Club Troppo

Karl Rove charges 7K, Sarah Palin 25K.

Not to mention some of our own politicians.

I think this is a terrific idea and I’m open for bids.

Even if it’s a bit long. Here.

HT: Peter Martin

For economists and other social scientists who read this blog but don’t pop over to the Government 2.0 Taskforce website, you should – there’s money to be made serving the public interest – never a bad thing.

Cross posted from www.gov2.net.au

At a roundtable in Sydney, Miriam Lyons of the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) mentioned the idea of inquiries 2.0.

As I said to her at the roundtable, Ive been giving a fair bit of thought to that question myself. Having spent some time on the Productivity Commission. We were proud of the transparency of our inquiries. Indeed the foundational rationale of the Commission championed by the modern official founders of the Industries Assistance Commission of 1974, Alf Rattigan and Bill Charmichael, was the idea that people should not come to government asking for favours tariffs and bounties in the case of the Commission and its predecessors without being able to defend their case publicly and subject to independent scrutiny.

Now we have the tools to turbocharge that openness and transparency and to take it further perhaps a lot further. Were trying to model what an Inquiry 2.0 would look like though Im being made painfully aware of our shortcomings of which more in a moment. I know this blog could be improved in various ways, and a blog is not the ideal collaborative tool for building towards a complex and integrated position on a suite of issues as various commentators have pointed out. We are starting to do that offline I promise!

But I think our blog is already a site for frank friendly and respectful exchange of information and views, and for dialogue and debate. But as the CPD submission which was not up on our website when I was writing this but may be now points out, there are plenty of ways we can take things further.

The [Henry] tax review is one of the most important inquiries held by the Rudd Government so far, with over a thousand submissions. Yet a member of the public who wants to find out what ideas other people have submitted about the future of Australias tax system [on the Henry Review website] has nothing more to go on than the fact that AAFCIS, ACT Peak Oil and Adams, James made submissions that are 1.2MB, 51KB and 9KB in size, in November, May and April.

On the bus home the next day, reflecting on the inspiring ideas of the #publicsphere presenters and on Lindsay Tanner and Joe Ludwigs encouraging words on the role of the new Taskforce, one of my fellow noodle-eaters tweeted to ask the name of the inquiry Id been complaining about. He then proceeded to scrape the PDFs from the url I sent him, and turned them into a searchable database at http://ray.haleblian.com/taxreview/index.html. Its a pretty basic site, but overnight, purely for the hell of it, Ray Haleblian transformed an obscure, inaccessible mountain of data into something that is just that little bit easier for an interested citizen to use.

In fact a standard internet search engine can do some of this work, particularly if all the files exist in the same folder on the relevant website.

Still its clear that it wouldnt take much to provide much better searchability and access to searchability than is available. Im happy to join in the CPDs implicit criticism of the Henry review if only its understood that it is a criticism of us too. We had no plans to do anything particularly different on this site.

(Continued)

One of the things that surprises me is that – with Google providing cloud competitors for Microsoft’s other products, they don’t provide a database, or what is the same thing only tailored, a simple small business accounting package. OK putting Microsoft in there is a bit of a non-sequitur but I wonder if anyone knows of a simple, free bookkeeping package – which would be a hit with ‘distributed’ businesses like the business I run. Saasu looks the goods, but turns out to only be free for 15 transactions a month. I want a bit more than that. Any thoughts.

I just thought Id drop in here and offer a heads-up to Troppo readers that ABC will be re-broadcasting the first three series of The Wire on ABC2 at 9:30. What can I say about this amazing series that hasnt already been said.

How do I explain The Wire to the uninitiated, its so much more than another crime series about the war on drugs. This series moves well outside the genre of dramatic enactment of the cop-shows of a 50 minute adrenaline feast. Instead the investigations are shown in painstaking detail – the boredom, the office politics, the complex connections of dead or uncertain leads allowing the smallest of resolutions after the close of a twelve or thirteen episode series. But this is more than a detailed police procedural, the ambitiousness of the storytelling allow the viewer to encounter a realism in depicting the city of Baltimore that would not be possible in a more attenuated structure, which allows us to see how the various layers of the city meet in the strangest of places. Like Balzacs idea of the La Comedie Humaine we get to see the city from a wide array of angles, from the stash-houses of the drug-dealers, the schools, the look-outs, city hall, the sites of various workplaces and homes, offering a panoramic vision similar to a 19th century novel. And with this detail we get to see the demeaning nature of the poverty many of the characters experience, alongside the poverty of imagination that drives the cruel rules of “the game” of the various gang activities.

But most of it this is a story about the institutions Series 1 (the police force and the courts), Series 2 (the collapse of the old working-class), Series 3 (the transformation from local to machine politics), Series 4 (the nexus between poor educational outcomes and gang activity) and Series 5 (the dumbing-down of the media). And having such a large array of characters and incidents the creators David Simon and Ed Burns allow the viewer to witness how poor decision-making in the functioning of these institutions permeates downward, impacting those individuals in the most precarious of circumstances.

And in doing this we are also allowed to encounter the ethical struggles of the characters, torn between self-interest and a wider communal duty, (e.g. the police captains duking the stats, the schools forced into rigid ciriculums, the politics of the police investigations) allowing us to see how it is often the careerism of the protagonists that feeds the zombie politics of the city. Truly sensational viewing.

This is how Anke Hoeppner appeared when she played Leonore in Opera Queensland’s production of Fidelio in July. On Saturday night she sang the same role in the Sydney Opera House in a cocktail dress (or some such thing) from the corner of the stage while Nicole Youl, in costume, mimed the part on the stage and performed the spoken lines.

The Herald tells the story. No doubt the account is right as far as the background facts are concerned, but it misses most of the points that make it so amazing. The first is the glorious irony of being both the rescuer in, and the rescuer of, the greatest rescue opera. Adrian Colette, in his sheepish announcement from the stage, conspicuoulsy failed to explain why the understudy, whoever she was, was in Melbourne, so it’s a reasonable working hypothesis that Hoeppner rescued him from burial in a pile of rotten tomatoes, and perhaps even saved him his job.

The second point, not unrelated to the first, is that Leonore isn’t exactly Mary Poppins. (Continued)