Simon Copland

Yesterday the Macquarie Radio Network (MRN) decided to suspend all advertising on Alan Jones’ radio show on 2GB. The move follows an intense campaign against the sponsors of 2GB and MRN after Jones said that Julia Gillard’s father probably ‘died of shame’.

What was probably more startling however, were the comments that came from MRN following with the announcement of the suspension. Here is an exert (more in the link above):

“Now in Australia these people of course have the right to express their views to anybody who wants to listen, about any subject they want, including Alan Jones and his radio show. They also have the right and plenty of choice; freedom of choice, to listen to any of the hundreds, in this digital age, thousands of radio programs available to them.

“What they do not have the right to do is on the one hand decide for our listeners who and what they are going to hear on the radio station they choose to listen to, and on the other hand decide for Australian based companies which media outlets they will or won’t use to advertise their products and services. They do not have the right to interfere with freedom of choice and they do not have the right to attempt to censor –not Alan Jones, not this radio network, not the people who choose to listen to it and not the companies who choose to advertise on it.“

“What we are seeing here is 21st Century censorship, via cyber-bullying.”

What MRN are basically saying is the campaign against Jones, and in particular against the sponsors of Jones’ show, is one of censorship, and importantly one to remove Jones’ right to free speech.

This is a very simple take on the idea of free speech, and one that really ignores the intricacies of this quite complex freedom. Whilst free-speech may give you the right to say what you want, it certainly doesn’t give you right to avoid the consequences of this speech.

There are two issues at play here. Firstly, whilst the ideal of free speech says that we have the right to say whatever we want, it doesn’t give us the right to a platform to say that. Put simply, no one has a guaranteed right to have our own radio show.

This reality therefore also works in the reverse. Our lack of right to a platform also means that you don’t have the right to keep your platform if you get one, particularly in a paid role. Just like every other employee of companies around Australia, media personalities have to stick to their employment contracts, as well as keep their customers happy. If they don’t, their companies have every right to fire them (which clearly MRN has no intention of doing with Jones), thereby removing their platform.

Let’s think about this in another way. Whilst on a smaller level, we can all imagine that a shop assistant has a platform of speech. They have the ability to talk to potentially hundreds of people every day. But if a shop assistant started abusing their customers or saying offensive things, it is clear that the customers have the right to complain, or ask for the shop assistant to be fired. If this didn’t happen, and the abuse continued, no one would give it two thoughts if these customers then started to apply community pressure on the management for supporting such abuse. It would be considered a perfectly natural response.

Just because Alan Jones’ platform is larger doesn’t mean he becomes exempt from these sorts of rules. He is both an employee and is accountable to his customers and to the community. The community therefore has the right to apply pressure on MRN’s management and to demand he be fired if he insults them.

Second, free speech does not mean a right to speak without consequences. Just as you have the right to say what you want, I have the right to inflict consequences (within the law) if I find what you say insulting or threatening.

This is a standard that we place across a range of different areas. Going back to our shop assistant example, the reporting of their abuse to their management, and their possible firing, is a justified form of consequence for their abusive speech.

This campaign is just another form of inflicting consequences for hateful speech. Yes, the people involved in this campaign may not listen to Alan Jones, or even suffer personally from he is saying, but the campaign is a way of saying ‘I find what you say offensive and I don’t think you should be able to get away with it’. There is nothing wrong with that.

Free speech is a complex issue. Whether you agree with the campaign being run against Jones or not however, it is really hard to see how it is taking away his right to free speech. Saying you have to deal with the consequences of what you say is nothing like saying you can’t say it in the first place.

Late last night a certain Twitter celebrity (not naming any names) took it upon herself to start asking why Alan Jones hadn’t come out yet (note, I’m not going to comment on Jones’ sexuality in this post at all. It simply isn’t my business.). Here are the tweets (I’ve deleted all Tweet responding to people, except one directed at Helen Razer):

16h Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

Why does Alan Jones hide his love for cock?

