Progressive Direction

October 22, 2018

• Club Troppo Protectionists: I hate these guys

  People you don’t like – they’re everywhere

  International Competition and Adjustment: Evidence from the First Great Liberalization
  by Stephane Becuwe, Bertrand Blancheton, Christopher M. Meissner – #25173 (DAE ITI)

  Abstract:

  France and Great Britain signed the Cobden Chevalier treaty in
  1860 eliminating import prohibitions and lowering tariffs with
  Britain. This policy change was unexpected by French industry
  and entirely free from lobbying efforts. A series of commercial
  treaties with other nations followed in the 1860s lowering
  tariffs with France’s largest trade partners. We study the
  dynamics of French trade patterns using product level exports and
  imports for France with all partners and at the bilateral level
  before and after these tectonic trade policy shocks. We find a
  significant rise in intra-industry trade in leading manufactured
  products. Cotton, woolen and silk cloth “held their ground,”
  rising imports being met with rising exports. Rather than
  shifting or destabilizing French patterns of specialization,
  liberalization allowed for an expansion of exports in
  differentiated products. The findings are consistent with the
  “smooth adjustment” hypothesis. The return to discussion of
  higher tariffs from 1878 should not be regarded as a backlash to
  international competition, but rather the outcome of
  anti-competitive protectionist lobbying.

October 20, 2018

• Club Troppo TriggerPod

  Konstantin Kisin is a comedian who was born in Russia and emigrated to Britain with his family when he was twelve. And he’s a friend of mine whom I met at the inimitable Kilkenomics. Like most comedians he’s a thoughtful guy. He’s much preoccupied with political correctness and he and a fellow comedian have worked up a regular podcast which they tell me will earn them a good income in the not too distant future – via Patreon. Which is great.

  In any event, Konstantin invited me onto the program and we speak about economics and democracy – unified by the single theme that economics (like most social sciences) is too preoccupied with ideological and thematic signalling – left/right, free market/intervention – in just the way in which politics is marred by the same thing, recently weaponised as political correctnesses of various kinds.

  You might like to check out the podcast more generally. Here it is at iTunes and here’s another general podcast site.

October 17, 2018

• The Northern Myth People Like Us, We Come From T/Here. Always Have, Always Will. Marntaj.

  

  A guest essay by Brenda L Croft*

  People from here aren’t like people from Redfern….

  We are from here, we come from here!

  The above exchange took place at Victoria River, Wave Hill, on 27 August 2016, during official speeches for the 50th anniversary of the Gurindji Walk-Off from Wave Hill Station. A group of protestors wearing t-shirts and holding a banner emblazoned with the searing image of an Aboriginal child’s eyes encased in barbed wire, framed by the slogan, ‘No justice, just us’[1], stood in silent protest, their backs towards Nigel Scullion, Senator for the Northern Territory, federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, who was standing centre-stage on a podium under the blazing August sun.

  Senator Scullion was championing the sovereign actions of a determined band of Gurindji stockmen and their families who walked away from Wave Hill Station half a century earlier, with a small group of protestors silently declaring their opposition to his presence at the tribute of one of the nation’s most renowned protest actions.

  The 50th commemoration had brought thousands of people from all over the country to the twin communities of Daguragu and Kalkaringi to honour the actions taken by 200+ determined Gurindji (and associated peoples) stockmen and their families who walked off Wave Hill station in protest at decades of poor treatment by ‘British Lord Vestey’ and his representatives.

  As has been acknowledged widely, the Walk-Off sparked the birth of the national land rights movement, building on earlier actions by First Peoples in the Northern Territory and further afield over preceding decades. The Walk-Off story has been detailed extensively over the years since in radio and television documentaries, films, print media, photographs and songs.[2]

  What more fitting time and place then for descendants of Gurindji community members – who had been stolen from their families as children since the early 20th century, in much the same manner as their traditional lands had been stolen in the late 19th century – to express their profound rejection of the treatment revealed at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, which had aired on national television less than a month earlier?

  On 25 July 2016, viewers across Australia had been sickened by the footage on the ABC TV Four Corners program, ‘Australia’s Shame’:

  …exposing one of the darkest incidents in the history of juvenile justice in Australia [with] an investigation featuring a chilling catalogue of footage revealing a pattern of abuse, deprivation and punishment of vulnerable children inside Northern Territory youth detention centres.[3]

  Watching that footage alone in my lounge-room, my distress intensifying, I contacted my cousin/sister, Josephine Crawshaw (Ruddick), suggesting we protest at the impending celebration, knowing that politicians, including the federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, would be present.

  It was Scullion’s reaction to the heinous revelations in the program that caused the greatest outrage. When pressed for a response as to why he had not watched the program, despite being notified that it was going to air [4 ]  he stated: ‘… I had never seen the vision, it hadn’t come to my attention, hadn’t piqued my interest[my emphasis], well, sufficiently…’[5]

  One can only wonder what would pique the interest of the politician responsible for the affairs of Australia’s First Nations?

  The Minister’s attitude changed after he received a call from a “fairly agitated” Malcolm Turnbull[6], then Prime Minister, who directed him to watch the program, which triggered a royal commission.[7]

  People Like Us, We Come From T/Here

  On 19 August 2016, wearing our t-shirts and carrying our banner, we had marched at the very end of the Walk-Off re-enactment from Karungkarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation to Victoria River, so as not to overshadow the commemoration event.

  

  At Victoria River we stood near where the Gurindji (and associated Malngin, Bilinara, Ngarinman, Mudburra and Warlpiri) strikers had camped half a century earlier after their sovereign action of walking away from degradation, abuse and desperation, and into history.

  As Scullion took to the stage during the program, our group – all Gurindji Stolen Generations’ descendants – stood and turned our backs.  Standing silently, we were progressively joined by non-Indigenous supporters as the Minister continued speaking. His voice rising in anger, he inferred that our group was disrespectful, trouble-making radicals from Redfern – so far off the mark it would have been laughable if not for the ignorance in which it was couched.

  If we were from Redfern – and there were supporters present who had travelled from the bastion of First Nations’ radicalism and self-determination[8]– we would gladly have owned our connection to that staunch stronghold of First Nations’ resistance. But we were standing on our country, proudly alongside and in honour of our community and family/ies – standing our ground as members of the world’s most enduring culture.

  The Minister’s frustration at our refusal to sit down and move away from the gaze of the media was clear to all, as was his suggestion that we had no place protesting at the anniversary of one of the country’s most significant protest actions.

  He seemed blithely unaware that his rebuke, that we were ‘out of place’ or ‘did not know our place’, was made while he was flanked on stage by NT Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation banners, their placement acknowledging that many of those present were either Gurindji members of the Stolen Generations, or their descendants. Our only option was to refute his ignorance: We are from here, we come from here!

  People Like Us, We Come From T/Here

  Placed in broader context, the Four Corners program was broadcast nearly two decades after ‘Bringing them Home, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’, conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now called the Australian Human Rights Commission), was tabled in Parliament on 26 May 1997. The date has since become National Sorry Day in recognition of the report’s contributors and their families.

  The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families was established by the Attorney General in 1995. Over two years, the National Inquiry took oral and written testimony from over five hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia, as well as from Indigenous organisations, foster parents, State and Territory Government representatives, church representatives, other non-government agencies, former mission and government employees and individual members of the community. The 689-page final report includes many of these personal testimonies as well as 54 recommendations to support healing and reconciliation for the Stolen Generations, their families and the Australian public more broadly.’[9]

  It was broadcast almost-nine years after the Howard Liberal government enacted the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act in August 2007. A complex and controversial package of legislation rolled out by the Rudd/Gillard Labor government, the NTER is colloquially known as The Intervention.

  

  Due to expire in 2012, instead the NTERA was replaced by the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act, which remains in place[10]. A bitter irony that the same year The Intervention was enacted, the Wave Hill Walk-Off Track was formally placed on the National Heritage List.[11]

  The broadcast came eight years after Kevin Rudd’s Labor government formally made The National Apology to The Stolen Generations on 13 February 2008, which was a key recommendation from The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families.[12]It remains one of the very few recommendations implemented.

  I was at Parliament House in the Great Hall the day that Rudd spoke, followed by Opposition Leader Dr Brendan Nelson in bi-partisan support. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I thought of my father, my grandmother, my aunts, uncles, cousins – so many extended family members whose lives had been irrevocably altered, fractured by decades of official removal policies.

  Decades of displacement from the safety and security of our families and communities had ground us/them down, as have cumulative government-sanctioned efforts to erase us/them from the very face of Australian society. Finally, public acknowledgement appeared to validate and ease the decades of intergenerational trauma.

  A decade on those words have turned out to be largely empty – null and void. My tears have dried while my sense of injustice had grown exponentially with the ongoing, accumulative negative treatment towards our people, especially some of those most vulnerable, our children.

  Watching the senseless, contemptible footage that night brought home to me just how debased some elements of society has become towards First Nations’ people. Twenty-one years after the report’s findings, the numbers of First Nations’ children in out of home care, under court orders, in foster care with non-Indigenous carers – no matter how well-meaning – is at their highest level ever.

  

  The Northern Territory – my patrilineal home territory – and the Australian Capital Territory – my place of residence – are the jurisdictions with the greatest numbers of First Nations’ children in care, living away from their families and communities.

  People Like Us, We Come From T/Here

  How has it come to this? Did exposing the trauma of the shared his- and her/stories from hundreds of our Elders, family and community members serve no purpose other than to re-open wounds and scars? The deeply ingrained decades of pain and suffering has affected not only those who were removed but has also had radiating ripple effects on our families and communities, those who had to live with the pain of their children’s absence, often for decades, sometimes forever.

  What of those whose parents were unable to do just that – parent- because they had no role models, no guidance, having grown up in institutions devoid of nurture, love, security, safety, and most important of all, cultural connections and shared knowledge of language and customary practices.

  

  This is the lived reality for many in our communities who have strong cultural connections and affiliations with Gurindji communities in the Victoria River region – the twin, yet distinct communities of Daguragu at Wattie Creek (the site chosen by Gurindji and associated elders Sandy Moray Tipujurn, Vincent Lingiari, Donald Nangiari, Pincher Nyumiari (Manguari), Long Johnny Kitngarri/Kitniari, Geoffrey Ngalgardji and others on behalf of their families), and Kalkaringi (the crown land site originally known as Drovers’ Common, chosen by the government as a means of controlling and restricting the Gurindji community’s dreams and ambitions[13]); from communities associated with Yarralin Walangeri (near Victoria River Downs) – Lingarra, Pigeonhole and Top Springs; from Limbunya, and surrounding Inverway and Riveren cattle stations to the west of Wave Hill; to the many Stolen Generations’ members and their descendants living away from their country, in Katherine, Darwin, Halls Creek, Kununurra, Alice Springs, Adelaide, and further afield, in every state and territory of Australia.

  

  Our experiences encompass enforced living away from our traditional homelands and communities, of fractured access to our languages and cultural knowledge of ceremony and country, of compounded transgenerational trauma with family members dying too young from preventable illness, of living below the poverty line, engaging in self-destructive behaviour, all direct results of our families and communities disrupted lives.

  

  Combined, all these can create an individual and/or collective sense of cultural dislocation. ‘Home’ for many of us is a series of places and sites associated with family members, our ancestors, our communities. We are faced with coalescing challenges of ignorance of and racism about our existence from the highest echelons of authority in this country, down to the person in the street – either through unintentional or wilful ignorance – who profess little to no knowledge of the social injustices that Australia’s First Peoples face each and every day.

  Having said that it would be remiss of me to not acknowledge that, alongside negative experiences facing many First Nations individuals and communities, there also shines inspirational resilience and determination; love, encouragement, support and embracing of those who make the long journeys home; profound intellect spanning thousands of generations; adaptation and innovation; Indigenous Storying and Knowledges – all of which sustains us as contemporary 21stcentury First Peoples.

  And there are many non-Indigenous people – kardiya– throughout Australia who have stood beside us in our ongoing fight; supporting our aspirations for social justice and equity; who are not prepared to stay silent and benefit from the spoils of colonisation; who know that they occupy stolen land and want to make restitution in whatever way they can.

  

  If one were to add up all the Northern Territory government institutions, church-run missions and recognised homes were First Nations’ children were placed from the 1870s until the present day the number is just shy of three digits. Of these my father, grandmother and extended family members spent time in at least 6 – 7 of these homes, and a disturbing number of my nieces and nephews continue to be placed under court orders in out of home care. Their parents had been removed from their parents, who had been removed from their parents, and so the cycle continues.

  

  It is chilling for me to consider that my immediate and extended family has experienced over nine decades of enforced removal. Even more distressing is that exact numbers of removed children (and mothers) may never be known. What about those children who were lost, who never made their way home, who did not know where their home(s) was? Where are they now, where do the spirits rest of those who never made it home to their people?

   

  What is the ongoing accumulated impact of two centuries enforced removal of First Peoples’ children from their families and communities[14], when numbers of our children in out of home care continue rising; when so few of the recommendations outlined in the Bringing Them Home report have been implemented more than two decades after being tabled; when, despite successive territory and federal governments attempts to ‘close the gap’, any gains continue to be far outweighed by an ever-increasing chasm of inequity; when confused and confusing efforts to ‘recognise’ the First Peoples in the Constitution appear stalled; when the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for a representational Voice to the federal government is summarily dismissed, after intentional misrepresentation from the then Prime Minister down[15]?

  People Like Us, We Come From T/Here

  People Like Us, We Come From T/Here is an exhibition of photographs and objects created in conjunction to the collaborative, practice-led doctoral research exhibition, Still in my mind: Gurindji location experience and visuality, which is opening at CDU Gallery, Charles Darwin University, on 31 October.

  This exhibition is away for me to pay acknowledgement and respect to my ancestors, to my immediate family, to Gurindji extended family and Stolen Generations’ members who have taught me so much in the decades I have been coming back hometo diverse places in the Northern Territory. It is also a way to acknowledge the deep level of support I have received from non-Indigenous people who want to live together in a society that respects First Peoples’ sovereign rights.

  

  My family’s journey is but one of thousands of similar travels and travails undertaken by Stolen Generations’ members and their descendants. I follow in the footsteps of my grandparents – Bessie and Joe Senior; my father – Joe, and through the determined efforts of my mother, Dorothy, to ensure my father was reunited with his/our family. It is because of them – all gone now – that I have been able to undertake my journey, to work out where ‘home’ is for me.

  It is through the sacrifices of other grandmothers from Wave Hill – Mona Noonai and her sisters; my aunts – Violet Wadrill and Kitty Mindaru, uncles – Hoppy Mick Rangiari and Horace Walman, other cousins, nephews, nieces, and their grannies – it is for all of them that I have created these works, these visual records of our connections.

   

  

  It is because of them that I walk for my brother Lindsay, who never got to make that trek himself. I have had the best of guides leading the way – my cousin/brothers – Maurie Ryan, Michael Paddy, Justin Paddy, Timothy Donald. I have been so fortunate to walk with and learn from my cousin/sister – Serena, my niece – Leah, and my nephew – John.

  I will be forever grateful for the support of all those elders who were/are so patient with my endless questions over the past three decades – Aunty Daisy Ruddick (Cusack), who first took me home to Wave Hill in 1991; Aunty Kathy Mills (McGinniss), who has shared so much with me over the years; Aunty Barbara Raymond (Mills) for her friendship with Aunty Nancy Gibbs (Croft); the late Uncle Alec Kruger, like a second father to me, whose story ran parallel to my father’s – both of them taken to Pine Creek and The Bungalow, then their lives diverging distinctly, not meeting again until Uncle Alec, Aunty Hilda Muir and other elders took their landmark case to the High Court in the early 1990s[16]; Robbie Mills, who helped my brother Tim and I take our father’s ashes home; Uncle Jack Gibbs, who lived with my Aunty Nancy at Channel Island Leprosarium where they lived for many years, having initially met decades earlier at Kahlin Compound.

  

  My cousins – my cousin/sister, Josie who took me under her wing when I turned up in 1987, all peroxided blonde, young and brash as.  My father’s younger sister, Mena Clancy’s (Croft) daughters – Elizabeth, Jacqueline, Rhonda, Kathy and Shirleen, and their children. My Huddleston cousin/brothers – Leslie, who came looking for me in Canberra in the early 1980s, his brothers Alan/Bird and Bobby – older brothers to me over the years – and their families; their beautiful parents, my father’s sister – Flo, who took me fishing, and my father’s brother-in-law – Harry, whose gentleness and generosity remains with me to this day.

  My niece and nephew, Valda and Leslie Giles, their beautiful mother, my friend Kerry Giles, who left us far too soon. Alan/Bird and Kerry’s grandson, Valda’s beautiful boy, Christopher, who lets me share his life. So many others have been guideposts to me along the way – for this, you all have my heartfelt gratitude.

  Thanks to all these people, all my relations, my family, I have been able to share my journey with my brother Tim and his family – my sister-in-law Tia and their children, Luca, Sasha and Maddie. When I look at them and Christopher, I see the little boy my father was when he was sent away from his mother, all those decades ago. We are still here, we are all making the long journey home.

  People like us, We Come From T/Here.
  Always Have, Always Will. Marntaj.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  People Like Us, We Come From T/Here

  Brenda L Croft
  27 October – 9 November 2018
  Paul Johnstone Gallery, 2/2 Harriet Place, Darwin City

  * Brenda L Croft is Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra/Chinese/Anglo-Irish through her patrilineal side and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish on her matrilineal side. While Brenda embraces this complex ancestry, it is her lived experience as a descendant of Stolen Generations members that foregrounds her personal and professional practice.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  [1] Designed by artist Chips Mackinolty at the request of myself and Josie Crawshaw, the image was printed on t-shirts and banners, funded by a coalition of supporters including Concerned Australians, the Northern Land Council and individuals. The work can be viewed at http://www.crossart.com.au/archive/113-2018-exhibitions-projects/344-a-widening-gap-the-intervention-10-years-on-counihan-gallery-in-brunswick-8-june-to-8-july-2018
  [2] The Gurindji Walk-Off from Wave Hill Station is also a key focus of the collaborative exhibition, ‘Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality’, which opens at CDU Gallery, Charles Darwin University on 31 October 2018.
  [3] ‘Australia’s Shame’ aired on 25 July 2016. Further reading, Caro Meldrum-Hanna and Elise Worthington, ‘Evidence of ‘torture’ of children held in Don Dale detention centre uncovered by Four Corners’, 26 July 2016, accessed 5 October 2018 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/four-corners-evidence-of-kids-tear-gas-in-don-dale-prison/7656128
  [4] Ibid, as in 3.
  [5] Further reading, Rachel Baxendale, ‘NT corrections minister John Elferink dumped in youth detention torture fallout’, The Australian, 26 July 2016, accessed 5 October, 2018, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nt-corrections-minister-john-elerink-dumped-in-youth-detention-torture-fallout/news-story/888fcf41fed46c3e76cfa8fb1b7d713c, accessed 5 October, 2018
  [6] Further reading, Hunter, Fergus, 26 July 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/previous-youth-abuse-revelations-didnt-pique-my-interest-nigel-scullion-20160726-gqe4ak.html, accessed 5 October 2018
  [7] Further reading, https://childdetentionnt.royalcommission.gov.au/Pages/Report.aspx
  [8] After the 1967 Referendum First Nations activists, frustrated at the lack of progress of positive change, demanding self-determined outcomes, shifting from non-Indigenous directed Civil Rights to self-determination/Indigenous Rights. The country’s first Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Medical Service, Aboriginal Housing Company, the Black Theatre were all established in Redfern. Further reading, Gary Foley, ‘Black Power in Redfern 1968 – 1972’,  http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html, accessed 5 October 2018.
  [9] Further reading, https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-report-1997
  [10] Further reading, https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-research-areas/indigenous-research/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention
  [11] Further reading, http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=105897
  [12] Further reading, https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articles/apology-australias-indigenous-peoples
  [13] Further readings: Hope, Zach, ‘Vincent Lingiari’s vision left to rot and die’, NT News, 21 August 2016,
  https://www.ntnews.com.au/news/northern-territory/vincent-lingiaris-vision-left-to-rot-and-die/news-story/18c14695b559b4128b69e9c50ce09135; Manning, Brian, ‘Brian Manning’s speech on the 45th Anniversary of the Gurindji walk off and Gurindji Freedom Day’, Chris White, Blogging from a life-long unionist, 23 August, 2011, http://chriswhiteonline.org/2011/09/2003/, accessed 5 October, 2018
  [14] One of the earliest documented removals of a child was 15-year-old Maria Locke, from the Dharug nation, who was the first girl placed in the care of the Native Institution at Parramatta when it opened in 1815. Further reading, http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2003/hc48.htm  http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2003/hc48.htmhttp://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2003/hc48.htm
  [15] Further reading, https://www.1voiceuluru.org/
  [16] Further reading, http://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/1041/Kruger-v-The-Commonwealth-of-Australia/

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Photographs

  1 – No Justice. Just Us. Courtesy of Chips Mackinolty, photographer unknown.

  2 – Maurie Ryan Japarta, Justin Paddy Jakarta & Michael Paddy Japarta. Victoria River bed, near to where Maurie was taken in 1952 by Native Affairs Patrol Officer, Ted Evans. 2015. Brenda L Croft.

  3 – Fight Racism, Buntine Highway, Top Grid, entry to Kalkaringi, 2011. Brenda L Croft.

  4 – Friends of Kahlin, Myilly Point Cultural Precinct, NAIDOC Week, 2015. Brenda L Croft.

  5 – Aunty Kathy Mills, Aunty Nancy Gibbs (nee Croft), 2015. Brenda L Croft.

  6 – Old hut, former Channel Island Leprosarium, Channel Island, 2015. Brenda L Croft.

  7 – Joe Croft’s grave, Kalkaringi cemetery, 2015. Brenda L Croft.

  8 – Brian Manning, Stuart Park, 2011. Brenda L Croft.

  9 – Maurie Ryan Japarta, Kerry Gibbs, Gibbsy’s Automotives, Stuart Park, 2014. Brenda L Croft.

  10 – Nancy Gibbs (nee Croft), former site of Kahlin Compound, Myilly Point, Darwin, 2015. Brenda L Croft.

  11 – Ronnie Wavehill teaching karu (children) about true stories from Gurindji country, Malyalyimalyalyi/Lipanangku (original Wave Hill station site, 1883 – 1925), Wave Hill, 2014. Brenda L Croft.

  12 – Self-portrait, former site of Retta Dixon Home, Bagot, 2014. Brenda L Croft.

  The post People Like Us, We Come From T/Here. Always Have, Always Will. Marntaj. appeared first on The Northern Myth.

October 16, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Rail plan leaked

  Channel 9 and The Age got hold of a previously unpublished rail plan, or at least the summary maps from it.

  Age: Leaked rail plan shows few extra services for regional commuters

  Channel 9: I assume the headline-writer got a little carried away. Metro 2 isn’t really a secret.

  #BREAKING: Public Transport chiefs are drawing up plans for a second Metro rail tunnel and proposing big changes to the politically sensitive Frankston line. @andrew_lund is LIVE. #9News pic.twitter.com/4h6HmgpE50

  — Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) October 16, 2018

  The stages

  The staging appears to be very similar to the PTV plan release back in 2013; it’s obviously evolved over the past five years. (Let’s assume that the swap of Spotswood and Seddon is an error.)

  To me it all seems reasonably sensible. Channel 9 has a good summary of the projects involved, which is well worth a read.

  Here’s how things will sit when the Metro (1) tunnel opens. Dandenong and Sunbury are connected via the tunnel. Frankston takes the Caulfield Loop. Sandringham is connected through to Newport.
  

  Also by this point, the Upfield line has been extended to Craigieburn, with Seymour/Shepparton/Albury trains using it instead of the Craigieburn line – does this mean the Albury line would be converted to broad gauge? Not sure.

  By stage 4, the western portion of Metro 2 (Werribee line, Newport, Fishermans Bend, Southern Cross, Flagstaff, Parkville) is in place, as well as electrification to Melton and Wyndham Vale (planning works for these were pledged by Labor yesterday).
  

  By this point the Frankston line has been extended to Baxter, and the Cranbourne line to Clyde. The other big change is the City Loop is re-configured to route the Frankston/Baxter line through to Craigieburn. Glen Waverley is running direct and is routed through to Upfield/Craigieburn, which has an extension to Wallan. The Airport line is in place via Sunshine, and there’s a connection from Werribee to Wyndham Vale. Laverton (Altona Loop) and Williamstown trains are disconnected from the Werribee line, and continue to run via Footscray.

  Also note the annotations showing the number of peak trains. This is the catalyst for The Age’s headline. Some people on Facebook have assumed that’s an all-day frequency. It clearly isn’t — the Dandenong line is not going to have 22 trains per hour all day.

  Stage 6 completes the Metro 2 tunnel, connecting Parkville to the Mernda line, which also has a branch north from Lalor to Wollert. This line is connected through to Werribee and an electrified Geelong line, with Warrnambool passengers changing at Geelong.
  

  A big change here is the Cranbourne/Clyde and Pakenham lines have been separated. Clyde now runs via the tunnel, then via Chadstone, with a branch at Huntingdale to Monash Uni and Rowville. This obviously differs from State Labor’s view of light rail serving Caulfield/Chadstone/Rowville. Additional tracks from Huntingdale to Dandenong (where the alignment is wide) allow Pakenham and V/Line trains to run express. At the city end, Pakenham is connected through to Wyndham Vale, if I’m reading the fuzzy out-of-focus lines correctly.

  There’s some final twists in the “Long term” vision.
  

  Seymour/Shepparton/Albury trains now run via the Airport instead of via the Upfield/Wallan line. The suburban Airport line no longer connects to Sunshine, but runs direct to somewhere near South Kensington – but without any intermediate stations, which seems a waste.

  Also note the City Loop configuration. It appears the Hurstbridge line would run via the Loop then out to Ringwood. By this point, no metro services would terminate in the City – they’d all be connected through to other lines.

  So what’s not in here?

  The Suburban Rail Loop is the obvious one. It was prepared separately from the rest of this plan before being announced last month. It does have limited interaction with the main network, particularly in the east, though there’s talk of it sharing parts of the Airport and/or RRL alignments.

  The other glaring omission is the Doncaster line.

  The focus for service frequencies is all based on the maximum. I know there’s good work going on to move towards frequent all-day services, and you’d hope that a full plan (with explanations for these leaked maps) would detail that.

  Despite the leak, I don’t expect the full plan to be released this year. But hopefully in coming years, well after the dust from the election has settled, and the bureaucrats have had time to properly digest and incorporate the plans of their political masters.

  Forward planning is vital, and the enthusiasm for rail from the politicians is very welcome — it’s vital as our city continues to grow. Let’s hope that whoever wins in November, things can move forward in a coherent, logical manner.

  Update: The Frankston Leader reported on the diversion of the Frankston line away from Southern Cross and Flinders Street:

  Liberal public transport spokesman David Davis said the plan would “make life very tough indeed” for Frankston line commuters trying to access the southern or western side of the city.

  Mr Davis accused the government of “hypocrisy” for removing the two major stops from the Frankston line after criticising the former Liberal government for a similar proposal.

  Mr Davis is referring to the 2014 “Melbourne Rail Link” plan, the Coalition’s version of the Metro tunnel. But before that, the Frankston to Craigieburn plan was seen in the PTV Network Development Plan back in 2013. So he’s criticising a plan originally released when the Coalition was in power.

  It’d be nice if the politicians looked at these plans on their merits rather than supporting or attacking them based on which side was in power when they came to light.

• Club Troppo Teen mothers and the success of their kids

  Grandparents, Moms, or Dads? Why Children of Teen Mothers Do Worse in Life
  by Anna Aizer, Paul J. Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes – #25165 (CH ED HE LS)

  Abstract:

  Women who give birth as teens have worse subsequent educational and labor market outcomes than women who have first births at older ages. However, previous research has attributed much of these effects to selection rather than a causal effect of teen childbearing. Despite this, there are still reasons to believe that children of teen mothers may do worse as their mothers may be less mature, have fewer financial resources when the child is young, and may partner with fathers of lower quality. Using Norwegian register data, we compare outcomes of children of sisters who have first births at different ages. Our evidence suggests that the causal effect of being a child of a teen mother is much smaller than that implied by the cross-sectional differences but that there are still significant long-term, adverse consequences, especially for children born to the youngest teen mothers. Unlike previous research, we have information on fathers and find that negative selection of fathers of children born to teen mothers plays an important role in producing inferior child outcomes. These effects are particularly large for mothers from higher socio-economic groups.

October 15, 2018

• The Northern Myth Call for Papers – Ethnoornithology symposium at AOC 2019, Darwin 3 – 5 July 2019

  

  There is nowhere much better to be at in the middle of a Top End dry season than Darwin and there is absolutely nowhere better to be if you are a birder than the Australian Ornithology Conference to be held at the Charles Darwin University Casuarina campus next July.

  I’ll be busy running an ethnoornithology symposium – see the abstract below – that will examine recent research in that most interesting field of work. It has been a while since we’ve had a dedicated ethnoornithology session at the AOC – the first we ran was a full day session on Australasian ethnoornithology in 2005 when the AOC was held at Blenheim, New Zealand.

  The 10th Australasian Ornithological Conference (AOC) will be held in Darwin, Northern Territory from 3-5th July 2019. The AOC is the primary conference for BirdLife Australia and Birds NZ, and is the largest biennial gathering of enthusiastic amateur and professional ornithologists from Australia and overseas.

  The main aims of the conferences are to:

  • Promote communication and interaction among ornithologists in Australasia;
  • Encourage student participation and provide networking opportunities, particularly for early-career ornithologists;
  • Showcase the best ornithological research from across Australasia.

  The conference will be a great week of bird talks, excursions, and catching up with friends in the tropics. We look forward to celebrating the wonderful birdlife of the Top End with you in July 2019.

  If you are interested in presenting a paper at the ethnoornithology session get in touch with me here or at birdknowledge@gmail.com or via Twitter at @bgosford. If you are after more information on AOC 2019 generally go to the conference website here for a wealth of information.

  See you in Darwin in the Dry Season!

  Ethnoornithology
  Symposium convenor: Bob Gosford

  Ethnoornithology is the study of the relationship between people and birds, and in recent years the field has emerged as a valuable source of ethnobiological research.  Ethnoornithology provides an opportunity to empower people of all cultures to discover, re-examine and preserve the connections between individuals, groups and cultures and the birds that they hunt, venerate and cherish. The field presents ornithological knowledge from alternative perspectives, which can enrich the more common approaches to ecological research, and contribute to management for conservation.

  In this session, we will examine current ethnoornithological research and practice in Australasia, with a shared focus on field and theoretical research across Australia and practical on-the-ground work by Aboriginal ranger and land management groups in northern Australia. Talks will demonstrate the significance of indigenous knowledge of birds and their cultural significance, and how these can assist in framing the research methods of western scientists working in related areas. An overview of previous ethnoornithological research in northern Australia will be discussed, as will future directions.

  The post Call for Papers – Ethnoornithology symposium at AOC 2019, Darwin 3 – 5 July 2019 appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Daniel Bowen Passenger Information Displays (PIDs) at stations are evolving

  Just a quick post while I work on something more substantive.

  I want to talk about Passenger Information Displays (PIDs for short) at Metro stations.

  For a while, it looked like suburban stations would all be getting two line LED PIDs.

  They show the scheduled time, destination, minutes to departure, and a summary of the stopping pattern, but no individual stations are listed.
  

  Around 2016 with many stations being rebuilt, more elaborate flat screens started to appear, which add every station the train serves, and the following two trains, as well as the current time. (Larger versions of these appear at central city stations.)
  

  More recently, at some stations the two line LEDS (only installed in 2014) have been replaced by the screens… with a twist. Some of them have been switched to a different design, which shows less detail, but in a larger font size.
  

  This makes sense, particularly where there’s only one screen per platform. They are far easier to see from a distance.
  

  They still show more information than that two line LEDs, including the current time and the following train, and can be switched to show different messages when relevant.
  

  Here’s a comparison with Sydney, where they’ve gone for a two screen display, which shows the next train on one screen, complete with a full (scrolling) list of stations, and following trains on the second screen. Overall it’s got more information, but I think (partly due to the colours used) is less readable, particularly from a distance.
  

  By the way, most of the above pictures are from Armadale. It and the other MATH stations have another older type of display on the concourse listing departures from all platforms:
  

  Good accurate timely information is important on the public transport network, and while apps now mean a lot of this is now available on smartphones, it’s good to have it displayed around the stations.

  Getting details of the following train is particularly important in morning peak, when the train at the platform may be delayed and packed. People may choose to let it go if they know the next one is only a few minutes away.

  Not including a list of all stations… perhaps that’s okay at suburban stations, though unfamiliar users may still have issues, particularly outbound — for instance, a Frankston line train may be terminating at Frankston, Carrum, Mordialloc, Cheltenham or Moorabbin — it’s high time major interchanges like South Yarra and Caulfield got screens with all the stations listed.

  But at least each new version has been an improvement. No doubt the PIDs will continue to evolve and improve.

October 12, 2018

• Daniel Bowen PT crowding increasing – but we can do better

  The May 2018 Metro and Yarra Trams passenger load surveys were released last week.

  Media coverage: Herald Sun (paywall); The Age

  It’s worth noting that load surveys are measuring what happens when the service is running as planned. It’s not designed to look at crowding during disruptions, it’s designed to guide future investment.

  Trains

  Here’s the TL;DR for Metro: After a reduction in the past couple of years, crowding is on the rise again. 9.8% of AM services are above the threshold, and 4.8% of PM services.

  To me, this indicates that patronage has kept increasing, and the reduction in crowding in 2017 was thanks to the removal of some seats to increase standing space. Unfortunately on some lines there hasn’t been a huge number of new services added to the peak timetable in some years — only 5 across the networkwide AM peak between May 2015 and May 2018 according to the graph.

