AT MILKING time there is a job for everyone. Young Luke, a fearless four, wants one too. Then he sees his chance. As his father herds more Friesians into the stalls, Luke grabs a plastic pipe and charges over to cows in the holding pen. Like a little emperor, he stamps the ground with his new-found staff to get them moving. They part around him placidly, their big brown eyes mild and unquestioning. Here, man and beast understand their appointed places, and man — however small — has dominion.
Luke knows the drill because he has watched it every morning and evening from the time he was a baby, parked in his pram, off to one side. His father, Jeff Broad, working down in the dairy’s “pit”, has known it all his life too. He is a fifth-generation dairy farmer. Broad’s job at this time of day is in the low passageway between the two rows of stalls; he’s in the basement and cows are on the first floor. The machinery chugs steadily in the background but his own rhythm is irregular: he reaches up to snap vacuum cups on udders, detaches them when the cows look ready, squirts them with antiseptic. He’s in gumboots and an apron, and spatters suggest he needs them both. Mucky business, this, in every regard except the result: luscious, creamy, foaming, it looks like nothing ever poured from a supermarket carton.
Ruth Broad is tending to the babies. She scoops up fresh milk to pour into feeders for the calves in the nursery, a corrugated iron lean-to. They nuzzle her with soft noses and raspy tongues. These are the heifers and they will be kept for the herd. In a separate pen with their mothers are the boys; they will be sold as soon as their navels dry out, in three or four days. She checks their eyes for signs of ill-health. “The rim on the bottom of their eyes gets swollen and their eyes sink into their heads when they’re not doing too good,” she says. “That’s when you give them electrolytes.”
This is the busiest time of year for a dairy farmer, and the Broads have another 60 calves to come from their herd of 280 cows. But the twice-daily demands of milking always have them rising in the dark and then working through what in most families would be dinnertime. They bought the farm from Jeff’s father, who had bought it from his uncle, who had settled here after riding around the district on a bicycle in the 1930s looking for just the right place. He settled on this lot at Nanneella, 15 minutes’ drive from Kyabram.
Jeff has lived in the same house all his life. “You know what they say about some of these farmers?” laughs Ruth. “All they do is shift bedrooms!”
Jeff is a man of few words. Asked what he likes about farming, he says, “Your own boss. Just out and about. Being outdoors.”
Ruth teases, “Tractors!”
After 12 hard years of drought, the Broads and their four children and families like them should be sitting pretty this year. But now they find themselves facing a new kind of trouble, one that many farmers across south-eastern Australia fear threatens not only their own livelihoods, but the very existence of their communities and their whole way of life: water wars.
Kyabram is part of the Murray-Darling Basin, a vast irrigation district that stretches from Queensland down to New South Wales through Victoria and on to South Australia. Here in the wide brown land, water is wealth. The 2500 dams and weirs on the Murray River and the thousands of channels that run off them have spread that wealth among the farmers and country towns of three states. But now the river is dying from the mouth and authorities want to return water to its flow. That means taking it back from people like the Broads.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority this month released a basin plan guide that proposed taking back up to 37 per cent of the water from farmers in the Goulburn region. A study by auditing firm Marsden Jacob Associates suggested this might well kill not just Kyabram but Cohuna, Stanhope and Numurkah; a second study — by independent banking consultant Adrian Rizza — warned that eight other towns might not survive, including Robinvale and Mildura.
The proposal to take back between 3000 and 7600 billion litres a year across the basin has unleashed a tide of apocalyptic fury in irrigators. “You have hurt my wife and family, you sons of bitches!” roared one local at a meeting in Griffith, NSW. Another asked if the basin authority intended to bankrupt rural Australia, and a third threw a fake horse’s head at authority chairman Mike Taylor. Protesters burned copies of the basin plan guide.
Taken aback by the response, authorities quickly responded. A federal parliamentary committee chaired by independent MP Tony Windsor will spend six months inquiring into the economic impact of the proposed cuts. The basin authority has said it will research the social impact.
It’s not enough for the 90 farmers who turned up to a public meeting in the historic local theatre organised by the shire council in Kyabram this week. “We are the environment, and other people are destroying us,” said one, to loud applause.
Farmers are not just enraged but bewildered and, underneath it all, wounded. They feel they work hard to be frugal with water and other resources and that they changed their practices radically to cope with drought but now are being attacked as “environmental vandals”. They are outraged by assessments that assume less water is fine because they managed to keep producing despite the drought — assessments that do not take into account those who went bust, or the enormous debt many went into in order to keep going.
Perhaps most importantly, the environmental arguments make no sense to them. Rural Australia is a heartland of climate-change scepticism. Jeff Broad is among the few who acknowledge, warily, that the rivers might need better flows, but many can’t believe a river that looks fine to them is struggling to survive. Farmers in Kyabram view climate-change science as rather like the tooth fairy: a foolish fantasy for those who like to believe it and not something sensible people waste time on. There’s been a drought and droughts break, they say confidently; it’s just natural cycles.
“Not many believe in climate change,” says Ruth Broad. “We don’t know anyone who believes it.”
Says Jeff, “It’s a dry period.” His father, Keith, also sitting at the kitchen table, tells of an international meeting in which “hundreds and hundreds of scientists say they haven’t got enough evidence for it”.
For them, water that runs into the sea is a waste. Says Ruth in disbelief, “We haven’t got very much water and we’re getting a bigger population. We can’t just tip it down the river. We’ve got people that need food.”
A survey last year of 1500 farmers by the Victorian Department of Primary Industries found that while 88 per cent acknowledged that rainfall and run-off had declined and 62 per cent agreed the state was experiencing more high pressure systems, only 30 per cent accepted a link between greenhouse emissions and global warming. Despite this, many were taking action that would reduce emissions or store carbon on their farms, such as tree planting.
Talking to farmers in Kyabram, it is clear they see themselves as custodians of the land and holders of its history. They refuse to discount the evidence of their own eyes, and they resent townies and boffins claiming to know better. At Kyabram’s public meeting, state MP Paul Weller said, “We shouldn’t accept that the environment is a big disaster.” He said the salinity in the Murray was now one-fifth of what it was in 1983 and that it had far more fish and invertebrates and much clearer water. “When I went to school, there were paddocks in our area that were bare with salt that are now green with trees . . . [They] have to acknowledge that the community has done a wonderful job of improving the environment.”
ANOTHER local jeered at scientific climate modelling: “You put something into a computer and let it tell you something at the end, and what it tells you depends on what has gone in . . . It means all the figures they are supplying are really vague and probably false.”
Other farmers said this was always a river that had had dry spells. They told of years in which locals had been able to picnic on the dry bed of the Murray, and one quoted explorer Charles Sturt writing of the river’s “putrid series of saline waterholes . . .”
Aren’t these the benchmarks of its natural history, they asked? Isn’t it overshooting the mark to want flows at the mouth of the Murray nine years out of 10? “It didn’t have that before white settlement,” claimed one man.
There was also fierce resentment at what is seen as a “water grab” in which vote-hungry politicians are diverting country water to city folk via the north-south pipeline and the desalination plant. “Why should 10 per cent of the population have to pay for 100 per cent of the population?” asked an angry woman.
Between the greenie and the farmer there seems almost no common ground. Paul Sinclair is healthy ecosystems programs manager with the Australian Conservation Foundation and author of The Murray: A river and its people. He says Professor Ross Garnaut’s figures forecast that with less rain as a result of global warming, “under business as usual, we are looking at 92 per cent less inflow into the rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin over the next 100 years”.
He warns it is rural people who will be hardest hit by more extreme weather such as droughts and storms and by the spread of diseases such as dengue and Ross River fever. “Farmers can think what they want and that’s their right, but it’s about more than what farmers think. Sticking your head in the sand means you fail to exercise leadership to help your community.”
As for the river looking fine, he says farmers don’t have a helicopter view of the overall system: “One of the great truisms of the river is that if you are in Albury, you don’t know how it is at Echuca, and if you are in Echuca you don’t know how it is at Swan Hill.”
Sinclair has a litany of disasters to recite: the Murray contains only 10 per cent of the native fish it had 100 years ago and many of its redgums are dead or dying. Ninety per cent of the basin’s floodplain wetlands have been destroyed and 20 of the basin’s 23 rivers are in poor or very poor condition. Vast stretches of the Murray have already collapsed. Two-thirds of the Coorong, at the mouth of the Murray in South Australia, has been devastated by overuse of water: “Rivers die from the bottom up. The consequences of over-extraction [there] are obvious: increased salinity, acid sulphate soils and no water for irrigators no matter how big their water licences are. For example, there used to be 23 dairy farming families around the Lower Lakes. Now there are three.”
Closer to home, “the Lindsay-Wallpolla islands, near Mildura, look like someone has detonated a nuclear bomb. It’s a system, so it won’t all die at once, but bits of it are under great stress.”
Sinclair says it is not valid to use local lore to compare today’s dry spells with those of a century ago or more. Back then the river was more resilient because it was not broken up by thousands of weirs and dams: “The river is like a boxer in round nine of 10 rounds. The river those people are describing hadn’t even got into the ring.”
There is, however, one point on which Sinclair and the farmers are agreed: it was appalling that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority released its detailed environmental proposals without mention of the effect they would have on the human elements of the environment, other than a cursory (and widely derided) estimate that the changes would lead to only 800 job losses. For rural people who already felt abandoned by government and marginalised in the debate, the report was evidence they had been entirely erased from the calculations of distant, hostile powers-that-be.
Sinclair groans when asked about the insensitivity of the process: “The performance of the MDBA has been like watching someone walk slowly into a metal fan. I thought, ‘My God, what are you doing?’ ”
Rural researcher Professor Margaret Alston, head of Monash University’s department of social work, had a similar reaction. She received an early copy of the guide and after she flipped through it her first question was, “Where are the people?” She says, “You will find information about birds and frogs but you won’t find a word about children. I was very uncomfortable that it was a socially blind document.”
AND HERE is where the woundedness comes in. Hurt as they might be by what they feel are assumptions about their environmental recklessness, that is not the main fuel for the fury of farmers around Kyabram. There is a deeper vein of resentment and fear that has spurted like lava to the surface: the pain caused by 10 years of drought. Rain has turned the grass green but has done little to ease other hardships that will be with them for a long time.
Money is tight, so tight. Many had to borrow large sums to see them through; for dairy farmers, no rain meant little or no irrigation, which meant they could not grow crops to feed their cows. Buying in fodder is hugely expensive. “It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for the largest farms,” says Jenny Reuther, who has relinquished her herd but not her links to the industry.
The drought forced most into ugly decisions of one kind or another. “Some people have said they want to keep going on the farm but others have said, ‘I don’t want to go into any more debt. I don’t want to erode my equity any further by continuing to borrow.’ ”
Many have left and their absence is felt by those who remain. The public meeting was told that the primary school in Stanhope had dropped from 140 students to 50, and many houses were for sale. Bob Winwood, a farmer outside Kyabram who has switched from dairy to beef, talks of a 20-kilometre road that in the 1990s was a sea of black and white cows. Now, “There’s one dairy farm at the top of it and then I don’t think there’s another one right through to the end.” He fears further water cuts “will just devastate this area”.
Deputy mayor and dairy farmer Neil Pankhurst estimates the Goulburn Valley has lost 60 per cent of its dairy farmers in the past decade and is producing a billion fewer litres of milk than at its peak in 2002-03. He warns of the risks for other rural industries if farms are hit any harder, listing milk factories and canneries in the region that depend on farm produce for work.
He says people were stunned and despairing when they heard the latest proposals piled on top of their existing problems: “There’s just so much uncertainty.”
Businesses are worried too. John Bacon has been in the mower and motorcycle shop on the main street for 32 years. He says the drought was purgatory: “The farm market was cut in half or less. So many businesses just survived by a little bit. Many had to tip money back in to keep going. At one stage one in five shops were empty.”
That’s because in a country town everything depends on the profitability of the farms: “If you pull out that bottom rung, it all falls down — the price of properties, the number of doctors and teachers.”
Then there are the private losses. People will tell you quietly that depression is on the rise, with all its sad sequelae, including family violence. Others have lost confidence; that fabled rural resilience is wearing thin. Local counsellor Allannah Jenkins says, “Communities where we had significant people who were enthusiastic and driven to nurture and drive that community have become exhausted.
We are seeing a lot of loneliness and isolation because communities are so fragmented and the people who are left are worn out and no one is stepping up to the mark.”
She uses government funding and donated goods to organise “pamper evenings” for women and “blokes’ barbecues” for men. Children are affected too. Alston says there are country schools where teachers set up anger management classes for children who were bringing the family tensions into the classroom.
The government has said no one will be forced off the land. There is $9 billion for the modernisation scheme and farmers can apply to have their water rights bought back by the government whenever a “subscription” is opened. “Farmers call it ‘the lucky dip’,” says Jenny Reuther.
She and her husband missed out the first time round and are hoping for a second chance to sell just part of their water rights, so they can retire debt but their farm stays workable for others.
Alston has been talking to rural people since 2001. She found gender differences in the family debate about whether to sell back their water rights. “Often it’s women who are going off-farm to source income that’s needed to get people through the next few years. It wasn’t uncommon to come across women in their 60s and 70s who were holding down full-time jobs, some of them in Melbourne. For a lot of them, buyback looks like a get-out-of-jail card.
“But for men, selling water meant revisiting the whole idea of who they are. Who are they if they are not farmers? In a small minority of cases, women were seriously considering leaving because it was just too hard to keep supporting that notion of the male farmer. They just wanted to move and have a dignified retirement.”
