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	Samaritans in the line of fire by World Humanitarian Day   Every year World Humanitarian Day recognizes those who face danger and adversity to help others. August 19th is the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, which killed 22 people.   We honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, and we pay tribute to those who continue to help people around the world, regardless of who they are and where they are.   Every day we see and hear images and stories of pain and suffering in our own neighborhoods and in countries far away. But we also find acts of kindness, great and small. World Humanitarian Day is a global celebration of people helping people.   Humanitarian work is one of the world"s most dangerous professions. Kidnappings, shootings and death threats are all part of the job description in places such as Sudan, Syria, Somalia and others blighted by conflict. Those who work in this rocky terrain are increasingly exposed to risk while maintaining a lifeline to the victims of wars and disasters.   It is self-evidently unacceptable that they are subject to harassment, abduction or even plain murder while serving humanity.   Attacks on humanitarian posts have tripled in the last decade. Since 2011, 109 humanitarian workers have been killed, 143 others were wounded and 132 have been kidnapped, according to the United Nations. Crimes against unarmed civilians are never justified. When these crimes are committed against people who dedicate their lives to saving others, the injustice is ever more apparent.   But it"s important to remember that the overwhelming majority of these victims are not international aid workers from western countries, but those serving in their own country, working closest to the local population.   Humanitarian aid is not the preserve of the west but a global imperative. The many national aid workers who have made the ultimate sacrifice bear witness to this.   Over the last 12 months, Syria has become a killing ground. Six humanitarian aid workers have been killed since the beginning of this year, all of them Syrian staff. In two cases, it is alleged that the victims, both from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, were deliberately targeted.   As with the shooting at ambulances, the misuse of hospitals and the shelling of civilians, these are direct violations of international humanitarian law.   The safety and security of aid workers are directly linked to safe access to vulnerable populations and the sustainable delivery of assistance. The violence committed against aid workers also affects those they are helping.   Thousands of vulnerable people can be left without essential support if aid is suspended or closed due to insecurity.   Humanitarian principles and international legal frameworks offer a degree of formal protection but only if and when they are observed and respected.   Sadly, the conditions in which humanitarian workers operate are growing more dangerous every year.   Humanitarians draw the world closer together by reminding us that we are one family, sharing the same dreams for a peaceful planet, where all people can live in safety and with dignity.   This is also a day to examine our lives and consider what more we can do to help – to reach out to people enduring conflict, disaster and hardship. Visit the related web page
	Stupidity is on the rise in our age of enlightenment by Barry Jones Australia   Public debate is dumbed down amid sloganeering, manic polling, managerial talk and pernicious spin.   Since former prime minister Gough Whitlam"s time, Australia has undergone a serious decline in the quality of debate on public policy - and the same phenomenon has occurred in the US, Canada and Europe. British journalist Robert Fisk has called this "the infantilisation of debate".   Currently, we are by far the best educated cohort in our history - on paper, anyway - but it is not reflected in the quality of our political discourse. We appear to be lacking in courage, judgment, capacity to analyse or even simple curiosity, except about immediate personal needs.   Debates on such issues as climate change, population, taxation, refugees, mandatory detention and offshore processing, plain packaging of cigarettes, limitations on problem gambling and access to water have been deformed by both sides resorting to cherry-picking of evidence, denigration of opponents, mere sloganeering, leading to infantilisation of democracy, treating citizens as if they were unable to grasp major issues.   There is a strong anti-intellectual flavour in public life, sometimes described as philistine or - more commonly - bogan, which leads to a reluctance to engage in complex or sophisticated argument and analysis of evidence, most easily demonstrated in the anti-science push in debate about vaccination, fluoridation and global warming.   Media - old and new - is partly to blame. Revolutionary changes in IT may be even more important, where we can communicate very rapidly, for example on Twitter, in ways that are shallow and non-reflective. Advocacy and analysis has largely dropped out of politics and been replaced by marketing and sloganeering. Politicians share the blame.   The politics (that is, serious debate on ideological issues) has virtually dropped out of politics and has been replaced by a managerial approach. The use of focus groups and obsessive reliance on polling and the very short news cycle means that the idea of sustained, serious, courageous analysis on a complex issue - the treatment of asylum seekers, for example - has become almost inconceivable.   