Intermission

I will be back in a day or two – I have been kept away by a combination of real life, several ongoing thoughts, and the dispiriting effects on my fundamental motivating parts of reading the comments on various sites on either side of the shouting match I mentioned elsewhere. The habit of calling such respectable writers as Haught ‘fleas’ on the comments section of RichardDawkins.net is particularly depressing. I remain sceptical that such emotion can result from arguments that are simply rational.

Ah well.

On an up (well, a musical) note, I offer you this for while you wait…

Must… restrain… desire… to argue…

I wrote a long and overly philosophical argument on an atheist blog about why several of their points were wrong. I got carried away, as usual. What I realised, having finished the second draft of my (overly long and philosophical) rebuttal of their (understandably frosty) response, was that I had quite simply missed the point.

It wasn’t really a philosophical argument at all. That was why nothing made sense.

I had blundered into a room and mistaken dress-up pirates for the real thing.

OK, what I had actually blundered into was just a part of the great American shouting match (which has echoes here, and all over the world) between those who fear their own repressed lack of belief so much that they dress up with all the more drama as believers, and those who are still believers enough to be enraged by the failure of their belief system, and who thus become atheism’s proselytisers. These claim the rhetorical mantle of science and philosophy, as the other half claim the rhetoric of morality, tradition, and family.

I should have remembered not to start philosophical arguments with people whose recommended reading list was all published in the last two decades (not an insult – they just obviously have other concerns than mine). I should have remembered John Carroll on rancour, and Nietzsche on the parable of the madman, who is considered mad by both the believer and the unbeliever. Really, I should have simply said that nothing small enough to be proved or disproved could be God.

Ah well. No more starting arguments that will only be misunderstood. I should get my sense of humour back – I got called ‘pompous’ by an atheist, and that has to sting. Maybe I should stop writing like all I’ve read in the last decade is Blake and Nietzsche Andrew Bolt the speeches of Emperor Palpatine football writers, recounting the 1989 grand final, while on television, and set to dramatic music.

Though, to be fair, a good part of what I really did read over the past two months was made up of John Howard’s speeches…

like watching someone bang their head against a brick wall

This is so dumb it makes my head hurt. How someone could take the elegant lucidity of Wittgenstein (preserved even in the students’ lecture notes that the author quotes from) and repeatedly read it in every possible way but the spirit in which it is meant, is quite beyond me.

Wittgenstein on religion is in my opinion one of the most revelatory perspectives on faith in the last century and a half. If only more serious thinkers read the fragments we have by him on the subject; if only some of our supposed theologians were half as deep as his ocassional lecture and debate. I mean, Bonhoeffer is admirable, but only Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (if you read him as a crypto-christian) come close.

Reading this tepid mush, all I can think of is Dylan – and while I normally hate quoting song lyrics out of context, those who know the song will, I hope, know exactly what I mean… and those who don’t, should. (So listen here)

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

Exactly.

Critical literacy: an anecdote

Critical literacy was a frequently recurring term during my education as a teacher. Not, thank God, in history; but it was the dominant approach to English teaching put forwards throughout my entire first year doing the new masters program at Melbourne Uni.

While the wikipedia link above suggests that modern Australian approaches to critical literacy are no longer centred around implementing social change, the first link unfortunately gives this the lie:

Critical literacy involves the analysis and critique of the relationships among texts, language, power, social groups and social practices. It shows us ways of looking at written, visual, spoken, multimedia and performance texts to question and challenge the attitudes, values and beliefs that lie beneath the surface.

The aim of this critical literacy, as it admits, remains the analysis and the ‘critique’ of power relations – One can still see Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed lurking not far beneath the rhetoric of open analysis.

(And never mind, for the moment, the deliberate move away from teaching the canonical works, via the implicit claim that all possible media are of equal cultural importance – that’s a fight for another day.)

One of my oft-repeated criticisms of teachers is that they typically have no idea of just how far to the left they actually are, and the page this passage is excerpted from is a perfect example of the problem. That views of this kind could sit as though completely uncontentious, on a state-sanctioned education website, tells us many things. Among these: how pervasive is the unconscious left-wing bias amongst educators, and, with reference to what I wrote yesterday; it again reminds us of how severe is most teachers’ deafness to criticism both from outside the profession, and from outside of their ideological ghetto.

