Being in mining was never part of my plan. As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a priest with a pilot’s license, living and working in remote Australian communities. I got an advertising degree, joined the foreign service, and spent five years working for the government, including three years as a junior diplomat in Samoa. But I never really fit in. I resigned from the foreign service in January 1999, when I was 27, and returned to my hometown, the remote and dusty mining town of Mount Isa in outback Australia.

There, instead of attending cocktail parties and rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and ambassadors, I mowed lawns, raked leaves, and did landscape work. About 10 months into my career break, my older sister Cassie handed me a newspaper advertisement for a “Senior Advisor, Indigenous Affairs” position at Mount Isa Mines, one of Australia’s oldest and most profitable copper, lead, zinc, and silver mines. MIM, as it’s known, wanted to hire an Indigenous Australian who grew up in the local community and understood its issues and challenges—someone like me. I didn’t expect to get the job, but I did.

Today, more than 20 years later, I am one of just a few Indigenous senior leaders working in the Australian mining industry. As the Chief Advisor for Indigenous Affairs for Australia at the Anglo-Australian metals and mining corporation Rio Tinto, I help our executive leadership team and board of directors improve our relationships with, and outcomes for, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, employees, and communities.

People like me are go-betweens, walking in two worlds. We are translators for companies and communities. We help them understand each other to achieve mutual benefits.

There are many complexities and challenges. Mining, a symbol of industrial progress and wealth creation, has unfortunately also left a legacy of exclusion, displacement, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In Australia, where the main exports are iron ore, coal, gas, and gold, the industry has spent decades disregarding and excluding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are Indigenous to the nation’s lands and waters.

Back when I took my first industry job, at MIM, many in my community thought I was either brave or naïve. But I believe Indigenous peoples must sit at the decision-making tables within corporations, not as passive stakeholders but as active influencers. We can actively secure redress for past misdeeds and lead an approach within the industry that will respect cultural heritage, drive economic benefit, and achieve environmental integrity.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands and possessed the land under our own laws and customs. Science suggests that we’ve been here for at least 65,000 years; the British colonized Australia less than 250 years ago. Over time they took our lands from us, and wrote laws that made it hard for us to fight back.

Indigenous people were powerless observers. In the 1950s to 1970s, mining companies discovered iron, coal, uranium, and industrial minerals such as bauxite, copper, lead and zinc in many places. Indigenous people rarely had any say, or ability to intervene, when commonwealth, state, and territory governments granted companies mining leases. Outsiders oversaw the destruction of our sacred sites, without recompense.

That includes near Mount Isa, my hometown. When I stepped into my role at MIM in 2000, the Kalkadoon Traditional Owners of the region had no stake in, and received no economic benefit from, mining operations. Open-pit mines had left large, gaping craters in their ancestral land. The Traditional Owners had no formal engagement with the mine, no dedicated Indigenous employment programs, and no social investment initiatives. They were organizing a native title claim aimed at legally recognizing and securing the Kalkadoon people’s historical rights to their ancestral lands and seeking a more inclusive approach to land and resource management for the future.

Leadership at MIM recognized that it was time to develop a better relationship. That’s where I came in.

Understandably, people expressed a lot of frustration in the initial meetings between the company and the Indigenous community. I felt about as welcome as a roast turkey at a vegetarian dinner party. I was verbally abused, physically intimidated, and called all sorts of names (nicer ones included “company man” and “sell-out”)—by people who were almost like family to me.

Over time, I built connections and trust. Soon after I started at MIM, I went to my boss, the mine site’s executive general manager, and convinced him to provide office space for the Traditional Owners to organize their title claim and conduct meetings. It was a small thing, but it signalled goodwill. Kalkadoon leaders still use the space today, as the registered office for their Native Title corporation.

This was an important lesson: A simple gesture of respect goes a long way—often much further than years of legal negotiations or purely transactional interactions. In September 2001, the Kalkadoon people, the Queensland Government, and MIM, among other mining companies, negotiated an Indigenous Land Use Agreement that paved the way for roughly 90 exploration licenses in the vicinity of Mount Isa. And that was only the start of what has become an enduring relationship between MIM and the Kalkadoon people.

I believe we are entering a new era of recognition for Indigenous people’s rights. The looming fight against climate change compels companies to listen to us. It’s often stated that Indigenous peoples represent about 5% of the world population but hold 80% of the remaining natural resources and biodiversity, including critical minerals. What will be the role of Indigenous people in the “just transition” to a low-carbon future—and is a green future that depends on more mining even possible?

Indigenous people still struggle. Our life expectancy is about 20 years less than non-Indigenous Australians, and I have seen many family and community members die early from preventable diseases. Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on earth. Our languages are disappearing, and colonization has eroded our cultural practices.

Still, I’d like to think we’re in a better place overall than when I started in this industry. Indigenous communities have more equal say, and greater control, than ever before—and the fact that more Indigenous people are coming up through the ranks and taking our rightful place in seats at corporate tables across the country has a lot to do with it. My hope is that the economic and social position of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, too, will rise.

