ClimateChange, Q & A and Brian Cox

GRAHAM WOODS

Open Letter to an Alarmist Shill

That ABC would stack its Q&A panel and audience comes as no surprise, as that is standard operating procedure at the national broadcaster. But even by those low standards,  alleged climate guru Brian Cox plumbed new depths in bias, bad manners and a compere's partisan indulgence

Dear Brian,
I’d appreciate your response to this email, which deals with your recent appearance on the ABC’sQ&A program.

First, I want to make it clear that, where you’re concerned, I’m not a ‘vexatious invigilator’.  My wife and I (each with an earned PhD) have watched most of your TV programs, and have been struck by their intellectual clarity and your unassuming personal style (as well as by your BMI: we’re high-level wellness devotees).  With that said, we both have serious misgivings about your recent appearance on Q&A.

No pronouncement that enjoys an audience has zero social consequences, and the more prominent the pronouncer the more significant the consequences are likely to be.  Your recent Q&A appearance brings that out well.  You were treated like a science guru, both by the audience and by compere Tony Jones, and it’s inevitable that what you said will affect the opinions of hundreds, probably thousands, of people.

You might disagree, but I’d argue that your authority carries a responsibility: a responsibility to ensure that your audience (whether that’s one person or thousands) is not misled by your pronouncements.  It’s difficult to evade the conclusion that, on this recent occasion, you didn’t live up to that responsibility.

First, the program itself, including some of its history.  In 2007, Tony Jones brought climate change sceptic Martin Durkin onto his program.  My wife, Denise, and I, at that stage relatively uninformed and open-minded about the subject, expected Durkin to be given a decent opportunity to put his case.  Instead, we watched the attempted ‘credibility destruction’ of a person who had obviously been set up to be ambushed.  The attack was carried out most enthusiastically by Jones himself.  I was so appalled by Jones’ behaviour that I wrote to the ABC about it (so did others); Denise and I were so disgusted that we’ve never been able to bring ourselves to watch Jones since.

In the recent Q&A (which, as matter of duty, I watched during its second airing, on Tuesday, August 16, 2016), Jones attacked nobody, but the ‘stage-management’ of that episode was undisguisedly tendentious.  On the panel there was no acknowledged climate or ‘climate -related’ scientist with known anti-AGW views (e.g. Bob Carter, William Kininmonth, Ian Plimer) – and, had there been, I suspect that you wouldn’t have been there.  In fact no panel member at all was a bona fide climate scientist: i.e. a scientist with specialised knowledge in one (or more) of the disciplines that are demonstrably related to global climate behaviour and who frequently applies that knowledge as a professional contributor to that field.

Instead, the panel comprised a ‘science superstar’ (an appellation used by commentators both before and after the show); a federal minister who would (inter alia) be interrogated about cutting spending on climate change; a federal opposition member with no obvious responsibility for any aspect of climate; a ‘mathematician’ (publicity blurb) who holds a bachelor degree built only partly on mathematics per se and who, as far as I know, is a person not connected professionally with any aspect of climate science research per se; and one lay climate sceptic who is – unfairly or not –  perceived by many Australians as an extremist (on many topics) and so was expected to shoot himself in the foot on the subject of climate change.

The outcome of the ‘debate’ was predictable: most media presented it as climate change scepticism being ‘debunked’ by a leading scientist with a worldwide reputation.

Whether or not you agree with your admirers about your status, as an experienced science presenter you know as well as I do that a national broadcaster in a self-proclaimed democracy has an ethical duty to present material in a balanced and fair manner; this was never more incumbent on a broadcaster than in the case of climate change.  Yet the Q&A program was stacked in a way that should have been expected to prejudice one side of a debate.  Why, then, did you agree to take part?  If your response is that there is no valid debate (a strange stance for a scientist anyway), then why were you there?  To lend your support to interaction that had a better than even chance of being reported as the modern equivalent of bear-baiting: a spectacle to thrill the masses?  (If you think I’m exaggerating here, just look at the coverage the show got later, including in your own British papers.)

A possible defence of the makeup of the panel is that the Q&A episode would deal with more than just the subject of climate change.  I would argue that to do justice to climate change under such circumstances was therefore next to impossible, and that it should not have been on the agenda.  But it was, and you came onto the show armed with graphs; given all the circumstances a balanced treatment of climate change never had a chance.

Another defence you might put is that you tried to be reasonable on the show and you can’t be held responsible for the way it was later misrepresented in the media and that you’re really quite surprised.  That defence might excuse a naive artisan scientist who works in a lab or out in the tundra, but you’re anything but.  You’re an experienced, media-savvy science presenter, well informed about embedded messages, the importance of context, the impact of the status of the messenger on the message, and much more.  (The ‘much more’ includes, or ought to include, the politics of science career protection and of access to scientific journals: each of these connected intimately with the other.)  The idea that a world-famous scientist, armed with graphs, would not have a profound influence on public opinion about climate change, is laughable; the idea that a contest between such a person and an already somewhat demonised antagonist would produce anything other than the result that it actually did, is just as risible.

I want to turn, now, to what you actually said (i.e. on climate and climate change) and what you didn’t say.

You presented some graphs (the fact that you had some ready suggests complicity in a stitch-up, but I’ll let you tell me how it was that you came onto the show so well prepared).  I’d appreciate copies, in due course, but what I took these graphs to show is that the mean global temperature has risen steadily during the last 100 years and so has the concentration of atmospheric CO₂.

The fact that the mean global temperature has risen during the last 100 years says nothing about what it was doing before then, and says nothing at all about its causes.  Even if the 100-year correlation with rising levels of atmospheric CO₂ were perfect (and there isn’t 100% agreement even on the purely statistical question of how good the correlation is), that proves nothing whatever about causation.  The fact that correlation says nothing about causation (a fact that guides all empirical inquiry, including science) was drawn to your attention by Malcolm Roberts, your sceptical fellow panel member, the fellow who, according to subsequent media assessments, you ‘schooled in the science of climate change’ and ‘exposed and destroyed’, and who is a ‘climate change denier’ (he isn’t) whose claims you refuted (you didn’t: you disputed them).

These facts – I call them part of the immediately relevant context – you grossly played down (I quote you: ‘The absolute – absolute – consensus is that human action is leading to an increase in average temperatures.  Absolute consensus.  I know you may try to argue with that but you can’t.’).  If youwant to argue that to include this ‘relevant context’ would have opened up issues that couldn’t easily be addressed within such confines, doesn’t that apply a fortiori to your decision to display the graphs themselves?

The predictable result of your manoeuvre was well captured in a tweet I noticed during the program: ‘the graph speaks!’.  With the utmost respect to this benighted soul: in the context of the program, the graph speaks but it does not fairly inform; moreover a glove puppet speaks too, but who is its manipulator?

