In defence of the character test

This response to Osman Faruqi’s article, The folly of appealing to Fortress Dutton, published by Overland yesterday, started as a Facebook post. I’m a bit hesitant to write anything at all, but as my recently-deactivated Twitter profile stated, I’m the holder of unpopular opinions. I might as well stick with it.

Faruqi’s central argument relies on a homogenous interpretation of section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (the ‘character test’) and incorporates frankly tiresome ‘Australian men rape/commit violence against women too’ rhetoric. Sorry, but anyone capable of reading to Year 9 level knows that the majority of sexual violence in Australia is carried out by people known to the victim; there is nothing new or clever in this.

He contends that Ministerial discretion in applying the character test is a slippery slope; invoking a muddle-headed critique of feminists and progressive campaigners ‘weaponising’ immigration controls’ which takes in Gamergate, honour killings, Chris Gayle and the despicable treatment of Faruqi’s mother, NSW Greens MP Dr Mehreen Faruqi, by immigration officials in the US.

The author, Albert Santos, led a campaign against actor Adam Baldwin’s attendance at the Supanova pop culture exhibition. He takes pride in not seeking to have Baldwin’s visa revoked on character grounds, that ‘grovelling at (Immigration Minister Peter) Dutton’s feet’ is an exercise in cognitive dissonance from progressive campaigners – all sans one detail: Baldwin was not invited here to spout hate to small groups of persuadable men and demonstrate how to demean, verbally and physically intimidate women. If you didn’t want to go to Supernova because Adam Baldwin is an A-Grade misogynistic, anti-feminist, anti-abortion, gun-loving, trans-hating, cyberbullying arsehole, you didn’t have to. A hashtag was launched. A Facebook page. Santos’ online campaign – all to have Baldwin ‘disinvited’. Supanova stood its ground, hypocritically claiming to support diversity and inclusion while promoting Baldwin, but he was kept on a tight leash – his abhorrent political views weren’t given a platform. I have little doubt that if he had, the groups Santos (and Faruqi) disparage would have launched a campaign against him through the immigration department.

Unlike Baldwin, Jeff Allen and Julien Blanc came to Australia with one aim, appealing to one audience: Australian men eager to improve their success as sexual predators through any means necessary. For Faruqi to state, ‘progressive campaigners would be better off protesting, organising rallies and boycotts and running public awareness campaigns designed to educate the community’ is an insult to the thousands of people who suffer, or work with those impacted by male entitlement to women’s bodies, including physical contact or intent of physical contact of a sexual nature that a person does not consent to – recorded crimes under the definition used Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification. Allen and Blanc teach men how to commit crimes for profit. RSD tours have one aim: to put the techniques they promote online into real-life. The deficients watching YouTube in their bedrooms bond together in a room, then hunt women in packs, emboldened by, and with encouragement and approval of a group. There is strong evidence that adopting a mob mentality makes men more dangerous to women. What could be more empowering than being told you are an Alpha male, not a Z Grader; that you can convert women into submitting to you sexually by what is (at the very least) unwanted physical contact? That you too, can ‘bang babes’. And when those ‘babes’ don’t want you? When the Alpha male delusion falls apart? The rage must be infernal.

Faruqi goes on to ‘be clear’ that he is ‘not advocating for the public incitement of violence against women’ and that other remedies, including civil disobedience and criminal law, are available to prevent Jeff Allen from doing so. What he fails to consider is that when Julien Blanc was kicked out of Australia on character grounds, visible disruptive civil action was possible because activists knew where RSD’s seminars were being held. This time, RSD went to extraordinary lengths to hide the locations of their seminars, demanding credit card details, doing background checks & not releasing times/dates – people who signed up had to wait for a text messages to find out where they would be inculcated in the ways of the Alpha male sex god who can *make* woman have sex with them. It made protest almost impossible. It also made it difficult to have him promptly charged with inciting violence. So what were ‘progressive campaigners’ left with in Allen’s case? New Matilda editor, Chris Graham, made public how difficult it was to gain information about Allen’s tour. Faced with the hammer of immigration law, or allowing a man to make money from teaching men how to commit crimes, they chose the blunt object.

Faruqi links the use of section 501 6(d) against Allen (tl;dr – it exists to prevent harassment, intimidation, vilification and inciting discord impacting a section of Australian society) with the 2011 amendment targeting the character of refugees and asylum seekers. Advocating s501 6(d) be ignored because the Minister might use it to target refugees and asylum seekers is specious. The provisions Faruqi (& others) rely on to argue the slippery-slope case are not one and the same. Arguing against the application of s501 6 (d) does not stop the Department or Minister from implementing section 501 6(aa) or s197A; allowing Jeff Allen to conduct some sort of covert proselytising operation to affirm to Australian men that they are indeed, the proper owners of Australian women’s bodies because Peter Dutton can apply different powers to target refugees and asylum seekers is a false equivalence.

Very few people argued against the refusal of David Irving’s visa back in the 1990s. Irving failed the character test because he denies facts about the Holocaust. Irving argued that this is a crime that only exists in Germany. The argument that can be made in the Allen case is that the character test is being used to limit speech; that we should accept this bunch just as we should have allowed Troy Newman to come here to show the Right To Life mob how anti-abortion action is really done, or David Irving to come here and deny evidence of the Holocaust. Implied causality between these high-profile cases and the application of the character test to refugees and asylum seekers is intellectually disengenuous. Campaign for the amendments which specifically target refugees and asylum seekers to be removed; but do not draw a bow between the treatment of asylum seekers and the treatment of white dudes who make money by teaching other dudes how to commit crimes against women.

No, I didn’t sign the petition, by the way. I despise the toxicity of the people who abused others who expressed discomfort with the character test being applied to Allen, but I do question the way this argument is structured. Further, there appears to be little space for consideration of an alternate view which holds that Australian women deserve to be protected under Australian law from people who want to come here and exercise normative social influence on Australian men and incite them to commit crimes.

It is about feminism…

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women’s issues.

~ Charlotte Bunch 

Ah, International Women’s Day (IWD).  Nothing like the klaxon of a UN-endorsed day of faffery to raise the hackles of the conservative commentariat, including Elle Hardy in her 6 March column for The Daily Telegraph, in which she lambasts modern feminism and casts humanism as the preserve of exponents of liberal democracy to address the plight of worthy victims of ‘real’ oppression, while ignoring the scholarly interpretation (i.e. the literary knowledge and linguistic skill required to be able to comprehend and practice the ideals of ancient and Renaissance thinkers).  Hardy quotes Cicero without providing the context that shaped his legacy, his translation of the Ancient Greeks and introduction of their chief philosophical schools to enable a new, distinctly Roman voice.  Hardy’s critique is a quasi-Pat Robertson rant against socialism, based on the quaint notion that the first & second waves of feminism were ‘noble‘, while the current or third wave of feminism, ‘has become a by-word for the persnickety and the banal; a banner under which to air boutique grievances … (the) cultural minutiae in the West’.

Piffle.

