OPEN SEASON ON SPLITTERS

As an advocate/activist with more than 20 years experience negotiating bureaucracies and tackling Ministers on a number of politically unpopular issues, I know only too well just how tricky the business of representation and advocacy can be.

Plan as one might, there will always be unexpected hurdles to negotiate, often without warning and more often than not, specifically contrived to be unexpected.

No one knows this better, nor learns the hard lessons faster, than those relative few souls brave, foolish or naive enough to accept the post of public spokesperson for their cause. 

Such people are destined to be judged and loathed, not only by the opponents of their cause, but also by an ever shifting percentage of the very stakeholders whose concerns the spokesperson strives, in good faith, to represent.

The more controversial the issue and diverse the stakeholder group, the more fraught the spokespersons’ job becomes, as he quickly learns he is obligated to be all things to all armchair critics, all of the time.

If the issue is apple production, for instance, there will always be those who are dissatisfied by the spokesperson’s failure to draw an orange analogy, and still others who are miffed because he failed to equate it all to the price of eggs. 

The business of firearms advocacy is no different. 

Whether one is the spokesperson for a representative organisation, or simply someone endeavouring to counter the ridiculous sensationalist claims of the media, to displease shooters on any single point, no matter how minor, is to risk a backlash of public vilification. 

This is a fact that Nick Harvey, Technical Editor for Sporting Shooter Magazine, and Robert Brown of the Shooters, Fishers & Farmers Party, both know only too well I'm sure.

Each man has recently come under fire for perceived failures in advocacy and representation, and both has been disrespectfully and childishly lambasted publically by those either arrogant or naive enough to believe they could have done better. 

What were their crimes?  

In the case of Nick Harvey, it was daring to pen an opinion piece in which he challenges the stereotypes of shooters promulgated by the media, which also included a personal opinion on one aspect of the National Firearms Agreement some considered to be traitorous. 

It was enough to see him viciously attacked by the shooting fraternity’s equivalent of Sharia police, who waved away the man’s inestimably valuable 60 year contribution to the shooting and hunting sectors with, “But really, what has he done recently?”

After which, Harvey was dubbed with a puerile pejorative based on a 1940s comic cartoon figure, designed to humiliate, belittle and punish the wrong thinker. 

All of it because in an article that addressed a number of issues very adequately, Harvey’s position on one aspect of the post 1996 NFA did not comply with prescribed and authorised doctrine.

A similar jihad was recently launched against SFF Party MP Robert Brown for what some considered his lacklustre performance on the SBS Insight program on gun control 20 years after Port Arthur.

Brown’s critics were particularly scathing, but this said far more about their total lack of understanding of the way such programs assemble an audience, along with the basic realities of pre-recorded programming, than anything else. 

The vast majority of the more than two hours of filming that goes into the final 50 minute Insight program (including ads) was always destined for the cutting-room floor. 

Ironically, those ordinarily keen to accuse the media of only putting to air that which serves to portray shooters in the poorest possible light, on this occasion did a back-flip worthy of Nadia Comaneci.

They ‘reasoned’ that if the bits of the program that went to air portrayed Brown’s performance in a less than glowing light, he must have performed even more poorly in the edited bits.

I mean, really?

As we all know, the media is committed to covering up our more inglorious moments caught on camera, I don’t think!

As one who has occupied an ‘experts’ seat in the audience on Insight and similar programs over the years, I can appreciate Brown’s no-win situation better than most. In fact many who had been invited to join the studio audience for this event declined because they too foresaw the outcome. 

But had no-one appeared to represent shooters the outcome for us in public relations terms would have been terminal. The sector recognised this and so two representatives sallied forth as whipping boys for the media and an audience bourgeoning, not with objective experts and analysts, but with victims invited to be loud, angry, emotional victims. 

One need only look at any of the dozens of reports that followed in the print media to see whose pictures and quotes feature to the exclusion of all reason and objectivity. 

Short of apologising to the victims of Port Arthur on behalf of all gun owners and undertaking to work in future towards greater gun control, nothing Brown could have said or done would have prevented his cunningly edited portrayal as an angry, insensitive, disingenuous, bearded ogre.  

In short, whoever turned up with the intention of contending that shooters are not all monsters and guns are OK in the proper hands, was destined to be pilloried by the Greens and the majority Howard-worshiping anti-gun audience, strategically stacked by the Insight program for maximum pathos and emotive controversy. 

I commend those who took the bit between the teeth and strove, on our behalf, to make the best of a set-up. What’s more, I challenge their critics to have a crack at being the public face of firearms advocacy and show us all how it should be done.

Ironically, those who have been most critical of the likes of Brown and Harvey, also push the line that every shooter/hunter should make the effort to call-in to radio programs taking shooters and hunters to task, in order to defend their fellow enthusiasts on air.

In principle it’s a theory...not a good one perhaps, but it’s a theory nonetheless.  However, I have this to ask of those encouraging our comrades to take the bit of public advocacy between their teeth. 

Why on earth would anyone bother, if they risk being taken to task, ridiculed and inducted into a cartoon character shit-list of fame if their performance doesn’t meet the standard laid down by the Brotherhood of Don Farq-Al? 

Advocacy and representation is a complex and imperfect ‘science’. It is only made more complex and imperfect by harsh public criticism and the ostracisation of people doing their best to gain ground against insurmountable odds on a heavily mined playing field.

Dividing the sector by attacking people who, while agreeing with us on 9 of 10 key objectives, have reservations about the 10th, is unproductive in the extreme and part of a naive and outdated approach to advocacy and representation that has hardly served us well to date.

While there is great wisdom in the phrase, “United we stand, divided we fall” there is no fabled lost second verse that runs, “And vilify all the splitters”, despite what Monty Python may have counselled on the topic. 

True unity comes only with open constructive dialog and compromise. Not necessarily the compromise of principle, but rather the kind of compromise that permits people to work together towards mutual objectives, and agree to disagree and work separately towards others.

Naming and shaming people publically for perceived failings in public performance, is a very dangerous, arrogant business. 

It is dangerous because it plays into the hands of the Antis who seek to discredit our advocates and demonstrate a dysfunctional sector full of angry people with guns.

It is arrogant because the critic presumes the right not only to speak for ‘us’, but also to marginalise someone who may be a very great asset to us and the sector over-all.

Of course everyone has the right to disagree with public statements thought ill-considered and even damaging. This does not, however, necessitate the pursuit and punishment of a transgressor, and the application of juvenile pejoratives that serve only to demonstrate to potential new talent that perhaps they’re better-off keeping their heads down.  

There is far more to be gained by constructively debating the issues of contention with a view to convincing the apostate of the merits of your doctrine, or if need be, accepting that Australian shooters and hunters were not all tipped out of the same mould.

Of course if we're really striving for a one size fits all style of advocacy, managed by angry people who'll brook no moderation, error or compromise...

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now...

©gmallard2016 all rights reserved

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