Club Troppo

Here is the first paragraph of a recent interlocutory judgement. Check out the dates. The judgement is dated 22nd November 2010. Six years and there’s no sign of a trial. Not much more need be said really. I’d add that litigating defamation ought to be a relatively straightforward exercise. One shouldn’t need to go digging for discovery. What’s been said is out in the open, so the essential question is whether it’s defamatory or not and what damages might be appropriate. In a difficult case the former question could be a tricky matter or law, but that’s all – ie the facts are likely to be pretty well sorted. So it shouldn’t amount to more than a few days of expert legal argument on a the tricky point or two of law. Then a judgement. On damages, maybe there are a few trickier facts to determine. Who knows. Anyway shouldn’t all that be possible in a month or two? Well no actually. Silly me. It’s six years and counting.

CHANNEL SEVEN ADELAIDE PTY LTD v MANOCK
[2010] SASCFC 59

1 The respondent to this appeal, Dr Manock, commenced an action for defamation in the District Court against the appellant, Channel Seven Adelaide Pty Ltd (“Channel 7”) on 22 March 2004. On 15 February 2008, almost four years after the commencement of the action, Channel 7 applied to a master of the District Court for permission to amend its defence to plead justification. The issue on this appeal is whether Channel 7 should have been granted permission so to amend its defence on that application.

This week at Missing Link Friday — bloggers tangle with the Wikileaks story, Ad Astra expresses his disappointment in Tony Abbott, Mr Punch falls victim to political correctness and the War on Christmas continues.

Tangling with the cables guy

A lot of bloggers are writing about the cables guy — Julian Assange of Wikileaks. But almost as many are writing about people writing about Julian Assange.

After reading media reports about Assange’s relationship with the two Swedish women making complaints against him, Naomi Wolf wrote a sarcastic piece for the Huffington Post. She suggested that “the alleged victims” were “using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings.”

At Crikey Guy Rundle writes that the case is turning feminists against each other. Kerryn Goldworthy at Still Life with Cat agrees.

In a post titled The Assange Case and the Great Feminist Schism of 2010, Kerryn writes that Wolf’s article “starts out funny”, and ends up “downright offensive”. The Assange case will damage women’s rights, she says, “if only by weakening and watering-down the views of those most likely, in other circumstances, to support those rights.”

At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim urges readers to stop and think about what it all means .. or at least I think that’s what she’s doing:

This is a fast moving feast … and whether it’s just a human need for a narrative, or an inability to accept uninterpreted information holding all sorts of possibilities, and events that do not conform to standard patterns, those walls I was talking about are being well and truly re-built. All over the shop.

Here at Troppo, the walls of this fast moving feast also seem to be all over the shop. Or to put it another way, there are a lot of different issues to think about. Paul Frijters attempts to grapple with some of them in a recent post.

Also at Troppo, Ken Parish complains about the mainstream media’s coverage of the Wikileaks and offers links to discussion online.

Update: Guy Rundle objects that I’ve put the wrong emphasis on his piece in Crikey. In the comments thread he reiterates his argument that second-wave feminism "as a single movement can no longer overcome the contradiction of the fundamentally different philosophies that people bring to it". In his piece for Crikey he wrote:

… the Assange case is proving to be the final process by which the second-wave feminist coalition formed in the late 1960s splits substantially, with feminists with differing attitude to Western state power finding themselves on different sides of the debate.

(Continued)

One of the more surprising newspaper stories of recent times was Peter Martin’s article of November 15 on OECD takes aim at Labor policies which quoted the OECD Economic Survey of Australia as saying that Australia’s unemployment benefits are too low. Along with a number of other people I couldn’t recall the OECD ever previously saying that any country’s unemployment benefits were too low – and I worked there for eight years. (Continued)

Current developments in e-books and e-readers may end up having dramatic effects on the mainstream newspaper industry, about whose future I’ve been musing in recent days.

