Too Much Luck: Paul Cleary skewers Australia's mining boom

Eight years into a seemingly never ending resource boom, Australia is now plundering a million tones of minerals every year from the ground. New industries such as LNG have signed contracts to quadruple exports in the next 10 years and will soon rival coal and iron ore in export earnings. It is a vast and vital natural resource that governments appear to be willing to fritter away frivolously at disgracefully low tax rates. That is the central thesis of Paul Cleary’s new book “Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia's Future”. Cleary was at QUT in Brisbane last Wednesday to speak about the problems his book addresses.

Paul Cleary is a senior writer with The Australian newspaper and a researcher in Indigenous development at the Australian National University. In a career spanning 20 years he has reported on politics and economics in the Canberra press gallery and worked as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and as a political adviser. He was awarded a Chevening fellowship by the UK Foreign Office to study at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and became an adviser to government of newly-independent East Timor in the early 2000s.

Cleary says Australia could learn from East Timor in how to deal with mining companies who have undue influence on public policy. Australia needs to make changes in savings, taxation and regulation if it is to make the most of the boom. East Timor has an oil resource fund as has Norway with its North Sea Oil Fund and Chile with its Pension Reserve Fund based on copper profits. This fund is critical for infrastructure, schools and health needs when the boom finally ends and Australia will have considerably less by way of natural resources to pay for them.

That will require a change of thinking and a way of “pollie proofing” the profits, as Cleary puts it. In the last 3 years leading up to the GFC, the Howard Government blew $334 billion in additional revenues on needless tax cuts and middle class welfare. The result was a spending binge that forced interest rates up by 3 percent. The new Labor Government was forced to borrow $106b to stave off recession. Similarly the Queensland Government was forced to borrow big to pay for the flood and cyclone recovery this year. By contrast Chile used its foreign currency wealth funds to avoid recession and rebuild after a massive earthquake “without racking up a single peso of debt.”

Australia is heading towards the bottom of the quarry with no plans for what to do when it empties, Cleary said. The high dollar is killing off other export industries and tourism which employs far more people than the mining companies. This eventually leads to Dutch disease and the paradox of the two-speed economy. But those industries don’t have the political power of the resource lobby who work on politicians devoted to the quick fix of mining royalties. The State Governments in particularly are hooked on these royalties which make a mockery of their dual role of industry regulator. Cleary said Australia plans to be world’s second largest exporter of coal seam gas (via LNG) despite only having the world’s 12th largest gas reserves and despite the fact that impacts on salinity and groundwater reserves are not fully known.

Cleary said if the States were less cash strapped, they would not be in such an unseemly rush to approve mining developments. He said reforms were needed to share the profits and remove the disincentive to wait for the production revenues. The “third world” taxation system also needed to be fixed to create a future fund and to ensure that governments only spend the average revenue. As Cleary explained to ABC PM that means, taking the 20 year average of mineral revenue as a spending limit and anything above that gets locked away and gets saved into these funds. As Cleary says, failure to do so is effectively stealing from our grandchildren. “We are enjoying an inflated standard of living based on running down an entirely finite amount of non-renewable resources,” he said.

Mandatory detention at Trial Bay Jail, South West Rocks

South West Rocks in mid-Northern NSW is one of the most beautiful spots on the east coast of Australia but its beauty hides a dark history. 5km to the east of the town lies Laggers Point. It was here in the 19th century authorities wanted to build a breakwater at a logical point half way between Port Stephens and Moreton Bay. It was not to be a new port, as locals might have wished, but just a handy sheltering point for ships caught in storms.

In 1861 the NSW parliament, fresh from the horrors of the convict era, wanted to usher in a more enlightened form of incarceration for its prisoners. Two good ideas came together with the building of the Laggers Point breakwater by convict labour. A new prison built in 1877-1878 of exceptionally hard local granite was constructed at what would be called Trial Bay.

Prisoners were not to be sequestered away in their cells but would be employed by Public Works to build the breakwater. By all accounts it was a success at improving prisoner morale (though would end up back in the justice system after completing their sentence. Several prisoners near the end of their sentences were allowed to become “licence holders” allowed to leave the prison on occasion and able to collect weeks.

But Trial Bay was less successful as an engineering project. The dual control between prison officers and public works officers led to friction and the prevailing sea conditions meant that after 10 years only one seventh of the breakwater had been built. Washaways and washbacks in storms were a particular problem constantly eating in to existing work. In 1893 a large storm caused a new opening of the Macleay river at South West Rocks and silting up the old mouth further north at Grassy Head. This contributed to the growing irrelevancy of the project.

Authorities pressed on until 1901 though with no great success. By then events had overtaken the project with improvements in shipbuilding meaning they were less prone to sinking in storms and there was no longer a need for a safe haven at South West Rocks. In 1903, the NSW Government decided to close Trial Bay jail. The experiment was over.

The prison lay abandoned until 1914. When war broke out, the Federal Government passed the War Precautions Act which created a new class of illegal and enemy aliens who were to be detained indefinitely. These included naturalised citizens and those whose fathers and grandfathers were subjects of a country “at war with the King”. Over 6,000 people were rounded up including German merchant seamen in Australia or some other colony when war broke out. It also included German families, many Jewish, who had settled in Australia and had no love for the Kaiser’s regime.

They were to be sent to an Australian ‘zivil lager’ for the duration of the war. The vast majority were held at Holsworthy Barracks in western Sydney but some were held in Berrima, in southwest NSW while Trial Bay was also re-opened in 1915. Those sent here would be the “upper 500”, citizens of “higher social status” who would be kept away from the rifffaff. This did not mean an easy ride for the detainees. The first batch took 24 hours to get from Sydney to Jerseyville by car and then a forced three hour march for the final 8km to Trial Bay. When they got there, they found their luggage had been looted.

But the inmates made the most of conditions. There were chess, boxing and bowling clubs. There were two choral societies and there was a theatre club with ornate designs and costumes made by inmates. Theatre club president Max Herz was also one of Australia’s foremost child physicians and was the highly competent camp doctor. Interned life was also made more bearable with the terrific weather of the region meaning the coast was centre of most activities year-round with fishing and a café on the beach. There was a carpenter’s shop, chair factory and even a newspaper publisher.

The inmates stayed at South West Rocks for three years. They erected a monument overlooking the jail to commemorate the five lives lost during their incarceration (three drowned, two died of TB after leaving the prison). In 1918 with the war nearing its end, authorities decided to shut down the jail and moved the 500 back to Holsworthy. There was to be no happy ending for the detainees Most were refused permission to stay in Australia, dividing families.Only 306 out of 5,600 were allowed to remain in the country. Worse still in 1919 as authorities prepared to repatriate the thousands to Germany, Spanish Flu devastated the camp killing hundreds.

Meanwhile Trial Bay remained unloved and neglected. The German monument was vandalised and the cairn knocked over in 1919 when local heard about desecration of Australian war graves overseas. In 1922 the local council held an auction to sell off the roof and other valuable components.

It was until after World War II that this important part of Australian history began to be cherished. A local history heritage group worked with the Kempsey Shire Council to restore the cairn and the prison itself. Finally in 1991 the site was declared on the register of National Estate and the Public Works took it over, just as they did 100 years earlier. This time however, as a museum rather than a prison.

Cowboys and Indians: Australia reviews its uranium export policy

India is using CHOGM to lobby Australia hard to sell uranium to the growing Asian superpower. According to The Hindu, Vice-President Hamid Ansari has already met Tony Abbott who said he supported selling uranium to India. Ansari is now conducting behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the current government to get Australia — which has the world's largest reserves of uranium — to export the mineral to India. Labor will review the matter at its national conference, with much talk of a possible policy shift to come. A confidential briefing note in February to the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson (exposed by Wikileaks) said the dialogue "may prove a useful avenue to communicate any policy shifts on the issue."

