Progressive Direction

July 17, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Retail therapy

  Just a quick few points while I work on a more complicated post that’s (inevitably) transport related…

  Shopping bags

  Many major retailers are phasing out single-use plastic bags. Or to be precise, they’re phasing-out free bags.

  • Woolworths: 20/6/2018
  • Coles, Target, Big W: 1/7/2018
  • Aldi never gave away bags.
  • K-Mart is phasing out free bags during 2018-19.

  This is not the first time Target has tried this. They stopped issuing free plastic bags in 2009, but brought them back in 2013. Part of the problem seemed to be that the bags they sold were the same as the previously free ones they’d given away. Other retailers sell higher quality bags.

  An outright ban has been in place for all retailers in NT, Tas, SA and ACT, plus Qld and WA joined them on 1st July, which no doubt is why the retailers have pushed ahead. Victoria is set to follow at some stage. Unclear what NSW will do.

  I’m happy to see this change. Yet there’s been some unbelievably ridiculous hand-wringing from some quarters:

  So plastics bags are now a matter of right/left combat. Of course. https://t.co/gkbJDp3Xvi

  — Alan Kohler (@AlanKohler) June 26, 2018

  C’mon. If you still want a bag, it’s typically just 15 cents to buy one. FIFTEEN CENTS! That’s just one percent of a $15 shop.

  For me, the only behaviour change is I now stuff a green bag into my work bag, so I have it for my detours to the supermarket on the way home.

  We’ll all adapt. In fact, at this IGA at Nagambie (snapped on 30th June, before Coles switched) the locals seemed to be coping without any fuss whatsoever.

  

  Dish washer

  The Fisher and Paykel dishwasher, which had been in my house since I moved here in 2005, broke down again.

  I’d previously thought that, given it was a pretty old model (circa 2000), I’d replace it the next time it failed, so that’s what I did, and found a good price on a Bosch.

  Why Bosch? The Bosch washing machine I bought nine years ago hasn’t skipped a beat, and they also rate very well on the Choice web site (which is well worth joining if you’re grumpy that The Checkout hasn’t been renewed).

  I paid the installation fee. While it didn’t take long, it was satisfyingly complex enough that I’m glad I did.

  Dishwashers aren’t for everybody, but I hate washing dishes, so for me, this is money well spent.

  

  The new car arrived

  I picked up the new car last night. That’s it above.

  I suspect the web has changed the shopping experience. I no longer go and look around car dealerships unless I already know what I want.

  The car dealers I’ve dealt with during this saga seem less slimy than the ones I encountered the first time I bought a car.

  When scouring Carsales, I had pondered that if I saw the perfect deal somewhere out in the country, I’d be willing to go to grab it. In the end I bought from a local dealership, which will make servicing it with them to maintain the warranty much easier.

  In fact as part of the handover, they showed me where the service area is, and how the after hours drop-off/pick-up works. Clever. The chief service guy there recognised me from when he used to work on my old Magna years ago. Heh.

  The dealer bloke showed me the basics of the car, then sent me on my way.

  Amusingly/horrifyingly I scraped the bottom of the steep driveway just exiting the dealership. Can’t see any visible marks. Also amusingly, I thought the engine was revving loudly on the drive home, until I realised it was in Sports mode, not Drive. Oops.

  Today I’ve sat in the car for a while with the manual and figured out all the controls. Or at least, the important ones.

  The psychology of buying a new car and wanting to drive places is powerful.

  Anyway, I like it so far, though I could do without the spoiler, which I don’t think helps visibility out of the back window. Perhaps I should have asked if the car was available without it.

July 14, 2018

• Club Troppo Paul Krugman: Nobel Prize or Academy Award? When economic theory is a tower of babel

  Below is my response to Krugman’s comments in defence of new trade theory. It’s not generated any discussion on the Mandarin or Evonomics, but perhaps it will here. Apologies for the delay in getting it onto Troppo – I’ve been travelling.

  I recently criticised contemporary economics in a speech launching Max Corden’s memoirs. Economic theory threatens to become a Tower of Babel, preoccupied with the world within its models and irrelevant to policy. This has crowded out an older style of which Corden was an exemplar, in which economics aspired to be the supremely useful social science, policy-relevant as clarified commonsense.

  I cited Paul Krugman’s claim that macroeconomics had actually regressed as a result, but I also pointed out that Krugman had himself been the architect of the same kind of regression. He won a Nobel Memorial Prize for his trouble.

  In Krugman’s characteristically vigorous and clear-headed response to my speech, he suggests that this is the ‘money quote’ from my speech.

  Krugman [is] about the most brilliant and useful economist we have. But his most brilliant work wasn’t useful, and his most useful work isn’t brilliant”

  We’ll get to what I think was the money quote, but first … Krugman and I are in violent agreement about the subject of his response – the differences between the Macro and the Trade Towers of Babel.

  In macro, the grand prize was ‘micro-foundations’ in which micro and macroeconomics would be unified into a crystalline structure, not unlike Euclid’s Elements, as macro was rebuilt from an aggregation of perfectly rational optimising agents. As I mentioned, “this mindset gave additional licence to the motivated reasoning of the libertarian right”.

  For many, that was the idea all along. Like the misdirection of a master magician, new classical models assumed away all the ‘imperfections’ that stare us in the face and make the macroeconomy such an ornery beast, both to live in and to understand; its frictions in transmitting information and incentives, its ‘animal spirits’ and tendency to self-fulfilling prophecies of gloom and euphoria, its ‘sticky’ prices and wages.

  And voila! Unemployment disappears! The great depression was really millions of workers taking a spontaneous holiday. And forget government action to fight the business cycle. It’s misguided, and futile if not actively destabilising. And no, I’m not kidding.^[1]

  By my lights, new classical macro is the most egregious example, but the pattern recurs in field after field.^[2] Including Krugman’s new trade theory. The new models produced a Tower of Babel in which strong, robust predictions or policy conclusions were hard to come by. But, as Krugman replies, here the motive wasn’t to banish aspects of reality that were inconvenient for the modelling (or one’s ideology), but rather to invite them in.

  What could possibly be wrong with that?

  II

  When the assumptions behind your model are simple and seem to formally capture the essence of something important, it can open up a world of insight. This occurred in the first wave of formalism in economics from around 1870 to World War II. At this stage, it’s easy to think that economics’ job is to simply expand this formal method, forever relaxing assumptions towards greater realism.

  That’s what the brilliant and useful Paul Samuelson thought as he pioneered the new, mathematical economics from the late 1940s on, seeking to “accumulate a convergent body of econometric findings convergent on a testable truth”. Forty years on he lamented. “My confession is that this expectation has not worked out”.

  We’ve been here before. In fact, Isaac Newton ran into the same problem. The handful of simplifying assumptions he made in his celestial mechanics give us a God-like vision of the heavens that’s intoxicated us ever since. But it turns out that its power degrades quite quickly once more than just two celestial bodies (like planets) enter the analysis.^[3]

  The early progress of formalism brought forth a vision that was almost as miraculous as Newton’s system and in some ways more intoxicating.^[4] Quite standard demand and supply diagrams give you a way to look at the chaos of economic life of such easy power that it feels you’ve got magic goggles. Suddenly, you can see how all manner of policies affect both the economy as a whole and the relevant groups as well. Rent control, tariffs, tax and welfare changes – you name it.

  But everything has its price. The price of this vision is a long list of unrealistic assumptions. And a central assumption is that competition determines prices, not firms. And the fact is that, in all markets that aren’t for commodities, scale economies limit the number of competitors and give firms some pricing power – as Apple has over smartphones and McDonalds or even the local milk bar has over its burgers. Now there’s a serpent in paradise.

  In my original speech, I quoted Max Corden’s mentor, J.R. Hicks, wrestling with the serpent on our behalf. He was trying to hang onto those goggles. Firms’ pervasive pricing power is modern economics’ ‘three body problem’. As Hicks points out, if firms have some pricing power, you don’t even know if they’ll increase supply when demand rises. They might just raise prices, or even cutsupply to boost prices further. And if your answer to any important question is “it all depends on the circumstances”, you don’t have much of a theory.

  Hicks plumps for perfect competition because, although imperfect competition is more realistic, if we “abandon … the assumption of perfect competition … the basis on which economic laws can be constructed is … shorn away”. He concludes:

  We must be aware, however, that we are taking a dangerous step, and probably limiting to a serious extent the problems with which our subsequent analysis will be fitted to deal. Personally, however, I doubt if most of the problems we shall have to exclude for this reason are capable of much useful analysis by the methods of economic theory..

  Hicks’ advice isn’t to ignore scale economies but rather to take them into account either informally, or with ad hoc models fitted to specific policy issues and circumstances, just as a person with a map understands that they might have to work out the detail that it doesn’t cover.

  III

  Economics had changed by the late 1970s. The Dixit-Stiglitz model of imperfect competition and variants of it were becoming workhorses in various areas. So it made sense to deploy them in trade theory to see what insights they might turn up. But those models themselves were full of ad hoc assumptions – leaving Hicks’ wider concerns unaddressed,^[5] limiting the practical relevance of the modelling results. The culture of economic discourse had changed too. With academic specialisation proceeding apace, Hicks’ style of close, discursive reasoning became rarer and, perhaps more to the point, unnecessary to get journal articles accepted.

  Max Planck told us that science progresses one funeral at a time. But that’s it regresses too. Like lots of intellectual innovators, Krugman had difficulty publishing his early new trade papers. Referees were unconvinced that an “understanding of these issues would be helped by writing down formal models”.^[6] Of course the papers deserved publication, but the referees’ concerns weren’t only valid, they were vindicated. In the upshot, as Krugman admits, this journey towards more ‘realism’ in formal trade theory, wasn’t very useful. It showed that:

  • scale economies give us more gains to trade (suggesting that traditional models can substantially underestimate the case for free trade) but
  • at the same time the models generate a plethora of ‘special cases’ enabling countries to advantage themselves with trade interventions to advantage certain firms.

  And we already knew that. As trade theorist Ronald Wonnacott protested after a decade of new trade theory, it “may not yet have even scratched the surface. To identify one of the large number of possible new cases, all that’s required is the combining of one of the many causes of market failure with one of the many mercantilist instruments that could then be used to increase welfare”.

  Here’s Krugman’s Nobel acceptance speech:

  You may think all this is obvious, and it is – now. But it was totally not obvious before 1980 or so – except for some prescient quotes from Paul Samuelson, you really can’t find anyone describing trade this way until after the theory had been laid out in mathematical models. The plain English version came later.

  And you should bear in mind that economists have been thinking and writing about international trade for a couple of centuries; to come along and say, “Hey, we’ve been missing half the story” was a pretty big thing.

  Here we get to the nub of my beef with Krugman. Certainly there must be a division of intellectual labour to get anywhere. But formal theory should develop in close dialogue with – indeed to the extent possible should be enveloped by – close discursive reasoning. And theorists must respect the knowledge of others working in areas of relevance. My reaction – I think, were he alive, J.R. Hicks’ reaction – to the way trade theorists ignored scale economies before Krugman modelled them is “shame on them”, or more constructively, “how can we improve the disciplinary incentives that reward this groupish myopia?”.

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  For all his brilliance, I’m repeatedly shocked at Krugman’s complacency on this score from his perch in the heights of the academy. As I put it in my speech, Krugman thinks that that “those who smell a rat at the dysfunctionality of all this should just get over themselves”. But it gets worse. What could Krugman possibly mean when he tells his Stockholm audience that “the plain English version” came after his theory? What’s his response to the list I mentioned in my speech?

  • Hicks (1959),
  • Linder (1961),
  • Elkan (1965),
  • Vernon (1966),
  • Balassa (1966),
  • Drysdale (1969),
  • Grubel (1967),
  • Corden (1970),
  • Lloyd (1975)
  • Gray (1976),
  • Bhagwati (1973),
  • Krueger (1978).^[7]

  I’m genuinely baffled, given Krugman would be familiar with most if not all these authors. In any event, if he wants a ‘money quote’ from me to respond to, that would be my pick.

  All this while Krugman laments new classical macro’s bred-in insularity from those pesky facts in the real world.

  IV

  Theory is a moon buggy for exploring terrain that’s difficult or impossible to explore any other way. We need our wits about us to build and to guide the buggy. The real distinction isn’t between formal and informal methods – they both need each other.^[8] It’s between the use of those methods that is skilful and fruitful, rather than just clever, and use that is less so – between good analysis (formal and discursive) and not-so-good analysis.

  Formal models will be worthwhile if they raise logical possibilities leading to conclusions that are important and surprising and weren’t otherwise clear. Another kind of usefulness arises when they give us another, better understanding of the mechanisms causing the economic phenomena we observe.

  To get back to what Krugman took to be my ‘money quote’, since he’s stopped using his brilliance to rediscover the obvious, his work has focused on real and pressing problems. I think of Krugman’s Nobel for his new trade theory as an Academy Award. He deserves the Nobel for calling the risks of a lost decade long before the reality was upon us and for his economic journalism – the best since Keynes. Though these days he occasionally apologises for the provisional nature of his sketched models on his blog for their falling short of the standards expected in academic publication, their usefulness shines through. So much the worse for academic publications which, in the age of the internet, we’ve made lamentably little progress in reinventing.^[9]

  While the sales pitch was always that new trade theory responded to developments in the world, its real focus was itself. In 1985, Brander and Spencer showed that an export subsidy could advantage a nation hosting one of the two firms in a duopoly where the other was located abroad – think Airbus and Boeing.^[10] Apparently, this “idea” generated a “flurry of excitement”.^[11]It wasn’t wrong theory. It was bad theory, labouring to rediscover the obvious by imposing crude assumptions to get the maths out. The next year Eaton and Grossman published an analogous model with a slightly different (though equally crude) assumption about how the firms interacted.^[12] This reversed the result.^[13] Which paper was right? Neither. They both follow long-established conventions in the assumptions and the maths they use. So they look serious and, as we saw, they’re publishable. But, as a way of thinking about the difficult question of Airbus and Boeing’s rivalry, both tell us next to nothing. They’re silly; ‘academic’ in the bad sense.

  In this sense, I think the heirs to Corden’s work in trade are those who’ve done the intellectual work to understand the patterns of trade and development we observe and to infer robust, or at least promising and insightful policy conclusions from them: people like Dani Rodrik and Ricardo Hausmann. They’re helping break open another citadel of groupish myopia – the Washington Consensus. They use theory of course, but not merely to rediscover the obvious and then reprove others’ for failing to render their thoughts visible to the high priests.

  2018 July 8

  References

  ^[1] As Paul Romer puts it “Macro models now use incredible identifying assumptions to reach bewildering conclusions”.

  ^[2] To quote two emails I received from practicing economists – one in the markets and one in an international governmental organisation – in the upshot of this debate

  “[Y]our aphorism was a good one. … [I]t is, in a way, a marvellously pithy summary of the the whole of post-1980 economics – macro, monetary, trade (I assume), micro… the lot. When brilliant, a bit useless – when useful, all too often a statement of the bleeding obvious.”

  “[You] could easily be describing aspects of health economics”.

  ^[3] Patterns that emerge robustly with two bodies often break down into non-recurring patterns bogging the analysis down into endless special cases some of which break down into chaotic motion. Though there are multiple bodies in the solar system, stability is assured by the fact that virtually all the relationships exist as one or more small bodies circling a much larger body so the third-body interactions have very marginal effects on the main pair. The planets perturb each others’ orbit infinitesimally.

  The presence of three bodies does not produce chaos automatically, but raises the spectre of the same. See this essay for further elaboration. The point is simply that the capacity to understand even a very simple system can break down quite quickly once we move towards greater ‘realism’ or fidelity to the empirical world we can see.

  ^[4] It gives us a powerful new way of looking at the world. As Australia’s then Opposition leader, Professor of Business, John Hewson observed in 1991: “As soon as you get an equilibrium approach to life, suddenly you realise that a lot of what you’d thought was wrong”. But it threatens to be more intoxicating because, in addition to painting a picture of the way the world really is (if only the world could stop being so messy) it also offers a powerful vision of an ideal. When an anomaly was discovered with Newton’s system, there was no-one arguing that we should change nature’s laws to make it look more like our model. When some grand theory appears to be refuted by experience, there’s usually no shortage of people arguing that we haven’t tried hard enough to implement the theory.

  ^[5] Here’s a really insightful discussion of the significance of imperfect competition in the development of economics as a science:

  In contrast [to Einstein’s explanation of an empirical anomaly in Newtons system], the Dixit-Stiglitz [model of imperfect competition] did not attempt to explain anomalies. … The aim was to make models with imperfect competition tractable.… [The (unrealistic) assumptions they made] meant there was a standard way to handle imperfect competition…. [But] there are no general results…. [The Dixit-Stiglitz model] made it possible to have the illusion that economic theorists understood imperfect competition, but this was discovery by assuming we have a can opener. The example was fruitful because, once a lot of people decided to explore the same special case, they could discuss its interesting behavior…. Theory can grow if people agree on core assumptions. This is progress if the assumptions are useful approximations. … I do not think the the development of a new branch of theory is necessarily scientific progress.

  I think economic theory was massively improved by the Dixit-Stiglitz example because it made economists outside of industrial organization willing to consider imperfect competition. But… it gave the impression that there were simple elegant results based on assuming imperfect competition similar to those based on assuming perfect competition. There aren’t….

  ^[6] Gans, J. G. and Shepherd, G.B., 1994. “How the Mighty are Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 8, pp. 165-179 at p. 170.

  ^[7] All mention the significance of scale economies in driving trade patterns together with plenty of empirical data and theorising in both plain English and ad hoc partial equilibrium models and schematic diagrams. Some I didn’t mention in my speech include:

  • Kravis (1956),
  • Drèze (1958),
  • Posner, (1961),
  • Hufbauer, (1965),
  • Elkan (1965),
  • Kojima (1965),

  ^[8]  I’d add that informal reasoning, of the kind we’re using in this discussion, is the master discourse and formal reasoning its servant, or, to use the image of a marvellous book, it’s emissary. For those who are interested, I recommend the introduction given by Russ Roberts in his recent, characteristically excellent,  interview with the author of the 2009 classic, The Master and his Emissary on EconTalk.

  ^[9] I’ve offered some somewhat tangential thoughts on this here and here.

  ^[10] Brander, J. A. and Spencer, B., 1985. “Export Subsidies and Market Share Rivalry”, Journal of International Economics, 18, pp. 83-100.

  ^[11] Krugman, P., 1993. “The Narrow and Broad Arguments for Free Trade”, American Economic Association, Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Review, 83, pp. 362-371.

  ^[12] Eaton, J. and Grossman, G. M., 1986. “Optimal Trade and Industrial Policy under Oligopoly”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 101, pp. 383-406.

  ^[13] The two papers used ‘Cournot’ and ‘Betrand’ models of duopoly respectively. A Cournot duopolist maximises its profits assuming its competitor’s output as given whilst the Betrand competitor takes their competitor’s prices as given.

July 13, 2018

• Club Troppo Is Trump getting Funnier? On Brexit and May.

  The Donald is visiting the UK and has had me in stitches a whole day. He’s clearly been having a chat with Nigel Farage about how to handle the Conservatives and has shown them up in spectacular fashion.

  Theresa May, bless her, was of course in an impossible position. She undoubtedly loathes the Donald and yet had to try and woo him into that mythical trade deal that the Brexiteers have been promising the UK would get with the US if only they left the EU. So she put on a dress and ‘did her duty’ by raising the issue of a favourable trade deal with the guy who just launched a trade war against her.

  The Donald must have been wearing a big grin at this clumsy attempt to suck up to him. He was only in the UK to add to his collection of photos with royalty. He probably likes the idea of ruling by divine right. And now the host is begging him for a special favor! If not a ‘yes’ to a deal, then could he at least give her a ‘Maybe’ when talking to the press?

  The response was hilarious. He announced that Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister instead of Theresa, and he told the UK press that there was no point talking to Britain whilst it still had any other friends in Europe. No, only if Britain gave up all its allies and was completely at the mercy of the US, would he entertain the idea of a trade deal.

  What a slap-down! It is like telling someone who invites you to dinner that someone else should own the house and they’ll only deal with you if you’re in the gutter on your own. If you believe that you’ll be taken more seriously if you have no friends left, you’ll believe anything, so it’s not even an attempt at being serious. It is purely dismissive, which is very funny in the midst of pomp and ceremony.

  In some sense, of course, May and her government had it coming. The whole sycophantic ‘special relationship with the US’ story that the UK politicians have been running for decades shows such a lack of self-respect that it deserves this kind of slap down. When you behave like a slave, don’t be surprised if you’re kicked like a dog.

  Poor Theresa though. The Germans and French in that regard are showing her how to deal with the Donald: you ridicule him and meanwhile ignore whatever he wants from you because you know that in the end, the US needs its allies at least as much as they need the US (and with Trump, the US is not going to find other allies, is it?). There is thus, for instance, no way that the Europeans will increase their defense budgets anytime soon, and they simply laugh at his claims. Have a look at how the German press reacts to the Donald:

July 11, 2018

• Daniel Bowen What, yet ANOTHER rebranding?

  Although it doesn’t involve removing level crossings, the Mernda rail extension is being built by the Level Crossing Removal Authority (LXRA).

  This LXRA tweet last week got some attention, and not just from those who have been long awaiting the project’s completion:

  A sign of things to come #Mernda đŸšđŸšđŸš #transformingMelbourne pic.twitter.com/nUc8lt4ZiF

  — Level Crossings (@levelcrossings) July 6, 2018

  Perhaps unintentionally, the tweet text has a double meaning: the font is different from those used previously (it’s the newish Network Sans, especially commissioned for PTV) and the PTV logo, recently plastered over everything, is missing.

  Signs in this style were also installed at the new Huntingdale bus interchange earlier this year. (“Hail bus”? Really?)

  

  The PTV logo is also missing off the latest rail map which started rolling out in early 2017.

  Okay, is THIS the final rebrand?

  There have been so many public transport rebrandings over the years, most of us have lost count.

  In some parts of Melbourne, just in the past 25 years, we have seen the trains branded as:

  • The Met/PTC
  • Bayside Trains / Hillside Trains
  • M>Train (on the Bayside trains lines)
  • Connex (on the Hillside lines, then across the system)
  • Metro
  • PTV

  This is in contrast to Victorian Railways, which ran the trains from 1859 to 1983. The branding would have changed over time, but at least the name remained the same (apart from shortening to Vicrail in the 1970s).

  Now what? TfV? Unclear, since the TfV isn’t appearing on these signs either.

  I really hope it’s not another full rebrand. Perhaps it’s just a stripping things back to the colours, at least on station signage.

  But hopefully it’s the last major change, and hopefully it’s a gradual rollout as signs need replacing, rather than a huge expensive fast replacement.

  

  Where did the colours come from?

  The modal colours — green for trams, orange for buses, blue for trains, purple for V/Line — were devised around 2003, and introduced with the Metlink (and Viclink) signage across the network.

  The Metlink changes were a good start at unifying the branding, which had long been a complete mess, with individual train and tram operators having quite different styles of maps and signage when the system was initially split-up and privatised (1999-2004), and there had long been similar issues across the many bus operators.

  The Metlink branding didn’t include vehicle liveries, but did at least put Metlink logos on everything, and made all the signage standard, with colours for each mode, and wayfinding showing connections between them.

  Later PTV branding expanded the scheme to vehicle liveries, by taking the Metro design and adopting it for trams and buses too.

  Why did they choose those colours? Well, we don’t know for sure, but…

  Green has long been associated with trams. The Met used it in the 1980s (for all modes), and this in turn harked back to the Melbourne Metropolitan Tramways Board (formed in the 1920s) which had used green initially when the St Kilda Road route was electrified in 1925, then later for their entire fleet.

  Blue was used as the main colour for the Victorian Railways, first introduced in 1937 on the Spirit Of Progress, and included on the “blue” Harris suburban trains rolled out from the 1950s, and used on other pre-1980s regional carriages.

  Orange was a colour used extensively across all modes of Victorian public transport in the 1970s and 80s, including prominently on the MMTB bus fleet, which might explain why it’s ended up as the Metlink/PTV bus colour.

  And purple for V/Line? Perhaps they just wanted something different to the others – as far as I can make out, there is no particular precedent for using purple.

  I don’t mind the current set of colours. They seem to work quite well, including on signage that needs to point people between multiple modes. And having been around for about fifteen years, people are getting used to them.

  

  

  Logos

  While Metlink had a single compact logo, which some described as a fish, PTV took over from Metlink, triggering a rebrand.

  I’m not enamoured of the PTV logo, and I’m not disappointed to see it vanish off the signs (though I hope this will be a gradual phaseout as signs are replaced, rather than yet another huge expensive replacement exercise).

  The removal of the PTV logo may reflect that parts of its job have been moved across to new umbrella body Transport for Victoria (TfV for short).

  Let’s face it, the PTV logo was never very good. Although arguably it’s quite recognisable, in some contexts the sideways V risks being confused with a right-pointing arrow. Three letters is arguably too clumsy to use so widely and prominently.

  The Metro M logo (and name), for instance, is far stronger, but of course only represents one mode. Prominent blue signs on the street with a strong distinctive logo representing trains make it far easier to find a railway station when you’re in an unfamiliar place.

  Alas the Metro logo has been mostly removed from the trains and stations, in favour of the PTV logo.

  

  

  

  The Metlink squiggle logo was also the type of shape you could use more prominently and universally, though to my mind it was never terribly well recognised — perhaps it wasn’t around long enough.

  If only we could come up with something simple and recognisable, and stick to it, like the London Transport logo, which originated in 1908 on the Underground, but is now used with various colours and labelling to represent the entire London transport system.

  

  As shown above, the Brits use the old British Rail logo (dating back to 1965) to represent anything to do with the National Rail network.

  Over in Belgium, a giant B logo (used since 1936) adorns railway stations:

  

  In Brussels you might be looking for the blue M of the Metro — using this letter is very common around the world:

  

  

  Sydney has moved to single letters to represent trains (T), ferries (F), buses (B) and light rail (L). It seems to work — the single, strong letter has potential to be very recognisable, though I’m not sure about the four different letters having so little else to unite them. But at least they have a plan, and are rolling it out progressively.

  It ties into the branding of rail and ferry routes, T1, T2, F1, F2 and so on, which is quite clever; I mean to blog about this another time… though arguably the ferry routes F1, F2 may confuse some with freeways, which in NSW also use F. (I wonder if they’ll use M for the new Metro lines, or stick with T for trains?)

  Is an icon better than a letter, or a letter better than an icon? Pros and cons either way.

  The point is, these types of logos are very recognised, thanks to having had a long life, and a good design that you can put them anywhere and everywhere — prominently on the top of a building, or even on directional signage.

  This example, part of the “Legible London” wayfinding strategy to me, very clearly communicates that there’s an Underground station nearby, because the logo matches what’s on the stations.

  

  On some of central Melbourne’s wayfinding signage, the icon for trains doesn’t really leap out at you, despite it being perhaps the most important destination marked on the sign… though at least it’s the same train logo used by PTV on the signs outside stations.

  

  Victoria’s new (apparent) strategy of removing organisational logos in favour of just modal icons and colours might work… but then you lose that message about who to contact if you need information. How many people would remember to Google “PTV” if they didn’t see the logo plastered everywhere?

  The branding on the signs ties back to what’s used on the vehicles, printed material including maps — and even the colours used on those maps, which in turn show up on the rainbow status boards and Live Updates web site.

  I certainly don’t have all the answers here, but I recall chatting to a contact in the bureaucracy when the rail map was being drafted — they are thinking about these issues, and how all the branding ties together.

  Part of any service is promotion, and a vital part of the public transport network is easy to use signage, and a branding strategy that works… and that doesn’t keep changing. In Melbourne, longevity might be the biggest failing.

  Hopefully this time around we’ll see a good cohesive design, gradually rolled-out across the network, that they’ll actually stick with for more than a few years.

July 09, 2018

• Club Troppo Social context reveals gender differences in cooperative behavior

  A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. For the purpose, we compared men and women behavior under two social conditions: in groups of strangers and in groups with long-term socialization—groups of friends. The differences were found in changes in the level of cooperation, taking into account the effects of mixing social and gender variables. Social interaction and communication made cooperation of group members strength and sustainable. However, men’s and women’s cooperative behavior in groups differed. Women were initially more inclined to cooperate in interaction with strangers. Men showed greater sensitivity to sociality effects. They tended to make cooperative decisions more often if there were friends in the group. Furthermore, men cooperated with previously unknown people after socialization with them significantly more than women

  Available here.

July 06, 2018

• Club Troppo PATRICIA EDGAR. Going Round the Twist with Telstra and the NBN Co

  Cross posted from John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations

  NBN Co claims their ‘focus remains strongly on improving customer experience on the network including a smooth connection to the network.’ In fact the experience is a fiasco.  

  Bill Shorten says the dysfunctional NBN needs to lift its game, and under a Labor Government, the company will have to pay compensation to businesses and families who have been seriously inconvenienced by their incompetence. Appropriate standards and financial penalties would be determined in consultation with the ACCC, NBN, and other stakeholders.

  We are told NBN installers missed more than 80,000 appointments in 2017and a report by the ombudsman in April this year found that complaints about the NBN increased 200% in the second half of 2017 to 22,827, most of which concerned service quality and delayed connections.

  The installation partnership between NBN with Telstra as service provider requires the talents of Shaun Micallef and Charlie Pickering to make sense. It is impossible to work out who is responsible for the mess. The frustrations caused – when appointments are cancelled, missed and the ongoing harassment from Telstra callers who can’t understand Australian English, who cannot deviate from the script in front of them, and it seems, can’t keep accurate records from one call to the next – are enough to send someone round the twist. And of course you can never speak to the same person twice, if you can reach anyone at all.

  My nightmare began November, 2017.

  We own a holiday house at Anglesea where we require the internet to do our work. We have had an ADSL connection with Telstra which has cost $29.00 monthly over some years. Two years ago we began to receive letters insisting we must sign up to the NBN. I investigated the costs of connection and found the best deal I could get was $80.00 a month. When I queried this price, the Telstra salesman said, ‘Life was tough.’ So I waited. Late last year I was sent two threatening letters. The wiring would be removed from the street to the house if I didn’t sign up. So I did.

  The ‘case manager’, who spoke from a place unknown, said three appointments were required; dates were not negotiable. Two modems arrived separately in the mail. I made myself available on the set date for the first appointment which went smoothly. The technician, a local from Anglesea, took the second modem and told me he had seen up to five sent to a house. Further appointments were set and dates were cancelled with no reasons given. The second appointment didn’t require entry to the house but the third took some time. Eventually we got a date confirmed which was meant to conclude the task. But no; that technician, who installed a small device, advised we would need a fourth appointment as Telstra had not done the work required for the phone connection.

  Over six months later and through innumerable calls, when a script was read, and I had to repeat myself interminably – giving my name, DOB, being notified the call would be recorded for training purposes, then the history of the case reviewed – a date would be announced when I couldn’t be in Anglesea. Such a deviation from the script – as saying there would be no one in the house on the stated date – would stymie the caller and they would have to play music while they went off- line, into the Telstra morass, to find someone who could deal with this intractable client.

  After several such calls, I suggested the local technician from the first job could be given access to the house to complete the work. That was not acceptable. That technician, who works for Telstra, tried to get the job, but he had no success either. Technicians are sent far and wide, rarely doing jobs in their home territory, as those allocating the jobs live in Woop Woop and don’t know their geography.

  Then I received another threat: the service would be cancelled if I did not present on the day specified. I demanded my recorded discussions, where I railed about Telstra’s extraordinary inefficiency, be forwarded to management. I then got a call from a manager who could speak English. He would sort out a convenient date. But two days after that call, when I thought all was resolved, I got another call. The previous manager was ‘no longer with Telstra’ so I was required to go through the story again. I lost my cool, so another manager got involved and a ‘mutually agreeable’ date was set for the fourth appointment. I waited at Anglesea that day and the technician didn’t show up.

  Meanwhile, we have been billed for the last four months for a phone connection we do not have. After an hour on the phone, we thought Telstra understood the problem, but the next bill was the same. A further call to Telstra uncovered the fact that our case had been lodged as a complaint. A manager needed to review the complaint, a process that takes weeks apparently.

  This saga is to be continued…

  A consumer has no chance of apportioning blame between the wholesaler and the retail internet provider. Both Telstra and the NBN companies seem to be unmanageable and both need a monumental shake up.solution; where to now?

  Now, it seems Telstra could clean up its act by purging 8000 staff. Mr Penn says it will lead the way with the 5G mobile rollout, offer unlimited data free and split its infrastructure and retail operations. Who then would want the NBN? The government will undoubtedly write off its $74 billion tax-payer-funded loss-making misfortune and Telstra will possibly pick it up at a bargain price. Those of us who have been coerced in acquiring the Turnbull hybrid will need, when the projected roll-out is complete in 2020-22, to have all the old copper wiring replaced to ensure reliable broadband access.

  Welcome to Turnbull’s innovation nation. What is it I am missing?

  Patricia Edgar is a media sociologist and the producer of the television series Round the Twist

• Club Troppo PATRICIA EDGAR. The ABC, Facebook and the Meaning of Trust
  

  Google images selected this image as the most relevant to “ABC Trust” for obvious reasons.

  Cross-posted from John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations.

  Trust is an interesting concept. It takes time to develop trust which results from a broad experience of something (or someone) which demonstrates consistent, reliable behaviour with integrity, ability, and surety; it involves confident expectation. But trust can be lost irretrievably, quite quickly. Trust allows for mistakes if they are dealt with openly and honestly. It does not forgive manipulation, dishonesty and betrayal.

  This brings me to the recent Roy Morgan Media Net Trust Survey that found in 3 surveys of 4000 Australians, that the public gives a negative trust value to the banks of minus 18, while media companies score minus 7. Morgan subtracted distrust from trust to achieve a Net Trust Score (NTS). While the banks are seen as the most toxic brands, media companies are still in negative territory.  When 1,111 people were asked which media they trust and distrust most, the results show half of all Australians (47%) distrust social media compared to only 9% who distrust the ABC.

  The only three media organizations that get a positive score are the ABC, SBS and Fairfax, in that order. The commercial networks score between – 6 and -10. The drivers for negative views are false news, bias, sensationalised stories, pushing a political agenda and too much advertising.

  It has become a cliché to say the ABC is biased. The claim is repeated endlessly in the commercial media and by the Coalition MPs, who run campaigns on the basis of slogans, and who complain regularly about the treatment of the government on ABC news and current affairs. They work on the assumption that if you say it often enough people will believe it. But trust is not born from slogans.

  It really doesn’t matter what the commentariat – conservatives like Gerard Henderson and Andrew Bolt or ‘liberals’ like Paul Barry or Chas Licciardello –assert as opinion, for trust is not formed by opinion pieces. It is built up over time.

  The ABC has been there since 1932; television since 1956, and there is a history to review and a record to examine. The public has had a lifetime to evaluate the ABC. The public broadcaster openly examines the accusations of bias made against it on its own channels and invites detractors on air to express critiques. It publishes complaints against it, along with its editorial policy.It attempts to provide ‘balance’ – an absurd concept when someone like One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts is given equal time to refute the facts of climate science with physicist Brian Cox. Should a creationist, terrorist, fascist, racist or misogynist expect time to promote their ignorance, prejudice and disruption on a public broadcaster? Lines have to be drawn in civilized debate and the professional journalists at the ABC are there to make such decisions. In the end, the public makes its own judgment, as shown by this survey.

  Based on its record of performance the public has judged Facebook to be untrustworthy. The 500+ billion dollar company with its 2.2 billion active monthly users is at the centre of a series of major scandals from Russian electoral interference to the Cambridge Analytica data breach. It is not only the fact that Facebook has refused to characterize the hoovering up of the personal information of more than 87 million users and their ‘friends’ as a security breach, but it has stuck its head firmly in the sand, in denial and evasion. So investors are agitating for change at the top.

  Trust is not about larger numbers and higher ratings, which the commercial networks argue mean the public prefers them to the ABC. The fact that viewers watch reality television and buy the Murdoch press for the sporting news, or go on social media to play games or communicate with friends is not a measure of trust. Children don’t want to spend all their time with their parents; they want to go out to play and have fun, but when in need they turn back quickly to those they trust, their parents and friends.

  Some involved in the current debate about the value of the ABC argue the broadcaster should not be speaking up for itself. But in principle, the argument is the same as the child bullied in the schoolyard: they must learn to stand up for themselves. The ABC should and it must do this. It has a record of achievements to defend, policies to make public: the Board, the Managing Director and the staff must speak out loudly and proudly.

