Posts tagged 'society'

Portable patriotism. (Source: Stephen Barnett/Flickr)

Today, ideas of national identity, patriotism, community and equity come to the fore in the Australian imagination (sharing real estate with flags and barbeques, perhaps). Drawing on events held during the past year, we’ve put together a list of viewing recommendations for your public holiday.

Prior to the arrival of Captain Cook and cohort, Australia’s indigenous population carefully managed their environment, making use of fire to rejuvenate the land and manipulate the movement of fauna, historian Bill Gammage explained.

The appearance of European colonialism planted the seed of today’s reconciliation debates. We explored this debate – covering treaty, social justice and opportunity – in our Not Sorry Enough discussion. Larissa Behrendt discussed the challenges of overcoming indigenous disadvantage, while Sarah Maddison presented an argument for how mainstream Australia can move beyond white guilt.

A South Australian Corroboree (1864) by WR Thomas, from the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. (Source: WikiCommons)

Iconic storyteller Thomas Keneally presented his take on early nationhood and Australia’s regional racism in his Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation in December. Race and Aboriginal politics were amongst the myriad topics addressed in a marathon two-hour interview between Paul Keating and Robert Manne, with some of Keating’s sentiments echoing Manne’s earlier polemic regarding our national political complacency. Also cautioning against complacency, Susan Mitchell spoke of the potential disaster of a Tony Abbott victory.

We held many discussions on the state of our democracy. We asked whether it was broken, dumbed down or going nowhere fast, and for how long we might remain the lucky country. Tim Soutphommasane presented his case for why progressives should embrace National Service, and one of our Intelligence Squared debates focussed on the question of whether our soldiers should be in Afghanistan.

In a series of events, we paid tribute to our country’s literary heritage, whilst writerly alumni of the University of Melbourne’s Janet Clarke Hall celebrated their colleagues. As for contemporary literature, the 21 titles comprising the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist provide a compelling picture of our nation’s writers today.

Finally, in our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series we explored the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Doubtless, many such stories are being shared as you read this.

If you’ve been reading the Fairfax press (or surfing social media) recently, you’re probably familiar with the debate about writer and activist Melinda Tankard Reist – and whether she has the right to call herself a feminist.

Tankard Reist is the author of two books by Melbourne feminist publisher Spinifex Press, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and Big Porn Inc. (edited with Abigail Bray). She runs an activist group, Collective Shout, that works against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls for commercial profit.

She’s also a conservative Christian who is anti-abortion (or ‘pro-life’) and spent twelve years working for Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine. [missing asset]

Tankard Reist has long been a controversial figure – particularly in feminist circles – but the current furore began with a front-cover profile in Sunday Life magazine on 8 January, nearly two weeks ago. The profile writer, left-wing feminist Rachel Hills, says she interviewed Melinda because she ‘thought it would be interesting’. She wrote on her website, ‘Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing … I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.’

This weekend, iconic Australian feminist Anne Summers argued that you need to sign onto certain principles in order to be a feminist – and abortion rights is one of them. ‘As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent. There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility … To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.’

She concluded of Tankard Reist, ‘Just because she says she is a feminist does not mean she is.’

In a past Wheeler Centre debate, Summers' contemporary Wendy McCarthy recalled abortion in the 1960s – before social pressure from feminists and others made it legal – as potentially fatal. ‘In my own experience, to get an abortion required furtive phone calls, 63 guineas (a large amount of money), cops patrolling up and down the road, hoping someone would give you advice when you left…’

Yesterday, Kate Gleeson said the most significant argument against Tankard Reist’s identification as a feminist is her involvement – through her work as Harradine’s adviser – in restricting the approval of the abortion drug RU486 and ushering in Australia’s adoption of the ‘global gag rule’ that dictates AusAID’s overseas family planning guidelines.

Gleeson said this had ‘profound implications for women’s access to contraception in our donor destination countries’, contributing to ‘the two-tier system in which Western women have mostly unfettered control over their reproduction, while those in the developing world are at the mercy of dangerous abortions’.

