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Why Vaccinating the World Is the Best Thing for Australia

photograph of multiple arrows in target's bullseye

With COVID vaccine boosters ready to be rolled out across Australia, a debate has arisen about the ethics of taking a third vaccine shot when nearly half of the world population has yet to receive their first. Tedros Ghebreyesus, President of the World Health Organization, has invoked the principle of health equity in suggesting that booster shots should be restricted until the world’s poorest have access to a vaccine. Daniel Burkett has argued in this very venue that the ethical choice is to boycott the booster – sending a message that we refuse to partake in ill-gotten gains – although A.G Holdier replies that any such attempt might ultimately prove futile. On the other hand, proponents of the shot highlight evidence of its efficacy in reducing infections and symptoms of COVID, and suggest that our moral obligation to get vaccinated might well extend to taking booster shots. In this case, however, we need not choose between self-interest and morality: for those of us in Australia, the two are aligned.

It might be argued that vaccines should be directed, not to the poorest countries, but to those with the highest case fatality rates (CFRs). Research has shown that COVID-19 is more deadly in countries with increased prevalence of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and those with older populations: all apt descriptors for Australia. Such a simplistic take, however, would overlook the quality of medical care already available in Australia and our medical system’s strong (albeit still limited) capacity to deal with significant medical emergencies. Furthermore, this analysis relies on questionable data, with severe undertesting for COVID skewing statistics in poorer countries. And as noted by Burkett, any analysis based on CFR would have to consider not only the initial risk of COVID, but the diminishing returns in vaccine effectiveness. Whereas the first dose of a Pfizer vaccine can reduce the likelihood of developing symptoms by around 50%, a second dose adds around 40% more protection and a third only 10-15% when compared to baseline.

So, it is hard to make the case that we need booster shots more than those in the developing world need a first or second dose. A better argument might be that boosters would provide a net benefit to both health and the economy, and, as we can get them, we should take them. This is a kind of medical lifeboat ethics: we have the capacity to save ourselves, and we shouldn’t squander that chance on the naïve hope of saving others. After all, the responsibility of government is to look out for the interests of its citizens. Politically, vaccine boosters are local, immediate and – perhaps most importantly for the current government in the run up to an election – highly marketable to an understandably worried voter base. And whereas bioethicist Nancy Jecker points out that countries like Tanzania, Chad, and Haiti are hovering at a disastrous 1% vaccination rate, this comparison is neither apt nor helpful. The issue there is not so much with vaccine supply (although this may be a contributing factor) as the potent mix of conflict, corruption and political instability preventing acquisition and effective distribution of vaccines. In Australia, we have boosters available (and more on the way), and we have the capacity to administer them. So why shouldn’t we?

A more enlightening comparison would look not at the least vaccinated nations, but those where COVID has taken a significant toll. Countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa, with stable governments, better record-keeping and active – albeit imperfect – vaccination programs. There, the picture is grim. India’s actual COVID death toll could be well over two million (compared to the official figure of less than 500 thousand), while vaccination lags at just over 50% first dose. In South Africa, official figures suggest less than 100 thousand COVID-related deaths. However, excess mortality since the start of 2020 exceeds 250 thousand, with an estimated 95% of these deaths due to the disease. Just over a quarter of the population have received a vaccine dose, and even fewer have received two. In Brazil, somewhere around 600 thousand people have died from COVID, while less than 60% of the population are fully vaccinated (although a more impressive 75% have received at least one dose). Most disturbingly, each of these countries have seen the emergence of new, dangerous variants, with Beta coming out of South Africa, Gamma originating in Brazil, and the now-dominant Delta strain starting in India before taking over the world. This is before mentioning the fast-encroaching specter of the new, ominously named Omicron.

Here is the crucial point. On this issue, we don’t have to choose between morality and self-interest, as suggested by Nicholas Bugeja at The Interpreter. Instead, this is one of those (increasingly rare) cases where morality and self-interest align. The biggest threat to Australia is not a resurgent Delta variant attacking those whose vaccines have diminished in efficacy. The biggest threats are of new variants, incubated in highly mobile, densely packed, and largely unvaccinated populations. Every time COVID-19 is transmitted – wherever in the world that transmission occurs – there is the chance of a potentially dangerous mutation emerging. The best way to deal with this threat is mass vaccination of the unvaccinated, not marginal gains for the already protected.

Nor must we choose between vaccinating the world and protecting our most vulnerable. We can do both. Booster vaccines should be prioritized for those most at risk – the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions – while an increasing share is sent overseas to boost immunity and reduce the threat of new variants. CSL is already contracted to produce about 30 million more doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but the government should reconsider its decision to stop production after the current run. We might not be able to vaccinate the whole world, but we can certainly play our part.

It is important to note that this analysis takes a myopic Australian viewpoint and may not apply to much of the world. Here, despite our slow start, vaccination rates are approaching 80% of the total population (and continue to rise), while case numbers remain low. For Holdier, living in Arkansas where vaccine hesitancy (and rampant misinformation) has kept the vaccination rate below 50%, the personal likelihood of catching COVID skews the moral calculus in favor of boosters and away from admirable, but possibly futile, political posturing. There, the risk of catching a current strain may well outweigh the dangers of a new variant.

But in Australia, as borders reopen, international students are welcomed back, and international travel returns, so too does the threat of a new, more virulent, or more deadly strain hitting our shores (the much-hyped Mu variant might have been kept at bay, but Omicron is already here). Hotel quarantine wasn’t enough to keep Delta out last time, although it was a huge help. This time, we will be without our first and most effective line of defense. If we demand people get vaccinated before coming to Australia – and we should – then the onus is on us to make those vaccinations accessible. It’s in our best interest.