As I understand it you’re an astrophysicist and/or particle physicist – and, by my own reckoning, you’re an excellent science presenter.  On Q&A the other night you let yourself be manipulated (or deliberately chose the strategy yourself), such that it was your credibility as a ‘scientist’ that gave credibility to your comments on climate.  But you aren’t a ‘climate scientist’ (i.e. you don’t study climate and its perturbations as your primary professional job): in the area of climate and climate change you’re a layman – almost certainly a well-informed one but still a layman: like your chief opponent, Malcolm Roberts, and like me in fact.  Your moral duty, I believe, was to emphasise, for the benefit of your audience, that you’re NOT a climate scientist: in respect to climate change your most pertinent expertise is that you’re a presenter and explicator of science topics.  Along with any other panel member, you had a perfect right to nominate the dimensions of climate and climate change that you believe deserve to be put on the table, but as a non-specialist and a non-expert you had an obligation to confine those dimensions to those about which there can be very little doubt whatever: dimensions or facts that any intelligent non-specialist could, in principle, discover for herself.  Here are some of them, the first and second groups surely safe from dispute by any climate scientist:

• Planet Earth is a dynamic planet in a dynamic solar system: thus climate change is, now and for millions of years to come, inevitable and unstoppable.  In the absence of climate change, life as it exists on our planet simply wouldn’t.
• Our global climate system is almost incomprehensibly complex: across geological time and into the present affected interactively by the sun; the moon; possibly by some of the larger planets; by tectonic plate movement; volcanic activity; cyclical changes in the earth’s oceans; changes in the quantum and distribution of the earth’s biomass; changes in greenhouse gases that themselves are the result of changes in more underlying factors; by changes in the earth’s tilt and solar orbit; probably by changes in the earth’s magnetic field; and possibly by some other non-anthropogenic factors that at present scientists either don’t know about or whose impact they haven’t yet fully appreciated.
• ‘Consensus’ means ‘majority view’; majority views can be egregiously wrong (witness the work of apostates Marshall and Warren in the case of Helicobacter pylori and stomach ulcers).
• There is no published estimate of the degree of consensus on any aspect of climate or climate change that is so statistically robust that it can’t be contested; in any case, the size of the majority in favour of a scientific conclusion is logically disconnected from its validity: scientific hypotheses and conclusions are refined and proven by empirical data, not crowd appeal.
• There are now countless thousands of studies drawn from at least twenty scientific disciplines that aim to – or purport to – shed light on how the earth’s climate ‘works’.  Many of their results and conclusions are, by their authors’ own reckoning, tentative; the results and conclusions of some studies contest the results and conclusions of others.  There would be few, if any, aspects of climate that could claim 100% agreement among the relevant researchers except some of the raw data – and even many of these are contested, because different (though prima facie equally defensible) methods have been adopted to collect them.
• In 2016, the feedback loops and tipping points that are assumed to affect global climate systems are, in actual real-world settings, imperfectly understood, and tipping points in particular are largely speculative.  This is true regardless of the possibility (even the likelihood) that the current ‘very rapid pulse increase’ in CO₂ is geologically unprecedented or the possibility that it will have irreversible climatic consequences.
• There is demonstrable scientific debate about the presumptive roles (yes, roles) of CO₂ in medium- and long-term climate change in the real world – and there is no conclusion about how CO₂ is related to these dimensions that is supported by incontestable empirical evidence.
• The impact of anthropogenic CO₂ is therefore a scientific question, not a matter on which ‘the science is settled’ or ‘the debate is over’.

You might nit-pick one or other of my proposed ‘agreed facts or dimensions’, but as a non-specialist appearing on a national TV ‘debate’ entered into by non-experts you had no legitimate brief to ignore most of them and substitute (albeit via oblique insertion) what I assume are your personal convictions about climate and climate change, misusing the face-validity of your science credentials to have your views uncritically accepted by a wider audience.

Let us, for one phantasmagorical moment, pretend that all the data are in (this would be a first for any science ever, and would transform it from science to dogma), that ‘the (scientific) debate is over’, that CO₂ has been shown unequivocally to be the main driver of global warming during the past 40 years, and that the existence of countervailing global mechanisms is vanishingly unlikely: given the world-wide concern about ‘climate change’, and given your high profile as a scientist, you have further duties of care I believe.  Chief among them is to help people understand what sort of world they’ll inhabit if fossil-sourced substances are taken off the menu.

Nuclear-powered electricity generation could, theoretically, substitute for a very significant proportion of current fossil-fuel-powered generation.  Assuming uniformly supportive governments and negligible public opposition (an unlikely scenario), nuclear power could be up and running across the world in 5-10 years.  It follows that fossil-fuel-powered generation will be required for at least that long: in reality it’s likely to be much longer.

Assuming anything less than a massive increase in nuclear electricity generation, in the absence of fossil-sourced energy and fossil-sourced raw materials (for many of which there are currently no realistic alternatives) at least the next twenty years would be years with minimal heating and cooling; with compromised urban street lighting; with compromised sewerage and other waste disposal systems; without motorised transport, functional agricultural, mining and industrial machinery, newly manufactured computers and tablets, mobile phones, television sets, refrigerators, bicycles or any other conventional consumer goods, including clothes and shoes; and with inadequate food and/or water for most of the world’s people and their pets and livestock.  Modern medicine would collapse; so would most school systems; so, probably, would our financial systems – and possibly even our political systems.  In such a world, people like Brian Cox won’t be able to jet to Australia – and will struggle to conduct their professional lives even via video-conferencing – and Al Gore will have to significantly reduce the scale of his energy-dense lifestyle.  The world as we’ve come to expect it during the past century simply won’t exist, and many of its human inhabitants will perish: in particular the already impoverished, the very young, the otherwise frail, and the physically handicapped.  In a world so beleaguered civil unrest is certain, and food-looting, widespread violence and murder are virtually guaranteed.  This is the larger context in which the ‘climate change debate’ (now over … ) should be conducted.  It’s a context that implies balancing risks against benefits, and that balance will have to be struck even if the worst of the climate-change scenarios is realised.

The sciences that are contributing to our full understanding of climate and climate change are a long way from achieving their goal; the debate that characterises their work is a sign of a healthy scientific enterprise.  The rise of climate-related ‘think-tanks’, ‘idea clearing-houses’ and other lobby groups – or individuals (on both sides of the contest) is predictable, but the main contribution of many of them, ill-informed and/or tendentious as they are, has been to massage prejudices and close people’s minds.  Your own contribution, on the recent Q & A, will almost certainly have that effect too: in fact the subsequent media coverage already comprises powerful evidence.  Your implicit invitation, that people do their own research, is disingenuous: you know, as well as I do, that most people won’t do their own research, and that many are simply not capable of it.  The vast majority of the world’s public look to respected spokespersons such as you to instruct them about what they should think and believe.  You have a profound duty of care to instruct them even-handedly and fairly; I believe you failed in that duty on the recent Q & A.

Denise and I will continue to watch your programs, simply because they’ve been so good and you seem so decent.  However, your recent appearance and performance on Q & A have severely disillusioned us.  Perhaps now is the time for you to consider a series of programs of your own on this, one of the most vexed of current topics.  Your flair for making complex subjects intelligible to the lay person without misrepresenting them (sadly, not on display on the recent Q & A) should make the series compelling.  But it’s precisely your recent appearance on Q & A that leads us to doubt that you would be able to conduct such a project fairly and with an open mind.

Undoubtedly you have a lot on your plate, so I’m willing to wait until 7 September for your response to this letter, without taking any further action.  If I’ve heard nothing by then, I’ll rework the document and distribute it as an open letter, available for scrutiny and comment by anybody.

With best wishes

Graham Woods

Australia

Settlement or Inavasion

Quadrant magazine

ROBERT MURRAY

1788 Deserves Better

Invasion won prime ministerial approval at the winter election and now seems set to win the decades-old battle with settlementas the key word in the larger argument about whether or not the origins of modern Australia were “shameful”.

Invasion is mainly applied to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788—one never hears it applied to settlement in comparable contexts, for example settlement in the north—and there are arguments for and against. It leads, though, to a general but erroneous public impression of the past. It gives the impression that European settlement in Australia was only achieved by armed force and widespread killing, which is far from the truth.