1Oct Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

There is nothing wrong with liking cock. Why is Alan Jones shy about it? It’s normal.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

I’m actually asking a serious question. I have never understood why wealthy, powerful, high profile people don’t own their sexuality!

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

But hang on everyone. Michael Kirby and thousands of other GLBTi are the same age as Alan Jones and out. It’s a form of self homophobia.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

How is saying someone likes cock ‘an attack’ ? It’s like saying someone liking pasta is ‘an attack’.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

Guys, guys, guys! Everyone knows Alan Jones is gay and we have NO problem with it. Why does he?

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

Alan Jones’ listeners are incredibly loyal. If he came out he’d keep them and get a whole new audience. I don’t get it. What’s his fear?

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

Wow! Amazing all the homophobes saying it’s disgusting I bring Jones’ sexuality up. Him being gay is not a big deal. Him denying is.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

I have never linked Alan Jones’ Gillard comments with his sexuality. I’ve just never understood his shyness about it.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

I don’t hate Alan Jones for being in the closet. I just don’t understand it. I hate him because he’s a misogynist bigot.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

@HelenRazer I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

Saying ‘I don’t get why Alan Jones doesn’t come out. We all know and don’t care’ is not judging him. Dickheads.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

When established high profile people in the public eye come out they help dissolve homophobia.

Catherine Deveny ‏@CatherineDeveny

It’s very intellectually lazy suggesting wondering why a well know gay man doesn’t come out is homophobia.

Now, I don’t want to use this piece as an opportunity to attack Catherine Deveny. The ideas that she brings out (which are popular well beyond her); that gay people in the public view should just ‘come out’ really do need to be tackled.

Let’s start by looking at the issue of why don’t people like Jones, if in fact he were to define himself as being gay (more on that later), don’t come out. It’s funny that Deveny says that it is ‘intellectually lazy’ for her to be called homophobic as I think it’s pretty intellectually lazy if you can’t think of any reasons people might not want to come out.

There are many reasons people don’t want to come out. It could be that it will affect their relationships or career. They may fear abuse. Alternatively, they may be perfectly happy not being ‘out’. They may even not identify themselves with labels such as ‘gay’ and therefore ‘coming out’ it not something they want to do. These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, but I am certain there are plenty more. It’s not hard to think of them and if you can’t see them you’re either lazy or ignorant about the role of homophobia in our society.

Demanding that others come out is not just lazy though. It can also be extremely harmful.

As one of Deveny’s tweets showed, one of the biggest reasons people say others should come out is that apparently this helps the cause of ending homophobia. The thought process is that if more high-profile people come out, then it will break down some of the barriers around homosexuality.

When you think about it this is a huge burden to place on high-profile queer members of our community. It puts the weight of the queer community on the shoulders of a few and says ‘you have a responsibility, no matter what the consequences are for you’. I’m not saying that queer people don’t have a responsibility to try and tackle homophobia. We all do (in fact if you want to criticise Jones for anything it may be this, and not in his disclosure of his sexuality). But to place the burden on a certain few without thinking about the consequences is destructive.

More importantly, in doing so it also starts to place the blame on the ‘victims’ of homophobia. It says that homophobia is the fault of those who aren’t coming out, rather than on those who are homophobic and stopping people from coming out in the first place.

Building on this, demanding that people come out really breaks down some of the broader goals of the queer movement. Coming out is really a process of putting a new label onto yourself. It is about dropping the straight label and adding the gay or lesbian or bisexual label etc. While this may be useful for many (it has worked pretty well for me), for many others that simply isn’t the case. They may not have a new label that they want to come out to. They may be completely happy with the labels that they currently have. Or they may just be happy without any labels on them at all.

Demanding that these people come out therefore is potentially about demanding that people assign themselves labels, or sexualities, that they don’t want. Accepting people’s sexuality should be about accepting and letting people be who they want to be, which includes their desire to disclose their sexual activities and preferences. Demanding that people come out goes directly against this.