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Why Trivial Contributions to the Climate Crisis Still Count

photograph of water pollution with skyscrapers on opposite shoreline

Countries resistant to meaningful climate action often point to the relatively small size of their contributions to global carbon emissions. It is this very point which conservative Australian broadcaster Alan Jones sought to convey with his infamous grain-of-rice demonstration. The argument against Australia taking climate action, it seems, goes something like this: Even if anthropogenic climate change is a concern, and even if Australia is adding to this problem, their contribution (about 1%) is trivial compared to the exceedingly large contributions of other nations (such as China and the U.S. with 28% and 15% of global emissions respectively). Given this, it is these emissions heavyweights that should bear most — if not all — of the responsibility for taking climate action. Call this the Trivial Contribution Argument.

But is this a good argument? For starters, let’s ignore the fact that — despite their relatively small total emissions — Australia has the third worst per capita emissions rate in the world. Let’s also ignore the fact that when emissions from coal exports are taken into account, Australia’s total contribution to global carbon emissions is closer to 3-4%. Assuming that Australia is responsible for only 1% of global carbon emissions, does this excuse them from taking meaningful climate action?

In order to answer this question, it’s necessary to dig a little deeper into how the Trivial Contribution Argument works. One underlying assumption seems to be that a trivial contribution, when remedied, will only ever provide a trivial solution — one that is unlikely to solve the problem in question. Suppose, to borrow a vivid illustration provided by one philosopher, I am currently pouring a jug of water into a flooding river. Suppose, further, that the river is about to breach its banks downstream and cause devastation to a nearby town. Am I under some kind of obligation to curb my behavior? My contribution to the flood is trivial, and — for this same reason — any remedy to my actions will only provide a trivial solution. Sure, I can refrain from pouring the jug into the river — but this won’t prevent the flood. Given this, there seems to be no compelling reason for me to modify my behavior; it makes no difference either way.

This, it seems, is the fundamental reasoning behind a country pointing to its trivial carbon emissions as a way of avoiding their obligation to engage in meaningful climate action. Unless larger polluters (like China and the U.S.) do more, there is little to be gained from the remedial actions of smaller emitters. Given that climate action always comes at a cost — both economically and otherwise — why would countries decide to bear this burden when it won’t solve the problem?

Such reasoning, however, is deeply flawed. Consider another example to show why this is the case. Suppose that official waste disposal is expensive in my neighborhood, and that — instead of paying for this service — my neighbors begin dumping their garbage on my front lawn. The damage to my garden (and property value) is predictably severe. I eventually catch one of my neighbors tossing a burger wrapper on to my property and confront him about his behavior. He shrugs his shoulders and says that he isn’t the culprit I need to worry about. He surveys the accumulated rubbish pile and estimates that he’s responsible for less than 1% of the waste. He identifies two of my neighbors as littering heavyweights, claiming that they, together, are responsible for more than 40% of the waste. He explains that curbing his own behavior won’t do much to help until I convince those neighbors to do something about their own behavior. With that, he shrugs his shoulders, flings a banana peel onto the heap, and departs.

In this context, the unreasonableness of my neighbor’s defense is plain to see. Yes, there are those who are more responsible for the problem. But he is still responsible for at least some of the problem, and thus responsible for at least some of the solution. While ending — or at least reducing the extent of — his littering will not remedy the issue entirely, this does not excuse his complete inaction.

In fact, the Trivial Contribution Argument isn’t merely flawed — it’s actually paradoxical. Suppose we accept that a 1% contribution is small enough to excuse a country like Australia from any obligations regarding climate action. What percentage, then, would require them to act? Those emitting 2% will point to those emitting 5%, and those emitting that amount will shift the blame on to those emitting even more. Inevitably, the buck will be passed upwards until only the largest emitter is held responsible. But herein lies the paradox: While China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, they are still responsible for ‘only’ 28% of total global emissions. Thus, any remedial action taken by China would be limited to solving no more than a quarter of the problem. Indeed, China could shirk their own responsibilities by saying “even if we do all we can, it won’t be enough, as the remaining countries (combined) are doing far more damage than we are.” In this way, the rationale behind the Trivial Contribution Argument would allow China to shift blame back on to the smaller emitters — leading us full circle, with no responsibility attributed.

The only way to avoid this is to deny the validity of the Trivial Contribution Argument; that is, to deny the claim that a trivial contribution to a problem should be treated like no contribution at all. This is why — when considering the demands of climate justice as they relate to climate action — philosophers tend to take a more pluralistic approach. While the extent to which an actor has contributed to a problem (often called the Polluter Pays Principle) is relevant, we also take into account other principles — such as the extent to which an actor has benefited from the problematic behavior (the Beneficiary Pays Principle) and the actor’s capacity to provide a solution (the Ability to Pay Principle). This more nuanced approach is vital if we wish to engage in real and effective climate action on a global level.

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Black Lives Matter: Australia

Protest in Australia; two signs are visible: one reads "lest we forget the frontier wars, black lives, white lies" and one shows a black and red image of Australia with the word "genocide" written on it

Our public discourse [is] full of blak [sic] bodies but curiously empty of people who put them there. Alison Whittaker

This weekend protestors for Black Lives Matter in Australia took to the streets in contravention of Covid-19 health warnings to join worldwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd to highlight police violence against people of color and to once again raise the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

The statistics and the stories of Black deaths in custody is a vexed issue in Australia, and a national disgrace. In the 30 years since a royal commission was conducted, successive governments have failed to implement many of its key recommendations; and in that time 432 Aboriginal Australians have died in police custody. Despite the manifest violence, negligence, and displays of overt racism around these deaths, charges against police are rarely brought, and there has never been a conviction for an Aboriginal death in custody in Australia. 

Indigenous activists and families of victims have been trying, with only incremental and limited success, to elevate the issue in the wider Australian public. Most of the names and stories of these people are not known to most Australians. 

In a piece for The Conversation, Alison Whittacker, law scholar, poet and Australian Indigenous activist, writes,

“Do you know about David Dungay Jr? He was a Dunghutti man, an uncle. He had a talent for poetry that made his family endlessly proud. He was held down by six corrections officers in a prone position until he died and twice injected with sedatives because he ate rice crackers in his cell. Dungay’s last words were also “I can’t breathe”. An officer replied ‘If you can talk, you can breathe.'”