Today, Cathy Sherry takes issue with all those who’ve questioned Tankard Reist’s right to call herself a feminist. She says ‘I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like the nasty in-group in primary school … I do not know Melinda Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her own beliefs … The real test of tolerance is tolerating those with whom we strongly disagree. We will never have a right to express our own contested ideas if we do not defend others' rights to do the same.’

A somewhat baffled Rachel Hills (who says that the huge response to her profile – including five separate opinion pieces last weekend – has been both ‘a bit of a dream’ and ‘challenging’) reflected this week on what she’s learned from the experience. She concluded, ‘if you want people to listen to what you’re saying – whether you have a big platform or small one – you also have an obligation to engage in good faith’.

Hills’ approach to the profile was to avoid a hatchet job, but ‘to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human’.

While perhaps not all the arguments being traded are useful (or indeed respectful), the broad debate is teasing out some big questions.

On the liveability trail, our intrepid scout David Nichols finds himself nestled amongst dogs, babies and bagels in the biggest smoke of all.

New York

New York is like some kind of enormous share house, with 2.3 degrees of separation and no way of getting away from other people. Step into Central Park and the elegant, arcane setting is riddled with exercisers, cyclists, infants with nannies or nanas, strollers, joggers, runners. Two women pushing baby carriages are urged by a third woman – their trainer, presumably paid for this bollocks – to stretch their arms and twirl their hands as they push their hapless toddlers down a small hill: “Take advantage!” she cries. “Take advantage!”

Joggers taking advantage of Central Park with a view to the Upper West Side, via Patrick Grubans/WikiCommons

There is no privacy in New York anyway, so New Yorkers have essentially persuaded themselves that privacy is a kink, overrated and unnecessary. They have loud and involved conversations loudly on the streets with each other in person or on mobile telephone devices. “I was essential to that company, I mean, empirically!” asserts one twentysomething dude on his cell.

Middle-class Australians reared on Woody Allen films no doubt have their own picture of the city (or at least of Manhattan), perhaps not realising that (1) Allen amplifies certain elements of the place for satirical affect and (2) Allen is of a generation soon to pass and (2[a]) a rarified class. But there are some elements of the city that do undoubtedly work and have done so for a century or so. The subways are quick, although they demand a little mental exertion (particularly the assumption that you know which line you’re on at all times, so that every other possible connection will be mentioned on the overhead boards when you alight at a station, but not the one you’re connecting from). Street food is often a joy, and I hold to that despite one particular morning’s disastrous hot, stale, cardboard pretzel. Thankfully bagels are everywhere.

We are often told that New York is not really America (this is, of course, a snob’s whimsy). Anyone who tries the standard coffee will know that, of course, it’s totally America: the coffee right across the USA invariably invokes the sensation of drinking a cup of hot water from a vessel that once contained coffee. That is, unless you can find a place that does espresso, in which case, you can pay top dollar for a teaspoon’s worth of actual coffee.

As we’ve found all week, however, the dog index is the one that seems most pertinent to judging New York’s liveability. Manhattanites love their dogs, and dogs big, small, huge and tiny can be found – always accompanied by doting human – on the streets at all times. They are often pampered like dollies, or perhaps – can this be true? almost certainly! – have been sculpted by a hairdresser to give them coquettish, Disneyesque faces. Where the humans – mostly – recognise they must abide one another, the dogs will occasionally have severe responses to each other. At such times, the owners don’t acknowledge each other. They just tug their errant charges away.

I have a bad feeling that there are many (new) urbanists who look at New York’s über-built-up apartment lifestyle as the ideal way to live. There are – quite clearly and undeniably – some who relish the place. Even I was settled in within just a couple of days: I was peeved just like a local when the Wholefoods near where my wife and I were staying in Upper East Side didn’t open its automatic doors with joy when I came by at 7:40am (it opens at 8, stays open ‘til 9).

But the point about a place like New York is obviously that there’s no place like New York. Nice place to visit. Surely no-one – aside from those 8 million self-selecting antpeople who already do – could possibly live there?