The post I’m Indigenous Australian, and I Work for a Mining Company appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shell-adorned bikini tops. Fishtail skirts. Starfish accessories. Seafoam green eyeshadow. Expect to see all of this and more riding the waves of Disney’s latest live-action blockbuster, The Little Mermaid.

In other words, “mermaidcore”—the personification of aquatic glamor and physical beauty—is back.

Since antiquity, mermaids have embodied our fantasies of the briny deep. Inscrutable, various, and generally scantily clad, these half-fish, half-woman mythological creatures are shapeshifting female figures known the world over, from the sirens of the Aegean, to the jiaoxiao of the South China Sea, to Africa’s Mami Wata, often traced to the coast of Guinea. Historical accounts of mermaid sightings continued to flourish on through the 1800s. While none ever produced a real mermaid, hoaxes like P.T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid”—a Frankenstein-ed monkey head sewn onto a fish’s tail—were plentiful, capturing the public’s attention and coin.

But as the industrial revolution’s rising tide traded wonder for rationality, “real” reports from the ocean began to quiet. Rather than disappear into myth, mermaids performed their next act of transformation: moving from the water to the stage and silent screen. The early 1900s productions that resulted popularized what I’d argue to be the first mermaidcore. And the skimpier and transgressive fashions inspired by them played a tangible role in helping girls and women traverse societal barriers in style and sport.

Of all the early mermaid tales, it was Neptune’s Daughter that might have captured the public imagination the most. Staged in the Hippodrome, the famed New York theater that boasted a stage 12 times larger than its Broadway counterparts, the show was an instant hit when it debuted in late 1906. Audiences flocked to see the actresses playing mermaids dive into an 8,000-gallon clear tank filled with water. People were astounded by how they were able to stay underwater for so long. While the “day of miracles and the belief in miracles is past,” as one reporter commented, the theatrical effect in Neptune’s Daughter kept the illusion intact. To maintain the fantasy, rehearsals were conducted with utmost secrecy, with management threatening to fire anyone who gave away the gimmick (submarine chambers) that allowed actresses to linger below the surface. Such precautions paid off. “No spectacular invention or innovation of recent years has aroused such popular interest or awakened such widespread curiosity as the mermaid scene,” observed the New York Times.

A silent film production of Neptune’s Daughter followed in 1914, shot on location in Bermuda, and starring champion swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman, “the Australian Mermaid.”

Swimming, long considered a “masculine domain,” had opened up to women relatively early in Kellerman’s home nation. Around the 1830s, middle-class women swam recreationally, and by the time a young Kellerman entered the pool at 9 years old, a burgeoning competitive scene had started up. Because Kellerman was bowlegged, her parents had put her in swimming lessons as a form of physical therapy. While she was weak on land, in the water, she found she was athletic and graceful. She began winning swimming and diving titles against girls and boys. By the time she made her way to the U.S., in 1906, she had already attempted to swim across the English Channel and was well on her way to achieving international fame.

But when Kellerman arrived in America, she found women’s swimming culture was stuck in Victorian times. Because there was no long-distance swimming to be had, she first made money doing water stunts in vaudeville performances. She also began campaigning to change American swimwear. As she reasoned, if women wanted to enter the pool, they first needed the freedom to abandon the cumbersome bathing costume of wool skirts, blouses, stockings, and swim shoes that was literally weighing them down.

The best costume is the cheap, ordinary stockinette suit, which clings close to the figure, and the closer the better. It should be sleeveless and there should be no skirts. Skirts carry water and retard the swimmer. They are very pretty and appropriate for the seaside, but not for the swimming pool. Stockings may be worn if they fit tightly, but under no circumstances should shoes be used.

That excerpt comes from the 1907 article “Swimming Hints,” one of many editorials Kellerman authored to encourage more women and girls to lose their bulky swim costumes and adopt a modern one-piece swimsuit.

But perhaps nothing did more to change the conversation than her mermaid motion pictures.

Kellerman made her U.S. film debut in 1911, starring in two Vitagraph shorts, The Mermaid and Siren of the Sea, which catapulted her to stardom. Because the fantasy scenes she starred in filtered her form-fitting swimwear “through a fictional layer,” as author Christine Schmidt put it in her 2013 book The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk, Kellerman was able to transcend the norms of the day. Through her mermaid persona, the star could help neutralize “any suggestion of indecency” that her outfits might have otherwise engendered had she appeared in them on screen.

The public watched with fascination. Kellerman was heralded by the press at the time as being “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.” And an audience hungry to be just like her followed her every move, eager to copy everything about her, including, in time, the trademark “Annette Kellerman suit.”

By 1914, the very same year Kellerman starred in Neptune’s Daughter, America’s premier amateur sporting league, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), officially permitted “mermaids,” as they called competitive female swimmers, to participate in sanctioned competitions. And by the time Kellerman’s film career wound down a decade later, most women were starting to wear the same one-piece “Kellerman suits” the star first championed at the turn of the century.

Mermaidcore, of course, wasn’t alone in opening up the waters for women, but it undeniably lent its sparkle to the cause, paving the way for them to transform their reality on land.

Today, this glamor can continue to offer us a way to shapeshift through fantasy. After all, as Kellerman herself once put it, to become a mermaid is to simply “see a woman make a fish out of herself.”