  The public, who trust the ABC, want to hear that defense of their institution. They can and will attend rallies, but the current attack on this highly valued public institution is so vicious, it cannot be ignored. The Prime Minister, Minister Fifield and Pauline Hanson want to see the ABC haemorrhaging from the endless cuts being delivered. They want to see the ABC intimidated; they want it to die with a whimper.

  This survey sends a message. The public don’t trust the political institution the politicians represent; they trust the ABC. So hands off, Malcolm Turnbull; you continue this fight at your political peril for trust is a social phenomenon, not just a personal feeling. Once people lose trust in institutions that lack integrity, lie and distort the truth, the whole society is under threat. We all, especially the government, should be grateful we still have one public institution – the ABC -in which most people do have trust.

  Patricia Edgar is a media sociologist.

July 05, 2018

• Daniel Bowen I finally bought a new car

  Apologies for the following long ramble about buying a car.

  The costs of cars (Do I even need one?)

  My prolonged hunt for a new (used) car got me thinking about how much they have cost me… and how long I’ve kept them.

  My first car was a 1993 Mitsubishi Magna (pictured above), which I bought in 1998 for, as far as I remember, $11,800. (In 2018 dollars this is about $19,600)

  In 2008, by the time it had 215,000 kms on the clock, it was only good for scrap when I sold it, getting back only about $250.

  My second car was a 2000 Holden Astra, which I bought in 2008 for $10,990. (In 2018 dollars this is about $13,900.)

  At the time it had 117,000 kms on the clock; ten years later it’s now at 180,000, and is basically worth almost nothing, which is a bit annoying as about a year ago I spent $500 on brand new tyres for it.

  So basically, the two cars I’ve had have depreciated by about $1100 per year.

  What other costs? Insurance roughly $400 per year (though it used to be higher when I was younger). Rego about $800 (this is rising, not reducing).

  Petrol: I fill up about 4-6 weeks. Looks like I spent $518 on fuel in 2017.

  Maintenance and repairs? So far since the start of 2017 I’ve spent about $1600. This is probably going up as the car gets older, so let’s guess an average of $600 per year.

  So in a year, costs of about $3400, over double the cost of my annual Myki fare.

  With average annual car travel of about 6300 kms (which is under half the Australian average, by the way) that’s about 54 cents per kilometre.

  My usual driving pattern is that I use the car on the weekends, but rarely during the week. Mostly those weekend drives are around the suburbs, but a few times a year it’ll be a longer trip to visit relatives in the country.

  What if I didn’t own my own car?

  The only car share scheme in my area that I know of is Car Next Door – vehicles cost about $20-30 per day plus about 33 cents per kilometre.

  Based on my annual kilometres, that works out to be roughly 20% more than paying to own my own vehicle. If my weekend drives were occasional, it’d probably be cheaper, but not if driving a bit almost every weekend.

  Of course if using car share, you’re likely to make more of your trips using other modes. Countering that: my sons are about to learn to drive, so demand for a vehicle may go up a bit.

  So for now, I’m thinking I need to continue owning a car, at least until PT is so good that the PTUA has no purpose!

  What I want in a car

  So I got to shopping. What did I want?

  • 5-star ANCAP rating – Nothing gets you thinking about safety like your offspring learning to drive
  • High used-car safety rating if an older model
  • Automatic — after 20 years of being intimidated by hill starts, I think I’ve had enough of Manuals (and my sons don’t seem interested in learning on one)
  • Cruise control for country driving
  • Something a bit bigger/roomier than the Astra, but not too big, so it’s reasonably fuel-efficient. Small to medium-sized, while noting that small cars are now about the size of that Magna I used to own
  • Reliable/as new as possible, of course. (Just to filter down the options, I decided to stick to Japanese brands, as a synonym for reliability)
  • Preferably white, it’s meant to be safer
  • Nice to have: alloy wheels make the whole car a bit lighter, which may be more fuel efficient, or so they tell me
  • I’m quite enamoured of indicators on mirrors. Possibly they are more visible to pedestrians, but in any case I just like them. I’m not sure why.
  • Daytime running lights are now a mandated European standard, apparently help safety, particularly with visibility to pedestrians. (I have fog lights on my current car. I don’t think I’ve ever used them.)

  What would fit the bill?

  Apart from HowSafeIsYourCar, you can also peruse the full MUARC report, though it’s a bit hard to read:

  

  Working out the costs of motoring, above, especially the real costs of purchase back in the day, and the money lost in depreciation, made me feel a lot better about shopping for a car in the $15,000 range, to get something as new as possible, and of course with a 5-star ANCAP rating.

  After talking to relatives, I concluded that everybody likes the car they drive. Stepfather likes Subaru; sister likes her Mazda 3; cousin likes his Mitsubishi Lancer. (All Japanese brands. Hmm.)

  After noting the high safety rating, I did start looking at Subaru Impreza for a while, but there aren’t that many of them about for sale, and you have to spend well over twenty grand to get an almost new model with those nice indicators on mirrors and daytime running lights. Not that they’re essential by any means.

  I was also a little nervous about reviews which remarked that Subarus can be a little fussy on maintenance. Which means to minimise risk it’d be a pricey dealer service every time.

  So, back to the Carsales web site to do some more searching and researching. (By the way, the Carsales mobile web site lets you search for specific feature in a car, such as Cruise Control. I can’t see that feature on the desktop/standard web site.)

  I just bought a new car

  While out for a walk the other morning, looking at various cars I saw along the way, I wondered:

  Considering I spent over $19,000 (in 2018 dollars) on my first car, back when I had relatively little money, what about upping the budget a bit so I could stop compromising so much and get everything on my list?

  I am lucky enough that I can (just) afford to do this.

  

  An ad caught my eye: a demonstration model 2017 Mitsubishi Lancer for $18,500 (drive away price). Retail price for the 2018 model (in automatic) is $21,990.

  I like the size and the style (though I could do without the “bum enhancement”).

  $18,500 is more expensive than I’d like, but let’s look again at the maths:

  • Servicing on a used car could easily be $500-800 per year, and is often wildly unpredictable, especially the older the vehicle gets. But many brands of new car have capped price servicing. In this case, it’s a maximum of $230 per year for the first three years, so potentially a saving of at least $750 over three years, but even beyond that, repairs are hopefully going to be cheaper on a newer vehicle. (Plus warranty.)
  • A new car also comes with a full year of rego, saving up to $800 — many of the used cars available only have a few months
  • It’s new, so there’s no need to pay for a pre-purchase inspection, saving about $225-250
  • It also comes with four years of roadside assistance, saving about $50 per year (for budget roadside assistance companies) to $105 (the base level for RACV) per year

  So in the first four years, potentially a saving of around $2000. And given how much I hate buying cars, I can keep a brand new car for longer.

  Suddenly buying a discounted demo car at about $18K seems not a bad proposition compared to a used car at $15K, so I went and test drove it. I quite liked it. It seems odd that the Lancer is being discontinued (and not replaced) at the end of 2018.

  Anyway, I decided to go for it. Although it was a demo car, the dealer said it’s actually brand new, sitting in a holding yard somewhere until it can be delivered.

  Trade-in? Worth almost nothing, unfortunately, a couple of hundred dollars. But I knew that going in, so at least I wasn’t disappointed.

  But we did that little haggle dance around the final “changeover” price, and I did manage to get a bit of a discount, and floor mats thrown in.

  The main guy handed me over to a lady who organised payment and delivery, and also offered some extra options like tinting, paint protection… They made the mistake of giving me a minute or two to Google and find this Choice article: Useless car extras revealed, leading me to opt out of those.

  So anyway, I’m getting a new car. And not just a new car, but a new car.

  It arrives in about two weeks.

  Hopefully by the time I’m done with it in a decade or more, electric cars will be plentiful and cheap, and/or public transport will be at a standard where I don’t need to drive regularly on the weekend.

  • Niggling doubt: rather than a sedan, should I have bought another hatch? Will I be cursing myself the next time I need to bring home flatpacks from Ikea? Mind you the specs say it does have the 60/40 split folding seats
  • Of course, having been researching cars for months, every online advert I now see is for cars.

  PS: This crash test between a 1998 Corolla and a 2015 Corolla shows the value of newer cars with improved safety features:

  …That said, it’s notable that older cars often have poor safety ratings now, but did well in ANCAP tests at the time. They don’t have the 1998 Corolla ANCAP results still available, but the 2009 model scored 5/5 at the time, but only rates 2/5 now based on accident statistics.

• Club Troppo Centrist strategic voting
  

  This image was picked from a bunch of images on Google Image. This post is not about Canada. If you’re interested in Canada, it’s unlikely you’ll get ANYTHING out of this post. Canada is just incidental to this post. It is very cold there a lot of the time though, so it’s odd more people live there than live here. But that’s just the kind of provincial small mindedness that Troppo readers hate, but in which Troppo’s leadership collective CONSTANTLY INDULGE. SHAME.

  This is my response to Peter Dempster’s proposals.

  I can see one important merit of them. Electoral politics is inherently polarising because electoral politics involves politicians beating other politicians to qualify to be politicians in the first place – by getting into parliament – and then joining the team that helped them get to parliament in beating the other team. So it’s good to have stabilising influences such as what’s been proposed.

  But while I like this intention, it seems to me that the idea has some difficulties intellectually and has no chance practically. The results of the survey that Peter quotes are interesting and informative, but I don’t think they should be read naïvely.¹ For instance 45 percent of people say they’d consider voting for a new centrist party, but we know how many people do vote that way when people try to establish such parties.

  This leaves aside the question of where the ‘centre’ is. For me the ALP are a thoroughly centrist party. The concrete policy decisions the Government is making so far are relatively centrist also, but the right now has the problem the left had from the 1960s to the around the mid 1980s, which is that they have an unreasonable faction. ² In the same vein, I’m not sure how easy it is to pick a single dimension of ‘centrism’. For instance on military matters there’s nothing centrist about me. I’m in favour of doing almost anything to avoid getting into a war. Not anything – I’m not a pacifist – but almost anything. There’s nothing centrist about that.

  Moreover I’m quite left wing when it comes to income distribution, but allergic to the self-righteousness of the left. I don’t hold this against them personally, because the more I’ve thought about politics in the way I now think about it, the more I blame the system not the victim. Self-righteousness works politically. It works to recruit and hold adherents, and rev them up against their opponents. Being more low key and resigned about things in one’s manner doesn’t.

  On the practical side, I also don’t think political journalists know much at all. They hang around parliament and engage in lots of pub-talk. Then they continue the pub-talk on Insiders, and Outsiders and Leftsiders and Rightsiders and Purplesiders and Lemon Merangsiders. I think we have a pretty good idea of who’s a moderate and who’s not from political journalists’ and others’ reporting right now.

  More generally, I think the idea has precisely no chance of going anywhere. Even if quite a few people could give it a lot of public profile. The engine of political engagement is emotion, not reason. The proposal embodies an entirely abstract idea, and people routinely fail to defend abstract ideas at the ballot box.³

  In speaking with people who are seasoned campaigners on both sides about the idea of a party based on giving sortition or random selection a bigger presence in our democracy – for instance by selecting the upper house or some part of it by lot – their advice to me is that it would definitely bomb unless one had squared off some policies to campaign on – which, to be consistent, one imagines one would do with some randomly selected or otherwise representative body.

  If one campaigned for this, most people wouldn’t get it. And most of those that did have lots of other things on their mind. Do they want to vote Green? Which of the parties do they feel happiest with? Do they feel vengeful towards the existing lot for the way their electricity prices have gone up? In that context abstract ideas typically cut across those considerations. If I help ‘centrists’, will that get my electricity prices down or should I vote for the candidate who says that working families are stretched to breaking point by rising electricity prices and we have to Eaze the Skwese?

  There’s also the chicken and egg problem. Lots of small businesses start thinking that their idea is so great that people will beat a pathway to their door. I know because I thought people would queue up to get the same home loans from Peach Home Loans that they could get from Westpac or any other lender. It turns out that, not only is it very difficult to get known, but even then, there are various psychological reasons why people are wary and will head down to their local branch. Still it plugs away in its low key way. Does anyone out there want a home loan? Our Going Troppo Liberator Loan comes with free access to Troppo for the duration of the loan – with a home loan from the bank of your choice and $1,000 in your bank account.

  Finally, where is the evidence that strategic voting of the kind Peter envisages can take off in a substantial way? That’s a genuine question, I don’t know, but I would expect it’s a pretty boutique kind of operation (though the graph the Troppo elves chose to illustrate the piece suggests otherwise, so perhaps I’m wrong). Perhaps more to the point,  I can’t really envisage any way that’s practical and consistent with our traditions of preventing large scale cheating. If someone agrees to vote in a deal with me, how do I know they’ve done so? And how will that effect my confidence in them and theirs in me?

  1. I hope you like that little gizmo over the “i” in ‘naïve’. I do! But I digress. ↩
  2.  I was going to say it’s an ideological faction and to some extent it is, but that’s dignifying it somewhat. Opposition to greenhouse gas abatement isn’t really ideological, it’s part tactical and part a reaction to another ideology which one might call ‘political correctness’ – anyway, that’s just a quibble – not very interesting. . ↩
  3. My favourite example is the election of 1977 when there was a small swing away from the Fraser Government after its landslide win in 1975. One Liberal MP had a swing to him. Phillip Lynch who’d been engaged in various shady land deals (I may be being unfair here, he may have been innocent, but there was a fair smell about him at the time as I recall.) ↩

July 04, 2018

• Club Troppo The Rise of China and dealing with American grief.

  Like the world today, Europe in the 19^th century witnessed major shifts in the balance of power, with new technologies changing how life was lived. Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian, saw opportunities in that chaos. He unified the warring German principalities in 1870 via an unexpected war on France. He modernised Germany so that it was the industrial powerhouse of Europe at the start of the 20^th century.

  He achieved his aims by lying, cajoling, threatening, invading, persuading, networking, and analysing. He modestly said of his own achievements:

  “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.”

  How would someone like Bismarck have viewed God’s major strides in our time, the rise of China?

  The rise of China will inevitably lead to the emergence of two competing power blocks in world politics. On the one hand there will be China and its allies, on the other the West and its allies. Some countries will initially try to stay neutral or play the two major blocks off each other, but the smaller ones will be easy prey for the two power blocks to force into a choice, so they either unite in a third alliance or pick a side.

  The rise of China raises obvious questions about alliances and less obvious ones about emotions.

  The alliance questions are obvious: India would naturally fall in the camp of the West, so how would we prevent it slipping away? Korea and Russia could go either way, so what would sway them and what role could they be offered in the West? Should we try to delay countries who naturally belong into the China block, like Vietnam, from switching? Would three blocks be more stable than two? Can we keep the conflict relatively cordial or is some kind of low-level proxy-war inevitable? This is the obvious power-play stuff and the relevant scenarios will occupy thousands of analysts in both the West and China right this moment.

  Bismarck excelled in power-play but thought deeper and considered the dynamics of group emotions.  The one I think we should watch out for is the grief that the Americans have to go through in order to come to terms with their smaller role. The West has not considered this issue yet, but I think it will dictate much of geopolitical life this century.

  Consider the many ways in which the Americans will feel pain. Their military bases will be closed in the countries that switch to China, and their culture will be humiliated. Their cherished truths, pushed by their media, will no longer be the truths that others buy into as their grandeur fades. Their banks will be challenged such that the world financial system will not be dominated by them. Their internet companies will be taxed by allies and their technological inventions copied shamelessly without payment. Their corporate and political leaders will feel their power and influence reduce.

  Americans as individuals will notice this when they travel abroad and taken less seriously. Their culture will be less admired and copied, which will mean the rest of the world will feel stranger to them, less welcoming. American tourists will have to watch their step more, and the brain drain to the US will reduce as American education will be downgraded in status.

  The Americans are a very proud people, who have enjoyed a 100 years of being at the top of the world political tree, and 200 years of bossing around other countries in their own backyard. That is a long period of dominance to lose. They will feel intense pain and, after that, intense anger.

  Britain and France have shown us that grief over a lost position of pre-eminence can last longer than 100 years and can motivate elites to do really stupid things.

  France was pre-eminent around 1800 and since then has been in continuous relative decline. Its wounded pride motivated it to seed the second world war by inflicting the humiliating treaty of Versailles on the Germans, one of the worst political mistakes ever made. The grief of the French enabled the rise of Hitler and cost the world 60 million lives.

  Britain resented its loss of influence enough to bottle up Germany in the early 20^th century, a major factor in the outbreak of WWI. Its reluctance to accept historical shifts gave us unnecessary disasters like the Suez crisis. Even now, a century after it lost its pre-eminence, many Brits delude themselves that Britain will regain some of its former stature if it breaks with the European Union.

  So if we owe devastating wars and disruptions to the British and French elites pining for lost glory, what can we expect the grief of the Americans to cost?

  We face a century of American grieving over its lost position. We have only just entered the denial stage. What is yet to come is pain, followed by anger. Only after that anger can there be acceptance and bargaining.

  What can we do to minimise the cost of American grief?

• Daniel Bowen Where are you really from?

  I found SBS’s “Where Are You Really From” to be compelling viewing.

  If you don’t look ethnic, you won’t know the experience of people asking where you’re from — and not taking “Sydney” for an answer.

  They don’t want to know where you’re from. They want to know where your family originated.

  The whole series had some powerful stories, but it was the first episode that particularly struck a chord, as host Michael Hing visited the Chinese community in Bendigo.

  Not that I have any connections to Bendigo. But as with the people interviewed, I get my half-Chinese looks from family who came to Australia before Federation — farther back than many white Australians.

  I grew up somewhat isolated from any cousins or uncles/aunts or grandparents, and in those circumstances you can easily assume that your family’s background story is unique. It’s not. Suddenly seeing a group of people who have shared many of the same experiences was not just eye-opening, it was quite emotional.

  My jaw dropped when I realised just how common it was for Chinese immigrants in the 1800s to have their names messed up by officials.

  My grandfather’s name ended up back to front. This happened all the time. (Rather than try and fight it, he just went along with it. Only one of my uncles bothered to change it back.)

  Walking across country to either avoid Chinese-specific taxes, or just because you’d landed at the wrong place and didn’t have any money, was also apparently commonplace, and something that some of my ancestors experienced.

  We ended up watching the episode again in a family group, with some verbal dissection afterwards.

  While the first episode really struck a chord, the others were worth watching too – in fact watching the second, I felt the situation reversed somewhat, with my usual assumptions about Sikhs in turbans flipped as soon as you heard their Australian accents.

  Whatever your family background, this is well worth a look.

  • All three episodes are on SBS On Demand

July 03, 2018

• The Northern Myth Reforming Northern Territory self-government – Reconciling the Two Towers of Power – Part Two

  

  This is the second part of a two part guest post by Darwin-based legal academic Ken Parish* that was presented at the Northern Territory Archives Centre in Darwin on Thursday 28 June 2018. You can read the second part here.

  Reform of governance of Indigenous corporations

  On the one hand, at the same time as the Martin Territory government was enacting its super shires legislation (it came into force on 4 September 2007) the Howard federal government was introducing its “new broom” regulatory authority for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations now called the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC).

  Its avowed aim was to radically modernise the regulation and oversight of Aboriginal corporations and reduce waste, mismanagement and corruption by updating governance standards, educating board members about their governance obligations, and implementing early intervention strategies well before a corporation’s maladministration reached crisis levels. ORIC appears to have been extremely successful in achieving those aims. Had the Territory government adequately consulted the federal government about the ORIC reforms it might have realised that requiring all Aboriginal community local council bodies to bring themselves under the Federal regime and submit to ORIC prudential supervision would have been a much better policy solution than their wholesale abolition.

  Incidentally, there is an argument, which in my view is quite a strong one, that the Martin/Henderson government’s super-shires scheme (which continues to operate albeit with some amendments), which confiscated all the assets and undertaking of locally controlled Aboriginal community councils and transferred them to the new “super-shires” by Ministerial action, is “constitutionally” invalid because it breaches both the prohibition on acquisition of property on unjust terms (section NT(S-G)A and the prohibition on Ministerial action which affects rights in relation to Aboriginal land. For reasons best known to themselves the major land councils chose not to challenge the legislation.

  A central Australian remote community council (see: Amoonguna Community Inc & Ors v Northern Territory of Australia) sought to challenge it but was prevailed on to settle before hearing despite winning most of the preliminary skirmishes. The Territory Government ground them into submission by seemingly endless interlocutory applications which the Government could afford while the Amoonguna community could not.

  The Howard/Brough “Emergency” Response

  But then again, it is likely that the Howard federal government and Minister Mal Brough would not have been helpful or informative even if Clare Martin or Elliot McAdam had tried to consult them. Because at the same time as Martin and McAdam were introducing super shires and the federal government was implementing its ORIC reforms (the ORIC reforms came into force on 1 July 2007), Howard and Brough were also secretly plotting their NT Emergency Response under the pretext of addressing a crisis of child sexual abuse in remote Territory Aboriginal communities revealed by the Little Children Are Sacred report.

  In the eyes of many, the Emergency Response was mostly just a calculated political wedge designed in a desperate bid to salvage the political fortunes of Prime Minister John Howard against a much more popular federal Labor leader in Kevin Rudd.

  The Emergency Response was even more authoritarian and anti-democratic than the Martin government’s super shires scheme. It involved sending in the troops to enforce a federal takeover of 50% of the Territory’s landmass against the wishes of both the Territory Labor government and its Aboriginal population. The Emergency Response was announced on 21 June 2007.

  Howard and Brough no doubt calculated that the Rudd Labor Opposition would feel compelled to reject this outrageous intervention and the Coalition would then march into the 2007 federal election masquerading as the champions of abused children in Aboriginal communities by contrast with a Labor Party under the sway of left-wing apologists for perverts. But Kevin Rudd didn’t fall for it. He happily embraced the Emergency Response and eventually adopted it as his own.

  The rest is history.

  In contrast to Rudd, Clare Martin didn’t happily accept the Emergency Response at all. She vehemently opposed it. After all, her government was in the process of adopting the well-considered recommendations of the Little Children Are Sacred report, which would almost certainly have worked had they ever been implemented because, unlike Howard’s Emergency Response, they were the result of careful consultation with affected communities.

  According to Clare Martin at last month’s NT Governance Summit, she urgently rang John Howard in an attempt to arrange a meeting to sort out the apparent misunderstanding. Howard refused to meet her. In pragmatic political terms Rudd’s unprincipled embrace of the Howard Intervention proved very successful, at least in the short run. Rudd defeated Howard at the federal election held on 24 November 2007. Both Howard and Brough lost their seats in Parliament. It is alleged that Rudd phoned Clare Martin the next day and told her he expected her to resign as Chief Minister for the greater good of the ALP, and be replaced by her opportunist colleague Paul Henderson who was just as willing as Rudd to eat Howard’s policy poo sandwich and implement the Emergency Response.

  Martin denies that the phone call occurred but in any event she resigned, Henderson replaced her and managed to win the 2008 Territory election by the skin of his teeth, but then lost the 2012 election as a direct result of his public stewardship of both the super shires scheme and the Emergency Response. Some would say it was belated political karma.

  Further reflection

  Of course that karma observation flows from an implicit value judgement that the policy responses of John Howard and Mal Brough: and to a lesser extent Clare Martin, Kevin Rudd and Paul Henderson, were driven by cynical political calculation. A more charitable and probably more accurate evaluation is that a significant contributor to those policy responses was a genuinely horrified if misguided reaction to the horrendous levels of family and community violence and gross dysfunction revealed first by Tony Jones and Lateline and then graphically confirmed by the Little Children Are Sacred report.

  It was undeniably true that the appalling situation is in large part a consequence of the “rivers of grog”, illicit drugs, gambling and endemic unemployment so powerfully described in Little Children Are Sacred. That was never really a secret to anyone who bothered to look, but Rex Wild and Pat Anderson did everyone a favour by confronting the politicians with the harsh reality in such a stark manner that they could no longer afford to keep ignoring it.

  The mistake the politicians made (although Clare Martin was an honourable exception) was to conclude that this very long-standing “emergency” demanded that the white politicians and bureaucrats urgently devise and impose their own “expert” punitive, paternalistic policy solutions on those recalcitrant, irresponsible black fellas who wouldn’t even protect their own children from the thugs and paedophiles in their midst. It was a sort of Bill Leak-style racist assumption writ large and imposed as government policy, and it was grossly offensive and utterly unfair to Aboriginal Territorians.

  Most Aboriginal people are far more acutely aware of the problems in their own communities than any white politician or bureaucrat. They live with the consequences every day and battle against them as best they can with the inadequate resources they have available. What they needed (and still need) was mutually respectful, cooperative, well resourced, community-based, “human centred” policy responses. Decades of research and practical experience show that those are the only sorts of programs that work. What they got instead, with the Emergency Response and to a slightly lesser extent the super shires scheme, was a military invasion of their communities which imposed ill-considered paternalistic solutions on Aboriginal people who were apparently conceived by the politicians as naughty children who had to be forced to do the right thing and whose own views and lived experience were unworthy of consideration. It is hardly surprising that the Emergency Response did not work, nor that its rebadged and only slightly less paternalistic successor Closing the Gap has been only marginally more successful. Aboriginal affairs policy remains blighted by the New Paternalism ushered in by the Howard Intervention.

  Nothing much will change until the underlying arrogant assumptions and attitudes are revised.

  Reconciling the Two Towers – Voice, Treaty, Truth

  It is generally considered that a major reason why Shane Stone’s statehood referendum failed in 1998 was because of opposition from Aboriginal organisations (especially land councils) and their supporters. That opposition in turn was to a significant extent due to a perception that Aboriginal interests were better protected by remaining under ultimate Commonwealth control. Given that approximately fifty percent of the NT’s land mass is now Aboriginal land (much of it under Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (“ALRNTA”) inalienable title), there is no doubt that statehood without patriation to NT control of the ALRNTA would be very unsatisfactory.

  Moreover, strong land council opposition to any such move remains evident, as shown by immediate adverse land council public comment on the announcement of COAG support for a renewed statehood process in 2015. Finding a way to cut through this Catch 22 is essential to the success of any statehood proposal, and indeed to successful self-government reform irrespective of whether the Territory ever becomes a state. Entrenching Aboriginal land rights and other rights in a constitutional bill of rights would of course be effective, but is very unlikely to meet with either political favour or success in any referendum.

  There is quite widespread opposition to constitutional bills of rights on both sides of politics, and inclusion of any such proposal in a referendum would almost certainly doom it to failure.

  A treaty would also help.

  My idea instead builds on a proposal by Tony McAvoy SC, Australia’s first Indigenous senior counsel, and more recently adopted in the Uluru Statement From the Heart, for a First Nations Representative Assembly at a national level in conjunction with negotiating a treaty (or series of treaties). At Northern Territory level such an Assembly would be complementary to the negotiation and implementation of a treaty between the Northern Territory government and the Territory’s First Nations, a development to which Labor Chief Minister Michael Gunner has indicated he is receptive. Canada already has an Assembly of First Nations which plays an increasingly prominent part in its governance.

  Controversial Indigenous leader Noel Pearson has also argued for such a body in the federal context, although he apparently has in mind a purely advisory Aboriginal representative assembly. Pearson argues that such a body would have significant political if not binding legal authority:

  A consultative body of Indigenous Australians would offer non-binding advice. At the same time it could wield political authority. The people, through a referendum, would have established the consultative body. It would derive some authority from that fact alone. It could use its position as an institution of the constitution to demand an explanation whenever government seeks to ignore one of its reports.

  However, Aboriginal Territorians constitute a significant proportion of the Territory’s population. Because of their legitimate demand that their land rights be securely protected, the sort of First Nations Assembly we need here is not a mere advisory council of elders, but an Assembly forming part of the Territory’s Parliament that would have real determinative and decision-making powers in relation to Territory laws and policies vitally and directly affecting Aboriginal people.

  In the Territory context such a body could be established straight away by ordinary legislation. It would be purely advisory in most respects, as Pearson has in mind. However, the First Nations Representative Assembly would have veto rights over any Territory law directly affecting Aboriginal land ownership and management. In other words it would function in that respect as a true Upper House of Parliament. Aboriginal land would be more securely protected under such a system than it is now, because any Territory bill directly affecting rights of ownership or management of Aboriginal land could only become law if passed by the First Nations Representative Assembly sitting as the upper house of the Territory Parliament.

  The Assembly would fulfil an even more powerful role when or if the Territory achieves statehood and control of the ALRNTA is “patriated” to the new state. Regulations (see Regulation 4(2)(b)) under the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 (Cth) already contain restrictions on the ability of the Territory Parliament or Executive to interfere with ALRNTA land rights and management of Aboriginal land. However those restrictions were arguably ignored by the Legislative Assembly when the Martin/Henderson Labor government enacted its “super shires” scheme in 2007-8.

  A First Nations Representative Assembly sitting as the upper house of the Territory Parliament would ensure that this could not happen in future. Many Aboriginal Territorians have historically seen the Federal Parliament as the best guarantor of secure land rights. That is understandable given the history since self-government in 1978 of total opposition to all land claims by previous CLP governments at Territory level. However, the Howard federal government more recently stripped away traditional owners’ rights to control their own land as part of the Intervention or “Emergency Response” legislation in 2007, and the Rudd/Gillard Labor government adopted that punitive, paternalistic approach when it achieved government.

  As a result, it is apparent at least to some Aboriginal Territorians that no political party and no level of government can be trusted to protect Indigenous rights. Only secure legislative and institutional protections, along with a treaty capable of enforcement through the courts, can provide secure rights to self-determination. Indeed that approach is the basis in political philosophy of the system of separation and division of law-making and executive powers and broader democratic checks and balances that underpins western “liberal democratic constitutionalism” of which Australia is a part.

  This realisation of the need for secure institutional protections (rather than just relying on whitefella goodwill that may give way to other priorities when it suits the politicians) informs the development in Arnhem Land of the Yolngu Nations Assembly. Recently elected Independent MLA for Nhulunbuy Mark Yingiya Guyula plays a prominent role in that Assembly. Its objectives include a treaty. A First Nations Representative Assembly that is a formal part of the Territory’s structure of government should also be an important part of those institutional protections.

  It would give a treaty real enforceable “teeth” because the Assembly would also have the legislative veto powers of an upper house of the Territory Parliament in relation to any law directly affecting treaty rights negotiated and agreed between the Northern Territory government and the Territory’s First Nations clans.

  While the structure and membership of the Assembly would be determined after careful consultation and consideration, one possible model that may serve as a starting place is that it would meet several times per year, its members being paid sitting fees (not a salary). It would meet either in Parliament House itself (with conversion of the NT Library space to its designed function as a second house of Parliament) or perhaps in the old Chan Building across the square.

  Membership might initially consist of all current Aboriginal MLAs and an Aboriginal representative of each of the four Territory land councils and each of the three Aboriginal legal aid organisations. Thus it would have something like 13 or 14 members. The First Nations Representative Assembly could be implemented immediately by ordinary Territory legislation, but that would be just an advisory council of elders if that approach was adopted.

  Nevertheless it might be worth creating it in that way initially so that people get used to it and can see that it is a positive development not a threat. The federal Parliament would need to pass amendments to the Territory’s “constitution”, the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 (Cth), for the Assembly to be given the partial determinative powers of an upper house of the Territory Parliament. However there is no reason why the federal Parliament would refuse those amendments if there was a bipartisan political will among Territory politicians that it should be done. Implementing a First Nations Representative Assembly would be visionary, practical and enlightened, not only on a local but a national and international level.

  It would be a decisive step towards bringing Aboriginal Territorians into the NT mainstream as real and equal participants in Territory growth and development. With Aboriginal people constituting one-third of the population and owning fifty percent of the land, realistically the Territory can never achieve its full economic or social potential without some such dramatic and effective process.

  =======================

  The post Reforming Northern Territory self-government – Reconciling the Two Towers of Power – Part Two appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• The Northern Myth Reforming Northern Territory self-government – Reconciling the Two Towers of Power – Part One

  This is the first part of a two part guest post by Darwin-based legal academic Ken Parish* that was presented at the Northern Territory Archives Centre in Darwin on Thursday 28 June 2018. You can read the second part here.

  Reforming Northern Territory self-government – Reconciling the Two Towers of Power

  One of the biggest problems about NT self-government is that very little thought was given back in 1978 to what legal and institutional relationships needed to exist between the new government, land councils and traditional owners to allow for a smoothly functioning polity. Those relationships remain confused and ill-defined.

  There are effectively no structures or institutions tying government, land councils and traditional owners together in a defined or workable manner, even though Aboriginal Territorians own more than fifty percent of the Northern Territory and can largely prevent development on that land if they wish.

  Native title had been recognised over 238,120km2 or approximately 17 per cent of land and waters in the Northern Territory. In December 2015, native title had been recognised in 78 of the 79 consent claimant determinations and 8 of the 9 litigated claimant determinations, with a further 86 claims awaiting finalisation. At that time, 19 registered prescribed bodies corporate had been set up to hold on trust or manage that land on behalf of the native title holders in the Northern Territory, and there were a further 39 successful determinations of native title for which the prescribed body corporate was yet to be advised. The Northern Territory also has a land rights regime, brought in with the enactment of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (Cth) (ALRA) in 1976. This was the first legislation in Australia to establish a land claim process by which traditional owners could claim land. Since then approximately 50 percent of the land in the NT has become Aboriginal land in addition to 85 percent of the coastline.*

  Yet the Territory government and land councils each have significant real world authority over the same land mass, and therefore real roles in important decisions made about land use, tenure and development on half of the Territory’s land, which in turn comprises twenty percent of Australia’s land mass. In constitutional terms the Territory actually possesses a complex, evolved but largely unplanned system of separation of powers between two levels of government (federal and territory), land councils and traditional owners (customary law authority structures) which isn’t constitutionally or legislatively defined, and whose interrelationship isn’t clearly understood by any of the participants. It’s hardly surprising that it doesn’t work very well.

  Although the ALR(NT)A was the product of detailed consultation and evaluation by the Woodward Royal Commission, the same wasn’t true for the Northern Territory (Self-Government Act 1978 (“NT(S-G)A”) :

  In 1947 a Legislative Council was established and comprised six elected and seven appointed members. It was not until 1974 that a fully elected Legislative Assembly was established.
  3 2.5 During the 1975 federal election campaign, caretaker Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser made a surprise announcement that the Territory would be granted ‘statehood in five years’. In 1977, an interdepartmental Committee on Northern Territory Constitutional Development, in consultation with the Northern Territory Cabinet, decided to defer the issue of statehood until the achievement of self-government.
  The Northern Territory was granted self-government in 1978 with the passage of the Commonwealth Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978.**

  Longstanding former Chief Minister Marshall Perron has subsequently commented that, although there was discussion about postponing statehood, there was very little meaningful consultation about what sort of constitutional model of self-government would be enacted by the Commonwealth. What we ended up with was a Canberra-drafted concoction that was essentially a “cookie-cutter” Westminster colonial constitution but with no upper house, no constitutionally entrenched rights or freedoms except a right to compensation for property acquisition on unjust terms, and with significant restrictions on the new Territory Government’s powers. There was no express reference to Aboriginal Territorians in the NT(S-G)A and only scant reference in the Regulations.

  Whether such a model was appropriate to a place of the Territory’s population (200,000 people spread over 1/5 of Australia’s land mass), and at a stage of social and economic development with a very narrow economic base and stark disparities of wealth, culture and customs between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Territorians is at the very least questionable.
  The lack of carefully designed and broadly agreed governance structures means that negotiating business and development deals on Aboriginal land is much more difficult, time-consuming and expensive than elsewhere. As a direct result significantly less economic activity takes place.

  Moreover, I would argue that the failure of the Commonwealth to consult meaningfully and implement an appropriate self-government model has entrenched a racial and cultural conflict model which drastically impacted the first 20 years of self-government and continues to cast a deep shadow over present-day politics. The “sunset” clause for new ALR(NT)A claims took effect in 1998 along with the Native Title Act 1998 (Cth); together those enactments largely put to rest exaggerated fears that Aborigines were about to claim people’s suburban backyards.

  The Two Towers of Power – Government and land councils

  The Territory government and land councils represent competing but largely unreconciled major sources of power over the same land (more than half of the Territory). The two central pieces of “constitutional” federal legislation which establish them (the Northern Territory (Self-Government Act 1978 (“NT(S-G)A”) and Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976) (“ALR(NT)A”) contain only rudimentary provisions spelling out how those Towers of Power should interact with each other.

