Against Australian Democracy – In Defence of a Right to Vote

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard

On 17 August, just three weeks out from the 2013 Federal Election, the Guardian Australia website reported that ‘17% of Australians aged 18-24 are not on the (electoral) roll, compared with 7.6% in the wider population.’  This amounts to more than a million eligible Australians who are not on the roll.

And I’m one of them.

So why is a middle-aged, middle class Australian, with a near life-long interest in the practice and theory of politics and without a (criminal) record, not on the roll?

Because I believe in the right to vote; and having a right to vote means having the right not to vote.

I’m not talking here about intentionally informal voting (with or without gratuitous depictions or commentary on the merits of the candidates), or about attending the polling booth, having your name marked off the roll, and using the voting papers for a bit of ad hoc origami. While those may be meritorious political tactics, my strategic focus is on not attending the booth at all.

There are lots of ways lawfully not to vote when residing in Australia, other than just being too young: be in prison for a sentence of three years or more; don’t be an Australian citizen; be of unsound mind or intellectually or physically incapable; oh…or have a religious objection.

Yes, a genuine religious objection will get you off; but only a religious one – a non-religious philosophical objection won’t do. So, for example, holding a sincere and well-considered belief in the right to vote, as opposed to the duty to do so, will not cut it.

Trust me; I know.

I debated it in the NSW Local Courts over the trifling matter of a local government election; arguing that, as local government is not constitutionally recognised, we shouldn’t be required to vote in their elections. I went down with a fine reduced from $110. (The magistrate, it seemed, was partly moved by my arguments – maybe she thought it was all pretty trivial, too).

Anyway I have a record of some sort, I guess, to accompany the $50 fine.

My well-considered response (I had a while as the next election was some way off) was pretty similar to the other million or so unenrolled people. I took the easiest way out in my quest for civil disengagement – if you can’t beat ‘em, don’t enlist in the battle.

I haven’t been on the roll now for nearly two years. It’s easy.

Whenever you move house, and you notify the state licensing/motor registry office and other government bodies of your new address, they tell you that they advise the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) of the changes, and ask if you would like to formally change your address on the electoral roll.

Guess what you do next? Nothing.

You don’t inform the AEC and you don’t respond to their cute letters inviting you to update your records. The AEC knows where you now live, but under current law can’t do anything about it. Being good bureaucrats, they hate that.

The AEC hates it because they don’t believe in, or enforce, the right to vote. They try to enforce the duty to vote. They’ve been seeking for some years a change to the law to require you to update your AEC records or to allow them to do it without your concurrence. So far, without success.

Of course the only problem with my strategy is that you can deny yourself the right to vote on those occasions when you otherwise might like to do so. Naturally you could re-enrol before an election of interest, but then the buggers have got you enrolled at your correct address until you move again.

I tell you, there are some advantages in being itinerant.

Of course, if voting wasn’t ‘compulsory’, we wouldn’t have to worry about this nonsense. But until this country grows up, treats us all like adults, and acknowledges that the right to do X entails the right not to do X, get with the million.

When you next move house, don’t tell the AEC.

NAÏVE DUALISM AS A FORM OF MADNESS IN HEALTH POLICY AND SERVICES

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

Rene Descartes, Le Discours de la Methode, 1637

Those readers with even a bare smattering of Western philosophy will know of the dominant theory in the philosophy of mind from the mid-17^th to at least the mid-19^th century – interactional, or Cartesian, dualism.

‘Cartesian’ because, famously, the idea was brought to its intellectual apogee and propagated by the French rationalist philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes, whose main works, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method, first appeared in the short period between 1637 and 1644.

Dualism in the philosophy of mind is the hypothesis that mental phenomena are, in some or all respects, non-physical, or that the mind and body are not identical. The idea is that the body works like a machine; that is, it has only material or physical properties. The mind, on the other hand, is nonmaterial and is not subject to the laws of nature.

The key idea in interactional dualism is that, the above notwithstanding, mental states such as beliefs and desires causally interact with physical states; a view that appeals to our common sense or folk-psychological view of ourselves and our conscious experiences.