The statistics for Aboriginal incarceration in Australia are mind-blowing. In some areas in the country, Aboriginal people are the most incarcerated people on earth; They make up roughly 3.3% of the overall population but account for 28% of the prison population. Aboriginal women represent 34% of the overall national female prison population.

The 460 deaths in custody since 1990 is a terrible number, and to each belongs a story – a life, and then a death of indignity, of violence, of neglect. As in the US, in Australia it belongs to an historical legacy of rapacious, brutal colonial expansion. 

May 27 to June 3 is Australia’s National Reconciliation Week. These dates mark two significant milestones for Aboriginal people. One is the 1967 referendum, which for the first time recognized Aboriginal Australians as citizens. The other is the High Court native title decision known as Mabo, which overturned the legal doctrine of ‘terra nullius’ – the principle by which the Crown acquired sovereignty of the continent in 1788, on the basis that the lands were lands ‘belonging to no one.’ 

But there is still a long way to go for Australians to come to terms with the history of frontier wars, which morphed into state maintained forms of oppression and violence, and then into official government policy of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. This history is not visible enough to, nor unflinchingly acknowledged by, wider Australia. Nor are the tendrils visible which reach through that history into the present, holding Aboriginal people in all sorts of disadvantage. Disadvantage that is reflected in the statistics. As the Uluru Statement from the Heart says:

“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.” 

What, at this time, now, can be said and done about the work of reconciliation? In 2000, 300,000 people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for reconciliation. This year, then, marks the twentieth anniversary of ‘the bridge walk’. Yet material change has been frustratingly slow, and in some indicators, things are going backwards. 

The 2018 Close the Gap report on Indigenous health and education targets and outcomes found child mortality at twice the rate for Aboriginal children, school attendance rates declining, and a persistent life-expectancy gap of almost a decade between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. 

Perhaps reconciliation has had its moment. It was maybe only the first word Australians have learned in the lexicon of change and of justice. Recognition of the nation’s shameful history is a starting point on the long road to equality and justice. But perhaps it has become a platitude, a way for white Australians to settle the ledger of their guilt, a way to paper over deep-seated systemic injustice that is thwarting real progress for Aboriginal lives and that continues to create privilege for settler Australians.  

The problem, as many voices have been saying (for a long time but) especially in the weeks since the BLM protests broke out in the US following the murder of George Floyd, is that white and settler oppression of Black and Indigenous people is thoroughly baked in to the system; baked into the system of colonial expansion– which included slavery and dispossession under terra nullius (both mechanisms used to dehumanize people for the purpose of wealth creation) – and it is baked into its neoliberal iterations. 

Perhaps the problem, rather, is that we have been reconciled to these things, to the reality of Indigenous disadvantage and risk of police violence and incarceration, for too long. 

How, then, can we reimagine and re-engage the concept, the work of reconciliation, or do we need to move beyond it to another stage? The national conversation in Australia has been painfully slow to get going. 

National Sorry Day is marked on May 26th, began in 2007 when the Australian Government, following the release of the Bringing Them Home report, formally apologized to Aboriginal people who were forcibly removed as children from their parents in a government assimilation policy. 

Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita writes that the findings of the report “[were] a source of deep shame for many Australians, and for some a source of guilt” ( A Common Humanity, 1999, pg. 87). While, as Gaita observes, many people feel shame and guilt, many also resisted such feelings, and felt that they were being asked to take responsibility for past wrongs they felt no part of. 

The refusal of shame sometimes takes the form of national pride, in which being proud of one’s nation is mutually exclusive with acknowledging its brutal history and recognizing the remnants of that history. 

Those who hold this conception of national pride take the view that history in which racial injustice is afforded a more central place in our story and our journey to self-understanding is overly bleak. It is known by its detractors as the ‘black armband view of history’ and they argue that we should be focusing on trying to fix the current inequalities rather than looking backwards into a troubled past. This obviously ignores the fact that these current inequalities, created by that past, are able to continue because it has never been reckoned with. 

Therefore the corrupted, shallow conception of national pride can never do anything other than let the deep national wounds fester. To be authentic in our attempts to reconcile, we should not contrast our national truth telling with our national interest, and reconciliation cannot be about ‘moving on’ until the appalling statistical gaps between white and black Australia are well and truly closed. 

But the injustice is not just expressed in the material conditions (by these gaps), or even the systemic problems. Simply moving forward means that there is no proper acknowledgement that those who suffered —  and continue to suffer these injustices — are wronged, and that to be wronged, is itself a distinctive and irreducible form of harm. 

Jacqueline Rose, on the 2018 conference on ‘Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation’ in Stellenbosch, South Africa, wrote: “thinking was not enough. Not that ‘feeling’ will do it either, in a context where expressions of empathy – ‘I feel your pain’ – are so often a pretext for doing nothing.”

Guilt and shame are part of a pained acknowledgement of wrongs we have committed or in which we are in other ways implicated. But they must also be part of what forces us to change the system and ourselves. 

As protests in response to George Floyd’s murder and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racialized violence and oppression raged across the US last week, a Sydney police officer was filmed handcuffing and then sweeping the legs out from under a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal boy who had just issued a vulgar verbal threat; the officer slammed the boy’s face into the pavement. 

Shortly afterwards the New South Wales police minister defended the officer, saying he was provoked and threatened. The minister, in public remarks, expressed far more outrage at the verbal abuse from the teenager than at the officer’s brutal response. 

How can reconciliation occur if such blatant power differentials cannot even be recognized, if the historical weight of wrongs done to a people and the humiliation and disadvantage they continue to suffer is totally invisible? Nothing, then, has been reckoned with. 

The worst thing about this story from Sydney is the grim, horrific moral equivalence being drawn between a lippy teenager and an officer of the law, whose duty is to ‘protect and serve’ using brutal and retributive force.  

When a teenager can be face-slammed for giving a mouthful of foul language to a police officer and this act can be defended by his superiors as a response to a threat, we are nowhere. 