Third wave feminism is a reaction against the second wave ignoring the voices and agency of women of colour, differing abilities or gender identification.  In scorning the third wave, Hardy scorns the Ciceronian legacy she professes to admire; for we move further along the path of ‘kindness, generosity, goodness and justice’ through welcoming and celebrating diverse voices, not mocking or ignoring them.  Hardy’s column is a strange exercise in confirmation bias: ‘my weltanschauung* is better than yours and I am here to liberate you’; yet most of her criticism is reserved for middle-class, white, female feminists.  Yes, she is correct in using the dread ‘socialism’ tag twice in four paragraphs: International Women’s Day was started by groups of European socialists.  In 1911, more than one million women and men attended IWD rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.  I’ll repeat that for the peanut gallery: women AND men joined together to give birth to this crypto-socialist feminista wankfest.  A week later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed the lives of 140 women in New York City, cementing labour standards and working conditions as a key angle of future IWD observances.  I love this clip, full of socialist ratbags such as Angela Merkel:

Elle Hardy’s desire to stick feminism in a museum display case because she wants opportunity, not equality is naïve.  Opportunity stems from structural equality, particularly socio-economic equality.  As one of my favourite tweeters, Nigerian journalist Jennifer Ehidiamen wrote on 6 March, ‘Gender equality is giving equal oppr. It is not disenfranching 1 group over another’.  Hardy’s assertion that 60 per cent of the wealth of the United States lies in the hands of women is unsourced, so here’s a little something I prepared earlier: while women fill 51.4 per cent of management, professional and related occupations in the US, only 8.1 per cent of the country’s top earners are women. Fewer than 15 per cent go on to executive officer level (source: Catalyst.org).  The pipeline for women to progress beyond broad-based management positions (which, as defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, includes occupations such as ‘lodging’ and ‘food service’ managers) to the pointy end of the pyramid doesn’t exist.  Australian women are increasingly occupying middle-management roles, but the same growth is not seen in senior leadership ranks.  Given all of the opportunities our postcodes of birth offer, the Elle Hardys are more likely to remain team leaders than thought leaders.  Yes, as a white Australian woman, I am better served than a black man.  We’re both better served by society than women of colour.

Giving a paternalistic pat on the head to the good people who work in rape crisis centres and shelters does not excise them from feminism.  Violence against women is rooted in gender inequality (I forgot, don’t worry about inequality ‘because opportunity’).  Poor maternal health care is rooted in gender inequality.  Lower rates of access to healthcare among women affect generational, whole-of-family wellbeing.  As for liberal democracy solving these problems, take a look at these infographics:

#IWD2014: 1/3 of women are abused by partners & 600 million live where this is no crime http://t.co/WWhmhEen5T Facts: pic.twitter.com/s9Xqy1WMvs

— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) March 8, 2014

The King Canutes railing against feminism and International Women’s Day in 2014 do so because feminism is more powerful, richer in context and influence than it was 100 years’ ago.  They deny the essence of humanity that the third wave (and whatever comes next) brings.  Feminism belongs to more people, who interpret and live it as suits them – not ‘us’.  Who is likely to effect the greater social change?  Those who impose their belief systems or local agents for change?  As Jessica Valenti states: “Feminism isn’t simply about being a woman in a position of power. It’s battling systemic inequities; it’s a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.”

*I believe there are concepts certain languages do justice to; in the case of ‘worldview’, it’s German.

32

Meet Marika Ninness.

Marika died in John Hunter Hospital on Saturday, 21 December 2013, from injuries sustained after she was allegedly king hit and allegedly knocked to the ground outside the George Tavern near Stockland Green Hills shopping centre in East Maitland on 7 December 2013.  Marika’s husband & sister held her hand as she died, 80 hours after life support was withdrawn.  Marika’s funeral was attended by more than 350 mourners.

Marika’s boyfriend, Ross Albert Merrick was arrested at the scene and charged with causing grievous bodily harm by an unlawful act, recklessly causing grievous bodily harm and causing grievous bodily harm with intent.  A statement of facts tendered in court accused Merrick of elbowing Marika to the head during an argument before midnight. He was subsequently accused of punching her and was bailed at a hearing on 13 December 2013.  The charges were upgrade to murder on 22 December 2013.  Merrick was remanded in custody until 23 December, when he was granted bail unopposed by the prosecution.  Merrick missed a scheduled court appearance on 12 February due to ‘miscommunication’ between the defence, prosecution & court.  That is the last report I’ve been able to find on Merrick’s case online.  Apologies to the Hunter region media if they reported on the matter (the next hearing was set for 19 February), but it looks as though the case is not newsworthy enough after just three months.  Marika Ninness died just 10 days before 18-year-old Daniel Christie was attacked in King’s Cross, but barring five paragraphs on 22 December, her case wasn’t reported by the Sydney Morning Herald (she didn’t even rate a mention in the Daily Telegraph).  I understand that Sydney news editors might deem the death of a 35-year-old woman from a Hunter Valley town as of little interest to their readers, but that didn’t stop the Herald using her beautiful face in a gallery of 15 victims of street violence attached to this article calling for a political response to an ‘epidemic of street violence’ after Daniel Christie’s death.  The O’Farrell government’s ‘one punch’ legislation, drafted on the back of a fag packet after a media campaign focused on the deaths of two Sydney teenagers,  is inner city-centric (barring the statewide mandatory band of off-license alcohol sales after 10pm) & will do nothing to prevent the ‘epidemic’ from affecting women, men and children in suburban, regional and country areas.  Of the 15 people the Herald refers to as victims of ‘king hit punches’, two (Thomas Kelly & Daniel Christie) lost their lives within the O’Farrell government’s ‘CBD Precinct’.  Six of those pictured died in Victoria; one in Queensland. Of the NSW victims, two died in Maitland (including Marika Ninness); one in Windsor; one in Woolooware in Sydney’s south; one at Kingscliff, near Tweed Heads; one in Coffs Harbour and one in Griffith:

• Christopher Leicester died in Woolooware, near Cronulla in 2007 after he was punched, knocked to the ground &  kicked in the head repeatedly by three youths who thought he had insulted them. They were found guilty of manslaughter in 2009.
• Connan McLeod died after he was punched by Michael Ryan in the car park of Windsor KFC in May, 2011. Both men were heavily intoxicated. Mr Ryan was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, the jury deeming the punch self-defence. Mr McLeod and his brother-in-law (who, the court heard, has a long history of violence) had been involved in a scuffle inside a pub. A few minutes’ later, Mr McLeod chased Mr Ryan through a shopping mall, shouting, ‘I am going to kill you’. Mr Ryan punched Mr McLeod once, & pushed him away. Mr McLeod lost his balance and fell.
• Scott Snodgrass died after an altercation with a 20-year-old man at a taxi rank in Coffs Harbour in May 2013. The man was questioned by police and released without charge & the matter remains under investigation.
• 50 year old Kelvin Kane died at Kingscliff, near Tweed Heads. His alleged killer, Craig Field, has been charged with murder, with the case adjourned until 7 March.
• Jamie Purdon died after he & his friends were chased by a 17-year-old & 15-year-old at Maitland Show. The 17-year-old’s custodial sentence was reduced to periodic detention for giving evidence against the 15-year-old, whose conviction for manslaughter was overturned as a miscarriage of justice by the Court of Criminal Appeal (he awaits a re-trial).  The teenager who punched Mr Purdon was subsequently charged with assaulting another man a year later.
• Andrew Farrugia‘s teenage killers were convicted of manslaughter.  It is a monument to the Sydney Morning Herald that the dreadful, racist ranting of columnist Paul Sheehan was picked up by the ‘white nationalists’ at Stormfront. Really, what a feather in your cap.

These are stories of Australian men and boys – at homes, in parks, at restaurants, at parties, at pubs and clubs.  Verbally & emotionally abusing, harassing, stalking and physically attacking people.  Kicking them, stomping on them while they’re on the ground. Assaulting strangers, acquaintances, friends, and at least once a week, killing female partners.  It’s symptomatic of a pervasive culture of impunity, a word Westerners are more comfortable assigning to African warlords.  People who think that it is OK to do as they see fit, whether it’s getting into a fight with a stranger or verbally degrading the person they ‘love’.  They aren’t cowards. ‘Coward’ implies they lack the courage to do or endure dangerous or unpleasant things.  Instead, they rely on a cowardly society which is uncomfortable with intervening in ‘unpleasantness’.  We fail to stand up & say, ‘hey, you: if you want to behave like that, you’re not welcome here.  You do not meet the standard we as a society expect of you’.  We set the ‘what’s acceptable’ bar so low, & make it pointless by looking away when it’s breached. As Sydney city’s top cop, Commander Mark Murdoch told the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘you could close every pub in Sydney at midnight and have a million cops on the street, but it won’t do anything when people believe they can behave in that fashion and get away with it’.

