Week 34: Dangerous Deceptions
Week 34: Dangerous Deceptions
Australia's Liberal Party undermines a forthcoming referendum process, and seeking ideas for the newsletter moving forward
Undermining Voting Reaches Australia
In the coming months Australia will hold a referendum on recognising the country’s First Nations people in the constitution and establishing a new body that would advise the parliament on indigenous affairs – to be known as the Voice to Parliament. The country’s main opposition party, the Liberal Party (a conservative party, which may confuse Americans) is advocating No to the proposition. Yet this week the party’s leader did something extraordinary, he claimed that the process for adjudicating ballots is “rigged”
On the referendum ballot paper citizens will be asked to write either Yes or No. However, there may be people who misinterpret or not pay close attention to the instructions and may instead put a tick or cross. How these markings are interpreted is what the opposition leader is claiming is an unfair advantage to the Yes campaign.
The rules that are in place on how to adjudicate unique markings on ballots in referendums were put in place 40 years ago, and were the same rules that were used at the last referendum in 1999, which was brought to the public under a Liberal-led government. To claim that the rules are being “rigged” for this referendum is completely disingenuous (or purposely false).
Having worked for the Australian Electoral Commission in the past this is deeply personal to me. The AEC is the gold standard for independent electoral bodies in the world. They are staffed by highly professional people who take the role as election organisers and arbiters incredibly seriously. The organisation has water-tight procedures in place that make the accuracy of their counts above any doubt. Attempting to politicise the work of the AEC, or cast doubt upon their impartiality, is both utterly pathetic and astonishingly dangerous.
Yet this is now how the Liberal Party and its cheerleaders in the media are choosing to conduct themselves. Last federal election they began sowing suspicion of the country’s preferential voting system (alternative vote, as it is known elsewhere). Advocating for the deeply flawed (and far less democratic) first-past-the-post system, which would have won them a few more seats, but would not have reflected the electorate’s intentions.
This dangerous behaviour has come as the party is losing support in Australia’s major urban centres. As one of the most urbanised countries in the world (11 million of the country’s 25 million people live in just two cities), no party can win an election without its cities. Yet rather than doing the necessary self-scrutiny to understand why they are so unpopular, and adjust themselves accordingly, they are instead choosing to sow discontent with the country’s democracy. Maybe not as aggressively as the Republican Party are in the United States, but in subtle ways that allow them to pretend they are supportive of democracy while “just asking questions”.
Part of the problem is that many people within the conservative (or formerly conservative) ecosystem in Australia are so thoroughly captured by American culture wars that they fail to understand Australia’s unique political terrain. Australians value stability above all else, and, with a keen eye on U.S politics, they see the Republican Party as an incredibly destabilising force. Trying to import these tactics into Australia will only ever excite a minority of the population.
Most Australians are also incredibly proud of the country’s independent electoral commission, as well as our compulsory voting, and preferential voting system. Recognising these as massive safeguards for the country’s stability. I suspect if the Liberal Party chooses to ignore this sentiment its popularity will continue to decline.
As an aside, my latest essay for Movement of Mothers is related to a Hague Convention case involving a First Nations mother and child, and is highly relevant to the forthcoming referendum. You can find the link below in This Week’s Reading.
Newsletter Update
For a little update on this newsletter, I’ve decided to open up the community engagement, so you can now comment on posts. As it is becoming increasingly difficult to promote my work and engage with people on Twitter (or “X” as it is now hilariously called), I’m looking for other options for engagement.
This also comes after a bit of an existential crisis over the past week with the direction of the newsletter. My recent essay “Our “So-Called” Problem” gained no real traction outside of regular readers, which I have been disappointed by (I guess I was hoping there were lots of people who also hate the phrase). This has led me to contemplate what kind of writing would gain greater interest. I think as I write on a wide variety of subject matter there may be people who are more interested in some articles than others. Which is natural and understandable. But opening up some engagement with comments might help provide better insight into what articles may or may not work.
I’m also considering a name change. As this newsletter was originally started after the discontinuation of the Australian Foreign Affairs magazine weekly newsletter (which I wrote), I had initially tried to fill that void. But it’s taken a different turn over the past several months. So I thought a new name could be in order to reflect the different approach.