There is sympathy for those who put up their hands because the prevailing view is there are no “willing sellers”; people sell because they are financially pressed. But both those considering leaving and those who plan to stay are worried about what it will mean for their communities.
Peter Costello, Tongala farmer and United Dairyfarmers of Victoria district president, says farms that have sold out are now covered in weeds and pests, posing problems for neighbours. He also fears that if more than a third sell out, those left behind will have to share the cost of water between them: “I would expect the water price could double.”
Those worries seem a long way away as little Luke Broad swings on a farm-gate pointing out the smallest calf on the farm. The shadows lengthen across the paddocks and birds flock, chattering, to their nests in nearby trees. Their day is over long before the Broads’ is.
Jeff and Ruth plan to go to the protest meetings but are not as concerned as many of those around them. Their property straddles a “backbone”, a large water channel. They are doing their sums and hope to sell some of their water back to finance improvements to the farm that will make them more water efficient. They don’t want to see 37 per cent of flows taken from the region, though.
“The dirt in our area is rubbish without water,” says Ruth Broad.
Whether their family will see a sixth-generation dairy farmer depends on many factors, not least of which are the outcome of the basin plan and the ambitions of their children. Luke doesn’t want to be a dairy farmer, he admits shyly. What does he want to be? “A racing-car driver!”
Category Archives: Features
Learning to live together peacefully
DUTCH academic and author Paul Scheffer visited a school in the Belgian city of Antwerp, where 70 per cent of the students were Muslim. The teachers called him aside to ask his advice about a problem.
”The teachers told me it was very difficult to talk about the Second World War and the Holocaust because the students didn’t want to hear this, they said it was all lies,” he says. ”In biology class, they didn’t want to hear about evolution. In literature, they didn’t want to hear about Oscar Wilde because he was homosexual. Physical education classes were difficult because they didn’t want boys and girls to be together.
”What does a policy of multiculturalism tell you to do in such a situation? It is a philosophy of avoidance. It perpetuates the first stage of a migrant community, which is living side by side but separately from the wider society. It doesn’t give you a clue about what you need to do next.”
Scheffer, now professor of European studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, agrees with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that multiculturalism in Europe is dead, a failed policy unable to come to grips with today’s social realities. In 2000, he wrote an essay warning of this kind of eventuality, intending to criticise a smug Western elite that he believed was ignoring the social disadvantage of others.
In The Multicultural Drama, he warned that many first-generation migrants and their children lagged behind in terms of jobs and education and that more needed to be done to help them. But he also pointed out many of them were unwilling to accept a liberal society and religious pluralism.
The essay took off like a rocket, sparking some debates in terms that were not of Scheffer’s making and which made him ”pretty miserable”. First it was used to back right-wing rhetoric on race. After the 9/11 attacks, however, it morphed again, with the debate becoming focused on religion. Scheffer says that in Europe, ”9/11 made the question of migrants into the question of Muslims”.
Farooq Murad, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, puts it more strongly: ”Suddenly, this large faith community, which represents one-fifth of the people on this earth, became, in the eyes of the Western world, criminals, or at least [people who were] suspected of harbouring that point of view.”
Murad says 9/11 has made daily life much harder for Muslims in myriad ways. One study found that Asians – in Britain, most of them are Muslim – are 46 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than non-Asians.
”I have lived in England since I was a teenager,” he says. ”Suddenly, overnight, you feel an outsider, you feel suspected, you watch your behaviour. Boarding a train, you feel awful that you might be causing distress to your fellow travellers. On a plane you may need your bag in the overhead compartment but you don’t get it because you don’t want to cause alarm.”
All this, he says, despite the fact that Muslim leaders have repeatedly condemned terror attacks, and the fact that Muslims were among the victims of both 9/11 and 7/7 (the London bombings in 2005).
He disagrees with Scheffer’s interpretation of multiculturalism; it shouldn’t mean ghettos, or separate school curriculums, he says – and he points out that all major religions, not just Islam, have minorities with rigid orthodox views.
The spotlighting of tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim communities was not the only aftershock of 9/11 in Europe. As anxious nation-states tried to tighten their security against an amorphous, stateless threat, they introduced new laws, curbed long-standing civil rights, and developed different policing techniques, especially with regard to counterterrorism.
Under the leadership of US president George W. Bush, several European countries, including Tony Blair’s UK, also joined ”the coalition of the willing” in the Iraq war and the military operations in Afghanistan.
Britain and the continent were familiar with terrorism on their own turf in a way that the United States was not, says security expert Tobias Feakin, pointing to the history of the Basques in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, and the IRA in Britain. So Europe did not experience quite the shock America did with the advent of Islamist terrorism, he says, but it was appalled by the magnitude of the destruction on September 11.
Then came Europe’s own Islamic extremist attacks: 191 dead in Madrid in 2004, and 52 killed in London on July 7, 2005. Feakin said Europe had to develop new responses to Islamist terror because it was very different to what had come before: no warning was given before an attack, bombers were willing to die themselves, the aim was simply to kill the maximum number of people as dramatically as possible, and there was no clear political agenda – at least, not one the Western public could understand.
Feakin, who is director of the national security and resilience department of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in the UK, says Britain responded to the London attacks and to several cases of lone terrorists with a raft of measures.
“The law was changed to create a detention-without-charge period, so someone can be arrested but not formally charged to allow police additional time to investigate in order to gather the rest of the evidence,” he says. ”Police were dealing with huge bodies of evidence, sometimes in international languages they didn’t understand, or with encrypted file sources.
”Stop-and-search powers were brought in at a later stage, so that police could stop anyone they felt they had a reason to, and we got control orders to put someone under house arrest and control their movements and communications … even without charge or conviction.
”And counterterrorism policing is very different in the UK since 9/11; counterterrorism police hubs in co-ordination with MI5 have been placed right across the UK.”
This tense atmosphere was further fuelled by the murders in the Netherlands of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the latter sparking more than 100 retaliatory attacks on Muslim targets such as mosques.
Some countries have allowed post-September 11 fears about Islam to rigidify into a determination to resist its symbols. France has banned the face-covering burqa in public and the headscarf in schools, arguing that they were an affront to the nation’s secularism; the Irish have banned the burqa from classrooms; and the Swiss voted for a national ban on minarets (the towers on mosques) in a referendum sponsored by the extreme right but opposed by the government.
The paradox is that while such civil measures have increased, the debate is now looking more critically at initial responses to the crisis.
The former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, last week argued in a public lecture that it was a mistake to have called the response to September 11 ”the war on terror” because it legitimised terrorists as warriors. She also criticised the shrinking of civil liberties, arguing that this was ”handing victory to the terrorists”.
Feakin says Britain is soon to roll back some security measures that were found to be too heavy-handed. Meanwhile, support for al-Qaeda has fallen across the Arab world because of its attacks in Iraq: ”They slaughtered thousands of fellow Muslims. It was an incredibly hardline approach that seemed to go against the ethos of taking the war to the US.”
The Arab Spring might lessen Muslim frustration, too, in a way that siphons off the anger that spurred terrorism, Feakin says. ”Al-Qaeda used to talk about the oppressive governments across the Arab world and now they are gone. If democracy there is successfully allowed to develop in a proper manner, you could see al-Qaeda become completely irrelevant. But if you see another kind of abuse of power develop, that will go with the al-Qaeda agenda.”
It is a view Scheffer shares. If the Arab Spring lessens the sense of grievance about dictatorial regimes supported by the West, ”that might change the equation, especially now that people have seen the genuine effort by France and Britain in Libya. It makes it harder to argue that the West is trying to push the Arab world into a corner.”
Scheffer’s new book, Immigrant Nations, looks at how immigration is changing the world. He says that researching the topic has reassured him that the current tensions between Europe’s 20 million Muslims and their neighbours are to be expected and should ease over time.
”I’m confident that the conflict we are witnessing isn’t a sign of the failure of integration,” he says. ”It’s part of searching for a new understanding of how to be with each other, and that is often painful and difficult.”
He says the history of immigration in the US shows new communities typically go through three phases: avoidance, when they live separately; conflict, as they begin to rub up against the existing community and its different ways; and, finally, accommodation, as both sides learn to live with each other.
But he says that in order to reach the final stage there must be acceptance of mutual values, including religious freedom, freedom of speech, and equality of treatment.
The key is reciprocity: ”If I have a class of boys from a Moroccan background, I ask, ‘Why are you angry?’ They might say it is because they are discriminated against; they want to be treated as equals. ‘But then there is perhaps a question of the equal treatment of women, or of homosexuals; can you live with that idea? Because if you think it’s an important value, you can’t just pick and choose when to apply it.’ They see the fairness of the argument.
”But you are not going to force people to change their thinking through laws or banning the burqa or saying you can’t build a mosque. It’s a matter of explaining that the freedoms you are demanding can only survive if you grant them to people with whom you deeply disagree … If not, you are transforming yourself into an outsider.”
Murad agrees, and points to the need for visionary political leadership to help heal the rifts of the past decade. He says, ”Muslims and Christians and Jews have created great societies together in the past. We share a great deal of common values, and in a shrinking world, [living together peacefully] is not a matter of choice any more.”
The enemy within
OSLO
THE worst in people has brought out the best in people. Staid, proper Oslo, faced with atrocity, has become a city of flowers. A bright circle of blooms on the cobblestones outside the city’s cathedral has swelled by the day; sheets of blossoms float in fountains; roses are tucked lovingly onto statues and signposts.
The pilgrimages continued all this week, long past the 200,000-strong “March of flowers” remembrance on Tuesday night. Most trams going into the city centre carry grown-ups and children clutching bouquets. Each laying of flowers is a small, individual gesture. But it is also part of a wider expression of two emotions shared by the rest of Norway: grief over the 76 lives destroyed by gunman Anders Behring Breivik, and the peaceful defiance of a people who refuse to be cowed.
Well, those emotions are shared by most of the rest of Norway. The western city of Fored, on the other hand, this week found itself tagged with triumphant Nazi swastikas. Jailing Breivik is not going to solve all the ugly problems exposed by his ideologically driven violence; not in Norway, and not in Europe.
While Breivik’s bloody slaughter of teenagers at a summer camp was repugnant to all decent people, it is also true that a good proportion of decent people quietly share some of his political views. Support for right-wing politics is on the rise across Europe, fuelled by economic hard times and fear of Islam. A rise in the number of extremists on its fringe is expected as a result.
Breivik had intended his massacre to be a “wake-up call” to Europe about what he saw as the danger of a Muslim takeover. Instead it has become a different kind of wake-up call, warning a Europe that had been preoccupied with the threat of Islamic terror that blond, Christian, home-grown threats can be just as deadly.
Many Norwegians say the only comfort over the lone-gunman massacre eight days ago is that Breivik must be crazy, a freak of nature, a psychopath; a product not of politics and culture but of a murderously disordered mind. “He could not possibly be sane and do what he has done,” one person after another will tell you.
But those who study such things say this isn’t so. The “lone-wolf” terrorist is rarely mad or psychopathic, says Will Hartley, the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre in Washington.
“Terrorists tend to be better adjusted [psychologically] than the average. They often have a surfeit of qualities that would otherwise make them respectable, such as empathy and the ability to act altruistically. Their background is often surprising — with the 7/7 bombings in London, one of the terrorists was a social worker who worked with children.”
A terrorism expert at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs, Helge Luras, says Breivik’s internet manifesto suggests he pumped himself full of steroids to heighten his aggression, and listened to music through earphones so he would not be moved by the pleas of his victims: “So he’s not a psychopath or lacking in emotion or empathy. In the manifesto he talks about how it will be difficult to kill these people in this manner because he has empathy. Psychopaths don’t struggle with that.”
Breivik’s meticulous planning over nine years, and his attention to detail, suggest he is well and truly in touch with the real world, if markedly paranoid. Some analysts see him as a man who became a killer not because he was overcome by any emotion but because he made a logical decision that this was the best way to spread his ideas.
“Breivik was doing a mass murder as a form of fundamentalist PR,” says Matthew Feldman, lecturer in history at the University of Northampton in Britain and an expert on the extreme right wing.
He is convinced Breivik killed to get publicity for his online manifesto and video, posted just hours before he set off a car bomb and hunted teenagers with a sub-machinegun. “If he had posted them two weeks earlier, they would have sunk without trace. It was a publicity stunt. At the same time, the documents, video and killings were the first salvo in what he thought would be a European civil war.”
Feldman sees the fundamentalist Breivik, calling on heroic figures from Christianity’s distant past, as the Western equivalent of the Muslim terrorist: believing that ideas are more important than human life, that violence will lead to revolutionary change, and that martyrs must offer their lives in defence of their besieged culture. “It’s a kind of crusading ‘Christianism’ that is the mirror image of jihadi Islamism,” he told The Saturday Age.
According to his 1500-page manifesto — much of it cut and pasted from other writers — Breivik believes that European governments are allowing Muslims to take over Europe through mass immigration that is diluting the culture. He claims to be part of an organisation called the Knights Templar dedicated to fighting for Europe. The original Knights Templar was a military organisation during the mediaeval Crusades to take the Holy Land back from Muslims.
His manifesto suggests he killed the young people of Norway’s Labour Party at their summer camp on Utoeya island because Labour deserved “the death penalty” for its multicultural policies and friendly approach to immigration, which were a “betrayal” of Europe. He predicts that continued immigration will lead to civil war and history’s third expulsion of Muslims from the continent.
Analysts concede that, even within the bizarre world of terrorism, Breivik is an unusual specimen. Most terrorists work in groups, partly because it is mutual reinforcement that leads to the gradual acceptance of radical ideas, and partly because competitive dynamics help push individuals into violence. But while police are investigating Breivik’s claims of two more cells, and of international contact with bodies such as the English Defence League — denied by the league — it seems at this stage that he conceived and carried out his massacre alone.
