Progressive Direction

May 24, 2017

• Daniel Bowen UK/Belgium holiday in planning

  Very busy the last few weeks, which is why the blog has been so quiet.

  Long-time readers would know that I like to write about my interstate and overseas holidays in almost excruciating detail. Well brace yourself for another one – I’ve got a European holiday in planning for later this year.

  It’s looking like England, Wales, and Belgium, with catching up with various family scattered around the place being a key priority.

  It’ll be the first big family holiday in many years, and my first time in Europe this century — previous trips were in 1999 and 1998.

  Eurostar hadn’t even opened the last time I was there, so you can be sure we’ll be using it to get to Belgium! It’ll be my first journey on an actual High Speed Rail service (I used the Brussels to Amsterdam high speed “Thalys” in 1998, but it was at regular speed due to flooding) and my first time using Oyster card!

  Daniel’s 1998 Europe trip highlights from Daniel Bowen on Vimeo.

  Obviously the terrible events in Manchester this week (and previous incidents in London, Brussels and elsewhere) are a concern, but ultimately you can’t cower at home because something might happen.

  On the list of touristy things already are various sights in London, Cardiff, Brussels, probably Bath and perhaps Stonehenge or Avebury since we’ll be visiting relatives in that part of the country.

  Any must-see suggestions?

  More notes as I ponder:

  • London transport accepts most overseas PayPass cards, which will save us buying Oyster cards for everyone.
  • I’m wary of Britrail passes – it sounds like roughly the same cost if you prebook flexible fares a few weeks in advance.
  • We’re looking at Air B’n’b for places we’ll be staying more than a day or two, as it’s useful being able to easily cook some meals and do laundry. Hotels for 1-2 day hops.
• The Northern Myth Accountability and transparency? The Gunner government gets a Fail grade so far

  

  This is a guest post by Darwin-based legal academic Ken Parish* that was originally published on 23 May 2017 at the Charles Darwin University site The Summit: Public governance issues and politics, with a particular focus on the Northern Territory.

  The Gunner Labor government came to office last August promising to restore the trust of Territorians in government, after it had been shattered by four years of chaos, division and dubious or worse ethical behaviour by various members of the Giles CLP regime. Enacting and boosting safeguards ensuring accountability and transparency were to be at the forefront of the new Government’s program.

  After 9 months in office, how are they going? In my assessment the record is none too impressive.

  MLAs’ financial interests

  A modest but worthwhile initiative to publish MLAs’ registrable interests (financial and property) online has been implemented. However it appears that it will only be published online annually, whereas the Legislative Assembly (Disclosure of Interests) Act requires any alteration of interests to be notified to the Clerk within 28 days. Accordingly the online register is of extremely limited value as a transparency/accountability measure. There is no obvious reason why the online Register should not be updated in real time so we are in a position to know whether a MLA has a conflict of interest in performing his or her duties to Territorians.

  Political donations

  One of the Gunner government’s election promises was to convene an inquiry to look at reforming political donations laws. There appears to have been some funding for that initiative in the May budget, but as far as I am aware it has not yet been convened or anyone appointed to conduct it.(1)

  In the meantime the Gunner government moved in Parliament a couple of weeks ago to enshrine in legislation its seemingly hasty decision late last year to impose a previously unannounced “policy” for a maximum floor area of 400 square metres for takeaway liquor outlets.  The effect of the initial decision was to prevent the national Woolworths-owned Dan Murphy’s chain from establishing a store in Darwin. The effect of including that ban in parliamentary legislation, as opposed to mere subordinate legislation, will almost certainly be to prevent the circumstances surrounding the decision (including any connection with rather large donations to the ALP by interests associated with the Australian Hotels Association, whose members stand to benefit from the exclusion of Dan Murphy’s) from being probed by the Federal Court in proceedings commenced by Woolworths.

  Anti-corruption commission

  Similarly, the Gunner government promised to implement a local Independent Commission Against Corruption, an important accountability mechanism that exists in every other state and territory (although not yet at federal level). The NT ICAC has been funded to the tune of $3 million in the 2017-18 Budget, but for inadequately explained reasons won’t actually commence until the second half of next year. In the meantime neither the Ombudsman nor Commissioner for Public Interest Disclosures has the power to investigate alleged misdeeds by politicians or their staffers.

  Whether the new ICAC once established would be given the power to investigate dubious actions occurring prior to its commencement (e.g. numerous Giles government actions and the ALP’s Dan Murphy’s shenanigans) is yet to be seen, but we can fairly safely predict that the answer will be no.

  Essentially that is the sum total of accountability and transparency measures the Gunner (Gunna?) regime has moved to introduce. Otherwise the record is one of unfulfilled promises, inaction and in some cases actions that have actually reduced the Government’s effective accountability to the public.

  Resourcing of Independent MLAs

  In the latter category is Mr Gunner’s refusal to provide any extra staffing or resources (other than 2 parliamentary library staff shared between all of them) to the 5 Independent MLAs in the Legislative Assembly. The two CLP MLAs were deemed to be the official “Opposition” and given all the resources that accompany Opposition status. Most importantly that includes funding allowing the employment of 11 or so staffers, who always include portfolio experts like economists, lawyers, and health, education and other experts. Their assistance is vital to allow the MLAs to subject the Government to effective scrutiny and oversight, a fundamental purpose of Parliament in a Westminster system.

  In the NT Legislative Assembly that scrutiny function can now only be performed in a reasonably effective manner by the two CLP MLAs. Even though the five Independents include very capable and experienced members like Gerry Wood and Terry Mills, their general parliamentary experience cannot compensate for their complete lack of expert staffing resources. There is no proper reason for Mr Gunner to have refused to fund those resources.

  The expense is minimal in the context of a $7 billion annual Budget. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the new Chief Minister has cynically taken advantage of NT voters’ wholesale rejection of the CLP to achieve almost complete immunity from effective parliamentary scrutiny for his own government.

  Reduction in parliamentary scrutiny

  That impression is confirmed when we examine the fate in the last Parliamentary Sittings of the recommendations of the somewhat ironically titled Select Committee for Opening Parliament to the People. It made some excellent recommendations in its green paper, but many were watered down in the final report, seemingly under pressure (“expressed a strong preference”) from the Government(2). The remaining recommendations in the final report that the Government disliked were either rejected outright or referred to the Standing Orders Committee where they will no doubt be further neutered before being returned the Assembly for enactment(3).

  The most crucial example is that the Select Committee’s (reluctantly watered down) final recommendation on the annual fiscal Estimates process being undertaken by a single Estimates Committee rather than the two initially proposed portfolio-based scrutiny committees have been cynically used by the Government as a flimsy pretext for halving the available time for parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s Budget by the Estimates Committee from 60 hours to just 30.

  The pretext for this seemingly outrageous reduction in parliamentary scrutiny of the  Government’s fiscal record and intentions is that the Estimates Committee would get to use the other 30 hours for scrutinising the Annual Reports of government departments and agencies in November each year. But there are at least three fundamental problems with that excuse:

  • As noted earlier, the Independent Members of the Estimates Committee have no expert staff resources that would allow them effectively to scrutinise Annual Reports and ask meaningful questions with any real chance of uncovering problems;
  • The Government rejected a recommendation by the Select Committee that it consider giving the Auditor-General the power to conduct performance audits of any department or agency. This is a power that every other auditor-general in Australia possesses but the NT’s Auditor-General does not. As the Select Committee noted:

  The Committee considers that the Auditor-General can play an important role in assisting the committees understanding performance information and developing a systematic approach to analysing it. However, the Committee notes that the Auditor-General’s ability to assist the committees in this regard is somewhat constrained compared to other Auditors-General throughout Australia due to the lack of a function to audit the actual effectiveness, efficiency and economy of Agencies in meeting their objectives. Enabling the Auditor-General to bring their professional expertise to assist the committees in the examination of performance information would facilitate a more focussed scrutiny of Annual Reports.

  • Departments and agencies themselves are not legally required to report on their own effectiveness or efficiency and so most do not do so.

  The end result is that the Northern Territory, alone of all Australian states and territories, has no proper system at all for independent scrutiny of government departments’ efficiency or effectiveness in spending taxpayers’ money. Given that more than 80% of the Territory’s revenue comes from the Commonwealth, it is reasonable to wonder why the federal government has not intervened to impose basic standards of fiscal scrutiny and accountability that are taken for granted everywhere else.

  Ministers’ post-politics employment

  I have written on this subject previously here at The Summit. As I observed then, some other states (most notably New South Wales and Victoria) have significantly stronger restrictions on Ministers’ post-politics employment. The need for stronger protections is obvious from various revelations about the behaviour of former Chief Minister Adam Giles in relation to Hancock Prospecting and the Halikos group, and former Housing Minister Bess Price in relation to Zodiac Business Services. As recently as today, a story by the NT News’ Christopher Walsh gave more details of seemingly dubious circumstances surrounding the awarding of multi-million dollar contracts to Ms Price’s new employer Zodiac. Despite that, the story notes that little has been done by the Gunner government.  Seemingly no bureaucrat has been subjected to any form of disciplinary action, although:

  A spokesman for Chief Minister Michael Gunner said new procurement processes were put in place and that the Government is “considering … further action”, but did not elaborate.

  The Report Card?

  The Gunner government’s end of semester Report Card gives it a fairly miserable failing D grade in the subject Accountability and Transparency.

  Teacher’s comment: “Occasional glimpses of promise and a marginal improvement on last year’s class (the worst the school has ever had) but much more effort is needed”.

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

  Footnotes

  1. Moreover, the defects in the current system are manifest and don’t need a prolonged inquiry before fixing them. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the “inquiry” is just a pretext to delay taking effective action. At present donations to political parties don’t have to be disclosed until 20 weeks after the financial year in which they are made – Part 10 Division 3 of the Electoral Act – section 194. The practical effect is that big donations aren’t declared until at the very least many months after the Territory election at which all Territory voters should be entitled to know whether and to what extent the parties for which they are voting may be unduly influenced and acting at the behest of vested private interests who have made large donations. Even worse, in the case of donations made after 30 June in an election year, the public won’t know about those until 18 months after the donation was made, a time long after the election that the donation was intended to influence. This situation could be readily remedied by legislating for real time (within 28 days) online disclosure of all donations to parties of more than $1500. There would no doubt be a modest expense involved in establishing and maintaining such a system, but it is a critical component of any credible democratic system to restore integrity to our electoral system, and there is no need whatever for a formal inquiry before establishing it.

  2. For example, the green paper recommended that the fiscal Estimates process also be undertaken by the two new portfolio-based scrutiny committees it also recommended, along with the functions previously performed by the Public Accounts Committee and Subordinate Legislation Committee. The effect of that would have been that each of those committees would have had one week (30 hours) to examine the Budget and 30 hours to examine departmental annual reports. That would have meant no net reduction in committee scrutiny of the Budget below the current 60 hours. Instead the Select Committee appears to have been pressured into agreeing that the entire Estimates function would be undertaken by a separate Estimates Committee. It was that coerced capitulation which led to the halving of Parliamentary scrutiny of the Budget discussed below.

  3. For example, the crucial recommendation for enhanced powers for the Auditor-General – recommendation 16 – was rejected outright, as was a recommendation that Territorians have the ability to require a complaint by an aggrieved person about the operation of subordinate legislation to be heard by the relevant portfolio scrutiny committee – recommendation 14, while a recommendation requiring tabled petitions containing not less than 1000 signatures to be debated by the Legislative Assembly (not just tabled and ignored as occurs at present) was referred to the Standing Orders Committee where it will no doubt be neutered before implementation – Recommendation 23. Finally, the Committee’s eminently sensible recommendation that the responsibilities of the two new scrutiny committees be organised on the basis of portfolio responsibility – Recommendations 1-4 inclusive – was rejected in favour of the Government’s preference for policies organised around vague descriptions of social and economic policy. As the Select Committee pointed out, the Government’s preferred/unilaterally imposed organisational division of responsibility between the two scrutiny committees is inherently confusing and problematic, in that many Bills before the Parliament have both social and economic dimensions.

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

  * 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 he early 1990s.

  The post Accountability and transparency? The Gunner government gets a Fail grade so far appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• The Northern Myth Matthew van Roden, you train your child – a review by Koulla Roussos

  

  This is a review by Darwin-based barrister & curator Koulla Roussos of recent works by Darwin artist Matthew van Roden at pirrie space in Darwin.

  “… Do not let us despise the word. After all it is a powerful instrument; it is the means by which we convey our feelings to one another, our method of influencing other people. Words can do unspeakable good and cause terrible wounds.” Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis

  There are many forms of discipline exerting and leaving impressions over the human body. Words and images, visible texts, intangible ideas shape, twist and distort the individual body and body politic. Practices, customs, discourses, ideas are generated by institutional actors with direct impact on body, memory and identity for institutional aims and objectives.

  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  John 1:1

  With sharp observation and with clinical precision in the use and arrangement of his materials, Darwin artist Matthew van Roden scrutinizes the institution of religion, the institution par excellence which has enforced its domain over the human body since time began with weapons and with words.

  Van Roden presents you train your child a suite of new works arising out of his Masters of Visual Arts practice at Charles Darwin University. The works are expertly installed and presented inside pirrie space, a new  art space in Darwin’s more interesting suburbia.

  

  Within the corpus of meaning proliferation there is always Michel Foucault (1926-1984) a leading French intellectual who singularly deconstructed his queer body as he searched through the annals of human history looking for the birth, the infancy, the maturity, proliferation and simulation of the instruments of dominion and social control:  the church, the clinic, the school, the prison, the academy  leaving behind a plethora of theoretical and canonical texts for an inquisitive meaning maker like van Roden to employ.

  Materials used in making art are equally “texts”, each with its own context, culture, syntax, history.  With power & pleasure (flesh becomes words) [ figure 1 and 2] , van Roden presents two square panels, synthesising  all the primary materials he used in the execution of the work: wooden panels,  gauche, graphite wax and paper, and religious text in the font of a standard school letter stencil.

  There are many languages, syntaxes, orthodoxies which can be utilised by a meaning maker de-textualised and re-presented to convey in another language multiple meanings. Turning to post-modernity’s enormous treasure chest of lexicon, tropes, and methods available to today’s artist/writer/image/ text/meaning maker, van Roden returns to the historiographical relevance of the scriptures to conduct an inquisition on the word.

  

  Wax is particularly interesting, since this material is imbued with religiosity. Wax as an encaustic material attached gaudy colours over the marble statues in the temples of antiquity. The wax candle in the Christian ritual, as it burns and melts symbolises both the transience of the body and transcendence of the soul. Molten wax has also a sensual texture and erotic associations, offering divergent desires an ecstatic sublimation by conflating pleasure with pain.

  

  Religion as an institution has a long pre-historical claim to authority over the human body. Two powerful instruments for corrective religiosity have been the weapon and the word. Religious institutions correct transgression. Religion imprints the word on the body with corrective instruments, leaving behind a trace, stamping its authority with the word.

  

  The absurdity of a mass produced item for parental discipline is captured by a sequence of 18 spanking paddles in van Roden’s you train your child ( words become flesh) 2017.

  For van Roden, growing up within a Pentecostal Christian family, biblical verses and ideas were imprinted at a young age. “ The spanking paddle, a manifestation of scriptural text, held within it the promise of keeping one’s children on the straight and narrow, a tool to guide them through the follies of youth; to temper the demonstrations of original sin.  Disobedience of parents was rebellion against God and this scriptural inscribed spanking paddle would play its part in the righteous life.”  *

  The application of white wax on a pink coloured marine-ply board synthesises van Roden’s exhibition narrative. The minimal colour spectrum employed materialise ideas such as the pink stain mark left behind by spanking, as well as the pink after stain left behind by wax on the body.

  Cleverly this work captures the ubiquity of mass consumption and the little accidents which in the detail present the notion and nature of the cliché, that hiccup like  accident in the mechanical printing process of reproduction lending the work  the aura and authenticity that radiates from a singular original work of art.

