In Patriotism Reclaimed, Tim Soutphommasane described the ways in which patriotism can come to be expressed in things like the taste of VB, the beach, cricket etc as ‘sentimental mush’. I took that as the starting point for an argument about his book, suggesting that it showed a curiously abstract and disembodied idea of what patriotism, or countrylove or whatever, might be. In his in today’s Crikey, Tim has given an Ettomagh pub souvenir tea-towels’ worth of Australian references, but his argument simply reinforces my point – that his approach is elitist and divorced from the real swirling positive and negative feelings which revolve around….

 country. His inability to understand that this is not something constructed from on high is revealed in this paragraph:

But I also argue that patriotism must involve an emotional dimension. It is just that I think any patriotic affection must ultimately be tied to a national historical tradition rather than to things such as a beach lifestyle. I make no apologies for believing that a sense of an Australian democratic achievement and an egalitarian public culture should be a central part of an Australian national identity

In other words, let’s us bunch of intellectuals get-together and design something people can believe in. Given that patriotism, for most of Australia’s history, has turned on whiteness and a highly limited egalitarianism – male , white, anglo – this is simply a reconstruction of the country’s past in terms of its approved present.

My point is that when people do things which could be described as patriotic – die in combat, go the extra mile for an Australian in a foreign country, risk their life as a CFA volunteer – they’re not thinking of the ‘Australian ballot’ when they do so. They are overwhelmingly motivated by the concrete web of people and things they love – and often despite a country’s best or worst historical traditions. What could be a more compromised, constructed affiliation than finding a strand of your own beliefs within a country’s complex history, and then nominating it as the ‘true Australia’?

After all it is Tim, not I, who wrote a 200 page book on love of country while barely evoking a single sight, smell, memory or image of the place – save for state functions such as nationalization ceremonies, which are part of his approved patriotism. If he has deep associations that’s good meIt’s a pity that it took a forthright critique of the book to bring out what should have been in it in the first place – an actual expression of what he felt about the place, rather than what he thought people should be engineered to feel about it.

Tim’s reaction to my criticism of designing a new Australia from Oxford is an obvious misunderstanding of my argument. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being abroad – though spending five of your eight years of adulthood away is a funny way to show your love, the ultimate ‘I’ll call you’. But global intellectuals who don’t sufficiently reflect on how their practice shapes their thought come up with silly stuff – like a patriotism built off a civic blueprint, without any thought of actually finding out what people feel about their country, and going from there. It’s why Tim can’t see the obvious howlers he makes – that the Australian beach and its culture, is just like the Californian version. It bloody isn’t, but it probably looks that way from the 747.

Watching the relatively minor mediatised spectacle of Cronulla from Oxford, Tim concluded that the left dropped the ball. It didn’t, it just didn’t run with it in the way  that he wanted – by trying to grapple over who had the right to wear the flag. The fight against mandatory detention, for David Hicks and others, and against wars were not conducted by some gimcrack reversal of the ‘un-Australian’ tag, as if every negative strand in our history was some detraction from its good essence. The fight was made on humanist grounds, but in the Australian context – as in, we do not want to be the sort of country that does this. The particular fight for Hicks, rather than for all of the Guantanamo prisoners is social solidarity at its best – you take up his case because of a real historical connection, but on the grounds of injustice to a fellow human being. Tim thinks I’m getting into a pissing competition over who’s more patriotic – which is pretty rich, given that most of his book is about the alleged ‘defeatism’ of the Left.  I don’t like the ‘p’ word much at all but if we’re going to use it, yeah staying and fighting to shape what your land will become sure as shit beats captaining the Balliol college first XI in the love of country stakes.

                        Even at the end Tim still can’t get it, damning my ‘cultural nostalgia’ – nostalgia, the ultimate insult of the cultural technocrat, the inconvenient attachment people have to what they grew up with, and made them who they are. My point was that real countrylove can’t be enrolled into a political programme – it is inchoate, sometimes regressive, sometimes appalling. Tim has misread what was more by way of being a confessional than a programmatic statement.

