Criminal Justice Committee where he clashed repeatedly with his own Premier Wayne Goss. Beattie was appointed Health Minister in the dying days of the Goss Government. He was elected party leader when Goss resigned after his party’s defeat in 1996. Two years later Beattie was Premier.

There is no doubt that Beattie is a remarkably resilient and popular figure. By 2005, he led a government with a $3 billion surplus thanks to the knock-on effect of the resource boom. His personal popularity was always high and he was instrumental in Labor winning three successive landslide election wins after winning minority government in 1998. With the opposition almost non-existent, Beattie’s powers were almost unlimited. Queensland is Australia’s only unicameral parliament. Since the Senate was abolished in 1922, government decisions face no house of review nor parliamentary committees.

While Beattie has consistently proved popular with the electorate, his administration has become dogged in controversy in recent years. Problems in public administration supposedly resolved by the 1989 Fitzgerald Inquiry appeared to come the fore again with issues related to the health scandal, Mulrunji’s death on Palm Island, the jailing of racing Minister Merri Rose for blackmailing Beattie and the resignation of Health Minister Gordon Nuttall due to his failure to declare a $300,000 ‘loan’ made by a Queensland mining magnate.

But it was the mismanagement of health policy under Nuttall’s watch that made the most headlines. Dr Jayant Patel was an overseas-trained director of surgery at Bundaberg base hospital. It was alleged he was responsible for numerous patient deaths and the media dubbed him Dr Death. In 2005 the government’s three month $5 million inquiry into the scandal collapsed amid ugly squabbling of accountability and culpability. Beattie’s bizarre response was to blame the people of Queensland saying those who were overweight or smoked unnecessarily burdened the state. Luckily for Beattie, Health Minister Nuttall fell on his sword to take the blame with him.

But Beattie’s government had a good record in participatory governance initiatives such as the Community Cabinet process, the Community Renewal Program and the Cape York Partnerships. These initiatives were born as a response to the success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in 1998. Queensland brought in a set of ‘whole of government’ priorities which emphasised more responsive policies and widespread citizen engagement. The Community Cabinets saw community forums and cabinet meetings held in rural Queensland. The Community Renewal Program attempted to deliver more services to disaffected residents and improve community wellbeing. The Cape York Partnership was Beattie’s most ambitious community governance program. It attempted to tackle the Cape’s social and economic problems of ill-health, alcohol, violence and crime spearheaded by local Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson.

Water management was another much-debated aspect of Beattie’s leadership. His term of office coincided with a massive drought and severe water restrictions as South East Queensland infrastructure struggled to cope with rampant population growth. Beattie’s controversial solution was to construct a dam at Traveston Crossing on the Sunshine Coast’s Mary River which will cost a staggering $2.6 billion. His plans have been opposed by local action groups, environmental organisations and scientists. Despite the opposition, premier in waiting Anna Bligh has pledged to continue the development as well as push on with the proposed council amalgamations.

While Bligh picks up the pieces, she will also hope to inherit some of Beattie’s media skills. Beattie was the master of managing the political backflip. While most politicians used backflip and apology as a last resort, Beattie used it as a first response to a crisis. His willingness to concede error increased his perception as a strong leader. A self-described “media tart”, his style has been described as a ‘mixture of modernisation, nationalism and populism'. In the parting words of his press conference today, Beattie said he will not miss the constant media exposure. "You get to a stage in your life when you're over it," he said. "I'm over it."

The Mayne Inheritance

Rosamond Siemon’s “The Mayne Inheritance” tells a fascinating tale of dark deeds in Brisbane’s early European past. The story is about the family of Patrick Mayne, a Catholic Irishman and one of the city’s early fathers. According to Siemon, the eventually wealthy Mayne made a deathbed confession to a murder someone else had hung for 17 years earlier. The confession would haunt his five living children, none of whom married or had children.

Siemon’s argument is because of the rumours of a tainted family, the younger Maynes did not get the credit for their acts of benevolence to Brisbane. The murderer Patrick Mayne unfairly tarnished the younger members who never received the praise they deserve for donating the Mayne inheritance – the St Lucia riverbend lands on which the beautiful campus of the University of Queensland now stands.