Hartley says this suggests he is highly self-reliant and has a massive ego, full of the importance of his own ideas, like America’s Unabomber. “He’s not mentally ill but he may have delusional fantasies. He likes to picture himself in the uniform and cross of the Knights Templar; there is an element of role-play, of conveying himself as knight in a long line of European crusader heroes who fought for their religion.”
He warns that solo operators such as Breivik are almost impossible to detect in time: “The lone-wolf terrorist is far, far harder to track unless he makes mistakes. The first you hear of him is when he carries out his first attack.”
Which is a big problem, because European police have been warning that exactly this kind of terrorist is becoming more likely, created by a new and volatile combination of factors: the technology of the internet, and a right-wing backlash across Europe focused on immigration, unemployment and national identity.
The internet provides the would-be terrorist with anonymity, global reach on information and the ability to spread material quickly and widely. Feldman says there have been two recent right-wing, lone-wolf cases in England, one involving a member of the white-supremacist Aryan Strike Force who made the deadly chemical ricin. “With the right amount of dedication, a credit card and a modem, you can make weapons of mass destruction from your home computer.”
Breivik claims he learnt how to make a car bomb by spending 200 hours on the internet in two weeks.
In Europe, Islamism has been the major focus of terror fears since September 11. Europol’s 2011 report on terrorism warned of a continuing “high and diverse” threat of Islamist terrorists, with 179 arrests in 2010 over plots to cause mass casualties. This was a 50 per cent increase on the year before. And it warned that more “lone actors with EU citizenship” were becoming involved in Islamist terrorism, with fewer plots controlled by leaders from outside the EU.
But the Europol report also said the threat of right-wing extremists was intensifying, and noted: “If the unrest in North Africa leads to a major influx of immigrants into Europe, right-wing terrorism might gain a new lease of life by articulating more widespread apprehension about immigration.”
Immigration is a focus of every mainstream right-wing party in Europe, although most have worked hard to eradicate any clear sign of racism. “Very few contemporary right-wing movements play with race,” Hartley says. “It is the fringe of the fringe. The mainstream has tried to move beyond that. Once you drop race and start focusing on levels of immigration, that concerns a much broader segment of society. That’s what’s behind their growth.”
Of course, the left argues that debating immigration is simply “dog-whistle politics”: those being called recognise it as code for “race”. But among extremists, Feldman says, there is no room for doubt: “The 20-century scapegoating of Muslims is something everyone on the far right can agree on.”
Far right parties have become a more powerful presence in mainstream politics across a range of countries. In Russia, says Hartley, “they are conventional nationalists, against migration from the former Soviet socialist republics”.
In Britain, “The British National Party has actually secured seats on councils and things like that, and is much closer to giving the conventional parties a run for their money in elections.”
It seems paradoxical, but the old left is part of the new far right. Hartley says most members of the BNP are “traditional Labour voters who no longer feel Labour is protecting their interests in terms of multiculturalism and the erosion of salaries. The right-wing parties are benefiting from being able to portray themselves as representatives of disenfranchised workers”.
Britain also has the English Defence League, cited by Breivik as an organisation he connected with, which has chapters in many European countries and a Norwegian Facebook page with 13,000 members, says Feldman. “The EDL is perhaps less uncompromising in its ideology, but that doesn’t stop hundreds of working-class young white men putting their hoodies up and shouting slogans on English streets.”
A sense of an in-group that is being economically threatened by an out-group is central to the resentment of far-right activists in Britain, while nationalist ideas are more the focus in Europe, according to research by Matthew Goodman, an associate fellow at Chatham house.
He interviewed one British far-right activist who said of migrants, “They’re getting post offices, shops, takeaways . . . The government’s way of dealing with deprived areas is by giving the biggest regeneration grants to the poorest areas . . . They’re winning hands down every time. We haven’t got a chance . . . So they’re getting their houses done up . . . new windows, new doors, new kitchens . . . they’re making people angry.”
And another: “They [mainstream politicians] don’t know what it’s like to live cheek by jowl with a Polish person, a Lithuanian person, an African person and then fight for a job.”
On the continent, far right-wing groups are gaining traction from Hungary to Italy, but their rise is particularly apparent in northern European countries such as Norway that previously had liberal immigration policies.
The rapid arrival of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants, many of them Muslims, led to a significant backlash in Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party has 25 out of 179 seats in parliament, and the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom won 15.5 per cent of the vote in the 2010 general election. Wilders once compared the Koran, the holy book of Islam, to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In Sweden, a man was arrested last November in the city of Malmo in connection with more than a dozen unsolved shootings of immigrants, including one fatality. The far-right Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time last September after winning 5.7 per cent of the vote.
The far right is getting better at recruitment in the digital age. Europol spokesman Gerald Hesztera told The Saturday Age that right-wing extremists are now more professional in their use of the internet, with stylish websites and clever use of social media.
“White Power” music groups hold concerts organised over the internet that attract hundreds of young people to listen to xenophobic songs with hate-filled lyrics, he says. “They have a general ideology of white supremacy and they are rock groups with a racist, sometimes fascist, orientation. Right-wing skinheads go to these concerts all over Europe,” he says.
On Oslo’s streets the racial mix is clear. Along with the ethnic Norwegians are Africans, Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis, as well as stateless Romany, who have drifted across from Eastern Europe.
Norway tends to see itself as an open, democratic, inclusive society of tolerance and shared values. Not everyone there agrees. One man of Pakistani background, who did not want to be named, says he is second-generation Norwegian but is preparing his children, who are third-generation, for the fact they will be made to feel like outsiders in their homeland. “They will get to school and be seen as Pakistanis and Muslims, as foreigners. If a person can function in a society, can follow the rules, can work and go to school, they are part of the society even if they have a different skin colour or religion or culture. That’s my opinion. But there are a lot of Norwegian politicians who want you to go and hold a sausage in your hand and want your woman in a bikini and only then are you part of the society.”
He was one of several Norwegians privately to express relief this week that the killer had not been a Muslim because that might have led to social fracture.
Forty-nine per cent of Norwegians questioned in a recent poll said they thought immigration had gone too far and too fast, says Helge Luras. This is not a reaction to immigration but the way it has always been in Norway. “People said pretty much the same thing in a poll in ’87,” he says.
Luras says he is not right-wing, and that he angered the right because he always argued that the threat of Islamic terrorism in Norway was overblown. But he does urge caution over immigration, simply on the basis of human nature’s historical intolerance of difference.
“This is not just something peculiar to Europe. This need for group cohesion and the issue of borders is so ingrained in humans. It ensured our survival in the very early phases. This is still with us and it creates problems in a phase of globalisation, but we are genetically what we were 20,000 years ago. I’m not saying that’s how it should be, but that is more or less how it is. We have to adapt our political and social system to the reality.”
He formed views partly while working “for a long time in the Balkans, with a multi-ethnic society that collapsed into civil war because of people’s perceptions of difference in identity and [economic problems]. This dynamic of finding scapegoats has been part of human affairs ever since we have been studying them.”
He says every culture has a threshold of tolerance for newcomers that varies over place and time: “If there’s massive unemployment, even if it’s not to do with immigration, then at the same time you have the immigration of large groups of people who live in separate neighbourhoods, definitely that’s a factor of instability and could lead to conflict.”
The Progress Party now holds about a quarter of seats in Norway’s parliament and is seen to have increased its support because of its criticism of immigration, which has become more restricted as politicians began to take note of the public mood. This week, the party — which is not as far to the right as those in other nations — was at pains to distance itself from Breivik, who was a member when he was younger. Breivik wrote that he left both the Progress Party and the English Defence League because he found them inadequate.
Himanshu Gulati is a 23-year-old Norwegian of Indian background who is vice-president of the Progress Party’s youth wing. He told The Saturday Age that it had less of a focus on immigration than conservative parties in other countries, and that its concerns were more about failures of integration, such as female mutilation and forced marriages.
Gulati said his party had been distraught over the massacre: “Even though we disagree with the Labour Party we do agree on core values and principles, and what this crazy guy has done is against what we all stand for. I am part of the Progress Party’s youth movement and all of us know many people who were on Utoeya. Most of the youth politicians of all parties have been there. They invited us to debates in their summer camp and we invited them to ours. We have all had the worst week of our lives, no matter which party we belong to.”
In typically Norwegian fashion — political debate here is strong, but so is the tradition of consensus — leaders of all the main parties agreed to suspend partisan politics for several weeks, and this week met at the Progress Party’s headquarters to discuss how best to manage the election coming up in September.
ANDERS Behring Breivik wanted to change the course of history. He thought he would light a fuse that would set fire to Europe. Opinion is divided on what effect, if any, he will have on the future.
Hartley says he has damaged the mainstream right wing because now some of its rhetoric is linked with his violence: “He reminds everyone of what they have been trying to bury, and now the right is being tarred as racist in the media because of his focus on Muslims.”
But Breivik could turn out to be inspirational to some who, like him, feel the system is rigged against the right and prevents ordinary people from expressing views considered politically incorrect, says Hartley.
Luras says the drivers for far-right-wing support — stagnating economies and pressure on borders — will continue, and Europe should be “prepared and concerned” about its rise. “It doesn’t mean that it would lead to terrorism but my sense at the moment is that Mr Breivik is the beginning of what may be a cult figure for some. He has described in detail how the movement should arise to be inspired by himself, and some will be inspired.”
Luras says the level of hero-worship will depend on whether Breivik cracks in prison: “If he can keep up the appearance that he is superhuman, able to stand completely on his own, still believing in himself even though he is in a cell, then the cult will definitely be created.”
And if that should happen, “I will be very surprised in 10 years if, looking back, not a single terrorist act has occurred connected to Mr Breivik.”
Calculated attack on future of nation’s left wing
HE IS a man of vision. Anders Behring Breivik did not kill just any group of teenagers. He targeted the Norwegian Labour Party’s next generation of leaders.
Every year since 1974, teenagers interested in left-wing politics had gathered at the summer camp on the idyllic island of Utoya to play, debate and meet political leaders. This is where the party shaped its idealistic young. The Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, remembers it as “the paradise of my youth”.
Mr Breivik, the man who has admitted he slaughtered at least 86 of those young people and seven more in the Oslo bomb blast in what is the bloodiest day of Norway’s peacetime history, has told his lawyer the killings had been “gruesome but necessary”. He said he is willing to explain what he has done, and why, when he appears in court for a custody hearing today.
The explanation is likely to involve racial hatred and a twisted sense of nationalistic mission.
The Oslo police chief, Sveinung Sponheim, told reporters Mr Breivik had confessed and will co-operate with the hearing but said he is not accepting criminal responsibility.
Police have not ruled out accomplices, and last night six people were briefly detained and later released after an armed raid at a property in the east of the country’s capital. Reports suggest officers were trying to access chemical containers at the address.
Most mass killers are crazed; Mr Breivik, according to a manifesto he wrote on the internet, also had a political framework. In Norway his attack is being seen not just as a slaughter of innocents but as an assault on racial tolerance and the consensual values of “the Scandinavian way”.
Norwegians are appalled not just by the scale of the bloodshed but by the careful preparations leading up to it. “This thing on the island is truly sickening because the calculation which appeared to go into it is truly evil,” Erik Olsen, 44, told the Herald.
Mr Olsen had mistakenly thought he was at the centre of Friday’s violence. A public servant in the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, he works opposite the 10-storey building that houses the prime minister’s offices in the centre of Oslo. At 3.26pm on Friday he heard a large, clear crack, like an immense champagne cork popping. It became a deep boom as the soundwaves radiated out, he learnt later, shattering windows blocks away.
It felt to him like the building jumped. His window exploded inwards and a wardrobe on the other side of the office fell down. When he reached the corridor outside, it was full of rubble and clouded with smoke and dust. He says it was then he recognised the look of this: it was the September 11, 2001, look.
He and others made their way downstairs and into the street. Buildings looked as if their facades had been scraped off. “Everything was jagged and hanging loose … It looked like those pictures from New York.” Others have described bloodied bodies on the ground and torsos hanging out of windows. Seven people died and 30 were injured. But that afternoon reports emerged about Utoya, and Mr Olsen started to recognise the extent of the carnage: “It became apparent that we were the sideshow.”
It appears the car bomb was a distraction, a decoy. It also provided a ploy for Mr Breivik to disarm his initial victims and bought time for him to carry out his plans on the island.
Mr Breivik’s internet diary suggests he had been planning the attack for nearly two years. He had bought a property outside Oslo and registered a business growing vegetables. He bought six tonnes of fertiliser, a key ingredient in bomb-making.
Police believe he planted the car bomb and then drove a van to the edge of the mainland and took a ferry to Utoya.
There, many of the 600 youngsters were gathered in or around the main building, anxious for news about the bombing in the city. Mr Breivik was dressed like a policeman. He called out for them to gather around, he had news. And then he began to shoot them.
Some friends of Lisa Marie Husby, 19, had gone to greet him. Then she heard gunshots: “It was chaos and people were screaming ‘Run! Run! Run for your life!’”
She turned and fled the other way. “My friends came with me and we ran into the forest for about 500 metres with the man and the gun running behind us. We got to this cabin in the middle of the wood and then he turned and went back.”
Inside the cabin she lay under a bed with suitcase on top of her listening to more gunshots. The man came back and started shooting through the doors. She switched her mobile to silent and lay still, terrified that if he heard movement he would break in. After he left, three of her friends decided to run back to the main building. “I haven’t seen them or heard them now … everybody outside the main building was shot.”
A boy told the BBC that Mr Breivik was a methodical hunter. He checked out tents and shot their cowering occupants. Twenty or 30 were shot as they tried to swim away: “The weapons were so powerful that the jet of water was very high.”