Now that doesn’t mean that people being forced to stay in the closet isn’t a problem. Clearly many continue to suffer from being forced to hide their sexual preferences. But forcing people to come out when they may not want to is not the solution. In fact, if we want to find one solution (of many), tackling our own prejudices may be one of them. One of the tweets Deveny retweeted in reaction to her comments was this one:

14h Roz Vecsey ‏@Vecsatious

@CatherineDeveny I’m gay, I’ve spoken with my people. Jones can stay in closet, we don’t want him.

It’s a pretty common thing when you hear about right-wing, or even ugly people who come out. It may be funny, but it is extremely destructive. What comments like this show is how exclusive much of the queer movement can be. If you’re someone we don’t like, or are seen as a traitor, then we ‘don’t want you on our team.’

Whilst I often find it difficult to understand how queer people can engage with some of the most homophobic elements of our society, the reality is we can’t claim to be open and accepting, but then actively reject people because we disagree with their views. This kind of behaviour adds extra pressure on people to stay ‘in the closet’ even if they want to come out as they don’t see a community that will be accepting if they do.

It might feel like you are doing a service to the queer community by saying that people like Jones should come out. But what you’re actually doing is putting immense on some to potentially ‘come out’ to a label that they don’t want. In that case all you’re really doing is hurting people and the queer movement.

Last week I had an article published on Crikey on the bias of reporting on climate change by News Corporation. One of the more interesting critiques I’ve received about this piece has been that it is ridiculous for a clearly biased commentator (myself) to criticise other organisations for their bias.

These were really interesting comments and ones that really pointed to a lot of our thought processes around bias in the media. In attacking me for being biased, these people were defending the bias of another organisation, and trying to break down my credibility as an author.

This made me think about a blog post I wrote years ago covering the topic of bias, and how progressives in particular should respond to attacks that we are biased in our reporting. It’s a pretty common tactic for people to be attacked for being biased and looking back at it (the blog is now defunct, but I had saved the post), I think this part is still relevant:

How Should the Left Respond?

There are two ways I think the left are best to respond to such attacks:

1) Point out the hypocrisy. I always find it funny that it is those who criticise people for being biased that are generally the most biased of all. It is the responsibility of the left to point this out, not in order to attack these people for being biased but rather to attack their hypocrisy.

2) Embrace our bias. A lecturer I greatly respect once started the first lecture of a course he took with a slide that stated ‘Beware…Marxist at work’. What this lecturer was doing was openly acknowledging and embracing his bias, through letting his students know about it. As people who believe in academic freedoms and freedom of press the best way to fight the ‘bias attack’ is to openly acknowledge ones bias and publicly allow the public to deal with and accept those biases as they wish.

These are both tactics that I have seen in practice in media and the academic world and have been extremely good ways to bounce off attacks of ‘bias’. It is important for the left to continue such efforts to reject these growing attacks that are not only hypocritical in their nature, but also extremely dangerous.

On reflection, I think the second point is definitely the most valuable. Yes, I am biased when it comes to climate change. I see the science and I want us to take some pretty serious action on it. This feeling is part of a larger progressive nature of my politics. Yet, I feel that unlike News Corp. I am willing to embrace my bias. I don’t present myself as an  ‘objective’ news organisation, who then is then deeply biased in their reporting on issues.

The issue with News Corp. really then is not their bias, but their unwillingness to be honest about their bias. If they were to be more comfortable in just coming out and saying ‘we don’t believe it and we’re going to campaign against it’, then I would be more comfortable (although, given their size and influence, not completely happy) with their role in the media sphere.

Originally published in Crikey, September 24 2012

New research out of the US has provided evidence of the “misleading” reporting of climate change by News Corporation. The report, Is News Corp. Failing Science, written by the Union of Concerned Scientists, looked into representations of climate change at Fox News and The Wall Street Journal over a period of six and 12 months respectively.