Writing in the Australian today (behind the firewall so no link), Paul Kelly calls the policy “obsolete and discredited” and it is difficult to argue with his assessment. Currently Labor does not support uranium sales to India because that country is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India along with Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have never signed the NPT which came into place in 1970. They make the valid argument that because the treaty restricts the legal possession of nuclear weapons to those states that tested before 1967 (US, Russia, UK, France and China) it creates an unfair system of haves and have nots. Nowhere does the treaty explain why this is a valid distinction.

India has been a declared nuclear power since 1974. According to the Indian Department of Atomic Energy, nuclear power has very important short term and long term roles in the country’s energy needs. They said their nuclear power program would sustain resources manage radioactive waste and make an important contribution to minimisation of greenhouse gas emission. The Department said local supplies of uranium are “modest” however an AFP report in July said a new mine in south India could contain the largest reserves of uranium in the world. The Tumalapalli mine in Andhra Pradesh state could provide up to 150,000 tonnes but it is mostly low grade compared to the high grade uranium produced in Australia.

Australia is the world’s third largest producer of uranium after Kazakhstan and Canada with 16% of the world’s market in 2009. Its market share is declining due to lower than expected mined ore grade. But in terms of reserves, Australia is the largest in the world with 23%. With Labor now abandoning its three mines policy, production is expected to pick up beyond the existing mines at Ranger in NT and Olympic Dam and Beverley in South Australia. BHP recently won environmental approval to expand the largest mine at Olympic Dam.

These new and expanded mines will need a market and India is obvious location, particularly with other countries closing down nuclear operations in the wake of the Japanese tsunami disaster at Fukushima. Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said he remains opposed to changing the policy. Rudd avoided mention of the NPT and instead justified his stance on the fact India did not need Australian uranium. "There is no problem in terms of global supply,” Rudd said. "If you hear an argument from an Indian businessperson that the future of the nuclear industry in India depends exclusively on access to uranium, that is simply not sustainable as a proposition.”

Groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation remain opposed to a change in the current policy which they say is “prudent and sensible”. ACF campaigner Dave Sweeney said the NPT, while imperfect, was a key international legal mechanism in restricting the spread of nuclear weapons technology. Australia, as a significant global uranium supplier, has a responsibility to acknowledge that India is a nuclear-armed state that obtained its weapons capacity in breach of international commitments,” he said. “Adding Australian uranium to the mix would not ease the long standing tensions between India and its nuclear-armed neighbours or improve the effectiveness of the global nuclear safeguards regime.

But the NPT is not just imperfect, it is illogical and unfair. If Labor truly wanted to avoid the spread of nuclear weapons, it would refuse to export uranium to all nuclear weapon states including Russia and China. It would also stop exporting uranium to the US which is Australia’s biggest customer taking 38.4% of local reserves according to 2004 data. Australia says its uranium is explicitly for use in civilian reactors but it has no way of stopping it ending up in weapons programs. It shows up a national hypocrisy about the mineral, particularly when Labor is in power. As Helen Caldicott wrote, Australia was like a heroin dealer, “pushing its immoral raw material upon a world that is hungry for energy."

Obama administration continues to hound journalist to reveal sources

US prosecutors have appealed a federal district court decision to limit the scope of a journalist’s testimony in the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information. Last week the case against New York Times reporter James Risen was taken to the appeals court after lower courts defended his right not to name a source. Risen was originally subpoenaed to give evidence in 2008. The Justice Department were asking Risen to give up his sources for a chapter of his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” Risen refused citing a commitment to confidentiality.

Risen and a colleague won a Pulitzer for a December 2005 article in the New York Times that exposed the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. His book State of War was written a year later and it included explosive revelations about illegal actions taken by President Bush, including the domestic wiretapping program. It also disclosed how Bush secretly pressured the CIA to use torture on detainees in secret prisons, how the White House ignored information that showed Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and how the Bush Administration turned a blind eye to Saudi involvement in terrorism.

The chapter that got him into trouble is about the CIA’s efforts to disrupt the Iranian program. The CIA sent a defected Russian scientist to Vienna to give nuclear bomb plans to an Iranian official on the pretext he would provide further assistance in exchange for cash. The CIA deliberately inserted a technical flaw in the designs but the Russian scientist spotted it and told the Iranians. In his book, Risen said the ploy was reckless and may have had exactly the opposite effect than intended. The Bush administration subpoenaed Risen to reveal his source in January 2008. Risen successfully fought the subpoena which lapsed 18 months later. But in April 2010, the New York Times reported the Obama administration was still seeking to compel Risen to testify.

In the meantime US authorities’ suspicions about the identity of the leaker fixed on Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling was a former CIA officer trained to recruit Iranians to work for the CIA in the 1990s. Sterling, who is black, was sacked in 2002 and he claimed racial discrimination. However a court upheld the sacking saying litigation would require the disclosure of highly classified information. Between 2002 and 2004, the FBI claimed it tracked email traffic between Risen and Sterling. Sterling was arrested in January on charges he illegally disclosed national defence information and obstructed justice, but there was no mention of Risen in the warrant.

In July this year, a federal judge ruled Risen did not have to testify in the Sterling case saying prosecutors had not demonstrated his testimony was critical. District Court judge Leonie Brinkema said Risen’s testimony was not necessary because court records say an unidentified former intelligence official has testified that Risen told him Sterling was the source. Prosecutors argued the official's testimony would be inadmissible hearsay, but Brinkema ruled it would not be because statements that tend to prove an individual's guilt may not be hearsay. Brinkema's order restricted Risen's testimony to matters of his authorship and the accuracy of the book.

But now prosecutors have appeal Brinkema’s decision to the US Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia further delaying Sterling’s trial which was due to start yesterday. Prosecutors cited a 1972 US Supreme Court decision Branzburg v Hayes which ruled 5-4 reporters have no First Amendment right to refuse to answer all questions before grand juries if they witnessed criminal activity. However in the years following Branzburg, federal courts nationwide interpreted the “limited nature” of case to give journalists qualified privilege to balance their right to protect the sources against the government’s need for the information.

Reporters Without Borders has urged the Obama administration to withdraw the appeal. “We remind the Obama administration that its role is not to determine what is good coverage of national security issues,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Jeffrey Sterling’s trial has now been suspended indefinitely. Forcing Risen to testify is an attempt to muzzle every journalist who might publish leaked information. It is an attempt to decide what should and should not be in the press.” They had a statement from Risen which said he would press on. “I believe that this case is a fundamental battle over freedom of the press in the United States,” Risen said. “If I don’t fight, the government will go after other journalists.”

African Union's war with Al Shabaab intensifies

Somali Islamist group Al Shabaab has returned to Mogadishu where it has displayed the bodies of dozens of African Union and government soldiers in a show of strength. On Thursday they laid out bodies in military uniforms they said were Burundian soldiers with the AU force whom they had killed in an area they hold outside the capital. At least 70 bodies were laid out, though the Burundian army will admit to only 6 dead and 18 injured. (Photo: Feisal Omar / Reuters)

The attack on Burundian soldiers was not unexpected. Along with Kenyans and Ugandans, they make up the bulk of the AU force in Somalia. In July, al-Shabaab bombed bars and a stadium in Kampala, the Ugandan capital as thousands were watching the World Cup final. Over 70 people were killed in the attacks which came after repeated warnings to Uganda and Burundi for providing troops to the AU force in Somalia. The suitably named Al Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamoud Rage said they were sending a message to every country that is willing to send troops to Somalia they will face attacks on their territory. “Burundi will face similar attacks soon, if they don’t withdraw,” Rage said.