Witnesses told Norwegian news agencies the gunman sprayed bullets into corpses, seeking out any who were still breathing. “It seemed he was enjoying it,” Magnus Stenseth, a youth leader, told the newspaper VG. “He walked around the island as if he had absolute power.”
The killing spree went on for nearly 90 minutes while the police response was delayed. They were dealing with the aftermath of the car bomb and had trouble getting a helicopter and boats.
At the weekend, police pulled 20 bodies from the water. Dozens of others were scattered around the water’s edge, covered in blankets. Yesterday a mini-submarine scoured the depths for eight or so still missing. The current death toll from the island is 86. It is expected to rise.
A criminal psychologist who profiles killers for British police and was the expert adviser for the television series Cracker has speculated that Mr Breivik was a well-disciplined man with a “slow-burn” rage against society.
Ian Stephen told London’s Telegraph that Mr Breivik’s background suggested “a very egocentric, narcissistic and disciplined man” likely to believe he was always right.
Mr Breivik is 32 and lived with his mother, who neighbours say doted on him. His estranged father said he was in shock.
“I was reading the online newspapers and suddenly I saw his name and picture,” the pensioner told a Norwegian newspaper from France, where he now lives. “It was a shock to learn about it. I have not recovered yet.” He claims to have had no contact with his son since 1995.
Mr Breivik did not shoot himself afterwards, as many mass killers do, Dr Stephen said: “It’s as if he takes satisfaction from seeing the results, and might take pleasure from being interviewed by police and getting to explain his beliefs.”
A professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, David Wilson, agreed: “This is not somebody who is ashamed of what he did.”
Others look not to the personal but to the political for explanations. Mr Breivik saw Norway’s immigration policy as lax. He apparently hated Muslims, left-wingers and the country’s political establishment.
He had previously been a member of the conservative Progress Party. The Progress Party has strengthened its position on the back of rhetoric about “sneak-Islamicisation”. It demands tighter immigration rules, whereas the centre-left government supports multiculturalism.
The young campers at Utoya were everything Mr Breivik disliked, politically and racially. The New York Times reported that many victims were the children of immigrants from Africa and Asia who had begun to stake out a greater role in Norwegian society.
Politicians have said the massacre must not be allowed to damage democracy.
First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
World’s disasters bring a new degree of trauma to victims
WHEN someone recalls a trauma, their eyes take on a faraway look as they find themselves back in the moment. Some talk in torrents, with words and images and feelings tumbling over each other in an urgent rush to escape. Others, especially those still in shock, seem unnaturally calm because they have not yet felt the full force of their emotions.
Jacqueline Kennedy was like this the week after her husband was shot and she held together the pieces of his skull as their limousine raced to hospital. During an interview she gave days later to writer Theodore White for Life magazine, she was utterly composed. He found she had vivid recall of every grisly detail, as well as an obsessive need to ensure history would cast her husband’s time in office as a “Camelot”. She even gave White the line.
It was separately reported that in the months that followed, her young daughter Caroline told teachers at school that mummy spent day after day in bed, crying. She had, after all, lost her husband, her home, and a whole order of life in a sudden, shocking blow.
Disaster is so public. In Victoria after the fires, in Queensland after the floods, in New Zealand after the earthquake, we can see the ruination of homes and farms and businesses, the natural landscape obliterated by fire or water or earth, the tracks of tears on dirtied and bloodied faces, the blanketing of bodies. In the immediate aftermath, the anguish is felt and seen by the world.
And then the cameras rush on to the next big event, and those who have been traumatised are left to deal with it — or not — behind closed doors.
They can expect sleeplessness and flashbacks and heightened fears about their own safety and the safety of those they love. Some will blame themselves for what they did or didn’t do at the moment of crisis. They will struggle for years with the magnitude of the task of rebuilding their homes and their lives.
Some will get sick as prolonged stress undermines previously healthy bodies. In Victoria, there have been anecdotal reports of Black Saturday survivors suffering from illnesses, including pneumonia and heart attacks, in unusually high numbers in the two years since the fires.
Trauma has always been part of the human condition. It used to be easy to divide its causes into two categories. The first was “acts of God”, such as plague, flood and earthquake. The second was the suffering humans inflict on each other: rape, torture, killing and war.
The Christchurch earthquake falls into the first category. But many disasters that would once have been written off as sheer bad luck — the Queensland cyclone, the Victorian bushfires, the Biblical floods that swept through Pakistan and parts of south-east Asia last year — no longer fit neatly into the shoulder-shrugging category.
Millions are predicted to be traumatised by climate change. The United Nations estimates that by 2020, the world will have 50 million environmental refugees, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was told this week. Like Jackie Kennedy, they will lose their homes and a whole order of life, but unlike her, they will not be cushioned by wealth. They will lose loved ones not to the drama of the assassin’s bullet but to the slow, evil wasting of starvation.
Cristina Tirado, a professor at the University of California, and other speakers told the conference that climate change was already affecting the security of the world’s food supply, and that “when people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate”.
And they riot. Food shortages have been a trigger in many political uprisings from the French Revolution to the present turmoil in the Arab world. This week John Ashton, the British Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change, gave a speech in London at Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in which he warned: “Tunisians first came on to the streets in protest at high food prices, driven up by climatically intensified supply shocks. Climate change is a stress multiplier. It is hard to imagine a more effective engine than our interconnected insecurities over climate, food, water and energy for driving angry young people onto the streets of crowded cities. That engine cannot be switched off in a high-carbon economy.”
Our own part of the world will suffer the most, according to a 2009 report by the Asian Development Bank, The Economics of Climate Change in South-east Asia: A Regional Review. Neighbours, including Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, could lose up to 6.7 per cent of gross domestic product each year by 2100, more than twice the predicted global average loss, due to floods, droughts and cyclones. The report warned that up to 94 million people in the region could be flooded by rising sea levels.
The four countries are tipped to suffer a fall in potential rice yield of about 50 per cent by 2100, compared with 1990, unless there is action to prevent it.
You don’t have to be a greenie to care about climate change. You just have to be sensitive to human suffering, and to the likelihood that there might soon be a whole new meaning to the expression “a world of pain”.
Embers of pain stir in young hearts
BLACK SATURDAY – ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ —Graham Greene
MATTHEW is an outdoors boy. He likes fishing, his scooter, his motorbike. Aged 10, he swims and plays basketball and has a dry sense of humour. On Black Saturday, he was eight. That afternoon, he and his mother left their house to take refuge with family. While others fought the firestorm roaring outside, Matthew was told to shelter inside. “What do you want me to do, Mum?” he demanded.
“Once he got past his initial terror, he was right into it,” says his mother, Tania*. “He was still frightened but he kept himself busy.” He put towels under doors and fetched wet face-washers for other distressed children as they all choked on the smoke.
When the fire passed, the house they had been protecting was safe, as were they. But a bewildered Matthew still found himself encircled by loss. His home and everything in it had been burned to the ground. His grandparents had lost their home, which had been the much-loved hub of the family for decades. His school was gone. His neighbours and two schoolfriends had been killed. The landscape of his life — the bushland around Kinglake — was a blackened ruin.
The door to the future had opened.
For Matthew, it was a future strewn with panic attacks. With choking fits that made it hard for him to eat. With nightmares about fire, in the early days, which were followed by dreams of being chased, or of being trapped, or of losing his mother. Even during the day he was often tense. He rarely laughed. He shrank away when anyone mentioned Black Saturday. Young as he was, he understood enough to know he was struggling. He told his mother: “I think I’m going crazy.”
That’s a scary thing for any parent to hear. It’s even scarier for parents who are struggling themselves.
Two years after the Black Saturday fires — the anniversary is on Monday — the physical world is beginning to heal. Trees are leafy and paddocks are lush and neat new houses have sprung up; not enough for everyone to be back under their own roofs, but enough to be a heartening sign of progress.
Emotional wounds can take longer. In bushfire areas, there are still young children wetting the bed, and having nightmares and insomnia. Some have even talked of killing themselves, at an age when kindergarten is only just behind them and the very concept should be foreign. Older children have been caught nicking antidepressants from their mother’s supply in the hope that a single “happy pill” will stop them feeling so sad.
There are children who become hysterical at the sight of a red sunset because it reminds them of flames in the sky. When mist swirled across a wintry road one morning, students on a school bus screamed because they feared it was smoke.
Bushfire-affected teenagers are showing strain too. Lesley Bebbington is a local mother who began a teen youth group in Kinglake after realising that many were coming home from school and locking themselves alone in their rooms night after night.
She says: “We are really concerned at the moment because there are a lot of kids who have just now started to experience their trauma. There are high levels of truancy and more kids accessing welfare officers now than at any time since the fire. That gels with the trauma model, which says that for some people, years two to four are the worst.
“We also noticed last year there was an increase in the use of alcohol and drugs, promiscuity — definitely an increase in that risky behaviour. Kids are talking about suicide, and ‘What’s the point?’ — both face-to-face and online with each other. They just feel there’s not any future so you may as well go the full max and not think about the consequences.”
At the heart of all these problems lies a force with which modern psychology is starting to come to grips: disaster trauma in children.
Children touched by the fires had their first encounter with mortality long before they were ready to make sense of it. Perhaps they nearly died themselves; perhaps friends or family actually did. To that mourning, and fear of sudden death, add the loss of a home and a whole order of life, as well as parents who are themselves distraught and distracted by having to rebuild, and you have a potent mix of pathogens. Survivors of the recent floods and the Queensland cyclone will face similar problems. The good news is that much is now known about how to help children heal.
Dr Paul Valent is a Holocaust survivor and a retired psychiatrist who specialised in trauma. He says it works this way: “Something major has happened that’s implanted in the brain. It’s like a big, dark, gravitational force. Everything has imploded in there. It’s invisible but it’s got enormous energy. You can’t think about it, you can’t talk about it, and you don’t have words for it. It’s overwhelming.”
He says that within weeks of suffering the trauma, the person begins to cut off from feelings about it that are too painful. Those feelings might be expressed instead in physical symptoms. In children, that might be bedwetting, stomach ache or headache, or through behaviour such as screaming or clinging to a parent. Very young children will
re-enact trauma through drawings and play. Valent says a survey in South Australia after the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 found 23 per cent of children in a bushfire community had psychiatric problems, and that in one kindergarten, fire games were still the most popular games 10 months afterwards.
There is likely to be misplaced guilt over what the person did or did not do during the crisis, Valent says, with children particularly prone to blaming themselves. After Ash Wednesday, one girl believed she had caused the whole disaster: “Magical thinking is more prominent in children. She had wished harm to someone, and harm had come.”
He says adults and children “don’t join the dots [over emotional problems causing the physical symptoms] because behind that lies thoughts like, ‘Life has no meaning because I didn’t save so-and-so’ or ‘because I killed so-and-so’. So they disconnect parts of their minds: emotions, thoughts. But when you kill off parts of yourself, you can’t negotiate what you will kill off. If you kill off guilt, you also kill off love. If you cut off from fear, you experience psychic numbing. You can’t be loving and creative and whole any more.”
Young Matthew blamed himself later for not having been brave enough during the fire, his mother, Tania, says. “He felt a lot of guilt. He felt like he wasn’t being brave because he had cried at one point. He was, in fact, amazingly brave but he didn’t want to hear that. He was being very hard on himself.”
Hardest for both of them was Matthew’s loss of faith in her ability to protect him. In the early days, he would ask what if they had done this or that during the fire, and the outcome had been different. She told him she would never have let him be hurt. He retorted that the parents of dead children had probably said that too.
Principal Jane Hayward is looking after a school full of children who have trouble feeling safe, even though the new Strathewen primary, cut into a hillside overlooking the once-devastated valley, is built to withstand near-apocalypse conditions: huge water tanks, a sprinkler system, metal shutters on all windows and doors, GPS positioning in case helicopter water-bombing is needed. “We can go into complete lockdown,” says Hayward.
Half the students here lost their homes — some were convinced they were moments from death as houses burned down around them — and four parents and several grandparents were killed. Many others were displaced because their homes were too damaged to live in, and the school itself was incinerated. “The children have experienced so much trauma, and their individual stories are so extreme, that it’s going to be a long haul,” Hayward says.
She went to bushfire workshops and was discouraged to hear that families “would be fine after three months”: that’s not what she was seeing. It was more than a year later, when she met a psychotherapist experienced in child trauma, that Hayward learned more.
“The kids have developed ‘hyper-vigilance’ because they know that in the blink of an eye, your world can be turned upside down and changed forever.” This means that when they are told a parent has phoned, their first reaction is fear: “Is everything all right?”
While the school still has high expectations of academic performance, that has had to be tempered with understanding of new problems. “What we found with learning is that children seemed to be chugging along and learning normally. And then you would do a test, or score a piece of work, and wonder, ‘What have I done wrong?’ because there were obvious learning gaps.” The psychotherapist explained to Hayward that after trauma there are often Swiss cheese-type holes in concentration, exacerbated by tiredness from lack of sleep — a phenomenon locals call “bushfire brain”.
Sleep is a precious commodity right across bushfire communities. Says Hayward, “On a windy night when the wind roars through [sounding like a bushfire], no one sleeps. The sound is enough to trigger the fear.”
And then comes the occasional crisis when it becomes clear what is at the heart of an individual child’s distress. Bebbington tells of a boy who had a flashback to when his family was fleeing the fire: “He suddenly remembered that when his dad stopped the car, to tell the mother and the rest of the family in the car behind that the road was blocked by a fallen tree, he had felt his dad had left him to die. He had a complete meltdown, out of the blue.”