And now, an anecdote:

(I don’t mention names because the specific teacher involved does not deserve to cop the flak for what are, I believe, the sins of the profession as a whole)

In one of the first lectures I attended on ‘critical literacy’, our lecturer put up a slide from a professional development seminar that she had given, at various schools, on how to teach it in their classrooms. On the slide were a variety of ‘critical perspectives’ that she suggested could be used to interrogate a text. They included, from memory: Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, post-colonialism, and postmodernism. I remember scribbling the question: why are all these perspectives taken from the left? Of course, there are centrist and conservative feminists, but given the ‘critical’ context I doubted they were who was being cited; as for psychoanalysis,  Freud was in some ways a conservative, but again, the history of the movement has been more radical than conservative since figures like Lacan and Reich gained prominence.

As apparently the lone figure in the theatre with enough of a background in politics or philosophy to see how radical this collection of ‘critical perspectives’ was (there was at least one politically aware, and very active, liberal party member in our intake that year – thankfully, for his health, he was not taking English as a method) it was left to me to confront our teacher about why no centrist or conservative perspectives on textual analysis were included. It turned out that she had not even heard of Oakeshott, or of Leo Strauss; F.R. Leavis was treated as a misguided retrograde, a straw man to set this enlightened new analysis against (despite the in-fact quite complex nature of his call for a return to ‘moral seriousness’ in literary analysis); Eliot and Bloom, Kieran Egan (first Egan link needs login, sorry) – none of them had been considered: few of them had even been read.

When I asked her how this could be justified, she replied that, “well, we teachers are a pretty bolshy lot.” This is undoubtedly the truth – it is also, undoubtedly, the reason for the exclusion of the more conservative perspectives – but I hardly need point out that it is not a justification for it.

There is, I believe, good reason to study all of the perspectives she mentioned – although not, I think,  in high school – but to teach them at all without also teaching their opposing counterparts is not only to turn our society’s cultural and political dialogue into an indoctrinating monologue, but is to remove any real sense from the very perspectives you are trying to teach. It will become extremely difficult for students to understand why the world works the way that it does, if they imagine that these ‘critical’ perspectives are the only ones that an intelligent person could be justified in holding; and even if they hold to these leftist ideals in later life, much of their thought and argument will be rendered impotent if it is made with no understanding of their opposition.

This last admonition, of course, goes equally for the right.

learning is fun, apparently…

…though you wouldn’t think so from the way people write about it.

Catallaxy links to this article by Michael Costa in the Australian.

Costa repeats some of the same themes with regard to the teaching unions that William Briggs pursues in June’s Quadrant – in the print edition only, I’m afraid, unless you’re a subscriber.

Briggs, unfortunately, buys into the recent trend of Quadrant paranoia, making tenuous links between yesterday’s communist party membership and today’s teachers’ unions (Stuart Macintyre is now actually pretty moderate, if you read him) but both Briggs and Costa make a good point about the Australian Education Union: that its concern with curriculum at times goes beyond its role as an advocate for teachers as employees, and into the realm of outright societal reform.

Costa also makes the excellent point that “one of the tactics used by teachers unions is the claim that criticism of educational practice is synonymous with criticism of the commitment and professionalism of individual teachers”. This particular diversionary stratagem is used all too often, and is an inexcusable confusing of an already difficult issue. It has unfortunately become almost second nature for many teachers to think this way.

I am a qualified teacher, for those who don’t know (I actually only ‘officially’ finished my masters on Thursday, when I got my final marks back).

As student-teachers, my classmates and I were often shown examples of media criticism of teaching practise in our lectures and tutorials, and often with the underlying assumption that it meant a criticism of us as professionals – which we were reminded, again and again, that we were. This claim of ‘professionalism’ can serve as a catch-all defence when any part of the teaching process comes under fire: it makes teaching a closed shop, a body of knowledge complex enough and obscure enough that nobody outside of the system can properly understand. I cannot help but feel that the introduction of so much postmodern theory into modern pedagogical writing stems from this unconscious drive to prevent external analysis. It is a defence mechanism.