Descartes, in a speculative leap that today looks foolhardy at best, argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland; which, many readers will know, actually produces the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of sleep patterns and seasonal functioning.

Astute and interested readers, even if untrained in analytic philosophy, will I trust also have detected a wider and more fundamental problem with the interactional hypothesis. Indeed it is so well known and commonly taught to first year philosophy students that it has a name – the Link Problem in interactional dualism.

The Link Problem emerges directly from the Cartesian view of the body and the mind – the former is physical, extended, divisible and unconscious; the latter is spiritual, unextended, indivisible and conscious. The problem is this: how could two such fundamentally different sorts of things – one subject to physical laws, the other not – causally act on each other?

Moreover, for Descartes, while minds have no general physical properties, they are located in space and time. But how does this spooky non-physical entity, the mind, get tugged around by and causally interact with the rest of us, the body, to which it is notionally linked?

In the mid-20^th century the Oxford philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, dubbed Cartesian dualism the dogma of the ghost in the machine, wherein ‘the body and the mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body the mind may continue to exist and function’. Ryle’s purpose was to highlight the absurdity of dualist systems like Descartes', in which the means of interaction are without explanation.

As Ryle argued, it is a doctrine false not in detail but in principle. Mind and body are not separate things to be linked. To believe them to be so is not just a factual error; it entails what philosophers call a category mistake. Mental activity is not linkable with physical states – it is (something like) a function of (some) physical states; thus, if there is no physical stuff (eg a brain), then there is no mental activity.

In this light, to maintain a commitment to interactional dualism would be like asserting that cars can be linked to motoring. It may be cute as a metaphor, but as a scientific grounding for the study of transport, it manages to be both pointless and misleading.

Whatever one’s religious or metaphysical views might otherwise be, naïve dualism is not a candidate for the deeper understanding of our mental and physical states. And so, a fortiori, it should not feature in the grounding of health services for Homo sapiens in the 21^st century, any more than do voodoo or occult medical practices languishing from a pre-scientific culture. But alas it does.

*          *          *

Mental Disorders and Physical Health: Linking body and mind

TheMHS Summer Forum, UTS Sydney, 21-22 February 2013

While it is not likely, as far as I know, that the imminent fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), will list as evidence of a disorder the belief in interactional dualism, reliance upon it in dividing the mental health world from the physical health world is in my view a form of social or institutional madness. Why so?

It is instructive to consider a scenario put to the above forum by a psychiatrist with an interest in physical health, Dr Jackie Curtis: we can call the scenario, the emergency response to the torso and the head. Imagine two teams of emergency clinicians on the pavement outside your local ED, one team dealing with the torso of a patient, the other a few metres away, examining the head.

It’s a silly scenario, of course – and it’s meant to be. It’s meant to throw into relief the folly of dealing with mental health problems in isolation from physical health problems. And as far as it goes it highlights the point fairly effectively. The problem is, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The division of mental health from physical health is starkly more absurd than that.

How come? Well, for two reasons: the detached head is still the locus of ophthalmology, ENT, head and neck, maxillofacial and neurological surgery, et alia. And mental health, if it is to be represented as separate even from neurology, needs to have a third team in the scenario; one attending, if Cartesian dualism were right, an entirely mysterious entity ‘hovering’ who knows where.

Ryle’s attack was against not just philosophers – he targeted the views then prevalent among a wide range of theorists, including psychologists and religious teachers. And, as whacky as some even relatively recent (ie 20^th century) psychiatric theories have been, naïve dualism still conveniently dwells in customary thinking not only in mental health but also in the wider health field.

For reasons that Dr Curtis and fellow speakers in the Summer Forum on Mental Disorders and Physical Health otherwise amply demonstrated, this matters for consumers of health services. If we are to treat people as whole individuals, whose mental and physical life is one, we need to integrate health services. But resistance to this change remains ingrained on all sides of the various clinical fences, and the naïve belief in dualism helps entrench it.