The post Welcome Back, Mermaidcore appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60 percent of all online advertising in the world (outside China). With Amazon taking another 9 percent, that leaves a mere 30 percent of global digital ad revenue to be split among tens of thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising more than half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this domination has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country.

Australia’s situation is typical. Its Competition and Consumer Commission found that for every hundred Australian dollars spent by online advertisers, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook.

Most Australians who access their news online don’t go to the original news source. Instead, they absorb the gist of the news from Facebook and Google’s headlines and preview blurbs. With fewer people clicking through these links, the digital media platforms effectively have turned thousands of publishers and broadcasters into little more than uncompensated ghostwriters of content.

That’s why Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources. Platforms could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites; but they don’t. They prefer to repackage and monetize product from the original producer without paying for it. In other industries, that’s called theft.

Australia decided to fight this thieving duopoly with some rules-setting of its own. A new law approved by the Australian Parliament requires large digital media companies to compensate Australian news outlets fairly for their proprietary content, and to submit to binding arbitration with news publishers if they can’t agree on terms. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers. But Facebook flexed its muscle by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days. This prevented Aussie news publishers and everyday users—including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services—from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial “shot heard ’round the world.” Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of “big tech authoritarianism.” Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the flexing of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

Now a similar battle is playing out in the state of Maryland. Over the last 10 years, U.S. newspapers’ advertising revenue decreased by 62 percent, and without that source of funding, newsroom employment dropped by nearly half. That decline coincided with a huge increase in digital media use and, according to Pew Research Center, today more than half of U.S. adults report often receiving their news from social media, search, or podcasts, and only a third from news websites or apps. Those numbers zoom off the charts for young people 29 and under.

Squeezed by these economics, Maryland approved America’s first tax on digital ad revenue earned inside its borders, targeting companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The measure is projected to generate as much as $250 million annually, dedicated to schools. The tech giants are threatening lawsuits against Maryland, even as Connecticut and Indiana legislators have introduced similar measures.

But the real battle is just beginning. One of the most important, unsettled debates of the Internet Age is whether digital media platforms like Facebook, Google/YouTube, and Twitter are the new “public square,” a kind of global free-speech Agora, or just the latest techno variety of old-fashioned publishers and broadcasters. Or a hybrid of these.

With each crisis revealing the gap between the tech companies’ public-square pretentions and their very real publishing power, the debate has intensified. Following the U.S. Capitol ransacking, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all decided to discontinue “publishing” the president of the United States. Before that—as the platforms tried to contain their toxic pipeline of pandemic and election disinformation and racial tension—they slapped warning labels on posts and removed the content of certain users.

Now, in response to Australia’s law, Facebook pulled the plug on an entire country. That’s something only a giant monopoly publisher can do. In 2014, when Spain enacted legislation requiring Google to pay Spanish news outlets for the article snippets in its search results, Google bullied the government and ultimately closed its new service there.

Even before the past year’s seminal events, Facebook, Google, and Twitter acted as publishers by allowing their “engagement” algorithms to make critical decisions about which content is featured at the top of users’ news feeds, and what is promoted and amplified. Their sophisticated “long tail” publishing machines precisely target niche users, showing different content to different people, including political ads.

These are not passive online chat boards, and the Big Tech platforms are not merely managers of the digital public square. They are “robot publishers,” in which algorithms do the essential duties of an editor. From a liability or accountability standpoint, it should matter little that there is a supercomputer behind the curtain, instead of a human.

So it’s pretty difficult to argue credibly that these platforms are not in some sense publishers, deciding what content and sources should disappear or be amplified. These companies have more in common with the New York Times, CNN, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp than they do with an online Wikiboard or free speech corner in London’s Hyde Park.

Indeed, Facebook’s and Google/YouTube’s algorithmically curated machines, with 2.6 billion and 2 billion users, respectively, are the two largest publishers and broadcasters in human history. Yet existing law does not treat these companies as either, when it comes to being liable or answerable for their mistakes and abuses. The digital media platforms, seeking to avoid accountability and its costs, hide behind the fact they have billions of users generating content. But that should not obscure the centrality of their publisher role.

Critics of the Maryland and Australian approach claim that treating Facebook and Google as publishers threatens the principle of an open internet, which views the internet as an infinite free speech zone for information sharing, consumer choice, and global connection. It’s a beautiful but outdated dream, and it must be balanced by the “copyright principle,” which was established years before the internet was even invented. Copyright law mandates that any person or organization cannot swipe someone else’s content and monetize it without paying for it.

There is something inherently basic and fair about digital media giants paying for the original news content they use to drive traffic to their sites. But the open internet principle essentially demands that traditional news sources bear the financial burden of continuing to produce quality news without fair compensation, much as it demanded that Napster be allowed to distribute copyrighted music for free without compensating musical artists and record companies.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the open internet principle will cannibalize what’s left of the news media. With no credible news sources to steal from, Facebook and Google would be even more overrun by disinformation. They are eating their own seed.

