Noises are being made about high speed rail links in Australia again, and once again focus has begun on the Newcastle-Sydney leg of any such system. I assume this is both because of the density of the population, but also because the endless dormitory suburbs and above ground cemeteries of the Central Coast lend themselves to being marginal electorates.

I’m a veteran of countless trips on the existing Cityrail service, so I had plenty of time to consider the topic. Economic/financial feasibility yes, all good and dandy, but then onto a more exciting physical issue.

Where do you put the damn thing?

The Hawkesbury sandstone country that divides the Central Coast and Sydney is pretty  rugged. Essentially everything is either a steep slope or water.  The result is that the existing railway line and the old Pacific Highway are extremely circuitous (albeit picturesque) – not great for a high speed train. The alternative is to blast your way through the sandstone like they did with the F3. This isn’t too appealing to many advocates of rail, since they overlap so greatly with conservationists. Additionally, it just feels crude, and inelegant. Why have rail when it acts so gauche? Tunneling under the entire thing or skipping around it would probably rob the project of feasibility.

My solution – put it on top of the F3, an elevated track standing on the median strip. It takes a straightish route without having to gouge more out of the landscape, and it also has the benefit of providing its own advertising as the trains race past commuters who have chosen to drive. On the other hand, it will still be prone to the bushfires that periodically close the three existing routes and  isolate Sydney, and temporarily closing a lane on the F3 will provide months of whinging vox pops for lazy media.

But it sounds nifty.

Well folks, that’s how your mad as hell correspondent feels.  I’m refining the #HeSaidSheSaid campaign. After posting it I realised that we really needed a more general term as the pathologies of modern media – what Tim Watts calls souffle journalism – comprehend quite a few moves, not all of which fit properly within the HSSS description, and, as my last post on the subject illustrates, sometimes bring on something resembling the opposite of HSSS which is comment dressed up as news. Thus a story tells us that Tony Abbott saying that Julia seems to be saying that “‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘no’” is a gaffe.  (I thought it was both funny and legitimate.)

So in the last post I mooted the idea of a new hashtag trying to encompass all that we hate about the kinds of stories I’m talking about.

Anyway, reflecting my despair at the state of our media, and since I’d just spoken of “the carcass called media values” I proposed ‘#MediaCarcass’, which on reflection I think is rather good. Tim Watts has subsequently suggested:

#FailureOfthePress

#UReportWeDecide

#UrKillingDemocracy

#SouffléJournalism

Anyway folks.  It’s now up to you – tell us what you think. “Have your say” as they say on Govt and MSM websites and/or come up with something better.  I’m off to tweet this.  If you have a twitter account please retweet, and we’ll see how we go. I’ll nominate a new hashtag tomorrow by COB.

The most common defence of ‘he said she said’ journalism is that reporting both sides with wide-eyed ignorance about the merits of their claims is at least ‘objective’ and it’s true in a way.  I remember having dinner with some relatives in Italy when a heated argument broke out between a couple who were friends of my rellies – an attractive Italian man and an even more attractive woman. I told them that I could sort out the argument because I couldn’t understand a word of it and so I could be perfectly objective about who won. I picked the woman.

In any event, part of the pathology of current media values is that ‘he said she said’ is really a contest between he and she, so you can also – without offering any evidence or evaluation – racecall the very debate you’re ‘he said she said’ reporting.  Yesterday Tony Abbott made a joke about Julia Gillard’s refusal to debate him when she was in front saying that people were suggesting (Julia was suggesting) that “when it comes to Julia, no doesn’t mean no”.

Now there are some people who claim to be offended by this comment – because it makes a reference to a sensitive topic: the idea that sexual consent is not always straightforward. I recall being irritated with that criticism yesterday.  I guess some people might disagree, but I thought it was a good line and the mere fact that the expression comes from an area of life that’s sensitive doesn’t mean it’s off limits to a bit of humour.

Given that Tony repeated it several times, and then defended himself vigorously, he presumably liked the idea of this debate and thought of it as a moment he could show himself as the Son of John Howard. In any event the story filed by Kirsty Needham from the Age led “It was designed to be the big day for women” and explaining how this had distracted Tony Abbott’s campaign.  Did the writer know this?  Nope. She then followed up by reporting that he said that he wasn’t going to cop the smears against his use of the term from the Labor Party, provided no reporting on what the Labor Party had said on this, if anything and then reported that she (a Greens candidate) said that Tone’s comment was ‘inappropriate’.

