Simon Copland

This video has been doing some rounds recently.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY&w=560&h=315]

Watching it made me think about my coming out, and people asking me, “when did you find out you were gay?”. It always bemused me – as if there was a date that I suddenly ‘figured out’ that I was gay. I decided to start responding “when did you find out you were straight?” It not only confused people, but I think it also got people to question some of their assumptions about sexuality.

I think lots of queer people have probably had this sort of experience. And in doing so I think many have framed their understanding around the development of sexuality wholly through that experience – sexuality is developed at puberty, you get given your label (gay, lesbian, bi or straight) and then that is what you get for your life. It’s not a choice. It’s a message that has even taken a deeply political tone – how often do you hear people say that sexuality is not a choice so therefore we shouldn’t discriminate against the gays and lesbians?

I think it is about time we challenge this ‘choice’ (or really non-choice) narrative. And as luck would have it, Charlie Anders, the authors of one of the latest chapters I’ve read in That’s Revolting, ‘Choice Cuts’ would happen to agree with me. What a great opportunity to mix a bit of a rant with a review at the same time. Anders goes straight to heart of the issue:

The involuntary queerness story is the linchpin of many queer peoples strategies to claim normality. “We didn’t choose this” becomes part of “We’re just like you in every other way.” Because, of course , if it wasn’t for that one difference, queer people would all be just like Republican hate-monger Orrin Hatch. Even the women.

For Anders, this seems like a very strange version of ‘pride’:

“Straight-acting” gays and “soccer-mum” lesbians always seem to be the ones who claim the lack-of-choice defense most vigorously. It’s no more our fault than a blink in response to a finger jab in the eyes. It’s always struck me as a weird version of pride. Aren’t people usually proud of their decisions and the things they’ve built for themselves? The implication of the “we’re just built this way” argument always seems to me that if queer people could choose, of course they would choose to be straight.

In fact, I don’t see this as just an ‘implication’. I think many queers believe it outright. The amount of times I’ve heard queers say “why would I choose this” is amazing – a form of internalised homophobia that whilst based in the idea that no one would want to live with such prejudice, actually facilitates a discussion around how awful it is to be queer. Of course this is something that has been inflicted upon us by a homophobic society – the idea that being queer is an awful thing to be stuck with – but there is also a bit of a political agenda here.

Because if we decide that ‘queerness’ is not chosen, we get given it at birth, and it is nice and simple, just like straightness, then it gets rid of all the scary queer stuff. It gets rid of the exploring your sexuality, and just says – you have a sexuality, and it is nice, simple, and vanilla. We’re saying, don’t worry conservatives, you shouldn’t feel threatened as us – we’re just as conservative as you, we’re just born differently.

Of course, this has it’s problems. Firstly, it says that we’re breaking the rules of society because we’re forced to, not because they’re shit rules. And in doing so, we’re only breaking them a little bit, not enough to freak you out too much. But do you know what? I want to break the rules – they are rules that need to be broken. As Anders states “I want to keep on being openly frivolous, breaking the rules for fun rather than out of necessity.”

But, it’s more than this, because it means that the queer community is once again limiting itself to a set of a few different options of acceptable identity. And one who chooses a ‘sexually deviant’ lifestyle is definitely not one of those acceptable sexualities. There can be no better example than this than the way actor Cynthia Nixon was treated after she said her sexuality was a choice. Nixon was quoted in a New York Times magazine a couple of years ago, saying:

“I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

The response was stunning. Wayne Besen, of Truth Wins Out, for example stated:

“Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words…When people say it’s a choice, they are green-lighting an enormous amount of abuse because if it’s a choice, people will try to influence and guide young people to what they perceive as the right choice.”

Blogger Perez Hilton responded by saying:

We totally hear her out and true, we cannot define her “gayness,” but it wasn’t a choice for us. We were BORN gay. And millions of gay people around the world feel the same way.

Whilst both Bensen and Hilton framed their arguments around the impact on the queer movement, what they were actually saying is ‘you cannot express your identity how you want because it’ll freak out the conservatives’. As Anders says, it is the perfect way to exclude people:

It’s easy to make political arguments based on lack of free will. Nobody can really hold your identity against you if it was thrust upon you. That makes it easier, in some ways, to pus for nodiscrimination legislation, beacuse you can compare queerness to “inborn” traits like ethnicity.