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Pacific Islands Forum: Climate War in the Pacific

photograph of shoreline

The fight to mitigate full-blown climate catastrophe last week suffered a blow thanks to Australia’s intransigence at a meeting of Pacific leaders, which culminated in a plea from the president of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific country already being inundated by rising seas, to the world: “We ask, please understand this, our people are dying.”

We should not be in the grip of moral uncertainty here. There is no more time to dispute the science – or to try to argue that it is in dispute. The science is in and evidence of the rapidly worsening climate crisis is all around us. 

Consider this analogy: Imagine you are walking past a pond, you hear someone pleading for help and you see a drowning child.1 You have the capacity to save the child’s life, at some cost to yourself. The cost may be something relatively minor or it may be something more serious – perhaps you will be late for a class, or miss an important meeting; ruin an expensive suit, or even lose your job. None of these things, even losing your job is (without serious qualification) morally equivalent to the child’s life. It should be uncontroversial that you are morally required to save the child. 

Now imagine that you are a large wealthy country strolling past a small poor nation being inundated by water as the seas rise from the effects of climate change. Imagine you hear that country pleading with you to help, to save it from drowning. Your help would of course require some sacrifice, but it will not threaten your life, or even your livelihood. It may be a major inconvenience to you, but it is a matter of life and death to the other. It should be equally uncontroversial that you are morally required to do whatever you can to come to its aid. 

Something like this happened last week in the tiny Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu where leaders from a host of smaller nations along with Australia met for the annual Pacific Islands Forum. The most pressing topic of the summit was the climate emergency, as the Pacific islands are on the front line, and Tuvalu, like many other low-lying, small Pacific Island nations is facing immediate peril from rising seas. Many regional leaders had their sights set on Australia, which is becoming a notorious laggard on efforts to combat climate change and honor its commitments made in the Paris agreement. It was hoped that an agreement could be reached at the leaders summit that would reflect the urgency of the crisis and forge a cooperative strategy to address the emergency. 

However, this is what those Pacific Island leaders were up against: just two years ago Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, (then federal treasurer) stood up in parliament brandishing a lump of coal and shouting that coal is nothing to be afraid of, to the guffaws of other government ministers. Morrison fronted the forum this week with his guile fully intact. Australia’s current conservative government (Liberal-National Party), now in its third term, began its tenure by repealing the previous government’s progressive and effective carbon tax, and has been defined by its ideological and pecuniary resistance to weaning Australia’s economy from its reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal, towards the many great opportunities the country affords for clean renewable energy generated by solar and wind. 

Australia is one of the richest nations per capita, owing to its vast fossil fuel resources and relatively small population; Australians also have one of the highest carbon footprints per head of population and Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. Because of Australia’s massive coal exports, the country is a major contributor of carbon heavy fuels and bears responsibility for its own carbon output as well as that of the nations to whom its coal is exported. Australia’s lack of action on climate change, together with its plans to continue to open up new coal mining prospects is having direct impact on the imminent existential crisis faced by Tuvalu and other Pacific nations. 

In his opening speech Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama said: “I appeal to Australia to do everything possible to achieve a rapid transition from coal to energy sources that do not contribute to climate change,” he said, adding that coal posed an “existential threat” to Pacific countries.

In an effort to head off criticism the Morrison government announced $500m in climate resilience and adaptation for the Pacific region. In response Tuvalu’s prime minister, Enele Sopoaga said: 

“No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse to not to do the right thing, which is to cut down on your emissions, including not opening your coalmines.”

During the leaders’ retreat where a communiqué was debated which will be used as the basis of regional decision-making, Australia refused to budge on certain ‘red lines’ – including insisting on the removal of mentions of coal, limiting warming to under 1.5C, and setting a plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, to the grief and frustration of the other nations. 

The Fijian prime minister expressed his anger with the difficulties in negotiating with Australia during the leaders’ retreat, telling The Guardian that Morrison had been “very insulting and condescending.”

So, to return to the drowning child scenario, it is meant to help us see that where it is in our power to help someone whose life is in danger “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” Australia has failed the test. It has walked past the child, refusing to help on the basis of reasons which are not morally equivalent – as Sopoaga said he told Morrison at one point during discussions: “You are trying to save your economy, I am trying to save my people.”

But there is another stratum of moral bankruptcy to how the broader conversation in Australia went. Australia’s deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, offering his own commentary back home from a business function as the forum was underway in Tuvalu, told an audience 

“I also get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive,” 

The current Australian government not only doesn’t understand its moral obligations or isn’t prepared to meet them, but has no compunction about flouting its preference for its resource sector (lets say its expensive suit) over the survival of its neighbors (the drowning child).

1 I am here borrowing, and adapting an analogy used by Peter Singer in his paper Famine, Affluence and Morality, published in 1972.

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Cultural Heritage and the Murujuga Petroglyphs

photograph of petroglyphs etched in a number of different stone faces

The Australian continent has been continually inhabited for at least 60,000 years. The Aboriginal or First Nations people of Australia are the longest surviving continuous culture(s) in the world, though their traditional lifestyles, languages and connections to country have been severely degraded by European settlement at the end of the Eighteenth Century. The Burrup peninsula, in the north-western corner of Australia, is home to a vast gallery of petroglyphs, or rock carvings, which tell a story of human habitation that stretches back tens of thousands of years, well before the last ice age to the time when Neanderthals still inhabited Europe.

Known as Murujuga in the local Aboriginal language, the site contains more than one million petroglyphs across 36,857ha of the peninsula and surrounding Dampier Archipelago. The petroglyphs of the Murujuga peninsula “have been considered to constitute the largest gallery of such rock art in the world.” The most recent petroglyphs were carved in the 1800s, before the Yaburara People (the artists and traditional inhabitants of the area) were murdered or driven off the land in a period of sustained colonial killings in 1868 known as the Flying Foam massacre.