The story of the Mayne Inheritance begins with a murder in Brisbane on 6 March 1848. Brisbane was then a tiny northern frontier town in the colony of New South Wales. It was established as Moreton Bay prison colony 24 years earlier. That Sunday in 1948, a boatman found a brutally butchered body in the Brisbane River. The dead man was a sawyer named Robert Cox staying in a hotel at Kangaroo Point on the south bank of the river. The prime suspect was the hotel cook William Fyfe, who shared a bed with Cox. Though the evidence was dubious, Fyfe was sent to Sydney for trial. Evidence at the trial implied Cox and Fyfe had a homosexual relationship but could not prove he killed him. Despite the flimsy case, he was found guilty and hanged.

The motive for Cox’s murder was money. He had recently earned the considerable sum of £350 for cutting and selling a large quantity of cedar to a Tweed River boatyard. The money was never found. Cox’s mistake was to tell his drinking friends about his good fortune. Brisbane was a harsh place with many rowdy hotels and few women. Violence was part of the culture. One of the men Cox told about the money was butcher Patrick Mayne. Mayne's alibi for the murder was never tested. Within a year of Cox’s murder, Mayne produced the equivalent of six years wages to buy a butcher shop and stock in Queen St where he began trading.

Patrick Mayne was then 24 years old. He was born in 1824 in county Tyrone in the north of Ireland. Both his parents died when he was young. To escape Ireland's crushing poverty, he set off for Port Jackson as an indentured apprentice, aged 17. He arrived in Sydney after 100 days at sea and spent two years in the service of businessmen John Gilchrist and John Alexander. In 1844 he went north to seek his fortune in Moreton Bay. He got a job at a slaughterhouse for £1 a week. It was not until after the murder his stocks began to rise.

Within a year of the murder, he married Mary Mackintosh. Mary was a young Irish Protestant serving girl, just as headstrong as Patrick. The pair began to build their family in the leafy solitude of Moggill, upstream on the Brisbane River. Patrick returned to Brisbane to buy the Queen St butchery. The previous owner had struggled and had to sell up for £240. Mayne bought the business and turned it round. As a man of property, he was now also on the electoral roll. He went surety for Irish publicans who returned the favour by buying his meat.

Despite occasional brushes with the law due to a violent disposition, his business grew as the great depression of the late 1840s finally ended in 1853. He began to expand his portfolio of land. The town’s population doubled in six years. The southern gold rush saw businessmen such as Mayne offer rewards for the discovery of gold in the Brisbane region. In 1859 J. D. Lang led a successful push to separate Queensland from NSW. It was now a separate colony and its new capital Brisbane held its first ever municipal elections. Mayne stood for office and won. Out of 37 candidates he was now one of Brisbane’s first nine unpaid aldermen.

Businessmen won all the seats in the first election. As well as the butchers Mayne and George Edmonstone, there were innkeepers George Warren and William Sutton, builders John Perrie and Joshua Jeays, tanner TB Stephens, seedsman AJ Hockings, and baker Robert Cribb. Mayne finished second in the poll to Perrie. Mayne also sat on the first Queensland Board of Education. However a concerted hate campaign kept him out of state parliament.

That wasn’t his only disappointment. His second child and first daughter Evelina died in 1853, aged 1. Nevertheless the Maynes were the parents of five living children. While Mary looked after the family, Patrick was a man of action who loved argument and debate. He was an authoritarian but useful and energetic member and the driving force behind committees to improve the town. His energy waned after he fell ill in 1865. He deteriorated quickly and died shortly after making his murder confession. Although his will allowed for the possibility his children would marry, the result of Patrick’s devastating confession and discussions about his mental stability caused the family to agree on a pact that none would marry.

The word about the confession quickly got out. The family closed in as it became the victim of smears and innuendo. The Maynes were treated as social outcasts. Yet Mary kept a tight grip on the family and smartly held on to all the property Patrick had accumulated despite the threat of another recession. They hid away at the family home of “Moorlands” in Auchenflower.

The eldest daughter became a nun and was excluded from all the family wills for fear the church would inherit it. The Maynes had different plans for their inheritance. In 1889 Mary Mayne died and she gave her property to her four other children. Eldest son Isaac had a less happy inheritance from his father – his dangerous side. He murdered a Japanese trader near their home. Although never charged, Isaac was confined and restrained to his room. He was eventually transferred to a Sydney psychiatric hospital. Isaac hanged himself in hospital after being linked with another Brisbane murder; that of Carl Markwell.

The youngest three surviving Maynes struggled with the burden of inheritance. William was a man of leisure, James was a doctor who retired early and the youngest was Mary Emilia who never left home. After William died in 1921, James and Mary Emilia had all the family’s money. Among the few visitors to Moorlands was the Catholic Archbishop James Duhig of Brisbane who hoped the Mayne fortune would end up with the Church.