Part of the reason for this is of course the prominent role that religious institutions had and to an extent still have in the provision of health services. And many practitioners in health care, their scientific education notwithstanding, retain a degree of personal if not professional religious affiliation. Some, I dare say, privately even believe in such things as the immortality of the soul.

Mostly in their working lives they keep these quaint ideas in check; separate from their roles and opinions as health professionals. But occasionally these notions leak out.

These philosophical poltergeists are especially prone to emerge from their closets in debates about the roles and relationships of various parts of those complex social entities we call health services; and can do so even inadvertently, as would appear in the title of the forum, Linking body and mind.

Why do I say these views are mad, rather than just wrong? Because, as I trust DSM-5 would have it, the beliefs are not in accord with reality and have a propensity to cause harm to self or others. But what’s the harm? It is the deleterious impact on the structure, relationships and effectiveness of health services, and therefore on the optimisation of health outcomes for whole human beings.

Within the Australian health system, there are some notable and forward-thinking exceptions, such as the Brain and Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney. But even its thinking is a fair way, I suggest, from seeping through the core of health services policy and practice. Despite 20 years or more of mainstreaming in mental health, almost all health services, and a great deal of health policy, still turn on dualist notions of the incommensurability of mental and physical health.

I implied in the title of this piece that only naïve dualism is a form of madness. But there I was being excessively generous. Without glossing over the last 60 years of the philosophy of mind too lightly, it can be rightly said that the only competing views with any prospect of success have been some take or other on physico-functionalist accounts.

And the advances in the neurosciences generally over the same period have simply served to strengthen the case for non-dualist accounts of the mind*. Thus, any form of dualism that permeates health policy and practice in the 21^st century is in reality mad.

We’ve largely moved on from the beliefs about medical and health sciences of the 17^th, or even the 18^th or 19^th, century. We need to do the same with the philosophical views of human nature that underpin health and medical policy and practice. So let’s get motoring.

Dr Enrico Brik

March 2013

* The only notable remnant of dualism in analytic philosophy in the late 20^th century, New Epiphenomenalism (itself a more sophisticated re-articulation of 19^th century Epiphenomenalism), is rightly seen by most in analytic philosophy as dualism’s last gasp.

Fine Words Better No People: Aboriginal Health and Constitutional Change

Australian society is a beautiful youth with a disfiguring scar. It is a scar that shames us most because it was inflicted by our forebears. Yet our gaze will not be averted: repeated surgery has failed to fade it; no amount of make-up or finery conceals it. We are on show with it to ourselves and the world.

That scar is the problem of Aboriginal Health.

It is not the only wound on the Australian body politic, but it is surely the one that most disturbs and disgraces us.

If ever there was a case study for the social determinants of health, Australia’s failure over Aboriginal Health is it: a young, rich, successful, first world nation-state, with an enviable health, medical and scientific system. And what do have? By far the worst indigenous health of all the OECD nations built on colonising occupation.

In reality, the problem of Aboriginal Health is strictly neither an Aboriginal problem nor a Health problem. It is a malaise much deeper and wider than that.

It’s as much a calamity of obstinate unemployment, woeful literacy and education, lamentable housing, destructive drug and other addictions, dire child abuse and neglect, and incorrigible violence, crime and incarceration rates – in short, a compound of underclass social indicators. It’s just that atrocious health will do as the key exemplar and proxy for all Aboriginal ill-being.

As a function of colonisation it is at bottom a social problem. And as a social problem it has been tackled principally through economic and technical means – by pouring resources into it. Nevertheless the Aboriginal Health glass remains neither half full nor half empty; after decades of filling and refilling, of overflowing the sides and soaking coasters, it contains only dregs.

Clearly it is not the right type of receptacle to satisfy the thirst for wellbeing.

This is not to deride the hard won advances in some areas – many good people, black, white and otherwise, have worked hard for decades with small but encouraging improvements in their area of Aboriginal Health, often only to see them falter and regress as attention is diverted to other initiatives.

