Three Little Words: WikiLeaks, Libya, Oil @medialens

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'Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves— 43.6 billion barrels — outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects.'

So reported the Washington Post on June 11, in a rare mainstream article which, as we will see, revealed how WikiLeaks exposed the real motives behind the war on Libya.

So what happens when you search UK newspaper archives for the words 'WikiLeaks', 'Libya' and 'oil'? We decided to take a look.

From the time prior to the start of Libya's civil war on February 17, and of Nato's war on Libya on March 19, we found a couple of comments of this kind in the Sunday Times:

'Gadaffi's children plunder the country's oil revenues, run a kleptocracy and operate a reign of terror that has created simmering hatred and resentment among the people, according to the cables released by WikiLeaks.' (Michael Sheridan, 'Libya froths at plundering by junior Gadaffis,' February 6, 2011, Sunday Times)

The Telegraph described political wrangling over the alleged Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi:

'The documents, obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to this newspaper, provide the first comprehensive picture of the often desperate steps taken by Western governments to court the Libyan regime in the competition for valuable trade and oil contracts.' (Christopher Hope and Robert Winnett, 'Ministers gave Libya legal advice on how to free Lockerbie bomber,' The Daily Telegraph, February 1, 2011)

From the time since Nato launched its war, we found this warning from Jackie Ashley in the Guardian:

'...cast aside international law, and there is nothing but might is right, arms, oil and profits.

'Well, you might say, but isn't that where we are already? Not quite. Many of us may feel great cynicism about some of the west's war-making and the strange coincidence of military intervention and oil and gas reserves. I do.' (Ashley, 'Few would weep for Gaddafi, but targeting him is wrong: In war, international law is all we have. If we cast it aside there'll be nothing left but might is right, arms, oil and profits,' The Guardian May 2, 2011)

This hinted in the right direction, but no facts were cited in support of the argument, certainly none from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables.

The Guardian's Alexander Chancellor managed to discover a leaked cable revealing that Libya 'sometimes demands billion-dollar "signing bonuses" for contracts with western oil companies'. (Chancellor, 'The bonanza of kickbacks and corrupt deals between Libya and the west have helped Gaddafi cling on to power,' The Guardian, March 25, 2011)

Other cables offer more significant insights, but Chancellor made no mention of them.
George Monbiot's March 15 Guardian article contained all three search terms - his sole mention of Libya in the past 12 months – but he was writing about Saudi Arabia: 'We won't trouble Saudi's tyrants with calls to reform while we crave their oil.' The article had nothing to say about the looming assault on Libya, just four days away. Monbiot has had nothing to say since.

Johann Hari wrote about the Libyan war in his sole article on the subject in the Independent on April 8, commenting:

'Bill Richardson, the former US energy secretary who served as US ambassador to the UN, is probably right when he says: "There's another interest, and that's energy... Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage of Libyan oil production... So this is not an insignificant country, and I think our involvement is justified".'

This was a rare affirmation of the role of oil as a motive, albeit one that emphasised the specious claim that the US concern is simply to keep the oil flowing (Hari did mention, vaguely, that results were intended to be 'in our favour'). And again, Hari appeared to be innocent of any relevant information released by WikiLeaks. A lack of awareness which perhaps explains why he had 'wrestled with' the alleged moral case for intervention before rejecting it.

Soured Relations - Gaddafi And Big Oil

Remarkably, then, we found nothing in any article in any national UK newspaper reporting the freely-available facts revealed by WikiLeaks on Western oil interests in Libya. And nothing linking these facts to the current war.

By contrast, in his June 11 article for the Washington Post, Steven Mufson focused intensely on WikiLeaks exposés in regard to Libyan oil. In November 2007, a leaked State Department cable reported 'growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism'. In his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi had said:

'Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.'

Gaddafi's son made similar comments in 2007. As (honest) students of history will know, these are exactly the kind of words that make US generals sit up and listen. The stakes for the West were, and are, high: companies such as ConocoPhillips and Marathon have each invested about $700 million over the past six years.

Even more seriously, in late February 2008, a US State Department cable described how Gaddafi had 'threatened to dramatically reduce Libya's oil production and/or expel... U.S. oil and gas companies'. The Post explained how, in early 2008, US Senator Frank R. Lautenberg had enraged the Libyan leader by adding an amendment to a bill that made it easier for families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing to 'go after Libya's commercial assets'.