  

  Here’s a summary of the state of the lines. Rather than use the figures concerning the number of trains that are overcrowded, I’ve pulled out the percentage of peak passengers travelling on overcrowded trains:

  Line	AM peak	PM peak	Notes
  Alamein	0.0%	0.0%	Steady since 2012
  Glen Waverley	0.0%	16.6%	Crowding increasing
  Ringwood	7.4%	6.8%	Crowding increasing marginally in AM peak
  Dandenong	16.8%	10.8%	Crowding dropped markedly from 2016 to 2017, but is on the rise again
  Frankston	16.1%	5.3%	AM peak has been consistently more crowded since 2012. Dropped between 2015 and 2017, but rising again
  Sandringham	0.0%	0.0%	In the past has been consistently more crowded in AM peak, but has improved a lot since 2016.
  South Morang	24.0%	27.2%	This survey was before the Mernda extension opened, though that added extra services: AM peak increased from 15 trains in May to 20 now.
  Hurstbridge	22.1%	0.0%	Increased crowding in AM peak. Continued duplication of the line will help run extra trains.
  Craigieburn	23.6%	10.7%	Peaked in 2016 and has been dropping, but clearly still very crowded
  Sunbury	18.4%	0.0%	Peaked in 2016 but has improved… for now.
  Upfield	0.0%	0.0%	Crowding has dropped since 2016 despite no extra services; not really clear why. (The AM peak switch from 20 minute frequencies to 18 minutes was in 2012.)
  Werribee	17.6%	5.7%	Similar to the Dandenong line; crowding had been improving, but has increased recently
  Williamstown	0.0%	0.0%	As with Alamein, no crowding recorded since 2012

  Basically, crowding on the lines serving the growth areas of Melbourne (especially Sunbury, Dandenong, Werribee and South Morang/Mernda) can be expected to worsen over coming years if nothing is done.

  Also worth noting: the focus is on peak hours, but there are now real problems outside peak hours, including weekends. Some lines run as little as every 40 minutes on Sunday mornings, and are packed. This should be an easy win to fix, but seems to be a blind spot for the government.

  The load survey notes say that counts are actually done between 6am and midday, and 2pm and 7pm. It’d be interesting to see the data from the middle of the day, when some lines see a big service frequency reduction.

  

  Trams

  Tram crowding has also worsened, with load breaches primarily on Swanston Street/St Kilda Road, and Elgin/Lygon Street (routes 1 and 6), particularly in the morning peak.

  Other hotspots in the AM peak include Wellington Parade (routes 48/75 — I’m betting mostly the 48, which usually uses small trams), and on Clarendon Street (route 12, another with small trams).

  And there’s a twist: for the first time, they measured a “non-cordon” (eg non-CBD) location: route 82 at Droop Street and Ballarat Road — and found that too is overcrowded in the AM peak.

  Perhaps this should be no surprise: despite huge urban renewal around Maribyrnong, this route is one of the least frequent in Melbourne (only every 15 minutes in peak) and runs all small trams.

  

  Decentralisation?

  One can understand where the debate about population and decentralisation is coming from – prompting talk of (among other things) fast rail to the regions.

  But if decentralisation just means fewer people moving into Melbourne (which at least has some semblance of a public transport network) and more moving into regional areas (many of which really don’t have any public transport, apart from a small number of buses and trains) then that’s not a good outcome. It just means more car dependence and sprawl in towns around the state.

  Plus our local decision makers haven’t yet learnt that big cities can and do deal with congestion… just not by building more motorways. They can’t necessarily eliminate congestion, but they can ensure that more people can get around without being caught in it, by providing alternatives to driving.

  Can PT cope?

  You can argue that public transport in Melbourne and Sydney isn’t coping with our growing population.

  But it’s incorrect to claim it can’t cope… because we haven’t really tried.

  • Australia has no metro systems (Sydney’s one line under construction doesn’t make a system) — frequent services all day until midnight, with dedicated routes? Suburban rail can transition to it, but it’s a frustratingly slow process
  • There’s almost no proper light rail with real on-road and traffic light priority — the Gold Coast is the only example in the nation.
  • Frequent buses with priority? Very rare. Brisbane is perhaps the only city doing this seriously, and even there the busways are arguably doing the job that should be done by trains.

  Meanwhile, Melbourne’s recently opened major rail projects were very welcome, but:

  • Tarneit/Wyndham Vale/Caroline Springs/Melton etc need a metro or a suburban service, but got a regional train service which is predictably struggling
  • Mernda got a “Metro” connection that runs as little as every 30-40 minutes

  None of this is good enough in a city of 5 million people and growing.

  

  While successive Victorian governments haven’t really tried in a serious way to fund high frequency high capacity public transport, they’ve tried everything they can to get the motorways to cater for growth.

  More and more lanes, “managed motorways” (metering aka traffic lights, dynamic speed limits, automated lane signage).

  It doesn’t work. Ultimately, moving millions of people around in their own metal boxes simply doesn’t work… which is why the smartest big cities have fewer motorways than we do.

  The time has come for proper, turn-up-and-go, big city public transport. Our government must do better.

  • On Wednesday I participated in a forum on ABC Radio. The full audio is here. Transport is the middle section, but the whole thing (also covering housing and crime) is worth a listen.

October 10, 2018

• Club Troppo The China-US cold war commences! Was Turnbull the first victim?

  As I predicted a few months ago, the US security apparatus is going after China relentlessly, mainly in order to have something to do. As I predicted in 2012, Australia is firmly behind the US and the wider Western alliance that will eventually form a block against China.

  The main reason the new cold war was inevitable is that the Americans have been used to being top dog in the world and the reality is now that they are the second economy in the world, well behind China in trade, but also in manufacturing and, increasingly, R&D. The Americans are a proud people with the world’s most powerful army and security apparatus so of course they were going to try and compete at some point. They have just entered the denial stage that they in fact are less important than the Chinese, so there’s a long way to go before they calm down.

  What is amazing is how long it took for the Americans to go after China. Basically it is far too late now to stop China’s rise. 20 years too late. It makes it a bit of a rearguard action that is thus probably limited in scope. China has in a way been extremely fortunate that the US was occupied with its war on terror and other relatively minor adversaries because the Chinese economy meanwhile modernised and outgrew that of the US.

  The immediate causes are varied and can be gleamed from the speech by the US Vice-president that announced the new cold war. Pence basically accuses the Chinese of meddling in other countries’ affairs, which is probably true but no different from what any other major power does. Indeed, the Chinese have cause to interfere with the US, at least in their eyes: the Chinese leadership was truly rocked by several New York Times articles on the financial affairs of the top Chinese leaders, something that was of great personal importance to those leaders. The West underestimates just how crucial ‘face’ is in Chinese culture and how the Chinese leaders will have ascribed those articles to the US administration rather than merely to journalists. Those articles will have prompted a whole machinery to gear up to try to disrupt the NYT, US politicians, and Western opinion on China in general.

  The Chinese also have form when it comes to adopting technology, with many joint-ventures ending up with the foreign partner handing over their IP to Chinese companies that subsequently start to compete with them. This tactic has been supported and encouraged by Chinese leaders for decades now, and it has worked very well for them to the chagrin of American businesses. Too bad, too late.

  Of course the Chinese embassies try to keep the large Chinese diaspora and recent migration waves in line, though the object is not so much the disruption of foreign countries but the prevention of internal unrest due to dissent brought in from outside China. To the collectivist Chinese mind set, this is entirely appropriate and crucial for their internal harmony. Western complaints about this are going to be fruitless.

  On the side of the Americans, it was already clear after the collapse of ISIS in Syria that China would be the next meal-ticket for the US security apparatus and planning indeed immediately commenced, as one could read from the US strategic defense report of 2017.

  I think that the US security apparatus worried for a while that Trump might not be totally on board with their designs and hence authorised the New York Times leak in which the only clear policy stance was the commitment to the Western alliance and the opposition to China/Russia. I interpreted that high profile leak as a clear message to the rest of the US administration that whatever Trump might tweet or say, the next enemy is China/Russia and everyone had better fall in line. It worked like a charm. A month later, Trump is on board and Pence declares a cold war.

  Australia was caught by surprise a bit by the push towards a cold war that kept growing throughout 2018, and the elites were split over it because of conflicting interests. On the one hand, the business elites did not want a Cold War because they benefit enormously from the Chinese via mineral exports, visa tourism at our universities, Chinese tax evasion funneled into Australian property, and burgeoning Chinese tourism. China is Australia’s biggest business partner and money talked. On the other hand, the Australian security apparatus is joined at the hip with the Americans and was more than keen to sign up, sensing a good excuse for more powers and budgets. Via Peter Dutton and others, they talked.

  Those who doubt that China has been on the Australian defense radar for years need only reflect on the supposed purchase of submarines for more than 50 billion dollars, a project for which the lobbying started years before the first contracts were signed in 2016. What were they for? Their purpose is to torpedo Chinese vessels in harbours like Shanghai.

  The split between these opposing parts of the elites that rule Australia then played itself out. Malcolm Turnbull came down on the side of business and called for a calm and neutral strategic position with respect to China. The security apparatus and hardliners in the Liberal party grumbled, but could not on their own topple him and the anti-China chorus subsided.

  Then Rupert Murdoch, himself closely aligned to the US administration, flew in and helped orchestrate Turnbull’s downfall. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I suspect Malcolm is the first Western leader to lose his position in this new Cold War. His successor has been quick to fall in line with the security apparatus, meaning that the business interests have lost. The anti-China chorus is rising once more and this time there is no-one to stop it.

  One wonders whether the ALP leadership has already done a deal in the background to support the new Cold War. If they haven’t already, they will soon.

October 06, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Coalition pledges faster regional trains

  On Wednesday the Coalition announced a pledge to upgrade all the main regional rail lines to 200 km/h, cutting travel times.

  ABC report: Coalition promises 32-minute trips from Geelong to Melbourne under regional rail upgrade

  Melbourne is bursting, we must take control of population growth by decentralising growth. The Liberal Nationals 200kmh high speed rail vision will enable this to happen. Every regional and country rail line, major upgrades. pic.twitter.com/Z4pznZMkMx

  — Matthew Guy MP (@MatthewGuyMP) October 2, 2018

  This is a really interesting policy. Given the ALP has pledged to investigate fast rail to Geelong, and is upgrading other lines, it’s great to see both sides talking about regional rail.

  

  “European” high speed rail

  The talk from the Coalition is of “European-style” high speed rail. I’m not sure that analogy stacks up. The Europeans are running electrified trains at 250-320 km/h, not diesel trains at 200.

  The plan is closer to the British main line railways with their large fleet of diesel-powered InterCity 125s (eg 125 mph = 200 km/h). However these were developed in the 1970s (with swing doors!) and many (but not all) are starting to be phased out as part of a huge upgrade, in favour of electric or bimodal trains on the main lines.

  In fact in a lot of the world, high speed rail is not a term applied to trains that run at 200 km/h — this is known as “higher-speed rail“!

  The other important aspect of European high speed rail is a good network of local services connecting high speed rail services to the suburbs of regional cities — this is something both sides of politics aren’t really talking about. For rail services to rely purely on walk-up catchments and Park And Ride is severely limiting patronage.

  Timetables

  Apart from proposed running times, the Coalition are a little vague on details of a service plan. Perhaps fair enough not to get into too many specifics without some detailed planning, though it’d be good to have a rough idea of what they have in mind. The current mostly hourly off-peak service doesn’t cut it.

  The plan does specify hourly trains between Colac and Bannockburn (I admit I had to look it up; it’s northwest of Geelong on the line to Ballarat), and from Waurn Ponds to Werribee. That would make for a combined frequency of half-hourly between Waurn Ponds and Geelong, alongside the main service to Melbourne.

  This is a clever idea, with a lot of potential, though the Werribee service could be more frequent if it’s going to attract people out of cars along the Princes Highway.

  A short term change flagged is more express trains between Geelong and Melbourne, to immediately cut travel times down to 50 minutes.

  In fact, the 17:33 weekday departure out of Southern Cross already does this trip in 50 minutes, scheduled to arrive in Geelong at 18:23.

  Running more trains at this speed is possible, but difficult. You’d need to change stopping patterns around to make way for the expresses, which could lead to long waits and crowding at intermediate stations.

  It would also further complicate the timetable, which already has an incredible 16 different stopping patterns in just the morning inbound services before 10am. More consistency would help cut delays and even out train loads.

  

  Is 200 too slow?

  After my UK trip last year, I thought upgrades to get Victoria’s main lines to 200 km/h would be a great idea. After all, the Brits did it in the 1970s. How hard could it be? Turns out it’s difficult — you need a new fleet, the V/Locities can’t do it.

  It would also be wise to remove most level crossings, though it may not be absolutely necessary to remove the quietest/low-risk crossings.

  Of course you’d also need to straighten out the curves, and particularly from Gippsland, additional track through the suburban area would be needed to drastically cut travel times. (The Rail Futures Institute suggests an elevated route along the Princes Highway for V/Line and Metro express trains.)

  So the next question is: if you’re going to spend tens of billions on new fleets and rebuilding track, shouldn’t you be aiming a little higher than 200, up from 160? What about 250 or 300? This would require total grade separation, but for the money, would make a bigger difference to speed.

  Or is 200 too fast?

  Alternatively… it strikes me that in terms of bang per buck, if we’re not aiming for a top speed of well above 200, a better option would be to institute upgrades that help the V/Locity trains reach their full potential.

  • Duplicate the single track sections to cut delays and allow higher frequencies
  • Straighten and upgrade the main routes to allow longer stretches at 160
  • Sort out the hopelessly long run time into Southern Cross from Footscray, which is slower than Metro
  • And definitely run more trains across the day, not just in peak hour — at least every half-hour all day, every day, if not more frequent.

  I’m betting all that would be a lot cheaper than $19 billion, and would bring huge benefits to overall travel times — in particular cutting delays and waiting times (especially to/from connecting services).

  Amazingly, according to remarks in this video (go to 8 minutes in), the Coalition plan appears not to include full duplication of the Ballarat line, just “a slight extension of some of the passing loops on the western side of Bacchus Marsh”. This shows that — just as Labor did last decade with the disastrous singling of the Bendigo line — they’ve focused far more on speed and travel time, at the expense of frequency and reliability.

  

  Reaction

  Predictably, Labor has savaged the Coalition’s proposal for its lack of detail.

  It’s clearly a very ambitious plan: Geelong fully upgraded by 2022, the rest by 2028. Is it possible? There’s an awful lot of cynicism about it, but at least the Coalition is thinking big.

  Driving the overall policy is the Coalition aim of help decentralise Victoria’s population, which makes a lot of sense.

  I don’t have all the answers, but it’s a great discussion to have, and it’s terrific to see both sides being ambitious around public transport.

September 30, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from September 2008

  How can it be October already?

  It’s still September in some timezones, so here’s my regular post of photos from ten years ago, covering September 2008.

   

  At Richmond station, I was probably trying to take a photo to help publicise the PTUA’s discount yearly tickets – but couldn’t get the ticket itself quite into focus on the old camera.
  

  Also at Richmond, one of those days when the glorious sunshine meant it didn’t matter half the platforms had no weather cover. Since then the platform shelters have been extended all the way along.
  

  As early as 2008, there were protests against the proposed road tunnel under Royal Park – what became the East West Link. This photo taken on my old mobile phone of the time, outside Docklands stadium where a corporate do. The tunnel had been proposed in the Eddington Study, released a few months earlier.
  

  A rather better photo taken by Cory Baudman, who clearly had a much better camera. I’m ranting into the microphone, but holding the loudspeaker is the late Julianne Bell from Protectors of Public Lands. I can also see Greens Upper House member Colleen Hartland in the crowd. (More photos)
  

  Two people showing things you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) do while driving. Note the clean wall of the Siemens trains – I guess this was before the period when they were regularly covered with tags.
  

  As blogged at the time, some genius remodelled the street in 2008 such that the taxi rank was split into two, forcing taxis out into traffic to move up the queue. It was fixed sometime later.
  

  Also in this month, my old car (a 1993 Magna) got taken away for scrap. Allegedly the engine was destined for the Sudan to work a pump in a village somewhere. Cool.
  

  I believe it was also ten years since the last time I went to the Melbourne Show. Here are some of the pop culture show bags on sale at the time.
  

  This view over the Showgrounds also shows the city skyline in the background. Rather fewer skyscrapers than now.
  

  Younger son Jeremy riding the train home from the Show with one of his new acquisitions. That day also prompted a blog post about the lax attitude of Connex towards ticket checks.
  

  At Flinders Street station, then train operator Connex installed the first information centre. On the opening day I was there talking to a senior Connex manager (from memory it was then-CEO Bruce Hughes) when some footy fans asked us how to get to AFL Park (in Waverley). Thankfully we gave them the right directions. The centre itself got rebranded when Metro took over in 2009.
  

September 26, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Ride the highline… if you can

  The other day I had cause to catch a train from Gardenvale to Balaclava.

  It’s interesting to compare these two stations.

  They are both elevated over main roads. Both have shopping centres that have built up around them.

  Both have connecting street-based public transport.

  Gardenvale station opened in 1906 as an additional station on the existing line, and appears to have its original ramps in place. These are narrow and steep, and definitely not DDA-compliant.

  

  Parts of the platform are also quite narrow. Apart from additional Myki readers on the outbound platform, it looks like no major works have been done here for many years, though the building on the citybound side was rebuilt following a fire in 2009.

  

  Balaclava is three stations north – this station opened in 1859, and like many streets of the streets in the area is named for the Crimean War. It was my nearest station for much of my childhood, and I remember the old ugly pebble-mix building well.

  But Balaclava has had major work done on it. Between 2012 and 2014, the entrances and buildings were entirely rebuilt, and parts of the platforms were widened. The station was upgraded to Premium (full-time staffed), filling a gap between full-time staffed stations, and there’s a coffee stand on the citybound side.

  The old entrance ramps were replaced by DDA-compliant ramps, and stairs, and there is provision for future lifts.

  

  Cleverly, there are Passenger Information Displays at street level to advise when the next train is expected. (Memo to self: go back with a real camera and get a proper photo.)

  

  Even better: the tram stop below the station has been upgraded since I was last here, with accessible stops.

  

  Unfortunately none of the trams on route 3/3a are low-floor, but some on route 16 are, benefiting those with prams, wheelchairs and luggage – as well as cutting stop dwell times. Over time, we can expect more low-floor trams to come into service. The bike lane along the platform is a nice touch too.

  

  It’s good to see Balaclava get this investment. Apart from Prahran, it’s the line’s busiest station south of South Yarra, so access is important.

  

  Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that the line’s busiest stations are all in the inner section: they have the best connecting services (mostly tram), and serve higher-density (and most likely less car-dependent) neighbourhoods. Note that of the top five, apart from Elsternwick, none have any parking!

  So, Balaclava looks good. It’d be great to see similar upgrades at other stations around the network to achieve DDA-compliance, as we move towards a more accessible transport network.

September 24, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from Europe 20 years ago

  Normally each month I post photos from ten years earlier.

  I noticed that it’s twenty years since my 1998 trip to Europe. This was the first trip I blogged in excruciating unnecessary detail – and I’m glad I did, as I’ve been rereading the posts, reliving the trip.

  I’ve taken the opportunity to re-scan some of the better photos and update the blog posts, and here they are in a post of their own.

  2/9/1998: arriving in London for the first time, I suddenly felt like I was from some hick town. The place was just so busy. This is outside Victoria Station.
  

  3/9/1998: Exploring Chichester near my grandparents’ place
  

  4/9/1998: Arundel Castle, which is probably not even in the top ten British castles… but frankly if you’ve never seen a castle before, is damn impressive.
  

  6/9/1998: On a train from my grandparents’ place near Bognor Regis, heading towards London. The photo was taken using a timer and placing the camera on the window ledge opposite. Does that mean it was a selfie, before anybody called them selfies?
  

  Later the same day, in York.
  

  York. Another selfie. Camera on a bollard.
  

  7/9/1998: Edinburgh Castle
  

  Edinburgh looking down at the railway station.
  

  10/9/1998: Near Plockton, Scotland. Camera on a rock.
  

  Plockton. It’s that kind of town.
  

  Near Plockton. Yes, there is a railway somewhere in there.
  

  The view of Plockton from across the water. Pretty scenic!
  

  11/9/1998: Doctor Who was on its long (1989 to 2005) hiatus back then, but so it was very nice to find this Police Box in Earls Court, London.
  

  12/9/1998: The most famous zebra crossing in the world at Abbey Road. Shame I glanced to my left just as my buddy Merlin took the photo… and wouldn’t know until weeks later thanks to it being a film camera.
  

  15/9/1998: We got to Bruges on our trip in 2017, but I’d also made it there with friends back in 1998. From what I saw, it hasn’t changed much!
  

  16/9/1998: Boarding a high speed train from Brussels to Amsterdam.
  

  18/9/1998: Back in… where is this place again? Once again, the perils of film cameras meant that it would be weeks before noticing that a world famous landmark appeared to be coming out of the top of my head.
  

  Finally, I’ve posted this before, but here are some video highlights from that trip.
  

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

  If you feel like wasting your time, you can read my twenty year old travel blog here.

September 19, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Apartments for trainspotters (part 2)

  Longtime readers of this blog may recall that back in 2010 an apartment block was being advertised at Caulfield, smack bang between where the Frankston and Dandenong lines diverge.

  It was never built. Google Street View shows by 2014 the site was still empty, and the advertising sign was covered in graffiti.

  Around 2016 the site was taken over by the Level Crossing Removal Authority for use during the Caulfield To Dandenong “skyrail” project.

  But most of the land is now clear again, and in the past month or two, an advertising sign (only visible to passing train passengers) has gone up.

  

  It looks to me like part of the land has been used for the skyrail tracks, which were placed slightly to the south of the old ground level tracks, leaving the development site smaller than before.

  A sales office is on the site, and their web site is eastapartments.net.au.

  

  In nine years, the price seems to have gone up by about $100,000.

  This development wouldn’t be the first homes on the site. Street View shows much older houses there in early 2010.

  As I said in 2010, hopefully the new buildings’ soundproofing is good.

September 17, 2018

• Club Troppo Results of equal opportunity programs that will MAKE YOU GASP!!

  Do Equal Employment Opportunity Statements Backfire? Evidence From A Natural Field Experiment On Job-Entry Decisions
  by Andreas Leibbrandt, John A. List – #25035 (LE LS)

  Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of
  vital import to modern economies. For their part, governments
  and companies around the globe have implemented equal employment
  opportunity (EEO) regulations to influence labor market flows.
  Even though such regulations are pervasive, surprisingly little
  is known about their impacts. We use a natural field experiment
  conducted across 10 U.S. cities to investigate if EEO statements
  in job advertisements affect the first step in the employment
  process, application rates. Making use of data from nearly 2,500
  job seekers, we find considerable policy effects, but in an
  unexpected direction: the presence of an EEO statement dampens
  rather than encourages racial minorities’ willingness to apply
  for jobs. Importantly, the effects are particularly pronounced
  for educated job seekers and in cities with white majority
  populations. Complementary survey evidence suggests the
  underlying mechanism at work is “tokenism”, revealing that EEO
  statements backfire because racial minorities avoid environments
  in which they are perceived as regulatory, or symbolic, hires
  rather than being hired on their own merits. Beyond their
  practical and theoretical importance, our results highlight how
  field experiments can significantly improve policymaking. In
  this case, if one goal of EEO regulations is to enhance the pool
  of minority applicants, then it is not working.

• Club Troppo Peer learning and financial education

  Peer Advice on Financial Decisions: A case of the blind leading the blind?
  by Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, Fulya Ersoy, Donna Harris – #25034 (PE)

  Previous research shows that many people seek financial advice
  from non-experts, and that peer interactions influence financial
  decisions. We investigate whether such influences are
  beneficial, harmful, or simply haphazard. In our laboratory
  experiment, face-to-face communication with a randomly assigned
  peer significantly improves the quality of private decisions,
  measured by subjects’ ability to choose as if they properly
  understand their opportunity sets. Subjects do not merely mimic
  those who know better, but also make better private decisions in
  novel tasks. People with low financial competence experience
  greater improvements when their partners also exhibit low
  financial competence. Hence, peer-to-peer communication
  transmits financial decision-making skills most effectively when
  peers are equally uninformed, rather than when an informed
  decision maker teaches an uninformed peer. Qualitative analysis
  of subjects’ discussions supports this interpretation. The
  provision of effective financial education to one member of a
  pair influences the nature of communication but does not lead to
  additional improvements in the quality of the untreated partner’s
  decisions, particularly in novel tasks.

• Daniel Bowen Thirty years on

  Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

  This is especially so for school reunions. My eldest son is pondering whether to even go to his – the people he wants to stay in touch with, he does via Facebook.

  Fair enough.

  I however do go to my school reunions. Melbourne High School has an active Old Boys Association which is very well organised for them.

  The 30th (gulp) reunion was on Friday night.

  View this post on Instagram

  The old school. 30 years on #gulp

  A post shared by Daniel Bowen (@danielfbowen) on Sep 14, 2018 at 12:19am PDT

  Those of us who got there by 5:30 got to have a tour of the school. Much of it looks about the same, but most (but not all) of the old portable buildings have been replaced. Overall the grand old school building is looking good, though a little shabby in places. There’s never enough funding for as much maintenance as they’d like.

  And… gasp… we got to go to the top of the tower. I never got to go up there as a student.

  The view was spectacular.

  

  

  

  The reunion proper was down in the pavilion as usual. Of the 300-odd-strong cohort, about 60 attended, perhaps not too bad after this long.

  Some speeches, a flood of memories, some reflection on those who didn’t make it to thirty years, then some raucous singing.

  The song “Forty Years On” might have been specifically designed for school reunions, and it’s damn devious of the school to implant it in our brains while when young so we can belt it out in our senior years.

  Most valuable was some good chats with old friends who I hadn’t seen in a while.

  One bloke I was with at primary school too. We had a strong bond in grade six (what’s that, 36 years ago?), but we lost touch in high school — and having thought about it over the weekend, I think that was my fault.

  

  So it was good to catch up, have some laughs and reminisce over old times.

  Great to see them all in person. Better than Facebook and Linked In.

  And the view from the tower was better in person, too. Well worth going.

September 15, 2018

• The Northern Myth Fecund – Fertile Worlds – a curator’s review by Koulla Roussos

  

  This is a guest post by artist, curator and barrister-at-law Koulla Roussos

  It is not very often that one can prepare for an exhibition review by spending days studying and examining the minutiae of space in the very institution hosting it.

  I had an opportunity recently to examine Fecund—Fertile Worlds, to reflect on the nature of exhibition making with the curator, assisting her in the de-installation, condition reporting, handling and packing of the artwork during a two-week internship at Godinyamin Yijard Rivers Arts and Culture Centre (GYRACC) in Katherine.

  Fecund—Fertile Worlds is the first in Artback NT’s Spark NT Curator Program, initiated to foster art critical and curatorial practice within the NT and to provide NT artists with opportunities to showcase their work within curated touring exhibitions.

  Artback NT is the Northern Territory’s visual and performing arts touring agency. It tours NT generated exhibitions to remote, regional and metropolitan galleries. Considering the dearth of curatorial opportunities for emerging curators in the NT, this is a welcome initiative.

  Curator Clare Armitage, who graduated in 2011 with a Bachelor of Art History and Theory with Honours from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and a Master of Art History and Curatorial Studies from Australian National University in 2016, has been exposed to the depth and breadth of the Northern Territory’s rich indigenous and non-indigenous arts practices.

  She has been employed by GYRACC since 2014 (with intermittent stints at Nomad and Outstations Galleries, some of Darwin’s best commercial art galleries) and currently holds the position of curator with GYRACC. With that in mind, I was looking forward to reflecting on the impact her ‘familiarity’ with the artists and gallery space might have had on the exhibition’s development and presentation.

  

  Fecund—Fertile Worlds features mixed-media works by well-known and respected Northern Territory artists including Chips Mackinolty, Winsome Jobling and Djirrira Wunungmurra along with a selection of works from emerging interstate artists such as Christie Torrington and Nikala Bourke.

  Acrylics on canvas and oils on boards were displayed along with digital photographic prints, sculptural and 3D installations along with a digital video projection on the wall.  The exhibition includes an exhibition wall panel setting out the curatorial premise.

  It is also supported by an exhibition catalogue, with a detailed exhibition rationale prepared by Armitage. Each art work is accompanied by an exhibition wall label, indicating the name, title, year and materials. The explanatory material provides important entry point into the art works, allowing for audiences to appreciate the themes and threads between the diverse group of art works, which is a testament to the financial and professional support this exhibition has received from Artback in its endeavours to support critical and curatorial practice in the NT.

  

  I was thrilled to see Linda Joy’s Katherine Gorge (the 2013 Katherine Prize recipient) on display.

  Getting up close and intimate with a canvas which has been carefully sanded, noting the smooth illuminating whiteness of the gessoing process, and following the little inked curls that evoke the dense forms of a majestic landscape was an absolute treat. Her repetitious mark-makings, are mesmerising, playing with perspective while depicting a country formed by powerful forces shaped by water and fire.

  The exhibition invites audiences into different worlds. Worlds that are funny and sad, threatened and flourishing, imagined and real. Noting the black ink in Joy’s work, representing a waterway that is a critical artery of an undulating river in the direct proximity of Talitha Kennedy’s 2015 two-part installation Effigy for Repressed Entropy, is one of many threads the curator has cleverly woven between works.

  

  Kennedy’s practice involves shaping using black kangaroo leather, the surreal forms of the Northern Territory’s magnificent mangrove root system, in one part hanging from the ceiling, while another part connected to a power-point.

  At this stage, I should say, that I had already seen Fecund—Fertile Worlds briefly in April 2018, when it was launched at the Northern Centre of Contemporary Art (NCCA). I was struck then by the difficulty of appreciating the art works in an exhibition space that was poorly cared for, one which has become so dilapidated that the display of art works appears incidental to its core business.

  Unlike the NCCA’s almost derelict display of Kennedy’s towering black punk-like-gothic works which were hanging limp like from a weather stained ceiling and resting on dirty smudged exposed cement, the intricacy of Kennedy’s forms at GYRACC are marked resplendent by clever lighting, sharply contrasting the black kangaroo leather aerial sculpture with the almost bleach-like pristine whiteness of GYRACC’s main gallery exhibition walls.

  The gallery’s polished floors add to the work’s capacity to blend in and create a metaphysical reach outside the immediacy of space, by sinking through and into a mirror like reflection on the floor.

  The relationship between Kennedy’s otherworldly installation works made with the soft pliable kangaroo leather and Merran Sierakowski’s work I Virri, 2015, which uses crocheted computer data cable to sculpt magnified bacteria and viruses is another connecting thread to this exhibition highlighted by Claire Armitage’s use of GYRACC’s gallery space, which was lost by the NCCA display.

  Whilst Sierakowski’s work was elegantly displayed inside NCCA’s window box, the isolation of this work from the body of the exhibition inside NCCA’s gallery space precluded it from engaging in dialogues with other works in the exhibition.

  

  I Virri’s location inside GYRACC hung inside an exposed window bay, flood lit by natural light permits closer inspection of the materials and allows for appreciation of the work’s intricate material processes.  Its direct proximity to the rest of the exhibition and Kennedy’s work, allows for a playful contrast between themes, artistic and artisanal, materials and shapes, as well as enabling an interplay between works mimicking natural and artificial forms, creating an additional tier of meaning to evoke an atmosphere tinged by artful irony.

  Whilst Armitage declared that she did not select any of the work with exhibition spaces across the NT in mind, it is apparent however, that her connection with GYRACC and familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of its exhibitions’ spaces, has allowed this exhibition to be displayed to its full potential.

  Sierakowki’s colour scheme connects with Gwenneth Blitner’s signature acrylic on canvas 2015 work, Ngukurr Cemetery and Bush Banana, which as the title evokes, engages with a bitter-sweet tinge the theme of death as being necessary to the cycle of life, sustenance  and creation, joining disparate works by artists from disparate cultures and traditions to an exhibition which evokes the dynamic diversity of the Northern Territory experience to that point of connection between nature and science.

  

  It is important to note the Centre’s art institutional position in a small regional town which is itself surrounded by sublime nature, resplendent in its unpredictable and ferocious beauty. As Katherine’s major cultural centre, at the time of reviewing the exhibition, it was hosting the Federal Senate Inquiry into PFES emissions polluting the waterways including the town’s drinking supply.

  Furthermore, aware of the town’s recent history, I approach the art works with a consciousness reflecting the collective memory of a town traumatised by floods.

  My mind was left to wander, considering the environmental risks associated with fracking, a sensitive issue in a town susceptible to biblical floods. I looked at each art work mindful of the prevailing neo-liberal orthodoxy, which consistently fails to factor in the environmental and economic devastation of regional and remote communities.

  

  It was with this bitter tinge that I inspected Steve Gough’s delicate oil works on board—three almost miniature-like landscapes capturing the rosy peach coloured sky, with the fecund and blossoming wet season cycad and grevillea contrasted against the bare but flowering dry season one. His choice to work on a small scale provides for a counter-intuitive effect to Kennedy’s larger installation.

  Whilst beautifully capturing the cycle of life and death, these un-conventional works are punctuated by humour, since the triptych is completed by a third depicting red-tail black cockatoos. The memento mori these works evoked in the tradition of Dutch oil landscape was punctuated by the imagined throng of laughter these birds managed to evoke.

  Gough’s forms and shapes of imperfect curves and contours found in natural states link to other works, forming additional threads to this exhibition’s central concept connecting growth and potency.

  

  The themes are exemplified by Tarron Ruiz-Avila’s mixed media works, where breasts in pictorial collage form manifest into with sculptural three-dimensional form. These works hint at female potency, and explicitly engage the audience in a sexual relationship with nature. Hands are represented fondling and pinching supple breasts. The plaster of Paris sculptural works in an open display on a shelf provoke erotic imaginations to do the same.

  Curves, contours, lines, and blots of paint interconnect in the vast and complex ecosystem of life. Monica Watson’s Pukara, I 2017, acrylic on canvas depicting her homeland and its flora, celebrates the kaliny-kalinypa, or honey grevillea plant, and its associated cultural story.

  The scattering of seed in the air is characterised by the repetitive gesture of a fluid brush work.  The composition includes a representation of two waterholes. The opaqueness of the pink and white brushstrokes contrasts the solid green of the waterholes, providing the exhibitions synthesis with all other works, connecting themes with the myriad of forms and colour threading throughout the exhibition.

  There are opportunities when critically engaging with the materiality of space to intertextually connect an exhibition with the happenings of the overall space.

  While visual metaphors are relatively easy to read when critically engaged, it is the aural sensations sparked by sound that can prick unintended meanings, which upon recognition, can shift consciousness through a portal where infinite juxtapositions are possible.