She says: “I defy anybody to match the resilience of my community and the kids in it, but just because they are resilient and keep going every day doesn’t mean they’re not extremely sad and traumatised.”
At Whittlesea Secondary College, 19 members of the school community died in the fires, including four students and two whole families, as well as parents, staff and school councillors. Sixty families and seven staff lost their homes. A survey found that 392 of the students had been directly affected in some way.
Principal Terry Twomey says: “If you come into the school, you wouldn’t notice anything. There’s plenty of routine and lots of terrific things going on. But there is a lot happening under the surface too. Many are missing friends they lost in the fires and many are missing not living where they used to live. There’s a whole lot of frustration over the rebuild, and there’s all of the financial and relationship issues that have emerged . . . You can never listen too much.”
He says staff are working hard to try to keep students connected to school, because they know they are at risk. “Ash Wednesday data found a lot of young people became disengaged from learning and didn’t go on to tertiary education at all, and there were some significant mental health issues for that cohort down the track . . . They need to see purpose and a future for themselves.”
It sounds like a discouraging cocktail of troubles. But Ruth Wraith, a former head of the department of child psychotherapy at the Royal Children’s Hospital and the trauma specialist who helped the Strathewen teachers, is neither surprised nor alarmed to hear such stories.
Parents should not fear that children are irreparably damaged when they scream at red sunsets, she says, or even when a very young child talks of suicide. “These are symptoms, or reactions, that are messages from the child about what the meaning of the traumatic experience is to that individual child. To understand, we need to know what need the symptom is fulfilling.”
Of talk of suicide, she says: “What does the child mean when he says those words? It might have a very different meaning for a child than it does for adults. It might mean they want to get further away from trigger reminders, or from fighting in the family. They might want to ensure they will never face bushfire again. It may be that somebody has died and they have overheard an adult conversation that this person is at peace now, so perhaps they have concluded: ‘If I die, I will be at peace.’ ”
The same principle applies to understanding troubled teenagers who are relying too much on sex, drugs or alcohol. “In adolescence, it’s normal to feel immortal and invulnerable. That’s why they take the risks they do. Part of adolescence is learning you’re not Superman; learning what the limits are, in a way that allows you to understand the realities of life, without losing your curiosity and your sense of adventure. These teenagers had all that stripped away in an instant, without the chance to develop a gradual understanding of their mortality.”
She says sex for some might be like an addictive drug, an instant good feeling; or a chance to be close to someone without getting involved; or quasi-medicinal — something to numb the pain. US research suggests teenagers who have experienced trauma are more likely to marry and have children young, she says, either because they think they “may as well get on with life and live it in a hell of a hurry because there could be no tomorrow, or else because of a desperate need to be close to someone, to be held and understood”.
If parents are worried about their children or their families, they should act on that awareness and seek advice, she says.
For Matthew, counselling was the key to recovery. Tania says: “He hated counselling. He used to sit with his arms folded, looking out the window. Then one day she said: ‘Tell me about the friends that you lost.’ ”
Matthew began with his schoolfriends, but the dam really burst when he started talking about one of his neighbours — “The shape of his arms when he used to lift Matthew over the fence, and how strong he was, and how funny he was.
“Then he turned to me and said: ‘And I should have gone to his funeral!’ It had been one of the first funerals, and we were struggling, and I had thought: ‘We won’t do this.’
“And quick as a flash, the counsellor said: ‘You need to have your own funeral for him. You plan it and you conduct it the way you want to.’
“So Matthew invited me and my mum and dad. We all had a balloon. We all wrote a message that we kept private and we tied them to the bottom of the strings.
“Then we let them go at the gravesite of the man and his wife. Then Matthew asked my parents lots of questions about the funeral. His main question was: ‘Were they in the same coffin together?’ They said: ‘Yes, they were.’
“Then he just picked up overnight. I noticed he started to laugh more and enjoy things more. The biggest change was when he was faced with information about the fire, or people were talking about what happened to them. He is now able to hear it without it affecting him.”
Her boy is different to how he might have been had there been no fire. He is more perceptive, more compassionate; a little wise beyond his years, she feels.
Jane Hayward says the same of her charges at Strathewen, who are almost painfully attuned to suffering they see on television, such as the Christmas Island boat disaster, or the New Zealand mine catastrophe. “They’ve got an incredible insight into death and loss. It’s a very adult understanding. They have such insight, and empathy . . . They have a real social conscience, a strong need to do good in the world, to fund-raise for our sponsor child. They haven’t got that childhood innocence, where you can just fluff around and have a good time. They are going to be amazing adults. I think they will change the world.”
* The names of Matthew and Tania have been changed to protect Matthew’s privacy.
For help or information, visit www.dhs.vic.gov.au/em/bushfire-recovery/emotional-support, or call Lifeline on 131 114.
Surgeon at arms
THE soldiers could hear a woman crying out in a house at the other side of the village. Two of them peeled off to investigate. Unluckily for them, Serb paramilitaries had left a booby-trap.
In Kosovo, Muslims take off their shoes before they enter a house. It is a gesture of respect for the home. But during this Balkans war, Serbs used shoes at the doorstep to disguise a tripwire that triggered fragmentation grenades. The moaning woman had been spared for one reason only: as bait to lure whoever would come next to this hamlet, site of a massacre by advancing Serbs.
Craig Jurisevic is an Australian doctor who had volunteered as a medic to help the victims of the Balkans War. This day, for the first time, he had picked up guns to go on patrol with soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army. He realised this was the moment when he crossed the line to become a soldier who could practise surgery, rather than a surgeon who knew how to hold a gun. What he did not know, when he holstered his pistol that morning, was that the doctor in him would feel forced to use it on a patient.
Hearing an explosion, he raced over to the house. He checked their pulses and confirmed the deaths of the soldiers and the woman. He had already found 15 bodies of women and old people riddled with bullets. He moved cautiously towards a second house that held another woman whimpering in pain. He inspected the doorway carefully; yes, there was the wire. It was snipped and he entered.
The woman was sitting up against a wall. Near her lay the body of her husband, his head in a pool of darkening blood. In her arms she cradled a dead child, a boy of about four or five — the age of Jurisevic’s own son, back home in Adelaide. The child had been garrotted.
The woman had been shot in both legs to prevent her moving and was sitting in a massive pool of blood. She had been partly disembowelled and the coils of her innards spilled from the gash.
“The wound to her lower abdomen is meant to cause enough pain to make her cry out without killing her too quickly,” Jurisevic later wrote.
She clutched his wrist and begged him to bury her son before the next day, as is Muslim custom. Then a soldier translating for her said, “Doctor, she is asking us to kill her.”
“To kill her?”
“Yes. That is what she is saying. Doctor, I am sorry, I cannot do this.”
Jurisevic knew he must be quick because the Serbs would have heard the explosion and would return. If they found her still alive, he was sure, they would torture her even more.
In his book Blood on My hands: A surgeon at war, this is how Jurisevic describes what happened next: “I move the woman as gently as I can and place her beside her dead husband. From the bedroom I fetch a thick blanket. I think she sees clearly enough what is to follow, and she nods and manages something like a smile. I turn her head to one side, gently place the blanket down on it, point the barrel of my pistol down and pull the trigger. I wait for a few seconds, then reach for the woman’s wrist. The pulse is gone. I slide the pistol into its holster and take my leave.”
That was 11 years and half a world away. Today, Jurisevic sits at an outdoor cafe in Adelaide, his camouflage gear swapped for an immaculate navy pinstriped suit — he has been in his consulting rooms all morning — looking every inch the successful medical man. We are in the shade but all through lunch his eyes are hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, the dark, shiny lenses reflecting the outside world and shielding the responses of his inner one. Despite his ready answers to questions, the shades give the impression of a surgeon who doesn’t fancy the prospect of a journalist cutting too deeply into him.
At 45, Jurisevic is still lean and handsome, with chiselled cheekbones, blue eyes that crinkle at the corners when he laughs and teeth that must be the despair of his dentist; they seem to be quite naturally Hollywood-perfect. Here, as on the battlefield, he makes quick, decisive choices; this cafe, this table, this chair are all picked out in very short order. He immediately notices any need and swiftly moves to fill it; a glass of wine, a menu, the salt and pepper, tomato sauce for the burgers. He radiates energy, and action provides opportunities to release it. It also seems that, if there’s a need or a problem, Jurisevic believes it is up to him to solve it.
This deeply seated sense of responsibility has combined with what he calls an “adolescent hunger for stirring times in exotic climes” to make for an exciting life — but a life with episodes that he sometimes looks back on with doubt and remorse. Not putting the pistol to that poor woman’s head. The decision was so clear-cut that, in a book where he debates every other moral dilemma he was faced with at the front, this incident is only briefly described.
“It wasn’t as hard as most people think,” he says, “because, if you take away the method I used, it would just be euthanasia for someone who is dying. But because it wasn’t a drip with morphine, because it was a pistol, people say it’s terrible . . . She would have been dead in a few hours. She’d been shot in both knees and she’d lost a huge amount of blood. She’d been cut open and her bowels — ” he gestures expansively. “We had no blood, and we would have had to carry her, and we couldn’t carry her. I had just a little bit of [anaesthetic] but I was going to keep that for the people who would survive. Also because she had lost a lot of blood, there was no way you could put a drip in and then wait for her to die with [anaesthetic]. And besides, we had to get out within minutes because the Serbs were coming . . . they would have tortured her more.
“I knew, it was instinctive, that’s what I had to do. She wouldn’t have suffered . . . It would have been a lot harder if she didn’t consent or didn’t ask.”
But he concedes that even if she hadn’t begged him, he would still have considered putting her out of her misery. “Even if I was a rampant anti-euthanasia activist, I can’t see how I could not have ended her life. I couldn’t have walked away saying, ‘I feel good about myself because I believe euthanasia is wrong, so I am walking away and leaving her to suffer more and to be tortured again, but I can live with that.’ You couldn’t!”
Jurisevic feels strongly driven to be a good man, and his idea of manhood was powerfully shaped by his childhood experiences. Although they later reconciled, he was estranged from his father for some time. He changed his surname from his father’s name, McLachlan, to his mother’s maiden name, Jurisevic.
His mother was a Yugoslav refugee who taught herself English and trained as a psychiatric nurse in Australia. It was she who told him inspiring stories of the wartime heroism of his Slovenian grandfather, Franc, who “put his life on the line for a cause, and was sent to concentration camps, then came back and saw corruption in Yugoslavia and spoke out against that, and was put in prison again by the people for whom he’d fought. So he had a very strong hatred of injustice.”
JURISEVIC volunteered to work with the International Medical Corps in the Balkans after being moved by the suffering of thousands of refugees pictured on TV news reports. He had previously done a stint with the Israelis, including about 40 medivacs in Gaza; there, too, he had picked up a gun because he came under fire when rescuing the wounded. “I saw taking up a weapon and using it to protect the patients as just part of my job, an extension of treating the disease,” he says.
What of the doctor’s Hippocratic oath, which warns, “First, do no harm”?
“When they say ‘do no harm’, it’s in reference to do no harm to your patient, not do no harm to anyone,” he argues. “So if somebody’s trying to kill the patient, you have to defend the patient. You can’t just say, ‘Sorry, do no harm,’ and stand by. That’s just ridiculous.”
Jurisevic has decided views; words such as “terrible”, “ridiculous” and “absolutely” punctuate his sentences. He says he is drawn to war zones because he has an abhorrence of injustice. He was alerted to the potential of this war when the Serbs began using medical terms and the phrase “ethnic cleansing” as euphemisms for atrocity.
He writes, “Whenever national leaders start applying metaphors of ablution and disinfection to human beings, you can expect killing on a large scale to follow . . . [they rationalise] murder by talking of cancer . . . of scalpels and intervention.”
When he arrived in the Albanian town of Kukes, 200 kilometres north-east of Albania’s capital, Tirana, Jurisevic was appalled. His gorge rose at the stench of untreated gangrene even before he entered the decaying ruin of a hospital. Inside, blood spattered the theatre walls, equipment was dirty, instruments were rusty and nurses were drunk, drugged or cruel. He caught a doctor hacking with blunt scissors at exposed muscle and tendons in the hand of a small child who had been given no anaesthetic. When the boy screamed and writhed, nurses slapped him.
He spent long days operating on refugees — women, children, old people — with horrific wounds. “So many amputations!” he writes. “Reports of casualties don’t fully convey what war does to people. Imagine if I were to give a weekly surgeon’s report to the news services and display the limbs that had been lost, the metres of bowel discarded, the eyes blinded.”
At times he found it hard to hold on to the surgeon’s clinical distance. Of retrieving wounded children from a bombed kindergarten littered with body parts, he writes: “I’d like to vomit or tear my teeth out or shut my eyes and fall to my knees.”
Jurisevic could not understand why supplies were so poor despite a flood of international aid. He learned that medicines and equipment were shut away in cupboards, to be sold on the black market. Patients with no money were turned away. The hospital chief was in cahoots with the local mafia, and they were using the flood of wounded as a revenue stream.
Jurisevic exposed the corruption with the help of the American military magazine Stars and Stripes. He was then warned the mafia would kill him, so he resigned from the International Medical Corps and accepted an offer from the KLA to run one of their field hospitals. There, he was alarmed by the lack of training that left the idealistic, untried young soldiers around him utterly unprepared for what they were to face. He set up his own combat training. The doctor there to save lives taught recruits the art of killing. He was practised with guns from his teenage years when he hunted and culled goats, roos and rabbits in the hills around Adelaide.
He puzzled over how to reconcile all this with his role as a healer. He decided to amend the Hippocratic oath with a principle laid out by Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice: “To do a great right, do a little wrong.”
