Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Social workers – legal status, laws, etc – australia"

South Korea has faced many social issues due to long working hours, lack of rest areas, and poor rest facility environments for cleaners, security guards, department store workers, etc. Discussions have been ongoing about mandating the installation of rest facilities. From August 18, 2022, Article 128–2 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, concerning the installation of rest facilities, was enforced. Consequently, employers in all industries are required to install rest facilities, and laws have been established to ensure these facilities meet certain standards. Accordingly, this study investigated the current status of rest facility installations and the awareness of the law’s enactment in Korean industrial sites. The results, analyzed by gender, age, managerial status, industry, and size of the business, indicated that younger people were less satisfied with the rest facilities. Managers were more knowledgeable about the legal regulations than workers. In the service industry, compared to other industries, smaller businesses were less likely to have rest facilities and were less aware of the legal regulations. The results of this study are expected to be used as basic data to help establish the rest facility installation laws in Korea.

Broke out since December of 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a global challenge that seriously affected the development of various economies in the world, including Vietnam. According to the Ministry of labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs of Vietnam (MOLISA), more than 5,000 migrant workers have to return home and risk losing their jobs and income. In addition, the migrant workers who still stay abroad are also subject to myriad difficulties in their lives and health situation, underemployment and reduced income, discrimination, prejudice and xenophobia etc. To clarify the legal and practices issues regarding protecting the rights of Vietnamese migrant workers in the context of COVID-19, the article focuses on analyzing (i) the status of Vietnamese migrant workers and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on this group; (ii) the regulations of Vietnam related to the rights of migrant workers; (iii) the policies have been adopted by the Vietnamese Government to protect the rights of Vietnamese migrant workers during the pandemic, and (iv) recommendations for implementation of policies and laws to ensure the rights of Vietnamese migrant workers in similar circumstances. Keywords: Human Rights, Migrant’s Rights, Covid-19 Pandemic, Vietnamese Migrant Worker, Labourer’s Rights.

The administrative and legal status of a health care worker gives a possibility to determine his place and role in public administration and other public relations. The rights and responsibilities of health care workers are of great scientific and practical importance, especially in view of the ongoing health care reform processes in the country. Given this, it is important to study the peculiarities of the formation of certain rights and responsibilities of medical workers, which constitute their current legal status, over a significant period of history of the Ukrainian state. The article provides a historical and legal analysis of the development of the legal status of a health care worker, the beginning of the establishment of the first norms of behavior and professional responsibilities of medical workers in Ukraine, as well as legal acts governing the legal regulation of the legal status of medical workers in different years of existence of the Ukrainian state. The importance of research in the context of modern health care reforms for the formation of its individual areas of implementation is emphasized. In Ukraine, as in every country, the legal regulation of the legal status of health care workers has its own genesis. The field of health care dates back to the establishment of the statehood by East Slavic tribes in the ninth century and various subjects in the field of treatment were singled out. Thanks to the work of the first "doctors" of Kievan Rus, medical knowledge and skills were spread out, the foundations of deontological norms of behavior and professional responsibilities were formed, and the interest of the state authorities in providing medical care to the population appeared. "Kyiv-Pechersk Paterik" contains a list of responsibilities of that time doctors that lived in monasteries, namely, they had to do menial work, caring for the sick; be tolerant in dealing with them; do not care about personal enrichment. The first professional duties of a secular doctor were contained in the "Svyatoslav's Miscellany " in 1076, compiled for the Chernihiv prince Svyatoslav Yaroslavovich from the " Miscellany " of the Bulgarian King Simeon (X century). Among such responsibilities was the provision of surgical care - the ability to cut the skin, amputate limbs, burn wounds, fight suppuration. The first basic act, which determined the legal status of medical workers was "Rules governing the professional work of medical staff" (hereinafter - the Rules), was approved by the SNC of the USSR on April 17, 1924. It established qualification requirements for medical positions. According to Art. 1 of this document, the medical staff included persons who had the qualifications of a doctor, dentist, obstetrician, assistant doctor, pharmacist, nurse or brother (medical), masseur. To hold the position of a doctor, it was necessary to obtain the appropriate qualification in a medical institute or university, or a higher medical school of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (hereinafter - the USSR) or the former Russian Empire. At the same time, such a right was granted to persons who had obtained medical education and the qualification of a doctor of medicine abroad and had passed an examination at a higher medical school in the USSR. Such professionals could engage in both medical practice and hold administrative positions in the field of medicine. Physicians, in agreement with the administration, were given the right to have a personal seal stating their qualifications. The rules also determined the features of medical intervention (surgery, hypnosis, anesthesia, etc.). For example, a doctor had the right to use anesthesia only with the consent of the patient or in the case of his infancy or mental illness, or fainting of parents or guardians. In case of urgent surgical intervention, the doctor had to consult with a fellow surgeon. Otherwise, he had to make decisions alone. Doctors were required to report such medical interventions to health departments within 24 hours. The health care system in 1969-1991 was based on the norms enshrined in the Fundamentals of the Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics on Health Care (1969) and the Law of the Ukrainian SSR "On Health Care" (1971). (hereinafter - the Law), which emphasized that public health is one of the most important tasks of the Soviet state and the duty of all state bodies and public organizations. The basics of the legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics on health care served as a kind of legislative basis, on the basis of which other laws and bylaws regulating the health of citizens were subsequently adopted. The law provided the duty to maintain medical confidentiality, which meant that doctors and other medical and pharmaceutical workers were not allowed to disclose information about illnesses, intimate and family life of citizens, which they found out as a result of their professional duties. To sum up, we can identify the main historical stages of formation of the legal status of a health care worker: 1) IX century, the times of Kievan Rus - the first mention of the duties of that time doctors ("Kiev-Pechersk Paterik", "Svyatoslav's Miscellany " 1076); 2) The times of the USSR in 1919 - the first attempt to streamline medical activities and outline the legal status of medical workers, including the provision of certain social and material guarantees ("Rules governing the professional work of medical staff", approved by the USSR SNK April 17, 1924), Resolution of the SNC of the USSR "On Improving the Situation of Medical and Sanitary Workers" of June 10, 1920). 3) 1969-1991, Ukraine in the Soviet period - strengthening democratic principles in public and state life, a new codification of Soviet law (Fundamentals of the legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics on health care (1969), the Law of the Ukrainian SSR " On health care "(1971)) Moreover, we can identify the basic principles of health care in Ukraine, which were formed over a long period of history of the Ukrainian state, due to the different legal and economic situation of the country and, due to historical and legal development that became decisive for the current legal status of medical workers. These are such principles as: recognition of health care as a priority of society and the state, availability and free medical care, democracy, provision of state guarantees, observance of medical secrecy, etc.

Pekerja rumahan belum banyak dikenal dan keberadaannya tidak terlihat sebagai kelompok masyarakat produktif, bahkan data statistik tidak mengkategorikan perempuan pekerja rumahan sebagai golongan pekerja, tetapi sebagai ibu rumah tangga. Informalisasi pekerja rumahan berdampak pada kondisi kerja yang tidak menguntungkan, upah rendah, tidak ada kontrak kerja, tidak ada jaminnan sosial, jam kerja panjang, rentan atas resiko kecelakaan kerja, dsb. Tulisan ini dimaksud dapat menjawab persoalan hukum atas perlindungan pekerja rumahan, menggunakan data sekunder, dengan pendekatan perundang- undangan namun tetap diisi kajian sosiologi dan antropologi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan kaburnya status hubungan kerja pekerja rumahan menyebabkan hilangnya sejumlah hak pekerja, dan keadaan ini merupakan dampak dari fleksibilitas hubungan kerja. Pemerintah tidak bisa menghilangkan tanggungjawab pengawasan dan perlindungan meskipun sektor informal belum tercakup sebanyak sektor formal dalam UU Ketenagakerjaan Homeworkers have not been widely known and their existence is not seen as a productive community group, even the statistical data do not categorize women homeworkers as workers, but as housewives. Informalization of homeworkers has an impact on unfavorable working conditions, low wages, no employment contracts, no social security, long working hours, vulnerability to the risk of workplace accidents, etc. This paper was intended to be able to answer legal issues regarding the protection of homeworkers, using secondary data, with a legal approach but still filled with sociology and anthropology studies. The results of the study indicated that the blurring of the status of work relations of homeworkers caused the loss of a number of workers' rights, and this situation was an impact of the flexibility of work relations. The government could not eliminate the oversight and protection responsibilities even though the informal sector had not been covered as much as the formal sector in the Major Labour Laws.

Korea has been implementing a policy of restricting birth from the 1960s to the 1990s amid explosive population growth after the Korean War. In the provinces, the rural population and the population of small cities have been concentrated in large cities and metropolitan areas due to lack of jobs, infrastructure, and capital. Korea's population began to decline in 2021 after peaking in 2020, and in 2023, it became a country with the lowest birth rate in the world at 0.72, and will soon become a super-aging society. The government has enacted the Framework Act On Low Birth Rate In An Aging Society, the Special Act on Local Autonomy Decentralization and Balanced Regional Development, and the Special Act On Support For Depopulation Regions to promote balanced regional development and to prepare legal policies to cope with population decline and local extinction. In Korea, there are many places where baby cries have stopped, and the equity of the burden of tax and social security costs between generations is a problem due to the low birth rate and the aging society, and the burden of social welfare costs is increasing in local governments. In this paper, after analyzing the current status of Korea's legislation on population decline and regional extinction response, we propose a plan to enact the Regional Revitalization (Regional Revitalization) Act since there are many population decline response laws, but there is no general law on regional extinction response. In addition, although encouraging immigration is not a fundamental measure to respond to population decline and regional extinction, the promotion of flexible local immigration policies in countries such as Australia, the United States, and France is becoming a major factor in population growth, so a regional-led local immigration system must be devised. do. In addition, in the case of Europe, when a city is created as a smart city, it is common for the population to concentrate, and as the population decreases in cities or rural areas with underdeveloped social infrastructure due to ICT convergence technology, cities in population-decreasing areas We review the issue of smart city creation within the city. In addition, when population decreases and regions disappear, there is no need to continuously expand and create cities as is currently the case, so the issue of introducing an appropriate location planning system to create a compact city (compressed city) is reviewed. In addition, we examine the expansion of the scope of use of the living population support introduced by the Depopulation Area Act and the concept and requirements of the related population, and review the issue of introducing a corporate hometown love donation tax to respond to population decline and regional extinction. Lastly, since population decline and regional extinction cannot be resolved through financial support alone, implementation of institutional guarantees for marriage and family community guaranteed under the Constitution, establishment of a livable local environment and infrastructure, provision of sufficient jobs and guaranteed income, transportation, education, and culture. I hope that the Constitution will be amended to create an equal living environment in the metropolitan area and local areas by guaranteeing accessibility to medical care, etc.

The Communist Party based its attitude to religion on Marxism-Leninism as a scientific and theoretical framework. As a critical theory of the capitalist society Marxism examined the phenomenon of religion and religious feelings in civil society and designed a project of a future socialist society. One can say that Marxism looks at the phenomenon of religion from the angle of a class society, from a materialistic viewpoint and while using the historical research method. The source of religion is in man’s alienation first from himself, then from other people and, finally, from society itself. Marxism surpasses the criticisms of religion dating back to the Enlightenment as well as the vulgar-marxist criticisms that associated religion and religious feeling with human ignorance and delusion. Marxism places religion into the historical framework including the social and economic setting which is changing, developing and thus producing or bringing about changes in religious consciousness. In their practice, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia or what was later the League of Communists of Yugoslavia had an attitude to religion and the church that was a mixture of some original Marxism but also, in much larger measure, of dogmatic, Leninist-Marxist and most often administrative –pragmatic stands which suited the then balance of political power in the state or at lower administrative levels. This attitude was also conditioned by the situation in the party, the state, Yugoslavia’s international position, the situation in the church, etc. In this context, one can say that in the actual laws and regulations governing the legal status of the church and the issue of the religious rights and liberties of citizens the atheist approach predominated, i.e. the approach that was solely and exclusively determined in relation to God. This approach seems to have predominated due to the negative experience gained by the workers’ movement in Yugoslavia between the two World Wars as well as during the course of the Second World War when the majority of church activists adopted a negative attitude to the National Liberation Movement (NLM). The process of atheization which was launched immediately following the end of the Second World War, in addition to formally playing a major role in establishing and giving legitimacy to the new social system of government, was also ongoing, in terms of its attitude to the churches, on at least two levels: 1) depoliticization of all religious communities; and 2) supression of the idea that religious attributes should be identified as national attributes in the established and traditional churches and religious communities (Serbian Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church, Islamic Religious Community).