  It was precisely at that juncture where I was sitting before  Claire Bridge’s 2016 film and sound work Tempest Flow which captures a harmonious soundscape arrested by the siren call of chainsaws, referencing Tasmania’s controversial logging history and empire’s global assault on habitat more generally, that I became aware of other sounds, spilling from Melabat Wanbala-Ngukurr Arts, another exhibition nearby, where Walter Rogers’ voice can be heard talking and singing, accompanied by the eerie sound of clapsticks beating rhythmically.

  These sounds, spilling out from another space, from a distinct film and audio work I am Numamurdirdi 2016, wherein an important ceremony man articulates the story behind feathered headband preparation for ceremonial dancing, connecting song lines, dance and art to the health of country, that unintentionally transported me from an abstract intellectual realm to connect me, as an essentially whole being to the physical space and time of my immediate location.

  Given the opportunity to engage with this exhibition with the benefit of the curator, I understood her approach to tell a story about potential and growth, exploring the idea of “fecundity” in both biological and philosophical terms.

  According to Clare Armitage, “The conceptual underpinnings weren’t particularly rigid, and the story the exhibition tells was shaped by the inclusion of particular works.” However, her selection of work was driven by a strong desire to include early career and established artists from all over Australia, from metropolitan, regional and remote communities.

  Armitage tells me that, “The SPARK brief is that at least half of exhibiting artists will be from the Northern Territory, so that was a requirement I had to meet. As a member of the Northern Territory arts community I also feel strongly that we should be in regular and robust conversation with the rest of Australian arts, because our perspectives, politics and products are significant and unique.”

  Aside from this, her choices were informed by the works, and how she perceived these could bring to the story from a visual and conceptual standpoint, to develop an exhibition that is interesting, diverse and beautiful.

  I keep in mind my conversations with Armitage as she takes me through the process of handling, packing and completing exhibition reports after the exhibition was de-installed. I am able to touch Winsome Jobling’s Wet and Dry, 2016 feeling the physical potency in her experimentally produced handmade paper, ontologically aware of the fibres, seeds and traces of the plants from which it was made as I carefully roll and slip the work inside a tube.

  I slip on a pair of cotton gloves to handle with an almost ecclesiastic reverence Ruiz-Avila’s sculptural breasts, tactile handling the exhibitions powerful sexual metaphors. As the Senate Inquiry continues in the adjoining room, I carefully pack away the DVD box with Clare Bridge’s Tempest Flow saved on a USB stick which contains in digital silence the soundscape of torrential storms and chain saws.

  I wrap and pack away Steve Gough’s triptych imagining the bird song and laughter acutely aware of how all these sounds and images have merged synchronously in my mind with Walter Roger’s voice caring for country through ceremony and song, and wish that the exhibition continues to spread the artists hopes and fertile imaginings “ … of ourselves, our world, our hopes and fears for our future, and our enduring bond with our environment.”

  Following its Darwin and Katherine seasons, Fecund—Fertile Worlds was exhibited at Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in Tennant Creek, throughout August 2018, and will be exhibited at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs from 16 November 2018 to 3 March 2019.

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

   

  The post Fecund – Fertile Worlds – a curator’s review by Koulla Roussos appeared first on The Northern Myth.

September 12, 2018

• Daniel Bowen How big events can be a catalyst for better public transport

  Despite living in a sports mad city in a sports mad country, I’m not the world’s biggest sports fan.

  But as a public transport advocate, I embrace big sporting events, because it’s amazing the things they can help get done in transport.

  This is only natural. Such events are often a showcase, particularly in Melbourne, and governments are keen to ensure they can get spectators in and out of the arena/venue as efficiently as possible, and while ensuring that the rest of the city continues to function.

  When a hundred thousand people need to converge on a venue, you don’t want to be doing that with private vehicles.

  

  This isn’t new. Historically, all of Melbourne’s football grounds and racecourses were close to railway stations. (Yes, even Princes Park, and the Brunswick Street oval in Fitzroy. No, not VFL Park.) But I’m thinking of bigger events than just regular football or cricket.

  Just as events such as the Olympics leave “legacy” infrastructure, sometimes big events have helped to shake up public transport services.

  The Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix started in 1996. Someone twigged that the then Sunday timetable of trains every 40 minutes on most lines wasn’t going to cut it, and they instead ran Saturday timetables (every 20 minutes) on GP day. Double the usual train frequency? Unheard of!

  Subsequently in July 1999, 20 minutes became the standard Sunday train frequency between 11am and 7pm.

  Up in Brisbane, for the 2018 Commonwealth Games they got a tram network extension built in time for the event, with trams running 24/7. The Brisbane Queen Street bus interchange was refurbished. And they ran the Gold Coast rail line 24/7, including 6 or more trains per hour most of the day. Mind you, it was at the expense of some other rail lines.

  Speaking of the Commonwealth Games, let me focus on Melbourne 2006.

  

  Melbourne’s 2006 Commonwealth Games

  A raft of temporary public transport upgrades were brought in to help people get to venues, and some of them were subsequently made permanent.

  Suburban public transport was included free with all event tickets, which also allowed discounted V/Line travel. PTV has a mechanism for free PT with event tickets as part of their event planning, though it’s not often used outside hosting big international conferences.

  Evening trains ran every 20 minutes on all lines (normally 30 minutes) to encourage people to travel after the PM peak — subsequently many lines have been upgraded permanently until about 9:30pm

  6-car trains ran from first to last train — at the time, most evening and weekend trains were 3-cars, but 6 is now standard. The new HCMT fleet is being built without intermediate driver cabs, which will allow more passenger space.

  The Upfield line ran every 10 minutes as far as Coburg to support events at Royal Park

  Trams and trains were extended to 12:30am every night — later in 2006 as part of MOTC, services were extended permanently to 1am on Friday and Saturday nights, and more recently all night on some trams and all trains, which also fixed issues with Sunday trains starting too late for fun runs.

  10 City bus routes ran extended hours, including the services that subsequently got upgraded to the DART Smartbus routes.

  51 suburban bus routes extended to around 1am on weeknights to meet trains until the last service, to help relieve suburban station carparks

  Skybus ran every 10 minutes at peak times – upgrades since then mean Skybus is now every 10 minutes throughout the day, every day until midnight

  Nightrider buses ran every night of the week, not just during weekends.

  Note the confusing wording in the official publication shown above — “Normal fares apply for Nightrider services” but also “Nightrider buses do not accept Metcards.” Most people would read “normal fares” as standard tickets, but I think what they meant was that old premium fares applied, though other information clarified that Games tickets included Nightrider travel. Later changes introduced standard Metcard fares for Nightrider, and nowadays, standard Myki fares apply to weekend Night Network services.

  Authorities postponed retiring some old Hitachi trains – for pretty much the first time it was recognised that the fleet had to grow. Memorably they ended up buying some back from a collector.

  Importantly, there was no car parking at venues, including the MCG. Many would still like to see this happen.

  "The offset would amount to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a month"
  – you know what would take *actual* cars off the road? Banning parking in Yarra Park. How about it, @mcg? #YarraParkNotYarraCarpark https://t.co/h5W9UXajGe

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) September 10, 2018

  Some upgrades like these can’t easily be made permanent, at least not immediately, because they stretch the assets and staff too much.

  But these types temporary changes prove what is possible.

  The PTV Annual Report notes more than 1100 special events in 2016-17 — and as in any big city, these are alongside smaller everyday events and activities that don’t make the headlines.

  

  Getting occasional users on board

  Big attractions get occasional users onto public transport, using the system to avoid event traffic snarls and car park hassles, even if those people normally drive everywhere else.

  An ABS survey from 2011 showed that 38% of Melburnians had used public transport in the last month — far higher than the typical metropolitan-wide mode share (18% for Journey To Work), indicating a lot of people use it for some trips, but not necessarily their daily commute. Part of that would be attending events.

  Occasional use like this means more people become familiar with using the system: how and where their most convenient station is, how to use a Myki card, and indeed more likely to have a Myki card in their wallet — the Herald Sun reported in January that there are 15 million active cards out there. This means one barrier to switching to public transport more often is gone.

  I'm not really into horse racing, but I'm quite fond of the ritual of the beautiful people catching trains to the racecourse. pic.twitter.com/Q20ERunLaA

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) November 11, 2017

  How significant this is, I’m not sure, but it’s interesting that the huge upturn in Melbourne’s public transport use last decade occurred pretty much straight after the Commonwealth Games.

  Alongside other events such as New Years Eve, it added to the sense that public transport is of huge benefit to mainstream society, and is worth investing in.

  Extra event services (when they supplement, rather than disrupt/replace regular services) can help all passengers by cutting waiting times and relieving crowding… though any regular footy goer will tell you that in many cases they need to further improve service frequencies and crowd control.

  And in the longer term? While regular commuters may be grumpy at occasionally sharing their crowded train with footy fans, big events can be a catalyst for upgrades, ultimately helping in the quest for a better public transport network for everyone.

• Club Troppo Imagine if policy makers understood what Nancy Cartwright says here, rather than thinking that the elements of evidence-based policy are self-evident

September 06, 2018

• Daniel Bowen More thoughts on the suburban rail loop (Metro 3?)

  Some more thoughts on the Suburban Rail Loop — which in this post, I am going to cheekily call Metro 3 for short, since it’s been proposed after Metro 1 (currently under construction) and Metro 2.

  A week and a half on, many questions remain, but the idea still looks like an incredibly forward-thinking, positive concept, built on a vision of providing more people getting around an ever-busier city with viable public transport options.

  And the community seems to agree. There’s been broad public support for the project.

  Time and time again, it’s been shown that most people want public transport prioritised over roads, and I suspect most people are pleased to see such a forward-looking, big-thinking idea floated.

  I had an impromptu chat with a senior elected figure who actually uttered the sentence many of us have been repeating for some time now: that in a big city like ours, “you can’t just keep building roads.”

  Maybe, despite the current plans for two massive tollways (WestGate Tunnel and North East Link), there is finally recognition that our mass transit system is way behind where it needs to be for a city of this size.

  

  The initial announcement was on Facebook, and reaction has been largely positive. As I see it, this is arguably the biggest city-shaping infrastructure initiative in decades. Making public transport competitive for so many more suburban trips will get more people out of cars like few other projects could.

  Even the State Opposition isn’t attacking the idea, but rather questioning the ability of the government to deliver it.

  There is some dissent from those who think trams or buses should be boosted instead. I’ll talk about that below.

  Whether for or against, I don’t remember the Vicroads plan for a 100km long orbital outer ring road attracting this much attention.

  

  Cost

  The Suburban Rail Loop Metro 3 is undoubtedly a hugely expensive project.

  It’s also the type of project that probably wasn’t feasible when Melbourne had just 3 million people, but has become more viable (and arguably essential) now we’ve tipped over 5 million and we’re still growing.

  Cost estimates have varied wildly. Most seem to be quoting in the region of $50 billion, but the new Federal Minister for Cities Alan Tudge claimed it could be $100-150 billion — on what basis? Not sure.

  Here’s a back of the envelope costing: The Metro 1 tunnel now under construction is 9 kilometres of twin tunnels and 5 stations, costing about $10 billion. Let’s assume for a moment that each station costs $1 billion, and tunnels cost $0.5 billion per kilometre.

  Metro 3 as initially envisaged is 90 kilometres and 12 stations (though I would strongly argue for at least a handful more stations). Based on that rule of thumb, we’d be looking at $45 + $12 = $57b. So about $50b or less might be close to the mark, assuming some economies of scale from the bigger project, and remember that some of the route won’t underground.

  Certainly land acquisition and perhaps other costs should be cheaper than in the middle of the CBD, and the Metro 1 tunnel will incur costs when train passengers are diverted around works near the tunnel portals; Metro 3 won’t have these.

  There’s also talk of re-using some of the construction equipment from Metro 1 on this project.

  

  It didn’t go through Infrastructure Victoria

  Many have pointed out that the project hasn’t yet been evaluated by IV. Nor is it part of a transport plan, as required under the Transport Integration Act — at least not one that’s been published.

  There has been a fair bit of planning work done on it despite this — evidently for about a year.

  Technology

  They haven’t really talked about the technology that could be used. If it’s a new standalone line (assuming it shares some of the alignment with airport rail, but not the tracks), there’s arguably no real reason to use the existing trains or technology.

  You could do standard gauge instead of broad. You could do modern 25 Kv AC power instead of the old standard 1.5 Kv DC, which has benefits such as the number of substations required.

  You could even do… driverless trains. The technology is mature, used in many cities (Singapore is shown below), and the line will be completely segregated from road traffic and — presumably — other rail traffic.

  

  It needs a few more stations

  The western section of Metro 3 needs some detail fleshed out. At present there’s Melbourne Airport, Sunshine, and Werribee, and nothing else in between. The government’s view is that scoping out additional stations may take a little time, as that whole area is developing.

  This calls for integrated transport and land use planning. In the east, the activity centres being targeted for stations are very well established. Not so in the west.

  The government should be taking the lead here and mapping out where the western suburbs’ next big education campuses and shopping centres should go. Werribee East is one – where will the others be in coming decades? They should either be near existing railway stations, or planned stations on the new line.

  Even in the eastern suburbs, there are some very big gaps, which means there’s potential provide more stations. Cheltenham to Clayton, for instance, is about 7 kilometres.

  Where the gaps are larger than about 4 km, it would be something of a waste not to look potential additional station sites – the retail/industrial area of Moorabbin East/Heatherton at Warrigal Road would be a candidate for a station and subsequent dense development. There are similar opportunities along most of the route.

  

  Is Glen Waverley too far out of the way?

  I wonder if Glen Waverley is too much of a diversion, given it already has a station, and the centre there isn’t as large as some (though it has potential to grow). Is there a more direct spot on that line it could intersect?

  You can’t hit all of the major centres out that way of course. Deakin Burwood, or Knox City? The plan is for Deakin. But this raises another topic.

  One ring to rule them all?

  One new ring metro line won’t solve all of Melbourne’s problems. Good connections to nearby locations are vital.

  Knox City is a good example. It’ll miss out because it’s too far off-course. Extending tram 75 to the centre, and upgrading the Burwood Highway section to proper light rail with Gold Coast-style traffic light priority would help a lot.

  Like wise, the rail line will miss Chadstone, which is in dire need of better public transport. The government’s Chadstone-Monash light rail idea could work, again, if it’s designed for speed, frequency and capacity, with good rail connections.

  But certainly the new orbital line will make cross-suburban trips more viable, in a way that the Smartbus routes haven’t been able to do — and probably can’t do without dedicated lanes all the way. Upgrading the buses would be cheaper, but the politics are really difficult. The government is actually removing bus lanes along route 903 in Fitzsimons Lane.

  Yes, it seems that perhaps finding billions for rail tunnels is easier than navigating the politics of bus lanes.

  The importance of connections

  Right along Metro 3, good connecting services will be needed to help people access the stations. This goes not just for the existing rail lines it will connect to, but also connecting bus and tram services.

  Trains along an orbital route bring huge time advantages, but only if end-to-end travel time is competitive.

  So frequency needs to be good, and the physical connections also need to be well designed.

  If traffic lights worked like public transport timetables…
  Would you expect anybody to use this road? pic.twitter.com/octXTqQwd2

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) July 1, 2018

  Station exits

  It’s obviously early days, but you can already see that they’ll need to be clever with how they design the stations and their exits.

  At Monash University for instance, it would make sense to try and design it for an exit into the main part of campus, near the bus loop (hello intermodal interchange!) as well as an exit near Blackburn Road for the employment centre.

  Likewise at Clayton. One exit for the station and shopping centre, another for the medical centre.

  At the Airport, it’ll be important to have good connections to the Airport-City line and connecting bus and coach services, as well as exits well-placed for the terminals.

  

  Why not buses/trams/monorails?

  There are three key things a strong orbital route needs: good travel time (speed and frequency) and capacity.

  Frequency is a must. If running frequently, buses and trams might meet the capacity requirements right now, but would probably be lacking in the future. You can do intensive high frequency operation with articulated buses and trams, but it becomes very expensive in terms of drivers.

  Speed: A Brisbane-style busway or light rail on a dedicated route might be able to get to 100 km/h, but not the top speed of 130 that’s being talked about. How much that matters depends on the route and the number of stations. But busways often aren’t that much cheaper than rail.

  Monorails, assuming underground, wouldn’t save any money over heavy rail, and capacity wouldn’t be as good.

  Remember, we’re talking about catering for demand in a city of 8 million or more people in decades to come.

  Nobody ever seems to talk about ride quality, which comes into play at high speed, particularly for people travelling long distances. Well-constructed heavy rail trumps all other modes for this.

  Possibly there’s an argument for a Brussels-style pre-metro line that is light rail built in heavy rail tunnels, pending a later upgrade, but it’s unclear how much money that would save.

  It seems to me that only heavy rail is sufficiently future-proof for the capacity needed as the city gets more populous… you can build a rail line for long trains, but start with short ones running frequently, and build up train lengths over time.

  And heavy rail is the only mode that really measures up against the main competition: motorways.

  

  Does it all have to be underground?

  It sounds like the Airport to Sunshine section would share the alignment (but perhaps/hopefully) not the tracks, so wouldn’t need to be underground.

  Skyrail along arterial roads would also save some money compared to underground, but most of the planned route isn’t aligned to such roads.

  Can it go a bit further?

  Metro 3 is promoted as connecting all major rail lines, but misses the Sandringham line. Should it also connect there? Arguably.

  At the other end, if it serves the Werribee East precinct, there’s probably a case for it going a little further to connect Point Cook to the rail network.

  Staging anticlockwise from east to west

  Given the prime targets for stations have been identified in the east, but the west is still evolving, one can understand the prioritisation, though starting with Cheltenham to Box Hill seems to overlook that the strongest patronage is expected further north, between Clayton and Fawkner. This may be down to practicalities: Clayton may not be envisaged as ever being used as a termination point, so you wouldn’t want to build unnecessary infrastructure.

  Then again, if including Sandringham, Clayton probably is a logical point for terminating trains during disruptions and works. (Hopefully there are a few such locations planned.)

  

  Would it really take 30 years to build the whole thing? I suppose we’ll know more when detailed planning has been done. But comparisons to the 118km London Crossrail might not be fair – as much of that line is pre-existing railway.

  Travel times

  The government is spruiking the speed of the trains (130 kmh) and travel times, quoting:

  • Cheltenham to Airport 45 minutes
  • Box Hill to Airport 25 minutes
  • Monash Uni to Latrobe 25 minutes
  • Broadmeadows to Monash Uni 35 minutes

  Even if times are slightly longer than claimed, something close to this opens up a myriad of opportunities. For example, when my sons were considering their university options, Latrobe and Deakin were ruled out as too hard to get to by public transport. A fast frequent orbital line with good connections to existing rail lines would make them manageable.

  Winston from Moorabbin is very much in favour of the Metro 3 Suburban Rail Loop.
  But then, he's very much in favour of everything. #SpringSt pic.twitter.com/dhExedPCP4

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) September 4, 2018

  No doubt, this project is going to cost a fortune.

  If it goes ahead, and they get it right, and it’s accompanied by lower-profile (but equally important) upgrades to existing services, this could revolutionise public transport, making it a better option for a lot more trips across Melbourne – and opening up more opportunities for education, recreation and employment – and that’s got to be a good thing.

September 01, 2018

• Club Troppo Me at the Australian Institute of Family Studies

  The AIFS puts on a mean Annual Conference. They fussed over us speakers trying to make sure we weren’t just a bunch of talking heads. I would have liked to have attended more of it, but had another conference at which I had pontification duties at the same time.

  In any event, I participated in two very well ‘curated’ (as we say these days) panels, one lasting two hours – yes, that’s right. My opening statement to this panel is above, and the whole thing, should you wish to check it out is below. It was a great panel. And below it is a forty minute panel I was on which discussed families, behavioural economics and nudges more generally. That was just me and Sam Hannah-Rankin who seems, at least from the outside, to be doing a good job of running her innovation unit in DPC.

August 31, 2018

• Club Troppo The decline and fall of Australian economics

  I reproduce here a fine review of what seems like a fine book. I’m not buying the book because of the outrageous price the academic publishers are charging. It’s an interesting story of practical contribution – economics as clarified policy commonsense as I like to think of it. But, along with so much else, it’s been swept away by the new philistinism managerialism. Academics are hitting their KPIs, filling in their forms, but making original contributions to Australian policy problems? Not so much.

  It reminds me of something Tom Fitzgerald said in his Boyer Lectures a long time ago:

  What is inspiring . . . is the example of Australian economists who arrived at independent conclusions contrary to the world orthodoxy, who invited criticism from the most eminent upholders of that orthodoxy, and, on being rejected, put their argument in an international forum, to gain ultimately a large measure of acceptance for their initial heresy.  Today they are far better remembered and admired by an eminent American economist, the Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson, than by any Australian counterparts.  . . .  Professor Samuelson has recently referred to them as ‘my-down-under-heroes’

  If this beautiful, elegiac book does not move you to be proud to be an Australian or New Zealand economist then I fear you may need a heart transplant. A delicious little morsel at just over 250 pages, Alex Millmow’s A History of Australasian Economic Thought still manages to convey a distinct sense of what was a diverse but definably unique branch of economic thought in Australia and New Zealand. I commend Professor Millmow for this volume and recommend it highly.

  The general problem with the history of economic thought, it seems to me (I am not a historian of economic thought), is the same as with all academic history. So involved in rooting out details of specific episodes and figures, it can be intimidating and apparently unnavigable for the generalist. Millmow’s book is a splendid corrective for this problem as regards the history of economic thought in Australia and New Zealand. It touches lightly on the various episodes in this history but with sufficient depth to give the reader a real appreciation for it, and sufficient orientation to it and the body of literature around it for the reader to seek deeper knowledge if they wish.

  The organising principle of Millmow’s narrative is the history of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand and its spinoffs, the Economic Society of Australia and the New Zealand Association of Economists. His major sources for the history of thought organised around these societies are their journals, first the Economic Record and later also the Australian Economic Review, Australian Economic Papers, Economic Analysis and Policy, and New Zealand Economic Papers. This takes his history from 1925 (and earlier where appropriate) through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Full Employment Era, the Great Stagflation, and the Hawke–Keating years to leave us with an appraisal of Australian and New Zealand economic thought as it stood at the end of the twentieth century. Millmow treats as an element of Australian and New Zealand thought any significant contribution of an economist while in Australia and New Zealand, or by an economist of a definably Australian or New Zealand identity.

  The major question one may ask of the history which emerges from this is this: what, if anything, is distinct about Australian and New Zealand economic thought? Millmow answers this question distinctly well, and one comes away from this book with a definite sense of what it was that made Australasian economic thought quite distinct. One discovers it to be largely composed of answers offered to an existential question: how do our small countries earn their living and make their way in a vast, vaguely hostile world economy?

  One gets the feeling from this volume of how important the role of policy questions were for inspiring economic thought in Australia and New Zealand, all organised around that central existential question of how to survive as an economy. There was a definite feedback between practical matters of policy and the formation of new economic thought. Australian and New Zealand economic thought was, to use Robert Heilbroner’s sobriquet, a body of worldly philosophy derived by worldly philosophers made unique by their willingness to be non‐doctrinaire when considering the distinct characteristics of their countries.

  This was a time before the necessity to publish became a career‐breaking matter, and Millmow’s book gives the impression that the resulting freedom allowed Australian and New Zealand economic thought to flourish as a result of its interaction with industry, government and the public sphere. The academic economists were free to spend time bringing the latest economics to bear on matters of national importance while allowing their experience in so doing to form their own thinking and infuse their own theory.

  The outstanding examples of this were of course Colin Clark, who split his time between the Queensland state government and cutting‐edge academic work; Lyndhurst Giblin, serving the Tasmanian government as part of his role at the University of Tasmania; and Douglas Copland of the University of Melbourne, a key advisor to the agencies of the Commonwealth government, resident in Melbourne prior to 1927 and a substantial presence there for some time afterwards.

  The concern of these men and their followers in their dual roles with how Australia and New Zealand would earn their living and make their way in a vast, vaguely hostile world would give rise to the distinct Australasian body of economic thought. This body of thought made contributions especially in, but not limited to, trade theory and the theory of labour–capital relations, but also provided the intellectual grounds for what might be called the ‘Australian settlement’ in policy.

  The ‘Australian settlement’ was largely a set of institutions for negotiating the economic issues surrounding nation‐building. The Australian government, for the most part the Commonwealth government through the Commonwealth Court (later Commission) of Conciliation and Arbitration, became a sort of ‘economic parliament’ for negotiating between various stakeholders in the Australian economy which would allow the Australian economy to ‘reset’ twice in the face of existential threats, first from the Great Depression and later from stagflation. Another unorthodox feature of the ‘Australian settlement’ was a selective but unapologetically protectionist industry policy, whereby Australian economists were ready to allow protection for young industries in a young economy to exist relatively unchallenged. These elements of the ‘Australian settlement’ were a unique product of the dialogue between academy, industry, government and public sphere.

  I should note that at a recent discussion of Millmow’s book at the 2017 Australian Conference of Economists, Professors Lodewijks and Coleman’s sole criticism of Millmow’s book was its apparent neglect of Australasian economic theory in favour of Australasian economic policy. I will defer to their superior historical knowledge, but that was not my impression. I did very much get a feel for what made the contribution of Australian and New Zealand economic thought to theory distinct. Again, what I found fascinating was the manner in which that core existential question of economic survival seemed to stimulate Australian and New Zealand economists to develop singular contributions to theory which offered a new perspective on eminently practical matters. These contributions very much have the flavour of being contributions, to again use Robert Heilbroner’s sobriquet, by worldly philosophers to a body of worldly philosophy. And the list of theoretical contributions made by Australian and New Zealand economists is actually quite staggering as you make your way through this work.

  The multiplier, the Laffer curve, computable general equilibrium simulations, the Swan–Solow growth model, new consumer theory, the theory of second best, Hecksher–Ohlin–Samuelson trade theory, ‘Dutch disease’, the Phillips curve, the Breusch–Pagan test for autocorrelation, National Accounting, and a great deal of practically minded commentary on Keynes’s General Theory – all these originated in or were significantly added to by contributions made by Australasian economic thought. Again, in charting this history Millmow has again shown the importance of the feedback from practice to theory. Few of the seminal contributions made by Australian and New Zealand economists did not have direct practical importance for appraising economic phenomena and designing policy. Rarely does it seem that that omnipresent question of how a small economy earns its living and makes its way in a vast, vaguely hostile global economy wanders far from Australasian economists’ minds.

  Millmow’s splendid book thus does convey that indeed there was a distinct and unique branch of economic thought in Australia and New Zealand. It was unusual, the product of ongoing engagement on the part of the academy with industry, government and the public sphere and organised around the practical issues surrounding a small economy earning its bread and providing for its people by trade. It often deviated from the orthodoxy because of the distinction of the problems it was considering relative to those considered by the orthodoxy in older, established industrial powerhouses.

  This all changed, of course, towards the end of the twentieth century so that, as Coleman is quoted as saying, ‘there is no Australia in economics any longer. Australian economics is at an end’. It is a matter of opinion whether these changes were a Bad Thing or a Good Thing. But what Millmow has shown in his splendid book is that Australian and New Zealand economics did exist, it was definably unique, and it was at the very least very interesting. Is the future to yield a resurgence of Australian and New Zealand economic thought by a new generation? Is there to be a re‐engagement by a new generation of Australian and New Zealand economists in the universities with the non‐academic world? I don’t know, but for the sheer interest of what happened when that was the case in the past, which Alex Millmow has excellently described in this splendid little book, I hope so.

August 30, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from August 2008

  Here’s my monthly post of photos from ten years ago.

  For a while I was waging war on ghost tram route numbers via this blog post and then this Age article.

  Numbers like 7 and 9 were pointless because nobody outside a few gunzels knew them. This was tram route 7 to Malvern Depot.

  In 2011, all the obscure route numbers got renumbered to something people can actually understand.

  Route 7 followed route 6 as far as Malvern Depot, so today it would be called a 6d.
  

  Here’s route 9 to Thornbury. Today I guess this would now be an 11d.
  

  Banksy’s “Little Diver” had appeared in 2003 just off Flinders Lane. The building’s owners put some perspex in an effort to protect it, but it was subsequently destroyed a few months after this photo was taken.
  

  Massive Spirit Of Progress poster advertising the Art Deco exhibition at NGV.
  

  Bentleigh station: Some kind of work in preparation for Myki equipment installation. Note the mounting poles. The system eventually got switched-on in Melbourne at the very end of 2009.
  

  Back on the trams, this holding siding had just been built on St Kilda Road. At first, some drivers seemed not to slow down sufficiently, so the trams would lurch in and out of the points. Hopefully they’ve improved since then.
  

  The same project included this triple track at the corner of Southbank Boulevard, allowing route 1 trams (turning right) to wait for their traffic light without delaying other trams. (Perhaps a cheaper option would have been to fix the traffic light so none of the trams got delayed?)
  

  In August 2008 I got my “new” (2000-model) car. First order of the day was to put a PTUA sticker on it, something I did last month with the brand new car that replaced it.
  

  Back in December 2007, we’d gone to Spamalot, the musical. From this photo, it seems I subsequently found a can of Spam commemorating the show, though according to Wikipedia it had closed back in April.
  

August 29, 2018

• Club Troppo The Royal Commission and the wages of complacency: Scandals as far as the eye can see
  

  Cross posted from Inside Story

  In 1943, back working where he’d been during the first world war, the now-famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to a friend:

  Here I am back… in the Treasury like a recurring decimal — but with one great difference. In 1918 most people’s only idea was to get back to pre-1914. No one today feels like that about 1939. That will make an enormous difference when we get down to it.

  And so it did.

  And here we are like Keynes’s contemporaries in 1918. Keen to return to the set-up we know got us into this mess. In the midst of the financial services royal commission, scandals stretch as far as the eye can see. They are rife in finance, of course, but are also evident in the way professionals — from the commanding heights of academia to policy-makers and opinion leaders — have failed to move beyond a vision of reform that was already stale at its zenith in the 1980s and 90s. After the global financial crisis, that vision stands today bereft and becalmed, increasingly irrelevant in today’s financialised, professionalised, digitised world.

  Trauma, intellectual growth and reform

  The postwar reforms were profound, giving us a generation of unmatched prosperity. But there’s also a more recent time when we turned our back on the bad old days. In response to the recessions of 1975 and 1982, and after prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s feints towards economic liberalisation, the Hawke and Keating governments turned “economic rationalism” — as it was then called — into a comprehensive program to refurbish our economic institutions.

  In each case reform was built on new understandings that had originated in the academy. Where the Keynesian revolution had underpinned postwar reform, post-1960s reform was founded on a cluster of ideas. They included George Stigler’s critique of “regulatory capture,” Milton Friedman’s popularising of proposals for unbundling of delivery from the financing of government services (using vouchers and income-contingent loans, for instance), and Ronald Coase’s idea of reassigning property rights to achieve specific objectives (think pollution permits and spectrum auctions).

  All these men were University of Chicago economists favouring greater reliance on markets. But they thought of these ideas as technocratic rather than ideological. Many of them — like income-contingent student loans and the liberalisation of airlines, tariffs and agricultural subsidies — had egalitarian implications and were supported by many from the centre left to the centre right.

  The institutional refurbishment following the second world war lasted twenty-five-odd years. But it was only a few years before the Hawke-era reforms atrophied into a reductive formula under which change that looked more rather than less “market-based” was preferred on principle. This might reflect the lobbying power of business even with centre-left governments. But it was also the product of faltering intellectual progress in the academy and the political class’s wider failure of imagination and empathy for the people for whom they ostensibly govern.

  Market-oriented reform

  Supporting greater “market orientation” worked well when it involved dismantling the detritus of eight decades of policy-making by deal-doing. Tariffs, agricultural subsidies and regulated shopping hours were slashed and government-sanctioned cartels in the airline industry broken up.

  Reform also inspired some well-conceived new policies that could be achieved with the stroke of the pen, as when we more tightly targeted family payments around need. (Not all notable Australian policy successes followed this formula, and they showed Australian policy-makers at their best. They included programs to divert people from residential aged care — via Home and Community Care — and more sophisticated ways of partnering with communities through such initiatives as the AIDS strategy and Landcare.)

  But relying on a summary aesthetic of greater “market orientation” was no way to reform sectors — utilities and finance, for instance — in which market failure is pervasive. There, as Mark Twain once put it, it’s not what you don’t know that does the damage. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. Looking back, the landscape is strewn with disasters.

  In infrastructure and utilities, monopoly problems abound, so regulation remains inevitable and new rent-seeking pathologies lie in wait for those unpicking the old ones. Here, our reform efforts brought forth overpriced tollways, energy, desalination plants, airports and airport carparks, and governments selling buildings they owned only to rent them back at vastly higher ongoing cost. And that was just the opening salvo of a lurch towards crony capitalism, as the insiders who engineered the changes parachuted into careers lobbying their successors on behalf of the beneficiaries of their reforms. In the process, we’ve seen massive overinvestment in electricity transmission and, until recently, underinvestment in other infrastructure.

  That’s before we even get to finance.

  Here’s a marvellous passage in which the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf introduces finance as “a jungle inhabited by wild beasts”:

  [T]he purchasers of promises will know that the sellers normally know much more than they do about their prospects. The name for this is “asymmetric information.” They will also know that those who have no intention of keeping their word will always make more attractive promises than those who do. This is “adverse selection.” They will know that even those who are inclined to be honest may be tempted… not to keep their promises. The source of this is “moral hazard.” The answer to adverse selection and moral hazard… is to collect more information. But this too has a drawback: “free-riding”… [T]hose who have made no investment in collecting [information] can benefit from the costly efforts of those who have… That will, in turn, reduce the incentive to invest in such information, thereby making markets subject to the vagaries of “rational ignorance.” If the ignorant follow those they deem to be better informed, there will be “herding.” Finally, where uncertainty is pervasive and inescapable — who, for example, knows the chances of nuclear terrorism or the economic impact of the internet? — the herds are likely both to blow and ultimately to burst “bubbles.”

  And that’s before allowing for the special status of the public–private partnership that is banking. Here, commercial banks resell basic banking services they access exclusively from the government-provided central bank that, as lender of last resort, effectively guarantees their liquidity. Oh, and if that isn’t enough, governments first guarantee them, as the Rudd government did over one panicked weekend in 2008, or, failing that, simply hand over money to keep the show on the road.