It’s a lot harder to face up to opponents of queer rights and say, “Yes, I’m deliberately flouting your rules, because I like it.”

But whilst it may be easier to argue that we didn’t ask to be this way, it makes our coalition a lot smaller. You leave out people like me, as well as other potential allies.

I guess, in the end though, what this all amounts to is an level of self-hatred that needs to go. Being queer can be fucking awesome and we should bloody celebrate it. Of course, many people still face awful queerphobia and that can make life hard, but the problem here isn’t ‘being queer’ it’s the way people react to us being queer. And therefore when we say ‘we wouldn’t choose this’ what we’re actually saying is ‘we’re just as ashamed of ourselves as the straight community are’. Well, we shouldn’t be ashamed. We should be proud. I know I am.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott recently asked what the national disability insurance scheme was trying to achieve, and if it would impose a cost we could not afford. The council is behind the program, in assessing a key issue for national productivity and casting judgment on its fiscal prudence.

The Productivity Commission answered the question 18 months ago. The goal of the NDIS is to increase the economic and social participation, and therefore productivity, of 410,000 Australians with severe disability.

This is what John Della Bosca, the national campaign director of Every Australian Counts wrote in his op ed a couple of weeks called This Scheme Makes Business Sense. That’s right. The point of the NDIS is to increase productivity. People with a disability are only useful to our society if they are ‘being productive’.

Whilst NDIS supporters have used a range of arguments to promote the scheme, recent coverage has been dominated with the use of economic benefits to promote its passage. Following on from Della Bosca’s op ed for example, a segment in The Project in the same week focused almost solely on the economic benefits of the scheme as the reason for its passage. On the following Sunday, Peter Martin wrote a piece on the increase of the Medicare Levy, saying:

Some things are worth doing precisely for the reason that they will boost Australia’s economic performance. Whatever its other merits, the national disability insurance scheme is one of them.

I’m not going to say that helping people get into work is a bad thing. Of course work can have positive impacts (although as I’ve noted before we have to be careful is assuming that work is always a good for individuals). But the use of pure economic indicators to promote social reform is becoming all too consuming.

We can see these argument across the policy spectrum. The Productivity Commission is becoming an extremely influential Government body – having major influence in policy ranging from the NDIS to climate change. Our arguments about high-speed rail seem only to be able to focus on ‘return of investment’, as if mass public transport doesn’t have other benefits. And education reform now seems focused on ensuring all students can ‘get into the workforce’.

This is part of a continued neo-liberal agenda that puts the economic individual at the heart of policy. The negative impacts of this are clear.

First, if we focus entirely on economic output, we ignore people who may not be able to be productive in the way we desire in our society. Whilst the NDIS has the opportunity to help many get into the workforce, there are many others who may not be able to. Framing everything about economic output means that those who may not be able to ‘contribute’ to our economy have the potential to get left out. If you can’t be productive, you’re not worth providing assistance to – you’re not a worthy part of our society.

And this really opens up big questions about our public policy priorities. Productivity and employment are simply not ends in themselves – they are means to get to other ends our society desires. We need an employment system so people can work to get the resources they need to survive, and productivity is about getting these resources as efficiently as possible.

Bertrand Russell describes this best in his piece, In Praise of Idleness: 

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare.

As Russell points out in his essay, there is a lot more to life than work. Our desires to be part of a society, and to achieve enjoyment in ‘idleness’, or in other words to be able to do the things we enjoy in life, are what work should be about. It is these things that are often shown to have real impacts on human happiness and well being.

Yet, our economic focus has changed this. We are now treating productivity and jobs are an inherent good in our society. Everything is focused on growth and if you cannot add to that you are no longer worthy. And in doing so we have switched our priorities. Instead of using employment and productivity to achieve a social good – we are framing them as an inherent social good and basing all our policy around how to achieve them.

This is part of a growing neoliberal agenda, which the left wing movement is buying deeply into. Whilst we often think about neoliberalism as about individualist freedom – it is more than that. It frames this freedom in economic terms – turning us into economic individuals, rather than a society that is good in and of itself. Producing is the way for individuals to succeed. And left movements are now buying this wholly – whether it is linking the NDIS to productivity, talking about the jobs benefits of climate action, or unions being almost wholly obsessed with ‘jobs’.

