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The middle ground of Christian privilege The Byron Shire Echo Volume 33 #51 • May 29, 2019
The age of deep fake ‘The first casualty when war comes is truth’, US senator Hiram Johnson (1866–1945) reportedly said. As the dust settles from May 18, the first casualty from the federal election appears political polling, with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald (Fairfax, owned by Nine) having ‘pressed pause’ on publishing predictions from polling companies such as Ipsos and others. The move follows anger and confusion at the misleading federal election prediction. Busting our collective perceptions about polling that uses outdated technologies is a good start towards a clearer understanding of whatever truth is. Next would be holding social media giant Facebook to account for allowing misinformation and lies to spread. Last week, Facebook admitted that it knew a fake video of US senator Nancy Pelosi appearing drunk was shared millions of times on its platform, yet says it won’t remove fake videos because it’s not in the news business. Even Murdoch’s US Fox network reported the video of Pelosi to be fake. Facebook have always been firmly in the fake-news business and have never understood or cared for the important job of news dissemination and analysis. On Twitter and other social media platforms that are replied upon for ‘news’, fake news has become embedded into the psyche. The latest tool for furthering illiterate distrust and division is called deep fake. Its origins began in 2016 with the launch of the Face2Face program. It modifies video footage of a person’s face to depict them mimicking the facial expressions of another person in real time. That technology has developed into deepfake, with doctored pornography (including revenge porn) surfacing on the internet around 2017. In January 2018, a free desktop application called FakeApp was launched, which allows users to easily create and share videos with faces swapped. Mass deception from artificial intelligence (AI) has now again leapt to a new level, with www.sciencealert.com reporting last week that the Samsung AI Center, based in Moscow, have developed a way to create ‘living portraits’ from a very small dataset (as small as a single photograph, in a few models). Realistic talking heads can be generated from a single image, including putting words into their mouths. Yet despite the impending uncertainty of reality, Finland appears to be winning the war on fake news. According to www.cnn.com, since 2014, students have been taught a checklist of methods to deceive readers on social media. They include image and video manipulations, halftruths, intimidation, and false profiles. Bot (AI robot) and stock photo identification is also covered, along with assessing the volume of posts per day and a lack of personal information. Hans Lovejoy, editor News tips are welcome: editor@echo.net.au
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t didn’t take long for the hubris to kick in. Before the dust was settled, an exultant Liberal was reported as gloating: ‘We just campaigned on a strong economy – we’ve got a mandate to do anything!’ Well, anything – or nothing. And just in case there was any doubt about who that ‘we’ referred to, when asked who would drive the agenda if the coalition won, the Supreme ScoMo replied flatly: ‘I will.’ If this sounds arrogant and authoritarian, it’s because it is: a long way from our miraculous prime minister’s claim to straddle the middle ground. But we are now realising that Australia – or at least parts of it – have shifted decisively to the right, and we do not mean the centre right but the extremes. It is now clear that the big swing in Queensland was against Labor, but it was not to the coalition: the winners were Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer and to a lesser extent Bob Katter. It was their preferences that delivered the swag of seats which procured the majority Morrison needed. So he owes them. He may have enough political capital to ignore the debt – at least for a while. But there will come a time of reckoning. The senate results are still to be finalised, but it is highly likely that Morrison will need One Nation’s two votes sooner or later. And while Palmer is out of the parliament in body, his presence will live on, demanding commercial favours as he has always done. He will not, and cannot, be ignored. And in the meantime the Liberals’ own steroid-charged right wing will want their kilograms of flesh. The most obvious and immediate will be the boost for religious freedom – by which they mean Christian privilege. But there are other interest groups, and people, that will suffer far more than the humanists. The ABC is an inevitable target – it certainly won’t get the funding that it wants and needs, that is a given. But the demands that it must be cut down to size, if not actually privatised entirely, will become still shriller and more strident. Once again, Aunty will be going
through another change-of-life crisis. Depressing enough, but the fate of Indigenous Australia is even more dire. Bill Shorten’s promise of a referendum for implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart now lies in the dust of the red desert where it was devised. Malcolm Turnbull promulgated the lie that it was promoting a third chamber of parliament and Morrison quickly doubled down on it.
While Palmer is out of the parliament in body, his presence will live on Mungo MacCallum In the past I have written, optimistically, that the history of reconciliation has always been a process of two steps forward, one step back – tortuous and frustrating, but at least there was progress to report. Now it has been kyboshed for many years. No doubt there will be the odd token gesture, a few paternalistic and patronising moves to what is called ‘practical’ reconciliation – meaning the government will decide what is good for the blackfellas, and they should bloody well be grateful. The hope that they might actually be given a say in what they actually want has been crushed by the weight of Hanson and Palmer. Business as usual – as it has been for the last 231 years or, if you take the longer view, about 60,000. And then there is the Labor Party — or its smoking remains. As always, it is raking over the ashes for consolation – hey, we could still be in reach of government in another three years, the Libs lost the unloseable election in 1993 and stormed back in 1996, we have kept our key members, it could have been worse. And it could – but not much. After a clobbering like that, there will have to be a completely new agenda. The leader in waiting, Anthony Albanese, says that we will have to review the policies, but not the values, which is all very well, but one clear lesson from last week is that the values
of the blue-collar traditionalists and the white-collar progressives are becoming increasingly incompatible. Albo believes he can somehow square that circle; well, good luck with that. As a lifelong warrior from the left, he will have to do a lot of reconnecting. The trolls of the Murdoch press have already decreed that he should have been strangled at birth as a cryptocommunist. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? And there are those on his own side of politics who fear he is past his time – a class warrior in the mould of the great loser, Arthur Calwell. They see the need for generational change. But at least Albanese starts with a near unanimous endorsement from his party. Even the once-dreaded New South Wales right has effectively backed him, and if he may not have the full support of his caucus, he will be overwhelmingly welcomed by the party rank and file. This is why the potential candidates from the right – Chris Bowen, Jim Chalmers, Joel Fitzgibbon – meekly surrendered as soon as they saw those who should have been their factional allies drifting to Albanese. They knew their only hope was the party room – in the open ground the only people who could have given Albanese a fight were Tanya Plibersek and Penny Wong, both of whom were, for different reasons, unavailable and both of whom ended up backing Albo anyway. And this, I think, is Albo’s great virtue – while some may disagree with his prescriptions, no-one seriously questions his integrity. During the last Labor governments, he was a zealous supporter of Kevin Rudd, who briefly rewarded him with the deputy’s job. But during the leadership of Julia Gillard, he was unswerving loyal as one of her senior ministers – indeed, she said she could not imagine a Labor government without Albanese in it. And although he had beaten Bill Shorten in the rank-and-file vote in 2013, Albanese worked tirelessly to elect his leader for six long years – no sniping, no wrecking, no undermining. Albo exudes an authenticity that ScoMo can only fake. And if the voters come to realise that, he may be halfway there.
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