Burundi itself has not yet been hit but Mogadishu continues to bear the brunt of the struggle. On Tuesday a suicide bomber blew up a car full of explosives near the foreign ministry. Four people were killed, including the bomber in an attack deliberately aimed to coincide with a visit from the Kenyan foreign and defence ministers.

Al Shabaab is particularly hostile to Kenya. Kenyan jets struck Al Shabaab positions in the border region a day after the suicide attack. They are targeting rebels they blame for abductions, including that of a French woman Marie Dedieu, 66, who was captured from her wheelchair at a beach resort in Kenya and who in captivity in Somalia. The air attacks are intended to soften the area up for an attack by Kenyan ground troops guided by pro-government Somali forces.

Meanwhile a new battlefield is emerging 70kms south of the capital with Kenyan forces. The fighting is at the coastal town of Kismayo, an Islamist stronghold. Kenyan military planners have targeted Kismayo and two nearby secondary ports to cut off the export earnings and taxes al Shabaab use to finance their war. Kenyan ground forces are attacking from the north and their navy from the south, leaving thousands of Somali refugees fleeing the area due to aerial bombardment. Somali traders prefer to use Kismayo because of its import duties –$1000 cheaper than Mogadishu – making it still profitable to enter goods at Kismayo and drive to Mogadishu.

Al Shabaab is Arabic for “the boys” but there is nothing lad-like about these Islamist hardliners who continue to make life a misery for the citizens of Somalia. Less than 40 percent of Somalis are literate, more than one in ten children dies before turning five, and a person born in Somalia today cannot assume with any confidence they will live to 50.

Al Shabaab emerged from the break-up of the Islamic Courts Union who were de facto rulers of Somalia from the mid 1990s to 2006 when Ethiopia-led forces invaded from the west. Ethiopia toppled the ICU but hardliners formed Al Shabaab which proved more difficult to dislodge. In 2009, By February 2009, they controlled most of southern Somalia where they imposed sharia law. They contributed to the famine in the region by banning international aid agencies, including the UN World Food Program. Despite only having a few thousand fighters they have been able to expand due to the lack of a central government and co-operation from clan warlords.

Al Shabaab’s continued support relies on hatred of invaders. A March 2010 report said US support of the transitional government was “proving ineffective and costly”. The Government was is unable to improve security, deliver basic services, or move toward an agreement with Somalia's clans and opposition groups to provide a stronger basis for governance. The report recommends a strategy of "constructive disengagement." This calls for the US to accept an Islamist authority in Somalia—including al-Shabaab - as long as it does not impede international humanitarian activities and refrains from both regional aggression and support for international jihad. While the report has merit, it seems naive to think Al-Shabaab will abandon its most fundamental philosophy.

Curtsy and CHOGM

It didn’t take long. Within an hour of what seemed like a respectful and polite greeting by the Australian Prime Minister to a foreign head of state, media companies had spun it into an apparent breach of “protocol”. The online editions of all Australian newspapers and broadcasters were posting a story about a word that doesn’t stray often on to the tongue: curtsy. Wikipedia says a "curtsey (also spelled curtsy or courtesy) is a traditional gesture of greeting, in which a girl or woman bends her knees while bowing her head. It is the female equivalent of male bowing in Western cultures.” (photo: Debutantes practise a form of the curtsey known as a Texas dip)

If the Queen, the sovereign head of the United Kingdom and of the Commonwealth (in which capacity she is visiting the country) is upset a woman didn’t bend their knees in greeting to her, then she is getting more doddery in her dotage than she is letting on. She would have had a lot more on her mind than a knee gesture. She would have been thinking about her role as conduit between the UK and Australian Governments or discussing practical considerations about the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth. After all it is an important meeting of 60 leaders she and Gillard will be co-chairing. It happens every two years and brings together a strange brew of countries who all share British colonial history, law and culture with varying degrees of adherence (we Irish need to get over our historical gripes and enter this intriguing league of nations).

The theme of this year’s conference is “Building National Resilience, Building Global Resilience” which is not very sexy sounding but of great importance to most of the leaders present as it talks about transnational responses to global poverty and climate change. Yet a Google news search of the theme of the conference found just two occurrences – and one was the official press release from CHOGM.

The other was in Trinidad Express Newspapers which quoted Trinidad & Tobago Foreign Affairs and Communications Minister Dr Suruj Rambachan. Ranbachan noted the theme would mean discussion on the challenges of food security, sustainable development and natural resource management. All these themes have much greater importance than a misunderstood gesture but attracted no media attention outside the Caribbean.

Compare articles on “Building National Resilience, Building Global Resilience” to "curtsy". A quick glance again at Google News found 1,160 or so articles on Gillard’s failure to bend her knees. Britain and Australia in particular were all over it. The British Telegraph noted a contrast with the Governor General “While Mrs Bryce curtsied to the Queen, Ms Gillard, an avowed republican, opted for a handshake and shallow bow.” Presumably they don’t mean shallow in the sense of lacking depth. The Australian Telegraph was showing Gillard up by pointing out in their headline that two eight-year old were practising their curtseys ahead of an engagement with Her Majesty. Gillard meanwhile had to “explain” her behaviour: "As I greeted the Queen she extended her hand to shake hands and obviously I shook her hand and bowed my head. - That's what I felt most comfortable with".

News Ltd’s Melbourne paper Herald Sun lived up to its motto “stories start here” and read far more into it, saying Gillard’s “decision” was a “sign”. Australia, it trumpeted, was "catching up with the modern monarchy". While most are unaware the modern monarchy had left Australia behind, the Herald Sun found a TV chat show host, an etiquette expert and the deputy chair of the Victorian branch of the Australian Monarchists League who agreed Gillard had blundered by not curtsying.

In the quick way of these things, someone added "–gate" to it. Watergate was the foundation meme because it was a scandal that eventually brought down the president of the US. And adding “gate” to something is fun because the new word is instantly memorable. But the suffix has long since jumped the shark. It is also lazy journalism as it ascribes a whole set of motives to the event that may be entirely absent. To be fair, I can find no evidence any newspaper or website journalist has referred to "curtsygate", but it took off in Twitter.

The phrase was attributed to Sydney 2GB radio shock jock host Ray Hadley, which is plausible but I cannot verify if he actually said it. Whoever said it, the reaction in Twitter was typically either one of head-shaking weariness at the thought of this latest gate abomination or else the cause of sarcastic glee it was the end of democracy.

But if journalists did not gate it, they should not have left curtsy past the gatekeeper either. If they really want to talk about the significance of the Queen’s visit they need to look beyond etiquette experts and Lisa Wilkinson’s Twitter stream. The real villains here are the chiefs of staff and the news editors who select these stories and give them prominence. They not only fit the ongoing destabilisation of an unpopular Prime Minister in contrast to a hugely popular monarch, but also hyperinflate the primary news value of “conflict” (the fact that someone might be outraged by Gillard's behaviour) which editors believe most news users want to read about.

But here’s an idea. If the news editors are seeking genuine conflict - perhaps the sort of conflict that changes people's lives - then they should give their staff the link to the CHOGM paper and tell them to chase down the Trinidad foreign minister. I’m sure he has some enlightening and possibly non-complementary things to say about Australia and other first world countries. The Queen might even give them his number if they bow politely enough.

Wikipedia pulls Italian version in protest at wiretapping laws

Wikipedia has taking its Italian language version down in protest at new privacy laws currently before Italy’s parliament. The draft law would oblige websites to amend content within 48 hours if the subject deems it harmful or biased. In a communication released on Tuesday, Wikipedia said their Italian version may be no longer able to continue. “As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced by Law to actually delete it,” Wikipedia said. “The very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built - neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents - are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni.”