The Libyan equivalent of the deputy foreign minister told US officials that the Lautenberg amendment was 'destroying everything the two sides have built since 2003,' according to a State Department cable. In 2008, Libyan oil minister Shokri Ghanem warned an Exxon Mobil executive that Libya might 'significantly curtail' its oil production to 'penalize the US,' according to another cable.

The Post concluded: 'even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies'.
Similarly, compare the chasm in rational analysis separating the mainstream UK media and the dissident Real News Network, hosted by Paul Jay. Last month, Jay interviewed Kevin G. Hall, the national economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. Jay concluded with a summary of their conversation discussing oil shenanigans in Libya:

'So you've got the Italian oil companies already at odds with the US over Iran. The Italian oil company is going to, through its deals with Gazprom, allow the Russians to take a big stake in Libyan oil. And then you have the French. As we head towards the Libyan war, the French Total have a small piece of the Libyan oil game, but I suppose they would like a bigger piece of it. And then you wind up having a French-American push to overthrow Gaddafi and essentially shove Gazprom out. I mean, I guess we're not saying one and one necessarily equals two, but it sure - it makes one think about it.'

Hall responded:

'Yeah, it's not necessarily causation, but there's - you might suggest there's correlation. And clearly this shows the degree to which oil is kind of the back story to so much that happens. As a matter of fact, we went through 251,000 [leaked] documents - or we have 250,000 documents that we've been pouring through. Of those, a full 10 percent of them, a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil. And I think that tells you how much part of, you know, the global security question, stability, prosperity - you know, take your choice, oil is fundamental.' (Our emphasis)

Jay replied with a wry smile:

'And we'll do more of this. But those who had said it's not all about oil, they ain't reading WikiLeaks.'

Hall replied: 'It is all about oil.'

In March, we drew attention to a cable released by WikiLeaks sent from the US embassy in Tripoli in November 2007. The cable communicated US concerns about the direction being taken by Libya's leadership:

'Libya needs to exploit its hydrocarbon resources to provide for its rapidly-growing, relatively young population. To do so, it requires extensive foreign investment and participation by credible IOCs [international oil companies]. Reformist elements in the Libyan government and the small but growing private sector recognize this reality. But those who dominate Libya's political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector that could jeopardize efficient exploitation of Libya's extensive oil and gas reserves. Effective U.S. engagement on this issue should take the form of demonstrating the clear downsides to the GOL [government of Libya] of pursuing this approach, particularly with respect to attracting participation by credible international oil companies in the oil/gas sector and foreign direct investment.' (our emphasis)

The US government has certainly been 'demonstrating the clear downsides' since March 19.

US analyst Glenn Greenwald, asks:

'Is there anyone - anywhere - who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya? After almost three months of fighting and bombing - when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory - is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya? Is there anything more obvious - as the world's oil supplies rapidly diminish - than the fact that our prime objective is to remove Gaddafi and install a regime that is a far more reliable servant to Western oil interests, and that protecting civilians was the justifying pretext for this war, not the purpose?' 

'The Urge To Help'

It does seem extraordinary that anyone could doubt that this is the case. But the fact is that the WikiLeaks cables cited above, the Washington Post's facts, and Greenwald's conclusions, have been almost completely blanked by the UK media system. Notice that they have been readily accessible to us, a tiny website supported by public donations.

As though reporting from a different planet, the BBC reported last week:

'Nato is enforcing a UN resolution to protect civilians in Libya.'

Is this Absolute Truth? Holy writ? In fact, no. But it does reflect the mainstream political consensus and so the BBC feels content to offer it - by way of a service to democracy - as the only view in town. And yet, we need only reflect on three obvious facts: while UN Resolution 1973 did authorise a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians, Nato is now openly seeking regime change and rejecting all peace overtures out of hand. The UN did not authorise regime change.

An Observer leader entitled, 'The west can't let Gaddafi destroy his people,' told the same tale in March:

'the only response that matters now is a common position which brooks no more argument... to pledge, with the honest passion we affect to feel that, whether repulsed in time or not, this particular tyranny will not be allowed to stand'. (Leading article, 'Libya: The west can't let Gaddafi destroy his people,' The Observer, March 13, 2011)

Like a cut and paste from Orwell, the paper insisted:

'This is a regional uprising of young people seeking freedom, remember? Do you recall all the power of the tweet, as lauded only a fortnight ago?

'The millions who began this revolution won't be much impressed by a democracy defined only by inertia. They won't thank the west – or China, India, Russia, the African Union – for letting this Arab spring die in a field of flowery promises.'