After Margaret Thatcher died earlier this year, much of the criticism about her focused around her infamous statement “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” The statement was the worst example of Thatcher’s awful individualism . Yet, in the criticism of Thatcher’s individualism, we often forgot an important part – that individualism wasn’t just about ‘individual rights’ – but it was about an entire state of being and ‘usefullness’. The individual in neoliberalism is only useful if it is being economically productive – societies are a collection of people competing against each other to be economically productive.

And whilst progressive people and organisations were quick to criticise Thatcher, if we look at the way we deal with social policy today, we can see the ongoing impact of neoliberalism. Even when it comes to social policies that are supposed to be to heart of the left we have bought into an economic neoliberal agenda – one which puts the economic individual before our society. The society has been taken out of social reform.

* Feature image sourced from: http://everyaustraliancounts.com.au/images/NDIS_logo_htext_hires.jpg

I am currently working on a long piece on the role of work in our society (something I hope to have published sometime in the near future). So I have been been doing a lot of reading on work. Today I thought it would be worth reviewing on of the most interesting piece’s I’ve read on the issue so far, Bertrand Russell’s  In Praise of Idleness. (Actually this has ended up not so much as a review but as a summary of the work, but that is fine).

In Praise of Idleness focuses on our obsession with work. Russell starts by looking at what work is:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. 

Russell aims to find out how we got to our current work situation by looking at the history of work:

From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men’s thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

It is the end point of that (long) paragraph that is so important. Before the industrial revolution hard work was an essential component for everyone for survival. Without it you wouldn’t have the basic needs of life. It is from this history that we have come to value work – a belief that you need it to survive. Yet, the industrial revolution brought with it something special – a reduce in the labour required to produce the necessities of life.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since.

We no longer all need to work ridiculous hours to survive. We can produce the necessities of life on much less labour than in the past. Despite this however, our work obsession continues. Russell provides an illustration:

Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Work has become an end in itself. Russell argues that this is because of two reasons:

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface.

What this means is that whilst we value work, we actively de-value the results of work:

The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad.

The solution; an end to our work culture? Russell suggest a four hour work day, which he believes will have significant results:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Yesterday was an interesting day of political drama, wasn’t it?

It all began with a conservative MP from Sydney’s north. After rumoured internal rumblings, MP Alex Hawke finally broke ranks, arguing that the Coalition should drop it’s policy on paid parental leave. Actually, the drama probably began well before then. It started with a well-financed, and now pretty influential thinktank, the IPA, putting pressure on conservative politicians to come out against their leader. But, yesterday the story really hit its peak, and after Hawke broke ranks, so did others.

Following this Opposition Leader Tony Abbott (and Opposition Tresaurer Tony Abbott) was forced to come out to defend the scheme. And then, this. In this press conference Abbott says:

“We do not educate women to higher degree level to deny them a career. If we want women of that calibre to have families, and we should, well we have to give them a fair dinkum chance to do so. That is what this scheme of paid parental leave is all about.”

And of course, the reaction.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek was quick to respond to Abbott’s comments, saying:

“Who exactly does Mr Abbott think are women of calibre? What does he think about women who are child care workers, nurses and community sector workers? Are they of lower calibre than women who are law firm partners?”

Anne Summers was one of many who took to Twitter, saying:

Aussie sheilas of calibre let’s #destroythejoint and stop these silly boys saying these stupid things about us FFS

I don’t call this a political drama to play down the impact of yesterday’s events, in particular Abbott’s comments. Although I am a man and therefore really can’t understand the impact of sexism, I get that these sort of comments hurt, and as I’ve said in the past, they have an real impact. But I think, a day after this whole thing played out, that there is a next part of the story – the one where we deal with the real threat that came from yesterday’s events.

Let’s get the formalities out of the way before I start. Firstly, Abbott’s statement was clearly clumsy at best, and extremely classist/sexist at worst. It was stupid, and potentially a real indication of his attitudes. Second, Abbott clearly still has issues with women. Many rightly think that on a whole, an Abbott Government, would be bad for women.