That said, both Costa and Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy fail to properly identify who is best suited to control the curriculum if we open the teaching profession up to criticism. The national ranking system will be based on marks, and will give a much more concrete incentive for teachers to ‘teach to the exam’ tailoring their classes to the specific assessment, exchanging genuine education for cribs and cramming. This is already a huge problem in VCE subjects, where the entire final year will often be spent simply preparing for the specifics of the final examination. It also seems odd that conservatives and libertarians are advocating giving more power to a central government body. Perhaps it is a variation on ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ fallacy: as unions need to be curtailed, and only the government can do this, we’ll ignore our opposition to government meddling for as long as they’re meddling with the unions. Partisanship over intellectual rigour, in other words.

Costa writes that, “from the point of view of students and their parents the minimum outcome one would expect from a properly functioning education system should be a proficiency in these basic skills” (he means literacy and numeracy). This formulation, though, shows the real problem with dialogue about education: both sides assume that schools are rational ’systems’, factories that can produce predictable results – the same assumption, after all, underlies the union’s belief that teaching can bring about ’social justice’.

Schools are not systems.

Schools are associations of particular individuals, of traditions and of habits; and teaching is both based on skills, and on irreducible practise that cannot be taught in any university course. Not every ‘well-taught’ teacher will be a good one: not every well-funded, ‘well-taught’ school will produce equal results. I and a friend of mine came equal top of our final year at school: what separated us from other students was not our schooling, but our social background. Growing up in houses filled with books (every wall, in both his and mine), and with parents who inculcated in us an unconscious commitment to discussion and to intellectual success, I always found natural and easy the analysis that was to my fellow-students at times a struggle. (For those pathologically compelled to seek scientific-style research and data collection in their social studies, my anecdotal evidence is in part supported by such studies as this one. It’s towards the end of the article – here’s the pdf for when the nice google HTML cache expires)

What our teachers did give us, while not being solely responsible for our success or failure, was inspiration; my history teacher inspired me to major in it; a teacher who was a folk singer put me on to music and philosophy; a third led me to a better appreciation and understanding of religion through her teaching and through her own honest and unpretentious (but never overbearing) faith. Teachers are hugely important, but not necessarily in any simplistically statistical way. The emphasis on marks has its own unintended consequences. Yet this does not excuse teachers from engaging with criticism from outside their profession.

In addition to the idea that the state can somehow legislate for a better ’system’, there is implicit in Costa’s analysis the claim that parents and students are the consumers, who will, if left to themselves, naturally choose the best education ‘product’ available. This is patently untrue in the case of students – a student will often not appreciate the teacher who pushes them to think; all good teachers recognise the conflict between ‘making friends’ with their students and educating them. As to parents: they rarely have the time to see a school in action; most will meet their child’s teacher once a term at most; and they can hardly send their child to three schools at once so as to compare the varying educational quality of each – they cannot shop around as they would for a new notebook computer. This means that parents choose schools based on surface phenomena; in the independent sector, this has resulted in a focus by the schools on building what will look best on the brochure; spending on equipment and facilities because these can be photographed and listed on the school’s advertising material. Creating or maintaining a good teaching culture, that fragile mesh of the inspired and the inspiring, comes a very poor second – and can often fall entirely by the wayside. The proposed rankings system is just another external surface factor that schools would be encouraged to prioritise over genuine education. It should be opposed as much as union excesses should.

A solution I’ve considered in the past, and one that I’m surprised the people at Catallaxy have never entertained (it being a very libertarian solution), is the complete removal of government control from school curricula; let every school teach as it will, and then it would be up to each university or workplace to set its own entrance exams/interviews/etc. This would make the value of a education something more than the piece of paper received at the end. It would encourage competition between schools, while allowing the focus of that competition to return to a more ‘holistic’ (excuse the much abused term) measure of educational success, a focus perhaps on shaping the human being rather than simply teaching them.

In this proposed system, positive qualities would have to be emphasised; that is, without a specific external measure of ’success’, schools would have to say what exactly they were trying to do, justified on their own terms. Short of eliminating advertising for education (impossible in a liberal free market, obviously), this seems one of the only ways to address the problems of an over-rationalised education. As Michael Oakeshott writes,

We may recognize learning, not merely as the acquisition of knowledge, but also as the extension of the ability to learn .. as an inheritance coming to be possessed in such a manner that it loses its second-hand or antique character

Yes, I’ll say it again: go read Oakeshott now, please.