Canada says it will adopt the Australian approach, possibly India, too. And France and Austria have passed similar laws. The U.S. is known for encouraging competition, so you would think regulators would jump into action. Yet the Biden administration has been silent on this subject. Will the United States, a longtime champion of the free press, step up?

The post The Real Battle Between Big Tech and the Free Press Is Just Beginning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And while we’re used to water scarcity in Australia, we do have particular periods of national drought, the latest stretching from 1997 to 2010. It has taught all of us that water is priceless, because we cannot live without it. It’s also brought a greater understanding in Australia’s towns and cities of what it is like to live in the bush. A drought so long and severe required all Australians to bear the burden.

Schools and community groups got deeply involved in Waterwatch, a national, volunteer water quality monitoring and water education program. Farmers installed observation bores on their property and regularly measured water table levels and groundwater quality, to guard against salinity that can spoil water and land in droughts. If you drove into a country town during the drought, the first thing you saw was a large sign stating the level of water restrictions.

In the cities, people stopped washing cars, then stopped watering lawns, and then stopped watering gardens. Many of us had a bucket between our legs in the shower, but that was voluntary! The country has expanded water recycling, with many places aiming to recycle 100 percent of their wastewater. We also invested heavily in desalination (though now, because the drought has dissipated, much of the expensive, energy-consuming equipment is no longer needed). The Australian nation has had to learn together to learn to turn the tap off and treat fresh water as a valuable resource.

Australians love water and we mostly live by the sea, but getting access to fresh water is getting more dangerous for those in the northern parts of the country. Recently a 15-foot-long crocodile plucked a bloke out of his boat in front of his family in a national park. The croc was shot (a rare event, since crocs have been protected from shooting since 1972) and the man’s body recovered. The culprit was as much the dry conditions as the croc. Crocodiles always guard their piece of waterway, and they are always growing bigger. As it gets drier, the big crocs and humans have less water to use, and are drawn closer together.

As an agricultural consultant on a recent trip to Northern Queensland, which is still in drought, I was introduced to a new term—“sell’em or smell’em” meaning that if you do not sell your cattle livestock, you will smell them dead. There was just not enough water to keep them alive.

But droughts are not new to Australia, and historically our landscapes have been able to function and flourish. The question is how a modern society can cope with the droughts, which affect everyone in our nation. Perhaps we can learn from Peter Andrews, a racehorse breeder and grazier from New South Wales, who wrote an excellent book called Back from the Brink. The book explains how the Australian landscape was distinguished by its ability to hold fresh water underground in huge floodplains. These plains released water over time, but also accommodated floodwaters by absorbing them into underground aquifers.

This natural process stored excess water and then released it in dry times, feeding streams at their highest point. Reed beds acted like biological safety values. They held water back, and the water would rise. The rising floodwater and floating debris increased leverage on the top of the reeds. Then they would flatten like a protective blanket, protecting what was beneath them.

This process is no more as livestock and machinery have drained the floodplains of fresh water, removed the reed beds, and in many cases allowed salt to move down into the lower parts of the landscape. The drought has again taught us that we need to mimic nature and learn to read the landscape in order to start to repair it.

For those in drought, my simple message is to remember that a drought normally ends with some form of flood, which can do even more damage. As there is little vegetation to slow down the flow of water and precious topsoil is washed away, too much water ends up degrading farmland and undermining bridge foundations. You can’t erase a drought all at once. So be prepared.

The post Could This Drought Bring Californians Together? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Australia, that moment was the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which a gunman killed 35 people at a tourist attraction in Tasmania. To put the size of the death toll in perspective, the United States population is 14 times larger than Australia, so the impact of the Port Arthur massacre on Australia would be like a U.S. shooting that cost more than 400 lives.

As the U.S. reels over yet another mass shooting—this one involving a man who killed six students at UC Santa Barbara and shot himself—it’s worth taking a look at what happened in my country after that mass shooting—and at what has happened since.

As a nation that won its independence from Britain by consent rather than revolution, Australia’s Constitution does not contain a right to bear arms. But firearms are a part of rural life (used, for example, to cull kangaroos). Our police officers carry a firearm when they’re on patrol. Shooting ranges are common.

That’s the backdrop for the Port Arthur massacre, which took place at a critical time. The previous month, a conservative government had been elected. After the shooting, the new prime minister, John Howard, immediately came under pressure from elements of his party to leave gun laws unchanged.

But he didn’t. Supported by Tim Fisher, leader of the rural-based National Party (with which Howard’s party was in coalition), Howard tightened laws around access to firearms, particularly rifles and shotguns. The government also announced a buyback that would compensate owners for their weapons at market prices. More than 650,000 guns were handed in, making it the largest destruction of civilian firearms in the decade before or afterward.

The effect of the buyback was to reduce Australia’s firearms stock by around one-fifth, equivalent to the U.S. reducing its national stock by 40 million guns. And while some weapons came from households with multiple firearms, survey evidence suggests that the buyback nearly halved the share of Australian households with one or more firearms.

From 2008 to 2010, while working as an economics professor at the Australian National University, I teamed up with Wilfrid Laurier University’s Christine Neill to study how the Australian gun buyback affected the firearms homicide and suicide rates. We published two peer-reviewed journal articles on the buyback, one looking at the trends over time and another studying variation across states and territories.