  Bank of England governor Mervyn King describes this diabolically bad set-up as the worst “of all the alternatives.” We’ve duct-taped it back together: a little more capital adequacy here, tighter prudential standards there. Global debt is now $164 trillion, or 225 per cent of global gross domestic product, 12 per cent higher than its last peak in 2009. The banking system, both nationally and internationally, remains structurally unstable, just as it was before the crisis, amplifies the economic cycle, just as it did before the crisis, and will blow up again, drawing taxpayers back into its maw.

  Are you feeling lucky?

  The road not taken

  All this is a microcosm of a wider and longstanding intellectual complacency. In the sixty years since they were first articulated, there’s been little replenishment of the first generation of reform ideas I quoted above. And so our policy-makers and opinion leaders wing it against a backdrop in which two caricatured abstractions — “free markets” and “government intervention” — fight it out. This dichotomy feels compelling. It gets our ideological juices going and can fuel a thousand Twitter storms. But it makes little sense.

  The standard view among economists, and more informally among the public, is this. Markets provide private goods like cookies, cars and cameras, while governments provide public goods shared by all, like roads, rubbish removal and regulation. That’s a good start, but it’s a lousy conclusion. It ignores how profoundly individual and collective endeavour are enmeshed.

  And that’s before considering something that economists have largely ignored since Adam Smith founded his whole view of society on it — the dialectic of individual endeavour within the collective bonds of culture. The very language in which I’m addressing you is a public good that is owned — to the extent the term makes any sense — collectively. So are any number of other aspects of its transmission to you, from the open-source software powering so much of the internet and its epiphenomena to the internet itself.

  In areas like education, health, aged care, finance, research, legal services and cultural industries like the arts, and in networks like media, transport, energy, telecommunications and other infrastructure, and in city planning, output is better thought of as the joint product of competitive and collective (collaborative and regulatory) activity. Each sector requires the evolution of quite different institutions in which public and private, competitive and collaborative considerations concatenate at every level from high policy down to workplaces.

  And we’ve barely started on the project of trying to shed intellectual light on these issues in ways that might cash-out in practical improvements to the way our institutions work. We might have begun decades ago, if we’d understood reform as refurbishing the institutions of the mixed economy.

  THE SCANDAL OF ROYAL COMMISSIONS, AND BEYOND…

  Let’s start with the scandal of the royal commission itself. A Productivity Commission inquiry costs three or four million dollars — a figure that might double or quintuple if we include the costs of outside participants in the inquiry. The PC actually has discovery powers not unlike a royal commission’s, though it’s never used them and it wouldn’t be the appropriate specialist body for searching out and pursuing wrongdoing. But it provides an indicative benchmark on the costs of a good look around. So too does the recent inquiry into the public service, which at around $10 million seems excessive to me but is similar.

  Though I would expect its policy conclusions to be meagre — it is focused on misbehaviour — the royal commission is budgeted to cost government $57.5 million. Each of the major banks is spending around that on their favoured big law firm. Then there’s external PR, lobbying, day-to-day “issues management,” crisis and/or strategic issues management, and so on.

  Add to this substantial in-house expenditure on all these items. Smaller firms would be spending less, but there are many more of them — in banking, funds management and financial advice. Consistent with the adage “never let a good deed go unpunished,” the industry super funds have also been drawn in, their solid investment returns and relative lack of scandals putting the big end of town to shame.

  So half a billion dollars seems like a safe underestimate of the total cost of this exercise. Much of it goes on massively inflated salaries to top lawyers — think ten to fifteen thousand dollars a day. But more goes on sheer inefficiency. The legal system has virtually no regard for directing lawyers’ efforts to where they’re most valuable. So the commission sends out trawling requests for all records of all misconduct. This has at least uncovered lots of bad things, though many had already been reported to authorities and then kept quiet.

  Still, this approach is prodigiously wasteful in other legal proceedings for reasons we’ll discuss shortly. Sure enough, ASIC’s gun-shyness in pursuing corporate wrongdoing arises partly from this wastefulness. It blew $20 million in legal costs going after OneTel and $30 million going after Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest. $30 million! Presumably total costs, including Twiggy’s, exceeded this figure handsomely. But looking at the case notes, and even allowing for the inevitability of “gold plating” some processes when one is pursuing the potential wrongdoing of the wealthy, this is an extraordinary amount to determine a legal question. Oscar Wilde once described fox-hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Here we’ve sent in the irredeemable in pursuit of the insatiable.

  Why we might have expected better: the professions

  One theme of the economic reform playbook from the University of Chicago was the way the professions are just one genteel instance of Adam Smith’s famous line, “People of the same trade seldom meet… even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

  This should figure in any list of the unfinished business of economic reform. Policy reform has been all over this question in vocational training, with “competency based” training and certification. Reform in the professions does figure in the list of unfinished reforms Gary Banks compiled as chair of the Productivity Commission. But how often do we see high-profile champions of reform highlight the issue?

  And if it were to be taken seriously, there’d be so much more to successful reform than simple deregulation of barriers to entry. At both macro and micro levels, professions typically exert a huge influence on the demand for their services. The lawyers representing each side in a case effectively dominate legal procedure and will gold plate each stage of the process to an extraordinary degree. (Ask Twiggy Forrest or his adversary, ASIC.) Likewise, in the country where the market is least constrained by government acting as “informed purchaser” of health services for the community — the United States — health spending has surged to being half as large again as the health sectors of comparable countries, with worse health outcomes.

  I’ve only highlighted financial aspects of reforming the professions. Making them truly responsive to our needs is a bigger prize. Imagine a market in which you might be able to find medicos, lawyers, investment advisers and managers in the way you can assess which restaurant suits you on TripAdvisor. Throw in consumer advocates, found in the same way, who help you navigate the maze of professional services to best meet your needs.

  The analogy with TripAdvisor is facile, of course; and nor could the idea be dictated in a learned journal. It could only succeed if pursued iteratively, building the institutions in situ with co-design and dialogue between practitioners, their clients and disinterested experts guiding experiments to build better practice. The ideal is well expressed by businessperson Charlie Munger: “A seamless web of deserved trust.” Where have we heard that, or anything like it, in the endless debates on “reform”?

  An information age for spin doctors and conmen

  Commentators on the royal commission have been shocked, shocked that AMP sought amendments to Ernst and Young’s reports. But what else would you expect? We might be taken aback by the frequency, regularity and flagrancy of AMP’s entreaties. But who really believes that firms aren’t heavily invested in getting what they want from those they hire to perform “independent” analysis? This applies to auditing, which should be a truly fundamental public good, its purpose being to ensure that the connections between the different parts of our immensely complex economy are based on financial reality.

  The constraint that stops auditors spinning any old pack of lies — the way those advertising patent medicines did in the nineteenth century — is that auditors wanting to remain in business must conform to professional standards. But that leaves plenty of wiggle room, and so increasing effort and resources go into “stretching the envelope,” to use a tellingly recent expression.

  This is just one small example of how an information supply chain gets subtly perverted. Within governments, the same thing happens endlessly. We’ve set it up that way. All manner of “impact analyses,” from regulatory to environmental, are performed or commissioned by the very agencies whose impact is under review. Auditors are chosen by the firms they audit the world over, and the Australian approach of having agencies complete “regulatory impact analyses” in defence of the regulations they are promoting is offered as typifying best practice within the OECD.

  Even this is the tip of a very large iceberg. Far more shockingly than AMP’s clumsy mishandling of the optics of “independence,” the utterly corrupted markets for information in nineteenth-century patent medicine markets have been replaced by much subtler corruption that steadily worsens as traditional professional standards give way to the intensifying pursuit of revenue and other institutional imperatives. Driven by various factors, not least academics’ and learned journals’ competition to “publish or perish” and their resulting lack of interest in “null” results and replication, published results are full of bogus findings. As they say in the trade, “if you torture the data enough, it will confess.”

  Scholars recently found that only 11 per cent of pre-clinical cancer studies could be replicated. John Ioannidis, a leading scholar in the field, came to this devastating conclusion: “Overall, not only are most research findings false, but, furthermore, most of the true findings are not useful.” Incredibly, the process by which research then feeds into the proving up of drugs for human use is likewise tangled in similar conflicts. Researchers’ funding depends on the favour of drug companies and widespread suppression of “unsuccessful trials.”

  Once drugs are on the market, their marketing is further compromised by conflicts of interest. And so the dominant treatments for vexing and chronic conditions, from anxiety and depression to the short attention span of children, are marginally efficacious drugs while less easily privatised and possibly more efficacious social cures go largely unfunded and unexplored. This is worst in the United States, which tolerates more advertising and more aggressive drug marketing than other developed countries. One result is the opioid epidemic, which has now given the United States the extraordinary distinction of being the first country since records were kept ever to experience peacetime falls in life expectancy for large socially mainstream demographic groups.

  Gary Banks’s list suggested removing restrictions on the ownership of pharmacies, but made no mention of any of this.

  MICROECONOMIC REFORM FOR THE INFORMATION AGE

  These issues concern the arteries of our information economy. Yet, compared with the set-piece reform talking points driven by business — the state of the budget, over-regulation, restrictive workplace practices and tax — and the obligatory warnings against backsliding on trade protection, they’re largely absent in our reform conversation. They’re nowhere to be found in the endless op-eds and “summits,” where the tall poppies of the Lucky Country bemoan declining productivity growth, and canvass the favours that might be done them while they lament the pervasive lack of leadership.

  If we’re to rise to the challenge, we’ll have to ditch all the barracking for “free markets” or “intervention.” When markets work, they do so miraculously by harnessing the information distributed throughout society. Yet they also corrupt information flows wherever one side has better information than another — say, about the shoddy product they’re selling. So solutions to these problems must be pragmatic hybrids of competition and collaboration — accessing and leveraging local knowledge while minimising conflicts of interest throughout the production chain.

  Around the Western world “information policy” is mostly stuck in early prototype. Thus, governments issue crude edicts with little care for their effectiveness. In finance, for instance, mandated product disclosure statements for investments cost the economy billions annually, but go virtually unread. Meanwhile, as the scandals about financial “advice” surge from time to time, new regulation is developed. But it always resembles a PR makeover rather than serious policy action. Some corrupt limbs are jettisoned so the rotten body — the corrupt business model — can live on.

  Both investment “advisers” and mortgage brokers are now subject to extensive and costly regulation, including the usual mandatory disclosure of commission payments. But it’s all built around the existing model and its fundamental deception — that they’re “advisers.” Regulation now requires practitioners to provide formal written “advice” to their clients — generally adapted from master scripts spewed forth from software marketed to the industry as “sales technology.” Salespeople still play their well-rehearsed role as their clients’ fiduciaries (though most still lack even a university degree) but now as government-approved professionals.

  This fecklessness is reinforced by academia’s disciplinary values. There’s a vast literature on the economics of information. But it’s nigh-on impossible to get these issues into the obligatory formal mathematical models required in academic publishing without ruthless abstraction down to ideal types. This is an unpromising hunting ground for new hybrid institutions in which competition and collaboration would be structured in some new and promising way. Recall that none of the ideas I cited from the Chicago School came from formal modelling. Rather, they came from empirical investigation, helpful reframing of problems or institutions, and pragmatic insights, or what a software coder would call “hacks.”

  Note that in our discussion of the travesties of regulating financial advisers, we’ve not even got to the main game, which must surely involve surfacing which advisers are providing the best advice and structuring a market that helps consumers find them. One likely prospect would be improving the transparency with which professional reputations are made. But if we simply impose this from the outside, as we’ve done with NAPLAN testing for instance, what’s made transparent will probably be the wrong thing, and even if it isn’t, it will still be vitiated by gaming and buck-passing. Professions and industries must be closely involved in, but should not dominate the building of, standards against which they’ll be judged, while we ensure that those standards represent the interests of users.

  We should be asking how we could build institutions to get important information to people in ways they can use. We already know the recent on-time departure rates for airlines, for instance, and the workers’ compensation premiums of firms, which offer a good proxy for workplace safety. What kinds of institutions would build routines to bring this and other relevant information to the attention of those who need it — buyers of airline tickets and prospective employees respectively — when they need it? We could begin without cumbersome regulatory edicts — with groups of industry and user representatives developing disclosure standards — and with governments and other civil society institutions using their convening power to forge greater regard for the collective public good (the standard) so competition between providers is actually in pursuit of something of value. We’d talk and experiment our way to better information flows and better lives. Isn’t this better than ideological barracking for “free markets” or “intervention”?

  Wither post-reform renewal?

  Meanwhile, the internet is reconfiguring the ecology of public and private goods. Digital artefacts, like language, are potential public goods — available for endless, costless reuse. You’ve probably heard of the “free-rider problem,” which can kill off improvements like new drugs because the scope for using others’ ideas without paying undercuts the original incentive to develop them. The problem is real enough in some areas, and it’s why governments subsidise research and development and protect intellectual property. But the “free-rider opportunity,” where existing cultural artefacts — like words and ideas — spread for everyone’s benefit, has always been more important. That we’ve never heard the expression is a testament to how biased towards private interests our discourse really is. When it comes to sharing, the vested interests driving public debate are vastly more preoccupied with preventing it from undermining private profit than with optimising the immense and increasing opportunities and advantages it offers.

  Be that as it may, with the advent of the internet, the free-rider opportunity is burgeoning as a slew of new public goods are privately provided. They include open-source software, blogs and Wikipedia, where people generate digital artefacts to satisfy their own desires and then throw them open for digital sharing to work its magic. And public goods privately provided for profit are also burgeoning. Google and Facebook could have marketed their products behind a paywall to monetise more of the value they generated. But in those cases, as with so many others, the free-rider opportunity afforded by the internet now so overwhelms the free-rider problem that monetising a small fraction of a public good via advertising has made their owners vastly richer than they’d have been if they’d obsessed about free riders, as our policy debate does, and provided their services as private goods for a fee.

  The internet has certainly given the entrepreneurs of the world plenty to be getting on with. Government policy-makers not so much. I’ve suggested a whole class of digital public goods delivered by public–private partnership, and as chair of Innovation Australia I presented them to scores of officers senior and junior from the federal Departments of Innovation, Treasury and Communications. We’ve had a major innovation statement since then in which I participated at senior levels. No one disagreed with the ideas. Several found them exciting or inspiring. But they never took hold — even to be ultimately rejected further up the line. In the jaded discourse of our post-reform world, they could never be more than innocent entertainment. It’s so much easier just turning out the same old, same old.

  Back to where we started

  Since before the finance industry royal commission was announced, the Productivity Commission has been conducting a major inquiry into intensifying competition in finance. My submission proposed a small “hack” that could make a big difference: a slight gloss on an old idea of “competitive neutrality.”

  Indeed, my proposal “completes” the idea of competitive neutrality, putting it on an ideological level playing field, as it were. Since we’ve taken so seriously the idea that, if they compete with private firms, government enterprises should compete on a “level playing field,” shouldn’t we also take the converse idea seriously — that where governments have substantial investments in providing services exclusively to some group, they should provide them on an unsubsidised basis to all comers?

  This would see governments opening up the superannuation services they provide for their employees to all comers. It would also see the utility banking products central banks provide to commercial banks — products like savings and payment accounts with the government — opened up to the general public online.

  The PC’s draft report on finance dealt with competitive neutrality in banking with the silence of a holy order. With others taking interest — from Martin Wolf to the Greens (who adopted it, quickly topped and tailed for political consumption) — the PC’s final report broke its silence. Not to engage with the issues, but to shoo them away. They think it’s a bad idea. And here’s the thing. Maybe they’re right. Policy is a difficult game with more moving parts than anyone can feel confident about. But if we’re to get even a glimmering that we’re reasoning our way to a decision rather than having our prejudices do all the work, the PC needs to weigh the pros and cons conscientiously.

  But that’s not how the game has worked in Australian economic debate for a long while. Instead, the PC points to some untoward possibilities. It doesn’t suggest how likely they are, how bad they’d be or what might be done if they happened. Nor does it weigh those concerns against possible benefits. Rather than engage with a new idea that goes (however slightly) against the grain, it simply gainsays it as John Cleese does in Monty Python’s classic argument sketch. My proposal got the five-minute argument. But we’ve been getting the full half hour for decades.

  As Thomas Paine once observed, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” There’s certainly lots to be thought about after the good, the bad and the ugly of thirty-odd years of reform and economic and social development in the age of the internet. But when the royal commission hands down its report and the vested interests of finance are at their weakest point, the intellectual work to get us beyond a bit more tinkering won’t have been done.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

August 27, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Melbourne orbital rail proposal

  Okay, I didn’t see this coming.

  Orbital rail for the middle ring of Melbourne, announced on Facebook this morning.

  Labor say they want to build a 90km suburban rail loop from Cheltenham (by which they appear to mean Southland), Clayton, Monash, Glen Waverley, Deakin Burwood, Box Hill, Doncaster, Heidelberg, Latrobe Uni, Reservoir, Fawkner, Broadmeadows, Airport, Sunshine, to Werribee.

  Some of the detail is a little hazy, and would be subject to further study, but it seems to be aimed at hitting the biggest suburban traffic generators that don’t currently have rail.

  It’s unclear where (or if) intermediate stops might be located, particularly between the Airport and Werribee.

  At least from Cheltenham to the Airport would be underground tunnels. The whole project would support a more polycentric city, which makes a lot of sense, enabling cross-suburban trips in a way that Smartbuses don’t quite manage, and help Melbourne develop more jobs not just in its CBD and inner suburbs, but across the greater city.

  

  Train services on both the new and existing lines would need to be frequent of course, with easy connections to and from the existing network. It would also provide regional train connections at Clayton, Broadmeadows and Sunshine.

  Labor say the line would not only be Melbourne’s longest, but also Melbourne’s busiest, with around 400,000 passenger trips per day.

  The project might divert some people away from the busiest inner-city part of the rail network, but would inevitably generate more public transport trips as well.

  Doncaster would get rail – just not in the way most people expected… Doncaster to the City via Box Hill would become a more time-competitive option.

  I wonder if they assume the orbital trains would be similar technology to the existing fleet, or something different? To support frequent services, perhaps they would build the stations for full-length trains, but initially run shorter ones.

  Business case funding of $300 million will be provided if Labor is re-elected, then construction starting 2022, in a phased approach but most likely concentrating initially on the southeastern section first, with the Airport to Sunshine portion falling under the existing Airport rail project, which would share the same alignment.

  And yes, suddenly some other Labor ideas make sense in context, such as Monash Uni/Rowville light rail instead of heavy — the heavy rail option would be Clayton to Monash instead.

  This is Big City thinking, and should be applauded, though who knows how much it will cost and how long it’ll take to build. Billions and decades, I would expect.

  It’s incredibly ambitious, which is great to see. Not that it lets them off the hook on other, smaller things like fixing Melbourne’s buses (particularly to help people access railway stations) and all-day frequent trains on the existing lines.

  But if they can pull it off, it’s huge, a game changer for the city.

  • Transport campaigner Garry Glazebrook proposed a similar rail line last year
  • Paris is building an orbital line; London’s Overground is developing into a similar network; Singapore’s Circle Line is also similar
  • State government: Underground Suburban Rail Loop To Connect Victoria. Suburban Rail Loop project information
  • Media: The Age, Herald Sun, ABC
  • This blog post has been adapted into an Age Opinion article
• The Northern Myth Bob on Bob. Bob Dylan in Sydney and Newcastle, August 2018. A review by Robert Adamson

  Bob Dylan had a great time in Sydney last week. He gave two concerts of his own and also attended the Opera House for a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Rod Quinn interviewed Opera Australia’s artistic director on ABC radio.

  Lyndon Terracini said Bob turned up trying not to look conspicuous, ‘wearing a hoodie, a hat and huge scarf’. Dylan loved it and was really fascinated by the fact that the singers didn’t use microphones, he asked Terracini: ‘How do these guys do this? I can’t see her diaphragm moving and she’s so small’. They spoke about the microphone as third person—operatic voices projected directly to the audience.

  Quinn asked Terracini what he thought of Dylan’s voice, the director said: ‘I see Dylan as a poet who uses music as a mechanism to communicate text—his lyrics affected generations of people.’ (I’ve always preferred Dylan’s voice to Opera myself.)

  I went with Anna Johnson, the best art critic around these days, Juno is in Paris so gave Anna her ticket. We headed out from Hawkesbury River on the M1 Pacific Motorway, and few of hours later slid into the outer suburbs of Newcastle. After a couple of U-turns the Entertainment Centre at Broadmeadow appeared. It looked like a B-Grade concrete space ship from a sci-fi movie that had been plonked down onto an outsized football field: a far cry from the Sydney Opera House or the venerable Enmore where Dylan played last Sunday.

  

  Happily we were able to park in the road outside the entrance. At the gates we found ourselves joining a band of Dylan fans keen to be early. By the time we were seated, the centre was a packed house, the show started at 8pm exactly. The lights came up on Dylan standing legs apart at his piano. He often takes on the stance of a boxer, and he was smiling.

  (Dylan wrote in Chronicles: ‘Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me. ‘You look to light for a heavyweight kid, you’ll have to put on a few pounds. You’ll gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper—not that you’ll need much in the way of clothes when you’re in the ring—don’t be afraid of hitting somebody too hard’)

  Well, it seems Bob took all that advice seriously.

  Dylan launched into ‘Things Have Changed’ quick with irony; Bob’s piano leading the guitars into a yet another unfolding previously unheard arrangement, fluid and seemingly spontaneous. Maybe not so much irony as I first thought.

  These days the lyrics make more sense than when the song was featured in the movie Wonder Boys. Think of current headlines and Dylan’s line, ‘The next sixty seconds could feel like an eternity’—it brings to mind Ezra Pound’s dictum, ‘Poetry is news that stays news’.

  We were connected now, plugged into Dylan’s electric freedom and his voice rode with a rough edge over the tight music.
  ‘Concert’ was not quite the word for this performance, as words cracked in the air, I was aware I liked it more than any ‘singing’ I have heard before. When Dylan sang Pay in Blood (But not My Own) his voice sounded ancient, harsh and merciless,

  Night after night, day after day,
  They strip your useless hopes away
  The more I take, the more I give,
  The more I die, the more I live

  The musicians rocked as Bob spat out iron lyrics: ‘This is how I spend my days / I came to bury not to praise’.

  I listened as my projection of time dissolved, memory and its million golden birds sang through years I may or may have not lived: this could be where Dylan met those Early Roman Kings. A limbo stretching throughout history, ‘Another politician coming out the abyss/ another angry beggar blowing you a kiss’—Dylan’s humour can be agile, blunt or acidic, ‘Gonna put you on trial in a Sicilian court’

  Back to the river again. ‘Wading through the muddy water, I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere.’

  Such a great set list of songs: It Ain’t Me Babe so final, so bleak yet hopeful, that’s it and think about love.

  Some of my favourites were Love Sick, with existential echoes not bouncing back, and a Boogie Woogie arrangement of Gotta Serve Somebody, lightened up and more ambiguous than on record. Desolation Row was airy and almost lovely, Dylan sang it in a haunted melody and changed some of the lyrics and his dark humour licked and twitched playfully around phrases in each verse.

  Then the most unexpected song of the night, When I Paint My Masterpiece, emotionally charged and I loved some new lyrics, ‘I’m going to lock all my doors and look inside’ some others I’ve forgotten. This was a rare treat because Dylan has hardly performed it since he was with The Band.

  At this stage I was reminding myself we were in Newcastle. Other highlights were Duquesne Whistle, Honest With Me, Tryin’ To Get the Heaven, Tangled Up in Blue—a dreamy version—tilted with pain and rueful. Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, clean and perfect with the band holding back.

  I think Dylan’s last five albums of original songs are some of his best; like the great poet W.B.Yeats the work improves as he gets older. It was a brilliant set list, best of all the seven concerts I’ve seen, from the 1st April 1978 to last night.

  Dylan’s triple sided sense of humour threaded the songs together and also when he needed to, he poured forth his furies, so many aspects. When he sang Ballad of a Thin Man it sounded as if he still meant every word of it.

  I have to end with my favourite performance. Soon After Midnight, where Bob sings :‘It’s soon after midnight And I’ve got a date with the fairy queen’ It took me back to Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (1590) and here I’ll end by quoting the first verse of Dylan’s song back to him:

  I’m searching for phrases
  To sing your praises
  I need to tell someone
  It’s soon after midnight
  And my day has just begun.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Robert Adamson is an internationally recognised poet and one of Australia’s most respected and awarded writers. From Canticles on the skin (1970) to Net needle (2015), his 13 collections have won just about every prize available, including the NSW and Victorian Premiers’ prizes, the Age Book of the Year, the CJ Dennis and Banjo awards, and the Grace Leven prize, and he has been awarded both the Christopher Brennan and Patrick White prizes for lifetime achievement.

  Adamson was the inaugural CAL Chair of Poetry at the University of Technology.

  The post Bob on Bob. Bob Dylan in Sydney and Newcastle, August 2018. A review by Robert Adamson appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Club Troppo Monetary policy settings: hawks, doves and the seat of the pants

  What’s at stake in monetary policy? The most obvious answer is “jobs and growth” – to coin a phrase. The idea is that, by meeting its target of low and steady (2-3%) inflation, the RBA tries also to keep us as close as practicable to full employment. But, as we’ve realised since the GFC, there’s also “financial stability”. And right now they’re in some tension. For years the RBA has been reluctant to cut rates because low interest rates were what blew the financial bubbles that got us into this GFC problem – capiche?

  Indeed, there’s been no shortage of people telling us that cutting rates as far as we already have is crazy. But there’s something else at stake. Economic ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ are performing a different self-image. All pundits like to think they’re evidence based. Even so, those animal names came from military strategy. Hawks are serious and tough. What they have to say may not be nice, but they’re not afraid to tell us to take our medicine. They’re rigorous chaps.

  Doves let in a little more love. Why some of them could even be chapettes (my spell-check suggests “chapattis” but I’ll just let that bit of algorithmic misogyny go through to the keeper). So how much is the debate a psychodrama between hawks and doves, and how much is it a careful weighing of the costs and benefits according to the evidence?

  I’ve only read those complaining that rates are too low en passant as it were. I’ve not read them closely. So it enables me to propose a test which, in the full glory of my ignorance has some claims to objectivity. Here’s one commentator quoted by Gene Tunny which prompted me to pose my test.

  …the RBA had recklessly underestimated the impact of its 2012 and 2013 rate cuts on house price growth and credit creation, which would precipitate a bubble and the need for unprecedented regulatory constraints on lending…

  What I find unsatisfying about this is that it doesn’t paint the story as a dilemma which can only be solved by weighing pros and cons of the alternatives. It suggests that there’s one true path which, at least in principle, is pretty clear (perhaps the author sketched out the considerations I’m suggesting – I genuinely don’t know).

  I think thinking this thing through needs to consider at least two things.

  The first is that old business about costs and benefits. If higher interest rates now will lower the risk of financial instability later, how much will they lower it, what are the benefits of so doing, and what are the costs? The one attempt to do this that I’m aware of was by Lars Svensson. In this paper, the former Riksbank Deputy Governor, compared the costs of higher rates– increasing unemployment by around 1.2 percentage points – with its benefits – the marginally smaller likelihood and severity of a possible future downturn. The result? The costs of higher rates outweighed the benefits 200 to one. The Riksbank subsequently reversed policy pioneering negative repo rate – relatively successfully.

  Now you can disagree with Svensson’s figuring, but not I think with his reckoning of costs against benefits. So who’s doing that in the Australian debate? (This is a genuine, not a rhetorical, question by the way.)

  Secondly I don’t think the choice is a simple one. Even if we rate financial stability as much more important than maximising short and medium term economic activity, the ‘hawks’ accept, I think that rates should still be relatively ‘accommodating’ as the RBA likes to say – or ‘low’ as they say in the papers. So, erring on the side of higher rates for financial stability’s sake keeps rates at a low level longer than they’d be if we cut them more aggressively to get the economy growing again as quickly as practicable whereupon they’d resume their upward climb towards normality.

  This is, in fact the situation we’re in and to which I’ve been objecting for years. You can object to how low the RBA went – down to 1.5% – but its current policy takes us where I’m talking about. And it seems like a pretty good way to blow bubbles. For probably about five years now, official forecasts have been for inflation not to rise out of its band and for unemployment to rise, flatline or fall far more gradually than it would with more aggressive policy.

  So if you’re thinking of borrowing to invest, it looks like rates will stay low for a long time. Is this more bubble resistant than getting rates down to zero, with a quite substantial exchange rate response, so that we can get them heading up as soon as possible – to keep those borrowing to invest a little more focused on downside risks in a year or two? My guess is that this more direct and aggressive approach lowers the risk of blowing bubbles. But that’s all it is. My guess. The RBA’s research division is bigger than mine. Have they done any work on this? It seems not. Have any of the hawks arguing for higher rates done it or even canvassed this conundrum?

  I mentioned this to an RBA board member at the RBA dinner in Melbourne last March. I asked if this question had ever been raised on the board. They said no, but that it was the best question they’d heard in a year or so. What concerns me here is not that the bank might be wrong, but that the bank in its public accounting for its decisions and its publication of research papers doesn’t seem to be leading this discussion or trying to really structure that discussion so that we can have the best chance possible of getting to the right answer. It’s all much more by the seat of the pants.

  My conclusion is that the choices we’re making are temperamental – not evidence based. You have hawks who think we shouldn’t have cut as much as we have. You have textbook fuddy-dovvies like me who think we should cut as aggressively as we can to get back on a strong growth path both to maximise jobs and growth and minimise the risk of  financial bubble blowing. And you’ve got the RBA sitting on the fence, with the seat of its pants doing double-time.

  

  Oh and here’s one more test of whether what we’re seeing is reasoning by weighing the evidence or reasoning by temperamental leanings. If people really are concerned about the prospect of bubbles, wouldn’t this also lead them to be arguing for more expansive fiscal policy so we can get this risky period of low-interest rates behind us and nip any bubbles in the bud as soon as we can – as well as returning the budget to surplus once we’ve restored the economy closer to capacity?

August 26, 2018

• The Northern Myth What is it with these stupid acronyms?

   

  

  This is a guest post from Chips Mackinolty, an artist and journalist based variously in Alice Springs, Palermo and Darwin 

  There’s an old (and true) story that with the transition of the Darwin Community College, initially as a campus of a Queensland university, a group of good and wise administrators decided on a particular name for this new institution. For at least three weeks they were going around with the new title until they handed it over to graphic designer who told them “You can’t call it this!”

  It was only then they saw what the initialism spelt out, that they realised they couldn’t call the new seat of higher learning the “College of the University of the Northern Territory”.

  So what is it with these stupid acronyms invented by bureaucrats and politicians?

  Take the one that has been dominating the media for months. The National Energy Guarantee. The NEG? No wonder Mr Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg were having trouble selling something so, well, negative. And of course in his regular flip flops in recent weeks the headline writers were having great fun with the notion of reneging on the NEG.

  Then there’s the North Australian Infrastructure Fund, which according to then-Minister Canavan has “got a clear objective in the act to help stimulate economic and population growth in Northern Australia”. Call me naïve, but NAIF? With a name like that, little wonder the population of northern Australia continues to languish.

  Of course acronyms and initialisms surround us all, and get thrown around with abandon in private and public life—not least as a form of obscure jargon within particular specialties or areas of expertise, especially in the sciences.

  In my current game within the health research world, I find myself regularly having to google acronyms to try and work out what on earth we are talking about. At a recent AHRA* meeting, not knowing what ACTA was, I googled and got Australian Clay Target Association. WTF?

  The second entry got me the Australian Clinical Trials Association which made more sense—though on that single page there was also the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Animal Control Technologies Australia and the real doozy: the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. I leave it to you to work out what TESOL stands for.

  There are acronym-generating sites on the internet, so the level of acronym invention and use will only escalate, presumably according to some sort of linguistic Moore’s Law. There’s no way to stop it, short of establishing, as an old New Yorker cartoon had it, of a street march behind the banner of COCA, the Coalition Opposing Contrived Acronyms.

  I shouldn’t talk. I work for an organisation called CA AHSC.

  See you next Thursday.

  * The Australian Health Research Alliance

  The post What is it with these stupid acronyms? appeared first on The Northern Myth.

August 25, 2018

• The Northern Myth “I hate to disappoint!” Genevieve McGuckin on Spencer P. Jones 1956 – 2018

  

  This is a guest post by Melbourne-based writer and musician Genevieve McGuckin originally published at her Facebook page

  I watched Rage last night, the outpouring of memories and all the funny poignant stories have made Spencer seem so real, it’s impossible to believe he’s gone. So much has been said and so well, it’s a bit daunting to add to.

  Aw, Spencer. I was lucky enough to know this charming funny and generous man who made incredible music, and who had a way of making me feel pretty damn special. Spencer was like a kid with a lolly jar around music and I found that irresistible in a man who’d written and played some of my all time favourite songs.

  Newly back in Melbourne after 15 years in Europe, Rowland [Howard] and I were both staying at Rowland’s dad’s place in Albert Park. We must’ve been there for about 2 weeks when Jock shuffled into the kitchen one sunny afternoon to say:

  Jock: “Rowland! Your drug dealer’s here.”
  Rowland: “WHAT?! What on EARTH are you talking about Dad?”
  Jock: “He’s here again… the one with the hat … and the leather jacket…”
  Rowland: “WHAT???”
  Jock: “…he comes nearly every single day.”

  Nonplussed we peered into the stygian gloom of the hallway to find only Spencer, hat in hand, grinning sheepishly.

  “I hate to disappoint!” he said quietly.

  Ha! Jock seemed totally unable to imagine that anyone would visit Rowland so often for any other reason.

  Of course there was a reason. Music. And friendship.

  Even in 94, Spencer seemed to have already played with everybody. In Europe being in more than one or two bands was viewed as suspicious, if not downright traitorous! Yet here was Spencer with multiple bands and projects bubbling up and down around him. It was different. A more fluid chaotic way of working, but Spencer managed it.

  Usually.

  Like Harry, I’d been a little peeved when Rowland (back in Australia alone in late 93 he assumed absolute power and formed a ‘fake’ These Immortal Souls to play gigs: Rowland. Spencer, Peter Jones and Chris Walsh. The first time I heard Spencer playing my piano part from Marry Me with this dirty big grunge guitar sound, I thought… “Holy hell what happens now? Am I even needed…”

  Eventually Harry and I slotted back into our old roles, Chris and Peter J left, but Spencer kept playing with us for another 15 months. He and I adapted, worked it out, became friends. (And we never did sound like duelling
  banjos—always a fear of mine). These Immortal Souls + SPJ were louder, sometimes chaotic, but fantastic. And we did a mean version of The Low Road for a 2nd encore.