In their study, stories were investigated and rated “accurate” or “misleading”. Misleading pieces were defined as those that:

• Had a broad dismissal of the scientific evidence that climate change is occurring and is largely due to human activities
• Disparaged climate scientists generally or specifically
• Disparaged or mocked climate science as a body of knowledge
• Cherry-picked individual facts or findings to question overall climate science conclusions
• Engaged in debates or conversations in which misleading claims drowned out accurate ones.

Out of 40 mentions of climate change on Fox News, 37 were determined to be misleading, or 93% of stories. The reporting in The Wall Street Journal (researchers looked at the opinion section) was slightly more accurate; 81% of stories were considered misleading. Disparaging the basic fundamentals of the science was the most common approach at both outlets.

You can read the full article at crikey.com.au

The story of the farmer is often seen as synonymous with the story of Australia. Australian history is dominated by farming heroes, from the tale of ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to the story of the 1891 sheep shearers’ strike. But today, the public view of farming is often of an industry dominated by outdated industrial techniques and thinking from the 1950s. The stereotypical farmer is conservative, backward and reluctant to change their ways to adapt to the realities of the 21st century.

But Charles Massy, author of the recently released book, ‘Breaking the Sheep’s Back’, which charts the collapse of the Australian wool industry, and a PhD student at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, says that farmers across Australia are challenging this view. For Massy, Australian farmers are at the forefront of using innovative techniques that are revolutionising the way they work.

“Everyone knows that land degradation is a major issue in Australia, yet little has been done to effectively address it,” says Massy. “These innovative farmers are changing their practices on a number of levels to tackle this issue and increase the health of their land. For example, some of the most basic techniques include reducing overgrazing, improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, and planting trees and edible shrubs in the landscape. Beyond this, many are now using animal energy, through planned animal grazing and animal grazing of crops, to significantly reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels or chemicals on their land. One of the most interesting cases I’m looking at is called holistic grazing management. Rather than animals being left in one paddock, they are moved frequently around different paddocks in a flexible but planned manner. This allows the land and plants to get a lot of rest and recovery, which increases ground-cover and soil water absorption. I’ve seen farmers pretty much drought- proof themselves and increase productivity with this approach. It is revolutionary. These changes are about farming that suits the Australian landscape rather than trying to do it the other way around. It is about ensuring that we have healthy soils and functioning landscapes.”

Massy says that these techniques are also highly profitable, and could have a huge impact on Australian farming.

“Farmers have been increasingly using fossil fuels and chemicals since the industrial revolution.Removing or greatly eliminating fossil fuels and chemicals would therefore be revolutionary in terms of agricultural practice. There are also a range of other benefits to these practices. For example, this sort of grazing and cropping would have the ability to rehydrate the Murray-Darling Basin through increasing the soil health in the region. There are also implications for human health, with the reduction of chemicals making soils and food much healthier. This would have big knock-on effects for society.”

As part of his PhD, Massy is investigating what is driving these farming innovators to change their practices.

“I’ve interviewed more than 80 leading innovators in what I call transformative agriculture. The aim was to look at how and why they changed their personal psychological constructs and why they decided to challenge the dominant industrial agricultural paradigm,” he says. The results suggest a wide variety of reasons for changing practices.

“About 60 per cent of the farmers I interviewed changed their techniques because they had some sort of major life shock. They were burnt in a bushfire, had a marriage break up, or suffered chemical poisoning, for example – the sorts of issues that completely changed their world- view and approach to things. For the other 40 per cent it was a range of reasons, some of them spiritual, some ecologically based, and some due to intrinsic personal differences.”

But these innovators have faced resistance.

“There’s been some flack within the farming, scientific and institutional communities. Australian farming is still based on very traditional ideas, with big trans-national companies dominating the industry. Any major challenge to this is bound to receive significant pushback.”

Massy says that despite this, transformative agriculture is growing and will be hard to stop.