But, in saying all of this, I actually think we may have missed something in the way many attacked him yesterday. Because whilst Abbott has major problems when it comes to women’s policy, and class, this isn’t the case when it comes to paid parental leave (PPL). Abbott’s PPL scheme is excellent – it makes it a workplace right, and not a welfare system that needs to be applied for. This brings it in line with other rights, such as long service leave or annual leave. And instead of hitting the poor to pay for it, it actually hits where it needs to – the businesses who should be paying for this already. Compared to so many other policies, in this one instance, Tony Abbott has brought the Coalition significantly in the right direction.

And what yesterday’s events showed is that this is under threat. Right-wing forces in the Coalition are mounting not just to change the Coalition’s current PPL policy, but to potentially get rid of it in its entirety. To take Australia back to the dodgy position of joining the US as the only country in the Western World that doesn’t have a PPL scheme.

This was the real threat posed yesterday. And unfortunately, instead of genuinely talking about it, what we all focused on was Abbott’s stupid comments.

And this is something about identity politics today. We are outraged (myself included). And we are obsessed with outrage at things people say. We get angry at Alan Jones, Jim Wallace, and Black Caviar being named sportswoman in the year. And of course this makes sense. But instead of raging about their role in structuralised racism, homophobia and sexism – we seem to focus only on their stupid comments. It misses the point that bigotry is structural – it is about structural homophobia, sexism and racism in our society.

And paid parental leave is one way to deal with these structural issues. It is a key way to do it. And Abbott is on board. In fact, Abbott’s scheme is further on board than the ALP’s.

So whilst we were shaming Abbott for a stupid comment yesterday, the real attack we should have been making was against Alex Hawke, the IPA and other conservatives who want to take down a major social reform. We should be attacking these people and defending paid parental leave to ensure it stays enshrined in not just the next term of Government, but forever.

And I know that people are keen to have a go at Abbott, and given his conservative positions, that is worthwhile. But that is another area where we missed an opportunity. Because if we needed to attack Abbott yesterday, there was a good line of attack we could have made . There are some simple questions that could be asked; why, if Abbott thinks PPL is so important, does he still have such awful positions on other women’s issues? Why is he still opposed to a woman’s right to choose? Why did he vote to cut Newstart payments? What other sorts of welfare payments is he planning to cut? If he believes people deserve the best in paid parental leave, why not in welfare?

This is the next part of the story we should be telling. It is the story of how, despite the attacks from conservatives, we managed to enshrine paid parental leave, and make it better. It is the story about how we managed to tackle one element of structural sexism and put it to bed. But to tell that story, we need to turn our anger away from a stupid comment, and on to the conservative forces brewing.

*Correction: I have been informed that Abbott’s scheme would only allow men to take two weeks off and forces women to take the rest. It is therefore really problematic to call it ‘paid parental leave’, when it really is ‘paid maternity leave’. This is a major problem with the scheme.

Finished!

It’s taken a couple of months (I’ve read a lot of other books at the same time), but I have finally finished The Occupy Handbook. Instead of reviewing the book though, I thought today I would do a reflection on one of its final chapters; Jeffrey Sachs’ Occupy Global Capitalism. Whilst I don’t agree with all of what Sachs says, his piece comes closest to being a review of the book itself.

Before I do that however, let’s have a quick look at the book. As I’ve said, The Occupy Handbook is a series of essays on the occupy movement. The book is broken up into three categories; How we got here, looking at the lead up to the financial crisis and the occupy movement, Where we are now, looking at the economic situation we face and how the occupy movement stands, and Solutions, looking at, well, the solutions. In doing so, the book covers a lot – ranging from detailed and technical economic policy to analysis of how anti-capitalist social movements form and can succeed. And whilst it is this broad analysis that makes the book worthwhile, it also brings it problems. Although it has an overall leftist critique (despite some very notable exceptions), the Handbook in many ways lacks a true narrative.

This is where Sach’s piece is really useful. Just like the book itself, Sachs’ piece covers the key issues of how we got here, where we are now, and solutions to the problems. In doing so he provides an overall analysis that I think is largely in line with much of the narrative of the book itself.