David Nichols' liveability series ends Monday with a look at Baltimore.

(Click to watch video.)

“This year two thirds of all world growth has come out of the developing economies. And we think we can have a debate about the circumstances of someone’s birth and their complexion and how they look. I mean, it’s sick, sick, sick. It’s truly sick.” Paul Keating’s recent conversation with Robert Manne at the Melbourne Recital Centre revealed a man still passionate about the value of conviction politics. It also allowed a born political storyteller space to tell his stories – and there were several major themes.

In classic Keating gladiatorial form, the former Prime Minister reiterated his belief that, were the federal electoral cycle four years rather than three years, he would have beaten John Howard in 1996. “I just needed more time,” he told Robert Manne. Keating blames a Royal Commission involving Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia that took up most of 1995 – at the time he called the commission a political stunt. “By the time I got on to Howard, I had him a blithering wreck … He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. If I’d had another year I would have done to him what I did every other day, was tread on him. He never got on top of him in the polls … and I would have massacred him in 1996 if I’d had another year, but I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time.”

On the issue of illegal refugees, Keating berated the ALP for not having the courage of its convictions. “One of the primary duties of a Prime Minister is to protect a country from prejudice,” he says. At the time of Tampa, Keating recalls having advised the then Labor leader and opposition leader Kim Beazley that the ALP couldn’t hope to outflank Howard’s conservative reaction: “The Labor Party should have stood its ground.” This leads Manne onto the topic of the Labor Party’s mixed fortunes since Keating. He asks, has Labor lost its way? “Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story,” Keating replies. “This is another transition. This is perhaps the biggest transition in 300 years. This is the transition to the establishment of China’s position of primacy again in the international system. A change in the way the world works, from West to East. And … here we are, a primary exporter to this.” The Labor Party, he adds, should be “constructing a story of transition”. The transition “should also be a cultural one”, he says, and thus Keating comes to the tagline that made the papers the next day: Australia should derive its security in Asia, not from Asia.

This is Keating’s biggest theme, one he returns to repeatedly in the course of the conversation. The rise of China is the great story of our generation. “All great states claim strategic space. And if you don’t give it to them they take it.” Keating warns that refusing to accord China the strategic space it demands may lead to catastrophic results. “Accommodating China a new construct is … the most important thing facing Australia.”

Keating concludes his Wheeler Centre appearance with another classic aphorism that summed up his political fortunes: “You don’t necessarily give the public back what the public wants. You give them what the public needs. If you give them too much of it they get sick of you.”

Today is the day the United Nations Population Fund has deemed the day most likely the world’s population hits the seven billion mark. We’ve just uploaded the video/podcast of our recent event, ‘Seven Billion: It’s Getting Crowded in Here!’, presented in partnership with the ABC and hosted by Radio National’s Natasha Mitchell (click the image below to watch the video).

In reality, it’s impossible to know where the seven billionth person will be born, but statistics favour India. The Fund’s State of World Population 2011 report has warned that a lack of investment in education, infrastructure and employment will stunt the life opportunities that would otherwise be potentially available to almost two billion young people across the world. The Guardian’s infographic tracing the history of human population begins 72 millennia ago.

It’s a subject we covered about three weeks ago but we’ve found a bunch more on the web to bring to your attention. The Herald Sun covered the story with an infographic that’s fun to play with. It graphs the rise in population from 1950 to the present day across the world, with the biggest rises in East and West Africa. The population of each of these regions now comfortably surpasses the billion mark.

In 1999, the Guardian invited Salman Rushdie to write a letter to the world’s six billionth person. Now, the newspaper has asked its readers to do the same. While it took only 12 years to jump from six to seven, the population growth rate is slowing. By mid-century, we should have topped nine billion, and by century’s end should only have grown one billion more. But the tiniest variation in fertility could see the 2100 mark hovering closer to 15 billion.

Meanwhile, this collection of photographs published on the Atlantic’s website brings home what would otherwise be a somewhat abstract milestone.

(Click to watch video.)