Whichever way you cut the data, it seemed clear that the national gun buyback reduced gun deaths. In the decade prior to the buyback, there was an average of one mass shooting (five or more victims) every year. In the decade after the buyback, there were no mass shootings. Overall, the firearms homicide and firearms suicide rates had been trending steadily downwards through the 1980s and early 1990s, but the fall accelerated after the buyback.

The strongest evidence in favor of the Australian gun buyback came when Neill and I compared statistics across the eight Australian states and territories. In some jurisdictions, the buyback had only a small impact on the firearms ownership rate, while in other places, it had a huge effect. Analyzing these variations between states, we again found the same result: In states where more firearms were bought back, there was a bigger drop in gun deaths. Put simply, fewer guns meant fewer gun deaths. We looked for displacement effects (Did non-firearms deaths rise?), and found little evidence. Our published papers concluded that the Australian gun buyback saves around 200 lives per year.

Although the policy was aimed at reducing gun homicides, we found that its effect was mostly to reduce the gun suicide rate, with most of the 200 lives saved being averted suicides. This makes sense once you realize that the ratio of firearms suicides to homicides is around 4-to-1 (in the U.S., the ratio is 2-to-1). Put another way, the person most likely to kill you with a gun is yourself.

In the decade and a half since the Australian gun buyback, the number of firearms per person has stayed constant, and gun deaths have remained thankfully low. For the purpose of making choices about public health interventions, economists have a concept known as the value of a “statistical life.” In Australia, if an intervention can save a life for $3.5 million, it is considered good value. Using this approach, the gun buyback appears to be a great investment for the community. The annual social benefit of the buyback is larger than its one-time cost.

What can the U.S. learn from the Australian gun buyback? When I studied the effect of the policy, I was a professor. Since then, I have entered federal politics, representing the Australian Labor Party. So one lesson is to recognize courage when you see it in your political opponents. Howard and Fisher did not have tightening gun laws on their agenda before they were elected, and they could have squibbed the chance to change Australia’s gun laws. But they didn’t. Both believed that gun laws needed to change, so they set about building a political movement for reform. They probably paid a political price at the 1998 election, which saw the Labor Party win a majority of the popular vote, but (like Al Gore in 2000), fall short of victory.

Another lesson is the value of a bold package of reforms in changing culture. When U.S. researchers have studied the impact of U.S. gun buybacks on crime, they typically find no effect. Most likely, it’s because these buybacks are conducted at the city level, and are not accompanied by a general tightening in ownership laws. By contrast, the Australian law change was implemented nationally, accompanied by a massive publicity campaign. It caused parents to reassess whether the .22 rifle in the closet was really necessary, or whether it was more likely to become a risky plaything for teenagers.

In my parliamentary district, I sometimes visit the rifle range used by the Canberra Rifle Club, which is more than a century old. Speaking with locals who use the range, I wouldn’t pretend that every recreational shooter is as proud of Australia’s gun buyback as I am—but most see firm gun laws as supporting the ability of law-abiding shooters to enjoy their sports. This was the philosophy adopted by America’s National Rifle Association in the 1960s, when it backed a crackdown on cheap handguns (“Saturday night specials”) because, as the NRA said at the time, these guns had “no sporting purpose.”

Yet since 1977, when Harlan Carter and Wayne LaPierre took over the organisation, the NRA has taken progressively more hardline positions: opposing bans on armor-piercing bullets, describing federal agents as “jack-booted thugs,” and insisting on going ahead with an NRA conference in Colorado just weeks after the Columbine killings. Australia’s gun lobbies have never been as well resourced, connected, or politically extreme as the NRA.

Today, there are more guns than people in the United States, while Australia has one gun for every seven people. So it should come as no surprise that more than one in 10,000 Americans will be killed by a gun this year, compared with fewer than one in 100,000 Australians.

Much as we’d like to believe the Dirty Harry fantasy that guns are used to defend goodies from baddies, the world doesn’t work like that. Gun deaths are more likely to occur when a depressed teen finds dad’s gun, when an angry spouse turns a rifle on their cheating partner, or when a young boy opens the bedside drawer and starts playing with the a loaded pistol inside. That’s why the most careful U.S. studies point to the conclusion: more guns, more crime.

Having lived in the United States for four years (from 2000 to 2004), I don’t believe that Americans have any greater tendency toward violence than Australians. And yet compared with Australia, the U.S. has a slightly higher suicide rate, and a homicide rate that is over five times higher. The difference is guns. The question is whether it will be possible to build a U.S. political coalition that can transform the laws and reduce the death rate.

The post The Great Australian Gun Buyback appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

She and I have spent recent years sailing our boat more than halfway around the world, including a three-week trip across the Pacific Ocean from the Galapagos to Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. When we tell people this, their first question most often is either “Isn’t that dangerous?” or “Do you get frightened out there?”