A significant part of the problems being experienced by old media companies generally, especially Fairfax in Australia and to a lesser extent Murdoch worldwide, is that we’re in a transitional phase between the old world of print media and the new wholly online world.  During this phase, old media companies are forced to maintain their existing expensive, labour-intensive print infrastructure and physical distribution networks while simultaneously developing new and even more expensive state-of-the-art online platforms to deliver the same content and advertising.

They can’t avoid either element because a large though progressively falling proportion of their audience still relies predominantly on print for news and information, but more and more of their young audience especially is migrating to the web as their major source of news, information, entertainment and social interaction.  If old media fails to develop adequate web platforms their audience and customer base will be stolen by leaner, meaner web-only competitors not laboring under the additional overhead burden of a print and physical distribution infrastructure.  For example, eBay and similar smaller operators have liberated a significant amount of what would previously have been newspapers’ classified advertising “rivers of gold”.

However, the time is fast approaching when the old media corporations like Fairfax and Murdoch will be in a position to jettison their print operations and move to a wholly online model.  The key to timing of any radical business decision of that sort will lie in how rapidly their customers adopt e-reader or tablet technologies as their primary delivery platforms for reading material and entertainment.

Google’s announcement this week of its new eBookstore may mark a decisive stage in that shift:

(Continued)

Anyone looking for a link between my post earlier today on the future of Fairfax and Paul Frijter’s two posts on the Wikileaks saga need go no further than a story just published on both Fairfax sites:

Rudd’s revenge on US

Kevin Rudd retaliates after diplomatic revelations about him, blaming poor US security, not the WikiLeaks founder, for leaks.

This sort of juvenile tabloid nonsense provides another illustration of the reasons for the continuing demise of the Fairfax group.  What a choice Australians have in the MSM!  An utterly biased blatant manipulator of truth in Murdoch or fatuous foolishness at Fairfax.  Rudd is dead right, as I commented on one of Paul’s posts:

However that certainly doesn’t mean Assange should be charged, demonised or assassinated(!!!). What it DOES mean is that the Americans should get their house in order ASAP and tighten up on security so that mass document dumps simply cannot occur. It is said that up to 2 million people potentially had access to the Wikileaks dumped documents, which is just absurd.

The ozblogosphere coverage of Wikileaks is immeasurably superior to that of the Australian MSM.  See Anna Winter’s post at LP, (other links to come after I get back from acting as a chauffeur check out this morning’s Twitter-based Missing Link Daily, which contains links to all the blog posts I was going to link here)

As predicted just a few days ago, Queensland-boy Julian Assange is now in police custody and has been denied bail pending his extradition to Sweden to answer allegations of having had consensual sex without a condom. In Sweden, American prosecutors will no doubt try to have him extradited to the US where he would face trumped-up charges of willingly damaging national security. Whether he will be extradited to the US seems unlikely, but you can be assured that a whole raft of further allegations will emerge in the coming weeks to keep him occupied with legal issues. It is ominous in that regard that Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, reported to be in an ‘active, ongoing criminal investigation’ into WikiLeaks.

In a previous blog I discussed what the long-term impact was of having private citizens trying to hold whole administrations accountable for their dealings with other countries and for the way they ran their administration. The ensuing thread uncovered differences of opinion on whether whistle-blowing sites had something of value to offer over and above the usual checks and balances in the form of ombudsmen, constitutional protection, and the existing media.

In this blog I want to highlight the behavioural and political economy aspects of the wikileaks saga, including the question of whether Australia should put in formal protests at the American embassy due to senior American politicians like Sarah Palin calling for the assassination of an Australian citizen who has so far not been convicted or charged with anything. It is ironic, but it is probably Rudd’s current duty to defend his countryman against unconstitutional death threats made by foreigners.

(Continued)

Crikey boss and former Fairfax editor Eric Beecher published a scathing opinion piece about his former employer in yesterday’s newsletter, in the wake of the sudden departure of Fairfax CEO Brian McCarthy.