This article is devoted to the study of the state of implementation of the control functions by the representative bodies of Ukraine. It states that, depending on their legal status, representative bodies represent the interests of the territorial community and make decisions on its behalf. They perform representative, rule-making, control functions and powers within their competence. They also contribute to the realization of the rights and interests of the population of the autonomous region and to the solution of the region's vital activities. The Ukrainian Parliament implements the powers defined by the Constitution and laws of Ukraine at the national level. The article reveals the function of representative control, as a function of the above-mentioned bodies, which should ensure their interaction with civil society (individuals and legal entities) and other branches of state power, which is built on the basis of their subordination, accountability and control to representative bodies. Attention is focused on the fact that the relations of local self-government bodies with enterprises, institutions and organizations that are not communally owned by the respective territorial communities are built on a contractual and tax basis and on the basis of control within the limits of the powers granted to local self-government bodies by law. It is noted that control over the exercise of delegated powers of executive bodies by local self-government bodies is entrusted to the relevant local state administrations and the Council of Ministers of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and in the cases provided for by law, to ministries and other central bodies of executive power, their territorial bodies. At the same time, control should be carried out by analyzing the acts of local self-government bodies, providing information by local self-government bodies on the implementation of delegated powers of executive bodies, conducting inspections of the activities of executive bodies of village, settlement, and city councils. It is emphasized that local self-government bodies can take the initiative to carry out measures of state supervision (control) at enterprises, institutions and organizations that are not in communal ownership, as well as in relation to natural persons – entrepreneurs who use the labor of hired workers, by submitting official by persons of local self-government bodies of the corresponding appeal on the issues of exercising the powers delegated to them by the executive authorities. In general, effective control by representative bodies of local self-government is one of the important means of providing them with comprehensive economic and social development in the territory under their jurisdiction. It is noted that public awareness of the activities of communal enterprises gives the public the opportunity to control the legality and reasonableness of the decisions of local self-government bodies regarding the creation and operation of such enterprises, the need for their financing, the proper performance by such enterprises of the tasks set for them, their compliance with the legislation of Ukraine, in the areas defined by the legislation of Ukraine limits, use of funds, property that is communal property. The activity of supervisory boards of communal enterprises, which are formed in accordance with Article 78 of the Economic Code of Ukraine, serves as a good help for the implementation of control functions of both representative bodies and the public. The creation of supervisory boards aims to improve the management system of utility companies, make them more competitive and partially eliminate corruption risks. It is in the implementation of control and awareness of both representative bodies and the relevant territorial community regarding the state of affairs in the relevant territorial unit that people's rule is manifested. Therefore, control functions both over legal entities and individuals under the control of local self-government, and over local bodies themselves must be carried out in accordance with internationally recognized principles of such control. One of these international acts is the European Charter of Local Self-Government. Attention is drawn to the fact that parliamentary control is an integral component of one of the highest forms of exercising people's power – its representative, mediated form. It is an important tool that helps the parliament to obtain the necessary information about the performance of duties and the exercise of powers by the executive authorities. The Ukrainian Parliament, as a representative of the entire people, controls the use of budget funds, compliance with laws, the effectiveness of the work of ministries and other departments, etc., taking the form of state control. The article describes the forms of parliamentary control. It is noted that one of the negative dynamics of parliamentary control is the lack of a mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of the application of adopted laws. It is proposed to expand the boundaries of the analysis of the practice of applying laws, supplementing it with a number of new tools of parliamentary control, including consultations with interested parties. The significant shortcomings of the current mechanisms of parliamentary control, the attitude of the people's elected officials to its implementation, are revealed, and relevant proposals for its improvement are developed, such as: temporary introduction of the imperative mandate; the introduction of public councils at state authorities of all branches of state authority and local self-government.

Contemporary society is concerned about successful functioning of its members and their effective participation in social interrelations therefore the adaptation of children living in foster homes is perceived as a relevant social issue. In the context of developing democratic ideas increasing attention is being paid towards the problem of adaptive behavior and its development in children without parental care. It is influenced by important social, political, value and legal changes having occurred in the last several decades in Lithuania in a context of which the attitude towards children without parental care, their social status, foster care and development is also changing. While adopting more laws and resolutions on the issues of child’s foster care, development and healthcare there appear more possibilities to solve a lot of relevant questions in child foster care and training institutions. In the context of democracy increasing attention is paid towards social integration of children living in foster institutions, their involvement and participation into social life. The goals and objectives of Lithuanian educational system reflect the intention to prepare a person for life, who is able to analyze reality individually or with other people, also adequately deal with the problems, plan the future and successfully adapt to the constantly changing, dynamic society. These objectives allow to discover a variety of aspects of the organization of educational activities in foster homes. The problematic issue arises while preparing foster home pupils for independent living: Are the educational system and conditions at foster homes sufficient and adequate in process of preparation for independent life? The article actualizes the educational significance of preparing teenagers for independent life. Interviews with foster home staff evaluate the current situation of foster homes, disclose the education system, work achievements (strengths), discuss the developmental problems and identify deficiencies of preparation for independent living in foster homes. The aim – to assess the preparation of foster home pupils for independent living within the context of foster homes, revealing the positive and improvable aspects of the foster home educator’s point of view. Analyzing the features of foster home preparation for independent living in care institutions, the study involved 17 foster home staff, based on their opinion about their personal work experiences and points of view. In order to understand home educational activities, to review the pupils’ preparation for independent living opportunities, educational reality, to find out and identify problems, provide opportunities for improving the situation, the interview method was used. Instant analysis revealed that home care workers initiated a variety of activities: encourage children to solve problems, analyze situations and make decisions. It is also practiced by demonstration of adult example, analyzing the situation and promoting the search for solutions. Workshops are organized, situations and educational environment is created in which the pupils are encouraged to act independently, provide practical training skills that enable learners to try themselves in different activities (household work, cooking, etc.). However, according to the assessment of the current situation in foster homes, it is clear that there are not optimal functions performed by the formation of practical skills and preparing for independent living of children without parental care. Interviews revealed that foster homes lack „real practices“ when most children are able to buy food, count the money, pay for services, cook, and independence is developed mostly by the potential circumstances. Comments on the survey suggest that the lack of practical activities, funding and real-world examples in foster homes prevent realization of the set goals, implement ideas for youngsters to prepare for independent living, to acquire domestic skills and do not create conditions for independent personal development (learning). Discussing the opportunities for improvement of foster home preparation for independent living, almost unanimously expressed material financial base and the improvement of household demand. Foster home staff believes that the conditions under which pupils can cook themselves face with the real everyday life, keep their own budgets, learn, acquire new knowledge or skills may be one of the most successful assumptions for training (learning) to live independently when they came out foster homes.

"Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas. . The debate surrounding the self reliance will be meaningless if issues related to women in a large country like India will not only be inappropriate but sometimes even misleading. Women specific and women related legislations have been enacted to safeguard the rights and interest of women, besides protecting against discrimination, violence, and atrocities and also to prevent socially undesirable practices. Despite the constitutional mandate of equal legal status for the girl child, the same is yet to be realized. The de jure laws have not been translated into de facto situation for various reasons such as illiteracy, social practices, prejudices, cultural norms based on patriarchal values, poor representation of women in policy-making, poverty, regional disparity in development, lack of access and opportunity to information and resources etc. According to the Uttar Pradesh Govt. sources, female life expectancy is less than 55 years and the under-five mortality rate is as high as 141 per thousand. Australia was the first country to develop a gender-sensitive budget, with the Federal government publishing in 1984 the first comprehensive audit of a government budget for its impact on women and girls. Empowerment of women is essentially the process of upliftment of economic, social and political status of women, the traditionally underprivileged ones, in the society. It involves the building up of a society wherein in women can breathe without the fear of oppression, exploitation, apprehension, discrimination and the general feeling of persecution which goes with being a woman in a traditionally male dominated structure. One major therapy prescribed by woman empowerment advocates is empowering women through legislation for ensuring participation in political decision making. Such an approach provides the women with a constitutional platform to stand up to men, to raise their voice on issues concerning women oppression, subjugation and related issues and thus in effect, providing them with an identity in an orthodox male dominated socio-political set up, in addition to providing a much needed forum to seek redressal of problems directly affecting them: the true essence of empowerment. The present paper attempts to look into the dynamism of the process whereby women empowerment is achieved (?) through legislation or women participation in the Panchayati Raj Institution. KEYWORDS: Self Reliance, Gender Bugdeting, Women empowerment, Panchayati Raj Institutions.