  Aboriginal traditional owners control more than 50% of the Territory’s land mass and 85% of its coastline, but do so indirectly through a plethora of Aboriginal Land Trusts which are in turn controlled by the land councils.
  Aboriginal land is inalienable freehold private land and cannot be acquired or resumed by the Northern Territory Government or otherwise interfered with by Northern Territory legislation or exercise of executive power. Regulation 4(2)(b) of the Northern Territory Self-Government Regulations expressly provides that Ministers have no executive authority in relation to “rights in respect of Aboriginal Land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976”.
  Moreover, Aboriginal traditional owners have a right of veto over all mining activity on ALR(NT)A land. See Part IV of the Act.
  However, the Territory Minister can issue permits allowing public servants, teachers, police and some others to enter Aboriginal land for official purposes. See Aboriginal Land Act (NT).

  Land councils and traditional owners

  However, the relationship between land councils and the traditional owners they represent/manage is also fairly ill-defined, despite the fact that the ALR(NT)A is largely the product of the Woodward Royal Commission established by the Whitlam Labor Government in 1973-74. It was one of numerous Whitlam government initiatives that the Fraser Coalition Government followed through and enacted.

  Under the ALR(NT)A Aboriginal traditional owners can only exercise power over their own land via the agency of the land councils, whether they like it or not, and quite a few of them don’t. Exactly which TOs the land councils consult, whose wishes they regard as binding, and to whom they distribute mining royalties and in what proportions, are all quite opaque to many traditional owners.

  The land councils are obliged to act in accordance with the wishes of traditional owners and after consulting other affected Aboriginal people. See for example section 19(5) ALR(NT)A.

  Some years ago the land councils managed to convince the federal government that they should have an unchecked statutory discretion as to whether they maintain a register under section 24 of the ALR(NT)A setting out who they regard as the traditional owners of a given area of land. The word “shall” was converted to “may”. It appears that the land councils mostly choose not to do so. That gives them considerable unchecked and potentially arbitrary power. I’m not suggesting land councils do not make good faith attempts to consult and implement the wishes of the right people. But the lack of transparency and clear accountability mechanisms is a big problem that in my view we can’t afford to keep ignoring.

  Groups of traditional owners regularly attempt to move away from the big land councils and form their own “breakaway” land councils because they don’t believe the existing ones are representing their interests. However, despite the fact that the Land Rights Act provides for the formation of new land councils, successive federal governments have chosen to ignore those demands. It’s more convenient for governments only to deal with the large land council bureaucracies and leave to them the messy job of reconciling often fractious disputes between traditional owner groups about land tenure and development issues.

  Even though the land councils’ efforts may not accord with any recognisable version of democratic deliberation and may even play fast and loose with customary law authority structures, governments prefer not to disturb this ill-designed status quo. Former NT senior counsel and now Federal Court Judge John Reeves researched and wrote a report some years ago in 1998 commissioned by the Howard government. Among other things it recommended that serious consideration be given to creating smaller land councils whose membership equated more closely to traditional authority structures.

  While I don’t agree with everything in the Reeves report I certainly think that this recommendation should have been taken more seriously. Inalienable freehold title is in some respects an illusory form of ownership when it is impossible to make any meaningful decisions about the use of your land without the permission or direction of the Federal Minister, a land council consisting of Aboriginal owners of up to half of the Territory (of which your land is a tiny part), and especially the land council’s employed bureaucracy whose views and advice unavoidably inform and sometimes dictate the decisions the land council will take about your land. Imagine if you couldn’t build or conduct any business on your suburban block of land without the permission of all the local residents of the surrounding suburbs for kilometres around.

  The entire structure of the ALR(NT)A is inherently paternalistic and patronising: traditional owners are legislatively deemed to be too childlike, naïve or gullible to be trusted to make their own decisions about their own land.
  Poorly designed governance structures impact jobs and growth directly and in a major way. It’s not that Aboriginal Territorians don’t want jobs or development for themselves or their kids, it’s just that they also insist on maintaining their land, law, language and culture. Those aims aren’t incompatible, but they require not only mutual respect and listening to each other, but also suitable governance structures, institutions and clear rules on which we can all agree. The vehicle of a treaty or treaties is the most obvious and perhaps only one that can achieve those aims. For anyone who truly wants more jobs, growth and development for the Territory, knee-jerk opposition to even the possibility of a treaty is just not sensible.

  Super-shires and the Howard/Brough Intervention

  An article by Amos Aikman in The Weekend Australian is especially noteworthy from a Territory governance perspective:

  A policy designed to reward indigenous business owners with easier access to government contracts is instead exposing taxpayers to fraud and corruption, including serious misconduct by public officials, whistleblowers warn.
  In a letter to the head of the Prime Minister’s department, a group of concerned public servants say the indigenous procurement policy is enriching a few “already privileged and wealthy” indigenous businesspeople, allowing large corporations to escape competitive tendering through “sham joint ventures” and allowing departmental staff to commit “a form of corruption” by handing lucrative work to close friends. …

  “Using your position as a commonwealth official to promote the business interests of close friends is corrupt. It does not change that your friends are indigenous,” the letter states. “This is corruption dressed up as indigenous engagement. It is hard to avoid the ¬conclusion that years spent ¬socialising with … are paying ¬lucrative business dividends.”

  The whistleblowers say the IPP encourages “cosy arrangements” to flourish in an environment with “insufficient controls … to prevent mismanagement of public ¬resources”.
  The story reminds me of my own experiences in providing legal advice to a variety of Territory Aboriginal communities and associations over a period of almost 20 years until I came to CDU as an academic. It sometimes seemed as if white employees and Aboriginal traditional owners were taking it in turns to raid the public funding biscuit tin. Standards of integrity, governance and accountability were woefully inadequate and prudent management standards were poorly understood at best.

  Super-shires

  It appears to have been similar concerns which led the Martin/Henderson Territory Labor government to implement its notorious “super shires” Aboriginal local government amalgamation scheme in 2007-8. Sixty small Aboriginal community local council corporations had their assets confiscated and transferred to just eight new “super shire” or regional councils and were then abolished by Ministerial fiat.

  Although then Local Government Minister Elliot McAdam gave various rationales for the scheme, it appears that the dominant concern was very significant waste, mismanagement and even corruption in quite a few of the Aboriginal community local council bodies. However, at least in most communities poor administration flowed from a lack of understanding of “whitefella” bureaucratic structures and expectations, poor literacy and numeracy levels, and demands imposed on committee members by occasionally aggressive relatives demanding that they honour “kinship obligations” by sharing the cash and material bounty of the local club or community store.

  It was an entirely legitimate concern for a Territory government to have, but both the solution itself and the manner of its implementation were drastically ill-conceived and eventually led to the demise of the Henderson government in 2012 when Aboriginal people deserted it en masse and voted for the Country Liberals, in many cases for the first time ever.

  It was a classic example of authoritarian top-down imposition of radical policy change with little or no consultation with either the affected local communities or the federal government. Had they consulted local communities it would not have taken very long to discover that removing Aboriginal people’s rights to manage their own communities would result in white-hot anger although initially it only caused mass confusion, allowing new Labor Chief Minister Paul Henderson to limp across the line and win the 2008 election. As Ruth Elvin writes:

  There was a great deal of confusion about the nature of the reforms as expressed at meetings and in conversation with community members, particularly as the reforms took place at the same time as the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, also sometimes referred to as ‘the Intervention’), which was announced on 21 June 2007. Much of the time at local government transition meetings and community chief executive officer (CEO) meetings was taken up with questions about the impact of the NTER, particularly on housing, income and CDEP. It was only by March 2008 that residents of local communities were beginning to ask ‘This local government: is it good? What is it?’

  Had the Territory Labor government consulted the then Howard federal government they may perhaps have discovered that there was a better solution for endemic Aboriginal community waste, mismanagement and corruption, one that would not have involved wholesale removal of Aboriginal people’s rights to manage their own communities.

  But then again maybe not.

  * Native Title Information Handbook Northern Territory 2016, AIATSIS.

  ** A Heatley, Almost Australians: The Politics of Northern Territory Self-Government, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit Monograph, 1990, 63, 134-35.

  =======================

  * About Ken Parish: Ken Parish is a legal academic at Charles Darwin University, with research areas in public law (constitutional and administrative law) and teaching & learning theory and practice. He has been a legal academic for almost 12 years. Before that he ran a legal practice in Darwin for 15 years and was a Member of the NT Legislative Assembly for almost 4 years in the early 1990s.

   

  The post Reforming Northern Territory self-government – Reconciling the Two Towers of Power – Part One appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Club Troppo PETER DEMPSTER: A strategic voting proposal in defence of centrism
  

  Who is that man in the corner, and why is he watching you?

  Well folks, as you know, Club Troppo is the only website east of the whole damn Murray Darling system that has the reputation to attract the kind of high quality debate we’re in for tonight. So everyone, in your best ClupPony clobber, cop this debate. A nice fellow going by the name of Peter Dempster approached me and asked what I thought of his idea. I sent him a few dot points, but then thought that rather than expand, I’d set up a debate or discussion here. So I’m publishing this piece now and after you’ve had your fill of civility, we’ll launch another round when I work up my reaction.

  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fill in all the surveys that tell you (quite routinely and wrongly as it turns out) that, here at ClubPony we value your opinion. And then you’ll do it all over again.  Anyway, here’s Peter’s post.

  Most voters occupy the middle ground of politics; they are centrists.

  Statements about politics: Essential Poll, 18 July 2017	Agree	Disagree
  I wish both sides of politics would try to ‘meet each other in the middle’ more often	71%	6%
  I don’t personally identify with either “left wing” or “right wing” politics	50%	18%
  I would consider voting for a new “centrist” political party which takes ideas from both sides of politics	45%	14%

  We don’t need a new centrist party. Working with what we have, but voting smarter, centrist voters can force politicians to meet in the middle. To make it happen, however, they need expert advice from political journalists. Sports journalists provide a rough model for what political journalists need to do.

  Consider that sports journalists watch a lot of sport, talk to lots of fans, players and coaches, read and write about sport, argue about sport, may have played and coached. Journalists routinely distil that information, for the fans, by nominating a national team and arguing the case for who makes the final cut, who doesn’t. The process is part of the routine elevation – from club teams to national team – of the loyalties and hopes of sports fans.

  Political journalists watch a lot of politicking, see how issues play out, talk daily to politicians and their advisors, immerse themselves in polls, read and write about politics, argue about politics, have participated in politics or plan to. They could distil their knowledge by nominating a national political team, but don’t. They should, since it provides voters with critical information that is otherwise impossible to obtain. The sports model can be modified to preserve journalistic independence.

  Thus, at election time, the centrist voter may appeal to the journalist …

  Of the candidates nominated by the major political parties, nominate the slate of candidates, from both sides, that offers the best prospect of meeting in the middle, of cutting a deal that most voters can live with. We accept the uncertainties; your informed and considered opinion is all we ask.

  … responding constructively, the journalist ranks candidates for their ability meet in the middle. Let’s just say that candidates are ranked according to their ‘moderateness’ as revealed by their history of political words and actions, providing the basis for the elevation of voter loyalties and hopes – from parties to nation. To illustrate …

  Suppose there are 100 seats and 200 candidates, 100 from each side of politics. The journalist separately ranks each of the two slates, one to 100, according to moderateness. The centrist slate then selects itself; it’s a hybrid slate that takes the top 50 candidates from both sides. A sports journalist has the corresponding task, to rank the players. The sports team then selects itself – the top 11, 13 or 15, however many are required. The difference is that a political journalist provides two lists, separately ranking the candidates from each party. The centrist voter imposes the 50:50 split, taking the top 50 from both sides, and journalistic independence is preserved.

  Rankings will vary between journalists; that’s good. Let’s shine a light on moderation; debate how to assess the moderateness of politicians; look closely at the relative merits of candidates at the margin of the cut, either just in or just out. Expect a consensus ranking to emerge, such there is broad agreement about the relative moderateness of candidates.

  Journalists may apply complementary filters when ranking candidates – ability, experience, integrity, consistency and transparency. They may give weight to considerations of balance – more women, fewer lawyers, fewer from the finance and property sectors, more new blood and fewer old hands. Such variations are welcome, requiring only that journalists explain their approach.

  The centrist agenda can be variously interpreted. It enlists political journalists in a public examination of the work of preselection committees, marking both parties down for candidates who cannot get beyond their factional and party rivalries. It provides centrist voters with the information they need to informally swap votes across party lines, abandoning non-centrist candidates from their party and switching votes to centrist candidates from the opposing party. It upholds democratic principles: accepting ‘the will of the people’ regardless of one’s own views; electing representatives for their ability to investigate, discern and accomplish the will of the people. It applies selective pressure to processes of political recruitment, such that, longer term, qualities of ruthlessness, manipulation and aggression become less important to political success; more agreeable natures aspire to political careers.

  Democracy comes more easily to centrists; it’s their will that should prevail. Intentionally or not, however, the centrist gift to the non-centrist is precisely that democracy prevails – including of course, that opposing non-centrists will not prevail. Non-centrists, if also democrats, can cease representative hostilities with opposing non-centrists. Centrism is thus a political device that elevates all democrats, centrist and non-centrist alike, from party to nation.

  Plausibly, political behaviour will improve immediately that rankings and centrist slates begin to take shape, since many seats are threatened if five or ten percent of voters apply pressure where it matters. Many more would welcome the result. Many of us try to send a message via the minor parties but it’s a desperate and unconvincing tactic. Angry threats to ‘wreck the joint’ are also risky; the joint might get wrecked.

  The organisational requirements need thought; the centrist cause would need a media strategy and commensurate resources. The objective is clear, however, that voters understand the centrist option and are somehow handed a centrist how-to-vote card on election day.

  But first things first; will political journalists respond to the call, enabling centrists to distil their knowledge into how-to-vote cards? Somebody needs to ask.

  A more detailed version of this proposition is here (pdf).

July 02, 2018

• Club Troppo Fred Rogers

July 01, 2018

• Club Troppo The Norms of Science: Extract from Paul Romer

  I was looking for something on economic method, and found this section of Paul Romer’s “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” which I thought was worth posting.

  Some of the economists who agree about the state of macro in private conversations will not say so in public. This is consistent with the explanation based on different prices. Yet some of them also discourage me from disagreeing openly, which calls for some other explanation.

  They may feel that they will pay a price too if they have to witness the unpleasant reaction that criticism of a revered leader provokes. There is no question that the emotions are intense. After I criticized a paper by Lucas, I had a chance encounter with someone who was so angry that at first he could not speak. Eventually, he told me, “You are killing Bob.”

  But my sense is that the problem goes even deeper that avoidance. Several economists I know seem to have assimilated a norm that the post-real macroeconomists actively promote – that it is an extremely serious violation of some honor code for anyone to criticize openly a revered authority figure – and that neither facts that are false, nor predictions that are wrong, nor models that make no sense matter enough to worry about.

  A norm that places an authority above criticism helps people cooperate as members of a belief field that pursues political, moral, or religious objectives. As Jonathan Haidt (2012) observes, this type of norm had survival value because it helped members of one group mount a coordinated defense when they were attacked by another group. It is supported by two innate moral senses, one that encourages us to defer to authority, another which compels self-sacrifice to defend the purity of the sacred.

  Science, and all the other research fields spawned by the enlightenment, survive by “turning the dial to zero” on these innate moral senses. Members cultivate the conviction that nothing is sacred and that authority should always be challenged. In this sense, Voltaire is more important to the intellectual foundation of the research fields of the enlightenment than Descartes or Newton.

  By rejecting any reliance on central authority, the members of a research field can coordinate their independent efforts only by maintaining an unwavering commitment to the pursuit of truth, established imperfectly, via the rough consensus that emerges from many independent assessments of publicly disclosed facts and logic; assessments that are made by people who honor clearly stated disagreement, who accept their own fallibility, and relish the chance to subvert any claim of authority, not to mention any claim of infallibility.

  Even when it works well, science is not perfect. Nothing that involves people ever is. Scientists commit to the pursuit of truth even though they realize that absolute truth is never revealed. All they can hope for is a consensus that establishes the truth of an assertion in the same loose sense that the stock market establishes the value of a firm. It can go astray, perhaps for long stretches of time. But eventually, it is yanked back to reality by insurgents who are free to challenge the consensus and supporters of the consensus who still think that getting the facts right matters.

  Despite its evident flaws, science has been remarkably good at producing useful knowledge. It is also a uniquely benign way to coordinate the beliefs of large numbers of people, the only one that has ever established a consensus that extends to millions or billions without the use of coercion.

June 28, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Here’s an idea: Pedestrian Clearways

  For the proposals in City of Melbourne’s discussion papers to be described as “radical” and “ridiculous” just shows how far we haven’t come in transport planning in this state.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise given that in the forthcoming election, if choosing a major party, we vote for either the mob who wants to build two massive motorways, or the mob who wants to build three massive motorways — the latter announced on a day of heavy smog, and despite Melbourne already having more motorways than most cities of its size.

  Nowhere in the City of Melbourne discussion papers did they suggest outright banning cars in the CBD. And I think that would be a bridge too far; the Hoddle Grid is a far bigger area than any car-free central city areas around the world, and it would cause headaches for vehicles that have to be there, such as for deliveries.

  But it’s blindingly obvious that in a central business district where the majority of people arrive and travel around without a car, that it’s time to stop allocating the majority of road space to a diminishing number of motorists.

  

  Central cities are, by their nature, space constrained. Inner Melbourne is getting busier, with daily population expected to climb from almost a million now, to 1.5 million in the coming years.

  So reducing space for motor vehicles, and discouraging motorists from coming into the CBD isn’t radical or ridiculous – it’s just commonsense.

  Although the discussion paper is a long way from being City of Melbourne policy, it’s refreshing to see recognition of the issues.

  Making CBD main streets a single lane each way for traffic. By my count, of the 14 streets in the Hoddle Grid, only 6 aren’t one lane each way, so this isn’t actually a big change. (Perhaps 6.5 if you count Flinders Street, a few sections of which have two lanes of traffic.)

  Re-allocating a traffic lane and/or parking spaces to pedestrians and cyclists would be a big improvement. More separated cycling lanes and wider footpaths would be a win for the most efficient modes.

  Queen Street and Lonsdale Streets should probably have 24/7 bus lanes implemented, given these are major bus corridors.

  Optimising traffic lights is an obvious one. King Street’s dominance of light cycles in particular, is absurd, delaying east-west flow for pedestrians heading to/from Southern Cross Station, and trams. But it’s also a problem at other intersections, including William/Bourke. In fact the lights along Bourke Street are all over the place, playing havoc with the trams.

  

  Motorcycle parking has long been a bugbear of mine. Given almost every person coming into the CBD is a pedestrian at some point during their visit (even those who drive), but journey to work mode share for motorcycles is just 0.7%, it’s ridiculous that these motor vehicles take up so much space on footpaths, with only unenforceable guidelines to stop them completely taking over.

  Assuming we don’t align ourselves to every other state in Australia and ban footpath motorcycle parking outright, they should at least be restricted to designated areas where they won’t impact pedestrian flows and can be manoeuvred on and off the road without conflict.

  In fact the whole question of street furniture needs looking at – footpaths are littered with obstacles, as shown in this short video:

  Pedestrian Clearways

  Walking is probably the most neglected transport mode. Even worse than buses.

  It’s the most space-efficient, but increasingly squeezed for capacity as pedestrian numbers grow.

  Let me put forward a modest, simple proposal: The busiest parts of the city centre should have Pedestrian Clearways.

  Concentrate initially on the spaces around the railway stations, which see the largest pedestrian flows:

  • No motorcycle parking
  • No outdoor dining at peak times
  • Advertising bikes prohibited
  • Fixed rubbish bins, letter boxes, bike hoops, information and sales kiosks, parking signs and other street furniture either removed completely, or minimised — and designed to be as much out of the way as possible
  • Garbage collection from buildings moved to adjoining laneways or side streets, or scheduled so that bins are clear of footpaths during peak hours
  • Careful placement of trees to maximise available space
  • Removal of parking to allow wider footpaths
  • Traffic light programming to prioritise pedestrian flows
  • Rigid enforcement of Rule 128, requiring motorists to keep clear of intersections and crossings

  There’s a great opportunity to ease crowding on our CBD streets.

  In a constrained space like the city centre, encouraging more people to walk and use public transport can only be a good thing.

  But you can’t just wish for improvements. It’s high time authorities acted to prioritise pedestrians.

• Club Troppo PATRICIA EDGAR. The Circus that has been Government Policy on the ABC for Forty Years

  Cross-posted from John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations.

  The ABC has been an extraordinarily resilient organisation. It has withstood management and Board upheavals, survived remorseless budget cuts and harassment. But the current attacks on staff and on its role are as overt and vicious as they have ever been. Many of those who were imbued with ABC values have died or moved on. The biggest fear to friends of the ABC today is inertia. This current attack will not be solved by quiet negotiation. The Government’s tactics are neither rational nor honest. This has to be a vocal public fight and once the dangers are understood the public will have to respond. What is there left to defend for our democracy to live on if the ABC is destroyed?  

  There is a single, simple reason why the Liberal Coalition is persecuting the ABC: they believe it will be easier to remain in power if the ABC is nobbled.

  The long and volatile history of governments, both Liberal and Labor, attacking and cutting the public broadcaster’s funding , ostensibly to achieve greater efficiency with public money , shows their motives over the past 45 years to be primarily political rather than in the public interest. This history is informative for the challenges the ABC and its supporters now face.

  Until the mid 1970’s the ABC enjoyed an acknowledged and unchallenged role in Australian society reflected in the relatively stable relationships it had with Government, its agencies, other broadcasters and the audience. Liberal Governments had been in power for 23 years until Gough Whitlam won government in December 1972, which included the years since the introduction of television.

  But the ABC played a central and controversial role in the politics of the 70’s and, following the Whitlam years (1972-5), and with the re-election of the conservatives under Malcolm Fraser, considerable debate began within government circles about the future role, structure and operations of the ABC and of broadcasting generally. The Liberal government believed that their time out of office had been made much more difficult by the ABC and that the broadcaster was biased toward a Labor government. They wanted to put the media in order generally, so as well as targeting the ABC they aimed to reward the commercial broadcasters with whom they were more comfortably aligned. This proved to be a very tricky agenda.

  Early on, in May 1976 Fraser announced an internal Inquiry, to be chaired by the permanent head of the Department of Post and Telecommunications Fred Green to look at the broadcasting system as a whole but with ‘particular attention… to the structure, powers and functions of the ABC’. Green recommended that the ABC policies and performance be subject to review every 7 years. That never came to pass, but in July of that year the Parliament appointed Sir Henry Bland, a tough-minded career public servant, as ABC Chairman to ‘clean up’ the Commission. Sir Henry had been Permanent Head of the Defense Department where he had earned the nickname, ‘Sir Hatchet’ for shaking up the bureaucracy and cutting costs. He lasted 5 months as ABC Chairman, at war with ABC staff and ‘Friends’. He supported government cut-backs which, taking inflation into account amounted to an effective reduction of 17% of the ABC’s annual budget, more than most other government agencies or departments at that time. But his big mistake was to intervene in decisions about program content, the highlight being his attempt to censor the Alvin Purple sex comedy series. Sir Henry lost the war, resigning with a bitter attack on the Prime Minister.

  The turmoil did not settle however with Sir Henry’s departure and low morale among creative staff was reflected in a series of strikes and staff meetings. Claims by politicians of bias in news and current affairs and the demand for greater efficiency imposed through cut backs have endured since that time.

  Tony Staley did ease the turmoil when he became Minister for Posts and Communication in December 1978 by making statements supporting the political independence of the ABC, but there was no increase in funds forthcoming and in May 1979 Staley announced the Dix Inquiry, the first major external inquiry into public broadcasting in Australia since the ABC began broadcasting 47 years before.

  Mr. Alex Dix was a pragmatic businessman who made clear in media interviews that his report had to be acceptable politically or it was a waste of time. The public response was considerable. It took Dix 18 months to unravel 2200 written comments and the evidence from 830 individuals which resulted in 5000 pages of transcripts.

  The final Report described the ABC as ‘the most significant cultural institution in the country,’ yet its emphasis was on cost efficient remedies. The Dix Report lacked a philosophy; there were 270 recommendations which did nothing to clarify the role of a publicly-funded broadcasting institution. So an opportunity was missed to examine the purpose and role of the ABC half a century after it was established. The Bulletin at the time suggested it was a million dollar job application by Dix for the role of ABC Chairman.

  The most controversial recommendation in the report was that the ABC should accept corporate underwriting to defray program costs. The ABC Board fought back with the Chairman, John Norgard accusing the Government of breaking its promise to maintain the level of funding: an all too familiar cry since.

  The reason why the Government was reluctant to move too rapidly to curb the ABC further at that time was because of the vitriolic debate going on about the commercial television industry. Nothing went as the Government planned. The Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) was abolished by Fraser in December 1976, because of troublesome Labor government appointees who were supporting community broadcasting and the regulation of children’s programs. The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT) was established (1977) in its place with the commercial industry’s hand-picked favourite son, Bruce Gyngell appointed as Chairman. But once again the government misjudged the character of its chosen man.

  Gyngell chaired the Self Regulation Inquiry of commercial broadcasting in 1977, which was intended to pave the way for removing content regulatory requirements on the commercial networks, but he was persuaded by public submissions to support the regulation of children’s programs. This decision led to the quotas still in place today. His friend Kerry Packer was outraged. Then Gyngell conducted the first public commercial television license renewal hearings ever held and subjected his peers to cross examination and public scrutiny they had never been used to.

  The public interest groups came out in force and the Government, fearing an electoral backlash, tried to restore calm. Gyngell was persuaded by Tony Staley not to continue at the ABT and David Jones, a lawyer and more cautious man, replaced him as Chairman. The public bun-fights with the commercial networks, which the media, including the ABC, covered extensively, diverted the government from its broadcasting reform agenda. It was proving just too hard.

  Bob Hawke was elected in March 1983 and Labor governed until Paul Keating was defeated in March 1996.Yet Labor too had its concerns. The ABC’s relationship with these governments soured quickly, primarily because of its current affairs coverage. Four Corners, triggered the Street Royal Commission, in NSW in 1983 through claims Premier Neville Wran had tried to influence the magistracy. Labor didn’t like media critique of their actions any more than the Liberals.

  Hawke appointed David Hill, as both Chairman and Managing Director in 1986, giving him authority to sort out the ABC. Hill had gained a reputation as a tough operator, having busted the power of the unions as boss of the NSW State Rail Authority. He relinquished the post of ABC Chairman in 1987, remaining as Managing Director. But despite his appointment the defunding continued with Gareth Evans calling for a break-up of the ABC to diminish its power.

  Hill’s approach was to pursue an aggressive commercial agenda and he ran a successful campaign which grabbed public attention and support, stating the ABC cost each Australian only 8 cents a day. But he also pursued back-door sponsorship of programs and partnerships with Hollywood and Fairfax in pay TV. One proposal was to merge ABC Children’s with the US Nickelodeon Channel, a venture attacked as ‘McDonald’s Television’. This merger failed but ABC children’s programs were commercialised and merchandised nonetheless.

  Such a commercial approach brought Hill into conflict with staff who were uncovering backdoor influence on life-style programs and who saw Hill as undermining the integrity of the broadcaster. Thus Hill became no more enamored of ABC current affairs journalists than Hawke and Keating. That did not mean they were brothers in arms. Alan Ramsay, a Fairfax journalist, reported Paul Keating allegedly told Hill, ‘We’ve had enough of you c_ts. We’ve f_ed up Fairfax, now it’s your turn’. (The Age, June 23, 2018).

  Hill survived 8 years in the job but staff and public unease grew and in response the then Chairman Professor Mark Armstrong initiated an independent investigation into the commercial activity by ABC management, commissioning George Palmer QC for the task. Palmer established that several life-style programs had breached the ABC’s rules by accepting payment for favorable company exposure on those programs. There was evidence of deals in writing. Paddy Conroy, the director of ABC television, resigned along with David Hill.

  A Senate Select Committee conducted its own inquiry into the scandal and its final report stated that the editorial integrity and independence of the ABC had been compromised. Richard Alston, who was to become Minister of Communications and the Arts following the March 1996 election, chaired the Committee. Shortly after his appointment, in July, with the Liberals back in business, Alston announced the Mansfield Inquiry. This inquiry, 15 years after the Dix Report, was meant to redefine and reposition the ABC for the 21^stCentury.

  At the same time the government announced further funding cuts to the ABC of 12% in 1996-97 which was to be followed by further cuts of 10 % in 1997-98. Bob Mansfield, a high profile successful businessman, but with no experience of broadcasting, was to sit alone and report in 18 weeks defining how the ABC might convert to the digital age while accepting significant funding cuts. Mansfield planned to read all submissions but found the task impractical. Public interest in the review was overwhelming: 10, 615 individuals, groups and organizations put their views in writing.

  Mansfield’s response to his task was to recommend a new charter be adopted that would drop the word ‘comprehensive’ and, instead, set out the program areas that the ABC should be specifically obliged to provide; namely, news, current affairs, information, children’s, and youth. He recommended also the outsourcing of television production to the independent sector to save costs, the cessation of funding for international broadcasting, dropping the management of orchestras and rationalizing ABC properties, and despite his 21^st Century brief, there was to be no expansion of services with digitization or funds to support the significant change that was to be part of the emerging media world.

  The Report did however strongly oppose the ABC accepting advertising or sponsorship as a means of financing and on the issue of bias, recommended that the Board and management publish their methodologies for monitoring balance and address the need to train journalists for clear lines of editorial responsibility.

  A new Chairman, Donald McDonald, a high profile arts administrator, member of the Liberal Party and friend of Prime Minister John Howard, was appointed Chairman of the ABC in 1996. He would remain for 10 years. During his tenure he worked with three Managing Directors – Brian Johns, Jonathan Shier (March 2000- Dec 2001), and Russell Balding. Johns had been appointed by the Labor Government just prior to their electoral defeat and he had a tense but workable relationship with McDonald as he attempted to negotiate the digital revolution with his plan for technological convergence: One ABC.

  When Johns’ term expired in March 2000 the Liberals saw their chance to bring in another hard-head to ‘clean up’ the ABC. This time Jonathan Shier was their chosen man. He could be described as the ABC’s Donald Trump. Metaphorically speaking he came in swinging, restructuring and producing redundancies. One ABC went by the wayside as executives came and went and department heads were expected to come up with lists of expendable people. Senior staff were forced to re-apply for their jobs and Shier once called in the federal police over a leaked memo. At one point off the top of his head he initiated a discussion with me about outsourcing all ABC children’s programs to the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF). In April 2001, a protest rally organized by Friends of the ABC and the Community and Public Sector Union, about what was happening to the ABC drew about 11,000 people.

  Shier proved to be so out of step with the culture and purpose of a public broadcaster he lasted just nineteen months, resigning with a million dollar payout because Donald McDonald, who had been party to his selection, couldn’t work with him. It was said however that he did streamline some of the labyrinthine processes of the ABC. A comparatively calm period followed under the partnership between McDonald and Russell Balding who wanted to settle the place down. Within twelve months of Shier’s departure, staff morale turned around and ratings increased – up 7.5 per cent for TV, five per cent for local radio, and 25 per cent for ABC Online.

  Mark Scott, appointed July 2006 by McDonald, followed Balding and he was MD for 10 years. He came in under a Liberal government a year before Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister and he proved to be a canny negotiator bridging the Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull administrations. He also had to deal with some very conservative Board members including Maurice Newman who became Chairman, following McDonald’s departure. Scott charted a reasonably steady course seizing opportunities when they presented to grow the digital expansion of the ABC. He persuaded Rudd to finance the expansion of a children’s digital channel although the result did not live up to his rhetoric and was badly mistimed as the child audience was by then departing scheduled television. (This story is told elsewhere www.patriciaedgaranddonedgar.com)

  Although Abbott famously declared ‘No cuts to the ABC’ during his election campaign, that promise was promptly ignored by Malcolm Turnbull as Communications Minister. The government commissioned a review from Peter Lewis, the former chief financial officer of Seven West Media, one of the ABC’s commercial competitors, which resulted in a $254 million funding reduction over five years on top of a $47 million ‘efficiency saving’ already imposed in the May 2014 budget. Lewis claimed all such savings should not affect content. As well the ABC’s contract to provide news overseas through the Australia Network (worth about $220 million over 10 years) would not be funded. Its cancellation cost about 80 jobs.

  Scott argued that while it was no comfort to the 400 ABC staff who would lose their jobs, things could have been worse. Turnbull agreed to back-end the cuts, allowing more financial room to come up with redundancy payments. But what followed transformed the broadcaster. The budget for Four Corners was cut , overseas bureaus were restructured and in some cases closed. State-based 7.30 programs all over the country were axed, (ABC studios closed in South Australia as they had already in Perth and Tasmania) a number of regional radio posts were closed, the Foreign Correspondent program was cut, local sports coverage scrapped, and other radio and television programs either chopped or moved, as was Lateline. About 100 journalists were made redundant. Some critics claimed the cuts played into Scott’s hands allowing him to make changes he wanted to make.

  Before he departed, having made the cuts the Government required, Scott declared ‘We need to fulfil a charter of public broadcasting that has essentially held true for decades. We need to inform, educate and entertain – we need to deliver content that others will not be able or willing to deliver – we need to have programs of wide appeal and specialist interest. But we need to think through again and again, how best we fulfill that unchanging mandate in a world that is changing’.

  That task fell to Michelle Guthrie, appointed as Managing Director in May 2016 to an organization still struggling with its role in the digital world, facing further financial cutbacks and a government obsessed to the point of paranoia about so called left-wing bias, and with some politicians determined to close down the public broadcaster to silence its journalists. Most recently there has been the ridiculous, but sinister motion, voted at the Federal Liberal Party Council, to sell the ABC, followed by a quick denial by Prime Minister Turnbull.

  We have learnt over time we trust politicians at our peril. The Public Service has been knackered. Once there to serve and offer fearless advice and independent policy options to Ministers, its role has become managerial and one of its functions is to see that no agency or organization that seeks government funding criticizes government. This threat has tamed welfare agencies and a range of organizations across the community who used to contribute to a lively debate about where we were headed as a democracy. Statutory Authorities that were set up to offer arms-length policy advice to government such as the commonwealth Schools Commission, the Australian Institute of Criminology and the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, have been abolished across the years. Others, like the Law Reform Commission are publicly castigated and the Australian Institute of Family Studies is now subject to ministerial oversight that permits no independent voice. These agencies have been abolished or muzzled because their independent research often contradicted political claims.

  The Universities are compromised by vulnerability to overseas fee-paying students, (who now make up 40% of intake) to stay afloat and they are attacked by conservatives for alleged left-wing bias. The Church has been exposed as corrupt. Corporations including the banks, power companies, Telstra and the NBN are grossly inefficient and exploitative of their customers. The commercial media, press and television, now compete for attention in a 24/7 news cycle and care only for ratings. They resent public subsidy of the ABC with Rupert Murdoch the most vocal. The multiple and diverse voices promised by digital media perpetrate fake news and ‘the most powerful man in the world ‘ tweets lies.

  We need the ABC for it is the only Australian institution in which we can put our trust. It is the one national institution that can reach most Australians, interpret Australia to the world and the world to Australia, in a way that is common to all. It is there to foster national communication, national cultural understanding and national identity, representing social diversity while unifying the nation through comprehensive programming. To destroy this institution is to threaten the unity of the nation, to fragment different social groups and foster disharmony.

  As Peter Manning, former producer of Four Corners, wrote recently, ‘It is cloud-cuckoo land to believe that a huge institution like the ABC, with so many checks and balances within it, with such a public ambit, annually called to account by the Parliament, regulated as to its purposes and values by law, with professional employees bound by Codes of Ethics, would have one political bias…. The ABC’s editorial independence is its major gift to the nation. It makes our democracy richer’.

  This endorsement does not mean the ABC is beyond criticism. There is another story about the ABC’s arrogance in its relationships with producers in the independent sector. I have been a critic of its commercialised and often banal children’s programs. But the purpose of such critique is to attempt to make the organisation stronger, not to destroy it. And the bigger issue now is the insidious attempts to undermine and intimidate the news and current affairs division.

  Michelle Guthrie and the current ABC Board must fight strongly for the ABC’s survival in the face of another $84 million cut. An occasional speech or opinion piece in the Fairfax press is not enough. History shows that when the Chairman, Board members, Managing Director and staff fight for the values of the ABC the public respond. Now is definitely the time to remount the barricades.