The Guardian also focused on the 'ethical' motivation. In a February 24 leading article entitled, 'Libya: The urge to help,' the editors simultaneously mocked and reversed the truth:

'It is hard to escape the conclusion that European leaders are advocating these moves in part because they want to be seen by their electorates at home to be doing something, and in part because they want to be seen by people in the Middle East as being on the right side in the Arab democratic revolution. They may hope that a dramatic line on Libya will go some way toward effacing the memory of the dithering and equivocation with which they greeted its earlier manifestations in Tunisia and Egypt, France being particularly guilty in this regard.'

Compared to the analysis discussed above this reads like a bed-time story for children. The deceptive words 'dithering and equivocation' refer to the West's iron-willed resolve to protect tyrannical clients and to thwart democratic revolution in the region while appearing (the key word) to be 'on the right side'.

The conclusion: 'a no-fly zone should become an option. Lord Owen was therefore right to say that military preparations should be made and the necessary diplomatic approaches, above all to the Russians and the Chinese, set in train to secure UN authority for such action'.

The Guardian's argument was shorn of the political, economic and historical facts that make a nonsense of the idea that Western military action 'should become an option'. There may indeed have been a moral case for action by someone. But not by Western states with a bitter history of subjugating and killing people in Libya, and elsewhere in the region, for the sake of oil. But then it is a trademark of Guardian liberalism that Britain and its allies are forever Teflon-coated, forever untainted by the evident brutality of 'our' actions. This is the perennial, vital service the paper performs for the establishment.

We are asked to believe that the facts sampled in this alert are somehow unknown to the hard-headed corporate executives who write of 'The urge to help' and the 'common position which brooks no more argument'. And yet, the Guardian was one of WikiLeaks' major 'media partners' at the time the cables were published - it is well aware that 'a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil'. Like the rest of the corporate media, Britain's leading liberal newspaper knows but is not telling.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Please write to the following editors and journalists. Ask them why they have not explored WikiLeaks' revelations indicating the role of oil in the war on Libya:

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

Jackie Ashley
Email: jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk

George Monbiot
Email: george@monbiot.info

Johann Hari
Email: j.hari@independent.co.uk

Jeremy Bowen at the BBC
Email: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk


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Even the worst nightmares can’t keep Andrew Bolt upright

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Geoff Lemon

The aftermath of news like that from Oslo leaves only numbness. The injustice of it, the disbelief that this was even possible. Bombs at least kill in a single action. The deliberate persistence involved in attacks like Anders Breivik’s make them all the more distressing.

For a writer with comedic inclinations, the usual set of responses are neutered. Laughter falters, mouth half open. Even in our bleakest political situations, there are moments of light. Something like this is all darkness.

As reports began to come in, it was the last subject in the world you would have imagined being used for political point-scoring. But if ever someone was going to do just that, it was Andrew Bolt.

First thing last Saturday morning, with news still scant, he was on his blog suggesting that Muslim terrorists were behind the attack. Not an outrageous assumption, by any stretch, but ‘pretty sure’ shouldn’t be enough for such a prominent columnist to proceed without confirmation.

Contradictory news soon came in, and the page was hastily and almost comically corrected. “Already the unconfirmed reports suggest our immediate suspicions are correct (UPDATE: No, they aren’t)…”

“In fact: ‘Explosives were found on the island,’ deputy Oslo police chief Sveining Sponheim told reporters. He said a man detained by police was aged 32 and ‘ethnic Norwegian.’”

“Even so,” Bolt went on, “the history of Islamic violence in Scandinavia suggests Muslim immigration there has been a bad deal for the locals.”

Hold up a minute. “Even so”? At what point does a misplaced assumption like that earn the right to an addendum?

In an action replay, it goes: “In latest news, here is some evidence that would definitely prove that I’m right. Oh, wait a minute, that evidence doesn’t exist. Even so, I am actually right, and let’s proceed with that assumption.”

And that was before we even got to the backup evidence. The “history of Islamic violence” that Bolt was able to provide for Norway consisted of three men being arrested (not yet charged or convicted) for possibly planning an attack on either a newspaper or an embassy, no-one is quite sure; and a charge against a man for threatening a politician.

So, two instances of alleged offences that haven’t even gone to court. Not the most weighty habeas corpus ever to land on a judge’s desk.

Not to mention that death threats are hardly germane to radical Islam. I got them from true blue Aussie battlers just last week for writing an article about carbon taxation. Perhaps Bolt can help me arrange to have the culprits deported to Riyadh.