The invasion/massacre/dispossession “black armband” version of history now routinely appears in the media and fiction, is taught in schools and universities and is a staple of private conversation, often in a deeply moral way. But it is invariably just a “given”—a vague and generalised presumption without detail or context. It originates in history books, themselves sometimes only moderately biased, and then seeps into the system, becoming exaggerated over time. The available facts, however, do not support it.

There is not much direct evidence either way about what the Aborigines thought at any time about whites arriving. I have read everything I could find over many years, and the indirect evidence suggests that the Aborigines usually—though not always—accepted our forebears, shrewdly and warily. There is no evidence that, except in a few parts of the tropical north, the indigenous people “resisted invasion” or were in any modern sense “freedom fighters”.

The “evil ancestors” version, blaming supposedly ruthless and racist governors, police, soldiers and squatters, also barks up the wrong tree.

There is much more evidence about convict transportation and the record there is clear: for all its rough edges it was massively successful in improving the lives of scores of thousands of people.

To be quite clear, the colonial period was a disaster for Aborigines. But they have genuine grievances enough without the need of exaggeration or invention. The disaster that befell them was essentially a consequence of the outside world colliding with a continent and its people after they had lived in isolation for 50,000 years. Even if it had been foreseen, it would not have been avoided for long had Britain decided to ship its convicts elsewhere. Regrettably, it was an inevitable part of the opening up of the Pacific.

The extreme “black armband” version of Australia’s pioneer days is a fantasy, a 1970s radical confection from assorted anti-colonial theory, American history, anti-Vietnam War ideology and a dash of South Africa grafted on to cherry-picked bits of Australian history.

It is simply not true that the 1970s brought, Watergate-style, a sudden rush of enlightenment, until then suppressed, especially from school books, about the “shame” of Australia’s past and the “need to come to terms” with it. As with all history, there have been a lot of new books about the white–black encounter since the 1960s, varying from good to patchy to bad, but they add detail, opinions and interpretation; they do not change the main story.

Many of these books display an anti-white bias, mainly through being selective, and have sought to enlarge the Aboriginal presence in mainstream history and build up Aboriginal pride and confidence. The ensuing publicity established fashionable views which have been repeated uncritically and built on by guesswork.

It is hard to see how in the 1780s “permission” from the Sydney Aborigines, or a “treaty”, could have been practical, given the immense gulf of culture, language and distance. North American treaties between Europeans and natives, which are often held up as examples of what should have been done here in 1788, usually broke under the pressure of white expansion; they were rarely worth the paper they were written on.

The British executive governors in Australia instead used diplomacy and conciliation with the Aborigines, as London instructed them to do, and it worked reasonably well over the seven decades of governor rule that followed 1788.

There is no evidence that the Sydney Aborigines opposed the First Fleeters or had a big problem with their presence. Black-armband writers point to the clearing of land as an example of probably unwelcome invasion of space, or to known and recorded conflict with the Botany Bay dissident Pemulwuy.

While there is no record of what the Aborigines thought, a vast amount has been recorded and written about early Sydney. On balance the impression is of a fairly successful, well governed and harmonious society, especially given the human raw material.

It is unlikely that any of the London officials who authorised and organised the early fleets had ever heard of the words “Terra Nullius”, which was then a legal technicality but is now widely supposed to be the doctrine that allowed the British and other European powers to “invade” countries such as Australia.

From the remote past until about a century ago, powerful countries considered it normal to plant small colonies in less developed lands. This was particularly so when the colonies were in territory with small populations, “wilderness” without towns and farming or visibly built dwellings or identifiably effective government. Group movement of people from one country to another was seen as normal.

A lot of the world was still like this in 1788, though it had declined greatly over the centuries. Immigration and port restrictions were also in a fledgling state worldwide. It was a quieter, less busy world. World population in 1788 was about one billion, compared with 7.5 billion today.

The original European colonies were usually intended for trade, such as those planted in seventeenth-century India, but it was common enough also to plant them for domestic purposes, such as exiling convicts or for major power strategy considerations—all factors present in early Australian colonies, though convict transportation was the main purpose here. Over time and for various reasons, such as wool growing in Australia, early niche colonies often grew far beyond their original purposes and were then incorporated into empires.

What happened in Australia also happened in comparable ways in India and the Americas. It had been the way of the world back at least as far as ancient Rome and could be viewed as a natural way of bringing stronger, more developed society to the weaker ones. One could endlessly ponder the strengths or weaknesses of particular cultures but it is evident that some survived and developed better than others under the pressures of the outside world.

The idea that 1788 was an invasion became popular in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentennial. The main impetus was a perceived need to be more inclusive and build up Aboriginal pride, which seemed then to be sadly lacking. But “invasion” gives a wrong impression. People tend to imagine a process more like the D-Day invasion of occupied France in 1944 than the bland events at Port Jackson in 1788. There was a popular view around in 1988, which never even made it to print or screen, that the First Fleet came sailing in with war guns blazing at hapless indigenous defenders.

What did the Aborigines do? As far as we know, nothing much, except look on from the bush. One said later they thought the newcomers might be possums, climbing the ships’ masts as they did.

The main impression that emerges from fairly abundant records, and has been told in print over and again, is of the two Sydney-side races mingling fairly well, mutually curious and learning from each other. But there are serious qualifications to that happy picture that the black-armbanders seize on.

There were probably about a thousand Aborigines living around Sydney Harbour in 1788 in about a dozen loosely related communities, and 5000 of them in the wider Sydney region. The Australia-wide indigenous population was perhaps 750,000. The white population reached about 5000 in 1800 and only 190,000 even by 1840, when the Aboriginal population was about the same—extremely light use of the land by any standard. There were probably no more than 50,000 of each in the southern grazing lands.

White occupation of the land was slow—smidgins before 1800, and long after that only tiny coastal enclaves plus vast uncleared grazing runs. Only rarely did indigenous people directly oppose the process.

Nor was much land “grabbed”. An orderly system of government land grants prevailed in the Sydney basin and tiny areas around Hobart and Launceston in the early years. After about 1820 the grants went to wider areas within “limits of location”—about 350 kilometres round Sydney, and in the area between Hobart and Launceston. The grants were intended to grow food for the colony and help to pay its costs, to employ the convicts, teach them rural skills and encourage them to stay in Australia when their sentences expired. Immense expanses of unexploited bushland filled even these relatively “settled” districts.

Occupation by whites beyond the limits was illegal until 1836, when the wool boom had reached such a pitch that it was too big to stop. From 1836 these early “squatters” on the vast expanses beyond the “limits of location”—most of south-eastern Australia—had to pay for licences to graze their stock. Only after 1848 were the licences for fixed areas and periods, allowing more settled “stations” to develop.

Governments seemed at first to view the land as like common land in England, for informal sharing. Aboriginal rights were uncertain until 1848 but when some graziers drove local Aborigines from traditional lands, London ordered the grazing leases to be legally shared with the Aboriginal customary owners. Local colonial governments sometimes fudged the application, but the principle is the basis of Mabo.

As a rule, and with much qualification, the Aborigines accepted this rather light sharing of their lands with newcomers, who brought advantages such as more secure and diverse food and drink, metal goods, often a degree of security from hostile neighbouring tribes, and also the eye-opening wonders of the previously unknown outside world. It is, after all, normal for people to accept modernity.

Far more distressing for the indigenous people than the arrival in 1788 of a thousand interesting whites, surely, must have been the calamitous death rate at the same time. The greatest blow was the smallpox epidemic of 1789; First Fleet records estimate it to have killed about half the Aboriginal people of Sydney in a short time. The epidemic most likely originated in the Sulawesi area of Indonesia and came to the north coast of Australia with Sulawesi fishermen, who were frequent visitors at the time. Smallpox then spread throughout the continent by contact among the tribes, probably halving the total population.

