Club Troppo

A while ago, I was rung by Richard Letts of the Music Council of Australia, a kind of peak body of music organisations asking – to my amazement – if I would give the Annual address at their annual conference. Robyn Homes of the National Library of Australia had seen me speak at the National Library’s 2010 Innovative Ideas Forum and had suggested I give the address. So, having braved the quite extraordinary incompetence of Virgin Blue last Sunday, and not got to Brisbane on time to give my talk, I got there to give the talk after lunch on Monday. Its title was that given in the heading above. As a bit of light relief, but with some intent beyond that, I included in the lecture, a bunch of cartoons from a former life.  They are displayed in the text below at the point where I clicked the remote control and brought them onto the screen behind me displaying PowerPoint slides. It doesn’t seem like such a long time ago, but I did those cartoons nearly 25 years ago. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the speech – and the cartoons.

I.

You may be surprised that I am standing before you giving your Annual Address. But not as surprised as me. Richard Letts rang me a few weeks ago and asked me to speak to you. I didn’t know why. He said that someone had heard me speak and that they had recommended me. They certainly didn’t hear me play any music.

I am an economist, though I like to think not of the marauding kind, and in 2009 was the chair of the Federal Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce. It was in prosecuting the cause for Government 2.0 that I was heard and recommended for this address tonight.

If you’ve wondering what Government 2.0 is, you’re not alone, though I’m hoping you know what Web 2.0 is. The term Web 2.0 was popularised in 2005 to signify the internet’s transition from being a medium for point to point and hub and spoke medium communication and interaction – as in the case of e-mail and websites respectively – to being a medium, or as it has become fashionable to say, ‘platform’ on which people who might not even know each other could discover each other and collaborate. Wikipedia is the iconic example.

I think Web 2.0 offers extraordinary possibilities in our society, our economy, our government. It’s been said, I think with only mild exaggeration that its significance is like that of the book. If that is so, then one would imagine some of its most exciting, its grandest possibilities to arise in the world of culture. Over the course of my time as Chairman of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, to my own surprise, I morphed into a motivational speaker. Perhaps that’s why the person who heard me recommended me. And tonight, in my own way, I’m going to give you a motivational speech.

I’ve titled this talk “The life you could be leading” to refer to that golden age that beckons. And it’s not inconsequential that it comes from a cartoon by one of the world’s best cartoonists Michael Leunig.

II.

You see just as you are musicians, in addition to being an economist, I am a cartoonist. Or was a cartoonist. It all began in the mid 1980s dull and depressed on one of Melbourne’s cold, drizzly winters days sitting in my bedsit next to a small radiator. I sketched out this cartoon on a card and sent it to a friend in Canberra. (Continued)

Contemplating recent nominations for the Prestigious Critical Rationalist Scholar award. Terence Kealey, Barry Smith, the late Sir Donald Bradman and Ronald Dale Barassi.

The criteria for the PCR Scholar are identical to the four that are  used for the Rhodes Scholarship, covering academic achievement, participation in sports, personal character, leadership and community service. PCR scholars include Struan Jacobs, Karl Popper and Peter Klein.

Given the requirement for academic component the scholarship is awarded to university graduates but the level of achievement required is not high enough to preclude some unlikely winners such as Ross Campbell who was stunned to achieve the award. He suspected a clerical error because he was short on sports and community service as well. There is an interview in the  Hazel de Berg collection but the link fails. This is more fun than the interview.  [Warning, he does not sound like a Rhodes Scholar]. You could say if Ross Campbell could win it, practically anyone could.

Recall that in Barassi’s time only about 2% of people went to uni, a couple of decades later he probably would have gone and achieved a respectable degree to teach Physical Education. On the other criteria he looks good, you have to give some points for growing up in Tasmania and coming to the rescue (aged in his 70s) when he saw a girl being monstered in the street.

Much the same applies to Bradman with the advantage that he was more obviously cerebral.

The big problem for the committee is to decide is how much to allow for talents that were not realised for lack of opportunity. And how much weight to assign to the academic component in relation to the other three criteria.

This is a guest post from Julia Thornton an occasional commenter on Troppo.