  In 2008 Rowland and I spotted Spence over at the bar in Ding Dong. Me: “Spencer’s a dead ringer for someone tonight but I can’t think who… ”Rowland laughed and said, with not a flicker of doubt and much affection: “Andy Capp”

  Spencer wasn’t Andy Capp … or the be-hatted gentleman of Jock’s imagination … he never asked me to think of him as an uncle Spencer … he was just Spencer … and boy will I miss him!

  My heart is with Angie Alvin and everyone who ever loved him.

  I won’t forget

  Love, Gen X

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  Photo of Genevieve McGuckin and Spencer P Jones by Christopher Rimmer

  The post “I hate to disappoint!” Genevieve McGuckin on Spencer P. Jones 1956 – 2018 appeared first on The Northern Myth.

August 23, 2018

• The Northern Myth The Loftus Rule, the Government Gazette and the NT judges who never were

  

  Loftus Rule: A rebuttable presumption that where an NT government decision is questioned it is more likely to be a fuck-up rather than an innocent mistake. (Syn: snafu – situation normal, all fucked up)

  The Loftus Rule—first invoked by esteemed Darwin and Hong Kong-based barrister Pat Loftus sometime during the chaotic years of the 1980’s as a reflection on the chaotic nature of successive Country Liberal Party government’s administrative incompetence, has long been considered as a rebuttable presumption that had fallen into apparent desuetude, due perhaps to increased competence among the bureaucracy and administrators of all things legal in the NT. Pat Loftus passed away in 2015.

  Until yesterday that is. The Northern Myth is pleased to report that the Loftus Rule is back.

  Late yesterday morning—while the rest of the country was transfixed by the bizarre events unfolding in Canberra—the NT Department of the Attorney-General and Justice dropped this media release containing the following words that captured the imagination of more that a few lawyers and journalists.

  … nine judicial appointments had not been formally gazetted due to an administrative oversight within the Department of the Attorney-General and Justice … [the Department] … has carefully considered the matter and is confident that the administrative oversight, while unfortunate, does not affect the validity of the appointments, or things done pursuant to them.

  The apparent unswerving confidence that the Department has in its own decision-making isn’t necessarily shared by others around the traps in Darwin and The Northern Myth has heard from a few lawyers around town that are casting very interested eyes upon this matter, particularly of they’ve had clients that’ve been slotted by any of the beaks in question. The Gazette Notice purportedly correcting this snafu—No S67 issued on 22 August 2018— can be found here, and a most interesting document is is too.

  The roots of this “administrative oversight” go back to to early 2016, when, in the dying days of the 4 year chaotic reign of the CLP from 2012, then Attorney-General Johan Wessel Elferink introduced the new Local Court Act. That legislation effected a timely re-jigging of arrangements in the NT Local Court and included, among other things, provisions that re-branded the cohort of NT magistrates as Judges of the Local Court.

  Up until mid-2016 the provisions governing the appointment of magistrates under the NT Magistrates Act required that magistrates be appointed by the NT Administrator (Section 4(3)) and swear an oath (Section 20(1). The Schedule provided the form of words to the Oath of office that required the appointee to:

  … be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her heirs and successors, according to law, that I will well and truly serve in the office of and that I will do right to all manner of people according to law, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.

  Section 65 of the replacement Local Court Act retained the mandatory oath of office to Her Majesty in similar form but revised the method of appointment, requiring, by Section 53, that the NT Administrator may, by Gazette notice, appoint a person to be a judge of the Local Court.

  This last requirement for gazettal is apparently the cause of the blind panic—we can only imagine what happened when the penny dropped—that would have run through the Attorney-General’s department (and elsewhere) once it was realised that no Gazette Notices had been made giving legal effect to the nine judicial appointments made since mid-2016. The continuing offices of Magistrates appointed prior to the commencement of the Local Court Act, i.e. under the old Magistrates Act, were preserved  by the usual transitional provisions.

  Whether yesterday’s Gazette Notice will be effective to correct the “unfortunate … administrative oversight” is an open question, with today’s NT News quoting a spokesperson for NT Attorney-General Natasha Fyles saying that the government was considering whether to “ram through legislation at the next parliamentary sittings to ensure the appointments were valid.”

  The full extent of the fallout from this snafu will become apparent over the coming days and weeks but word on the street is that more than a few criminal and administrative lawyers are shaking their heads and closely examining the wording and effect of yesterday’s Gazette Notice—which on my count doesn’t name the nine judicial officers whose appointments are apparently under question—and of the relevant legislation, particularly the application of the NT Interpretation Act. I’ve heard that at least one silk is clearing space in their diary for dates for a High Court challenge.

  The Northern Myth asked the Attorney-General’s Department to release the legal advice it relied upon to support its decision—presumably provided by Solicitor-General for the Northern Territory Sonia Brownhill SC—but they declined to provide that advice.

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  The post The Loftus Rule, the Government Gazette and the NT judges who never were appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• The Northern Myth Chris Wilson – the “Gentleman of Australian Blues” needs you

  

  This is a guest post by Jeff Lang.

  You won’t get a ticket for tomorrow night’s fundraiser at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne for Blues musician Chris “Gentleman of Australian Blues” Wilson and his family for love or money. But you can still support the great man in his time of need by throwing some well-deserved dosh at this Go Fund Me page, where all funds will go to Chris and his family.

  I’ve got my own lingering memories of Chris—for a time back in the day I worked for Paul Kelly and the various iterations of his backing bands over the years. On stage Chris was a literal riot, a hulking presence that blew his harps and his voice into an uproarious storm. On-stage he would upstage anyone. Off stage he was a gentle giant. One memory sticks.

  On tour at the small town of Katherine in the Northern Territory in the late 1980’s, Kelly and his band had played a blinder of a gig at a local club. The next day the local crew took the band fishing a few klicks out of town behind the small Aboriginal community of Rockhole. We were all more than a little hungover from the night before, Chris no less than the rest of us, but while we all staved off our collective head-cracks with cold VBs and dips in the Katherine river, Chris spent a few hours fast asleep—like a denim-clad beached whale—he was a big man—on the sandy river bank, oblivious to the close-up roaring waters and kids using him as a climbing frame.

  Oh those times.

  Last evening fellow blues musician Jeff Lang posted this loving tribute to Chris Wilson on his Facebook page. He has graciously allowed me to re-post it here. Unsurprisingly, Jeff’s best memories are of Chris’s gigs.

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  I’ve been thinking about Chris Wilson a lot over the last couple of months, playing a song or two at each show, listening to his albums to pick a couple of songs to sing at the Corner Hotel benefit this weekend. I’ve been fortunate to see him many, many times through the years and to play with him a lot too.
  As the memories have bubbled up I’ve been thinking about some of the Chris Wilson gigs that left an indelible impression on me.

  * Vic On The Park, Marrickville, early 1990’s

  First exposure to the force of the Wilderbeast. I must’ve seen this listed in the street press and went in cold, not knowing what to expect.
  I’d moved to Sydney a year or so earlier and was living pretty much on the bones of my arse at a BYO-roof residence in Summer Hill. There were a lot of live music venues running back then. A couple of guys who were regular gig-goers met me there and we stood near the front of the stage shortly before the Crown Of Thorns hit the stage with a ball-tearing version of Born Under A Bad Sign.

  Shane O’Mara on a red Strat, Chris Rodgers on bass, not certain but probably Pete Jones on drums. And the big fella up front – holy crap, he was pretty frightening to encounter, lunging toward the audience prodding his finger at us to punctuate the point of a given line, prowling backwards and forwards during guitar breaks like a caged bear in a bad mood. Then he’d unleash a harmonica solo and that fat, searing tone would tear our heads off.

  He was carrying a bit more weight back then which only added to the slightly scary intensity of the performance. We all took a backwards step a few times. It was powerful stuff, quite the first impression.

  * Esplanade Hotel, St. Kilda, 1995

  I was playing a solo set in the Gershwin Room that night, probably opening for someone or other, and seeing that Chris was on later in the front bar I packed up quickly and rushed through to get a position.
  The room was pretty packed by the time Chris hit the stage, this time accompanied only by Shane O’Mara on acoustic guitar and resonator guitar.
  The Power Duo.

  Having seen him in full band mode I was blown away by the beautiful songs I was hearing in the stripped back setting. It was the first time I heard songs like You Will Surely Love Again, Rose Tattoo and The Changeling live.
  It was, if anything, even more powerful than the previous experience. Whoever was running the sound certainly had them dialled in perfectly – it was loud, clear and all enveloping.

  “Shane O-fucking Mara on guitar everyone, give him a round of applause!”
  We certainly did. He had a stereo DI rig for his guitar, hard-panned left and right. During the intro of one song (might’ve been their dark take on When The Levee Breaks) Shane had a panning effect making his guitar move side to side and he also had a flanger switched on, swirling the sound about. Only way to describe it is that the guitar sounded like it was shooting around the room, back to front, left to right, half instrument, half jet airplane.

  I’d never heard someone with such a rich concept of how their live sound could provide texture and colour from an amplified acoustic guitar before. It was super impressive, and that was just the one intro. The entire gig was like a master class on how to accompany a singer with a lone guitar and have it be as dynamic as a band.

  The other thing which blew me away was how Chris brought that same coiled, animal intensity to a gig largely comprised of tender, beautiful songs. Songs that hinged on the stories and imagery of the lyrics, and that displayed the full range and effect of his sonorous voice. It could feel like it was an incongruous fit, but watching him it wasn’t. He’s just a natural born front man, born to fill any space he sings to.

  * Hopetoun, Surry Hills (Sydney) 1999

  By this stage I’d done a fair few gigs with Chris, sometimes playing with him, sometimes with him graciously agreeing to accompany me on harmonica on a gig of mine, other times on the same bill with the then-current incarnation of Crown Of Thorns – Chris Tabone on drums, Andrew Pendlebury on telecaster, ‘Evil’ Graham Lee on pedal steel and Chris Rogers on bass.

  Chris was touring a fair bit on the back of the double album The Long Weekend and the band were a well oiled machine. This gig was on a Sunday afternoon on a weekend where I’d played a couple of double-bill shows with them in Newcastle (where he had me join them for a song without a guitar, just singing, standing next to him… the bastard! Haha!).

  I had the night off so I went along to watch despite having seen them the two nights previous. Why wouldn’t I?
  I’m not sure Chris believed in his own material as much as the rest of us. Certainly he could breath life into someone else’s song and make it his own, but I’d noticed in Newcastle that the ratio was quite low on his own songs. When I’d prod him with a request he’d say something like “Nah, no one wants to hear that depressing crap…” then change the subject.

  Well, I’m glad I caught the Crown Of Thorns that Sunday in Sydney as it was two sets of wall-to-wall Chris songs, the band taking flight behind him, covering all moods required.

  People Like Me, Hand Becomes Fist, Can’t Stand The Way, Little Richard, Shootout At The 7-11, Sunbury 73, Face In The Mirror … one after the other, often with very funny stories preceding them. It was one of those magical gigs.

  I remember him sitting on the edge of the stage between sets, savouring the buzz. Savouring being a total badass, possibly.
  They encored with the day’s sole cover, a version of Hey Joe that tore the roof off the place, Chris arching his back and leaning into the sound coming from his amp as he played a long wavering note on his harmonica, un-cupping his hands from the microphone, just enough to generate a note of feedback that he somehow controlled so it rang in harmony with the note he played.

  Incredible. Unforgettable.

  * Port Fairy Folk Festival, 2018

  PFFF isn’t a gig where you hear loud bands. For one thing they have strict dB limits set. 96db I recall, which while not whisper-quiet is very polite. I was playing on one stage in a late morning spot and went to catch up with the sound crew, say hi, get the lay of the land. About the sound restriction the front of house tech laughed and said something along the lines of “It’s a little hard to keep to that when we had one band pushing 110db off the stage…” I asked who that was. “Skronkadoodledoo”.

  Wilson strikes! Haha!
  Skronkadoodledoo was the band Chris formed with his longtime guitarist Shannon Bourne and his son Fenn on drums. Alison and I made a note to make sure we caught them in their evening spot in the festival’s rowdiest venue: the Guinness Tent.

  As we entered the tent the band kicked off. They sounded like The Who or something – a massive sound. Shannon Bourne is a guitarist not to be messed with, a player of rare facility and sensitivity who can follow the music anywhere. That evenings requirement was a brutal form of force. Totally musical but coming AT you. Taking no prisoners. His Fender Jaguar through a Hiwatt half stack sounded like the way a mountain looks.

  Fenn Wilson was pounding the kit like Phil Rudd. Rock solid, relentless. At the end of the set his snare was covered in blood. His dad was proud of that. He values commitment, always has. Won’t stand anyone up there being half-arsed.
  Chris played rhythm guitar for half the set on a Gibson SG. He’s left handed, so it had a nice visual symmetry when the two guitarist would walk toward the kit in the centre, their guitar necks looking like they were pointing and directing the energy inwards for Fenn to push back out.

  The rest of the gig Wilson was at his frontman best, chiding the audience to make more noise for the two musicians accompanying him, strutting and prowling, throwing out his arms out as he sang in that deep voice. Owning it and blowing everyone away. As usual.

  The repertoire was largely blues standards and he was having a whale of a time up there. As were we in the audience.
  It’s likely to be the last gig I’ll see from him and it was a memorable one. Alison and I have talked often about how great it was, well before we knew about Chris’ illness.

  Like I said I’ve been thinking about Chris Wilson a lot since I learned of his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. It’s very sad I probably won’t hear him play again, won’t get to watch him own a stage and destroy a room again. But I’ve been so very lucky to have these memories and many others to carry with me as fuel.

  Anyway let’s not mope, we don’t know how long he has left but he’s still here. None of us know how long we have left, but we’re still here for now. I feel grateful to be alive, the joy, the sorrow, the whole glorious fucking mess of it all.

  Thanks Chris Wilson.

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  Here is the note from Chris’ GoFundMe page.

  Chris Wilson is not well. He has pancreatic cancer. For over forty years Chris has given the people of Melbourne, Australia and the world the gift of his talent and enormous heart. As a singer, harmonica player, songwriter, producer, mentor, husband, father and friend he has laid himself on the line and lived with fierce authenticity. He won’t be performing any more, his wife Sarah will be stopping work to care for him, so if you can spare a buck or two please help ensure that financial stress is one thing the Wilson family won’t have to endure at this time. Thanks in advance.

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  Australian guitarist-songwriter-vocalist-producer, Jeff Lang has built a reputation for making startling music that is accomplished, intricate, gutsy, melodic and loaded with soul. Often taking unexpected turns, he has consistently inspired his audiences by creating a stylistically diverse catalog of over 25 albums … Jeff has mischievously called his music ‘Disturbed Folk.’ One writer referred to him as a “quiet achiever.” But the overall impression one has from observing Jeff’s lengthy career is that of a driven man who keeps his head down, playing and recording music as if his very life depends on it.

  Outside of his homeland, Jeff has toured the UK, Europe, Japan, India, China, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada as well as concentrated work in the U.S., where he has played upwards of 300 shows, living there for 6 months at a time. He has appeared on prestigious American radio programs A Prairie Home Companion, Mountain Stage and Acoustic Café. Jeff has shared stages with Bob Dylan, Dr. John, Richard Thompson, Bonnie Raitt, Ani Di Franco, Chris Whitley, Albert Collins, Loudon Wainwright III, Greg Brown, John Butler, A R Rahman and Bob Geldof among many others.

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  The post Chris Wilson – the “Gentleman of Australian Blues” needs you appeared first on The Northern Myth.

August 22, 2018

• The Northern Myth The Barngarla people’s continuing struggle for native title rights – nuclear waste ballot heads to the Full Bench of the SA Supreme Court

   

  

  It has been a busy few weeks for the Barngarla people, native title holders of the land and seas around South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula. Two months ago to the week they joined South Australian Premier Steven Marshall at the declaration of their native title interests on and around the Peninsula after a long struggle through the Federal Court.

  Last week they were in court again—this time in the Supreme Court of South Australia—seeking an injunction against a community postal ballot organised by the District Council of Kimba about the Commonwealth government’s proposed nuclear waste dump in the Barngarla people’s backyard and from which they claimed to have been excluded.

  The Court agreed with their submissions and granted a temporary injunction, ordering—in a surprise move—that the matter be expedited to be heard this morning before the Full Bench of the South Australian Supreme Court including Chief Justice Chris Kourakis.

  At first instance, Dan O’Gorman SC for the Barngarla people argued that while his clients had no issue with the community postal vote proceeding they felt excluded by the process.

  O’Gorman told the Court that:

  … they just want to be included, they don’t want to be treated any differently because their rights are Aboriginal rights … There is no justification for excluding people on the basis of native title rights.

  The Barngarla people’s temporary success delayed the conduct of a similar postal ballot further north in Adnyamathanha country in the Flinders Ranges, where, as I reported here in 2016, then Federal Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg and his department had fundamentally under-estimated the resolve of the Adnyamathanha traditional owners, who had been strongly opposed to the short-listing of a site on their ancestral lands near Hawker in the Flinders Ranges.

  Senior traditional owner and Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association CEO Vince Coulthard said in a statement that:

  This is in our sacred country with a very important spring just nearby. This is another example of cultural genocide. This cannot happen! … We believed they were going to meet with the board in an official capacity, prior to any announcement happening. But this certainly didn’t happen.

  As I noted at the time, since the 2014 contentious settlement of litigation against the Northern Land Council’s nomination of a site at Muckaty Station in the NT for the nuclear waste dump, successive Federal Governments had lost the plot on dealing with low-level nuclear waste, most notably by the adoption by Tony Abbott’s Federal Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane’s adoption of a nationwide tender process.

  Macfarlane’s adoption of a nationwide tender for alternative sites smacked more of quick-fix and a withdrawal from the Federal government’s acceptance of its responsibility to resolve a long-standing problem. Frydenberg has done little more than adopt Macfarlane’s flawed policy and, if anything, appears even more reluctant to engage with this thorny issue. Both have overseen a flight of institutional memory and capacity from the relevant ministry and department. Neither has had the length and depth of engagement–or knowledge of and interest in–the field that previous Coalition and Labor ministers applied to this project. Ministers like Brendan Nelson, Julie Bishop, Martin Ferguson and Gary Gray knew the key players and were across the fine practical and policy details, while neither Macfarlane or Frydenberg have been.

  While the current community postal ballots at Kimba and Hawker are being run by the respective local government authorities, ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the overall process must rest with Federal Resources Minister Matt Canavan and his department, who do not appear to learnt anything from past stumbles.

  Meanwhile, the cost of dealing with Australia’s nuclear waste only rises. Canavan is waving big money at anyone who’ll take our waste, with latest figures indicating total funding of $31 million for the project. The current shortlisted communities have received Federal Government development grants totalling $4 million.

  Back in 2007, the Ngapa clans proposing Muckaty Station as a nuclear waste dump would have received a total of $12 million.

  An unexpected bonus from the Bargarla’s injunction proceedings may be that local government decision-making processes will now have to take a more inclusive approach to the rights of local native title holders.

  Watch this space.

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  The post The Barngarla people’s continuing struggle for native title rights – nuclear waste ballot heads to the Full Bench of the SA Supreme Court appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Club Troppo A dash for the deserts? What the solar revolution could lead to.

  One of the best pieces of scientific news the last decades has been the spectacular improvements in solar energy generation. The current world price was set in 2017 when the Dubai government bought a large future solar contract for 7.3 US cents per Kilowatt Hour,  a mere 1/6^th of the price in 2010. Compared to the 1970s, solar cells now cost less than 1% of what they were then. Unless you own a coal mine, that counts as great news!

  Let’s dream out loud a little as to what this revolution in solar might lead to this century. I expect solar to transform the deserts around the world, and I like the fantasy that solar power will be used to green Australia’s deserts by pumping desalinated water up to the top of the Dividing Range.

  Before sharing such dreams, let us first discuss a few technological bottlenecks to wider-scale adoption. A continuing problem for solar is that it is intermittent, meaning that large-scale usage depends on technology to store surplus energy and transport it to and from the areas of generation to where it is used. Both long-distance electricity transport and large-scale storage remain very expensive and very limited in scope at the moment, despite technological advances in both.

  As a rule of thumb, you lose 5% of the electricity for every 1,000 kilometres of electricity transport, and even that requires prohibitively expensive electricity lines. That rules out any fantasy wherein Australian solar farms supply New York!

  Battery storage has come a long way since the 70s, with of course the big Tesla battery in South Australia showing that you can have large batteries that can turn on and off very quickly, which is important for solar applications because solar is very variable. Yet, even that battery is relatively small and not capable of storing whole days worth of population consumption, and it’s way too expensive as a storage device to allow solar to compete with fossil at the moment for large-scale supply to the grid. It’s current function is to smooth intermittent supply from fossil-fuel power stations, making fossil fuel more attractive!

  In case you’re wondering: batteries in the form of ipads or electric cars are basically too small fry to make much of an impact on this equation.

  You might think there is some clever combination that solves all problems. For instance, you might fantasise about storing surplus electricity by pumping up water to some high-mountain lake from which you later on draw electricity by having it fall down again. Think carefully about the main issues involved: you lose something like 20% of the energy pumping the water up at the mountain; you need very unusual mountainous terrain that allows you to have two large lakes from which the water tumbles and gets pumped up without much leakage at either end; and if the population is 2,000 kilometres away, you lose another 20% getting the electricity to and fro. All this is quite apart from the installation and running costs of the lakes, the pumps, the solar panels, and the electricity lines. From my reading, such a package is a long way off being commercially viable, and really only a longer-term dream for countries like China that have the requisite mountainous terrain.

  The hope of course is that the bottleneck technologies continue to improve. They will have to for solar to replace fossil as the go-to source of energy for the main electricity grid. The same considerations, btw, also go for wind energy, which has seen similar reductions in price. Both technologies are now low-cost enough to be commercially interesting for many applications and in particular areas, but the package is still not quite there yet to knock fossil off its throne. That, btw, is partially because fossil fuel has become a lot cheaper too, particularly since the US and China found vast reserves of shale oil and gas. Hence the world’s carbon emissions are still increasing despite renewables hitting an all-time high of 25% of world energy consumption.

  Relevant to this are the current developments in China.  In the 00’s, the Chinese government wanted to be independent of fossil fuel rich regions, like the Gulf and the US. It invested massively in solar technology, which lead to huge cost reductions in solar technology, now copied elsewhere. Yet,  the Chinese have recently found vast reserves of shale gas and as a result are scaling back their own solar projects, which tells you they don’t think solar is cheap enough to replace gas. When it comes to this sort of thing, the Chinese leaders are a very pragmatic bunch of engineers, so stories of evil conspiracies of the fossil fuel industry are unlikely to have mattered for this decision: costs will have dominated.

  Supposing that the battery and transport costs of electricity indeed come down though, the future of solar seems immense. Let’s dream a little.

  For one, cheap solar transforms deserts from places bereft of human activity to prised assets for electricity generation. You see, many deserts are near the equator where the sun is the brightest and land in the deserts is extremely cheap since there is nothing much else for humans to do there. So deserts are the logical places to house massive solar farms.

  What is currently in the way of a place like Australia filling its deserts with solar farms is the transport costs of electricity and the big-battery issue. When those bottlenecks are gone, the dash for the deserts is on. Places like Australia, Saudi Arabia, but also California and Mexico, would be big beneficiaries. Plenty of cheap deserts in those places where nothing much else happens of high value.

  Deserts in Africa and Central Asia could also be stacked with solar panels, but in those cases there is an additional bottleneck, which is that the main users of the electricity would be in other countries, which raises the issue of international politics. Like the oil pipelines that go through many countries, electricity cables that go through different countries would be prime targets for extortion and political in-fighting. The countries in Africa with lots of deserts are very politically volatile and any expensive electricity lines would undoubtedly get sucked into many conflicts, which essentially just increases the price. Central Asia is a bit more stable, but the same problem applies, so don’t expect the dash to happen there first.

  The deserts might well be affected by another solar-related change, which is that intermittent availability is not a problem for desalination and water pumps. Hence one of the major processes that is not dependent on the big battery problem, nor even that of electricity transportation costs, is that of desalinating ocean water and pumping it to the deserts to make them greener. It is a prime thing to do with the excess electricity during sunny days, when the price would be close to zero. This too is highly relevant for Australia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with deserts close to the sea.

  In the case of Australia, the obvious scenario is for solar farms to supply the energy to desalinate huge volumes of water just East of the Dividing range, pumped up to the top of the Dividing Range, and then let loose to the West of that range, essentially desalinating parts of the desert and greening the interior. If you look at a geological map of Australia, the most suitable place to pump the water to would seem to be somewhere west of Lismore: from the top of the range there, one could let the water stream via a system of canals to the Great Basin to the North-West and into the Murray-Darling Basin to the South-West.

  Admittedly, this is a mere pipe-dream at present, but hej, why not? Building these pipes, canals, and pumps could be one of the major infrastructure projects of the 21^st century. Once the technology has been perfected in Australia, it is a good bet the companies would be commissioned to repeat the feat in many other places in the world, so it could become one of our comparative advantages.

  Cheap solar unlocks the deserts in another way, which is that it provides the energy for lots of air conditioning, making them much more habitable, though obviously still confined to in-doors environments.

  Finally, cheap solar makes the deserts more attractive places for extremely energy-intensive industries, like Bauxite-to-Aluminium processing or big chemical plants.

  Then the issue of climate change. Would cheap solar (and wind), combined with cheaper big batteries and cheaper electricity transportation, on its own lead to such a reduction in fossil fuel usage so as to halt the warming of the earth? It would seem the answer at the moment is still ‘no’ for several reasons.

  For one, one should always bear in mind that the increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are like a blanket over the earth that only very slowly gets reduced in its thickness if it is no longer added to. By very slowly, I mean that the natural processes that return atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-industrial values take centuries, if not thousands of years. So even if all human emissions were to stop abruptly today, the world would continue to warm for a long, long time yet.

  It also remains the case that there is huge regional variation in just how cheap fossil fuel is and that this implies that the whole package containing solar would have to be extremely cheap to out-compete fossil for most applications nearly everywhere. You see, in some places, like the Gulf, the costs of pumping up the oil is almost zero and the only costs borne by the users is that of usage. Even if the solar panels were for free, the other elements (batteries and transport) will often be too expensive to compete with that. In areas with strong winds, abundant sunshine, and less easily available fossil fuels, the relative costs look different.

  The convenience of fossil fuel should also not be under-estimated. Fossil fuels are very portable, pack a lot of energy punch for their weight, and of course they have the advantage of the huge existing infrastructure for its dissemination and usage (fuel stations, existing power plants, and lots of combustion engines). Even free solar energy would take a long time (decades?) to flush out those advantages.

  You might think that cheap solar (and wind) could out-compete these mobility and energy-per-weight advantages of fossil fuels by, for instance, being used to create hydrogen that would also be mobile and an alternative to fossil fuel. Whilst there too, the technology is progressing, the key problem with hydrogen is that it is so bloody volatile and explosive. Just as you don’t put ammunition depots in the middle of the cities, so too do you really not want large stores of hydrogen anywhere near large population centers. The technology needs to progress a lot to overcome that bottleneck. Remember the Hindenburg disaster!

  Finally, there remain applications for which solar (or batteries in general) is not energy-intensive enough. Key among those are aeroplanes and large ships. Those two applications alone would ensure the world continues to pump more new greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than naturally gets taken out, which essentially means that the world as a whole would just slightly more slowly go through its fossil fuel reserves.

  Doesn’t it help if the world burns its fossil fuel reserves more slowly? Basically, ‘no’. From a geological-time perspective, the difference between burning up the fossil fuel reserves in 50 years or 300 years is nigh-irrelevant for the eventual peak in global warming. You would thus still need to do something else than merely slow down the fossil burning if you want to halt global warming (like actively taking out CO2 or geo-engineering).

  So technologies still need to improve spectacularly for solar (and wind) to seriously dent the climate change trajectories over the coming centuries. Yet, it would seem that the technologies are getting close to the point where we should expect major effects on our deserts already. Cheap solar should be expected to make them much more habitable and suitable for energy-intensive industries.

August 21, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Mernda rail extension opens this Sunday

  On Sunday I went out to see the Mernda rail extension.

  The Level Crossing Removal Authority, who built it (well, it does involve new stations and grade separation of an existing disused rail corridor, so it kinda makes sense) ran a community open day, with free shuttle trains between South Morang and Mernda.

  After catching a regular train to South Morang, I found a big crowd waiting for a shuttle train.

  

  Mernda

  Mernda was packed with people, so it’s just as well they built this new terminus to generous dimensions, with a good wide platform.

  

  I met up with Darren Peters, who headed up the community campaign that got the politicians to commit to the rail extensions (both to South Morang, then Mernda). Locals kept stopping to congratulate him – deservedly so!

  2012 / 2018 pic.twitter.com/iC08Rgb9ZH

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) August 21, 2018

  Mernda station has a wraparound roof structure similar to the Dandenong line skyrail stations, but glass panels block the wind coming through. The design is less rounded futuristic, more boxy, and I’m told is meant to reflect the farm heritage of the area – still seen on a few farm buildings in the vicinity.

  

  A huge amount of space is available underneath the station platform. There’s a large car park and a bus interchange on the eastern side, where buses will converge from nearby suburbs, mostly with frequencies of 20 minutes in peak, 40 off-peak.

  To the west is… an empty paddock. This will be the place for the Mernda town centre.

  

  North of the station is more parking (with a second station exit), and a stabling yard to store trains between the peaks and overnight.

  

  

  New traffic lights seemed to be giving an inordinate amount of green time to nonexistent traffic coming out of the station, without actually providing much green man for pedestrians. This was resulting in traffic jams along Bridge Inn Road. Perhaps trying to get locals used to the traffic lights being there?

  It’s unlikely that the line will be further extended to Whittlesea any time soon. This is the northern edge of Melbourne, and the Urban Growth Boundary shows no signs of shifting.

  While there aren’t many houses in the immediate station environs, there are a few in the street north of the station, some of which look like they’re already being re-developed to medium density. And a little further away are vast numbers of homes, so it’s no wonder Plenty Road, pretty much the only road to the south, gets packed with cars at rush hour.

  Hawkstowe

  Heading back south, I looked at Hawkstowe station, a similar island platform design to Mernda. Already there’s a playground underneath the tracks, which reminded me of Singapore, and may be an indicator of what’s coming underneath the Caulfield to Dandenong skyrail.

  

  

  Middle Gorge

  And then there’s the third station…

  A post shared by Daniel Bowen (@danielfbowen) on Aug 19, 2018 at 6:27am PDT

  There’s been some controversy over the name, but let’s look at the actual design.

  Side platforms have been used, which is fine, and a nice wide subway connects them, reminiscent of Tarneit station.

  But for some reason the building structures have very high-up roofs, which look impressive at first, but I expect will provide almost zero weather/rain protection.

  

  There’s a plaza on the outbound side which is quite nice, but it also means the bus stops are a good couple of hundred metres away from the station, ensuring anybody who tries to interchange when it’s raining will get drenched. The bus stop has no shelter that I could see (maybe that will be installed before opening day this Sunday?)

  Okay, so not as many buses will connect here compared to the other two new stations – it’s only route 383, which also goes to South Morang, but it’ll be about eight minutes faster to change to the train at Middle Gorge.

  And the shared (bike) path coming from both directions is on the opposite side of the tracks to the bike cage, and particularly indirect from the north. Is this really the best they could do?

  

  These concerns aside, it was great to see the community come out and see their new stations – despite the weather having been horrible earlier in the day.

  Enough about the infrastructure – what about the services?

  There’s little doubt the trains will be popular for those headed to destinations further down the line including into the City.

  Some extra services have been added for peak hour, making for trains up to about every 6 minutes in peak.

  There are no express services to speak of – the peak frequency is so intensive that there’s really no spare capacity for them. An express train would catch up quickly with the train in front. And remember, express trains save less time than you’d think – typically a minute per station skipped, while penalising people at those stations with fewer services, and leading to uneven train loads.

  There are some counterpeak expresses – in the AM peak a train arriving at Flinders Street will go around the Loop, then back out in service. Some of these stop at only a handful of stations (including Reservoir for the 301 shuttle bus to Latrobe Uni), then up to Epping or South Morang to terminate and go back into stabling.

  Outside peak hour, the current frequencies will remain: mostly every 20 minutes, but every 30 after 9pm, 40 on Sunday mornings (WHY?!) and hourly Night Train services overnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

  In the long term, the Metro 2 tunnel will be needed to cope with continued growth on both this line and the Hurstbridge line.

  Meanwhile, obviously authorities will need to watch patronage carefully and keep adding more services where they can, though there’s a limit to peak capacity between the city and Clifton Hill. The usual point applies: better off-peak services can help spread the load across the day.

  But one thing’s for sure: the three new stations add richly to the transport options for people in the outer northern suburbs.

  • More about the Mernda rail extension
  • Also this weekend: the new Hughesdale station opens
  • …and timetable and route changes around the network
  • PTUA members: there’s a meeting tomorrow night with PTV’s CEO Jeroen Weimar – hear what he has to say, and ask questions. Not a member? Join now.
• The Northern Myth “Better than Roy and HG!!” – Stewie O’Connell calls the footy at the Yuendumu Sports Weekend

  Writer Martin Flanagan once asked some Warlpiri fellas, “What was the biggest difference between Yuendumu and Melbourne?” They answered, “The sky in Yuendumu is bigger”.

  Set in the Tanami Desert, 3 hours drive west of Alice Springs, the Yuendumu sky is like an enormous deeply azure dome. By night, it’s a mass of pulsating stars. The irony being, that in this small place one feels connected to something much bigger.

  Bigger … that’s how I feel when I attend to co-commentate the Australian Rules Football at the 55th Yuendumu Sports Festival.

  Connected to something bigger, both in the sense of universal energy and by being part of a gathering that is a modern incarnation of gatherings that have been taking place for over 40,000 years. It’s a cliché, but it really is a privilege to be able to be here, to soak up the energy of this unique world. The landscape, language, culture and world view, while not unfamiliar to me due to my experience, are still essentially foreign and refreshing.