People convicted under the new NSW government ‘one-punch’ laws may not ‘get away with it’ thanks to mandatory minimum sentences, but it is my view that mandatory minimums will prove as useful in preventing assaults as antibiotics are in killing a virus.  Keeping people in prison for a set period of time, with no prospect of leniency, mitigation or change removes any incentive to learn and practice good behaviours.  As I wrote previously, imposing mandatory minimums as a deterrent is based on the assumption that people are rational actors when they commit a crime.  Randomly assaulting a person on the street is right up there with the least rational crimes. In what fresh hell could Wally Hung, who killed Scott Parnell be deemed ‘rational’? Both men were drunk at a 21st birthday party at Moreton Bay’s Bribie Island Rugby League Football Club. Parnell had previously hit Hung’s friend. While on bail for manslaughter, Hung delivered another single-punch assault while drunk. Hung was convicted of manslaughter in the Parnell case & assault occasioning bodily harm in the second case. Wally Hung is a violent man from the Planet Stupid or Ignorant. What he is not is ‘rational’, nor are the men & boys who killed the other people named in this article.  If charged & convicted under the new mandatory minimum laws, they would have been locked up for longer periods, but would their behaviour have changed?  Would a 15-year-old sentenced to eight years leave adult prison in his early 20s a reformed character? As Richard Ackland notes in The Age, there are no studies to assess the effectiveness of mandatory minimum sentences as a deterrent to crime in Australia, but US Attorney General Eric Holder (with a wealth of data & research available to him), last year issued a memo urging prosecutors not to lay charges that would trigger mandatory minimums for certain non-violent drug offences.

Worse, we have these bright & shiny punitive measures while services which attempt to address the causes of violence, drug & alcohol abuse are being cut back, or are thin on the ground (NB: I’ve attempted to source this information as widely as possible, if any readers know of preventative or educational strategies & services specifically targeting alcohol, please let me know, I will publish an update).  According to NSW Health’s Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Office (MHDAO), the NSW Government Drug and Alcohol Budget for the 2013/14 financial year is $170 million, with more than $120 million allocated to Local Health Districts to provide frontline drug and alcohol services, almost all focused on treatment. The rest is farmed out to non-government organisations and other agencies to provide:

• residential rehabilitation services;
• education and prevention services; and
• encouragement to pharmacists to engage with the pharmacotherapy program

NSW Health’s Your Room project produces a fact sheet on alcohol abuse and the ‘Your Guide’ series on dealing with alcohol & how to have a good night out, available here.  Programmes delivered through Life Education NSW cost $20 per student. Receives $1.8 million NSW Government funding (approximately $6 per student); The Department of Education & Communities (DEC) chips in $4 through ‘fundraising and other initiatives’, leaving parents to pick up the rest of the tab. For some people, $10 for a non-compulsory school activity is unaffordable; for many, it’s a disincentive.

Department of Education & Communities’ Drug Education Unit: closed. The Australia Drug Law Reform Foundation’s submission expressed reservations as to whether the Unit’s role had been effectively replaced:

“The highly regarded NSW Alcohol and Drug Education Programme (in the Education Department) has recently been closed. The work on alcohol previously undertaken by this department is now being undertaken by Drinkwise, an organisation which is, in effect, a branch of the alcohol beverage industry.”

DEC responded to the Foundation’s concerns with bureaucratese: the Unit hadn’t closed, it had been recalibrated. Screw that: a dedicated unit established & funded has been abolished, its work now delivered as part of the Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) curriculum. Individual teachers decide how much time is spent on alcohol & drug education. Over years 7 – 10, students undertake 300 hours of PDHPE, while in years 11 and 12, Government school students must participate in the Crossroads program for 25 hours.

According to its website, Drinkwise is funded by the following companies:

• Accolade Wines Australia Ltd
• Aldi Stores
• Bacardi Lion Pty Ltd
• Beam Global Australia Pty Ltd
• Brown-Forman Australia Pty Ltd
• Coles Group Ltd
• Coopers Brewery Ltd
• Diageo Australia Ltd
• Carlton & United Breweries
• Lion (Lion-Beer, Spirits & Wine Pty Ltd)
• Moet Hennessy Australia & New Zealand Pty Ltd
• Premium Wine Brands Pty Ltd
• Suntory Australia Pty Ltd
• Treasury Wine Estates Australia Ltd
• Woolworths Ltd

In 2006 the Howard Government contributed $5 million over 4 years. In 2012 the Gillard Government contributed $600,000 for point of sale educational material to highlight the message ‘it is safest not to drink while pregnant’.  Terrific. We have an ‘epidemic of alcohol-fuelled street violence’ and the body largely entrusted to deliver a preventative strategy is funded by grog merchants and a piss-ant government handout. Six of the 13-member Drinkwise board represent the alcohol industry.

On 31 January 2013, the University of NSW’s National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre announced a new school-based drug & alcohol study of 3,000 Victorian & NSW Year 8 students, one of several projects conducted by a new $2.5 million National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) in Mental Health and Substance Use, launched by then federal Minister for Health Tanya Plibersek and federal Minister for Mental Health and Ageing Mark Butler. Given the Abbott government’s approach to science, research and y’know, facts, we’ll see how long that lasts, and what, if anything, is done with the baseline data.

As for the ‘Newcastle Solution’ and the drop in assaults in non-domestic settings in the ‘CBD entertainment zone’, much is made of the non-displacement of violence, i.e. that drunks aren’t strolling off to venues with close proximity to the lock-out area to continue drinking.  This straw man argument fails to give proportionate weight to the fact that venues in neighbouring suburbs are in largely residential areas & close before the lockouts enforced under the ‘Newcastle Solution’ take effect.  In this eight-page report by researchers from the University of Newcastle & the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics & Research, only one paragraph acknowledges this as a factor in the non-displacement argument.  Ugly exceptions to the ‘Newcastle Solution’, such as the near fatal assault of 23 year-old Kelsey Johnston on the night Marika Ninness died, are swept under the carpet by its advocates.  Kelsey suffered bleeding on the brain from an alleged single-punch attack outside the Prince of Wales Hotel at Merewether.  Merewether is a few minutes away from the Hamilton end of the lockout zone.  The Prince of Wales closes at midnight.

On International Women’s Day, and the first real test of the new arrangements in inner-city Sydney, I remember Marika Ninness.  While she died outside her home, her alleged killer was her partner.  I remember that among the backflips Barry O’Farrell has performed on mandatory minimums was dumping them for sexual assaults.  I remember that the deaths of 32 women in NSW in domestic violence situations last year sparked… a framework & a task force.  If the epidemic of violence against women in NSW incited a response equal to the moral panic over street violence, we’d remember those 32 names – but it doesn’t, & we don’t.

UPDATE:  Marika’s sister, Charnie Braz, contacted me this week.  Merrick’s next court appearance is scheduled for 9 April 2014.  In Charnie’s words, ‘the best thing you can do for us is promote fair and responsible reporting of violence against women’.  This report by Nick Ralston, Amy Corderoy & Inga Ting in today’s SMH is a step in the right direction. I hope the editors feel their work is worthy of a broader campaign – & at least devote the same coverage to Merrick’s trial as it will Shaun McNeil’s (the man charged with murder over the death of Daniel Christie).

Killer facts

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Friedrich Nietzche

On 23 January 2014, the ABC reported the following quote from NSW Bar Association president, Mr Phillip Boulten SC:

“There’s no evidence at all that mandatory sentencing ever decreases the amount of crime that’s committed and it has the ability to act unfairly on vulnerable and disadvantaged groups.