Among its treasures Murujuga contains pieces of rock art that are some of the oldest known examples of art by prehistoric humans. The oldest of the petroglyphs at this site date back some 40,000 years. Among many things the Murujuga petroglyphs depict, there are pictures of some species of megafauna, such as the giant flat-tailed kangaroo, which became extinct around 30,000 years ago. The Murujuga site is also home to the first known image of a human face in history, carved about 35,000 years ago. The value of these ancient carvings, not only for Australia’s First Nations people, but also for all of humanity, is inestimable.

However the northwest of Australia is also home to massive iron ore, oil, coal, mineral and gas reserves, as well as other heavy industry. Industrial scale mining in areas including the Burrup Peninsula has, from the early twentieth century, contributed to Australia becoming one of the per capita richest developed countries in the world. Thus it comes as no surprise that the preservation of the Murujuga rock art has been subordinated to economic and corporate interests. In the 1960’s development of deep-water ports to transport iron ore was carried out without any survey work, as museum recommendations on preservation following survey work on nearby rock art had hindered other proposed developments. “A great deal of rock art was destroyed on the peninsula in the 1960’s” writes Robert Bednarik, an archaeologist who, since the early 2000’s has been arguing for greater steps to be taken for protection so that the petroglyphs may be saved from further destruction.

These developments, along with those of and around the original town of Dampier, where coastline was bulldozed and filled in, including a major site on which the power-station was erected, has destroyed an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the population of petroglyphs. The Murujuga rock art is now under threat from chemicals associated with mining, and nearby fertilizer plants. The site currently sits adjacent to the largest gas refinery in the Southern Hemisphere. 

In 2018 the Western Australian government formally committed to pursuing World Heritage status for the Burrup peninsula and together with traditional Aboriginal native title land owners signed off on an application to have the site listed under the UNESCO world heritage programme. 

Central to any proposal for a site to gain recognition as world heritage is a ‘statement of outstanding universal value.’ The notion of ‘outstanding universal value’ means that sites are seen as part of the ‘heritage of mankind as a whole,’ and as such ought to be protected and transmitted to future generations. Sites of ‘outstanding universal value’ can gain World Heritage status by meeting one of ten possible criteria. At least the following three clearly apply to Murujuga: the site represents a masterpiece of human creative genius and cultural significance; it bears a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared; it is directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance. A site of ‘outstanding universal value’ therefore marks a remarkable accomplishment of humanity, and stands as evidence of our cultural, intellectual and aesthetic history on the planet. 

The importance of gaining world heritage status for the Murujuga rock art is that world heritage status is a strong catalyst for better protection and management. It is also a strong statement of what we value and why. Present in the very idea of world heritage is a sense of reverence for the achievements of human life, civilization and culture through time, and the idea that relics of such achievements from the distant past teach us all something about what the human journey has been. The importance of protecting the Murujuga rock art lies in its value to humanity – as a record not just of human history as something in the past, but as a testament to human creativity.

The Murujuga gallery is a place of enormous anthropological and archaeological importance. But unlike other sites of prehistoric art, such as the ancient cave paintings in Spain and France, it is part of a living cultural tradition. For Australian Aboriginal people, places of special sacred significance, and objects and artifacts produced by ancestors, form part of a living cultural tradition, in which ancestors are ‘present’ – captured in the notion of Dreamtime with its complex understanding of place and time in which myth, narrative, past and present mingle. 

But the possibility of a successful application leading to official world heritage listing is dependent on there being a good chance the site can be preserved. This aspect of the application already looks shaky, as the West Australian government is apparently not prepared to make sacrifices to industry, current or future, that would put the interests of the petroglyphs above those of industry. 

The WA government is currently pursuing further industrial development alongside the world heritage listing. A briefing note to premier Mark McGowan leaked to the media last year warned that the timing of the latter was “critical” to ensuring industrial development continued. Regulators in Western Australia are considering proposals for two new chemical plants on the Burrup peninsula that would increase air pollution. A Senate report has warned emissions from heavy industry on the peninsula could damage the carvings, prompting rock art experts to call for a halt to new industry approvals until an accurate picture of the damage being done to the petroglyphs can be assessed. Any plans to increase industrial development in the region could damage the rock art and undermine efforts to secure world heritage listing. UNESCO has already indicated that the current level of industry on there may impinge on the possibility of World Heritage listing.

Consider the analogy between the destruction of  Murujuga and the worldwide outrage at the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001 along with the heartbreaking destruction of Palmyra by Isis in 2016. These actions caused a widespread global sense of shock both at the loss of irreplaceable historical and cultural treasures as well as at the barbarity with which they were destroyed. Is it any less barbaric to fail to prevent the slow destruction of the Murujuga petroglyphs, through insidious neglect and capitulation to industry? 

The ethical issues are clear here, and clearly connected to the line that can be drawn from the colonial attitudes to and barbaric treatment of Australia’s First Nations people, (exemplified in the governments’ historic disregard for sites of important cultural significance for Aboriginal people) to the corporate colonial interests of resource giants being allowed to continue the destruction of cultural heritage. 

Those advocating for the preservation of the Murujuga petroglyphs face a difficult fight to protect these beautiful, delicate and ancient artworks, which reach as far back as human history, from the industrial juggernauts of fossil fuel mining and heavy industry destroying our collective human future.

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Christchurch: White Supremacism, Politics and Moral Evil

Photograph of candles and flowers arranged to mourn victims of the shootings

Almost three weeks ago, on Friday March 15, 2019, the world looked on in horror as news broke of a terrorist attack perpetrated by a white supremacist against a community of Muslims during Friday prayers at two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman, a 28-year-old Australian man, killed 50 people with a cache of weapons including semi-automatic rifles emblazoned with white nationalist symbols. He streamed film footage live on social media before and during the massacre. (Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, has promised not to speak the terrorist’s name in public so as to deprive him of the fame he desires. Many news outlets in New Zealand and Australia have followed by continuing not to use his name, and in that spirit, this article will also decline to use his name.)