Remarkably, he eventually took the stunning evidence brief down, conceding that “leaving it up is being interpreted as my insisting on a gratuitous point instead.” Truer words…

But it didn’t signal any change in attitude. In the days since, Bolt has been milking Oslo for all it’s worth. One doubts he’d be so fixated if he weren’t trying to compensate for his early cock-up.

In the early hours of Tuesday, it was those damn Muslims hogging up all the limelight. Because the killer didn’t actively target Muslims to be shot, Bolt quoted that “Muslims are now the preferred victims even in a story in which they are entirely absent.”

Right. But Breivik’s stated aim was to encourage a popular uprising that would drive Muslims out of Europe, and to devastate the political party that he blamed for their presence in Norway. Not entirely unreasonable, then, to give them a passing mention?

Bolt also attacked an ABC journo for apparently not investigating the Breivik manifesto to Bolt’s satisfaction. “But who checks when it fits the preferred narrative?” asked Bolt with trademark outrage. If there was a Geiger counter for hypocrisy, we’d already be clocking Fukushima levels.

But his glow-in-the-dark moment came while getting stuck into the ABC for describing Breivik as right-wing and Christian. Apparently focusing on a terrorist’s faith as a factor in his atrocities was just not the kind of conduct befitting proper journalists.

“[R]elevance of his Christianity seems obscure,” wrote Bolt on Sunday, “given nothing in the New Testament and nothing said by any Christian leader possibly justifies his murder of so many young Norwegians.”

He returned to it yesterday, in a far less coherent post: “The Christian New Testament explicitly forbids violence, but jihadists quote Koranic verses they say justify murder, and worship a warrior Prophet who slaughtered a Jewish tribe.”

But Bolt’s attempt to position Christianity as cleanskin couldn’t be any more pat.

It completely omits the inconvenient Old Testament, a patently insane and brutal document characterised by a God so jealous and vengeful he might have been auditioning for Once Were Warriors. This is the God of both the Christians and the Muslims, I might point out, and He slaughtered cities, tribes, and at one point the entire world. He’s still the Church’s main squeeze.

Yes, I’ve read the Old Testament – it’s great literature. I’d love to know if Bolt has read a proper translation of the Koran.

And while the New Testament indeed forbids violence, it is the far less relevant half of the Bible in Christian politics. Avowed and public Christians have been involved in war and violence since the Church was founded, and see no contradiction. These leaders have quoted Biblical verses they say justify murder for centuries, and continue today. The deeply religious rhetoric of the United States routinely favours the Old Testament eye for an eye over Christ’s call to turn the other cheek. Just look at George Bush’s reaction to 9/11 against Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg’s reaction to Breivik’s outrage.

Let’s imagine masked men attacking homes in the night, killing and raping those who live there, burning down churches and houses and schools to destroy a society and culture they loathe. Sound like something from Bolt? Yes, because the Ku Klux Klan are perhaps the earliest practitioners of classic terrorism in the modern age. The aforementioned tactics were employed for decades, along with their bombing of Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.

The Klan are also an overtly Christian organisation, at least in their own estimation. The burning cross did not become one of the most hated symbols in the world due to a Klansman fondness for tic-tac-toe.

Does “nothing said by any Christian leader” mean Klansmen committed their crimes on pure Boy Scout initiative? Does it apply to those who organise the murder and intimidation of abortion doctors and nurses, or the bombing of clinics?

Does it apply to the leaders of Westboro Baptist Church, they who picket funerals, shouting foul slogans at grieving relatives? Westboro is one of the ugliest religious groups in the world. Pure hate is preached in Christ’s name every day.

As for Breivik’s stated religion not being relevant to his actions, look to his YouTube clip. “Celebrate us, the martyrs of the conservative revolution, for we will soon dine in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Add in a few dozen virgins, and it starts to sound awfully familiar.

Other Christians would of course distance themselves from this hateful perversion of religious tenets. So they should. It bears no relation to a compassionate and true interpretation of Christianity. It is something twisted by the unhinged.

So the affront with which Bolt’s commenters receive talk of Christian violence should give them an indicator of how Muslims feel being associated with extremists. Stating that the Ku Klux Klan claim to be Christian should not suggest that they represent Christianity. In saying that the 9/11 pilots called themselves Muslim, the same detachment should be applied.

Citing Christian violence is not about a tit-for-tat, trying to come up with a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ side. The point is that neither such thing exists. There’s no crisper summation than that of comedian Doug Stanhope: “There are only two countries in the world: dick, and not a dick. The border goes right the way around.”