While the answer to the latter is “most definitely,” the less dramatic truth is that, up to the day of our Cape Leeuwin visit, our voyage largely had been uneventful. By that time, we had sailed as far as New Zealand and finished up what’s considered among sailors to be the Pacific crossing. “Pacific” means non-violent, non-aggressive, and that’s what the ocean had been. If you ask me, the primary skills needed for a Pacific crossing are: (1) the absence of ADHD, agoraphobia, or a short attention span, (2) a very high tolerance for sunshine, heat, sleep deprivation, boredom, and body odor, (3) an ability to persist without fresh fruit or vegetables, and, most importantly, (4) the ability to avoid falling off the boat, which is something just about anyone can manage with ease.

We’d gone to Western Australia on a side trip to visit friends, and after a cross-country train ride and a short flight from Sydney, we soon found ourselves back aboard Spectacle in her berth at Bay of Islands Marina in Opua, New Zealand. As we prepared for our Tasman Sea crossing to Sydney, we were well aware that this was likely to be far less pacific than previous legs and almost surely the most intense sailing we would ever do.

Unless you are a sailor, you might be unaware that, in general, ocean conditions tend to be less threatening the closer one is to the equator (this presumes that you have managed to avoid hurricane season which, mercifully, remains predictable). You will note that the bottom half of Australia is nowhere near the equator. Pretend Australia is a clock with the base of the hands somewhere near Ayers Rock; if you are offshore anywhere between 3 and 9 o’clock, you are doing something that can become very dangerous very quickly.

Indeed, not a single other sailor we met was planning a trans-Tasman crossing. They all were headed north to Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, or New Caledonia, but we couldn’t pass up the chance to breeze into Sydney Harbour on a sunny afternoon with our quarantine flag up and the Stars and Stripes off the stern, waving at the flotilla of friendly Aussies who surely would greet us with offers of “barbies” and stubbies of VB (barbecue and beers) as they escorted us in. It’s not sailing around the world if you don’t sail into Sydney Harbour, right?

In an attempt to be at least somewhat cautious, we vigilantly monitored weather forecasts. With the luxury of ample time to wait, wait is what we did; more than three weeks passed without a proper window. Finally, the forecast cleared (“Today’s the day” confirmed one of the region’s leading meteorologists, who shall remain nameless), and we were off.

Joined by our friend Ryan, we left mid-morning. As we sailed up the eastern coast of far northern New Zealand, things were perfectly pleasant. We rounded Cape Reinga overnight and spent the rest of the day in cooperative conditions. But as night fell on day two, so did the temperature and the barometer, and as we left the lee of New Zealand, the wind began ramping up.

As the sun rose on day three, we found ourselves about 200 miles west of New Zealand with strengthening winds coming from the south-southeast and seas starting to build. The obvious plan was to press on and hope things would remain fast and bumpy but manageable.

They didn’t.

By 4 p.m., I had seen gusts up to 66 knots (76 mph) on our wind indicator. For some perspective, a Category 1 Hurricane has sustained winds of 64 knots. And when the wind indicator hits 66, there’s nothing to tell you it won’t be at 80 in half an hour. We had hours at a time with wind in the upper 40s, and repeated five to 10 minute spells in the 50s.

Wind itself isn’t dangerous to a sailboat, but wind creates waves, and waves can be very dangerous. The biggest threat is being knocked down sideways by a breaking wave (as happened to Robert Redford’s hapless seaman in the film All Is Lost). So long as a breaking wave is as tall as your boat is wide, it is capable of knocking you down if it hits you from the side. Our boat is 14 feet wide, and these breaking waves were much bigger than that, making loud, crunching, cringe-inducing noises as they beat down on our port quarter.

What followed were five days of medium-intensity terror. No showers, no meals, no sleep—just a focus on keeping the boat heading in the right direction and the hope that things wouldn’t get any worse. We took a hit from a rogue wave that effectively submerged the entire boat, creating 15 to 20 seconds of the eerie, muffled soundtrack of a scuba dive and leaving a small squid on top of our sunshade, which sits about 14 feet off the surface of the water. We blew out two sails and had to scamper over the pitching foredeck to get them down and back into the boat. One of the sails was described by the repair shop as “looking like someone took a shotgun to it.”

We learned later that a better boat helmed by a much more experienced sailor sank in the same storm to the north of us. After eight days, we made it into Sydney Harbour—in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived and shell-shocked, with even the lights of the Opera House switched off and no welcoming committee beyond the graveyard shift at the customs wharf. We did have an ample supply of beer—needless to say, it hadn’t been touched.

As bad as this was, the area off the other side of Australia where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have crashed into the sea is significantly more dangerous. The search area last week was 400 miles further south, in the “Roaring Forties,” the persistent strong westerly winds found between the latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees in the Southern Hemisphere. The Roaring Forties and the waves they create build unobstructed all the way from southern Argentina.

Abby Sunderland found this out the hard way. The American teenager, who was attempting to set the world record for youngest solo circumnavigation, was sailing through the neighborhood of the MH370 crash in June 2012 when winds of up to 60 knots and huge seas resulted in multiple knockdowns. Her boat lost its mast, ending her quest and necessitating a rescue by the Australian coast guard.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that search efforts for MH370 are proceeding in fits and starts. Gale-force winds and their accompanying high seas made it effectively impossible for surface vessels to even begin the hunt for the crash site and the black boxes. The search site moved 600 miles north a few days ago, but that site is still more than 1,000 miles from Perth, itself one of the most remote cities on planet Earth.