“Through my PhD I’m hoping to get a better understanding of what we need to do to constructively challenge, change and work with the dominant farming paradigm. There are a few things that clearly need to happen. First of all, we need good science. There are some first-rate scientists at ANU and elsewhere looking at what’s going on in the farming world and we need that to continue. Second, some of the groups that are involved in these techniques have already got their own education diffusion systems and that’s starting to snowball. They’re the ones that should be empowered and celebrated, and we need to work out how we can help them. It should be a bottom- up, not a top-down approach. Most importantly however, we need to start thinking differently about agriculture in Australia. As the benefits of transformative agriculture become more apparent, I hope we will be able to challenge the dominant farming paradigm, and that will trigger government and research policy to encourage these changes,” says Massy.

Perhaps those changes will mean Australia’s future, as well as its past, will be illustrated with farming heroes.

It’s been a big week for the same-sex marriage debate in Australia. With votes going down in the House of Representatives and the Senate, there have been some clear winners (the anti same-sex marriage lobby(for the moment)), some clear losers (Cory Bernadi) and a movement that now stands in a little bit of no-mans land.

Within all of this however, two people have managed to skate through, receiving little to none of the attention they deserved. Whilst Cory Bernadi has been sacked for his comments linking homosexuality to bestiality, ALP Senator Helen Polley, and Nationals Senator Ron Boswell have had just as offensive statements basically ignored.

Polley took to the debate on the same night as Bernadi. In her speech she said that two-thirds of the correspondence she had received had asked her not to support the bill. She then read out a number of letters from her constituents. Here are a couple of corkers:

“From D and AO: ‘Those who seek to change the definition ignore the impacts on children and the potential to create another stolen generation by putting an adult desire above the needs of children.’”

“From JS: ‘Marriage is a very ancient and important institution in our society…History shows that the homosexual groups always have another issue that must be addressed. After same-sex marriage, what will be next?”

Boswell’s comments came the night before, and took a more sexist approach. Talking about the impact same-sex parenting may have, Boswell stated:

“Two mothers or two fathers can’t raise a child properly. Who takes the boy to football? Who tells him what’s right from wrong? What does he do? Go along with mum, or two mums? How does he go camping or fishing? It won’t work, it’s defying nature!”

I’m not going to go into the details of why I think Bernadi has fell victim to his comments, whilst Polley and Boswell are skating through (although it’s probably to do with the relative positions they hold). The reality is though that if you were disgusted in Bernadi’s comments, your outrage at these two Senators should be just as high. I know mine is.

Whilst neither Boswell, nor Polley, hold the sorts of positions that Bernadi held, their statements deserve just as much condemnation, and their party leaders should be called on to do so.

Cory Bernadi’s comments rightfully showed this week that you can and should no longer be able to spout disgusting homophobic views without facing some form of consequence. Whilst the pressure placed on him has been great, we can’t let people like Polley and Boswell continue to skate through.

Ps. Want another great take on Polley’s remark. Check out Clementine Ford’s post.

If the last few days have shown us anything, it is that we don’t understand the role violence plays in our society.

On Saturday a small group of protesters took to the streets of Sydney as part of global rage over a film produced in the United States which denigrates Islam and the prophet Mohammed. Some parts of this protest turned violent, attacking police officers and other members of the community.

The response has been predictable. NSW Barry O’Farrell said “What we saw yesterday was the unacceptable face of multiculturalism.’’ Prime Minister Julia Gillard was quoted as saying ‘‘To anybody who wants to replicate that behaviour today, I just want to say very strongly that this kind of conduct has no place on the streets of our country.’’ Calls for moderate Muslim leaders to condemn the violence have been fierce, whilst right-wing shock jocks have predictably used this as an opportunity to continue a crusade against Muslim people in Australia, with some calling for an end to multiculturalism and for Australia to ‘give intolerance a go’.

What very few people have done however have been to truly think about the role violence plays in our society, and ask the question, what has lead people to such acts? In fact, this is a common tendency of our discussion around Islamic Terrorism and violence – we see it as an inherent evil, but don’t question why it happens and our role in it.