Workplace wellness programs raise the question: Who owns the health and sickness of the employee? Once, they belonged to the person and his/her doctor, in a kind of binary health relationship. Now companies have made it a triangular relationship. But actually, it's rectangular - the government is also shaping this relationship by occupying a fourth corner. As Nikolas Rose (1989) points out in his exploration of the place of individual in the corporate state, history suggests that it might be the government whose corner is dominant. Rose notes that "Taylorism", the scientific pursuit of maximum efficiency of human labour which was fashionable early last century, is now seen not just as the creation of industrialists like Henry Ford. Much more broadly, it reflected a philosophy current in the western industrialised nations like the US, UK and Germany. Achieving optimum output from men and machines was "part of a wide family of political programmes that sought to use scientific knowledge to advance national efficiency through making the most productive use of material and human resources." Reflecting prevailing political climates, national governments had already begun to introduce legislation which regulated the relationship between capital and labour. Ostensibly, these laws were intended to protect the rights of workers, but Rose suggests that their ultimate motivation was to ensure the nation received social dividends from the labour market. That was then. Now, social dividends from employment may be different but governments are still pursuing them. It was a labour government in Australia in the 1980s which first required employees to fund their own aged pensions (by trading off pay increases for superannuation). In another manifestation of their worry about the costs of an ageing population, governments are now prodding workers to become their own health managers, through the agency of wellness programs at work. Wellness programs really began to flourish in the last 20 years, most visibly in the Unites States where pressure from the employee health insurance system and high participation targets set by the Federal Government have made them the rule. "As a result, work-site health promotion programs are becoming increasingly prevalent. In 1985, 65 percent of work sites with 50 or more employees offered at least one health promotion activity. The [Government's] Healthy People 2000 goals aim to increase this proportion to 85 percent and to increase employee participation in these programs." (Meurer et al. 1997, p. 384) In other countries, pressure from insurance/litigation may be weaker, but employers have increasingly seen workplaces as suitable locations for health campaigns targeted at their employees, and governments have become supportive of such programs because of the public health benefits and convenience. They might be viewed as privatised community health promotion. In Australasia: "The idea of using workplaces as sites to promote health is attractive from a public health point of view. It provides an opportunity for adults to gain access to health promotion initiatives and enables them to participate in programs planned according to their needs in a familiar physical and social setting. It also provides an opportunity for health promotion efforts to extend to the worker's home and involve his/her family." (Williams 1991, p. 490) From an employer's perspective, workers' sickness has always been a matter of interest because of the duty of care. In the distinctive social environment of work, their health has belonged at least partly to the company, but the wellness programs may be further stripping away the autonomy of health. Moral philosopher R S Downie and his co-writers (1990) believe that health promotion is not value-free. "It endeavours to persuade people to adopt certain lifestyles.") It attempts to transfer to the employees values held by the organisation, promoting a particular lifestyle - in this case, a healthy one. Participation in wellness programs provides benefits which flow in two directions. The company donates the resources which allow the employees to avoid sickness and to live healthier lives. The employees donate a longer and more productive working life to the company and society. In this way, these programs conform with the dominant current management philosophy describing the relationship between employee and employer. Just as Hirschhorn (1988) describes how workers won social freedoms in exchange for psychological "unfreedoms" (the work ethic) in the industrial revolution , so Rose describes how modern, caring management practice is all about "aligning the wishes, needs and aspirations of each individual who works for the organisation with the successful pursuit of its objectives". A win-win situation? In some organisations, some employees may not see it that way. The fact that wellness programs are declared "voluntary" may not necessarily rectify a perception of compulsion. Employees may believe that nothing is truly voluntary at work. With these concerns in mind, Stokols et al. (1995) advocate ethical guidelines to prevent job discrimination based on health status and related potential conflicts of interest. They say that the bottom-line benefits to management of health-promotion campaigns cannot legitimately include discriminating against employees who refuse to make healthy lifestyle choices. Discrimination might exist on another level. What is the company to make of workers who choose to continue an unhealthy lifestyle which may put them at greater risk of a succumbing to a health hazard at work? The most well-known of such consequences is the predisposition to bronchial illness caused by smoking. Of course, there are two sources of sickness at work; self-induced and work-induced. Smoking cigarettes may cause self-induced sickness. Mining asbestos may cause work-induced sickness. If it was once clear who was responsible for which sickness, the advent of workplace wellness programs has reduced the clarity. Such health promotion can make it seem that the employer has taken responsibility for both self-induced and work-induced sickness, or perhaps the worker has. Wellness programs are culturally ambiguous. Their very introduction signifies the employer's care for employees' health, but the function of the program is to teach the employees how to take responsibility for it. So Blewett and Shaw (1995) wonder whether health promotion programs change the balance of responsibility between employer and employee. The origin of this issue, they suggest, is in the World Health Organisation's 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, which describes health promotion as "the process of enabling individuals and communities to increase control over the determinants of health and thereby improve their health." (cited in Blewett & Shaw 1995, p. 462) The writers argue that the health promotion rhetoric is increasingly focused on promoting 'self-responsibility' for health in the workplace, and the skills of health self-care. If governments value wellness programs, and business likes them, is the workplace a conducive cultural setting for wellness to be marketed? Do workplace health promotion programs obviate the well-documented communication barriers from which community programs suffer? It seems they might. "Worksites afford a high degree of leverage for influencing the health of the population," according to Stokols et al. (1995, p. 1136) "Leverage" is a reference to the big percentage of the population (the employed) they reach, as well as the power of persuasion in a workplace. The persuasion can derive from the corporate culture which employers strive to create in their organisations - a mono-culture whose values are aligned with those of all members. It can also derive from company rules - all members of the organisation, whether value-sharers or value-rejectors, are captured by the requirement to conform with wellness objectives. Thus, in western industrial democracies, where smoking is banned it is usually because they are places of work. It is necessary to ask the question: Do employees exposed to health promotion at work make good use of self-care skills. Williams (1991) notes that the uptake of health promotion campaigns, not at work but in the broad community, is greatest among those who least need the benefits - that is, it correlates with socio-economic status. Wellness programs in industrial settings provide opportunities for health promotion to reach lower-paid trades and "blue-collar" employees not well served by these community campaigns. However, poor health behaviours are based on life-long habits, usually reinforced by people's lifestyles, reference groups and family structure. These habits take time and persistence to counteract. It is only in the long term that participation gives employees positive benefits, and therefore positive reinforcement for their healthy efforts. Noblet and Murphy (1995, p. 18) report that "early workplace programs relied heavily on behaviour change techniques as their health promotion strategy." Therefore, many failed to produce lasting change because they did not take advantage of the complex social and cultural structure that exists within each workplace. The writers suggest that recently "activities have expanded beyond risk reduction strategies to a settings approach that addresses the social, organisational, environmental and cultural factors." (Noblet and Murphy 1995, p. 18) In conclusion, it is likely that the motivation for companies to run health promotion campaigns will increase, but wellness may be a concept which fits somewhat awkwardly in the employer-employee relationship. Perhaps care for employees is the factor which will bring outcomes beneficial to all. Farnell (1987) expresses such care this way: An organisation's health comprises three components, its financial health, its organisational health (openness, trust, morale, etc) and the personal health of its members. No employer should consider the organisation in good shape without addressing each component. References Blewett, V. and Shaw, A. "Health promotion, handle with care." Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand 11 (1995): 461-5. Downie, R., Fyfe, C. and Tannahill, A. Health Promotion - Models and Values, Oxford UP: Oxford,1990. Farnell, L."Corporate culture change - the healthy way." Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand 3 (1987): 46-52. Hirschhorn, L. The workplace within: psychodynamics of organizational life. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press,1988. Leigh, J. and Harrison, J. "Reduction of Ischaemic heart disease risk factors following direct probabilistic risk communication in the workplace.", Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand 7 (1991): 467-72. Meurer, L., Meurer, J. and Holloway, R. "New models of health care in the home and in the work site.", American Family Physician 56 (1997): 384-7. Noblet, A.J. and Murphy, C. "Adapting the Ottowa Charter for Health Promotion to the Workplace Setting." Health Promotion Journal of Australia 5 (1995): 18-22. Rose, N. Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self. London: Routledge, 1989. Stokols, D., Pelletier, K. and Fielding, J. "Integration of medical care and worksite health promotion.", Journal of the American Medical Association 273 (1995): 1136-42. Williams, P. 1991, "Planning factors contributing to on-going health promotion programs." Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand 7 (1991): 489-94.

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References ABC. “A Jihad for Love.” Life Matters (Radio National), 21 Feb. 2008. 11 March 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2008/2167874.htm >.Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen.” M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08aly-green.php >.Aly, Anne, and David Walker. “Veiled Threats: Recurrent Anxieties in Australia.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27.2 (2007): 203-14.Brasted, Howard.V. “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000.” Muslim Communities in Australia. Eds. Abdullah Saeed and Akbarzadeh, Shahram. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html >.Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html >.———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. Washington, 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html >.Charney, Evan. “Political Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and the Public Sphere.” The American Political Science Review 92.1 (1998): 97- 111.Costello, Peter. “Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means and How to Nurture It.” Address to the Sydney Institute, 23 February 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2006/004.htm &pageID=05&min=phc&Year=2006&DocType=1 >.Dallmayr, Fred. “Rethinking Secularism.” The Review of Politics 61.4 (1999): 715-36.Erjavec, Karmen, and Zala Volcic. “‘War on Terrorism’ as Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualisation of G. W. Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18 (2007): 123- 37.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Herald Sun. “Readers’ Comments: Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Herald Sun Online Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008. < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/comments/0,22023,23186973-5000117,00.html >.Humphries, David. “Live Here, Be Australian.” The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2006, 1 ed.Hutcheson, John S., David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. “U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and Patriotic Press Following September 11.” Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 27-50.Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99.4 (1989): 883-905.Modood, Tariq. “Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship.” The Political Quarterly (1994): 53-74.Osuri, Goldie, and Subhabrata B. Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151- 71.Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978.Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism. WA: Government of Western Australia, Nov. 2004. 11 March 2008 < http://www.equalopportunity.wa.gov.au/pdf/wa_charter_multiculturalism.pdf >.Yousif, Ahmad. “Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20.1 (2000): 30-43.