This individual was not known to authorities or to security agencies in Australia or New Zealand, but subsequent searches show that he supported Australian far right groups (now banned on social media) and was an active member of several online white supremacist forums. Prior to the massacre he published a 74-page “manifesto” online titled “the great replacement” in which he enthusiastically discusses various neo-fascist modus operandi including creating an atmosphere of fear in Muslim communities. He describes himself as a “regular white man from a regular family” who “decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.” He said he wanted his attack on the mosques to send a message that “nowhere in the world is safe.”

The accused gunman mentioned Donald Trump in his manifesto, praising the US president as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney brushed off the association: “I don’t think it’s fair to cast this person as a supporter of Donald Trump” Mulvaney said, adding “This was a disturbed individual, an evil person.”

The notion of evil is evoked in particularly extreme and egregious circumstances. Doubtless Mulvaney is right about the gunman being disturbed, and perhaps about his being evil. Evil is a moral category that bears some examination; but statements of the ilk of Mulvaney’s, which emphasize the individual nature of the action are challenged by another view. Since this horrific event there has been much soul-searching and a great deal of public debate in the gunman’s home country of Australia about possible causes or exacerbating factors for such an event; or at least about its possible relationship to wider public sentiments about issues like race and immigration. Many have criticized the level of public discourse in Australia where some views espoused by mainstream media and mainstream politics seem to prefigure and presage many of the views expressed by the gunman in his manifesto.

It is being widely acknowledged that there has been a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in mainstream political discourse; that incendiary platforms of anti-immigration and racist rhetoric have increasingly been employed not just by fringe right-wing political outfits (in Australia the One Nation party is a particularly egregious example) but also by the major political parties to drum up support and to create political advantage.

Examples are not difficult to find. In the days following the massacre Frazer Anning, a senator from One Nation (Australia’s furthest right, whitest, most nationalist minor party), was castigated for suggesting the mosque attack highlighted a “growing fear over an increasing Muslim presence” in Australian and New Zealand communities. These remarks are obviously abhorrent, and Anning will be formally censured in Parliament for them. But while Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was denouncing Anning, he was also explaining, or rather denying, remarks he himself is reported to have made in a strategy meeting as opposition Immigration spokesman, in which he reportedly urged his colleagues to capitalize on the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration”, “Muslims in Australia” and the “inability” of Muslim migrants to integrate.

And all this is familiar to the Australian public who have just witnessed, in the weeks before the massacre, the government drumming up hysteria about refugees (most of whom are Muslim) by suggesting that they may be rapists and paedophiles, and that bringing them to Australia for medical treatment would deprive Australians of hospital beds. There is no doubt (even if Donald Trump denies it) that white supremacy is on the rise, that it is being fed by social media, and that the movement is feeling emboldened by the current political climate. Given this tinderbox of conditions, many believe that it was only a matter of time before it again erupted in violence.  

So how do we square claims about the social and political conditions that feed such hatred with claims about the individual evil of the nature and actions of the one gunman who committed this massacre?

The question must be about responsibility. Acknowledging the conditions, which foment a general anxiety about race and immigration, and which embolden the already radicalized, are important parts of what we must as a (local and global) community come to terms with. Yet if we want to say that this was an act of evil perpetrated by an evil person, then we want it to be understood that that also means he is fully morally culpable, not that he is simply an instrument or product of the zeitgeist. We therefore must be aware of those who want to use that view to deflect responsibility away from themselves or their vested interests, including politicians whose policies and public pronouncements too closely resemble the evildoer’s message of hate.  

So how do we think about the notion of moral evil – and assess the moral usefulness of that concept here? There is a long history in philosophy of discussions of the nature of evil. Historically, evil has been a theological concept, and much philosophical discussion has tended to focus on ‘natural’ rather than ‘moral’ evil (natural evil is said to include bad events or bad things that happen over which agents have no control). Reasons for shunning the concept of evil in modern moral discourse are its sense of the supernatural, and because it can be thought to, by evoking a sense of mystery, express a lack of understanding and of reason. In the secular systems of philosophy, evil as a moral concept has often been eschewed in favor of moral categories of ‘wrong’ and ‘bad.’

When people say, following such an event, that ‘it was an act of evil’, what do they mean? Even if the category of evil is evoked over and above badness or wrongness, there may be different understandings of its distinction from these categories. Is evil different in kind, that is, is it qualitatively different, from an act that is just morally wrong, or may be described as bad? If that is the case, then there must be some element an evil act possesses that an act that is simply morally wrong does not. Yet it has not been easy for philosophers to pinpoint what that element is. It has been suggested, for example, by Hillel Steiner in his article “Calibrating Evil” that the quality present in an evil act that is not present in an act of ‘ordinary wrong’ is that of the pleasure derived by the perpetrator from the act. On the other hand, it could be argued that evil is quantitatively different from acts of ordinary badness, and that as a moral category it serves to amplify our understanding of the moral terribleness of an action.   

Regardless of your metaphysical commitments on these questions, a reason for turning to the concept of evil in moral philosophy is that the moral categories of ‘wrong’ and ‘bad’ are at times not enough to capture the moral significance of horrors which seem to go beyond the limits of those concepts. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the concept of evil, in the context of her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects, and bureaucrats, of the Jewish Holocaust. (As it happens, both her theory and her source material seem to be relevant here.) Arendt employed the idiom ‘evil beyond vice’ to name a kind of radical evil, one she saw as coming to fruition in the horrors of the Nazi death camps and the ‘final solution’. She analyzes evil of that nature as being a form of wrongdoing that cannot be captured by other moral concepts; that involves making human beings superfluous and that is not done for humanly understandable motives like self-interest.

Though a great deal of philosophical ethics is normative – gives us the tools to discern in a variety of situations, right from wrong and good from bad – following an event like the Christchurch massacre it seems that the role of ethics becomes partly a descriptive one – so that we use moral concepts to come to terms with, and face honestly up to, the terribleness of such events.

