Silence Gives Consent

A MODEST, QUIET LIFE with lots of golf and time to terrorise the trout, that’s not much to ask is it? And it is not as if it’s a one-way street, because the intent at the Billabong has always been to give a little back. Those hard-pressed professional reporters, they just don’t have the time to be looking into every interesting and curious angle arising from the stories they purport to cover, so little blogs like this one, we do our best to help.

When News Ltd cans a columnist or Fairfax a radio host, each axed for the indiscretion of bringing up our PM’s light-fingered former swain, it seems a public good to make mention every so often of the scandal. When a prime ministerial aide promotes a race riot, same thing.  Like the dead, affairs of that sort live on in memory only if their names are uttered every now and then, even if by small voices barely heard. Those Big Media outfits have their reasons for wishing not to give offence to politicians who might, by way of retribution, institute an inquiry into their industry. Who can blame them? There are shareholders to consider and government advertising contracts to retain, so it is easy to understand why they elevate self-interest to a virtue.

This is the where and why of the Professor’s downbeat mood. According to Finko & Rickety, sites like this one need regulating, as they would benefit from the oversight of bureaucrats equipped to determine which opinions and views are fit for public airing, not to mention which interpretation of available fact represents the authorised truth.

How will they attempt to execute their plan? Well that is a mystery. Fifteen thousand pageviews per year make a website big enough to warrant official scrutiny, according to the Media Review’s authors. It is a threshold that would mark this blog a target before its landlord recovers from New Year Eve's excess.

Will Stephen Conroy and his heirs ban Google from their NBN if its Blogger unit declines to hand over traffic figures or disclose IP addresses? Will it ban proxy servers and the smartypants software that protects a modest blogger’s low profile? How big will the fines and jail terms need to be in order to encourage widespread compliance?

And the imponderables?  What if, just say, an Australian blogger who happens to reside in Washington publishes something deemed objectionable in his homeland and does so via, say, a Polish host? Don’t laugh, Washington-based Tim Dunlop was in almost that position with his Road To Surfdom site, back when blogging was young and he was studying to become, as he would put it, a public intellectual. It is a safe bet that Finko would not have a clue about any of those practicalities. Would he send an Australian gunboat up the Potomac to obtain the information by force of arms? Wreathed in the residual majesty of a retired judge, Finko has perhaps grown so accustomed to deference that he imagines the wider world operates on the same authoritian principles of his former courtroom.

As for Rickety, let us note that he boasts of shuttling between newsrooms and academia throughout his career, so he has no excuse for failing to acknowledge the practical issues involved in monitoring and policing an entire nation’s chatter. Either he doesn’t care that his proposals are unworkable or, more likely, he deems their actual implementation beside the point. The key to control is acquiescence. If his desired re-working of free speech is revealed as impractical in specific and isolated incidences, it would be a minor deficiency. The key will be to nudge and bully the bulk of the publishing industry’s players over the line, position them where the threat of investigation and action is enough in itself to advance docility.

Where does that leave bloggers and small, independent publishers without the wherewithal to pay the lawyers who will be needed to fend off speech regulators? The answer is simple as it is obvious: poised constantly at the brink of silence and financial ruin.

The Media Review is a smug, arrogant manifesto which crystallises all the noxious attitudes that have ruined Fairfax, sullied the ABC and replaced debate with an absurd insistence that the views of the tight, hooked-in, self-referential coterie of worshippers at authority’s altar represent more, much more, than a mere body of opinion. As the Litijus Mordys demonstrated in the action brought against Andrew Bolt, opinions – the wrong opinions, that is – are now subject to adjudication on the basis of nothing more substantial than plaintiffs’ hurt feelings. The courts have already imposed themselves as one wing of a pincer movement that aims to enclose free speech. The public service speech police Finko & Rickety  advocate would snap closed that trap with a loud and inescapable finality.

In the Media section of today’s Australian, various heavyweights weigh in on the inquiry with balanced and nuanced appreciations of its worth, the general view being that the report is worthy of further discussion and refinement. Perhaps they cannot think beyond the report's endorsement of taxpayer subsidies because they are already bending over, assuming the position. They do not object to being stuffed, apparently, just as so long as they retain the feeble right to negotiate how deep that violation will go.

The circumstances under which Finko & Rickety were set to work, the unquestioned assumption that there is both a right and need to regulate speech, the expectation that genuflections before authority are right and proper – they are the inquiry’s original sins and they pollute the published whole as thoroughly and dangerously as botulism poisons the most lavish banquet.

What Finko & Rickety have produced is an obscenity. Their recommendations need to be scuttled before they can be launched. There will be no sinking them after that.

And then, maybe, there will be a bit more time for golf and fishing.