Nicholas Gruen’s Government 2.0 taskforce left us a treasure trove of a report, but when the nerds, hackers and policy wonks had gone home, in amongst the half eaten pizza and empty Coke bottles there was left behind, forlorn and deserted, a little piece of software with Canberra game changing possibilities, called “LobbyLens”. (See link below)

For the last few weeks in Canberra it’s been a lobbyfest, and things don’t look like changing any time soon. Rob Oakeshott has remarked that he has been deluged by thousands of emails a day. People were even turning to that old technology, the fax, in order to circumvent a clogged email system and get their message through. Who knows what pressures the independents have been subject to behind closed doors? There are now six people whose vote could change the direction of Australian politics. It’s important to know who has their ear.

As a counter to conflicts of interest and in support of the general principle that in a democracy, access to the powerful should at least be visible, even if it is not as it would be ideally, scrupulously equal, John Faulkner set up the Lobbyists Register and the Lobbyists Code of Conduct.

While a laudable attempt to “use sunlight as a disinfectant”, the register has from its inception had problems:

• The register shows lobbyists but not who, precisely, is lobbied. This makes it difficult to ascertain the relationship or the interests that may be being served.
• The definition of a lobbyist is narrow. It does not cover “in house” lobbyists who work for a firm which is itself a direct lobbyist. It covers only those lobbying firms which work on behalf of a client company. (Continued)

After a year of reading about relative salaries in different sports, salary cap breaches, player unrest and defections in the NSW press, I only just learned that the salary cap in the AFL is $7950000 compared to the NRL’s $4100000. This set a little bell off in my head. This might explain the huge AFL salaries which the NRL players were coveting, but I thought AFL teams were huge.

So I ran some back of the envelope calculations (if anyone can improve the data, please do so).

The AFL has a cap of $7.95M on TPP for the clubs top 40 players (excluding “veteran” players – rookie list players who are discounted I’ve excluded for simplicity). This gives a mean salary of $198750.

The NRL has a cap of $4.1M for the top 25 players. This gives a mean salary of $164000. The differential isn’t surprising considering the better administration of AFL over the past 20 years, the lack of a split in the 90s, the lack of a controlling party who buys TV rights and simple greater popularity – they all result in greater revenue.

But what has really got the NRL players going is the likes of the $1.5M being dolled out to Israel Folau. Granted this is a trophy buy by a club with looser cap restraints, but Chris Judd is still paid a reported $1.2 million a season. To the best of my knowledge (here I hope for correction) the best paid NRL player is Darren Lockyer at $660000 a season. If not him or this amount, it is very close.

To put it another way, the top NRL player is being paid  3.43 times the mean salary. The top AFL player is being paid 6.04 times the mean salary. The premium for being better than average is far greater in the AFL than in the NRL.[fn1]

This is quite strange on first impressions. An AFL player is only one amongst 18 on the field. An NRL player is one among 13, so the influence of any one player at a given time should be more. Moreover, rugby league play tends to channel through a few positions more than other, with the hooker, halves and fullback registering far more touches than any other positions, which would imply securing talent in these positions is worth enough to bid up the price of talent here instead of maximising average talent accross the team. Lastly, other codes and another league in Britain are willing to bid up the price of leadingNRL players where (apart from a couple of NFL punters) no such option exists for the AFL players.

They’re both team sports. Why does individual brilliance get deemed by clubs to be so much more important in Aussie Rules than in Rugby League? (Continued)

I was a bit disappointed when we were in front and looked like winning by a point – at around the 25 minute mark? Why? Because my son was overseas on a school trip and he would have loved to have been at the Grand Final. So I was hoping St Kilda would have a Barry Breen to kick a point and that that would be that. A draw. The rest as they say is history. But now I need more tickets. Ideally three – one for me and my two kids, but failing that two, and failing that, yes, one. All the usual blandishments apply.

By the way, I did get tickets to the ground today, for me and my daughter, but not through Troppo. And through a source that I expect won’t cough up again. Any ideas?