  The ABC is on its own, and always has been in leading the defence of freedom of speech and investigative reporting. But it has so far had the wider public behind it – a voting strength the ABC’s critics can’t ignore. Country voters who may be National Party members rely on the ABC. So has the ABC undermined itself by cutting regional services and becoming Sydney/ Melbourne centric? Guthrie is attempting to correct this drift. Is the public voice weaker as people opt out into their own digital spaces? We need to find out.

  The ABC has been an extraordinarily resilient organisation. It has withstood management and Board upheavals, survived remorseless budget cuts and harassment. But the current attacks on staff and on its role are as overt and vicious as they have ever been. Many of those who were imbued with ABC values have died or moved on. The biggest fear to friends of the ABC today is inertia. This current attack will not be solved by quiet negotiation. The Government’s tactics are neither rational nor honest. This has to be a vocal public fight and once the dangers are understood the public will have to respond. What is there left to defend for our democracy to live on if the ABC is destroyed?

   

  Patricia Edgar was a member of The Australian Broadcasting Control Board 1975-76; Chair of the ABT’s Children’s Program Committee 1979-1983; Founder and Director of the ACTF 1982-2002

• Club Troppo Adam Smith and Jane Austen: Another take from John Burnheim
  

  This person wrote a whole book on Jane Austen and Adam Smith without finding my essay on the same subject – or at least judging by Amazon’s search facility quoting it. As the President of the Free World is known to say … Sad!

  John Burnheim send me the following response to reading my essay of some years ago “Adam Smith is to Markets as Jane Austen is to Marriage“. I think it’s terrifically interesting.

  
  Adam Smith Today

  Morals

  The relation between Smith and Austen is very interesting. Austen’s characters are normally very sensitive to the injunctions of the prevailing moral standards in ways that Smith’ psychology of morals suggests. For them, morality is not a set of arbitrary restrictions on what they want to do, imposed on them by God or “society”, but a basic part of what they see as their true selves. In this attitude they rejoin the ancient philosophers, but without their metaphysical justifications. No loss, in my opinion.

  The weakness of this psychology as a foundation of moral education is that it depends on the young being gradually drawn into a society whose standards appeal to them as consistent and sensitive to what matters to them. It works very well up to adolescence. But it is easy for adolescents to react against a family and a society they find dull and trivial, especially when they find others who share their discontent and offer a sort of collective justification of their revolt. Some fail to recover any sense of identification with prevailing moral aspirations and fall into an amoral mentality. Others are saved by love and friendships. Others become aware of the social importance of at least appearing to observe morality. Add to that the fact that there are many opportunities to gain advantages from deceiving others, and one has to predict a good deal of hypocrisy.

  Does that matter? I would suggest that it doesn’t as long as there is vigorous moral debate, sustained by people who are deeply concerned about one or more of the three basic kinds of moral values:

  • what qualities befit a person as an agent;
  • what rules make for the common good; and
  • what are we entitled to demand of each other.

  If an individual is unconcerned about such matters, so much are they the poorer. They can hardly avoid external conformity to most of the prevailing morality. A hollow life.

  A basic fact about the framework of our lives is that it consists mainly of conventions, language, body language, social skills which have to be learned if one is to engage successfully with both other people and the world around us. To be assured that we have got these conventions right we need approbation, not just in childhood but in the higher levels of knowledge and expression for as long as we live. At the same time, precisely because they are conventions they are changeable, often by causes we cannot fully understand. It is of fundamental importance to their worth and ours that the process of critical public debate goes as far as it can towards giving due consideration to all the relevant factors that our conventions are meant to enable us to coordinate with others. In this endeavour, as in all our achievements, success in solving one problem leads on to uncovering another.

  It is inevitable that while for some this process is engaging and exciting, it can offer no guarantee of success to those who need reassurance and consensus, respect for familiar conventions. It is also the case that achieving sound conventions is so much easier in relatively small and culturally homogeneous societies than in large and multicultural societies that many are drawn to moral parochialism. In facing this problem, we are torn between having recourse to abstract but universal formulae on the one hand, and admitting that many people need a certain cultural relativism relating the validity of moral conventions to their particular culture. Philosophically we might represent the problem as the conflict between the universalism of Kantian pure reason and Hume’s naturalistic sentimentalism.

  Both of those mutually exclusive positions are conceptually inadequate. Smith, I believe, offers a way of grounding the objectivity that Kant seeks and the motivational ground that Hume seeks in an ongoing process of attempting to find more adequate moral rules. What needs to be added to Smith’s account is a more adequate conception of societies, particularly in view of episodic, cheap and quick global communications and interactions. We all contribute to and draw on many different networks, many more than as individuals we consciously identify with or even comprehend.

  It is very important to our wellbeing that the processes and procedures by which these networks operate tend to produce both the effects on which we rely and sufficient information to enable those most closely involved to make sound decisions about how to regulate the processes and procedures involved. Both as individuals and as groups, we depend on that network of networks to know what to expect and react to it appropriately.

  I would argue that the totalising tendency of nationalistic democracy is obsolete and harmful in the world of interdependencies in which we have to live. We have to look to ways in which different networks are regulated by those most closely involved in or affected by the operation of each important network. The networks may be seen as organisms that adapt to and nourish each other, thus forming an ecosystem without any all-embracing plan or director.

  Markets

  The principal networks that regulate the interactions of other networks are markets that bring together producers and consumers of certain specialised kinds of goods and services, while all commodity markets are regulated to some extent by money markets and markets of access to resources.

  Markets automatically establish standardised patterns of products and prices that enable meaningful planning and comparative assessments of commodities on the part of regular producers and consumers. These markets are linked in relation to markets in money and resources, which in turn produce a pattern of rents which for money and resources are made available.

  In addition rules and understandings grow out of and warrant expectations about the accuracy and comprehensiveness of relevant information supplied by producers. The group develop a moral code governing their activities. It may appear that the moral force of such codes is lost when most players in a market are no longer individuals but firms. But firms of any size are bureaucracies in which employees are required to act within a certain role and obey the rules relevant to their tasks. Where employees are encouraged to break those rules it will not be long before they do so in their own interest rather than that of the firm. They are aware that if their breach of the ethics of the market is exposed, it is they who will be blamed by their superiors who gave them that licence to offend.

  A good reputation is both a valuable asset and a source of pride in work. However, given the ease and speed at which information can now be gathered and broadcast, reputations are very vulnerable. At the same time technological change and changes in lifestyles are so rapid that the quick profit now at the risk of losing reputation becomes more attractive, especially when investors are focussed on quick returns and executives are also rewarded for quick returns. Perhaps a system of independent auditors who would assess and publicise the soundness of executive policies might help restore incentives in favour of responsibility and trustworthiness.

  There is a lot more to be said about money markets, land and labour markets and trading in items whose value is almost wholly a matter of scarcity rather than utility. But I must stop.

June 27, 2018

• Club Troppo Democracy and inequality

  I was a little crestfallen when, after my public lecture on democracy and sortition at King’s College London was filmed with a few to producing a video and the contractors informed us that the recording was hopelessly corrupted. So I was pleased when I gave another presentation on democracy to the Communities in Control conference in Melbourne a few weeks ago the recording of which appears to have remained uncorrupted. The presentation was similar to the Kings College lecture, though the King’s College lecture was longer and focused on Brexit whereas this one focused on inequality.

• Club Troppo Deep Strategisation: the schlock of the new

  Cross posted on The Mandarin.

  The OECD recently published this OECD report on inclusive growth. It’s certainly a Good Thing that the OECD regards alleviating inequality in the light of various things including:

  • Sharply rising inequality within many countries – even though global inequality is falling with poorer countries incomes growing much faster than richer countries.
  • The equivocal support of the discipline of economics since its turn towards scientism. 1

  The report is certainly worth a good look. There’s lots of good information in it. But, like so many similar documents, it’s full of strategisation. When I coined the expression, I described it as a practice which somehow embodies “the primacy of rhetoric (you know all that stuff about ‘our narrative’) over thought”. You’ll often see statements to the effect that “because citizens are more and more demanding and governments have limited resources, therefore governments should become more productive”.

  That’s strategisation. Because, if you think about the statement, governments should take any opportunities they can to become more productive whether or not they happen to be in a specific situation, and more to the point, what opportunities governments have to improve their productivity is strictly governed by the facts on the ground, not by some strategic context. If it would be totally great if government improved its productivity, if it would enable the government to provide ‘leadership’ by doing so, if the Prime Minister promised to do it in his policy speech, it makes no difference. Governments should improve their productivity by as much as they can always and irrespective of the circumstances.

  I’ve called the phenomenon in this post ‘deep strategisation’ because something similar is going on but it’s happening deep inside the structure of discussion. We’re making ‘strategic’ something that is more mundane than that. Since the rise of modernity, a core function of all governments has been tackling inequality – this is nearly as true of the ‘free market’ US as it is of ‘social democratic’ Sweden as embodied in their progressive tax and payments arrangements. But now we’re packaging this central function up under a name.

  Selling the equity agenda by another name

  What’s the significance of calling a policy concern with equity the new name ‘inclusive growth’? The fairly clear benefit is that you get to label something, make it sound contemporary and all that, which can be important if you’re trying to interest or ‘sell’ an agenda to people or (as we say these days), if you’re trying to get ‘traction’ for a ‘narrative’. But beyond this, the possible gains for the OECD come with likely hazards for clearly thinking through the policy issues and the directness with which we can move on the issue.

  Calling it ‘inclusive growth’ means you can kind of start all over again. You can ‘position’ (as we say these days) the whole agenda as a timely reaction to contemporary developments. You can have a new Inclusive Growth Initiative in the OECD, a new topic code in the academic literature and on and on.

  But here’s the rub – or one of them. The topic of equity is an old one in economics, going back at least to Adam Smith’s moral philosophy:

  This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, though necessary to maintain the order of society, is, at the same time, the most universal cause of corruption of our moral sentiments.

  That’s quite a statement from the father of modern economic liberalism. In any event, equity started becoming formalised with the formalisation of economics in the half-century or so after 1870. By the end of that period, it was a mainstream underpinning in British economics that, just as Lance Armstrong assures us that ‘It’s not about the Bike’, (even if we didn’t know how right that was at the time) so economics wasn’t about the money.

  Money was important, but in the final analysis it was an input, the basic output being ‘utility’, which some of the economists proposed would be accounted for in ‘utils’. This was at a time when economics was seen as just one part of our make-up. But in today’s more conceptually freewheeling, not to say louche world, we call it ‘wellbeing’ or ‘happiness’.

  The fact is that, whatever metaphysical entity you’re in pursuit of, it’s commonsensical that, other things being equal, a dollar to the poor will buy you more of it than a dollar to the rich. But there’s no mention of these disciplinary underpinnings that I can see – or find using word searches for “Marshall, Pigou or Pareto”. So all this deep intellectual and cultural background is sloughed off. And we find ourselves back in the eternal present.

  Adopting a framework for policy action

  I think this matters to the quality of our deliberation, but I can’t prove it. But we get closer to more practical implications when we observe the way in which the new agenda is developed – not principally in terms of concrete actions that might be taken in any number of different situations with any number of different systems that governments influence, but rather in terms of new ‘frameworks‘.

  What could be more flatteringly ‘strategic’ than a framework? It sounds like so much more intellectually sophisticated than a checklist or a list of ‘hacks’. And yet, as I’ve documented in the area of wellbeing, it’s amazing how low the reward for effort can be in establishing such frameworks.

  In some cases as with the Australian National Development Index or the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, the framework degenerates into complete incoherence. In other cases as with Australia’s Treasury, the framework never really gets beyond talking points. It’s seen in public speeches but not heard where the decisions are made – not seeping into the agency’s thinking or choices in any serious way. More often, as in the case of New Zealand’s wellbeing framework, many years go by with frameworks being developed before anything much happens, and when it does, achievements are fairly modest – though this is now getting a shot in the arm from a new government.

  I went through this as recently as last week when contacted by an international NGO considering involving itself in wellbeing. They wanted to gain ‘expertise’ on wellbeing. Now there’s some expertise that’s important. There are plenty of niceties and things to become expert on and traps in which one finds oneself in a conceptual madhouse having tried to build a strategic framework for wellbeing. But the main task is getting on with things – identifying actions that optimise the cost-effectiveness of improving wellbeing, most particularly the most promising ‘no-regrets’ measures which deliver on existing objectives but also enhance wellbeing. But somehow the person doing the interviewing kept seeking the imprimatur of august organisations and ‘expertise’. I dare say, she might end up developing a framework.

  As I argued in the case of wellbeing, an alternative, far simpler process would be to do what we did with greenhouse gas abatement measures which is to identify ‘no-regrets’ measures which deliver on the new objective (greenhouse gas abatement, enhancing wellbeing or tackling inequality) without compromising other government objectives – most obviously economic efficiency. We can simply ask, as has been done on numerous occasions here at world Troppo Headquarters (Frameworks and Diagrams Division), what policy moves promote economic efficiency and equity simultaneously. That’s likely to provide plenty of action for the short term while one works out more about the ‘cost curve’ one is facing and then starts to move up it.

  And so, promoting ‘inclusive growth’ becomes a matter of adopting new “frameworks”. Indeed the OECD report I’ve linked to is “A framework for policy action”. It’s not even a ‘strategy’ or less grandiosely still “Some ideas for inclusive growth”. And there’s much talk of things needing to be ‘coherent’ implying the strategic interconnection between aspects of policy when so much can be analysed and delivered without such ‘coherence’.

  And a lot is lost by packaging it all up as a framework or even a ‘strategy’. A government or other body might want to have a strategy, but equity is relevant to a vast number of policy decisions taken every day. Putting things in this strategised context might promote the prospect of frameworks and strategies amongst the OECD’s member countries and significant other VSPEs (Very Serious Persons and Entities).

  Frameworks don’t encourage the kind of improvisational thinking, the kind mutual adjustment between objectives that can lead to big and small ‘hacks’ that together can make a big impact. In addition to a ‘cost curve’ identifying the lowest hanging fruit, the OECD might produce a kind of ‘how to’ guide that could help keep people’s minds on the implications of all those small policy design decisions. Making something deductible will favour those on high incomes, issuing a tax credit at a uniform rate provides an equal subsidy to all and capping that tax credit swings things against those at the top. 2

  There are oodles of similar kinds of rules, but my own experience in government is that lots of people don’t really think like this. (So it is that the left-of-centre ALP ushered in a system which now holds over trillion dollars of Australia’s savings with a flat tax in which those with small, hard earned balances get their savings gobbled up by the best paid industry going round – the finance sector. All breathtakingly unfair, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. But I digress.) In any event, in the document, amidst the useful wonkish information, frameworks and diagnosis of existing trends etc, I couldn’t see much of this kind of thing.

  And as I’ve argued elsewhere 3, talking about over-enthusiasm for strategy sessions amongst senior management, the vast bulk of improvements we can made are modular. Much of this is also true of policy, though there are obvious connections and interactions – most obviously between taxes and transfers.

  The strategic diagram

  Anyway, I know you want to get on with it. Who doesn’t like a strategic diagram? So here it is. It’s got no hacks. But it has got three ‘pillars’. And pillar three is to “build efficient, responsive governments”, which reminds me that it leads on directly to the cure for all known diseases so getting this inclusive growth right has <strategisation>never been more important</strategisation>.

  

  As you can see, it’s very important that this be a diagram – rather than a list of Good Things for instance. Because in the diagram you can have a circle rather than a rectangle, or a hexagon for instance. And Elton John wrote a song called “The Circle of Life” and it was huge– just HUGE! If he’d written “The Rectangle of Life” do you think he’d be mentioned in this piece? No. Frankly, it would have gone nowhere. If he’d called it “The Hexagon of Life” people would think they were going to see the movie “The Bee King”. Then Concepts would have insisted it be “The Bee Queen” because there are no bee kings. And then where would we be? Who’d want to see “The Bee Queen”? Who’d want to even fund it? Probably not Disney, though their Diversity division might take a second look. And then we’re back to where we were with the rectangle of life – pretty much nowhere.

  But I’m being silly. The point of the shape (well so long as you disregard its shape) is that the area in the middle that dominates the diagram of the framework allows us to see structural relations between ideas. So you can see the three propeller blade-like things radiating out from the circle with each triangular segment of the circle focusing on the two domains defined by the propeller blades. (The blades aren’t rotating at this stage. Please pay attention, and if you are having any trouble, just think of planes that are sitting in a hangar or in Mussolini’s air-force.) So pillar one is between the two propeller blades “firms” and “people”, so naturally it doesn’t relate to the third propeller of “places”. It’s just “Invest in people and places left behind, providing equal opportunities”. Well pretty obviously that’s not true – it does relate to places, and not so much to firms. But you get the general idea.

  Likewise you’ll see a context. The context is fourfold. Contexts tend to sit towards the top right-hand corner of strategic diagrams, often in oblong shapes of dark blue – as here. That helps us think about – well context – I hope you’re following me here. It’s really pretty easy when you get the hang of it. For simplicity’s sake, there are no other oblong shapes of any colour anywhere else in the diagram. It’s quite important that they not be just splashed any old where, as they help us think about difficult things – and ‘Context’ is quite enough for one diagram. In fact, most of the OECD’s diagrams have just one oblong though often they don’t have just four points in them – three-point and five-point oblongs are not unknown in the OECD’s diagram oeuvre.

  Are there any questions?

  Footnotes

  1. At the turn of the 20th century, the economics of Marshall and Pigou was built on the idea that wellbeing or ‘utility’ was the end for which economic resources are the means. The scientism of neoclassical economics and the post-Hayekian promotion of the market as an engine of discovery – the preeminent mechanism by which one discovers economic value – produced our current situation in which economic growth is revered as a more or less absolute value.As an aside, perhaps to be developed in later writing, one could argue that this is one of the distinguishing characteristics between old liberalism and neoliberalism. Here I’m thinking of Philip Mirowski’s tendentious and intemperately expressed, but nevertheless astute argument that post-Hayek neo-liberals came to think of a market not just as a means of accessing distributed knowledge. They came to regard it as the preeminent epistemological device. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to a kind of reductio ad absurdem for issues like greenhouse emissions where there can be no market valuation of its importance outside of state action.
  2. Australia makes charitable giving deductible and, as I understand it, Britain offers a tax credit at a uniform rate.
  3. “It’s a mercy that things are ‘modular’ like this, because improving things is hard enough. But truly strategic discussion begins where this is not the case — where one aspect of an organisation implicates others with strategy seeking to understand, illuminate and then work constructively with this relationship”.

June 25, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from June 2008

  Here’s another in my series of old photos from ten years ago… this time, June 2008.

  You might remember that Frank Woodley did TV ads for Metlink, to encourage bus usage. Here’s the cartoon version, on a bus stop.
  

  Speaking of advertising, I quite liked this ad for the Get Smart movie (originally posted here). Come to think of it, I’ve still never seen the movie.
  

  Hitachi train, sporting its Comeng-era seat covers
  

  Gambling addiction is a serious problem, but this is still one of my favourite photos: The Machines Will Win. (See also: Part II)
  

  (For those with short memories, that’s a Metcard machine; the predecessor to Myki, and just as disliked when it first got introduced.)

  The signage at Bentleigh station, back when the train times worked.
  

  Punt Road – then, as now, sometimes the buses can’t reach the bus lane because of all the traffic. Hopefully the re-design of this intersection will fix that.
  

  The last few photos are from a visit to the Eureka skydeck in late June 2008…
  

  The view of the Westgate Bridge/Kingsway intersection. It conveys the vast amount of space used by motorway interchanges.
  

  A more youthful looking me, back when I wore a tie, with Government House and The Shrine of Remembrance in the background
  

  The city skyline. Note despite the two lanes of traffic across Princes Bridge, the cars were still queuing.
  

June 24, 2018

• The Northern Myth Bird of the Week: Pilatus PC-21 at Alice Springs, June 2018

  

  Thanks to my mate Mitch Chip Childs over at the Aviators of Alice Springs Facebook page for the tip that a couple of brand spanking new Pilatus PC-21s would be passing through Alice Springs this morning en-route from their base in Switzerland to the RAAF Roulettes home at RAAF Base East Sale in Victoria.

  I was lucky enough to catch a few minutes with one of the pilots on the ground at Alice Springs airport and he told me they’d been in the air for 36 hours (with stops) so far. These are numbers 17 and 18 that will add to the current 16 PC-21s in the Roulettes’ contingent of new generation trainers—they’ll end up with 48 in total.

  I can’t wait until the RAAF Roulettes bring these back to Alice Springs to do a fly-over – here are some pics of mine when I last caught up with the Roulettes (flying the equally beautiful Pilatus PC-9/A) in November 2010.

  

  

   

  

  The post Bird of the Week: Pilatus PC-21 at Alice Springs, June 2018 appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Daniel Bowen Walking at night? Be one of the good guys

  Lots of people usually alight at my station, even late at night. But as we all exit and walk off in different directions, the streets, especially at night, can get pretty quiet very fast.

  The awful murder of Eurydice Dixon has got us as a society once again talking about personal safety issues.

  While it’s true the risks are actually greater at home among people we know, there are obviously some dangers out in the world.

  One article that caught my eye was this piece in The Age, about walking home in the dark.

  I get off the train in the darkness, and see a woman. She is smaller than me. Most are. She strides with purpose – upright, head on a swivel – seemingly alone, with only her “situational awareness” for company.

  She would have seen me, too. I’m the big stranger behind her, leaning into the wind, dressed all in black – boots, hat, coat, with a beard.

  She moves quickly, but in the same direction I’m headed. In the hurry to get home and see my wife and little boy, I could breeze by her, quickly closing the gap between us until my long strides overtake her short ones. I could fall into lockstep with her brisk pace, following from a short distance away. I could bolt past, if I wanted.

  But I don’t. I haven’t done any of those things in a long time. These days I stand and wait a few moments, to create a comfortable buffer. Or I choose an alternate path home. Or I call someone on the phone, hoping my voice engaged in light conversation might dispel any sense of troublesome disquiet that my silence might otherwise stir.

  Of course, most people are willing to help if something bad is happening. (The article has specific advice on this; please read it if you feel the need to comment on this specific point.)

  But this is an important reminder that also there are things us blokes can do to ensure our presence is not intimidating to others.

  I recall many years ago, when I was about twenty, reading a letter in a newspaper on this topic. The female author was thanking an unknown man — she had been waiting at a dark lonely railway station late at night, and he arrived to catch the same train. She noted that where and how he entered the platform to wait nearby, and his body language, appeared to be deliberately non-threatening.

  This rubbed-off on me.

  When walking at night or in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, your own personal safety means it’s often better to convey a sense of purpose, and that you know where you are going.

  But beyond that, there are things you can do to avoid being unnecessarily intimidating to others around you.

  Not just women — anybody who might consider themselves vulnerable to others. Kids on their way to school. Anybody walking alone when you’re in a group. Anybody smaller than you.

  Everybody’s got a right to be out there on the street. It’s not Might Equals Right.

  

  So what can you do?

  Don’t walk directly behind someone. Back off, or overtake quickly — perhaps at a spot where the footpath is wider so you don’t get too close; or cross the street.

  Don’t walk in silence. If I’m with others, I talk to them. (Around the streets of Bentleigh in the evenings, you’ll often find my sons and I walking, talking about their favourite topic: movies and TV!)

  It seems to me that even little gestures of body language might help put the other person at ease. If walking in the opposite direction, by all means acknowledge, but don’t stare. Even bow your head slightly to stare instead at the pavement is likely to give off the signal that you’re not a threat.

  I’ve never even thought to ask anybody if this makes sense to others, but apparently it’s seen as a positive:

  I can tell you that women notice and appreciate these gestures, also alerts us to potential helpers

  — Jackie Katsianas (@JackieK_) June 20, 2018

  Some of the reactions to the Age article have been interesting. One (female) letter-writer suggested men should call out offering help, even if everything seems fine. I’m inclined to think that’s just going to be perceived as creepy.

  Some responses have just been grumpy, and selfish: What should men do? Are you kidding me? Nothing is the answer. Why? You are in charge of your own safety, not men.

  Why? Because we live together in a society, that’s why.

  It’s not Every Man For Himself. We can work together to help each other; to make our spaces safer and more enjoyable.

  One of the joys of living in a city is random helpful interactions with strangers.

  Open a door for someone; give a lost person directions; pick up and pass back something someone has dropped or left behind; volunteer some water for someone who needs it; even just standing on the left of the escalator.

  I just watched Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette“, just released on Netflix. It’s excellent, compelling viewing. I won’t give away the ending, but there’s a marked change of tone towards the end, and one thing she discusses is people’s humanity.

  Having consideration for others, helping (and being helped by) strangers — it’s not just the right thing to do. If you don’t have these random happy moments in your life, you’re missing out.

  Be one of the good guys.

June 19, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Carnegie and Murrumbeena stations opened

  The new Carnegie and Murrumbeena stations opened on Monday morning.

  These used to be my local stations. I lived close to Murrumbeena in my teens, and again from 2003 to 2005, and occasionally used Carnegie as well, and still sometimes pass through on the bus to Chadstone.

  As this photo from Saturday shows, immediately after the train leaves Caulfield it starts climbing to go up and over Grange Road. It then stays elevated through Carnegie, Murrumbeena and Hughesdale (yet to be opened) before descending back down to street level.

  

  The trains running on the elevated track seem a fair bit quieter than they were at ground level.

  This is the view from Dandenong Road, where the impact of the elevated rail is far less than the other side where there is housing.

  

  The old railway has been mostly cleared away.

  

  Both Carnegie and Murrumbeena are basically the same design, and similar to Clayton and Noble Park.

  This photo from Saturday shows the wraparound shelter – note the jagged edges – it’s not completed yet.

  

  Metro and V/Line trains were running between Caulfield and Oakleigh on the weekend ahead of opening, for driver training purposes. This is continuing during normal running days, with already-trained “On The Job Trainers” accompanying drivers through the new section. This is a train leaving Carnegie towards Caulfield on Saturday.

  

  Monday was opening day. At Carnegie the old subway has already been filled-in with concrete.

  

  Temporary stairs up to the platform, while they get the lifts and escalators working — unlike Noble Park and Clayton, these stations are in exactly the same spot as the old stations, so this will take a while to get done. In the meantime, there are shuttle buses between Caulfield and Oakleigh for those who can’t use stairs.

  

  At Carnegie there were lots of staff, ABC 774’s Jon Faine was doing a live broadcast, and a number of politicians and senior government and operator types were milling around, as well as some police.

  

  The wraparound roof structure is similar to the other skyrail stations. Unfortunately it doesn’t run the length of the platform, but other shelters provide some coverage further along. This is Carnegie…

  

  …and this is Murrumbeena, basically the same design.

  

  At Murrumbeena I had a chat to some locals, including Twitter’s “CrossingWatchin”.

  Good to meet @danielbowen on the first morning #Murrumbeena station is open for business. #skyrail pic.twitter.com/JE8zkVK8fU

  — Crossing Watch (@CrossingWatchin) June 18, 2018

  Given it refers to the crossing, this sign seems to have been recycled…

  

  This view from the temporary stairs at Murrumbeena shows the space where the escalators and lifts will go.

  

  Here’s the view from Murrumbeena looking towards Carnegie and the City. Note the Eureka building on the right.

  

  View from Murrumbeena towards Hughesdale — same design, but flipped around 180 degrees, as the new station is on the western side of the road, not the eastern side.

  

  The train back to Carnegie was delayed… eventually it arrived, and it was packed. A reminder than reliability, frequency and capacity on this line needs to improve, given it’s the main route for a huge area of Melbourne.

  

  Grievances

  Back at Carnegie a local resident spoke to me – he is one of those affected by the line being just above his backyard. He made it clear he’s not very happy, and he berated me somewhat for a somewhat jokey tweet from Singapore back in 2016. Hopefully he’s read the rather more detailed, nuanced, post about it.

  His main beef was with the government – he said the local MP had refused to meet, and he cited a Level Crossing Removal Authority survey which claimed 82% of people support elevated rail — but it actually excluded people living within 400 metres of it!

  Anyway, he was invited to express his grievance on-camera by Channel 9, and did so.

  Leafy suburban streets are shaping as the latest battleground for Victoria's political leaders. @andrew_lund #9News pic.twitter.com/y7PlRne4ml

  — Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) June 18, 2018

  This should be obvious, but just in case not: PTUA did call for impacts on residents to be minimised, but this is not the first priority of public transport advocates — the focus is on services for passengers, amenity and disruptions.

  Track expansion

  One other point raised by detractors is that the project hasn’t added two more tracks. (Adding just a third track is not very useful.)

  As noted previously, removing the crossings and other upgrades mean a huge increase in the passenger carrying capacity of the line, even if it doesn’t allow expresses or fast V/Line services.

  But what about additional tracks? The government says this would only have been possible with large-scale property acquisition through Carnegie and Murrumbeena, where the existing rail alignment is quite narrow. The skyrail design as built allows light and rain to get in between the tracks, giving flora a chance to develop — but a four track viaduct wouldn’t allow this, and in any case would need more space through the alignment.

  Will they need to do something about this in the future? What will the plan be? It’s clear there’s provision for future tracks on the south side of the line between Dandenong and Huntingdale, but what about closer in?

  Some propose an entirely new alignment along Dandenong Road, though this may not be possible if Caulfield to Rowville light rail is built along there.

  But ultimately, more tracks between Dandenong and Caulfield are of limited use without more tracks between Caulfield and South Yarra, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

  

  Premium!

  So, apart from improved safety, better train reliability, the ability to run more trains (which starts with extra evening services later this year), better access into the stations and across the tracks (especially Hughesdale where there was no alternative to waiting at the gates), DDA compliance, and cuts to delays to buses, what has grade-separation ever done for us?

  Well…

  Unlike at Clayton and Noble Park, the original plans for Carnegie, Murrumbeena and Hughesdale stations actually excluded escalators, and had no changes to staffing levels: morning peak only at Carnegie and Murrumbeena, and PSOs after 6pm at all three.

  PTUA lobbied for both. Escalators just seemed obvious given the distance from ground level up to the platforms, and if you’re spending all this money on stations in fast-developing areas, why wouldn’t you spend a little more and give them extra facilities and a full-time staff presence?

  Fairly early on we had a win on escalators.

  Just recently it was confirmed that the new stations will also have full-time staff. The State Government and the LXRA are to be congratulated on this – it means better amenity for passengers, and all the security and assistance benefits that a proper staff presence brings.

  So, everybody will welcome the removal of the crossings, and the rail line having re-opened. But there are also some definite wins for passengers with these new stations. Now, bring on the development of the space under the tracks.

  Fair to say my old station has changed a little bit since I lived here. #skyrail pic.twitter.com/uQMjxMlxh4

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) June 17, 2018

  • A blog on the project from before construction commenced
• Club Troppo A lucky boy from a golden age of economics

  When the financial crisis struck, it was back to the economics Max Corden learned in the 40s and 50s — a golden age of economics in which conceptual simplicity was a feature not a bug and the central criterion of good work was its generality and usefulness — rather than the conspicuous cleverness that defined later economics.

  (Cross posted from The Mandarin) This has been adapted from Nicholas Gruen’s address at the launch of Max Corden’s memoirs Lucky boy in the lucky country at Queens College, University of Melbourne on May 29.

  The German philosopher Hegel said “the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk”. It’s an oracular way of putting an arresting and, if the truth be told, deeply melancholy thought.

  In our fallen world, so much of life is revealed to us in retrospect. Reflection and wisdom come too late to be useful. In some ways, Max’s penchant for economic theory is an assertion of optimism against that melancholy. For by the fragile and imperfect construction of theory we try to build bridges between the events of the past and those of the future. We want to be ready next time. But therein lies a challenge. We want our theory to be useful, a point to which I’ll return.

  The owl has been visiting Max lately. In an earlier discussion with Ross Garnaut to try to coordinate what we’d each speak about, I mentioned to him that my father was less conscious of his Jewish roots and less reflective of his past than Max. “Exactly like Max” said Ross. My father died twenty years ago and Ross says that Max’s deeper interest in his past has grown considerably since then.

  Still that owl has a habit of creeping up on one. It was only towards the end of my father’s life that I gained any real interest in his history. It was much later again when I realised that all those things that migrants’ kids said – for instance about the strange food they ate at home – were also true for me, at least in small ways. A couple of decades ago I wouldn’t have noticed Max’s Europeanness. I barely noticed my father’s. But I do now.

  I was invited to speak at this launch because of my father’s friendship with Max and the similarity between Dad’s and Max’s stories. I don’t know if Max knows some of the eerie similarities. I’ll tell you one. As Max tells us, in May 1938 he started two terms at the Streete Court School in Westgate-on-Sea in Kent.

  He would meet Dad in Australia twenty years later at Monash University and write a paper together. They’d become closer friends another twenty years after that as respective heads of their centres at the ANU. Indeed Max writes in his memoirs “I don’t think I have met anybody in my life whom I have admired so much for his personality and balanced judgement”. But all those years back at Streete Court School, Max was just six miles or so up the road from Herne Bay College where my father had been boarding since 1936.

  As Ross was speaking of the clarity of Max’s work, the simplicity that came from thinking things through before one opened one’s mouth or put pen to paper, it put me in mind of Steve Jobs who spoke of the simplicity on the other side of complexity – the simplicity that comes from all that work trying to find the most compelling way into and through some difficult problem.

  It’s a clue to Max’s success as an economist – a discipline which, as Keynes remarked, is intellectually “a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science?” Keynes’ sting in the tail was that “good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds.”

  You see economics itself is built on very simple foundations. In fact, I was once at a lunch following the launch of Nugget Coombs’ last book at which a ditzy blonde acolyte was on my left and Nugget was on my right. She trilled that economics was far too complex for her to understand. I responded that economics might look complex, “but it’s really all built on a single idea”. Nugget, who like surprisingly many economists towards the end of their days despair of their profession, leant across to her and said: “Yes and it’s wrong!”

  Max and my father made their careers during a golden age of economics in which conceptual simplicity was a feature not a bug and the central criterion of good work was its generality and usefulness. Gradually academia somehow came to reward conspicuous cleverness as its apex value and quite quickly its usefulness of economics receded – a Tower of Babel rising in its stead. It’s telling that, when the financial crisis struck, it was back to the economics Max learned in the 40s and 50s. Paul Krugman, of whom I’m a huge fan is the impresario of this new age, a strident but pathologically clear headed critic of the way in which the macroeconomics of the business cycle actually retrogressed after the 1980s. Ironically, as I’ll argue shortly, he was an architect of a similar retrogression in trade theory from about the same time.

  I recall one of the first conversations I had with Dad at around the age of thirty when I’d finally relinquished one of my life-long goals to not become an economist. He read me a marvellous passage from the great British economist and friend of Max, John Hicks. In Value and Capital published in 1939 Hicks spoke of how little progress could be made in economic theory if one incorporated scale economies which are logically incompatible with perfect competition. Here’s the money quote from Hicks:

  “It is, I believe, only possible to salvage anything from this wreck – and it must be remembered that the threatened wreckage is that of the greater part of economic theory – if we can assume that the markets confronting most . . . firms . . . do not differ very greatly from perfectly competitive markets. . . . At least this get-away seems well worth trying. We must be aware, however, that we are taking a dangerous step, and probably limiting to a serious extent the problems with which our subsequent analysis will be fitted to deal. Personally, however, I doubt if most of the problems we shall have to exclude for this reason are capable of much useful analysis by the methods of economic theory.”

  Note that last sentence. Hicks didn’t say “I doubt you can get a paper published assuming imperfect competition”. Indeed, people had done it throughout the 1930s though with disappointing results. His claim was that, in the light of his carefully considered and formulated arguments, formally modelling scale economies would not be useful.

  Of course, he never advocated ignoring scale economies. Indeed he wrote about scale economies often. He understood that in a formal model the realism of one’s assumptions came at the price of the tractability of the model and the generality of its results. Therefore perfect competition would generally be assumed in his formal modelling, particularly in general equilibrium, and scale economies would be taken into account formally in simplified partial equilibrium models and diagrams and/or in discussion of limitations to the generality of one’s formal modelling or how some theoretical conclusion might be applied in a specific context.

  For Hicks, as for Keynes and for Max and my father, economics was commonsense, worked over, clarified and applied.