The Italian Parliament is currently debating DDL intercettazioni which requires all websites to publish a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image within 48 hours of the request and without any comment. Wikipedia said the law does not require a third party evaluation of the claim and anyone offended by online content has the right for a correction to be shown, unaltered, on the page, regardless of the truth of the initial allegation. Wikipedia said this law would distort its principles and would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting “an end to its existence as we have known until today”.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi introduced the draft bill in 2010 saying it was needed to protect the rights of private citizens. The bill restricts the right of police and prosecutors to plant bugs and record telephone conversations and also proposes fines for journalists publishing transcripts of recordings. Journalists across Italy went on strike in July 2010 in protest at the laws. Head of the Italian journalists union, Roberto Natale said the real objective was to prevent reporting of judicial cases with high political impact, “the ones that can generate, and have generated, embarrassment.”

Reporters Without Borders strongly condemned the law at the time. They said the laws went beyond just the national domain. “It would send a disastrous signal to other countries and would encourage dictatorships to use it as a model for restricting the investigative capacity of their local press with even more dramatic consequences,” RSB said. They said telephone taps were often the main evidence in support of stories about corruption and organised crime. “The sole practical aim of this bill is to prevent any investigative reporting.”

Berlusconi has been the victim of several wiretaps. Most recently judges released wiretaps at the conclusion of an investigation into Gianpaolo Tarantini, who paid women to sleep with the prime minister at his home. The wiretaps revealed a man with a large sexual appetite but whether this is something for the public domain is debatable. Berlusconi didn’t think so. “My private life is not a crime, my lifestyle may or may not please, it is personal, reserved and irreproachable,” he said.

His law is not totally without justification. Italy is the champion of the western world for wiretaps. In 2005 Italian mobile operator TIM issued a fax to all Italian public prosecutors they have already over-stretched their capacity from 5000 to 7000 simultaneously intercepted mobile phones and had now reached their limit. In 2004, Italy orders 172 judicial intercepts per 100,000 inhabitants.

After being bogged down for a year, debate on the bill resumed on Wednesday. Centre-right politician Giulia Bongiorno was responsible for carrying the law though parliament disowned it after Berlusconi's PDL party succeeded in adding an amendment that would see journalists jailed for between six months and three years if they published "irrelevant" wiretaps. Bongiorno said she no longer recognised anything in the text of the bill and blamed the changes on Berlusconi's direct intervention. The UK Independent now says the parties have reached compromise to see the law applied only to registered online news services and not to amateur blogs. That compromise was not good enough for Wikipedia.

Eatock v Bolt :The stories of the nine plaintiffs – Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about the stories of five of the nine plaintiffs in the Eatock v Bolt case revealed in Justice Bromberg’s s 149-page judgement. Today, it’s the turn of the other four.

Larissa Behrendt
Behrendt is a NSW law professor and author who lives in New South Wales. Her father and paternal grandmother were Aboriginal. Her paternal grandmother lived in an Aboriginal camp before she was taken away from her family by the Aborigines Protection Board. Her paternal grandfather was English and her mother and maternal grandmother were Australian. Bolt made a schoolboy error when he said Behrendt looked “almost as German as her father” based only on the sound of the surname. Her father was a prominent, well-respected member of the Aboriginal community was an expert on oral histories. He was always part of her family and her mother was always strongly supportive of her Aboriginal identity. Behrendt was 11 when her father reconnected with his Aboriginal family and told her about his languages, dreamtime stories and Aboriginal traditions. Behrendt said she “identified as Aboriginal since before I can remember”.

She began to experience racism at school where she was teased for being “black”. She was motivated to become a lawyer because her grandmother was forcibly removed from her family. She became a Doctor in law at Harvard Law School and was not the beneficiary of any special admission program for Aboriginal people. She has won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous writing. Bolt called her “professional Aborigine” who is “chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Aboriginal television service”, a reference to the National Indigenous Television Service established in about 2006 for which she received $20,000 a year. Behrendt said she took the position because Aboriginal people needed to have their own voice in contemporary Australia. She said Bolt’s reference to her as “mein liebchen” was particularly offensive, patronising and denigrating. Her take-out message from the articles was they sent a message to young people that if you are light-skinned and identify as Aboriginal you will be publically attacked and criticised. She regards that message as very intimidating.

Leanne Enoch
Leanne Enoch is the Red Cross Queensland director for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships. Her father is Aboriginal and her mother is Australian. Her and her siblings’ cultural upbringing was dominated by her father’s side of the family and she has always identified as Aboriginal. She grew up on North Stradbroke Island where her mother (whom she resembles) was always accepted as part of the extended family and her mother fully supported her Aboriginal identity and her education in Aboriginal culture. As the eldest grandchild of the eldest son (her father), she was groomed for cultural responsibilities from a young age Enoch has always been recognised as being an Aboriginal person and first faced challenges about her identity at school after her family left Stradbroke. Many thought she was adopted and she witnessed racism from people who didn’t realise she was Aboriginal and likely to be deeply offended. Enoch trained and then worked as a teacher for 10 years where she assisted with Aboriginal cultural awareness programs.

She then worked Aboriginal social policy and stood for election in the ALP. While first dismissive of Bolt’s article, she became more alarmed when she realised that everyone in her family and community would see it. Her father and many of her relatives saw it and were upset and she too was distressed by the effect on her children, particularly her oldest son who is fair, unlike her younger son who is darker, and who is going through identity issues of his own. Enoch said it was highly offensive Bolt said she was “not really Aboriginal” because of skin and hair colour. Because Bolt suggested she chose to identify as Aboriginal to further her political career he was saying her hard work, skill and talent were of no significance.

Mark McMillan
Mark McMillan is a lawyer and an Arizona Appeals Court judge for American Indians. He has an English father and a mother of Aboriginal descent. He was raised by his mother until he was eight and then moved to his maternal grandmother in Trangie, near Gilgandra, NSW. In Trangie McMillan and his siblings all knew they were Aboriginal. They were told stories about their Aboriginal relatives, including about their maternal great grandmother who was the last Aboriginal local language speaker.

His family were all involved in the Trangie Aboriginal Land Council and two years ago McMillan was elected to the Board of the Council. Like the other eight plaintiffs, he experienced racism and was called an “Albino Boong”. In 1996 he worked at ATSIC as a clerk. Three years later he was awarded an Aboriginal undergraduate award and studied law at the Australian National University.
He was selected to participate in further study through an exchange program in Canada. He was admitted to the bar in 2001 and found a research position with Larissa Behrendt at Sydney UTS.

In 2003, he was accepted to the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program. McMillan found Bolt’s suggestion he was “not Aboriginal enough” offensive and said he inferred he only identified with his Aboriginal heritage for political gain. He was also infuriated by Bolt’s insinuation he was a “a gay white man with a law degree” and “just the kind of Aboriginal who needs a special handout” which was offensive and humiliating. McMillan was humiliated when subsequently forced to assure his American employers he was indeed Aboriginal.

Pat Eatock
Pat Eatock was born in Brisbane in 1937 and is now retired in NSW. Her mother is Scottish and her father had Aboriginal parents. Her father was ashamed of his background and it was never discussed at home. They were also afraid the authorities would take away the children if they ever found out about their black heritage. Eatock identified as Aboriginal since she was a teenager and she told the court much of her Aboriginal identity was formed by negative experiences.

At Primary School in Ingham, the playground at the school was divided by a fence. “White kids” played on one side of the fence and “black kids” on the other. Eatock and her sisters were put to play with the “white kids”. When the school teachers saw the father the childen were taken out of the “white” children’s playground and put in the “black” one. Some parents then complained about “white” children on the wrong side of the fence. They were then put back in the “white” playground and this was Pat Eatock first identity crisis.