“It isn’t effective, it’s not a deterrent, it just leads to more people being locked up for no good purpose.”

On 5 February 2014, the ABC’s Fact Checking Unit found Boulten SC was ‘overreaching’ in his claim. In determining its ‘verdict’, Fact Check relied on five examples of the outcomes of mandatory minimum sentencing.

Fact Check example: The 1997 Northern Territory Sentencing Act for certain property crimes – repealed in 2001 (property crime went up).

The Act provided a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of 14 days for a first offence, 90 days for a second property offence and one year for a third property offence (the Act was amended in 1999 to provide for alternatives to sentencing in ‘exceptional circumstances’). The Juvenile Justice Act provided that a person aged 15 to 18 who has been convicted for a certain property offence and has at least one prior conviction for such an offence, must be detained for at least 28 days (with additional measures applicable on top of the mandatory minimum). Until 2000, children between 17-18 years were treated as adults under the Sentencing Act rather than under juvenile justice legislation.

The result was an explosion in incarceration rates, with associated costs, particularly among the Indigenous population, largely due to the inconsistencies of the mandatory sentencing regime. For example, the theft of petrol from a bowser attracted a mandatory sentence, the theft of a tankful of petrol through the use of a fraudulent credit card – a ‘white collar crime’ more likely to be committed by non-Indigenous offenders – did not. In this submission to the UN Human Rights Commission, the Australian Human Rights Commission details research findings & case studies including:

• Two 17 year old girls with no previous criminal convictions both sentenced to 14 days in prison for theft of clothes from other girls who were staying in the same room.
• A 15 year old girl was detained for 28 days for unlawful possession of a vehicle – she was a passenger.
• A 17 year old petrol sniffer from an Aboriginal community was sentenced to seven months plus 120 days for stealing food, alcohol, cigarettes, soft drink and petrol and causing associated minor property damage. The stolen items were consumed with friends. His sentence was based on the mandatory detention formula (120 days) with an additional seven months. He had very little family support and his record was clean until June 1998.
• A 15 year old Aboriginal boy attempted suicide while in police custody, having been arrested for a mandatory detention offence (property damage). He broke a window after hearing about the suicide of a close friend.
• A 27 year old white teacher disputed the quality of a hotdog at a Darwin fast food bar and poured water onto the till. She paid in full for the damage she caused. She was sentenced to 14 days in prison.
• A 29 year old homeless Indigenous man wandered into a backyard when drunk and took a $15 towel. It was his third minor property offence. He was imprisoned for one year.
• An 18 year old man was sentenced to 90 days in prison for stealing 90 cents from a motor vehicle.

Confession: the 90 days for 90 cents’ worth of petrol is probably the most useful case study I have found to use against the introduction of mandatory minimum sentencing on cost-effectiveness grounds. For this one-cent-a-day crime, taxpayers coughed up about $15,ooo (based on estimates contained in the 1995-96 NT Correctional Services Annual Report).

Fact Check example: Western Australia’s “three-strikes and you’re in” law for home burglaries in 1996.

Fact Check doesn’t assess the efficacy of the 1996 laws at all. Handy. As the adage goes, if you want something done (properly), do it yourself – so I did. The AHRC submission states:

“The Western Australian laws provide that when convicted for a third time or more for a home burglary, adult and juvenile offenders must be sentenced to a minimum of 12 months imprisonment or detention. This is regardless of the gravity of the offence.”

If the results of research detailed here were not so serious, they’d be laughable:

• Aboriginal children constituted 80 per cent of the three strikes cases in the Children’s Court of Western Australia from February 1997 to May 1998.
• In the four months after the amendment of the Act, an average of seven children a month were given mandatory sentences.
• In 93 per cent of cases where the juvenile was from a non-metropolitan area, the juvenile was Indigenous.
• 34 per cent of all prisoners in WA were Indigenous.
• The rate of imprisonment of Indigenous people was 21.7 times higher than that of the non-Indigenous population.
• Aboriginal juveniles comprise approximately one-third of the Children’s Court caseload.

Fact Check example: mandatory minimum sentences for any assault on a police officer, introduced by WA’s Barnett Government in 2009. Fact Check appears to have relied on this WA Government media release to support its statement that:

“… the results indicate crime decreased under the 2009 legislation which introduced mandatory minimum sentences for police assaults. The then police minister Rob Johnson and attorney-general Christian Porter announced a 28 per cent decrease in assaults on police officers one year after the laws were introduced.”

It’s one thing for a government to trumpet a percentage, but for a fact checking service to report one figure at the top of a press release without any context is inexplicable – particularly when the information is contained on the same page.

Of the 377 offences reported between September 2009 and September 2010 (following the introduction of the mandatory minimum sentence) only 14 charges were brought (12 for bodily harm or grievous bodily harm to a police officer; one against a prison officer, and one against a transit officer approved by police prosecutions central division). At the time of the media release, five offenders were in remand awaiting trial; one offender was subject to a bench warrant; one case was downgraded by the DPP to assault public officer and the other two cases were discontinued. Below is a list of the offences and sentences of five offenders who were found guilty of, or pleaded guilty under the mandatory minimum sentencing laws:

• Female offender at Kelmscott Train Station bit right arm of a female transit officer causing swelling, bruising and bleeding. The victim was conveyed to hospital for treatment and underwent a blood test due to bodily fluid exposure. Imprisonment nine months
• Female offender in Rangeway punched a male police officer to the right side of the face causing immediate pain and swelling. The victim required analgesics and pain-killing injection. Imprisonment nine months
• Male offender on Roe Highway punched a police officer to the mouth causing a large split in the lower lip, which required five stitches, as well as swelling and soreness to the area of his jaw. Imprisonment six months, one day
• Female offender at Broome Police Station struck a police officer to the face causing bleeding and swelling to the nose. Medical treatment was sought for possible broken nose. Imprisonment six months, one day
• Female offender in Northbridge punched female police officer to the face causing sustained fractures to left cheekbone, severe soreness in the face with suspected dental complications. Victim will require ongoing treatment. Awaiting sentencing.

Fact Check then takes our mandatory minimum tour to the United States.

Fact Check example: “In 1992, mandatory sentences were introduced for firearm offences in Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania.”

Hello, Fact Checkers! Anyone home? The Northwestern School of Law study cited was published in 1992. It is based on differing gun laws introduced in 1977 (Michigan, two-year sentence for the possession of a firearm while committing any felony); 1975 (Florida, three-year sentence for persons convicted of committing any of 12 specified felonies while in possession of a firearm), and 1982 (Pennsylvania, five-year minimum sentence for any of seven violent crimes if (1) the offense was committed with visible possession of a firearm; (2) the defendant had been convicted of the same offense within the past seven years; or (3) the crime was committed in or near public transportation facilities).

The authors’ methodology for concluding that mandatory minimum sentencing has reduced gun crime in the three States has been widely criticised. When evaluating data from the sample cities – Detroit (MI); Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami (FL), Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (PA) – specifically, the authors found the following:

• A statistically significant decrease in the number of gun homicides in Detroit, but no significant change in other offenses. We concluded from this study that the results best fit a model in which the mandatory sentencing law did not have a preventive effect on crime.
• Significant decreases in Tampa gun homicides and Jacksonville gun assaults. Unarmed robberies increased significantly in Tampa and Miami, but armed robberies did not change. In addition, there was a significant increase in Tampa gun assaults. Again, we concluded that the results did not support a preventive effect model.
• Statistically significant decreases in gun homicides in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The decrease in Philadelphia gun homi-cides was mirrored by a reduction in non-gun homicides, however, and there was no change in gun assaults or robberies in the state of Pennsylvania. Alone, the Pennsylvania estimates do not strongly challenge the conclusion that the statutes have no preventive effect.

