David Penberthy: When did we stop agreeing to disagree?
REGARDLESS of which side of politics you barrack for, we should all be able to debate without fear of being screamed down or silenced by censorious opponents, writes David Penberthy.
I READ a nice story this week about a group of enterprising young women who have pitched in and bought an old inner-city pub in which they intend to feature their own successful microbrewery.
While I wish them nothing but success in the endeavour, especially in such a blokey industry, there was one part of their business plan that struck me as a tedious reflection of the times. Part of their idea is to use the spruced-up venue to hold “politics in the pub” nights. They’re all progressive people and one of them was quoted as saying it would be a great opportunity for people to discuss political ideas around changing the date of Australia Day, equal rights for transgender people, climate change and so forth. Good luck to them I suppose, but instead of calling these nights Politics in the Pub it would be more accurate to describe them as Politics We All Agree With in the Pub, as I very much doubt that Cory Bernardi or Andrew Bolt will be getting an invitation.
Wherever you look it is becoming increasingly clear that Australians are losing the ability to discuss politics; rather, they want everyone to agree about politics. The conservative broadcaster Alan Jones was subjected to a mass campaign across social media this month ahead of his appearance on the ABC’s Q&A program, with hundreds of tweeters angrily demanding the national broadcaster prevent this loathsome man from going on the air.
Now, Jones might be an objectionable man at times, and I attacked him at length in this column over his horrible remarks about Julia Gillard’s late father, but this campaign to have him black-banned is a stellar example of the censoriousness of the times.
In Brisbane, the organisers of that city’s Writers Festival have been rightly pilloried for their politically correct squeamishness in vetoing the list of attendees on ideological grounds. It is deeply disturbing that a forum ostensibly designed to celebrate and explore challenging ideas saw fit to blackball the mother of modern feminism, the iconoclastic Germaine Greer, and a former Labor Premier in Bob Carr over their apparently controversial views. What an indictment in a liberal democracy that an event aimed at university-educated crowd will try to ensure that no-one is confronted by anything resembling a provocative opinion.
Australia’s conservatives have created their own echo chambers, with Paul Murray’s program on Sky News serving as an hilarious drop-in centre for neo-right types who think the world is out to get them. Some of the funniest television I’ve seen in a while involved a panel discussion during the recent leadership dramas where Murray teased out the issues with Spectator editor Rowan Dean, and former Liberal ministers Brownyn Bishop and Gary Hardgrave. After a quick whip-round the four of them established that the next leader of the Liberal Party absolutely had to be Peter Dutton.
The most disturbing development of all came this week with the ruling by the media watchdog the Australian Communications and Media Authority bringing down a thundering ruling condemning Channel 7’s Sunrise program about a segment on child neglect in our most impoverished indigenous communities. During that segment one guest made a heavy-handed remark in which he brushed aside the important history of the stolen generations, and said that for the sake of this new generation of abused children in towns like Tennant Creek, we needed to do the same thing again. It was a pretty intemperate and insensitive statement, which almost seemed to be holding up a racist and paternalistic chapter of our history as the ideal model for social policy in 2018. Having said that, the manner in which ACMA condemned not just the segment but the poor host Samantha Armytage, who would easily be one of the most kind-hearted people in the media, was a complete disgrace.
In ACMA’s eyes the segment was tantamount to hate speech and the topic itself should be regarded as a no-go zone. The ACMA ruling has the effect of operating as a blanket ban on any robust discussion about the undeniable horrors that are happening in places such as Tennant Creek. Indeed on the very day the ruling came down new evidence of child abuse emerged from that Godforsaken town. There was a bleak symmetry to it all. Apparently now it is forbidden to suggest that some communities are so irreversibly dysfunctional that the children should be removed on safety grounds. Maybe if we ignore these problems they will somehow go away. If only that were true.
Plain and honest language is under threat like never before. It is imperilled by these quangos such as ACMA and the Human Rights Commission with their legislated ability to tut-tut on behalf of those whose feelings have been hurt by a three-minute news segment or a single cartoon. Plain and honest language is also under threat from our growing inability to agree to disagree, to relish the intellectual challenge of a proper argument, where points are made and taken, or rejected off the back of robust exchanges. Political discourse has become like sport, where you simply cheer for your own team. It does a huge disservice to the overwhelming majority of us who are politically ambivalent and try to examine issues and problems on their merits, rather than some undergraduate sense of barracking for the left or right depending on where you line up ideologically.