Club Troppo

Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last – say – thirty years in cinema.

A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adults) and American accents (the kids). Some of the baddies spoke with a German accent. (OK so the Sound of Music was forty years ago. No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition). In Casablanca too, the Germans speak with a German accent I think, whilst Claude Rains has a kind of clear generalised international English speaking accent – I don’t think he tried to sound very French, although where people were to be presented with some ethnicity, they spoke English with an ethnic accent.

Anyway all this became decidedly non-U. It signified that the film wasn’t ‘realistic’ and as film sets were turfed out and we went ‘on location’ wherever and whenever, realism in the way people spoke became valued. So gradually accents came to be seen as corny, and where films involved interspersed scenes with different communities speaking languages other than English original languages were spoken and English subtitles were provided. Thus (IIRC) Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence would have had the Japanese speaking Japanese with subtitles. Even Tora Tora Tora did this I think – and that was 1968 (again from memory).

Anyway this spell seems to have been broken. There are now a whole bunch of films on the screens that seem to take us back to the production mores of the past – of The Sound of Music. In The Reader they put on German accents. In Valkirie they don’t bother. The German high command spend a lot of their time discussing tactics in all sorts of mainly British accents.

Anyway, for my taste I don’t mind translating other languages into English in a film – it makes it easier to watch. But I don’t like delivering that English in recognisable accents associated with other places and styles. Accents are very powerful things which body forth all sorts of implicit assertions about character. Imagine Hitler delivering a speech with a soft Irish accent or an Aussie accent or Mao with an upper class English accent. Of course you could say that playing Hitler or any other German as a person who speaks English with a German accent is just engaging in stereotyping. But for my money if you’re going to speak English, the only way to convey the German-ness of a person linguistically is with some kind of German accent (and of course there are lots of English speaking German accents to choose from – one can presumably make the accent quite lifelike if one goes to sufficient trouble.) I think Kate Winslett did this well in The Reader, even if I kept thinking how English she nevertheless seemed.

Anyway I wonder what others think about this burning issue of our time.

Here’s how you do free association economics?  You start writing a piece on the politics of the budget and then you just say pretty much anything that comes into your head.  You use the general riffs that are doing the rounds at the moment and just see how it comes out. You make calls on pretty much everything, the politics, the economics and so on.  For instance you say that because the stimulus will help a bit, we shouldn’t do it and generally bloviate. That’s what people are saying in pubs isn’t it?  

Then you just press ‘send’ and you have a Crikey article.

Rudd’s Package III: Stimulate with a Vengeance

WEDNESDAY 22 APRIL 2009

This might be the most difficult budget in decades but at the moment politically it looks a gimme, because theres no Opposition worthy of the name to pressure the Government. Wayne Swan could comprehensively botch the budget and the Government would still maintain its political dominance. Malcolm Turnbull would still look negative, or thered be another round of infighting within Coalition ranks, or Peter Costello would start his semi-regular efforts to attract attention. He cant let Budgets go past without drawing attention to himself.

Thus were relying on the policy smarts of the Gang of Four, assisted by Treasury, to get the Budget right.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Stimulus Package Mark 3.

Therell be further stimulus in the budget, Wayne Swan said last night (incidentally and perversely, doesnt Swan seem more and more assured the worse things get?). “The Government now faces questions about its budget stimulus package,” ABC Radio and the ever more peculiar ABC Breakfast consequently reported this morning, as if some crime had been perpetrated. It cant be too long til the Government is accused of a cover-up because it is waiting until Budget Night to release its Budget.

Still, its a bit early to complain about the tone of Budget speculation, given were only warming up for another three weeks of it.

Whats the policy case for additional stimulus? There isnt one at this point. (Continued)

The High Court this morning rejected an appeal by former radio star John Laws’ employer Radio 2UE against a defamation verdict for comments he made about fellow shockjock Ray Chesterton.  The SMH seems to summarise the judgment accurately as far as I can see from a quick scan reading:

Radio talk show host John Laws has exhausted his final appeal against a finding that he defamed columnist Ray Chesterton by calling him a “bombastic, beer-bellied buffoon”.

The High Court has dismissed an appeal by radio station 2UE over a jury’s finding that Laws defamed the Daily Telegraph journalist in comments broadcast in August 2005. …

After a Supreme Court jury found Laws’s comments were defamatory, the radio station appealed first to the NSW Court of Appeal and then to the High Court.

But the High Court unanimously found in a judgement handed down this morning that the judge in the original case had correctly instructed the jury and affirmed the general test for defamation, that the comments would cause an ordinary reasonable person to think less of the plaintiff.

Chesterton’s lucky I wasn’t on the jury.  I don’t know about the “beer-bellied” bit, but I would have thought being a bombastic buffoon was part of the job description for a radio shockjock. 

Mind you, it does make me wonder whether my own concerns about the need to balance rights to protection of reputation against free speech rights if a bill of rights is enacted might be a little overblown.  The vast majority of defamation cases are by public figures entirely capable of defending themselves, and who in many cases see a defamation win as akin to a second division Tatslotto prize rather than compensation for genuinely wounded feelings or a truly lowered public reputation.  Chesterton could have just gone on his own programme and responded in kind: “Nah nah nah.  Takes one to know one!”   Why should the publicly funded resource of our court system be clogged with this sort of trivial, childish nonsense?

I see PJ O’Rourke is in the country to strut his schtick for the Centre for Independent Studies.  He wrote an opinion piece in yesterday’s Oz along predictable lines: the keynesian socialists are squandering our money on all these GFC stimulus measures, when the best thing to do would be nothing at all.