So while I subscribe to the conventional wisdom that eventually some identifiable debris will turn up, I’m deeply doubtful that anything truly explanatory—such as the flight data recorders—will ever be found.

We’re told that if they don’t find the black boxes in the next two weeks, the batteries in their underwater locator beacons will expire. With such limited time, a search area so far from land and so vaguely defined, and with waters ranging in depth from about 3,500 feet to six times that, it’s hard to imagine that we will ever know what really happened to MH370. But the search will go on. As you follow along, spare a thought for the poor buggers who, somewhere over the Cape Leeuwin horizon, are out there being battered by one of the world’s angriest oceans.

The post I’ll Tell You Why They Won’t Find Malaysia Air Flight 370 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Folkenflik was appearing before a large crowd at The Actors’ Gang in Culver City, talking with moderator Kevin Roderick, publisher of LA Observed. Roderick pointed out that Murdoch, while a member of the elite, also likes to needle the wealthy and powerful. What motivates him to do so?

Folkenflik explained that Murdoch’s father was a respected, even famous, Australian political journalist and a knight. But Murdoch thought his father had been cheated out of some of holdings at the end of his life by the powers that be; Murdoch himself had inherited from him just one newspaper, in Adelaide. Today, Murdoch continues to define himself by who he thinks his enemies are. And in response to his feeling that the establishment is against him, he has created his own establishment, bringing prominent ex-politicians and leaders into his organizations.

People say Murdoch has been bad for journalism, said Roderick. Has he destroyed good journalism?

“I wouldn’t say he uniformly destroys good journalism,” said Folkenflik, pointing to the large number of journalists the Wall Street Journal employs under Murdoch’s watch; the previous ownership could not have sustained that many reporters. He’s improved the Journal in a lot of ways, said Folkenflik. But there are also a number of instances when reporters have felt they’ve been pulled to the right politically by the leadership at the newspaper.

Roderick asked about the News of the World phone hacking scandal that is continuing to play out in British courts. Folkenflik said that the scandal has shown just how integrated the political and media elite became, thanks to Murdoch and his colleagues. It’s become clear that the political and media elite worked in the interest of each other—and lost their connection with the public. Folkenflik said that the trial of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who later became Prime Minister David Cameron’s director of communications, was as momentous as it would be if Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, were put on trial for having engaged in some sort of corruption when he was Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief.

In a lecture years ago, Murdoch said that his sense of “public service” is any service he and his company can provide that the public is willing to pay for—within the law. What the hacking scandal shows, says Folkenflik, is that some of his employees lost sight of the within-the-law part.

Murdoch and his top brass can be ruthless, whether or not they’re working within the law. Folkenflik was blacklisted by the Murdoch empire for 15 months after exposing a lie told by Geraldo Rivera. Tim Arango of The New York Times, in response to a story on ratings that irked the empire, found a stint in rehab exposed on a gossip website. And people employed by Fox News public relations took drastic measures to enhance the organization’s public image, setting up sock puppet accounts to comment on any post on any blog—no matter how popular—or even comments on posts that were not in Fox’s favor. This included not just negative postings but neutral ones, too, all rebutted by employees taking on as many as over 100 aliases from equipment that couldn’t be traced back to Fox.

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked Folkenflik about the future of the Murdoch empire after Murdoch’s death or retirement—and about the future of journalism.

People who work for Murdoch don’t talk about what will happen if he leaves or dies, said Folkenflik; Murdoch doesn’t believe he’ll die, and his employees don’t want to indicate they disagree. But Folkenflik predicts that once Murdoch departs, News Corp will let its newspapers go. They’re losing so much money that one of Murdoch’s top investors described the newspaper business to Folkenflik as an ice cube—“melting fast.” It’ll take just two years or less, post-Murdoch, for the newspaper holdings to change significantly. Murdoch’s children control 40 percent of the voting shares of News Corp, and an ally of theirs controls another 7 percent of the vote. They’ll have to decide what they want to do with that business and with 20th Century Fox.

As to the future of journalism in general after Murdoch—and as to Murdoch’s cumulative effect on the industry—Folkenflik said that while Murdoch’s impact has been indelible, a very different generation of leaders is emerging.

For proof that Murdoch’s fingerprints extend beyond his own newsrooms, Folkenflik pointed to MSNBC emerging in response to Fox News and a former News of the World editor running the New York Daily News. Murdoch has gotten The New York Times to acknowledge—at the very least—that it’s seen as being a left-leaning coastal elite publication. He’s made cable news center on the feverish pitch of opinions rather than on the most convincing facts. In sum, he’s done much more to shape the mainstream media than people recognize, said Folkenflik.

Yet the new leaders in journalism, unlike Murdoch, will not have come up in the newsroom. Rather, said Folkenflik, the “true saviors”—like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who’s launching a new news venture, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who just bought the Washington Post, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who owns The New Republic—are going to be billionaires from the digital sphere.