A second smallpox calamity hit in the 1820s and also possibly again killed half the indigenous population of Australia, as well devastating many of the Pacific islands. Again Indonesian outlying islands are suspected to be the source. Black-armbanders ignore the epidemics or make little of them, and the less responsible ones guess that the First Fleet brought smallpox.

The origins of the epidemics have been debated, inconclusively, for two centuries but the weight of evidence is with the northern source. A First Fleet source cannot be ruled out but is the least likely of various suggestions. There is no record of smallpox on the First Fleet ships, and the time and distance of the voyage would not have allowed the germs to survive.

Once smallpox has entered an area the population gradually becomes immune, as in Britain or Java, but it devastates unexposed populations with no long-term history of it, such as the outer Indonesians, Australian Aborigines and Pacific islanders.

Another population calamity was venereal disease. Convicts and visiting seamen from 1788 onwards undoubtedly brought it but it might also have been spread by the Indonesian fishermen. Once into Australia, it spread through the unsuspecting indigenous people, devastating women’s ability to have children.

The age-old custom of lending wives—it was a polygamous society with child betrothal and two or often several wives—in exchange for presents had been a social bond over isolated aeons when visitors were rare, but it was calamitous when the outside world crashed in.

Aboriginal liking for alcohol, especially when visiting towns like Sydney, multiplied the disaster, since the Aboriginal people often traded encounters with their women for grog. White observers from time to time reported rates of 30 per cent and even up to 90 per cent of indigenous women suffering from venereal disease. Official reports on populations of various tribes show very small numbers of children, especially compared to the big-breeding colonial whites. Aboriginal infanticide—the killing of unwanted babies, including part-white ones—also reduced the population, although reliable information about its extent, which seemed to vary, is scarce. This again was age-old practice geared to life in the wild, especially in difficult times.

Other European diseases like influenza and measles do not seem to have been big killers in the early decades but they added to the tsunami of fatal disease, especially in Tasmania and other colder climates, as the white population increased, voyages became faster and more frequent, and colonisation spread. Tuberculosis was another major cause of death, among whites then too, but thought to have been devastating among blacks.

Aborigines, especially mixed-race people, gradually learned precautions against the new diseases, and immunity may also have improved. By the 1880s the plummeting population numbers of the mid-nineteenth century began to steady, but recorded indigenous numbers continued to fall; they reached a low of about 80,000 in 1930, but this figure excluded many part-European people.

Australian health control was fairly good, though, and the worst international killer diseases, such as cholera, were kept out. Little is known about Aboriginal health in the long aeons of isolation from the world.

Massacres of Aborigines by whites and vice versa have long haunted the Australian imagination. Old bush tales about them abound. People as various as South Africans and the far Left seize on them as the main reason for the decline in the Aboriginal population. Massacres had an especial lease of life in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War protests, when the spin was added that knowledge of them had been suppressed until that time.

Nobody denies that massacres happened. The challenge is sorting out the facts from substantial but inadequate evidence and an overdose of rumour. “Freedom fighting” and “defending country” rarely fit the evidence, except occasionally in the far north. I have seen very few references to verified poisoning and even fewer of poisoned waterholes.

As an extremely inadequate summary, from inadequate evidence, there may have been forty or so massacres around the country between 1800 and 1920. They were more often extended, lethal skirmishes in the bush than set-piece massacres.

Only about half a dozen that we know of were in the first fifty years of white settlement on the mainland. This period saw the great wool boom, when graziers spread over much of southern Australia, and Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane were founded. Most incidents could be attributed to white mistakes rather than outright resistance. Otherwise, as far as records show, relative racial harmony prevailed throughout Australia until 1838—a considerable achievement, as officialdom liked to point out.

It would not have been difficult for the Aborigines to have fought off the whites then, had they seriously wanted to. The graziers advanced with slow-moving mobs of sheep accompanied by bullock drays on barely existent bush tracks. Most of the accompanying workers, typically serving or former convicts, were on foot, usually unarmed. Such guns as there were were muskets or long-barrelled rifles, of limited use against nimble Aborigines armed with spears and knowing every inch of their country.

A period of serious conflict began in 1838 and lasted in southern Australia until the mid-1840s. The reasons are not known with certainty—the Aborigines kept no records—but they can be estimated. One would have been drought—1838 was a bad drought year. The Aborigines might also have become wary of the overbearing and permanent nature of the white advance, or perhaps they wanted rent. But this is speculation. It is important to remember that “the Aborigines” were not a single entity but a collection of loosely governed tribes (more accurately described as clans and language groups), historically antagonistic and sometimes at war.

By the late 1830s the squatters were moving into more remote country where the Aborigines may have seen them as allies of neighbouring tribes where squatters had already settled. Such indigenous “politics” seem to have been a frequent flashpoint on the frontier, but it is hard for historians to assess other than circumstantially.

Much of the lethal racial violence of 1838 to 1845 was in these new squatting districts, such as far south-western Victoria, home of the independent, technically somewhat advanced Gunditjmara people; Gippsland (south-eastern Victoria), home of the warlike Kurnai who were already bitterly at war with the Kulin of central Victoria; and in far north-western New South Wales around the Queensland border, home of the big, strong Kamilaroi.

The biggest single cause of fighting, though, was large-scale sheep stealing (at least that’s how debt-plagued squatters perceived it). To again summarise a poorly understood subject, I think the main cause was the many light-fingered former or escaped convicts then roaming the frontier and attempting to set up little pastoral operations of their own and asserting themselves over the local Aborigines.

But it was a real tangle. Various motives have been attributed to explain Aboriginal sheep stealing, from all-out resistance, to punishing particular squatters, to simply being naughty. But the main reason was that they loved barbecued mutton. It seemed more about property and women, including raids on huts and drays, than about land.

The north of Australia saw much more frontier violence, especially in Queensland, where deaths of whites at black hands numbered in the hundreds and Aborigines possibly in the thousands. By then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, guns were much more advanced, horses much more numerous and distances even more immense. Northern Aborigines had the reputation of being more aggressive and there were more of them. The convict era had long gone, so convicts cannot be blamed.

The biggest and most distinctive human killers of Aborigines there were the native police forces, comprising mounted, armed Aborigines under white officers. Especially in Queensland, they developed a dreadful reputation for killing and mistreating Aborigines from outside their own tribal group—who were the great majority of those they dealt with.

Records are poor. How much of the lethal turmoil, especially between 1860 and 1890 when graziers flooded over northern Australia, was due to defending squatters from attacks on their livestock and on themselves and their workers, and how much to friction among Aborigines, remains unknown. But it was a wild time.

The number of Aborigines killed in conflict with whites and native police forces is not known. Published estimates are extremely rough guesstimates, but probably several thousand lost their lives—a sad, if relatively small, contribution to Aboriginal depopulation.

Note: This article has been summarised from many books and records. Two good books are Jan Critchett’s A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers, 1834–1848 (1990) and Judy Campbell’s Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1788–1880(2002).

Robert Murray is the author of The Making of Australia: A Concise History (Rosenberg).

RealitiesOfDomesticViolence

The Australian 20thAugust 2016

Domestic violence groups have built an industry on skewed figures
Eva Solberg is a Swedish politician, a proud feminist who holds an important post as chairwoman of the party Moderate Women. Last year she was presented with her government’s latest strategy for combating domestic violence. Like similar reports across the world, this strategy assumes the only way to tackle domestic violence is through teaching misogynist men (and boys) to behave themselves.