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

  With untitled, 2017 van Roden returns to the restrained elegance of abstraction.  As an iconoclast, he liberates the body of this work from the confines of the word, achieving pure aesthetic pleasure by producing a work of art without words, a pleasure achieved from the materiality of all the ingredients and the method of his material studio practice.    The text is rendered superfluous. The infinite and unknowable universe requires an intelligent body at once present with a mind negotiating meaning in the face of infinite possibility, or as van Roden said: “[with] a queerness that spreads itself over the surface of things until nothing is- anymore- clear.” #

  As such Van Roden concludes his excision from the logocentric body. Just like the title, there are no words in this work. The simplicity and elegance of a circle, an orb, a globe, pinned to a white wall, it hovers inside the space of an infinite white square.  Platonic and ideal form at once finite in its precise imprecision and infinite in the dreamy contemplation it invokes of all that is and remains unknowable.

  

  Mathew van Roden, you train your child

  pirrie space

  By appointment only: pirrie.space@gmail.com

  * # Matthew van Roden, you train your child // artist statement.

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

  For an interesting artist floor talk: https://soundcloud.com/pirriespace/pirriecast-you-train-your-child

  This post was first published at Koulla Roussos’ webpage here. Well worth a look for more …

  The post Matthew van Roden, you train your child – a review by Koulla Roussos appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Links International Venezuela: speaking up to say the truth

   

  

   

  By Atilio Boron

   

  May 24, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Alainet — In various recent works, different analysts and observers of Latin American political life have reproached intellectuals and militants on the left for their silence on what is happening in Venezuela. That silence, they say, only reinforces the worst features of the government of Nicolas Maduro. This strategy was used a few weeks ago by a noted Venezuelan intellectual, Edgardo Lander, and more recently, in a special production of Pagina/12, it was reiterated by two colleagues from Argentina: Roberto Gargarella and Maristella Svampa. [1]

   

  read more

May 23, 2017

• Club Troppo Accountability and transparency? Gunner government gets a Fail grade

  The Gunner Labor government came to office last August promising to restore the trust of Territorians in government, after it had been shattered by four years of chaos, division and dubious or worse ethical behaviour by various members of the Giles CLP regime. Enacting and boosting safeguards ensuring accountability and transparency were to be at the forefront of the new Government’s program.

  After 9 months in office, how are they going? In my assessment the record is none too impressive.

  Read more at The Summit

• The Northern Myth “Follow the money, bruss!” A short history of electoral funding in the NT

  

  Late last year I applied to the wonderful people at the NT Archives for an NT History Grant for a project I somewhat facetiously gave the working title of “Follow the money, bruss!’: A short history of political fundraising in the Northern Territory 1978 to 2018.”

  Little did I know that shortly after I applied the (new) NT government would initiate an inquiry into election funding in the NT.

  Then in early 2017 I received notice that I’d been successful …

  As SBS reported in late November under the headline “NT govt to probe political donations“:

  The Northern Territory Labor government will establish an inquiry into political donations to look at the “murky relationship” between the Country Liberals Party and an alleged slush fund. Chief Minister Michael Gunner brought forward a motion in parliament for the inquiry, which is expected to be completed within a year. It will examine the current disclosure system and whether there should be a cap on party campaign spending or public funding of candidates. It’ll also investigate all donations to political parties in the past 10 years, including the alleged CLP slush fund Foundation 51 and the Labor-affiliated Harold Nelson Holdings. Mr Gunner says electoral reform is crucial to restoring community trust in government after the CLP failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Foundation 51 in the lead up to the 2012 election. “Deliberate and systemic breaches of the disclosure provisions are a direct attack on our Territory democracy,” he said. “The public has a right to know about the murky relationship between the CLP and Foundation 51 and their related financial arrangements.” Former CLP leader Terry Mills said Labor has also done bad things in the past and has been called out for it as well. “Pride comes before a fall,” he warned.

  My grant application outlined the following proposed course of my research.

  Synopsis and Outline

  This project will examine the history of political fundraising from the commencement of Northern Territory self-government in 1978 (and perhaps briefly in the years prior) through to the present day. I believe that this area of NT politics has not previously been the subject of substantive research and that my project would make an important contribution to the history and conduct of political affairs in the NT.

  As the section headings below indicate, while it is necessary to cast a wide net—some analysis of NT political and social history will be required—the primary focus will be the electoral fundraising efforts of the two major parties, the Country Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party.

  I have already–in the course of related research–collected a substantial amount of material on this topic generally and the history grant would provide me with funds to conduct interviews in Darwin and Alice Springs, conduct further documentary research (including at the NT Library, and NT Archives) and collate my research into a (hopefully) meaningful and relevant form.

  Research methodology

  1.    Collect and collate relevant documentary material, including newspaper articles, material from the NT Legislative Assembly Hansard, academic research, NT Archives, NT Electoral Commission and relevant third-party material;

  2.    Establish a chronology of key political, legislative and public policy events and developments;

  3.    Contact past and present NT politicians and others involved in the administration of political parties and related entities seeking contributions and comment;

  4.    Conduct a brief media campaign (articles and possibly advertisements in newspapers etc) seeking broader comment from members of the public and others not identified in (3) above;

  5.    Conduct a number of semi-structured interviews with key participants (relevant party-wing officers, elected members etc) in Darwin and Alice Springs;

  6.    Write-up my research into draft form, identify any gaps or new lines of inquiry, finalise report for publication.

  I anticipate that the project would consist of a considered examination of political fundraising in the NT – by both political parties and independents – over the past forty years. I have a working length of about 8,000 to 10,000 words.

  I’ve lived in the NT since the mid-80s and for many years was an interested though distant observer of NT politics. Since 2006 I have written for the daily edition of Crikey.com.au and since 2008 have edited the Crikey blog The Northern Myth contributing upwards of 800 pieces to that site – many related to NT and national politics.

  Primary research facilities – the NT Archives, the NT Public Library and political party offices etc – are located in Darwin and the effective conduct of my research will require attendance at those locations.

  Proposed section/chapter headings

  1.    Introduction – a brief history of politics in the NT

  2.    The early years – 1978 to 1984 – Carpentaria Pty Ltd and beyond

  3.    Chaos and change – the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties

  4.    The “professional” era – the Stone Age and the rise of the ALP

  5.    The CLP in the wilderness – 2001 to 2012

  6.    The return of the CLP and the rise and fall of Foundation 51

  7.    The future of electoral funding and political fundraising in the NT – discussion and conclusion

  Appendixes

  1.    Political parties in the NT

  2.    Electoral law in the NT – an overview

  3.    Electoral funding in the NT – a chronology of selected events

  4.    References and bibliography

  5.    Selected biographies

  I’d like to thank my referees, Rolf Gerritsen, Professorial Research Fellow at the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University based in Alice Springs; Syd Stirling, President of the Australian Labor Party and past member for Nhulunbuy, Deputy Chief Minister and more. Shane Stone, whom I’ve already caught up with in Alice Springs for an early morning chat over coffee and chuckles, was also gracious enough to provide a generous reference.

  I’ll be in Darwin next week for the first phase of my research, focussing on documentary research and getting a few interviews.

  If you want to catch up drop me a line at bgosford@gmail.com and we’ll see …

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

   

  Image from The New Daily: http://thenewdaily.com.au/money/finance-news/2016/12/14/end-of-100-note/

  The post “Follow the money, bruss!” A short history of electoral funding in the NT appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• The Northern Myth Probable Night Parrot detected in the Northern Territory

  

  This is a guest post by two likely lads as you would be lucky enough to meet up with on some blasted gibber and spinifex plain in the middle of somewhere … often a longways from anywheres. Mark Carter and Chris Watson are two of the best field naturalists working in this part of the country and this is their story, first published at Mark Carter’s webpage earlier today here. 

  Acoustic recording reveals call of probable Night Parrot in southern NT

  In early 2017 zoologists Chris Watson and Mark Carter found a bird call in an acoustic recording which could not be positively identified. The site of the recording is a stand of very old thick spinifex (Triodia longiceps) surrounded by natural gibber firebreaks. The call recorded is a series of short constant frequency whistles at around 2.2kHz. The time of the call is roughly an hour after sunset. There had been rain at the site shortly before the call was recorded.

  Two observers have since heard the call repeated at the site, in one instance coming from thick spinifex close to the observer.

  No further recordings of the call have been identified (however, many hours of acoustic data from the site has been gathered which is yet to be analysed).

  The call is a similar frequency and tone to Night Parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) calls recorded in Queensland and recently released to the public, but differs in its length (see sonogram image). In March it was announced that Night Parrots found in Western Australia have calls which differ from the birds in Queensland.

  After liaising with the ornithologists who found the Western Australian population we were able to compare our recorded call to other examples of Night Parrot whistle calls from WA. While there is not an exact match, the calls from WA Night Parrot and the bird recorded in the NT are very similar.

  

  Sonogram of (top) a confirmed Night Parrot whistling call from Queensland sourced from https://nightparrot.com.au/index.php/resources/night-parrot-calls/ and (below) the call we recorded in the NT ©Carter & Watson 2017. Note the similar frequency but longer duration of the NT call.

  The land system in which the call recording was made is extensive and hosts many locations which correspond with the known habitat requirements for this species elsewhere in Australia.

  We are proceeding on the basis that we have detected a probable Night Parrot in the Northern Territory. Work is now underway with the relevant statutory body to gather more data at the site and identify more locations in the wider landscape where this bird may occur.

  We have deliberated for some time on whether to release this information into the public domain. We cannot access enough reference material to make this a fully confirmed record of the bird (or to dismiss it as another species). We have both been openly critical of the extreme secrecy and intrigue which has surrounded this species in recent years. Where practical, we will release information as soon as we can; particularly information that will assist others in finding the bird elsewhere.

  As the tentative identification of the call was partly reliant on acoustic data which is not ours to release we are limited to releasing the sonogram image of our call only, not that of the reference calls from Western Australia.

  We will not be sharing location data of this site under any circumstances in the interest of the bird’s conservation.

  Mark Carter and Chris Watson 23 May 2017

  The post Probable Night Parrot detected in the Northern Territory appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Links International Is Maduro taking Venezuela down the authoritarian path?

   

  

   

   

  By Lucas Koerner

   

  May 23, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Venezuela Analysis — Venezuela is once again dominating international headlines as violent opposition protests bent on toppling the elected Maduro government enter their seventh week. The demonstrations have claimed to date at least 54 lives since April 4, surpassing the previous wave of violent anti-government protests in 2014, known as “the Exit”. However, this time around, the unrest coincides with a severe economic downturn and a transformed geopolitical landscape defined by the return of the right in Brazil and Argentina as well as an even more bellicose regime in Washington.

  read more

• Links International The Chávez hypothesis: vicissitudes of a strategic project

   

  

   

  By Chris Gilbert

   

  May 23, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Counterpunch —What does Chavism really stand for? What are its main accomplishments and its main failures? What was the soldier-become-president Hugo Chávez trying to achieve, and how far did he go in achieving it? Most often it is taken for granted that Chávez, who was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, began with an anti-neoliberal project that became, with time, anti-imperialist and then later aspired to socialism. It is also usually argued that, unfortunately, Chávez went very little of the way to achieving the latter goal. Chávez’s project suffered, this story goes, because it was only discursively socialist; that is, it proposed socialism as a goal but could not really begin the transition, being unable to go beyond mere discourse to concrete social and economic facts. That being the case, a part of the Left praises the Venezuelan leader for what it sees as an essentially verbal achievement. This group contends that Chávez fulfilled an important task for humanity by merely recovering and promoting the word socialism after the fall of the Eastern bloc. Others, generally from the so-called Hard Left, are more skeptical. They highlight Chávez’s failure to significantly alter the structure of the society or the economy.

   

  read more

May 22, 2017

• Club Troppo High wages are good for growth: jobs and growth

  I’ve always thought that, if there’s an economic driver for Australian culture it’s the high demand for labour – exceeding supply a lot of the time – that applied in Australia from the convict period on and the resulting uppityness of workers – including convict workers judging from John Hirst’s work. That put us in the running to benefit from a virtuous cycle instead of the usual vicious one. Instead of low wages driving down worker morale, worker initiative, investment in workers – by both workers and their employers – high wages led to the opposite virtuous circle. The same phenomenon that led Lee Kwan Yew to target high wages in Singapore in the 1960s and the Northern European countries to do it beyond then – and arguably to this day.

  I’ve always thought the instinct economists had for thinking that the relationship between output and equality was negative was stupid – that it depends on context and that there are lots of things that promote both. And here’s some interesting corroborating economic history.

  Australian Squatters, Convicts, and Capitalists: Dividing Up a Fast-Growing Frontier Pie 1821-1871, by Laura Panza, Jeffrey G. Williamson – #23416 (DEV)

  Abstract:

  Compared with its nineteenth century competitors, Australian GDP per worker grew exceptionally fast, about twice that of the US and three times that of Britain. This paper asks whether the fast growth performance produced rising inequality. Using a novel data set we offer new evidence supporting unambiguously the view that, in sharp contrast with US, Australia underwent a revolutionary levelling in incomes between the 1820s and the 1870s. This assessment is based on our annual estimates of functional shares in the form of land rents, convict incomes, free unskilled incomes, free skill premiums, British imperial transfers and a capitalist residual.

• Club Troppo From the department of ‘Wow!’: Externalities of coal storage

  Handle with Care: The Local Air Pollution Costs of Coal Storage. by Akshaya Jha, Nicholas Z. Muller – #23417 (EEE PE)

  Abstract:

  Burning coal is known to have environmental costs; this paper quantities the local environmental costs of transporting and storing coal at U.S. power plants for the sample period 2002-2012. We first demonstrate that a 10% increase in coal stockpiles (number of deliveries) results in a 0.07% (0.16%) increase in the average concentration of fine particulates (PM2.5) for locations up to 25 miles away from, and downwind from, plants. We next assess the impacts of PM2.5 on average adult and infant mortality rates using coal stockpiles and deliveries as instruments for PM2.5. Our findings within this instrumental variables framework indicate that a 10% increase in PM2.5 leads to a 1.1% (6.6%) increase in average adult (infant) mortality rates; these causal estimates are similar in magnitude to the epidemiological estimates used by the USEPA in their regulatory impact analyses. Our estimated increase in mortality rates implies local environmental costs of $183 ($203) per ton of coal stockpiled (delivered); to put this in perspective, the average power plant paid roughly $48 per ton for coal during our sample period. These sizable but highly localized environmental costs of coal transportation and storage disproportionately impact the economically disadvantaged communities living near coal-fired power plants.

• Club Troppo Status Goods: Platinum Credit Cards, Social Situations and Psychological Wellbeing

  Status Goods: Experimental Evidence from Platinum Credit Cards by Leonardo Bursztyn, Bruno Ferman, Stefano Fiorin, Martin Kanz, Gautam Rao – #23414 (DEV LS PE)

  Abstract:

  This paper provides novel field-experimental evidence on status goods. We work with an Indonesian bank that markets platinum credit cards to high-income customers. In a first experiment, we show that demand for the platinum card greatly exceeds demand for a nondescript control product with identical benefits, suggesting demand for the pure status aspect of the card. Transaction data reveal that platinum cards are more likely to be used in social contexts, implying social image motivations. Combining price variation with information on the use of the card sheds light on the magnitude of the demand for social status. In a second experiment, we provide evidence of positional externalities from the consumption of these status goods. The final experiment shows that increasing self-esteem causally reduces demand for status goods. We infer that part of the demand for status is psychological in nature, and that social image is a substitute for self-image.

• Links International Major decisions face Québec solidaire at its forthcoming congress

   

  

   

  By Richard Fidler

   

  Original published on May 16, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Life on the Left — Quebec’s broad party of the left, Québec solidaire (QS), will open a four-day congress on May 19 in Montréal — the 12^th congress in its 11-year history. The delegates face a challenging agenda. It includes the final stage of adoption of the party’s detailed program, a process begun eight years ago; discussion of possible alliances with other parties and some social movements including a proposed fusion with another pro-independence party, Option nationale; and renewal of the party’s top leadership.