A dialogue

This may be a little more ‘philosophical’ than most of what I’ve been posting here, but I’ve been having a discussion over on Fractal Ontology that some might find interesting. It’s on Nietzsche, Capitalism, and Nihilism, and they have what seems to me an interestingly computational take on (to some degree) postmodern theorising. Definitely more commited to the possibility of a rational understanding of social phenomena than I am, but interesting.

technical

Just realised a few links weren’t pointing where they should – mainly some that went to the wrong subheading in a wikipedia article. Also cleared up one or two vague or easily misunderstood statements. So if you were wondering why my link to ‘epiphenomenon’ went to the psychology subheading rather than the top of the article where it belonged, or if it appeared that I was advocating the expulsion of immigrant Australians rather than admitting that I was one*, now you know why.

*I am. I mean, the latter. Just to make that one double clear. I get enough grief from my friends on the left without that particular misunderstanding hanging over my head. Whew. Crisis averted.

Making myself unpopular: an argument over gay marriage

An interesting article in The Age, from a few days ago. An English bishop by the name Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, who is a prominent member of the new “Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans”, a division of the Anglican church that opposes gay marriage and ordination, has recently been accused of stoking the fires of homophobic hatred over comments he made on the day of a gay pride march.

This is a more complex issue than the article tries to suggest – again, the media (on every political ’side’) seem to prefer drama to clear reporting. The title of the article implies that Nazir-Ali’s faction is aiming, as many American religious lobbyists have done, to try and change government policy. As he himself makes clear, and as the article in fact quotes him saying towards its conclusion, the ‘Fellowship’ is not concerned with a change in government policy, but with the church standing firm against being “rolled over by culture and trends”; in other words, retaining its doctrines and traditions in the face of current popular opinion. Something that, in a liberal society, and as a self-convened entity, they are legally entitled to do.

I hardly need say that this is a contentious issue: a brief discussion I had on it the other day quickly sank into rancour and raised voices, and I was only trying to present the other ’side’ to my interlocutor. It is too easy for those on both of these apparent ’sides’ to believe theirs is the only real opinion: those opposed to their state or church recognising single-sex marriage tend not to recognise homosexuals as stakeholders in the situation at all, while those in favour of gay marriage assume their opponents must be motivated by simple bigotry or homophobia.

Marriages recognised solely by the state – non-religious unions – are to me a less complicated issue. The liberal state must recognise all competent individuals equally*, and as marriages outside of religious oversight have long been acknowledged by all liberal states, theses states can hardly now return to religious sources of understanding to justify or classify marriage. It’s too late, even if one wanted it, for the sort of campaigning that American religious conservatives have been about to be at all legitimate.

Nazir-Ali’s focus, however, appears not to be on the state but on the church.

There are certainly homosexual believers, in the Anglican church and in others; and amongst these, some wish – understandably, I think – to have their unions recognised in the sight of God. Of these, some are – again, understandably – made angry and upset by those moral conservatives who define marriage as being possible only between a man and woman. To not understand what this exclusion feels like is, I think, to suffer from a critical lack of empathy.

That said: those progressives who base their calls for change on this empathetic understanding often fail to acknowledge the other side; the fact that these changes really are a radical reformulation, even if they are a just one. Dr. Nazir-Ali and his ilk may well be guilty of a lack of compassion on this issue, but this lack can hardly be assumed equivalent to anti-gay bigotry. Religious traditions, like any system of values, require at least the appearance of immutability through the changes around them. For example: It might be just, in some sense, to rewrite the bible so as to remove discrimination – but then the writers would be placing their societal norms above the bible, and not really valuing it as a source of values somehow greater than themselves.

In other words, it requires a quite fundamental difference of understanding to see the justice of allowing gay marriage as a reason for changing one’s religious doctrine. It in fact says something quite profound about western liberal societies that so many of us place being moral over being devout, and often do not even see the potential contradiction. That the bulk of the anti-gay-marriage opinion in Anglicanism has sprung from less developed nations is not due simply to a lack of western, cosmopolitan acceptance of difference in these countries – although this no doubt plays its part – but due to the animating presence of religion in the lives of, for example, Central African Anglicans. This is not to say there are no Central African liberals, or no truly animated believers left in the West – but being both simultaneously does present real difficulties.