But though they lavished three stain-glass windows on St Stephens Cathedral, his Eminence was to be disappointed. The Maynes had already donated money to the Brisbane University to build an agricultural facility at Mogill; now they proposed to donate £50,000 to buy the riverside land at St Lucia for a new campus. The university in the city was cramped and James Mayne thought of his own days at spacious university grounds in England.

The 274 acre donation was not immediately embraced by the university. The medical facility wanted to be near the hospital at Kelvin Grove. After a three year battle with the help of the city mayor William Jolly, James convinced the University senate to move to St Lucia. The first foundation stone was laid in 1937.

James died two years later and Mary Emilia died after another 12 months. Her estate of £200,000 including Moorlands went to the University Medical School. Despite having a small suburb near Bowen Hills named after the family, the Maynes remain low key in the university they bequeathed their fortune to. The stains of Patrick and Isaac reached beyond the grave to taint the memory of the younger Maynes. There are none left now to change the story.

Horses for courses: The History of Opinion Polls in Australia

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer rejected calls today for a Coalition leadership change prior to the federal election. Prime Minister John Howard’s position has been under threat since a disastrous opinion poll earlier in the week followed by calls from high profile supporters for him to step down. There is also speculation that Howard will call an election immediately after APEC ends, possibly announcing it as early as Wednesday. However Downer has doused both theories saying there is no reason for the Prime Minister to step aside nor is there a reason to rush an election soon after APEC.


The cause of the speculation is the most recent Newspoll opinion poll for The Australian on 4 September. That poll has Labor holding a massive 14-point lead in the primary vote with 51 per cent, while the Coalition is down two points to 37 per cent. It also gave Labor a two-party preferred (2PP) lead of 59 to the Government’s 41 percent. The 2PP margin is up 8 points since the previous poll two weeks earlier. This would translate into a landslide in an election. The polls cast a shadow over Howard’s management of APEC and led to key supporters such as Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen withdrawing their support of the PM.

Opinion polls are now crucial actors in the Australian political scene. Stephen Mills in “Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture” argues that since the first Australian poll in 1941, they have been shaped by their relationship with the newspapers that pay for and publish the polls. The idea of polling was first picked up by Herald and Weekly Times chairman Keith Murdoch (Rupert’s father). HWT selected 31-year-old finance journalist Roy Morgan to travel to the US and study the pioneering methods used by George Gallup. Gallup had correctly predicted the 1936 presidential election by relying on random selection rather than the then orthodox measure of massive poll size. Morgan’s first poll in 1941 for the Melbourne Herald found 59 per cent of respondents favoured equal pay for women.

Thw early days for polling were difficult. The Herald’s third poll measured caretaker PM Artie Fadden’s war effort. Fadden only lasted 40 days in the job and the poll was not ready for publication until after he was replaced by Labor’s John Curtin. Nonetheless the Morgan-HWT partnership dominated Australian public opinion polling for 30 years. Roy Morgan died in 1985 but Roy Morgan International lives on with his son Gary Morgan running the $40 million company.

The initial political polls were quite a novelty for the newspapers. The Herald told its readers that “it is not suggested that the leaders of Australia should blindly follow poll findings” but, it added, “the leaders can take steps to correct misunderstanding, where it appears to exist”. Roy Morgan operated out of the HWT building and the early poll questions were chosen by the newspaper. In 1942, they produced the first poll on voting intentions. The first poll was coy. The question was phrased: ‘If a federal election were held today, would you vote the way you did in the last election?’ The interviewers asked respondents not to state their opinion but instead to complete a ‘ballot paper’ and cast it into a simulated ‘ballot box’. Six voting intention polls were held before the practice was suspended for the remainder of the war.

Polls were resumed in the lead up to the 1946 federal election after which they became a permanent and central institution of campaign reporting. Morgan established a reputation for accuracy with widespread polling and a steady refinement of the Gallup methodology. He picked the winner of five consecutive federal elections from 1946 to 1954 within a margin of 1 percent. Morgan spread the Gallup message that pollsters were impartial scorekeeper charting the outcome of closely fought campaign and insisted that the publication of poll results was integral to the process.

By the end of the 1970s, Australian’s other newspapers had ended the HWT-Roy Morgan monopoly on opinion polling. The polls had provided the Herald with a ready staple of news that gave a precise measurement to previously intangible public opinion. They also set the agenda for public debate. Not surprisingly it was Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd who first opened up competition in 1970 when his Australian entered a joint venture with UK-based National Opinion Polls group called Australian Nationwide Opinion Polls (ANOP). The Fairfax owned Melbourne Age soon followed with an agreement with Australian Sales Research Bureau (ASRB).