She left school aged 14 and began to identify herself as Aboriginal so she would not be accused of hiding her background. She worked in factories until marrying in 1957. She cared for her children until 1973 when she went to university where she encountered a different kind of racism. People would make racist remarks about Aboriginal people in her presence which she found stressful. She would tell people at the outset she was Aboriginal or wear clothing associated with Aboriginal issues. Encounters with Faith Bandler inspired to get involved with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972 and 1973. She has stood for election in the Australian Capital Territory as an independent Aboriginal candidate.

Eatock graduated with an arts degree in 1978 and worked for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. She became a lecturer in Aboriginal Community Development in late 1991 and got a disability support pension in 1996. She still volunteers for Aboriginal issues and lives modestly in a one bedroom Department of Housing flat in Sydney.

Eatock told the court was horrified, disgusted, angry and sick in the stomach when she saw Mr Bolt’s Articles. She said Bolt disconnected her from her Aboriginality and denied her life’s work and ethics. She has been more disadvantaged than advantaged by identifying as Aboriginal and has had only six to six-and-a-half years of employment since 1977. She said Bolt’s articles were racist and she remains deeply offended.

These stories of Eatock and the others show racism was casual and endemic in Australian society. They, more than most, suffered for their background by not neatly fitting the stereotype of being black skinned. Judge Bromberg quoted the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2003 Report on the Protection of Human Genetic Information which said ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are social, cultural and political constructs, rather than matters of scientific ‘fact’.

Bromberg noted the ‘blood quantum’ classification for determining Aboriginality common in Australian law until recent times. “It is a notorious and regrettable fact of Australian history that the flawed biological characterisations of many Aboriginal people was the basis for mistreatment, including for policies of assimilation involving the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families until the 1970s,” Bromberg said. “It will be of no surprise that a race of people subjected to oppression by reason of oppressive racial categorisation will be sensitive to being racially categorised by others.”

Eatock v Bolt :The stories of the nine plaintiffs – Part 1

The stories of the nine plaintiffs have been lost in the outpouring of emotion for and against the racial discrimination judgement against fact-free columnist Andrew Bolt. One of the nine, Graham Atkinson, said in court that Bolt’s articles reduced Aborigines “to that invisible group of people that government policies or government authorities tried to create in the past”. It is not just Bolt who makes them invisible. The Aboriginal plaintiffs continue to be written out of the argument that has followed the controversial case. Regardless of what you think the implications are for free speech, Eatock v Bolt offered the chance for nine Aboriginal people to tell their stories. When the dust finally settles, they will emerge as the most haunting and most illuminating part of Judge Bromberg‘s 149-page judgement.

Anita Heiss
According to Bolt, Anita Heiss's choices were “lucky, given how it’s helped her career”. Heiss is a NSW author whose maternal grandmother and great aunt were part of the Stolen Generation. Her mother was Aboriginal (not part-Aboriginal as claimed by Bolt) and father was an Austrian who became a part of the Aboriginal community. Their marriage produced six children, three fair-skinned including Anita and three darker-skinned. Her colour didn’t stop the racial abuse. At school she was called an “Abo”, a “Boong” and a “Coon”.
Others reacted badly when she told them she was Aboriginal. At university she became conscious of injustice to Aborigines and did a PhD on indigenous literature and publishing in Australia. Since then Heiss served on numerous boards and committees involved with indigenous issues most of which are voluntary.
Heiss told the court about the irony of having been discriminated against for being dark and now being discriminated against because she is not dark enough. She was also offended by Mr Bolt’s “blood quantum” approach to racial identity and its focus on how people look.

Bindi Cole
Bolt said Bindi Cole “rarely saw her part-Aboriginal father” and chose “the one identity open to her that has political and career clout.” Cole is a Victorian artist who lived with her single English mother till she was 7 until she became unfit to be a parent. Her mother always told her that she was Aboriginal.
She then went to live with her Aboriginal father’s family for 4 years, living with her grandmother and her large family who were all Aborigines. Cole kept close ties with the family even after she moved back with her mother, aged 13.
Cole studied to become an artist and photographer in 2001 and is recognised within the Koori community and the broader Australian art community as an Aboriginal artist. In 2008 she and exhibited a series of photographs called “Not Really Aboriginal”, referred to and misunderstood by Bolt.
The series questioned the perception of the stereotypical look of an Aboriginal person based on her personal experience of being fairer skinned. Cole said she was intimidated by Bolt’s articles and insulted by his phrase “distressingly white face.” The article affected the whole Aboriginal community and her aunt rang to ask her “why are they saying that about us?”

Geoff Clark
Geoff Clark is a Victorian and the former chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. His mother is Aboriginal and his father is Scottish-Australian. His parents never lived together. Clark and his two sisters were raised by his Aboriginal grandmother at Framlingham, near Warrnambool.
Framlingham is one of the longest established Aboriginal communities in Victoria established in 1861 and Clark has lived there most of his life. Here he watched his grandmother making traditional medicines, baskets and food and here he went hunting and fishing with his uncles. Relatives and elders passed on traditional knowledge of sacred sites and stories and he is now a custodian of this knowledge and an elder of the Tjapwhuurrung people.
Clark first became exposed to racism and prejudice at high school in Warrnambool. His classmates talked about their grandfathers shooting and poisoning Aboriginal people and told him he was too white to be Aboriginal. This casual racism motivated his involvement in Aboriginal issues. He was a delegate to the Convention of the International Labour Organisation dealing with the rights of indigenous people elected Victorian ATSIC representative in 1999 before becoming national chair. Clark was outraged by Bolt’s articles which he said were the essence of prejudice and racism in Australia.

Wayne Atkinson
Wayne Atkinson is a Victorian academic whose parents are from the Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung tribal groups. He had one great grandfather born in Mauritius of Indian heritage. Atkinson was raised by his maternal grandmother until his early teens on the riverbanks of Mooroopna in an Aboriginal fringe camp. He spoke English and Aboriginal languages at home and experienced racism at school.
He dropped out at year eight in order to work in unskilled jobs. After a decade, he began his studies about his history and culture and work for his community. He is now a senior elder of the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation a principal claimant for their native title claim and teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Atkinson told the court the idea he was not sufficiently Aboriginal to be extremely offensive and was frustrated after 30 years of teaching about his culture, people do not accept who he is. He said Bolt affected a huge number of people in the Aboriginal community with the content of his articles.

Graham Atkinson
Graham is Wayne Atkinson’s brother and a member of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council and chair of the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation. Being Aboriginal was not something Graham had to think about growing up until he and a cousin were the only Aboriginals at a technical school. Students taunted him with “Blackie”, “Abo”, “Boong” and “Nigger”.
His parents and siblings supported him which strengthened his self-esteem and pride in his identity. He also experienced racism whilst serving in the army in Vietnam. In 1977 he was one of only three Aboriginal students at Melbourne University and he graduated with a degree in Social Work and later he gained an MBA.
He told the court he was highly offended Bolt said he identified as Aboriginal only because Thomas James had married his (and Wayne’s) great-grandmother. He said the attribution of identity based on skin colour as making no sense.

Part 2 tomorrow looks at the stories of the other four plaintiffs.

Arse over Titanic

In the final scene of the 1953 film about the Titanic, A Night to Remember, second mate Charles Herbert Lightoller (played by Kenneth More) ruminates on the cause of the sinking. “There were quite a lot of ifs about it,” he said. “If we’d be steaming a few knots slower, or if we’d sighted that berg a few seconds earlier...if we carried enough lifeboats for the size of the ship...” This sinking was different, he concludes. “Because we were so sure, because even though it has happened it is still unbelievable.” The reluctance of many passengers to leave the ship, believing that it was unsinkable meant nearly all the lifeboats were lowered away without their full complement of passengers. The sinking of the Titanic was the shattering of the belief in the human harnessing of technology for good that was the beginning of the end for modernism.