JURISEVIC learned that the young volunteer soldiers at the front, Mount Pastrik, had been abandoned by their commanders and their doctors, who feared for their own lives. His book paints ultra-nationalist Serb troops as alcohol and amphetamine-fuelled war criminals, but he slams the KLA too, for cowardice.
Jurisevic decided that he would go to the front himself. He set up his own aid centre in a cave on a ridge line at Mount Pastrik, sometimes evacuating the injured down the mountain under a hail of sniper fire. At night, he slept with dead bodies in the cave waiting for burial. Day and night, he endured the Serb shelling.
And it was at this point that he made the decision that would trouble his sleep long after he returned to Australia. Jurisevic led a small patrol closer to the Serb positions. He mapped their co-ordinates in detail and sent the figures off to NATO troops. The next morning, those Serb units were heavily shelled by NATO. Later that day, a ceasefire was declared.
Years later, Jurisevic discovered that that last round of NATO shelling had killed up to 600 people. “I still don’t know whether or not the co-ordinates I gave resulted in that bombing,” he says. “And whether or not that bombing in the area of Pastrik ended the shelling, or whether it was just the ceasefire that resulted in the end of the shelling. But up to 600 people died. It’s still not a good feeling, even if they were all war criminals and baby-killers.”
Then his language hardens, and suddenly he is using the same ugly euphemisms he heard on television in Adelaide: “I realised that certain paramilitaries in the area were a hard bunch. They had no respect for human rights. So basically — it sounds terrible — I saw them as a disease. They were inflicting harm and illness on innocent civilians so they had to be stopped.”
The book makes clear that Jurisevic did suffer some kind of post-traumatic distress after he returned. He says, “One thing that I’ve realised is that I still can’t actually remember arriving in Adelaide and seeing [my wife and my son]. I still can’t remember several days, which can’t be a good sign.”
He did not seek professional help but found writing the book was therapeutic. He says he has had death threats since its publication, mainly from ultra-nationalist Serbs living in Australia. It is not because he shamed them, he says: “If you expose war crimes they don’t deny the war crimes, or even express remorse. They say ‘Yes, this happened, we did this because this happened 800 years ago.’ You can’t justify crimes against humanity now by crimes against humanity in the past.”
Jurisevic has now joined the Australian Defence Force reserves and has been to East Timor and Afghanistan but says he would like to spend the next few years in Australia with his wife and three sons.
He is on another campaign, though: he wants to mount a class action against the federal government to force the banning of cigarettes. As a cardiothoracic surgeon, more than 90 per cent of his work involves trying to remove lung tumours from smokers. He says tobacco kills up to 18,000 people a year but the government won’t ban it because it earns $4 billion more in taxes than it costs in healthcare.
“Of all lung cancers diagnosed each year, only 15 per cent will be early enough to be cured by surgery and chemo-radiotherapy . . . The death rate from lung cancer has not changed significantly in the past 30 years,” he says. “The greatest threat to Australian lives today is not terrorism, road trauma or knife crime. It is tobacco.”
The man who loves causes will never lack for one.
Blood on My Hands: A surgeon at war, by Craig Jurisevic, $32.95, e-book $11.25 from www.wilddingopress.com.au.
JURISEVIC CV
BORN 1965.
FAMILY Married Donna, also a medical specialist; three sons.
WORK IN CONFLICT ZONES Israel and Gaza 1992-3; Albania and Kosovo 1999; East Timor 2006; Afghanistan 2008.
CAREER Cardiothoracic surgeon, senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, member of the International Humanitarian Law Committee of the Australian Red Cross.
Dangerous liaisons: the lessons of election 1940
WHILE the nation has not been faced with a hung parliament since 1940, it has occurred at times throughout the states and territories in the decades since then. Some of the resulting marriages of convenience have been pragmatic and steady, and some poisonously volatile.
The seeds for the 1940 stand-off were sown the year before when prime minister Joseph Lyons died in office. His United Australia Party eventually elected Robert Menzies as leader, who became prime minister.
After his first election as leader, in September 1940, Mr Menzies’ UAP-Country Party coalition won 36 seats. This created a stand-off with the ALP, which had 32 seats, and the four members of Lang Labor, a breakaway group loyal to sacked NSW Labor premier Jack Lang. There were also two independents, Arthur Coles and Alexander Wilson, who came from seats traditionally non-Labor. They held the balance of power.
Mr Coles and Mr Wilson backed Mr Menzies but support for him as leader collapsed within his own party. He was forced to stand down as prime minister in August 1941 and he was replaced by the Country Party’s Arthur Fadden.
Mr Coles and Mr Wilson disliked this government and, in October 1941, they blocked the budget. This gave power to Labor’s John Curtin, who became prime minister and went on to romp home in the 1943 federal election.
Victoria faced a minority government in 1999, when the ALP’s Steve Bracks had to rely on three independents.
Plea for a revolution
MELBOURNE
BEFORE Black Saturday, Leigh and Charmian Ahern would have made a poster couple for Victoria’s bushfire policy, “stay or go”. They had always taken seriously the threat associated with life in a heavily forested area. They belonged to their local Fireguard group and had installed an elaborate fire-fighting system: two tanks with 20,000 litres of water each, a fire pump, a spray backpack for spot fires and roof sprinkler systems. Water pipes were buried to protect them from heat. Leigh Ahern kept the place clear of leaves and debris and regularly tested the fire system.
Their fire plan was based on the “stay and defend” option. This part of the state’s policy said able-bodied people actively defending a well-prepared house had a very good chance against fire; houses protect people, and people protect houses, was the mantra. Even an ill-prepared home would probably shelter people against radiant heat while a fire front passed over.
But the Aherns became two of the 173 people whose ghosts haunt Victoria’s policy-makers.
Fire ignited in the roof space of their Steels Creek home after wind lifted the roofing sheets, making all their preparation useless, arson chemist Karen Ireland told the Bushfires Royal Commission. “Once the roof sheets became detached, the sprinkler system would have been rendered ineffective . . . The occupants would have struggled to extinguish multiple fires within the home . . . and they would have been exposed to extreme temperature, wind and smoke.”
Roofs ripped off by fierce bushfire winds led to the deaths of many that day. It was one of several deadly possibilities not mentioned in bushfire advice offered to country people. And it is one of the Black Saturday problems the state government seems reluctant to acknowledge.
The government appears to be positioning itself to muffle or reject parts of the final report of the Bushfires Royal Commission, to be released next Saturday.
This week, Premier John Brumby initially announced he would not even respond to the commission’s findings until the government had spent weeks consulting with the public, agencies and business groups “to ensure that the concerns of the community are properly addressed” — even though that is precisely what the commission has just spent $40 million and 14 months doing.
It was only following pressure from Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu that the Premier agreed to hold a parliamentary debate the week after the report is released.
The government effectively put itself on trial when it set up the royal commission last year. Like any accused, it seems to fear the verdict. It is an election year, and the final report can only mean trouble — even though the explosive energy around failures in emergency leadership has now been effectively neutered.
CFA chief Russell Rees, who presided over a chaotic system that failed to warn thousands in the path of the most deadly fire, resigned this year (although it is believed the decision that he would go was made last year). Former chief police commissioner Christine Nixon found herself in the village stocks for having gone out to dinner on Black Saturday despite knowing a disaster was unfolding, and for fudging her evidence on that point to the commission. Now she, too, is gone, having fallen on her sword as head of the recovery effort last week. While neither admitted quitting over Black Saturday, their absence from the public arena is a blessing for the government.
But there are other big problems for which there is no easy “exit, stage right”. The first is the government’s responsibility for the failures of its stay or go policy (more formally known as the Prepare, Stay and Defend or Leave Early policy). The second is its declared reluctance to pursue some of the likely recommendations.
The inquiry heard that, for more than 20 years, experts had warned that the stay or go policy had problems, but successive governments and their mandarins failed to act. They included:
■1984 Ash Wednesday researchers found that fires starting in roofs were dangerous to occupants, who were unlikely to survive if houses were destroyed quickly. They also warned that people in houses surrounded by exceptionally high levels of fuel, such as those near mountains or ash gullies, might be wiser to evacuate.
■1992 CFA researchers studying the 32 civilian deaths on Ash Wednesday concluded that if people did not receive a warning in time, a good understanding of bushfire safety was irrelevant.
■1999 Researchers told the CFA the stay or go policy was asking people to make extremely complex decisions, and that most people ignored it: “Those who really conform to the two ideas of the Stay or Go Early options are in the minority . . . It is highly likely that there will be people who will ‘wait and see’ or ‘do as much as possible’ then leave.” This report told the CFA it had to develop new strategies for those people.
■2004 A report called for different survival strategies for extreme events that might make it hard to stay and defend; assessment of the effect inadequate warnings might have on the safety of those preparing to stay; and a definition of when it was not safe to stay.
■2008 A study of 552 bushfire deaths over 100 years largely backed the policy but said even those who planned to stay and defend were often not well prepared, had no back-up plan and did not expect the ferocity of fire or sudden wind changes.
Lisa Nichols, counsel assisting, said the caveats in these studies were ignored, and that bushfire advice to the public also wrongly presented staying and going as almost equal in terms of safety.
Stay or go solidified as policy from the mid-1990s, when there was a shift in the balance of responsibility over bushfire in Victoria. Much of the burden for human safety was lifted from emergency services and placed on people living in the bush. Authorities called this “shared responsibility”.
But the commission’s lawyers say this led to authorities ducking responsibility and abandoning other protective measures, such as refuges. Nichols said stay or go also meant “excluding assisted or directed evacuation, excluding giving specified advice about the defendability of homes and excluding the giving of concrete, directive warnings during fires”.
Instead, warnings were designed for those who had prepared to stay, telling them to activate their fire plan and offering little help to those who had no idea what to do. On Black Saturday, even that limited warning system collapsed: an incident controller who felt bound by protocol refused to issue warnings over the Kilmore fire; those managing other fires also failed to alert the public, and to alert firefighters to the dangers of a wind change; and those higher up the CFA and police hierarchies failed to notice that warnings were inadequate.
Despite stay or go telling people to make their own choices, research found the community continued to believe emergency services would help them during bushfire. Authorities persisted in believing that education would change people’s attitudes and behaviour.
It didn’t.
Counsel assisting said in a submission: “The evidence did not support . . . the offering of a one-size-fits-all choice between two apparently equal options for survival, the ruling out of back-up options and the effective removal of the role of fire agencies in giving advice and assistance during fires. Well before 7 February 2009, the risks, ambiguities and leaps of faith exposed in the analysis of a decade earlier ought to have been obvious to policy-makers . . . The community was, because of the stay or go policy, predisposed to suffering major losses.”
At hearings, the government vehemently denied that it had ignored warnings about the policy. It conceded Black Saturday showed up “weaknesses” but said no one could have foreseen them and that it should not be abandoned. Neil Clelland, SC, said it was the approach in all states and territories and was based on 100 years of “bitter experience” that people who sheltered in houses were likely to live, and people who fled late were more likely to die.
“Nowhere was it suggested, right up until the eve of 7 February, that the policy should be abandoned, or that it was flawed, or even that it exposed people to the risk of death,” he said.
But the intention to stay and defend played a significant part in deaths, disaster expert Professor John Handmer, of RMIT University, told the inquiry. He said this was an indictment of the policy and agreed it called on ordinary people to fight fires in situations where we would not put our most experienced firefighters.
Lawyer Clelland argued that Handmer found only 5 per cent of people who died were well prepared and carrying out an active defence at the time of their deaths, and this did not suggest the policy had failed.
But crisis expert Professor Herman Leonard, of Harvard University, told the commission: “The hope that people might do something is not itself a policy; it is what it is, a hope.” He said a policy should be judged on whether people complied with it. If they didn’t, “the policy is actually an invitation to a potential disaster”.
MOST of those who died were not like the Aherns; they had no intention of defending but did not receive enough help or warning to escape in time. An extraordinary 44 per cent were vulnerable because of youth, age, illness or disability.
The oldest was Karma Hastwell, 88, who used a walking frame, and the youngest was Alexis Davey, who was eight months old and just starting to crawl; both died sheltering with able adults in Kinglake. A Marysville woman was eight-and-a-half months pregnant; an elderly couple died at Narbethong with their son, who was in a wheelchair; and a disabled man with epilepsy, schizophrenia and palsy caught alight in his driveway in Bendigo. Foreign tourists with no understanding of wildfire died on a bush track near Marysville.
Many others who thought they were well prepared were caught out by a single weak link: a failed fuel pump, melted water pipes, or windows that exploded and exposed them to a blizzard of embers.
Stay or go failed to provide a contingency plan, a place to go when all else had failed, or even a specific warning to “Get out, now!” Police superintendent Rod Collins said police believed the policy left them unable to organise fire evacuations: residents were permitted to defend their properties, which meant “you effectively have a right to make a decision about staying and dying”.
Lawyers for the commission want a revolution. They want people warned that defending could mean death or injury. They want evacuations prioritised, with incident controllers made responsible for issuing specific advice — including routes, if possible. They want sites nominated as places where people can shelter during fire. They want local councils to keep a list of vulnerable residents who might need early warning, and they suggest police should help them leave.
And here is where the crevasse between the parties widens. Councils don’t want to be responsible for such lists and the state says it is not possible for police to be responsible for evacuating individuals, or for incident controllers to tell residents when or how to evacuate. The state denied it was dragging its feet over community shelters, even though Victoria still has only one formal fire refuge and 83 Neighbourhood Safer Places designated, compared with 600 in New South Wales.
Even late in the hearings, Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin was resisting the idea of a range of safety choices. He warned: “The difficulty with a suite of options . . . is that it might encourage individuals who would otherwise choose the less risky ‘leave early’ option to feel unrealistically more secure there are ‘other options’.”