The Labor party introduced modern campaign techniques of market research and advertising in its victorious “It's Time” 1972 election. It was also the first election Australian media could track the progress of the campaign through their own polls. In the 12 months prior to the election, the three pollsters ran 30 polls compared to just 11 in the same period before the 1966 election. The party leaders were also subject to 20 approval polls whereas Robert Menzies was the subject of just three polls in 23 years as Prime Minister.

The erratic poll results across the three providers fuelled Labor suspicions of anti-Labor bias in the media. They commissioned ANOP to do private survey work on their behalf. Under Rod Cameron, ANOP severed their ties with News Ltd and worked solely as Labor pollsters. They were widely credited with providing the party with the winning edge in its domination of Australian politics in the 1980s. Politically-motivated polling would play a major role in the Hawke-Hayden Labor leadership contest of 1982-1983.

Today, polls are endemic. In the 1996 two-month election campaign, three pollsters conducted 21 polls sampling 30,000 respondents, which was half the total of all of 1972. This does not include polls on more specific topics, regional polls or variations such as ‘who do you want to win?’ and ‘who do you expect to win?’ The flood has led to the prevalent form of news reporting known as the ‘horserace story’. If poll 2 follows poll 1, then poll 2 not only measures opinion, it also measures the change from poll 1. The polls become benchmarks where journalists measure expectations about outcomes which themselves become news if unexpected.

Horserace reporting dominates the front pages in the lead up to elections. “Labor up 5 points”, “Howard approval down: Newspoll”, and “Swing back to Coalition” are the typical headlines generated by these type of stories. These stories then become source material for media which did not commission the polls, and are a staple of TV news reporting. The domination of horserace reporting has profoundly changed the nature of campaign reporting. Candidates are constantly questioned about latest poll figures. In turn, candidates themselves seek to influence reports by positioning themselves as trailing the field to create an underdog effect.

Obsessive reporting about polling reinforces the tendency to cover an election as a contest and squeezes out more complex discussion on policy issues. According to American journalist EJ Dionne, it ‘highlights technique to the exclusion of substance’. Dionne said measurement not debate was becoming the stuff of American politics. His accusation applies equally to Australia.

The polls themselves are not always right. Distribution of preferential voting makes predictions difficult. Morgan polls consistently underestimated the DLP vote in elections from the late 1950s. The Age polled a 54:38 split for Labor in 1980, an election they lost. The polls were further embarrassed in 1993 when they predicted a John Hewson victory. Today, Newspoll has the reputation as Australia’s most accurate pollsters.

However the establishment pollsters may soon face a revolution if Britain’s YouGov’s internet only polling success is to be believed. YouGov is a listed six-year-old research firm that won the polling contract for London's The Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and pay TV operator Sky. Using online voter panels, YouGov claims to have produced the most accurate voting predictions of any pollster in Britain over the last eight national and local elections with an error margin of plus or minus 1 per cent - the industry standard is plus or minus 3 per cent and has started building an online database of 50,000 registered Australian respondents.

US political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg believes this surfeit of polling has changed the nature of opinion. He says polling has “transformed [opinion] from a political potent, often disruptive force into a more docile phenomenon”. Opinion has shifted from assertion to response. Polls elicit opinion on topics the government, business or the media choose, not the public. Polls have become a tracking and targeting mechanism for governments to discover what they want to know about the public.

Violence blights election in Guatemala

The death toll in Guatemala has risen to over 50 due to violence ahead of this weekend’s election. The violence is the worst in the country since the end of the civil war in 1996. Much of the bloodshed has been blamed on drug barons trying to force their candidates into office. Guatemala goes to the polls to elect a new president and Congress on Sunday. Former general Otto Perez Molina hopes to capitalise on the violence with his ‘tough on crime’ campaign.

Perez has risen in the polls as he promises a strong hand to tackle the violence. He has promised to implement the death penalty and expand the military's role in battling organized crime. But his rhetoric has revived fears among those who recall the murderous role of the army in Guatemala’s history. Perez’s biggest rival for the presidency, Alvaro Colom, said the violence has gotten so out of hand that he considers Guatemala a "narco-state" because of the influence drug lords wield with government and law enforcement. Real power is held by the criminal syndicates on the one hand and a small coterie of businessmen on the other.