McDowall, Loftin and Wiersema went on to standardise & pool the data they had collected over relatively short & differing post-intervention periods & offences, ranging from twenty-four months for Detroit to sixty-three months for assaults and robberies in the Florida cities.

BADA BING: THEY WERE ABLE TO REACH THE CONCLUSION THAT MANDATORY MINIMUMS WORK IN DECREASING GUN CRIME BY ADDING THE FIGURES TOGETHER.

Venturing out on a limb, the decreases in gun homicides might correlate to advances in medical intervention saving the lives of more gunshot victims in the period between the introduction of mandatory sentencing. Maybe the results are skewed by the short-term nature of the periods studied. Maybe they don’t take into account external factors such as a spike in poverty in Detroit, homelessness & job insecurity, or drug-related crime. Have a look at some more recent state-by-state data: gun homicides are up in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and comprised almost 75 per cent of all homicides in both States. The rate of robberies with firearms was above 50 percent in both States. The rate of assaults using a firearm were an incredible 86 per cent in Michigan (yep, people are shooting each other, but not dying), and 39 per cent in Pennsylvania. As Tony Abbott would say, “baddies” are overwhelmingly the victims: in Philadelphia, the percentage of those killed in gun homicides that had prior criminal records increased from 73 per cent in 1985 to 93 per cent in 1996. Detroit – declared America’s most dangerous city by Forbes magazine four years’ running – is bankrupt. In 2010, 32 children died in gun violence. Of the 500 child homicide deaths in Detroit since 2000, a Detroit News investigation claimed most were gun-related. This data set (from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports) does not contain information from Florida (or Alabama, for that matter). I tried the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but the website didn’t want to play ball, but as these reports show, while the overall homicide rate in Florida is falling, gun murders are increasing. Between 2007 and 2010, more than 9,000 people died in gun-related violence in the State, which has a population of around 19 million and three times as many gun dealers than post offices.

Fact Check example: “California introduced a three-strikes policy in 1994, which imposed a life sentence for a list of serious and minor crimes if the offender had two previous convictions for crimes defined as serious or violent.” Fact Check refers to a 2007 study to reach its conclusion that the three-strikes policy resulted in a measurable decrease in crime:

“Researchers at George Mason University in Virginia found arrest rates were 17 to 20 per cent lower for the group of offenders convicted of two-strike eligible offences, compared to those convicted of one-strike eligible offences. The authors concluded this indicated that the three-strikes policy was deterring recidivists from committing crimes.”

None of this research (or ABC’s Fact Check) take into account whether mandatory minimums are the best way of curbing crime.

Firstly, mandatory minimums are inconsistently applied: perhaps the most infamous of California’s ‘three strikes’ cases involved Jerry Dewayne Williams, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison just months after the laws were passed. His ‘third strike’? Stealing a slice of pepperoni pizza. In 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that Williams went back to court following a California Supreme Court ruling that judges could reduce life sentences handed out to ‘third strikers’ by overlooking previous convictions, and was released in 1999. While he claims to ‘live on eggshells’, Williams has skated on incredibly thin ice since his release, with prosecutors not treating a 2003 felony charge of making a criminal threat as a third strikes. Barred from leaving the county following his release from 17 days’  jail, he moved and triggered an arrest warrant which remains active. Since moving, he has been arrested once for being drunk in public but was released without charge.

Secondly, mandatory minimums are not cost-effective: there are increased costs in the court system as more defendants contest charges to try to avoid mandatory penalties where they otherwise may have pleaded guilty. In 1999, Nicholas Cowdery estimated the cost of keep a prisoner imprisoned for a year at about $60,000 and approximately $200,000 to build a new cell. That money could be spent on crime prevention by investing in improving education, pre-school care and health care, especially if targeted at those at risk of offending.

Finally, mandatory minimums do not act as a deterrent (generally or specifically), given that deterrence rests on the assumption that people are rational actors who do a cost/benefit analysis before committing a crime. Much crime, especially violent crime, is impulsive. Mandatory minimums are of little deterrence to the poor & minority groups, leading to over-representation in custody and mandatory minimum sentences applied following relatively minor crimes. In the NT in 1999, an Aboriginal man was sentenced to jail for a year for stealing $23 worth of biscuits & cordial from a Groote Eylandt mine site smoko room (his two previous convictions were for property crimes). In California, about 40 percent of three-strikers are either mentally retarded or mentally ill, & also likely to be black. Blacks make up seven percent of the population, 28 percent of the prison population and 45 percent of the three-strikers (source: Rolling Stone, 27 March 2013. If this compelling Matt Taibbi article does not make you decry mandatory minimum sentences, you should be sentenced to a week in 3rd class to work on reading comprehension).

Fact Check’s final piece of evidence on the ‘overreach’ claim is this 2007 study by the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, which examined the effectiveness of incapacitation (i.e. depriving criminals of the opportunity to offend under all forms of sentencing, mandatory or otherwise). The study estimated that a 10 per cent increase in incarceration rates is associated with a 2 to 4 per cent drop in crime. Fact Check leaves it there. The report goes on to state:

“… the most sophisticated analyses generally agree that increased incarceration rates have some effect on reducing crime, but the scope of that impact is limited… moreover, analysts are nearly unanimous in their conclusion that continued growth in incarceration will prevent considerably fewer, if any, crimes than past increases did and will cost taxpayers substantially more to achieve.“

Fact Check sought expert opinion on incapacitation from the chair of the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council, Arie Freiberg, (incapacitation); on rates of crime from Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics (and Research) and from Professor Geraldine Mackenzie, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bond University (deterrence). Their verdict? “…there is not much evidence that mandatory sentencing reduces the level of crime being committed, but there is some.”

My verdict? The ABC published Boulten’s ‘none, nyet, nada evidence’ remarks on 23 January. The Fact Check unit chose to examine those words and published its response yesterday. Given the time that elapsed, surely it should have provided further context, such as remarks made by Cowdery in the same piece – (mandatory minimum sentencing) is ‘naive and not supported by research and a lot of work that’s been done in that area’ and/or remarks & statements made by Boulten and others in the intervening period. Yesterday, the Newcastle Herald published an excerpt from an address to Newcastle Court for the opening of the law term by Peter Cummings SC, president of the Newcastle Bar Association as an opinion piece. Cummings SC joined Boulten SC, NSW Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Bathurst and former Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery in slamming the introduction of ‘one punch’ laws or mandatory minimum sentences.

Fact Check states on its website that its ‘focus will be on statements likely to influence the public debate, rather than minor errors or gotcha moments involving trivial gaffes. Opinions and exaggerated rhetoric will be avoided. Our aim is to be 100 per cent accurate. But if a mistake is made, the item in question will be corrected and the verdict revised. Statements can be both right and wrong, depending on when they were said. Determinations are therefore based on evidence available at the time’.

On these criteria, was Boulten’s claim the most important made in the highly contentious and much-publicised issue of mandatory minimum sentences to be introduced in NSW? Is his voice more likely to influence public debate than the Premier of NSW? Fact Check has not checked other claims on the NSW mandatory minimum sentencing debate, even the claim that Sydney is in the grip of an ‘epidemic of street violence‘.

Yes, pedants: Boulten SC should have replaced ‘none’ with ‘scant’, ‘little’, ‘minimal’, ‘limited’, ‘negligible’, or ‘insufficient’; but in ignoring the content & context of his entire quote and the evidence it used to arrive at its ‘overreach’ verdict, this ‘fact check’ is an unsatisfying waste of bandwidth that leads to more questions than it answers.

Disclosure: I applied for a job as a fact checker with the ABC. I failed (not interviewed). Related: I have the time to write 3,000 words on fact checking.