Intellectual property. It's a strange term, indicating from its structure that the questionable notion of property has been appended to something that, in a tangible sense, doesn't even exist. Difficult to grasp, like water, or air, yet at the same time so desirable to own... In Anglo-American law, property is defined, as the eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone put it, as "that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe" (Terry & Guigni 207). For most physical things, the 'right' of exclusion seems simple enough to understand, and to control. Yet even there, when the boundaries blur, especially over space and time, the results of such 'rights' become less and less manageable, as indicated by the classic 'tragedy of the commons' (Hardin). And once we move outside of the physical realm, and into the world of ideas, or of feelings or the spirit, the notion of an exclusive 'right' of ownership steadily makes less and less sense. It's an issue that's come to the fore with the rise of the Open Source movement, creating software that can be freely shared and used by anyone. There are many arguments about exactly is meant by 'free', though there's often an emphasis on freedom of ideas rather than price: "think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'" is how one group describes it (Free Software Foundation). Unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, the source-code from which the programs are compiled is available is available for anyone to view, amend, extend. As yet, few programmers are paid to do so; certainly no-one is excluded from doing so. The results from this apparently anarchic and altruistic model would be startling for anyone coming from a conventional economics background: for example, Sourceforge, the main Open Source repository, currently hosts almost 60,000 projects, with almost ten times that number of active contributors (Sourceforge). Some of these projects are huge: for example, the Linux kernel is well over a million lines of code, whilst the Gnome user-interface is already almost twice that size. Open Source programs such as the 'LAMP' quadrivirate of the GNU/Linux operating-system, Apache web-server, MySQL database and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages provide most of the software infrastructure for the Internet (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python). And the Internet returns the favour, by providing a space in which collaboration can happen quickly and for the most part transparently, without much regard for status or location. Yet central though the Internet may be to this new wave of shared 'public good', the core innovations of Open Source are more social than technological. Of these, probably the most important are a specific kind of collaboration, and an unusual twist on copyright law. Eric Raymond's classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is one of the best descriptions of the social processes behind Open Source (Raymond). "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch", says Raymond: see a need, tackle it, share the initial results, ask for help. Larry Wall, the initiator of Perl, "wanted to create something that was so useful that it would be taken up by many people" (Moody 133), and consciously promoted it in much the same way as a missionary (Moody 131). Open access to communications and a culture of shared learning provides the space to "release early, release often" and invite collaboration. Some projects, such as Apache and PHP, are run as a kind of distributed collective, but many are somewhat hierarchical, with a well-known lead-figure at the centre: Linus Torvalds for Linux, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido van Rossum for Python, Miguel de Icaza for Gnome. Yet the style rarely seems hierarchical in practice: the lead-figure's role is that of coordinator and final arbiter of quality, far removed from the militaristic 'command and control' so common in business environments. What makes it work is that anyone can join in, identify a bug, submit a patch, volunteer to design some desirable function or feature, and gain personal satisfaction and social respect for doing so. Programmers’ motivations vary enormously, of course: some share their work as a kind of libertarian statement, whilst others are more driven by a sense of obligation to others in the software-development community, or in the wider world. Yet for many, perhaps most, it's the personal satisfaction that's most important: as Linus Torvalds comments, "most of the good programmers do [Open Source] programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program" (Torvalds & Ghosh). In that sense it more closely resembles a kind of art-form rather than a conventional business proposition. Realistically, many of the smaller Open Source projects are little more than student exercises, with limited real-world usefulness. But for larger, more relevant projects this borderless, inclusive collaboration usually results in code of very high quality and reliability – "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is another of Raymond's aphorisms – in stark contrast to the notorious security holes and general fragility of proprietary products from Redmond and elsewhere. And it leverages different people's skills to create an extraordinary degree of 'win/win', as Linus Torvalds points out: "imagine ten people putting in one hour each every day on the project. They put in one hour of work, but because they share the end results they get nine hours of 'other peoples work' for free. It sounds unfair: get nine hours of work for doing one hour. But it obviously is not" (Torvalds & Ghosh). It's this kind of return-on-investment that's making many businesses more than willing to embrace the 'insanity' of paying programmers to give away their time on Open Source projects (Pavlicek). The hard part, for many businesses, is that it demands a very different approach to business relationships. "Forget business as usual", writes Russell Pavlicek; "forget about demanding your own way; forget fluffy, empty management speeches; forget about fudging facts; forget about marketing that alienates the community; forget about pushing hype rather than real value; forget about taking more than you give" (Pavlicek 131-7). When everything is open, and everyone is in effect a volunteer, none of those time-dishonoured tactics works well. But the real catch is the legal framework under which Open Source is developed and distributed. Conventionally, placing work in the public domain – the intellectual-property equivalent of the commons – means that anyone can apply even the minutest of changes and then declare it exclusively as their own. Walt Disney famously did exactly this with many classics, such as the Grimms' fairy-tales or Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The Free Software Foundation's 'GNU Public License' – used for most Open Source software – avoids this by copyrighting the work, permitting freedom to view, amend and extend the code for any purpose, but requiring that any new version permit the same freedoms (GNU/FSF). This inclusive approach – nicknamed 'copyleft' in contrast to conventional copyright – turns the usual exclusive model of intellectual property on its head. Its viral, self-propagating nature uses the law to challenge the law of property: everything it touches is – in principle – freed from exclusive private ownership. Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons legal team have extended this somewhat further, with machine-readable licenses that permit a finer granularity of choice in defining what uses of a work – a musical performance, a book or a Weblog, for example – are open or withheld (Creative Commons). But the central theme is that copyleft, together with the open nature of the Internet, "moves everything that touches it toward the public domain" (Norlin). Which is not a happy thought for those whose business models depend on exclusion and control of access to intellectual property – such as Hollywood, the media and the biotechnology industry – nor, for that matter, for those who'd prefer to keep their secrets secret (AWOLBush). Part of the problem, for such people, is a mistaken notion of what the Internet really is. It's not a pipe or a medium, like cable TV; it's more like a space or a place, a 'world of ends' (Searls & Weinberger). Not so much infrastructure, to be bought and sold, but necessarily shared, it's more 'innerstructure', a kind of artificial force of nature: "like the Earth's fertile surface, it derives much of its fertility from the life it supports" (Searls). Its key characteristics, argues Doc Searls, are that "No-one owns it; Everyone can use it; Anyone can improve it". And these characteristics of the Internet ultimately arise not from the hardware – routers, cables, servers and the like – or even the software, but ultimately from an agreement – the Internet Protocol – and an idea – that network connections can and should be self-routing, beyond direct control. Yet perhaps the most important idea that arises from this is that one of the most basic foundation-stones of Western society – the model of property as an exclusive 'right', a "sole and despotic dominion" – simply doesn't work. This is especially true for supposed 'intellectual property', such as copyrights, trade-marks, patents, genome sequences, scientific theories: after all, from where do those ideas and patterns ultimately arise? Who owns that? In legal terms, there's no definable root for a trail of provenance, no means to identify all involved intermediaries, and hence no ultimate anchor for any kind of property claim. Many other types of intellectual property, such as domain-names, phrases, words, radio-frequencies, colours, sounds - the word 'Yes', the phrase 'The Real Thing', Ferrari red, the sound of a Harley-Davidson – can only be described as arbitrary expropriations from the public domain. In many senses, then, the whole legal edifice of intellectual property is little more than "all smoke and mirrors", held together by lawyers' bluff – hardly a stable foundation for the much-vaunted 'information economy'! Whilst it's not quite true that "nobody owns it", in practice the only viable ownership for any kind of intellectual property would seem to be that of a declaration of responsibility, of stewardship – such as a project-leader's responsibility for an Open Source project – rather than an arbitrary and ultimately indefensible assertion of exclusive 'right'. So a simple question about intellectual property – is it copyright or copyleft? should source-code be proprietary or 'free'? – goes deeper and deeper into the 'innerstructure' of society itself. Miguel Icaza describes this well: "as the years pass and you're working in this framework, you start to reevaluate in many areas your relationships with your friends and your family. The same ideas about free software and sharing and caring about other people start to permeate other aspects of your life" (Moody 323). Perhaps it's time to look more carefully to look more carefully not just at intellectual property, but at the 'rights' and responsibilities associated with all kinds of property, to reach a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share. Works Cited Blackstone, Sir William. "Commentaries on the Laws of England." Book 2, 1765, 2, quoted in Andrew Terry and Des Guigni, Business, Society and the Law. Marrickville, Australia: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1994. Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162 (1968): 1243-8. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm>. “The Free Software Definition.” Free Software Foundation. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.php>. Sourceforge. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://sourceforge.net/>. Linux. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linux.org/>. GNOME. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.gnome.org/>. Apache. The Apache Software Foundation. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.apache.org/>. MySQL. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.mysql.com/>. PHP. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.php.net/>. Perl. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.perl.org/>. Python. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.python.org/>. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 11 Aug. 1998. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.openresources.com/documents/cathedral-bazaar>. (Note: original location at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ is no longer accessible.) Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001. Torvalds, Linus, and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. "Interview with Linus Torvalds". First Monday 3.3 (1998). 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/torvalds/index.php>. Pavlicek, Russell C. Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development. Indianapolis: Sams Publishing, 2000. "Licenses – GNU Project." GNU/Free Software Foundation. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html#TOCWhatIsCopyleft>. Lessig, Lawrence (Larry). Home page. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig>. Creative Commons. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://creativecommons.org/>. Norlin, Eric. Weblog. 23 Feb. 2003. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.unchartedshores.com/blogger/archive/2003_02_23_ar... ...chive3.html#90388497>. “G W Bush Went AWOL.” AWOLBush.com. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.awolbush.com/>. Searls, Doc, and David Weinberger. World Of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://worldofends.com/>. Searls, Doc. "Is Linux Infrastructure? Or Is it Deeper than That?" Linux Journal 14 May 2002. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074>. ---. "Setting Fire to Hollywood’s Plans for the Net: The GeekPAC Story". Linux Journal 29 Apr. 2002. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6033>. Links http://creativecommons.org/ http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig http://sourceforge.net/ http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://worldofends.com/ http://www.apache.org/ http://www.awolbush.com/ http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/torvalds/index.html http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html\lTOCWhatIsCopyleft http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnome.org/ http://www.linux.org/ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6033 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074 http://www.mysql.com/ http://www.openresources.com/documents/cathedral-bazaar http://www.perl.org/ http://www.php.net/ http://www.python.org/ http://www.unchartedshores.com/blogger/archive/2003_02_23_archive3.html\l90388497 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Graves, Tom. "Something Happened on the Way to the ©" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/03-somethinghappened.php>. APA Style Graves, T. (2003, Apr 23). Something Happened on the Way to the ©. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/03-somethinghappened.php>