  While it does inspire me being here, I am not oblivious to the harsh realities. The desert, with its extremes of temperature and dearth of water is a tough place to live. Add to that decades of failed Government policy, a vulnerability to exploitation, serious addictive substances issues and flare ups of factional violence and you have a community that is occasionally teetering on the edge of breakdown.

  

  That said, this is a community that has survived for 72 years despite levels of trauma that would have completely destroyed those with less resilience. I have seen many of the manifestations of this trauma over the years, through my work as an Aboriginal Legal Aid solicitor, including attending the bush court at Yuendumu. That’s what makes attending the Sports Festival even more inspiring. It is a chance to soak up the enormous positives rather than being immersed in the negatives.

  The PAW (Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri) Media Team, a mix of dedicated and talented Whitefellas and Warlpiri, have been busy setting up since the crack of dawn on Saturday. By 10.30am I am champing at the bit to get into it. It’s moments like this that I have to remind myself to let go of my city time-consciousness and busyness and adapt to “Warlpiri time”. Things will happen when they’re ready.

  By 11.30am the old men have gathered. This is the genesis of everything. If they lived in the mainstream these old fellas would be enjoying a relatively relaxed retirement. Instead they are busier than they have ever been in their lives. They are constantly juggling a variety of duties from land, legal, business, health, development, cultural and research issues. The constant pressures they face are enormous. On top of that they are charged with the responsibility of both organising and maintaining order at this festival.

  After much vigorous and animated discussion, the draw is settled and the legendary Harry Nelson gets to work on the PA system, threatening teams with forfeit if they don’t get their act together. It works and we are soon underway.

  

  The starting point in any footy commentary is to get a good team sheet in numerical order. The challenge out bush is that there are often three players wearing the same number, several players with no number and some players with no guernsey at all. That’s when you have to get creative and write the player’s name next to “red boots”; “barefoot”; “topknot”; “big tummy” etc. Even when you’ve sorted that, there is a lot of random jumper swapping throughout the game.

  Again, the key is acceptance and having fun with it. One fella came up to me at the end of the second day and said the comedy that came out of the commentators trying to keep up with whose who on the field was “better than Roy and HG”.

  I find that mentioning names in the commentary is more important than the action, scores and time. Family is everything to Aboriginal people. And when a family member is mentioned on radio doing something fantastic on the sporting field that brings a great sense of pride and joy to those family listening. It’s always nice hearing those congregating around the commentary area responding to the call with a proud “that’s my son, grandson, nephew” etc.

  Names and relationships are glue to Warlpiri cultural life. Everyone has at least four names, an English name, a Warlpiri name, a nick name and a skin name. Sometimes a person has to change their name as it is the same name as a person who passed away recently. Working out the most appropriate name to call someone is an interesting challenge.

  On top of that, there is no shortage of creativity amongst Aboriginal people when it comes to choosing English names. Over the weekend I called a Hendrix, Messiah, Kiriath, Ananias, Nazareth, Jezaniah, Navarrone, Amadeus, Jethro, Augustine, Zieran, and Rodriguez. The girls are even better, Shimayla, Shemona, Shaimaya, Danisha, Laketta, Makisha, Ravina, and Prestina. The four syllable names are commentary death and I apologise again to Nicodemus, Ammoniah and Terrisita. Sometimes the players want to be called by their nicknames, often the names of AFL players or a Warlpiri word, but we did have one lad who wanted to be called as “The Terminator”.

  In addition to getting the names down I also try and throw in a little bit of Warlpiri, with the help of my co-commentators, with Ngurruju!! (Good!!) being a staple. And every now and then I’ll try a local based metaphor with mixed success (“he climbed over his opponent to take that mark like a perentie (a large lizard) climbing a mulga bush”).

  

  Then it is time to settle in, have fun and absorb the remaining challenges. Even in winter the desert sun is fierce. And we’re calling the footy while seated in the tray of a truck. So day one brings sunburn. We erect a shade but day two brings wind. The wind in the desert has a life all its own. It changes direction, ferocity and temperature depending on its mood. It decides games of football, carrying footballs 80 metres in one direction and stopping them dead in the other. And, when it is feeling extra cheeky, it sends out a whirliwhirli straight over the commentary team, on this occasion ripping off our headphones and the recently set-up shade.

  

  In 2013 it nearly blew us clean off the roof of a troopy (watch this link to the end to see one of the best bush tornadoes ever!!. Then there’s the dust. A week later and I’m still shaking red dust out of my hair, ears, eyes, nose and boots. At various times the dust was like a thick red mist in the air such that it was impossible to see the players. What really fine tuned the senses though was when the dogs decided to fight right next to the boom mike, or even better, a cheeky kid would walk past and scream into it. That was a good test for the eardrums.

  

  And finally, the cold.

   

  Now that Yuendumu has lights at the oval the footy doesn’t stop at sundown. And once that sun goes down the desert transforms from oven to icebox. By the end of the Grand Final at 11pm on Monday night I could not feel my fingers or toes. All around the ground the spectators had sparked up campfires to keep warm and that was an amazing sight. I wanted to start one up on the back of the truck!

  And what of the football itself. In a word, sublime. Silky skills, blistering speed, fierce tackling and gravity defying leaps. All taking place on an oval of hard blood red earth. It must hurt like Hades when players get dumped on it, especially if they hit one of the many drink cans or dog chewed animal bones that pock mark the surface. But no one stays down for long.

  Did I mention they are tough out here?

  For a sports lover like myself it is Nirvana; or more appropriately out here, Jukurrpa. Football is not just a game out here, it is a centrepiece to an important social gathering, where links to people, country and culture are reasserted and reinforced. It is part of everything, everywhen, Jukurrpa!

  

  So when the ball is bounced none of the challenges matter. There is just a sheer exuberance to be part of this beautifully chaotic celebration of life. I literally do not have a care in the world. I just do my best to describe the drama, comedy and action unfolding before me. While the contests are fierce that undercurrent of sheer joy is also evident in the play. The joy of being part of Jukurrpa, of being alive, of resuming existing relationships and making new ones and the joy of being able to show off ones skills to the mob and, hopefully, receive their adulation. The teams that participate differ every year, depending on who is able to make it and the emergence of new teams.

  Fourteen teams participate this year, from as far North as Ti Tree (a 6 hour drive) to as far South as Amata (a 21 hour drive). The age of the players ranges from 10 years old to 50, if you can play, you’re in. Seeing a 3.5 foot child playing full forward against a 6 foot adult defender is one of the many great contrasts on display.

  This year it wasn’t just the men who got that opportunity. For the first time there was a women’s football competition. And it was superb. The women and girls were at it just as fierce as the men and the crowd loved it. In the women’s Grand Final the Nyirripi Demons won a thriller against the Wulaign Blues. The enthusiastic embrace of this cultural shift is testament to the strength and adaptability of the Warlpiri people.

  Then, finally, at 9pm on Monday night, after three days of sensational football, the Grand Final between the Yuendumu Magpies and the Ti Tree Roosters kicked off. The oval is an incredible sight with cars parked facing the oval all around the perimeter. All are tuned into the PAW call on their car radios, so in the lead up to the first bounce we get everyone to honk their horns and flash their lights. The atmosphere is electric. The contest is willing and see-sawing. With five minutes to go and the game in the balance the lights go out!

  

  There is always a controversial event in the Yuendumu Sports Grand Final, as if the spirits of the land want to ensure it is forever remembered and the victory properly earned. The lights are out for half an hour and the discussion gets animated. In the end the lights come back on and Ti Tree finish strong to claim their first Yuendumu Sports Title in two decades. They, and their supporters, certainly let everyone know about it with lots of whooping, honking and handfuls of red dust thrown into the night sky.

  Even though it is 11pm and around 2 degrees celsius, there is a sense that no-one wants the festival to end and even though my throat is rasping from 12 hours straight calling, my eyes are filled with dust and my fingers and toes are numb, I don’t want it to end either.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Stewie O’Connell has written for The Northern Myth previously on life, mud and floods during the Katherine floods of 1998. You can read that post here.

  The post “Better than Roy and HG!!” – Stewie O’Connell calls the footy at the Yuendumu Sports Weekend appeared first on The Northern Myth.

August 20, 2018

• The Northern Myth Aretha and me. Jane Clifton on losing your nerve and finding your own voice

  

  It took me a long time to realise that I was not Aretha Franklin. Nobody told me.

  I had to find out for myself. 1971, on stage at the TF Much Ballroom in front of a huge audience, standing at the microphone about to sing (Sweet Sweet Baby) ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ and suddenly losing my nerve.

  It was all very well to sing along with Aretha at home and maybe you could even hit the high notes with her help, but a pale imitation – so pale – is a pale imitation and that realisation hit me then and there, aged 22, and I freaked right out.

  Aretha was the Gold Standard by which all of us pretenders measured ourselves. In the same way, I imagine, that Adele and Amy are for girl singers today.

  She was the bar up to which most of us (with some exceptions) could not, cannot rise. All that culture, history and Jesus packed into that one glorious set of pipes could not be replicated, merely mimicked.

  Gladys and Mavis are separate branches of that same royalty but Aretha was and always will be the undisputed Queen of Soul.

  Respect and Think, on every level – length, solo lyrics – are the greatest feminist hit singles Of All Time, bleaching into vapid insignificance the milk-toast I Am Woman.

  And then there was the piano playing … A true musician at every level, Aretha.

  In 1983 I did some recording (for Joe Camilieri) at Criteria Studios, Miami, Florida, in the very same studio Aretha recorded Respect. Overwhelmed much?

  Hard to get a note out with confidence in that hallowed room.

  Aretha made me go looking for my own voice, whatever that was, no matter how white, how weedy, and I thank her for that and for so much more.

  This is a sad day.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Jane Clifton is the genuine show-business all-rounder. Actress, singer, writer, occasional broadcaster and registered civil celebrant. A graduate of Monash University’s halcyon days of sex and demos and rock ‘n roll, Jane was lured away from a promising career as an English teacher by Melbourne’s alternative theatre – at La Mama and the Pram Factory – and the rock ‘n roll beer-barn circuit.

  Jane has published 3 crime novels – Half Past Dead (Text), A Hand in the Bush (Text), Flush (Clandestine Press) – and 1 memoir, The Address Book. In 2018 her project is to write one poem a day. On Friday 14 September you can catch Jane at the wonderful Kastoria Music Club in sunny Coburg North in Melbourne’s hinterlands with a host of buddies singing all songs Linda Rondstadt.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  The post Aretha and me. Jane Clifton on losing your nerve and finding your own voice appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• Club Troppo A new go at upgrading the stock of regulation
  

  A particularly grotesque example of many things, only marginally related to the red tape busting agenda.

  This post is worked up from a comment of mine on this Mandarin post on a new submission to the Thodey review intriguingly written by two Treasury officials in their own name.

  It’s an interesting and (my guess is) productive contribution. Interesting also that people are being allowed to make submissions, though it would be useful to understand the extent to which these comments were cleared by their agency made more explicit. I am (again) guessing that suggestions that were not consistent with Treasury’s priors wouldn’t be welcomed as personal contributions.

  It’s also worth noting, I think that this is an ‘in principle’ recommendation, rather like the original regulation review which was implemented in 1986, took nearly a decade to achieve more than the most desultory compliance in form, and has never been widely complied with in substance. So some examples of how it has worked in New Zealand would have been useful.

  More fundamentally, the submission continues to partake of the old approach in which we see regulation review as being focused on minimising avoidable costs of regulation. That’s an important task. Why do we not also seek to optimise the benefits of regulation? Why does this require no oversight of the kind proposed in the submission? Secondly the submission doesn’t interrogate the way in which the current problems are really the product of the existing incentives in the system?

  As we know (don’t we?) regulation review doesn’t work largely because line agencies see it as their role to ‘get up’ regulation for their minister. So they tick the boxes, but regulation review is very rarely an objective look at the problem looking for least cost/most benefit solutions. That’s not what ministers want and so it’s not what they get.

  I suspect that, while it might have some benefits, the real question is the extent to which they would be limited by these kinds of conflicted incentives and what might be done about them.

August 19, 2018

• Club Troppo Rent Seeking in Elite Networks

  Some more fascinating results in the ‘whodda thunk?’ category. You can track down the paper in various published and pre-published forms here. Note, while I’ve not changed any meanings, I’ve occasionally shortened a sentence without horsing around too much with [square brackets]. Otherwise elisions are marked with an ellipsis …

  There’s growing recognition of the importance of social capital in improving economic outcomes. Social proximity can mitigate informational frictions, thereby enabling transactions otherwise inhibited by adverse selection and moral hazard problems. However, there’s also a dark-side exemplified in Adam Smith’s line “people of the same trade seldom meet” and echoed by Olson who identifies the emergence of self-serving interest groups created to further their own interests largely at the expense of others. Olson argues that, after a period of stable growth, countries have a tendency to accumulate rent-extracting institutions that ultimately lead to the decline of nations. ¹

  In this paper, we examine the role of elite social networks. … We obtain membership information of an important service club organization in Germany. … The objective of this network is to maintain its reputation as an elite network. … From the outset, it should be noted that our analysis focuses on firms whose CEOs are members of the same service club organization, which alleviates selection concerns to some extent. To quantify the effect of social connections on lending, our empirical strategy compares for the same firm, quarter by quarter, the financing provided by banks whose banker is a member of the same club branch as the firm’s CEO (in-group banks) to that provided by other banks (out-group banks). …

  We exploit two events that generate perturbation in social connectedness between firms and banks: (i) entry of members to a club branch and (ii) the formation of a new club branch within a city. … We find that firms experience an increase in lending from the in-group banks that is 37.20 percentage points higher than from out-group banks after they enter a club branch and a 56.67 percentage point higher increase from their in-group bank after participating in a new club branch formation. Additionally, the probability of establishing a new relationship with the in-group bank relative to an out-group bank increases by 14.95 percentage points after joining an existing club branch and by 10.47 percentage points after participating in a new club branch formation. …

  We find that the share of borrowing from in-group banks increases by 11.50–12.87 percentage points after firms join an existing or a newly established club branch. The increase in lending from in-group banks does not just constitute a substitution from out-group banks; we find that total borrowing increases by 13.89 percentage points after firms join an existing club branch and by 22.41 percentage points after firms participate in new club formation. Similarly, firm leverage significantly increases after these events by about 6– 9 percentage points. …

  To differentiate between a rent-seeking mechanism and positive effects of connections on credit allocation, we evaluate the relative profitability of connected lending by comparing the return on loans (ROL) that banks generate from in-group vis-à-vis out-group transactions. Since we are able to measure ex post loan performance after interest payments, defaults, and recovery rates, all contract features that affect the banks’ returns, for example, differences in collateral, are accounted for.

  We find that a given bank generates a 4.37 percentage point lower ROL on in-group loans compared to loans extended to out-group firms in the same city. Comparing lending from in-group and out-group banks to the same firm, we observe a 2.73 percentage point lower ROL for in-group banks.4 Investigating the drivers of the difference in ROL, we observe that while interest rates and recovery rates are not significantly different for loans made by in-group and out-group banks,5 in-group banks continue to lend to ailing firms after out-group banks start to withdraw lending. It is this excess continuation of firms as a going concern that stems from the soft budget constraint problem of in-group banks (Kornai 1986) that generates a lower ROL. This excess continuation constitutes a more disguised, harder to detect, form of preferential treatment, compared with changes in the price of credit.

  To sharpen our analysis on the underlying mechanism, we exploit crosssectional differences in bankers’ incentives. An implication of Becker’s (1957) work on discrimination is that competition provides a means to mitigate taste-based discrimination if such practices are costly to firms. In competitive markets, firms (or in our context banks) that engage in costly discrimination face the risk of being driven out of business. Consistent with this view, we observe that banks engage significantly less in ingroup lending in areas where credit market competition is higher, and we find that the wedge between in-group and out-group ROL is smaller in areas with competitive banking markets.

  Furthermore, we examine how career concerns affect rent-seeking behavior of bankers. A large literature argues that career concerns are an important mechanism in aligning agents’ incentives and preventing moral hazard. While younger bankers are subject to strong career concerns (bad performance may have a significant impact on future promotion and compensation decisions), older bankers, close to retirement, are less concerned about the impact of bad performance on future income. When we compare differences between in-group and out-group lending for young and older bankers in private banks, we find that young bankers engage relatively less in preferential in-group lending and the wedge between in-group and out-group loans is significantly smaller for young bankers. Overall, the cross-sectional results provide compelling evidence that bankers who bear higher costs of engaging in unprofitable activities participate less actively in connected lending. Looking at the wedge between returns on ingroup and out-group loans controls for differences in the ability of bankers with different degrees of incentives to generate different returns on lending in general. …

  The paper closest to ours is Guiso and Zingales (2014), which analyzes connected lending in Italy in a setting very similar to ours. They uncover some similar patterns. Specifically, they find that banks allocate more credit to socially connected firms. The authors interpret this as evidence of social connections reducing borrowing constraints. However, since they do not have data on contract terms, the evidence on the underlying mechanism cannot be conclusive. …

  Finally, our paper contributes to the understanding of differences between state and private bank financing. Governments around the world are taking ownership of large parts of the banking system, and this public-sector involvement in the banking sector might potentially have considerable longterm effects on many countries.

  1. In a similar vein, Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) warn us about the role of colluding elites in establishing extractive institutions as a major impediment to economic prosperity. ↩

August 16, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Most crowded stations

  It’s been very busy the last week or two, which is why the blog has been a bit quiet.

  Apart from the day job, this week I’ve been to two MTF transport forums (Melbourne, and Glen Eira), and a PTUA committee meeting.

  There are more MTF forums (fora?) in the coming weeks, and if you’re interested in this topic, they’re well worth attending. Details here.

  At the Glen Eira session on Wednesday, one of the panel members remarked that Caulfield station needs an upgrade, because it’s the tenth most crowded station.

  I agree on both counts! But as usual it can be useful to trace back the source of the information.

  How did they know Caulfield is the tenth most crowded?

  Because it was in this ABC story:

  

  Where did the ABC get it? They asked the PTUA.

  How did the PTUA calculate it?

  Ummm… well…

  There are different types of crowding: on the trains, and in and around the stations.

  Some stations are particularly bad for train crowding. Even when the service is running well, it can be difficult to squeeze aboard at the height of peak hour. Typically these stations are the last “minor” stops before the inner-city, where the trains are at their most crowded. Hawksburn and South Kensington are examples of this.

  At other stations, it’s a struggle getting in and out because of constrained and crowded platforms, stairs, ramps, subways, entrances and exits. Flinders Street is an example, where during morning peak (when full trains arrive and disgorge passengers) the infrastructure struggles to cope with the sheer number of people exiting and interchanging.

  At some stations they suffer from both of these problems. South Yarra, Richmond and others.

  

  There’s relief on the way for some of these issues.

  • Flinders Street has already gained a new exit to the river, and extra gates in the centre subway, with more changes coming.
  • A recent announcement revealed South Yarra and the adjoining tram stop will get upgrades — though given high-rise apartment development around the station, ultimately it probably needs a second (northern) concourse to take the pressure off.
  • The level crossing program can allow more trains to run if the busiest lines are largely free of crossings, and the newly rebuilt stations are typically more spacious and efficient for passenger movements. The first steps towards this are starting, with more evening (post-peak) services running on the Dandenong line from next week.
  • And the whole metro tunnel project is geared towards separating out lines to run more services to relieve crowding on trains, particularly on lines that currently share the Loop tunnels with the services that will use the new tunnel.

  

  Getting back to that list. Can these factors be measured?

  Train crowding yes, via passenger load surveys. Station crowding is more difficult.

  So when asked “which stations are the most crowded”, I looked at a bunch of factors, including observations and opinions from fellow passengers, but it wasn’t a scientific or mathematical measure.

  It’s anecdata! And apart from South Yarra being nominated as the “worst”, the stations weren’t strictly ranked. But people love a list, even if it’s not actually meant to be in a particular order.

  So. Yeah. Caulfield, 10th most crowded? Well, kinda sorta!

  With growing patronage and a future role as a metro tunnel interchange, does it need an upgrade? You bet!

August 15, 2018

• Club Troppo Competitive neutrality: Camels, pinballs, tilted playing fields and five minute arguments …

  Cross posted from the Mandarin:
  

  I recently made a submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into competition in finance. I wanted to suggest a very simple idea, that I thought could make a big difference. Moreover it came straight from Downtown Reformsville. It’s a slight gloss on an old idea that’s been so central to Australia’s economic reform that we coined the expression by which it is known globally – ‘competitive neutrality’.

  Indeed, I like to think that my proposal ‘completes’ the idea of competitive neutrality, putting it on an ideological level playing field as it were. This makes it serve the interests of efficiency and the public good rather than special interests whether they’re from business or government.

  Since we’ve taken so seriously the idea that, if they compete with private firms, government enterprises should compete on a ‘level playing field’, shouldn’t we also take the converse idea seriously – that where governments have substantial investments in providing services exclusively to some group, they should provide them on an unsubsidised basis to all comers? I proposed this in another context – National Competition Policy – over two decades ago.

  Silly me. The answer, in case you’re wondering is …

  Well that was the answer in the Commission’s draft report on finance. A silence worthy of a holy order. The Commission made no mention of my submission or the ideas in it. But others took some interest. Martin Wolf of Britain’s Financial Times discussed my proposal favourably in a column. And the Greens adopted it (quickly topped and tailed for political consumption). So in their final report the PC break their silence.

  They think it’s a bad idea. And here’s the thing. Maybe they’re right. But since the PC is supposed to be an expert clearinghouse of ideas, it needs to demonstrate that it has carefully considered both the pros and cons of an idea, and weighed them to come to a reasonable conclusion. Instead, tossing a new idea into a PC submission is a like playing a pinball machine. Once the silver ball’s in play, no matter how skilful you are on those flippers, eventually you lose it.

  Just as gravity always wins on the tilted playing field of a pinball machine, so ideas that are against the ideological grain – however slightly and however otherwise chiming with the economic reform playbook – ultimately go down the gurgler.

  Here’s how it works. The PC points to some untoward possibilities. They don’t suggest how likely they are, how bad they’d be or what might be done if they did. Nor do they weigh those concerns against possible benefits. Rather than engage with an idea they simply gainsay it as John Cleese does in Monty Python’s classic argument sketch. My proposal got the five-minute argument. But it’s essentially the same story even if you get the full half hour.

  In a complex world this shallowness of engagement ends you up back at your ideological priors. Nothing ventured: nothing gained. Come to think of it that’s not a bad motto for the PC and for so much else in our policy life.

  There’s one other thing worth noting. Behind the theatre of arms-length objective inquiry, there’s always been a rich ‘back-channel’ to the movers and shakers in the central agencies and their political masters. Indeed, when I was on the Commission this sometimes made Commission meetings confusing because the Chair sometimes abetted by the Executive Commissioner (the Deputy Chair in the current structure) and the Head of Office, would suddenly close down a line of argument for reasons that didn’t really make sense. I’d figure out later that the argument was inconvenient to a direction they’d determined in consultation with the Treasurer or the Treasury. This doesn’t mean the PC simply does what it’s told, but they’re invariably in close touch on the shaping of any important report.

  At its worst as Ross Gittins commented, on the PC’s report on the automotive industry in 2002, this degenerates into a farce:

  “[It’s] the PC’s duty to make recommendations advantaging the economy as a whole, not help its political masters cook up deals acceptable to the politicians’ mates in the motor industry. And if designing camels as horses is the best the PC can manage in this era of over-bearing politicians then, frankly, an interdepartmental committee would be a whole heap cheaper.”

  The finance inquiry seems to have been unusually influenced by the back-channel. The report on ‘finance’ (which excludes super) offers some fairly scathing comments about lack of competition in banking and financial advice but pretty tame remedies for doing much about it. However its report on superannuation seems more ambitious, at least when one considers the Government’s priors which are to not let the industry funds go unpunished for embarrassing the retail funds with their superior returns.

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  • READ MORE: Taking competitive neutrality seriously
    

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  My guess is that the Commission is trying to design a super system which helps channel money into better performing funds but it knows the government won’t be enamoured of what that involves – which would be more money for not-for-profit government and industry funds and less for the top end of town. To lower the degree of difficulty and raise ideological alignment with the Commission’s perspective, the idea of competitive neutrality – giving all Australians access to government super – gets the chop.

  And so citizens’ access to government super gets the five minute argument. The argument is so risible it occurred to me on reading it that we may actually be getting a wink and a nod saying in effect “We can’t run with your idea now, but we’ve made the arguments so bad they won’t stand in your way. In fact we’ve presented arguments for our case which are really arguments for your case!”. How’s this?

  “When the Swedish Government launched their premium pension scheme in 1999, it established a government-owned default fund for individuals who did not choose a fund. Initially, more than two-thirds of new savers chose a fund. However, by 2011 almost all new savers were joining the default, and many likely did so by making a deliberate passive choice (Barr 2013). Reasons offered for the decline in new savers making an active choice include an excessive amount of fund choice, the dot-com bubble immediately after the launch of the premium pension, and the strong performance of the default fund compared with other premium pensions [my emphasis] …

  “If allocated all default contributions, [a government] fund would fail to harness the benefits of competition for better member outcomes (as identified by the Murray Report, and implied in the terms of reference for this inquiry). [Unless of course the government fund manager harnesses gets individual fund managers to compete for the money which of course government fund managers virtually always do.] While having a government-owned fund competing to make the best in show list would enable benefits of competition, such an arrangement would still raise concerns about the potential risk to current and future taxpayers stemming from a government-owned default fund in the event of poor performance (potentially encouraging a more conservative investment strategy). It would also raise competitive neutrality concerns and possibly constitutional issues.”

  Plop. Another pinball disappears into the bowels of the machine. So as you can see, with apologies for changing the metaphor, it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the Commission to recommend government entities compete in a market. However competent and successful those government entities are, however dysfunctional and corrupted the market is.

• Club Troppo Comment from today’s Banking Day: Plain vanilla a super flavour
  

  It’s funny how not-for-profit is more efficient than for profit where there’s masses of opportunities to rip people off? Who’da thunk? The Industry Funds were dragged into the Royal Commission in line with the well established principle of public administration: Never let a good deed go unpunished.

  The current round of hearings at the royal commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industry has been notable on many levels. Thus far, the much anticipated grilling of the industry super funds has been a fizzer for their critics.

  Ian Silk, who has been chief executive officer of the largest industry fund, the A$140 billion AusSuper, since 2006, was unruffled in his time in the witness box, in stark contrast to the caning given to NAB’s super fund trustees who preceded him.

  Likewise, for David Elia, the CEO of hospitality and tourism industry fund Hostplus, a position he has held since 2003. He said that as of July this year, Hostplus had $34.5 billion funds under management on behalf of just over 1.1 million members, many of them very young, in part-time entry level casual employment.

  Elia took the first opportunity he was given to remind the commission how, despite needing to consider the cohort of disengaged youngsters whose money his fund was managing, it has nevertheless thrived, with the Hostplus MySuper product ranked as the best performing fund, net of investment fees and tax over one, three, five, seven, 15 and 20 years.

  What was notable?

  Unlike their for-profit counterparts, two of the country’s largest and most influential super funds were represented by their chief executives, both of whom could claim long-term outperformance over their tenures.

  Neither of them obfuscated or tried to hide behind weasel words. And they couldn’t – and didn’t – trot out the excuse so often used by their banking counterparts that they weren’t in the job at the time, or weren’t told anything, when (insert allegation of poor behaviour or regulatory breach here) occurred.

  On the evidence so far, the industry funds’ CEOs have not left themselves open to the same allegations of bad behaviour and putting their members last that have so damaged the rest of the financial services sector.

  Their banking CEO counterparts will soon get their respective days in the spotlight.

  The excellent, but paywalled original is here.

August 11, 2018

• Club Troppo Could CPR resuscitate our political system (Corporate Political Responsibility that is)?

  One of my twenty something friends once told me of a meeting to discuss corporate social responsibility in their Big Law Firm. Along came the heavies of the firm, together with their Champions of Change. These champions of change are men who look out for women – largely by making sure you don’t have to listen to women when you can listen to a Champion of Change. #WTNTL?

  In any event, the team leader or perhaps a Champion asked people what they thought corporate social responsibility was all about. This person piped up and said that it might mean that the law firm wouldn’t do legal work for firms that whose business model actively harmed the world. Most obviously tobacco companies but also, it was suggested Adani and other coal miners.

  It emerged that this was the wrong answer. It turns out that corporate social responsibility amounts to doing Nice Things while one works. Whistling While You Work doesn’t quite cut the mustard, but doing Something Nice does. You might spend a night out with the homeless, do pro-bono work for a Good Cause or do a lot more recycling (even if – perhaps specially if – it harms the environment like paper recycling does).

  Anyway, its intriguing the way in which CSR is often corralled into relatively peripheral channels. In this regard shared value, is a similar more positive approach to a similar theme. But if corporations do want to show some ethical backbone, one thing we might surely expect them to do is to desist from lobbying governments with demands in their own interests that fairly clearly violate the public interest.

  Indeed, the great flaw in so much of this ‘ethical’ this and that is the public good problem. A firm can be ‘ethical’ in choosing to make goods that can be made with lower levels of pollutions effectively outsourcing the pollution to other firms – or countries – offsetting or even in some circumstances outweighing the good they do (as could easily happen with offshore production of aluminium using dirtier coal or manufactures with worse labour practices).

  At least corporate political responsibility would not suffer from this public good problem. Unless and until the Western economies transition into the kinds of gangsterism we see in Russia and in the mind of Donald Trump, if one firm desisted in lobbying for its own benefit at the expense of the public interest, other firms in the same industry might lobby for their interest, but if they were successful in influencing policy they’d also benefit the Good Firm that was desisting from such practices.

  Do I expect any of this to happen? Not soon. But then Ben Neville drew my attention to this article, calling for environmental CPR. It’s a pity it’s limited it to environmentalist objectives, especially since CSR often extends well beyond environmental responsibility and the article wasn’t even shoehorned into an environmental journal. It wasn’t even delivered at a conference at which the theme was Pirates of the Caribbean The Environment.

August 10, 2018

• Club Troppo It’s on again on 6th Sept: making the world a tad better with our guest Christos Tsiolkas

  If only I’d been alive to get to one of these events.

  Nelson Mandela

  Last year’s second dinner was perhaps only matched by Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

  Nicholas Gruen

  Lying Nick Gruen is a total lightweight. TOTALLY FAKE ECONOMIST. Begged me to let him clean the ashtrays on The Apprentice. Small hands. Todd Sampson only thing to come out of his TV show. Sad!

  Donald Trump

  As you may recall, last year I had so much fun at my birthday, I decided to make it an annual event. To disguise the naked egotism of it we (which is to say “I”) decided to raise money for a Good Cause. For me that’s refugees. We ran a kind of trial just two months after my birthday last year and it was a blast.

  Now, many months after not getting my act together for my birthday, we’re going again. So you’re invited to a fantastic party in Melbourne with a whole lot of fantastically interesting people I know. (Seriously, there’ll be some fascinating people there I promise!)

  It will mostly be dinner and meeting and talking to friends and interesting people you’ve not met before, but Christos Tsiolkas is coming and has agreed to speak to us. We’re inviting you to pay your way with $49.99 as was the case last year) I contemplated raising the price to $50 but then the credit card margin (which you get to pay) also went up by a cent. And effective marginal tax rates of 100% are not something that is tolerated in my profession! So Book Now for 7.00 pm on Thursday Sept 6th at Tazios on this link.

  I’m also hoping you can donate and will match every dollar of yours over $100 up to a total liability of $5,000 for me. (Last year Ross Gittins decided to play hard-ball and try to bankrupt me with a thousand dollar donation which took $900 out of my pocket right there! Bring it on I say! We can always auction off the Troppo garage of imaginary cars, – starting, obviously enough, with Rooter.)

  And there’s a special deal for those from out of town. They can make a donation as Ross did from interstate or overseas. Just email me on ngruen at gmail and I’ll send you details. And please pass this around.

• Club Troppo Authoritarianism: GUEST POST by John Burnheim

  Arguing with an American ex-Australian now resident in Canada, I contested his view that, of the three countries, America is the least and Australia the most, authoritarian. In part it was a verbal difference. I was taking “authoritarian” in the established pejorative meaning: Valuing authority for its own sake often used to describe totalitarian regimes or certain personalities or cultures.

  I was pretty sure that he was following an American usage that is descriptive of the degree of governmental activity in regulating daily life. But the pejorative content of authoritarian is not so easily shrugged off, especially in America where there is a widespread belief that government is at best a necessary evil. What follows is my attempt to sort out some of the issues. In any event below is the text of an email I wrote him:

  I did find the distinction you mention between structure and culture very useful. I think of a social structure as a bus that is supposed to run its route by a timetable. Anybody can use it, if they accept it’s operating conditions. On the whole it is in the interests of the citizens if the bus does what it is supposed to do.

  Even though it must involve quite a lot of use of authority, it is not authoritarian until running the system becomes an in in itself, imposed whether people like it or no by an authority that claims to act in a superior interest. In any majoritarian democracy, it is inevitable that some people feel that some authoritative decisions are authoritarian, but that may be a matter of a tolerable defect in a wider context.

  Culture is the behaviour of the bus driver and the passengers, regulated either by explicitly accepted rules or by reasonable expectations. There are always reasons for most rules that are generally accepted as beneficial. Often the reason is simply that people don’t like to have to change their habits. Even those who would prefer a different rule at least know where they stand. That is social authority.

  It becomes authoritarian when the predominant objective of enforcing or changing the rules is to control behaviour as an end in itself or for ends that are irrelevant to the particular purpose of the activity in question. Authority is least authoritarian where it maximises the appreciation of expressive behaviour that is spontaneous and unpredictable. Democracies may be authoritarian if they love regimentation and discipline or insist on religious observances in non-religious contexts.

  A country may be structurally strongly regulated, but not authoritarian and in culture pretty anti-authoritarian. I think particularly of France and Belgium as I knew them long ago and of Australia in its present form.