To its credit, the government has implemented bushfire changes costing tens of millions of dollars. Emergency services have better warning systems, staffing, training and communications. There are new fire danger ratings, advice to householders on the defendability of their homes, improved bushfire resistance in school buildings and township protection programs for 52 high-risk areas. An enormous amount of thought, time and energy has gone into doing a lot, fast.
But the final report might call for even more dramatic and expensive measures. Counsel assisting, Melinda Richards, has argued for a buyback of high bushfire-risk land to allow residents to move to safer places in a “retreat and resettlement” strategy. Richards also said development of 50,000 small lots outside the urban growth boundary should be limited. They have no reticulated water, poor road access and many are too small to achieve defendable space, a combination one witness called “death-trap planning”.
The government opposes the buyback because it would be expensive and complex, said a lawyer for the state, Kerri Judd, SC. More public land might raise the bushfire risk for people left behind and communities would suffer from population loss, she warned.
Another proposal that would cost billions is a massive upgrade of the state’s ageing electricity system. Five of the biggest blazes on Black Saturday, including the Kilmore East fire that killed 119 people, were allegedly started by electrical lines or fittings.
Jonathan Beach, QC, for power company SP AusNet, said the proposals would cost up to $7.5 billion in its distribution area and could force up power bills 20 per cent every year for 20 years — not a prospect any government would relish.
It was bad luck for the Brumby government that Black Saturday happened on its watch. The stay or go policy seems to have been seeded initially under the Kennett government. If it were not for 12 years of drought and 11 consecutive days of searing heat, Black Saturday might not have become Australia’s worst bushfire catastrophe.
But it did, Victoria was not ready for it, and Labor was at the helm. Now it faces the ugly reality that serious improvement in public safety in the most fire-prone place on the planet requires vast sums of money over a long time — and even then, it will never guarantee safety for all.
The Aherns’ son, Dale, says: “My parents were prepared for bushfire. They were not prepared for what hit them that day. We just hope that future policies will reflect the new reality that no one had imagined prior.”
Next Saturday, we will learn the commissioners’ verdicts. The government’s verdicts on which proposals will be accepted are likely to dribble out over weeks or months. The voters’ verdicts will come when the Premier faces the polls.
The ABC’s brave new world
MELBOURNE
WHEN Mark Scott took the podium at the Melbourne Press Club last month, he departed from the text of his speech. He noted that there were many colleagues in the room, and he singled out two: Michael Gawenda, former editor-in-chief of The Age, and Steve Harris, who had been the paper’s publisher and another of its editors-in-chief. In one swift, mocking flourish, Scott — now managing director of the ABC — stripped them of their gravitas.
“They remind me of those two guys in The Muppets,” he quipped to his audience, “the gallery there — ready to provide the ongoing commentary.” The room broke into mirth.
Then Scott took a breezy shot at competitor SkyNews and its Australian Public Affairs Channel, which had asked his permission to send a camera to film his speech: “I’m happy for that to happen. Any contribution I can make so there’s less New Zealand Parliament on Australian television . . .”
Critics and competitors neutered, his dominance of the room established, and his audience now duly attentive, Scott peaceably returned to the formality of his prepared speech.
On a personal level, this looked like an Oedipal display by a younger buck keen to lock antlers with the stags. At 47, Scott is effectively a generation behind Gawenda and Harris, senior newspapermen he worked with at a distance in his previous incarnations as a journalist and then executive with Fairfax in Sydney (Fairfax publishes The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald). He was telling them that they had had their day in the sun, which was now beaming on him. It was the sort of heady, vainglorious moment that probably comes to every successful man, although not all care to parade it.
The display was also intriguing on another level. Mark Scott is doing what no ABC chief has done before him: he is taking on Australia’s media proprietors at their own game. As competitive as any businessman, he has also shown himself to be an astute political player, an unflinching opponent and an expansionist in his vision for his fiefdom. Under his leadership, our venerated Aunty is not just hitching up her skirts a little; she has broken into a cancan.
His plans for the ABC include a 24-hour digital television news station; online “regional hubs” (websites for rural Australia); a new online site, The Drum, that runs written commentary and analysis by ABC broadcast journalists; and web portals for the arts and religion. He boasts that the ABC has introduced hundreds of thousands of Australians to podcasts (radio interviews that can be downloaded on the internet); that Aunty set up the nation’s first catch-up TV service on the internet, iView; and that many of its senior journalists are on Twitter.
The broadcaster is even looking at “future forms of narrative, with initiatives in games, whose stories appeal so powerfully to the generations coming through”, Scott says.
Scott’s most vaulting ambition? To establish an international news service to rival the BBC and CNN and advance what he calls Australia’s “soft diplomacy” around the globe.
Some cynics in the commercial media have dubbed his ambitions Messianic, and his package, “Mark’s plan to take over the world”. Others, pained by the contrast between his focus and energy and the continued floundering in other areas of the media, have mockingly gibed, “Great Scott — a plan!” The proprietors themselves have naturally squawked in protest at Scott’s taxpayer-funded incursions on to what they see as their turf.
But you don’t need to be a media proprietor or a shareholder to wonder what it will mean for Australia’s media — and, ultimately, the openness of its democracy — if the ABC becomes the digital era’s emperor on a throne.
The role of the public broadcaster in a time of media abundance — and simultaneous mass-media fragility — is a crucial one. Would a more dominant Aunty really hasten the decline of quality journalism in the commercial media, as proprietors claim? If so, would the ABC then become a lifeboat for the nation’s journalism — Gawenda points out that it now employs more journalists than The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald combined — or could Aunty’s treasured editorial independence also be endangered by some of Scott’s initiatives?
Rupert Murdoch, seemingly the last of the great media barons, has public broadcasters in his sights. In August 2009, at a speech in Edinburgh, Murdoch’s son James attacked the dominance of the BBC and what he saw as its distortion of the media market. James, who is also non-executive chairman of pay-TV company BSkyB, said the BBC’s $9 billion in government funding was crowding out new and existing news providers.
“The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit,” he said. “The scale and scope of [the BBC’s] current activities and future ambitions is chilling . . . In this all-media marketplace, the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy. Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet.”
It was also in August that Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put online news behind a pay wall, to ask a generation that has never paid for news online to pay for Murdoch news online. Bloggers and sites such as Google — “the content kleptomaniacs” — should not be able to use his company’s news free: “The philistine phase of the digital age is almost over.”
Mark Scott retaliated in a speech at Melbourne University in October in which he effectively derided Murdoch as an emperor with no clothes. The ABC would continue to supply online content without charge; taxpayers had paid for it once and would not be required to pay a second time. Murdoch’s pay-wall plan, he said, “strikes me as a classic play of old empire, of empire in decline. Believing that because you once controlled the world you can continue to do so. . . Acting on the assumption that you still have the power that befits the emperor.”
The only media organisations to survive, Scott warned, would be those . . . who can see now what many generals only see after devastating loss — that the tactics that won them the last battle might just be the ones that deliver them defeat in the next.”
Within the ABC, Scott and his plans have been greeted largely with delight. According to many insiders, staff had been feeling battered and bruised by years of management that was seen to be either hostile or lacking in vision. They are relieved to have this time scored a leader with media experience, people skills and ideas who has also become a trenchant advocate for the broadcaster. In a vast continent such as Australia, Scott says, the much-loved ABC “is a commons, a shared space . . . a cultural experience we all have in common at a time when common cultural experiences are harder to come by”.
The host of Melbourne’s ABC morning radio news show, Jon Faine, says he has worked under five managing directors and Scott “is better than the rest of them put together. He’s clear about what he wants the organisation to be and what he wants the staff to do. He’s energetic. He’s affable. If he’s in Melbourne, he will walk the floor. He remembers people’s names, he knows what you do, he cares what you do.”
Faine says the ABC is flying high: “Whether you measure us by ratings, agenda-setting, impact on debate, mentions by other media or mentions by parliamentarians, state or federal — by every possible measure, the ABC is doing extraordinarily well compared with any time I can remember in the 20 years I have been a participant. You would be the biggest suck to attribute all of that to the managing director, and I don’t, but obviously there’s a role management has to play and he’s playing it very, very well.”
Scott’s current dexterity on the media trapeze has startled some of his former colleagues at Fairfax; there, he was not so known for taking up big ideas, and a couple of senior appointments he presided over were perceived by his troops as misguided. At the ABC, however, he has received nothing but praise for his selection of lieutenants, particularly Kate Dundas as director of radio and Kate Torney, who is seen as able and dynamic, as head of television news and current affairs. Torney is believed to be the source of many of the initiatives he has taken up.
He is on the record as being committed to being open to the ideas of others and has talked about the need “to seek and be excited about finding and working with people who might turn your organisation upside down. To sit in meetings with people half your age. And listen. And act.” Scott is also known for being genuinely interested in the new technologies that are driving change and sees that the media future is digital.
But for the commercial mass media, the digital era has meant unparalleled “challenges”, as they like to say in MBA-land. With the coming of the internet, advertising markets are “fragmenting”; the advertiser’s choice used to be limited to “old media” such as billboards, papers, radio or TV, but now there is a blizzard of niche websites attracting readers and viewers and breaking up the advertising dollar. The result is declining revenue for “old-empire” media. In response, they have cut staff.
This is happening at the same time that the internet and other technologies demand that journalists, for example, work across and file stories to different “platforms”— newspapers, television, radio, online, and Twitter. Media companies must work out how to engage with readers’ desire for material on devices such as mobile phones and iPads. Revenue and staff are decreasing but the work is intensifying and the need for innovation has never been so great.
While the commercial proprietors are wrestling with these lions, into the arena strides Mark Scott, shielded by the gleaming armour of $800 million in government funding, plus a $150 million increase granted by the Rudd government last year. Says Mark Hollands, chief executive of the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association, “God knows, it’s hard enough to make a quid out there as it is, and we don’t need the ABC and taxpayers’ money making it harder.”
But if the ABC does not take advertising, where is the threat?
Hollands says: “It’s the potential to take readers or users [whose numbers draw advertisers]. It’s a virtuous circle, but it clearly requires the readers first.”
He says the broadcasting regulator in Britain now insists that the BBC does media impact studies before expanding its operations: “If you launch a website, are you going to tip over a local publishing company, and what loss and impact will that have?” And he warns that a monolithic ABC presence would discourage newcomers here: “I know for a fact that the national broadband network will pull out all sorts of entrepreneurs in towns like Bendigo and Ballarat and Kalgoorlie. People will be using high-speed internet access to challenge the incumbents. It’s happened in the US and Britain. But if you have the ABC entrenched in, say, Bega, you are effectively dissuading new players from competing.”
Hollands believes the roll-out of the broadband network is also a factor in Scott’s thinking: “He’s getting there first and claiming the high ground.”
Says Gawenda: “Most commercial media companies are desperately searching for a way to make their sites and their digital journalism pay, and they are running up against the roadblock of the free ABC sites. If you made people pay for theage.com.[au], it would lose 95 per cent of its audience. They would go elsewhere, where it’s free.”
But part of Scott’s job is to ensure that taxpayers get value for their money. Even some of his competitors concede that he is doing that. Greg Baxter, corporate affairs spokesman for News Ltd in Australia, says, “I think he’s doing a terrific job and I think as taxpayers we are getting better value than ever.”
He says News has no problem with the ABC’s existence: “I can’t remember us ever arguing about [ABC] funding. They have been part of the landscape for 70 years . . . But when Mark comes out and makes the comments he did last year in the end-of-empire speech, then we feel compelled to respond because he’s got $800 million a year from taxpayers.”
News Ltd also argues that Scott’s 24/7 news station won’t be able to do anything Sky News does not already do, and that “to argue that it won’t cost any more money when you are recruiting journalists and building a studio in [Sydney] is nonsense”.
News also takes issue with Scott’s suggestion, at Senate estimates hearings, that the contract for the Australia Network should go to the ABC without being put to tender. Baxter says: “Clearly, we have an interest in Sky . . . and we can’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be an open, transparent and competitive tender for that service.”
Scott declined to be interviewed for this story, so it is not possible to ask him the reasons for his transformation into the most creative, expansionist and “out there” managing director the ABC has seen. Whatever his ambitions for himself, it seems his ambition for the broadcaster is to ensure the digital era does not leave it stranded, like a cuttlefish on the beach, in the ranks of “legacy media”. He has money; he has the support of his staff below and his board above; and he has the backing of the government.
At the ABC, Scott is freed from the straitjacket of the business plan. He is not required to defend his ideas with promises of short-term profit. His plans stand or fall by other criteria: whether they will fill a market gap, or offer a public good. He must provide a benefit to the citizen who is a viewer, listener or reader, rather than a dividend for shareholders. He acknowledged this advantage in his end-of-empire speech: “Being willing to innovate and take risks so that we can produce a social benefit through the ABC is a responsibility that comes with not having to produce a financial profit. ”
For commercial media proprietors, Scott’s freedom is maddening. “The ABC is transforming into a taxpayer-fuelled broadcasting gorilla with a huge appetite for territory, more public money and a control over public policy,” fumed Sky News managing director Angelos Frangopoulos in an article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph in January. He was angered by the announcement that the ABC would set up a 24/7 news channel to rival Sky’s subscription-TV news channel, which is connected to almost 40 per cent of homes.
THE new ABC news service, Frangopoulos pointed out acidly, would be on the high-definition spectrum and so would itself only be available to the 40 per cent of homes that can receive HD. But Gawenda, now director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University, says: “I absolutely accept Mark Scott’s argument that the ABC had to have a 24-hour news service. It fills that gap in the market; there is no free-to-air 24-hour news service. You have to get cable TV, and 70 per cent of people are cut off from that.” An ABC staffer says it is “a bit rich” for Frangopoulos to complain given that Foxtel and SkyNews have had 10 years to recoup their investment in cable news.