I’m also considering whether to fold my music blog – Lunch Hour Pops – into this site (or at least cross-posting). This was my original Substack, where I wrote essays on various albums and songs. It has lay dormant for the past year, but I resurrected it this week with a brief new feature on interesting obscurities. There is a pipeline of essays topics either partially written on identified to write about, and as I think this concept has produce some of my best writing (or writing I’m proud of), I’m keen to get them finished. But the permanent struggle against time will be a factor.
Any suggestions on what you may like to read would be appreciated.
This Week’s Reading
Grant Wyeth – Movement of Mothers
“Natural harmony is a core social and spiritual idea for Australian First Nations. When they speak of their connection to Country they describe more than a national pride in one’s residence that Western societies may feel. Instead the idea of Country (always capitalised) is a broader and deeper concept that encompasses an interdependent and spiritual relationship between the people — past, present and future — and the land, waterways, air, trees, animals, and plants. First Nations leaders speak about walking in Country, not on Country, which is a more apt way of visualising how First Nations people feel.
This is a recognition of the harmony of natural laws and humanity’s place within them. Country is a relationship, a deep spiritual connection that has been forged over thousands of years, between people and place that is distinct from the more individualistic notions of humanity that come through Western philosophical traditions.
Alongside a sense of natural harmony between people and land, Country is also about responsibility. It is a sense of custodianship not just towards Country and cultural knowledge, but of ancestors, those alive, and those yet to be born. This is a spiritual sovereignty that exists outside of a Western conception of sovereignty as simply being power or control-based. These are timeless bonds of responsibility and reciprocity that are at the core of First Nations customs, spirituality and approaches to the world.
Government policies like the forcible removal of children — alongside many others — smashed through these bonds like a wrecking ball. These policies were not just brutal to the mothers, children, and extended family members who were affected on an individual level, but they created a social dissonance within First Nations communities. Nations that had lived and developed on the Australian continent for at least 65,000 years had their deep and abiding connection to Country and community fractured. These state-sanctioned crimes persist as a form of collective and intergenerational trauma that, despite the commitment to healing within First Nations communities, may never fully mend.”
Megan Garber - The Atlantic
“The Greek myth of Medusa takes many forms, but the most common is this: Medusa was a woman who, having angered the goddess Athena, was made into a monster. Athena punished Medusa by turning her hair into a writhing tangle of serpents, and then by ensuring that anyone who looked into Medusa’s eyes would be turned to stone. In shaping their story of a gaze made violent, the creators of that early democracy were prescient about the man who has tried to destroy ours. Donald Trump’s head may be covered in spray rather than snakes, but he is a Medusa all the same, reconfigured for the age of mass media: Once you look at him, your fate is already sealed.
Even as Trump was held to account, then—even as he was, in theory, brought low—he was elevated. Last night, as so many times before, viewers’ gazes were directed Trump-ward. Medusa’s curse is also the curse of anyone in her path: Whatever the consequences, she compels us to look.
In the process, though, the event that should have been a show of accountability for Trump became an act of concession to him. The typical mug shot, usually taken after the subject’s unexpected arrest, bestows its power on the people on the other end of the camera. The alleged criminal, in it, tends to be disheveled, displaced, small. But Trump, trailed by the news cameras that confer his ubiquity, found a way to turn the moment’s historical meaning—a former president, mug-shotted—into one more opportunity for brand building. He might have smiled, as some of his alleged co-conspirators did, making light of his legal jeopardy. He might have assumed an expression of indignation, the better to channel one of his preferred personas: the innocent man, victimised.
But he did neither. Instead, he looks straight at the viewer, seemingly incandescent with rage, taking the advice he has reportedly given to others: Perform your anger. Turn it into your script. Make it into your threat. His menacing glare gives a similar stage direction to the people who follow him and do his bidding—both in spite of his disrespect for democratic processes and because of it.”
Ian Johnson - Foreign Affairs
“For more than a year, economists have argued that China is embarking on a period of slowing economic growth. To account for this, they have cited demographic changes, government debt, and lower gains in productivity, as well as a lack of market-oriented reforms. Some have talked of “peak China,” arguing that the country’s economic trajectory has already or will soon reach its apex and may never significantly overtake that of the United States. The implication is often that if only Beijing would tweak its economic management, it could mitigate the worst outcomes and avoid a more dangerous decline.