  However, what worries me about this sort of picture of national cultures is that it concentrates on national culture as a unity when in fact it has many independently developing and often conflicting strands. I want to insist that the old image of the nation as a person must be supplanted by that of an ecosystem consisting of many diverse systems and linked in a host of divers ways to the global ecosystem. More importantly still, many of those strands are developing on a global scale as both informal communications and structural practices. They are more powerfully influenced by cosmopolitan factors than by local indigenous traditions, leading to worldwide conflict between conservative and cosmopolitan forces at every level of our social structures and behaviour.

  What worries me most about this situation is that the conservatives, seeing the old ways threatened, are driven towards authoritarianism. Nothing must be conceded to a cosmopolitanism seen as also unitary and authoritarian, a plot to take over the world.

  I think the only way out of this dangerous situation is the diversification of authorities at every level from the local to the global and the concomitant diversification of decision procedures in relation to their subject matter, participation and sanctions. I don’t like my chances of success. We love simplicity and emotional security.

August 09, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Don’t be a jerk

  I was looking through some old photos, and found these from November 1996.

  I’ve scanned them from the negatives.

  As you can see, they provide some good advice…

  

  

  (Click on either photo to view it larger in Flickr)

  Things to note here:

  • “Don’t be a jerk” is a work by Barbara Kruger, originally from 1984
  • Some of the well-known CBD skyscrapers are visible in the background, but more were to come over the following 22 years!
  • This is snapped from Flinders Street Station looking east across Swanston Street. The old Gas And Fuel building is being demolished to make way for Federation Square
  • In the first photo you can also just see the entrance to the old Princes Bridge station (look for The Met logo), which was also mostly demolished – apart from platform 14. Back then it also had platforms 15 and 16, used by terminating trains from Clifton Hill.
  • Z-class tram in The Met colours – this was before privatisation. Note the “Do not enter” signage on the rear door; these trams ran with seated conductors near the front, and later as driver-only. This particular tram, number 150, came into service in 1980, and is still in service, making it 38 years old.
  • No tram superstop. Just a “Safety zone”
  • I’m not sure what time of day this was. It looks pretty dark and rainy for November, but that’s what the scribbled note on the photo says!

August 08, 2018

• Club Troppo The first page test: Hannah Arendt edition

  There’s an amazing amount of dreck about – masquerading as the latest thinking. It’s not that there isn’t a lot to think about, so it’s easy to think you should read this or that. How to choose? One of my filters is the first page test, or even the first paragraph test. Does the first paragraph have arresting ideas in it. Ideally does it intimate a whole bunch of ideas in ways that make you think the author might have been pondering them for some time, bringing them into some compelling relation to each other.

  Because there are books that start well and you then end up wading through dreck, you can also apply the random paragraph or page test. This also helps because you can get an idea in the bookstore and read the first chapter on your ebook sample.

  Why am I telling you this. Because over the fold I have the first page of an essay by Hannah Arendt called “The Crisis in Education”. Imagine if every first page had what it has? Note, during the afternoon, I ran into another cracker of an opening, and so you’ll find it below Arndt for your delectation.

  (Disclaimer and declaration of conformity with Troppo’s ethics policy: I’ve rushed into print. I’ve not got beyond the paragraphs quoted below. Perhaps she goes on to develop the thesis that our education system is in crisis because of alien abduction. Perhaps she thinks it will all be fixed by a giant monocle mounted on a pedestal. If that is the case then my ‘front page test’ is thus refuted. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s pretty much plain sailing as far as I can see.)

  “The Crisis in Education” by Hannah Arendt (1954)

  The general crisis that has overtaken the modern world everywhere and in almost every sphere of life manifests itself differently in each country, involving different areas and taking on different forms. In America, one of its most characteristic and suggestive aspects is the recurring crisis in education that, during the last decade at least, has become a political problem of the first magnitude, reported on almost daily in the newspapers. To be sure, no great imagination is required to detect the dangers of a constantly progressing decline of elementary standards throughout the entire school system, and the seriousness of the trouble has been properly underlined by the countless unavailing efforts of the educational authorities to stem the tide. Still, if one compares this crisis in education with the political experiences of other countries in the twentieth century, with the revolutionary turmoil after the First World War, with concentration and extermination camps, or even with the profound malaise which, appearances of prosperity to the contrary notwithstanding, has spread throughout Europe ever since the end of the Second World War, it is somewhat difficult to take a crisis in education as seriously as it deserves. It is tempting indeed to regard it as a local phenomenon, unconnected with the larger issues of the century, to be blamed on certain peculiarities of life in the United States which are not likely to find a counterpart in other parts of the world.

  Yet, if this were true, the crisis in our school system would not have become a political issue and the educational authorities would not have been unable to deal with it in time. Certainly more is involved here than the puzzling question of why Johnny can’t read. Moreover, there is always a temptation to believe that we are dealing with specific problems confined within historical and national boundaries and of importance only to those immediately affected. It is precisely this belief that in our time has consistently proved false. One can take it as a general rule in this century that whatever is possible in one country may in the foreseeable future be equally possible in almost any other.

  Aside from these general reasons that would make it seem advisable for the layman to be concerned with trouble in fields about which, in the specialist’s sense, he may know nothing (and this, since I am not a professional educator, is of course my case when I deal with a crisis in education), there is another even more cogent reason for his concerning himself with a critical situation in which he is not immediately involved. And that is the opportunity, provided by the very fact of crisis–which tears away facades and obliterates prejudices–to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter, and the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world. The disappearance of prejudices simply means that we have lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely without even realizing they were originally answers to questions. A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.

  But wait there’s more. Here’s the opening of Amatya Sen on “Merit and Justice”.

  Justitia and Justitium

  I have been asked to write on “Justice in Meritocratic Environments.” The idea of meritocracy may have many virtues, but clarity is not one of them. The lack of clarity may relate to the fact, as I shall presently argue, that the concept of “merit” is deeply contingent on our views of a good society. Indeed, the notion of merit is fundamentally derivative, and thus cannot but be qualified and contingent. There is some elementary tension between (1) the inclination to see merit in fixed and absolute terms, and (2) the ultimately instrumental character of merit—its dependence on the concept of “the good” in the relevant society.

  This basic contrast is made more intense by the tendency, in practice, to characterize “merit” in inflexible forms reflecting values and priorities of the past, often in sharp conflict with conceptions that would be needed for seeing merit in the context of contemporary objectives and concerns. Some of the major difficulties with “meritocracy” arise, I would argue, from this internal conflict within the concept of “merit” itself.

  When I received the invitation to write on justice in meritocracies, I was reminded of an amusing letter I had received a couple of years earlier from W. V. O. Quine (addressed jointly to John Rawls and me, dated December 17, 1992):

  I got thinking about the word justice, alongside solstice. Clearly, the latter, solstitium, is sol + a reduced stit + from stat-, thus “solar standstill”; so I wondered about justitium: originally a legal standstill? I checked in Meillet, and he bore me out. Odd! It meant a court vacation. Checking further, I found that justitia is unrelated to justitium. Justitia is just(um) + –itia, thus “just-ness,” quite as it should be, whereas justitium is jus+stitium.

  I shall argue that meritocracy, and more generally the practice of rewarding merit, is essentially underdefined, and we cannot be sure about its content—and thus about the claims regarding its “justice”—until some further specifications are made (concerning, in particular, the objectives to be pursued, in terms of which merit is to be, ultimately, judged). The merit of actions — and (derivatively) that of persons performing actions—cannot be judged independent of the way we understand the nature of a good (or an acceptable) society. There is, thus, something of justitium or “standstill” in our understanding of merit, which involves at least a temporary “stay” (if not quite a “court vacation”). Indeed, examining the nature of this “standstill,” which is ethically and politically illuminating, may be a better way of understanding the place of meritocracy in modern society than seeing it as a part of some categorical justitia that demands our compliance.

August 06, 2018

• Daniel Bowen The desire to drive, and how we must counter it

  I am discovering that there’s some powerful psychology going on when you get a new car.

  Playing into this for me is that my old car was wearing out, and was getting difficult to drive, plus the change from manual to automatic.

  This means the new car seems like a breeze to drive.

  The “new car smell” is real, and somehow makes it seem pleasurable to sit in the driver’s seat.

  The extra features – even on this model which was as cheap as I could buy in the size I wanted – are (I’m guessing) designed to appeal, to make you want to be in the car (and thus to drive it).

  Some designers have identified cupholders specifically as desirable, with some perhaps unlikely explanations:

  Rapaille says women love cup holders because — and this is really what he told her — cup holders mean coffee, and coffee means safety, because of the memories we all have of our mothers preparing coffee with breakfast.

  And this: Anthony Prozzi, design manager for Ford in Michigan, explains that “part of a designers job is to play psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist, and knowing those things helps you read consumers and know what puts a smile on their faces.”

  

  My new car has a spot to put a bottle in the door (like my old car did) plus cupholders in the centre between the front two seats. So I can have two drinks within easy reach if I want… while the manual warns you not to actually use them while driving. Plus it’s got a spot for a packet of tissues, in case I have a spill.

  I suppose car manufacturers have been at this game for a long time. You’ve bought their product for thousands of dollars – they want you to feel good about it, so that in time you’ll want to upgrade to another one.

  The net result is that – even for someone like me, who understands the consequences of driving, and doesn’t like driving – I feel like I want to drive it.

  I’d never drive it to work. Parking is too expensive, traffic is too soul-destroying, and (usually) the train is too good.

  But it’s tempting to drive it other places where PT options are fewer – and I can understand why some people would be tempted to drive every day, even into horrible traffic. Combined with (Australian) governments who keep building big roads, even though it doesn’t solve congestion (it expands it), the desire to drive is powerful.

  Just get in, turn the key and go. It’s so easy. Mostly the noise, air quality and traffic impacts are Somebody Else’s Problem. The motorist doesn’t pay for them; society does.

  Governments are complicit in this, especially in Australia, where they build ever more roads as cities get bigger – despite this being not how the world’s biggest cities solve their mobility problems.

  So the desire to drive is powerful.

  

  Fighting back

  All this means that those of us who believe in the importance of solving those impacts through alternative transport modes have to make sure that they improve enough to fight back. If everybody who could afford to and was able to was on the roads, it’d be a disaster.

  Perhaps to an extent cars are self-defeating. The more crowded the roads become, the better the alternatives look.

  I also associate the car with first escapes, driving nowhere in particular in the middle of the night with a friend, movement being a goal in its own right. … Countless trips have been made by car since then, and we (still) own a small car today. However, trains became our favorite transport mode a long time ago, and as a family, we nowadays associate highways with congestion and stress, places to avoid. — Stefan Gossling

  Ultimately to fight back against the car, the other options need to improve.

  Gossling again: There are powerful interests at work to psychologically engineer car addiction—addicts, conveniently, never question their behavior. Other insights pertain to the role of cars with regard to emotions, sociality, sex and gender, speed, authority, and death. We need to understand these interrelationships to unlock the possibility of alternative transport futures.

  

  Can public transport improve?

  One could focus on the psychological aspects of public transport, but what about the basics – making the system easy and pleasant to use?

  Cleanliness, crowding, information, security and easy to use ticketing all come into it. But seamless connections and cutting waiting times to reduce door-to-door journey times are fundamental requirements.

  It would be easy enough to despair. Progress is so damn slow.

  Most suburban buses are still running to frequencies from cuts 25 years ago. The last tranche of the better quality orbital Smartbus routes were implemented in 2010, almost a decade ago.

  Trams have seen capacity expansion (big trams replacing smaller trams) but few route extensions, and remain slow due to a lack of progress on traffic priority.

  The noises about public transport expansion are positive, but the actual progress isn’t.

  Particularly frustrating is that literally billions are being spent on new rail tunnels to fix peak hour (great!) but most suburban train lines continue to run only every 20 minutes at most times of day, 30 minutes evenings. There are still gaps of 40 minutes on some lines on Sunday mornings.

  A few have improved, but on most lines at most times they are much the same now as they have been for 30 years.

  Let’s face it, with some exceptions, outside peak, most of the public transport system remains pathetically infrequent and slow, especially for a city of nearly five million people — despite increasing all-day demand.

  Really, it’s no surprise that most people continue to drive.

  The car industry is doing its best to coax us in, and on the other side, every signal from authorities, every pathetic half-baked public transport upgrade, every poorly-programmed pedestrian crossing, every non-existent bike path tells people to drive.

  To curb the many problems of the car, they have to do better.

• Club Troppo The people’s voice: as rage and as healing

  

  There’s a spectre haunting Europe … and the rest of the Western world. We have elaborate ‘diversity’ programs in good upper-middle-class places to prevent discrimination against all manner of minorities (and majorities like women). It’s a fine thing. But there’s a diversity challenge a little closer to home which is tearing the world apart. There’s a war on the less well educated.

  They’re falling out of the economy in droves, being driven into marginal employment or out of the labour force. This is a vexing problem to solve economically if the electorate values rising incomes which it does. Because, as a rule, the less well educated are less productive.

  Still, the less well educated are marginalised from polite society. Polite society even runs special newspapers for them. They’re called tabloids and they’re full of resentment and hate. And yes, a big reason they are the way they are is that the less well educated buy them. They’re also marginalised, except in stereotyped form, from TV.

  Then there are our institutions of governance. While less than 50 per cent of our population are university educated, over 90 per cent of our parliamentarians are. Something very similar would be going on down the chain of public and private governance down to local councils and private firms.

  And I’m pretty confident that a lot of this is internalised even by those not well educated. The last working-class Prime Minister we’ve had in Australia was Ben Chifley who was turfed out of office by a silver-tongued barrister in 1949. Barrie Unsworth in NSW going down badly in his first election as NSW Premier despite seeming – at least to me to be doing quite a good job. But he sounded working class – because he was. I wonder if that was it?

  The world is made by and for the upper middle class, those who’ve been to the right schools and gone to unis (preferably the right unis), to get on. The ancient Greeks had a political/legal principle of relevance here which is entirely absent from our political language. In addition to ‘παρρησία’ or ‘parrhesia‘ which is often translated as ‘freedom of speech’ but which also carries a connotation of the duty to speak the truth boldly for the community’s wellbeing even at your own cost (a la Socrates), they also had the concept of ‘ισηγορια’ or ‘isegoria‘ meaning equality of speech.¹

  In Australia Pauline Hanson’s One Nation represents the political system’s concession to isegoria – toxified as a protest party within a hostile political culture. My own support for a greater role for selection by lot in our democracy is to build more isegoria into our political system in a way that, I think there’s good evidence, can help us get to a much better politics and policy.

  In any event, the big, most toxified political events illustrating these problems are, of course, Brexit and Trump – concrete political acts of transformative significance standing before illustrating the power of isegoria as rage.

  

  We’re used to this kind of thing. But stop for a minute and look at the images.

  That’s one reason why I think Brexit presents such a dramatic opportunity to confront isegoria as rage with isegoria as healing. For a whole host of reasons, participants in citizens’ juries are eager to explore different perspectives so as to compromise and unite to arrive at some collective decision, as opposed to the alternative enshrined in electoral politics which is the accentuation of differences to assemble a majority.

  It’s been instructive trying to get Brexit Deliberation Day off the ground. I’ve spoken to lots of people who might be in a position to help. Almost everyone I speak to likes the idea, many like it a lot. But there’s a catch. They need to be well disposed to political activism of some kind to be likely to do more than talk about the idea, but if they’re of activist bent, they’ve already picked their side.

  

  I’m strongly against Brexit and so, notionally on the side of the creators of this image.

  Right now there’s a fair bit of money being put into an anti-Brexit campaign which is seeking a second vote. I can show them good evidence that running the deliberation day would improve their chances of averting Brexit – as I argued in my piece, there’s good evidence that moving from the will of the people to their considered will on this subject produces a swing away from 50:50 to about 60:40 for remain.²

  But I can’t guarantee it. And campaigners are campaigning for one outcome, not for Good Debate. And no-one can guarantee them that the process won’t end up endorsing Brexit.

  So I’ve been toying with another idea. Local councils have some ‘skin in the game’ in the sense that they’re full of politically engaged councillors. They’re Brits. Many if not the overwhelming majority would have a strong view on Brexit. So, with Brexit tearing the country apart, what if councils from strongly pro-Brexit regions buddied up with councils from strongly anti-Brexit regions to try to forge greater understanding between these two populations which seem to be drifting ever further apart.

  The same goes, perhaps even more for Trump’s America. I was taken aback by the huge demonstrations that broke out at the time of Trump’s victory. It is true that he won with fewer votes, but that didn’t reflect a deliberate Republican-engineered gerrymander as the Republican dominance of the House does. So unless one is demonstrating specifically for some review of the Electoral College system, the idea of simply rejecting the winner of a democratic election seems shocking to me. Indeed, so scared am I of the American right’s penchant for violence – which put paid to hundreds of people in the last century through lynching – I’ve been surprised there’s really only one notorious example of white nationalist terrorism since Trump took office – at Charlottesville. Perhaps I’m wrong and more people are being bumped off than I’ve heard.

  

  As the son of a holocaust survivor I find all the images on this page horrifying. We’re so used to this kind of demonisation of our political opponents. But what are these images if not an invitation to contempt and hate?  Are we out of our minds?

  If anti-Trump voters wanted to do something, I recall a friend suggesting after the election, they should collect some of their like-minded friends, find some people who voted for Donald Trump and break bread together to try to generate greater mutual understanding of each others perspectives. So here’s one plausible institutionalisation of that idea.

  We could try to forge ‘sister council’ arrangements between differently minded council areas. Co-funded by councils and whatever crowd-funding and philanthropic funding one might be able to cobble together, I’d suggest there be two tracks. Those participating would all meet in one of the two council areas.

  One track would be a properly organised citizens’ jury consisting of equal numbers of representatively randomised citizens from each area who would go through some properly organised process of discussion seeking points of understanding. The citizens’ jury would draft some communique of the majority’s views – and minorities would also be able to draft communiques. And changes of mind in both directions would be significant for the wider political world as it looked on to observe any systematic patterns emerging as people moved from less, to more considered views.

  And it would be great if this was taken up by others as an exciting opportunity to deepen their engagement with different perspectives. So I’d like to see a vigorous ‘voluntary’ track. Having a weekend or two in another, area of the country with different demographics and different values, ideally billeted by citizens of the host council, people could get together informally, keep tabs on the citizens’ jury and meet each other in pubs and elsewhere to really try to get inside one another’s heads. Even if they couldn’t change each others minds, I’m dead sure they’d dial down the self-righteousness and hate.

  They might come to feel, as I’ve felt on more than one occasion driving home when displeased with another driver. Road rage welling up inside me, I’ve contemplated a strong blast from my horn, and perhaps some gesticulation. Perhaps I’ve gone ahead with it. Then I’ve been mortified to discover not only that it’s my next door neighbour to whom I’ve been attributing such vile motives, but that of course we’ll be getting out of our cars right next to each other. What was I thinking?

  ¹  Here’s a good article on the two concepts which I think goes off on a tangent seeking to make them relevant to ‘no-platforming’ on campuses. It’s an interesting argument it makes – that ‘no-platforming’ is in defence of isegoria. Perhaps. But the kind of speech policing that’s going on in defence of ‘political correctness’ is to a large extent stigmatising forms of speech that are more typical of less educated people. Also, by the way, apologies, for the pomposity of including the greek lettering. I can only plead that, having learned the letters up in school and then relearned them marrying a Greek, I find picking my way through them cool.

  ² That produces an ‘optics’ problem. It would be preferable to raise an equal amount of money from both sides but Brexit supporters’ money won’t be forthcoming given how much it’s likely to work against their interest. But I’d be happy to wear that and simply say to the electorate “yes, this process was funded mostly by Remainers, but it’s governed in a transparently bi-partisan manner with two respected people – one Remainer and one Brexiter as co-chairs and each of those, plus an overwhelming majority of participants in the citizens’ juries must sign off to say that the process was fair to both sides.

August 01, 2018

• Daniel Bowen The rail map circa 2025

  Transport For Victoria have quietly put out a map and plan for the rail network for 2025. It’s dated June, but I hadn’t spotted it before.

  Well, I say plan… it’s only a ten page brochure (eight if you exclude the covers) mostly summarising projects that we already know are fully funded:

  • Metro tunnel (aka Metro 1)
  • High Capacity Metro Trains and high capacity signalling
  • Level crossing removal
  • Mernda Rail (which opens later this month)
  • Hurstbridge line upgrades (currently the object of a political stoush)
  • Regional Rail Revival – new fleets and track duplication

  

  In comparison the 2012 plan, which covered metropolitan rail only, was 144 pages. So this one is scant on detail.

  It does vaguely mention the prospect of all-day frequent services:

  The Major Transport Infrastructure Program is delivering a series of projects to transition the network to a ‘turn up and go’ service, which will deliver:

  • More peak services, reduced wait times and improved connection times
  • More frequent services throughout the day, with more services outside of peak periods to support non-peak travel
  • Improved journey experience, including getting to and from the station and transport interchanges

  …which on the face of it sounds good, but there’s no public plan of how and when this will happen, other than that we know the network infrastructure will be able to support it. (And besides, most of the rail network supports this right now.)

  Marcus Wong recently noted that the business case for the Metro 1 tunnel didn’t even include anything better than a 20 minute frequency to stations west of West Footscray. The government rang me to say that’s just a “base case” and not a service plan. But it’s not surprising people assume it is a service plan when it looks like a service plan, and there’s no other public documentation available.

  The rail map 2025

  And then there’s the rail map. They’ve published a 2025 version that shows how it’ll look once the Metro 1 tunnel is open. (View it bigger or go to the original PDF)

  

  This confirms what we knew about operations once the tunnel opens. The Sunbury line will connect through to the Cranbourne/Pakenham line. Frankston trains will run through the Loop. Sandringham will run through to Newport.

  State Library and Town Hall are shown as distinct stations, but with connections to Melbourne Central and Flinders Street.

  What’s interesting is what the map doesn’t show. They’ve apparently not committed to removing Glen Waverley trains from the Loop, even though it’s obvious that as frequencies increase, they’ll need to do so. Myki on long-distance V/Line? Not clear. Melton/Wyndham Vale electrification? Also not shown.

  The document does mention the latter, and other upgrades in passing, without any timelines, providing something of a shopping list for the politicians as we move towards the State Election.

  Metro 2 is not mentioned, and there’s only a brief mention of accessibility.

  It’s good to see them looking ahead… though I’d hoped to see something that showed a bit more detail around all day service frequencies. These are vitally important to how people can use the train system. The Coalition has made a pledge (but it seems a bit wobbly as it’s not in writing anywhere), and Labor are yet to talk about it.

  The current, mostly every 20 minutes, train service doesn’t cut it in a city of almost 5 million and growing, especially in the face of growing motorway expansion that will worsen congestion. Let’s hope we see this change sooner rather than later.

• The Northern Myth The African gangs of Alice Springs

  

  There’s been a lot of talk about African gangs lately, mainly from the far-flung suburbs of Melbourne, where another gang of alleged criminals—your older grey-haired Anglo geezers wrapped in their customary gang garb of white shirts and cheap ties have been screeching from our TV screens and the front pages of our tabloid daily newspapers—have spun a furious pitch about the rampages allegedly conducted by immigrant Africans preying on unsuspecting citizens out for a chew and a brew or ten on the streets of Melbourne.

  By and large most of us—well, those of us with a capacity for critical analysis more developed than a doomed male phascogale in mating season—cast a skeptical eye on those claims.

  Yeah right … meanwhile in Alice Springs …

  Don’t tell Malcolm, Peter, Tony, Ray, Andrew or the host of other beat-up bastards trailing on their grubby coat-tails but over the past ten or more years African gangs have inculcated themselves into the very social fabric of Alice Springs. These nefarious groups have taken virtual control of just about every aspect of daily life in the remote township. Africans—drawn from right across that darkest continent but mainly from Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zimbabwe—have relocated to Alice Springs … maybe to escape the depredation of the white-shirt brigade down south.

  A large proportion of them come from the benighted and recently-minted country of South Sudan.

  Curious much? Here’s some examples of how these folks have sneakily seized control of just about every aspect of life in this dusty little outpost in Australia’s red-dirt heartland.

  Case study one is their creeping domination of our legal system. I work with one of these folks who, unsatisfied with being a practicing lawyer in his home town in Sudan (the northern part) had the temerity to come to Australia, study law again and now practices as a lawyer here. Two law degrees! What is it with these people?

  Another of his countrymen (well, from South Sudan) has a full-time gig in the local courts as a security guard and is always ready with a big smile, fist-bumps and a warm welcome. He also—like many of his countrymen and women who work multiple jobs—moonlights as security at my local bottle-shop. More than a few of his fellow uniformed mates patrol local supermarkets and mom-and-pop stores and pat me down at the airport screening station.

  Other African gang members have snuck into the health care system, working at the local hospital as nurses and also as disability and mobility support workers, at the local Aboriginal aged care centres and at the Aboriginal hostels.

  Taxi and bus drivers, university and TAFE students, checkout chicks and guys, pizza shop owners, cleaners and receptionists at the local casino, bank tellers, senior public servants, business operators and real estate agents.

  The list goes on.

  Most of the long-term resident African gang members have even taken up Australian citizenship or permanent residency on the way to that goal. Their kids go to local schools—public and private—and generally do well at sports and academically.

  Oh, and the crimes that this mob commit?

  My colleague tells me that—from personal experience—few of these criminal gang members ever get caught up in the legal system, with most appearances before the local courts being for small-time assault and personal injury—usually black African on black African—matters.

  Generally, a far lower crime rate than the local Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal communities.

  Have we got an African gang problem in Alice Springs?

  Hell, yeah, we most likely need a lot more of them.

  Just don’t tell Malcolm, Peter, Tony, Ray and Andrew and their mates …

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July 31, 2018

• The Northern Myth Think you know what the world’s most dangerous job is? You’re dead wrong …

  

  If, like I did until earlier today, you thought that the world’s most dangerous gig might be as a tree-feller, an off-shore crab-fisherman or even an underground miner or somesuch other innately dangerous job (or perhaps as an American journalist in these troubled times) that might turn up in a quick Google search … well, you’d be as wrong as I was.

  For my money the most dangerous job you could do right now would be … wait for it …

  … as a ranger.

  Today, according to the good folks over at the International Ranger Foundation, is World Ranger Day. The IRF reckons that World Ranger Day is celebrated at functions worldwide :

   … on July 31st to commemorate Rangers killed or injured in the line of duty and to celebrate the work Rangers do to protect the planet’s natural treasures and cultural heritage.

  According to the World Ranger Day In Memoriam list (below) 128 reported and confirmed deaths occurred in the last 12 months – the list is incomplete and the true figures are unknown – and it includes the following causes of death.

  • Elephant attack – 13
  • Rhino attack – 3
  • Traffic accidents – 13
  • Unknown – 9
  • Plane crashes – 4
  • Buffalo arrack – 2
  • Snake – 1
  • Bull attack – 1

  Most of those are not unexpected when people are working in remote areas doing inherently dangerous work. Unfortunate but regrettably understandable.

  What is surprising, and indicative of the terrible threats that too many rangers have to face when they go off to work each day, is this next set of deaths caused by their fellow humans.

  • Killed by Poachers – 13
  • Killed by Insurgents – 17
  • Killed by Jihadists – 8
  • Killed by Illegal Loggers – 6
  • Killed by Military – 2

  As the poster below notes, “This list also includes those with similar roles/duties as Rangers who have different title but does not include severely injured Rangers, of which there are many …”

  

  The figures for 2017-2018 are bad enough but when you look go back and look at the period 2009 to 2018 (below) then you can really get a sense of the difficulties facing Rangers in the field – particularly in Asia, where 410 Ranger’s lives were lost and in Africa, with 327 deaths.

  In total of 871 deaths of Rangers were recorded during this period, and as noted, those numbers surely don’t reflect the real death toll and don’t take account of the injured and traumatised.

  The IRF defines a Ranger as, the person involved in the practical protection and preservation of all aspects of wild areas, historical and cultural sites. Rangers provide recreational opportunities and interpretation of sites while providing links between local communities, protected areas and area administration.

  

  The International Ranger Federation (IRF) was founded on 31st July 1992 in Peak National Park in the UK and has now expanded to include membership by 65 Ranger associations from national, state and territorial entities that have affiliated with the IRF, as well as several Rangers from around the world, who have Provisional membership status whilst they attempt to establish Ranger associations in their countries.

  The IRF is guided by an agreement that has goals of  providing a global forum for Rangers from around the world to share their successes and failures in protecting the world’s natural heritage and to promote the exchange of information and technology from countries in which protected area management enjoys broad public and government support, to countries in which it is less supported.

  The IRF asks that on World Ranger Day we:

  … pause for a moment to reflect on the courage and sacrifice that Rangers make: by honouring Fallen Rangers and standing with Rangers who bravely undertake their role on the frontline. World Ranger Day is an International Ranger Federation initiative promoted together with its official charity arm, The Thin Green Foundation.

  

   

  You can read more about the work of the IRF at their website or their Facebook page. You can donate to support the work of The Thin Green Line Foundation (TTGLF), the official charity arm of the IRF. All donations to the IRF are administered through them.

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July 30, 2018

• The Northern Myth Art in translation: Murray Garde and John Mawurndjul

  

  Linguist anthropologist Murray Garde talks about the Kuninjku language and being an interpreter for artist John Mawurndjul

  Murray Garde, a linguist and anthropologist, is fluent in the Kuninjku language – the language spoken by master bark painter John Mawurndjul. Mawurndjul’s work is the focus of a major retrospective John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new, which opened at the MCA on 6 July 2018.

  Garde worked as a school teacher for the Northern Territory Education Department in the 1980s and ’90s, living in Kuninjku-language communities on the remote outstations or homeland centres south of Maningrida in western Arnhem Land. He first met Mawurndjul, whom he calls Balang, in 1988: “Balang is his skin name or his subsection, which is how most people refer to him.”

  In this interview, Garde talks about learning the Kuninjku language, his close friendship with the artist, and why Indigenous languages continue to be under threat.

  How did you come to learn the Kuninjku language?

  I learnt Kuninjku by being totally immersed in Kuninjku-speaking outstation communities south of Maningrida. As a school teacher, I felt it was important that to be effective as an educator I had to be able to communicate properly with the people I was working with. As I was living on Kuninjku country with Kuninjku people, it just seemed obvious that I should make an effort to learn the language. As a visiting homeland centre teacher, I was teaching English during school classes which ran from 8.30 am to lunch time. In the afternoons the whole community would go off fishing, hunting or visiting other communities, so I would accompany people on these excursions and participate in the daily activities.

  I carried a notebook around in my pocket at all times and later I started making audio recordings which I would then transcribe. I guess it took me about 3 years to reach some level of fluency. But learning another language as an adult is like aiming to reach the horizon – as you chase your goal, you realise that the horizon keeps moving away from you and the task becomes, in fact, a lifelong journey.

  When translating for John Mawurndjul, what is difficult to express in English about his art practice?

  There is a misconception, often held by monolingual English speakers, that there is such a thing as a “literal translation”. I am often asked by non-Aboriginal people to provide a “literal translation” from Kuninjku into English. Once, when I was acting as an interpreter in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, a barrister asked me to only provide a “literal translation”. I asked him what he meant by that, and he replied “a word-for-word translation”. Sorry to rain on his parade, I informed him that such a notion was a myth.

  There is no such word-to-word correspondence whereby the meanings of a word in one language always have an analog word in the other language with an identically bounded semantic range. Many cultural concepts expressed in the Kuninjku language do not exist in non-Indigenous cultures of Australia and therefore have no single-word equivalents. The inverse is also the case. Further, Kuninjku is what linguists call a polysynthetic language, whereby a whole sentence in English can be expressed by a single very long word in Kuninjku. These long words are composed by gluing together in the correct order many small word parts, or what linguists call “morphemes”.

  Here is an example: “Kabirriyawoyhdarnhbimnan” (“They are looking very closely at the painting again”) or “Kabirri-yawoyh-darnh-bim-nan” (“They-again-closely-painting-look”).

  When speaking Kuninjku, many subjects and things being referred to are done so in very vague terms because people in small culturally homogenous communities have a lot of shared knowledge and they do not need to be continually explicit about many of these things. It is assumed that the listener will be able to infer what the speaker is talking about. Further, in Kuninjku art, many religious subjects are of a sacred nature and when John Mawurndjul talks about them, he often uses cryptic or indirect expressions. As an interpreter, I then need to work out how to decode this for the benefit of my audience without compromising the delicate nature of this knowledge. Many subjects Balang Mawurndjul talks about have no equivalents in English.

  One of the most troublesome subjects for interpreters who work with Australian languages is finding acceptable ways to refer to the concept of a sacred site. In Kuninjku, these are known as Djang. In central Australia, the term Tjukurrpa is becoming more well known by non-Indigenous people. These terms involve more than just a location, but also ideas about deep history, the period of creation and the association between specific groups of people and totemic aspects which have their historical focus in these places. The term ‘Dreaming’ is so inadequate and misleading and so many Indigenous people are starting to reject this term, although others continue to use it.

  Other difficulties for me as an interpreter involve reference to non-human persons and beings in Balang’s art. For example, he sometimes depicts a subject from his wife’s clan, a being known as Namorrorddo, which is a fearful and dangerous being that can cause harm to humans. It has long claws, makes a whistling sound as it moves and has light streaming from the back of its head. Some non-Indigenous people call it a “shooting star spirit” but this is not completely accurate. Namorrorddo are not necessarily associated with shooting stars, which are known by another term in Kuninjku. So, what do you do when Balang uses the name “Namorrorddo”? For an audience who have never encountered a Namorrorddo before, you have to paraphrase and explain the term when it is first encountered.

  

  Today, Kuninjku has about 300 or 400 speakers. What can be done to protect Australian Aboriginal languages?

  Kuninjku is one dialect in a chain of mutually intelligible varieties of a single language that linguists now refer to for convenience as Bininj Kunwok or “the people’s language”. The total number of speakers would be about 2000, which, in Australian terms, is one of the larger language groups. Nonetheless, the few hundred people who speak Kuninjku experience many difficulties in being able to live out their aspirations to continue to enjoy their language and culture in the face of government policies that seek to override and frustrate these aspirations.

  There is no doubt that in the face of Australia’s anglophone monolingual mindset, all Indigenous languages are constantly under threat. It only takes one link in the intergenerational transfer of language from parent to child to be broken and the language and cultural knowledge carried by the language is lost to subsequent generations. At the same time, the Commonwealth Government does allocate funds through its Indigenous Languages and Arts program to support the maintenance of languages such as Kuninjku. As part of this program, language maintenance and support programs are currently taking place in communities where Kuninjku people are living and working.

