Not The Greens Ad

This Australian federal election has been characterised by an even higher than usual amount of mudslinging. Let’s look at three examples: Liberal attacks on the government’s broadband plan, Labor attacks on Tony Abbott’s attitude to labour relations, and the attack by both sides on asylum seekers who, when I last checked, were not one of the parties running for office.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott appears to think it sufficient to attack the government’s broadband plan on the basis of not trusting Labor to get it right, rather than any attack on the specifics. Much of the Liberal opposition attack on Labor is on the theme of alleged bungles in office, especially around spending their stimulus package. There were serious errors, but there is a big difference between a considered multi-year plan and emergency stimulus spending to stave off a major recession.

On the other side, Labor harps on Tony Abbott’s history of supporting the Howard government’s unpopular “Work Choices” labour relations package. While there is good reason to suspect that Abbott would bring those measures back if he could, it’s not an unreasonable line from him that he would not do so without going to another election.

On the issue of asylum seekers, both sides of politics have gone to the gutter, labelling asylum seekers as a “border protection” problem. Excuse me. These miserable people are not an invading army. In fact many are heading here because we invaded their country. Fully a third of refugees on the UN’s books are from two countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. We invaded Afghanistan for the reasonably justified cause of stopping further atrocities like 9/11. But we didn’t finish the job. We left Afghanistan with an unpopular, incompetent government that could only survive with foreign military support, and launched a war on Iraq, a country that has never been shown to have any kind of link to Al Qaeda or 9/11. We bungled that one too, resulting in a civil war and ongoing violence. These two conflicts alone have resulted in about 5-million refugees.

In any case, whatever the source, asylum seekers – anyone who asks for recognition as a refugee, and who is at risk if they return home – are entitled to seek refuge in Australia. We have signed international conventions that oblige us to take them. Here’s a surprising fact: the vast majority of boat arrivals (up to 97%, depending when you count) have their refugee status approved and end up staying in Australia. But they are a tiny fraction of total asylum seekers. Far more arrive by plane, with legitimate passports and visas. But most of those who arrive “legally” end up having their applications for asylum denied. Let’s summarise this:

• boat people – tiny fraction of all asylum seekers, almost all legitimate: demonised
• plane arrivals – most asylum seekers, very few legitimate: not a political issue

Add to that around 50,000 real illegal immigrants – backpackers and the like who overstay visas – and you should realise that the whole attack on boat people is a con.

When Tony Abbott and Julie Gillard talk about stopping the boats, and Tony Abbott talks about sending back people without proper passports, they are talking drivel. Luckily for them, the people most affected are a tiny constituency who can’t swing an election.

So going back to the examples, we have once each of an attack from either side that lacks substance, and an attack by both sides on an innocent third party (not in the sense of a political “party”).

By this stage in an election, with so much heavy-weight advertising by the major parties with so much investment put into focus groups and polling, the Greens poll numbers start to sag. Not this time. Instead, the Greens numbers are holding up remarkably well. The latest (at time of writing) Roy Morgan poll on senate voting intentions shows the Greens vote holding up well enough to double their senate representation from 5 to 10 senators. Yet the Greens have had little or no TV advertising, certainly none I’ve seen.

Could it be that the major parties have reduced TV advertising to an echo chamber of negativity, that has voters so turned off that they don’t pay attention any more?

Meanwhile on the ABC’s Gruen Nation on Wednesday night 11 August 2010, one of the ad agencies asked to pitch for alternative messages came up with this:



That’s certainly a positive message, even if the ABC won’t allow the agency to sell it to the Greens. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. This way, anyone who likes it can embed it in their own web page, because it’s not a political ad, it’s just an example of the TV advertiser’s craft.

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Further reading
There are many sources of information on asylum seekers and refugees, including the UNHCR. For a quick summary, try GetUp’s fact sheet – but I urge you to research the issue yourself.

District 9

District 9 has been picking up pretty good reviews on the whole, but another whole layer has been missed by many reviewers who don’t understand the South African setting. I lived in South Africa until 2002, and have been a long-time follower of the local SF culture. I’ve been a member of the national SF club, SFSA, since the 1970s, and the fact that there is this sort of creative talent in South Africa is not so much a surprise as the fact that it’s resulted in a major movie with a big worldwide launch – without turning it into an American-centric story, where the kid saves the day (actually, there is a minor element of the kid saves the day, but it’s not as unbelievable as in the average movie where a human kid does this).



The movie starts with a mystery: it has no hint as to why the aliens arrived. All we know is that they have lost their ability to control most of their vastly superior technology (not quite all: a few of their weapons work but only in contact with alien DNA, and their space craft is able to remain in a fixed position for decades). There appears to be some linkage between their genetic make up and their ability to control their technology, but much of this is left a mystery.