Well whether they win or not the ‘Colliwobbles’ come from another time, long, long ago in the late sixties and early seventies when the Collies used to finish first and then not win, either through some bad luck (64, 66, 70) or through peaking a bit early or going into the finals in a form slump. It was pretty depressing. We’ve lost lots of GFs since then, but we’ve been the worse side in the GF, so it’s not so surprising that we lost. GFs kind of do that. They tend to select the better side.

Anyway, this time we’re the best side, having put on a half of football against Geelong last week that needed to be seen to be believed. (I saw it and believed it). We will win again tomorrow unless:

• something nasty happens. An early injury reduces your chances of winning by around 17%, two injuries is worse etc
• the Sainters close down our forward line. This is quite possible.  They choke their enemy pretty effectively. And as I’ve said, there are some things – like intelligent leads, that we pretty much do without on our forward line. If we start kicking lots of points, end up taking our shots from the boundary line and don’t seem to be able to find forwards, St Kilda are in the game and may close us down and then beat us.
• St Kilda’s big forwards, particularly Nick Riewoldt, have a good day. Collingwood’s backline is one of the best in the business, but it has a weakness – subduing big forwards (sigh)

But the most likely outcome is a comfortable win.  I can hardly believe I’m saying that. I can certainly say I’ve not expected to win a GF since 1990. And guess what happened then.  We won.

All Troppo readers are required to have some slight sympathy for me tomorrow – unless you barrack for the Sainters, like my friend from Harkaway Primary School, John Chandler.

But the name “Barry Breen” may not be mentioned.

When I hear that anything is ‘committed’ to something I reach for my gun. It’s an almost certain signifier of insincerity. As a donor I receive bumph from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. The latest newsletter I got told me that “The Brotherhood is committed to ensuring that everyone in our community is given the opportunity to join the mainstream life of our society.”

What the hell does that mean?  A government, with all its resources might have a ‘commitment’ like that, although it is more likely to be a pretty much flat out lie – because it will only be ‘committed’ to it up to some very low threshold of pain and what kind of commitment is that? But the Brotherhood? Why would it take on such a fanciful commitment. Why not make the commitment to the whole world. The Brotherhood is committed to the ending of world poverty.

This isn’t so much a blog post as a tweet that won’t fit into 140 characters. I have nothing more to add, except to say ‘bollocks’.

Yesterday in the post I received a copy of CAB: Collaborative Auto Biography, a series of short anecdotes and stories from residents of Cabramatta rendered as comics by Matt Huynh – a project intended in a large part to show stories about the area that don’t involve heroin.

I ordered the book mainly because I wanted to see mainly what comics were being made about the Australian experience (a way of procrastinating away from scripting my own comic) and I was struck by a couple of little things and one major thing.

I was a little dissapointed that the comics fell into the trap many autobiographical indie comics do (and their is a surfeit of this genre) where all events and situations are described in captioned narration, leaving artwork as a merely compliment and neglecting the medium itself. This is a bugbear for someone as fiercely formalist towards comics as me [fn1]. That said, the project is using the words of others so it may have been inescapable. Perhaps Huynh’s other work which I am yet to get to is not so (in the interview above he does echo a phrase of Scott McCloud’s, who is more formalist than I’ll ever be).

I did like the way the artwork, whilst distinctive, still had genetic traits I associated with Australian illustration rather than aping American indie conventions. Sometimes parts of an image would remind me of the children’s illustrator Craig Smith,  a similarity that had greater significance than I thought.

Because what struck me the most is that the stories resonated with an Australia I knew far more than most Australian art ever has. Not because of any particular brilliance, but merely because most Australian art, if it was dealing with an Australia that existed at all, it wasn’t one which I knew, or which I grew up in. (Continued)

Strange things happen when you check the links on your site. Proceeding from a nice statement of classical liberal principles to the Mont Pelerin Society we find The Winners of the 2010 Hayek Essay Contest.

And the winner is…Toby Evans of Australia.

Whoever he is, you can probably meet him at the Mont Pelerin Conference in Sydney next month because part of the prize is a ticket to the event. This year the international guests will include Peter Boettke of  The Austrian Economists, now Coordination Problem and Terence Kealey ($4 well spent).