The Swedish politician spat the dummy. Writing on the news site Nyheter24, Solberg took issue with her government’s “tired gendered analysis”, which argued that eradicating sexism was the solution to the problem of domestic violence. She explained her reasoning: “We know through extensive practice and experience that attempts to solve the issue through this kind of analysis have failed. And they failed precisely because violence is not and never has been a gender issue.”

Solberg challenged the government report’s assumption that there was a guilty sex and an innocent one. “Thanks to extensive research in the field, both at the national and international level, we now know with great certainty that this breakdown by sex is simply not true.”

She made reference to the world’s largest research database on intimate partner violence, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, which summarises more than 1700 scientific papers on the topic.

She concluded that her government’s report was based on misinformation about family violence and that, contrary to the report’s one-sided view of men as the only perpetrators, many children were experiencing a very different reality: “We must recognise the fact that domestic violence, in at least half of its occurrence, is carried out by female perpetrators.”

One of the key patterns that emerged from PASK, Solberg said, was that violence in the family was an inherited problem and children learned from watching the violence of both their parents. “To know this and then continue to ignore the damage done to the children who are today subjected to violence is a huge social betrayal,” she concluded. “The road to a solution for this social problem is hardly to stubbornly continue to feed the patient with more of the same medicine that has already been tried for decades.”

There’s a certain irony that this happened in Sweden, the utopia for gender equality and the last place you would expect misogyny to be blamed for a major social evil. But despite Scandinavian countries being world leaders in gender equality (as shown by the 2014 World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index), Nordic women experience the worst physical or sexual violence in the EU. Given this inconvenient truth it seems extraordinary that for decades the gendered analysis of domestic violence has retained its grip on Sweden — as it has in other Western countries, including Australia.

No one would deny that it was a great achievement to have men’s violence against women fully acknowledged and to take critical steps to protect vulnerable women and ensure their safety.

But it has been shocking to watch this morph into a worldwide domestic violence industry determined to ignore evidence showing the complexities of violence in the home and avoid prevention strategies that would tackle the real risk factors underpinning this vital social issue.

Here, too, we are witnessing Solberg’s “huge social betrayal” by denying the reality of the violence being witnessed by many Australian children.

Just look at the bizarre $30 million television campaign the federal government ran a few months ago, which started with a little boy slamming a door in a little girl’s face. A series of vignettes followed, all about innocent females cowering from nasty males.

The whole thing is based on the erroneous notion that domestic violence is caused by disrespect for women, precisely the type of “tired gender analysis” that Solberg has so thoroughly discredited.

Yet our government spent at least $700,000 in funding for research and production of this campaign — just one example of the shocking misuse of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Malcolm Turnbull boasts our government is spending on domestic violence.

Our key organisations all sing from the same songbook, regularly distorting statistics to present only one part of this complex story.

There is a history of this in Australia. “Up to one quarter of young people in Australia have witnessed an incident of physical or domestic violence against their mother or stepmother,” Adam Graycar, a former director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, wrote in an introduction to a 2001 paper, Young Australians and Domestic Violence, a brief overview of the much larger Young People and Domestic Violence study.

Somehow Graycar failed to mention that while 23 per cent of young people were aware of domestic violence against their mothers or stepmothers, an almost identical proportion (22 per cent) of young people were aware of domestic violence against their fathers or stepfathers by their mothers or stepmothers — as shown in the same study.

This type of omission is everywhere today, with most of our bureaucracies downplaying statistics that demonstrate the role of women in family violence and beating up evidence of male aggression.

How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true. Most Australian women are lucky enough to live in a peaceful society where the men in their lives treat them well.

The official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows violence against women has decreased across the 20-year period it has been studied, with the proportion of adult women experiencing physical violence from their male partner in the preceding year down from 2.6 per cent in 1996 to 0.8 per cent in 2012. (Violence from ex-partners dropped from 3.3 per cent to 0.7 per cent.)

“There’s no evidence that we’re in the middle of an epidemic of domestic violence,” says Don Weatherburn, the respected director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, confirming that these figures from national surveys carried out by the ABS provide the best data on domestic violence in the country.

He adds that in NSW “serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, have actually come down by 11 per cent over the last 10 years”.

The most recent statistics from the ABS Personal Safety Survey show 1.06 per cent of women are physically assaulted by their partner or ex-partner each year in Australia. This figure is derived from the 2012 PSS and published in its Horizons report by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, available at http://bit.ly/1ZYSyEj. The rate is obtained by dividing cell B9 in Table 19 (93,400) by the total female residential population aged 18 and older (8,735,400).

One in 100 women experiencing this physical violence from their partners is obviously a matter of great concern. But this percentage is very different from the usual figures being trotted out. You’ll never find the figure of 1.06 per cent mentioned by any of the domestic violence organisations in this country. Their goal is to fuel the flames, to promote an alarmist reaction with the hope of attracting ever greater funding for the cause.

What we hear from them is that one in three women are victims of violence. But that’s utterly misleading because it doesn’t just refer to domestic violence. These statistics are also taken from the Personal Safety Survey but refer to the proportion of adult women who have experienced any type of physical violence at all (or threat of violence.) So we’re not just talking about violence by a partner or violence in the home but any aggressive incident, even involving a perfect stranger — such as an altercation with an aggressive shopping trolley driver or an incident of road rage.

That’s partly how the figure inflates to one in three, but it also doesn’t even refer to what’s happening now because these figures include lifetime incidents for adult women — so with our 70-yearolds the violence could have taken place more than 50 years ago. And the equivalent figure for men is worse — one in two.

As for the most horrific crimes, where domestic violence ends in homicide, we are constantly told that domestic violence kills one woman every week. That’s roughly true.

According to AIC figures, one woman is killed by an intimate partner or ex-partner every nine days. One man is killed by his partner about every 30 days. So it is important to acknowledge that male violence is likelier to result in injury or death than female violence towards a partner.

The fact remains that almost a quarter (23.1 per cent) of victims of intimate partner homicide are male — and we hardly ever hear about these deaths.

It is not serving our society well to downplay the fact female violence can also be lethal, towards men and towards children: women account for more than half of all murders of children (52 per cent).

These are all still alarming statistics but here, too, there is good news. Domestic homicides are decreasing. The number of victims of intimate partner homicide dropped by almost a third (28 per cent) between 1989-90 and 2010-12, according to data supplied by the AIC (http://bit.ly/2bxn1GO).

Chris Lloyd is one of a growing number of Australian academics concerned at the misrepresentation of domestic violence statistics in this country. An expert in statistics and data management at the Melbourne Business School, Lloyd confirms our best source of data, the ABS’s Personal Safety Survey, clearly demonstrates domestic violence is decreasing.

He, too, says it’s wrong to suggest there’s an epidemic of domestic violence in this country. “Many of the quoted statistics around domestic violence are exaggerated or incorrect,” says Lloyd. “Contrary to popular belief and commentary, rates of intimate partner violence are not increasing.” He adds that while he understands the emotional reaction people have to this crime, “emotion is no basis for public policy”.

He’s concerned that Australian media so often publishes misinformation — such as a recent editorial in The Age that repeated the falsehood that domestic violence was the leading cause of death or illness for adult women in Victoria.

As I explained in my Inquirer article “Silent victims” last year (http://bit.ly/29CV5zD), it doesn’t even make the list of the top 10 such causes. The Age ignored Lloyd’s efforts to correct its mistake, ditto his concern about erroneous media reports that inflated domestic violence figures by using police crime statistics — a notoriously unreliable source.