Sucker punched

Well played, dickheads.

The new offence & mandatory minimum sentence for so-called ‘one-punch’ assaults occasioning death, announced today by the O’Farrell Government is poor public policy on several counts. I don’t have time to pretty this up, I want to put a few thoughts out there & some links. You can chew my argument up & spit it out, but bring your A game. I worked for a government which made similarly populist decisions & they sucked arse. This one bites because it’s not only bad policy, it’s bad politics.

1/. What has the NSW Government done?

See the fact sheet released by the government here. In addition to the new ‘one punch’ offence, the government will:

• increase maximum sentences by two years and introduced mandatory minimum sentences for serious assaults committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol;
• create a new ‘CBD precinct’ stretching from Kings Cross to Cockle Bay, The Rocks to Haymarket and Darlinghurst which will be subject to 1.30am lockouts and no alcohol sales after 3am;
• not approve new liquor licenses for pubs and clubs within the precinct;
• run free buses from Kings Cross to the city every 10 minutes;
• give police the power to ban ‘troublemakers’ from the precinct for up to 48 hours and the Police Commissioner the power to ban persons from the precinct for extended periods of time;
• introduce a periodic ‘risk-based’ licensing system, based on the Victorian model (higher fees based on poor compliance);
• change closing times for liquor stores to 10pm Statewide;
• increase on-the-spot fines for anti-social behaviour;
• toughen penalties for the possession of steroids;
• suspend online Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) certification until changes are made to protect their integrity;
• continue covert police surveillance to prevent sales of alcohol to minors; and
• run a social media and advertising campaign.

2/. Why has the O’Farrell government acted?

The new ‘one punch’ offence is a reaction to a handful of high-profile cases and a sustained campaign by both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. The moral hazards or unintended consequences this moralising presents will come back and bite us all on the bum. You’ve got 150,000 signatures on a petition? I reckon I could do a whip count and match it with people who think this is at best unhelpful, creates different classes of victims of crime and could make a situation inflated by the media worse. When the State Government body which collects crime statistics tells you last week that the facts do not bear out the media campaign, you know you’re on a loser. Here is the latest NSW quarterly crime report. Violent crime is falling or stable in the City of Sydney. Crimes, as reported to police and passed to the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, but no, let’s go and set our hair on fire over a catch phrase.

One Australian woman a week is killed by a current or former partner. ONE A WEEK, but you’re most likely to read about it if the Governor-General speaks about it, or the victim is a beautiful young woman. I live for the day either of these rags passionately advocates for a ‘safer Sydney’ for women and children murdered by their partners. White Ribbon Day is a fantastic initiative, but it’s not in the same league as the ‘one punch’ mission the newspapers went on. Why choose to crusade over the tragic deaths of a few young men when BOCSAR research indicates domestic violence is grossly under reported. If Dr Don Weatherburn & his team is right, you could look at doubling the recorded number of assaults in a domestic setting. There were 27,000 in the 12 months to September 2013.

• The recorded number of assaults in the domestic setting in the City of Sydney LGA in the year ending September 2013? 905
• The recorded number of assaults in the domestic setting in the City of Sydney LGA in the year ending September 2012? 874

(I.E. UP)

• The recorded number of non-domestic related assaults in the City of Sydney LGA in the year ending September 2013? 3583
• The recorded number of non-domestic related assaults in the City of Sydney LGA in the year ending September 2012? 3737

(I.E. DOWN)

This data is published quarterly by BOCSAR. It is freely available & I strongly encourage you to refer to it whenever you read about what constitutes or provides for ‘a scared community with the succour and support it needs’. Also, listen to the Governor-General’s second Boyer Lecture in full. If her words on the Convention on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEDAW) and its Australian context doesn’t blow your socks off, I don’t know what will. How dearly I will miss Her Excellency. I’m not big on titles, but Quentin Bryce deserves that one.

3/. Why am I angry?

• I am terribly sorry for the loss of these young men’s lives. The grief of their families and friends … I’ve never known it. I don’t question the push for sentencing reviews. A life lost in circumstances such as Thomas Kelly’s is worth more than the four-year sentence handed down to the man who punched him. I just don’t believe that a new offence needs to be created, or that one life ended at the hands of a violent drunk is worth more or less than another’s. A person who is stabbed to death is not any more of less dead than a ‘one punch’ victim. The person who stabbed them might be up for murder, found guilty, be sentenced to life and get a non-parole period of 10 years. Excellent. Reverse the situation. The 25 year old man charged with murder following the death of Daniel Christie on 11 January 2014 faces life imprisonment if the Crown proves his intent was to kill Mr Christie, or that he acted with reckless indifference to human life. If the charge of murder is proven, it serves as a precedent for charges to be laid in future cases. That’s a life sentence, which carries a standard non-parole period of 25 years. The maximum sentence under the new offence (if the offender is intoxicated by drugs or alcohol) is 25 years. The call to ‘get tough on thugs’ could result in a plea bargain for the lesser offence, and wind up before a judiciary chafing at the bit to tell the executive branch of government exactly what they think of mandatory minimums by handing out custodial sentences of 10-12 years. Well played.
• Voluntary intoxication will be removed as a mitigating factor in hearing such cases, but the ‘vulnerability’ of the victim (such as age) is still taken into account as an aggravating factor. What happens if an 18-year-old man (they’re not ‘boys’, so let’s stop with that right now) physically attempts to restrain you to further unwanted sexual advances? Say the man is pissed out of his brain and falls like a sack of spuds if, in desperation, you hit them with an open backhander? Is it a WFA title bout? What constitutes ‘one punch’? What happens if two people each throw one punch, and only one connects, or as Ed Butler writes today, a person reacts to seeing a male or female friend being threatened or assaulted, lands one punch on the instigator, who then falls and dies? How do you treat the death of someone after a ‘brawl’, such as Daniel Cassai? Does anyone deserve a mandatory minimum of eight years’ jail because they’ve clocked someone on the back of the head in an effort to stop a rape? Removing judicial discretion – the idea that judges and magistrates have the wisdom, experience and knowledge of the law to give proper consideration to all evidence presented in court – is just a nonsense; as is the implication that a jury of our peers can’t understand or execute their role, one of the most important in our society. It’s a bloody insult to our collective intelligence. In the United States,the introduction of mandatory minimums for dealing in crack cocaine – but not powder cocaine resulted in one thing: disproportionate incarceration rates among young men from minority and lower socio-economic backgrounds. It’s the same drug, just presented in a different form. This is what I mean when I talk about creating classes of victims. Are the Christie and Cassai cases so different? All people who die during, or following a violent assault should be treated with the same dignity.
• Mandatory minimum sentencing laws do not work, here or abroad. As Declan Roche wrote in a 1999 Australian Institute of Criminology report;

1. they are not a general deterrent to crime – deterrence implies that people are rational actors when considering committing a crime when much crime (especially crimes such as ‘one punch’ assaults’) is impulsive and involves limited deliberation;
2. they are not cost-effective – in fact, they are the opposite of a cost-effective solution to fighting crime. Consider the increased costs in the court system as more defendants contest charges to try to avoid the mandatory penalty that follows conviction, where they otherwise may have entered a plea of guilty; cost of housing large numbers of offenders imprisoned under mandatory sentencing laws. In Australia it is estimated that it costs up to $60,000 to keep a prisoner imprisoned for a year and approximately $200,000 to build a new cell;
3. they do not promote consistency in sentencing – statutory definition of offences is inherently imprecise. Very unequal offenders can receive the same sentence when convicted under mandatory sentencing. Secondly, mandatory sentences may encourage judges to circumvent the mandatory penalties imposed by legislation. Judges and juries may “nullify” laws or penalties that seem to them unjust. Thirdly, rather than eliminating discretion it simply displaces it to other parts of the criminal justice system, most notably, prosecutors. Discretion is unavoidable in the criminal justice system. When that discretion is left in the hands of judges they are in a position to attempt to achieve consistency by taking into account all the relevant circumstances of the offence. Moreover, judges’ decisions are publicly accountable through their visibility, which provides some safeguards against inconsistency. By contrast, displacing that power & putting it in the hands of prosecutors means that discretion is being exercised in a less considered, and certainly less accountable way.