But as an overall program Aboriginal Health has been an almost unmitigated failure, indeed quite literally a tragic one. It is a tragedy not simply because of its origins but because of the tolerance of it by non-indigenous Australians and our refusal to root out the deeper causes.

*             *             *

Those causes ultimately are ones of attitude – their resolution thus can occur only by social, political and legal means; by us changing the way we look at ourselves and each other.

We need a gestalt shift; we need to see the course of history not as a scar but as a birthmark. This can happen only if we recast the origins of the Australian nation as a birth that blends the qualities of two peoples – indigenous and non-indigenous.

Perhaps to that end, Australia now has before it a report by the Great and Good to the Prime Minister* recommending a referendum to amend the Constitution so that, inter alia, it recognises Aboriginal people as the first Australians.

Why then do many people long concerned about this issue feel palpably underwhelmed?

By way of explanation we need a little recent history.

After the 1967 referendum, the most important events for indigenous Australians were the Mabo and Wik decisions of the High Court in the 1990s. They went some distance in specific ways regarding land law and the status of Aboriginal legal systems and by dispensing with the legal fiction of terra nullius, and even then excited such conservative reaction as to sour those sweet little victories.

Paul Keating’s Redfern speech in 1992 and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generation in 2008 were good and worthy gestures too, though limited in effect and historically ephemeral: they had no legal and institutional significance.

Aboriginal wellbeing demands a bold and enduring change: something like the treaty that has been sought for the 40 years the Aboriginal tent embassy has been pitched on the grounds of old Parliament House.

Yet the lawyers tell us we may not in strictness have a treaty – these are made between separate nations. It is only at the creation of a colony or with the resolution of war that peoples may make treaties (as was the case in Canada and New Zealand).

We can however have a compact – a special sort of agreement with institutional gravity, in standing somewhere between a treaty and a contract – that may form part of the Constitution.

But alas, in the proposal now before us, we don’t have the option even of a compact. We have just proposed amendments to constitutional provisions with three new sections.

Meritorious though these proposals may mostly be, they are not enough. Fine words about first Australians are still just words.

*             *             *

Aboriginal people are not just the first Australians, they are the quintessential Australians. It is an ineluctable historical truth that without Aboriginal people preceding us we would not be the Australians we are; we would be some other colonising mob.

There thus needs to be a practical recognition of the standing of Aboriginal Australians; one by which we say not only, ‘you were here first’, but ‘you are special’.

Indeed Aboriginal people are special: when they talk of being of (not just in) the land, or being one with the land, they are not being wholly metaphoric. The term ‘indigenous’ emerged in English in the 1640s, having come originally from the Latin, indigena, meaning "sprung from the land”.

As a nation of blow-ins and boat people, we struggle with this idea. But we shouldn’t. After all, ultimately we all come from stock indigenous to somewhere or other.

It is ironic that the Australian ’no-special-cases’ view of fairness as a crude and basic equality – born of tough times in a hot, hard land – impedes a subtle understanding of equity that treats people in the light of their peculiar circumstances and history.

But special cases demand special treatment: average Aboriginal life expectancy is almost two decades shorter than that of non-indigenous Australians, more than double the gap experienced by indigenous peoples in comparable countries like New Zealand, Canada and the USA.

No more money, no more effort, but much better health outcomes elsewhere. What could be the variables driving this substantial difference in life expectancy?

Constitutional status and recognition, matched by dedicated political representation. What is needed is a compact with Aboriginal Australia as part of the Constitution bolstered with material political symbols of that compact.

We should adopt the approach of New Zealand with indigenous seats in Parliament – in Australia this could be readily accommodated by two senate seats (as were added for the ACT and the Northern Territory) for whom indigenous people could vote as an alternative to their state or territory senators.

 

Would it work? Who knows?

Will it help improve Aboriginal Health? It might, if the life expectancy and health outcome experiences in New Zealand, Canada and even the USA are any guide.

We’ve tried everything else imaginable and none of it has worked. Maybe this will.

What’s the harm in trying? It beats fine words.

*Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution: Report of the Expert Panel