Like everyone in a society built from waves of migration I feel a loss at what has passed in the process of global change – a world of milk bars and 3XY, the VFL, and the W class tram. When I say Tim wasn’t part of that, I don’t mean he isn’t an equal citizen of modern Australia – I mean that it was an earlier stage of multicultural Australia, and that he literally wasn’t part of it. Those further waves – that substantially changed the feel and nature of the country, often for the better – hadn’t happened yet.

But I know for certain that those attachments are real in a way that Tim’s empty official patriotism is not, and that defining them as ‘nostalgia’ or ‘mush’ is not only a profound error about what countrylove is, it’s also likely to have a political blowback. In a society like ours, whatever forms social unity takes – and there is no reason to value it above conflict, in any given situation – a conscious and rational commitment to shared life within a pluralist polity is preferable to an engineered abstract patriotism. What I express as a contingent and reflected-upon set of emotions, a lot of Australians will still assert as anglo nativism, and they ain’t going to be policy wonked out of it.

If Tim has his own attachments to growing up in Australia, great. It’s a pity he didn’t put more of them in the book. As it is, the few lines about attending Hurlstone Agricultural High School have the  air of the detached outsider about them, and it was from that that I took my cue.  The only other evoked situations in the book are a state occasion, the citizenship ceremony – and a grand final in a pub at Oxford, which captures the way in which nationalism is made externally and projected back, rather better than I could.  It would certainly have been better than appeals to people to surrender their processes of rational reflection to the ‘ecstatic myth’ of Gallipoli.

Tim has had a lot of support from sections of the left – though I wonder how many have actually read his book carefully – but his proposals are clearly of the right. His work is reminiscent of the interbellum elitists – Pareto, Gasset, Coudenhove-Kalergi – who saw the values of the ‘masses’ as something to be managed and programmed, insofar as that were possible. Soutphommasane adds a new twist –  tilting towards neoliberal economics, and ‘progressive patriotism’ as a way of compensating for its fraying effects. Were have we heard that before? Oh yeah. He has invented that most interesting of things, multicultural Howardism – which jettisons the man’s actual attachments (Bradman is mush) – and preserves its aridity. That is an achievement worthy of a monument in our country’s ‘Big’ series. I would suggest a galah. In Balliol.

The Government’s willingness to cut a deal would, perversely, have been strengthened last week by yet another display of disunity and division from Nick Minchin, which would have narrowed the space within which Malcolm Turnbull can agree to a deal that won’t tear his party apart.  The Government will be aware that it can offer a generous deal that meets much of the Coalition’s wishlist and still be rejected because the Liberals are at sixes and sevens.  The result is that the Government looks like it bent over backwards to accommodate the climate denialists in the Coalition and was still rebuffed.  Manna from electoral heaven.

Bear in mind that compromises that further diminish the effectiveness of the CPRS aren’t a policy problem for the Government.  They know full well the CPRS in its current form will do virtually nothing to curb Australian emissions or establish a carbon price in the Australian economy.  But the CPRS is primarily a political tool to convince voters the Government is doing something about climate change and cause hell within Coalition ranks.  It doesn’t need to actually do anything in the real world to achieve that.

If you want a comparison, think of the Howard Government’s Temporary Protection Visas, which actually led to an increase in arrivals of asylum seekers.  The point of the policy – and why it was maintained for so long – was to convince voters the Government was tough on refugees, and to wedge Labor, and it worked.

The key to a deal will be if the Government is willing to stump up yet more compensation for big polluters who are already getting more than 94% of their permits free, and the electricity generators, foreign multinationals and the Labor Govts of NSW and Qld who are already getting billions over the next five years.

Possible compensation sources before the Government has to hit the Budget start with the fuel excise offset, which starts at around $2.2b in 2012-13 and steadily increases year in, year out.  That could be re-deployed to big polluters or electricity.  This is my tip for a compromise – if the Government can get the Coalition to sign off on it, it has the added virtue of neutering the political effect of any petrol price rises from the CPRS.  Both sides of politicis would have agreed to remove the offset, so the Government would be immune from a campaign based on the cost to motorists.