• The new ‘CBD precinct’ just pushes the ‘problem’ elsewhere. What about Bondi, Coogee, Manly – all ‘notorious’ trouble spots for ‘alcohol-fuelled’ violence. I live two blocks outside the Darlinghurst suburb boundary, near other pubs in Surry Hills. Are those pubs going to adhere to the 1.30am lockouts because they want to be good neighbours? YA THINK? I look forward to the locked out masses trying to get into pubs 500 metres down the road. Fun times.
• NEW ANGER: You know loses out here? The large pubs & clubs on Oxford Street, safe places for LGBTQI people, all with 5am licences. Odds on an upsurge in gay bashings because people who choose to switch nightclubs themselves are locked-out after standing in a queue for 30min & are vulnerable to homophobic fucks? THAT. THAT RIGHT THERE IS AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE.
• Here comes another ring stinger:  small bars (yay, civility and $20 cocktails in Mason jars); restaurants and ‘tourist accommodation establishments’ are exempt from the CBD precinct rules on lockouts and new liquor licence applications. Excellent. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Think hard. It lets James Packer’s Barangaroo casino development go ahead. No worries.
• The ‘bans’ on ‘troublemakers’? WHAT THE ACTUAL EFF? ‘Hey, pissed up suit! Don’t bother rolling up to the office after you’ve been arrested?’ How is this even going to work?
• 10pm closing times for bottle-os? Get fucked. Just fuck right off. How many off-licences are open after 10pm? I know of two. The others are hotels which sell takeaways during opening hours. ‘Pre-loading’ doesn’t begin at 9pm. If you’ve ever caught a train from Newcastle to, or from Sydney on a Saturday afternoon, you’ll see it in full flight.
• WARNING: OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE – call a cunt a cunt and there’s a good chance some cunt will hand you a cunning $500 fine because that cunt can;
• The ‘roid angle is interesting for singling out the stereotypical ‘one punch’ deliverer – a pumped up mid-20s bloke trained in mixed martial arts. What about the ‘one punch’ puncher who really is a coward & doesn’t have the self-discipline the vast majority of people who are trained in any martial art or boxing possess?
• OH FINALLY SOMEONE HAS REALISED THAT ONLINE RSA TESTS ARE RORTED AND EVEN WHEN PEOPLE HAVE RSA CERTIFICATES THEY KEEP SERVING ALCOHOL BECAUSE MONEY.
• Covert surveillance – I think this means young cops hanging out at Liquorland but I’m not entirely sure.
• Bring forth the ad blitz. If it’s one thing Australia does well, it’s PSAs (no sarcasm; we really are very good at creating and heeding them. I just wish they’d run ‘DON’T HIT OR RAPE PEOPLE EVER’ on loop.

I know police are sick of seeing punch ons, but pro-tip from an inner-Sydney resident: I have seen police sending eight to 10 officers into nightclubs with sniffer dogs, or squad cars and paddy wagons parked outside one or two pubs, 20-30 police milling about, then walked 250 metres to my street and found a group of young blokes kicking a homeless person, or a man pushing a woman around. I’ve stepped in, because I always think, ‘what if that was me’? I’ve seen a bouncer drag a young kid from a club around into a lane way & beat the shit out of him & was too scared to intervene. I shouted at him & went into the club to tell the manager; the bouncer came in & dragged me off the premises. The manager told me to fuck off. I called the police, when they arrived they said there was no point taking the matter further because I’d had wine over dinner & the kid was a meth-addicted rent boy. I’ve seen a young woman thrown into a cab by two bouncers. When people who saw what happened tried to give the young cops a different story, they became belligerent. I’ve seen a bouncer hit a bloke, then lie about it to the cops, backed up by eight other bouncers. There is a plethora of existing law under the Crimes Act 1900 for NSW Police to enforce. There are City of Sydney bans on public drinking – in 12 years living here, I’m yet to see the bans in action. The laws & by-laws exist. They just aren’t enforced.

Finally (!) … as well as making no sense from a public policy perspective, it’s just really poor politics. I would be tempted to vote Liberal if Barry O’Farrell had stood up to the papers and their combined circulation of the population of Elizabeth Bay and led. Instead, the Premier did as he has done from 25 March 2011. He squibbed it. Small target politics is O’Farrell’s comfort zone. With the ALP unlikely to make a comeback for the next two, even three elections and a thumping majority, O’Farrell made the mistake of treating the NSW parliamentary press gallery with contempt. Ministers rarely hold press conferences or throw the lazy sods an ‘announceable’, so the media set itself as the Opposition. In a salutary lesson for the Abbott government, it shows that playing Sergeant Schultz, issuing statements instead of facing the cameras and not having the common courtesy to return calls before deadlines is a dangerous play. Sure, you can avoid the relentless questions on topics from Britney Spears to bikie shootings, but the habit of saying nothing can easily be turned into the perception of doing nothing, until you cut your losses and announce poor policy written on the back of a beer coaster, sponsored by the all-mighty liquor industry lobby. Instead of looking at the multiple causes and victims of violent assaults, Barry O’Farrell handed the papers their win. Really, the gloating is unseemly. Rather than ask the people of NSW to take a long, hard look at the way our casual acceptance of cultural norms not only around alcohol, but ego, as detailed here by Brandon Jack, followed up with this and this by Dane Rampe (which I might not agree with entirely, but I’ll take the lived experience of men of the same generation as the ones punching and dying as more relevant), the Premier folded, earned the plaudits of the crusaders and blamed one factor for an upsurge drop in violent assaults outside the domestic setting.

This is a Government creating new law in a category where crime rates are falling and introducing mandatory minimum sentences that will increase the cost of our criminal justice system and are unlikely to be at the forefront of a drunk’s mind when they throw a punch.

We’re the biggest state in Australia and we’re being governed by the Beverly Hillbillies.

Disclosure: after the Sydney Morning Herald’s deputy editor, Ben Cubby, tweeted this today, I thought I would add the following, even though my family’s financial interests and the occupations of people I talk to when I am not writing for five hours are none of your damned business. My parents are part-owners of a pub in Muswellbrook. My sister manages a pub in Newcastle. My parents are not members of the AHA. I have friends who work for the major liquor industry lobby groups. They might want to throttle me for a few of these points. I have not been paid, encouraged or influenced to write this or any other form of written or oral communication on this issue by my parents’ financial interests OR my relationship with anyone else. These are my thoughts on a media crusade I believe is unwarranted and a Government reaction to that campaign which I see as unwise and unworkable. You’re welcome.

So much cheese gone to waste

I lived in the UK between 1996 and 2001, firstly in Cardiff, & then after travelling from Istanbul to Alexandria, Amsterdam to St Petersburg, my then-partner & I settled in London. At first, we lived in a semi-detached in East Putney. Nice place. Not flash, but a solid 3 out of 5 on the chintz cushion scale of comfort. My boyfriend worked in ‘The City’ and I had various temp assignments, one as a receptionist at a housing trust in Peckham.