PJ is spinning his propaganda off poor old Adam Smith these days, although he twists Smith’s arguments almost as egregiously as Kevin Rudd distorts Hayek.  Apparently PJ has written a book about Smith which I won’t be bothering to read, although I’ve read most of his earlier output.  PJ is a bit of a one-trick pony for my taste, although it was a trick I found quite entertaining for a long time.  He slags lefties in pretty much the same way Hunter S. Thompson used to do to righties, and I’ve got most of Hunter’s books too.

I was about to put fingers to keyboard for a post deconstructing PJ’s op-ed piece, when I discovered that someone named Fritz had already encapsulated my thoughts in the comment box to PJ’s own article.  It just shows you, Murdoch’s “blogs” aren’t absolutely filled with complete morons shouting past each other in the darkness.  Fritz said:

It seems to me that this present crisis was born out of a series of financial failures for which the left and right share equal responsibility. So from the Left we had disastrous interference in the market by pressuring Fannie May and Freddie Mac to lend money to people who could not afford to pay it back and from the Right we had the disastrous deregulation of investment banks. The first was based on an ideology of social inclusion; the second based on an ideology that individual companies are in the best position to act in their own self interest. Both were critical errors and led to a massive asset price bubble which encouraged further borrowing and spending beyond our means. Unfortunately for us one of these sides (Left or Right) is in power at any one time and is only willing to address the deficiencies of the other side. So right now we have a lot of discussion about “tough regulation” but nothing about disastrous government interference (did anyone say $43 billion infrastructure project without a business case?). What we need is a middle ground: appropriate levels of regulation which compel companies to be transparent and responsive to their shareholders and minimising government intervention to areas of natural monopoly and social welfare.

(Continued)

Our hosts, the University Computer Club, have advised that there will be some downtime today between 11am and 12.15pm WA Standard Time. I hope you can all nurse yourselves through your Troppo withdrawals for this brief interlude.

The Thomas v Mowbray thread has taken an unexpected but fascinating turn, at least from my viewpoint as a public lawyer.  It’s kickstarted a productive debate about the form of an Australian bill of rights.  As this is only tangentially related to the topic of the post, I’ve decided it merits a post of its own despite the  fact that I’ve written a few on this topic recently.

Pedro began by commenting:

Bring on a proper bill of rights in the constitution. Lets have the first to the nineth except the second and third. Im not sure the 10th is necessary with our constitution, but put it in if it is not already covered. Oh, and get rid of external affairs as a basis for increasing the field of legislative authority.

Lawyer Patrick Fitzgerald responded:

I do however support a bill of rights along the lines you suggest.

You should note, however, that we already have two-thirds of the first amendment, partly implied partly express. Likewise with the fifth – all we really want from that is the due process clause, and the tenth. The fourth I have doubts about, the seventh I dont think is helpful at all.

This would seem to suffice as additions:

1 Neither Parliament nor any State shall make any law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.
2 No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
3 In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial before an impartial jury, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
4 Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
5 The enumeration in this Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others, which are inherently retained by the people.

Religion (the establishment clause of the first amendment) and just terms (the takings clause of another) are already in there.

I then responded to Patrick:

(Continued)

There’s been a lot written about this subject lately, but this two pager (pdf) from Paul Ormerod seems pretty good to me.

Alex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns.  We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are quite subtle.  And explaining Smith’s concept of sympathy – which though the best ‘translation’ is the one he uses himself, fellow-feeling – it somehow sounds sentimental and unconvincing that this could be a powerful social force.  Also Alex wanted to talk about Jane Austen which added a possibly new degree of difficulty. Anyway, it all worked out well I think, though you may disagree!

In 2008 a group of people and organisations coming together under the name of Australia 21 invited both John Quiggin and me to discussions in Sydney to discuss the issue of resilience with them.  Resilience, they suggested was something that we should be concerned about generally regarding all sorts of systems that make up our physical and social world. One idea people were particularly preoccupied with was the idea, familiar to environmental science and politics that one might be wandering up to a ‘tipping point’ without much knowledge of it, and with things looking like they were fine, only to find out that they most assuredly were not fine. 

My reaction – and I think John’s – was that there was some instinctive overplaying of this idea. People were arguing that by stretching our economy to become more and more efficient in the short term, we might be compromising its capacity to adapt to shocks. While that’s definitely worth thinking about, and we developed a version of it in our essay, it wouldn’t be very sensible to go back to old style manufacturing, just because ‘just in time’ production renders you more vulnerable to disruption in the event of certain shocks.  There is often a value in pushing the system and then trying to iron out the resulting bottlenecks that one discovers (preferably before they occur). On the other hand . . . 

The upshot was that John and I penned an essay for them, now published in a larger set of essays on building resilience (pdf), on the resilience of Australia’s economy.  We wrote it as the GFI (the Global Financial Infarction) was getting underway throughout 2008 and before it got really really serious with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.  

When we were called on to publish the essay we’d written a lot of water had flowed under the bridge (IIRC from around Aug 2008 to March 2009).  Was our essay resilient to events? We thought it stood up quite well and popped a postscript on (which naturally enough highlighted the ways we’d been Right All Along – and quietly smoothed over our less clairvoyant moments – the usual kind of thing.)

But seriously folks, I think it did hold up fairly well – at least a bit better than John McCain’s comment that the economy was basically sound.  

It’s set out below the fold for Troppodillian delectation. 

(Continued)