In his book ‘Violence,’ philosopher Slavok Žižek argues that our society tends to focus on what he calls ‘subjective violence’ – acts of assault, murder, terror and war. In doing so, we ignore two other forms of violence in our society, ‘symbolic violence embodied in language and its forms,’ and systematic violence, which he states are the “often catastrophic consequences of the functioning of our economic and political systems.” These forms of violence are what are described as ‘structural violence,’ or the violence embedded in our society through the way it operates.

We can see Žižek’s theory in play when we discuss modern protest movements. We are very quick to condemn violence when it involves at the Seattle World Trade Organisation ‘riots,’ the riots in London or the Tent Embassy protest on Australia Day, without commenting on the ongoing systematic violence conducted by the World Trade Organisation, the British economy, or the 200 year oppression of Aboriginal people. We criticise queer protestors when they engage in violent acts, whilst ignoring the symbolic violence embedded in the homophobic language that still dominates our society today.

Let me explain a little bit more that this means looking at the reaction to the protests recently.

Whilst we are quick to condemn the ‘subjective violence’ of the protest on the day, we continue to ignore the systematic and symbolic violence the Islamic Community in Australia faces every day.

Islamic people in Australia face systematic violence in every aspect of their daily lives, whether it having lived through centuries of their homelands being colonised and (often secretly) bombed and invaded, being assumed to be violent and/or potential terrorists everywhere they go, or having their religion continuously called inherently violent and a cancer on our society.

For those living in Australia, this is not the overt, media worthy sort of violence that you see in a protest, but rather the covert, hard-to-film sort of violence. It is the violence of eliminating people’s basic rights, the violence of inflicting people to structural discrimination every day, the violence of denigrating the very things people believe in, the violence of decades of colonisation, invasion and war, and then wondering why people get angry. It is the exact kind of systematic violence that Žižek describes.

At the same time, Australia’s Muslim population continues to suffer symbolic violence. At the most basic level, this occurs through the racism these people face in the Australian community, whether it is overt racist statements or ongoing comments about how all Muslims are terrorists, or people who don’t share any basic human values with us.

At the political level, our elected leaders engage in symbolic violence on an almost daily basis. One only needs to look at Australia’s refugee discussion and the suspicion created around those arriving from the Middle East to see examples of this.

Symbolic and systematic violence are prevalent throughout our society. Indigenous and queer people, women and members of the lower class, migrants and those from the third world all experience this kind of violence every day. It is the kind of violence that is embedded in the very way our economy and society works, and it is the sort of violence we should be fighting against every day.

We should condemn violence in our society. But when we do, we need to understand that no matter how much we focus on subjective violence, we will have achieved very little until we tackle the structural violence our communities face every day.

Originally published in Mamamia, 13th September, 2012. 

It’s time to stop the trolls.

That’s what we’re being told by the Daily Telegraph who yesterday started the #stopthetrolls campaign. On the face of it, this idea has the potential to do a lot of good.

Trying to stop online abuse is a good thing (no judgements on the methods here). Yet, as the mediafocus on the trolling of some, why do we ignore or even accept the constant abuse and bullying of others that occurs every day?

The campaign is calling on Twitter to stop allowing people to troll online anonymously. It has come about after a number of high-profile trolling incidents over the past couple of weeks.

First, Charlotte Dawson was admitted to hospital after being attacked by Internet trolls. Following that, Tigers captain Robbie Farah spoke out after someone sent an abusive tweet to him after a game, resulting in calls from NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell to change federal legislation in this area and earning Farah a meeting with the Prime Minister.

It’s important to be clear here: bullying and emotional abuse is serious and we should do what we can to stop it, whether on or off line. Homophobic abuse is one of the leading causes in the high rates of depression and suicide in GLBTIQ people. Racial abuse creates similar problems in Australia’s Aboriginal community. Research shows that those who have suffered from bullying at school are 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide.

Yet what’s interesting about our new focus on stopping the trolls, it how isolated it is. Whilst we are all up in arms and obsessing over Internet Trolls, what we’re not seeing are any sorts of similar campaigns to stop homophobia, or to stop racism, or to stamp out sexism.

