Stone the crows

THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM IS MUCH THE SAME

STONE the crows! It’s going to be a noisy election. According to social media spruikers, twitter has taken over, making editors obsolete as reporters file direct to readers who respond with their own instant analysis.

Just as the twitterati was commenting on President Obama’s State of the Union address, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were still arguing as the assessments of their performance occurred.

“Twitter is becoming a vehicle for participatory democracy in Australia thanks to its ability to create unmediated interaction between political journalists, engaged citizens and politicians,” University of Canberra academic Julie Posetti wrote in March.[1]

Veteran cultural studies commentator Stuart Cunningham claims, “the irresistible array of new communication activity engendered by new digital technologies has reached a stage where mainstream media and political leadership can no longer deny or avoid it, or operate effectively without engaging with it.” [2]

In reply to which the crows just caw. These arguments have less to do with the actual impact of social media on politics than the aspirations of academics and self-appointed opinion leaders to get into the act.

Social media urgers have the argument half right. The new technology means news and gossip gets into circulation faster than any spin-doctor can control.

In a classic case of studying the story everybody else has forgotten, online or anywhere else, Posetti (who describes herself as a “senior political journalist in the Canberra Press Gallery” before becoming an academic) is working on an analysis of the role of social media in covering the coup against Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull. Oh come on, you remember him, the bloke between Brendan Nelson and Tony Abbott. [3]

It’s a shame she is not writing about the removal of Kevin Rudd. While her line about participatory democracy is unconvincing the twitterfest on the night of 23 June was  “unmediated interaction” in spades.

Everybody who watched Sky News cover the breaking story (ABC TV wasn’t interested until David Stratton got really boring on The Movie Show) knows the role Twitter played in the most extraordinary political play ever seen in Australia.

Journalists David Spears, Kieran Gilbert and Ashleigh Gillon were centre stage, receiving tweets from Labor contacts as the drama unfolded.

Although the Crows have no clue how the coup occurred, they suspect the Sky trio reading tweets from Labor Party players pushed it along, with MPs seeing the way the cyber wind was blowing and switched sides as the evening progressed.

The Sky team was right to report what they heard but the impact of their accomplishment is unsettling – the information they aired helped Julia Gillard do in hours to Kevin Rudd what took Paul Keating years to do Bob Hawke.

The coup is an excellent example of Mark Roeder’s argument about the way social media shapes politics:

The juggernaut aspect of the media is often used to good effect by politicians and their Machiavellian handlers. They know if they can create enough momentum for their cause, keep feeding it and stay “on message” it will soon become a self-perpetuating force that is difficult for their opponents to stop.[4]

Thanks to Twitter, and with apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the momentum is the message.

We saw the way instant messaging is the most mass of communications last year in Tehran. A grass-roots insurgency used Twitter to protest that the state had stolen the national elections. And while the government could control conventional media with the standard tricks of the censor’s trade, there was not much it could do to stop angry Iranians tweeting and texting. To keep the momentum up, the US State Department asked Twitter to delay a maintenance shut-down. [5]

But while social media works for self-organising insurgents it is even more useful for old fashioned political parties. The Obama presidential campaign used social media to get its message out and raise US$500 million. This was less grass-roots democracy in action than a stock standard campaign, using new media to reach old objectives. The Obama machine used the Internet to advertise, relying on paid Google space to promote rallies and recruit volunteers. “The big trick was organisation,” campaign manager David Plouffe writes.[6]

And as for social media empowering independent arguments and ending the power of politicians and well-resourced interest groups with resources to shape debates, the reverse is occurring, at least in the US.

Pew Center research says a third of online aficionados get their political information from sites that suit their point of view, up from 26 per cent in 2004:

Politically interested internet users have access to a wealth of political content online, along with new tools for finding, customising and filtering highly targeted political commentary. As a result they are delving more deeply into the “long tail” of online political content where they frequently seek out information that carries a distinct partisan slant and comes from sources beyond traditional news content.[7]

The challenge for the players is to learn to manage social media to channel momentum to advance their own objectives and expand the impact of their ideas. Which requires what politics has always relied on, organisation and intellectual ammunition.

And for as long as the established parties outgun the activists in terms of administration and policies that appeal to the mass electorate, the new technologies are just another box to tick on the media schedules.

Sydney University’s Peter Chen predicts online media will deliver more of the same sort of politics in this election:

…the pattern of new media politics is likely to be repeated in 2010, the major parties, with their overwhelming resources and disproportionate mainstream media coverage, will continue to dominate political journalism and the alternative blogosphere, irrespective of their declining “rusted on” support. [8]

And as for all the talk of innovation, tweeting today is just a scaled-up version of what word of mouth momentum achieved in pre-industrial cities. Victor Hugo explained the way “unmediated interaction” outsmarted the state in Les Miserables when he wrote about the way riot became rebellion:  “Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot. Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From the clouds.”[9]

Tweeting: new media same old politics.

stephen4@hotkey.net.au

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[1] Julie Posetti, “The #spill effect: Twitter Hashtag Upends Australian Political Journalism”, Media Shift @ www.pbs.org/mediashift

[2] Stuart Cunningham, “Political and Media Leadership in the Age of YouTube” in Paul t’Hart and John Uhr(?) Political Leadership in Perspective and Practice, (ANU E Press, 2009) 177-186, 180

[3] www.expertguide.com.au/JuliePosetti

[4] Mark Roeder, The Big Mo: Why Momentum Now Rules Our World (ABC Books, 2010) 79

[5] Evgeny Morozov, “Iran Election: A Twitter Revolution” The Washington Post, June 17, 2009

[6] David Plouffe, “The Internet and Presidential Politics”  (in) The Institute of Politics, John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Campaign for President: The Managers look at 2008 , Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) 95-109, 98

[7] Aaron Smith, The Internet’s Role in Campaign 2008 (Pew Research Center, 2009) 6,7

[8] Peter John Chen, “New media is still losing in the fight for votes”  Sydney Morning Herald, July 22

[9] Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, vol iv, book 10, chap 4

STONE the crows! The Prime Minister promises parsimony if she wins the election. Just like the last prime minister, as well as the one before him. But while her predecessors meant it, at least until the polls plummeted, we had better hope Ms Gillard sticks to her mantra of mean if she wins.

Because the days when treasurers had enormous numbers of our quids in their pockets and even finance ministers felt flush are coming to an end, however much money the new mining tax raises.

The reason is obvious to anybody who looks around them on the bus or in the shops – there are an awful lot of older Australians, around 13 per cent of us are 65 plus. And there are going to be many more, the number of people above retiring age will nearly double by mid century. And they have every intention of growing older in affluence [1].

Which they will expect the state to subsidise. Not that many people in politics will admit this. Peter Costello, who came up with the idea of the inter-generational report, used to warn us demographics was destiny but since then most ministers have tried to convince us superannuation will save us.

To which the crows say pull the other wing, it’s got bells on it.