   

  read more

• Links International Why socialists don’t need human nature

   

  

   

  By Themistoklis Pantazakos

   

  May 22, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In his recent Jacobin article, Adaner Usmani makes a claim that will sound odd to the socialists of our times, or at least to the post-structuralists among them. This claim is, per the title of Usmani’s piece, that socialists should believe in the existence of human nature. That this claim should raise a fair amount of eyebrows among contemporary socialists is expected, as Usmani himself recognizes: human nature has been a repository, a refuge and a departure point for much of the reactionary political thought of the modern era. The concept is typically summoned to block any kind of socialist programme in its genesis. Per a certain right-wing ideology, human nature, which is held to consist of qualities of the ilk of selfishness and greediness, is intrinsically antithetical to a life built on solidarity as described in a manifold of socialist and communist political programs.

   

  read more

May 21, 2017

• Club Troppo An exchange on deliberative democracy

  Below is a spirited exchange between me and Barry Jones on deliberative democracy which I reproduce with his permission. He won’t be participating in any online debate because as he puts it

  I … confess to being a total abstainer where social media is concerned. I don’t want to get involved in something which is potentially time consuming and/or obsessive. I have time for Bach, or social media. I choose Bach.

  Sounds pretty fair enough to me. The exchange didn’t get too far because Barry didn’t see my reply for some months and then took me up on getting together to discuss things. Still I think the email debate is worth recounting here.

  See this footnote ¹ for my initial email. Here’s Barry’s first email response to my sending my essays on deliberative democracy in the Mandarin. My reply is below his.

  Dear Nick

  I  read your piece on deliberative democracy with keen interest. I have had a good deal of experience with deliberative polls. While I can see the value of citizens’ juries, or their analogues, in providing insights into the way people feel  about particular issues (e.g. the republic) I am profoundly sceptical about the general merit of ‘sortition’ or ‘lottocracy.’

  These deliberative bodies are useful with specific and rather narrow issues e.g. a jury trial, Melbourne Water, and Jim Fishkin’s pioneering work with electricity in Texas, but not in broader issues, such as settling a Budget.

  But how do  you get the toothpaste back into the tube? How do you persuade the existing hegemonic structures to cede power? Remember Voltaire’s comment on St Denys.

  I attach a letter I sent to somebody who sent me David Van Reybrouck’s  Against  Elections.

  Many thanks for sending me Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck which I read with interest, but also deep concern.

  I agree generally with his analysis (although in some cases I would have gone further) but not with his suggested remedies. Loss of faith in democracy is a growing and disturbing international trend, compounded by the rise of populism and the impact of social media. We have the same problem here, confirmed by the ANU’s Australian Election Study 1987-2016.

  The situation is very serious but Van Reybrouck’s alternatives are potentially worse.

  It is worth noting that if the US had direct voting for President instead of the Electoral College, Gore would have won in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

  Van Reybrouck does not address what I regard as the most important problem in democracy, that is, if all votes are of equal value, does this mean that all judgments are equivalent? That opinion may be more important than evidence? That we must search for simple solutions to complex problems?

  I am interested – but also concerned – about the tributes printed on the back of the book and would like to see the context in which they were written. [J. M. Coetzee emailed me that he is not a supporter of sortation, despite the apparent endorsement by him on the back cover.]

  Van Reybrouck works, inevitably, from his own knowledge and experience with G1000, and as a Belgian citizen/ academic/ intellectual. But Belgium is, I think, a very bad model to work from. Van Reybrouck is an enthusiast for consensus politics.

  In Belgium consensus politics has been adopted to an excessive degree. I think of party representatives sitting at a round table, holding hands. Does an election change anything? Hardly at all. I can understand why Belgium could have gone for 541 days without a government. Presumably nobody noticed. Consensus is a very comfortable goal, involving not asking too many awkward questions. In Belgium the dreadful serial killings by Mark Dutroux in 1995-96 demonstrated consensus at its worst. The regional police forces would not share information because they did not want to be interfering in someone else’s jurisdiction. Belgium’s record of sexual abuse in the Catholic church was one of Europe’s worst – but police and politicians, although they knew about it, did not want to upset the apple cart. Van Reybrouck has more citations from Belgium than any other country.

  Despite its superficial attraction, I am very wary of consensus politics. It is inherently collusive, and often corrupt. Most issues that engage political activity are binary and have been throughout our history. White Australia? Abolishing the death penalty? Aboriginal  land rights? Same sex marriage? Effective action on climate change? Separation of church and state? Republic? Euthanasia? Funding priority for government schools? Essentially they involve Yes/ No decisions.

  It could certainly be argued that the Australian political system has adopted a ‘consensus’ position on the treatment of refugees. Is that a good thing? Polling indicates that it is politically popular.  I think it is despicable. There is a consensus in the major parties not to set up a Federal ICAC. This is understandable. But is it the best outcome?

  Van Reybrouck advocates ‘sortition’, a very unattractive word. I don’t think it will catch on. (It might be better to call it ‘random sample democracy’ or even ‘lottocracy.’)

  He quotes James Fishkin as being the reviver of the concept, which is not accurate. (James Burnheim was earlier.² I knew and have worked with Fishkin and his mentor Peter Laslett.

  Fishkin’s  disciple Pam Ryan divides her time between Texas and Adelaide. I assume you know her – but if you don’t I’d be glad to arrange a meeting.

  I took an active role either as Chair or Co-chair in several ‘Deliberative Polls’ in Australia – on the Republic, on a Bill of Rights for the ACT, on amending the South Australian Constitution, on Muslims in Australia, and I think there was one more, which I have forgotten.

  The deliberative poll, if properly run, can be a very useful instrument for teasing out issues, resolving conflicts and raising the levels of understanding. But it all depends on what the issue is. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that, for all its merits, the deliberative poll would then become a valuable  instrument of government, passing and administering laws. I concede that the experiment seems to have worked well in Iceland and Ireland, and small homogeneous societies may find it useful.

  I am happy with random sampling for juries or public opinion polls, but I would not choose a dentist, brain surgeon, airline pilot, engineer, meteorologist, philosopher or child minder by casting lots. Nor would I toss a coin about Budget outcomes.

  Australia is mentioned in passing references to deliberative polls and some inaccurate comments on Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit, held in 2008.  Van Reybrouck describes this as the calling of ‘a thousand residents for a citizens’ summit.’ Well, not quite. It would have been better to describe it as calling ‘a thousand experts to discuss problems in their areas of expertise.’ That is quite another thing. John Coetzee was there, for example, not because he was a citizen chosen by lot, but as an outstanding writer/ thinker.

  He approved of the 2020 Summit more than I did. I thought there was too much consensus. Resolutions could only be adopted if there was a ‘consensus’, which in practice meant unanimity. In the Climate Change stream, which I attended, having 90% support for a proposition was not enough. A vocal minority exercises a veto, in effect.

  Passing a Budget is a classic example of where a body chosen by lot would, I think, inevitably fail. An Australian Budget might have at least  3000 line items. How could/ should priorities – putting a road here, an airport there, a hospital and a school somewhere else be determined? What principles are involved?

  And what happened to accountability? The buck stops, where? If you have lay people toddling in and out of the deliberative assembly for their brief exposure to running a country, why should they feel responsible if there is a failure? (They may not even remember it.)

  Nature, notoriously, abhors a vacuum. With a weakened legislature, with personnel constantly changing, power will inevitable go towards entrenched groups, the bureaucracy, armed forces, profession interest groups, and corporate lobbies.

  The greatest weakness in Van Reybrouck’s book is how his suggested changes could be implemented.  If there is even a single sentence on this I must have missed it! He just writes that Belgium ought to try it. Then the EU ought to take it up. Is he serious?

  I am sure the Americans will yearn for advice from Belgium!

  Sorry to be so blunt, but I thought it was better to get it off my chest!

  To fix the existing system requires a concentrated effort from those well-informed but hand-wringing citizens, many of them professionals, who can’t bring themselves to engage in the dirty business if politics. Think of Archimedes and his lever. Where is the fulcrum to be?

  All the best

  BOJ

  And my reply

  Thanks for your email Barry and apologies for the delay in replying,

  As I pondered your own suggestion for what you called a courage party, I started to think it should be called the “we hate the uneducated party”. If you are right that the less educated people in our society have more odious views than the educated – the professionals as you put it in your email – then I guess I’m with you. However I’m at least as sceptical of professionals as I am of the hoi polloi. After all I’m an economist – and neoclassical economics was built by professionals. They have a single counter-intuitive insight (Ricardo’s comparative advantage) and the rest is a blizzard of silly 19th Century engineering maths which makes little sense but satisfies a neurotic aesthetic about being ’scientific’.

  My main reason for disagreeing with your own view is however that it seems to me that your idea for perpetuating elites in politics rests on a social order – the dominance of middle class respectability – that is starting to look as out of date as poke bonnets. When you can have the established mainstream press egging on the mob baying at 3 judges for making a determination according to law calling them ‘Enemies of the people’, when the Koch brothers can fund vast and endless campaigns of disinformation – most of it cheerily provided by professionals, and conveyed by professional journalists – I’m afraid that world of respectability, where politicians regard themselves as fundamentally constrained by some shared notion of the truth and a shared life together is dying.

  Just calling for ‘courage’ within existing structures seems unimaginative and doomed to failure against the growing depredations of all those professionals who are helping themselves to millions and billions of dollars by gaming the sale of professional expertise – in finance, in health, in law, in media, IT, education and indeed in R&D itself – where as you know the growth in the number and salaries of bureaucrats is vastly outstripping growth in academia proper – whilst all the while the academic bureaucrats treat the academics like lab rats in a Skinner box and the quality of academic work continues to slide. I could go on :)

  Of course I realise I’ve done more or less what you’ve done in your email to me, which is outline a whole lot of (I hope you think) reasonable objections to existing institutions where you’ve done the same for more egalitarian rules of engagement in politics. We’re coming from sufficiently different places that it would take a long time to get far. Perhaps we should meet over lunch and see if we can make any progress.

  One final thought – you’ve made a case  for the kinds of things a randomly selected house might not be able to do. Could it put together a budget? I think you may have a point. The thing is that I didn’t propose that it put together a budget. I proposed that it act as an upper house with the lower house arrangements remaining as is. I think it would do that admirably, though I’m very happy for the Senate to also review the House. I see the people’s chamber asking hard questions of the lower house’s plans. Why are we cutting company tax when the evidence suggests its disproportionately expensive. Why have we cut top marginal rates? Why does the lower house want to abolish carbon pricing for a cockamamie ‘direct action’ scheme which will deplete the budget by over $10 billion per year?

  Of course it’s easy to imagine that the people’s house might do other things – it could declare war on dole bludgers, bring back capital punishment – something I know is dear to your heart. I think there are a few responses to those concerns.

  1. Obviously I may be wrong and if there was evidence that citizens juries tended to produce pressure for the madder populist policies, I’d concede my proposal isn’t worth pursuing. Do you have good evidence that this happens?
  2. The evidence I’ve seen is that the process of deliberation transforms a lot of this kind of thinking – and I think in the process has hugely educative impacts on the electorate. 70% of Oregonians supported a citizens initiated referendum proposal entitled “mandatory sentencing” which sounded not very extreme on its face. The citizens’ jury split 21-3 against the proposal and this fact seems to have moved the dial on public opinion judging from the 56% “yes” vote the proposal ultimately received.
  3. I’d draw your attention to how powerful party discipline is now, involving politicians frequently voting against their consciences. Don’t you like my idea that where there’s a super majority of the people they can compel a secret ballot of the other chamber? Obviously open voting is essential to modern politics and party structures, which it’s naïve to want to overturn (at least without a well worked out theory of what you replace it with) but this seems to strike the right balance. It seems to me that this is even more important in America than here because in America Tea Party style activism is forcing Republicans to vote against their conscience or simply be swept away. Not much point in courage there, any more than it would have been doing any favours for black emancipation for Lincoln to have campaigned on the immediate abolition of slavery in his first presidential campaign. He would never have got the gig and he knew it.

  1. Hi all,

     As you may know I’ve been concerned about the deteriorating quality of our democracy – what I call vox pop democracy– for a long time and have gradually come to believe that greater use of selection by lot – which we use in juries – could be a powerful way to ‘detox’ our democracy.

     I gave a speech on this at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas in October last year but have now set out the case more pointedly in a series of articles in the Mandarin.

     The first which goes through some of the pathologies of our democracy – like trivialisation, polarisation, the marginalisation of certain kinds of voices, the public’s sense of being manipulated – and outlines the ways in which selection by lot could heal these problems is here.

     The second outlines how deliberative democracy mechanisms might be introduced into our constitution – one day – but, perhaps more importantly sketches the way in which one might start on such a journey – by establishing a ‘citizens chamber’ outside the constitution which would act as a lightning rod to identify areas in which our the policies being pursued by our elected politicians were at odds with the considered views of a group of Australians that was broadly reflective of the whole population. That article is here.

     I concluded the series with this piece on how mechanisms like citizens’ juries can be used by the bureaucracy.

     As someone who’s seen how politics works, I’m not naturally given to thinking that big ideas get anywhere just because they’re right. Rather the opposite. As I wrote here, lots of ideas don’t make it even if they’re low risk and have no natural enemies. In my experience, people can listen to the ideas even be impressed with them. They say how energised the ideas make them feel. And then they get back to their in-trays. And that’s pretty much it.

     But sometimes there are things whose time has come borne on by the fact that firstly, things are broken and will stay broken – indeed get worse – until they are fixed and secondly that there is a straightforward way of tackling the problem once people focus on it. That happened with tariff reform which Professor Max Corden pronounced as late as 1968 was of academic interest only as, after the best part of a century supporting protectionism, Australian politicians would never depart from. By 1978 it was clear that things had to change and by 1988 it was pretty much all over with a government credibly committing to 5 percent tariffs.

     I think deliberative democracy is one of those ideas, though if any politicians did champion it seriously, the evidence suggests it comes with powerful electoral rewards rather than political pain, so I’m intending to make this a substantial focus for the foreseeable future.

     Naturally I’d be interested in any thoughts you had on the pieces or on ways we can start making changes happen.

     Cheers,

     Nicholas. ↩

  2. I think Barry means John Burnheim the Sydney philosopher who wrote Is Democracy Possible in 1985 and is still with us and thinking about these things at 90. ↩
• Daniel Bowen The week in transport

  This is an occasional series, when a few things happen during the week and I want to put a word in…

  ABC: Ticket inspectors taking tram user’s phone to seek proof of identity unacceptable, PTV says

  This is a concern, but context is important. It’s a matter of degrees. I think whether it’s acceptable or not depends on how they do it.

  If the AO has to verify an ID, and no other proof is able to be presented and they say “Hey are you able to show us your name and address from an app, otherwise we’ll have to wait for police to attend”, and the passenger agrees, then I don’t see a big problem with it.

  On the other hand, if the AO demands to see it, and/or grabs the phone and/or intimidates the person into logging on, and/or watches them do so (eg observes their pass code) then that’s definitely a problem.

  

  Age: Level Crossing Removal Program business case released: the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) is 0.78

  As the business case documents reveal, the problem is that the standard methodology used for BCRs uses a discount rate that may not be appropriate, and also doesn’t count many of benefits that are commonly associated with level crossing removals.

  The core benefits anticipated as a result of the program include travel time savings, reduced vehicle operating costs, road travel reliability benefits, public transport user benefits and avoided collisions. As a standalone program, the LXRP is expected to deliver a Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) of 0.78 using a 7 per cent discount rate. Using a discount rate of 4%, the BCR is 1.34.

  The BCR has been calculated using a standard appraisal methodology. This excludes other significant benefits that the LXRP can be expected to deliver, including:

  • Wider economic benefits (WEBs), such as agglomeration benefits and additional tax revenue from increased
    labour supply, which are expected to be $555 million using a 7 per cent discount rate
  • Additional Benefits – such as improved network resilience to incidents, reduced perceived congestion benefits
    and the related benefits and costs of land use changes occurring as a result of the project – are expected to be
    $175 million using a 7 per cent discount rate
  • Local amenity benefits, increased activity centre connectivity/ consolidation, and benefits for emergency services.
  • Avoidance of wider social impacts (ie. to families and communities) caused by accidents at level crossings

  There’s a heap of other interesting stuff in the report… I haven’t read it all yet, though I did find a familiar photo, originally used in this post.