As Weatherburn points out, it’s very difficult to determine whether swelling numbers of incidents reported to police reflects an increase in actual crime. “It may simply be a tribute to the excellent job that has been done to raise awareness of DV, encouraging women to report, and efforts to get the police to respond properly,” he points out.

Weatherburn believes that the slight (5.7 per cent) increase in reports of domestic assault in NSW during the past 10 years could be due to an increase in victims’ willingness to report domestic assault; he points to the 11 per cent drop across that time in serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, as a more reliable picture of the trend in domestic violence.

Weatherburn adds that valid comparisons of state police figures on assault are impossible because each police force has a different approach to recording assault. But in many states the goalposts have also shifted.

The explosion in police records is due in part to recent expansions in the definition of family violence to include not just physical abuse but also threats of violence, psychological, emotional, economic and social abuse. Look at Western Australia, where this changed definition was introduced in 2004. That year West Australian police recorded 17,000 incidents of violence, but by 2012 this had almost tripled to 45,000.

Other states report similar trends because of these expanded definitions.

“If a woman turns up to a police station claiming her man has yelled at her, the chances are that she’ll end up with a police report and well on her way to obtaining an apprehended violence order, which puts her in a very powerful position,” says Augusto Zimmermann, a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, who explains that AVOs can be used to force men to leave their homes and deny them contact with their children.

Often men are caught in police proceedings and evicted from their homes by orders that are issued without any evidence of legal wrongdoing. “It is a frightening reality that here in Australia a perfectly innocent citizen stands to lose his home, his family, his reputation, as a result of unfounded allegations. This is happening to men every day (as a consequence) of domestic violence laws which fail to require the normal standards of proof and presumptions of innocence,” Zimmermann says, adding that he’s not talking about genuine cases of violent men who seriously abuse their wives and children but “law-abiding people who have lost their parental and property rights without the most basic requirements of the rule of law”.

The growing trend for AVOs to be used for tactical purposes in family law disputes is also pushing up police records of domestic violence. “Rather than being motivated by legitimate concerns about feeling safe, a woman can make an application to AVO simply because she was advised by lawyers to look for any reason to apply for such an order when facing a family law dispute,” says Zimmermann, who served on a recent government inquiry into legal issues and domestic violence.

A survey of NSW magistrates found 90 per cent agreed that AVOs were being used as a divorce tactic. Research by family law professor Patrick Parkinson and colleagues from the University of Sydney revealed that lawyers were suggesting that clients obtain AVOs, explaining to them that verbal and emotional abuse were enough to do the trick

The bottom line is that police reports tell us little and the ABS Personal Safety Survey remains our best source of data, showing the true picture of domestic violence. But there’s one more vital fact revealed by that survey that rarely surfaces: men account for one in three victims of partner violence.

You’ll never find this figure mentioned on Our Watch, one of our leading domestic violence organisations, annually attracting government grants of up to $2 million. In May, when Lucy Turnbull became an ambassador for Our Watch, she was welcomed by its chief executive, Mary Barry, who thanked the ambassadors for “engaging Australians to call out disrespect and violence towards women and advocating for gender equality”, which was “exactly what the evidence says is needed to end the epidemic”.

Our Watch staff spend their time writing policy documents and running conferences all firmly locked into the gender equity framework. The site’s facts-andfigures pages include lists of cherry-picked statistics about violence against women but male victims are dismissed by simply stating that the “overwhelming majority of acts of domestic violence are perpetrated by men against women”.

There’s an interesting parallel here. As it happens, this one-inthree ratio is similar to the proportions of suicides among men and women. Among males, 2.8 per cent of all deaths in 2014 were attributed to suicide, while the rate for females was 0.9 per cent. Imagine the public outcry if the smaller number of female suicides were used to justify committing the entire suicide prevention budget to men. So why is it that all our government organisations are getting away with doing just that with the hundreds of millions being spent on domestic violence?

According to one of Australia’s leading experts on couple relationships, Kim Halford, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Queensland, most family violence does not fit the picture most of us have when we imagine domestic violence — a violent man severely beating up his partner to control her. Such violence makes up less than 1 per cent of family violence.

Most family violence is twoway aggression, with international research showing about a third of couples have a go at each other — pushing, slapping, shoving or worse. Given the shame and stigma associated with being a male victim of family violence it is not surprising that men downplay these experiences in victim surveys such as Australia’s Personal Safety Survey. It’s only when men and women are asked about perpetrating violence that the twoway violence emerges, with women readily admitting to researchers that they are very actively involved and often instigate this type of “couple violence”.

“Thirty years of international research consistently shows that women and men are violent towards each other at about the same rate,” Halford tells Inquirer.

As one example, two major meta-analysis studies conducted by psychology professor John Archer from Britain’s University of Central Lancashire in 2000 and 2002 found that women were likelier than men to report acts such as pushing, slapping or throwing something at their partner. Archer pointed out that women were likelier to be injured as a result of the couple violence, although there was still a substantial minority of injured male victims.

This two-way violence wasn’t what most researchers expected to find, admits a leading researcher in this area, Terrie Moffitt from Duke University in the US. “We asked the girls questions like, ‘Have you hit your partner?’ ‘Have you thrown your partner across the room?’ ‘Have you used a knife on your partner?’ I thought we were wasting our time asking these questions but they said yes, and they said yes in just the same numbers as the boys did.” Moffitt’s work with young people was part of the world-renowned Dunedin longitudinal study back in the 1990s that recently featured on the SBS series Predict My Future (http://bit.ly/29NEDwQ).

It is telling that Australia has not conducted any of the largescale surveys focusing on perpetrating violence likely to reveal the two-way pattern shown elsewhere. But gender symmetry did emerge in violence studies published in 2010-11 by Halford that focused on couples at the start of their relationships, newlywed couples and couples expecting a child together. Even with these early relationships, about a quarter of the women admit they have been violent towards their partners — just as many as the men.

Halford suggests that perhaps three-quarters of a million children every year in Australia are witnessing both parents engaged in domestic violence. Only small numbers see the severe violence we hear so much about, what the feminists call “intimate terrorism”, where a perpetrator uses violence in combination with a variety of other coercive tactics to take control over their partner, but as Halford points out, even less severe couple violence is not trivial.

“Children witnessing any form of family violence, including couple violence, suffer high rates of mental health problems and the children are more likely to be violent themselves. Couple violence is also a very strong predictor of relationship break-up, which has profound effects on adults and their children,” he says.

The 2001 Young People and Domestic Violence study mentioned earlier was based on national research involving 5000 young Australians aged 12 to 20. This found ample evidence that children were witnessing this twoway parental couple violence, with 14.4 per cent witnessing “couple violence”, 9 per cent witnessing male to female violence only and 7.8 per cent witnessing female to male violence only — which means about one in four young Australians have this detrimental start to their lives. The report found the most damage to children occurred when they witnessed both parents involved in violence.

It is often claimed that women hit only in self-defence, but Halford points out the evidence shows this is not true. “In fact, one of the strongest risk factors for a woman being hit by a male partner is her hitting that male partner. It’s absolutely critical that we tackle couple violence if we really want to stop this escalation into levels of violence which cause women serious injury,” he says. Of course, the impact on children is the other important reason to make couple violence a significant focus.

Naturally, none of this rates a mention in the section on “what drives violence against women” in the official government framework (http://bit.ly/2a3sVOQ) promoted by all our key domestic violence bodies. Nor is there any proper attention paid to other proven, evidence-based risk factors such as alcohol and drug abuse, poverty and mental illness.