Sure we have already socked away stupendous sums since the Hawke Government’s 1989 retirement income policy. Back then we had a $119 billion in the kitty. But, as of March, super and other forms of managed funds had grown to $1,368bn. This is an extraordinary achievement, making Australia the envy of fund managers short of a fee all over the world. And the country is better off with a trillion plus socked into funds instead of investors bidding up the price of investment flats and racehorses.[2]

But the feds are fooling themselves if they think that our super savings will save Canberra paying pensions.

There is also the Malthusian fact that trillions in savings will not pay for the health and housing of the exponentially increasing army of the aged.

What’s worse is the problem that no minister dares acknowledge, the elderly will use their numbers to vote themselves benefits, which they will want to collect on top of their own savings.

And their numbers already make them hard to argue with. Canberra loves to tinker with the superannuation rules. Ever since the Howard Government introduced the superannuation surcharge in 1996 ministers have mucked around with savings strategies. On the crows’ count, governments have made some 40 significant changes to super since 1996.[3] But most of them encouraged people to sink more into super, on ever-more generous terms.

That’s the good news for the pointy heads. The bad news is that irrespective of incentives, Australians assume super is the cream and social security is the cake, that even if they do their dough on dodgy investments the government will see them right.

As the recent Cooper Review on the super system pointed out, “the age pension both increases retirement incomes for those who experience adverse investment outcomes from their superannuation during the accumulation phase and due to the age pension taper rate, reduces the variability of retirement incomes.”[4]

There will also be an awful lot of people who will want the state to help them out with health and welfare spending.  The Productivity Commission warns the number of people 85 years and above, the group which needs the most health care and housing will grow by a factor of four by the middle of the century.[5] According to the recent Intergenerational Report, age pension payments alone will double to around 4 per cent of GDP over the next 40 years.[6]

Sure, could be worse. In western Europe, where the birth rate is low and fewer workers will pay for their parents’ pensions in the coming decades, the cost of welfare for the elderly will double to 15 per cent of GDP by mid century.[7]

But less bad than everywhere else is not good for Australia, especially as it seems it will be quite a while before most of us will be able to pay anywhere near our way in old age. Despite the stupendous size of the super sock people 40 plus have not set enough aside to support themselves in retirement.

According to the Investment and Financial Services Association, the retirement savings gap, (the difference between what return on investment will provide and 62 per cent of final salary, which is the benchmark for retirement income,) is $695 million, or $72,000 per person. And that includes the pension! Without it the shortfall is $1.5 trillion – more spondulicks than there are in the super system.[8]

Economists might assume that everybody will accept that the obvious answer is to reduce financial support for the elderly, to avoid younger workers paying ever-more tax for levels of service to the old.

This is why there are few economists in cabinet. The European experience shows what happens when governments try to cut entitlements. Until now, Greek women could retire at 52 and men at 57 on 14 months worth of pension payments a year set at a maximum of 14 per cent of final salary and indexed against wages growth[9].

If the country was not all but bankrupt the Greek government would have no hope of imposing its plan to increase the minimum pension age to 65, the average is now around 61[10]. In France the national pension fund is going broke but President Nicolas Sarkozy only dares proposing increasing the retirement age from 60 to 62 in response. This will only delay the evil day to 2020, but it was enough for the socialist opposition to promise to abolish the increase if they win the 2012 election. [11]

Even in the US, where there is not much welfare in the welfare state for anybody but the old, people over 65 have not suffered as much as everybody else in the present recession. [12]

So, if overseas is any indication, don’t expect the elderly to make do with less or work longer to pay their way. The average Australian retirement age in the last five years was just 60, a birthday when most people still had around a quarter of their life ahead of them. And by far the most common reason people retired was because they could – they had reached the qualifying age for their super or the aged pension.[13]

And the elderly bristle when anybody points out what their health and pensions cost. Sydney radio announcer Alan Jones explained it all when he got stuck into Treasurer Wayne Swan for banging on about the financial impact of our ageing population, with or without super:

Do you understand how the aged are starting to feel? I’m getting a stack of calls here and letters, and they are being made to feel by the Prime Minister’s constant reference to them that they are a problem, and we may be going to ask them to work until they drop, or at least make them feel as though they’re going to have to do more to pay their way when many of these people have paid all their health insurance for all of their lives.[14]

It’s not an especially sensible argument but as a statement of raw political power it is the shape of things to come, whoever wins the election – and the ten to follow.

stephen4@hotkey.net.au

ENDNOTES

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[1] The Treasury, Intergenerational Report, 2010 @http://www.treasury.gov.au/igr/igr2010/Overview/html/overview_01.htm recovered on July 17

[2] Parliamentary Library, “Chronology of superannuation and retirement income in Australia,” June 1 2010, @www.aph.gov.au/Library/BNeco/Chron_Superannuation, Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Managed Funds, March 2010” @www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.msf recovered on July 12

[3] Parl Lib, “Chronology Super” ibid

[4] Super System Review, Final Report, 195 @www.SuperSystemReview.gov.au recovered on July 13

[5] Productivity Commission, Trends in Aged Care Services (2008) @www.pc.gov.au/research/commissionresearch/aged-care-trends recovered on July 14

[6] Treasury, The 2010 Intergenerational report@www.treasury/gov/au/igr/igr2010 recovered on July 13

[7] “Scrimp and save” The Economist, June 25 2009

[8] Annette Sampson, “More work and no play likely for many under-funded baby boomers” Sydney Morning Herald, February 6 2010

[9] Tim Colebatch, “Greek lesson in the perils of overspending”, Sydney Morning Herald, May 7 2010

[10] Associated Press, May 18

[11] The Economist, July 1, June 16

[12] Pew Research Centre, “How the great recession has changed life in America” @ www.pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/759/ recovered on July 14

[13] Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Retirement and retirement attentions, July 2008 – June 2009” @www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@nsf/Latestproducts/6238

[14] Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, “Interview with Alan Jones, 2GB Radio, Sydney 2 February 2010” @www.treasurer.gov.au Recovered on July 16

Not in my back paddock

Stone the crows! It turns out wind energy isn’t the health risk we were warned about.  But the crows wonder whether this will stop people opposing wind farms on the general principle that while cutting green house gas emissions is important, it is best done nowhere near them.

People who don’t like wind farms near where they live claim they make them crook. Nina Pierpont (MD, PhD) confirmed their fears last year with a book explaining the medical impact of wind turbines.  Apparently the  infrasound, (generally inaudible to humans), shadow flicker and blade glint causes insomnia, nausea, headaches, depression and general malaise. [1] Talk about (and with apologies to Michel LeGrand) the whine mills of your mind.

But now the National Health and Medical Research Council has concluded the complaint is a crock; “there is currently no published scientific evidence to positively link wind turbines with adverse health effects”.[2]

Not, the experts say, that wind energy has no health impacts – the noise really irritates some people and the very presence of wind farms upsets others, undoubtedly including some of Dr Pierpont’s readers.