  Hmmmm…. nice picture -> https://t.co/WiucXRnIdl pic.twitter.com/TYEF1bOXEI

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 20, 2017

  

  Leader: Westfield Southland shopping centre will introduce paid parking in preparation for the opening of the station.

  Charging after 3 hours not unreasonable. As I understand it, at other Westfields such as Doncaster, they charge beyond 3 hours, but you can get parking validated at the cinemas and so on so you’ll still be able to see a long movie and not get charged.

  Something had to be done — either a hard limit, or charging — before the station opened, or the shopping centre car park would inevitably fill with commuters’ cars.

  Leader: City of Port Phillip is to ban motorcycle parking along parts of Acland Street.

  Good. The current laws, which allow motorcycles to be parked basically anywhere on a footpath, are getting out of control. Motor vehicles take up too much space to be allowed in busy pedestrian spaces. Commonsense guidelines are not communicated to riders, and are unenforceable, and thus widely ignored. The lesson for the council here is to ensure that there is plenty of signage for the ban, and that it’s enforced — unlike similar bans in the City of Melbourne.

  Two here today, @cityofmelbourne, including the one from last week. Can you please start enforcing your parking laws? Ping @LordMayorMelb pic.twitter.com/OKhFa5U0zJ

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 10, 2017

  Motorcycle parking banned on footpath here. 4 parked. One has been here all week. No action from @cityofmelbourne https://t.co/Tx9s2yt3VC pic.twitter.com/rxIzy5Oswr

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 12, 2017

  Age: New Metro train timetables in August.

  The government had already announced that V/Line would get a boost. Geelong trains will run every 40 minutes on weekends (currently hourly) should help relieve crowding, though it looks set to mess up bus connections (if they don’t get a wriggle-on and re-write those timetables to match), and really, who decided the non-clockface frequency of 40 minutes is a good idea? Half-hourly would have been better.

  The Bendigo and Ballarat lines will also get more services, including an upgrade to hourly on weekends, and there’ll also be more trains to Ararat and Shepparton.

  

  The Metro changes include an end to the much-hated weekday off-peak Altona shuttles — these will now run all the way into the City. It’s not clear yet whether the Werribee trains will continue to stop all stations, or if these will run express part of the way; otherwise all the stations from Newport in will have 9 trains per hour, which is probably overkill for off-peak.

  There will also be a handful of extra peak services on the Craigieburn, Werribee, and Sunbury, though much of the capacity freed up by Regional Rail Link on the latter two will remain unused.

  Full details of Metro and V/Line timetables will be released in July.

• Club Troppo Airport rail links should be a low(ish) priority
  Embed from Getty Images

  With airport rail links in the news in both Sydney and Melbourne, here’s my recent column for The CEO Magazine arguing that most transport systems have higher priorities.

  Most people seem to love the idea of airport rail links. Some media outlets have taken to referring to an “embarrassing gap” between Melbourne Airport and other big airports. It’s even been claimed that “experts say” a rail link to Badgery’s Creek is vital to that planned airport’s success.

  Such claims are dubious. Getting people to airports is important, but the best planners think about the needs of the city, not just its CBD – a point made well by transit expert Jarrett Walker (no relation). And compared to other uses of the money,  it’s hard to make CBD-to-airport rail stand up when you compare benefits to costs. On top of that, Melbourne Airport already has a good bus service.

  Read the whole thing here.

  Since writing the column I’ve been pointed to this thesis paper, which reiterates two points often overlooked in these discussions:

  • Airport rail link advocates tend to overestimate ridership and understimate costs, as shown by the work of Bent Flyvbjerg.
  • Bus links tend to cost less, scale better and let you pick up and drop off passengers in a lot more places.

  Australians mostly prefer trains and trams to buses. But some relatively small investments in better bus links – more protective and comfortable stops, more seat space, better road priority and so on – may make much more sense than huge investments in airport rail. That’s particularly so when autonomous vehicles are making the future of public transport less clear.

May 20, 2017

• Club Troppo Weekend competition: Why (oh why?) aren’t the Liberal Democrats doing better?

  There’s a lot I don’t understand. We don’t have enough space of a proper survey but let me give you an example. Pistachios taste better than hazelnuts. Much better. And yet hazelnut ice cream and gelato are much much yummier than their pistachio equivalents. As I recall someone writing in a university student newspaper in the early 1970s “verily it is a mind fucker”.

  Anyway, so much for theory. What I don’t understand is this. Brexit is a Serious Thing. It’s the most important political decision they talk about Back Home.¹. It’s a big deal politically. And it’s a big deal for a lot of Brits. Now as I understand it, while the Conservatives and the Labour Party have been browbeaten by a 52% popular vote into supporting Brexit, which they both think is a bad idea. I began this post thinking that the LibDems were against Brexit. But on checking on their manifesto, it turns out the spin-meisters have been hard at work. They’re ‘finessing’ their position as we might say and propose a second referendum.

  Moreover the UK has a very unfair first past the post system of selecting who wins seats to the House of Commons. That means that the Conservatives and Labour start from a base of at least 30% with the LibDems and other parties getting another 30%. So if someone gets to 40% of the vote they’re able to form a government.

  So just as I don’t understand the alchemy by which not especially nice hazelnuts make very nice icecream, I don’t understand why the LibDems aren’t doing better in the UK election. True, if I were the LibDems I wouldn’t have that spin doctor airbrushed position for another referendum. I’d just be against Brexit – the anti-Brexit party. Can’t be more democratic than stand for a platform and then introduce it. But what would I know? I just don’t understand why all those people who were and remain horrified by Brexit aren’t intending to vote against it at the election. In fact the LibDems vote has been falling since the election was called.

  Like #Srsly. Help me out here. What am I missing? And no question begging answers like “people identify too strongly with the Conservative or Labour parties”.

  1. ClubPony expression for Old Blighty. ↩

May 18, 2017

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from May 2007

  Another in my series of ten year old photos.

  If you drive out of the car park at Southland, down the ramp from the 2nd level, near the railway line, you may have noticed that there’s a sign there saying to “Give way to pedestrains“. Evidently it’s been that way for at least ten years. Late in 2017 it’ll finally make sense: “pedestrains” are obviously pedestrians walking to the railway station about to open at last.
  

  Ah, back in the days when Connex ran the rails.
  

  This was at Skateworld in Mordialloc. Evidently it had been taken off a train – I’m guessing it’s old Comeng seating, though the seat cushions had been changed.
  

  “Worst fares in Australia”! This was a splash resulting from a PTUA study comparing fares around Australia for different distances into the CBD, which showed that in most (but not all) cases, Melbourne’s were highest. With the 2015 cut for long-distance fares, it’s changed a bit since then.
  

  Here’s the graph for single fares — the thick blue line is Melbourne:
  

  And another was done that included a handful of world cities — adjusted for Australian dollars:
  

  Finally, this was before the wholesale disposal of CRT televisions started. I think the message here is: don’t buy a “Konka” television.
  

• Club Troppo The Labor Share and Superstar Firms

  The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms
  by David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, John Van Reenen – #23396 (LS PR)

  Abstract:

  The fall of labor’s share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments of trends in labor’s share typically have relied on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this paper, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and international sources and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms with high profits and a low share of labor in firm value-added and sales. As the importance of superstar firms increases, the aggregate labor share will tend to fall. Our hypothesis offers several testable predictions: industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by between-firm reallocation rather than (primarily) a fall in the unweighted mean labor share within firms; the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; and finally, such patterns will be observed not only in U.S. firms, but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions.

• Club Troppo Ebony and ivory: Not such perfect harmony

  Up from Slavery? African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility Since 1880
  by William J. Collins, Marianne H. Wanamaker – #23395 (DAE LS)

  Abstract:

  We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new datasets to study the late 19th and early 20th century and combining them with modern data to cover the mid- to late 20th century. We find large disparities in intergenerational mobility, with white children having far better chances of escaping the bottom of the distribution than black children in every generation. This mobility gap was more important than the gap in parents’ status in proximately determining each new generation’s racial income gap. Evidence suggests that human capital disparities underpinned the mobility gap.

May 17, 2017

• Links International Corea del Sur después de la elección de Moon Jae-in

   

  

   

  [Original in English here.]

   

  17 de mayo, 2017 — Traducido por Enrique García, Sin Permiso — Moon Jae-in, del Partido liberal demócrata, ganó las elecciones presidenciales de Corea del Sur el 9 de mayo, obteniendo el 41% de los votos y derrotando fácilmente a su oponente, el archi-conservador Hong Jun-pyo, que obtuvo alrededor del 24%.

   

  Las elecciones tuvieron lugar después de la destitución de la presidenta conservadora, Park Geun-hye como consecuencia de un gran escándalo de corrupción. Park, del partido conservador Saenuri (rebautizado Partido de la Libertad de Corea, en un intento de cambio de marca), fue obligada a dimitir tras la gran “revuelta de las velas”. Millones de coreanos se movilizaron en una serie de protestas con velas para exigir su destitución.

   

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May 16, 2017

• Links International A Québécois view of Canada’s 150th anniversary: Why celebrate colonial autonomy?

   

  

   

  By André Binette, translation and notes by Richard Fidler

   

  May 16, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Life on the Left — Each sovereign state can choose the date of its national holiday. Generally, this date recalls the accession to independence. The United States, for example, chose to emphasize each year their unilateral declaration of independence of July 4, 1776. They preferred this date to the date of the Treaty of Paris, 1783, which ended the revolutionary war they had won thanks to France’s decisive support. Their national holiday commemorates a founding act.

   

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May 15, 2017

• Club Troppo A short history of Australian bank hatred (plus extra Barbara!)

  My latest column for The CEO Magazine sees Scott Morrison enjoying his move to the political centre.

  I still haven’t worked out whether this particular $1.5 billion a year bank liabilities tax is actually good policy. But it has at least some policy justification.

  And my column is not policy analysis; it’s an analysis of the Big Four banks’ behavior over the past two decades, and how easy they have made it for Morrison to start beating them up. Few people anywhere love banks, but Australia’s quite successful institutions have been peculiarly passive in the face of mounting hostility. Now they’re paying the price. This is not just my view; it’s Mark Textor’s view as well.

  Not everyone agrees with this analysis. Here’s Mungo McCallum:

  Turnbull and his mates have a lot more than a thousand quid to play with, but they are still seriously outgunned by the banks … It is not clear just what penalty rate the banks will offer their staff members to coerce them into the coming battle, but you can bet they will be willing to fight to the last man (or woman) to preserve their privileged positions. Whether Turnbull and Morrison will have the same stomach for a protracted and ugly campaign is yet to be seen.

  Maybe. But my guess is that the banks will prove simply too conservative to mount a political campaign. They know it would stir up even more hostility. Unlike the miners, banks still have to deal with customers every day, and I’d pay good money to see bank tellers trying to explain to customers why the bank tax is a bad thing.

  And besides, what would be the clarion call of their campaign? “Vote Labor to get rid of this terrible impost that we’re going to pass on to you”?

  I don’t think so. The last really bold thing the Big Four banks did to shape consumers’ opinions of them was that innovative bunch of secret payments to Alan Jones and John Laws known as “cash for comment”, and that didn’t really work out so well. My guess is that eventually they’ll take it and smile. They don’t really know how to do anything else.

  Note: At the far end of this link you can also take a nostalgic look at the ANZ’s wonderful “Barbara from Bankworld” ads, in which one of the Big Four admitted that banks deserve all that hostility.

• Links International 1917: The View from the Streets #10 & 11 - Soviet executive calls for peace - and renewed military offensives

   

  

   

   

  Fraternization between Russian and German soldiers on the Eastern Front, World War I

   

  May 15, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal / John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentary website — One hundred years ago, on May 15 (2), 1917, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies issued two appeals – one to all socialists of the world and the other to all soldiers at the front.

   

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May 14, 2017

• Daniel Bowen Which way to the Airport?

  (Apologies in advance for the length of this post. It got away from me a bit, but hopefully it’s interesting.)

  The debate around a Melbourne Airport rail link has progressed in the past few months, with all sides broadly agreeing it has to happen – the only question is when.

  The Coalition and many others say now; the ALP say (assuming the Albion route) it should only happen after the Metro tunnel opens in 2026. Even Melbourne Airport, which famously makes millions from car parking, wants rail access.

  (Some say it’s not viable at present, for instance Alan Davies presents these arguments, and he’s posted no shortage of related articles.)

  Tuesday’s Federal Budget threw in $30 million of funding for a business case. Undoubtedly it’s a political move to help force State Labor into backtracking, but it may help things progress a little further.

  (Is that a lot of money to write a business case? Presumably it can include some very in-depth investigations.)

  

  What kind of rail link, and why?

  Even with the Albion route being the default, it’s worth stepping back and considering why we want it, and what kind of rail link we want to have.

  The main reasons for building it are to provide more capacity and consistent travel times as the Airport continues to grow, and the roads around and approaching it get busier. Melbourne is now ranked as the 50th busiest airport in the world, and one of the only ones that big without rail transport.

  A big new double deck Skybus departs…leaving 30+ people behind.
  When are we getting a train? pic.twitter.com/FdK8BPRu1T

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) January 5, 2017

  The capacity advantage of rail is obvious. The current Skybus service, even with 88 seat double-decker buses every ten minutes, is swamped by demand, frequently leaving people behind to catch the next bus. While they can run more buses, given the biggest cost of running an extra service is the driver, there is a limit, and this drives up costs.

  Consistency of travel time is the other big problem for Skybus. It frequently gets caught in traffic snarls around the CBD and on the motorway. Longer travel times mean more buses have to be used to maintain the service frequency, preventing higher frequencies.

  Congestion could be bypassed by dedicated bus lanes and traffic light priority – in fact this would be the next logical step, before rail. But the government has shown zero indication that it’s interested in providing this – despite the recommendations of its independent umpire on such matters Infrastructure Victoria, which has said that such measures are required.

  Melbourne Airport bus. Deliver a high level of onroad priority to bus services linking Melbourne Airport to central Melbourne, including better signalling and managed motorway improvements, over 0-10 years. This will maximise the capacity, efficiency and reliability of these services and defer the need for a more costly investment in a heavy rail line to Melbourne Airport to the 15-30 year period. Upgrading airport bus services will make this mode more attractive for use by employees at the airport and surrounding facilities and for travellers, reducing demand and congestion on the Tullamarine Freeway.

  (For years, Skybus prominently advertised its twenty minute travel time. This recently disappeared off their web site — they now say 30 to 45 minutes. It’s unclear if this is a temporary omission during Citylink works, or permanent, in recognition that they often don’t meet it due to traffic congestion.)

  There are other advantages to rail, such as ride quality and passenger comfort which are difficult to replicate with buses.

  

  The need for speed

  What about speed? For rail, this is highly dependent on the route. And while ten years ago I’d have said it has to be 20 minutes from the City, I’m now less sure this is critically important, as the competing modes (private car, taxi) increasingly get caught in a traffic mess of their own making.

  This was brought home to me last year when visiting Singapore. To get to the airport, you catch the East-West line to Tanah Merah, and change to a shuttle train the rest of the way. It’s not spectacularly fast, and it’s certainly not faster than driving in uncongested conditions. But it’s incredibly popular, partly because it’s reliable, easy (even with the change of trains; it’s a cross-platform interchange between frequent services) and cheap.

  So for Melbourne, I suspect as long as the travel time is consistently 30 minutes or less, it’s probably okay, as long as frequency is high.

  Frequency and service span: the 2012 study said departures every 10 minutes, and operations 24 hours a day (presumably frequency reducing overnight, as Skybus does now). I’ve got no argument with that. It’s one of the things Skybus has got right, and the trip much easier than it was when the service was only half-hourly.

  Fares: undoubtedly part of what’s holding back public transport mode share (despite Skybus booming, it’s still only 9% percent of airport trips) is the $19 each way price tag, with no discount for return trips, not even same day — so if you want to see somebody off, or meet them, it’s $38 just for your fare. Ka-ching!

  For most public transport, the biggest part of the operating cost is the staff. So undoubtedly the bus mode itself, limiting passengers to 88 per bus and driver, is a contributor to the fares.

