Last night the Nelson Mandela lecture “Strengthening our Democracy – Valuing Our Diversity – Building Our Future” was delivered by Thomas Mayo, who is “an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander man, assistant National Secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia and author of seven books about First Nations history and justice.”
It was held at the Hawke Centre (more of that later) on North Terrace. Last time I was here was for a pre-Voice referendum event which left me disconsolate for its lack of strategic focus, and fearful for what was to come(1). Last night I left with more ‘hope’, but still uneasy.
This was a night of three parts (four if you count the book signing afterwards, I guess).
First up there was an excellent “welcome to country.” These can vary in quality of course, but this one was done with empathy, honesty, clarity and good humour (especially the line about normally asking people to stand up, but given the tiered theatre and the audience demographics switching to plan B). The woman welcoming us was of the Kaurna peoples, and also a member of the Pirltawardli Collective, trying to defend trees and animals from the State Government’s chainsaws. I didn’t catch her name, but will add it as soon as I can.
Second up there was a very good lecture by Thomas Mayo.
The man knows how to grab an audience. The anecdote about his Bob Marley fixation being joined by a love for Lucky Dube was great.
Mayo has a lovely voice, a lovely manner and – crucially – an actual working-class perspective to put. It is all too rare to hear a full-throated defence of unions in public life.
In a paragraph – there are a series of pillars of Australian democracy (among these trades unions, recognition of First Nations, access to information, the right to protest), all of which have been under very deliberate sustained attack for decades. Mayo explained why each was important, what was being done to it and what needed to be done to defend the pillar/undo the damage.
Mayo also had useful things to say about Artificial Intelligence – and the need for a Universal Basic Income, and much else.
It was entirely competent, occasionally lyrical, but – back to that sense of unease – very much left me with ‘who will bell the cat?’ vibes. (This is from one of Aesop’s fables). The point is – there are all these good policies we are expecting ‘government’ to enact, but who is going to force the government to do the right things, when it is so obviously a plaything of the economic elites? “Braver mice” was the answer of someone earwigging my explanation to a friend. Braver mice sure, but who is brave, under what circumstances, for how long, to what purpose?
Anyway, that asides, Mayo’s speech was excellent and watching the video recording would be a good use of your time, whether you’re interested in defending (Australian) democracy, or learning how to structure a speech or to deliver it. Or something else.
As soon as the Hawke Centre people put up the recording, I’ll post it here and also blog it again.
The final portion was however, frankly painful, through no fault of Mayo. There were no questions from the audience, but rather Mayo was ‘in conversation’ with Peter Geste. This can work, but if the questioner is bold, engaging and bringing their A-game. Not tonight; it was a polite/liberal avatar of Andrew Bolt in the room. Geste, presumably needing to defend his journalistic persona as ‘neutral,’ (2) was flipping through all the right-wing/nut-job (the Venn Diagram merges year after year) talking points. Doubtless among the thousand people joining the meeting via Zoom were some Murdoch hacks looking for a cheap headline about “ABC journo in soft-balling [insert dogwhistle adjective] activist.” Rather than asking any interesting questions, getting Mayo to expand on his arguments, Geste forced Mayo onto the back foot. It was frustrating and literally unedifying. Geste is a man of undoubted courage and intelligence and this was all quite bewildering.
This could have been prevented if the Hawke Centre either
- Had a different interlocutor (Marcia Langton was in the room, for instance)
- Had had the guts to go to the floor for questions instead (though this comes with its own risks, of course).
Random reflections
- It is easy to give a list (litany) of what has been going wrong, and Mayo did it very well.
It is less easy to explore the underlying motivations/causes of what has been going wrong, and Mayo, in the margins, tackled this.
It is not easy at all to explore (in private and especially in public) the reasons why those wanting to make things worse for ordinary people and better for the big end of town have been winning, almost without pause, for a good 40 years. That’s because speaking truth about power marks you out as a radical, and speaking truth about the failures of the forces trying to slow down/reverse the horrors will mark you out as a malcontent, who is ‘not constructive’ etc. Mayo did not attempt this at all, and while I totally understand (I think!) why he didn’t, it’s a pity, because if we don’t talk about the failures of the ‘progressive’ forces, the reasons for those failures, and what might be done to avoid history repeating itself again and again and AGAIN, well, history will probably repeat itself, with force.
As James Baldwin said – “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
- One thing that makes it harder to defend democracy is the isolation and atomisation we all face. Part of this is to do with “technology,” part the sense of ‘speed up’ in our lives (real or imagined) and partly by the destruction of ‘third spaces’ where people can meet and be convivial and, well, civil.
The Hawke Centre COULD, if it wanted, take some really quick simple and no-financial cost actions around this. They COULD create a norm where every public lecture has a two or three minute ‘turn to someone you don’t know – probably someone sat behind or in front of you – and introduce yourselves’ at the beginning of their events, and similar before a Q&A.
I’ve written about the why and how of this, in case you’re interested
We’ve got to stop meeting like this
https://theconversation.com/weve-got-to-stop-meeting-like-this-81615
“Meetings are institutionally sexist”; discuss. (White-knighting by #Manchester #climate bloke)
I don’t expect it will happen, but then, speakers like Mayo could insist on it until it became a new ‘norm’ of meetings. And then, in a town like Adelaide, the informal ‘weak ties’ would become more numerous, loose networks would spread, information, ideas and resources would flow more easily.
- It was the Hawke government that ratted out the Aboriginal communities on a Treaty, after basking in the applause of saying they’d sort one, back in 1988. (Aye, Barunga).
But then it’s not polite to mention these things…
Footnotes
- And so it came to pass – the Murdoch media’s assault, and the decision of Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party to be the absolute worst version of themselves, meant that a tsunami of lies swept away the possibility of basic respect. Had it not been for the events of October 7th, Australia’s international reputation would have taken a massive hit.
- Many books have been written about what ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ mean in journalism. I ain’t gonna recapitulate except with a quote and a reference.
The quote – “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor” Desmond Tutu
The citation –
Maxwell T Boykoff, Jules M Boykoff,
Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press,
Global Environmental Change,
Volume 14, Issue 2,
2004,
Pages 125-136,
ISSN 0959-3780,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378003000669)
Abstract: This paper demonstrates that US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse. This failed discursive translation results from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms. Through content analysis of US prestige press—meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal—this paper focuses on the norm of balanced reporting, and shows that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.