…if people are worried about their health they may become anxious, causing stress related illnesses. These are genuine health effects arising from their worry, which arises from the wind turbine, even though the turbine may not be objectively a risk to health. [3]

To the crows untutored understanding this sounds like a suggestion that people who do not like wind farms worry themselves sick about them.

There is also something odd about the way Wind Turbine Syndrome selectively strikes; money appears to inoculate against its effects. The NHMRC refers to findings that show, “people who benefit economically from wind turbines were less likely to report annoyance, despite exposure to similar sound levels as people who were not economically benefiting.”[4]

So the best chance of a cure for people who live in windy places is to have a rent-paying turbine built on their land, instead of copping all that infuriating flicker from the windmills across the way. Either that or be bought out by a wind farmer sympathetic to their suffering. As Dr Pierpont puts it,

… all turbine ordinances, I believe, should establish mechanisms to ensure that turbine developers will buy out any affected family at the full pre-turbine value of their home, so that people are not trapped between unlivable lives and destitution through home abandonment.[5]

If the NHMRC is right what Dr Pierpont sees as a health problem is really a loss of amenity – much the same as people who find themselves unexpectedly living by a new road or railway, above a mine or under a flight path.

Either that or people see wind farms as impositions that cost them cash. As a House of Representatives committee report on renewables put it, “some residents claim that their land values have fallen appreciably following the construction of wind farms on neighbouring properties”.  [6]

Opponents of wind farms in Victoria appear especially vulnerable to worrying about wind turbine and the damage they do to health and wealth. In the 2004 federal election windmills were an issue in the seat of Macmillan. And after the poll then federal environment minister Ian Campbell put a proposed wind farm on hold because he was worried that rare orange-bellied parrots might fly into the turbines, thereby becoming rarer.

After extensive study it appeared that this was not much of a risk, as the sensible birds had stopped visiting the vast majority of turbine sites. But in a commendable concern for the parrots, Senator Campbell played safe and blocked the project.[7]

It was a result that encouraged activists and stopping wind farms is now a Victorian state election issue, with the Libs promising to give local government the power to prevent turbines being built within two kilometres of houses.[8]

It’s not that all Liberals are unilaterally opposed to wind power. In the Senate, they voted to censure the government for not doing enough to back the Musselroe Bay wind farm planned for Cape Portland in north eastern Tasmania, where jobs are scarce and energy investors admired.[9] The crows can’t find anybody opposed to the project.

But in areas where the property values are high and people are used to getting their way the “not in my back paddock party” will always out-argue advocates of doing anything practical to reduce carbon emissions.

The Greens must be delighted that nobody much votes for them in the bush so that they do not have to choose between environment principles and keeping voters happy who oppose any commercial activity noisier than practicing pilates. And inner city Labor MPs must be relieved that they will never be forced to choose between green power and their electors’ property values.

Because the only way wind farms are ever going to accomplish anything is by getting bigger and louder and more industrial – with taller towers and larger rotors.[10] Which will not appeal to people who did not pay a fortune to have a power station, however green, over the fence.

As the Environmental Protection Council puts it,

Australians generally understand the need to reduce their carbon emissions, but also want to ensure that wind farms are developed in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. [11]

In itself this is a Seinfeld of a stoush, an argument about nothing much. As Scott Montgomery points out, wind farming “is one of the most environmentally benign of energy technologies”. But while wind farming is much more efficient than it was a generation back, it “can act as a vital supplement but not a principal source of global electricity”. [12]

The only chance of a wind farm replacing a base load coal fired power station, is for a state has an energy minister who likes apologising for blackouts whenever hot days push power demand up.

Wind Turbine Syndrome also demonstrates why politicians should not get too worried about demand for green energy. Sure, everybody wants it, but just not with the plants that produce it anywhere near them.

Of course there is a way to win popular support for wind farms – announce a nuclear power plant for the same site.

stephen4@hotkey.net.au

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[1] Nina Pierpont, Wind Turbine Syndrome: A report on a natural experiment (K-selected books, 2009)

[2] NHMRC, Wind Turbines and Health (July 2010)

[3] ibid

[4] ibid

[5] Pierpont, 121

[6] House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry and Resources, “Renewable Power; A case study into selected renewable energy sectors” (September, 2007) @ www.aph.gov.au/House/Committee/irs/renewables/report recovered July 8

[7] Ewin Hannan, “Breezy Dismissal”, The Australian, April 8, 2006

[8] “Councils to get control of wind farms under Libs” ABC news May 13 2010 @www.abc.net.au/news/stories/20101/05/13/2898404.htm recovered on July 7

[9] Senate Hansard February 23 2010, 880 @ www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/dailys/ds230210.pdf recovered on July 6

[10] House of Reps Standing Committee on Industry and Resources, op cit

[11] Environment Protection and Heritage Council, National wind farm development guidelines (2009) 7

[12] Scott L Montgomery, The Powers that Be: Global Energy for the 21^st Century and Beyond, (University of Chicago Press, 2010) 165, 167

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and all politicians come from planet purgatory.

Stone the crows! What a setback for old-fashioned feminism! With a woman in the top job, it’s hard to argue the odds are against women in politics.

But this did not stop some of the sisters having their say, generally about, well nothing much.  Anne Summers said just because a woman had made it to the top job did not mean equal opportunity has arrived, “just look at the upper echelons of business, the military and the federal public service, and you will see women are as rare in these areas as female prime ministers once were.”[1]

Bettina Arndt thundered about the prime minister’s domestic arrangements, worrying her unwed state sends the wrong signal to impressionable young women.[2] Myf Warhust responded with a piece that read like Catherine Deveny calmed by herbal tea. The piece was more about Myf than what having a woman in (or at least with its keys) in the Lodge meant.[3]

And demonstrating some of the sisters prefer political martyrs to mavens, Virginia Haussegger suggested Joan Kirner and Carmen Lawrence blazed the trail for Gillard.[4] It was an unlikely argument. While Kirner and Lawrence were incapable of raffling a chook in a pub; if you put the PM in a public bar with some chickens within the hour they would have a new industrial award and preselection for a safe seat.

It was left to Sue Dunlevy to actually address an important issue, whether the prime minister will be judged by her gender: “The trick Gillard must pull off is to be ruthless and caring if she wants to straddle the opposing stereotypes our society has of women and leaders,” she wrote.[5]

But even Ms Dunlevy was arguing out of the old paradigm, which assumes women in politics are forced to play roles, rather than be themselves. The canon for this crock is Dr Julia Baird’s book on women in politics, in which she explained why Carmen Lawrence, Natasha Stott Despoja and Cheryl Kernot were cruelly treated:

Men and women need to tackle and confront the political culture together. In politics, women remain a symbol of what the problems are, as would any marginalised, disenfranchised group. Some women will fail. Some will be mediocre performers, average policy performers, uninspiring legislators. Just like a lot of the men. But their exclusion still represents lack of justice, and they remain, despite all their protestations, hope-for change agents.[6]

Women as a marginalised group? Excluding the prime minister apparently. The point Dr Baird missed was the women she studied failed in politics, not because they are women, but because they were spectacular duds.