  Even though this is cheaper per kilometre than other Australian airport express public transport, it’s still expensive compared to other local trips – most costing $4.10, including the train plus local bus option to the Airport which takes 3-4 times as long). Some level of premium isn’t unreasonable, but almost five times the price seems excessive, particularly when travelling in a group.

  Airport workers can get a discount, rumoured to be in the region of $120 per month.

  Sydney’s airport rail link is also quite expensive, but they have a weekly cap roughly equivalent to two trips, so if you’re working there every day, the $13.80 per trip premium for using the airport stations drops to a more reasonable $27.00 per week.

  And it seems Sydney’s link patronage is increasing:

  Weekend use of the Sydney Airport rail service has increased by 40% since 2014. Later this year we will double the number of trains pic.twitter.com/9zrxBzxM6o

  — Howard Collins (@HowieCollins) May 14, 2017

  So what are some of the options for Melbourne Airport rail?

  Suburban trains – some world airport links just use extensions of the regular suburban network. This means carriages not necessarily specially designed for airport travellers, but it may also mean that providing the service is more economically viable, which may result in cheaper fares. (See: Sydney, London Tube, and more recently Dallas and Seattle, and Perth’s link under construction.)

  Dedicated trains – often express, and you can have carriages designed for luggage. But very expensive if that’s all the train does, and that can mean limited usefulness for airport workers.

  Regional/Interstate trains – some propose diverting the Bendigo line through the airport, or even making it part of an eventual High Speed Rail project. One weakness of these plans (apart from the fact that HSR may never happen) is you could end up with long distance trains serving a busy CBD to Airport route.

  It’s the old Sunbury/Swan Hill problem again – before electrification, when Sunbury commuters were served by long distance trains, they packed trains as far as their stop, then left a near-empty train to trundle sometimes halfway across the state to its eventual destination.

  Of course it would be possible to run City to Airport-only trains on the same tracks (and would be necessary for a decent frequency), though that might complicate the infrastructure, operations and ticketing.

  

  Then there’s the monorail/light-rail/standalone shuttle train option, which has come up recently. Two main issues with these: firstly the Citylink contract might trigger compensation if the rail line is something other than part of the suburban network (though I’m sure a clever government could figure out a deal).

  Secondly it limits the route’s network connections if it only runs to one CBD station… which depends on the route of course. And the beauty of rail options compatible with the existing suburban rail network is it can run as part of an existing line, and/or feed into the City Loop, increasing one-seat trips and providing more connections.

  On the pro side, such a link might well be more affordable and built sooner than heavy rail.

  (Extending the route 59 tram to the Airport would be useful for local Airport workers, but far too slow for anybody else.)

  Even assuming heavy rail, which route?

  As far as routes go, four options were considered by the 2012 study initiated by the Baillieu government.

  

  Albion:

  This is the default (base case) design now planned by the State government. It would see the new line branching off the Sunbury line at Albion, travelling northeast along the existing Albion freight railway corridor (presumably on new tracks) into the airport.

  Pros: Would link into the rail tunnel, which means trains from Dandenong would run all the way to the Airport, providing a one-seat ride not just from the City, but also much of the southeast, as well as the CBD, the Parkville hospital and university district.

  Cons: A little slow, with a possible travel time from Melbourne Central of about 30 minutes. This is because it would share the line from the City to Albion with other trains.

  Still, if you allowed say 20 minutes from the City to Albion (as fast as the existing stopping Sunbury trains), then it shot like a rocket to the Airport along a new line (it’s about 15 km), under 30 minutes should be easily doable.

  Costs thrown around seem to be in the billions, which seems very high, despite the relatively short section that doesn’t use an existing alignment. But perhaps that’s the cost of the new (double, electrified) line along that alignment.

  The State Government maintains it’s not practical before the metro tunnel opens in 2026, because the City Loop is full. To which I say: if Airport rail is dependent on the tunnel, why not build it in parallel, so both can open in 2026?

  Mind you, with some clever planning, in the shorter term Airport trains could probably run direct to Southern Cross, or via the City Loop (with Craigieburn or Upfield trains diverted) until the tunnel is built.

  Some argue that the Sunshine to CBD track capacity will be eaten up by the Sunbury and Melton lines by the time the tunnel opens. One group proposes a completely separate line to Sunshine/Albion for it. That could be very pricey, and I think falls into the trap of rejecting incremental changes: theoretically one day the line will be too full (for a few hours a day in peak), therefore we must have an impractically expensive workaround.

  

  Broadmeadows or Coolaroo suburban line extension:

  Until last decade, the popular view was that you could just extend the Broadmeadows line west to the Airport. A reservation had been put in place in the 60s when the Airport was first built.

  Pros: cheap. Good for Airport workers living along the existing line. (Remember, this is a substantial number of people, well over 10,000, and they travel to the Airport every day.)

  Cons: apparently out of whack with the current Airport masterplan, which assumes rail would come in from the south, in line with the Albion plan.

  Slow. Travel time likely to be around 35 minutes. (City to Broadmeadows is 29 minutes, and there’d be almost no opportunity to overtake unless extra tracks were built).

  Congestion could be an issue on the existing line; patronage is growing fast.

  Finally, the Craigieburn extension (opened in 2007) has put this option in doubt, because if there was a branch off the line, frequencies to the Airport (and Craigieburn) would be halved.

  One variation involves diverting the Upfield line through Coolaroo to the Airport.

  

  Going direct:

  Via Highpoint and/or Flemington – the study grouped these separately, but they have similarities. This concept sees a line running more-or-less direct from the Airport, with long tunnels connecting via Highpoint, then either to the existing line at Flemington, or connecting near Footscray.

  Pros: quick travel time, assessed by the 2012 study as around 20 minutes, possibly a little slower if there are several stops along the way.

  Could provide stations to serve existing destinations such as the very busy Highpoint shopping centre, and proposed housing at Flemington around the racecourse. Perhaps also Airport West shopping centre, and even the new suburb to be built on ex-military land at Maribyrnong, just announced.

  Cons: very expensive as it’d need a lot of tunnelling. Track capacity might be an issue at the City end. You could build more tracks, but where would they go in the CBD?

  Lots of options

  There are numerous options, and variations of each. They all have their pros and cons.

  Personally I lean towards conventional suburban heavy rail, linked to the current network, either via Albion or (if we decide to solve north-western suburban issues as well, at additional cost of course) one of the direct tunnelled routes connecting Highpoint.

  But ultimately, given widespread agreement that we need an Airport rail link, we as a city need to work out what we want it to do, and how we want it to work.

May 13, 2017

• Links International Global capitalist crisis and Trump’s war drive
   

  

   

  By William I. Robinson

   

  May 14, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The recent U.S. attack on Syria and mega-bombing of Afghanistan come at a time when the Donald Trump regime is facing a mounting scandal over alleged Russian involvement in its 2016 electoral campaign, historically low approval ratings for an incoming presidency, and a growing mass grassroots resistance movement. U.S. rulers have often launched military adventures abroad to deflect attention from political crises and problems of legitimacy at home.

   

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• Links International Critiquing Maduro from the left

   

  

   

  By Steve Ellner

   

  May 13, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from NACLA — With the intensification of political conflict and economic deterioration in Venezuela, harsh all-encompassing criticism of the government is originating not only from the right side of the political spectrum, but also from the left. Gone are the days when late President Hugo Chávez could boast of having unified the nation’s notoriously fragmented leftist movement, ranging from Trotskyists and Communists to social democrats.

   

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May 12, 2017

• Links International Venezuela: The Constituent Assembly is a strategic decision

   

  

   

  By Carlos Eduardo Morreo, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

   

  1. The Constituent Assembly is strategic

   

  The initiative by the government of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to convene a National Constituent Assembly with ‘originary powers’, disrupts the dynamic of confrontation against the government by the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition and those who support this political instrument.

   

  After more than a month of street protests and mobilisations by the opposition, the constituent initiative may shift the spaces of confrontation, from the highways and the codes of violence, to texts, political negotiation and discourses regarding the Venezuelan state.

   

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• Links International Standoff in Venezuela

   

  

   

  May 12, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal / Green Left Weekly — Venezuela has been rocked in recent weeks by almost daily protests and counter-protests, as right-wing opponents of socialist President Nicolas Maduro seek to bring down his government.

   

  While the media portrays these events as a popular rebellion against an authoritarian government, supporters of the pro-poor Bolivarian revolution initiated by former president Hugo Chavez say the country is witnessing an escalation in what is an ongoing counter-revolutionary campaign seeking to restore Venezuela’s traditional elites in power and reverse the gains made by the poor majority under Chavez and Maduro.

   

  Federico Fuentes interviewed Steve Ellner, a well-known analyst of Venezuelan and Latin American politics and a retired professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente, to get his views on recent events.

   

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• Links International What is to be done in Venezuela?

   

  

   

  By Greg Grandin

   

  May 12, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from The Nation — The news from Venezuela is grim: A “fall in oil prices, soaring interest rates…have intensified an already deep-rooted recession. The country is being pauperized. It has the highest inflation in Latin America, increasing unemployment and more than 40 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty.” With economic immiseration comes political violence: Over the course of one year, “security forces killed 126 people, 46 in extra-judicial executions, and 28 when they were in police or military custody. Authoritarianism and repression are growing. Of 13,941 arbitrary detentions, 94 percent occurred during anti-crime operations mainly in poor neighborhoods.… Violent death has become a feature of Venezuelan life. On Monday mornings, the newspapers carry a grim roll call of those killed in stabbings and shootings in the city’s slums. The figure often reaches 40 or 50, mostly young, male and poor.” 

   

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May 11, 2017

• Club Troppo American Film Festival

  And yes, if you’ve not seen it, Annie Hall really is that good. It’s a four and a half from me.

  Festival Website | Films | Schedule

  Top Picks

  ---

  20th Century Women (Opening Night)

  Dorothea is mother to Jamie and he’s growing up fast. It’s a challenging time and Dorothea decides she needs all the help she can get. Living in a house with lots of comings and goings, Dorothea enlists the services of her punk-rocker lodger Abbie and Julie, Jamie’s best friend. Together they share their lives and experiences in the hope that these personal insights will help guide Jamie to manhood but they’re complex things to absorb.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Cine Vue

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

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  Becoming Bond (Centerpiece)

  Probably the biggest mystery in Australian show business is why George Lazenby’s more than credible Bond never made a return to the screen. Shrouded in mystery and rumour the reason has never quite been established – that is until now – and the answer is very likely to surprise you. In this hugely enjoyable film Lazenby himself confronts the camera and takes us on an often laugh out loud journey from his days as a car mechanic to 007 and the life after. As Lazenby recounts many surpremely funny and more personal moments the events are depicted in highly stylised and equally clever interpretations by Josh Lawson, Kassandra Clementi and others including Jane Seymour no less.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  The Graduate

  Benjamin Braddock is a young man with it all. Good looking, a wealthy family and a beautiful fiancé the world is at his feet. That is until he meets Mrs Robinson, the wife of one of his family friends and mother of his fiancé Elaine. What she provides for Ben is a path outside of the one pre-ordained and for him that’s at first both exciting and rebellious. But what starts as a fun physical sideline turns into a quagmire of loneliness and isolation in what is a powerful statement of 1960s youth and expectation.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

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  California Dreams

  This unusual and laconic work travels like a tumbleweed through the lives of half a dozen or so characters as they dream of somehow, sometime making it to Hollywood. Underpinning these disparate and sometimes desperate characters is Cory Zacharia who spends the film trying to raise money to star in a film he’s been promised by a German producer he met sometime earlier. Between auditions, acting classes and odd encounters Cory speaks candidly with the various characters that inhabit this arid landscape to often profound effect giving the film such an usual texture with lots of hidden surprises.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Sylvio

  Sylvio is a gorilla working for a debt collection agency but isn’t happy with his job. He’s soon promoted to house calls collecting outstanding debts. In accordance with his job he arrives at the house of Al Reynolds, who’s running a very low-fi public television variety show from his basement. Sylvio is mistaken for Al’s next guest who’s meant to be a novelty juggler of breakables. Sylvio gives it a go and inadvertently becomes a hit on the show with his special skill becoming the destruction of props put in his way. Unknown to all though is Sylvio’s secret hobby of producing short hand-puppet videos called The Quiet Times With Herbert Herpels.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin

  This lovely portrait of acclaimed author Armistead Maupin is as much a story of the man’s life as it is a chronicle of San Francisco’s gay scene. The film examines the life and work of one of the world’s most beloved storytellers, following his evolution from the conservative Old South into a gay-rights pioneer whose novels have inspired millions to claim their own truth. Jennifer Kroot’s documentary about the creator of Tales of the City moves nimbly between playful and poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. With help from his friends, Maupin offers a frank look at the journey that took him from the jungles of Vietnam to the bathhouses of 70’s San Francisco to the front line of the American culture war.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Annie Hall

  Annie Hall delves into the world of Avly Singer – a neurotic New York comedian who after a failed marriage falls for Annie Hall, a would-be singer. It can never be smooth sailing for Alvy and things start to fall apart on the therapists couch as he deals with his own insecurities and Jewish guilt.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

  ---

  G-Funk

  During the early 90s the G-Funk style of hip hop emerged from Los Angeles, combining melodic elements of Motown, Funk, and R&B with socially-aware rap lyrics. For the first time in history, a hip hop album debuted at #1 on the pop charts and the genre became a staple of mainstream American culture. This is the untold story of how hip-hop’s most commercial and iconic sub-genre came to be.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Mulholland Drive

  A beautiful girl has a gun pulled on her while obviously held hostage in a motor vehicle on the outskirts of LA. A terrible accident on the road is both curse and saviour for our mysterious heroine as she escapes with amnesia and hides in an apartment. Arriving in town is Betty, an aspiring actress who finds our mystery woman hiding. Together they seek to find out the how, what, when and why of our protagonist hidden world.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Cine Vue

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

  ---

  You Never Had It: An Evening With Bukowski

  You Never Had It is made up entirely of until recently lost U-matic tapes of Charles Bukowski interviewed by journalist Silvia Bizio. Over the course of a single night that’s infused with red wine, cigarettes and in the company of his soon to be wife Linda Lee Beighle, Bukowski opens up in the most fascinating of fashion. In a kind of stream of consciousness Bukowski is absolutely himself. Answering questions with wit, humour and laser guided honesty his observations are endlessly fascinating as is the environment which is the lounge room of his San Pedro home…, and you really feel like you’re there sitting on the floor with everyone else.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Eraserhead

  Henry lives in a desolate and decrepit industrial world. Thrust into his world is what resembles something of a child but is perhaps more alien than anything. Henry is forced to look after the child whose behavior becomes nothing short of torture for him and during which period he succumbs to all manner of hallucinations – including the famous “woman in the radiator”.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

  ---

• Links International South Africa's ANC: Mistaking consequence for cause

   

  

   

  By Dale T. McKinley

   

  May 12, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Pambazuka News — President Jacob Zuma’s recent Cabinet reshuffle is nothing more and nothing less than the latest instalment of a long-running story of the capture of the ANC and the post-1994 democratic state it has politically run. It is but a component consequence of a political, economic and social crisis that has been forged and fed by the ANC (and its Alliance partners) as a whole, in conjunction with capital. That crisis is not the result of actions taken by a small collection of conspirators, a select group of bad people or an individual.

   

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• Links International What the world needs to know about Western Sahara

   

  

   

  By Amira Ali

   

  May 12, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Pambazuka News — For more than 40 years, Morocco has forcefully and illegally occupied Western Sahara despite provisions of international law that recognize the country’s sovereignty. The suffering but resolute Saharawi people, especially the younger generation, are getting impatient with endless colonialism. African people and all who value human dignity and freedom must stand up in solidarity with Western Sahara by demanding an end to Moroccan occupation.