For decades, politics has been reported as a subset of the entertainment industry, in which it is assumed that audiences look for instant responses and suffer from short-term memory loss. Politics is treated as a sporting contest, with its violence, personality clashes, tribalism and quick outcomes. The besetting fault of much media reporting is trivialisation, exaggerated stereotyping, playing off personalities, and a general "dumbing down". This encourages the view that there is no point in raising serious issues months or years before an election. This has the effect of reinforcing the status quo, irrespective of which party is in power and at whatever level, state or federal.   The 2010 federal election was by common consent the most dismal in living memory, without a single new or courageous idea being proposed on either side.   In 2010 the assertion that Australia"s public debt was getting out of control was largely unchallenged - although figures confirmed we had the lowest percentage in the OECD. Similarly, nobody pointed out that we run 46th in the number of refugees arriving unheralded on our shores. The largest factor is community withdrawal and disillusion. The tiny numbers of people in major parties confirms this.   By any objective measure, Australia has been more successful than any other OECD nation in coping with the aftershocks of the global financial crisis. Recent strong praise by the IMF ranking Australia as first in the world was described by the opposition, perversely, as a "warning shot across the bows" and a conclusion that we must do better. However, Newspoll and the Age/Neilsen poll indicate that of all sectors of government, economic management is regarded as the area where the opposition is strongest and the Gillard government weakest. It flies in the face of common sense but must be recognised, however irrational, as a political reality.   The High Court"s recent decision that Commonwealth funding for school chaplains was unconstitutional was immediately bypassed by a cross-party love-in, hurriedly passing new legislation to nullify the court"s judgment.   This is a classic example of how a fundamental principle - the separation of church and state - is abandoned for fear of offending powerful interest groups and losing votes.   In 1860 in New York, Abraham Lincoln began his campaign for the presidency with a very complex speech about slavery. All four New York newspapers published the full text, which was widely read and discussed. In 1860, the technology was primitive but the ideas were profound and sophisticated. In 2012, the technology is sophisticated but the ideas uttered in the presidential contest so far are, in the most part, embarrassing in their banality, ignorance and naivety, much of it fuelled by rage or ignorance.   We live in the age of the information revolution, but it is also the age of the cult of management. Education (like health, sport, the environment, law, even politics) is often treated as a subset of management, with appeals to naked self-interest and protecting the bottom line.   At its most brutal, the argument was put that there were no health, education, transport, environment or media problems, only management problems: get the management right and all the other problems would disappear. Coupled with the managerial dogma was the reluctance of senior officials to give what used to be called "frank and fearless" advice - and replacing it with what is now called "a whole of government" approach. This is not telling ministers what they want to hear - it is actually far worse, a pernicious form of spin doctoring.   Paradoxically, the age of the information revolution, which should have been an instrument of personal liberation and an explosion of creativity, has been characterised by domination of public policy by managerialism, replacement of "the public good" by "private benefit", the decline of sustained critical debate on issues leading to gross oversimplification, the relentless "dumbing down" of mass media, linked with the cult of celebrity, substance abuse and retreat into the realm of the personal, and the rise of fundamentalism and an assault on reason. The knowledge revolution ought to have been a countervailing force: in practice it has been the vector of change.   In Britain in the Thatcher era, and in Australia after 1983, there was a growing conviction that relying on specialist knowledge and experience might create serious distortions in policy-making, and that generic managers, usually accountants, or economists, would provide a more detached view. As a result, expertise was fragmented, otherwise, health specialists would push health issues, educators education, scientists science, and so on. Sport has become very big business. Political parties are managed by factions, essentially a form of privatisation.   Departments contract out important elements of their core business to consultants. A consultant has been defined as somebody to whom you lend your watch, then ask him to tell you the time. Consultants, eager for repeat business, provide government with exactly the answers that they want to receive. Lobbyists, many of them former politicians or bureaucrats, are part of the decision-making inner circle.   Generic managers promoted the use of "management-speak", a coded alternative to natural language, only understood by insiders, exactly as George Orwell had predicted.   The managerial revolution involves a covert attack on democratic processes because many important decisions are made without public debate, community knowledge or parliamentary scrutiny.   * Barry Jones is a writer, and fellow of four of Australia"s learned academies. Below is a link to The Global Mail an independent Australian media site. Visit the related web page
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