The post Is Rupert Murdoch As Influential As You Think? More So. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As someone who grew up in Australia, I am surprised by such results. My home country does not allow low voter registration or low turnout to dent its leader’s claim to be truly representative. Instead, Australia requires eligible voters to vote.

Today, 23 countries have compulsory voting laws. In these countries, voter participation is as much as 30 percent higher than it is in United States. Since nationwide compulsory voting was introduced in Australian elections in 1924, the turnout has never fallen below 90 percent.

Australia is no political paradise. Politicians there are often just as daft as the ones in America. Campaigns produce plenty of nonsense. Australians, like Americans, are not always the informed voters and engaged citizens they should be. And some Australians participate in an apathetic practice called “donkey voting”—simply numbering the candidates one through ten instead of ranking them according to preference, spoiling ballots by defacing them, or placing no vote on a ballot.

But the percentage of informal votes remains small—around 4 percent in most counts. And they hardly mitigate the distinct advantages of compulsory voting. There’s no other form of voting in a democratic election that gives as accurate an indication of what an entire country is thinking politically.

In ethnically diverse countries formed by immigration, such as Australia (and the United States), it is hard to overstate the value of compulsory voting. The system allows the greatest proportion of voices to be heard in an election, and in doing so promotes social cohesion and the value of political participation. Watching my parents vote in every election, I understood the importance of the duty—and of Australian citizenship. Compulsory voting creates culture and expectations. I can’t name one person I know who has been levied the standard $20 fine for not voting.

For all these reasons, compulsory voting is one Australian affinity that, unlike Vegemite and Mel Gibson, Americans would do well to emulate.

Compulsory voting—on display this weekend in the country’s national elections—also addresses many of the concerns that Americans are raising about the state of their own democracy. Chief among these is the relatively weak representation of the views and circumstances of lower-middle-class and poor Americans in the nation’s politics.

Political science research establishes that when voting is voluntary, as it is in the U.S., those with higher socio-economic status—people with time and money—are more likely to cast a ballot. According to the U.S Census Bureau, in the 2008 election, 76 percent of voters earning a median income of $50,000 or more voted, while only 59 percent of Americans earning less than that cast their ballots.

With compulsory voting, the elections—and the debate around them—would be broader. Since so few Americans actually vote, American politicians don’t have to appeal to the whole country. Instead, they cater naturally to the groups most likely to vote for them, and, in office, they create narrowly focused policies and laws with the aim of turning out those same voters in the next election cycle. Compulsory voting also would diminish the value of negative advertising, which is mostly designed to reduce turnout for political opponents.

Yes, there are objections to compulsory voting, but, under scrutiny, criticisms of the system seem minor compared to the advantages. The most common complaint raised in the U.S. against compulsory voting is that it infringes on one’s freedom not to vote. But if requiring voting every two or four years is a suppression of rights, it’s a fairly modest one—and far less time-consuming than the government coercions of paying taxes, jury duty, or receiving a basic education.

And it’s far from clear that compulsory voting is coercive at all. In 1971, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that compulsory voting did not amount to a violation of the right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Compulsory voting only requires voters to go to the polls. It does not dictate that the ballot be marked in any particular way or at all. And, if democracy is a public good from which citizens benefit, there should be a reciprocal duty for citizens to participate in its function.

Opponents of compulsory voting often fret that it could skew election results or undermine their quality. Some worry that compulsory voting benefits the liberal party, on the assumption that minorities and younger people are the missing voters in most elections. Others suggest that the additional voters are less informed and will make choices of dubious quality compared to voluntary voters. “The median voter is incompetent at politics,” Jason Brennan, a professor of ethics, economics, and public policy at Georgetown University, argued in The New York Times. “The citizens who abstain are, on average, even more incompetent. If we force everyone to vote, the electorate will become even more irrational and misinformed. The result: not only will the worse candidate on the ballot get a better shot at winning, but the candidates who make it on the ballot in the first place will be worse.”

But there is little evidence to back either objection. Despite its compulsory voting laws, Australia’s political landscape has resembled that of the United States—domination by two major parties on a familiar liberal to conservative spectrum. A 2008 study by political scientist John Sides of George Washington University showed that compulsory voting would have had little impact on the results of American presidential elections between 1992 and 2004. (Sides suggests compulsory voting might only be a factor in some tight races.) In either case, if the goal of democracy is to have as many citizens participate and be represented as possible, compulsory voting’s advantages are undeniable.

Its adoption in the United States also would help Americans get past their toxic debate over laws that would make it harder to vote. When voting is compulsory, there are strong incentives for voter-friendly election laws. Australia is a voter’s paradise. Election Day is always on a weekend. Postal and early voting are readily available. The Australian Electoral Commission encourages simple registration practices and ensures that there are mobile polling stations as well as booths in hospitals and nursing homes. Given all these advantages, it’s no surprise that compulsory voting is popular, with public approval at about 75 percent.

As Americans battle over voter suppression and disenfranchisement in places like Texas, North Carolina, and Florida, compulsory voting looks like a way out. If every eligible adult were required to vote, states would have little choice but to overhaul their electoral systems and make voting as accessible as possible. This would focus attention back on the issues, not the process—and would make American democracy more representative, and Election Day an occasion for everyone.

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