We didn’t see the daily newspapers coming out with a #stophomophobia campaign after Jim Wallace’s comments last week, or a #stopracism campaign after the Aboriginal Memes outrage.

Robbie Farah

In fact, depending on the public profile and the public support for a person – trolling and abuse are often completely ignored or in some cases, just accepted as part of life.

For example, whilst Robbie Farah has been complaining about abuse he’s received, one thing he and the Daily Telegraph didn’t mention was the Tweet he sent last year (which he has now apologised for) saying that Prime Minister Julia Gillard should be given a noose for her birthday. Apparently stopping the trolls wasn’t that important when the abuse was directed at our PM.

After Andrew Bolt was convicted for breaching the Racial Discrimination Act recently, columnist Miranda Devine wrote a piece describing the ‘chilling effect’ that this could have on our democracy and right to free speech (noting of course that this ruling related to ‘offense’, the exact thing people are complaining about on Twitter).

So, what’s the difference between these cases and trolling? There are probably two answers.

The first is ideology. More than anything, it is probably political ideology that has meant that much of the mainstream media have ignored abuse thrown at an unpopular Prime Minister and other politicians like Bob Brown, whilst campaigning against the trolling of celebrities and sporting heroes.

Charlotte Dawson

The second, and probably more important answer: is power. The young queer people in rural Australia have nothing like the power to speak out against abuse or bullying that Charlotte Dawson has. The Aboriginal people who face racial abuse every day have nothing like the power that Andrew Bolt does through his newspaper columns.

A few select people have the power not only to speak out when they’re being bullied but then to also defend their right to free speech when the words come out of their mouths.

This is the reason why trolling is now taboo and something to be condemned – whilst homophobia, racism and sexism get ignored under the guises of ‘well it’s always been that way’.

The thing about Internet trolling is that it tends to affect those in power more than anyone else. It is a hazard of being important or popular. That doesn’t mean that these people deserve to be bullied or trolled – absolutely not – but it also doesn’t mean they deserve more protection than those than anybody else.

But because of their power, and their ability to speak out, that’s exactly what is happening. What this means is the protection of speech for some and not others, and the protection from bullying for some and not others.

If we want to be serious about bullying and abuse we need to take it seriously for everyone, not just those suffering from Internet trolling.

This article was originally published on Simon’s blog here and has been republished with full permission.

Climate change is a difficult issue. Many people remain confused about climate science and policy, leading to skepticism and disenfranchisement around both the science and what to do about it. Unfortunately, many scientists and public policy makers don’t understand why so many people are so confused, leaving themselves and the community out in the cold. This is an issue that Dr Will Grant and PhD student Luke Menzies from the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science are addressing in their research project Long Conversations.

“The aim of Long Conversations has been to produce a ‘knowledge exchange’ on climate change,” Grant explains. “We took leading climate scientists and experts to rural towns around Australia to talk about climate change – discussing the complex science and policy issues. The idea was to build a space where members of the community could discuss climate change with leading researchers. They could ask questions, provide ideas and discuss their needs, fears and desires on the issue. A key part of this was that the workshops were an ‘exchange’. It was not about researchers conducting a lecture, but rather engaging in a conversation. These conversations were meant to be a two way process – one where members of the community and scientists could learn from each other.”

Menzies, who is writing his PhD on the experience of the workshops, said that he thinks the work could help climate scientists and members of the community connect with each other over the issue.

“A lot of research shows that to engage with people around issues such as climate change we can’t rely on just giving people information,” Menzies explained. “Our experiences from these workshops back this up. Many participants, both scientists and community members, said that the workshops were extremely valuable to them in helping them understand climate change issues. We hope that this research can help build a better understanding of the way conversations can help influence the views and opinions of both ‘experts’ and ‘non-experts’ on climate change. Hopefully this can help increase engagement from across the community on the issue.”

The Long Conversations workshops were held in rural towns around Australia throughout 2011.