Nevertheless Guatemalan citizens will cast their votes this Sunday to elect a new president of the Republic, as well as a vice-president, 158 congressmen, and 332 local rulers. Recent polls suggest that the result with be close. The two favourites are General Perez, the right-wing candidate of the Patriot Party, and Alvaro Colom, the left-leaning candidate. The most likely scenario is a run-off between the two on 4 November.

Guatemala, with a population of 13 million, has one of the highest murder rates in the world. 6,000 people were murdered in 2006. Only 3 per cent of these crimes were solved. The country’s low per capita GDP ($1,512 in 2001) is exacerbated by extremely unequal land holding and income distribution. 80 per cent of the population live in poverty with Mayan Indians making up the overwhelming majority of the poor. The situation is exacerbated as most Mayan parents refuse to send their children to public schools or to learn Spanish, because their children become assimilated into Guatemalan culture and leave the community.

The mighty Mayan empire was routed in the 1520s by murderous conquistador Don Pedro de Alvarado. He established the city of Santiago de Guatemala as the seat of Spanish power in the region for the next three hundred years. The conquered Mayans became slave labourers on the city’s monumental works. Catholic missionaries outlawed the Maya religion and burned all but four of their sacred bark-paper books.

Mayans have remained at the bottom rung of Guatemalan society. The country itself became nominally independent from Spain since 1821. But since then it has been under the considerable shadow of American influence. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated and helped carry out the violent overthrown of Jacobo Arbenz’s democratic Guatemalan government. The all powerful United Fruit Company had opposed Arbenz’s agrarian reform policies and successfully lobbied President Eisenhower to portray Arbenz as a communist threat. Since that time, through to the late 90s, Guatemala was ruled by an oligarchic military regime supported by American training, weapons, and money. A low-level Mayan insurgency has been in place since Arbenz was overthrown.

In the early 1980s the civil war became fiercer and the Guatemalan government launched a brutal war against its own people. Military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, backed by the US Reagan administration, began an all-out military campaign to annihilate the mostly Mayan Indian peasantry. Some of the worst massacres occurred at Rio Negro where the locals were forcibly evacuated to make way for the World Bank funded construction of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam. Military leaders owned vast tracts of land in the area that the dam would service but the locals were reluctant to leave. In four separate massacres, almost 500 men, women and children were strangled, shot or hacked to death. Filling of the reservoir began after the last of the natives were removed or killed. To date neither the World Bank nor the Guatemalan government acknowledge responsibility for Rio Negro.

Rios Montt continued his scorched earth policy throughout the 1980s. But international opinion was beginning to turn against his government. In 1992, Mayan Rigoberta Menchú (who is an outsider for the upcoming election) won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bring international attention to the government-sponsored genocide against the indigenous population.

In 1996 the UN brokered a peace accord between the government and the rebels. The accord ended the longest and bloodiest of Latin America's Cold War civil wars, leaving between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians dead, mostly Mayans. A UN-sponsored truth commission said that government forces and state-sponsored paramilitaries were responsible for over 93 percent of the human rights violations during the war.

But the dividend of peace remains elusive for most Guatemalans. Organised crime and drug trafficking are thriving in a country where the police, courts and jails are barely functioning. The justice system is so ineffective that the US and other Western nations successfully pushed for a UN commission last month that would tackle criminal cases that authorities are unable to pursue. "If they catch you, you must be an idiot. Because it's almost impossible that they catch you," said Ana Maria Mendez, director of the UN's justice, security and conflict program in Guatemala. "In some of those places, justice is in the hands of God."

Cyprus talks resume between Greek and Turkish communities

The leaders of Cyprus’s divided communities met yesterday for the first time in over 12 months in the UN buffer zone in the capital Nicosia. Tassos Papadopoulos, Greek Cypriot president, and Mehmet Ali Talat, Turkish Cypriot leader, held a three-hour meeting facilitated by a UN resident representative, Michael Moeller. Ahead of a Greek Cypriot election, the talks did not make great strides. However Moeller said the two leaders "agreed on the need for the earliest start for the process" and "discussed other issues leading to a comprehensive settlement." Negotiations have been stalled since Papadopoulos rejected a UN power-sharing plan in 2004 which the Turkish Cypriots accepted.

The latest talks were welcomed by British foreign minister David Miliband who currently visiting Turkey. He pledged London’s support for a lasting settlement that would eventually lead to Turkey’s accession to the EU. “We very much hope that those talks will be entered into with real openness and determination on both sides,” he said.

