Stewart Fist, The Australian IT, Tuesday 15 February
Reproduced with permission of the author.

At one time we a were governed at the corporate and the political level by managerial direction. Until the Vietnam War, most Australians unquestioningly accepted the right of politicians and executives to tell the public and their underlings what to do without explanation.

Today, no-one trusts the bastards. We know they aren't trustworthy, in politics, bureaucracies, statutory organisations or the larger corporations. Disastrous mistakes are constantly made; deals are often shonky; lying has become an art-form; and we have good reason to question the skills and motives of management.

To counter this lack of trust, the old paternalistic and directive tactics have given way to a more subtle form of incrementalism, especially when potentially unpopular actions are being taken.

Incrementalism is a well-understood technique of governance that is effective when executives and politicians need to force through change against public opposition. Incrementalism has two sub-divisions: the thin-end-of-the-wedge approach when something nasty is being introduced, and salami-slicing when good things are being taken away.

The whole point of incrementalism is to be unobtrusive so, when a story hits the front pages of the newspaper, the tactic has partly failed. Then there is a need to go public, characterise objectors as zealots, purists, or fanatics, and say everyone is overreacting.

This last claim has the uncommon virtue of truth.

Opponents of incremental change have no choice but to over- react. Increments always increase when the first change has been adopted. The only successful tactic is to cut off incrementalism at the earliest possible moment.

As the attorney for Phil Zimmerman (author of PGP) said about the US government resisting Internet encryption: are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our liberties. There always will be. But our rights are not so much stolen from us as simply lost by us. The price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation."

Bureaucrats and politicians know most people have a high threshold of annoyance, and require attacks on their personal well-being before they respond and participate in counter measures. So the whistle- blower can always be isolated and labelled difficult, or someone with a bee in their bonnet. You might think I am talking in circles here about the deal between the ABC and Telstra over Internet content, and you'd be incrementally right. To me, the media (and particularly the ABC) is the infrastructure of Australian democracy, and I want it to be as pure as possible.

This thin-end-of-the-wedge approach to commercialising the ABC is only one aspect of what has become common practice in government and political circles, and in many public and mutual organisations (notably AMP and NRMA).

In the last week alone I could point to stories about CARE workers in Somalia and Serbia who were asked to help with military monitoring. It compromised all international humanitarian missions - but only a little!

SBS also revealed that for almost a year AustAid told the Australian government Indoriesian militia were incrementally murdering Timor's opposition.

Indonesia correctly judged that daily massacres of 10 to 20 people would be below Australia's threshold for actiori. We have a remarkable tolerance for small massacres among on-European people.

Then there's the Australian Broadcasting Authority's cash-for- comment report on John Laws and Alan Jones -an example of a system finally reaching the thick end of the wedge, where it is impossible to pretend it hasn't been noticed.

When the wedge has been driven in far enough to be widely noticed and bought to public attention, there are a number of standard and predictable defences.

Globalisation and world's best- practice are always good lines to trot out. We are told Australia must follow the pattem of other countries or be left behind. Communications Minister Richard Alston used this line to claim the ABC is only following the BBC's lead in flogging its online material.

But the UK govemment modified the BBC's Act specifically to include online services in its strict editorial guidelines. That hasn't happened with the ABC, which is why the Telstra deal slid past the guard-dogs despite seven months of secret negotiations.

The second ploy of snake-oil incrementalists is to claim that the integrity of the institution will be protected by China walls, firewalls or quarantining. They maintain it is possible to partition one section of an organisation from the others, and prevent any payola pollution from permeating the barrier of editorial independence.

This is complete corporate clap- trap, and everyone in business knows that, but it gets trotted out regularly by politicians.

Editorial independence at all levels in the ABC is constantly subject to funding threats, and news and current affairs have regularly fought battles to block back-doordeals. Government apparatchiks tend to have a budget-centric mentality, which becomes especially dominant when they are reaching the limit of their terms, but are not yet ready to retire.

A third ploy is to claim that rules of editorial and accountancy separation no longer apply. In the Telstra-ABC case, board member Michael Kroger suggested full privatisation of the ABC's online division, and both the managing director and the minister imply Internet deals are not as relevant as flogging the credibility of tele- vision and radio programming.

In fact, Internet compromises are potentlly much worse.

As an advertising medium, the Internet is introducing serious problems of privacy because it is interactive. Privacy is not a prob- lem with conventional radio and television broadcasting because the channels are one way.

Everyone can see that the commercial value of the Internet lies with its unique ability to identify individuals, and later target them with advertising tailor-made to suit their requirements and interests. For this to happen, individuals must have a personal profile, which can only be constructed by computers using feedback tech niques of the DoubleClick variety. So even if the Telstra site's ABC news pages don't carry ads, the main advantages to Telstra for its $66 million gift is the ability to identify ABC users and profile them. Telstra can also exploit the ABC's credibility and deploy advertising around the index pages, which are essential repeated-access links in any online deployment.  Another ploy of incrementalists is to cast a few red herrings to hide the stink of their own fishing. The ABC-Telstra deal comes littered with more dead herrings than the rivers of Romania.

Brian Johns told the Australian Mobile Communications Congress he was confident the ABC's board would shun advertising of any sort, and that raising "the spectre of advertising is a false and misleading issue in this debate". Rubbish.

The ABC cannot continue to be only a broadcaster, he said. "It will be a benchmark deal if it comes about." Apparently the arrangement with Telstra places "real value on ABC content" (ie money value) and gives the organisation a leg up into broadband services. "The ABC had to focus on revenue raising services," Johns says.

We heard that story a few years back with ABC manoeuvres in pay television.

These assurances come from a man who committed SBS to only a little bit of corporate sponsorship (never advertising). He was com- mercialising SBS at the time David (Horatio) Hill was watching over the ABC series called Holiday (travel with contra deals), Great Ideas (funded by Telecom and mining companies) and Everybody (a life- style program funded by snack-food and fast-food companies).

When Johns replaced Hill at the ABC, he presided over the outsourcing of A River Somewhere (with obvious label promotion of fishing reels and grog) and Sports Australia, for which sports market- ing companies were invited to kick in $10,000 to $15,000 per episode.

In the past week, the Play School staff and presenters have been fired, presumably to be replaced by someone willing to make choo- choos out of Coke or Pepsi cans. Or better still, they might incremen- tally drop toy-making using cotton- reels and cardboard boxes in favour of playing with the real thing: plastic Bananas in Pyjamas from ABC Enterprises, or perhaps GI-Joes with machine-guns from Toys-R-Us.