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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?

I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.

Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.

No, not really, but blaming Murdoch and News Corp for everything is a time-honoured strategy on the left, much as blaming everything on the ABC and complaining about its funding is a popular pastime on the right.

No, Australia's media is not like this. It's similar to America in terms of its partisan split (a large centre-left blob with some right wing counter-outlets), but less extreme and much more responsible in terms of the accuracy of its reporting. Most of the complaints about "misinformation" in the voice referendum refer to arguments like "this will divide us by race" - e.g. David Speers tried to nail down Julian Leeser on the Insiders program to "admit" that this was misinformation. But of course it's an entirely reasonable argument.

And of course the Yes campaign engaged in plenty of misinformation of their own, for example by touting that 80% of indigenous voters were in favour of the voice - relying on out of date polls from January-March while recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

The sheer nebulousness of the Yes case made it hard to directly misinform, too. So many of the 'X is misinformation' articles I saw were of the 'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'

'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'

This whole debacle sounds like an episode of The Thick of It but in Australia instead of the UK.

I did feel that the Yes campaign came off as... a bit slimy, if that makes sense? Big on claimed moral authority, but not very willing to nail down specific points. It felt like being asked to vote not so much on a specific proposal, but on the vibe of the thing.

recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.

Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.

I think the remote mobile teams in Lingiari are the most reliable indicators of outback Aboriginal votes, and they were indeed pretty high for Yes - around 73% on average. But of course outback Aborigines are a small minority of total Aborigines - and while they're the ones that we're most concerned about from a policy standpoint, that's tangential to the question of polling accuracy.

So I do think the evidence suggests that white Aborigines voted No more heavily than remote Aborigines did. That doesn't really surprise me - while the elite Aborigines are white, most white Aborigines are poor and working class. It can be simultaneously true that remote outback Aborigines and white urban Aborigines are very different from each other, and that the elite activist class is different from both of them.

I had to look up Lingiari to see that it was an electoral division. It’s huge, and yet the least populated division? I can’t believe that the middle of your continent is so…empty.

Yeah the Northern Territory is about 150k people and electorates are supposed to be about 120k people. So it can either be one overpopulated electorate or 2 underpopulated ones. They went with two, and one of them is basically just Darwin. Lingiari is everything else.

It's incredibly sparse in the interior. Durack is the biggest electorate, covering a huge chunk of Western Australia. It would be in the top 20 largest countries in the world if it were a country, bigger than Peru or South Africa. And it has less than 120k people.

I grew up in the outback, and unless you've lived there you just can't understand it. You have to do pretty much everything for yourself, because there's so few people around you to trade with to do it for you. Our closest neighbour was 40km away, the nearest town was 60km (and was just a few hundred people). Even the mailbox at our front gate was a 10km drive. Our farm was 2.5x the size of Manhattan, and it was one of the smaller ones in the area. The distances are just vast.

Question- do you tend to have large extended families on the farm, with maybe a hired laborer or two, or is it a one nuclear family plus a ranch hand operation?

It seems like this is set up for sons to live at home with their mail order brides well into adulthood, but it also seems like Australia has a culture not-particularly conducive to that.

One nuclear family, no employees, and the kids move to the city when they grow up.

What that means of course is that an incredibly empty part of the country is steadily becoming even emptier. For example this region of South Australia, more than double the size of Italy, with just 2573 people, and losing about 3% of their population each year.

Edit: Last year this property larger than Palestine sold for $34 million, or about $21 million in US dollars.

It looks like that big area of SA is about 8000 people if you add back the two enclaves which are small towns with independent municipalities. Still scary. The most remote place I have been is a tossup between the drive to the Grand Canyon North Rim and the drive through the Scottish Highlands from Fort William to Skye Bridge. In both cases you go about 30 miles between settlements, and the settlements have populations in the low three figures.

Are the jobs that the missing people used to do (presumably, mostly running sheep stations) being automated away so that the agricultural productivity of the Outback is holding up, or are they just not being done any more?

More comments

The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?

No, I'm pretty sure this is just standard progressive whining that their enemies were allowed to speak at all, and defining anything that does not agree with them as misinformation. A la Brexit, and Trump, the eternal wheel of cope ever dictates that when the proles get it "wrong", it's because they're stupid/misinformed/racist. No person who is with a conscience and/or in full possession of The Facts could ever disagree with a progressive viewpoint. I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

Yeah about that..

"Nationwide demonstrations took place on Saturday purportedly organised by Simeon Boikov , an online commentator who posts anti-vaccine and pro-Vladimir Putin content."

And more

"Currently Simeon Boikov aka @aussiecossack is fronting the Russian information warfare strategy on the Voice Referendum. He is doing this by supporting the NO Campaign while holed up in the Russian Consulate and last week he was granted Russian citizenship by Russian President Vladimir Putin. "

"‘We don’t interfere’: Russian envoy on Voice debate"

"Moscow’s local envoy says he will not silence a pro-Kremlin conspiracy theorist who is organising rallies against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament while he is holed up in a Russian diplomatic compound in Sydney.

Russian ambassador to Australia Alexey Pavlovsky denied his government was encouraging Simeon Boikov – who goes by the online moniker “Aussie Cossack” – to undermine the Voice referendum."

This guy was on the front page of various Australian news sites in the days leading up to the referendum. Lots of vague gesturing towards Russian interference.

I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

It's Darkly Hinted at.

We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Rootless cosmopolitans, even!

Ayo how come OUR rootless cosmopolitans aren't based. Sucks we get stuck with the wrong KIND of international interests in our own back yard.

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