Parity between the sexes, harmony between the religions, balance between the cultural differences: these principles all hinge upon the idealistic concept of all things in our human society being equal. In this issue of M/C Journal the notion of ‘equal’ is reviewed and discussed in terms of both its discourse and its application in real life. Beyond the concept of equal itself, uniting each author’s contribution is acknowledgement of the competing objectives which can promote bias and prejudice. Indeed, it is that prejudice, concomitant to the absence of equal treatment by and for all peoples, which is always of concern for the pursuit of social justice. Although it has been reduced to a brand-name of low calorie sugar substitute in the Australian supermarket and cafe set, the philosophical values and objectives behind the concept of equal underpin some of the most highly prized and esteemed ideals of western liberal democracy and its ideas on justice. To be equal in the modern sense means to be empowered, to enjoy the same entitlements as others and to have the same rights. At the same time, the privileges associated with being equal also come with responsibilities and it these that we continue to struggle with in our supposed enlightened age. The ideals we associate with equal are far from new, since they have informed ideas about citizenship and justice at least from the times of Ancient Greece and perhaps more problematically, the Principate period of the Roman Empire. It was out of the Principate that the notion primus inter pares (‘first among equals’) was implemented under Augustus in an effort to reconcile his role as Emperor within the Republic of Rome. This oxymoron highlights how very early in the history of Western thought inevitable compromises arose between the pursuit of equal treatment and its realisation. After all, Rome is as renowned for its Empire and Senate as it is for the way lions were fed Christians for entertainment. In the modern and postmodern world, the values around the concept of equal have become synonymous with the issue of equality, equal being a kind of applied action that has mobilised and enacted its ideals. With equality we are able to see more clearly the dialectic challenging the thesis of equal, the antitheses of unequal, and inequality. What these antitheses of equal accentuate is that anything to do with equality entails struggle and hard won gains. In culture, as in nature, things are rarely equal from the outset. As Richard Dawkins outlined in The Selfish Gene, “sperms and eggs … contribute equal number of genes, but eggs contribute far more in the way of food reserves … . Female exploitation begins here” (153). Disparities that promote certain advantages and disadvantages seem hard-wired into our chemistry, biology and subsequent natural and cultural environments. So to strive for the values around an ideal of equal means overcoming some major biological and social determinants. In other words, equality is not a pursuit for the uncommitted. Disparity, injustice, disempowerment, subjugations, winners and losers, victors and victims, oppressors and oppressed: these are the polarities that have been the hallmarks of human civilization. Traditionally, societies are slow to recognise contemporary contradictions and discriminations that deny the ideals and values that would otherwise promote a basis of equality. Given the right institutional apparatus, appropriate cultural logic and individual rationales, that which is unequal and unjust is easily absorbed and subscribed to by the most ardent defender of liberty and equality. Yet we do not have to search far afield in either time or geography to find evidence of institutionalised cultural barbarity that was predicated on logics of inequality. In the post-renaissance West, slavery is the most prominent example of a system that was highly rationalised, institutionalised, adhered to, and supported and exploited by none other than the children of the Enlightenment. The man who happened to be the principle author of one of the most renowned and influential documents ever written, the Declaration of Independence (1776), which proclaimed, “all men are created equal”, was Thomas Jefferson. He also owned 200 slaves. In the accompanying Constitution of the United States, twelve other amendments managed to take precedence over the abolition of slavery, meaning America was far from the ‘Land of the Free’ until 1865. Equal treatment of people in the modern world still requires lengthy and arduous battle. Equal rights and equal status continues to only come about after enormous sacrifices followed by relentless and incremental processes of jurisprudence. One of the most protracted struggles for equal standing throughout history and which has accompanied industrial modernity is, of course, that of class struggle. As a mass movement it represents one of the most sustained challenges to the many barriers preventing the distribution of basic universal human rights amongst the global population. Representing an epic movement of colossal proportions, the struggle for class equality, begun in the fiery cauldron of the 19th century and the industrial revolution, continued to define much of the twentieth century and has left a legacy of emancipation perhaps unrivalled on scale by any other movement at any other time in history. Overcoming capitalism’s inherent powers of oppression, the multitude of rights delivered by class struggle to once voiceless and downtrodden masses, including humane working conditions, fair wages and the distribution of wealth based on ideals of equal shares, represent the core of some of its many gains. But if anyone thought the central issues around class struggle and workers rights has been reconciled, particularly in Australia, one need only look back at the 2007 Federal election. The backlash against the Howard Government’s industrial relations legislation, branded ‘Work Choices’, should serve as a potent reminder of what the community deems fair and equitable when it comes to labor relations even amidst new economy rhetoric. Despite the epic scale and the enormous depth and breadth of class struggle across the twentieth century, in the West, the fight began to be overtaken both in profile and energy by the urgencies in equality addressed through the civil rights movement regarding race and feminism. In the 1960s the civil rights and women’s liberation movements pitted their numbers against the great bulwarks of white, male, institutional power that had up until then normalised and naturalised discrimination. Unlike class struggle, these movements rarely pursued outright revolution with its attendant social and political upheavals, and subsequent disappointments and failures. Like class struggle, however, the civil rights and feminist movements come out of a long history of slow and methodical resistance in the face of explicit suppression and willful neglect. These activists have been chipping away patiently at the monolithic racial and sexist hegemony ever since. The enormous achievements and progress made by both movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s represent a series of climaxes that came from a steady progression of resolute determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. As the class, feminist and civil rights movements infiltrated the inner workings of Western democracies in the latter half of the twentieth century they promoted equal rights through advocacy and legislative and legal frameworks resulting in a transformation of the system from within. The emancipations delivered through these struggles for equal treatment have now gone on to be the near-universal model upon which contemporary equality is both based and sought in the developed and developing world. As the quest for equal status and treatment continues to advance, feminism and civil rights have since been supplanted as radical social movements by the rise of a new identity politics. Gathering momentum in the 1980s, the demand for equal treatment across all racial, sexual and other lines of identity shifted out of a mass movement mode and into one that reflects the demands coming from a more liberalised yet ultimately atomised society. Today, the legal frameworks that support equal treatment and prevents discrimination based on racial and sexual lines are sought by groups and individuals marginalised by the State and often corporate sector through their identification with specific sexual, religious, physical or intellectual attributes. At the same time that equality and rights are being pursued on these individual levels, there is the growing urgency of displaced peoples. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimate globally there are presently 8.4 million refugees and 23.7 million uprooted domestic civilians (5). Fleeing from war, persecution or natural disasters, refugee numbers are sure to grow in a future de-stabilised by Climate Change, natural resource scarcity and food price inflation. The rights and protections of refugees entitled under international frameworks and United Nations guidelines must be respected and even championed by the foreign States they journey to. Future challenges need to address the present imbalance that promotes unjust and unequal treatment of refugees stemming from recent western initiatives like Fortress Europe, offshore holding sites like Naru and Christmas Island and the entire detention centre framework. The dissemination and continued fight for equal rights amongst individuals across so many boundaries has no real precedent in human history and represents one of the greatest challenges and potential benefits of the new millennium. At the same time Globalisation and Climate Change have rewritten the rule book in terms of what is at stake across human society and now, probably for the first time in humanity’s history, the Earth’s biosphere at large. In an age where equal measures and equal shares comes in the form of an environmental carbon footprint, more than ever we need solutions that address global inequities and can deliver just and sustainable equal outcomes. The choice is a stark one; a universal, sustainable and green future, where less equals more; or an unsustainable one where more is more but where Earth ends up equaling desolate Mars. While we seek a pathway to a sustainable future, developed nations will have to reconcile a period where things are asymmetrical and positively unequal. The developed world has to carry the heavy and expensive burden required to reduce CO2 emissions while making the necessary sacrifices to stop the equation where one Westerner equals five Indians when it comes to the consumption of natural resources. In an effort to assist and maintain the momentum that has been gained in the quest for equal rights and equal treatment for all, this issue of M/C Journal puts the ideal of ‘equal’ up for scrutiny and discussion. Although there are unquestioned basic principles that have gone beyond debate with regards to ideas around equal, problematic currents within the discourses surrounding concepts based on equality, equivalence and the principles that come out of things being equal remain. Critiquing the notion of equal also means identifying areas where seeking certain equivalences are not necessarily in the public interest. Our feature article examines the challenge of finding an equal footing for Australians of different faiths. Following their paper on the right to free speech published recently in the ‘citizen’ issue of M/C Journal, Anne Aly and Lelia Green discuss the equal treatment of religious belief in secular Australia by identifying the disparities that undermine ideals of religious pluralism. In their essay entitled “Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege”, they identify one of the central problems facing Islamic belief systems is Western secularism’s categorisation of religious belief as private practice. While Christian based faiths have been able to negotiate the bifurcation between public life and private faith, compartmentalising religious beliefs in this manner can run contrary to Islamic practice. The authors discuss how the separation of Church and State aspires to see all religions ignored equally, but support for a moderate Islam that sees it divorced from the public sphere is secularism’s way of constructing a less than equal Islam. Debra Mayrhofer analyses the unequal treatment received by young males in mainstream media representations in her paper entitled “Mad about the Boy”. By examining TV, radio and newspaper coverage of an ‘out-of-control teenage party’ in suburban Melbourne, Mayrhofer discusses the media’s treatment of the 16-year-old boy deemed to be at the centre of it all. Not only do the many reports evidence non-compliance with the media industry’s own code of ethics but Mayrhofer argues they represent examples of blatant exploitation of the boy. As this issue of M/C Journal goes online, news is now circulating about the boy’s forthcoming appearance in the Big Brother house and the release of a cover of the Beastie Boys’ 1986 hit “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” (see News.com.au). Media reportage of this calibre, noticeable for occurring beyond the confines of tabloid outlets, is seen to perpetuate myths associated with teenage males and inciting moral panics around the behaviour and attitudes expressed by adolescent male youth.Ligia Toutant charts the contentious borders between high, low and popular culture in her paper “Can Stage Directors Make Opera and Popular Culture ‘Equal’?” Referring to recent developments in the staging of opera, Toutant discusses the impacts of phenomena like broadcasts and simulcasts of opera and contemporary settings over period settings, as well as the role played by ticket prices and the introduction of stage directors who have been drawn from film and television. Issues of equal access to high and popular culture are explored by Toutant through the paradox that sees directors of popular feature films that can cost around US$72M with ticket prices under US$10 given the task of directing a US$2M opera with ticket prices that can range upward of US$200. Much has been written about newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australians whereas Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson’s Apology has been somewhat overlooked. Brooke Collins-Gearing redresses this imbalance with her paper entitled “Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal: Some Are More Equal than ‘Others.’” Collins-Gearing responds to Nelson’s speech from the stance of an Indigenous woman and criticises Nelson for ignoring Aboriginal concepts of time and perpetuating the attitudes and discourses that led to the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families in the first place. Less media related and more science oriented is John Paull’s discussion on the implications behind the concept of ‘Substantial Equivalence’ being applied to genetically modified organisms (GMO) in “Beyond Equal: From Same But Different to the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence”. Embraced by manufacturers of genetically modified foods, the principle of substantial equivalence is argued by Paull to provide the bioengineering industry with a best of both worlds scenario. On the one hand, being treated the ‘same’ as elements from unmodified foods GMO products escape the rigours of safety testing and labelling that differentiates them from unmodified foods. On the other hand, by also being defined as ‘different’ they enjoy patent protection laws and are free to pursue monopoly rights on specific foods and technologies. It is easy to envisage an environment arising in which the consumer runs the risk of eating untested foodstuffs while the corporations that have ‘invented’ these new life forms effectively prevent competition in the marketplace. This issue of M/C Journal has been a pleasure to compile. We believe the contributions are remarkable for the broad range of issues they cover and for their great timeliness, dealing as they do with recent events that are still fresh, we hope, in the reader’s mind. We also hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we enjoyed working with their authors and encourage you to click on the ‘Respond to this Article’ function next to each paper’s heading, aware that there is the possibility for your opinions to gain equal footing with those of the contributors if your response is published. References Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976.News.com.au. “Oh, Brother, So It’s Confirmed – Corey Set for House.” 1 May 2008. 3 May 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,23627561-10229,00.html >.UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency. The World’s Stateless People. 2006. 2 May 2008 < http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/452611862.pdf >.