The only officially sanctioned risk factor for domestic violence in this country is gender inequality. “Other factors interact with or reinforce gender inequality to contribute to increased frequency and severity of violence against women, but do not drive violence in and of themselves” is the only grudging acknowledgment in the framework that other factors may be at play.

At the recent hearings of Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence, experts in alcohol abuse and mental illness spoke out about this blatant disregard of the 40 years of research that addresses these complexities. “It is simplistic and misleading to say that domestic violence is caused by patriarchal attitudes,” said James Ogloff, a world-renowned mental health expert.

“A sole focus on the gendered nature of family violence, which labels men as the perpetrators and women as the victims and which identifies gender inequity as the principal cause of family violence, is problematic on a number of levels,” said Peter Miller, principal research fellow and co-director of the violence prevention group at Deakin University.

Miller was involved in a comprehensive recent review of longitudinal studies involving predictors of family violence that identified childhood experiences with abuse and violence, particularly in families with problem alcohol use, as key predictors of adult involvement in domestic violence. He has encountered obstruction in conducting and publishing research into the role of drugs and alcohol in family violence.

The evidence is there about the complexities of domestic violence, but on an official level no one is listening. The reason is simple. The deliberate distortion of this important social issue is all about feminists refusing to give up hardwon turf. Ogloff spelled this out to the royal commission when he explained that the Victorian family violence sector feared that “recognising other potential causes of violence could cause a shift in funding away from programs directed at gender inequity”.

Forty years ago an important feminist figure was invited to Australia to visit our newly established women’s refuges. Erin Pizzey was the founder of Britain’s first refuge, a woman praised around the world for her pioneering work helping women escape from violence. On the way to Australia Pizzey travelled to New Zealand, where she spoke out about her changing views. She had learned through dealing with violent women in her refuge that violence was not a gender issue and that it was important to tackle the complexities of violence to properly address the issue.

Pizzey quickly attracted the wrath of the women’s movement in Britain, attracting death threats that forced her for a time to leave the country. She tells Inquirer from London: “The feminists seized upon domestic violence as the cause they needed to attract more money and supporters at a time when the first flush of enthusiasm for their movement was starting to wane. Domestic violence was perfect for them — the just cause that no one dared challenge. It led to a worldwide million-dollar industry, a huge cash cow supporting legions of bureaucrats and policymakers.”

In Pizzey’s New Zealand press interviews she challenged the gender inequality view of violence, suggesting tackling violence in the home required dealing with the real roots of violence, such as intergenerational exposure to male and female aggression.

News travelled fast. By the time Pizzey was set to leave for the Australian leg of the trip she was persona non grata with the feminists running our refuges. Her visit to this country was cancelled.

That was 1976. Since then the gendered view of domestic violence has held sway, dissenters are silenced and evidence about the true issues underlying this complex issue is ignored. And the huge cash cow supporting our blinkered domestic violence industry becomes ever more bloated.

How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true
Bettina Arndt is a Sydney-based social commentator.

PC world

THE AUSTRALIAN

The death of humour

BILL LEAK

Forget terrorist attacks, it’s humourless hipsters who threaten our way of life

I told a joke at a dinner party in 1978 and no one laughed. I knew it was a good joke because I’d laughed until my tonsils showed when I first heard it and everyone I’d gone on to tell it to had done the same.

But not this mob. Their constipated faces suggested a belly laugh ready to emerge, but they seemed determined not to let it as they squirmed in their chairs, grimaced and flapped their hands in disgust.

My host, an intimidatingly intellectual Marxist academic lecturing not in art but in “visual communication”, launched into a vicious but eloquent tirade of abuse, excoriating me for having told a joke that was racist and sexist, and therefore unworthy of being told in his exalted company.

While I didn’t know it then, I’d been belted by someone wielding the weapon now known as political correctness. They were opening salvos in a war on humour itself that has forged a strange alliance between supposed Western progressive thinkers and the anti-progress force of Islam.

Political correctness has been thriving in the Islamic world since the seventh century. Not even the smuggest, most self-righteous social justice warrior in Australia today could hold a candle to Mohammed, who made the antiguy guy David Morrison look like Rodney Rude. Mohammed occasionally smiled but would never display his tonsils, though one of his disciples once did report excitedly that he “indeed saw the Messenger of Allah laugh till his front teeth were exposed”.

He also advised his followers not to laugh because “laughing too much deadens the heart” and warned them off joking by saying: “A man may say something to make his companions laugh, and he will fall into Hell as far as the Pleiades because of it.” In other words, the reward for anyone telling jokes and making his mates laugh was to spend eternity burning in the fires of hell.

If you want to crack a gag at an Islamist open mic night you’ve got to make sure you stick within the guidelines as laid down in the Koran and Hadith. And that means “for humour to be in accordance with Islam, the joke should not insult anyone, should not frighten anyone, should be within the limits of Islamic tolerance, should tell the truth, should not be offensive, should not contain un-Islamic material or promote immorality or indecency”.

Sound familiar?

If you substitute PC for Islam in that set of rules you’ve got the rules governing humour as laid down by the progressive Left in the democracies of the modern world. Right there, in a nutshell. Except you’d have to leave out the one that demands you tell the truth because the primary purpose of PC is the avoidance of it.

As human beings, we are hardwired to a need for transcendent, sublime experience. We need access to a higher level of consciousness that provides us with an escape from the mundane realities of everyday life in a way that’s more enduring and more rewarding than, say, a night out on the eccies. So what is it about the sublime that postmodernist progressives find so objectionable? You don’t deconstruct a joke before laughing at it; when you get it, you experience it. And you don’t read or analyse a work of art; you experience that, too.

Both, at their best, give you access to the sublime.

But by demanding of art that it must have a literal meaning, postmodernism has demeaned and suffocated art by reducing it to the level of illustration, and the whole idea of art as a means of accessing the transcendent has gone right out the door. Visitors to galleries are now required to read the artist’s statement first before plunging into the work itself for fear of not knowing how to navigate their way around it, not understanding its meaning and walking away baffled. But there’s no artist’s statement next to Picasso’s Guernica, Beethoven didn’t write a list of instructions for people to read before listening to his symphonies and you didn’t need a degree in philosophy to find Groucho Marx funny. He just was.

So, with access to the sublime through art now denied and Christianity discredited, environmentalism has emerged to fill the higher power vacuum and become the religion of choice for everyone who claims not to have one. It is every bit as oppressive as Christianity used to be and Islam still is, its high priests preach just as much fire and brimstone from their pulpits, and its devotees are every bit as dull. Its influence is so pervasive that our postreligion, atheistic society has not only become a deeply religious one, it’s on the verge of transforming into a theocracy.

If you’re found guilty of heresy against the new religion its perpetually offended and outraged adherents respond with the same sort of savagery that once drove Christians to burn witches and now drives Islamists to acts of mass murder. And you’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe they wouldn’t happily make the transition from metaphorical lynching on social media to actual lynching if given the chance.

Prudishness used to be the prerogative of the straitlaced conservative who attended church and was derided as a Bible-basher. Today, virtue signalling and censoriousness are fashionable so it has become the prerogative of the hipster. And with the sanctimonious hordes lying in wait, armed to the teeth with Twitter and Facebook accounts and ready to ambush anyone who transgresses the unwritten laws of the new puritanism, the cartoonist’s job gets harder every day.