Perhaps people will judge the prime minister by their ideas of how women should behave but nobody who has ever observed her working will. Because gender is irrelevant to the way successful people in politics, and management for that matter, behave. Of course everybody has their own individual approaches and values, but there gender is no predictor of performance.

There are as many big, boofy birds as there are hard faced bitch-blokes.

ANU academic Judy Wajcman argues, the idea women behave differently to men in demanding jobs is based on “stereotypical femininity …  The problem is that the qualities, characteristics and culture ascribed to women originate from the historical subordination of women,” she writes. And goes on:

In practice senior women managers manage in much the same way as senior men within the same specific context. This is because styles of management are shaped more by organisational imperatives than by the sex or personal style of specific individuals.

It is hard to imagine a culture with more prescriptive rules that universally apply and to which all players conform than politics. Or one which better makes Wajcman’s point; “The individuals of either sex who succeed are those who are prepared to be hard, those who can ‘take it like a man’. Feminine and masculine qualities are not the exclusive preserve of either sex.” [7]

The most prominent example of a woman in politics who played the feminist card but failed because of her too obvious ambition and self-obsession alienated staff and unsettled electors is Hillary Clinton.

Two substantive biographies of the now secretary of state demonstrate how she was as aggressive and insensitive, as ruthless and rapacious, as any man in the way she played politics.

According to Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta jnr, Hillary Clinton has always had a tin ear for human relationships and a solipsistic sense of superiority, resulting “in a forced, artificial demeanour, a reinforced tendency toward arrogance and a belief that she is immune to the rules, and a sense that anyone who disagrees must be an enemy”[8]

Carl Bernstein lauds her ideals but questions her character, but details the way she assumes everybody in her orbit only exists to oblige her:

Great politicians have always been marked by the consistency of their core beliefs, their strength of character in advocacy, and the self-knowledge that informs bold leadership. Almost always, Hillary has stood for good things. Yet there is often a disconnect between her convictions and words, and her actions.[9]

Insert the name of the Australian politician this description reminds you of most and I will buy you a beer if it is not a bloke.[10]

Wajcman’s point about the pursuit of power transcending gender is made by the way Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democrat primaries. In books about the campaign Clinton comes across as the lesser politician, with less strategic sense, less ability to assemble a team, less capacity to stay on message and far less talent to inspire affection or respect. She worked her staff to exhaustion, never disguised her belief they were expendable and always acted as if everything was about her.

The brutal way Hillary Clinton sacked long time staffer and supposed friend Patti Solis Doyle, by email, during the primaries and then acted as if all could be forgiven when she realised the decision was a disaster, demonstrated a tin ear for human emotions – the sort of emotional illiteracy the sisters say is a male characteristic. [11]

In contrast, Obama understood and even respected other people’s emotions, which is why he could credibly sell his caring candidacy. Where Clinton commanded obedience, Obama generated loyalty, even love.

Obama’s character and working style was an important element in his victory. It was not a case of a man in touch with his feminine side beating a woman brutalised by politics into acting like a man. Rather, the better politician won and empathy with people is an important part of being better.

On planet purgatory, where politicians come from, gender difference does not matter, character does.

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[1] Anne Summers, “Historic moment, but barriers remain for half the population”, Sydney Morning Herald, June 25

[2] Bettina Arndt, “Shacking up is hard to do” Sydney Morning Herald, June 29

[3] Myf Warhurst, “Is Gillard’s relationship the biggest issue”, The Age, July 2

[4] Virginia Haussegger, “The polka dots dance on the political stage”, The Age, June 29

[5] Sue Dunlevy, “There’s no sympathy for sex and sitting MPs”, Daily Telegraph, June 30

[6] Julia Baird, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians (Scribe, 2004) 268

[7] Judy Wajcman, Managing like a man: Women and men in corporate management (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) 158-159, 160

[8] Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta jnr, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little Brown, 2007) 225

[9] Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Vintage, 2008), 554

[10] conditions apply

[11] John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (Harper, 2009) describes the Solis Doyle sacking in excruciating detail, 448

More argumentative economists please

Stone the crows! Where there was Rudd there’s a ranga! Given the crows think a coup is what chickens live in they have nothing to add to the political autopsies on the former prime minister and panegyrics for the present one.

But amongst all the politics last week there was an important policy story that did ruffle their feathers. That’s p-o-l-i-c-y, what politics is supposed to be about. And no, it’s not a synonym for plotting.

Last Monday Treasury Secretary Ken Henry addressed the pointiest of policy pointy-heads, tax academics. It was a good speech free of the public sector palaver that curses most addresses written by multiple hands in the bureaucracy.

And as Dr Henry’s immensely complex review is reduced to an argument over much tax miners in the money should pay, it put an important policy issue on the agenda – how economic hypothesises, the raw materials of politics, are developed by academics, refined by bureaucrats and shaped into saleable form, with the press offering instructive, and otherwise, criticism at every point of the process.

It is difficult to find consensus views among academics, perhaps especially in the social sciences in which even the most abstract theoretical proposition will betray a normative position. And yet, in the domain of tax policy debates, achieving academic consensus is the easy part. It is much tougher to convince a wary public; tougher still cynical media (sic).[1]

A sensible explanation of the status quo.  But it wasn’t what was in the speech, at least the text as released that attracted attention. It was what the ABC reported of Dr Henry extemporising on his ideas;

There are occasions on which economists might, at least for a period, put down their weapons and join a consensus on an idea

And he used the Rudd Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme as an example,

Even that idea which most academic economists would have accepted, I’m sure at least behind closed doors, was a sound policy idea. There were no end of academic economists who wanted to say it’s not bad but I’ve got a better one … And in the way in which political debate occurs, such a statement does enormous damage to the chances of sensible reform.

So what’s an economist to do? Stop arguing, apparently;

There are times when I think it would certainly serve the national interest if we economists, particularly academic economists, could just call a halt to the war for a while.[2]

What nonsense.  As Stephen Kirchner, one of the bickering fraternity, responded to Dr Henry, most of his peers “do not see their role as being cheerleaders for government policy because “economics encourages caution in policy making.” [3]

But more important, Henry ignored that arguing, often endlessly and sometimes pointlessly is what academics do. It’s called debate and it is how paradigms are shifted, applied ideas are tested and policies prepared for the tough task of explaining and selling them to the public.

And disciplines that don’t do it decay. Quick, name a university historian whose ideas have had an impact outside the academy on Australian history in the last 20 years (no Paul Kelly is not a professor, at least not yet).

Certainly it is up to the mandarins to work out how to apply ideas and to politicians to sell them but economists are the geologists of policy, identifying new intellectual oil to power economic growth.

And the search takes enormous amounts of energy and argument. It is all very well to assert academic economists should have got on the climate change cart but ideas that look intellectually elegant to the true believers don’t always survive close scrutiny. Even with the way the GST was watered down to placate the Democrats it was a better tax in the end (if only because it was adopted) than either Paul Keating or John Hewson’s earlier versions.