In recent years ecological thinking has been applied to a range of social, cultural, and aesthetic systems, including performing arts as a living system of policy makers, producers, organisations, artists, and audiences. Ecological thinking is systems-based thinking which allows us to see the performing arts as a complex and protean ecosystem; to explain how elements in this system act and interact; and to evaluate its effects on Australia’s social fabric over time. According to Gallasch, ecological thinking is “what we desperately need for the arts.” It enables us to “defeat the fragmentary and utilitarian view of the arts that dominates, to make connections, to establish overviews of the arts that can be shared and debated” (Gallasch NP). The ecological metaphor has featured in debates about the performing arts in Brisbane, Australia, in the last two or three years. A growing state capital on Australia’s eastern seaboard, Brisbane is proud of its performing arts culture. Its main theatre organisations include the state flagship Queensland Theatre Company; the second major presenter of adapted and new text-based performances La Boite Theatre Company; venues which support local and touring performances such as the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Brisbane Powerhouse; emerging talent incubator Metro Arts; indigenous companies like Kooemba Jdarra; independent physical theatre and circus companies such as Zen Zen Zo and Circa; and contemporary play-producing company 23rd Productions (cf. Baylis 3). Brisbane aspires to be a cultural capital in Australia, Australasia, and the Asia Pacific (Gill). Compared to Australia’s southern capitals Sydney and Melbourne, however, Brisbane does have a relatively low level of performing arts activity across traditional and contemporary theatre, contemporary performance, musicals, circus, and other genres of performance. It has at times been cast as a piecemeal, potentially unsustainable arts centre prone to losing talent to other states. In 2009, John Baylis took up these issues in Mapping Queensland Theatre, an Arts Queensland-funded survey designed to map practices in Brisbane and in Queensland more broadly, and to provide a platform to support future policy-making. This report excited debate amongst artists who, whilst accepting the tenor of Baylis’s criticisms, also lamented the lack of nuanced detail and contextualised relationships its map of Queensland theatre provided. In this paper we propose a new approach to mapping Brisbane’s and Queensland’s theatre that extends Baylis’s “value chain” into a “value ecology” that provides a more textured picture of players, patterns, relationships, and activity levels. A “value chain” approach emphasises linear relationships and gaps between production, distribution, and consumption in a specific sector of the economy. A “value ecology” approach goes further by examining a complex range of rhizomatic relationships between production, distribution, and consumption infrastructure and how they influence each other within a sector of the economy such as the performing arts. Our approach uses a “value ecology” model adapted from Hearn et al. and Cherbo et al. to map and interpret information from the AusStage performing arts database, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and other sources such as previews, reviews, and an ongoing local blogosphere debate. Building upon Baylis’s work, our approach produces literal and conceptual maps of Queensland’s performing arts as they change over time, with analysis of support, infrastructure, and relationships amongst government, arts organisations, artists, and audiences. As debate on Mapping Queensland Theatre gives way to more considered reflection, and as Baylis develops a follow-up report, our approach captures snapshots of Queensland’s performing arts before, during, and after such policy interventions. It supports debate about how Queensland artists might manage their own sustainability, their own ability to balance artistic, cultural, and economic factors that influence their work in a way that allows them to survive long term, and allows policy makers, producers, and other players to better understand, articulate, assess, and address criticisms. The Ecological Metaphor In recent years a number of commentators have understood the performing arts as an “ecology,” a system characterised by interacting elements, engagements, flows, blockages, breaks, and breakthroughs whose “health” (synonymous in this context with sustainability) depends on relationships between players within and without the system. Traditionally, performing arts policies in Australia have concentrated on singular elements in a system. They have, as Hunt and Shaw argue, “concentrate[d] on individual companies or an individual artist’s practice rather than the sector as a whole” (5, cf. 43). The focus has been on how to structure, support, and measure the success—the aesthetic and social benefits—of individual training institutions, artists, administrators, and arts organisations. The “health” of singular elements has been taken as a sign of the “health” of the system. An ecologies approach, by contrast, concentrates on engagements, energies, and flows as signs of health, and thus sustainability, in a system. Ecological thinking enables policy makers, practitioners, and scholars to go beyond debate about the presence of activity, the volume of activity, and the fate of individual agents as signs of the health or non-health of a system. In an ecologies context, level of activity is not the only indicator of health, and low activity does not necessarily equate with instability or unsustainability. An ecological approach is critical in Brisbane, and in Queensland more broadly, where attempts to replicate the nature or level of activity in southern capitals are not necessarily the best way to shore up the “health” of our performing arts system in our own unique environment. As the locus of our study Queensland is unique. While Queensland has 20% of Australia’s population (OESR; ABS ‘ Population Projections’), and is regularly recognised as a rapidly growing “lifestyle superstate” which values innovation, creativity, and cultural infrastructure (Cunningham), it is still home to significantly less than 20% of Australia’s performing arts producers, and many talented people continue to migrate to the south to pursue career opportunities (Baylis 4, 28). An ecologies approach can break into oft-cited anxieties about artist, activity, and audience levels in Brisbane, and in Queensland, and create new ideas about what a “healthy” local performing arts sector might look like. This might start to infuse some of the social media commentary that currently tends to emphasise the gaps in the sector. Ecologies are complex systems. So, as Costanza says, when we consider ecosystem health, we must consider the overall performance of the system, including its ability to deal with “external stress” (240) from macro-level political, legal, social, cultural, economic, or technological currents that change the broader society this particular sector or ecosystem sits within. In Brisbane, there is a growing population and a desire to pursue a cultural capital tag, but the distinctive geographic, demographic, and behavioural characteristics of Brisbane’s population—and the associated ‘stresses’, conditions, or constraints—mean that striving to replicate patterns of activity seen in Sydney or Melbourne may not be the straightest path to a “healthy” or “sustainable” sector here. The attitudes of the players and the pressures influencing the system are different, so this may be like comparing rainforests with deserts (Costanza), and forgetting that different elements and engagements are in fact “healthy” in different ecosystems. From an ecologies point of view, policy makers and practitioners in Brisbane and in Queensland more broadly might be well advised to stop trying to match Sydney or Melbourne, and to instead acknowledge that a “healthy” ecosystem here may look different, and so generate policy, subsidy, and production systems to support this. An ecological approach can help determine how much activity is in fact necessary to ensure a healthy and sustainable local performing arts sector. It can, in other words, provide a fresh approach that inspires new ideas and strategies for sector sustainability. Brisbane, Baylis and the Blogosphere Debate The ecological metaphor has clearly captured the interest of policy makers as they consider how to make Queensland’s performing arts more sustainable and successful. For Arts Queensland: The view of the sector as a complex and interdependent ‘ecosystem’ is forging new thinking, new practices and new business models. Individual practitioners and organisations are rethinking where they sit within the broader ecology, and what they contribute to the health and vitality of the sector, and how they might address the gaps in services and skills (12). This view informed the commissioning of Mapping Queensland Theatre, an assessment of Queensland’s theatre sector which offers a framework for allocation of resources under the Queensland Arts & Cultural Sector Plan 2010-2013. It also offers a framework for negotiation with funded organisations to ensure “their activities and focus support a harmonious ecology” (Baylis 3) in which all types and levels of practice (emerging, established, touring, and so on) are functioning well and are well represented within the overall mix of activities. Utilising primary and secondary survey sources, Mapping Queensland Theatre seeks: to map individuals, institutions, and organisations who have a stake in developing Queensland’s professional theatre sector; and to apply a “value chain” model of production from supply (training, creation, presentation, and distribution) to demand (audiences) to identify problems and gaps in Queensland’s professional theatre sector and recommend actions to address them. The report is critical of the sector. Baylis argues that “the context for great theatre is not yet in place in Queensland … therefore works of outstandingly high quality will be rare” (28).Whilst acknowledging a lack of ready answers about how much activity is required in a vibrant theatre culture, Baylis argues that “comparisons are possible” (27) and he uses various data sets to compare numbers of new Australian productions in different states. He finds that “despite having 20% of the Australian population, [Queensland] generates a dramatically lower amount of theatre activity” (4, cf. 28). The reason, according to Baylis (20, 23, 25, 29, 32, 40-41, 44), is that there are gaps in the “value chain” of Queensland theatre, specifically in: Support for the current wave of emerging and independent artistsSpace for experimentation Connections between artists, companies, venues and festivals, between and within regional centres, and between Queensland companies and their (inter)national peers Professional development for producers to address the issue of market distributionAudience development “Queensland lacks a critical mass of theatre activity to develop a sustainable theatre culture” (48), and the main gap is in pathways for independent artists. Quality new work does not emerge, energy dissipates, and artists move on. The solution, for Baylis, is to increase support for independent companies (especially via co-productions with mainstage companies), to improve (inter)national touring, and to encourage investment in audience development. Naturally, Queensland’s theatre makers responded to this report. Responses were given, for example, in inaugural speeches by new Queensland Theatre Company director Wesley Enoch and new La Boite Theatre Company director David Berthold, in the media, and in blogosphere commentary on a range of articles on Brisbane performing arts in 2010. The blogosphere debate in particular raged for months and warrants more detailed analysis elsewhere. For the purposes of this paper, though, it is sufficient to note that blogosphere debate about the health of Queensland theatre culture acknowledged many of the deficits Baylis identified and called for: More leadershipMore government supportMore venuesMore diversityMore audience, especially for risky work, and better audience engagementMore jobs and retention of artists Whilst these responses endorse Baylis’s findings and companies have since conceived programs that address Baylis’s criticisms (QTC’s introduction of a Studio Season and La Boite’s introduction of an Indie program in 2010 for example) a sense of frustration also emerged. Some, like former QTC Chair Kate Foy, felt that “what’s really needed in the theatre is a discussion that breaks out from the old themes and encourages fresh ideas—approaches to solving whatever problems are perceived to exist in ‘the system’.” For commentators like Foy the blogosphere debate enacted a kind of ritual rehearsal of an all-too-familiar set of concerns: inadequate and ill-deployed funding, insufficient venues, talent drain, and an impoverished local culture of theatre going. “Value Chains” versus “Value Ecologies” Why did responses to this report demand more artists, more arts organisations, more venues, and more activities? Why did they repeat demands for more government-subsidised venues, platforms, and support rather than drive toward new seed- or non- subsidised initiatives? At one level, this is to do with the report’s claims: it is natural for artists who have been told quality work is “rare” amongst them to point to lack of support to achieve success. At another level, though, this is because—as useful as it has been for local theatre makers—Baylis’s map is premised on a linear chain from training, to first productions, to further developed productions (involving established writers, directors, designers and performers), to opportunities to tour (inter)nationally, etc. It provides a linear image of a local performing arts sector in which there are individuals and institutions with potential, but specific gaps in the production-distribution-consumption chain that make it difficult to deliver work to target markets. It emphasises gaps in the linear pathway towards “stability” of financial, venue, and audience support and thus “sustainability” over a whole career for independent artists and the audiences they attract. Accordingly, asking government to plug the gaps through elements added to the system (venues, co-production platforms, producer hubs, subsidy, and entrepreneurial endeavours) seems like a logical solution. Whilst this is true, it does not tell the whole story. To generate a wider story, we need to consider: What the expected elements in a “healthy” ecosystem would be (e.g. more versus alternative activity);What other aesthetic, cultural, or economic pressures affect the “health” of an ecosystem;Why practices might need to cycle, ebb, and flow over time in a “healthy” ecosystem. A look at the way La Boite works before, during, and after Baylis’s analysis of Brisbane theatre illustrates why attention to these elements is necessary. A long-running company which has made the transition from amateur to professional to being a primary developer of new Australian work in its distinctive in-the-round space, La Boite has recently shifted its strategic position. A focus on text-based Australian plays has given way to adapted, contemporary, and new work in a range of genres; regular co-productions with companies in Brisbane and beyond; and an “Indie” program that offers other companies a venue. This could be read as a response to Baylis’s recommendation: the production-distribution-consumption chain gap for Brisbane’s independents is plugged, the problem is solved, the recommendation has led to the desired result. Such a reading might, though, overlook the range of pressures beyond Brisbane, beyond Queensland, and beyond the Baylis report that drive—and thus help, hinder, or otherwise effect—the shift in La Boite’s program strategies. The fact that La Boite recently lost its Australia Council funding, or that La Boite like all theatre companies needs co-productions to keep its venue running as costs increase, or that La Boite has rebranded to appeal to younger audiences interested in postdramatic, do-it-your-self or junkyard style aesthetics. These factors all influence what La Boite might do to sustain itself, and more importantly, what its long-term impact on Brisbane’s theatre ecology will be. To grasp what is happening here, and get beyond repetitive responses to anxieties about Brisbane’s theatre ecology, detail is required not simply on whether programs like La Boite’s “plugged the gap” for independent artists, but on how they had both predicted and unpredicted effects, and how other factors influenced the effects. What is needed is to extend mapping from a “value chain” to a full ”value ecology”? This is something Hearn et al. have called for. A value chain suggests a “single linear process with one stage leading to the next” (5). It ignores the environment and other external enablers and disregards a product’s relationship to other systems or products. In response they prefer a “value creating ecology” in which the “constellation of firms are [sic] dynamic and value flow is multi-directional and works through clusters of networks” (6). Whilst Hearn et al. emphasise “firms” or companies in their value creating ecology, a range of elements—government, arts organisations, artists, audiences, and the media as well as the aesthetic, social, and economic forces that influence them—needs to be mapped in the value creating ecology of the performing arts. Cherbo et al. provide a system of elements or components which, adapted for a local context like Brisbane or Queensland, can better form the basis of a value ecology approach to the way a specific performing arts community works, adapts, changes, breaks down, or breaks through over time. Figure 1 – Performing Arts Sector Map (adapted from Cherbo et. al. 14) Here, the performing arts sector is understood in terms of core artistic workers, companies, a constellation of generic and sector specific support systems, and wider social contexts (Cherbo et al. 15). Together, the shift from “value chain” to “value ecology” that Hearn et al. advocate, and the constellation of ecology elements that Cherbo et al. emphasise, bring a more detailed, dynamic range of relations into play. These include “upstream” production infrastructure (education, suppliers, sponsors), “downstream” distribution infrastructure (venues, outlets, agents), and overall public infrastructure. As a framework for mapping “value ecology” this model offers a more nuanced perspective on production, distribution, and consumption elements in an ecology. It allows for analysis of impact of interventions in dozens of different areas, from dozens of perspectives, and thus provides a more detailed picture of players, relationships, and results to support both practice and policy making around practice. An Aus-e-Stage Value Ecology To provide the more detailed, dynamic image of local theatre culture that a value ecology approach demands—to show players, relations between players, and context in all their complexity—we use the Aus-e-Stage Mapping Service, an online application that maps data about artists, arts organisations, and audiences across cityscapes/landscapes. We use Aus-e-Stage with data drawn from three sources: the AusStage database of over 50,000 entries on Australian performing arts venues, productions, artists, and reviews; the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data on population; and the Local Government Area (LGA) maps the ABS uses to cluster populations. Figure 2 – Using AusStage Interface Figure 3 – AusStage data on theatre venues laid over ABS Local Government Area Map Figure 4 – Using Aus-e-Stage / AusStage to zoom in on Australia, Queensland, Brisbane and La Boite Theatre Company, and generate a list of productions, dates and details Aus-e-Stage produces not just single maps, but a sequential series of snapshots of production ecologies, which visually track who does what when, where, with whom, and for whom. Its sequences can show: The way artists, companies, venues, and audiences relate to each other;The way artists’ relationship to companies, venues, and audiences changes over time;The way “external stressors” changes such as policy, industrial, or population changes affect the elements, roles, and relationships in the ecology from that point forward. Though it can be used in combination with other data sources such as interviews, the advantage of AusStage data is that maps of moving ecologies of practice are based not on descriptions coloured by memory but clear, accurate program, preview, and review data. This allows it to show how factors in the environment—population, policy, infrastructure, or program shifts—effect the ecology, effect players in the ecology, and prompt players to adapt their type, level, or intensity of practice. It extends Baylis’s value chain into a full value ecology that shows the detail on how an ecology works, going beyond demands that government plug perceived gaps and moving towards data- and history- based decisions, ideas and innovation based on what works in Brisbane’s performing arts ecology. Our Aus-e-Stage mapping shows this approach can do a number of useful things. It can create sequences showing breaks, blockages, and absences in an individual or company’s effort to move from emerging to established (e.g. in a sudden burst of activity followed by nothing). It can create sequences showing an individual or company’s moves to other parts of Australia (e.g. to tour or to pursue more permanent work). It can show surprising spaces, relations, and sources of support artists use to further their career (e.g. use of an amateur theatre outside the city such as Brisbane Arts Theatre). It can capture data about venues, programs, or co-production networks that are more or less effective in opening up new opportunities for artists (e.g. moving small-scale experiments in Metro Arts’ “Independents” program to full scale independent productions in La Boite’s “Indie” program, its mainstage program, other mainstage programs, and beyond). It can link to program information, documentation, or commentary to compare anticipated and actual effects. It can lay the map dates and movements across significant policy, infrastructure, or production climate shifts. In the example below, for instance, Aus-e-Stage represents the tour of La Boite’s popular production of a new Australian work Zig Zag Street, based on the Brisbane-focused novel by Nick Earls about a single, twentysomething man’s struggles with life, love, and work. Figure 5 – Zig Zag Street Tour Map In the example below, Aus-e-Stage represents the movements not of a play but of a performer—in this case Christopher Sommers—who has been able to balance employment with new work incubator Metro Arts, mainstage and indie producer La Boite, and stage theatre company QTC with his role with independent theatre company 23rd Productions to create something more protean, more portfolio-based or boundary-less than a traditional linear career trajectory. Figure 6 – Christopher Sommers Network Map and Travel Map This value of this approach, and this technology, is clear. Which independents participate in La Boite Indie (or QTC’s “Studio” or “Greenroom” new work programs, or Metro’s emerging work programs, or others)? What benefits does it bring for artists, for independent companies, or for mainstage companies like La Boite? Is this a launching pad leading to ongoing, sustainable production practices? What do artists, audiences or others say about these launching pads in previews, programs, or reviews? Using Aus-e-Stage as part of a value ecology approach answers these questions. It provides a more detailed picture of what happens, what effect it has on local theatre ecology, and exactly which influences enabled this effect: precisely the data needed to generate informed debate, ideas, and decision making. Conclusion Our ecological approach provides images of a local performing arts ecology in action, drawing out filtered data on different players, relationships, and influencing factors, and thus extending examination of Brisbane’s and Queensland’s performing arts sector into useful new areas. It offers three main advances—first, it adopts a value ecology approach (Hearn et al.), second, it adapts this value ecology approach to include not just companies by all up- and down- stream players, supporters and infrastructure (Cherbo et. al.), and, thirdly, it uses the wealth of data available via Aus-e-Stage maps to fill out and filter images of local theatre ecology. It allows us to develop detailed, meaningful data to support discussion, debate, and development of ideas that is less likely to get bogged down in old, outdated, or inaccurate assumptions about how the sector works. Indeed, our data lends itself to additional analysis in a number of ways, from economic analysis of how shifts in policy influence productivity to sociological analysis of the way practitioners or practices acquire status and cultural capital (Bourdieu) in the field. Whilst descriptions offered here demonstrate the potential of this approach, this is by no means a finished exercise. Indeed, because this approach is about analysing how elements, roles, and relationships in an ecology shift over time, it is an ever-unfinished exercise. As Fortin and Dale argue, ecological studies of this sort are necessarily iterative, with each iteration providing new insights and raising further questions into processes and patterns (3). Given the number of local performing arts producers who have changed their practices significantly since Baylis’s Mapping Queensland Theatre report, and the fact that Baylis is producing a follow-up report, the next step will be to use this approach and the Aus-e-Stage technology that supports it to trace how ongoing shifts impact on Brisbane’s ambitions to become a cultural capital. This process is underway, and promises to open still more new perspectives by understanding anxieties about local theatre culture in terms of ecologies and exploring them cartographically. References Arts Queensland. Queensland Arts & Cultural Sector Plan 2010-2013. Brisbane: Arts Queensland, 2010. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Projections, Australia, 2006 to 2101.” Canberra: ABS (2008). 20 June 2011 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/3222.0Main+Features12006%20to%202101?OpenDocument›. ——-. “Regional Population Growth, Australia, 2008-2009: Queensland.” Canberra: ABS (2010). 20 June 2011 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/3218.0Main%20Features62008-09?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=3218.0&issue=2008-09&num=&view=›. Baylis, John. Mapping Queensland Theatre. Brisbane: Arts Queensland, 2009. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. John G. Richardson. New York: Greenwood, 1986.241-58. Cherbo, Joni M., Harold Vogel, and Margaret Jane Wyszomirski. “Towards an Arts and Creative Sector.” Understanding the Arts and Creative Sector in the United States. Ed. Joni M. Cherbo, Ruth A. Stewart and Margaret J. Wyszomirski. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 32-60. Costanza, Robert. “Toward an Operational Definition of Ecosystem Health”. Ecosystem Health: New Goals for Environmental Management. Eds. Robert Costanza, Bryan G. Norton and Benjamin D. Haskell. Washington: Island Press, 1992. 239-56. Cunningham, Stuart. “Keeping Artistic Tempers Balanced.” The Courier Mail, 4 August (2010). 20 June 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/keeping-artistic-tempers-balanced/story-e6frerc6-1225901295328›. Gallasch, Keith. “The ABC and the Arts: The Arts Ecologically.” RealTime 61 (2004). 20 June 2011 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/61/7436›. Gill, Raymond. “Is Brisbane Australia’s New Cultural Capital?” Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October (2010). 20 June 2011 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/is-brisbane-australias-new-cultural-capital-20101015-16np5.html›. Fortin, Marie-Josée and Dale, Mark R.T. Spatial Analysis: A Guide for Ecologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Foy, Kate. “Is There Anything Right with the Theatre?” Groundling. 10 January (2010). 20 June 2011 ‹http://katefoy.com/2010/01/is-there-anything-right-with-the-theatre/›. Hearn, Gregory N., Simon C. Roodhouse, and Julie M. Blakey. ‘From Value Chain to Value Creating Ecology: Implications for Creative Industries Development Policy.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 13 (2007). 20 June 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/15026/›. Hunt, Cathy and Phyllida Shaw. A Sustainable Arts Sector: What Will It Take? Strawberry Hills: Currency House, 2007. Knell, John. Theatre’s New Rules of Evolution. Available from Intelligence Agency, 2008. Office of Economic and Statistical Research. “Information Brief: Australian Demographic Statistics June Quarter 2009.” Canberra: OESR (2010). 20 June 2012 ‹http://www.oesr.qld.gov.au/queensland-by-theme/demography/briefs/aust-demographic-stats/aust-demographic-stats-200906.pdf›.