The paradigm for evil since the Second World War is the horror of the Nazi regime and the Jewish holocaust. It is very disturbing that there is a link, and not an incidental one, between that paradigm of evil and the motivations of the evil of the Christchurch shooter. White nationalism is white supremacy and white supremacy is neo-Nazism. There are ample pictures on the internet of the groups with which the Christchurch shooter identified, and countless groups like them, showing people displaying swastikas and doing the Nazi salute. Even the United States president Donald Trump ostensibly claimed that there were ‘fine people’ marching with torches in a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2018.

Calling this an act of evil may, or may by some using that designation, be meant to distance it or cut it off from factors which the speaker has a reason to be defensive about. Yet there is no reason to accept the implication that an evil act is an act that occurs in isolation from social and political forces. Matters of causality are difficult, and almost always opaque. Not every individual engaged in nationalist chat rooms or racist conspiracy theories will commit an atrocity, but the discussions in those spaces will foment and galvanize the hatred. And every politician’s casually nationalist or off-handed racist statement or policy adds to the normalization of the same sorts of messages that white supremacists promote. All of this matters because it will help create the atmosphere for such unspeakable acts of evil to take place.

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Australia’s Pill Testing and Different Versions of Harm Minimization

Several different colored pills laid across a white table

Sadly, the Australian summer just gone has once again seen as increase in deaths and hospitalizations associated with drug use at music festivals. As of January 2019 the state of New South Wales (NSW) coroner’s office announced it would investigate five recent deaths at music festivals. For the past decade deaths and overdose hospitalizations following ingestion of MDMA, ecstasy or other party drugs at music festivals has prompted debate about whether pill testing services should be made available at such events.

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Celebrating Invasion Day: Australia’s History War

Photo of the Sydney Harbor overlooking the Opera House and an Australian flag flying in the sky from a plane

On January 26 each year Australia celebrates its national holiday ‘Australia Day’ with official events including citizenship ceremonies and firework displays, as well as gatherings, barbecues and many other quintessentially Australian activities. But over the past several years, a debate has raged about whether it is appropriate to hold celebrations on that particular date, given its meaning for Australia’s Indigenous population (known also as Aborigines or First Nations People [1]), many of whom commemorate that particular date as Invasion Day.   

It was on January 26, 1788, that Captain Arthur Philip led the First Fleet into Sydney Cove, planting the British flag, and claiming the territory for the British Empire. The colonization of Australia meant severe degradation of traditional cultures which stretch back into prehistory.  The story of white, European settlement is, for First Nations people, a story marked — often dominated — by horrors of dispossession, massacre and attempted cultural genocide.

Inseparable from the ethical issues at stake in this debate — Aboriginal rights, justice and reconciliation — are broader philosophical issues about truth raised by vying interpretations of history. Disagreements about how the history of white settlement should be understood, and about how current generations of white Australians should respond, have become increasingly divisive over the past two decades, fuelled by the so called ‘history wars.’

At the time of European settlement, Australia had been inhabited by its indigenous occupants for over 60,000 years. That makes Aboriginal culture (though it is by no means homogenous) by far the oldest surviving, continual civilisation in the history of the world. The peoples of the First Nations made up over 600 individual Nations, with many different languages and cultural characteristics and customs.

Australia was colonized under the auspices of the doctrine of “Terra Nullius” (no-one’s land). The belief that the land did not belong to its Indigenous inhabitants rested on ignorance about the depth of the relationship of Aborigines to the land. To the European settlers, it justified their policy of driving Aboriginal people off lands in which they lived, hunted and fished, and it led also to many massacres of those who tried to resist. In the state of Tasmania, local Indigenous people were all but wiped out. In the state of Queensland, at least 65,000 estimated Indigenous people lost their lives defending their country in the frontier wars of the 1800s.

More recently, from the beginning of the twentieth century until roughly the 1960s, a government policy was in operation to remove Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children from their Indigenous parents. The (so-called) Stolen Generation were taken and sent to homes or foster care, and in many cases were subject to abuse and neglect. A 700-page report entitled Bringing Them Home, the result of a national enquiry into the Stolen Children, was tabled in Federal Parliament in 1997. It detailed story after harrowing story of families torn apart and lives ruined by the grief and suffering visited on the victims of this state-enforced policy.

Currently, the situation for many Aboriginal people remains marked by disadvantage. For example, as of the 2016 census, First Nations People represented 3.3 percent of the total Australian population yet account for more than 28 percent of Australia’s prison population. Rates of youth suicide, violence, and substance abuse remain far higher for many Indigenous communities than for the population at large.

In the context of these egregious past and ongoing current injustices, many Indigenous people have asked the rest of the community to change the date of the national holiday celebrations. Many Aboriginal people feel both that they would like to be included in national celebrations, and simultaneously cannot feel included because of what the date means to them. They need the broader Australian community to hear their need for recognition of the wrongs they, as a people, have suffered. Indigenous television presenter, Brooke Boney said,

“This is the best country in the world… But I can’t separate the 26th of January from the fact that my brothers are more likely to go to jail than school, or that my little sisters and my mum are more likely to be beaten and raped than anyone else’s sisters or mum,” she said. “And that started from that day. For me, it’s a difficult day and I don’t want to celebrate it.”

A great many non-Indigenous people fully support Australia’s First Nations people in their call for a national holiday and celebration to be held on a date not synonymous with the pain and suffering of their people. Yet the call to change the date has encountered fierce ideological resistance from other sections of the community.  Keeping Australia Day on January 26 remains the official policy of both major political parties.

In an interview last year Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he understood that some who opposed celebrating a national holiday on January 26 did so out of respect for Aboriginal people, but said refusing to celebrate the day was “silly.” He recently wrote in a Facebook post: “Indulgent self-loathing does not make Australia stronger.”

There is a prevalent view that even though grave injustice was done to Aboriginal people in the past, colonization has also brought great benefit, and since contemporary Australians are not the perpetrators of historical wrongs, they need not, indeed should not, feel guilt or shame.

Many, especially on the socially conservative side in the history wars, argue that focusing on the darkest elements in Australian history eclipses the nation’s achievements, fosters disunity rather than togetherness and threatens to drown national pride in national sorrow. Many also feel confronted by the suggestion that they could or should feel shame for the past actions of others.