  However, at about the time Max moved on from the microeconomics of trade, these sensibilities changed. Paul Krugman and a cadre of others set about ignoring Hick’s warning. Here’s a challenge I’ve put for a couple of decades now without anyone rising to it. Show me any paper from the ‘new trade theory’ that mentioned Hicks’ warning or one like it (Milton Friedman had the same advice) and carefully considered why this time it was different. I think of Krugman as about the most brilliant and useful economist we have. But his most brilliant work wasn’t useful, and his most useful work isn’t brilliant.

  And what’s that they say about people forgetting the lessons of history being condemned to repeat it? Krugman later lamented that such a “fundamental rethinking” of trade theory “can have such modest implications for policy”:

  “The models [we] used were, in a way, typical of economics: clearly untrue assumptions (symmetric constant elasticity of substitution preferences; symmetric costs across products!), and involved a fair bit of work to arrive at what sounds in retrospect like a fairly obvious point: even similar countries will end up specializing in different products …. But this point was only obvious in retrospect. People in trade were not saying anything like this until the New Trade Theory models came along and clarified our thinking and language. Trust me, I was there ….”

  I was there too. So let me decode Krugman’s statement that “people in trade” weren’t saying that “even similar countries will end up specializing in different products”. He’s saying first that economists can’t see what isn’t in their models – whereas Hicks and pretty much every economist until the late twentieth century would have understood the need for careful and ongoing reconciliation of formal modelling and other sources of knowledge. More shockingly he’s saying that those who smell a rat at the dysfunctionality of all this should just get over themselves. To quote Krugman:

  “You may not like this tendency; certainly economists tend to be too quick to dismiss what has not been formalized (although I believe that the focus on models is basically right).”

  It’s ironic given how compellingly Krugman has documented the regression of macroeconomics in the same period that saw his own rise via new trade theory. I think both retrogressions were driven by formalisation at all costs, though, in the case of new classical macro, this mindset gave additional licence to the motivated reasoning of the libertarian right. In each case, economics regresses into scholastic abstractions, and obviously important parts of the story slide pristine invisibility to the elect.

  For the record when Krugman says “people in trade” weren’t thinking of scale economies driving trade patterns he really means academics at the commanding heights of formal neoclassical trade theory. The rest of us were shouting ourselves hoarse. Take Linder’s early 60s model of mass marketing at home and luxury marketing abroad, Raymond Vernon’s ‘product cycle’ model of trade a decade later,  or Peter Gray’s late 1980s heuristic model of trade and imperfect competition. Two distinguished antipodean economists Peter Drysdale and Peter Elkan (from New Zealand) not to mention another Kiwi by birth Peter Lloyd who is with us tonight elaborated the significance of scale economies for trade. They proposed ad hoc partial equilibrium toy models and diagrams to illustrate various ideas and proposed policies based around them. Then there was the empirical work of people like Bela Belassa, Anne Krueger, Jagdish Bhagwati and others who, from the early seventies on, explored the implications of scale economies, regional trade agreements and intra-industry trade. This is not to mention Max himself, who has a whole chapter on scale economies in Trade and Welfare.

  Before I wind up. One more coincidence – this time in the form of a riddle. What do I and Max’s student, Sir Nicholas Stern have in common? I don’t know if Max knows this but we’re both second generation Dunera Boys. My father came out on the Dunera and stayed. His father came out and went back, surviving the journey unlike a few unlucky souls who set sail to return during the war but perished at sea.

  And finally to kindness. Max concludes his book Lucky boy in the lucky country with a typically straightforward accounting of all the lucky breaks he had in his life. His humble gratitude for the kindness of others is palpable. As it was with my father who often made a point of thanking those who had gone out of their way to help him and to protect him. Like a woman who’d looked after him in Austria, Frau Heller and Miss Margaret Holmes of the Student Christian Movement in Australia who helped the Dunera Boys get access to books and other things necessary for their education in their new homeland.

  I thought I would end with a quote from one of the Dunera Boys about one of the people who was kind to Dad and other Dunera Boys. For me it has the quality of a kind of incantation. I read it every now and again and also read it to other people. Let me read it to you now. It’s a description of Captain Edward Broughton who was the Sergeant of the 8th Employment Company in which my father and many Dunera Boys worked towards the end of the war. The first Australian to write a book on the Dunera, Cyril Pearl describes him thus:

  “He was a half-caste tattooed Maori. At the age of 16, by falsifying his age, he . . . served in the South African war. Fourteen years later he fought with the Maori Battalion on Gallipoli, was mentioned in dispatches, and commissioned. After the evacuation of Gallipoli, he served in France, and with a Russian regiment. Having overstated his age for the Boer War, he understated it by 16 years to fight in World War Two.”

  This is what one Dunera boy said about him on his death in 1955:

  “Keenly intelligent, well-read, endowed with a superb sense of humour, completely untainted by any racial prejudice… deeply interested in human beings, he did not only gain immediate respect and obedience, but also the love and affection of the unit. He enjoyed hugely being at its head, learned and meticulously respected Jewish customs, and was immensely proud of the unit because of the splendid work it did, humbly unaware of the fact that it was only he who could have turned these people into willing manual labourers. … He engaged in incessant publicity war on our behalf and fought hard to have our status changed, only to be booted out by the Army eventually. After being shoved around as flotsam and jetsam for many years he managed… to make us feel like human beings again. He restored our faith in man, as something more than 92 percent water and a few chemicals. He was a scholar and a gentleman.”

  As Broughton said to one of his refugee charges from across the world “You and me, we’re the same”.

  Both were lucky. And luckier still adding to each others’ luck.

  ---

  Those who’ve been paying attention to the multi-dimensional scandal of academic publishing may not be surprised to learn that Max’s publisher Palgrave have done Max the great disservice of gouging those who might want to read his book. Their price is $125 for Max’s slim, elegant volume. At the launch Max was subsidising this for readers and is pitching in his own money on top of the publishers discount to him to bring the price down to $50. In any event, if people wish to borrow my copy they should email or tweet me – and I’ll be happy to arrange to lend it to them.

June 18, 2018

• Club Troppo The central bank payment system would survive any crisis: My letter to the FT
  

  The first time I’ve ever had something published with the graphic being a cockroach. And hopefully not the last. From the FT.

  Bob Sleeper (Letters, June 15) is concerned that if central banks embraced competitive neutrality and extended to us all the utility banking they provide commercial banks, that would leave high-risk loans to the private sector. For me that’s a feature, not a bug.

  He claims it would make the system more crisis prone. Why? Currently bank depositors are forced to cross subsidise both low- and high-risk lending. Central bank lending against super-collateralised mortgages (at no more than 60 per cent of the value of mortgages) would slash the resource cost of low-risk lending.

  It effectively transfers it from the financial system, in which each link in the supply chain does “due diligence” on the previous one, to the monetary system which is adapted to minimise transactions costs. High-risk debt would then be (properly) repriced — with a little more “due diligence” going on. Borrowers would substitute towards more equity funding and lower spending.

  There would still be the usual mistakes and herd behaviour, but it would be on a smaller scale and with lower leverage against collateral. And the central bank payments system would survive any crisis, just as we are told cockroaches will survive a nuclear winter.

  That removes one central driver of bailouts. So wouldn’t asset bubbles, and the crises to which they can lead, be rarer? And milder? If existing prudential regulation of systematically important players — banks, insurers and pension funds — works now, it would work in this new world.

  If it’s defective, we should fix what we can. And to the extent that we can’t, there would be less to go wrong, not more.

  Nicholas Gruen Port Melbourne, VIC,
  Australia Visiting Professor, King’s College London Policy Institute

June 14, 2018

• The Northern Myth The trouble with shit-hawks – the firespreading raptors of northern Australia

  

  This is an edited version of the presentation by Dr Mark Bonta and myself given last week at the Joint Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology & Society for Economic Botany held at the Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin at Madison campus in Madison, Wisconsin (USA).

  In this presentation we concentrated on summarising the events and research that led to the publication of the first tranche of our work in the Journal of Ethnobiology late last year (see the abstract here) and the fieldwork we’ve been doing since.

  The photo at the top of this post was taken at a fireground at Borroloola in the Northern Territory’s Gulf country in 2012 on the morning after a grass fire set by local volunteer fire fighters. It shows three Black Kites (Milvus migrans) in an aerobatic tussle over a frog the victim of the previous day’s fire.

  A few years earlier I’d come across the following reference to avian firespreading in the book I, the Aboriginal, a popular biography (and later film) of Alawa language group man and activist, healthworker and leader Phillip Waipuldanya Roberts.

  I have seen a hawk pick up a smouldering stick in its claws and drop it in a fresh patch of dry grass half a mile away, then wait with its mates for the mad exodus of scorched and frightened rodents and reptiles. When that area was burnt out the process was repeated elsewhere. We call these fires Jarulan.

  Because I was working the Gulf and Roper River regions at this time I started asking people whether they’d seen the behaviour that Waipuldanya recorded. The response was quite overwhelming—not only had people seen—or were personally familiar with this firespreading behaviour, but they provided information on links between contemporary ceremonial practises and these birds. I spent the next few years conducting documentary and field research that led to the presentation to the 36th Society of Ethnobiology meeting in April 2013 at Denton, Texas on my research to date that I summarised in a post at The Northern Myth.

  

  Following the media release and attention generated by this research, by 2016 I’d been joined by my colleagues Dr Mark Bonta of Penn State University and Erana Jae Loveless from the University of Arizona at Tucson. In 2016 they (along with Max Witwer of Penn State as an undergraduate field worker) we conducted our first fieldwork sessions in the Northern Territory at Ngukurr (on the Roper River and where Phillip Waipuldanya Roberts had lived) and at Katherine.

  At Ngukurr we worked closely with Waipuldanya’s family members (he passed in 1998) and the local Aboriginal ranger group, the Yugal Mangi rangers, in particular Clarrie Rogers, seen here in this photo taken at the Yugal Mangi ranger base..

  

  And here we are at the Jawoyn Ranger base in Katherine, looking over some satellite mapping of the previous years’ burning.

  

  In mid-2017 I travelled to Barrapunta (also known as Emu Springs) in central Arnhem Land to attend at a week-long birds and fire workshop with a group of six ranger groups from the Arnhem Land area (you can see more about that trip here and here). The “Talking Birds” workshop involved senior landowners and Mimal, Warddeken, Djelk, Jawoyn, Arafura and Wardaman ranger groups joining with scientists and researchers, linguists and ecotourism providers. This photo of the attendees was taken by Darwin photographer and bird guide Laurie Ross.

  

  Then followed months of transcribing interviews, wrangling with drafts and maps and much more. By October 2017 we’d settled on a final version of our paper and it was accepted by the editors of the Journal of Ethnobiology and published in the December edition.

  

  Our paper documented 21 records of the firespreading behaviour spread across the Top End of Australia—from De Grey station south of Broome to Cape York.

  Following the release of our paper we were more than pleasantly surprised by the interest shown in our work. January and February 2018 were taken up with responses to media queries from around the world and numerous print and radio interviews. The following shows just some of the media interest, including journals of record from Europe and the US.

  The birds that steal fire. New Scientist, January 2018. (UK)

  Birds of prey spread fires. New Scientist. (UK) Video, 742,000 online views

  Birds That Start Fires: Using Indigenous Ecological Knowledge to Understand Animal Behavior PLOS One. (USA)

  As “aves incendiárias” que usam o fogo para facilitar a caça. BBC Brazil.

  Australijskie ptaki drapieżne umieją posługiwać się ogniem. Polska Agencja Prasowa (Poland)

  Le milan noir, oiseau pyromane. Le Monde. (France)

  I rapaci australiani incendiano i boschi per stanare le prede. La Stampa. (Italy)

  Attenti Al Falco Per Cacciare Fa Il Piromane. La Repubblica (Italy)

  In Australia, Arsonists May Have Wings. The New York Times. (US)

  Des Oiseaux pyromanes. La Recherche (France)

  Later in 2018 we conducted another round of fieldwork, catching up with our co-author Nathan Ferguson in Tennant Creek, where we spent a fruitful couple of days at a large fire outside of town and refined our field data collection methods. Here are a couple of photos from that time, including the crew—Brian, Shaun and John—of Pennsylvanian birdwatchers that came along as data collectors and photographers.

  

  After a few days at Tennant Creek we travelled up to Katherine and caught up with the Jawoyn Ranger group again. They took us out to a location in the south-western Arnhem Land foothills known as Nitbarnjarn, where they would spend a few days doing protective burns around a tourism base and local rock art locations. We spent our time there gathering very useful data on fire and bird behaviour and more. Here is a photo around the breakfast fire during the camp.

  

  So what next?

  • Drafting a new paper incorporating local Aboriginal knowledge of fire-spreading behaviour – using previously-recorded and new interviews and linking earlier anthropological research on firespreading behaviour as a part of contemporary ceremonial practice throughout Arnhem Land NT & beyond.
  • Analysing recent field datasets and methodologies – concentrating on bird guilds at firefronts, behaviour of different species between individuals and species, weather, fire and fire-ground characteristics, use of drone and remote sensing technologies etc
  • Investigating the possibility of similar behaviour occurring in other savanna biomes – preliminary information to hand suggests it may occur, particularly where there are frequent fires and Black Kites present and one account of Fork-tailed Drongo from Zimbabwe
  • Three conference presentations in 2018 and further field work in 2019 and 2020.

  Contacts for further information:

  Bob Gosford

  E:  birdknowledge@gmail.com

  bgosford@gmail.com

  Dr Mark Bonta

  E:   markabonta@yahoo.com

  The Arsonist Raptors in Northern Australia Facebook page

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  The post The trouble with shit-hawks – the firespreading raptors of northern Australia appeared first on The Northern Myth.

June 13, 2018

• Daniel Bowen We need better public transport, not free public transport

  From time to time the topic of free public transport comes up, most recently because of changes in Estonia.

  I think it’s a distraction from far more important issues.

  I just wanted to address a few points about it. Apologies for the rambling.

  Would it be a good idea in Melbourne and/or Victoria?

  I don’t think so.

  The first point is the cost: the PTV Annual Report indicates around $800 million is collected in fare revenue every year.

  Even allowing for the running costs of the ticket system and fare enforcement, hundreds of millions of dollars would have to be found to cover that.

  That’s money that wouldn’t be available for upgrades, which are a far higher priority, because the main reason people don’t use public transport isn’t the fares, it’s the service quality.

  If the system goes free, assuming that at least some of the shortfall is via higher taxes, you’d have a lot of people paying more for a service they can’t practicably use, which brings me to the next point.

  

  Would free PT get more people on board?

  Melbourne’s existing free public transport is an indicator of what would happen if the whole system was free.

  The usable, frequent services would be swamped with people. They’d need upgrades to keep up with growth — upgrades which would be far more difficult if revenue isn’t growing with patronage growth. Example: the Free Tram Zone; free New Years Eve trains.

  You’d also lose any peak/off-peak pricing mechanism that can moderate peak demand and help encourage off-peak travel. This is used heavily on V/Line (30% discount outside peak, and for all trips that don’t go through Zone 1), and also on Metro (100% discount before 7:15am on weekdays), though arguably this could be used more extensively.

  The infrequent, less usable services — such as suburban buses — still wouldn’t get a lot of use. Example: Seniors and Myki Pass-holders on weekends. Some use the buses, but plenty would rather drive, even if they can use public transport for free (or for no extra cost with their weekday ticket).

  And that’s a problem if one of the prime aims is to increase public transport usage. Those middle and outer suburban areas where most people travel day to day is where public transport is failing to win market share, thus driving dominates. It would continue to be the case.

  If a suburban bus is once an hour (and plenty are), then it’s not suddenly a compelling service if it becomes free. They need more services, not free services.

  

  It costs more to collect fares than the revenue

  No, completely wrong.

  Myki was an expensive system to build; around $1.5 billion including ten years running costs = $150 million per year.

  It’s still expensive. The recently signed operations contract is $700 million for seven years = $100 million per year.

  (Sydney’s Opal card system is also expensive, at $1.2 billion for 15 years. That’s a bit cheaper, but these systems can be very expensive when they involve coverage of a large network, requiring lots of hardware — whether or not it’s established technology or being built afresh.)

  So yes, ticket systems cost a lot of money. But even if you supposed that on top of the $100-$150 million per year for the ticket system, ticket inspections were costing another $50 million per year (and assuming those staff aren’t needed anyway for other purposes such as safety), that’s still around $600 million per year lost if fares aren’t collected.

  Or to put it another way: if Myki hadn’t been built, instead the system could have been fare-free… but only for about two years.

  There would be some benefit from going fare-free: better passenger flows in and around stations, as fencing and gates are removed, and on and off trams and buses. But at a huge cost, and these issues can be ameliorated in other ways.

  

  But Estonia has free public transport!

  No it doesn’t. If you look beyond the headlines, you’ll discover that recent changes have made regional buses in Estonia free.

  Free journeys will be available for all Estonians using county buses, but won’t be available on trains (although enhanced subsidies will make tickets on the state-owned rail network cheaper). And in Estonian cities outside of Tallinn, all passengers will still have to pay to use all modes of public transit, including buses. — Huffington Post

  It’s apparently not even all county regional buses:

  To date, not all Estonia’s 15 counties have taken up the offer, though the free-fare zone is set to cover large areas of the country. — European Sting

  So it excludes rail services, and city (suburban) buses — which would account for the majority of passengers.

  Tallin, the capital of Estonia (population 610,000) does have free buses, trolley-buses, trams, ferries and trains within the city limits, but only for residents.

  People still use a smartcard, but the cards issued to local residents give them free rides. Which means the system still incurs the cost of running the ticketing system. In fact Wikipedia notes that services are stopped during ticket checks — so it’s really not a fare free system at all.

  Problems aside, was Tallinn’s free public transport a success? That depends on how you define success:

  …a 2016 analysis of the Tallinn scheme found it didn’t really encourage many people to stop driving.

  In 2014, a year into the experiment, the use of public transport had increased by 14%. However, car use only declined by 5%.

  In fact, it was walkers who hopped on buses, as the number of trips made on foot dropped by a staggering 40%.

  And while the share of car use marginally decreased, the average distance travelled by car actually went up. — European Sting

  

  Wales has free public transport!

  No it doesn’t. Wales has free bus services on weekends only… but only for 9 bus regional routes run by one operator, the Welsh government-owned Travel Cymru. It appears to be a measure designed to stimulate tourism.

  The scheme excludes rail services, and all other bus services — including bus services within cities.

  Hasselt, Belgium has free public transport!

  No it doesn’t. They had free buses (not other modes) from 1997 until 2013 when they scrapped the scheme because of cost — in part the costs of running services to cater for higher patronage. The buses are still free for those under 19.

  Hasselt isn’t a big city, in any case – it has a population of only about 71,000 people. That means it’s not a good example to point to when arguing for a large city to go fare free.

  Paris…

  The (socialist) Mayor of Paris has proposed it, but the idea has been opposed by others.

  As far as I can make out, as of 2018, there is no major city in the world (of say more than a million people) where all public transport is free.

  But the roads are free

  Toll roads are an obvious exception, but even “free” roads aren’t actually free. They are heavily subsidised, but motorists still have to pay fuel tax at the pump, and registration and licencing fees.

  Public transport is subsidised too of course. This is no reason to cut out fare collection and make the subsidy even bigger.

  

  Priorities

  Chris Hale recently wrote in The Age that: “a public dollar frittered on fare discounting is invariably a waste, whereas that same dollar invested in better off-peak service gets great results.”

  Fares certainly need to be affordable. Part of that is addressed ensuring there are concessions to those who need them.

  But in any big city, even those hailed as having great public transport, service and infrastructure improvements are needed.

  In fact the best public transport cities tend to get into a growth spiral of patronage – they need ongoing investment. It costs, but it’s good for their city.

  All of which means that in any city, with even a moderately successful public transport network, given the huge amount of money raised from fares, it’s very difficult to envisage a time when making the service free would be a priority, or even desirable.

  • More reading: PTUA – Myth: Making public transport free will encourage use and political support
• Club Troppo My letter to the Financial Times: All finance requires is an upgrade for the internet age

  All finance requires is an upgrade for the internet age

  From Nicholas Gruen, VIC, Australia

  Given the resounding “No” from the Swiss in the Vollgeld or “sovereign money” referendum, and despite Bob Sleeper’s relief (Letters, June 12), Martin Wolf’s central question remains (“Why the Swiss should vote for ‘Vollgeld’”, June 6). A decade after the devastation, where’s the “radical rethink” of finance?

  Mr Wolf kindly mentioned my own alternative plan, which does nothing more than upgrade the existing public-private partnership that is banking for the internet age.

  Today central banks provide wholesale utility banking services to commercial banks, which then retail them to all. Just as Barclays and Lloyds can now, in my plan anyone could deposit funds with the Bank of England and use those funds to pay other account holders. They could also borrow from the BoE if it entails minimal risk. I’ve suggested lending up to just 60 per cent of the value of a home mortgage. As with Barclays and Lloyds, interest would be paid on deposits and loans at Bank Rate.

  These arrangements:

  • Generate tens of billions of pounds in government revenue from mortgage payments to the central bank;
  • Slash home loan interest rates on super-safe lending (while increasing them for the — still privately provided — riskier lending over 60 per cent of a property’s value);
  • Help develop a payments system less vulnerable to commercial bank insolvency and the attendant giveaways to plutocrats;
  • Give monetary policy far more traction near zero interest rates. We’ve been here before.

  In 1844 only commercial banks issued retail banknotes. Despite one parliamentarian’s warning of the “disastrous consequences” of government involvement in banking, Bank of England banknotes largely displaced the risk, fragmentation and cost of the alternative. This led commercial banks to focus on where they could add the most value — in funding and pricing commercial credit and pricing the attendant risks. A

  All we need do now is replicate that move for the internet age.

  Nicholas Gruen Chief Executive, Lateral Economics, Port Melbourne, VIC, Australia Visiting Professor, King’s College London Policy Institute

June 12, 2018

• Club Troppo The final chapter of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism

  The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus – an absent God.

  The end result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch , among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism.

  A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair.

  According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving – at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip – eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity.

  If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.

  Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

  

June 11, 2018

• Club Troppo Could Obamacare have lead to lower fertility?

  [just a thought]

  US total fertility rates were bobbing along very placidly around 2.05 live births per woman from 1990 to 2010, when suddenly there was a clear drop to 1.8 in 2010-2017. That drop has even continued to 1.76 births per woman in 2017. When I asked myself what could possibly explain this, the only real candidate I come up with is Obamacare, which became active in 2010 and was successful at insuring more than 20 million people. Fertility rates peaked in 2010 at 2.1 and then steadily came down in 2011 (1.9) to 1.76 now.

  Its an uncomfortable hypothesis, but it has to be the front runner because there is no other obvious culprit. The 2008-2010 recession had no effect on fertility, and the subsequent recovery after 2010 didn’t push employment levels above those of the early 00s. So its unlikely to be the economy. Its also unlikely related to the huge incarceration levels in the US (around 2.1 million in prison and jail in 2017), simply because those levels peaked just before 2010 and have actually gone down since then, without leading to a glut in new babies.

  There is also a possible mechanism, which is that ‘the package known as Obamacare’ included increased availability of contraception and a lower barrier to entering the health system, both of which should be expected to increase use of contraceptives and more knowledge of reproductive health. This would have particularly mattered for those amongst whom pregnancy is a bit of an unwanted accident, ie teenagers. Interestingly, recorded abortions actually dropped 25% since 2008, so its not more abortions but simply less pregnancies that are causing the drop in fertility.

  Surely not, I hear you scream! How could you think such a thing!

  Well, there are actually papers which say pretty much the same thing. One is a 2016 paper looking at the effect of school-based health centers, finding a big drop in teenage fertility amongst the poor. There is also evidence that the cost of contraceptives reduced a lot. And you indeed see record lows in teenage pregnancies in the US.

  It is difficult to convincingly show this train of thought though, because these effects are not likely to materialise immediately but will slowly emerge, which makes them impossible to detect with the methodology social scientists now prefer to identify these things: we like to see immediate jumps to a new equilibrium if a large change has occurred.

  Still, the deep tradeoffs involved between average happiness and population numbers if this hypothesis were true are painful. Let us not forget that France lost its pre-eminence in Europe in the 19th century because it was out-bred by Germany! If a welfare system indeed prevents many teenage girls from becoming professional mothers, and instead leads them to more productive lives with less children, then that would mean there is a long-run effect of Obamacare on the level of the US population, which in turn will affect its clout in this world.

  No more than a thought though. Happy to be proven wrong!

   

• Club Troppo Congratulations Neville Sillitoe

  We were thrilled at midnight last night to discover that Neville Sillitoe received an honour. Neville has been around for some time.

  He ‘discovered’ Peter Norman as Norman was running in Princes Park in Melbourne in the 1960s. He won his heat of the 200 metres at the 1968 Olympic Games in Olympic an record time 20.17 which stood for one day before he ran 20.06 in the final, an Australian record that’s still not been broken. But of course a second earlier,  Tommie Smith’s arms were raised in victory as he cruised to a world record 19.83 seconds.

  But of course that picture to our right has you remembering that Norman stood in solidarity on the victory dais with his fellow placegetters in the 200 metres as they gave their famous salutes in recognition of black oppression in civil rights America. As you may know, Australian officialdom never forgave Norman this transgression and he missed out on the next games in 1972. He wasn’t invited to the Sydney Games in 2000.

  Lest we forget.

  But I digress. Neville is still talent spotting. Each year he takes a group of the most talented Australian schoolkids he’s identified to Europe for seven weeks. How do I know? He spotted my son Alex in 2013. After going overseas with Neville, Alex has never lost his passion for middle distance running.

  Neville is perhaps the last in a long line of Australian coaches going back at least to Percy Cerutty, and Dunera Boy Franz Stampfl who were builders of character first and foremost and on that basis help build the bodies of elite athletes. Should he take his kids to the US the men with whom Norman stood in 1968 Tommie Smith and John Carlos have made it clear they’d love to host them. They were pallbearers at Peter Norman’s funeral.

  I discovered this thread on Facebook from a former pupil in the late 1970s.

  Then there was Neville Sillitoe. He was a superb PE teacher. Not so if you didn’t bring your PE gear. Who remembers the “Sexy Reds” punishment?? hehe. On a serious note this bloke would bring people in like Peter Norman (1968 Mexico Olympic Silver medalist and infamous Black Power incident) Denise Boyd who we raced against in practice. They would speak to us about top-level athletics. I remember holding Norman’s silver Olympic medal. This gives you an idea into the class of Sillitoe. … I thank you so much for your work. I will never forget you.

  Here he is in the Forres Gazette

  Games honour for Aussie stalwart

  FORRES Highland Games Secretary Mike Scott presents Neville Sillitoe, from Australia, with an honorary life membership on behalf of the Games committee. Mr Sillitoe is the coach of the travelling Australian Athletes squad and has been bringing a contingent of athletes to Forres to compete for the past 23 years at the event. The young athletes, aged from 10 to around 18 years of age, put up good performances at this year’s Games, winning many of the track and field events.

  And Neville may have been taking young athletes to Europe for 23 years as a retired PE teacher and athletics coach. But that was written in 2008. So make that 33 years. And make Nevill 92. He’s in Europe now with another group of kids!

  Congratulations Neville!

  Australian representatives who Neville coached:

  Peter Norman (1968 Olympics)
  Gary Holdsworth (1964 Olympics)
  Greg Lewis (1968 Olympics)
  Aaron Rouge-Serret (2 x Commonwealth Games and 2 x World Cup)
  Colin M’Queen (1977 IAAF World Cup)
  Denise Boyd (1976 and 1980 Olympics; 1974, 1978 and 1982 Commonwealth Games; 1973 and 1977 Pacific Conference Games; 1977 World Cup and 1983 World Championships)
  Richard James (1979 World Cup;
  Bruce Frayne (1984 Olympics)
  Tamsyn Lewis (1996 World Junior Championships; 1998 Commonwealth Games; 1999 World Indoor Championships; 2000

• Club Troppo Congratulations Neville Sillitoe

  We were thrilled at midnight last night to discover that Neville Sillitoe received an honour. Neville has been around for some time.

  He ‘discovered’ Peter Norman as Norman was running in Princes Park in Melbourne in the 1960s. He won his heat of the 200 metres at the 1968 Olympic Games in Olympic an record time 20.17 which stood for one day before he ran 20.06 in the final, an Australian record that’s still not been broken. But of course a second earlier,  Tommie Smith’s arms were raised in victory as he cruised to a world record 19.83 seconds.

  But of course that picture to our right has you remembering that Norman stood in solidarity on the victory dais with his fellow placegetters in the 200 metres as they gave their famous salutes in recognition of black oppression in civil rights America. As you may know, Australian officialdom never forgave Norman this transgression and he missed out on the next games in 1972. He wasn’t invited to the Sydney Games in 2000.

  Lest we forget.

  But I digress. Neville is still talent spotting. Each year he takes a group of the most talented Australian schoolkids he’s identified to Europe for seven weeks. How do I know? He spotted my son Alex in 2013. After going overseas with Neville, Alex has never lost his passion for middle distance running.

  Neville is perhaps the last in a long line of Australian coaches going back at least to Percy Cerutty, and Dunera Boy Franz Stampfl who were builders of character first and foremost and on that basis help build the bodies of elite athletes. Should he take his kids to the US the men with whom Norman stood in 1968 Tommie Smith and John Carlos have made it clear they’d love to host them. They were pallbearers at Peter Norman’s funeral.

  I discovered this thread on Facebook from a former pupil in the late 1970s.

  Then there was Neville Sillitoe. He was a superb PE teacher. Not so if you didn’t bring your PE gear. Who remembers the “Sexy Reds” punishment?? hehe. On a serious note this bloke would bring people in like Peter Norman (1968 Mexico Olympic Silver medalist and infamous Black Power incident) Denise Boyd who we raced against in practice. They would speak to us about top-level athletics. I remember holding Norman’s silver Olympic medal. This gives you an idea into the class of Sillitoe. … I thank you so much for your work. I will never forget you.

  Here he is in the Forres Gazette

  Games honour for Aussie stalwart

  FORRES Highland Games Secretary Mike Scott presents Neville Sillitoe, from Australia, with an honorary life membership on behalf of the Games committee. Mr Sillitoe is the coach of the travelling Australian Athletes squad and has been bringing a contingent of athletes to Forres to compete for the past 23 years at the event. The young athletes, aged from 10 to around 18 years of age, put up good performances at this year’s Games, winning many of the track and field events.

  And Neville may have been taking young athletes to Europe for 23 years as a retired PE teacher and athletics coach. But that was written in 2008. So make that 33 years. And make Nevill 92. He’s in Europe now with another group of kids!

  Congratulations Neville!

  Australian representatives who Neville coached:

  Peter Norman (1968 Olympics)
  Gary Holdsworth (1964 Olympics)
  Greg Lewis (1968 Olympics)
  Aaron Rouge-Serret (2 x Commonwealth Games and 2 x World Cup)
  Colin M’Queen (1977 IAAF World Cup)
  Denise Boyd (1976 and 1980 Olympics; 1974, 1978 and 1982 Commonwealth Games; 1973 and 1977 Pacific Conference Games; 1977 World Cup and 1983 World Championships)
  Richard James (1979 World Cup;
  Bruce Frayne (1984 Olympics)
  Tamsyn Lewis (1996 World Junior Championships; 1998 Commonwealth Games; 1999 World Indoor Championships; 2000

• Club Troppo Jordan Peterson: another take

June 09, 2018

• The Northern Myth Jo Best on the public realm, an energy ponzi scheme and resilience at Resilient Darwin

  

  This is the text of a talk given by Darwin-based architect Jo Best to a “Resilient Darwin” forum held in Darwin during Law Week 2018. 

  In the NT News article on 22nd April about the demise of the project at the Old Hospital site, Philippa Butt talked about the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. She quoted David Walsh as saying that MONA is a ‘loss leader’.

  Her argument seemed to be that if a public or private cultural centrepiece makes no money, that it shouldn’t be built. I’m not sure the government of Tasmania would see it that way, but the NT Government certainly does. Ms Butt’s point about a new museum being a loss leader was of course absolutely right but it ignores the intrinsic value of capital expenditure on cultural infrastructure, the broader economic and social benefits.

  She does however, bring up the very interesting topic of the cost of a building once occupied. Yes, a museum or whatever you like to call it would cost money to build and operate, so it is indeed a loss leader. It’s the hundred dollar lawnmower at Bunnings that gets you through the door so you’ll buy a hose clip with a ten thousand percent mark-up that will probably break on the way to the car.

  So, now let’s consider the rolled-gold money-making alternative to a loss leader. The commercial venture … the hose-clip of real estate. Why not, for argument’s sake let a developer, who may or may not be a party donor, have some prime land for free. It sounds crazy doesn’t it? But the developers, you see, can always be trusted to do what the loss leader can’t. Make money.

  Now, let’s assume for the sake of this chat, that they plan to build the kind of dwellings that have become ubiquitous throughout Darwin and her suburbs in the past 10-20 years. And let’s assume that they’ll be striving for a five star energy rating. In the Territory, what 5 star means is that when you air condition the building, the cool air can’t get out. But guess what, for the rest of the time, the cool air can’t get in. So you’ve got your multiple air conditioners in place and you build the near windowless box around them.

  That’s the law.

  So Brenda and Brendan Brown buy their airtight little house for $400,000. Their repayments leave them with very little left over at the end of the month and then the power bill arrives. Now they realise that they’re paying (the government owned) services company almost as much as they’re paying the bank. Brendan and Brenda Brown look past their eave-less roof to the heavens and curse the cost-of-living gods and the museum-building Pinkos they’ve heard about in their favourite paper.

  And they have no idea that they and their neighbours have bought into an energy Ponzi scheme. We have been building an energy deficit into our housing and throughout our cities and towns that will be difficult to reverse and it is making us poorer. The majority of domestic construction in the NT is dominated by development companies that deliver as cheaply as possible and pass on the legacy of poor design and construction to the uninformed buying public.

  This is allowed to happen through weak urban design, planning and construction legislation across the three levels of government. And where is this most visible? Where it can’t be seen of course. On indigenous communities across the Territory, at this moment, houses are being built that don’t comply with the basic health amenity of the Building Code of Australia. NTG standardised house designs have a single opening within bedrooms that comes standard with an opaque polycarb louvre. This in itself is not compliant because when the window is shut, no natural light can enter the room.

  But worse, the opening is exactly the size as a window rattler. So if residents decide they want an air conditioner to assist in the liveability of their inappropriately designed dwelling, not only do the remove (entirely) all access to natural light, but also fresh air. I realise this event was supposed to be aligned to a conversation around Darwin’s preparedness for extreme weather events and we have of course seen recent failures on this front, but there are many relevant day to day issues that affect Darwin’s ability to exist into the future.

  Cultural recognition & sensitivity, jobs, affordable housing (including during occupation), tourism opportunities, environmental protection, identity, community, and the much touted “liveable city”. We live in a town that is being moulded by traffic engineers instead of strategic thinkers like urban designers, demographers and economists. And the legacy left behind by the current decision makers, are huge pieces of infrastructure difficult and expensive to remove, damaging to the city and her peoples.

  The immediate future and perceived ‘wins’ are being valued over long-term viability and opportunity. Barneson Bld, is a perfect example of the people of Darwin being sidelined and ignored, not only in terms of immediate public opinion, but the viable future of our city and its population.

  If you ask for some kind of rationale, the rote learnt response from public servants is that the new road will ‘activate’ Frog Hollow Park & the City….really? How does a 5 lane blacktop moving at 60km/hour, that will sever three existing perpendicular roads (McMinns, Woods & Cavenagh) and a major green lung within the CBD do this?

  It’s a furphy. The best we can hope for is a replication of the wasteland that Daly St has become. In every other capital city in Australia (and across the world), cars are being removed from the CBD and replaced with quality public transport connections.

  This helps to reduce; pollution, vehicle infrastructure like carparks and thousands of square metres of bitumen that contribute to the CBD heat island. We should instead; be building coolth with tree canopies, increasing walkability, designing for a city that builds the health and wellbeing of its inhabitants at a time when increased rates of heat related morbidity and mortality are seen worldwide. Melbourne, has initiated their Urban Forest Strategy which will double the tree canopy in the city in ten years, Sydney has committed to planting 5 million new trees by 2030.

  These commitments to greening the urban realm and reducing vehicles on streets begins a holistic strategy to address the effects of climate change by embracing and utilising the environment, not trying to shut it out.

  And do you know the best thing about this approach? We’ve got 65,000+ years of experience right on our doorstep to teach us.