So, let’s start at the beginning. Where are we? Throughout the book we heard about a world of financial crises, massive economic inequality, and high poverty rates. To understand how we got to this, Sachs says we need to look directly at capitalism as a system:

Global capitalism has arisen during the past thirty years as a system of deep contradictions. On the positive side, global corporations have created a deeply interconnected network of production and finance that is fueling worldwide technological advancement at an unprecedented rate…

Yet global capitalism has also created massive new hardships and has sapped the political will and perhaps even the ability of national governments to response to the needs of those hurt or left behind by economic change.

Sachs’ analysis is therefore based largely around power. As capitalism has gone global so has the power of the global corporation. This is to the extent where economic interests have become more power Governments, or even broader society. The 1% is more powerful than the 99%.

Many of today’s multinational corporations are more powerful than the host governments. By virtue of their immense financial wealth and their credible threat to move jobs across borders, the corporate giants push local politicians to ease regulations, lower corporate tax rates, and weaken or abolish environmental and labor standards. The “race to the bottom” is evident in every sphere of government: business relations, financial regulation, accounting practices, tax police, labor standards, environmental regulations, and the compliance of boards and managers with fiduciary responsibilities.

The problem, as Sachs argues, is that the 1% only really have their own interests at heart:

Here, then, is the picture of today’s global capitalism: a ferociously productive juggernaut that brings new high-tech products to the marketplace but ruthlessly divides societies according to power, education level, and income. The rich are getting richer and more politically powerful; the poor are being left behind, without decent jobs, income security, an income safety net, or a political voice.

So, what are the solutions? There has been much criticism of the occupy movement since it arose – largely that it provides ‘no solutions’ and that it has no staying power. Sachs disagrees. He starts by looking at the history of social movements – arguing that the occupy movement has some good history to back it up, but also a unique challenge in itself.

Revolutions, protests, and anticolonial upheavals have often traveled across national boundaries. The year 1848 saw a wave of antimonarcial upheavals across Europe. Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 spurred several failed attempts at revolution in Europe. Anticolonial movements leaped from India and Indonesia in the late 1940s across Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Nineteen sixty-eight was a year of global youth protest, and in 1989, anticommunist revolutions spread like wildfires across central and Eastern Europe. The 2003 U.S. war on Iraq spurred coordinated antiwar protests around the world, showing how a global protest movement could be quickly organized with online support.

Yet the Occupy Movement is distinctive. It is a wave of social protest that spans rich and poor countries alike. While each country swept up in protest has its distinctive political and economic grievances, there are important commonalities in the aims of the protests in countries as disparate as Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Spain, Chile and the United States. The protests can reasonably be labeled Occupy Global Capitalism.

By framing it as the Occupy Global Capitalism movement, Sachs argues that the occupy movement has the capacity to bring about the next ‘progressive era’ of politics. Inherent in this is a range of demands that have clearly been articulated. He lists them:

Politics in the hands of the 99 percent, not of the 1 percent that control large corporations.

Rebuilding a mixed economy with a proper balance of markets and government

Ending reckless wars and downsizing the military.

Shifting public funds into training and education so that young people can develop the skills needed for gainful employment

Taxing the rich and the financial sector, including with a financial transactions tax

Building or rebuilding a social safety net and active labor-market policies more along the lines of northern Europe

Reinventing key services, such as health and education, to bring them within reach of everybody, rich and poor

Global cooperation to put this agenda into effect

Sachs argues that even though this sort of era may look a far way off, it could just be around the corner. The movement has staying power, and the real capacity to make change. To leave off, here is where he sees it going.

Today’s youth already changed politics in 2011, even though the new progressive era is yet to truly arrive. Authoritarian rulers were toppled, and long-standing social crises were brought dramatically and vividly to the public’s view.

Civil society is gaining strength by inventing new methods of social cooperation. Global civil society will increasingly be positioned to challenge, and to help reform, the global economy. We are entering an era of networked politics, education, healthcare, energy systems, and other key parts of our global economy. An era of transformation and reform is at hand.

Monday saw an interesting uproar after Independent MP Tony Windsor suggested a popular vote on marriage equality at the next election. Windsor suggested that a plebiscite could be held in conjunction with the vote to recognise Local Government in the constitution.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not really a big fan of marriage or the marriage equality movement (from a left-wing perspective), and given that I don’t think a vote on the issue is worth the resources. But the harsh reaction by many marriage advocates has been interesting, and for me really instructive as to where the movement sits.