Not only is an old tax a good tax so is a new tax that is only adopted after years of scholarly scrutiny of its attributes and implications. Monash University tax professor

Rick Krever makes the point that ideas for tax take time to refine. The 1975 Asprey report, which still sets the standard for taxation reform, was not adopted for a decade, as its ideas percolated through policy discussions until there was an intellectual consensus strong enough to overcome the political opposition that inevitably accompanies proposals for new taxes.  Having a treasurer who knew how to use Asprey’s intellectual ammunition also assisted. As Krever has commented:

Asprey did almost everything from capital gains to fringe benefits. But it does take time to come through, for people to see its merits. And it needs a politician who loves a fight, like Keating,[4]

And as for the idea academic economists are always sticking their bibs into policy debate – oh that it was so. Perhaps it reflects who the crows like to listen to, but most economists who contribute to policy discussions and political disputes work for banks or are in the media.

If anything, a great many academics only appear interested in arguing with each other – in algebra  – while ignoring everybody who cannot help win them an ARC grant.  Daniel Klein makes the point that the major fields of academic economic research, model building and the search for statistical significance, are often incidental to the ideas and issues that policy makers face.[5]

And assuming individuals, or for that matter communities, behave in accord with mathematically expressed abstractions, ignores the way economics can identify and then begin to work out answers to the masses of daily decisions individuals make that shape the economy. As British economist Diane Coyle claims economics today, “is not the study of competitive markets but rather an understanding of society as the aggregation of millions of individual decisions.”[6]

Economists interested in applying their ideas to the actual economy, messy and irrational though it is, and who have the stamina for the long haul that change always involves make a fundamental contribution to society, by working which issues are most important and what approaches will work.

And Greg Smith, a member of the Henry Tax Review understand that reform always take time:

It is opposed by the lucky winners who are directly benefiting from the existing system. Like any change, it always comes with transitional adjustment and uncertainty costs. These three problems stop many politicians, political advisers and members of the media commentariat. … Reform always confronts an ambivalent policy process. It is resisted, slow and always late. But it will come, however surprising it will always seem for some[7]

But only if there are economists arguing out the ideas, even this annoys politicians and their pals who are in a hurry.

Stephen4@hotkey.net .au

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[1] Ken Henry, “Tax Reform: Opportunities and Challenges”, June 21 2010 @www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1839/PDF/Tax_Policy_Conference_Speech.pdf, recovered on June 26

[2] “Treasury chief lashes academic economists over ETS”, ABC Radio, PM June 21 2010 @www.abc.net.au//pm/content/2010/s2932954 recovered on June 26

[3] Stephen Kirchner, “The economic consensus we could do without” Centre for Independent Studies, June 25 2010, @ ideas@cis.org.au recovered on June 25

[4] “Measuring up the latest take on tax”, The Australian, May 19,2010

[5] Daniel B Klein, “What Do Academic Economists Contribute” Policy (winter) 2000, 30-32

[6] Diane Coyle, The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do (Princeton University Press, 2008)

[7] Greg Smith, “Tax reform may be unpopular but it is inevitable”, Australian Financial Review, June 18, 2010

The Mail on Privatising Power

STONE the crows! Since when did political players in NSW start imitating apparatchiks in Japan? Since they wanted to work out ways to stop the privatisation of under-performing publicly owned assets is when.

In NSW it is the electricity system, in Japan the Post Office (which is less interested in delivering letters than providing financial services). Different industries, equivalent issues, demonstrating what occurs when patronage and protecting public sector workers become a primary purpose in politics.

Both jurisdictions have under-performing economies because political leaders either don’t dare defy the power brokers or are short on the smarts needed to beat them.

Political commentator Simon Benson’s new book explains how individual ambitions and inter and intra factional fighting prevented Morris Iemma from selling the power system, just as the comrades had conspired to stop Bob Carr doing it a decade before. [1]

Morris Iemma didn’t have much choice to sell, or at least lease the generators, leaving the distribution networks in government hands, to appease the public sector. The Owen Report had explained that NSW was running out of power and its generators could not compete with interstate private providers in the national electricity market. [2]There was also the matter of a generation of under-investment in Sydney’s transport infrastructure that had to be made up.

But none of this mattered most to party players who feared what would happen to power workers if the private sector took over or to ambitious Labor Party players who were worried about what the unions would do to the Labor Party’s federal election chances    – including, according to Benson, then opposition leader Kevin Rudd.

And so Iemma was sacked by the party. It started a trend. Also sacked was the premier who replaced him and the chances of the premier who replaced that one staying in office after the general election next March are not good, if Saturday’s Penrith by-election is any indication.

It’s the same in Japan, where the prime minister who won the election in 2009 is already gone and his replacement is in a fight to reform the country’s equivalent of our electricity system – the Japanese Post Office, which does more than deliver letters, it provides banking, sells insurance and virtually keeps the government afloat by investing 80 per cent of depositors’ money in government bonds.[3]

And it also employs enormous numbers of government workers who like their public sector perks and pay; the postal union has 229,000 members and backs parties, which oppose privatisation. [4]

And the politicians know not to annoy it. When Junichiro Koizumi was prime minister he was so determined to reform the Post Office he took on the majority of supporters of the status quo in his own Liberal Democratic Party. Immensely popular with the electorate, he won a general election on the issue in 2005, only to see the LDP back away from his plan when he left office.

And despite promising to reform the Post Office the coalition government led by the Democratic Party of Japan, which won last year’s election, did not want to upset anybody important. Shizuke Kamei, the minister responsible for reducing the Post Office’s stranglehold on financial services, was keen to transfer up to 100,000 casual workers onto the Post Office’s permanent payroll.[5]

The Post Office is typical of the way Japan works, or more to the point, doesn’t. Powerful public servants, their allies in government services and in the protected private sector use state subsidies and constraints on competition to ensure insiders prosper at the expense of everybody else, especially consumers.

The result is an inefficient and expensive domestic economy.

According to the OECD, Japan’s labour productivity per hour worked is 30 per cent below the US level.[6] During the export expansion beginning in 2002 labour productivity in manufacturing rose by 7 per cent per annum compared to 2 per cent for services, the area that accounts for 70 per cent of employment.

There are also anti-competition policies that protect small and medium enterprises, as well as barriers against service imports and foreign investment. Farmers are protected to a point that the average produce price they receive is twice that on world markets.

The winners are workers and employers on the inside of the economy. The losers are people, generally young, caught in the casual economy, which rose from 20 per cent of the workforce in 1990 to 34 per cent in 2008.[7]

Even worse the insiders’ economy is based on unsustainable public sector spending, which is why ministers do not want to upset the Post Office with its vast sources of savings financing government debt, approaching 200 per cent of GDP.[8]

Gosh, powerful unions, a bureaucracy at the centre of a system that rewards insiders at the expense of everybody else and politicians who either benefit from the status quo or get rolled when they try to do anything about it.