Bolt, no doubt, would just repeat his self-congratulatory lines about speaking the hard truth that soft-touch liberals don’t want to hear. This would have much more weight if he told the truth in a positive manner as well. Selective reporting of truth is just as deceptive as outright lies.

He doesn’t like to mention the strengths that migrants bring to our country, or how crucial they’ve been to our development. And not just white European migrants like Bolt’s parents, who arrived here after World War II. “But who checks when it fits the preferred narrative?”, a wise man asked. Empathy, apparently, fails to cross the generational divide.

I’d love to see Bolt do a profile on Melbourne’s Alia Gabrez, who aside from being a remarkable writer, helped create and run a volunteer program offering workshops and mentoring to disadvantaged youth of all backgrounds.

Or how about Omar bin Musa, the erudite Australian national poetry champion who has represented us at literary events around the world? Deeply proud of his Australian and Muslim heritage, Musa is a man of wisdom and statesmanlike humility. Spending some time with him might well do Bolt some good.

In Bolt’s post on Monday, he claimed that extremism of any political character was essentially the same, being “anything that diminishes the value of the individual”.

Diminishing their value is exactly what Bolt does every time he subsumes millions of individuals into the image of ‘Muslims’ doing or thinking a certain way. Bolt and I are both Australians; just a thousand words has shown the gulf between our world views.

But it’s precisely this ambiguity that rhetoricians like Bolt so wilfully ignore. His world is simple: make it about us and them, make people angry and afraid, and watch your page views tick over.

It’s a poisonous position, and one that involves taking advantage of everyone involved: the people denigrated, the ones whipped up into outrage, and the ones whose stories are hijacked to provide one more day’s grist.

Over in Norway, the survivors, the family and friends of the dead, and the nation as a whole, have just begun to endure a nightmare that will last for many years.

Here, in our country, Andrew Bolt no doubt sleeps as soundly as ever.



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Australian Communications and Media authority to investigate complaint about Alan Jones

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Lenore Taylor - SMH

THE Australian Communications and Media Authority is investigating a complaint about alleged inaccuracies in statements on climate change by broadcaster Alan Jones.

GetUp! had made a complaint, which it believed was not being pursued by the broadcasting regulator, but Fairfax Media has learned ACMA is investigating the GetUp! complaint, and some others, concerning Mr Jones.

If the complaint is upheld, Mr Jones may be asked to acknowledge the statement was wrong and promise not to repeat it.

The complaint says the 2GB broadcaster was wrong when he stated human beings produce only 0.001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air.

Several climate scientists have insisted the claim is inaccurate, and the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air today for which human beings are responsible is closer to 28 per cent. They base this on the difference between the pre-industrial concentration of CO2 (about 280 parts per million) and the current concentration of about 390 parts per million.

Climate commissioner and executive director of the ANU Climate Institute Will Steffen said another calculation was the amount of additional carbon, contained in carbon dioxide, that humans contributed to the atmosphere each year.

''Every year the earth - land and ocean combined - takes a net five billion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere, but humans put around nine billion tonnes in, meaning we are accumulating an additional four billion tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere each year,'' he said.

Under the commercial broadcasting code of conduct, broadcasters are required to make reasonable efforts to ensure that factual material is accurate, and are given 30 days to make a correction after they receive an initial complaint.

GetUp! has also alleged Mr Jones contravenes another section of the code of conduct which requires broadcasters to give ''reasonable opportunities'' to ''significant viewpoints'' on ''controversial issues of public importance''.

An ACMA spokeswoman said the organisation did not comment on specific matters it might be investigating. ACMA usually provides a preliminary report to the broadcaster for comment before a final report is written. Investigations often take several months.

A spokesman for 2GB did not return calls yesterday but, speaking to the Mumbrella website this week, Mr Jones distinguished between being a journalist and being a broadcaster.

''Much of my stuff is opinion … I am a broadcaster, I don't pretend to be a journalist, I don't know what that means anyway - they've got a certificate or something,'' he said.

''… if those opinions lack validity, or if those opinions are extreme, or if they are overly provocative, people won't listen, I've stood the test of time.''

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A media inquiry? Sure. But there are questions for politicians too @domknight @abcthedrum

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Dominic Knight

Julia Gillard’s claim that News Limited has "hard questions" to answer because of the phone-hacking scandal is disingenuous. Rather, it has a very simple question to answer: have its journalists hacked any phones or paid off any police in Australia? Like whether her colleagues are happy with her performance as Prime Minister, it's a straightforward question whose answer is almost certainly no.