There seems to be two main arguments against a popular vote. The first is that a vote will lead to a hate-filled campaign from those opposing equality. As George Williams said:

“National polls of this kind involve more than reasoned debate. They attract extreme views and give licence to the media to report them. This would likely include absurd and offensive claims that vilify gay and lesbian people. There are real dangers in holding a vote on contentious moral topics like gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia.

Rather than uniting Australians, a plebiscite on gay marriage is likely to deepen divisions and further polarise the community. This is not the way to bring about social reform. The change should be positive and celebratory, as was the case in New Zealand, rather than edged with rancour and bitterness.”

This is a rather curious argument as it seems to ignore that conservative organisations already have a decent platform from which to campaign. Has anyone forgotten Jim Wallace comparing homosexuality to smoking, Helen Polley saying that same-sex marriage would lead to the next stolen generation or Cory Bernadi saying it will lead to bestiality? Conservatives are already campaigning and campaigning hard. Take a quick glance to France, where massive demonstrations have followed the passage of marriage equality, and you can see that this doesn’t just stop because a bill is passed by a Parliament.

Given this, I find it slightly odd that marriage advocates wouldn’t take up the challenge of finally shooting these people down with a popular vote? What could be a better way to celebrate a victory than through a smashing vote at a national election – one that, if polls are to be believe, would come firmly down the on the side of marriage advocates. If you’re concerned about the mental health of young people, I’m pretty sure a massive election win is the best way to deal with that.

This leads on to the second argument – that people shouldn’t be provided a ‘vote’ on fundamental rights. As Carl Katter (and Rachel Maddow) said:

“We should be very cautious about putting minority rights to a referendum because of the precedent it sets. As US commentator Rachel Maddow has said about marriage equality referenda in her country:

“Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not supposed to be voted on. That’s why we call them rights.”

In many ways I can see where they’re coming from on this. The problem is however that our current system already allows for voting on issues related to minority discrimination. Whilst we don’t directly vote on issues like marriage equality, we vote for people who make those decisions. And this is where a fundamental issue about ‘minority rights’ comes about. Except for a small minority of the population (as expected) minority rights rarely come into play when people chose their representatives. Marriage equality is not a vote changer. However if recent results in the US, where votes in Maine, Minnesota and Maryland all voted to support marriage equality, it has the capacity to be changed when directly put at an election.

This is where I see a major missed opportunity from the marriage equality movement. There is an inherent contradiction in saying we don’t want people to vote on our rights, and then asking politicians to do so. This debate had the opportunity to address this contradiction. A better approach could have been to shift the focus. Instead of a plebiscite on marriage equality we could be arguing for a debate on a Human Rights Act (commonly known as a bill of rights) of some form – either one in legislation or in the constitution. A real referendum maybe. This has the capacity to shift the attention away from marriage equality as a sole issue, and instead to focus more broadly on the issue of legal discrimination. Once implemented it could also mean an end to people ‘voting’ on our rights – as these rights would be enshrined in a bill that couldn’t be changed.

But, in the end, I guess that is why the marriage equality movement was so quick to shut this idea down. Because the movement isn’t about a broad discrimination agenda, but rather about getting access to a social system for a lucky few. When you look at it through that perspective shutting down the debate makes sense – it may open a can of worms that delays marriage equality so we can tackle the tougher issues. And who the hell would want that?

Last week Barack Obama’s campaign arm, Organizing for America, sent this video around to their campaign list.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biUc0D6_UPA&w=560&h=315]

I was quite happy to see this e-mail land in my inbox. It said to me that after a presidential campaign where climate change was hardly mentioned, the Obama Administration may actually be committed to doing something about it. I’m not convinced yet that this isn’t just talk, but I would certainly prefer talk to what we’ve had over the past couple of years. What’s depressing though is that to put climate on the agenda Obama still has to focus on climate denial. It feels like the movement is still stuck at the base level.

When reflecting on this though, I couldn’t help but think that whilst this approach makes sense in the US, I’m not sure it does elsewhere. In the US denialism is a significant problem. Whilst numbers seem to have increased in recent months (possibly due to last year’s intense summer followed by Hurricane Sandy) belief in climate change in the US has been dropping significantly since 2007. The latest poll (which had an uptick) found that only 50 per cent of people believed the climate was certainly getting warmer (the poll however did show people were in favour of regulation of greenhouse gasses). More importantly though, politics in the US is dominated by denialists – in particular in the Republican Party. It has gotten to a point where it is believed that it is almost impossible to both believe in climate change and have the chance to win a GOP Presidential nomination.