What this analysis overlooks is the extent to which these economic problems are part of a broader process of political ossification and ideological hardening. For anyone who has observed the country closely over the past few decades, it is difficult to miss the signs of a new national stasis, or what Chinese people call neijuan. Often translated as “involution,” it refers to life twisting inward without real progress. The government has created its own universe of mobile phone apps and software, an impressive feat but one that is aimed at insulating Chinese people from the outside world rather than connecting them to it. Religious groups that once enjoyed relative autonomy—even those favoured by the state—must now contend with onerous restrictions. Universities and research centres, including many with global ambitions, are increasingly cut off from their international counterparts. And China’s small but once flourishing communities of independent writers, thinkers, artists, and critics have been driven completely underground, much like their twentieth-century Soviet counterparts.”
Anarchy Ended Our Imperial Dream
David Patrikarakos - Unherd
“This is the binary that has so obsessed Kaplan throughout his career: the dialectic between chaos and order. In February 1994, he wrote a now-famous piece in The Atlantic called “The Coming Anarchy”. While think-tankers and politicians pondered the role democracy would play in the coming years, Kaplan, out in the field, argued that it was tribal and ethnic divides, dwindling resources, and desertification and drought — which is to say climate change — that would shape the future.
He was right. In 2023, it’s not Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon or industrialised state war that loom but the spectre of anarchy. The conflict in Ukraine wasn’t officially a war when it began, often fought by local “separatists” — Russian proxies — and with mercenaries and organised criminal gangs all seeking a piece of the action. Meanwhile, opposing combatants often share a “nationality” sundered by ethnicity and language, while foreign fighters flow in on both sides. Head south and see conflict washing across the Sahel as Jihadists groups exploit the desperation wrought by dwindling water and exploding populations. We are living in Robert Kaplan’s world, not the value-freighted one that existed only in the imaginations of Tony Blair and Barack Obama.
The prerequisite to effective action is to first accept reality as it is — not in the lecture room or government department, but on the ground. This is the leitmotif that runs throughout Kaplan’s work. It is what has kept him at the cutting edge of geopolitical thought for decades, and it is what we must internalise, or else we will continue to act ineffectively, or worse, with great harm.”
Alex Hochuli – The New Statesman
“The balance sheet of the past 50 years has been stark. Western political institutions are no longer responsive to the popular will even if the institutions formally look the same. Western societies are depressed and atomised, easy prey for demagogues. Western culture has been rendered flat and lifeless by commodification. Western economies are stagnant: though productivity has vastly outstripped wages, productivity growth has declined, leaving society ever more unequal at a time when material progress means little more than the latest version of an old Apple product.
It’s true that Western decline is mostly relative, rather than absolute. The West’s loss has been others’ gain. When poverty statistics or similar indicators are taken into account, the overall global picture doesn’t look too bad, as the Steven Pinkers of the world love to insist. But subtract China from your accounting and suddenly those lines shooting up look rather flat.
The dark reality is that we are faced with a global slowdown and a reconfiguration of the economy in which there is little prospect of most of the world catching up. The West has reached the end of its developmental road – but so have so many other countries. Poor countries have scant opportunity to industrialise; many will never become middle-income countries. Middle-income nations, meanwhile, find themselves in a trap: rising costs and declining competitiveness. They are deindustrialising, which the West as a whole began doing decades ago.”
The Sources of Brexit and Trumpism Are Not the Same
Alexander Clarkson – World Politics Review
“[G]overnments led by Labour as well as the Conservative Party have to this day continued to meddle with how local authorities in England are organised in ways that regularly destabilise and underfund the forms of democratic state governance that have the most direct contact with voters. Though the devolution and peace settlements that provided substantial powers to legislatures in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff are much more difficult to reverse, their vulnerability to shifts in priorities within U.K. governments generates constant institutional friction that has played into the hands of nationalist movements seeking the breakup of the U.K.
Despite these constant waves of institutional experimentation, until 2016 much of the U.K.’s political and media elite continued to behave as if nothing had changed since the 1980s. During the Brexit referendum, those campaigning to leave the EU ignored the complex nature of overlapping political jurisdictions within the U.K., as well as the ways in which it was deeply intertwined with the EU’s supranational system. The leaders of the campaign to remain in the EU weren’t much better. They underestimated the instability generated by imbalances that gave Scotland and Wales more control over governance than England’s regions and the build-up of friction with the EU in an environment in which London had opted-out from projects that were reshaping European integration, such as the euro or the Schengen border system. For all their fundamental differences over the U.K.’s relationship with the rest of Europe, in 2016 many prominent pro-EU Remainers and anti-EU Brexiters shared underlying assumptions about the stability and power of the U.K. state that were no longer accurate even in 1996.”