  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  Phote: ABC Darwin

  The post Jo Best on the public realm, an energy ponzi scheme and resilience at Resilient Darwin appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Club Troppo Central banking for all: Meanwhile in the wider world …

  I’ve previously commented more than once on the relatively more healthy state of economic debate in the UK than here – which is not to say that the giant intellectual sucking sound that is Brexit isn’t already having its own disastrous impact on debate.

  Meanwhile two of my favourite British commentators have taken up ideas that are close to my heart. The Economist, proposing accounts at the central bank for all and Martin Wolf urging the Swiss to vote “Yes” to sovereign money tomorrow (polls suggest they won’t) and raising my proposal of allowing citizens to both park savings with the central bank and to borrow against super safe mortgages.

  I reproduce each below the fold.

  Central banks should consider offering accounts to everyone

  From The Economist: Individual accounts could improve consumer welfare and macroeconomic policy

  

  A RECESSION strikes. Central banks leap into action, cutting interest rates to perk up investment. But what if, as now, there is not much cutting to do, with rates already at or close to zero? In such cases the manual calls for purchases of government bonds with newly printed cash—quantitative easing, or QE—swelling the reserves each bank keeps at the central bank. Imagine instead that people also kept accounts at the central bank. New money could be added to their accounts, providing a direct, equitable boost to spending. That is one of several potential benefits of individual central-bank accounts, which are among the more intriguing of the radical policy ideas in circulation.

  Central banks deal in two sorts of currency: cash, which anyone can hold, and digital money, accessible only to financial institutions through their accounts at the central bank. Individuals hoping to spend digital money must use a bank card or transfer (or a service, like Apple Pay, linked to a bank account), or a private crypto-currency such as bitcoin or Ethereum. Some central banks are considering whether and how to expand the use of their own digital money. Sweden’s Riksbank, for example, is exploring ways to create a widely used e-krona. In June Swiss voters will participate in a referendum on a radical monetary reform, one effect of which would be to give individuals access to digital money at the Swiss National Bank (SNB). The main difficulty central banks face is how to facilitate the circulation of digital currency without routing everything through banks, as happens today.

  Blockchain technology, which underpins crypto-currencies, could be one way to avoid the banks. In such systems balances and transactions are tracked on a distributed public ledger, secured with cryptography. But central banks worry about security risks and technical challenges. And as Aleksander Berentsen and Fabian Schar write in the latest quarterly Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, central-bank backing for anonymised transactions would be awkward when private banks face demands to crack down on money-laundering and tax evasion. Easier and less risky would be to extend the privilege enjoyed by banks, to hold digital money at the central bank, to everyone.

  Why, though, would central banks want to do so? One answer is that individual accounts could help them with their monetary-policy mission. At present, they manage interest rates across the economy indirectly, by adjusting the rates banks earn on their reserves. But these are passed on only imperfectly to consumers. At the moment, banks in America can earn a short-run, risk-free interest rate of about 1.75% (those in Europe and Japan earn less). Current accounts at private banks, meanwhile, pay approximately nothing. In a world of individual central-bank accounts, in contrast, the rate paid on individual deposits would become a potent policy tool. Rate changes would have a direct, transparent effect on depositors. And were central-bank digital money to account for a big share of transactions, swings in such spending could become a useful real-time source of data for policymakers.

  The accounts would come in especially handy when near-zero interest rates leave central banks with few good options in a crunch. The effects of QE diminish over time, particularly when crisis-induced breakdowns in credit markets begin to heal. Central bankers could be more confident in the stimulative effect of what Milton Friedman termed “helicopter money”: distributions to the public of newly minted dosh. These would bring complications. Money is commonly considered a liability of a central bank. Accountants would frown at distributing new money without obtaining assets in exchange (like the government bonds purchased when banks carry out QE), since they would create a huge negative position on central-bank balance-sheets. But an institution that can create its own money cannot go bankrupt. As long as a central bank is keeping to a policy target (like a 2% inflation rate) an ugly balance-sheet is not a problem.

  Crucially, monetary policy oriented around individuals should be easier to understand than the customary prestidigitation. Political constraints on the use of QE—the perception that it is a giveaway to banks, or (in Europe) a way to prop up fiscally incontinent governments—might bind less tightly for injections of money into individual accounts.

  A “public option” for banking ought to improve private banks’ behaviour, too. To keep their deposits, they would need to offer useful services and competitive rates, rather than hidden fees. Guaranteed access to a simple, interest-paying savings vehicle, and to electronic money, could be a boon for the world’s underbanked poor. And though it need not, such accounts could represent a first step away from deposit-financing of bank lending: a reform favoured by some economists and regulators.

  QE too

  No bold reform comes without difficulty. Administrative costs should be low, given the no-frills nature of the accounts. But the system would require investment in physical and digital infrastructure. Many people will be uncomfortable with accounts that give governments detailed information about transactions, particularly if they hasten the decline of good old anonymous cash. Poorly implemented systems could cause big trouble. The Swiss reform would move all demand deposits from private banks to the SNB and tie its hands in costly ways (although the proposal is unlikely to pass, polls suggest a surprising third of the population are in favour). Where central banks are less politically independent, courting votes by pumping accounts full of money, or punishing political opponents by draining them, could be irresistible.

  But used well, individual accounts could improve consumer welfare as well as macroeconomic policy. It is a prospect that should raise interest.

  Why the Swiss should vote for ‘Vollgeld’

  From the Financial Times. A radical rethink of the financial system was essential after a devastating crisis

  Martin Wolf: JUNE 6, 2018

  A radical rethink of how the financial system works was, one might have thought, essential after the devastating crisis of a decade ago. Instead, the system was patched up. Now, predictably, the mood is shifting towards removing much of the regulation. That is why I hope, despite the polls, that the Swiss vote in favour of the Vollgeld proposal in the referendum on June 10. Finance needs change. For that, it needs experiments.

  According to a database compiled at the IMF, 147 individual national banking crises occurred between 1970 and 2011. These crises afflicted small and poor countries like Guinea, and big and rich ones, like the US. They were colossally expensive, in terms of lost output, increased public debt and, not least, political credibility. Within just three years from 2007, cumulative output losses, relative to trend, were 31 per cent of gross domestic product in the US. In the UK, the recent crisis imposed a fiscal cost only exceeded by the Napoleonic war and the two world wars. (See charts.)

  So how does this industry create mayhem on this scale? And why is it allowed to do so? It does so — and is allowed to do so — because, as the Bank of England has explained, banks create money, which is an essential public good, as a byproduct of their lending, which is an important economic good. We want banks to have risky assets and safe liabilities. Yet the liabilities of a highly leveraged, risk-taking institution cannot be safe and will unavoidably seem least safe during a crisis. Yet it is then that people want their money — their reserve of purchasing power in a frightening world — to be at its safest.

  Worse, it is often easiest for banks to justify lending more just when they should lend less, because lending creates credit booms and asset-price bubbles, notably in property. The willingness of the public to treat bank liabilities as stores of safe purchasing power provides stable funding, until panic sets in. To reduce the likelihood of panic, governments insure bank deposits, liquidity and even solvency. That makes crises rarer, but bigger. The authorities are simultaneously supporting banks and reining in the excesses created by support. This is a system designed to fail.

  Today, banks are less leveraged and better supervised than before the crisis. In the UK, retail banking is also ringfenced. Yet, the banks are leveraged at about 20 to 1: if the value of their assets falls by 5 per cent or more, such a bank becomes insolvent. One way to make banks safer then would be to increase their equity capital four or five times, as recommended by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig in The Bankers’ New Clothes.

  An alternative way to make the system safer is to strip banks of the power to create money, by turning their liquid deposits into “state” or “sovereign” money. That is the idea backed by the Vollgeld initiative. An alternative way of achieving the same outcome would be via 100 per cent backing of deposits by claims on the central bank — an idea proposed by free-market Chicago School economists in the 1930s. The rest of the financial system would then consist mainly of investment banking and mutual funds. The latter shift risk on to the investors automatically. The former might need to be regulated, but mainly on capital.

  The shift to a system like this would, as Thomas Jordan of the Swiss National Bank argues, be a mini-earthquake. Moreover, the proposal raises questions about the purposes to which the new sovereign money might be used.

  The obvious possibility is to use the money to finance the government. This idea is highly objectionable to some: it would surely create big challenges. Yet those challenges are nothing like as fundamental as was transferring responsibility for a core attribute of the state — the creation of sound money — to a favoured set of profit-seeking private businesses, co-ordinated by a price-setting government institution, the central bank. In no other economic area is public power so mixed with private interests. Familiarity with this arrangement cannot make it less undesirable. Nor can familiarity with its performance.

  There are many other ideas in this broad area that seem worth pursuing. One would be to allow every citizen to hold an account directly at the central bank. The technological reasons for branch banking are, after all, perishing quickly. Nicholas Gruen, an Australian economist, has argued that no private institution should have better access to the public’s central bank than the public itself does. Furthermore, he adds, the central bank could operate monetary policy by lending freely against safe mortgages. The central bank would not need to lend to banks per se at all. It would focus on assets.

  How did the 2008 financial crisis affect you? Global financial crisis Tell us your story The fundamental point here is that the burden of proof should not be on those who favour change. After a long series of huge and destructive crises, it falls rather on those who support the status quo, even today’s modified status quo. The advantage of the Vollgeld proposal is that it is a credible experiment in the direction of separating the safety rightly demanded of money from the risk-bearing expected of private banks. With money unambiguously safe, it would be far easier to let risk-taking institutions bear the full consequences of their failures. To the extent that bankruptcy remained difficult, regulation would still be needed, especially of equity capital. At the limit, as some argue, risk-bearing financial intermediation might need to be ended.

  The Vollgeld proposal is not as radical as this. Yet it could provide an illuminating test of a better possible future for what has long been the world’s most perilous industry. May the Swiss dare.

  Postscript: I’ve reproduced my letter to the Financial Times in response to other correspondence here.

June 07, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Is Google recording your conversations without you knowing?

  You’ve probably heard about the case of the Amazon Alexa smart speaker that recorded a conversation and sent it to someone.

  Amazon has been forced to explain how Alexa recorded a private conversation and sent it to an Echo user’s colleague without their knowledge. A Portland woman identified only as Danielle revealed the odd series of events in an interview with local TV station Kiro 7, claiming that an Amazon Echo device recorded a private conversation between her and her husband and sent the recording to an employee of the husband. — The Verge

  I haven’t got any speakers in my house that record. (Some of the newer Sonos devices can do it. Mine can’t.)

  And I don’t think I particularly want any.

  The other week, probably triggered by the EU’s GDPR legislation, I got an email from Google suggesting I do a privacy check.

  I had a look, and digging around found a page on Voice Activity.

  To my surprise, this has dozens of voice recordings, going back about 18 months.

  

  Apparently the Google app on my Android phone (actually my current phone and the previous one) has semi-regularly decided I was trying to attract the attention of the Google Assistant (normally invoked by saying “OK Google”), and started recording, then saved the recordings in the cloud.

  I can play the recordings. The sound quality isn’t great, but you can make out the words. In none of them did I actually want the Google Assistant. They’re just random conversations with people.

  You can turn the option off (well, you can pause it). Which I’ve now done.

  It’s good that you can access the recordings, and change the option.

  But I wonder how many people don’t know that Google is recording snippets of conversations and saving them on their servers?

  Check yours via this direct link, or go to myaccount.google.com and then choose My Activity; Activity Controls; Voice & Audio Activity (where you can also Pause the feature).

  Note: the Google App is also available on iOS, so it’s worth checking even if you have an iPhone, not an Android… And of course Siri has similar functionality.

June 04, 2018

• Club Troppo A Tale of Two Chinese Cities
  

  Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang Chi-wa, NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner, Donghai Airlines chairman Mr.Wong Cho-Bau and Donghai Airlines Chief Executive Officer Yang Jianhong following the arrival of the first Donghai airlines flight from Shenzen, China. Picture: Justin Kennedy Source:News Corp Australia

  Once upon a time (in 2010) a wealthy Chinese businessman granted a long-term lease of a luxury apartment at an apparent undervalue to a senior Hong Kong government official, and then undertook multi-million dollar refurbishment works to it free of charge. At the same time, a corporation controlled by the businessman was seeking approval for the grant of a media licence application that was effectively in the gift of the senior official.

  But why should Territorians care about that story? Well, the businessman is a chap named Bill Wong Cho-bau, based in Shenzhen. He is the founder and director of a number of companies including Donghai Airlines, which only last week began offering two Boeing 737 flights per week between Shenzhen and Darwin,  In return it is rumoured that Donghai is receiving a marketing subsidy from the Northern Territory Government of up to $10 million, although the Government won’t disclose the precise terms of the “partnering agreement” – they are said to be “commercial-in-confidence”.

  The senior government official concerned is former Hong Kong Chief Executive (effectively the Governor) Donald Tsang. He was Last Governor Chris Patten‘s understudy before the UK handover of Hong Kong back to Chinese control in 1997, and later followed the first Chinese-born Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa into the top job in 2005 on the latter’s retirement.

  By 2010 Tsang was in his 70s and looking to retire himself. It appears he was quite keen on retiring to a three storey luxury apartment in Shenzhen offered to him by his little business mate Wong Cho-bau. Apart from controlling Donghai Airlines, Wong’s corporate interests include controlling a media company then named Wave Media which held an AM radio licence in Hong Kong but was bidding for a much more valuable digital radio licence, which he was later granted (two in 2010 and one in 2012).

  Tsang was subsequently investigated by Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption and later charged with crimes of official misconduct and bribery by the Hong Kong equivalent of the Director of Public Prosecutions. He was convicted on the misconduct charge and sentenced to 20 months imprisonment in February 2017. However, two successive juries have been unable to reach a verdict on the bribery charge against him and the DPP has recently announced (on 6 November 2017) that they are giving up and won’t charge him again. On 8 November 2017 the Northern Territory News published a story reporting that “CHINA’S Donghai Airlines has been in Darwin this week continuing talks with the Northern Territory Government about direct flights from Shenzhen to Darwin”.

  Wong Cho-Bau (the alleged briber) has never faced any charges at all arising from his dealings with Donald Tsang.. He wasn’t an official so he couldn’t be charged with official misconduct. However you might ask why he has wasn’t charged with bribery as Tsang was? After all, in Chinese law (like that of Australia) bribery is a crime committed by both the briber and bribee. I don’t know the answer to that question but there are several possibilities:

  1. To be found guilty of bribery the prosecution must prove the intention to bribe. Perhaps there wasn’t as much evidence of intention against Wong as against Tsang. The close timing between the lease and renovation of the Shenzhen apartment and the grant of media licences may have just been a coincidence
  2. Perhaps the abortive prosecutions of Tsang made charging Wong too difficult.
  3. Perhaps there were differences between the bribery law in Hong Kong and that in mainland China, that might  also have made prosecution too complicated. The handover arrangement between Britain and China provided for Hong Kong to be ruled with a degree of autonomy under a system called “one country, two systems”.
  4. Perhaps Wong had greater influence with mainland Chinese authorities than Tsang had in Hong Kong (although that seems unlikely – the latter was Hong Kong’s Chief Executive).
  5. Perhaps Wong was innocent.
  6. There is also an active but inconclusive debate in China about the Chinese cultural practice of “guanxi” or gift-giving. Where does guanxi end and bribery begin?

  While guanxi is obviously open to abuse, it is only corrupt if the activity performed as part of the relationship is illegal, for example, paying a bribe.

  Leadership expert Steve Tappin says it’s simply part of the “social fabric” in China. “It’s very difficult to get things done without it,” he adds.

  In fact most business leaders say it’s downright impossible.

  “Right now in China, no matter how strong or how smart an entrepreneur is, as long as he does not belong to the business community, does not have a lot of friends who may help him, he’s not gonna win for long,” says Joe Baolin Zhou, chief executive of Bond Education Group, the largest private education service company in southern China.

  Whatever the reason, Wong was never charged with anything. But it does make you wonder how much “due diligence” the Gunner Northern Territory Government did before entering a “partnering agreement” with Mr Wong’s company Donghai Airlines to fly into Darwin.  I am not in any sense suggesting that the Donghai partnering arrangement wasn’t a good idea (Darwin badly needs air links with China), nor that either party acted in any sense improperly, let alone committing bribery. But you would imagine that character and conduct in a broader sense would be relevant factors in a due diligence process for such a major matter from a Northern Territory viewpoint.

June 03, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Frequency is (temporary) freedom

  If you used the Glen Waverley or Sandringham lines over the weekend, you might have got a pleasant surprise.

  Both were running every 10 minutes for most of Saturday and Sunday — twice the usual frequency.

  Why?

  Because the Frankston and Dandenong (Cranbourne/Pakenham) lines were closed between the City and Moorabbin/Westall between Friday 8pm and Saturday 4pm.

  The Dandenong line is also closed between Westall and Caulfield for the next two weeks as part of the big push to remove the final four level crossings as part of the skyrail project.

  

  Both the Dandenong and Frankston lines usually run every 10 minutes between 10am and 7pm. As part of their replacement with buses during the works, some passengers were shuttled to the Sandringham and Glen Waverley lines by bus.

  (Not that you’d have known any of this was happening if you relied on the online timetables or journey planners. PTV messed up their data feeds. Their own web site and apps were only updated with the closures on Friday afternoon, and downstream users of the same data never got the update. So if you relied on the Google Maps trip planner, you’d have been completely oblivious to the bustitution.)

  

  Running more trains on the Sandringham and Glen Waverley lines was a great idea – to minimise delays for people coming off other lines, and to help the trains cope with the extra loads.

  Apart from the official rail replacement buses, those using regular buses (or trams) to change lines also have benefited. One of my sons on Saturday decided to use the 703 from Bentleigh across to Brighton (12 minutes), then the Sandringham line (20 minutes), rather than catch a Frankston line replacement bus stopping all stations to the City (estimated 56 minutes). With half-hourly buses, and usually trains every 20 minutes, this would be potluck as to whether it worked. Trains every 10 minutes made the connection easy.

  (Most stations have orbital cross-line tram or bus connections. Trams run at good frequencies every day; unfortunately buses don’t. Most are only hourly on weekends and evenings.)

  People who usually use the Sandringham and Glen Waverley lines also got the benefit, though it’s doubtful that there was any patronage boost, since nobody knew about it. The only advertised change was that all trains ran direct to/from Flinders Street, not via the City Loop.

  It looks like the doubling of services will happen again next long weekend, with both the Frankston and Dandenong lines shut down again from Moorabbin/Westall from Saturday to the end of Monday, for both grade separation (Dandenong line skyrail) and upgrades to accommodate the new High Capacity Metro Trains.

  Frequent services make the whole network more usable, and if made permanent, would get more people on board. If only those lines (and the others) ran every ten minutes every day.

• Club Troppo Donghai dong low sweet subsidy chariot

  

  Long-ish article but a must-read in my humble opinion for Territorians interested in NT economic development (especially tourism).

  The Gunner government isn’t keen to disclose the terms of its “partnering” agreement with Donghai Airlines that resulted in the airline’s inaugural flight from Shenzhen to Darwin earlier this week; apparently the first of two flights per week for an indeterminate period of time. It was full of junketing “VIPs” travelling at NTG expense, reportedly to the tune of a total $70,000. Exactly how much taxpayers’ money will be going to Donghai on an ongoing basis is a mystery, because the Gunner government refuses to tell us. I wonder how much of the $10.85 million the NTG recently announced as being committed to “cooperative marketing with domestic and international airlines” is going to support the Donghai deal? I suspect it’s probably the lion’s share. Moreover, there are also rumours that the Government is subsidising Donghai’s landing fees at Darwin Airport.

  Why is this important? There are two reasons. First, the history of NTG attempts to increase the number and frequency of overseas airlinks is patchy to put it mildly, as I recently highlighted in a Twitter thread. Essentially what the subsidised airlines typically do is trouser the NTG subsidy dollars until the money stops, then cancel the formerly subsidised service/s. Historically these deals have been a waste of money. I’ll explore that proposition in greater depth below.

  Secondly, we will actually need to rely on government subsidies of one sort or another if we hope to establish the type of attractions Darwin will need to entertain all those Chinese visitors so they recommend it to their friends. At the moment, during the wet season  Darwin regularly features hordes of American and European tourists from visiting cruise liners wandering bored, broiling and bemused around the CBD because few shops are open and there’s little or nothing to do.

  Things will be marginally better at least in the dry season for Chinese visitors jetting in from Shenzhen, but Darwin still isn’t exactly excitement city. The potential is there but the execution is badly lacking. If our Chinese visitors also end up bored and bemused they won’t recommend Darwin as a destination and the Donghai service won’t last very long. Subsidising creation of one or more air services is potentially a good idea, but only if the subsidy period is used constructively and urgently by government and businesses to develop features and attractions that will make us a desirable destination and therefore make the air service sustainable in the longer term without a subsidy. Fortunately Darwin already has most of the necessary characteristics and natural beauty, compared with hot arid s**tholes like Dubai that have nevertheless constructed themselves as viable destinations, albeit only with vast amounts of oil money.

  What we clearly need is a concerted, co-ordinated and well-planned program to develop Darwin as an exciting, attractive and relaxing tourist destination. That program will have to be planned and to some extent funded or at least subsidised by the Northern Territory Government. That’s why the question of subsidies is critically important.  The money has to be intelligently and carefully spent so we get maximum “bang for the buck”. Some types of subsidy are good and some are wasteful or even damaging. Most of the previous attempts at airline subsidies have been bad and wasteful. Whether any lessons have been learned for the current Donghai agreement remains to be seen because its terms are secret. They shouldn’t be. Not only is it our money the Government is spending, but sunlight is the best disinfectant for dodgy deals.

  Transparency and accountability are critical in arrangements like this. In some ways it is understandable that the Gunner government is gun shy about disclosing the details of this deal, because some parts of the media habitually run condemnatory stories about almost any government-generated development whether or not its terms are in fact sensible and well-structured. The same goes for the usual local community Nattering Nabobs of Negativism who frequently feature on talkback radio and in the letters pages of the NT News. However, trying to cover the deal up and hide behind nonsensical incantations of “commercial-in-confidence” makes the situation even worse. It provokes suspicion even among strong supporters of industry growth and development like me. If our politicians can explain clearly and persuasively the necessity for deals of this sort then most Territorians will support them because most of us want the Territory to prosper. If they can’t explain then they shouldn’t be in politics.

  Subsidies good and bad

  Bad subsidies are those that undermine the “level playing field” in a given industry by giving one operator an unfair advantage over its competitors. With a bit of luck the Donghai deal won’t do that because no-one else is currently flying between China and the Northern Territory. Hopefully, however, the deal has been structured in such a way that future operators won’t be deterred from entering the market because of Donghai’s entrenched advantage. That was the lesson that should have been learned years ago from the botched subsidy deals for the building of the Darwin and Alice Springs Sheraton hotels in the 1980s. The NTG underwrote their operations by guaranteeing a 15% rate of return. Not only did it mean Sheraton didn’t need to try too hard to build a market (and they didn’t) but it deterred other operators from building more 4 and 5 star hotels for several years.

  Good “subsidies” include simply seeking tenders or expressions of interest from the marketplace to ascertain what sort of subsidies or inducements are needed from Government for a particular key piece of economic infrastructure to be built and operated by the private sector. Sometimes, as with the Jemena gas pipeline to Queensland, it turns out that no government subsidies at all are needed. Other times provision of free serviced land is enough, as seems to have been the case with the Landbridge Hotel project at the Darwin Waterfront. The Government is hoping that the same will prove true for the Expressions of Interest it is currently seeking for the proposed new major water theme park near Stokes Hill. Provision of free serviced government-owned land is a good form of “subsidy” because it doesn’t actually cost the government anything in budgetary terms, nor does it distort the market by allowing the developer to compete unfairly with existing businesses.

  Other potentially good subsidies in some circumstances include concessions for a defined establishment period on government taxes and charges including water, electricity, council rates, stamp duty, payroll tax and reductions in CBD levies for provision of parking in new buildings. That sort of inducement isn’t an immediate drain on the Budget: the Government doesn’t currently collect that revenue so foregoing it to induce a new business into the market doesn’t have a direct fiscal cost. However, subsidies or concessions of that sort must be evaluated carefully so they don’t give an unfair advantage to the developer over existing businesses in the same market. It’s fine if the business being created by the developer is the first one of that type into the market and therefore won’t detract from existing businesses (as with Donghai); or if it’s  a keystone facility or essential building block for the city or a particular industry, and therefore something from which everyone will ultimately benefit.

  We badly need mature, nuanced community discussions around these issues if the Territory’s economy is to grow and prosper sustainably rather than continue to exhibit an endless boom/bust cycle as businesses crash and burn, partly as a result of exaggerated expectations induced by gung ho government rhetoric and ill-considered subsidy regimes.

  

  The inaugural Donghai airlines flight arrives in Darwin from Shenzhen, China, under a water cannon salute. Picture: Justin Kennedy NT News

  That is quintessentially the situation with all the ballyhoo surrounding Donghai’s inaugural flight, because the service won’t last very long without development of exciting attractions to keep tourists and other travellers coming here. Moreover quite a few of those facilities won’t be developed at all without well structured government subsidies and other support mechanisms.

  The rest of this article suggests a series of ideas that should at least be explored if not developed in order to transform Darwin into an exciting destination for tourists, business travellers and (not least) local residents.  The first group consists of ideas that can be developed with little if any need for government funding as such but lots of encouragement and in some cases regulatory intervention. The second group comprises proposals that probably will need some sort of tangible government support or subsidy.

  All of these concepts assume progressive implementation of the ideas in the mooted Darwin City Deal between federal, NT and local government, together with those I advocated involving a co-ordinated public transport system in this article , That is, parking stations and main bus terminus situated below McMinn Street and free CBD electric shuttle buses running every 5 minutes. All of these are vital for Darwin to develop as a liveable, attractive “creative” city.

  Ideas that won’t need government money

  CBD retail outlets open in the evenings – This should be self-evident as a key concept for enlivening Darwin. The Darwin City Deal places huge emphasis on strategies for making the CBD a cool, pedestrian-friendly oasis, but the cheapest strategy will cost government almost nothing at all. CBD retail businesses simply need to exhibit the initiative to decide to act collaboratively and open their shops every evening until at least 9pm. It’s relatively cool and pleasant in the evening, even for much of the wet season. Both residents and tourists would flock to the city in the evenings if retail outlets other than “bloodhouse” Mitchell Street bars were reliably open.

  Delivering the concept might need some minor NTG assistance to shopkeepers to make a joint application to the Fair Work Commission for a Darwin CBD Retail Industry Award which would equalise wages so that evening opening is no more expensive in than during the day. Perhaps also there might need to be “sticks”  as well as “carrots”, in the form of higher rates and government charges for those who fail to participate and/or discounts for those who do.

  Legalised cannabis in licensed bars and cafes – The Northern Territory Parliament should legalise the consumption of small quantities of cannabis (both medicinal and recreational) for on-premises (not takeaway) consumption in licensed coffee shops, bars and restaurants. The Government would grow, tax and undertake the wholesale distribution of product to retail premises operating under tight control. This would not be a cost to government, indeed quite the reverse. The tax revenue would probably go quite some way to solving the NT’s chronic budget deficit problem.The slogan Get High With Donghai probably wouldn’t be suitable for the Chinese market but it might play well with some partis of the Australian domestic tourism market.

  Daytime produce market – I have in mind something like Victoria Markets, South Melbourne Markets or Prahran Markets in Melbourne. Darwin has lots of agriculture, horticulture and aquaculture producers keen for a reliable retail outlet. Many of those primary producers attend night markets each week at Mindil Beach, Nightcliff, Rapid Creek and so forth, but a daytime outlet in the CBD would be a sure winner.  Government should seek urgent tenders/EOIs for construction and operation of produce markets on free serviced land on the old oil tanks site in McMinn Street at the bottom of Knuckey Street. I’m sure they would be knocked over in the rush from developers because it would be very profitable. All that would be necessary is a large, air-conditioned but cheap-to-construct lined corrugated iron shed with wide shade awnings to facilitate pavement dining.

  International cookery school – South Melbourne Markets has just such a cookery school offering intensive masterclasses for professional chefs and ordinary classes for keen amateurs in many styles of Asian and European cuisine. Darwin has enough skilled chefs to offer a wide range of daytime classes. Perhaps Charles Darwin University, which already runs a Culinary Arts school for students/aspiring chefs could consider running this facility.

  Chinese weddings – Both Melbourne and Sydney attract lots of Chinese and other Asian marrying couples and their friends and family for weddings in an exotic, attractive overseas locale.  Donghai and other airlines flying into Darwin opens up the possibility of our capitalising on that growing market as well. Climate and proximity will be major drawcards. It probably only needs some targetted spending from the $10.85 million dollar marketing budget that NTG has already committed, and some concerted effort by a few good, entrepreneurial wedding planners working with other business that will benefit (reception venues, hotels, florists and so on). It’s time for Darwin businesses to stop whingeing, blaming others for their predicament and expecting Government to do all the heavy lifting for them.

  Projects that probably will need government funding or subsidy

  Chinese department store – This is a critical piece of commercial infrastructure essential for attracting and keeping mainstream Chinese visitors. They expect high end shopping and Darwin CBD currently doesn’t have any.

  Previous governments have made unsuccessful attempts to attract Australian department store chains like Myer and David Jones to open in Darwin, but with no success. They have rigid policies about the local population size necessary to support a department store. But Townsville has a Myer store that is by all accounts very successful and it isn’t much bigger than Darwin and arguably has less tourism potential. The Government should go all-out to attract a suitable Chinese department store chain to open in Darwin CBD, including by offering free serviced land, and carefully designed concessions for up to (say) 10 years on rates, taxes and charges. In contrast to Myer and David Jones, Chinese department stores have actually done quite well in recent years by developing their online shopping strategies and concentrating on optimising the sales and marketing mix between online and in-store.

  There would of course need to be a careful study to ensure that smaller existing local retailers are not damaged by such concessions. However I suspect that the benefit of having a large prestige “anchor” retailer would actually be a net benefit to smaller retailers by attracting more people to shop in the CBD. Probably it should also be built on part of the old oil tanks site below McMinn Street. In addition to free serviced land, the developer would not be required to construct or provide carparking space. The site would be immediately above the large parking stations that would also be constructed there as part of the vision of a pedestrianised CBD (discussed in my previous article).

  Major expansion of Bullocky Point Museum – A major reason why both domestic and overseas tourists come to the Territory is to experience the unique Aboriginal art and culture, and indeed our fascinating, colourful and harmonious multicultural community.  Moreover they really aren’t showcased or made accessible to a significant extent. Most visitors don’t have the time or resources to travel to remote communities so all they see are the urban itinerant casualties of white settlement/invasion, who are frequently outcasts from their own communities and suffering significant drug and alcohol problems and mental illness.

  Cairns delivers the Indigenous tourist experience much better than Darwin with its Tjakupai Culture Park, showcasing both visual and performing arts with dinner and multi-media shows several times a week. Darwin could do a similar thing only better, and an expansion of Bullocky Point Museum would be the best and most cost-effective way of achieving it. To reduce pressure on the NT’s budget it should be a joint venture between Government and relevant Top End Indigenous organisations, financed in part by funds from the Aboriginal Benefits Account (part of the proceeds of mineral royalties for mining on Aboriginal land) and perhaps with some money from the Darwin City Deal, the federal Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility or  the NT Industry Development Fund. Again this is a critical piece of infrastructure and the NTG should go all-out to achieve it as soon as possible.

  Water theme park – This is already happening depending on receipt of positive Expressions of Interest. It’s a great idea; Darwin can be a very attractive tropical holiday resort destination, although not based on open ocean swimming because of crocodiles, box jellyfish and other nasty marine critters. Darwin is clean, safe and prosperous (in contrast to Bali) and has a great tropical climate eight months of the year. Add water attractions and tropical beachside resorts and Bob’s your uncle!

  Wave lagoon – I have argued for some time that we should also develop a large wave lagoon like the one currently under construction adjacent to Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. When completed it will generate up to one thousand perfect two metre “tubing” waves every hour, a surfer’s dream. Melbourne has a much larger population than Darwin, but why would you surf in freezing cold Melbourne in the middle of winter if you can come to Darwin and have fun and perfect waves in the warm dry season sun?

  The area behind Lake Alexander at East Point would be perfect, and could also accommodate a Cable Beach-style resort. I understand that construction cost would be about $30 million, less than the projected cost of the Stokes Hill water theme park project but catering to a more mature keen surfer market.

  Cheap electric shuttle buses linking Waterfront, CBD, Cullen Bay, Casino, Museum, Ski Club, Sailing Club, Trailer Boat Club, Lake Alexander, Fannie Bay shops and return. Unlike the free electric CBD shuttle buses mentioned above and in my previous article, there would be a modest charge for catching these buses, say $4.00 for a 4 hours multiple journey (jump on-jump off) ticket. They should function with something like a Myki card, which would also be extended to the normal suburban bus services. That would facilitate the suggested affordable multiple journey time-based charging method.  The idea is to link the city in a fairly seamless way with the listed nearby attractions, for the benefit of both tourists and local residents. Most of the listed stops include venues serving food and alcohol, so an option that allows tourists and residents alike to get around town without needing to drive is an important and positive one. The concept is one of linking the city and nearby coastal attractions with an affordable transport system that might be seen as a high tech necklace of pearls ( a concept I stole from the Paspaley family).

  ———————

  For Darwin to break through to a sustainable local economy after a history of mostly failed attempts in the past requires Government, business and Territorians generally not only to dare to dream but to dream smart and then work smart and collaboratively make those dreams an exciting reality. Don’t be a Nattering Nabob of Negativism, cultivate the audacity of hope. I love cliches, especially when they’re exciting and true.

June 01, 2018

• Club Troppo The unbearable thinness of modern politics

  There’s been a great thinning out of our political culture. Once built up from the life-world with hundreds of thousands determining party policy feeding up from branches to politicians – though leaders obviously had quite a lot of power, particularly in the conservative parties, the process is now reversed. Brand management dominates from the top and the brand managers manage as best they can, ‘positioning’ and ‘repositioning’ themselves depending on whether or not their carefully focus group tested talking points get ‘traction’ and so on.

  One bit of road-kill from this thinning out of the institutions and culture of politics is that parties aren’t solid institutions with which one can do business. Neither are politicians. Of course, there was never a time when there wasn’t some mucking about, but there was a time (I’m thinking – perhaps someone can provide me with clear counter-examples to prove I’m just wrong) when agreements made in politics had some solidity. That they have next to none any more was nicely demonstrated when Tony Abbott took over as Leader of the Coalition.

  As you’ll recall, Malcolm Turnbull had concluded a deal with the ALP Government to allow the carbon pricing regime through the Parliament. One might have thought that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was negotiating with the authorised representative of the Coalition when they were negotiating with its then Leader and that there might be ethical qualms about going back on this. After all, that’s a bit of a problem for an organisation if everyone knows that a deal with it might not be worth the paper it’s written on.

  What seemed significant to me at the time was the more or less complete absence of any sense that there was a serious ethical issue to be addressed here.¹ I thought of this when Brian Burston defended his refusal to renegue on a deal he says he thought of himself as making. Now I’m aware that he might just be saying this, but let’s take him at his word. He says that he wouldn’t follow his Great and Fearless Leader Pauline Hanson because “once I make a handshake with somebody,  that’s it. I stick to my word”.

  As I wrote a while back, although the political class have the lowest opinion of these strays from outside the upper middle class who keep turning up, unannounced and unexpected in Parliament, they often deliver the voice and mores of ordinary people. And that’s often of a higher standard than the political pros. Thus you’ll recall all the back-slapping of Malcolm Turnbull when he ‘faced down’ the randos with a double dissolution in which they’d probably lose their seats. Surely that would lead them to buckle in defence of their own self-interest. But that’s rare in people’s conception of what it is to do the right thing in politics. Meanwhile, amongst career politicians it’s de rigueur – it’s pretty much what makes their world go round. ²

  1. No doubt it was raised as a talking point by the ALP and by one or two journos, but, to quote John Foster Dulles in a different context, their heart wasn’t in it. ↩
  2. I recall once talking to a cabinet minister when a particular operative was behaving in a particularly irrational fashion. He was uninterested for quite a while until I continued describing what was going on. Then he said abruptly. “So you’re telling me he’s no longer acting in his own interest”. “Yes” I said. His tone immediately changed. “We’ve got a problem”. ↩

May 30, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from May 2008

  Another in my series of old photos from ten years ago, this time from May 2008…

  Petrol prices shot up this month. This would be about $2.06 in today’s dollars. More amazing is that just four years earlier, the RACV had predicted prices wouldn’t go above about $1.08.
  