It would also be an oasis of sound policy in what is otherwise a complete dog of a scheme.

Next is the compensation to households.  It’s possible the modellers from Treasury have been called in to show how much less compensation for poor and middle-income families would be needed if more compensation went to polluters and electricity generators (who will cause the biggest impact on households via power prices).  It should be something approaching a zero-sum game – the more the generators get, the less they’ll need to increase prices, so the less need there is for compensation.  The cost of household compensation starts at $5b, lurches up to $6b in the third year of the scheme, and increases thereafter.  It’s over $7b a year by the end of the decade.  It should, therefore, have some capacity to fund more compensation.

And if that fails, there’s the Budget, particularly in the years beyond 2015, which has the status of Monopoly money for everyone except Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.  If there’s a deal, watch out for the five-year electricity generators’ compensation being extended to ten years (the Coalition proposed 15, but the generators didn’t like that, on the basis that cash flow in 2025 won’t help them renegotiate billion-dollar debt rollover now.

See, if you take away the need to actually have an effective scheme, the CPRS simply becomes lumps of money to be moved around the chessboard to meet your political needs.

Now it’s simply down to the politics, mainly the internal politics of the Liberal Party.

Update: A thought occurs about another possible compromise – given the complexity of the amendments required to implement likely deal options, and the fact that a lot may be implemented via the CPRS regulation, rather than primary legislation (the bulk of the CPRS is implemented by the relevant regulations, not the the legislation), don’t rule out the Government and most of the Liberals agreeing on a package in principle with the actual vote to actually occur early next year.  Rudd gets to go to Copenhagen with a deal (similar to the bipartisan support for the emissions reductions targets), Liberal honour is satisfied because they have not been forced to vote before Copenhagen, complex drafting doesn’t have to be rushed by harried Office of Parliamentary Counsel (legislative drafting) and Office of Legislative Drafting and Publishing (drafting of regulations) staff before Thursday when the Senate rises for the year.

Still, that involves a considerable degree of goodwill, and there hasn’t been too much of that on this issue.

In amongst all the media and political frenzy regarding the Tamil asylum seekers  refusing to get off some boats in Indonesia, a much greater and more problematic stand-off has been occurring in Thailand.

160 Hmong people, originally from Laos, have been kept in a detention centre in Thailand for the past three years.  Despite the UNHCR saying the people have been recognised as refugees, and four countries – Australia, Canada, the USA and the Netherlands – offering to resettle them, the Thai government considers them to be “economic migrants” and proposes returning them to Laos.

This report from a year ago provides a bigger picture of the sort of long running abuses in Thailand. It details thousands of Hmong refugees who have been locked up for years, agreements being signed between the Thai and Laos governments to return the “economic migrants” and refusals by Thai authorities to allow the UNHCR to enter the detention centres to make refugee assessments and determinations.

It is necessary for the Australian government to continue to work with Indonesia and other countries in our region to find workable compassionate approaches to the large number of asylum seekers in the area.

But Australia must not be complicit in facilitating human rights violations or mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees (or unauthorised migrants for that matter). We should also get out of the habit of turning a blind eye to what other governments in our region are doing.

The more we know about what happens elsewhere in our region, the more obvious it becomes why refugees would risk their lives and rack up large debts to try to find safety in Australia.

Last night he rose to speak on the package of CPRS bills and gave a speech that any climate sceptics – should they be genuine sceptics rather than outright denialists – ought to read and ponder.  Birmingham supports his party’s position on the bills and recognises the Government’s cynical timing.

It is sad that this government has sought to force upon the parliament very cynical timing in the consideration of their legislation relating to an ETS … bringing it back to this place for these last two sitting weeks of the year, exactly three months later, smacks of exactly what it is: rank political opportunism.

Nevertheless, he wants to see a deal reached to pass the CPRS.  “I hope that our sensible, sound amendments to fix this legislation are accepted because, ultimately, I hope to be voting for this legislation.”