Remind you of anywhere?

As the people of Japan suffer from a domestic economy based on assisting the well connected, so the citizens of NSW are hurting because Iemma was stopped from selling, or even leasing power stations. As Benson argues:

The issues facing NSW now, with its congestion crisis and the collapse of a coherent strategy to deal with it – largely because of lack of funding – are directly attributable to Iemma’s failure to proceed with his $15 billion privatisation.[9]

During the argument over electricity, union opponents of privatisation posted Sydney with signs warning “you would pay more” if it happened.

It didn’t but we will. The state government is now spending money fast to ensure the lights stay on. And all this because keeping a few thousand privileged power workers on the public payroll was the main objective of the labour movement and its friends in the parliamentary Labor Party that removed Mr Iemma.[10]

It’s a racing certainty that union officials are using the same sort of argument in Japan, warning voters of the disasters to come if the Post Office loses some of its enormous power.

And if the voters are not convinced, who cares? Union officials and bureaucrats can still push politicians around. The way the privileged use power to suit themselves is the same in every culture.

Stephen4@hotkey.net.au

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[1] Simon Benson, Betrayal: The Underbelly of Australian Labor (Pantera Press, 2010)

[2] Funnily enough the text of the Owens Report is now not easy to find on the Department of Premier and Cabinet website

[3] The Economist March 31, 2010

[4] Aurelia George Morgan, “Reversing reform: how special interests rule in Japan” East Asia Forum, April 12, 2010 @www.eastasiaforum.org recovered on 16 June

[5] Aurelia George Morgan, “Japan’s postal reform and the farmers” East Asia Forum, April 22, 2010 @www.eastasiaforum.org recovered on 16 June. Admittedly Mr Kamei did not get away with it, resigning last week in the face of DPJ determination to push on with reform. Rick Wallace, “Japan minister quits in protest” The Australian, 12 June, 2010

[6] Randall Jones, “Japan’s Economic Challenges” OECD Observer, 267 (May-June 2008)

[7] Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Economic Survey of Japan, (September) 2009

[8] Michiyo Nakamato, “PM warns Japan must rein in debts” Financial Times, June 11, 2010

[9] Benson op cit 281-282

[10] According to the NSW pricing regulator average prices will increase by a cumulative total of 20% for Integral Energy, 36% for Energy Australia, and 42% for Country Energy. “According to the AER, these higher prices are necessary to enable higher levels of investment in the state’s electricity distribution networks to improve network security and reliability of supply,” Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal , NSW, “Electricity Prices to Rise” March 18 2010, @ www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/files/Media, recovered on June 16

STONE the crows! Suddenly it’s the 1960s with centralised wage fixing and unions using the courts to stop competition.

Last week, Fair Work Australia jacked up the minimum wage for all awards and the National Tertiary Education Union announced it was going to law to stop the University of Newcastle doing more business with a private education provider.[1]

Both actions are awful for Australia. It is easy to understand why a union hates the idea of a university using a private partner who may not employ its members. And it is impossible to oppose people on the minimum wage collecting a few more quid – let’s see any of us manage on the new rate of $569.90 a week.

But since when did the courts get to administer the economy?

Since the electorate decided that we should start reconstructing the old arbitration system at the last election is when.

Of course many voters did not know this is what they were doing by voting against the Howard Government’s largely de-regulated industrial relations system. But it is what we have now got with Fair Work Australia, which is the old arbitration commission under another name.

The last Labor government ended the idea of an independent arbiter fixing wages and conditions. Before then our industrial culture, in place for close to a century, assumed labour and capital were inevitable enemies and that the state in the form of quasi courts had to protect the former from the latter by uniform wage judgements across industries that paid no heed to the specific

circumstances of every workplace.

It was an idea that did not work even when Australia sheltered behind high tariffs, making productivity improvements in individual enterprises all but impossible. And it broke down when globalisation ensured unproductive economies cannot maintain wages and conditions unrelated to what is happening in the rest of the world.

Paul Keating and a generation of long-gone union leaders understood what had happened and what they needed to do. According to Paul Kelly:

The 1990s recession gave life to two ideas formulated by Paul Keating and Bill Kelty that would touch the lives of most working Australians: enterprise bargaining and industry-based superannuation. These were the death knell of the old unionism and the old Labor Party. They dictated a reinterpretation of Laborism by harnessing enterprise culture and the share market to employee advancement.[2]

But Australians have a deep-seated sense of fairness and have always liked the idea that the state should protect the people on the bottom of the pile from those at the apex of the economy. Historian Babette Smith believes it dates from the First Fleet when Governor Arthur Phillip ordered equal rations for all in the starving Sydney settlement:

The fair go test cuts in right at the bottom; it’s a foundation issue. The thing about Australia is that values come from the core of ordinary people, our egalitarian society is enforced from below. [3]

And so the electorate is either happy, or at least not upset by the return of the old arbitration system. This does not mean the voters have adopted unionism and collective bargaining.

Despite the undoubted success of the ACTU’s campaign against de-regulating employment, union membership increased by one per cent to a fifth of the workforce in the year to last August. In the private sector, with less of a rights-culture than the public service, just 14 per cent of workers were union members.[4]

But most of us do not object to the assumption that a court (which is what FWA thinks it is) should regulate some wages and establish conditions across industries.

Certainly the award system is not what it once was. Where a third of workers had their pay set by the system in 1995 just 17 per cent were covered in 2008.[5] But those covered are the lowest skilled and least educated, the people with the poorest productivity and as such most exposed to unemployment when circumstances change.

Nor are all of them reliant on their wages to survive. Those with families qualify for welfare benefits (which generally decline as earned income increases), young people combining work with study live with families and benefit from household incomes much larger than their own.

The award system is good for the career paths of union officials and public servants who want to work in a centralised industrial relations system. But it is bad for workers and employers with specific circumstances, which do not suit notional national averages.

And the way productivity improved in the 1990s and employment expanded through the last decade demonstrates that deregulating industrial relations generates jobs.[6]

But competition is inherently unfair, at least for the losers and it inevitably offends some people. Like NTEU officials, who do not like the idea of private providers getting involved in higher education. [7]

Never mind that deregulation creates new business and helps universities expand what they can offer. And never mind that competition can deliver better products for student consumers.

Neil Shilbury, the head of international private education provider Kaplan wants to establish a for profit university in Adelaide with a business plan based on delivering a better education than the public system. [8]

The NTEU wants to stop Navitas with a ruling by Fair Work Australia and what is the betting that even if FWA throws the union case out this time sooner or later it will decide it has jurisdiction over the issue. And once that precedent is set others will follow.

There are not many unionists in Australia, but if the industrial relations industry has it’s way this will not stop it’s members re-regulating the economy.