But, in another salvo, last month Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy accused the ABC of threatening Fairfax’s rural publishing arm with its plan for online regional hubs. McCarthy said the ABC Open project, designed to allow regional people to share their ideas and tell their own stories online, might undermine Fairfax by stealing its rural audience: “I do not believe it is the role of the ABC to disrupt the commercial landscape by building empires with public funds.”
Faine and others at the ABC dismiss such protests as vested interests fighting to retain them. But the proprietors’ stance received unexpected reinforcement last week when The Times of London reported that the BBC would close two radio stations, halve the size of its website, sell some of its magazines and slash spending on imported programs to give its commercial rivals more room to operate.
The Times claimed: “It will be seen as an attempt to show the Tories that the BBC understands the effect the advertising recession has had on commercial rivals and that it does not need outside intervention to get its house in order.” The Times had earlier reported the Beeb was considering cuts to ward off Conservative proposals to cut the television licence fee that funds it, because the party was concerned that the BBC’s expansion online threatened to destroy commercial competitors.
The Guardian described the cuts as “a tentative peace treaty, not a surrender . . . Mark Thompson [BBC director-general] is getting strategic because he was making only enemies as corporate expansion blithely continued”.
In other words, the contraction is due to fear that the change of government expected in Britain later this year could lead to a Tory hatchet job on the BBC; it is a concession to political might, not a sincere admission of philosophical defeat.
Defenders of the ABC and the BBC, including Scott, point out that commercial media in the United States are also falling over — 142 daily and weekly newspapers closed in 2009 — even though America has no major public broadcaster offering competing news. “How reckless would it be for Australia to stop funding a credible, independent news service to somehow prop up business models that may continue to struggle in any event?” wrote Scott on the ABC website last week. He was responding to a call by News Ltd columnist Mark Day for Australia’s government to consider getting out of media altogether.
Later in the week Scott slapped his critics down again using the ABC’s opinion website, The Drum. He said the ABC had not exceeded its charter and that media companies were criticising the ABC because they were “threatened by the pace of change, the inflexibility of their own business models and their reluctance to invest”.
There is some disquiet in federal opposition ranks about the growth of the ABC. Responding by email to an inquiry from The Age, shadow communications minister Helen Coonan wrote: “If the ABC did not innovate, it would be a broadcasting backwater and not value for taxpayers’ money. The critical question, however, is whether it is appropriate to have a publicly funded broadcaster that sees a vastly expanded role for its services, e.g. 24-hour news and soft diplomacy, and whether that will come at the expense of other valued programs (e.g. science and religion). It will be important for Mark Scott and the board to be mindful of the constraints imposed by the ABC charter, which did not have in contemplation the new media landscape at the time it was adopted.
“I would not be surprised if these expanded activities prompted calls for a re-look at the charter given the . . . legitimate concerns of commercial operators that the taxpayer-funded broadcaster may well crowd out the competition. That said, Mark Scott is a talented operator. . .”
The doubters and critics, however, are currently howling into the wind. Scott is believed to have a cordial relationship with the ABC board — although that may have been tested this week with a warning by chairman Maurice Newman that staff had succumbed to “groupthink” in their reporting of climate change. Newman, a Howard government appointment and “climate change agnostic”, told staff they must “re-energise the spirit of enquiry” and cautioned against hubris.
While the ABC had “never been more popular, never stronger,” he said, “I think that now, when the corporation is at its strongest, is an ideal time to take a look at ourselves. Not when the critics choose to.”
However there is believed to be no perception at board level that Scott’s current plans might exceed the ABC’s charter. As for staff, they are relieved that none of his initiatives introduce any reliance on advertising, keeping Aunty pure in that regard.
Scott also has the strong backing of the Rudd government. He won that extra funding last year in the teeth of the global financial crisis. At least two of his grand schemes dovetail with government agendas. His plan for the 24/7 news service will hasten households’ take-up of digital and bring forward the time when the analog system can be switched off, something the government is keen to see happen as it rolls out the national broadband network. And his proposal for an international television service to promote the nation’s “soft diplomacy” efforts overseas fits with a Prime Minister keen for Australia to stride the world stage.
In a speech last year, Scott advocated “a more vigorous approach to international broadcasting in keeping with Australia’s global ambitions”. In a veiled reference to the ABC’s tender for the contract to continue running the Australia Network, he said it should be a public broadcaster, and not a commercial outlet, that is employed to use “soft power” as a strategy that “co-opts people rather than coerces them” by “putting your nation’s culture, values and policies on show”.
Scott argued that the ABC should be funded “to become the dominant regional provider of news, information and English-language learning material” and warned against China, in particular, as a rival for influence in the Asia-Pacific region. (This, as the ABC negotiates with China for “landing rights” for ABC telecasts into the country.)
Specifically, Scott wanted to boost the number of ABC foreign news bureaus in the region to 14, “more than either CNN or the BBC . . . [it would] firmly establish us as the pre-eminent source of news and current affairs about and for the region”. Long term, he wants to roll out ABC TV and radio services to China, India, Africa and the Middle East, then to Latin America and finally to Europe and North America. “Even a doubling of our existing effort adds up to less than half the budget of Baz Luhrmann’s [movie] Australia,” he argues.
Rupert Murdoch used an appearance on Sky News to hit back at Scott, saying the international proposal was folly: “Spending $800 million putting Australian culture and didgeridoos around the world is huge over-reach.”
While the debate to date has been couched in terms of a turf war, there is more than turf at stake here. Scott claims it would be possible to be “diplomatically deft” and further Australia’s global ambitions while not sacrificing key attributes of the ABC’s quality journalism.
But isn’t there a tension between the idea of editorial independence, and the offer to allow the ABC to be utilised by government to further its aims overseas?
“People can say, regarding the BBC, for example, that the act of quality journalism and quality coverage is in effect promoting the values of liberal democracy,” says Jason Wilson, a media columnist with newmatilda.com and lecturer in digital communications at the University of Wollongong. “Probably most of us wouldn’t have any problem with ‘soft power’ if it means everything from Hollywood movies to CNN programs. But there’s a difference between that and promoting a specific government line on particular issues . . . Australia is having a diplomatic dispute over whaling with Japan; what are you going to broadcast there? Are you promoting your own government line? Who knows?”
Wilson speculates that Scott had been speaking to “multiple audiences” with that speech, “signalling, perhaps, an understanding of the kind of job that perhaps the government would prefer to be done”.
Within the ABC, there are other debates, too. While generally supportive of Scott’s initiatives, staff also wonder how the new 24-hour news station will differentiate itself from what is already available. “We want to see the schedule,” says Quentin Dempster, an ABC broadcaster in NSW and former staff representative on the ABC board.
There are also worries that the ABC is trying to do much with too few. In the digital era, there is a temptation for all the media players racing to keep pace to be reduced to “churnalism” — shallow, continuous coverage of obvious news, rather than in-depth reporting and the hard work of digging to find out something nobody else knows.
Dempster says: “We’re delighted that the ABC is hiring. But there are significant human, quality and creative impacts which are radically changing broadcasting or ‘cybercasting’. There is deep distress among those being displaced, and among the technological survivors, that quality will suffer, that everyone will be stretched too thinly . . . pretty soon the MD will have us broadcasting direct live-to-air by holding up our HD camera-equipped iPhones at news conferences. Foreign correspondents are already doing this. What many of us want to know is this: will ABC journalism in future be more than ambulance-chasing?”
Another insider says foreign correspondents already think of themselves as “satellite monkeys”: arriving in a hot-spot only to find they can’t chase the story because they have to stay on a satellite link or internet connection for 10 hours a day, filing to different programs. “There’s the Midday Report, the 7pm news, Lateline, AM, PM, The World Today, hourly radio news, the News Breakfast show, the News Radio station, the 7.30 Report — and then the local radio stations get your number and you’re stuffed.”
Too often, he says, correspondents are reduced to loading up with web articles before they arrive so they can “rip and read” when they hit the ground, recycling news but not generating it themselves.
Chris Masters is an award-winning investigative journalist who retired from the ABC’s Four Corners program in 2008 and now freelances and works for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney. He says: “If there’s any area where it’s particularly under threat, it’s television. I don’t want a situation where it’s just the gun programs like Four Corners that are seen to be the ones that break news. The ABC doesn’t have a good reputation for breaking news, particularly in TV.
“I know from working in TV, it actually is very hard to be a journalist when you have got all these production responsibilities. There are TV journalists who go through an entire day without making a phone call.”
It is in newspapers, he says, that “the hard work of journalism” is done. “A newspaper reporter will come into the office and make 20 or 30 phone calls in a day. I might be wrong, and I won’t please a lot of my colleagues, but I don’t think too many people at the ABC do that.” So he believes it is important that a balance be maintained between the public broadcaster and the commercial media: “The nation would be so much the lesser if we didn’t have competitors. You don’t want the ABC turning into [former Soviet state mouthpiece]Pravda, and you don’t want Alan Jones taking over either.”
Wilson, too, believes too little investigative journalism is now done in broadcasting, a problem he says pre-dates Mark Scott but which still raises questions about his direction. “It has been decades since we had current-affairs broadcasts at the ABC that really had politicians worried, that surprised them, that break stories and get people off guard on a regular basis. Once upon a time, that was the sort of programming the ABC led with.”
ABC staff are also talking about the role of online and, in particular, the site called The Drum, where senior reporters write analysis and commentary. Quentin Dempster says, “There is a debate inside the ABC about the wisdom of asking our news reporters to write pieces for The Drum. Some are bagging it as self-indulgent opinion and self-promotion. Through The Drum, the ABC is morphing into a text publisher. We have to see how the guidelines and examples delineating analysis [generally seen as permissible for those reporting on news] from opinion [seen as undermining a reporter’s objectivity with the readership] evolve.”
Gawenda takes a tougher line: “You have got to wonder how The Drum fits the ABC policy of journalists not being involved in commentary. In my view, it doesn’t fit at all. They’ve tried to mount this ridiculous argument that there’s a difference between commentary and analysis, but they can’t even define where that line is.”
Gawenda warns that Scott must be careful to sniff the political wind in case it should shift direction. “Both the board and the CEO have to understand the political environment in which they are working. If they get it wrong, they will have political problems in terms of their budgets.”
But he also warns against attempts to rein in the broadcaster: “I actually think we are increasingly lucky to have an ABC. The national broadcaster will become increasingly important. That doesn’t mean you want commercial media to die, but the answer for the commercial media is not to knacker the ABC.”
SPREADING THE NEWS
May 22, 2006
Appointed ABC managing director
and immediately comes under
fi re for refusing to state his position
on whether there should be
advertising on the ABC. However,
says he strongly supports the ABC
Enterprises division to try to raise
independent sources of funding.
Believes the ABC’s biggest
challenge is “staying relevant in
a digital world”.
July 16, 2006
In fi rst national interview, says he
would green-light important stories
that might upset powerful people.
December 21, 2006
Following fi ndings of an independent
study, orders immediate
closure of ABC’s Brisbane studios.
Twelve women had been diagnosed
with breast cancer in the
previous 11 years.
July 1, 2007
ABC celebrates its 75th
anniversary.
September 10, 2007
In speech to the National Press
Club, Scott describes Rupert
Murdoch as the last best hope for
quality newspapers
September 12, 2007
Controversial episode showing
Chaser team breaching APEC
security during the forum’s
Sydney summit is watched by
2.24 million viewers nationally.
“I am a great fan,” says Scott. “I
think they work incredibly hard
and I am delighted for them for
the success . . .”
July 23, 2008
Launch of iView, an internet
platform that enables catch-up
viewing of popular programs.
November 3, 2008
The News Breakfast program goes
to air on ABC2 fronted by Barrie
Cassidy and Virginia Trioli.
May 12, 2009
The federal budget allocates
$165 million over three years
to fund a children’s TV channel,
more Australian drama and
regional online content.
June 10, 2009
Head of television comedy
Amanda Duthie removed by ABC’s
director of television, Kim Dalton,
after The Chaser’s controversial
Make a Realistic Wish sketch.
October 20, 2008
Religion Report presenter
Stephen Crittenden suspended
pending an inquiry into comments
he made about the axing of fl agship
programs on Radio National.
October 26, 2009
Scott announces new arts website
intended as a one-stop web
portal for arts practitioners and
consumers.
December 4, 2009
Kevin Rudd switches on ABC3,
a children’s TV channel.
January 21, 2010
Announcement that ABC will
launch a 24-hour television news
network to be running by second
half of year on its fourth channel.
March 5, 2010
Communications Minister
Stephen Conroy endorses ABC’s
expansion online and Scott,
saying the expansion and new
channels are legitimate activities
for a public broadcaster.
MARK SCOTT CV
BORN October 9, 1962, in Los Angeles (he
holds both US and Australian citizenship).
EDUCATION Knox Grammar School,
University of Sydney, Harvard University.
FAMILY Married to Briony Edmonds in 1993.
They have three daughters.
CAREER First job was as a teacher at
St Andrew’s Cathedral School in 1985. He
left in 1986 to work as a researcher for
Terry Metherell, a NSW opposition frontbencher.
In 1990 became chief-of-staff to
Virginia Chadwick. Became education editor at
The Sydney Morning Herald, aged 31,
in 1996. At Fairfax he rose through editorial
management, in charge of human resources
and industrial relations, holding titles of
editorial director and editor-in-chief. Managing
Director of the ABC since 2006.