  ACMI has put on a lot of great exhibitions, but this one might have been my favourite: basically the history of video games.
  

  A familiar sight: trams queued along Swanston Street
  

  …and this is why: a protest by pensioners, including Family First’s Steve Fielding, who joined in taking off his shirt, mimicking a previous protest by cab drivers.
  

  Flinders Street station: Aftermath of a train surfing incident.
  

  May 2008 was the month of my twenty year school reunion. Here in a terrible old mobile phone photo, a bunch of us nose around the school hall – which hadn’t changed a bit.
  

  Siemens trains were utterly filthy for years, so it’s easy to forget this wasn’t always the case. This one looks pretty clean.
  

• Club Troppo A Vibrant Darwin CBD – vision and reality

  
  It seems like time to review progress on the Gunner government’s quest to create a vibrant Darwin CBD. They actually appointed an assistant Minister for that noble quest (Paul Kirby) on achieving government in 2016. In terms of on-the-ground progress you’d have to say it hasn’t worked. CBD streets remain sparsely populated with both tourists and local residents; shops are still closing while others look tired and run-down; and otherwise nothing has changed except for some very nice murals on the sides of some buildings and some missing trees blown down in Cyclone Marcus.

  But things seem likely to be about to change, mostly for the better, in the near future. It looks like the Landbridge Hotel down at the Darwin Waterfront will soon start construction; federal funding has been committed for an imminent start to Barneson Boulevard linking Tiger Brennan Drive to the centre of the CBD (a mixed blessing); and the NTG has called for expressions of interest to build a major water theme park (a bit like the Bali Water Bom park) adjacent to Stokes Hill. The latter is a really excellent idea and I hope they receive strong expressions of interest from suitable developers. Some NTG funding has been made available for addressing the lack of shade and shelter in the CBD, and Darwin City Council has a current program to replace existing street lighting with brighter LED lights. I hope they’re MUCH brighter, because there are quite a few parts of the CBD where it’s very dark and quite scary to walk at night. Hardly an encouragement for tourists already disconcerted by the aggressive behaviour of many “long-grassers” and drunken thugs exiting Mitchell Street’s nightclub precinct.

  In search of the Darwin City Deal

  Meanwhile, the long-touted Darwin City Deal with the federal government still hasn’t materialised. As best I can understand, it was expected that the federal government would contribute substantially to the cost of a new art gallery/museum to complete State Square, a new Indigenous and multicultural museum at Myilly Point (now cancelled after ignorant community protests fuelled in part by the almost complete lack of information about the project from the NTG); and a new building to house CDU students and the law school adjacent to the GPO. I hope for self-interested reasons that they somehow find the funds to proceed with the new CDU building, because the law school’s student body are 80% online and we really can’t continue to function effectively at the Casuarina campus completely separate from all administrative and tech support staff.

  The Government’s central concept plan/vision for the CBD (see video above) looks very exciting indeed. In fact I only have a couple of relatively minor quibbles with it. First, the images of streetside shade structures look very much like the current one extending from the end of Smith Street Mall down to the pedestrian overbridge to Darwin Waterfront. It is shady but provides no shelter at all; and so is almost completely useless in the build-up and wet season (i.e. six months of every year). Surely it isn’t beyond human wit and wisdom to build structures that provide both shade and shelter.

  My second quibble is about the depicted “shallow, cooling reflection pools” adjacent to footpaths, presumably mostly along Smith Street. Sounds like a great concept until you actually contemplate stark reality. The combination of “long-grassers” and drunken thugs exiting Mitchell Street’s nightclub precinct at 4am will ensure that they rapidly become shallow, cooling urine ponds replete with floating Bondi Cigars, rather than the inviting vision conjured up by the NTG video. Maybe that could be controlled by copious administration of chlorine every morning and council workers going around with little nets to fish out the turds, but it certainly isn’t a job I would want to be doing.

  Otherwise the concept plan looks great, except that it appears to lack a central rationale beyond the clearly expressed one of increasing levels of shade and effecting other heat mitigation strategies for the CBD. Presumably the overarching idea is to create a more pedestrian-friendly CBD to encourage people to walk around, shop and relax in the city centre leaving their cars behind. But if that is the central if implicit rationale then it is actively contradicted by both the construction of a new $15 million underground carpark adjacent to State Square and the construction of Barneson Boulevard to funnel cars directly into the centre of the CBD in Cavenagh Street. Both are positively inimical to creating a more vibrant, pedestrian-friendly CBD. Darwin’s CBD is contained within a quite small area on a relatively small peninsula in Darwin Harbour. There are only three roads in and out and no obvious way to create any more. Although our currently stagnating population may be disguising it, we can’t continue to cram more and more cars into the city centre without creating a nightmarish CBD that no-one will choose to visit voluntarily.

  I don’t have a problem per se with the proposed new underground carpark. As the video asserts, it will reduce urban heat island effects of the existing bitumen carparks it will replace, as well as providing a much-needed $15 million economic stimulus to keep the economy afloat. However Barneson Boulevard, at least in its present form, is an especially idiotic idea. It will decimate Frog Hollow which is the only existing parkland on the CBD’s eastern side, and will exacerbate CBD traffic congestion rather than relieving it. Both those problems would be avoided, and considerable money saved, if Barneson Boulevard is terminated at McMinn Street rather than running right through to Cavenagh Street.  Surely it isn’t too late for a last-minute retreat to commonsense.

  Central elements for a Vibrant Darwin CBD

  Terminating Barneson Boulevard at McMinn Street leads me to what I think SHOULD be the central rationale/s of any CBD redevelopment plan:

  1. All new carparking should be concentrated on the edge of the CBD, mostly in and below McMinn Street and to a lesser extent at Myilly Point/old hospital site. I don’t suggest that CBD carparking should be abolished or existing carparks closed, but no more should be built and some current roadside parking should be sacrificed for planting of large street trees. The fact that some might eventually blow down in large cyclones is an unfortunate but unavoidable part of living in the monsoonal tropics.
  2. All suburban buses should arrive and depart from a new major bus terminus that would also be in McMinn Street, stretching from the bottom of Knuckey Street to just before the NT News building. None should enter the CBD itself.
  3. The old railway reserve from adjacent to the Bagot Flyover right into the city should be resuscitated and turned into a dedicated busway. The reserve remains largely intact and terminates just after it goes under the Daly Street bridge adjacent to the beginning of McMinn Street. Thus the “bones” of an effective rapid transit system already exist. A dedicated busway would allow suburban buses to get to the city quickly even in peak hours as traffic densities increase over the years with growing population. There is no reason why it can’t be constructed over the next few years without budgetary strain. Darwin will not be big enough to sustain either a light or heavy rail system in the foreseeable future, but nor is this necessary. Developments in electric bus technology utilising opportunity charging (see linked Volvo website) make that unnecessary. They may eventually be driverless, but not I suspect in the near future.
  4. There should be a large fleet of FREE electric shuttle buses from the McMinn Street parking stations and bus terminus, they would travel on endless loops around the whole CBD with a frequency of 5 minutes or less. There would need to be a high density of transit inspectors with appropriate powers to prevent the sort of disgusting behaviour highlighted in this article. This proposal is a local adaptation of the Melbourne Free Tram Zone scheme which has been phenomenally successful in creating a vibrant Melbourne CBD, but neither locals nor tourists will travel on the service unless gross anti-social behaviour is radically restrained. As long as that problem is addressed, Darwinians will soon abandon their current firm belief in the absolute necessity of being able to park right outside the shop they want to visit. It won’t be possible as the population grows, and free shuttle buses circulating with extreme frequency will make it completely unnecessary anyway. No-one in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane has such delusions. Darwin is nowhere near as big, but our CBD is much more irretrievably confined and future growth can only come through more high rise development and CBD “densification”.
  5. Finally, smaller car parking stations should be constructed at key points along main suburban bus routes, with low cost all day parking prices, so that commuters can drive from their homes to the local bus stop and leave their cars there so they can commute rapidly to and from work each day. Again that shouldn’t be expensive and can be completed progressively.

  In my view those principles form the essential core of any Darwin development plan. A Vibrant Darwin CBD is a worthwhile and even necessary objective, but the necessary elements can’t sensibly be considered in isolation from the wider questions about our future roads and public transport networks.

  I also have my own more extensive vision/concept plan for a Vibrant Darwin CBD. But that’s a topic for a further article.

May 29, 2018

• Club Troppo Unloading the Duelling Constitutional Six Shooters

  As far as I can tell, the position of the Australian Republic Movement ever since the failure of the 1999 Republic Referendum has effectively if tacitly been that there is no point in another referendum while the current Queen remains on the throne. Certainly the ARM’s current “plan” (such as it is) suggests such a strategy. It envisages a possible referendum in 2022 when the Queen will be 96 if she lives that long. More likely Charles will be on the throne. The ARM hypothesis seems to be that the reverence in which the current Queen is held was a significant reason why the Republic Referendum failed in 1999. Presumably the hope/supposition is that Charles will rapidly show himself to be such a buffoon as King that Australians will be much more receptive to voting for a republic than they were in 1999. But does that have any substance? The 1999 Referendum failed within a couple of years of the death of Princess Diana, a time when the Queen was widely reviled by her own subjects including Australians. Things had recovered a bit by 1999, but it isn’t evident that the Queen was especially revered.

  Similarly, although Charles seems to be a tad eccentric, it’s unlikely that he will emerge in his 70s as the Renegade King and immediately alienate his subjects. More likely he will act under the close guidance of senior Royal Household advisers, just as his mother did in her early years on the throne.

  In my view the ongoing seeming stability and complacent acceptance of constitutional monarchy by most Australians (although a recent poll showed increasing support for a republic) has much more to do with a belief that the current Australian system is itself stable and durable. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” remains the prevailing view. However that attitude itself flows from a fairly abysmal level of ignorance about our Constitution on the part of most Australians. There are numerous deficiencies in the Constitution, not least its failure to embrace First Nations peoples, the grossly defective disqualification provisions of s 44 and lack of protection of basic rights and freedoms.

  However the potential instability flowing from the lack of clarity of the relationship between  the royal Head of State, her Australian representative the Governor-General and our elected governments is in my view the most serious problem, even though it has only manifested itself in practice once since Federation.

  To comprehend the deficiency fully, an Australian citizen would need to have a good basic understanding of the concepts of representative and responsible government in a Westminster democracy; the respective roles of Queen, Governor-General and Prime Minister; the nature and operation of unwritten constitutional conventions especially those surrounding reserve powers; and the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. The reality is that almost no-one has a real grasp of those things other than constitutional lawyers.

  Fortunately, it is possible to explain at least the basic problem in fairly stark if simplistic terms. The Governor-General possesses unwritten constitutional reserve powers to sack the Prime Minister and elected government (or call an election against the will of the government) in some circumstances defined by unwritten conventions that are themselves a bit vague. One of the associated conventions is that the Governor-General should warn the elected Prime Minister if the G-G is contemplating sacking the PM and his or her government. However, Sir John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government without warning the PM, despite repeated advice from a High Court Justice (Anthony Mason) that he should give such a warning. But on a pragmatic view Kerr would have been a mug to pre-warn Whitlam. As Mason noted much later:

  Sir John was very much aware of the possibility that the prime minister might seek to have him removed from office. Apart from his account to me of his conversation with Mr Yeend, he told me of the prime minister’s remark before the state banquet in honour of the prime minister of Malaysia, “It could be a question of whether I get to the Queen first for your recall or you get in first with my dismissal”.

  Those few words by Whitlam himself starkly summarise the fundamental flaw at the heart of Australia’s constitutional system. Moreover, the Constitution didn’t exhibit that deficiency at Federation. At that time the Monarch appointed and dismissed the Governor-General on the “advice” (read “at the direction” – one of those pesky unwritten conventions again) of her British Ministers under Constitution section 2.  In those days the Prime Minister who advised (directed) the Queen to dismiss the Governor-General was NOT the same Prime Minister in respect of whom the Governor-General could have a corresponding and simultaneous constitutional duty of dismissal. It wasn’t until the enactment of the Statute of Westminster 1931 (Imp) embodying the earlier Balfour Declaration of 1926 that the current Duelling Constitutional Six Shooters scenario was created. The first Australian Governor-General to be appointed by the Monarch was Sir Isaac Isaacs who was (rather reluctantly) appointed by George V (the current Queen’s grandfather) in 1931 on the advice of  Labor Prime Minister Scullin.

  The Duelling Six Shooters scenario has never been remedied by constitutional amendment since that time. Consequently, there is no reason whatever to believe that any new constitutional crisis that might arise (whatever the details) would proceed differently from the disastrous and divisive Whitlam Dismissal saga.

  Again fortuitously, there is a clue pointing towards a possible pragmatic solution, one which would not involve the need for a referendum which would almost certainly fail in Australia’s current political culture, provided by the events leading up to the Whitlam Dismissal itself. As historian Jenny Hocking has fairly recently uncovered, it seems that Kerr had actually reached an informal understanding with the Palace that would in fact have allowed him to pre-warn Whitlam that he faced dismissal without simultaneously courting his own demise:

  Kerr’s 1980 journal details how he communicated with the Queen’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, directly about the safety of his own job in the lead up to the dismissal.

  Kerr referred in his journal to communications with Charteris about his fears Whitlam could recall him if he found out he was secretly considering the dismissal.

  The records also suggest Kerr confided in Prince Charles just a month before the crisis began that he was considering dismissing Whitlam.

  Again Kerr expressed concern for the chance Whitlam may have him recalled.

  Charteris told Kerr the palace would act to delay matters if “the contingency to which you refer” occurred.

  The best guess as to why Kerr failed to warn Whitlam, despite that reassurance from the Palace and Mason’s advice, is that he was simultaneously being told both by the UK government and Charteris that the best outcome would be if the Queen could be kept completely out of Australian partisan politics: – it was an Australian problem for Australians to resolve as far the British were concerned.  The facts suggest that protecting the Queen from controversy was Kerr’s overwhelming motivation to opt for ambushing Whitlam rather than giving him a fair go and warning him.  All this is laid out by eminent constitutional scholar Anne Twomey, who pithily refers to The Dismissal as “a conspiracy of masterful inactivity”.

  An ad hoc “republican” solution

  I see no sensible reason why Australia’s Parliament and political leaders should not be able, at least at a time when no potential constitutional crisis is obvious or imminent, to agree on a joint approach to the Monarch as Head of State setting out their joint advice/request as to how a future Whitlam Dismissal situation ought usually be handled by the Palace. That advice would be that if a future Prime Minister advises the Head of State to dismiss the Governor-General in a situation where the latter has warned the PM that he or she faces dismissal, then the Head of State should, before accepting and implementing the PM’s advice, require formal written advice from at least two recently retired Chief Justices of Australia, analysing:

   (1) whether the formal constitutional prerequisites for dismissal of the PM by the G-G are present;

  (2) whether such a dismissal is consistent with evolved constitutional conventions in all the circumstances; and

  (3) whether the warning to the PM has been appropriate in its nature and timing.

  Depending on that advice, it might be appropriate for the Head of State to “delay matters”, as Sir Martin Charteris put it in 1975, until the deadline for the Governor-General’s warning to the Prime Minister has expired.

  That suggested procedure would be entirely consistent with the Head of State’s basic role towards an elected government which, as Sir Walter Bagehot put it, is “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. Moreover, a joint approach to the Monarch by leaders of all the main political parties to establish this mutually agreed approach in a constitutional crisis, would avoid the possibility of the Monarch being dragged into an Australian partisan political controversy, which appeared to be both the Queen and UK government’s principal concern in 1975. Instead the Monarch would rightly be seen by Australians as fulfilling the proper role of an impeccably impartial arbiter acting strictly in accordance with the principles Australians wanted as well as the constitutional advice of the most eminent Australian lawyers.

  Incidentally, I also see no reason why an analogous process could not be enshrined in relation to the appointment of the Governor-General. It seems to me that Parliament could, at least under the nationhood power, legislate to require the Government to:

  (1) call for nominations for Governor-General;

  (2) put nominees up for endorsement/approval by both Houses of Parliament;

  (3) conduct a plebiscite to ascertain the wishes of Australian in relation to any one or more nominees pre-approved by at least 75% of Members of Parliament; and

  (4) advise the Monarch to appoint the successful candidate as Governor-General.

  I must confess I haven’t previously seen a suggestion along these lines, which makes me wonder whether I might be overlooking some basic constitutional or other principle that would make it impossible. But I can’t immediately think of one, so I might as well run the idea up the constitutional flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

  It seems to me that, together with the proposal outlined above to resolve a Dismissal Crisis, this would actually create an Australian constitutional system that would in truth have a plausible resemblance to the notion of a Crowned Republic that David Flint and others deployed falsely to confuse and mislead the Australian public into voting against a Republic back in 1999. And it would so so without any need for a referendum.

  Nevertheless any referendum to constitutionalise that system and make Australia a formal Republic would stand a much greater greater chance of success after the Australian people have experienced it in action for a few years. There would simply need to be variations to substitute Parliament and the people as appointors of the Head of State who would then be called President rather than Governor-General, while dismissal of the President would be directly by the two retired Chief Justices, without the formal intercession of the Queen, on the advice of the PM.

May 28, 2018

• Daniel Bowen What we know about the Myki mobile phone trial

  The State Government has announced a trial of a mobile phone app for Myki.

  • The Age: Farewell myki cards? Trial for app to let you touch on with your phone
  • PTV: Mobile myki trial
  • State Government: Mobile Myki Trial To Begin

  Here’s what we know about the trial.

  Will it mean the end of Myki cards?

  No.

  Despite the fascination of headline writers with Myki being replaced, a phone app will be an additional option, alongside cards.

  Some people don’t have mobile phones, and may never have mobile phones. They’ll still need cards.

  Will it only be E-class trams, as first thought?

  No, the government now say it’ll be systemwide, without the need to rollout new equipment. Which is good – there are thousands of devices out there on stations, trams and buses. Replacing them all would be extremely expensive.

  Why only on Android?

  I’m told it’s because Apple has the iOS NFC feature heavily locked-down, apparently in the hopes of controlling all payments made with iPhones.

  NFC isn’t on all Android phones, but it is on an increasing number of them. It’s already used by a number of public transport cards in some way, including being able to instantly check your balance on Sydney’s Opal.

  Perhaps in time Apple will come to the party.

  

  Will it cover Myki Pass and Myki Money?

  Yes, both. The app will be able to act as a Myki card, with the same fares.

  It will also allow instant top-up, without the current 90 minute online delay. (This delay is similar on all public transport smartcards).

  Will it cost $6 like a real card? Will it expire like a card?

  I doubt it will expire. (Most phones don’t last 4 years like a Myki card is meant to!)

  The cost is unknown. The $6 cost of a real card is partly because you can commence a (non-V/Line) trip on a zero balance, so the balance can drop as low as minus $4.30. It’s not yet clear how the app will work in this regard.

  Perhaps if in some way it enables a user to pay just the cost of a daily fare, this can partly negate the need for a single use ticket, which isn’t currently provided.

  What about contactless credit cards, such as Paypass?

  It looks like existing Myki equipment isn’t compatible with that.

  That’s a shame, as I suspect a lot more people have contactless cards than NFC mobile phones. Card payment works really well in London, and many cities (especially those that use a variant of London’s Oyster) are trying it.

  But that may be changing over time, and it’s still a positive move to help make it easier to pay a fare.

  And on balance, it’s better not to go down the path of huge expense to replace all the equipment around the system. Perhaps that can be planned for the new generation of station/bus/tram devices, to allow a later upgrade.

  

  When will the trial happen?

  The trial is expected to run from July until early 2019.

  I hate topping up. I want it now.

  If you use Myki Money, you should consider Auto-Topup.

  It was a bit kludgy when first introduced, but works really well now. I’ve had it set up on my kids’ cards for years.

  Unfortunately it doesn’t work with Myki Pass, which is why they should really implement Myki Money weekly and monthly capping, which was originally planned.

  How do I get involved in the trial?

  PTV says: To stay up to date with the Mobile myki trial, including how to register your interest in participating in the trial later in the year, make sure your myki is registered.

  What else?

  This government fact sheet might help:

  

  …or leave a comment/question and I’ll see if I can get an answer.

• Club Troppo John Burnheim on theory and practice in understanding the world

  In an exchange, John Burnheim sent me an email which seemed to me to be the effective condensation of a lot of good thinking. It certainly chimed with my own thoughts. So I suggested he clean it up and I’d reproduce it here, which I reproduce below. Because it is the conclusion of three emails, the first from him, followed by my response, I reproduce those two previous emails immediately below his final email – which is immediately below:

  Don’t despair. Just face the problem that the more we know the more difficult it is to handle our problems. Give up looking for a kit of tools each of which has a specific use and collectively can do anything you need to do. Even in physics the variety of models that turn out to be relevant to some apparently simple problems tend to keep on multiplying. complications.

  For much of my life I have been a devotee of sailing as “the poetry of motion” and a fascinating set of problems of design involving a host of diverse considerations, ranging from structural and accommodation problems, the capabilities of various materials, through hydrodynamics of flow, the interactions of hull with waves, to the aerodynamics of sails, each of which involves a different sort of theorisation, but also the impossibility of getting exact measurements such as might enable the relevance of variations of design to performance to be calculated from the theory, which itself is often an approximation. What theory does is to enable us to design ways of testing a particular way of dealing with a problem that identify its weaknesses.

  Nobody who knows anything about such design problems imagines that progress will take us towards a single model that incorporates and integrates all those factors, or even that some of the apparently well establishes theories of such things as laminar flow are as simple as we have supposed. An old friend of mine, Tom Fink, was at one time prof of aeronautics engineering at Sydney University. He was very critical of the reliance of his Cambridge teachers on empirical generalisation in aerodynamics and set out to get the theory right. He once announced to me with pride that he had solved the problem of supersonic flow in TWO dimensions. I said “Surely it’s at least a three-dimensional problem. He replied that even though that was true, the development was a big step forward, and not without its practical use in circumstances where you could treat the third dimension as given, assign values to it and see what happens.

  The trouble with economics is that the matters it deals with are much more complicated than the problem of sailing, but people want it to at least supply them with the sort of second-order considerations that they hope will enable them to make good decisions about particular matters even where there are no clear answers available to many of the questions that arise in the particular case. Philosophers are even worse addicted to simplification. Religions worse still. Emotionally for each personally, there is a strong hankering for clear direction, while collectively we seem to need agreed principles if there is ever to be unforced collective action on any other basis than arbitrary power. I think the agreement we need does not need consensus but compromise, based on awareness of the limitations of our knowledge and willingness to experiment honestly and prudently.

  What is particularly dangerous is that people constantly fall for oversimple “truths” to rule out certain things as impossible. My favourite example of such an assumption is that heavier gases fall, displacing lighter. So clouds consisting of colder and heavier vapour should never be able to form, but the molecules of H2O should immediately fall to the ground. Why they do not do so is a complicated story involving quite different forces that do not evade the law of gravity but succeed in countering that force in certain circumstances. Economists habitually assume that certain sorts of motivation cannot be countered by other motivations in certain circumstances. The paradox is that many people embrace such simplifications precisely because they recognise that human motivations are so various and complex that no realistic analysis of them is possible. In fact, there is a strong case for saying that motivations are irrelevant to economics, which should concern itself with the consequences of acing in a certain way in certain hypothetical circumstances, including the actions of others.

  One important advantage of such an approach to economic questions is that it facilitates constructive compromise. In assuring certain consistency and impersonality it should arrive at a representation of various outcomes that can, prescinding from other factors, be rated clearly in relation to the real problem. People may alter their prior subjective preferences in negotiation with each other in view of the possibility of achieving agreement to at least make a start at tackling the problem seriously. Moreover, enabling better negotiation between people who need to reach a compromise can, by exploring how much of the likes and dislikes of each party, accommodated them in relation to that particular proposal and its context. But that assumes that the models particular proposal is comprehensive and precise enough to minimise the danger of omitting seriously important factors. In practical situations what is needed very often is frank discussion of the likelihood of deceptive omissions and of insufficient weight to be attached to risks. Very often the risks involved in doing nothing turn out to be much less acceptable than those of some positive action. This is normally the case in business and in administrative decisions in most kinds of institutions that are forced to adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed, this sort of decision seems to me to be the central paradigm of practical rationality for people with diverse desires but a loosely defined important common interest in a very complex world acting on sound but limited knowledge to experiment with due caution.to meet the threats and opportunities the changing situation offers. Seriously considered action at least has some chance of improving a deteriorating situation.

  Its obvious downside is that it is not emotionally satisfying, offering no prospect of a decisive triumph of some collective identity, no simple second-order rule or objective, and no assurance of salvation from fatal dangers. All of these satisfactions have their place in other contexts. Not many people find analysing and negotiating solutions to our problems a congenial occupation. What I hope for is that we will evolve and reward institutions that undertake those tasks, that the recommendations ar which they arrive will have a strong influence on public opinion, and that legislators and administrators will be constrained to follow those opinions.

  John

  On 7 May 2018, at 12:53 am, Nicholas <ngruen@gmail.com> wrote:

  I doubt you’re out of touch, but economics is. It doesn’t really take this kind of thing very seriously. It didn’t in the Cambridge Capital Controversies where the Cambridge (England) guys won the intellectual battles, but it had no impact on the neoclassical model building – because (I think) model building and pressing on with the discipline is an academic imperative. Even if you know it’s wrong.

  No good in physics or hard sciences of course because you’ll be shown up. But in economics refutation is the least of your worries – no-one’s ‘theories’ are very securely supported by the evidence over others. I expect there’s some good thinking on the subject – or good-ish – but I don’t know of it as I doubt it’s much use to my own endeavours and I’m very confident that it will end up in some academic cul-de-sac – professionally speaking.

  That’s just not the way modern social sciences – or at least economics – develops any more, which is why I’m not that interested in a lot of contemporary academic economics. I don’t find it very insightful about anything other than the technicalities of its sub-field.

  Cheers, NG

  On 30/4/18, 6:15 pm, “John Burnheim” <jburnheim@bigpond.com> wrote:

  Hi Nicholas,

  A brief word about something that has troubled me for years. The classic Smith-Ricardo theory of markets seems to me to have been concerned almost exclusively with commodities, things that can be produced for consumption, and the role of markets in establishing the choices open to those involved in production and exchange of commodities in that sense.

  The value of assets like land, natural resources and works of art obeys a different social dynamic from commodities because they cannot be produced. And so does money in so far as it canvey produced freely as credit.

  Although each of the three categories depend on relative scarcity and relative desirability to motivate exchanges, it seems obvious to me that it is a mistake to treat money as the metric of scarcity and desirability. The crucial reason as I see it is that many needs for commodities are very inflexible on both the production and the supply sides, while both assets and money are instantly transferable.

  This has numerous effects, most of which are occluded by such measures of economic well-being as GDP, basically because they do not take account of the diverse dynamics of the markets for different forms of exchange. The power of physics is that it has continually found more precise understanding of the dynamics of the very different forces, having long since abandoned the attempt to reduce those forces to a single vague category, even though the result of force is always measured ultimately in the same terms. I think that for economics to be successful, the way to go is not the present path of more sophisticated psychology, but more analysis of the dynamics fo markets.

  Or am I a bit of touch?

  Yours,

  John

May 24, 2018

• Club Troppo OECD brain eaten by environmental memes

  The OECD has joined The Movement. In a new report it’s saying that plastic recycling isn’t working. So we’ve got to make it work. Fair enough. Perhaps we should. But you’d think that reading their material on it, there might be some discussion as to whether this was the most economic way to address environmental objectives, or at least the most environmentally sound way to do so. I mean recycling plastic involves a lot of pollution – with trucks running round collecting stuff, toxins being difficult to remove from the plastic on recycling. So you’d be interested to hear how it all stacks up.

  And when we hear that plastic waste is converted via incineration to energy and that this emits greenhouse gas, you’d want to know what the counterfactual was wouldn’t you? You’d want some reassurance that more recycling would lower plastics in the oceans – since, though it’s referenced as an important issue in the report, it seems to be a littering, rather than a recycling problem. And when you hear about the benefits of ‘extended producer responsibility’ you’re also waiting to hear about the very substantial costs and how the benefits and costs – economic and environmental – compare. But I had a quick read of the executive summary, and I was still waiting.

May 23, 2018

• Club Troppo Citizens’ juries as activism: holding political elites to their constitutional role

  For some time now we’ve been ‘proving up’ citizens’ juries as a means of consulting the people, but generally within the context of governments being in charge. As a result they’ve been mostly relatively innocuous. For instance the first two in South Australia were focused on making Adelaide’s nightlife safe and vibrant and getting motorists and cyclists to share the road more safely. They’re pretty anodyne and boutique issues for politicians so it’s pretty low risk. They might generate some answers they’re happy with, help get community buy-in to tricky issues. And if they don’t work out as hoped for, governments can walk away without too much angst.

  Having tried exercises with a degree of difficulty of about 3 out of ten, the then Premier of South Australia Jay Weatherill had a rush of blood to the head and tried the citizens’ jury with pike and triple twist – rated in the diagnostic and statistical manual of democracy at 10. Should South Australia start a nuclear waste storage industry? The answer was … no, which wasn’t much fun for anyone. Elsewhere in Melbourne a citizens’ jury worked on a ten year budget plan which was certainly well received at the time. The plan is now a few years old and I’m not sure how well it’s stood the test of time.

  In the UK, a consortium of academic and other interests held a citizens’ jury on Brexit but, in the angst ridden atmosphere of Brexit Means Brexit Britain, they were at great pains not to antagonise the politicians who were planning on spending the next four years masterminding what the overwhelming majority of them understood to be the disaster of Brexit (you know, the way Australia’s politicians did abolishing carbon pricing against the better judgement of around 80 percent of them – it’s costing the budget over $10 billion a year since you asked.)

  Thus, as the organisers collateral put it dutifully, “The UK’s voters have decided to leave the EU. The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit is not reopening this question. This decision has already been made.” ¹ However I can’t think of any big change that came about from people playing by the rules of the existing system and asking nicely. And the fact is that sortition has roots going deep into our history and culture – in fact back two and a half millennia to Athens, the birthplace of democratic politics, but also back more than 800 years to Magna Carta in our legal system in the form of juries. As public trust plummets for so many institutions, it’s trust in juries is alive and well and while ‘vertical’ trust – the trust of people in large and powerful institutions – has been falling, horizontal trust – in people’s peers and People Like Them has not fallen and may have risen.

  And, not being able to recall any form of political activism that brought about major change except by asserting its own legitimacy in competition with the legitimacy of the existing system, I want to find ways of confronting the existing system in its weakest places with the legitimacy of citizens’ juries and sortition where they are strongest. This is the way I put it in a recent interview:

  “Detoxing democracy requires a new form of political activism,” Gruen argues. Citizen engagement, and public consultations in particular, have become common strategies to address our growing sense of remoteness from government decisions. However, more often than not, public consultations seek citizens’ views only on small matters. At times, they merely have the function of validating existing decisions. That’s not to say that consultations should not be used by government. Rather, legitimacy requires a fundamental change in the way that public debates take place.

  In a number of papers and a public lecture at King’s College London, Gruen is proposing the concept of citizens’ juries as a form of political activism; as a bold assertion of a legitimacy outside the existing (electoral) system of democracy. Citizens’ juries as permanent and fully citizen-driven bodies can bridge the gap between what governments do and the will of the people. “They should ultimately become a core component of our constitution in a deliberative, detoxified democracy. Until then, they’d be an incredibly effective way of putting pressure on the existing system from the outside. If we could find some philanthropists to get them going, I think they’d be a fantastically cheap investment in another, better future” Gruen argues.

  That’s why I’m trying to convince people with the money to have a Considering Brexit Day in the form of 10 citizens’ juries around Britain all concluding on the same day. As I’ve argued there’s very strong evidence that it would produce a decisive swing from somewhere around 50:50 to around 60:40 against Brexit.

  That’s why I think political parties could access the legitimacy of sortition by challenging their opponents to a citizens’ jury on a given issue. I can think of good bets for the ALP on this score. Tax and welfare would probably be the most promising for them as I expect when people saw where their tax expenditure money was going the ALP’s priorities would appeal to more people than the coalitions. It’s also an area in which the Opposition – unusually for an opposition – is being fairly transparent about it’s plans – and taking the trouble to make them add up. Another one would be energy and greenhouse, though there I’m not sure the ALP have quite levelled with anyone about the costs of reintroducing carbon pricing, which might make the exercise less enlightening as the spin to substance ratio rose.

  For a long time I’ve been wondering how to do this in the US with its very different constitutional structure and culture. Anyway, this evening I realised that one of the greatest dangers for the US is what happens if the revelations about Donald Trump start sliding into illegality and the question of impeachment comes up. It would be pretty terrible for the US constitution for the Republicans to simply ignore all this and keep smiling – with the odd Flake and McCain (if he’s still with us) voting for impeachment.

  In such circumstances, a representative panel of Americans swinging from around 40 odd percent support for Trump (which is the support the polls suggest) swinging strongly towards impeachment – which I expect they would if Trump was clearly guilty of criminal activity – could be very influential in making it difficult for the Senate to avoid doing its duty. Of course the citizens’ jury might not swing as I expect, but I’m putting my faith in it not doing so. And if it does, well then things are even worse, a lot worse than I thought. And if it does do it’s duty there’s the American Constitution saved right there – the self-evident truths and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happenstance might just keep on chugging along.

  1. Likewise Kate Green, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston maintained party discipline:

     It’s a great pity that we didn’t have a citizens’ assembly before the referendum took place, on what is actually the biggest political, economic and constitutional decision of my adult lifetime. I think we have an opportunity now to use the outcome of the Assembly to inform decision-making as we leave the EU. ↩

• Club Troppo Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles (Deutschland films that is)

  Beginning tomorrow.

  Festival Website | Films | Schedule

  Top Picks

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  The Silent Revolution (Opening Night)

  It’s 1956 and during a visit to West Berlin, high school students Theo and Kurt witness dramatic footage of the Budapest uprising. Back at in Stalinstadt, they spontaneously hold a two minute silence during class in solidarity with the victims of the Hungarian struggle against Soviet oppression. But the gesture causes much bigger ripples than expected. The People’s Education Minister condemns the action as a counterrevolutionary act and demands that the ringleader be named, forcing the students to choose between standing together or not.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ The Upcoming

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  Mademoiselle Paradis (Special Event)

  The film tells the true story of Maria Theresia von Paradis, a gifted piano player in Rococo Vienna, who lost her eye-sight as a child. Desperate to cure their daughter, the Paradis family entrust Maria to Dr. Mesmer, a forward-thinking-physician. Under his care, Maria slowly recovers her sight. But this miracle comes at a price as she progressively starts to lose her gift for music. Faced with a heavy dilemma, Mademoiselle Paradis will have to choose: an ordinary life in the light or an extraordinary life in darkness.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BriefTake

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  303

  When biology student Jule finds out she is pregnant, she sets out for Portugal to find her boyfriend Alex. Traveling in a rusty Mercedes “303” campervan, she picks up hitchhiker Jan at a gas station outside Berlin. While on the road, they have impassioned and deep conversations about capitalism, human nature, love and the meaning of life. Their trip becomes an emotional roller coaster, which finds them desperately trying not to fall in love with each other.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Arthur & Claire

  The chance meeting of two people at the darkest moments of their lives leads to a bright new beginning in this bleakly humorous comedy. Terminally ill Arthur travels to Amsterdam seeking to end his life, though his planned last opulent trip is constantly disrupted: on the plane a child knocks over his glass of sparkling and on the eve of his scheduled death, he hears loud noises from the hotel room next door. There he finds Claire, a young Dutch woman who wants to commit suicide. He manages to stop her, and she takes him into the night life of Amsterdam, each with the intention of changing the other’s mind within the last few hours allotted to them.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Four Hands

  After Sophie and Jessica witnessed a brutal crime when they were kids, Jessica promised her younger sister to always protect her. As they grow older, this promise becomes an obsession. Now, Jessica suffers from paranoia and sees threats to her and her sister everywhere. But Sophie just wants to live a normal life without fear, without her sister; she wants to become a pianist and to fall in love. When the perpetrators are released from prison after 20 years, Jessica is shocked and wants to confront them. But an accident changes everything. Jessica’s promise turns into a life-threatening nightmare.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  The Final Journey

  When Eduard’s wife dies, his daughter wants to put him in a home. Instead, the 92-year-old former German World War II officer decides to board a train to the Ukraine, followed by his granddaughter, to find the only woman he ever loved – just as a new war breaks out in the former Soviet Union in Spring, 2014.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Three Peaks

  What was meant to be a restful vacation in the mountains becomes a struggle for survival in this white-knuckle exploration of fatherhood and family power dynamics. Eager to strengthen his bond with his girlfriend Lea’s distant eight-year-old son Tristan, Aaron invites the two on a log-cabin holiday in the Italian Dolomites. When Aaron’s efforts to get closer to Tristan appear increasingly in vain, he takes the boy on a solo hiking trip – where it all comes to a head.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ CineVue

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  When Paul Came Over The Sea

  Documentarian Jakob Preuss follows one migrant’s passionate and inexhaustible flight to freedom as he makes the journey from Cameroon to Berlin. Paul Nkamani is a migrant from Cameroon. He has made his way across the Sahara to the Moroccan coast where he now lives in a forest waiting for the right moment to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This is where he meets and befriends Jakob, a filmmaker from Berlin. After Paul manages to cross over to Spain on a rubber boat, he decides to continue on to Germany, forcing Jakob to decide: will he become an active part of Paul’s pursuit of a better life? A fascinating look at the relationship between filmmaker and subject set amidst the ongoing humanitarian refugee crisis.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Fack Ju Göhte (Part Of A Trilogy To Be Screened)

  Zeki Müller was in jail for 13 months, just long enough for Goethe High to construct a new gym on the exact spot where Zeki’s friend buried his loot from a robbery. In order to get regular access to the school’s basement, from where he hopes to drill a tunnel to his stolen money, Zeki takes on a job as a substitute teacher at the school. But will his elaborate plan work, or only lead him back behind bars?