Expect a deluge of commemoration in April next year for the 100th year anniversary of the sinking. 1502 people died in the North Atlantic on 15 April 1912 when Titanic sunk on its maiden voyage. It was the worst disaster at sea ever and it remains among the top peacetime sinking today behind only the Filipino Dona Paz (1987) and the Senegalese La Joola (2002) disasters.

Neither of these Third World tragedies have a cultural affinity in the west worthy of a Hollywood movie. Similarly unknown is the worst marine disaster ever the Nazi ship Wilhelm Gustloff which was torpedoed by a Russian submarine in 1945 for a loss of 7,000 lives. What too about the unheralded British Troopship Lancastria which sunk in 1940 for the loss of over 3,000 lives but whose official record has been classified until 2040 possibly because the captain ignored maximum loading capacity instructions?

The Lancastria is a mystery but the Titanic has become a myth. The reason it sank is for reasons familiar today: the law not keeping up with communication, technology and corporate greed. While fitted with wireless, it was unregulated and not unknown for rival companies to jam each other. Meanwhile the law the Titanic was sailing under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894. The relevant section about the number of life-boats, life-jackets, life-rafts and life-buoys on British ships was a matter delegated to the Board of Trade “according to the class in which they are arranged”. The Board, guided by ship owners, judged the number of lifeboats to be a function of tonnage not of total passengers. By law Titanic needed to have a lifeboat capacity for 1060 people but carried 20 lifeboats, enough for 1178 people including all of first class. She could carry three times that many people.

The last time the Board had regulated on the matter was 1896. At the time the law was passed, the largest ship afloat was the 12,950 ton vessel RMS Lucania. Identical in dimensions and specifications to Cunard sister ship RMS Campania, the Lucania was the joint largest passenger liner afloat when she entered service in 1893. But the Germans outstripped the Cunard ships with the 14,400 ton Norddeutsche Lloyd vessel Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1897, and further ruffled British feathers by winning the Blue Riband for the record speed in an Atlantic crossing averaging 22.3 knots, half a knot faster than Lucania.

White Star line then seriously upped the ante with vessels such as the Oceanic (1899), Celtic (1901), Baltic (1905) and Olympic (1911) trebling the tonnage. A year later their Titanic weighed in at a new record 46,329 tons, almost four times as heavy as the law aimed for Lucania. White Star’s ships were built for comfort and style not speed. Cunard continued to dominate the Blue Riband, despite their smaller ships. White Star was cutting corners of a different kind.

In 1912 White Star was owned by the International Mercantile Marine company owned by monopolist J.P. Morgan. At the time, IMM was overleveraged and suffered from inadequate cash flow that would eventually cause it to default on bond interest payments in 1914. At the British Inquiry into the Titanic disaster Sir Alfred Chalmers of the Board of Trade was asked about the lifeboat regulations. Sir Alfred made a strange claim.

He said if there were fewer lifeboats on Titanic then more people would have been saved. He said if there had been fewer lifeboats then more people would have realised the danger and rushed to the boats filling more to capacity. This claim has superficial validity as in theory the lifeboats could have saved 1,187 but only 710 survived. But then he gave the real reasons: The latest boats were stronger than ever and had watertight compartments making them unlikely to require any lifeboats, sea routes used were well-travelled meaning that the likelihood of a collision was minimal, the availability of wireless technology, the difficulties of loading more than 16 boats, and ultimately it was a matter for the ship owners.

Those owners were well served by the highest ranking surviving officer Second Mate Lightoller - the hero of A Night to Remember. Lightoller somehow guided his upturned boat through four hours of increasingly choppy seas to safety. In his testimony to the London Board of Inquiry said it was “very necessary to keep one’s hand on the whitewash brush”. That meant giving careful answers to sharp questions “if one was to avoid a pitfall, carefully and subtly dug, leading to a pinning down of blame on to someone’s luckless shoulders.” His job was to defend the work of the Board of Trade and White Star Lines and he succeeded admirably.

But his testimony did force a change of the rules. Lightoller himself admitted the pendulum had swung “to the other extreme and the margin of safety reached the ridiculous.” But then he would remember the “long drawn out battle of wits, where it seemed that I must hold that unenviable position of whipping boy to the whole lot of them.” The only other thing that bothered him was that White Star never thanked the whipping boy. Perhaps they had others things on their mind. Although the Line survived the tragedy, both IMM and Morgan went under - just like their most famous ship.

9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in late August 1991 or early September, roughly ten years before 9/11. The picture was taken by my then-wife when we were on a delayed trip around the world a year after we married. Memories being fragile and fragmental, I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I do remember the fantastic views and from that spot I looked out to the Statue of Liberty. In those days the Statue was still open to the public but the queue to climb the stairs was too long so we didn’t bother going to the top when we were there the day before.

Getting to the top of the World Trade Center was far less problematic. I don’t remember the queue being onerous, the minute long trip to the 107th floor was probably just as uneventful as this one in September 2000 just one year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had already changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center had been seriously bombed. While I was on honeymoon, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion that went off in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That didn’t happen but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke spiralling up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from all over the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay and probably the main reason Obama broke his election promise to close it. As well as WTC 1993, his terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and also crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who in turn heard it from the CIA. An undeterred Khalid Mohammed apparently proposed the plan of the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the idea of suicide attackers has long been an extreme staple of warfare because it is so difficult to defend against. It entered the political landscape in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: "Alexander II must die...He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

Gryniewietsky's dangerous conflation of honour and purpose was exactly the same as that inspired Japanese kamekazes in WW2 and later infused Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. Osama Bin Laden is now dead so there is no way of knowing what role he played in 9/11. What is clearer is the role of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorists that brought down the four planes in the attack. Atta was one of just 4 who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, he graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists that got together from 1998. Atta and other members of the cell went to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden where they agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 he sent an e-mail to 60 companies inquiring about flight training, "Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” Atta wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His application for a 5-year US visa was approved and he flew to Newark in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida, bankrolled by Sheik Khalid. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who would lead the South Tower attack as Atta took out the North). With daily training. Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. With plenty of money to wave around, no one asked him any questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline planes including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow Hamburg cell co-conspirator. Ramzi was supposed to be one of the attackers but could not secure a US visa because immigration officials thought Yemenis would illegally overstay their visit. Ramzi supposedly passed on Bin Laden’s instructions what was to be targeted: "four symbols of America”: Congress, the Pentagon, and the two towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (also now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash to convince authorities he wouldn’t end up an illegal immigrant. It meant Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them slightly more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm about Atta. His driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving when without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, he drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. At the airport the following morning, Atta was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed 8 of the 19 attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in the luggage and then leaving the airport. But it did not take into account people who wanted to use the planes themselves as another example of the poor man’s air force.

On arrival at Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about - but they got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact 8 other Middle Eastern men were leaving directly from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta had been arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He did have two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. 81 passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to cruising altitude in 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked 8 more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

By now Atta and his 4 helpers stabbed and slashed their way to control of the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the NC reservations office to say there was something wrong. She rang that number because it was a common help line for passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

By 8.25am Boston air traffic control knew there was a hijack situation. They heard a hijacker’s voice saying “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard him say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline then set up an emergency response centre. By now Ong was reporting a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

By 8.38am Ong was telling the operator the flight was descending rapidly. At the same time, Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was "real-world" and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call ended abruptly. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent... we are all over the place." The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later she said, "Oh my God we are way too low" and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the North Tower. The full horror of Sheik Mohammed’s planned day would take just two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Ultimately Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. At no point was any effort made to punish Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt's Mubarak for providing Atta.