However, I don’t think the same trend holds up in Australia. For example research conducted by Ross Gaurnaut in 2010 (it’s a bit harder to get decent stats from Australia) showed that across a range of different surveys belief in climate change averaged in the mid 70 per cent range (it may have dropped since). Research conducted by the Australian Beaureu of Statistics between 2011 – 2012 found that 57% of people considered climate change to be a concerning issue. Whilst climate change numbers have dropped, most Australians still believe it is an issue, and one of concern.

This opens up a question to me about our focus when campaigning on climate change. Whilst I think combating denialism plays an important role, I think we may be wasting a bit too much energy on it.

Combating climate denialism is something that has taken a lot of effort within the climate movement. For example, last year, in one of the most publicised events of the climate movement, former Directory of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), Anna Rose, published her book Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of  Climate Sceptic. The book and film that went with it got lots of coverage. One of the most popular (and my favourite) climate websites in the country Sceptical Science  tackles climate denial head on. Whenever Lord Monkton visits Australia he gets huge coverage, particularly from climate movement and take a look at Twitter and Facebook on any given day and fights about climate science are more than common – denial is the question of the moment, and we seem obsessed with it.

Now, I’m not saying that these efforts are a bad thing – and I congratulate Rose and John Cook (who manages Sceptical Science) for the work they do (although as I’ve noted in my blog in the past, we need to be careful about our approaches to denial). I think we should be trying to get everyone on board. But, I think there is a question of resource allocation here that needs to be addressed.

Because in Australia, whilst we may not find ourselves in a major problem of denial, we certainly find ourselves in a problem of action.  For example, the 2012 Lowy Poll found that a staggering 63% of Australians continue to be opposed to the Government’s carbon legislation. The same poll (different links) found that after peaking at 68% in 2006, only 36% of people now agreed with the statement “Global Warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves serious cost.”

What does this show? People still believe in climate change, but are now significantly less likely to want to take action on it. That says to me that we may have our focus wrong.

We can think about this using a crude matrix like this. I think we can identify three broad groups of people around climate change – ‘active supporters’ who really want action (that 36%), ‘believers’ who believe in climate change, but it is isn’t a vote/action changer, and complete deniers. Of course the categories are bigger than this, but this makes for a simple illustration.

If we were to run a really effective action strategy, I believe we would focus on the first two groups. We would get the active supporters effectively mobilised so they are taking action, and we would we then work on the ‘believers’ to get them into the active supporter camp. In Australia however, the deniers we would largely ignore. This is for a few reasons. Firstly with our limited resources we are better placed to get those who are already closer to being mobilised to get there. Even if that is only 60% of the population, an active 60% is going to be much more powerful than a non-active 40%. Secondly, talking to deniers can have an opposite reaction – it can get them active in an opposite direction, leaving us worse off.

Of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the science. But we need to be clear about who we are talking to. Our chat about science should be targeted at that middle (and by far the largest group). This is not to bring them into belief about climate change, but to ensure they don’t fall into the denial box. It is not about denial, but about affirmation of what they already believe, and to push them to action.

Of course I’m not saying this should be our complete strategy, and I see the strong desire to get everyone on board with the climate science. But, we have limited resources and limited capacity in the movement, and a need for fast action. Given this, we need to think about where to put our resources and energy. We have spent a lot of energy focused on that last group – trying to convince everyone to believe in climate change, and getting outraged when they don’t. In doing this however I think we could be ignoring the real task at hand – to get those who already believe to want to take action on the issue. I think that is where our energy could be best spent.

As regular readers may know, I have recently been doing a series of posts reviewing the chapters of the Occupy Handbook, which I have been making my way through. Whilst I haven’t quite finished the Handbook yet (almost there) today I embark on a new project. I have decided to finally start a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf for ages and has been begging me to read it; That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Published in 2004, as the title describes, this book is a series of radical queer essays (therefore right up my alley!).

