Monthly Archives: April 2010

Reading the tea-leaves on a double dissolution

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ABC political analyst Antony Green is predicting that Kevin Rudd will seek a double dissolution election in July-August.  A double dissolution election can’t be held after 10 August because Constitution s57 forbids a double dissolution within 6 months of the expiry of the House of Representatives’ term “by effluxion of time” and that expiry occurs on 10 February 2011.

Antony Green presents a superficially plausible scenario for the reasons he outlines.  In fact so superficially plausible that I got Antony to present an online seminar on the subject to CDU law students and academic staff a couple of weeks ago.  It was a useful way of teaching about the constitutional aspects of the deadlock and double dissolution provisions of Australia’s Constitution in an immediate practical context, and we’re grateful for Antony’s willing participation.  There isn’t much he doesn’t know about elections including their legal and constitutional dimensions.

However, the more I think about the practicalities the more I doubt that Rudd will choose the double dissolution option.  The only double dissolution “triggers” Rudd currently possesses are the package of Emissions Trading Scheme bills rejected for a second time last December in the wake of  Malcolm Turnbull’s demise and the bill to cut private health insurance rebate benefits to high income earners.  The latter not only involves increasing taxes (albeit only to high income earners) but a broken election promise.  Rudd specifically promised not to do this at the 2007 election.  Hardly a propitious launching platform for an election.

Presenting the ETS bills as the trigger for a double dissolution election presents even greater political dangers.  A double dissolution election would certainly breathe new life into Tony Abbott’s “Great Big New Tax” propaganda line.  Abbott managed to neutralise that potentially powerful message by proposing his own “Great Big New Tax” to fund paid maternity leave.  However a double dissolution would allow him to claim truthfully that the result of returning the Rudd government might well be that the ETS legislation would be passed in a parliamentary joint sitting, thereby actually inflicting the Great Big New Tax that the Coalition and Greens have so far managed to stymie in the Senate.

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What about me! — David Cameron’s ‘Great Ignored’

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Tory leader David Cameron says he’s "fighting this election for the great ignored":

Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight. They start our businesses, operate our factories, teach our children, clean our streets, grow our food, keep us safe. They work hard, pay their taxes, obey the law.

They’re good, decent people – they’re the people of Britain and they just want a reason to believe that anything is still possible in Britain.

With this catch-all description, commentators are wondering whether there’s anyone in Britain who isn’t part of "the great ignored". But look more closely and the rhetorical move makes more sense.

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The arbitrariness of the long distance projection

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News stories about the current population debate tend to be prefaced with the factoid that ‘on current trends Australia’s population will reach 35 million in 2050′. We are supposed to find this startling, either because we’ve only just adjusted to the idea of our millions being in twenties, or — if we’re a bit more sophisticated — because we remember that 28 million was the figure previously tossed around, having originated with an ABS release in 2001.

The way the issue is framed, we are each supposed to adopt a position on this — to follow the Prime Minister and bravely embrace the challenge, follow Bobs Carr and Brown and demand that the brakes be applied, or follow Harry Triguboff and bemoan the timidity of our leaders in aiming below 100 million.

But the thing about this 35 million projection, drawn from the Treasury’s 2010 Intergenerational Report, is that, just like its predecessor, it’s plucked out of the air. The natural part of the population growth rate, births minus deaths, is scientific enough, based on the current age structure, and plausible extrapolations of trends in life expectancy and fertility. Natural growth accounts for nearly half of the projection, but the outcome is not very sensitive to variation of the parameters over the plausible range — so errors in the assumptions won’t change the forty-year forecast by more than a million or so in one direction or the other. Continue reading →

I guess the kids are different now

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I’m not very old at all, but I’m old enough to have caught the tail end of a era in playground equipment design. This period was typified by danger. Metal slippery dips that one could cook an egg (or buttocks) on and which would hurl you far into the grass or merry go rounds that spun wildly and led to subsiduary entertainments like “find my finger”.

I understand why this period ended. Things like public liability and changing social preferences for non maimed children led to a new generation of equipment that was brightly coloured, plastic and devoid of risk. The most danger one faced was the risk of a static shock after edging slowly down a 1 metre slide. Very boring, and very explicable.

Now playground equipment tends to look like this.

This perplexes me.

I don’t find this very fun looking at all. I say that in the same way I don’t find it very erotic. It doesn’t seem to be something to which you would even consider applying the concept.

How on earth do you actually play on it? Is this the local council’s ultimate anti-litigation scheme whilst still fulfilling oublic expectations of playgrounds? If they create something on which no child will play, then no child will be injured playing on it.

Or have the internets and steroids in chicken and sex in music videos changed these kids in ways that even a young person cannot understand?

Tim O’Reilly on the iPad: my sentiments entirely (well mostly)

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From the NYT where you’ll find other excellent reviews:

If you’re old enough to remember the original 128K Macintosh, underpowered, not expandable, and soon-to-be obsolete, you know that the iPad doesn’t need to be perfect to be the harbinger of a revolution.

If the iPhone didn’t tell us that the 25-year reign of the mouse and windows user interface popularized by that original Macintosh was soon to be over, the iPad shouts it loud and clear.

Accept it. But the iPad signals more than the end of the PC era. It signals that the App Store, the first real rival to the Web as today’s dominant consumer application platform, isn’t going to be limited to smartphones. It signals that App Store-based e-commerce may replace advertising as the favored model of startup entrepreneurs. It signals that cheap sensors are ushering in an era of user interface innovation.