Stephen4@hotkey.net.au

ENDNOTES

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[1] www.fwa.giv.au/sites.wagereview2010/decisions recovered on 13 June 2010, Paul Bibby, “Unions to Fight Private Firms Push into Unis”, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 2010

[2] Paul Kelly, The March of the Patriots, (MUP 2009) p 134

[3] “Fair Go Ethos Key to Stormy Debate”, The Australian, 1 May 2010

[4] “Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership” www.abs.gov.au, recovered on 13 June 2010

[5] David Rozenes, “An Overview of Compositional Change in the Australian Labour Market and Award Reliance”, Fair Work Australia, 2010 at www.fwa.gov.au recovered on 13 June 2010

[6] In the 1990s productivity grew at 1.8 per cent a year, more than twice the rate in the 1980s. Dean Parnham, “Productivity Growth: Are we Enjoying a Miracle?”, Productivity Commission, 2002 at www.pc.gov.au/research recovered on 13 June 2010 . Unemployment was 7 per cent in 2001, fell to around 4 per cent in 2006 and while most of the G20 economies are in trouble is now 5.2 per cent, Australian Bureau of Statistics, The Labour Market During Recent Economic Downturns” (March 2010) @ www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS recovered on 13 June 2010, ABS, “Labour Force, Australia May 2010” @www.census.abs.gov.au/ausstats recovered on 13 June 2010

[7] According to the NTEU’s national policy resolutions for 2009, “growing profits have been achieved by a ‘horizontal slicing’ of the full-fee paying undergraduate student market, using a largely casualised workforce employed on below industry standard arrangements (often staff already employed in the ‘partner’ university) to deliver essentially the same curriculum using all the resources of the partner university (for a ‘royalty ‘fee’) @www.nteu.org.au recovered on June 13

[8] “Commercial Campuses ready to Fill Gap”, The Australian May 5 2010

STONE the crows! Talk about shooting the marketer.

Policy thinkers fear politics is being taking over by the image experts, focused on popularity not policy – which upsets pointy heads who think the purpose of politics is to win the battle of ideas.

According to some-time political insider Stephen Mills, marketers are a menace in the way their successful campaigns debase the quality of policy debate:

Their work works: It provides vast new potential for the age old political arts of manipulation and image-making and destablisation. It can erode leadership; it operates less through broad national appeals than through fragmentation of the electorate into segments; it encourages selfishness rather than altruism; it is fearfully expensive.

Former NSW treasurer Michael Costa thinks much the same:

the new machine men think politics is as simple as borrowing techniques and strategies from the product marketing textbook. Politicians are now brands that can be subjected to brand management techniques

Plus ca change … . Costa’s concerns appeared last week in The Australian, Mills made his point in a 1986 book. [1]

They both have points. Since Mills wrote, the tools of marketing, segmenting the electorate, targeting messages and ensuring voters recall them in the polling booth have grown ever more sophisticated. And Costa is understandably indignant at the way he and Maurice Iemma were stopped from selling the NSW government’s power stations by apparatchiks who opposed the plan because they believed it would upset too many electors.

There is also a new argument that explains why political parties should keep everything unthreatening; the neurobiology of voters programs us to ignore any idea that does not relate to our emotions and basic needs. As US political scientist Drew Weston put it in a 2008 book urging Democrats to stop selling policies and start appealing to voters’ primeval wants and needs.

…you can slog it out for those few millimetres of cerebral turf that process facts, figures and policy statements. Or you can take your campaign to the broader neural electorate, collecting delegates throughout the brain and targeting different emotional states with messages designed to maximise their appeal. [2]

Given all this, it is easy to see why keep-it-simple-and-unscary strategies appeal to political operators and their advertising agencies.

Easy but wrong and to call down a plague on the marketers misses the point. The practice of politics would improve if the boys and girls in the backroom paid more attention to the principals of marketing and less to smooth operators with focus group summaries or stats on unprompted recall of the party’s last 30 second TV spot.

In fact, this is the only way anybody with an unpopular plan is going to get it up. Which applies also to politics.

Adelaide academic Byron Sharp thinks there are seven laws of marketing, which apply to all industries, just as the laws of physics are universal, (Professor Sharp is not a bloke bothered by an argument with academics or advertising agencies). And the laws set two tasks for marketers selling any product or service; make it easy to acquire and ensure potential consumers have positive memories of it.

The first involves making a product or service physically easy to find and purchase; no problem for people in politics given the way voting is mandatory. The second is a lot harder, and involves keeping consumers’ memories of brands fresh and positive. Sharp writes:

Marketers need to understand the memory structures that have already been built for their brand. They need to use these and ensure their advertising refreshes these structures.[3]

For politicians it means sticking to what the market knows you stand for. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating got away with close to a decade of deregulation by selling it as fulfilling Labor’s obligation to improve ordinary Australians’ standard of living. John Howard increased welfare spending, presenting it as a defence of family values.

There’s not much point basing messages on what the focus groups like and what the polls say on the issue of an hour if it blurs your brand. A brand the strategy smarties don’t own. Sydney brand expert Martin Kornberger argues that consumers who incorporate brand values into the way they live their lives, even identities, are the real owners of brands.[4]

And they do not like them being chopped and changed according to the issues of the hour. Meg Lees paid the price for mucking around with the Democrat brand when she acted like the leader of a real political party by negotiating a compromise on the GST. This upset Australian Democrat loyalists, who preferred the political purity of impotence. But for people who believe in one of the major parties, or are prepared to consider either on the basis of what they stand for at each election, brand identity saves politics from the packaged candidates that infest American politics.

One of the underestimated reasons the Republicans did so badly in the last US presidential poll was that there was nothing underpinning John McCain’s brand other than his record in Vietnam. But this was more than his competitors had. The transcripts of a seminar where their marketing (sorry, campaign) managers spoke about their strategies makes Michael Costa’s point. They were obsessed with media mentions instead of crafting messages to explain what their candidates stood for (which in most cases other than ambition was not much).[5]

Sure political parties and candidates are brands; there is no way around that. But the laws of marketing apply to them like any other products and services. The challenge is to sell what you stand for. It’s easier said than done but nobody buys a brand that promises everything or appeals to everybody – they don’t deliver and the after sales service is disastrous.

ENDNOTES

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[1] Michael Costa, “Rudd will pay for voodoo politics”, The Australian, 1 June 2010, Stephen Mills, The New Machine Men: Polls and Persuasion in Australian Politics (Penguin, 1986) 208-209

[2] Drew Westen, The Political Brain (Public Affairs, 2007)

[3] Byron Sharp et al, How Brands Grow (Oxford University Press, 2010) 149

[4] Martin Kornberger, Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

[5] The Institute of Politics, John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2008 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009)

Stephen4@hotkey.net.au

STONE the crows! When will people stop focusing on indigenous rights in the abstract rather than on how to help individual black Australians in struggling circumstances?

On Friday (see below) Northern Territory chief justice Brian Martin announced his early retirement, despairing that prison had failed to stop the cycle of violence, especially against women, in remote communities. On that very morning the Australia Council released a report deploring the absence of airtime for indigenous musicians.