Given the prominence of this story, the lack of Australian allegations suggests that News Limited's journos are blameless. Surely if its local hacks had become hackers, they would have taken a wander through the juicy message banks of tabloid mainstays like Shane Warne, Wayne Carey and Lara Bingle, who would now be realising how certain embarrassing stories had made their way into the Murdoch press and kicking up a stink. And even if there were allegations, News' local journalists are as entitled to the presumption of innocence as anybody else, even if they don't always extend it to others.

That said, I'm unable to muster the high dudgeon with which certain News journos have reacted to the suggestion that it be investigated. It certainly isn't a "smear", as Tony Abbott has suggested. Given the extensive circulation of News personnel its News outlets in the UK, US and Australia, it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether a technique that was used against 4000 public figures in Britain made it to the Antipodes. If it wasn't, News' CEO John Hartigan wouldn't have felt the need to open an internal inquiry.

But the Prime Minister has sought to go well beyond this factual question. In concert with her new BFFs the Greens, she has been making ominous sounds about a media inquiry looking at ownership and concentration, while Christine Milne has explicitly called for licensing. The latter idea is not only unjustified, but dangerous.

Licensing would actively prevent accountability by encouraging proprietors not to antagonise the politicians who controlled the licenses. It's no more appropriate to regulate who can operate a newspaper in a democratic society than it is to license who can run for Parliament. Although Milne's comments have made me wonder about licensing for Greens Senate candidates.

Her view also draws precisely the wrong conclusion from what has occurred in Britain. The News of the World scandal was broken by the Guardian, showing the benefit not of regulation, but of a robust, open print media – the very thing that would be restricted by a licensing regime. Furthermore, it's hard to imagine how a licensing process or a fit-and-proper-person test could place more onerous sanctions on the News of the World than closing the whole thing down and sacking everyone who worked for it.

Labor and the Greens' enthusiasm about bloodying the nose of News Limited seems self-serving in the current political climate. The Australian has explicitly declared war on the Greens, and News columnists' antagonism towards the Gillard carbon tax has been pronounced and prolonged. But when those in power dislike what what a news outlet writes, that is all the more reason why its editorial voice must not be interfered with. Yes, even when it's Andrew Bolt's.

Despite the dubious motivations of politicians who'd like to make News genuinely Limited, some of the concerns they've been raising are valid nevertheless. Even Tony Abbott agrees that current privacy laws should be broadened. This is not a new insight – the Australian Law Reform Commission recommended that a few years back, and the Government had already intended to implement 90% of its findings.

But Julia Gillard and the Greens are also correct to ask questions about the concentration of media ownership – a problem in Britain, but more so here where Murdoch owns 70% of the newspapers. Furthermore, we have no newspapers that are set up on a public-interest, non-profit basis like the Guardian, which is owned by a trust. Although to be fair to Fairfax, its newspapers have often operated on a non-profit basis in recent years.

Here's the thing, though: nothing's stopping anybody from setting up another newspaper in Australia besides the near-certainty that they'd lose money. (A licensing scheme, ironically, would provide another barrier.) It's hard to imagine what a parliamentary inquiry into newspaper ownership would conclude other than that it would be lovely if there were more of them, but won't be.

The most important questions raised by the News International scandal for Australia, though, are not ones that our politicians are likely to want to delve into, because they concern political leaders who become too close to the media that ought to be holding them accountable. The appointment of former NOTW editor Andy Coulson as David Cameron's communications chief is extraordinary when the Guardian warned his aides that there were some rather pungent skeletons in the Coulson closet.

But even if there were no phone-hacking scandal, the British PM's eagerness to hire an ex-News editor raises questions. Was the appointment an attempt to secure positive coverage by having Coulson lobby his former colleagues? Was any deal cut, and why Murdoch was invited to tea after Cameron's victory? The whole Coulson situation is as problematic as a job with Elle Macpherson.

Until the phone-hacking story made it politically untenable, the UK Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was poised to rubber-stamp News' purchase of BSkyB. How could such a decision be made independently and in the public interest by a government which – like Labour's before it – felt that its survival depended on the support of Murdoch's newspapers? In the US, Fox News is often described as the propaganda wing of the Republican Party, and employs many high-profile GOP figures as commentators. How can such politicians ever feasibly regulate media ownership? There is not enough distance between the fourth estate and those it's supposed to report on.