The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. While the public prominence of the parties involved was not generally a factor in reportage, occasionally, prominent individuals were affected, such as the harassment of the athlete Michelle Baumgartner at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 which received extensive coverage but the offenders were never publicly named or disciplined. Two other incidents stand out: the Ormond College case at the University of Melbourne, about which much has been written; and Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas during his nomination to the US Supreme Court in 1991.The spectacle of Hill’s testimony to the US Senate is now an archetype of claims against powerful men, although, at the time, her credibility was attacked and her dignified presentation was criticised as “too composed. Too cool. Too censorious” (Legge 31). Hill was also seen to counterpose the struggles of race and gender, and Thomas himself famously described it as “a hi-tech lynching of an uppity black” (qtd in Stephens 1). By “hi-tech”, Thomas alluded to the occasion of the first-ever live national broadcast of the United States Senate hearings in which Hill’s claims were aired directly to the national public, and re-broadcast internationally in news coverage. Thus, it was not only the claims but the scale and medium of delivery to a global audience that set it apart from other sexual harassment stories.Recent events have since prompted revisiting of the inequity of Hill’s treatment at the Senate hearings. But well before this, in an epic and polemical study of American public culture, Berlant reflected at length on the heroism of Hill’s “witnessing” as paradigmatic of citizenship in post-Reaganite America’s “shrinking” public sphere. It forms part of her much wider thesis regarding the “intimate public sphere” and the form of citizenship “produced by personal acts and values” (5) in the absence of a context that “makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on a state” (3), and in which the fundamental inequality of minority cultures is assumed. For Berlant, Hill’s testimony becomes the model of “Diva Citizenship”; the “strange intimacy” in which the Citizen Diva, “the subordinated person”, believes in the capacity of the privileged ones “to learn and to change” and “trust[s] ... their innocence of ... their obliviousness” of the system that has supported her subjugation (222–223). While Berlant’s thesis pertains to profound social inequalities, there is no mistaking the comparison to the digital feminist in the #MeToo era in the call to identify with her suffering and courage.Of Hill’s testimony, Berlant describes how: “a member of a stigmatised population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship” (222). It is an “act of heroic pedagogy” (223) which occurs when “a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege” (223). In such settings, “acts of language can feel like explosives” and put “the dominant story into suspended animation” (223). The Diva Citizen cannot “change the world” but “challenges her audience” to identify with her “suffering” and the “courage she has had to produce” in “calling on people to change the practices of citizenship into which they currently consent” (223). But Berlant cautions that the strongest of Divas cannot alone achieve change because “remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity” can lead to “a confusion of ... memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself” (223). Instead, she argues that the Diva’s act is a call; the political obligation for the action of change lies with the collective, the greater body politic.The EchoIf Acts of Diva Citizenship abound in the #MeToo movement, relations between the individual and the collective are in question in a number of ways. This suggests a basis of comparison between past and present feminisms which have come full circle in the renewed recognition of sexual harassment in the continuum of sexual violence. Compared with the past, the voices of #MeToo are arguably empowered by a genuine, if gradual, change in the symbolic status of women, and a corresponding destabilization of the images of male power since the second wave era of feminism. The one who names an abuser on Twitter symbolises a power of individual courage, backed by a responding collective voice of supporters. Yet there are concerns about who can “speak out” without access to social media or with the constraint that “the sanctions would be too great” (Zarkov and Davis). Conversely, the “spreadability” — as Jenkins, Ford and Green term the travelling properties of digital media — and the apparent relative ease of online activism might belie the challenge and courage of those who make the claims and those who respond.The collective voice is also allied with other grassroots movements like SlutWalk (Jouet), the women’s marches in the US against the Trump presidency, and the several national campaigns — in India and Egypt, for instance (Zarkov and Davis) — that contest sexual violence and gender inequality. The “sheer numbers” of participation in #MeToo testify to “the collectivity of it all” and the diversity of the movement (Gill and Orgad). If the #MeToo hashtag gained traction with the “experiences of white heterosexual women in the US”, it “quickly expanded” due to “broad and inclusive appeal” with stories of queer women and men and people of colour well beyond the Global North. Even so, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo hashtag in 2006 in her campaign of social justice for working class women and girls of colour, and endorsed its adoption by Hollywood, highlights the many “untold stories”.More strikingly, #MeToo participants name the names of the alleged harassers. The naming of names, famous names, is threshold-crossing and as much the public-startling power of the disclosures as the allegations and stimulates newsworthiness in conventional media. The resonance is amplified in the context of the American crisis over the Trump presidency in the sense that the powerful men called out become echoes or avatars of Trump’s monstrous manhood and the urgency of denouncing it. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the name is all. A figure of immense power who symbolised an industry, naming Weinstein blew away the defensive old Hollywood myths of “casting couches” and promised, perhaps idealistically, the possibility for changing a culture and an industrial system.The Hollywood setting for activism is the most striking comparison with second wave feminism. A sense of contradiction emerges in this new “visibility” of sexual harassment in a culture that remains predominantly “voyeuristic” and “sexist” (Karkov and Davis), and not least in the realm of Hollywood where the sexualisation of women workers has long been a notorious open secret. A barrage of Hollywood feminism has accompanied #MeToo and #TimesUp in the campaign for diversity at the Oscars, and the stream of film remakes of formerly all-male narrative films that star all-female casts (Ghostbusters; Oceans 11; Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels). Cynically, this trend to make popular cinema a public sphere for gender equality in the film industry seems more glorifying than subversive of Hollywood masculinities. Uneasily, it does not overcome those lingering questions about why these conditions were uncontested openly for so long, and why it took so long for someone to go public, as Rose McGowan did, with claims about Harvey Weinstein.However, a reading of She Said, by Jodie Kantor and Megan Tuohey, the journalists who broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times — following their three year efforts to produce a legally water-tight report — makes clear that it was not for want of stories, but firm evidence and, more importantly, on-the-record testimony. If not for their (and others’) fastidious journalism and trust-building and the Citizen Divas prepared to disclose their experiences publicly, Weinstein might not be convicted today. Yet without the naming of the problem of sexual harassment in the women’s movement all those years ago, none of this may have come to pass. Lin Farley can now be found on YouTube retelling the story (see “New Mexico in Focus”).It places the debate about digital activism and Hollywood feminism in some perspective and, like the work of journalists, it is testament to the symbiosis of individual and collective effort in the action of change. The tweeting activism of #MeToo supplements the plenum of knowledge and action about sexual harassment across time: the workplace novels, the consciousness raising, the legislation and the poster campaigns. In different ways, in both eras, this literature demonstrates that names matter in calling for change on sexual harassment. But, if #MeToo is to become the last long take on sexual harassment, then, as Berlant advocates, the responsibility lies with the body politic who must act collectively for change in ways that will last well beyond the courage of the Citizen Divas who so bravely call it on.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. 1997. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.Bularzik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes.” Radical America 12.4 (1978): 25-43.Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. NY: Doran, 1918.Dixon, Jo. “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws.” Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes and Prevention. Eds. Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Karlewski. Massachusetts: Lexington, 1991. 161-171.Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Working World. London: Melbourne House, 1978.Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Beyond Gender at Work: Secretaries.” Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. 273–91.Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualisation of Culture’ to #MeToo.” Sexualities 21.8 (2018): 1313–1324. <https://doi-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.1177/1363460718794647>.Google Trends. “Me Too Rising: A Visualisation of the Movement from Google Trends.” 2017–2020. <https://metoorising.withgoogle.com>.Hearn, Jeff, Deborah Shepherd, Peter Sherrif, and Gibson Burrell. The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage, 1989.Herbert, Carrie. Talking of Silence: The Sexual Harassment of Schoolgirls. London: Falmer, 1989.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Jouet, Josiane. “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8.1 (2018). 1 Jan. 2018. <http://dx.doi.org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.22381/JRGS8120187>.Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence.” Women, Violence, and Social Control. Eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard. London: MacMillan, 1989. 46–60.Legge, Kate. “The Harassment of America.” Weekend Australian 19–20 Oct. 1991: 31.Mackinnon, Catherine. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.New Mexico in Focus, a Production of NMPBS. 26 Jan. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlO5PiwZk8U>.Pringle, Rosemary. Secretaries Talk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988.Rubinstein, Linda. “Dominance Eroticized: Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Worth Her Salt. Eds. Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982. 163–74.Sedley, Ann, and Melissa Benn. Sexual Harassment at Work. London: NCCL Rights for Women Unit, 1986.Stephens, Peter. “America’s Sick and Awful Farce.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Oct. 1991: 1.Storrie, Kathleen, and Pearl Dykstra. “Bibliography on Sexual Harassment.” Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation 10.4 (1981–1982): 25–32.Wise, Sue, and Liz Stanley. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Every Day Life. London: Pandora, 1987.Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalyn Keller. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 557–572. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285>.Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women's Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817749436>.