   

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• Links International Hats and men: Marx's faulty symmetry

   

  

   

  By Michael A. Lebowitz

   

  May 11, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Project — Was Marx a superman or a human being? Joan Robinson once asked a Soviet professor this very question. Of course, Marx was human, he answered. ‘Then he could make mistakes?’ Yes. ‘Would you mind mentioning a mistake that he made?’ The Soviet professor changed the subject.[1]

   

  However, 150 years after the publication of Volume I of Capital, it is long past time for revolutionaries not to change the subject but to talk seriously about mistakes Marx made in Capital and their implications. This article is about one such mistake and how it infected Capital and subsequent practice.

   

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• Links International Local and mayoral elections in Britain: Brexit election delivers carnival of reaction

   

  

   

  By Phil Hearse

   

  May 11, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity — The huge Labour losses in the local council elections are just what the Labour Right was hoping for. Peter Mandelson said as much late last year, when he stated he was hoping for Theresa May to call an early election that would result in a disastrous Labour defeat and therefore the removal of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s exactly what all Corbyn’s reactionary detractors in the press and television wanted as well.

   

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May 09, 2017

• Links International French left statements on presidential election outcome: Melenchon, Ensemble!, French Communist Party, New Anti-Capitalist Party

   

  

   

  Below, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is publishing statements from various French left groups on the outcome of the May 7 French presidential election which saw centre-right banker Emmanuel Macron defeat the far-right candidate for the National Front, Marine Le Pen. These include statements by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from France Unbowed; Ensemble! (Together!); the French Communist Party (PCF); and Philippe Poutou, from the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA).

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• Links International Britain: The Tories, the general election and neoliberalism’s second phase

   

  

   

  By Neil Faulkner

   May 9, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity — ‘Ignorance never yet helped anyone.’ So raged Karl Marx as he leapt from his chair and thumped the table so hard that the lamp shook. The occasion was a meeting in Brussels in 1846 of the newly formed Communist Correspondence Committee – the tiny acorn from which, over the next 150 years, so many mighty oaks would grow. The target of the tirade was a somewhat vacuous activist called Wilhelm Weitling, who professed to believe that socialist theory was unnecessary. This was, Marx fumed, ‘equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and only gaping asses on the other’.

   

  Theresa May’s decision to call a general election should not mean that socialists stop thinking and mumble platitudes. To become uncritical cheerleaders for a cack-handed reformism can only foster illusions and false hopes at the expense of equipping activists with the understanding they need in the struggle to change the world. Left websites which are simply shouting support for a Corbyn victory – without discussing any of the contradictions in play – are the modern Weitlings. Corbyn is not a prophet, activists are not gaping asses, and a general election should not be the occasion for putting our brains in deep freeze.

   

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May 08, 2017

• Links International 'The Kurds': Internationalists or narrow nationalists?

   

  

   

  By Marcel Cartier

   

  May 9, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from TeleSUR English — It seems impossible. I look down from the hilltop that I’m standing on to see a very narrow stretch of river — from here appearing rather insignificant. This, I’m told, is the mighty Tigris, and on the other side of it lies Iraq. Where I stand is Syria, the war-torn country that has already endured six years of destruction up to this point. To some in my company this particular region is more frequently called Rojava, but to the even more politically correct of comrades the name Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria is used (I will from here on use the abbreviation DFSNS rather than Rojava for reasons that will be explained later in this article).

   

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• Club Troppo MacBook Air Bleg

  A long time ago I ran Windows 98 and at least every 24 hours, though often more often I had to cold reboot it to make it work properly. Now, nearly twenty years after this was largely fixed in the Windows world, I have the same problem with my MacBook Air. I bought a new one about 18 months ago and rebuilt the hard disc about six months ago. I think it may have something to do with running Chrome which is very resource hungry. Anyway, I haven’t found running Safari helps much, and I’m much more used to Chrome. I downloaded CleanMyMac on someone’s recommendation that it was a good free app, but it’s not free. It keeps panhandling – asking for an upgrade without having completed it’s job.

  I’d love some suggestions for I can simply fix this.

  All helpful suggestions will receive imaginary prizes and the best suggestion will receive an imaginary first prize of hitherto unimagined munificence – imaginary munificence.

  Troppo®, where too much pretend is barely enough.

May 07, 2017

• Links International Julius Nyerere: Legacy and defeated dreams in Tanzania

   

  

   

  By Alan Broughton

   

  May 8, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– Julius Nyerere is regarded as one of the greatest African political leaders. He was a visionary for African unity, socialist development and self-reliance in the aftermath of colonialism, and still commands great respect. Though much of his vision failed to materialise he leaves a legacy of ethnic and religious tolerance and peace in his East African country, Tanzania.

   

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• Links International New Catalan political space: one hurdle cleared on the road to left unity

   

  

   

  By Dick Nichols

   May 7, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– The struggle to build a Catalan political force inspiring the level of support and activism needed to implement radical social change took a step forward in Barcelona on April 8, when the new “political subject” provisionally called Un País en Comú (“A Country Together”) held its founding congress.

   

  Un País en Comú, whose final name will be decided by membership referendum, is the third Catalan progressive unity project with en comú (“together” or “in common”) in its title. The first, in June 2014, was the broad activist coalition that under the name of Barcelona En Comú won the May 2015 Barcelona city council election. In defeating the ruling conservative nationalist Convergence and Union (CiU) the new formation made former housing rights activist Ada Colau the city’s mayoress and a reference point for radical politics across the Spanish state.

   

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• Links International Catalonia: What Un País en Comú stands for

   

   

  

   

  By Dick Nichols

   

  May 7, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– This appendix to the article “New Catalan political space: one hurdle cleared on the road to left unity” tries to summarise the essential content of the first draft of Un País en Comú.

   

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• Daniel Bowen The perils of comparison studies

  On Friday a number of UK publications posted news articles about a Deutsche Bank report saying that London’s public transport fares are the highest in the world.

  • Evening Standard: London travelcards ‘the most expensive in the world by a large margin,’ study finds
  • BBC: London’s monthly travel cost ‘most expensive in world’
  • London Loves Business: Deutsche Bank study reveals London travelcards are the most expensive in the world
  • The Times: London travelcard is most expensive in world (and forget driving)
  • The Sun: RAIL-LY PRICEY London travelcards are the most expensive in the world… twice the price of a New York pass
  • Yahoo: London plunges down quality of life index as cost of travelcards, renting and jeans hits hard

  The comparison was of a monthly public transport pass.

  Most of the news reports listed only the top three most expensive cities; London, Dublin and Auckland, and the cheapest: Mumbai.

  I wondered where Melbourne ranked. The BBC report was the only one to list beyond the top three; it showed Melbourne at number 9, with a monthly Pass costing £82 (US $106).

  It was also the only one to link to the source Deutsche Bank report. The report is not about public transport specifically, it’s about cost of living in numerous categories, in 47 cities. (Note: 47 cities is not the entire world.)

  Looking through the Deutsche Bank report, they’d got figures from various places. The public transport fares had come from a web site called Expatistan, which compares cost of living indicators — indeed, Deutsche Bank credits them for most of their pricing data:

  Most of our price data is collected from Expatistan (www.expatistan.com). We would like to give special thanks to the founder Gerardo Robledillo for permitting us to use this data and for assisting us in collating historical data from the website.

  Clicking through to have a look at their page about Melbourne, I found they had a monthly public transport pass listed at A$136.

  The problem is, this is wrong. A 30-day Pass actually costs $147.60 (excluding the cost of the Myki ticket). It looks like their price is about two years out of date.

  Edit: It’s been pointed out that a 28-day Pass is about the right price. But 28 days isn’t a month (usually!)

  Expatistan’s information is comprehensive… but it’s also crowd-sourced. This can be problematic — Deutsche Bank notes:

  Much of our data is from sources that utilize crowdsourcing techniques to collect and aggregate price data. While this methodology provides them with regular data updates from a large sample, there may be issues with data quality and consistency over time. … Do note thus that prices, changes and ranks should be considered representative with considerable room for measurement and sampling error.

  A few clicks and I was able to update the Melbourne price on Expatistan, but it’s not being accepted until I guess others enter the same data.

  

  Sydney was ranked 7th most expensive by Deutsche Bank. Expatistan says it’s A$147, but it’s not clear how this was calculated given there is no monthly pass available. The weekly cap on Opal is A$60, so a monthly cap would be at least $240 for four weeks.

  Even the provenance of the London figure quoted in all those articles is uncertain. The Deutsche Bank figure quoted is US$174. The Expatistan figure is UKP £134, which matches the USD figure. But £134 doesn’t match anything on the current official price list – the closest logical match is a zone 1 Monthly ticket, which is £126.80.

  Zone 1 only covers central London. The New York City price doesn’t match the official price (USD $121) either, perhaps because it changed in March. But even if it did, that’s not really a valid comparison, as the NYC fare covers the entire subway and local bus network.

  So really the fare comparison part of the study is problematic.

  Perhaps I’m over-thinking it, but when I did fare comparisons in the past for the PTUA, I went to official sources of fare information, and I was as careful as possible to ensure I was comparing apples with apples.

  In this case, the media quotes Deutsche Bank, who used Expatistan, who trust in their users and their algorithms. And data points I’ve checked are wrong, and/or, in my opinion, not equivalent enough to be compared.

  The lesson here is: Don’t believe everything you read.

  And when a study boldly states a conclusion, do a little digging, to understand how they got there.

May 06, 2017

• Links International Germany: The return of hope - for an offensive double strategy

   

  

   

  By Michael Brie and Mario Candeias

   

  May 7, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Transform Network — The future has gone astray. The neoliberal utopia is exhausted just as are left alternatives. The decades of an initially conservative-orthodox neoliberalism from Margaret Thatcher to Helmut Kohl; its generalization under the governments from Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder; and, finally, its authoritarian deepening and anchoring in the years of the crisis have caused social inequalities and dynamics, which are hardly under control. The structural crisis is not resolved and cannot be solved in the old framework. The attempts to stabilize financial market capitalism only extend the agony and tear apart the European Union and our societies. The situation is however not characterized by rupture; instead, an old quote from Antonio Gramsci applies: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” One such morbid symptom is the new radical Right in its various forms.

   

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• Links International Winning power, not just government

   

  

   

  By Florian Wilde

   

  May 6, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Jacobin with the author's permission — Is it a shortcut, if it’s seemingly the only path on offer? Many left parties in Europe today see participating in a center-left coalition government as the only realistic way to win reforms. They often justify joining these administrations by reasoning that having a left party in government will at least block the most regressive policies and keep a more reactionary formation from taking power. These parties also believe government participation will increase their credibility in the eyes of voters and members, ultimately strengthening their prospects to govern on their own.

   

  Twenty-five years of history, however, suggest that these expectations are rarely met.

   

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• Links International South Africa: World Economic Forum-Africa hosts a turf battle between Jacob Zuma and ‘white monopoly capital’

   

  

   

  By Patrick Bond

   

  May 3, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– At a time when US and South African presidents Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma personify controversies over crony capitalism, corruption, populist rhetoric and self-serving economic strategies, will big business calm down the politicians – or just egg them on?

   

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• Links International Feminist organising and the women’s strike: An interview with Cinzia Arruzza

  

  
Cinzia Arruzza interviewed by George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić. FIrst published at Salvage

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May 05, 2017

• Links International Jobs and industry in the Hunter Valley: Context for a conversation about a Just Transition away from coal

   

  

   

   

  By Steve Phillips

   

  May 5, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– The Hunter Valley is famously, or infamously, one of the most coal-mining-dominated regions in the world. We have one of the highest concentrations of mines on the planet, and we host its biggest export coal facility. Many will tell you that the Hunter has always been a coal-mining region, and it's true. But in the past it played a lesser role, and only in recent years has mining come to dominate the physical, social, and economic landscape of the Hunter Valley.

   

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May 02, 2017

• Daniel Bowen State budget 2017

  So here we are, state budget day 2017.

  A lot of things have already been announced, but they usually leave a few things until the day itself. Nobody was expecting anything huge, as logic would suggest they’d save their money until next year, when there’s an election and they need to dazzle people a bit more. But they might push along with some infrastructure projects that can be under construction by election day in November 2018.

  Annual tradition: the #VicBudget stakeholder media scrum. Queue on the right. Watch live at https://t.co/nGUa5CM9Pa pic.twitter.com/AWxlrer8Kv

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 2, 2017

  Below I’ve tried to summarise what’s being funded…

  Public transport stuff

  Night Network made permanent $193m

  8 more level crossing removals brought forward (from the list of 50 over 8 years, not a new bunch of 8)

  Station upgrades and car parking $9m – it doesn’t go into much detail

  Accessibility upgrades at Oakleigh station (regraded ramps and a lift) and Middle Park tram stop (not actually sure which one) converted to an “Easy Access” stop $11m

  Extra stabling at Mernda, and land at Broadmeadows for rail power upgrades $11m

  10 more E-class trams $218m – at that price, must include additional upgrades for power, stabling?

  More train/tram/bus services $62.5m – Werribee an extra 8 services, St Kilda Road tram shuttle (countering the recent removal of route 8?!), additional services for routes 57, 58, 59, extra 401 Parkville shuttle bus services to help during metro tunnel construction. Bus upgrades in middle and outer suburbs (Bentleigh, Frankston, Mordialloc, Narre Warren, Craigieburn, Sunbury and Broadmeadows… hmm, three marginal Frankston line seats, I see).

  “Keeping Melbourne Moving” transport network impact management plan $15m

  Train stabling at Kananook $187m

  Station improvements at Flinders Street, Southern Cross and Richmond $9m. Not sure why this wasn’t included in the funding for Flinders Street refurbishment.

  Hurstbridge line upgrade planning $5m

  Fix platform gaps, and more TWPS to improve safety $67m

  100 new PSOs, and it sounds like they’ll be used for mobile patrols. On trains perhaps?

  Extra buses to Fishermans Bend (routes 235 and 237) in peak hour $2m — badly needed, as crowding has reached critical levels

  You would think a highly spruiked area like Fisherman's bend should have a decent bus service… @danielbowen @ptv_official @Transdev_Melb pic.twitter.com/CO8M0HXjVR

  — DJ (@TheDe3Jay) May 1, 2017

  Regional

  Another 39 V/Locity carriages, and for design work to boost capacity and improve amenity in the V/Locity fleet $311m

  Regional/VLine maintenance $316m

  Seymour and Shepparton area extra coach and train services $43m

  Extra buses for Bellarine, Ballarat, Wallan $4m

  Gippsland line upgrades $435m* including some duplication to allow more services

  Warrnambool line upgrade $100m*

  Surf Coast Railway and Geelong line duplication works $110m* – prepare the corridor and reserve the land, but not actually build anything, it seems?

  Bendigo/Echuca upgrades for faster trains and an extra daily service to Echuca, as well as more services to Epsom and Eaglehawk $91m*

  Ballarat line $39m* for stage 2 of the upgrade package for trains to Ararat and Maryborough (eg after the stage 1 upgrade, which includes duplication to Melton)

  North-east line: upgrades for Donnybrook and Wallan stations and corridor changes to prepare for future standard gauge V/Locity services*

  Ballarat station bus interchange $5m

  *All these seem to be dependent on Federal funding as part of the asset recycling scheme

  Meanwhile on the roads

  North East Link $100m planning and preconstruction works funding, but basically locking the project in to happen after 2018.

  Mordialloc Bypass $300m, connecting the Dingley Bypass (only recently opened, and already causing increased traffic on South Road) with the Mornington Peninsula Freeway

  Yet more ring road upgrades $700m

  Monash freeway planning for yet another upgrade $5m

  …and a bunch of other stuff, including upgrades in regional Victoria.

  Reaction

  Did I miss anything major? Leave a comment.

  I’ll read through the numerous press releases and Budget Papers as I get time. There’s usually some interesting stuff on the latest patronage figures.

  Overall, even if you leave out the rail upgrades to be funded by the Feds (if they agree to it), there’s plenty there for trains, underscoring their role as the backbone of the public transport network. Some upgrades for trams too. A few upgrades for the bus network, but not a huge amount.

  And the question always must be: are they doing enough for public transport to keep up with population growth? And how much are they undermining it by building new motorways?

  • Lots more on the official Budget web site. Check Budget Paper 3 for the detail, or look through the many press releases.
  • PTUA: State, Federal governments must make a deal to fix transport
  • ABC: Victoria’s budget had big announcements for transport, but will it make a difference for your commute?