But it is Birmingham’s broader rationale for taking action that serves as an effective and clear articulation of why even sceptics should endorse taking action to mitigate climate change.

…I do not know whether climate change is real.  I do not know whether human impact on climate change is real.  I am not a climate scientist.  I have never pretended to be.  I also note that, so far as I am aware, nobody in this place or the other place pretends to be a climate scientist or qualified in such fields.  I note that many come to this debate with opinions that are doubtful of the veracity of climate science… I hope that they are right, because if they are right then the future for the planet looks much rosier than it does for those who take a far dimmer view of what climate science and climate change could possibly mean.

… with the exponentially increasing global population of people around the world, all of whom quite rightly aspire to have ever-improved lifestyles, we must be aware that this growth of populace and growth of consumption with it will of course have some impact on the environment in which we live.  I am reminded of Newton’s old law of motion: that for every action that is always an opposite and equal reaction.  In my mind, continually emitting ever increasing volumes of any one chemical compound into the atmosphere must ultimately have some impact.

For these reasons I believe, as I have said in my previous contributions on these bills, that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt and opt for action ahead of inaction when it comes to climate change mitigation.  It is, however, a case of making sure that we get that action right.

The conservative position on climate change must surely be one of risk management – the risk of not taking action is far greater than the risk of taking action in the event the climate change hypothesis proves flawed.  Like conservation, which had its historical roots in the conservative side of politics, climate change action should be as much at home on Right as on the Left.

It now seems likely that a reportfrom Queensland’s Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) into the way police dealt with that death in custody will be finished by the end of the year.  Precisely what is made public and what happens from there is still unknown, but the CMC’s credibility will be stake almost as much as that of the Queensland Police service. 

There have been growing criticisms of a perceived ineffectiveness of the CMC, as well as allegations that elements within the CMC may be too close to the government and the police.  A report today in The Australian that the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Commissioner, Alan MacSporran, has “accepted a brief to represent the Queensland Police Service at the second coronial inquest into Doomadgee’s death, to be held in February” will do little to quell those concerns.

It is hard not to perceive a justice system operating on double standards when Aboriginal people accused of being involved in a riot on Palm Island, after an initial official announcement that Mulrunji’s death was accidental, were quickly arrested and charged, while so little has happened in response to the death itself and the clear indications of malpractice in the way police investigated it. 

There has been more than sufficient evidence provided to the first inquest, as well as at the trials of some of the accused rioters, to warrant a major investigation. The people of Palm Island, and the many people of Queensland and beyond who support them, are still waiting. Let’s see what the CMC delivers.

At least she kept her teeth in.

Friday update:

Feel the power people. Feel the power.

You’d think, after THAT business earlier in the year, that Turnbull, or one of his staff, would have thought to themselves that renewing the claim of misleading Parliament was something, generally, to be avoided.  But Turnbull, as always, seems to have some difficulty with his impulse control.

The direct result was that it gave Rudd an excuse to duck the genuine question of whether the deal really was preferential.  Each time he was asked about the Oceanic Viking today – Question Time began moments after it was revealed the stand-off had ended – he circled back to the accusation of misleading Parliament.

It’s a minor matter.  It’s obviously not remotely on the scale of the Grech business, for example. And yet it confirms again what senior Liberals have said about Turnbull – he’s brilliant but too inclined to brainsnaps and misjudgements.

The broader point, though, is: who cares anymore about misleading Parliament?  Do voters care?  Does anyone outside Parliament and the Press Gallery?  Given the way in which Question Time has devolved into a cross between a particularly dire amateur theatre performance and your most boring Economics 1 lecturer’s greatest hits, does the whole supposed sanctity of telling the truth in Parliament mean anything any more?

John Howard didn’t resign after being forced to admit he misled Parliament about his meetings with Dick Honan in 2002. That was an open-and-shut case of misleading Parliament, but hardly the grounds on which any Prime Minister should have had to end their career.