Nor is it to say that belief must trump compassion if we are to believe that it is ‘truly animating’, fundamental to our worldview and our lived eperience – but there will be genuine difficulties.

Believing in something – in anything – very strongly will inevitably result in the occasional intelletual injustice, the odd lack of empathy. To believe that something is true require judgement, and hierarchies of what is best, or most important to consider. This is why, if you’ll excuse the tangent, popular (moralising) postmodernism is so absolutely relativist, and in fact so nihilistic. It has become a kind of intellectual Jainism, a desire to hurt nothing, to privilege nothing, to tread on no culture or belief-set. This is, in truth, never possible. In this particular debate on Gay marriage, to understand both sides is to see that something is lost either way, someone is hurt – and this is why, while I believe liberal states such as Australia and Great Britain are obliged to recognise single-sex marriage, I yet sympathise with those churches and religious movements who refuse to do the same.

Update: this article from Time just popped up in one of wordpress’s automatic similarity links. Turns out some people in the U.S. have proposed an alternative solution to the political problem of gay marriage, at the state level at least; take all ‘marriage’ out of the hands of the state, which will only recognise civil unions for anyone, gay or straight.  Whether you are ‘married’ in the sight of God would then come down to the requirements of your own faith, or the decision of your church, if you feel that that’s necessary. A sort of libertarian solution. Only in America. While this would be a nice solution for the States, where state recognition of gay marriage seems a problem that cannot be resolved either way, it is perhaps too large a symbolic change for most people to deal with. Sensible, though – and it could be spun well by both sides, so everyone feels they win.

Of course, it doesn’t solve the problems surrounding gay marriage within the churches at all.

*Yes, the definition of these terms is a mine of further contention, but is not hugely relevant to this argument. And of course one might argue that an individual can disqualify themselves from recognition not only by renouncing citizenship, but by any opposition to the state’s existence or implicit opposition through violation of its laws – yet another mine of potential issues, and a return to Crito from a few posts back.

The centre cannot hold – and the centrist cannot hold in his anger…

Since Howard lost the election and Windschuttle took over as editor, Quadrant have gone guns-out, backs-to-the-wall, they’re-coming-for-us crazy. I used to despair that most of the left would sooner commit ritual suicide than pick up and read a copy (back in the carefree days of Paddy McGuinness‘ editorship), but it is now the intellectual right who are more eager to attack a position than to seriously engage with its defenders. This particular passage, featured as the article’s teaser on the website’s front page, is a prime example:

At the core of Green doctrine is the belief that trees are sacred and that mankind is a pest or a virus on the planet. So the logging and timber industry has been targeted by the Greens for extinction, just as whaling was targeted for extinction in the 1970s. In fact the ban on logging in parts of Western Australia, and the closure of timber communities in those regions, for example, was specifically likened by West Australian Greens to the end of Albany as a whaling town. Trees and whales are either very tall or very large, and both are sacred.

I’m not sure which is more alarming – the article’s overall low-grade paranoia (extreme greenies are hiding behind every labour government’s environmental decisions, and ruining everything), or the clear lack of any engagement with any intelligent green thinking. Sure, the average green partisan is as bigoted, small-minded and as theoretically impoverished as are any typical group of partisans; and the extreme fringes are often anti-human, illiberal, and sadly ignorant of any arguments beyond their own – but again, extreme fringes are just that. There are many ethnic nationalist extremists who voted for Howard, who would likely believe they side with Quadrant on many issues, and who might advocate such positions as the expulsion of immigrants from Australia (I would, just so you know, be among those thus expelled). My respect for Howard is not lessened by the extremists who believed his cause and theirs coincided; nor is my respect for some of Quadrant’s work lessened by the extremists who doubtless read it.

It would be nice if the writers and editors of Quadrant could show a similar understanding – not to mention a little more intellectual rigour – and cease to lump together today’s moderate environmentalists with green extremists just because they share the occasional issue. Evans admits that there are moderates – but more for the narrative purposes of describing their replacement by extremists than to admit to common ground; he equates the growth in environmental activism with the growth of green extremism, and uses their (relatively common) association of environmentalism and nuclear disarmament to dismiss all of the modern ACF’s various causes as leftist extremism.