Yet the Prime Minister’s statement that “indulgent self-loathing does not make Australia stronger” appears not only to reject the so-called ‘black armband’ view of Australian history in unequivocal terms, but to seriously underestimate either the injustices done to Aborigines, or the depth of their effects. Racism of this kind that was behind the dispossession based on Terra Nullis and the policy of forced removal of Aboriginal children is constituted by a very deep-seated failure of white European colonizers to acknowledge the full humanity of their Indigenous victims.

To illustrate this failure, Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita emphasizes a couple of key moments. At the time of forced removals of Aboriginal children, James Isdell, a minister for protection of Aborigines in the Western Australian government, said that “no matter how frantic an Aboriginal mother’s momentary grief was at the time, they soon forget their offspring.” [2]

But in 1992, a high court ruling (The Mabo decision), overturned the doctrine of Terra Nullius doctrine. That judgement acknowledged that Aboriginal People’s spiritual relationships to the land are deeper than can be conveyed by the notion of ownership. [3] Then, given the definition of genocide decided by the 1948 Genocide Convention, The Stolen Generation’s Bringing Them Home report demonstrates that “The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other groups for the purpose of raising them separate from and ignorant of their culture and people could properly be labelled genocidal.” [4]

These pernicious government policies represent a denial of the full humanity of Aboriginal people – their connection to their land, their love for their children. The willingness of other Australians to dismiss the feelings of hurt endured by Indigenous Australians by refusing to change the date of national celebration only compounds that injustice. As the Mayor of Darebin Council in Melbourne, Susan Rennie, told ABC Radio: “the people for whom the celebration is most hurtful should be listened to… we have consistently heard from Aboriginal / First Nations people in our community that the date is hurtful and causes distress… why wouldn’t we respond to that and think about changing the date.”

A full conception of justice would need to acknowledge what Indigenous people are saying and what they need in order for reconciliation to occur. This recognition is not merely limited to acknowledging past wrongs but perceiving ongoing injustice. That does not mean that this generation of non-Indigenous Australians, for whom there is likely to be no direct connection to those historical wrongs, should feel guilt, though some doubtless do. But it does seem to entail that a full moral appreciation of the injustices suffered include an appropriate sense of shame.

So what should a country be celebrating with a national holiday such as this? It is natural, and it is right, it seems to me, to feel a sense of pride in one’s nation. But, that sense of pride should be founded on a sufficiently deep conceptual sense of what pride is, or should be, if national pride is not going to collapse into nationalism and jingoism. To take full moral possession of the dark aspects of a nation’s history is not anti-patriotic but authentically patriotic. True patriotism should be genuine love of one’s country, and not a hollow, jingoistic nationalism of the sort which leads someone to confuse acknowledging the shame many Australians feel with “indulgent self-loathing.”

 

Notes

[1] First Nations is plural because there were thousands of tribes many with their own language and cultural traditions inhabiting Australia prior to colonization.  

[2] Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 1999, p57. My analysis here draws especially on several chapters that pertain to issues of Aboriginal dispossession and genocide in his book A Common Humanity.

[3] Gaita, 1999, 74.

[4] Gaita, 1999, 116; https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/social_justice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf 234-239

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Australia’s Moral Disgrace: Child Mental Health Crisis in Australian Immigration Detention

Photograph of a rally with a person holding a sign saying "Indefinite Detention is a crime against humanity"

The Pacific Islands Forum is a regional intergovernmental organization of 18 Pacific countries. Australia is the largest member nation, with a population of 25 million. This year, in the first week of September, the annual forum meeting is being held on the tiny island nation of Nauru. Nauru houses Australia’s only remaining offshore immigration detention centre.  That centre, a bastion of Australia’s implacably cruel asylum seeker detention policy, has again been in the news for the past several weeks as a crisis develops concerning the mental health of dozens of children detained indefinitely there. Continue reading “Australia’s Moral Disgrace: Child Mental Health Crisis in Australian Immigration Detention”

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The Ethics of Deterrence: Australian Offshore Immigration Detention

Photograph of a long row of dark green tents

For over five years, the Australian Government has enforced a policy of not allowing asylum seekers or refugees attempting to reach its shores by boat to enter the country, and of ensuring that no persons who attempt to do so will be settled in Australia. Ever. As the government’s own disseminated advertising says: No Way. You will not make Australia home.  Continue reading “The Ethics of Deterrence: Australian Offshore Immigration Detention”

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Social Change through Democracy: Same-Sex Marriage in Australia

A photo of a rainbow flag being waved outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last month I made my first visit to Australia and was continually struck by the how different the country is from the US.  The scrubby outback, the bouncing marsupials, people saying “no worries” constantly—they all reminded me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore (or in my home state of Texas). But there was also a difference in what was on the news.  Australia’s marriage equality vote was a constant topic, which seemed peculiar; peculiar because the vote was taking place now, when same-sex marriage was legalized in the US two years ago, and peculiar also because of the role of voting. In the US, a Supreme Court decision established marriage equality in 2015.

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Saudi Arabia’s Football Team Shuns a Moment of Silence

Saudi Arabia is the latest Arab Gulf country making waves lately. In a recent World Cup qualifier game between the Saudi Arabian Football Federation and the winning Australian national soccer team, the Saudi players ignored the call for a moment of silence dedicated to recent victims in London. Two Australian women were killed in the recent attacks, so this moment was very important to many watching the game. Football Federation Australia organized the dedication, which approved by the Asian Football Confederation, but this approval was either lost in translation or ignored by Saudi officials.

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Is It Acceptable to Joke about North Korea?

On November 4th, it was reported that two Australian men caused quite a stir in North Korea. Morgan Ruig and Evan Shay were already in China on a polo trip when they found out about the North Korean Golf Championships and decided to enter the competition. Though the pair did not explicitly claim to be members of the Australian team, they did not correct the North Koreans who assumed as much. While most are finding the men’s antics entertaining, others are concerned about their underlying mocking the North Korean people and government.

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