Closer to home, Julia Gillard might like to answer "hard questions" about her own meetings with Rupert Murdoch. Kevin Rudd courted Rupert Murdoch before he was elected in 2007 – what was on the agenda when they met in New York? Did they discuss the Australia Network, or cross-media ownership laws, or Foxtel's recently-denied buyout of Austar, and were any undertakings made? And while Tony Abbott has spoken impressively about the need for newspapers to keep politicians honest, is he willing to assist this by detailing the substance of his own conversations with media proprietors?

We should already be worried about the relationship between our politicians and media owners in light of the progressive dilution of cross-media ownership laws by governments on both sides. It would probably be better if media regulation was handled by an independent body whose members haven't so much to gain from positive coverage. Whereas introducing a licensing system, of course, would only give our political leaders more chips to bargain with.

So by all means let's have this media inquiry. It's sensible to try to learn from the mistakes of others, and our system should be as clean as we can make it. In the famous words of Justice Brandeis, sunlight is the best disinfectant. But the inquiry's terms of reference should reflect the fact that the scandal in the UK raises questions not only for media proprietors, but for politicians.

Dominic Knight was one of the founders of Australia’s least profitable newspaper, The Chaser. He was a columnist for an obscure News Limited organ called The Glebe, but was sacked shortly before the whole thing closed down. He has voicemail, but no-one ever leaves him messages.

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Where the carbon tax is working nicely

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Michael Pascoe

Heard the one about the carbon tax working perfectly nicely, enjoying popular approval, reducing emissions, not killing capitalism? No, it's not a joke, or a fantasy – it's British Columbia.

If anyone took Christopher Monckton seriously enough to bother contradicting him, a quick check of the Canadian province's experience with a carbon tax would destroy his typically hyperbolic claim that putting a price on carbon would reduce Australia to a Third World banana monarchy.

This week's Economist magazine notes that, since introducing the tax in 2008, the BC economy has done well, outperforming the rest of Canada with slightly higher growth, slightly lower unemployment and lower income taxes. And the carbon tax has the support of the majority of the citizenry.

 

This is a tax that was introduced at $C10 a tonne, rising by $C5 a year to be $C30 next year when Australia's allegedly catastrophic version starts at $23 a tonne. (The Canadian and Australian dollars are within three cents of parity, so the numbers are much of a muchness.)

And the BC government didn't wimp out on applying the tax to fuel either – the Economist reports the tax adds 5 cents a litre to the price of petrol. Fuel consumption per head in BC has fallen by 4.5 per cent since 2008, more than the fall elsewhere in Canada.

"British Columbia has shown the rest of Canada, a country with high carbon emissions per head, that a carbon tax can achieve multiple benefits at minimal cost," opines the Economist.

Perhaps not just the rest of Canada, if we were willing to look. Meanwhile Australia's broader confidence levels continue to be damaged by the scare campaign over the tax and self-serving corporate campaigning.

The political obstacles here sound similar to those that faced Gordon Campbell, the BC Liberal premier who introduced the tax in the same year that Canada's Conservative prime minister used an anti-carbon tax stance to win an election against an opposition proposing one.

"When arguing for the carbon tax, Mr Campbell faced the same political obstacles that have stymied such plans elsewhere," the report says.

Only environmentalists were enthusiastic. Businesses feared it would add to costs and slow the economy. The leftish New Democratic Party (NDP) worried it would hurt the poor. But these fears have proved groundless.

"The carbon tax has been good for the environment, good for taxpayers and it hasn't hurt the economy," says Stewart Elgie, a professor of law and economics at the University of Ottawa.
"It helped that the law introducing the levy required its proceeds to be recycled back to individuals and companies as cuts in income taxes."

Like Australia, BC is doing nicely out of the commodities boom. The Canadian dollar has also appreciated against most others. No sign of a banana monarchy there yet. How aboot that, eh?

Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor.

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Waleed Aly: This is not a crazed loner, this is a terrorist

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Waleed Aly

When Jared Lee Loughner walked into a town hall meeting and unceremoniously gunned down a Chief District Court Judge and a Congress Democrat in January this year, the most conspicuously absent word in public response was "terrorism".

Hilary Clinton went close, calling Loughner an "extremist" and drawing a parallel with extremism in the Middle East. But overwhelmingly, Loughner was deemed dismissed as crazy - much like Norway's Anders Behring Breivik who has now admitted to killing 90 people on the weekend.