  Kuninjku will survive if the wider community, especially non-Indigenous people, accept the idea that there is prestige and great value in being able to speak Kuninjku and allowing it to have a formal or official status in the institutions and community organisations that interact with Kuninjku people. If Kuninjku children see their language valued and being learned by people outside of their community (and this includes art galleries and cultural institutions), this sends a very important message about the prestige of the language, and this translates into continued use by younger generations.

  You’ve said, “If you were to travel by car from Darwin through to Kakadu National Park and then to Maningrida, you would pass through the linguistic territories of at least a dozen different languages.” In your travels with Mawurndjul in Australia and abroad, how do audiences respond to this diversity?

  In Australia, most non-Indigenous people have no idea of Australia’s Indigenous linguistic diversity. Most people would not even know the name of the Aboriginal languages associated with the place where they are living. Last year, I took a bus in Darwin from the CBD out to the suburbs where I was staying. Among the passengers on that bus, I heard conversations in 5 different Australian (that is, Aboriginal) languages. Many non-Indigenous people refer to Aboriginal languages merely as “language” or “lingo” because it is not of any interest or importance to them and we can’t identify the names of these languages when we hear them being spoken. However, Australian Aboriginal languages have much to teach all of us about deep Australian history, as well as art and culture, the Australian environment and what is possible in the organisation of human societies.

  Throughout human evolution, multilingualism has been the norm for human societies. Monolingualism limits our potential to solve problems, think creatively and develop tolerance and appreciation of and respect for difference. People in Europe understand this better than we anglophones in Australia do. Driving a few hundred kilometres anywhere in Europe usually means you will cross linguistic borders and most people are able to speak at least 2 languages, if not more.

  The Kuninjku language features strongly in the exhibition and catalogue, with additional learning resources online. As a linguist, how do you respond to this level of engagement by a cultural institution?

  The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia really need to be congratulated for the commitment to have Mawurndjul’s Kuninjku language as a prominent feature of the exhibition and supporting print materials. As I am always saying, if you live in Australia, then learn to speak (at least some) “Australian”. Balang John Mawurndjul speaks Kuninjku as his first language. It makes sense then that an exhibition about his art will be presented in both his Kuninjku language as well as the national language of English.

  It’s not a question of one or the other. As art is not just a visual domain, it’s nice to think that you can learn many things about human cultural endeavour when you visit an art gallery. In this case, visitors to the exhibition can learn something about the Kuninjku language and that in recent decades it is now a written language with its own special official alphabet with letters and combinations of letters that represent some sounds absent in English.

  All art galleries who present Australian Indigenous art can make a contribution to the maintenance of Australia’s first languages in the way they present the art and interact with artists who speak Australian artists. I’m sure this exhibition will inspire other galleries to do the same.

  Finally, how has your friendship with John Mawurndjul changed the way you look at art?

  I would like to think that we have finally shaken off the description of artworks produced by Indigenous Australians as some kind of “ethnographic” or “tribal” fascination. Mawurndjul himself had to suffer the indignity in 1998 of having his works along with those of fellow Maningrida artists rejected from exhibition at the Cologne Art Fair on the grounds that art produced by Aboriginal people was “inauthentic” or “folk art”, as if only Europeans were capable of producing “authentic art”.

  While the creation of art is part of what it means to be human, there are indeed some aspects to art production that are unique for artists of a particular cultural background. Working and living over the years with Balang Mawurndjul has caused me to reflect on the psychological and emotional importance of depicting Djang – those special places which are a focus for the identity, history and wellbeing of different groups of Kuninjku people. Art is formed within the boundaries of the artist’s world view. When I look at an artwork now, from any artist, I wonder about the world view of the artist and the values and ideas that have brought the work into being.

  Kuninjku artists do not always separate people and non-human things into discrete categories. The boundaries that separate animals, spiritual beings and humans are quite fluid in Balang Mawurndjul’s art. Representatives of one category can take form in the guise of another. Animals are non-human persons, or animals are sometimes rainbow serpents, and the cave-dwelling mimih are another category of humans. Even objects such as ceremonial dilly bags, or landscape features such as plants or water can be animate agents who communicate and interact with other animate beings. That Mawurndjul’s art can express such ideas, based on the world view that all things are connected, reminds me that there are many options for interpreting art from other traditions.

  Mawurndjul always enjoys visiting important state galleries on his trips to Europe. He carefully examines each work in a very non-judgemental way. The view which he has often expressed to me on such trips is that everyone’s rarrk – or “ways of making images” – is to be equally respected and appreciated; while the external appearances are different, the making of art is common to all humans and that each work has its own “power”.

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  Dr Murray Garde is a consultant anthropologist and community linguist. He is currently Research Fellow in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University.

  John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until September 23 and at the Art Gallery of South Australia from October 26 to January 28, 2019.

  This article was first published online by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in ‘Stories & ideas’ on 9 July 2018 (www.mca.com.au).

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  Photographs

  Top: Transporting the mandjabu (conical fish trap) to Maningrida Arts and Culture, Bulkay region, July 1980. Courtesy of AIATSIS, Jon C. Altman Collection

  Centre: Kay Lindjuwanga, Jay Ragurrk, Laura Wawee, Ananais Jawulba, Kienan Wawee, Murray Garde, Lisa Slade, John Mawurndjul, Nici Cumpston, Keith Munro, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and Natasha Bullock, Milmilngkan outstation, 2016. Photograph: Tristan Derátz

  Bottom: John Mawurndjul and Murray Garde at the opening of John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new, 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photograph: Jacquie Manning

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July 29, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from July 2008

  Another in my series of old photos from ten years ago…

  Let’s start with Melbourne Central. A few years earlier, the centre and station concourse had been re-developed to better integrate the shops with the station. And by integrate, I mean funnel the passengers through the shopping centre instead of directly out to Swanston Street.

  What could possibly make it worse? Closing the entrance from Swanston Street for a movie premiere event (Mamma Mia). 5pm-7pm. Yes, during peak hour.

  I have an email from the time that says after “some words with Melbourne Central from ourselves (PTUA) and a journalist” they altered their event so it only blocked Knox Place (which runs east-west from Swanston Street), not the pathway from the corner of Swanston and Latrobe. But honestly, the nerve.
  

  Gathering for a human sign to say “Climate emergency” in the Alexandra Gardens.
  

  Brighton Beach station, with haze over the bay. Note the equipment installed in the sidings; from memory this was for the “Concorde” project on the Comeng trains, to make the two types compatible again after their modification by different train companies earlier in the decade.
  

  I knew Doctor Who had become mainstream when ads started appearing for it on public telephones. This is opposite the GPO – the Angus and Robertson book shop behind the phones has since vanished.
  

  New street furniture was installed around my local shopping centre in Centre Road in Bentleigh. Not sure why the green lighting. Maybe the council was expecting visiting aliens.
  

  The street upgrade also included trees in the parking lane – in principle a good idea, but they managed to chop this bus zone in half. They also messed up the taxi rank near the station.
  

  Also on Centre Road, the Smartbus sign for westbound buses, and the level crossing – since gone in the 2016 grade separation.
  

  Over in Edgewater (Maribyrnong), they’d created a new bus route which didn’t even have any bus zones at its stops.
  

  Rail works on the level crossing at Ripponlea.
  

• Club Troppo Me on Krugman: the podcast

  Leon Gettler interviewed me recently on my exchange with Krugman. As you can imagine, it’s a difficult thing to explain in an interview, but I took that as a challenge – if you like to my interview ‘technique’. Just as I love doing it with columns, working over what I’m saying to try to come up with the clearest and best combination of explanation and engagement, so I love being ‘in the zone’ in an interview or on a panel. Of concentrating as hard as possible and getting into a ‘flow’ state where I’m trying to do all this in real time. If I’ve thought about an issue sufficiently, and have come to know what I think, and if I then concentrate hard and give it the right amount of energy, it often works well.

  Anyway, here’s the result in this case.

July 24, 2018

• Club Troppo Dunera Lives
  

  I’m not quite sure how Monash University Press has done this, but this is a high production but relatively low volume book, so I was expecting its price to be around the $60 mark. It is $39.95 in shops, but can be purchased for $30.95 from Booktopia. This compares more than favourably to the extraordinary $150 odd price that Palgrave charged for the previous book I launched – Max Corden’s memoirs. 

  I have reached a new stage in my life. It is the book-launching stage, first identified in Egyptian writings where it was called the “scroll rolling” stage of life, though we only know this second hand from Phoenician sources. At least judging from my experience, it comes upon one quite suddenly. I hadn’t launched any books until this May and now I’ve launched two. Naturally, at my stage of life, I would be a fool not to make myself available for your next book launch.

  In any event I was asked to launch a marvellous book Dunera Lives – which I recommend to you not least because it’s text is deliciously short and well written with a whole slew of lavish illustration showing you just how much class was incarcerated on that boat and in the camps when it arrived in Australia.

  Checking sources as I wrote my speech I came upon a review of the first popular book on the Dunera sticky taped into the cover of Cyril Pearl’s The Dunera Scandal by my father. He ended it with the story of one of the Dunera refugees being shown a galah in a tree beyond the barbed wire by a soldier. “Have you ever seen one of those before?”. The soldier asked. “Yes” came the reply, but on that occasion it was in the cage.” The book is full of this kind of liveliness and cheek.

  In any event, the book was being worked on as historian Ken Inglis’s final project. He died before it could be completed but it was then taken to completion by his friend, American academic historian Jay Winter, historian at Monash University Seamus Spark and Carol Bunyan who was born in Hay and has taken a huge interest in the Dunera story and in documenting it. Though many of the speeches were apologetic that it couldn’t be as good as Ken would have made it, it’s different to what Ken would have delivered, but not worse. In particular Seamus’s researches turned up a treasure trove of artefacts that are beautifully reproduced.

  

  There was a lot of class when they arrived. But they added to that class. Here’s the Red Cross report on the Hay Camps 7 and 8 which took the Dunera Boys.

  I spoke after Rai Gaita, Jay Winter and Seamus. There were actually two launches. One on  Sunday 8th July at the Melbourne Jewish Museum (this was after a launch at the National Library in Canberra) and one at Readings Hawthorn the next day.

  In any event, my speech is below. As you’ll note, I end it, as I ended my speech launching Max Corden’s memoirs with a quote about Captain Broughton which I think of as a kind of incantation to empathy. I’d love to get a fund going to endow an annual Broughton Prize for a conspicuous act of empathy. Anyone fancy helping?

  Remarks on launching Dunera Lives

  As I discovered when I spoke yesterday, though none of the speakers planned it this way, the speeches you’ve just heard take me to the point I want to make. Note that none of the authors of the book were relatives of the Dunera Boys. And the one with the most distant physical connection – living on another continent – is the only one who’s Jewish.

  Jay spoke of the story as the triumph of Jewish customs and ways of life encountering and being re-lived in a new land, I wanted to celebrate the way in which the host culture – Australian non-Jewish culture and the Australian people rose to the occasion.

  Many of you will have seen the Hollywood movie “Pretty Woman” which ends in a famous scene which re-enacts the archetypal folk tale of Rapunzel. After performing the requisite heroics, Richard Gere as the hero asks Julia Roberts, now secure in his arms as the heroine “So what happened when he climbed up the tower and rescued her?”. She answers “She rescues him right back”.

  

  A Dunera Boy’s sketch of Kristallnacht

  The Australian people rescued the Dunera Boys. Australian officialdom was none too keen.

  (a) German Nazis. Having warned this group prior to sailing of my methods should trouble arise, . . . their behaviour has been exemplary. They are of a fine type, honest and straightforward, and extremely well- disciplined. I am quite prepared to admit however, that they are highly dangerous.

  (b) Italians. This group are filthy in their habits, without a vestige of discipline, and are cowards to a degree.

  (c) German and Austrian Jews. Can only be described as subversive liars, demanding and arrogant, and I have taken steps to bring them into my line of thought. They will quote any person from a Prime Minister to the President of the United States as personal references, and they are definitely not to be trusted in word or deed.

  But the people themselves were a different kettle of fish, including that man with the rifle in all the guises of the story that Jay mentioned – I heard that the Dunera Boy was asked to hold the soldier’s rifle so he could light a smoke on the train to Hay. And the Dunera Boys rescued them right back.

  Rai Gaita spoke of dignity. Here we’re talking about dignity and difference. And it turns out there’s a chasm between people’s view of difference – their way of comprehending it – from a distance, and from more personal encounters.

  

  Its remarkable how much of the art in the book is very good – as with this example. the book also contains Erwin Fabian’s fabulous portrait of my father.

  Let me tell you of the words of someone who’d just participated in the rescue of children from a sunken boat. “It was quite a joy to hold the little kids’ hands and watch them smile”. Those are the words of Naval Commander Norman Banks. We know the episode from some other words spoken a few months later in an election campaign. “We decide who comes here and the terms on which they come.” Yes it was the sinking of a refugee boat which provided the occasion for the Prime Minister to claim that the refugees had chucked their kids in the water for a PR savvy photo op.

  To this day the official meanness towards refugees, at least those arriving by boat is maintained by making sure no Australian can get close to them, can even see film of them. But as initially wary Australians encountered the refugees, their wariness melted away. They were just like us. This has happened around regional Australia all over again in the last decade or so as regional towns have welcomed refugee communities to their number.

  We don’t really understand exactly why some things are so memorable. We know that there were plenty of battles in WWI. Yet one of them rattles around in the Australian psyche so much more than all the others – Gallipoli. Similarly there were many ships bringing out migrants from the old to the new world. Many people living in silver cities of various kinds.

  And yet this unlikely story of a few thousand stray Europeans of indeterminate status finding themselves in the desert whiling away their time playing soccer – attending an improvised university, and performing and attending musical concerts and reviews – has produced a steady stream of books and, improbably of all, a TV mini-series.

  Australia was full of people who rose to that occasion. People like Ken Inglis who marvelled at these strange sophisticated souls who’d turned up at Melbourne University and spent his final years trying to make sense of it – and, as a good historian will, to make his own contribution to it. Like Carol Bunyan who was brought up in Hay and who beavered away on her database of the Dunera Boys sufficiently that she knows more about my fathers’ whereabouts during that time than I do. I told Carol that Dad stayed in Hay. That he wasn’t moved to Tatura. But her database says otherwise.

  

  If this work reminds you of Paul Klee, it should. It’s painter, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack studied at the Bauhaus before finding his way to Australia (no doubt via some circuitous route) on the Dunera. He was quite a bit older than my father and ended up as art master at Geelong Grammar where he wrought the entrance gates and painted a whole series of frescoes of Christian themes in the chapel there. I bought this watercolour called The Boat at an auction house about twenty or so years ago before I could have imagined its usefulness during the book launching period of my life.

  However, I want to close by reading you words written about someone who helped those Dunera Boys who were released from captivity into the Australian Army’s 8^th Employment Company, which as we know, they the Dunera Boys could not desist from calling the 8^th Enjoyment Company. They’re about the man who welded an extraordinarily diverse, and it seems from the record, incorrigibly cheeky group of men into an effective working unit.

  His name was Edward Renate Mugunga Broughton. He wasn’t Jewish. He wasn’t even Australian though he was antipodean in the truest sense. He was a mixed blood Maori born in Ngapuke, New Zealand in 1884. He lied about his age to fight for his country in the Boer War when his true age was 16. He fought with the Maori Battalion at Gallipoli and was mentioned in dispatches. He then fought on the Western Front and in a Russian regiment. Having overstated his age for the Boer War, he understated it by 16 years to fight in World War Two.

  This is what Dunera Boy Irwin Frenkel said about him on his death in 1955:

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

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

  And so we are.

July 23, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Traffic light programming, and the tale of the Magic Laptop

  The Magic Laptop

  One evening many years ago some PTUA bods and I were meeting with a Vicroads bloke about traffic light priority and other related issues.

  He had a laptop with him, and it displayed a diagram of a major intersection; I think it was somewhere out on Burwood Highway.

  While pondering topics such as tram priority, he talked us through how the traffic light sequences worked, and how the traffic flows, showing us on the laptop.

  And he showed us what would happen if the sequence was tweaked; part of the sequence runs for longer, causing some vehicles to pass through more quickly, some to be delayed a few seconds. Really interesting.

  Someone asked: “So that’s a simulation?”

  The response: “No, that’s real. It’s happening right now.”

  So he’d been fiddling with the traffic lights in realtime, and local motorists were probably wondering why they were zipping through or being slightly delayed.

  That wasn’t just a laptop, that was a Magic Laptop.

  

  Programming traffic lights

  Anyway, via this and other discussions with people who seem to know what they’re talking about, I get the sense that Melbourne’s traffic lights are reasonably flexible in terms of their configuration, and can be controlled remotely.

  But there’s a limit. They can’t handle all scenarios automatically, so for instance when trials of absolute tram priority were done in Nicholson Street, it needed someone to manually control the lights to give a green for the tram.

  There are also apparently limited resources, so opportunities to re-program traffic lights don’t come up as often as they’d like.

  Why is it so?

  Everywhere in government (as well as in the corporate world), if you go digging, you’ll find there’s usually a reason for something.

  Sometimes it’s a reason which doesn’t quite make sense, or is outdated in the face of changing circumstances, but a reason nonetheless.

  A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the traffic lights at Spencer and Little Collins Streets had an extraordinarily short green man, only about 18 seconds. Then the red man would flash for about another 10 seconds, and then there’d be a solid red man for a full 40 seconds before the parallel traffic light turned yellow.

  This is utterly ridiculous in the central city, next to a major railway station, where pedestrians should be the priority.

  Setting it like this is just goading people to cross against the lights.

  I made enquiries with City of Melbourne, and discovered it is a road managed by Vicroads. So I approached them about it, and eventually I got a response.

  Why was it like this? Because Spencer Street is closed for sewer works south of Collins, and they wanted to allow vehicles to detour into Little Collins easily.

  But — as shown by the video — there wasn’t much traffic coming down Spencer that actually needs to detour.

  Once they realised this, they set it back. Just like that. Someone probably clicked some buttons on a Magic Laptop, and it was done.

  A good outcome, with some delicious technical tidbits in the email trail which I won’t publish, other than to say yes, they really do use the reference numbers on traffic control boxes.

  (The few cars, and the number of people crossing Spencer Street against the lights would appear to indicate more needs to be done at this intersection to accommodate pedestrians. Note also that this is just metres from where the old pedestrian subway under the road from the station used to emerge.)

  The bigger picture

  I’ve also had a discussion about that super-annoying crossing at Centre Road/Eskay Road in South Oakleigh. I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently it’s been tweaked too.

  But the bigger picture issue is that traffic lights (even in the CBD) are being programmed with poor outcomes for pedestrians. Sometimes as above there’s a reason — sometimes, apparently, it’s just an error.

  Much the same issue occurred at Elizabeth/Little Collins a couple of years ago.

  And more recently, City of Melbourne has put in brand new installations that failed to auto activate the green man, despite it being policy within the Hoddle Grid.

  Unbelievably, newly installed green man at William/Little Bourke Streets in CBD doesn't activate without beg button being pressed. Please fix, @cityofmelbourne pic.twitter.com/BKGXQyDLN5

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) March 29, 2018

  (And after they fixed that one, the timing was wrong, with — again — too little green man time.)

  These things do make a difference. It’s not just about compliance and safety. The travel mode you want to thrive is the one you should encourage. Make it easier for people to walk, and more people will walk.

  What I have learned is that Vicroads is now consulting on some of these issues with groups such as Victoria Walks. This is definitely progress.

  Be polite, but firm

  Individuals shouldn’t really have to get these things fixed. But in the real world, everybody (including Vicroads and City of Melbourne) is stretched for time, and clearly some things simply aren’t being spotted and fixed otherwise.

  So…

  Put in a report. Twitter may not be sufficient, so do it via their feedback web site. Include a photo if it’s at all useful.

  Be polite. Scrupulously polite. You won’t get anywhere by shouting.

  Explain your case. Present the evidence, the logic.

  Keep a copy of your query text, and the reference number, because some web sites (such as Vicroads) don’t email you a copy back, and it may be useful at the next step.

  If you get a pro forma reply which doesn’t make sense or doesn’t address the issue, query it. Be polite, but firm.

  And with a bit of luck, and if your point is convincing, you might just get it fixed.

  Of course, what I really want is a Magic Laptop.

July 22, 2018

• Club Troppo A good argument for Brexit

  A friend referred me to a relatively new site “Briefings on Brexit” yesterday which I checked out with interest. It was started by academics who were fed up with Brexit being stereotyped as mad and bad. They started the site to proselytise a reasoned and well informed case for Brexit. On a quick look I was looking for signs of unreasonableness and crankery and found one article which fit the bill I think (the basic theory he quotes is speculative, but interesting, but he puts it to very crude use in his article complete with a ‘Laffer Curve’ style graph), but most seemed fairly reasonable at least on their face (though I’m not in a position to judge a lot of their claims).

  I thought this article raised a very important point. Here is the guts of the argument through extensive quote below. Note, due to Troppo readers’ notorious lack of concentration, I have added additional paragraph breaks. (You’re welcome!).

  The EU is an institution which – despite all its window-dressing – is still essentially an intergovernmental organisation.  Decisions are made through the familiar processes of international bargaining, though unlike other international bargains the ones made in the EU directly apply to the internal arrangements of the member states.  And international negotiations have always been pre-eminently the arena in which governments act secretly and spring faits accomplis on their citizens. … But secrecy in general is endemic to international relations.

  Because of this, even if a country’s constitution gives the final say over an international agreement to the legislature (as ours arguably does not), in practice the negotiations are entirely in the hands of the executive, the repository of secrets in most modern states.  International negotiations also tend to give a disproportionate role to the civil servants, the “sherpas” in contemporary parlance, who prepare the ground for their (supposed) masters, since very few modern politicians have the time or the experience to pay as much attention to international politics as they do to the internal politics of their own countries.  Their instincts are also likely to be much less acute when they leave the familiar territory in which they have made their careers.

  This is the particularly toxic feature of the EU. A democratic state like the United Kingdom has, by and large, a pretty open debate about important domestic issues.  There may be secret manoeuvrings within party executives and within Whitehall, but it all has to come out into the open before any firm decisions are made, and politicians can relatively easily be forced into u-turns.  But to make important decisions through international bargaining, decisions which then structure the economy, and even to some extent the society, of a member state, as those made through the EU institutions must do, is to bring secrecy into the heart of domestic politics.

  With secrecy inevitably comes mistrust.  As modern states do more and more through international agreements, distrust of politicians grows among their populations, who suspect that their ruling classes now have more in common with the ruling classes of other countries than they do with the ruled of their own.  They may be right in this mistrust – after all, for much of the pre-democratic history of our countries this would have been an entirely well-founded apprehension – but even without a cultural sympathy of this kind the logic of the international structures makes a politician into a kind of secret agent within their own country.  Who knows what they really want, and what they have implicitly as well as explicitly agreed to?

  Defenders of the EU can agree with all this, and they can go on to say that for this reason it is vital to turn the EU into a proper state with the kind of transparent internal politics that we were used to in our individual nations fifty or sixty years ago.  But as things stand that ambition looks absurdly utopian – far more utopian than anything Brexiteers are guilty of.  Like so much of the EU, its political accountability is stuck in a half-way house, unable to move forward or backwards.  If we value transparency and trustworthiness in our politics, we have to leave the EU and detoxify our public life; until we have thoroughly disentangled ourselves from it, distrust will remain the default attitude of the British public, and nothing can be done about that during the interim period we have embarked upon.

  These issues were most powerfully expounded on by Varoufakis after his Kafkaesque experience with the Eurozone. But they’re real for us too. And Kafka would be proud of the way it works. I was on the fringes of the negotiation of the TPP. Negotiated entirely in secret from all Australian interests, including Australian business – but not, remarkably enough from major US corporations – DFAT ‘briefings’ of Australian interests were a very strange affairs running roughly along these lines.

  DFAT: Welcome to this six monthly briefing where we’re consulting you on what you think our negotiating objectives are.

  Team Australia: What happened over the last six months.

  DFAT: Very hard to say. But what do you propose should be our updated negotiating objectives.

  Team Australia: Very hard to say.

  More to the point these secret international negotiations offer a vector by which international power – particularly international corporate power – enters Australian law – via such means as unjustifiably extended IP, disciplines on collective national negotiation of the price of imports and the running insult to the last few centuries of painful constitutional development that is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) which had the Canadian Government in lengthy arbitration over its improvement of the innovation hurdle in patents and Australia in the same kind of malarky over plain paper packaging for cigarettes.

  Does this make me a Brexiter? No, though I could easily a Euro exiter if I was in a country on the periphery of the Eurozone. We’re in a very sticky situation I think.

July 20, 2018

• The Northern Myth R v Bayden Flash – rough justice in the deep north

  

  This is a guest post by legal commentator Hector Lung

  On Monday 9 July 2018, in the Alice Springs Supreme Court, Bayden Flash pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife. By early afternoon of Friday 13 July, a jury of twelve had returned a verdict of guilty. A relatively straightforward murder trial by Territory standards both in terms of the tragic facts and the outcome.

  Flash, a   34 year old Aboriginal male, beat his 33 year old Aboriginal wife to death with a brick in a house in Tennant Creek in January of 2017.

  Flash was sentenced by the presiding Judge this week to life imprisonment, the mandatory sentence under NT law. His Honour fixed the mandatory minimum non-parole period of 20 years. With Mum dead and Flash to remain in goal or on parole for the rest of his life, the three children of the relationship are effectively orphaned. The eldest of these children was the child subject to the heavily criticised remarks by Judge Borchers in the Tennant Creek Youth Court only a couple of months after his mother’s murder.

  Mandatory life imprisonment? Minimum non-parole period of 20 years? The charge of murder is the most serious in the Criminal Code and the attendant punishments the most severe. If you are charged with murder you want that lawyer Tex Perkins sang about, you know, the good one, “the reeeaaaal good one”.

  Flash was represented by the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service (CAALAS) upon being charged in January 2017. CAALAS lawyers often acted for people charged with murder and swung into doing the work demanded of them by the adversarial system. The CAALAS template for defending a client charged with murder was to ensure the DPP made full disclosure of the evidence amassed against their client with a view to briefing a senior barrister (often a QC or SC) experienced in defending accused in murder trials.

  The barrister would sometimes appear at the committal proceedings or at least guide the CAALAS lawyers how to best run the committal proceedings with a view to maximising the defence case to be run at the eventual jury trial. The barrister would then lead the defence team at the trial, giving the accused the best possible opportunity to obtain an acquittal or a reduction of the charge from murder to manslaughter. A conviction for manslaughter does not attract life imprisonment and there is no set minimum non-parole period (although the non-parole period cannot be less than 50% of the head sentence). Typically a person found guilty of manslaughter receives a head sentence in the range of 8 to 12 years and non-parole periods in the range of 5 to 9 years.

  CAALAS did not get the opportunity to give Flash the defence he was entitled to. And I repeat entitled to. In a nation as affluent as ours, a nation committed to a properly functioning adversarial criminal justice system, Flash was entitled to an experienced murder trial advocate to defend him. The Crown always wheels out its most competent and experienced prosecutors in murder trials as it must, to ensure the interests of the community are best represented. To ensure the adversarial system works as well as it can, the accused must have counsel at least on par with that of the Crown. Mismatches of lawyers at trial is the stuff of Deep South murder trials in the USA. There some accused, unable to afford sufficiently experienced lawyers in an environment of little or token legal aid, can be represented by law students or destitute lawyers willing to appear for all in fees of a thousand bucks to defend an alleged killer heading to the electric chair.

  CAALAS was taken over by the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) on 1 January 2018. Amongst other dubious calls that can be discussed elsewhere, NAAJA decided not to stick to the tried and true formula of briefing an experienced murder trial advocate to defend Flash. In a move not seen for over 25 years in the NT for clients represented by an Aboriginal Legal Service, NAAJA decided that Flash’s counsel at trial would be drawn from the “in-house” lawyers at the Alice Springs office of NAAJA.

  NAAJA, already guilty of cutting its criminal lawyer numbers in Alice Springs, immediately heaping more work and attendant stress on those lawyers remaining, thought two of their more experienced “in-house” lawyers, neither who had led a defence team in a murder trial, could take on this most onerous of legal cases. Both of the lawyers who ended up sharing this poisoned gig had groaning caseloads and were predicted to have very little time to properly prepare for trial. Those predictions proved to be accurate.

  I want to make it clear that both of the lawyers who acted for Flash are competent practitioners. However it is equally clear that neither of them had the requisite experience to tackle this job and that that dearth of experience was magnified by the lack of time they had to prepare for the trial given their other workloads.

  In defending an accused at a murder trial, even a relatively straightforward one, an experienced murder trial defence advocate would set aside at least a full week to prepare the case and that week coming after other preparatory work at committal stage or just after committal. In Flash, one lawyer close to the case remarked that the preparation of defence counsel was “about what one would expect in preparation of a summary hearing” (a summary hearing being a half to one day contested matter before a Local Court judge or magistrate).

  Crucial to a trial of this type – where the jury is in essence trying to work out what the accused’s intent was while he bashed his wife – is the evidence of the forensic pathologist. The forensic pathologist gives the evidence about the cause of death and the extent of injury to the deceased. That evidence goes most of the way to providing the basis for a jury to decide whether the accused intended to kill or intended to cause serious harm to the deceased. For example, infliction of particularly serious or numerous injuries (or both) that speak of much force or sustained attack (or both) being used to inflict those injuries is the path to a finding of guilt for murder.

  Proof beyond reasonable doubt that the accused held either one of these intents (to kill or to cause serious harm) means a finding of guilt for murder. Lesser intents, like recklessness or negligence, results in a finding of guilt for manslaughter. The cross-examination of the forensic pathologist by the defence is often the pivotal period of the trial for the accused.

  Observers also noted the gulf in quality and power of the respective closing addresses. The Crown Prosecutor, well experienced in addressing juries in murder trials, won plaudits for a well-constructed and compelling address to the jury. The defence effort was described as “wooden” at the outset and by the time it reached some points of merit, the jury was apparently largely disinterested. Observers also noted the relative merit of the submissions made by counsel to His Honour as to questions of how His Honour should instruct the jury as to the law, in particular the question of the accused’s intoxication and how his intoxication affected his intention to kill or cause serious harm.

  The jury took two hours to return its verdict and that included a lunch break.

  “So what?”, some might say. “Who cares if a killer gets his just rewards and so what if his lawyers were not top notch?”. Well we should care. Even at the level of the public expense of housing an offender in goal for twice the time he or she would have served as a convicted manslaughterer than a murderer is a start. The conduct of the defence case in Flash is an alarming example of where the criminal justice system in the NT is heading if NAAJA continues to make decisions like this.

  Sources have also noted the situation that developed late last year and into early this year where the mother of a young woman charged with murder arising from an incident in Katherine challenged NAAJA’s choice of defence counsel for her daughter. When NAAJA refused to brief sufficiently experienced defence counsel, her and her daughter prevailed upon the NT Legal Aid Commission (NTLAC) and after NTLAC had applied their merit and financial tests, John Lawrence QC of the Darwin bar was briefed and a full acquittal, on the basis of self-defence, followed. NAAJA had raised with this young woman whether she would give instructions to seek to plead guilty to manslaughter. It must be said that this case of Flash was never, in truth, a self-defence case or an identification case so a full acquittal was never seriously on the cards.

  NAAJA has approximately 35 criminal defence lawyers in its employ who defend well over half the people who front the criminal courts in the NT. NAAJA is by far the biggest player on the defence side of the adversarial criminal justice system in the NT. This situation – that is, having an Aboriginal Legal Aid Service as the major defence player in the jurisdiction – is unparalleled in Australia.

  It is a heavy burden and questions must now be asked about the approach NAAJA is taking to this task. Already NAAJA has trumpeted that it is not an “Aboriginal Legal Aid Service” but an “Aboriginal Justice Agency” that is dedicated to reducing the number of Aboriginal people in custody in the NT along with providing legal services to Aboriginal people in a whole host of non-criminal law matters (child protection, Family Law, consumer complaints, Housing issues etc).

  NAAJA places considerable importance on its work in assisting prisoners make a successful return to the community. These are indeed proper goals but if they come at the expense of the core business of an ALS – provision of up to scratch defence counsel to obtain the best possible outcomes for its clients in the criminal court system – questions must be asked.

  The great badge of honour of the Aboriginal Legal Services in the NT over the past 40 years is that they could secure the services of top flight criminal law barristers to defend people charged with murder as those barristers were willing to take the briefs on very much reduced rates.

  NAAJA’s recent decisions to try and keep murders wholly “in-house”  is not a reflection of lack of resources but a conscious allocation of resources away from these most serious of cases. Having major trials run by experienced counsel, juniored at trial by ALS lawyers was a great way to attract bright up and coming lawyers to ALS’s and lift the overall standard of “in-house” ALS lawyers.

  People convicted of murder and imprisoned for life do not go away. They appeal. Trials that were not run by experienced defence lawyers are more likely to reveal appeal points when, inevitably, the trial transcript is pored over by an appeals expert.

  The more appeal points, the more likely a re-trial. It is plainly a false economy probably for NAAJA, certainly for the system as a whole, to run an increased risk of not getting the defence side of the equation right the first time.

  It must be said that the consensus of the observers of the Flash trial considered it a strong case for murder and it is most probable that, even in the hands of a defence counsel well experienced in murder trials, the outcome would have been the same.

  However to accept that as an excuse for NAAJA is to be misled.

  NAAJA has a clear responsibility to its clients in the criminal courts and pressure must come to bear on NAAJA to ensure it gets its core business right before it enters into other areas of law and broader social policy. The charge NAAJA must avoid is that is becoming a bit player in areas such as Corrections when it is the major player in the criminal courts and where it is, frankly, dropping the ball.

  The post R v Bayden Flash – rough justice in the deep north appeared first on The Northern Myth.

July 17, 2018

• Daniel Bowen Retail therapy

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

  Shopping bags

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

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

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

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

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

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

  — Alan Kohler (@AlanKohler) June 26, 2018

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

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

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

  

  Update 2/8/2018: Coles backflipped on 1st of August and made the reusable bags free for an indefinite period.

  Then the next day they backflipped again, and said the free bags will end on 29th August.

  Dish washer

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

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

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

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

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

  

  The new car arrived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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