by TIVI Weekly

1. Bishop Hepworth, some people think it inappropriate for religions to be involved in politics such as standing up against dictatorial and repressive regimes. What do you think ?

Religion has an absolute obligation to stand up to any repressive regime. Religion sets the rules by which people live and it sets the reason why people are here, and if religion believes that people are meant to be free and to live in communities that are just and fair and that they are able to worship God and love each other without the State interfering, then religion must always oppose governments that stop religion operating and stop people being free.

2. You certainly have a very busy schedule. So what are your motives in reserving your time to travel to Sydney and address the Forum on Human Rights and Freedom of the Press in Vietnam on 7/12/1998 ?

This struggle for human rights in Vietnam and for freedom, political and religious freedom, will not be achieved in any one country. It will be only achieved if people from many countries and their opinion makers are able to be mobilized, and my activities now in traveling considerably for this purpose is to try and become a good part of a global network that brings pressure to bear on the government of Vietnam and also gives hope to the Vietnamese people abroad that they can be developed into a single global force to provide change in Vietnam.

3. Why do people need freedom of the press? It was the Western notion of freedom of the press that lead to the communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 with, as a result, the death of millions of Vietnamese people in concentration camps or at sea. What is the real meaning of freedom of the press ?

Freedom of the press is just one part of a person's freedom. Freedom of the press, when it is properly understood, means that people are free to know what governments are doing and free to express their views. With any freedom, there comes an obligation. People must use the freedom properly. We may be free to own guns but we are not free to kill others without a very just reason. If we have freedom of the press we have an obligation to use it to avoid the sort of things that happened in the opposition to the Vietnam War in the West. That was a misuse of press freedom by and large in which people were not told the truth. They were told very selected facts and that led to the downfall of democratic Vietnam. So I support freedom of the press just as part of the whole fabric of democracy but I also understand that it can never be unfetted power for big business that owns large media enterprises to distort the truth in anyway they want to. That is not what we are talking about here.

4. The press in Western countries is owned by such powerful people as Murdoch in the US or Packer in Australia. Some media choose to sully individuals' private lives or attempt to overthrow governments by abusing their rights to free expression. Is this true freedom ?

That's obviously not true freedom, it is a misuse of power. People forget that freedom of the press is one thing and the power of the press is another. This power can be used to provide freedom - and that can be very difficult - or it can be used to control whole societies and indeed to bring down governments and individuals. That's a misuse of power, and just as we can condemn the government of Vietnam for its misuse of power whilst hoping that we'll have a new government that will use power properly, so with the press. We can condemn misuse of power whilst hoping that the press with other parts of society will learn to use power wisely and well.

5. Freedom of the press is called "the fourth power", independent from the executive, judiciary and legislative powers, but some journalists' personal power is even greater than the other three even though they have not been elected. What do you think about this?

The important thing to remember is that human beings are not created perfect. Human beings are imperfect and they are quite disposed to do wrong, indeed at times to do evil. The way we design governments is to be perfectly honest about human beings and we design in such a way that power is balanced, freedom is balanced, and among all the balances no individual can become too powerful enough to corrupt the whole of society. We are against any form of dictatorship whether it's a dictatorship in government, or whether it's the sort of Chinese dictatorship of the bureaucracy where the public servants exercise absolute power, or a dictatorship of a party where a single party controls everything, or a dictatorship of business where one or two big businesses can control a Third World country and keep its people in poverty, or the control of the media where one or two people become too powerful. The reason we have four areas of power in society is to try and balance them out, so no one area gets more powerful than any other, and that's an acknowledgment that power is basically evil. But it's going always to be with us, and so we have to learn ways of controlling it.

6. Communist regimes exert tight control of the press and use it as their lackeys (for example, Vietnam has 600 newspapers, all controlled by the Communist Party). In contrast, the press is owned by private citizens in free countries. However it exerts tremendous influence and power. Do you see any difference between the two models in relation to the concentration of power in the hand of a minority?

What we've got in Australia as well as in France, Britain and other countries, is the power of the press being shared by government-owned media and private media. If you have that, you have balanced once again control and the government media, you hope, will tell the truth in a certain way, private media will tell it in a certain way and citizens have access to both and they can make up their own minds about what they are being told. There will be never any media outlet in the world which tells the whole truth perfectly all the time. So if you allow people to have access to many different media, both international and national, government-owned and private owned, then each individual has some hope of discovering the truth for themselves.

It's unfair to expect a single media outlet to constantly satisfy everybody. Let's remember what we are talking about is freedom of the press, it's not only the press's freedom to publish what they feel they should but individuals' freedom to gain access to the media. The citizens must have access and in Vietnam, that means people being able to have short wave radios and listen to any station they want to, people being able to get in foreign journals, newspapers and magazines and people being able to watch CNN on their satellite televisions. Only in that way will people be able to make a reasonable decision about whether what the government is telling them is probably the truth.

7. Which model should Vietnam have with regard to freedom of the press? The communist "democracy" one or the western democracy one ?

We must find a proper one that takes respect for Vietnamese political traditions and cultural traditions, and I suspect the best one would be one that balances government-owned media with private owned media, at every area of media, television, radio, access to Internet and access to print media, and will also be international. In other words I believe that only by providing a large amount of media that people become truly free. I don't believe for instance that the United States media, which has almost no government-owned media and only large privately owned media, provides people with very good choice. The United States only saves itself by allowing access to many different international and government media from other countries. But I think that Britain, France, Australia have a better balance by balancing out the government-owned media with private media. And that's probably not a bad way for Vietnam to go. I suspect that much of the cultural, music and poetic heritage of Vietnam as well as its tradition of political dialogue will only be provided by government being prepared to support it. It's not particularly commercial, so Vietnam will need some government involvement, in much the same role as the ABC has in Australia where unpopular and uncommercial things are supported by the government, and at the same time you allow a secular private media to thrive.