He said it was OK, she said it was ‘innappropriate’ but the subbie got to sum it all up in the headling.

Abbott gaffe mars baby policy launch

A guest post by Conrad Perry:

It looks like the new Julia being the real Julia campaign has kicked off with a bit of good old fashioned teacher bashing. This reminds me of one of the things that seems really ingrained in many people’s minds, and an assumption which a lot of this teacher bashing is based on, which is that there is a horde of teachers out there who are bored, can’t teach well and are too lazy to get another job that they might actually enjoy. The solution to this is obviously to spend large amounts of money developing scales, standardized tests and IT tracking systems to try and identify them. This seems to appeal a lot to some people, although anyone actually caught up in this sort of system may well realize how useless these sorts of measures can be, and indeed how easy they are to cheat if you are cynical and really want to.
If you get away from the idea that performance should be measured on little scales that generally cheese teachers off and cost huge amounts to administer (it’s been tried on and off in different educational settings for at least 150 years, and there’s no evidence that it’s a particularly successful strategy), it is in fact quite possible to measure whether there really is a great horde of bad teachers out there damaging our education system – it’s been done, it’s been done multiple times and it’s been done using methods that are far better than those that keep legions of micro-managers employed in the education system. A very recent study done in Australia (NSW) and the US that shows just how it can be done well is by Bryan Byrne and colleagues, “Teacher effects” in early literacy development: Evidence from a study of twins (2010; Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 1, 32-42; unfortunately pay-walled), and here is the abstract:

It is often assumed that differences in teacher characteristics are a major source of variability in children’s educational achievements. We examine this assumption for early literacy achievement by calculating the correlations between pairs of twin children who either shared or did not share a teacher in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Teacher effects— or, more strictly, classroom effects—would show up as higher correlations for same-class than for different-class twin pairs. Same-class correlations were generally higher than different-class correlations, though not significantly so on most occasions. On the basis of the results, we estimate that the maximum variance accounted for by being assigned to the same or different classrooms is 8%. This is an upper-bound figure for a teacher effect because factors other than teachers may contribute to variation attributable to classroom assignment. We discuss the limitations of the study and draw out some of its educational implications.

You might like to compare this with some political fodder, the quote of which I’ll shamelessly steal from Byrne et al. also: (Continued)

In case you’re interested, there are some great election haikus circulating with the hastag above.

Here are a few chosen pretty quickly.  Feel free to offer your own here, or on Twitter.

Labour it campaigns / Five weeks in a leaky boat? / Waterfalls await.

All day winter winds/ howl, but cannot quite drown out/ those inane slogans.

@annabelcrabb seems to be pumping them out at a great rate.

A quick fave which seems to chime in with my own current preoccupations:

but moving forward / we go around in circles / unless we look back

Elo ratings involve a system whereby your ‘rating’ is a function of who you beat or lose to and their rating. The ‘future of the species’ business is a reference to the fact that this manoeuvre of bootstrapping meaning from the record has become more important to the world recently – because it’s the approach that Google showed us enables us to bootstrap a system of rating websites which provides pretty good proxies for their usefulness to users.

I’ve not checked out the methodologies behind ladders of Twitter importance, but presumably they do something similar rating how many people are following you and how many people are following them so on ad infinitum. Why should you care? Because, like I said, it’s important to our species now that it’s embedded inside the Google algorithm.  But there’s a much more important reason. Kaggle is launching a competition to improve the Chess rating system.  And today’s chess puzzle is niftier than I’d expected given the star rating it was given. On a quick look I didn’t suspect the denouement.

Julia is now ‘being Julia’ – complete with a big announcement – by her – that she’s going to be the new ‘real’ Julia prompting the opposition and media into the obvious riposte ‘then who was the old Julia?’. Might it have been a bit wiser to have been the real Julia for a few days and then, if the media hadn’t duly loaded it onto their memeographs to have send the spinmesiters out after the press to hand out memeograph cartridges preloaded with the desired meme?