Conservationist and conservative are two words from one source. Just as the conservative distrusts progressivist changes for their often unpredictable results, so the intelligent conservationist distrusts changes to the environment for the same reason – a scepticism about human powers of prediction. We can’t know the long-term consequences absolutely, and should proceed in all things with caution. The real debate between these two positions is just over how much caution, and in which area (environmental, social, or economic) caution should first be applied when these spheres’ interests collide.

For those who imagine I am simply playing with words here, remember that environmentalism began as a largely conservative cause, with the romantics; in recent decades, arch-conservatives Oakeshott and Strauss* were both concerned over human exploitation of the environment, and the traditionalist and catholic J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his great work The Lord of the Rings at least in part as a personal response to the environmental destruction wrought by industrial development. That so many hippies have adopted the environmental ideas without the required scepticism should no more put one off environmentalism any more than we should be put off conservatism because so many so-called conservatives have failed to extend their conservatism to cover issues of conservation.

In short: please, Quadrant, just relax a little; listening to your opponents occasionally will not weaken your position; and if you keep publishing rants that sound more like Andrew Bolt than Friedrich Von Hayek, you may have to drop the tagline, “Australia’s leading journal of ideas”. As John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

*both of whom are still to be found recalled in the pages of Quadrant – albeit not for the positions mentioned here (if they have been, and I missed the article, and you have the link/details, please forward it to me.)

Partisan Hackery

I am totally uninterested in joining the echo chamber of the epiphenomenal ‘blogosphere’. What does interest me is the blogs as part of the broader Australian political conversation. So while in a sense the recent kerfuffle between News ltd. and the left-wing blogs (esp. Crikey) is no more interesting in itself than any livejournal drama, it also represents in microcosm the overall failure of Australian political dialogue.

I usually like the Australian, and in fights between the moderate right and the moderate left, my intellectual sympathies are more often with the right. But in this instance, News Ltd. is undoubtedly in the wrong.

I say News Ltd., because while The Punch was, I believe, the first to frame Hartigan’s words as an attack explicitly on the left-wing blogs, The Oz is running with the same line (the Herald-Sun just repeats Hartigan’s opinion on blogs without adding anything new). Crikey seems to be trying to point out by implication how The Punch is not really part of a ‘conversation’, ‘Australia’s best’ or otherwise, but is in fact another mouthpiece for Murdoch’s News. Surely, though, this needs no pointing out. The Punch is an official organ of a large commercial news interest; it will avoid publishing negative comments about itself, it will spin the news as it is told. It is there to make money. No-one who does not already understand this is going to be convinced of it by Crikey – or is likely to even read Crikey.

Which makes Hartigan’s comments, and the apparent encouragement given to the various publications to expand upon them, appear quite strange. They were obviously intended to be spun to the public, or they would not have been so reliably done so: News Ltd. released page after page on them, all punctually on July 1st, and then followed up with comments. As an act of defence against the encroaching new (free) media, the ‘everything’s fine, and those other guys suck anyway’ line seems unlikely to be productive. In fact, t seems designed to provoke a response, which is perhaps the real point: to start a food-fight on the Internet, and so get more attention. It really is all just about livejournal-style drama.

No doubt News is genuinely pursuing the possibility of paid online content, but for that they need an established base of online readers. This explains the recent launch of The Punch, and the speech. The hypocrisy of the speech, if my analysis is correct, helps explain the hypocrisy I and others already identified in the Punch – not to mention the obvious hypocrisy of Hartigan, boss of such writers as these two complaining that “blogs and a large number of comment sites specialise in political extremism and personal vilification”, and that, “radical sweeping statements unsubstantiated with evidence are common.”

Or, for that matter, the hypocrisy of this article in the Oz, published the same day as the one that lambasted the complaining blogs for their pettiness and irrelevance, which takes its substance entirely from a pair of Club Troppo posts (without acknowledging that it comes from a blog, simply calling the original “an article”). The other blog is linked to when they want to start a fight, but not when it is a moderate or conservative voice that they will gain no traction from attacking, and they would rather simply claim to be first with the news. As Hartigan puts it: “original, exclusive, highly relevant and genuinely useful to your audience.” Indeed.

The Australian media – more particularly, in this case, News Ltd. -  continues to be complicit in the failure of the larger Australian political dialogue. By focusing on drama over content, they encourage us to continue our slide into partisan hackery. As I wrote a few days ago, we are indeed mired in it.