8. Bishop Hepworth, does Australia really have freedom of the press? I mean, if you have a lot of money, you may be able to influence public opinion in your favor.

Well undoubtedly that's true, but Australians take very little notice of what they read and what they hear. We also have thriving small scale media, there are lots and lots of small, cheap radio stations, public radio stations, multicultural radio stations. We also have lots and lots of little newspapers and journals, even right down to schools sending out newsletters and things. All of these are ways in which people are influenced. It's the freedom that counts and Australia has a vast media beyond the large multinational and powerful media and I suspect it's actually more influential than the large multinationals are.

9. While a defamed person can always sue the media and win financial compensation, but can money restore their honour?

That won't necessarily rescue their honour. When you sue the newspaper, most people don't find out you've won and that's a problem. Australia of course does have a Press Council and it can force the newspapers to publish apologies and often does, or make corrections. But at the end of the day, getting large amounts of money from the media because they have been stupid or done something that hurts you, is hurting them and it makes them more careful next time. So it's all part of the free process. If you (in Vietnam) have government controlled media that says what it likes about the individual whether they are hurt or not, at least our system (in Australia) forces the media to be careful, otherwise they'd become bankrupt.

10. Do you think that laws should be passed to restrict media monopoly in order to avoid manipulation of the press ?

I think it is very difficult. As soon as you make laws to stop business operating effectively then you're probably getting the government involved in endless payouts of money. I don't like media monopoly, I don't think we've got media monopoly. We've certainly got the mainstream newspapers owned by just 3 companies but we also have a government sector which is important and then we have this flourishing small scale sector that I've talked about. So I suspect that's all right. Government probably should prevent one person owning all the media and Australia does have rules to stop the newspapers owning television stations and so on. That's valuable, but at the end of the day, if the government really allows as many radio stations, television stations and newspapers to operate as want to, then commercial realities will ensure there are just as many media outlets as there are shops at the moment.

11. Everybody knows there is no freedom of the press in Vietnam. The only thing the press is allowed to do is to polish the Communist Party's image. What is the first thing you would call upon the Vietnamese government to do?

The first I'd call upon the Vietnamese government is to honorably resign because that's the only change that would have any effect whatsoever. The fact is a communist government or a communist-leaning government and an oppressive government, can do all the window dressing it likes and it will make no difference. The same people are still in power. Until we have a change of political system in Vietnam in which real opposition is possible, in which there is a real chance of the opposition becoming the government and in which people feel perfectly free to vote for anything that is within a good, proper Constitution, then we won't even begin to talk about free media. Free media is one of the things that comes with political freedom. You cannot have a free media if you don't have political and religious freedom.

12. We the Vietnamese press overseas and many other organizations in the world have, time and time again, called upon the Hanoi government to change. Do you think such calls will have any impact ?

If they weren't there, the government will simply be entrenched and smug. The fact is the government is operating in a climate of global condemnation. I'm not saying that any individual call will ever have any effect, but if the calls were not there then the government would go on almost for ever. So it is part of the pressure for change, it won't in itself lead to change, that's going to come through lots of different types of pressure, economic, international politics, international media, private activities as well as the struggle of the people in Vietnam who simply don't cooperate with the government and cannot begin to. So all of those things together make a difference. But if there wasn't the global media pressure constantly hounding the government of Vietnam then there would be no beginning.

13. Has the Australian government ever made pressure on the Vietnamese government to respect freedom of the press, or is Australia only interested in doing trade with this barbarian government ?

The Australian government tries to balance its trade interests with its human rights interests and tries to keep them apart. It is true that the Australian government has brought pressure privately to bear on the Vietnamese government over human rights. It's also true that the Australian government trades with Vietnam regardless of the Vietnamese human rights record. Many people including myself would say that you cannot separate those two things and that Vietnam would respond much more quickly if it were being hurt more. The Australian government would argue that it would hurt the people of Vietnam more if we didn't trade with it. I'm not persuaded of that. I think that, as with South Africa, there is sometimes a place for an international trading embargo designed to crush an utterly oppressive government, and I think the Vietnamese government has demonstrated over and over that it is precisely that sort of government that we ought to refuse to deal with under any circumstances, even if in the short term the people in Vietnam become even more uncomfortable than they are now.

14. As a priest and Chairman of the Australia Vietnam Human Rights Committee, have you discussed human rights and freedom of the press in Vietnam with the Australian government?

Yes I have discussed it with a number of government ministers and I'll be again discussing it in Canberra early in December on my way to Brussels. I find the government very responsive in its attitude to condemning the human rights record of the Vietnam government, somewhat less sure of what it can do about it. I am looking forward to fact that the meeting in Brussels may well be one of those decisive moments when those who are working around the world to change the system in Vietnam will form a common mind about the activity a government such as Australia might well do. I am conscious for instance that the opposition to apartheid in South Africa only came about after a number of careful international meetings in which international opinion gradually swung behind a particular form of activity which was trade sanctions and a lack of sporting contacts, which in the end did achieve the result after quite some years of struggle.

- Many thanks Bishop John Hepworth.