  Here’s the full stakeholder post-budget press conference, courtesy of VCOSS (PTUA’s Tony Morton is on at about the 15 minute mark):

• Club Troppo Hoisted from comments: Copyright, the Google Settlement and torching the second library of Alexandria

  One of the privileges of access to what we cool kids call the “back end” of Troppo is that when I write a long, long comment, in an old thread that has taken a new direction, I can make it the start of a new thread. As I’m doing here. Note that the comment originally arose from disagreeing with John Walker who supported the scuttling of Google Book Settlement. If you’re interested in that and don’t know of it, it’s fascinating and written up here.

  As ever, you know the rules. Please ensure all comments are brief, well expressed and in agreement (or strong agreement) with my post. This is Troppo, AKA ClubPony where disagreement is quietly frowned upon and, if persisted with, can lead to the withdrawal of access to the cucumber sandwiches.

   

  It’s true I don’t understand the Google Book Settlement in detail. So all my comments should be understood in that context. Perhaps if I took a month out of my life to understand it, and the options fully, I’d change my mind. Then again only professionals in the area – like Pamela Samuelson whom I met on an occasion and thought was on the side of the angels (of more openness) – can aspire to that without disrupting their lives. So I’m prepared to chance my arm, as we all do even when we think we know all there is to know.

  I’m afraid I’m incensed by the pettifogging self-indulgence, self-righteous, small-mindedness, and greed for tiny morsels of financial gain of the copyright crowd.

  The story from my point of view is that Larry and Sergey spent $400 mil of Google’s money with, it seems, not a great deal of thought of Google’s financial gain, in pursuit of a dream. Now the dream was a silicon valley rich boy’s dream. But it’s the same dream as Thomas Jefferson’s – to liberate the world’s knowledge for the betterment of the species and the greater glory of the creation and the creator if there is one.

  I don’t even know precisely that vision in detail, but it seems to me that at that stage Google had no restrictive intent whatever. Their project was available to anyone else to copy – in whole or in part. Moreover, consistent with the ‘fair use’ legal doctrine they were relying on, they would have honoured anyone’s right to prevent it from distributing their copyright. They would have distributed orphan works, quite possibly for nothing. They may well have desisted from monetisation given their established practice of doing the same in many other areas.

  But the immense and multifarious structures of commercial society – and perhaps Larry and Sergey’s desire for further riches – would have pushed them towards further monetisation. And company law would have placed that duty on Larry and Sergey as fiduciaries of their shareholders. Then another arm of commercial society reached out. Copyright owners and authors (whose involvement at least in this country is virtually always assiduously managed by corporate copyright interests and their well funded comms teams).

  They stood to lose nothing from what I can make out, but they saw the opportunity to make some small bucks out of this from copyright royalties on things that had long disappeared from print. That this involved torching the possibility of a free and open database of all the books written in former centuries? Well you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. These are rights that would not have existed except for copyright owners successful campaigns over the decades to extend their copyright from 14 years at the beginning of the eighteenth century to lifetime plus decades more by the late twentieth century – a term that is unjustified by the justifications usually put forward for copyright – there is no ‘incentive to create’ from extending copyright well beyond the death of the author.

  Because the corporate copyright lobby went after all this the result was a much more difficult set of choices in which a class action in effect made law for the country or the whole idea went back into storage indefinitely. That was a very unfortunate development. As I said at the outset it’s true I don’t know all the detail of the agreement. Nor do I expect I’d like it all. Nor am I naïve about Google’s motives or conduct – at least after the copyright lobby came after it. But at least from what I know it would have been much better to proceed with than the alternative which is bleak.

  As for concern about usurping Congress’s right, one feature of the American system is that courts have had a larger role in such law making, not least in making fundamental law as they have in great constitutinal cases like Roe v Wade and Brown v Board of Education. Ancient Athenian courts too often sat in judgement on acts of the ‘legislature’ ie the Ekklesia.

  So while I have some sympathy for the argument that it was Congress’s job, we all knew Congress was and is unlikely to do its job and we can at least think of this as in the spirit of Montesquieu and the founding fathers who quite liked the idea of jurisdictions overlapping and competing with each other to some extent. The other point to make is that if it really is Congress’s job, it can legislate and remake the rules after the event. (And because the money amounts are not large if compensation were involved it probably wouldn’t be a large consideration – even for a cash strapped government.)

  I’d add in that context that I’m deeply uninterested in monetary measurements of the importance of this. I see it largely as a cultural, and indeed, at the risk of sounding grandiose, a spiritual matter. (Of course if you’re paying attention, you’ll know I’m cheating. If the numbers were large I’d spin that my way too ;) So let me scale it back and say that the value of this measured by money has never been a big consideration for me.)

  Meanwhile CAL and it’s Chairman Kim Williams are out in force in today’s press defending, in their usual mendacious way, their outrageous purloining of $15 million from Australia’s schools, libraries and universities not to pay authors or copyright holders as is its mission, but to run political campaigns to keep up the protection racket it has built for itself out of the thicket of nonsensical rights ‘fair dealing’ as opposed to ‘fair use’ provides it.

April 28, 2017

• Club Troppo Doughnut economics: The hole is greater than the sum of its parts
  

  Rene Descartes eat your heart out: The diagram that changed the world.

  A friend wondered aloud on Facebook what I thought of Doughnut economics pointing me to this article by George Monbiot. My reply is reproduced below, but before that, a little hyperventilating from George.

  Such proposals are familiar; but without a new framework of thought, piecemeal solutions are unlikely to succeed. By rethinking economics from first principles, Raworth allows us to integrate our specific propositions into a coherent programme, and then to measure the extent to which it is realised. I see her as the John Maynard Keynes of the 21st century: by reframing the economy, she allows us to change our view of who we are, where we stand, and what we want to be.

  I quite like Monbiot but this is ridiculous. I haven’t read the book, but it’s a DIAGRAM for chrissake. There’s precisely nothing in what Monbiot has said that is in any sense new or even interesting – and I’m broadly sympathetic to his antipathy to neoliberalism as I indicated here and of course the diagram is wholly inoffensive, in so far as it makes sense.

  Firstly the ideas in the article, from what I can see are pure ‘strategisation’ in the sense that I elaborated on the word here. Secondly the idea that we need a new framework to pursue this vision – when the vision is thoroughly ho-hum (intellectually I mean – we all know it hasn’t been implemented, but that’s not because there was no framework there, it’s because of power structures and the fact that many of those who claim to be on the side of the angels are having a bob each way – that includes voters who vote against OTHERS emissions, not their own and political operatives who are on the side of the angels, but also on the side of their own careers.

  Thirdly this isn’t a new intellectual framework. It’s an old intellectual framework with a diagram and a book attached – standard marketing tools. It’s true I’ve not read the book, but don’t you think that if it was a new framework I’d notice? Certainly if it was the 1930s and Monbiot was summarising Keynes in a newspaper article, I’d certainly notice that it was a new framework – not a new diagram.

  Fourth, notice how the framework supports ALL of the priors of those who support it. Frameworks if they’re any good often throw up embarrassments – that illustrates that they have intellectual integrity because they lead to at least SOME places that their sponsor or their epigones might not have thought.

  So I think the left should stop hyperventilating and own their failure. I for instance have been writing stuff trying to expand a useful centrist/cum progressive framework for years. As for instance in this piece. But it doesn’t have diagrams and it’s not in a book. It doesn’t compete in the schlock stakes so it’s easy to pass up compared with a cool new breakthrough diagram.

  Anyway, here’s a prediction. In about five years no-one will remember this wheeze, or if they do it won’t’ be for any deep theoretical insights.

• Links International South Korea: How candlelight protests impeached a president and created spaces for direct democracy

   

  

   

  By Jeong-eun Hwang

   

  April 28, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– At 9 am on March 10, people gathered in front of the Constitutional Court to await the court’s ruling on whether to impeach South Korean president Park Geun-hye. Two hours before the verdict was read, those gathered chanted: “The Constitutional Court should uphold Park’s impeachment!”

   

  At the designated time of 11am, the crowd held its breath as the eight judges appeared on the large screen set up in front of the court. As acting chief Lee Jung-mi calmly read the verdict, the crowd broke out at times in cheers and at others times in groans. After 20 minutes, Lee concluded the verdict by stating that the president would be removed from office. The crowd erupted with shouts, clapping and crying.

   

  Those that had come out onto the streets in protest had finally “impeached Park.” For the past four months we had gathered at the square to realize our demands and acted on them, creating a space for direct democracy. In winter, we planted the seeds to make fundamental changes in Korean society shouting slogans, from the impeachment of Park to the eradication of deep-rooted problems like corrupt conservative forces and the chaebols that had been reigning over our laws. As spring comes, we await the seeds to sprout, nourished by the radiance of people power.

   

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• Links International South Africa: Mass protests follow cabinet reshuffle as Zuma impeachment vote looms

    

  

   

  By Patrick Bond

   

  April 28, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — On South Africa’s political left, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party dominated recent news by leading a mass march on President Jacob Zuma’s office in Pretoria, following a government power shift seen as amplifying corruption. The move also catalysed a ‘junk’ rating by two neoliberal credit ratings agencies. And an impeachment process on the immediate horizon represents the first real parliamentary threat to Zuma’s eight-year reign.

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April 27, 2017

• Links International Asia: Statement in defense of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution - no to foreign intervention!

   

   

   

  Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — We, the undersigned organizations, express our support and solidarity for the people of Venezuela and Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, against the ongoing threats of counterrevolution and violent attacks orchestrated by right-wing forces with the backing of the US imperialist power.

   

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• Links International French presidential election: An earthquake? Yes and no

   

  

   

  Manifestation of France Insoumise with Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 18 March

   

  By Maxime Benatouil

   

  April 27, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Transform Network — After the predicted but non-the-less spectacular result of the first round of the presidential election, on the left urgent questions are burning each and everyone’s lips: what shall we do in two weeks?

   

  Going for Emmanuel Macron to make sure that Marine Le Pen looses? Abstaining from voting, thus taking the risk to see her move in the Élysée Palace? Would not five years of ‘more of the same’ politics be ultimately leading to the victory of the far-right in 2022?

   

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• Links International Letter from North America: NAFTA redux and on steroids
   

  

   

  By Ernie Tate

   

  April 27, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity with the author's permission — The new Trump administration has made NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States, a major issue in its relations with its two neighbours. Recently, Trump has threatened to tear it up. With his standard nationalist demagogy, he claims “previous bad trade deals”, have cost the United States many jobs as a result of American manufacturers moving plants off-shore. He is now in the process of triggering the required ninety day notification period, telling Canada and Mexico the new administration is prepared to bully its way to a new and more favourable arrangement for itself.

   

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April 26, 2017

• Club Troppo Upmarket Agitprop: Clive James on John Howard on Bob Menzies

  An essay prompted by a friend recommending James’ essay I think largely for its defence of Menzies as worthy of more respect he’s been given by the left – which is a fair point. Cross posted from The Mandarin, which, to my surprise was interested in picking it up.

  

  In my view … the intellectual life of Australia since the Whitlam years has been increasingly weakened by the reluctance of almost the entire educated population to deal with past events whose implications might undermine their heartfelt views.

  Clive James

  [O]ne does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating. Such an attitude seems essential to me for any understanding at all to come about. This is nothing more than an observation. It has nothing to do with an ‘appeal’ and nothing at all to do with ethics. Even immoral beings try to understand one another.

  Hans Georg Gadamer

  I

  One of my earliest posts on this august blog was a description of my political credo as a conservative liberal social democrat. In any event, when I wrote those words, I was thinking of a political position as a combination of asserted propositions. But I’ve increasingly come to understand the power of the negative. The way I see the world, the three fine political traditions I outlined also exist in crude, dumbed down forms in which left-wing thinking is driven by moralistic sentimentalism and right-wing thinking represents nothing more than the indifference of the privileged against the disadvantaged. Now in principle, you might have a highly sophisticated appreciation of your own position as embodying the finer points of life, but when you’re doing battle with those of different sympathies, it’s always tempting to take the short-cut and do battle with them by just quoting their shadow dumbed-down selves. These are the weapons of choice where ignorant armies clash by night.

  II

  If that is a central problem of our time – and I think it is – then political debate needs to pay heed to it in some way. If it doesn’t you’re not really turning up. Of course, if you’re a political operative you can just dip into your side’s demonisation of your opponents and go for your life. After all, university tests have proved these techniques to work, and politics is, in any event, an endless negotiation between ends and means. More pressingly your opponents are going after you using the same methods, so it’s fair enough. This turns me off almost all party political discussion because it’s so drenched in inauthenticity. If I know each contributor to the debate would reverse their position if circumstances were a little different (if they were in Government rather than Opposition for instance or vice versa), I could program a robot or a journalist on auto-pilot to generate the debate.

  What we have is a ritual of sense-making without any sense actually being made or even intended to be made. Here we have a simulacrum of an argument in which the disputants disagree but they don’t disagree about anything other than the spin they will arbitrarily impose on the facts – according to the side of the debate their side is committed to at the time. However much respect I have for the individuals involved in party political combat, and without any disapproval towards them for playing by what has become the rules, it’s simply a waste of time. I try to apply what I call my ‘Mandy Rice Davies veto’ to choosing how to direct my attention and I long for the day that newsrooms applied it: If your reaction is “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” it’s clearly not news so why waste your time reading or reporting it. Pope decides not to become a Protestant. Dog eats dogfood – SHOCK.

  But imagine if you fancy yourself as some cultural, or intellectual exemplar. Shouldn’t one’s performance intimate some appreciation of these issues? Yet it’s surprisingly rare. I was a defender of Bill Leak’s cartoons about aborigines because it seemed to me they were making a legitimate and very important point. Of course, they did so in a way that could be highly offensive – but offence cuts through. In any event, I can’t really see how he could have made his points in a cartoon without offence. But I only had to see the complacency of the crowd that gathered to celebrate them to disabuse myself of my solicitude. Here’s Sir Les’s Speech interrupting Leak’s speech to welcome his collection of cartoons for a bit of the flavour. If I were to take Bill Leak’s defence seriously I’d want to see him a little more serious about his jokes, a little less encouraging of the insiders’ winks and nods to each other. Leunig, for instance, hasn’t escaped the occasional wrath of the political correctness brigade, but at least in my memory never descended into the groupish tittering about his opponents. Still I can’t really take exception to Bill Leak’s sharing his complacency with all his fellow footsoldiers in the culture war against political correctness. It’s a free country. It just affects my own impression of his bona fides.

  III

  However I do take exception to Clive James’ sloppy and tendentious review of John Howard’s biography of Robert Menzies. First, a preliminary personal aside. I think it’s great that John Howard wrote the book. Other than his achievements on gun control and fiscal discipline early in his first term, I didn’t like his Prime Ministership.¹ But an interesting feature of Australian life is that not only is it almost impossible to predict someone’s quality as PM before they take office, it’s at least as hard to predict their performance as ex-PM. Whitlam was a momentous, and a deeply flawed PM, and not much of an ex-PM – at one stage advertising photocopiers or some such. Fraser was a pretty lousy PM – though I was biased at the time – but as ex-PM he was a fine leader prepared to be spurned by his own tribe for his principles. Keating so-so on both though I expect almost no-one will agree with me on that. Hawke was easily the best PM of my life, but on shedding the self-denial of his premiership descended into a greedy and fairly lacklustre ex-premiership. For what it’s worth, I think Howard’s a good ex-PM. Seems to be fairly honest and reasonable in his views – given where he’s coming from – and he beavers away on books. What’s there not to like?

  Anyway, I celebrate Clive James as a very intelligent fellow, frighteningly well-read in literature and much else besides. I also celebrate his conservatism, not because I particularly agree with it – or disagree with it for that matter (I have a strong affection fo Edmund Burke’s thinking and temperament) – but rather because our cultural landscape is so biased towards the moralistic sentimentalism and identity politics of the soft-left. I’m always on the lookout for those on the right who might be able to provide some balance. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter whether you’ve swallowed a dictionary (as Paul Keating once said of ‘Diamond’ Jim McClelland), the remedy for the agitprop of the left is not agitprop from the right, however large the vocab, particularly coming from someone of James’ cultural and intellectual pretensions. Mandy Rice-Davies’ strictures come to mind.

