The Unfair Society

Is Fair Worth Fighting For?

After writing about this business of Christian Porter, I got to be thinking about what was disturbing me so much about the press conference. On the one hand if we are being fair to the person who accused the Attorney General, we have to be fair towards her and ask the questions. On the other hand if we're living in a society with due process, the manner in which we ask the question should have a bit more epistemological precision than a heated presser to get towards justified, true, belief on the matter. It would be unfair to everybody in society if we judged guilt on rumour and innuendo. 

Which got me thinking, I guess I'm a sucker for this notion of 'fair'. 

I saw a number of people going off on social media today saying Porter was merely denying it like Bart Simpson - "I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything" - which, to be fair is true as well, but if his denials are not sufficient from making your negative judgements, then doesn't that mean this really needs to go to court? 

If you were being accused rightly or wrongly, you'd want your day in court instead of just a presser. Yet because the would-be plaintiff is dead, there can't be a court date. It is entirely unfair to be judged on the letter. That's Porter's point. Thus fairness seemed to be one of the nodes on which this process was buckling.

This brings about the next question:

Do We Live In A Fair Society?

We value fairness in Australia. Everyday Australia's journalists describe our society as egalitarian. This is probably not quite right. I can say that it used to be egalitarian but years and years of Coalition rule has ensured a lot of privileges have been baked in as advantages for wealthy people. Going back 30 years to the year Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke from the Prime Minister's office, there have been 11 years of ALP rule and the rest belong to the Coalition. They won a lot over the years, some times in the most dodgy manner (which I won't bother going into here) and the ALP for its part has found numerous ways to hobble itself over the years. And each time the ALP hobbled itself, that was an opportunity lost. 

Fairness has been slipping in the socio-economic sense for 3 decades. We are far less equal now than we were in 1991. Year after year we find economic inequality has risen and that the gap with the indigenous community has not closed. Opportunities are less, the economy is far less diverse, and labour conditions are more precarious for far more people. It turned out this way because successive governments have been undertaking the Neo-liberal social experiment where governments no longer look to achieve full employment, they try and cut taxes instead and hope private enterprise pulls it weight. It has not. 

A simple analysis of GDP spread tells a simple picture of unequal spread of wealth. It was pointed out by an academic to me that 8% of Australia's GDP is derived from the surrounding blocks of Wynyard and Town Hall stations in Sydney. Melbourne similarly has 2 stations that provide a similar amount, and Brisbane has one that provides about 5. If you add it up, 1/5 of Australia's GDP rests on 5 suburbs out of all the suburbs in this wide country. This skewering is partly the result of public infrastructure policy (or absence thereof) but also an expression of the unequal opportunities present in our society. 

There are whole swathes of the country physically cut off from the opportunities that are available in concentrated spots in the middle of these urban centres. Australia's unemployed numbers 700,000 and upwards. In any given week there are job listings that number about 200,000, most of which are closely tied to these GDP engine sites. In any given week there are 500,000 people who need a job, are actively looking and cannot get the economic opportunity to better themselves as per the conservative Liberal National Party prescription for self-betterment. There's no rhetorical device to cover over the plain fact that the Coalition government can't even deliver on its own stated policy. It just can't work the way they say it does, thanks to the tyranny of distance. We live in a country that if you live in the wrong place, your odds at success get very long.

So no, we do not live in a society that is in any way fair; we have a government that has made it its stated policy to keep it unfair; and unfairness is celebrated by this ruling party at just about every turn. 

Therefore, it has to be asked how is it fair that the Attorney General of the party of unfairness, presiding over a government that enacts policies to bolster enduring unfairness, that spreads the unfairness and celebrates the unfairness it creates and sustains, complain when he is not being treated fairly? Can Christian Porter really complain about all this being unfair? What has fairness got to do with his party, his government, his life experience of wealth and privilege and his pursuit of said unfairness over his entire political career? 

What, fair? Christian Porter wants fairness? Due process? Who is he trying to kid? We don't get fairness from him or his government, why should that old expectation for egalitarian, democratic fairness still stand? He's getting exactly what's coming to him exactly because of the many many actions of his life apart from his possible rape that put him in a position to look like a rape suspect. It's extraordinary in some ways that a man's life in the law and politics has led him to being utterly unbelievable when he himself is accused of a heinous crime - but that's all on him. 

You Know What's Weird About The Date?

January of 1988. 

I keep looking at the date of the alleged rape and keep thinking it's peculiar. What is peculiar about it is that it's roughly the time of Australia celebrating its Bicentenary. I remember the event. On Australia Day that year I was down in Blues Point Park with my friends to see the fireworks which, for the first time were mounted from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Then they announced they would become incorporated into New Year Celebrations and the rest is history. The jingle went "Celebration of a Nation, lend us a hand," so we spent the year making jokes about hand jobs. It's hard to forget. It was typically a Hawke-Keating kind of Green-and-Gold Australia looking fo an identity to hang its celebrations upon, and much less the Southern-Cross-and-Union-Jack kind of Australiana preferred by John Howard.

All the same Australia Day remains hotly contested, with Porter's own party doing the defending of the day of invasion for the indigenous people of Australia. It's the ultimate day of unfairness that his party insists we keep as the day to celebrate our nation-hood. I'm pretty sure Christian Porter is also one of those guys who don't think we should move the date. It seems incredibly emblematic that around the time of the most unfair moment being celebrated was when the alleged events took place. 

And he wants fairness. Let that sink in. 

A Bit of Kafka, A Bit of Kant

I guess a part of me is still wedded to fairness. If one were to give Porter the benefit of the doubt, then it must be harrowing to wake up one day and be accused of a heinous crime 33 years ago when you were a teen. It's like something straight out of Kafka (or Philip K Dick). Like Kafka's 'The Trial', the allegation sticks, but he can't get to a courtroom to challenge his accuser or clear his name. Or maybe it is more like 'The Metamorphosis' where he woke up one day as a beetle (I have often wanted to wake up one day as a Beatle but that is another story). Instead of a beetle, Porter has woken up to find he is an alleged rapist.

It doesn't end well for Josef K. or Gregor Samsa the protagonists in Kafka's stories. It's hard to imagine this ends well for Christian Porter. He might not like it but his only shot at clearing his name is the independent inquiry being tossed around.

Immanuel Kant made a point in his book 'Critique of Pure Reason' that there are any number of things in the universe one could discuss but because of the way we are constructed, there is no way of knowing. For instance we cannot know if there is an afterlife because we can't die and come back. So any discussion of the afterlife cannot be sensibly made because nobody knows what they're talking about. Similarly, if we're careful about what we can know and what we can't know, the range of subjects we can discuss sensibly becomes self evident (or words to that effect, it's been a decade since I read the big fat turgid book). When applied to the situation of Christian Porter, it becomes self evident we can't talk about this case in any sensible way, given the circumstances. 

People are going to try anyway because it's their job to commentate, but keep in mind what Kant had to say about the limits of what we can know and whether sensible judgements can be made. They can have the independent inquiry but they might come up with bupkis. Is this fair? Is this fair on the woman? Is any of it fair? Like I said, I'm a sucker for fairness, but we're talking about a guy who tried to make fairness obsolete, asking for fairness. By all means have the independent inquiry but I can hear Kafka and Kant laughing from the grave. 

Whatever the outcome, it sucks to be you, Christian Porter. But it's no worse than the life of the disadvantaged in this country - a disadvantage your career was spent in trying to sustain.