No, Julia doesn’t have to be the real Julia particularly – though obviously it helps not to violate Brady Bunch rule #3 “Just be yourself Marcia.” She needs to be articulating both the Govt’s achievements – which are considerable – and its promise.

She’s a tad hamstrung in that by her circumstances. The greatest achievement – of having saved over 150,000 odd jobs – is an achievement of her old boss Kevin, though the Government has every right to take credit for it. And she’s hamstrung in it because for a year or so now, the government’s internal spinmeisters have told the government that school halls (and so, by implication, the stimulus) are not what you want to talk about – they’re where the Opposition is making headway.

As Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz put it last week, the choice was between waste from hasty stimulus spending (it was either that or nothing) and the waste of people sitting on the dole when they could be doing something useful, like let’s see . . . building school halls. Since the stimulus was the Government’s pre-eminent achievement, something that put it in Stiglitz’s book at the very top of the class when it came to fighting the GFC, not having taken on the Opposition’s criticism on waste left the government in a very bad place coming into an election.

Now, the spinmeisters are at least half right. It would be better not to start from here. You’d rather not have your strongest points like the stimulus so muddied by the one liners of the Opposition at this late stage.  But this is where the Government is.  And it’s a better place to be starting from than any desire to unfurl the ‘real Julia’.

Blogger Grog’s Gambit proposed some ads to focus on Labor’s economic achievement during the GFC. For instance screens rolling up lists like this:

During the Global Financial Crisis these countries went  into recession:

United Kingdom
Japan
New Zealand
Germany
Russia
Italy
Hong Kong
Singapore
Ireland
Greece
Spain
Sweden
Ukraine
Iceland
Estonia
The United States of America

The countries that didn’t:

Australia

But, as my old boss John Button once said to me after the 1985 election where the ALP did surprisingly badly despite its stellar performance in the previous term.  ”one emotion the electorate doesn’t possess is gratitude”. So you have to have something to offer them – based on your record. So based on the ads Grog proposes running I’d be concluding them with something like this.

“Tony Abbott’s policies would only have saved a fraction of our very small debt, but we’ve got another 150,000 people. In jobs. Paying tax. Paying off that debt. Who do you want in charge the next time something goes wrong? Do you want an Australian Government that will put it’s own job on the line to save yours?”

One reason that governments rush to the polls is because they have information about upcoming trouble that the opposition do not. This occurred in the Northern Territory, where in the wake of the 2008 election there was a spate of bad news that would have scuttled the Labor government only weeks earlier.

In February, the Australian Tax Office activated a completely new core system for collecting taxes and paying returns. This system proved to be inadequate to the task, causing enormous anger in the small business community due to delayed BAS refunds.

Now it seems that the same system has struck again for personal tax incomes. Yours truly feels sympathy for anyone having to hold onto great piles of cash, and thus, to relieve the government’s suffering I lodge my tax returns electronically on the 1st of July.

This has, in the past, meant prompt payment. A lot of folk place their returns throughout July; but since returns are dealt with more or less in order, it pays to get in ahead of the queue. Nevertheless, the ATO aims to process and settle 94% of returns within 14 days of lodgement. The other 6% is for more complex returns.

My taxes this year are trivial. It took me less than 5 minutes on the phone with my accountant to arrange, and was lodged electronically July 1st.

It is now August 2nd. A phone call to the ATO confirms my suspicion that the new system is, once again, at fault. “We’re not meeting our target at the moment, but we expect to next financial year”, said the helpful voice on the phone.

Lots of Australians look upon the tax return as ‘free’ money. It’s fondly looked forward to and mental lists of purchases are drawn up in advance. When the budget is tight, a few hundred or thousand dollars can make a big difference. This means that people want prompt payment. I am most certainly one of them. I am moving to Darwin to start work in mid-August, I could definitely use the additional cash buffer against unforeseen expenses.

Suppose you are a government who knows that a) there will be delays in payment, and that b) most people don’t lodge right away, so it won’t be obvious right away. Then it behooves you to go to the polls as soon as possible in order to minimise the anger from people who are relying on their tax returns.

Of course, there would be other reasons. But I reckon that this one is a sleeping giant — which will, if Labor is lucky, only bestir after the election.