Already you can see the rhetorical slide. What began as an unambiguous act of terrorism is slowly becoming the work of a "lone gunman". It's not, in the words of a Norwegian police official, "Islamic-terror related", so he must be a "madman". Terrorism is appearing in some reports of this most recent tragedy - certainly more than it did in the Loughner case - but nowhere nearly as frequently as it does when the perpetrators aren't one of "us".

There's a problem here, and it has nothing to do with political correctness. It's not even simply about public language. The problem is that the more we explain away acts of domestic terrorism as isolated cases of madness, the less capable we become of spotting it. Having realised the weekend's attacks in Norway weren't Islamist, we must do better than lazily assuming Breivik is just Norway's answer to Martin Bryant.

Martin Bryant he is not. Bryant is a loner who massacred 35 people apparently as a way of getting attention: to "make everyone remember me". Breivik is a committed political activist. His manifesto (which for the time being is on YouTube), if correctly attributed, makes this abundantly clear. It is deeply implausible that this was anything other than a textbook case of terrorism. It was fear-inducing violence by a non-state actor in the service of a political cause.

Understood this way, we can see that Breivik is far from an isolated case. This is clearest in America, where the phenomenon of "domestic terrorism" has been on the rise for the last three or four years. Here, I'm not talking about "homegrown" Islamist terrorism, which has also increased. I'm talking about people who, crudely speaking, are like Breivik: white, male citizens with some or other political axe to grind in their own nation.

In March this year, police arrested Kevin Harpham, a white supremacist and former soldier, for trying to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr parade in Washington state. He got as far as placing the bomb there. Six months earlier, an environmentalist named James J Lee was killed by police after he burst into the Discovery Channel's headquarters with explosives and a gun demanding it "broadcast to the world [its] commitment to save the planet". In February 2010 Joseph Stack flew a plane into an IRS building, killing himself and an IRS manager. Stack's suicide note raged against a range of things, including the US government's bailout of financial institutions and his ongoing problems with tax payments and debts.

I could go on. And on. These are not odd scattered plots. We're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of them - most, thankfully, unsuccessful. Today's domestic terrorists are a broad bunch, as the FBI notes: "From hate-filled white supremacists… to highly destructive eco-terrorists… to violence-prone anti-government extremists… to radical separatist groups." And that is to say nothing of anti-abortion violence, which is quite common. These attacks don't get international headlines, or blanket domestic coverage. As a consequence, they don't generate the broad fear that Islamist terrorism does. But when they succeed, and they do, the dead are just as dead.

Domestic terrorism is not simply an annoying constant. It ebbs and flows. Domestic terrorist attacks dropped sharply in America after September 11, 2001. By 2006 there were barely any attempted plots. It is not that extreme political views had disappeared. It is just that fewer people were inspired to express them violently. Then suddenly, from 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected, the number of plots rose sharply.

The trends aren't difficult to explain. The period between 2001 and 2006 was one of heightened national solidarity. All over the Western world, the September 11 attacks announced the presence of a foreign enemy. The War on Terror dominated the political discourse, two lengthy wars were waged in its name, and terrorist attacks in Bali, Madrid and London kept the focus on violent Islamism. This "external" enemy provided some degree of internal harmony.

By the time Barack Obama was elected, much had changed. No terrorist attack on Western soil had succeeded since 2005. Politicians had lost their zeal for spruiking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Western world had become increasingly focussed on the domestic sphere. Here in Australia, Kevin Rudd won an election that was mainly about industrial relations, and not at all about security even as the Howard government tried to breathe life into the spectre of Mohamed Haneef. Barack Obama beat John McCain largely on the economy: it is often forgotten the two were neck-and-neck until the scale of America's economic catastrophe became plain.

In short, Islamist terrorism had begun to recede from public contemplation. Sure, it was still an issue, but it lost its gut-wrenching purchase. That is fertile ground for the re-emergence of the domestic terrorism we had all forgotten existed in the shadow of September 11.

Breivik represents something novel in that Europe's experience of this is shallower than America's. But then, Northern Ireland is now witnessing the re-emergence of Republican violence, and militant white supremacy - which is not terribly far removed from Breivik's own politics - has also been rising across the continent. Meanwhile, Breivik's far-right, anti-immigrant views are becoming an ever greater presence in European politics. It is folly to believe Islamist terrorism is a thing of the past or should no longer concern us. But it is also naive to think that Breivik is purely a freakish aberration. We can expect more of this domestic militancy, even if it won't always be spectacular enough to get the attention of our headline writers.

Waleed Aly is a lecturer in politics at Monash University, where he also works within the Global Terrorism Research Centre.


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