Of course, as a direct Fairfax competitor, we should take Beecher’s opinion with a grain of salt.  He’s been gunning for Fairfax for some time.  As splenetic Melbourne blogger Andrew Landeryou points out, Beecher may conceivably have a few agendas in this game.¹1. KP: Mind you, Landeryou has a few agendas of his own that might not be immediately obvious to everyone, so we should take him with a grain of salt as well [↩] Indeed Beecher’s Crikey piece yesterday is mostly just a reheated version of a longer article he wrote about Fairfax a couple of years ago. Nevertheless it raises some interesting issues about the future of newspapers and the MSM generally in the Age of Social Media, a topic we’ve been musing about at Troppo recently, so I’ve reproduced Beecher’s article over the fold.

(Continued)

There are some common elements between my recent post, which suggested a new asylum seeker assessment regime to take the place of universal mandatory detention during assessment, and proposals outlined last week by the Coalition Immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison in an address to the Lowy Institute:

AFGHAN asylum seekers who arrive illegally by boat would be returned overseas while more refugees in international camps would be accepted, under a new trade-off proposed by the Coalition.

In what represents a sharpening of Coalition policy, Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has proposed that the brunt of Australia’s efforts should focus on the establishment of refugee processing centres in the countries of “first asylum” like Pakistan and Iran.

Nevertheless, Darryl Kerrigan would have a succinct answer to Morrison’s idea, at least in its current form, from a practical viewpoint: Tell him he’s dreaming!  Why would poor Islamic countries like Pakistan or Iran accept return from a wealthy country like Australia of asylum seekers who aren’t nationals of either country?

Moreover, even if they did agree, no doubt in return for vast amounts of Australian taxpayers’ dollars,  the chances of either country actually being able to sustain genuinely safe refugee processing centres are remote.  Pakistan is notoriously corrupt (not only in cricket) and its government seems incapable of knowing at any given moment whether its armed forces are fighting against the Taliban or in secret alliance with it.

And it gets worse.

(Continued)

John Foster has asked that I post a link to a paper he’s recently co-authored (pdf) arguing for a different carbon regulatory regime to promote carbon abatement. I’m travelling and unable to subject the paper to any analysis, but it looks interesting. I hope you’ll check it out. The abstract is as follows:

Whilst emissions trading systems are widely held to be able to deliver lowest-cost
abatement, uncertainty reduces their effectiveness. We consider a new scheme,
the Tender-Price Allocation Mechanism, which focuses carbon factor cost
expenditure on abatement rather than just revenue transfers. It is a scheme that
reduces uncertainty and the costs of uncertainty for both firms and regulators.
It also incorporates a suite of incentives that compensates for the externalities
associated with abatement investment.

Some readers may have noticed from the “sticky” permanent post at the top of Troppo’s front page that we’ve revived the old Missing Link feature in two separate forms:

• a weekly themed digest by Don Arthur;
• a daily Twitter-based service compiled mostly by me and delivered via Nicholas Gruen’s Twitter subscription.

Now I’ve also managed to configure the Twitter-based Missing Link Daily to display in an online newspaper format available from paper.li.  It looks quite nifty and is quick and painless to produce, although the categorisation is a tad random and you’re probably best to check the list view (“see all articles”) to make sure you view all recommended reading for the day.

The rationale for both forms of Missing Link is a fairly basic one but worth spelling out again.  Many if not most potential blog readers don’t have either the time or inclination to plough through mountains of drivel cluttering the blogosphere to find the numerous but scattered instances of great writing.  There are several sites that rate blog posts by reader rating/voting but I remain to be convinced that this form of quality rating is terribly useful.  At most they produce lowest common denominator selections.  Missing Link OTOH is unashamedly subjective in its selection method: Don and I respectively choose blog posts we personally assess as worth reading (for a variety of reasons).  I currently scan 261 blogs and alternative media sites each day to compile Missing Link Daily, aiming to select between 10 and 20 posts or articles especially worth reading.

I am hoping that other bloggers will increasingly recognise (and therefore promote and participate in) Missing Link as an entirely altruistic venture and not one designed to boost traffic to Troppo.  In any event the paper.li/Twitter-based Missing Link Daily is completely separate from Troppo.