The two events say a great deal about attitudes to addressing indigenous dispossession. Mr Martin’s despair at the inability of the legal system to protect vulnerable people in dysfunctional communities demonstrates the failure of orthodox opinion, which holds loss of land and lack of respect for culture is the cause of most of what is wrong in the lives of Aborigines.

Mr Martin certainly tried to uphold traditional indigenous practice in the past. In 2005 he sentenced a 55-year-old Aboriginal elder to two years in prison, suspended after a month, for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Mr Martin accepted the attacker believed he was acting according to custom as the child was promised to him as a bride, when she was four.

Perhaps people who believe in respecting indigenous culture saw some sense in the decision. But it is impossible to imagine that anyone, who was interested in the human rights of the victim, would agree – especially since the victim wanted nothing to do with the attacker. The case starkly set out the dilemma of what to do when the customary law that governed indigenous Australia for millennia ignores individual rights.

It is hard to imagine a better example of this attitude, that collective cultural concerns are especially important, than the Australia Council worrying that indigenous musicians are under-represented on the radio. Sure, less than 2 per cent of the music the ABC plays is by indigenous bands but given the Australian Bureau of Statistics records the indigenous population as 2.5 per cent of the total this is hardly an especially outrageous example of discrimination.

There are a plethora of problems set out in ABS statistics released last week that certainly need fixing first. Like the fact that indigenous Australians die ten years younger than the national norm. Like the fact their 2008 unemployment rate was three times higher than average.

For years regular reports have rolled in of the absence of discipline, be it imposed by indigenous culture or the law, in remote communities where there is no work but a great deal of drug and alcohol abuse which is accompanied by sexual violence. In 2006, Northern Territory Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers stunned Australia when she appeared on ABC TV’s Lateline and calmly described sexual assaults in remote communities.

That alcoholism and substance abuse is endemic all over Australia is beyond doubt and the ABS estimates binge drinking rates are much the same among indigenous and other Australians overall.

But there is no denying that crime born of indolence and intoxication curses remote communities, blighting generations. The Howard Government’s intervention program, policing how people spend their welfare payments, addressed this. To her great credit, Labor’s Jenny Macklin is extending a version of it across Australia and, in the process, ending the undoubted discrimination against indigenous people when it only applied in their communities.

Yet advocates of abstract indigenous rights fiercely oppose the principle of protecting the vulnerable by restricting the rights of others.

Many claim that specifying what welfare should be spent on does not work, which is fair enough. Others argue that the intervention insults people capable of managing their own lives, also true.

But the overall argument against welfare restrictions is that they breach indigenous human rights and blame the collective victim. As indigenous leader Pat Dodson put it last year:

“Community dysfunction is now understood as the fault of the colonised and their persistent cultural practices, rather than as a result of violent dispossession, brutal colonisation and authoritarian state intervention.”

Which is all very well, but it does not help women who are beaten by drug and drink addled men, nor the children of dysfunctional families who are

doomed to follow their fathers and mothers into lives of welfare dependency unless the cycle of misery is broken.

And increasing indigenous music on the radio will not do a damn thing to help.

• Listen to Brian Martin’s interview with ABC’s Melinda James (http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/05/28/2912627.htm)
• ABS figures for Friday 28 May 2010 at (http://www.abs.gov.au/)
• Australia Council on Indigenous musicians at (http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/)

Stop the presses! (permanently)

STONE the crows! but newspapers are in strife. Even worse people are losing interest in news as we know it.

You might have noticed, but given the way ever fewer people read them probably didn’t, reports in the papers that sales are still shrinking. The good news is although circulation figures are still dropping the industry is holding up better here than in the US. The bad news is that when the good news is the market is shrinking slower than elsewhere things are crook indeed.

The obvious cause of the crookness is the Internet and the way it provides endless news and comment fast and for free – making it hard for print, with its huge production and distribution costs and long lead times to compete.

This is (relatively) easily fixed. Papers are producing more online, improving what they offer advertisers and sooner or later they will coax readers into paying for content. And online products are vastly cheaper to produce.

In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows illustrates how product form and distribution problems are being worked out.

But there is an even more alarming issue – what if a mass audience is not interested in what journalists produce, whether distributed digitally or in hard copy?

Jack Fuller suggests journalism itself, rather than just how it is delivered, is in trouble in his new book, (only in hard copy, ironically, you can’t Kindle it), What is Happening to News.

At least journalism as it is practised and consumed at the elite end of the industry, what he calls the “standard model of professional journalism” and defines as consisting of  “the disciplines of accuracy, disinterestedness in reporting, independence from the people and organisations reported upon or affected by the report, a model of presentation sometimes called objective or neutral, and the clear labelling of what is fact and what is opinion.”

According to Fuller the standard model is under attack from forces as new as the Internet and as old as the prehistoric interests embedded in our brains.

The net has created endless news and opinion and because everything is equally available the gates once kept by editors and expert writer are broken down.

And what we like to learn online is the same information our ancestors were keen to acquire, information which appealed to people living in small groups and who needed to know who to trust and how people dealt with danger and distress. ‘Twas ever thus. Canadian psychologist Hank Davis looked at page-one stories over 300 years and found a consistent interest in the same subjects.

So what’s the problem? Readers have always picked the sort of press they prefer and the standard model prospered in the 20^th century because there was enough of an audience interested in the objective reporting of hard information.

The problem is that now we are in a media universe where the serious report faces the sensational on equal terms – and guess which people find most interesting. Even worse the Internet ensures that they can get as many morality tales and scandal stories as they like, reducing the authority of editors to decide what we need to know.

Certainly professional audiences have access to arguments and information online but the agenda setting press is in trouble – and that is bad for everybody. Because the top end of the printed mass media produce what Fuller calls “the data of democracy”, the stories on politics and policy, politicians and bureaucrats hate having reported.

This is very bad news indeed for the Americans, especially for those in one-newspaper cities. If the daily goes under, or adapts to a world where people do not want to read about public policy the in-depth analysis of state and local government that is too parochial for the Wall Street Journal or New York Times and which tabloid TV ignores goes with it.

And while Australia is in better shape, (every capital city has at least one local daily plus two national papers) what happens if Fuller is right and what we are seeing is less a change in the way news and analysis is delivered as a transformation in what people want to read?

A change that means political reporting becomes all about scandal and economics and public policy coverage retreats to the blogosphere and high-priced specialist newsletters.

Newspapers that shrink into scandal sheets or become the partisan voices of political parties or interest groups, which is what they mainly were in the 19^th century, will impoverish public life.

Fuller has a less half-baked than hopeless solution to stop the standard form ending; journalists appealing to readers emotions by putting themselves in the story. This demonstrates he has never endured the all too many Australian columnists who think solipsism is something to aspire to and write of little other than their own lives.

And it ignores the obvious – opinion masquerading as analysis has no place in the daily public policy writing appearing in the papers an informed democracy depends on.

So what’s to do? Damned if the crows know. But we better hope Fuller is wrong. The function serious newspapers fill can easily adjust to a different delivery system. But if the standard model disappears it will take what matters most in journalism with it.