At the heart of Cyprus’s problem is the mistrust and political rivalry between the island’s two ethnic communities. 80 percent of Cypriots are Greek Orthodox while the remainder are Turkish Muslims. Both sides claims to the island are rooted in history. Cyprus has been part of the Hellenic world since about 1000 BC and part of the Ottoman Empire since 1571. Ironically the Ottomans restored the Greek Orthodox religion which had been suppressed by the previous rulers, the Venetians.

In 1878, the Ottomans reached a secret agreement with Britain called the “Cyprus Convention” to transfer power of the island to the British. In exchange the British agreed to pay an annual lease and supported the Ottomans during the Congress of Berlin which redistributed Bulgarian territories back to the Turks. In the face of public opposition, the British reneged on the tribute and the money was diverted to pay off Crimean war loans instead.

After Turkey’s defeat in World War I, Cyprus became a crown colony. Britain formally annexed the island in 1925. Rebels began a campaign to end British control. However unlike Ireland and India, the Cypriots did not by themselves constitute a nation seeking independence. Instead, they saw themselves as an unfree part of a nation which possessed its own state. Consequently, for the Greek Cypriots freedom was synonymous with the goal of “enosis” - union with Greece.

It was gradually recognised, however, that enosis was politically unfeasible due to the presence and increasing assertiveness of the island’s Turkish community (about 18 per cent of the overall population). Instead, Britain signed the Zurich-London Treaty which declared the independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960. After pressure from the Turkish minority, the 1960 constitution went to great length to grant both groups cultural autonomy and institutional power sharing within a common state. At the time of independence Greeks and Turks intermixed in towns and villages across the island; there was no territorial base to divide the country into Greek and Turkish zones.

The Turks had a guaranteed 15 out of the 50 seats in parliament, three out of ten ministers and extensive powers of veto. In 1963 a frustrated Greek Cypriot President Makarios proposed amendments to the constitution to change guarantees on the number of Turks in the military and the civil service and remove the Turkish veto power. The changes were strongly resisted by Turkish Cypriots became the catalyst for a decade long conflict between Greek and Turkish elements separated by a UN peacekeeping force.

In 1974 the rightwing Greek junta arranged for the overthrow of Makarios and replaced him with a hardline Greek Cypriot government led by Nicos Sampson. Turkey feared this was a precursor to a Greek takeover and unilaterally announced a “peace keeping operation” to restore the constitutional order. They invaded the island and established control over the north. The invasion caused Greeks to flee south and Turks in the south to flee north fearing retribution. This ethnic cleansing resulted in a new entity called the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) which occupied 40 per cent of the island.

The international community condemned the invasion but the Turks were allowed to keep control. The TRNC has not been recognised by any country except Turkey which resettled peasants from Anatolia on the island to shore up its hold. The UN came in to police an 180km long middle ground known as the “Green Line” as positions hardened on both sides. The Green Line was up to 20kms wide and divided the capital, Nicosia, in two.

The (southern) republic of Cyprus joined the EU in 2004 after a 12 year waiting period. At the time, the European Council confirmed its strong preference for EU accession by a united Cyprus and insisted Greek and Turkish Cypriots to continue to negotiate with the objective of concluding a comprehensive settlement. However Cyprus was accepted into the union even though this clause was never realised. Talks in 2004 and again in 2006 failed to achieve the breakthrough.

Turkey also wants to join the EU by 2012 but Greece and Cyprus both insist it solve the Cypriot question before their application will be granted. However Turkey may turn this position to their benefit by agreeing to forego the TRNC in order to overcome Western apprehension of an Islamic country in the European alliance. In July 2005, Turkey included Cyprus in an expanded customs union with new EU countries offering preferential trading terms.

Issues to be resolved include the property rights of those made refugees by the 1974 invasion and the rights of minorities. The last time the two sides met was in July 2006, the two sides agreed to set up working parties to tackle issues affecting all Cypriots. They agreed on a twin-track process of technical and political talks. But none of the proposed groups has ever met.

The EU hope to implement a three part plan: Turkey to open its ports to Greek Cypriot shipping; Famagusta to be handed over from TRNC to the EU; and Varosha, the resort area of Famagusta, a no man's land since the invasion, would be handed over to the UN to allow Greeks to return. While these goals remain elusive, at least the sides are talking again. Tim Potier, assistant professor on international law and human rights at Cyprus's Intercollege, said the consequences of failure will only impact on the two communities and the island. "It's better for expectations to be lowered and the front door left open for further discussions," he said.