In July 2001, New York couple Jason Black and Francis Schroeder opened bidding on the internet for corporate sponsorship of their newborn son. Naming rights started at $US5000 000. For Black, the logic was simple: given the inescapable prevalence of commercial sponsorship in contemporary life, this was a valid way of working with corporate America. Black and Schroeder already had two daughters and lived in a small two-bedroom apartment. In exchange for their son’s financial security, they risked branding him ‘Big Mac’ or ‘Nike’ – literally. If nothing else, the case exemplified the amazing reach of brand consciousness. The couple had internalised its values and rationale with such ease and comfort, the notion of forfeiting their child’s name was not abhorrent, but a lucrative marketing opportunity. Then again, the story was not without precedent. In 2000, teenagers Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe, both from New Jersey, became ‘spokesguys’ for First USA, one of America’s top credit-card companies. By sporting the company logo on their surfboards and all their clothes, the pair receives an annual $US40 000 each in tuition, board and books for their four-year university contract. They do not just advertise the brand; they are its living embodiment. For critics of consumer culture, such stories exemplify the extent to which corporatism has become a complete and closed system, with the panoramic presence of brands and logos and the commodification of life itself. They demonstrate the alarming readiness of some people to encode and enact the consumerist impulse. At its most malignant, this impulse appears as a crass consumerism that eats up every aspect of a culture, so much so that consumerism becomes the culture – all meaning is both anchored in and governed by the capitalist creed. For many, mass-produced contemporary culture provides a seemingly empty substitute, what Fredric Jameson (1991) termed “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” (9), for genuine experience and emotion. In turn, the contemporary consumer has been reduced to a mere imitation of mediated expectations, a functionary cog in the corporatist machine. As this sign system infects and invades more and more space, a certain cultural literacy is inevitably called for, an intimate knowledge of symbol and significance, logo and logic. However, like all living language, this one is open to some resistance, albeit a somewhat piecemeal one. Part appropriation, part antithesis, it is a resistance that hijacks form in order to subvert content. To explain how this type of activism might work, one could consider the highly effective activist operation, ®TMark (http://rtmark.com). ®TMark is an online centre that organizes and directs funding for the ‘information alteration’ of corporate products (otherwise known as ‘sabotage’). In 1993, ®TMark was involved in its first high-profile act of sabotage when it channelled $US 8000 to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a group that switched the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. As befits a project affiliated with ®TMark, the critical content of BLO’s act was an alchemic stroke of humour and commentary. The protest lies within the ‘information alteration’ of commodities that usually rely on their supposed virtues. The BLO offensive drew attention to the questionable labour practices of Mattel, manufacturers of Barbie, thereby undermining the perceptions on which Barbie’s popularity rests. From the outset, ®TMark’s key feature is its corporate status. As a brokerage, ®TMark benefits from ‘limited liability’, just like any other corporation. It exploits this principle (that is, corporate protection, thereby bypassing legal responsibility) to sabotage other corporate products. Unlike other corporations, though, its bottom-line is cultural profit. As spokesperson Ray Thomas explains, the corporate model is both the object of ®TMark’s criticism, and the method by which that criticism is being facilitated: “Projects can be seen as stocks, and when you support a project you’re investing in it. When you contribute, say, $100 to a project that you would like to see accomplished, you are sort of investing in the accomplishment of the project. What you want to see out of that project is cultural dividends; you want to see a beneficial cultural event take place because of your money, as a reward. What you’re doing is investing in the improvement of the culture.” As with almost all ®TMark literature and material, the tone here is one of clipped civility, similar to the tense restraint characteristic of almost any corporation. Perhaps the closest the site gets to a ‘straightforward’ philosophy is in this piece of advice to dispirited students, fearful that, one day, they too will be sucked into the corporate void: “We believe that performing an ®TMark project can help you, psychologically at least, at such a difficult juncture; but more importantly, we urge you to at all costs remember that laws should defend human people, not corporate people like the one of which you will be a part. If you keep this in mind and work towards making it a reality, you may find your life much more bearable.” While this pseudo mission statement might be read as yet another appendage to ®TMark’s corporate veneer, it also points to some of the goals of the site. The depiction of ®TMark projects as morale boosters for disenchanted cynics goes some way in illustrating the ambitions and limits of the site. Rather than prescribe a far-reaching, holistic approach to social change (what might be termed a ‘revolutionary’ vision), ®TMark marshals ideas and initiatives a little more subtly. This is not to belittle or dispute its utility or significance; on the contrary, it is an approach that effectively (in)corporates a diverse range of people and programs. For example, rather than unifying its adherents to a common agenda, ®TMark operates as a coalition of interests. As such, the followings funds collectively serve the ®TMark project: the Labor Fund; the Frontier Fund (which challenges naïve visions of the ‘global village’); the Education Fund; the Health Fund; the Alternative Markets Fund (which considers overlooked demographics, such as poor gays); the Media Fund; the Intellectual Property Fund; the Biological Property Fund; the Corporate Law Fund; and the Environment Fund, among others. In turn, the ®TMark spectrum canvasses a plethora of pertinent, interconnected themes. This includes: the plight of workers in developing countries; censorship; institutionalised racism; the nominal triumph of consumer culture; techno-utopianism and the ‘digerati’; copyright law; and the increasing opacity of corporate activities. Underlying all these issues is ®TMark’s intention to publicise corporate abuses of democratic processes. Importantly, this multiplicity of interests is considered a suitable counterpart to the dispersed nature of corporate power. So, no one enemy is identified and targeted, since such reductionism belies the degree to which capitalism, corporatism and consumerism are irredeemably entwined in contemporary culture. In turn, these funds are often ‘managed’ by public figures whose association with certain causes lend their celebrity well to particular campaigns. For example, San Francisco band Negativeland manages the Intellectual Property Fund. This is most appropriate. Their 1991 legal battle with major label Island, on account of their ‘deceptive’ use of U2 material, cemented their place as champions of ‘creative appropriation’ and the right to create ‘with mirrors’ (as Negativeland describes it on their eponymous website). Similarly, the desire to create ‘with mirrors’ propels much of ®TMark’s work. It imbues all ®TMark projects with the same sense of calculated mischief. This suggests a mode of activism that is both opportunistic and ingenious, fashioning criticism from the very resources it is attacking. Financial reward aside (which, in any case, is negligible, at best) the real pay-off for ®TMark saboteurs comes via media coverage of their projects. As such, it straddles an interesting divide, between public infamy and necessary stealth. ®TMark requires media attention to render its projects effective, yet must maintain the critical distance necessary for any activist potency. Indeed, the need to bolster ®TMark’s profile was one of the reasons it went from being a dial-in system to a website in 1997. Within its first eight months the site had received almost 20 000 visits. In this schema, the activism in question is assigned a somewhat smaller purpose than has been hitherto associated with protest movements generally. Rather than provide a grand panacea for all the world’s ills, ®TMark’s scale is, by its own admission, modest: “The value of ®TMark is, and has always been, not in any real pressure it can possibly bear, but rather in its ability to quickly and cheaply attract widespread interest to important issues. ®TMark is thus essentially a public relations agency for anti-corporate activism”. In this way, ®TMark is firmly positioned within that strand of activism often referred to as ‘culture jamming’. This type of protest relies on a distinct degree of media and cultural literacy, one that is consonant with, and a product of, the Information Age. As Mark Dery explains, these activists “introduce noise into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media artefacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent”(http://levity.com/markdery/culturejam.html). Culture jamming draws on (and contributes to) critiques of contemporary consumer capitalism. Its premise is that too much public space has already been ceded to Hollywood, Madison Avenue et al, and that activists must seize whatever opportunities allow this space to be reclaimed, however fleetingly. Trading on publicity and shock value, jammers manipulate those icons, slogans and trademarks that will register immediate recognition, thereby rendering their efforts meaningful. It constitutes a politicised refusal to submit to the cheerful passivity scripted by the corporate class. As jammers resist this role, reclaiming rather than forfeiting public space, they create what Naomi Klein (2000) calls “a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism” (280). This term aptly captures the spirit of moralistic idealism that is, almost inevitably, a part of the milieu. This is not to dismiss or deride the progressive agenda of most culture jammers; if anything, it is a positive endorsement of their activism, and a response to those that would deem the postmodern zeitgeist politically barren or overwhelmingly cynical. What it reveals, then, is a somewhat unexpected distribution of power, as expressions of criticism and opposition emerge at seemingly incongruous junctures. They are at once engaged and complicit, finding cracks in ‘the system’ (that is, corporate society) and co-opting them, what Linda Hutcheon (1990) calls “subversion from within” (157). Eschewing ‘big picture’ solutions, culture jammers prioritise temporary connections and hybrid forms over ideological certainties and operational rigidity. Tactical thinking, and the malleability and mobility it relies on, clearly informs and animates ®TMark’s work. As Graham Meikle (2002) explains, “Different actions and campaigns use whichever media are most appropriate at any given time for any given purpose. An event might call for making a documentary, making a website, making an A4 newsletter, or making a phone call” (120). ®TMark stops short of overstating its purpose or exaggerating its success. There is no lofty manifesto or ironclad strategy; without departing too far from its anti-corporatist stance, ®TMark encourages an almost playful combination of comedy and critique, with a thick ironic overlay. At its most ambitious, then, ®TMark can hope to alter the everyday behaviour of ordinary citizens, making inroads at the expense of powerful corporations. At the very least, it can prompt bemused surfers to rethink certain things – such as Nike’s labour practices or Shell’s environmental record. In a sense, though, the degree to which such perceptual jolts can ‘make a difference’ is almost immaterial: the fact that the status quo has been questioned is a minor triumph. Where some commentators bemoan the virtual stupor they deem characteristic of contemporary Western politics, projects like ®TMark prove that there are spaces and opportunities left for meaningful debate and dissent. Works Cited Dery, Mark. “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs”. (http://levity.com/markdery/culturejam.html). Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1990. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2000. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York and London: Routledge, and Annandale, Pluto Press, 2002. Rtmark. (http://rtmark.com). Links http://levity.com/markdery/culturejam.html http://rtmark.com Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Khamis, Susie. "Jamming at Work " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/04-jamming.php>. APA Style Khamis, S. (2003, Jun 19). Jamming at Work . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/04-jamming.php>