  It’s ignorant to suggest that the ALP is somehow naturally more spendthrift than the LCP. That was the case with Whitlam at least until the Haden Budget of 1975. It wasn’t true of Hawke and Keating. The Rudd Government faced the GFC by following the macroeconomic advice of the Federal Treasury pretty much to the letter organising a very rapid and forceful stimulus – I think the largest in the developed world – and then wound it down just as quickly all as it had been advised. Revenue then fell away leaving a budget hole. It’s true the ALP Government failed to discipline small programs, but that’s not a big story and, at least in my judgement, pales against the Howard Government’s laxity in tipping into the budget almost so much of the torrents of revenue that came its way after the first few years of its term as a result of the reform dividend and the mining boom that followed.

  IV

  Here’s Clive again:

  As in Lazarus Rising, Howard seems wedded … to the proposition that it has taken both of the two main parties, each holding power for a fair share of time, to create the modern Australia. This is a position that few publicists for the current Labor Party wish to hold, but it can be argued that unless they can regain the concept they are doomed to infantilism, if not to oblivion.

  Possibly a fair call. Mightn’t it also be worth pointing out when this review was written – a few months before Tony Abbott departed disgraced – that this partiality doesn’t seem to be unique to the left? Later he refers to “Rudd’s [election] policies, most of which were straight out of a draft script for Duck Soup“. It’s a good movie. I recommend it. But I have no idea what James is talking about. The only things I can imagine him meaning are the NBN and the fiscal stimulus both of which became policies after Rudd’s election.

  There is one other policy that he could mean. It too wasn’t an election policy – election policies tend to be pretty bland so as not to scare the horses. That’s the resource rent tax which James refers to as “RGR’s kamikaze move to cripple [mining] with putatively anti-capitalist taxes”. This was a tax recommend by a review of five people chaired by the Secretary to the Treasury, Ken Henry with membership from one other departmental secretary (both were appointed secretaries of their respective departments by the Howard Government), Greg Smith an old Treasury hand of innumerable tax reviews, a centrist – for all I know somewhat left of centre – academic John Piggott, and Heather Ridout CEO of the Australian Industry Group. Indeed the tax was so ‘pure’ that it was poorly explained as a super-profits tax rather than a Brown tax the beauty of which is that, in principle, it has no impact on the incentive to invest.²

  One thing that was in Rudd’s election policy for 2007 was doing something to limit carbon emissions – something that Howard had been successfully browbeaten into making it a bi-partisan policy. James presumably refers to this policy when he describes it as “controlling the climate by dismantling industry.”

  V

  James also offers us some gratuitous observations on the involvement of the CIA in the dismissal:

  The believers would rather blame [Whitlam’s] fall on a conspiracy, perhaps instigated by the CIA. (Even a man as smart as Peter Carey can still be heard endorsing this theory to clueless American cultural reporters who wouldn’t know Gough Whitlam from Walt Whitman.) Whitlam himself, to do him credit – he was a dreamer, but not a fool – was always careful, in subsequent years, to say that the CIA had nothing to do with it. But he was up against his own admirers, who did not want to be confused with facts.

  Were the CIA involved? I don’t know. I’ve not read up on it much on account of the difficulty of coming to one’s own view in an area dense with facts, counter-facts and theories which I’m happy to leave to those with the time to distill the arguments and come to a reasonable conclusion. As a believer in the cognitive division of labour, I’ll pick up any general consensus that emerges and failing that, I’ll find some people I respect – hopefully of diverse ideological persuasions – and see if their conclusions and speculations can enlighten me. Of course, I’d like to think that the swinging self-assurance with which Clive assures us that only fools think they were involved (and “even a man as smart as Peter Carey”), means that Clive’s done the work for me and I can include him amongst those I trust. You’d think he might be punctilious enough to refer to some source that clears it all up, or at least delivers telling blows against those claiming that the CIA were involved. After all I think it’s the case that they were involved in the removal of Chile’s Allende Government so it’s surely a question worthy of being asked. But that’s to miss the point of what Clive’s up to which is to get the work done with a bit of sneering – the very thing he objects most strongly to in his opponents. Clive’s stature and his self-confidence do all the work a Burkean conservative might have hoped might be done by careful, respectful investigation and debate.

  One further point. James could respond that I’m being unfair, that the full quote above isn’t really centred on whether or not the CIA was involved but rather on “the believers” blaming a conspiracy rather than the Government’s poor performance for its woes. But anyone who believes that is a troll and they would say that wouldn’t they? Most of us learned not to dignify them with our time. Who, amongst those worth engaging really believes or even says that the Whitlam Government wasn’t partly responsible for its own downfall. So not only is James taking issue with the weakest views of his opponents, they’re pretty much the fringe. And what political party doesn’t have fringe dwellers who snigger, like all those at the launch of Bill Leak’s cartoons, at their tribe’s enemies.

  Meanwhile, excuse me for observing that it remains the fact – as Jenny Hocking’s and Paul Kelly’s continuing investigations continue to reveal – that the Whitlam Government was hemmed in by all manner of constraints from the establishment – political, legal, financial, constitutional (yes, the Queen and her unhappy, plant-whispering son and heir). And mentioning that, wondering about it, arguing about it (while the Australian archives continue to observe the Palace requested embargo on the correspondence between the Palace and Government House), or wondering what if any CIA involvement there was has James trashing you as a naive conspiracy theorist with an IQ lower than skin temperature.

  VI

  It’s surely a cautionary tale when James ‘lets himself go’ ideologically, as it were, or, to put it another way, engages in debate as culture war. As a result he assumes that arguments he disagrees with arise from his opponents’ foolishness and prejudice when they can be better put to use as a prompt for him to purge his own worldview of those same qualities and work towards something more worthy of his immense talents and achievements.

  The general case James makes for Menzies seems reasonable enough, though it’s surely not that contentious in this day and age to observe that, whatever one’s taste, Menzies was a successful Prime Minster with considerable achievements to his name, not least a commitment to broadly egalitarian social and political norms now somehow in eclipse. In that sense, for me anyway, James comes over as the ex-pat in a time warp. (I recall one of Bob Hughes’ TV programs about Australia made in the 1990s or naughties telling us all about ‘larrikinism’. This was the larrikinism fast disappearing over the horizon when I was in short pants).

  As might be expected, Clive’s review manages to land some enjoyable jokes.

  

  1. I’m among a small minority of economists who thought the GST reform wasn’t necessarily beneficial but I salute his political courage in championing it (while regretting it wasn’t spent on economic reform I value more) but I mainly dislike his successful prosecution of the culture wars against brown people. (James chides Noel Pearson for saying that Whitlam was the only politician entirely without race prejudice. He argues that this is “cruelly rude” to Howard. Does he really think that if white Zimbabwean farmers were washing up on our shores they’d end up on Nauru?) I say this even given my strong sympathy with Howard’s side of the culture war’s loathing of left sentimentalism and identity politics. ↩
  2. I’m abstracting from the fact that having been drawn by the mesmeric cleverness of the Brown tax, Treasury was then too clever by half and introduced it in a bastardised form. A proper Brown tax uses the tax system to simulate a joint venture between the private sector and government. Thus with the rate of the tax at 40%, the tax system replicates the financial outcomes of an investment as if it were a 40/60 joint venture between the taxpayer and the government. Accordingly, during the investment phase, the company and the government go 40/60 on their costs with the company getting back via the tax system 40 cents for each dollar it invests. And if profits are made, 40% of them are taxed away to the 40% JV partner – the government. (This is in addition to any other taxes owed.) It’s a beautiful bit of economic engineering because it’s usually impossible to design taxes that don’t distort behaviour. But here, the return on capital remains the same (the upside and downside are just diluted by the government’s participation) so the incentive to invest remains the same at least in principle. In any event, Treasury proposed instead, and the Government bought the idea of leaving companies bearing 100% of their upfront costs with the government’s upfront contribution being deferred and then treated as a loan from the government. And because the contribution was of right and from the government Treasury proposed that it would deem the capital cost of companies financing this part of their venture to be the bond rate – a fanciful thought from an Economics 101 model. Industry would have hated giving up any amount of money, but the way Treasury proposed to introduce it was sufficiently naïve about the way finance works that it made the policy a serious turkey. So in a technical sense, James is right: Labor’s original proposal would have curbed mining investment, but ironically that was the product of Treasury’s missteps, not crude anti-capitalism from Labor. But I digress. ↩

April 25, 2017

• Daniel Bowen Night Network made permanent

  I know I was just writing about Night Network last week, but the news that it’s been made permanent came through over the weekend, so here’s another post on it.

  My sons are of the age when they get out and about after dark. Recently one was out at a party in Brunswick until about 1am on a Saturday night, and it was great that he was able to hop on a train with his friends to easily and safely get home.

  Late nights like that are behind me. Every month or so I do catch trains home around 10pm or 11pm, but it’s rare that I’m out after midnight.

  A short history of Melbourne’s after-midnight PT

  I remember a time when (with no money for a taxi) I’d be watching the clock to catch the last train home on a Friday night. During the 70s and 80s, the last trains and trams out of the City were around midnight Monday to Saturday, and around 11:15-11:30pm on Sunday nights.

  In May 1993, the state government (under Kennett) introduced Nightrider buses, initially running once an hour along 9 routes, starting at 12:30am, and with a premium fare of $5-7.

  The route structure was designed to follow the busiest tram routes in the inner suburbs, and the longer rail lines in the outer. Perhaps this was logical when trying to provide a reasonable network from a very limited budget, but it meant routes were unfamiliar to most people, and some inner suburbs had good public transport access during the day, but no all-night services. This is a problem that plagues Melbourne’s night buses still.

  
  PTV Nightrider map 2015. The routes were largely unchanged since 1992. Click to zoom.

  In 1997, a “NightLink” tram (route 99) was trialled, running on Friday and Saturday nights after midnight, every 20 minutes from the City to Richmond along Swan Street, then via Chapel Street and Carlisle Street to St Kilda, then along the light rail back to the city via Collins Street, and up to Brunswick Street in Fitzroy. (Added following Mike’s feedback. I’d forgotten this one.)

  From 2000, Sunday night trains started aligning with Saturdays, with “Bayside” lines frequencies upgraded from 40 to 30 minutes, and last services pushed back from 11:30 to midnight. (Thanks to the rail system being split across two operators at the time, it took some years for all the lines to be upgraded. For a while there, when Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday, patrons at the Carols By Candlelight at the Music Bowl would miss the last train home on the Hillside/Connex lines if they wanted to see the concert finale.)

  In 2003/04, despite warnings, most New Years Eve services ran only until 1:30am, with only Nightrider after that, resulting in large numbers of people unable to board the last trams and trains, and resulting in sustained criticism of the state government. They fixed the problem, and all-night services have run on NYE every year since then.

  During the 2006 Commonwealth Games, trains and trams were extended to 12:30am each night. NightRider buses ran 7 nights a week; hourly from Sunday to Thursday, half-hourly on Friday and Saturday nights.

  In late 2006, the government extended trains and trams to run until 1am on Friday and Saturday nights, finally recognising that more people are out and about late on weekends than other nights.

  In 2007, the Nightrider buses, still oddly starting at 12:30am (overlapping with trains and trams), started accepting standard Met fares. Daily fares were adjusted to expire at 3am (eg start your trip by 3am) instead of the old “end of day” time of 2am.

  In 2008, the government rebranded and upgraded Nightrider to half-hourly, with first services around 1:30am. This combined with the standard fares finally got patronage taking off, leading to some routes running as often as every 15 minutes during summer to try and reduce overcrowding.

  Having lost power in 2010, Labor went into the 2014 election promising “Homesafe”, all-night trains on all suburban routes, six all-night tram services, and 2am coaches to regional cities, which became “Night Network” – implemented from January 2016 pretty much as Labor pledged.

  It didn’t come as a complete surprise. Internal planning for the possibility of all-night operation on weekends had been happening for some time. It also resulted in changes to maintenance and upgrade works; many have now moved to weeknights, either after last service or from 9pm, which probably has less of an impact on passengers than weekend nights.

  (Despite pre-planning, parts of Night Network may have been implemented in a hurry, resulting in inefficiencies such as some trains spending 50% of their time idle at termini. Ironically, it appears the trams and trains, a network essentially designed by Labor in opposition have been more successful for patronage than the Night Bus network, which was designed by PTV. My view is this is largely because Night Bus routes are completely different to day time routes, thus not well understood by most people.)

  On Saturday, the government announced that Night Network has been made permanent, which is great news.

  After a successful trial, the state govt will spend almost $200 million to keep our public transport running non-stop on weekends. #9News pic.twitter.com/4GBCfyON5H

  — Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) April 22, 2017

  After midnight

  After the Things Of Stone And Wood concert a few weeks ago, it was of great comfort to know that there was no rush for the last train — no last train!

  The concert in Northcote ended about 12:30am, and we hopped on a tram to the city, then walked down Swanston Street to catch the 1am(ish) train from Flinders Street Station. From 2006 and 2015, this was the last train of the evening.

  

  Northcote was busy. The tram was busy. The City was busy. Flinders Street Station was busy, with plenty of passengers and also plenty of staff.

  All-night public transport has followed the development of the all-night economy, but has the reverse been true as well, with the all-night economy now growing thanks to better public transport access? It’d be interesting to know.

  I also suspect it leads to more use of public transport before midnight. Given it was a Friday, I’d been at work before the concert — I knew I didn’t need to go home first and drive to Northcote, because there’d be a way to get home no matter how late it went. (Yes, there’s always taxi or Uber, but part of the reasoning for all-night public transport is that taxis in particular aren’t coping well with demand.)

  More broadly, does it encourage some younger people to defer learning to drive and/or buying a car? Quite possibly. The more trips are possible by public transport, the less compelling the expense of driving becomes.

  

  The morning after the Night Network announcement, Radio National aired this interesting program looking at 24-hour cities. They talk about the complexities and benefits of enabling the night time economy.

  One of the points they made was that longer licencing hours (and related services) help improve safety because a mass of people don’t all leave venues at once. Senior transport people tell me that in Melbourne, the all-night services have helped in a similar way, reducing the phenomenon of groups of people all waiting around for the first train of the morning. They also tell me there have been no major security incidents since Night Network began.

  As I wrote last week, Night Network could be better – the buses run routes completely different to daytime, and it’d be nice if the trains ran more frequently (which would improve their efficiency as well as increasing fare revenue).

  But at least now people have the certainty of knowing that it’s a permanent feature of Melbourne’s public transport service. With the right upgrades and promotion, patronage should continue to climb.

April 24, 2017

• Club Troppo From the Department of “Why didn’t I think of that”: A natty idea to encourage scientific replication

  An Economic Approach to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science: With an Application to the Public Goods Game by Luigi Butera, John A. List – #23335 (PE)

  Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current state of knowledge on the topic. The mechanics of statistical inference suggest that such initial findings, even when robust and statistically significant within the study, should not appreciably move priors about the phenomenon under investigation. Yet, a few well-conceived independent replications dramatically improve the reliability of novel findings.

  Nevertheless, the incentives to replicate are seldom in place in the sciences, especially within the social sciences. We propose a simple incentive-compatible mechanism to promote replications, and use experimental economics to highlight our approach. We begin by reporting results from an experiment in which we investigate how cooperation in allocation games is affected by the presence of Knightian uncertainty, a pervasive and yet unexplored characteristic of most public goods. Unexpectedly, we find that adding uncertainty enhances cooperation. This surprising result serves as a test case for our mechanism: instead of sending this paper to a peer-reviewed journal, we make it available online as a working paper, but we commit never to submit it to a journal for publication. We instead offered co-authorship for a second, yet to be written, paper to other scholars willing to replicate our study. That second paper will reference this working paper, will include all replications, and will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication. Our mechanism allows mutually-beneficial gains from trade between the original investigators and other scholars, alleviates the publication bias problem that often surrounds novel experimental results, and accelerates the advancement of economic science by leveraging the mechanics of statistical inference.