Instead the PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the dubious double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither crippling war can yet be considered a success. Instead, they represent a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

La Gillard enchaîné

The merry-go-round of Australian politics is revolving at sickening speed. Society’s craving for instant gratification has led to demands of perfection immediately. The inevitable failure makes us repeat the mistakes of the past in a desperate attempt to avoid the errors of today. And so the talk is of replacing Julia Gillard with Kevin Rudd. This way madness lies - Rudd’s knifing was wrong but there is no reason to believe he will become Lazarus of Queensland.

It is well to remember the ALP still runs the country and despite the High Court and Craig Thomson the only imminent threat to that is to replace its leader. Its coalition with the Greens and independents is predicated on the leadership of Julia Gillard and all bets are off with anyone else at the helm. Such a governing arrangement is common in Europe but is considered the devil’s work in Anglo-Saxon countries (apart from Ireland where amoral politics will tolerate any governing arrangement as long as it can turn a quick buck.)

In Australia, power-sharing is the subject of fear and suspicion from both the major parties. Keating called the Senate “unrepresentative swill”. He was half right because tiny Tasmania had as many seats as NSW where 14 times as many people live, but not right about the wonderfully complex proportional representation and plethora of candidates that made the ballot paper the size of tiny Tasmania. What Keating was really complaining about was the Senate did not agree with him. Similarly there is a perception today the country is overrun by anarchy when all that is happening is there is a government in power whose policies some people don’t agree with.

The fact "the Coalition" does not like coalitions is particularly rich as it tries to combine the neoliberals of the dry Liberal bent with the agrarian socialists of the Nationals. Totem of the latter, Senator Barnaby Joyce would profess to hate any taint of socialism but is a crucial figure in leading opposition to the Government. The US Government was worried Joyce had become a lightning rod for the resistance, particularly over climate change. It was his implacable opposition to climate change action that led to the unseating of Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader and Tony Abbott taking the party to the right.

I was at a meeting in Roma on Monday where Joyce spoke to the local business community. His ability to communicate effectively shone through. But there was little new from I hadn’t heard him say before, except perhaps, the admission he was the only accountant in parliament which “scared the hell out of him”. His audience may not have been entirely made of accountants (there was at least two there) but it was one disposed to be sympathetic. Whatever anger in the room was directed at the government. There was a question from a lady still livid our political system allowed Gillard to replacw Rudd in the first place. This lady was personally affronted and shocked a leader not elected by the people was now running the country. "How can Labor get away with this?" she asked Joyce.

It was a reasonable enough anger but as Joyce explained, the Westminster system allowed it. “You as voters chose your MP and the MPs come together to decide who leads them.” Joyce conceded it could happen on both sides of politics (Hawke/Keating in 1991 and McMahon ousting Gorton in 1971). He did take the opportunity to put the boot into Labor, by saying Rudd’s overthrow was the first time it has happened to a first-time prime Minister (Gorton won in 1969).

It is not enough of a distinction to hang current Labor over but given the presidential nature of election campaigns, politicians should not be surprised when voters see it as a failing in the system. As I wrote at the time, Rudd’s overthrow was a very Australian coup. Again like now, there was no rioting on the streets nor did the stock exchange collapse. The voters stored away their unease and anger and took it out at the ballot box where Labor was badly mauled in 2010.

Yet the Government scraped over the line thanks to Julia Gillard’s formidable negotiating skills and willingness to bargain and compromise with a variety of political perspectives. There were more conservatives than non-conservatives in the parliament so the Liberals played their cards poorly. Tony Abbott’s treacherous nature put off Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott and the pair knew any arrangement with him would be jettisoned as soon as Abbott had the numbers. Instead they dealt with Labor – already in control – who offered a power sharing arrangement guaranteed to 2013. Despite the ideological contortions Oakeshott took 17 agonising minutes to talk through, he knew Gillard made the better offer.

Falling just one seat short of Government left the Coalition with a strong sense of injustice it has nurtured since the election. The party has constantly attacked the “legitimacy” of the government though there is no sign of the police commissioner coming in to arrest Gillard any time soon.

Gillard chose the high road for her administration when she did an about turn on carbon taxation. It was an enormous gamble which she knew would excite opposition on two fronts. Firstly it opened up the breach of trust of going back on her word. Keating and Howard both survived similar breaches though neither suffered a nickname from Alan Jones like Juliar.

Secondly it galvanised an Australian tea party movement still convinced carbon emission issues are overstated and the response to it are the work of a cabal of left-wing fellow travellers. Personified by the recent “convoy of no confidence” (run by the Australian truckies, who will be hit hard by the tax) it sought to magnify the illegitimacy of the government by means of a massive people movement.
To that end the Convoy failed. It attracted poor responses from most towns it visited (except Bob Katter’s own Charters Towers).

But it had a sympathetic run in the media as it fed the “government in crisis” narrative. The convoy supporters’ angry attack on Anthony Albanese yesterday showed what it was really about. They were not there to listen but to jeer. None of those present were likely to vote Labor long before this crisis despite the exaggerated talk of defection of life long Labor voters unhappy with the alliance with the Greens.

This is a confected crisis. The parliament has two years to go and Labor may as well govern their way through it. Saving a by-election or a more serious charge for Craig Thomson, Gillard should survive to the next election. That will give the electorate enough time to look carefully at achievements as well as promises. By 2013, the carbon tax and the NBN will be realities too hard for Abbott to overturn and this week’s High Court result may actually make refugee processing easier for the Government to sell morally because it forces them to do it in Australia. There is also the loose cannon of Tony Abbott and his glib glass jaw that has not yet been fully tested. Despite all the noise and fury, Gillard could still win in 2013, if given the chance.

Australia's own Oranges and Sunshine victims remain forgotten

I saw the Jim Loach film Oranges and Sunshine last week. The film tells the moving story of the forced migration of UK children, a paternalistic government program from the 1940s to the 1960s that saw 130,000 children removed to Commonwealth countries, mostly to Australia. The British Government kept the program hidden for years as did the Australian Government to the Forgotten Generation – almost half a million children from the UK and Australia. The government snatched these children from their families and sent them to institutional religious environments where they were abused and treated as slave labour.

The film was especially poignant to me because I had met a member of that generation who told me his story for our newspaper. The man’s name is John Walsh who was born in Perth, WA on 27 March 1931. John was the eldest of seven children born in the 1930s who all were forcibly taken away from their parents.

When war broke out in 1939, John’s father joined the WA 2/11 battalion and he embarked for service overseas in 1940. The 2/11th arrived in the Middle East on May 18 and trained in Palestine and Egypt. They were mostly captured by the Germans in Crete and sent to Germany as prisoners of war from April 1941 to November 1945. And as John puts it, while his father and many others like him were serving their country overseas, the WA government destroyed their wives and families and sent the mothers into a life of hell and an early grave.

John said politicians in power from 1939 accused those working class and Aboriginal mothers of neglecting their children. The all powerful Child Welfare took control of the children and told the mothers they could not see their children until they turned 21. In March 1940 the Walsh family was split up. Four brothers John, Billy, Terry and George were sent to Castledare while sisters Theresa, Anne and baby brother Barry were sent to St Joseph's Subiaco. After 4 days, a Mr Young from Child Welfare came to Castledare and asked John to collect his young sister and brother who were in a bad way fretting.

“I had to look after my young sister and brother for about six months. It wasn’t easy with me being about 8 and ½ years of age,” John said. Both of them had to sleep with John on a veranda and the mattress was soaked every day so John had to put the mattress out in the sun every morning. After six months Mr Young returned to take the two youngest back to St Joseph's.