On the other hand, remove Parliamentary accountability and one of the critical bulwarks of accountable government is ostensibly lost.  The right of Parliamentary privilege also surely is accompanied by the responsibility of truth-telling.  And yet those notions look curiously old-fashioned in an era when the truth is only one available narrative, and not necessarily to be regarded as any more useful than others that may be available.

This is not to say that all politicians are liars. Some are.  But the good ones don’t lie – they merely provide those parts of the truth most convenient.  Good politicians live in the margin of uncertainty between truth and deception, generally preferring not to be pinned down with too much detail unless it serves their purposes.  Misleading Parliament is a quaint concept for such practitioners.

The announcement by Mr. Holder that has gained the most media attention is the decision to pursue a prosecution in the civil courts against five detainees who are currently charged with conspiring to commit the 9/11 terror attacks. The detainees are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.  This case is to be heard in the Southern District of New York, which means in the same locale as where the attacks took place.

Holder says that the men will get a fair trial.  But will they?  Will it be possible to find enough individuals who live in that part of the New York, or on the island of Manhattan generally for that matter, who do not have strong and intractable views about who caused 9/11, or who knows someone directly affected by the events of that day?  Mr Holder’s decision to try these men ‘a few hundred yards’ from the former World Trade Center seems to be more about politics and maximizing the chances of successful prosecutions than it does about a fair trial.

In fact, the whole issue of whether or not high profile defendants charged in relation to high profile tragedies should be tried in places where the events took place is currently being examined by the US Supreme Court in the context of the decision by a trial judge to allow trial of former Enron executives Jeff Skilling and the late Ken Lay in the city that was synonymous with the company’s name – Houston.  If the Supreme Court rules in Mr Skilling’s favour, then the Obama Administration may find themselves embarrassed into having to move this 9/11 trial to somewhere more neutral.

But while the upcoming 9/11 trial hit the headlines, one other aspect of Mr Holder’s Friday announcement has, relatively speaking, slipped under the radar.  It is the decision of the US to continue to refuse to release or repatriate to Canada, Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was arrested in 2002 in Afghanistan at the age of 15 and who has been detained in Guantanamo Bay ever since.  Khadr, born in 1986, was kept locked away for five years before being charged with murder and other terrorism related charges.  He was tortured by US military personnel in the form of sleep deprivation and he was interviewed by both Canadian and US officials without having access to legal representation or having a guardian or his parents present.  Two Canadian courts have ordered that country’s government to repatriate Mr Khadr on the grounds that his rights to be treated fairly have been abused.

What makes the case of Omar Khadr so morally repugnant is that he was tortured and mistreated by authorities in 2003 and 2004 – when he was still a minor.  That itself, should be enough for the Obama Administration to release him back into the community.  He was simply a child soldier, caught on the battlefield.

It is perhaps no surprise that it starts out with the so-called Golden Rule which is often said to lie at the heart of almost all religions – “always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.”  Given its aim of universal applicability, it is both short and simple in form. But (to me at least) it is not simplistic, nor is it simple to apply.

However, its messages are ones well worth reflecting on in considering the public debates of today – both the major, such as climate change and global inequality, and the not so huge, such as how to respond to small number of asylum seekers looking to get here by boat. That is not to say that the policy solutions to these and others issues are simple – they often are not. But rather, to assess potential solutions and the way we debate them, against some fundamental principles such as this:

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity.

At time of writing, over 13 750 people have affirmed the Charter – some well known public figures, many not.

The Charter for Compassion on YouTube

Gordon Brown’s recent speech on immigration raises many issues, but so far as Australians are concerned, surely one of them must be “why the hell aren’t we a republic?”

The speech foreshadowed the closure of a range of skilled occuptations to non-EU citizens, as well as a tightening of regulations around student visas.

I’m not advocating policy changes on migration here (or not policy changes for the special benefit of Australians, anyway). And of course Australia’s own migration policy has moved a long way since the days of the 10-pound-Pom.

But shouldn’t our Constitutional arrangements – our Head of State – reflect this changed reality?

Britain has set its own foreign policy priority – and it’s Europe, not the Commonwealth. We aren’t abandoning the Mother Country. Mother’s moved on.