Today I though I would start by covering a piece by Priyank Jindal called Sites of resistance or sites of racism? As the title suggests Jindal’s piece looks at racism within the queer movement. The piece couldn’t start more strikingly:

“Racism is articulated over and over again by the LGBT movement, especially in this time of increased Amerikan* militarisation. After September 11, there was a very clear response from the gay “community”: Gay bars suddenly discovered what fabulous fashion patriotism makes, drag shows suddenly had an infusion of patriotic themes, and Amerikan pride and gay pride flags were found flying proudly side by side.”

*(Jinal uses the spelling Amerikan throughout the piece – if anyone understands the reason, would love to know it).

Jindal uses the aftermath of September 11 to point out how efforts to assimilate by many in the queer movement meant assimilating into a ‘white heterosexual nation’.

“The response of the mainstream gay community to 9-11 was to focus on how “we” were affected just like the rest of white Amerika and to prove the “we” would respond in the same way: to stand behind the war on terrorism. This essentially means standing behind the killing and terrorizing of brown people inside and outside of Amerikan borders. The gay community’s emphasis on the similarities of experiences between (white) heterosexuality and lesbian/gay homosexuality, through a shared racism agains brown folk, has helped white gays and lesbians to assimilate and become part of the white heterosexual nation.”

As Jindal continues:

“9-11 created a space for the privileged gay community to talk about their rights vis-a-vis the terrorists. Who is worse: the white middle-class gay person next door who wants to see Amerika “succeed” just as much as any heterosexual, or the terrorists?”

As I said, Jindal uses the reaction to 9-11 as a launching pad to discuss the ongoing racism they find within the mainstream queer movement. As they state:

“Most spaces identified as radical queer spaces, unless they are explicitly for people of colour, generally lack any significant attention to or inclusion of issues or struggles not specifically queer. In this context, unfortunately, those spaces are not radical alternatives to gay identity, but a continuation of the legitimisation of white identity that exists in gay mainstream culture. This has led to deep-rooted forms of racism in alternative sites of resistance. Organisers of these spaces may give lip service to an anti-racist agenda, but in practice their actions maintain the status quo.”

So the issue here therefore is twofold. Firstly, gay mainstream spaces are still dominated by white voices. Secondly, within this context, these spaces tend only to advocate for what are seen as ‘queer’ issues – i.e. things like marriage equality, adoption rights, Don’t-Ask Don’t-Tell. As other voices are missing, so are the other struggles, which are just as queer as the issues focused on. Jindal describes the problem as thus:

“Why do sites of radical queer resistance consistently fail to effectively resist racist ideology? The answer is that these sites have been created from and organised around the lived experiences and political agendas of white people.”

Jindal points to a number of instances of this, one being ‘radical’ drag king shows.

“We see this pattern again in “radical” drag king shows where performers generally fail to interrogate the role of racism in their performance of gender. I have been to performances where I am one of the few brown faces in the crowd, and all the performers are white but not all of the performances are of white masculinity. There are many instances where white queers perform masculinities of color and do not recognise this as a very racist act. Just because it’s queer blackface doesn’t make it any less racist.”

As a white man in the queer community and movement, this says a couple of really important things to me. Firstly, it is about time that we all recognise that just because you are part of one minority, or even a part of a struggle as part of that minority, doesn’t not mean you cannot be discriminatory to another group. Too often we forget to challenge our own sexism, racism and homophobia within our communities, because we seem to think that it doesn’t exist.

The next obvious link therefore is to recognise that these issues are all linked and you cannot have one without the other. Unfortunately however much of ‘gay ideology’ doesn’t do this – it solely focuses on ‘gay issues’.

“The discussion of gay rights shaped by this ideology centers around providing assistance to gay partners; fighting for gay marriage, gay adoption and social security benefits; and fighting against the don’t ask/don’t tell policy. Needless to say, these are not the most pressing issues amongst working-class, poor, and transgendered people of colour whose race, documentation, class status, or gender identity often prevent them from receiving the wide array of social benefits afforded to white, middle-class gays and lesbians.”

A queer movement that does not join the fight against racism, sexism and classism however is not doing our community justice. We do not live in a ‘queer isolation’, meaning that these fights are just as much ours as they are anyone elses. And importantly if we do not recognise this, we have the very real potential to become a white male movement – one that ignores other struggles and focuses solely on things that benefit white gay people. This is not the movement I want to see.