(Click to watch video.)

For centuries, it was been the privilege of Westerners to define the Other – essentially anyone whose skin colour wasn’t white. The privilege rested on a technological and material dominance that allowed European and post-European societies to impose their cultures, laws and institutions on others. Now, that dominance is increasingly contested, and the rise of Asia promises a future where the Western gaze won’t be as privileged as it has previously been – begging the question, how does the Asian gaze look upon Western culture?

In his recent Wheeler Centre appearance, Tanveer Ahmed – psychiatrist, columnist and author of the memoir, The Exotic Rissole – traced a history of the Asian critique of the West that stretches from the agrarian fascism of WWII-era Japan to current-day jihadism. It has four themes: the city (urban civilisation, commerce, sexual license, leisure and wealth); the bourgeois (an anti-hero who priorities personal gain and safety, who lacks conviction and is essentially mediocre); a soulless and mediocre emphasis on reason; and feminism (the lure of feminine sexuality as a threat to discipline, self sacrifice, austerity and worship of the leader).

But it’s not all negative. Ahmed quoted a 2010 Forbes magazine survey that found modern-day Indians hold the US in higher esteem than any other country in the world for its consumerist middle-class lifestyle, while in China a new field in education is emerging called ‘success studies’.

According to most estimates the world’s population has just hit – or is just about to hit – the seven billion mark. A United Nations estimate has the world’s population peaking at about 9.3 billion in the middle of the century. That’s roughly a third as many human beings on the face of the planet 40 years from now as there are today, and that’s going to present nations already straining to meet the resource challenges of the 20th-century population boom with all kinds of additional challenges. Add to that the task of decoupling the global economy from fossil fuel and Houston, as they say, we have a problem.

The world’s human population only hit the one billion mark around about the time a young Queen Victoria acceded to the throne. It took an another century to hit the second billion. Billion three took 35 years, the fourth a mere 15, and for a while there it looked like we were going to breed ourselves to kingdom come. Then the rate of growth began to slow. China’s one-child policy began to kick into gear. Education and birth control began to reverse the trend in some countries. Others, like Nigeria, the Philippines and Indonesia, began to recognise the crippling effects of a surging population. After peaking at just over 2.1% in 1971, the world’s population growth rate slowed to just 1.2% in 2009 (this graph lets you plot the growth rate of just about every country).

It’s not all one-way traffic, however. Many countries face the opposite problem: population decline. This table indicates most countries facing population declines are characterised by a strange combination: high education and mounting poverty. Nations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union benefited from excellent education and health systems during the Cold War, leading to high life expectancy rates and low birth rates. High levels of education tend to result in lower birth rates – birth rates so low they are deemed sub-replacement fertility rates (SRFR). An SRFR means simply that more people are dying than are being born. In developed countries, the SRFR is about 2.1%. In developing countries where life expectancy rates are lower (in Swaziland, which has the lowest life expectancy in the world, it’s just under 40 years), the SRFR can be as high as 3.4%.

The end of the Cold War has impoverished many former Eastern Bloc countries, lowering life expectancy rates and encouraging emigration. For developed countries, immigration can mitigate a sub-replacement fertility rate – but who wants to emigrate to a poor country that’s only getting poorer?

The Wheeler Centre is hosting a panel discussion tonight in partnership with ABC Radio National on population called ‘Seven Billion: It’s Getting Hot in Here’, hosted by Natasha Mitchell.

“In constituency, it’s most similar to a prison riot: what will happen is that, usually in the segregation unit, nobody will ever know exactly, but a rumour will emanate that someone has been hurt in some way. There will be some form of moral outrage that takes its expression in self-interested revenge. There is no higher purpose, you just have a high volume of people with a history of impulsive behaviour, having a giant adventure.

“Of course, the difference is that, in a prison, liberty has already been lost. So something pretty serious must have happened in order for young people on the streets to be behaving as though they have already been incarcerated. As another criminologist, Professor John Pitts, has said: ‘Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future. There is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.’”

Taken from Zoe Williams' column in The Guardian.