Understand, too, that like the Macintosh, the iPad and the iPhone itself may well be outstripped by next-generation competing products built on commodity hardware and open source software. Never mind the brilliance of Apple’s design team, the lead in application count, Apple’s enormous and growing profits. Apple’s Achilles’s heel is that it seems to have come too late to an understanding of the key drivers of lock-in in the Internet era: not hardware, not software, but massive data services that literally get better the more people use them. Continue reading →

For the budget – do something positive (about negative gearing)

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From today’s Crikey:

Kevin, will that be two terms, or four?

The government has got its eye in, and been blooded through the odd embarrassment. It needs to ask itself whether it wants to be a two term government? Of course it does. But what about becoming a four term government?

Australians like to give their new governments a go.  So if you’re a first term government all you have to do is avoid really big mistakes, and keep the photo ops coming.  But the second term gets harder. And the one after that?  Well you’re fighting that nagging “it’s time” feeling in the electorate.

The Government needs to invest its political capital now doing things that might not please the electorate now, but leave it with something to show for having stuck with you.

To embrace a ‘four term strategy’ the Government needs to come up with some measures that show it means business.  It needs to find measures which don’t cause a riot but which generate growing dividends in the out-years. And not that they matter in the short term, but the cognoscenti will be even more impressed if the reform takes advantage of the specific short term circumstances we find ourselves to build for the long term.

There are plenty of such policies around. Here’s one.

With the RBA’s anxious about a housing bubble, now’s just the time to do something about negative gearing.  It’s much more targeted than raising rates and it will raise bucket-loads of revenue.  Here’s how to minimise the political flak. Continue reading →

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

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An interesting post by Clay Shirky on the collapse of complex business models. This points to an issue which jumps out at me when I read the Moran Review on the Public Service.  How much complexity, how much subtlety, how much productivity is it reasonable to expect a large centrally directed monopoly institution with all sorts of constraints on it from without to achieve. Anyway, here’s a nice story from the middle of the post.

In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

In spring of 2007, the web video comedy In the Motherhood made the move to TV. In the Motherhood started online as a series of short videos, with viewers contributing funny stories from their own lives and voting on their favorites. This tactic generated good ideas at low cost as well as endearing the show to its viewers; the show’s tag line was “By Moms, For Moms, About Moms.”

The move to TV was an affirmation of this technique; when ABC launched the public forum for the new TV version, they told users their input “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”

Or it might not. Once the show moved to television, the Writers Guild of America got involved. They were OK with For and About Moms, but By Moms violated Guild rules. The producers tried to negotiate, to no avail, so the idea of audience engagement was canned (as was In the Motherhood itself some months later, after failing to engage viewers as the web version had).

The critical fact about this negotiation wasn’t about the mothers, or their stories, or how those stories might be used. The critical fact was that the negotiation took place in the grid of the television industry, between entities incorporated around a 20th century business logic, and entirely within invented constraints. At no point did the negotiation about audience involvement hinge on the question “Would this be an interesting thing to try?”

The third way in the UK Part Two: this time from the left

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Diggers 1649My last post on the UK and the third way began with this sentence.

What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision?  You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vision and press on.

That was actually in preparation for the content of this post. I also contrasted the way in which it isn’t just politicians that campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Consultants and spruikers for the latest fads do it too. You don’t get lots of attention, which in some ways is a precondition for having influence if you’re always “on the one hand this and on the other hand thating”.

So proselytisers for the third way – and for most other ways – end up proselytising in poetry.  My mind goes to the difficulties too. In fact having read my share of ‘innovation in government’ manifestos, I hunger for the acknowledgement that successful innovation in government – like successful innovation in most places – is hard, really hard.  And certainly high levels of successful innovation is very rare in almost all established organisation for a reason that’s similar to why we have so few very good Prime Ministers.  Because the task is essentially impossible to formularise. It requires much more than raw intelligence, though it requires some of that.  It requires a kind of qualitative nous, a sensitivity to context, some basic understanding of people and what motivates them – which is a complicated and tricky subject.

Anyway spruikers can’t be agonizing saying it’s all very hard.  They have to entertain their audience indeed they are about the business of producing a stream of fascination which somehow leaves their audience leaving the presentation a little like the believers at an Anthony Robbins motivational show, thinking that at last they’ve got it and if only they can keep their focus on it, perhaps they’ll start leading The Life They Always Could Have.

Another characteristic is the piling of essentially different agendas onto each other – like third way ideas on social policy and environmentalism.  No problem with backing both agendas (though I have to confess that a fair bit of environmentalism irritates the hell out of me), but they’re mostly distinct or so it seems to me one can be more democratic, and more environmentalist – but it ain’t necessarily so. But somehow they get lumped in together.  I think the advocates of this would call it ‘holistic’.  I call it soft headed and faddish. It’s also a sign of a kind of ‘in’ speak, where one lot of people think they ‘get it’ and that the connections between all their favourite things can somehow to be assumed from sympathy with their comrades rather than from some understanding of the issues on their own terms.

On top of environmentalism we get ‘localism’. What’s good about localism?  I’ve never been able to figure it out.  Be that as it may let’s get the most irritating thing about the pamphlet I’m about to cite out of the way, this quote from Frijof Capra:

We should arrange our industries and our systems of production in such a way that matter cycles continuously, that all materials cycle between producers and consumers. We would grow our food organically and we would shorten the distance between the farm and the table, producing food mainly locally. All of this would combine to create a world that has dramatically reduced pollution, where climate change has been brought under control, where there would be plenty of jobs because these various designs are labour intensive and as an overall effect there would be no waste and quality of life would improve dramatically.

Bollocks. To quote Lord Wellington, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything”. Continue reading →