J. Colin Bradley - The Point
“Ultimately, Ahmari’s and Deneen’s mistake—a mistake that runs deep in post-liberal political thought—is to suppose that the only way to avoid the arbitrariness and libertinism of undisciplined thought and action is to yoke oneself to authority or tradition. This ignores the fact that a mature person can give the moral law to herself. It ignores the possibility of dignity. Freedom does require submission and discipline. It requires submission to and the discipline of one’s own faculty of self-critical reason. It is incompatible with submission to some external authority, tradition or dogma. This is what makes genuine freedom—the sort that it is worthwhile to cultivate, and that forms the basis of an honourable life—so difficult. This kind of freedom cannot be given by someone else. That is not to say one must go it alone. To the contrary, cultivating one’s capacity for reason requires the care, friendship and tutelage of others (not to mention adequate material resources). But in the end, you cannot outsource freedom.
Freedom, for republicans like Kant, consists in having no masters. In politics, having no masters is a condition that can only be brought about by the once-subordinated class itself. If the masters remove their own crowns willingly, they have the power to put them back on; republican freedom is something that by definition cannot be given, only taken. The post-liberals overlook this because they conflate “having no master” with “having no limits.” But these are not the same thing. Recognising the value of having no masters reminds us that the goal of building countervailing power among the poor and working class is not to achieve balance and to preserve the common good “of the whole,” which takes for granted that “the whole” must include an elite that dominates an underclass of the poor. The point is to overcome a world with masters.”
Ruqaiyah Zarook - Dissent
In her exploration of international tax havens, Hoang focuses on Vietnam and Myanmar, where she conducted hundreds of interviews with people in the paper entrepreneurialism business. They, in turn, led her to countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, where she spoke with lawyers, bankers, company secretaries, accountants, private wealth managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, auditors, and other financial professionals—the vast pool of people who help the world’s elite hide their wealth from tax collectors. They see countries like Vietnam and Myanmar as “frontier markets”—a term coined by the International Finance Corporation in 1992 to describe politically unstable states in the developing world with unregulated capital markets that will carry more risk than better-moored “emerging markets.”
Hoang’s portrayal of spiderweb capitalism represents a useful challenge to common assumptions about the divisions between developed and undeveloped economies. She demonstrates that financial markets are interconnected in large, complex ecosystems that span numerous sovereign governments. But the goal of Hoang’s book isn’t just to depict the scale of this system; it is to “give global capital a face” by showing the real people at the banks, law firms, accounting firms, and corporate service providers that spin this financial web of deception. These spiderwebs are so enormous and involve so many different people that that there is “no one villain to go after,” Hoang writes. And while many of the people she interviewed recognised the problem of global inequality not one felt responsible for helping to perpetuate it. Hoang further argues that this inequality contributes to crime, competition for scarce resources, climate change, environmental damage, and mass migration—socioeconomic issues that further entrench global networks of wealth protection.”
What People Misunderstand About Rape
Jen Percy – New York Times Magazine
“What is tonic immobility? It’s an extreme response to a threat that leaves victims literally paralysed. They can’t move or speak. For more than a century, scientists have studied similar phenomena in animals, and over the years they have been named and renamed — animal hypnosis, death feigning, playing dead, apparent death and thanatosis, an ancient Greek word for “putting to death.” Tonic immobility is a survival strategy that has been identified across many classes of animals — insects, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals — and draws its evolutionary power from the fact that many predators seem hard-wired to lose interest in dead prey. It is usually triggered by the perception of inescapability or restraint, like the moment a prey finds itself in a predator’s jaws.
Humans have been shown to experience tonic immobility in the context of war and torture, natural disasters and life-threatening accidents, and studies suggest that it is common in sexual abuse. In the early 1970s, the American researchers Ann Burgess and Lynda Lyttle Holmstrom observed this behaviour, what was soon termed “rape-induced paralysis,” in people at Boston City Hospital. Over the course of a year, they documented that 34 of 92 patients diagnosed with “rape trauma” experienced freezing — physically or psychologically — during their attacks, and that some described what may now be considered tonic immobility. “I felt faint, trembling and cold. … I went limp,” one woman reported. Another said, “When I realised what he was going to do, I blanked out … tried not to be aware of what was going on.”