Each morning, I caught the Number 37 bus from SW15 to SE15. It wasn’t your average descent from posh to povo until you entered Peckham proper. The huge housing estates of London are difficult to describe. Transferred to specialist non-profit organisations by councils unable and unwilling to maintain them, they are grey and poorly designed. Tower blocks where the lifts work on a lottery basis. Abandoned flats used as crack houses. Largely home to an underclass which can’t even claim working class status, generations who have somewhere to live only because the state pays housing benefits. Private rental properties remain out of reach. Almost all on transfer rolls to get out of the huge estates and into a row of detached houses. In the 1990s, the big estates of South London were the strongholds of criminals, drug dealers & men with guns. Regardless of your circumstance, no one would choose to live in them.

Taking on bigger estates – some housing up to 4,000 people – was a huge undertaking for the housing association. I moved from being a temp receptionist to PA and admin assistant in the development department, responsible for bidding to take over estates and undertaking their physical transformation. Each estate had its own, small office. One day, a package arrived at one of the satellite offices on an estate which had recently been transferred from a council. It was a video of a man suspected of grassing on a drug dealer being ‘necklaced’ – bound by tyres, doused with petrol & set on fire. He survived. The housing association was working to revitalise the estates, physically and socially. A lot of people were very positive about what we were trying to achieve, joining neighbourhood committees and coming to public meetings where plans were discussed, argued over and amended. The video was a message that there were some people who didn’t like the idea that their turf, their power bases, might actually change.

After I split from my boyfriend, I moved to East Dulwich, then Peckham, before I ended up in Brixton, in a housing association flat on Tunstall Road. I loved Brixton. It had everything and nothing. One summer night, my upstairs neighbour stuck his head through the front window. ‘Let us in, let us in man.’ He burst through the door with a gym bag; running through the flat, he emptied the bag on my bed, about 40 bottles of perfume. He threw a Chanel No. 5 at me and said, ‘you keep that one, hide the rest’ before sprinting out the back door, through the garden & over the high wall. Billy wasn’t a ‘yardie’ but he was no innocent. He was an unemployed, 20-something living with his Mum, a West Indian immigrant. He spent a lot of time with me & my new boyfriend, a Dutch guy who listed ‘beating up hippies’ as a hobby. Dave climbed through the front room window (the door was still open, but hey, he was nuts), laughing hysterically, barely able to speak. ‘Where’s Billy? Oh, you got to come and see this.’

‘DAVE! I’ve got half a Chanel counter on the bed! What the fuck is going on?’ He just ignored me, the overgrown toddler high-on-red-cordial look on his face. ‘Come, come outside.’ We walked out onto Tunstall Road. There was a group of about 40 people running in an out of Morley’s Department store. They were looting a Brixton institution, & I was a receiver of stolen goods. The riot police arrived & people scattered, running past the flat. I started panicking about the loot on my bed. ‘Don’t worry about that baby, just put it in a drawer until Billy comes back,’ Dave said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘As if the cops are going to come in here. We’re white.’

Dave & I thought it would be OK to go out for cigarettes. I was too scared to try & get on to the High Street, through the police cordons, so we walked up Tunstall Road, and around a corner to a small off-licence and literally into a wall of riot police on horses. ‘Go home,’ one of them said. Dave, ever respectful of authority, was having none of it. ‘Man, I just need to get some smokes, you know. We’re just going to the shop?’ ‘No, you’re not’ was the blunt reply. I grabbed Dave’s shoulder & hauled him away. Billy eventually came home and collected his plunder. I gave back the Chanel No. 5 – only because I didn’t like it. However, I had committed a crime – I had handled stolen goods; and that’s when I started thinking about what Dave had said. Firstly, if I turned myself in at the police station, would the police have charged me or simply asked for information on Billy? After all, the riot police had not questioned what we were doing outside. They accepted what we had said and told us to go home, no questions. I wondered whether the answer would have been the same if I had been with Billy. Would we have been stopped and searched? Race relations in Brixton had changed utterly, to steal from Yeats, since the 1981 riots, but the area was still overwhelmingly black and the Metropolitan Police were viewed as the enemy, particularly after the Stephen Lawrence case. I experienced a new feeling: I didn’t want to get my mate into trouble. I didn’t want him identified as one of the looters. He hadn’t hurt anyone, I figured. It wasn’t right, but I said nothing.

So what leads people to riot and loot in their own neighbourhoods? There was no ‘reason’ for the looting that summer evening a decade ago. No warning. The current riots in the UK have spread from members of the Tottenham community peacefully rallying around a family with a grievance against the police like a case of herpes, with cars, businesses, buses, and houses ablaze across the city. The vioence and looting has blistered, my old stomping grounds of Peckham and Brixton hit, and now other cities including Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. The pattern is similar to that of riots in France in 2005, when the deaths of two teenagers pursued by police sparked violence from the outer suburbs of Paris across the country, from Lille to Lyon and Bordeaux. The rapid outbreak and spread of violence may be alike, however, those riots were more heavily identifiable with racial tensions. In the UK, the looters are not stereotypical, but share one common denominator: impunity. At a micro level, this stems from the personal envy that builds when you see other people, everyday, in your neighbourhood, leading lives that you are not (while Tottenham is one of the poorest areas of London, it is not the worst; and areas including Hackney and Brixton have undergone substantial gentrification as the cool kids moved in). The death of Mark Duggan (under investigation by the coroner) was hijacked for people behaving with impunity, taking  and destroying symbols of the state and success. Why not take or destroy what doesn’t belong to you, from whoever has it, when you don’t? Who cares if you set fire to a furniture shop in Croydon if you don’t work there and can’t afford what they sell? Then there is systemic impunity. This year, UK student protests against massive hikes in fees were interspersed with outbreaks of violence, which made for pretty pictures for the TV crews. What was lost as people smashed windows at the headquarters of the Conservative Party was the fact that tertiary education is now out of reach for many – not simply the ‘underclass’. The real message may have been lost in the media coverage, but it still resonates with young people: even if you buy into the idea that you can change your circumstances by working hard at school, there may be nothing for you at the other end.  Britons were hit hard by the failures of their financial institutions and the impunity with which they and tax-dodging corporations acted; the ‘Big Society’ promised by their new, fresh government undermined at once by budget cuts that unleashed the broader ‘UK Uncut’ movement. The establishment has been engulfed in scandal, from MPs expenses, to Hackgate and the corruption of the police – and so we have a collision of immediate and impersonal impunity; an unfocused, bewildered rage. ‘I don’t care’ meets ‘neither do you’. 

Australia being Australia, every overseas news story must have an Australian angle. One of the most compelling was that of The Ledbury, a 2-star Michelin restaurant in ‘fashionable’ Notting Hill. Notting Hill, like Brixton, was a traditionally Afro-Caribbean suburb, most famous for its annual carnival than a movie starring Hugh Grant. Like Brixton and Hackney, gentrification means that houses costing hundreds of thousands of pounds sit cheek by jowl with estates where water runs down the walls from condensation and your kids have nowhere to play, so they hang about, ripe for the picking by people who exploit their boredom and undirected, simmering resentment. The Ledbury’s Australian chef, Brett Graham, was interviewed by Mark Colvin for ABC Radio’s PM programme, and described young ‘kids’ smashing their way into the restaurant, stealing from customers, even smashing a Bentley parked outside with the driver inside. Graham said (aside from the Bentley episode) that ‘they weren’t smashing cars …they were targeting businesses where people were, so we got done, the pub got done’. His words reminded me of the opening scene from Pulp Fiction where the characters consider the benefits of robbing a restaurant. You get the business takings and rob the customers as well – and no one is expecting to be robbed. No one deserves to endure a terrifying, violent attack on their person, from the appalling vision of an injured man himself being robbed to the experience described by Brett Graham and one of his diners in this blog; but it is hard to ignore these lines:

“I was sad for the wonderful smelling cheese cart that had glass littered all over it.

So much cheese gone to waste!”

Dave says Billy is dead. He had joined a car-stealing racket and crashed a BMW trying to make a getaway.

So much cheese gone to waste, yes; and so many lives.