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Wings Of Desire (Closing Night)

  Visible only to those like them and to children, Damiel and Cassiel are two angels, who have existed since long before humankind. Along with several other angels, they wander around West Berlin, observing and preserving life, sometimes trying to provide comfort to the troubled. When Damiel falls in love with a trapeze artist called Marion he decides to become human, even though that means giving up immortality. Peter Falk, playing himself as a former angel, has already taken that fateful step and urges Damiel to leave eternity behind too.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

May 20, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Cruising home like a rock star

  Backdated. Posted 26/5/2018

  Last morning in Sydney; almost time to go home.

  After checking out of the hotel, we headed back to the gallery to see if Sunday morning was a better option for looking at the Archibald Prize finalists than Friday had been.

  On the walk, the last of the half-marathon runners were coming through, including one old bloke, jogging along to the encouragement of passers-by and event organisers.

  

  

  First, a bite in the gallery cafe for breakfast, while trying to keep the ibis away from our food. They didn’t seem spooked by the fake owl.

  Then we looked around the exhibition. Some great works, both the Archibalds and finalists from the Wynne and Sulman prizes, also on display.

  

  From there another walk across the park and a poke around the shops for a bit.

  Back to the hotel to pick up the bags, then we headed for St James Station — drawing another bum card, as again due to works we went around the City Circle the wrong way (but hey, that Circular Quay view!!) and had to change at Central for the Airport line.

  

  

  No matter, back at Sydney Airport in plenty of time, no thanks to a faulty escalator at the Domestic station.

  Flying home Business Class

  As I mentioned, we ended up flying back Business Class on points.

  The following may seem trivial to people who usually fly Business, but as someone who has only previously flown Economy, I found it an interesting contrast.

  The Virgin lounge was pretty busy, and apart from the complimentary food and drink, perhaps little different to the public areas of most airports these days. WiFi and power for a laptop and somewhere to sit are pretty common.

  The really luxurious place in the airport is something I’ve only heard about (and don’t expect to ever see inside): the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

  Perhaps more advantageous than Virgin’s lounge was priority boarding, skipping the queue. Mixed feelings: guilt for jumping the queue, rock star for walking straight in, but fraud for doing it on points!

  

  And once aboard – the seats are certainly much more spacious. And personal service – would you like a drink before we take-off, Mr Bowen?

  We got a good view as we took off, but you can get that from any window seat.

  

  Of the eight Business Class seats in the plane, four were taken, four were empty.

  Being much a bigger seat, you get more window. And at the front of the plane you get a better sense of what’s going on, as the flight crew chat among themselves, and you can see the pier closing and moving away before the plane pushes back.

  

  On the way up to Sydney in Economy (departing 7:30pm), we’d been given a packet containing five cracker biscuits and five slices of cheese.

  Coming back in Business Class (departing 4:30pm), it was a full meal with a choice of options – I went for the Moroccan lamb jaffle. On a real plate, with real metal cutlery and a cloth napkin.

  

  After landing, one of the hosties positioned herself in the aisle to make sure us high flyers got to leave first, without the hoi polloi from Economy getting ahead of us.

  And at the baggage carousel, my bag came out super-quick thanks to the Priority tag they’d put on it. (My usual suitcase is actually small enough to take as carry-on, but I generally prefer not to schlep around the airport with it. Plus I had some liquid in it — I’d bought a bottle of hot sauce at the farmers market to take home.)

  Priority luggage allowed me to leave the terminal several minutes quicker, and get on a Skybus sooner (I only just caught it), with an earlier train connection home. So it got me home more quickly. Maybe only ten minutes earlier, but it helped.

  Some people yearn for the olden days of air travel. The glamour, the personal service.

  This of course was a time when most people couldn’t afford to fly at all. But for those who did, there was more space and better service.

  Clearly you can still have it — to an extent — if you’re willing to pay for it.

  But it’s not cheap. Checking Virgin’s web site, flights to Sydney start from $125 in Economy — for Business Class you’re paying at least $499 (for a Business Saver fare).

  I could get used to travelling Business, but my budget isn’t likely to allow it very often. Perhaps I’ll aim for the occasional points upgrade.

  Back in Melbourne

  Straight onto a Skybus back to the City. Unlike the slow trip on Thursday night, this was a quick 23 minutes, at full speed along most of the freeway. It could have been a minute or two faster if there was traffic light priority when the bus left the freeway at Footscray Road.

  Then straight onto a train home — noting that since the removal of seats around the doorways, there are very few spots in the Alstom Comeng trains where you can sit, and have your suitcase with you, but out of the way.

  

  After a few days of sun in Sydney, I was back in drizzly cold Melbourne.

  But with such a relaxing flight home, it didn’t matter a bit.

• Club Troppo Orations, orations orations … out they go
  

  I happened upon this post in ‘drafts’ without my having drafted anything. Events now make that unnecessary.

May 19, 2018

• Daniel Bowen The noise of art

  Backdated. Posted 24/5/2018

  Sydney getaway continued. First stop: a bakery in the Queen Victoria Building, the spectacular 19th century shopping arcade, where we grabbed some croissants for breakfast.

  Then to Town Hall Station to hop on a train to inner-city Redfern.

  A short walk from Redfern Station is Carriageworks, a former… well, railway carriage workshop, where there’s a farmers market on Saturdays, and art in the adjacent workshop buildings, which have been converted into gallery spaces.

  

  We browsed through the market — I bought a bottle of hot sauce to take home for my sons — then we took a look at the galleries: the Sydney Biennale was on.

  The interactive work “Constellations“ involved a huge white wall and a baseball bat. You take the bat and hit the wall, then listen to the sounds reverberating through the space.

  Unbeknownst to the audience, a concert-size public address system, including multiple subwoofers, microphones and related sound equipment, is hidden within the structure. The sound of the impact between bat and wall is amplified by a massive 120 decibels, reverberating throughout the gallery space and the building.

  As you can see from the video, when I had a go, there was a bonus, unexpected sound: that of a scared toddler who had just come around the corner, overwhelmed by the noise. Poor kid.

  Some of the other artworks were very cool as well, though nothing quite as interactive.

  

  From there we had a walk around Redfern, to see if we could find any good street art.

  Eventually we found a little, but not much. Ever tried Googling for “street art in Redfern”? No helpful results.

  Some lovely terrace houses though.

  

  

  

  

  We ducked back to the hotel to grab the present I’d brought up for my cousin’s daughter (that makes her my cousin once removed) and headed out to Marrickville.

  It’s a pleasant walk from the station to the park where we were meeting. It’s a very hilly area, and the council has created small parks in a few spots by closing off streets. Probably too hilly for playing football.

  Marrickville, Sydney. Fancy a game of kick to kick?

  A post shared by Daniel Bowen (@danielfbowen) on May 19, 2018 at 11:24pm PDT

  Further down towards the park and the river, I noted these height markers — I assume every so often the whole area floods, which explains why some houses were elevated above street level. (Zero was street level, not footpath level. I’m not actually two metres tall.)

  

  A lovely park BBQ with my relatives, then we headed by train and bus to my friend K’s place in the inner-west suburb of Forest Lodge for some nibbles, wine, a home made stew and some entertaining conversation.

  K showed us through the nearby TramSheds — you guessed it, a former… tram shed, part of the old Rozelle tram depot. They’ve got a restored traditional Sydney R-class tram in there. (Restored in Bendigo, in fact, the same place Melbourne’s W-class trams are restored.)

  

  It never occurred to me before that the traditional Sydney tram colours are the same as the traditional Sydney ferry colours. (I’ll probably write a separate post about public transport modal branding in Sydney. I find it quite interesting.)

  I mentioned yesterday the confusion of Sydney authorities as to whether light rail is tram or train. In Melbourne it’s definitely a tram. In Sydney it’s apparently a train, even though it’s branded “L” not “T”:

  

  We caught the “L1” Light Rail back into the city.

  The train tram was quiet at the western end, but got packed when we reached the Casino.

  

  We hopped off at Capitol Square and walked back to the hotel. George Street was awash with young party animals, and relatively few civilians, making it somewhat noisy, and the quiet comfort of the hotel even more welcoming.

May 18, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Sydney on shanks’ pony

  Backdated. Posted 23/5/2018

  Hotel buffet breakfast at the Sheraton is an eye-popping $44 per person. This is no big surprise – hotel breakfasts are always expensive.

  But they’d said at check-in that we had a $50 credit, so that took the cost down to $38 for the two of us, which is probably cheaper than if we went out somewhere for breakfast. So we dined in — and very nice it was too.

  Three course breakfast? Why not! That’s okay — we would end up walking all day.

  The locations plotted on my Google Maps timeline for the day aren’t quite right. At no point did we walk on water, for instance. But given the glorious weather, we did explore extensively on foot — and all within a few kilometres of the hotel.

  

  Heading out of the hotel, in Hyde Park we found preparation for the Sydney half-marathon, and this bloke from a backpacker tour group, minding all the bags while his compatriots were evidently elsewhere.

  

  One lesson I’ve learnt over the years is that if there’s a particular impetus for your trip, then if possible get that thing done as a priority. Just in case.

  So we headed straight to the Art Gallery of NSW to the Lady and the Unicorn exhibit.

  Amazing 500ish year old tapestries visiting from France.

  When M had mentioned it to an acquaintance who had never heard of tapestries, it was apparently interpreted as some kind of culinary event. Apparently tapestries are delicious… because they’re closely related to tapas.

  

  We’d booked for 10:30am on Friday in the hope that being early on a work day, it would be quiet. It wasn’t — busloads of retirees seemed to be coming in, and as we looked around, it got busier and busier. Still good though; if you’re in Sydney in the next month or so, get along.

  We pondered also looking in at the Archibald finalists, also on display. The queue just for tickets was getting long, and we could see that inside it was very busy, so after a look around the gallery shop, instead we headed out for more walking.

  First up to Mrs Macquarie’s Point, where spectacular views were to be found, and we joined in the other tourists at snapping away at the Harbour Bridge and Opera House.

  

  

  At some stage my phone lost its data connection. Odd – I don’t recall that happening before. There was some confusion getting it resolved, as when I had WiFi, I checked Telstra’s outages page, which said there was a fault in the area. Telstra’s people on Twitter however suggested rebooting, which turned out to resolve it.

  Then we walked across the Botanic Garden. Why is it Garden, singular, when Melbourne has the Botanic Gardens? I demand to know. (If you’re wondering they’re a similar size – Sydney 30 hectares, Melbourne 38, though I suppose Melbourne also has a separate garden at Cranbourne).

  

  This VMS was flashing messages for the forthcoming Vivid festival, so naturally I snapped on particular message.

  

  On a recommendation of a friend, we had lunch at the Governor’s Kitchen, the restaurant adjacent to the Sydney Museum.

  One delicious yet relaxing lunch later (well, apart from perhaps a little too much traffic noise), we headed back to the hotel for a bit, then out into the CBD proper along George Street.

  George Street used to be a wall of buses at peak times, but currently it’s being dug up for the light rail project.

  As you can see, they use concrete blocks for bollards in Sydney. Except unlike in Melbourne, these don’t appear to attract litter or decorations.

  

  Some commenters from Melbourne who may or may not be fully informed have noted that while Yarra Trams might not be perfect, they’d have had the whole thing done and dusted within weeks. Witness the diversion/reconstruction of tram tracks along St Kilda Road – it took about two weeks.

  Mind you the George Street design includes wireless technology — the tracks have a conductor rail that will pass power into the trams as they pass over. This probably means more construction impact under the tracks, requiring removal of underground services.

  One contact also reckoned that because Sydney authorities don’t know how to build light rail (tram lines), the whole project is (over) engineered to heavy rail standards. That might explain why on a previous visit light rail services were suspended due to a signal fault, and why the following day we encountered a tram/pedestrian crossing with signage that warned us to beware of trains.

  

  Despite it still being light, the sun was going down, and the gloriously warm weather from the middle of the day had gone, with the temperature dropping rapidly.

  Taking a somewhat roundabout route, we ended up at the Opera House, where we’d booked a tour.

  Being a few minutes early we sat and people-and-seagull watched. Along the water’s edge, restaurant wait staff served a row of al fresco diners, in turn watched by a row of seagulls.

  

  As soon as diners left, the seagulls would move in on any leftover food.

  

  

  At the Opera House, they do a Backstage Tour taking 2.5 hours, which sounds like it might be good, but we decided a simple one hour tour of the building would suffice. It was very interesting, with our guide quite knowledgeable, and some fascinating titbits of information about the construction and history of the place.

  The sun had gone down, and Circular Quay and the Bridge were looking lovely in the moonlight.

  

  

  We kept walking, first back to the hotel, then across Hyde Park to the Bodhi vegan restaurant – another recommendation – for a very tasty dinner. Meals to share that include very delicious imitations of duck and chicken. Fakeducken, you might say?

  Back to the hotel. Google Fit reckoned 20,300 steps for the day. Enough walking.

May 17, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Mini-break in Sydney

  Post backdated. Published 21/5/2018.

  M wanted to see the Lady And The Unicorn tapestries before they head home to France from their exhibit at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

  No big holiday likely this year, so how about we do a short break in Sydney?

  Booking the flights

  After looking at frequent flyer points on Virgin, mostly from last year’s Europe trip, we went ahead and booked.

  Melbourne to Sydney up on Thursday night. Plenty of FF Economy seats available. 11,800 points. Done.

  Sydney to Melbourne down on Sunday afternoon. No FF Economy seats available between about 10am (bleugh, too early) and 6pm (bleugh, too late).

  Wait a sec – they have some business class seats available at 3pm. That could work. 23,500 points. M had enough, and I almost had enough – a small shortfall could be paid with $20.

  Okay. M went onto the web site. Choose one of the eight available Business Class seats on the plane. Click. Booked. Great.

  I went onto the web site. Click. Error. No more seats available.

  Yep you guessed it — they only allowed one of the seats to be booked by Frequent Flying freeloaders. Perhaps to prevent people flying together in Business on points.

  So I ended up a later flight home — 90 minutes later. Oh well. Time to sit in the lounge and write this blog.

  Heading up

  We planned to head to the airport straight after work.

  Given the challenges of Melbourne traffic, I was thinking of opting-out of the Skybus ($18) and instead doing the cheapskate option: train to Broadmeadows, 901 bus to the Airport (effectively free, since I already have a yearly Myki Pass).

  Slower? Probably; it takes about 50-60 minutes depending on the connection. But it avoids the traffic, which Skybus would be likely to get stuck in.

  Checking the PTV network status shortly before leaving, the trains were running okay, but the buses… A look at the real-time departure information showed uneven frequencies, and there was a delay flagged… due to a landslide in Fitzsimons Lane in Templestowe.

  

  So we ended up on the Skybus instead, which was busy, but no waiting at all.

  Have you ever noticed how when you approach Southern Cross Station from Bourke Street, the sign for Skybus, one of the things that occasional visitors are most likely to be looking for, is behind a pillar?

  

  As I suspected, Skybus was faster than via Broadmeadows, but not my much. The Citylink transit lanes should give the buses a good run, but don’t – presumably because they’re not enforced.

  Been going for 20 mins so far. Traffic crawling at Pascoe Vale.
  Are all these vehicles meant to be in the Transit Lane? No? Not much of a Transit Lane then is it. #skybus pic.twitter.com/gVuYPiHVD8

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 17, 2018

  It took 42 minutes to get to the first stop at the airport.

  No wonder Skybus no longer claim a 20 minute journey time.

  Perhaps those new lanes opening soon will help… for a little while.

  But really, if they have a priority transit lane, they should use it properly. Of course it doesn’t help that both Transurban (Citylink) and the Airport are lobbying against bus priority. Evidently they really want to cater for vehicles, not people.

  

  The flight? It must have been an omen that our departure got switched to Gate 13, but at least Terminal 4 has improved in the last few years.

  Delayed about half an hour, so we got into Sydney well after 9pm.

  Smooth other than the delay. I got time to ponder why they give out copies of The Australian, which being a broadsheet is clearly completely unsuited to reading in a plane, at least in an Economy-class seat.

  

  And the train from the airport?

  Instead of a smooth 16 minutes straight from the Domestic Airport station to St James (at least as quick as a cab), due to trackwork we had to change trains at Central (up and down steps; there’s only one lift per platform), then catch a train the long way around the City Circle, so it took about half an hour all up (about as quick as a cab in peak hour).

  On the bright side, the view of the Harbour Bridge from Circular Quay station is a nice welcome to Sydney.

  

  The hotel

  The hotel was a level of luxury to which I’m not really accustomed.

  I usually book for location first, then price, then amenity. I like to be near to a busy railway station so we can use the hotel as a base, and stop past between activities.

  There was a good deal at the Sheraton on the Park, near St James station, so we ended up there.

  When I first started travelling in my 20s, I tended to stay at Youth Hostels for budgetary reasons. It’s fair to say this is the other end of the spectrum.

  As we walked up, the doorman offered to help with our bags. I declined. After pulling my wheeled suitcase all the way from my house in Melbourne, I didn’t need to pay a bloke $5 to have him take it the last 25 metres to the reception desk.

  That said, if the Sheraton want to remodel their front entrance, a ramp from the direction of the station would be a plus — currently the only ramp from the street faces the opposite direction.

  The room itself? Very nice. As one would expect in a nominally expensive hotel.

  We hadn’t booked (and paid extra for) the park view… instead it was a “city view” which turns out to be facing onto the back side of a building in the next street.

  No matter. Escaping a Melbourne weather forecast of grey and drizzly, instead getting Sydney’s sun and top temperatures of 20-21 degrees every day we’d be there? Priceless.

  Picked the right weekend for a Sydney getaway #winning pic.twitter.com/81AKmCfcmw

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 16, 2018

May 16, 2018

• Club Troppo Neutering the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

  

  This article is a follow-up to my recent long piece titled Northern Territory development, debt and deficit – the long and winding road.

  Urban development ideas are invariably bedevilled by community dissension, much of it uninformed and anything but constructive.  However, part of the cause is failure by governments to adopt clear collaborative and consultative processes. Protesters with NIMBY motivations and instinctive Nabobs of Negativism often achieve levels of community fear and concern that their arguments and motives don’t merit, because governments have failed to make proposals and their underlying rationale clear and failed to build a consensus in favour of them before formally announcing them.

  The proposed but now abandoned Myilly Point Indigenous and Multicultural Museum, which was to form part of the long-awaited Darwin City Deal with the federal government, is a classic recent example. Darwin badly needs an attraction that will honour our rich Indigenous and multicultural history and make it more accessible both to tourists and local residents. There’s no doubt in my mind that a well-conceived museum/cultural centre would have been really exciting and a big success. But the concept was never explained or “sold” clearly by the Gunner government either to the public or stakeholders. As a result, widespread misunderstanding and ignorant opposition were inflamed and the Chief Minister felt compelled to abandon the whole idea on pragmatic political grounds.

  There are other projects that arouse community opposition on somewhat more rational grounds.

  Darwin City Council’s abandoned plan for traffic lights at the Smith/Daly intersection in the CBD was a silly idea that was eventually abandoned after massive opposition. Providing a safe crossing point for cyclists wasn’t a silly idea, but traffic lights certainly were. How about a pedestrian and cycle overbridge? Ditto with the notion of a dedicated cycle lane along The Esplanade, when we already have a wide dedicated cycle path directly across the road in Esplanade Park. That idea was only abandoned after expenditure of significant ratepayer funds.

  There are still other proposals that attracted major community protests before they were built, but that just about everyone now supports and takes for granted. Both Cullen Bay where we live and the Darwin Waterfront development are examples of that phenomenon. On a smaller scale so too are the new large kids’ playground in Esplanade Park and the Foreshore Cafe adjacent to Nightcliff Pool. There was a time not so long ago when you couldn’t go for a walk or cycle along the Nightcliff foreshore without being accosted by someone with a petition collecting signatures against the Cafe. Nowadays you can find many of those protesters sitting around at the Foreshore Cafe happily sipping lattes themselves.

  Part of it is simply that many people lack the ability to envision change or realistically assess its likely impacts.  Better the devil you know than the one you don’t. They may also distrust the information they receive from government; their default assumption being that all politicians lie and that many have corrupt motives.

  So how do we go about building a more constructive, collaborative model for identifying and nurturing new urban development proposals and ensuring that as far as possible they meet fundamental public interest criteria? Here are two specific proposals.

  1. Committee for Darwin

  Our major capital cities already have business and community-based bodies with strong government linkages that identify, develop, research, consult and advocate for new urban development ideas to enhance their residential, business and tourism amenities. The Committee for Sydney and Committee for Melbourne are prime examples. The latter describes itself like this:

  Committee for Melbourne is an apolitical, not-for-profit, member-based organisation that brings together over 120 organisations from Greater Melbourne’s business, academic and community sectors who have a passion for shaping Melbourne as a leading global city in the world’s fastest-growing region, the Asia-Pacific.

  Its focus areas are future economy, liveability, infrastructure and urban optimisation. For example, the Committee proposed the Melbourne Free Tram Zone and had it adopted by government starting in 2015. The Zone allows people to move and shop freely and easily around Melbourne’s CBD without a car and irrespective of the weather. It has been a huge success, contributing to Melbourne repeatedly being named the world’s most liveable city. More recently they have proposed a plan to extend the free tram zone to include a range of sporting and cultural venues just outside the CBD. Darwin could do a lot worse than try something very similar.

  A Committee for Darwin might be expected to identify or at least analyse and research; accept or reject; and then advocate and build community consensus for major proposed new projects like new inner city roads, parking stations, the Myilly Point Museum and a mooted CBD major water theme park. No doubt some would be embraced while others wouldn’t. But at least it would reduce the current absurd and almost universal kneejerk opposition to just about all development proposals, where media uncritically report the protests because conflict is more newsworthy than consensus and collaboration. With a Committee for Darwin the NIMBYs and Nabobs of Negativism wouldn’t be able to masquerade as the silent majority.

  2. Mandatory publication of “business case” and benefit-cost analysis for major projects

  Again, larger states already have fairly formal processes requiring business cases for major development and “benefit-cost” analyses by independent expert bodies eg Infrastructure Australia and Infrastructure Victoria. These bodies rank proposed projects in terms of their assessed levels of return to taxpayers and advise on development priorities. An assessed rating greater than one means that the project can be expected to generate more benefit for the community than it costs to build, while a rating less than one suggests the opposite. Ratings include factors of benefit to the community that can’t necessarily be “captured” profitably by a private operator, such as environmental, social and cultural factors or reduction of traffic and overcrowding. That is, a public benefit-cost analysis is much more than just a business case.

  Both processes should be required in the NT. Any development involving more than (say) $20 million of public funds should require a formal business case and an independent public benefit-cost analysis, both of which would have to be published albeit with redaction of parts that could genuinely be regarded as “commercial-in-confidence”. The requirement would apply equally to fully public projects; private ones with significant government funding, subsidies or guarantees; as well as Public Private Partnerships. Had these processes been in place in past decades, the Territory might have been spared the wasted expenditure of the Trade Development Zone as well as worthy projects with misconceived subsidy deals like the Darwin and Alice Springs Sheratons.

  There might also have been more careful evaluation of projects like the Darwin-Alice Springs Railway, which might have ensured that it was built within a context involving realistic plans for development of other “building blocks” essential to fostering the avowed aim of making Darwin Australia’s genuine “gateway to Asia” over time (eg a highly efficient automated port with frequent affordable shipping links).

  Lastly, a requirement for independent benefit-cost analysis might have thwarted current projects like Barneson Boulevard and the proposed underground carpark adjacent to Parliament House, allowing government funds now committed to both of them to be devoted to more productive projects. I would be very surprised if either Barneson Boulevard or the underground carpark could survive any competent independent cost-benefit analysis.

  Maybe the NT at our stage of development can’t afford to develop our own infrastructure assessment body. We might have to sub-contract the analyses to Infrastructure Australia or Infrastructure Victoria (preferably the latter).

  Neither of my proposals involves reducing or restricting the powers of elected NT governments. They will remain practically and electorally responsible for the projects they propose, fund and deliver. If they believe that there are overriding public interest factors favouring a particular development then they will still be able to proceed irrespective of the views of bodies like Committee for Darwin or Infrastructure NT. But at least they will ensure a process that maximises government transparency and accountability, and will enhance the prospect that taxpayer funds will be spent in areas of maximum benefit to Territorians rather than for short-term political posturing or deals for mates.

May 15, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Beware of fake email bills – and how the corporates are letting the side down

  There are warnings of fake Telstra bills being sent by email.

  They look like the real thing. The only clue that they’re not is that the View/Pay Bill button goes to a non-Telstra web site.

  The lesson here is: check where the link goes. If it doesn’t go to an address that is clearly on the company’s web site (telstra.com), be suspicious.

  …Which is why I’ve been asking South East Water about their email bills.

  Those look legit, but the payment link goes to ippayments.com.au — in fact it’s worse — it goes first via a URL forwarder edmconnect.com.au (with a very long path/querystring)

  So my simple question to them was: how is anybody meant to know this is legit?

  Utility companies would help security by hosting their online payment gateways on their actual domain (or a subdomain).
  My @southeastwater email bill wants me to pay on a web site https://t.co/dX1YhKhnVH – how would I know if that's genuine?

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) April 25, 2018

  Their response:

  Hi Daniel, it's important to us to provide our customers with a secure payment gateway to pay bills & keep information safe. IPPayments is an accredited, PCI compliant payment site that specialises in taking payments. You can rest assured that it is a secure payment gateway.

  — South East Water Aus (@southeastwater) April 27, 2018

  That I think shows a misunderstanding of the question.

  IPPayments might be super secure (PCI compliant suggests that it is). But how does a punter know that?

  Thank you for the reassurance, but how is the average person meant to know that?
  One of the signs of a scam email is that it appears to be from a reputable company (like SEWL) but links to a different one.
  Any reason you can't host your payment gateway on your domain?

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) April 27, 2018

  We use a globally recognised partner with a proven reputation for secure payment processing transactions, to transparently demonstrate the necessary levels of assurance for information security (confidentiality, integrity and availability) for government compliance requirements

  — South East Water Aus (@southeastwater) May 1, 2018

  We also engage with multiple other secure payment channels and agencies (as listed on our bills) so our customers can choose how they pay their bills. Thanks for your questions and patience in us getting back to you.

  — South East Water Aus (@southeastwater) May 1, 2018

  They were still clearly not getting my point, so I persisted.

  Thanks for responding, but that doesn't really answer my question.
  How do I, as a customer, know that a link in an email to "https://t.co/p5k7tWRsxO)", which then forwards to "https://t.co/da5hxmXaIX", is legit? Neither of these addresses are listed on the paper bill.

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 2, 2018

  Hi Daniel, we take security very seriously and as mentioned use secure, accredited and reputable payment channels so our customers can rest assured that the links take them to a secure payment page.

  — South East Water Aus (@southeastwater) May 2, 2018

  Still completely missing the point.

  Okay, try another tack… provide an example of a company doing it properly:

  Thank you for the responses, but you still are not answering my question.
  In contrast, an email bill from Optus links to a payment gateway on an https://t.co/llk4FelSqg domain. Can I suggest you review and see if you can do the same.

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 5, 2018

  No response. Radio silence.

  Perhaps they finally understood; perhaps not.

  It’s frustrating, because if you register for their online portal, you can make payments through that. You go to southeastwater.com.au and end up on southeastwater.secure.force.com — which I do recognise — it’s Salesforce.

  Ideally they’d use a subdomain. Subdomains allow a company to delegate part of their web site to another one, for instance their online payment gateway.

  If they can’t do that, they should direct users to their main web site, and have them click through to the payment gateway from there, so people at least can have some confidence that the web site they enter their credit card into is actually authorised by the organisation.

  Paperless billing, using online instead? Great. But with so many scammers out there, corporations really need to make it easy for their customers to know they’re safe.

  (Lead photo: Anonymous Hacker, by Brian Clug — Creative Commons. I love a hacker stereotype photo. ‘Cos all hackers wear masks when they’re working, in darkened rooms. I bet those screens are showing fast-scrolling green-screen character interfaces.)

  Update 11/6/2018: I noticed that Optus also use IPPayments, the same payment gateway as South East Water, but Optus uses a “secure.optus.com.au” subdomain.

May 14, 2018

• Club Troppo Shared Value

  I’d like to write up some thoughts regarding Shared Value some time, but I’ve not had the time and there’s a fair few things in front of it in the queue. 

  So in case anyone’s interested here’s quite a good panel session on the subject with

  Pru Bennett / Managing Director and Head of Investment Stewardship, Asia Pacific, BlackRock

  Elizabeth Bryan AM / Chairman, IAG

  Ken Henry AC / Chair, NAB

May 13, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Bushes and trees blocking footpaths

  We all like some greenery in our neighbourhoods.

  But as I noted in this rant blog post, one bane of pedestrians is bushes and trees overhanging footpaths.

  They’re not really obvious unless you’re walking, but bushes and trees like this are everywhere.

  I’m sick of having to duck out of their way. This is especially difficult when it’s dark. You can easily not spot the hazard as you approach.

  

  Local councils have regulations about this. In my area, City of Glen Eira local law says:

  Trees must be trimmed to a height of three metres above the ground and, at least, vertically in line with the property boundary. Shrubs must not protrude beyond the fence line or encroach onto the footpath.

  If a Council notice is sent requesting that trees or shrubs be trimmed, the work must be completed within 14 days.

  …

  Property owners who do not comply with a notice within 14 days will be issued with an official warning notice. This provides a further 10 days to complete the work. If action is still not taken within the required timeframe, a penalty notice of $200 may be issued and a contractor will be engaged by us to undertake the necessary work. The property owner is responsible for the contractor’s fees.

  When I checked with the council, they said they don’t do proactive inspections. It’s up to people to report problems.

  But how many people know what the rules are, and that you can report them? No wonder it’s such a widespread problem.

  

  What the council does do is when looking at a reported site, they will look at the immediate surrounding area.

  They also said that for overhanging branches from trees on the nature strip, the council is ultimately responsible — though it sounds like they’d prefer if property owners kept them under control.

  One weekend I went for a walk along some main roads near home, and noted down some particularly problematic locations to report.

  I used a stricter criteria than the council. The council standard is 3 metres of clearance. I decided I’d only report it where I had to duck to walk under it (I’m about 1.8 metres tall), or if it was blocking enough of the footpath that a parent with a large pram, or someone with a mobility aid/wheelchair would have to detour onto the grass to avoid it.

  On a 6km walk, I found about two dozen problematic locations. About 90% of them were bushes and trees growing from private property. A small number were on the nature strip. And I reported a bunch of them.

  On a subsequent walk, I found one far worse:

  

  With most trees and bushes that overhang the footpath, you can brush past. Not this one.

  The main branches are so thick that you’d do yourself an injury if you collided with it. It’s right at head height.

  Someone had put a bit of hazard tape on it, but one wonders how it was ever allowed it to block the footpath like this.

  Duly reported.

  We’ll see what happens next.

  Update 15/5/2018: Sometime in the last 72 hours, the tree in question has been pruned back markedly, such that it is now clear of the footpath.

May 12, 2018

• Club Troppo RICHARD GREEN: Sakura, 5 years later

  I saw this post by previous Troppo regular Richard 塚正, the Troppo author previously known as Richard Green and tweeted a suggestion that he republish it here. To which I got the reply: “I long since lost my password and was too lazy to try and recover it. You can repost yourself if you want tho”. I tried to recover his password and send it to him, but couldn’t figure it out. So over the fold is his post. 

  A little over 5 years ago our daughter died and was born.

  I try to avoid talking about her too much, since it puts a burden on others, at least in terms of their expectations in how they should react to a still birth. But also because it seems unfit for me to make my own spectacle out of a grief that is equally shared by my wife; especially when it was my wife who had the ambiguous privilege of feeling Sakura’s life before it was taken. Nonetheless it seems remiss that Sakura’s remaining monument in this world would be the bleak and taciturn memorial I wrote a year later. Maybe she deserves more, and it is not what she now means to me.

  So now, after five years, I return to her.

  In part this follows 4 years of a fatherhood filled with warm and squirming children held in arms rather than just 1 year where fatherhood was just a memory of a cold one held in the hands. That alone makes what I wrote back then feel somewhat remote from the way I feel now.

  But Sakura’s brief existence has had a profound effect on my life. It deepened and strengthened our marriage in ways I will not discuss here, and it forced me to accept things the denial of which had been preventing much happiness. This wasn’t profound revelation so much as belated maturity, but still, she was the catalyst.

  In short, her death was mundane, it was unavoidable, and it was meaningless.

  That is; I was free to ascribe my own meaning, and had no compulsion to vindicate any part of her death.

  The first choice I made with that freedom is apparent through the way I speak of her. I’ve asserted Sakura existed as a person ever since she was born. Of course the law also makes this assertion, based on an arbitrary determination that a dead foetus is becomes a dead baby after 20 weeks in the womb. And much ink and more tears have been spilled litigating when we agree a human has humanity. But our assertion suits our own purposes alone. She may never have drawn breath, looked at our faces or known our love, but she is a daughter and now a sister.

  But recognising this about her death laid clear a broader, and comforting meaninglessness. I have never been religious (although ever without animus to those who are), but that doesn’t mean I was free of some sense of it; that the cosmos was to be vindicated, and there was purpose to my role in it. The teleology of my creed, although I did not recognise it, was that of Progress. The world was getting better, and this was necessarily so. The ills of the world were unavoidable and even necessary portions of the path to Progress that we tread. In addition I had been gifted some sort of talent and drive, and I was obliged to leave my mark on the world.

  The burden of this creed was not apparent until it was lifted. I did not know how much effort and anguish I had put into vindicating a world of ills until I no longer felt compelled to. Sakura’s death was an unavoidable; a random shuffling of chromosomes. Poverty is not. Violence is not. Borders are not. And they certainly aren’t waystations on the way to a greater good. They’re just evils we can choose not to accept, and work to eliminate.

  And the insubstantial legacy of Sakura’s existence made the vanity of leaving my mark more apparent. Any mark would just be a smudge, barely legible and soon obscured, and then wiped clean. Why not just enjoy life whilst letting others do the same?

  We may be but fleeting sparks against the void — albeit some more fleeting than others — but we can make of that moment what we will.

  Obviously there is nothing here that has not been written before innumerable times, and known by magnitudes more who in consequence have never felt compelled to write. I’m just doing this for Sakura, or what she means to me.

  But I’ll end with an appreciation of the most comforting passage of the bible; where God speaks from the whirlwind to Job chastising Job’s conceit; that which led him to assume there was meaning he could find in his suffering, when any meaning is knowable only to Him. An unknowable God is, in his function in this world, an entirely absent one. I can make of him what I will too The voice I hear from the whirlwind is my own to my younger self.

  “Grow up mate”.