Life was tough in Castledare. John said they never got much to eat. “People would see the bruises on us but you never did say anything for there were a lot of abuses going on and no one would believe you anyway,” he said. “This Christian Brother Murphy whose nickname was Spud was bad. Of course the people wouldn’t believe you, Catholics could do no wrong. You just had to shut your mouth and hope the truth would someday come out.”

In December 1941 eldest boys John and Billy were sent to Clontarf orphanage. They had to move again in February 1942 when the Air Force took over Clontarf and 238 children (200 Australian and 38 English) were sent to Tardun St Mary’s College in three groups by train. This was in the northern wheatbelt of WA one and a half hours east of Geraldton. As John remembers “we were sent into a life of hell from 1942 to 1945.”

At Tardun there was nowhere to sleep so farm machinery was pulled out of the shed to make room for living quarters. They had to wash in horse troughs and worked from daylight to dark to put in a new wing on the old building. “The food they gave you was full of maggots and no way could we eat it,” John said. “We would steal the molasses and boil it up with wheat. We also caught a lot of galahs and other wildlife. We picked up a lot of quondongs off the trees in the bush and also ate a lot of bush fruit. I found out later they were like antibiotics and probably saved us from getting sick.”

Tardun orphanage was so far out in the sticks, the children were out of sight and out of mind. An English boy Charles Brunard,13, was killed by a truck running over him. John was one of those boys on that truck and said Brother Thomas was the driver. “The radiator was boiling over and Brunard was copping all the boiling water as he was sitting on the left-hand guard”. But a normal death certificate was issued. A boy called Kevin Glasheen also died of a fractured skull. Other boys were told to shut their mouths or they would get the same treatment.

The boys also had no warm clothes for the winter. In this life of hell, John remembers Brother Beedon, a short baldy red faced man who wore glasses, who was never happy unless he was belting someone with a strap. “It was a long strap always on the bare bum,” John said. “He was always sexually abusing someone”.

In 1945 the Air Force gave Clontarf back to the Christian Brothers and John returned there. “Those Christian Brothers were paedophiles so we found out; the life of hell was starting out all over again,” he said. No one dared speak out about what was going on. Sexual abuse, floggings, red siphon hose wrapped around your waist, a special strap made for cutting down on leg muscles. The life of hell went on until the children turned 14 and were sent to work on farms.

On 1 August 1947, John was put on a train at Perth to get off at the Serpentine railway station. He waited at Serpentine station for the farmer to pick him up but he was four hours late. When he turned up in a horse and buggy, he went into town to go to a dance. The horse took them home as the boss was drunk. John got five shillings a week with Child Welfare claiming the other two pounds a week. He worked seven days a week between 12 and 15 hours a day and stayed there for six months.

The milk truck helped get him away. John found one of his mother’s friends and her son got him a job at Plaistowes sweet factory in West Perth. “I was there for three weeks before the Child Welfare found me,” John said. “But the Plaistowes brothers and three foremen would not let them touch me. I was 17 years old at the time and still a ward of state until I turned 21.”

John never saw his father again. When the men returned home in 1946 they could not find their families and got no help from the WA Government. John spent most of the rest of his life seeking his family as well as justice. On 1 January 1975 the WA Government destroyed all the files of all the forgotten children. In the 1980s, as Oranges and Sunshine testifies, the UK children came under the spotlight and there were several Senate investigations. But the Australian born victims were ignored. After years of contacting politicians without success, the WA Government finally offered John $45,000 last year, a figure he reluctantly accepted as the best deal he would ever get. He remains bitter about the treatment the Government meted out to the families.

“If the politicians and Child Welfare had paid assistance money these abuses would never have happened,” he said.“They abandoned us and turned a blind eye. It was their responsibility to what went on in these orphanages.” John said the politicians in power at the time thought the religious institutions could do no wrong, so they never went looking for it. “The politicians who were in the Senate in the making of an apology and calling us the forgotten Australians were wrong – we were the hidden Australians."

ACMA says telecommunications and media laws in Australia are broken

A new report by the peak communications body in Australia has said convergence has broken most of the media and telecommunications legislation it administers. The findings are in the Australian Communication and Media Authority report Broken Concepts: The Australian communications legislative landscape(pdf). ACMA is the government body that administers 26 Acts made over half a century, accompanied by 523 regulation requirements. Their paper examined the impact of convergence pressures on 55 key pieces of legislation and found most of them wanting. To use the ACMA terminology they were either ‘broken’ or ‘significantly strained’. The issue affects the regulation of such diverse items as video games, smartphones, tablets, 3DTVs, untimed local calls, community broadcasting, program standards, cable providers, universal service obligations, emergency calls, spam, media diversity and many others.

ACMA defined convergence by five key causes of change: 1. Technological developments 2. The development of a broad communications market 3. Increased consumer and citizen engagement with the toolset 4. Regulatory Globalisation 5. Government intervention (NBN). ACMA says digitalisation has broken the connection between the shape of content and the container which carries it. Legacy service delivery used service-specific networks and devices but digital transmission systems have made delivery mostly independent of technologies. The major consequence is regulation of content based on delivery mechanism no longer makes sense as devices develop multiple functions.

ACMA found seven major regulatory consequences of convergence. Firstly, policy and legislation no longer aligns with the realities of the market, the technology or its uses. Secondly, there are gaps in coverage of new forms of content and applications. Thirdly, there is misplaced emphasis on traditional media (television) and traditional communications (voice services). Fourthly, the blurring of boundaries is leading to inconsistent treatment of similar content, devices or services. Fifth, difficulties assuring innovative services are consistent with consumer safeguards. Sixth, new issues are handled in piecemeal fashion reducing overall policy coherence. Lastly, convergence is causing institutional ambiguity with no one sure which agency is responsible for which regulation.

The main acts that govern telecommunications in Australia are the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, the Radiocommunications Act 1992 , the Telecommunications Act 1997 and the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999. All are well over a decade old and all were drafted before the Internet became a reality. These core acts have been added to by ‘band aid’ solutions to newer problems such as spam and interactive gambling. As a result, ACMA says the Australian communications legislative landscape now resembles a patchwork quilt. There is no overarching strategy or coordinated approach to regulating communications and media in a digital economy.

Media diversity is one of the major problems addressed by the report. It said regulation has given undue weight to the influence of print newspapers and the ability to personalise media consumption magnifies as well as limits the amount of influence a media service can have on an individual. Also the ability to access broadcast-like content through non-broadcasting services is running a hole through the Broadcasting Act’s promotion of diversity of content (which I would argue was honoured more in the breach by commercial broadcasters in any case). There are 53 other areas of ACMA’s reach which are equally broken beyond legislative repair.

ACMA Chairman Chris Chapman said the report highlighted the ever-increasing strain on old concepts struggling with new technology. “The constructs for communications and media that worked 20 years ago no longer fit present day circumstances, let alone the next 20 years," Chapman said. “These ‘broken concepts’ are symptoms of the deeper change of digitalisation breaking those now outdated propositions, including that content can be controlled by how it is delivered.”

The report dovetails with the federal government’s Convergence Review. The review panel is due to deliver its report in March. It toured Australia earlier this month hearing submissions and will continue to receive input until 28 October. Its framing paper acknowledges changes are required but appears be focussed more on broadcasting issues rather than the wider telecommunications issue. This new ACMA paper is a welcome wake-up call to the seriousness of the problem. Technology and its uses will continue to evolve in unimaginable ways. The trick will be drafting legislation that does not fetter that growth while providing citizen safeguards against unscrupulous behaviour.