By a combination of hand cam shots meant to represent an official record of events, news-like footage, surveillance camera-style footage and the occasional realistic scene, it’s hard not to become involved and have a real sense of an actual story unfolding, even though the earlier events are in the past.

Imagine humans in a like situation. A million humans in a colony ship arrive at a distant planet, and our technology breaks down. Aliens who are obviously less advanced than us “rescue” us from our disabled ship and treat us like dirt. How would we cope? How many of us would have the advanced scientific knowledge to fix our broken space craft? Think Star Trek episodes and beaming down to the nearest planet to find some broken part or find a missing chemical. Totally unlikely. What we saw in District 9 is a much more likely scenario for a space ship breaking down far from home. Possibly this is why (though the last Star Trek movie was passably good, give or take the odd plot hole you could drive the Enterprise through) my favourite SF movies tend to be spoofs like Mars Attacks! and Galaxy Quest.

The real genius of this movie is in its use of role reversals. The aliens have arrived in a disabled space craft under squalid conditions (Australians, think refugees in leaky boats). They are treated with utmost condescension, and things that are obviously not for their own good are done to “improve” conditions for them. Suddenly you are put in a position of seeing this all from their point of view. You need a good understanding of South Africa to get all the references but for a foreign audience it adds to the “alienness” feeling of the movie. To add to the subtle feeling that you are looking at things backwards, one of the aliens is called “Christopher Johnson” (typical of the way colonial overlords renamed the natives when they couldn’t pronounce the native-language name), a name less “alien” to a non-South African audience than Van der Merwe.

Let’s examine some of those South African references. First, the very title harks back to the dark years of apartheid. District 6 in Cape Town (in a different part of South Africa) was a ghetto for Coloured (mixed-race) South Africans, which, despite poverty, had a strong sense of community. The government decided to clear out the residents because having Coloured people too near the city centre was inconvenient. Clearing out District 6 was a big running sore in apartheid history; forced removals were bitterly opposed, and the cleared land was left largely undeveloped until the fall of apartheid, when rights of former residents to return were recognized. Forced removals, in general, were a key feature of the apartheid system. One study of the effects was called the Surplus People Project; a movie depicting the effects was titled Last Grave at Dimbaza.

Second, the attitude towards the aliens is consistent with current attitudes in South Africa to “illegal aliens” of the human kind. There have been riots over the presence of such foreigners from poorer parts of Africa, and the attitudes expressed in the movie are absolutely typical, and a sad rejection of the apartheid past, when the rest of Africa rallied to support of the anti-apartheid cause, and accepted South African refugees with open arms. The aliens are accused of all kinds of things like causing crime, when the only evidence we see of criminality is from Nigerian gangs and the MNU company that is desperately trying to make money out of the aliens by any means, not matter how unscrupulous. MNU is a bit of a composite, not reflective of a real company. Americans may relate it to private contractors in Iraq. South Africa does indeed have a large armaments company, government-owned Denel (a relic of the apartheid era) but it does not do the sort of private security work depicted in the movie – there are other South Africa companies that do that sort of thing – nor is it as big in the world market as the fictitious MNU.

Third, and this is where the subtleties really accumulate, the attitude of protagonist Wikus van der Merwe to the aliens is exactly the way apartheid officials treated Black South Africans in the darkest apartheid years. Telling one of the aliens not to use so many clicks is a direct reference to South African languages, several of which include click sounds (the San languages are almost entirely composed of clicks, and Xhosa and Zulu have a few click sounds). That Van der Merwe, who obviously gets on well with his Black colleagues, can get away with this treatment of the aliens with no sense of irony or objection from the Black members of the team shows how little the South Africans represented in the story learnt from their apartheid experience.

More sensitive viewers may dislike the violence (especially in the second half, which turns into frenetic action scenes) but it is integral to the story and not gratuitous. The dialogue also includes some of the more serious Zulu cursing I’ve heard in decades but that would go over the heads of most foreign audiences.

No doubt the computer game heritage of the movie gives it some of its mass market appeal, but this is a real classic, as much a game-changer (in the other sense) as the Matrix movies, and a whole lot more intelligent. That there are almost no American (or even UK English) accents in the dialogue, some African language dialogue without subtitling and that the protagonist has a name almost unpronounceable to non-South Africa English speakers are brave moves but add to the movie’s appeal as something different from the usual Hollywood dross.

A little help for the foreigners: “Wikus” is pronounced something like Vee-cuss. “Van der Merwe” is pronounced something like Fun-deh-meh-vuh.

Sequel? Very likely. With the box office this one is generating, the unexplained details and the potential for follow-up developments left open at the end, a sequel is almost 100% on. I hope it’s as good as the first. At last, after a long drought, an SF movie that’s better than a parody. It’s been a long wait.