The trick has always been to look at a serious issue, exaggerate it to the point of absurdity and draw what you see when you get there. But the trick doesn’t work in these strange times when the more ridiculous an issue is, the more seriously it’s taken. And if you’re starting at the point of absurdity, where do you go from there? What’s the point in pointing out the absurdity inherent in something that’s obviously absurd and, more important, why isn’t everyone already laughing?

Why didn’t everyone just burst out laughing when, for example, someone suggested the dark arts of penis tucking and breast binding be taught to little children as part of the school curriculum? If we, as a society, weren’t losing our sense of the absurd, no one, let alone government ministers in the federal parliament, would have been able to keep a straight face when they heard that one. It would have been even more difficult to suppress a chuckle when that same person went on to explain that teaching little kids cross-dressing techniques would stop them being nasty and calling each other names and that no one would find it silly if the whole exercise were to be disguised as an anti-bullying program.

I mean, give me a break. In their relentless quest to transform society into the dismal utopia of their dreams, not even the innocence of childhood is safe from attack by the authoritarian barbarians of the new left intelligentsia. And because the progressive fundamentalists now are trying to dictate what’s permissible when it comes to cracking jokes, just like the barbarians of fundamentalist Islam, cartoonists have found themselves on the frontline.

The keyboard warriors of the

Prudishness today is the prerogative of the hipster and virtue signalling and censoriousness have become fashionable humourless Left could learn a thing or two from that old prankster, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who said: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.” And he wasn’t joking.

In 1989 he issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing a book. Sixteen years later a group of cartoonists in Denmark proved you no longer had to go to the trouble of writing a whole book to put your life, and the lives of others, in danger; drawing a cartoon would do the trick.

Two hundred people died in riots that swept across the world because a single page full of cartoons was published in a Danish newspaper.

Ten years later, 12 people were shot dead in the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, five of whom were cartoonists.

Two days later I drew an innocuous cartoon in response to this atrocity and woke up the next morning with a roaring fatwa. Officers in the counter-terrorist unit were picking up instructions to “fellow mujaheddin” in Australia from some wannabe gangsta of Islamic State to hunt me down and kill me for having offended the delicate sensitivities of adherents of a religion that imposed restrictions on humour.

Like the big brains in our human heads, our sense of humour is something that has taken a long time to evolve and we’ve developed it for very good reasons. By laughing at the things we fear most, humour enables us to rise above them. Our ability to recognise and laugh at the absurd provides us with a mechanism for keeping things in perspective without which we’d all go insane. Just as our sense of smell tells us a prawn has gone off and we’d better not eat it, our sense of humour tells us something’s absurd and we’d better not take it seriously. But unlike the smell of the rotten prawn that makes us reel back in disgust, the sudden impact of a front-on crash between the serious and the absurd makes us burst into laughter — a visceral, cathartic explosion of enjoyment not even the dourest intellectual would describe as unpleasant.

And what sort of dour intellectual would want to deny any other human being such simple but transcendent moments of pure joy? It would have to be someone who, through some perversion of the evolutionary process, had arrived at a stage where a conscious effort to suppress the urge to laugh at something funny was no longer required. This person would have achieved a state of humourlessness Mohammed himself would have admired and the likes of my academic mates back in 1978 could only dream of. Someone like Rebecca Shaw, for example.

Tim Blair wrote a hilarious column on May 9 in which he argued that if the man previously known as Bruce Jenner can now call himself Caitlyn and be considered a woman and a white woman named Rachel Dolezal can now be considered a black woman because that’s what she says she is, then it’s unfair that Belle Gibson isn’t allowed to be considered a cancer survivor just because she has never had cancer.

In a blistering response, Shaw, who identifies as a humorist — “one of Australia’s leading satirists”, no less — and writes hysterical columns that appear on the SBS website, went to great pains to explain why Blair’s column wasn’t funny. Among other damning insights, Shaw claimed Blair failed to amuse because he was “a writer making comparisons between two completely unrelated things” — a view that would have surprised most thinkers who have tried to understand why some things make us laugh, including Arthur Koestler, who believed “humour results when two different frames

of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them”.

For most of us reading Blair’s column no explanation of why it was funny was needed; it just was. And certainly for anyone reading Shaw’s musings, no explanation of why they weren’t funny was needed either; they just weren’t. The thing that does require an explanation is how someone like Shaw can be considered a satirist. She and the legions of others who stormed in to provide her with back-up spend their time looking for things to be offended by, instead of amused by, and then getting angry about them instead of laughing at them.

Satire is an offensive weapon

and when you fire it off someone, somewhere, will claim their feelings have been hurt. That’s their business. If they choose to be the collateral damage in a humour assault, it’s hardly the fault of the person who launched it.

You can’t keep loading up the cannon and blasting away if you’re going to waste time worrying about people who prefer to be offended than amused.

The cartoonist’s task has always been to reveal uncomfortable truths in a humorous way. People will pause to reflect on something, no matter how confronting it is, if they’re able to laugh at it first.

As a white, cisgendered Aussie male of a certain age, I could identify as a member of a persecuted minority myself and luxuriate in self-pity while being perpetually offended. Instead I find myself not only disillusioned but also frankly amazed that the contagion of political correctness could ever have spread to our shores.

Our legendary larrikin streak was one of our greatest national assets and, if it were still in good shape, would have made us immune to it.

We used to be instinctively anti-authoritarian and cynical, which made it almost impossible to offend us, and was the reason Australia became a breeding ground for great cartoonists. But it’s not any more because, instead of manning the barricades against this plague, our cartoonists, with a few honourable exceptions, rushed to embrace it. They abandoned a proud, national tradition of iconoclasm, wit and invective, and defected, en masse, to the purse-lipped prohibitionists and wowsers of the green-left intelligentsia.

It’s no wonder that so few of them have drawn a cartoon that was surprising, provocative or funny since. And how could they? As George Orwell said: “You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable classes.” When he wrote that in 1941 the people who made up the “comfortable classes” weren’t the sort of climate change miserabilists with dietary requirements and ironic beards that comprise the establishment today. And you’d think the last people on earth who’d want to become part of a crowd like that would be Australian cartoonists.

But they do. They want to be cool, they want to be popular; liked on Facebook, followed on Twitter. So at a time when their duty to offend has never been more pressing, they go out of their way to appease the offenderati by making their cartoons as inoffensive, as insipid, as possible.

Islamists have declared war on our civilisation and the best our politically correct politicians can do is assure us that if we all delete the word Islam from our vocabularies the threat, along with the word, will somehow just magically disappear. And our cartoonists, whose job it is to ridicule politicians when they spout nonsense like that, are letting them get away with it. Well, they shouldn’t.

You may not be able to ride your pushbike without a helmet, you may have to look at close-ups of corpses while you’re outside in the rain having a smoke, and old Nanny State may have assumed the right to tell you when it’s time to stop drinking and go home to bed, but here in the Lucky Country you can still find a space where it’s safe to tell a joke and people like me can still make a living out of poking fun at people in power.

It was hard enough to find somebody who hadn’t already heard the joke I told at that disastrous dinner party and now, after it has been circulating for nearly 40 more years, it’s almost impossible. But my mate Ramin, who comes from Tehran and knows a thing or two about what it’s like to live in a country where you can be thrown into jail and flogged for dancing, hadn’t heard it until I told it to him a week ago. I hadn’t even reached the final word of the punchline, “And why do you ask, Two Dogs …”, when he threw his head back and laughed until his tonsils showed.

The cartoonist’s task has always been to reveal uncomfortable truths

Bill Leak draws the daily editorial cartoons in The Australian. He has won nine Walkley Awards, 19 Stanley Awards and two News Awards.