Club Troppo

At last count eight people had been seriously injured and seven arrested after an extended family group returned to the Central Australian remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, having earlier fled to Adelaide to escape “payback violence” after a stabbing murder in Alice Springs.  That was despite the presence of a police taskforce sent there specifically to try to prevent such an outcome.

The extent to which a perverted form of “payback” vengeance is embedded in Aboriginal society is illustrated by this unashamed and uncompromising observation:

Senior people in one family say they fear the conflict will not end until they are allowed to carry out tribal punishment on the other family.

Troppo’s Alice Springs informant Bob Durnan anticipated just such an outcome in an ABC radio interview only last week

Anti-violence campaigners in Central Australia are increasingly concerned that cultural practices, such as payback, are being distorted and used to commit acts of terrible violence.

There were 455 violent assaults in the first three months of this year, and in the past six years assaults in and around Alice Springs have almost doubled.

The murder rate is very high and payback is being used as an excuse for endless feuds between individuals and groups of young men.

Bob Durnan has been working in Central Australia for 33 years and says payback has become a major problem for the region’s communities.

“Young fellas who drink get all fired up about the need to avenge some real or imagined slight or sorcery, or whatever, and go and assault and often stab people who are trying to sleep or lead a normal life,” Mr Durnan said.

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And yes, if you want you can do some sleuthing from the url of the picture.

Early next month we’ll learn whether Australia has won the hosting rights rights to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Surprisingly, given this would entail such a large amount of government expenditure, discussion in the media relates only to the tactics of the bidding team and the horse race implications of corruption in FIFA. Perhaps an issue has to be tied to short run party political fortunes (such as the NBN or public transport) to bring up media sound and fury? Or maybe you need to be tied to a Great and Good personage (in this case Frank Lowy) to assure everyone that it is a serious and reasonable matter (he is fabulously wealthy after all, he must be a very serious man).

Regrettably I’m unable to write much on it at the moment either due to base physical constraints, but I do want to point people’s attention to this paper by Kavetsos and Szymanski (also treated in popular form in Soccernomics).  Hosting major sporting events may not give you good infrastructure, they don’t expand the economy,  and they don’t increase participation…but they might make you happy, a end to which money’s effectiveness is notoriously debatable.

The widely proclaimed economic benefits of hosting major sporting events have received substantial criticism by academic economists and have been shown to be negligible, at best. The aim of this paper is to formally examine the existence of another potential impact: national wellbeing or the so-called “feelgood” factor. Using data on self-reported life satisfaction (happiness) for twelve European countries we test for the impact of hosting and of national athletic success on happiness. Our data covers three different major events: the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship. We find that the “feelgood” factor associated with hosting football events is large and significant, but that the impact of national athletic success on happiness, while correctly signed, is statistically insignificant.

The debates over the usefulness of measures of subjective wellbeing are well trod (and are canvassed in the article) so we need not retread them here (though I think for all their flaws, they’re no worse than utility). The writers make interesting comparisons within the confines of this measure. Based on regression coefficients, hosting a football tournament is roughly the same magnitude as being married, 0.6 times the magnitude of moving from the 2nd to the 3rd income quartile and 0.3 the magnitude (the other way obviously) of becoming unemployed. Given the difficulties achieving any of those by government policy, a major event might be a bargain.

What strikes me though is the comparison with athletic success. Given the elite sport lobby is uncritically quoted as saying the nation’s self esteem is reliant on the gold medal tally, this research provides a wonderful opportunity to redirect funding away from John Coates athlete mills (the kind of thing that should have perished with the German Democratic Republic) and towards something that might actually perform at the criteria they claim. Even disregarding the happiness factor, it might be preferable to know that money is to be wasted, let it be in white elephant stadiums rather than the petulant brats we sent to Delhi.

It always seems to be two steps forward and then two back with Australia’s asylum seeker policy.  In the wake of the High Court’s M61/M69 decision, DIAC has apparently begun offering all offshore asylum seekers who have been refused refugee status a renewed assessment and presumably merits review if necessary. They really didn’t have much choice because, as I suggested in a previous post, every single “offshore” asylum seeker assessment is affected by the fatal errors of law identified by the High Court.

Whether these renewed assessments will result in different outcomes remains to be seen. As I explained, it will be necessary for DIAC to provide all applicants with access to any general country information likely to be taken into account adverse to their application.   Apparently the success rate of applications has fallen in recent months from around 80% to 50%, since processing of Afghan and Sri Lankan applications resumed after the pre-election suspension of processing stunt .  That dramatically lower success rate may have something to do with the simmering discontent in detention centres in recent days.  It’s rumoured that the lower success rate results from assessors relying on more “positive” country information reports deeming a greater number of regions in both Sri Lanka and Afghanistan to be safe.  Applicants’ capacity to challenge the accuracy of those assessments may change the situation from now on, however, and is certainly likely to prolong the assessment and review process.

However, at the same time DIAC was granting applicants renewed assessments it was also emphasising that nothing fundamental had changed:

The Government says it will not be changing its policies or the way it handles asylum seeker cases. It says people can expect more frustration and tension as more asylum seekers have their refugee claims rejected and are repatriated.

Surely the government should now at least be asking itself whether it’s time for a major change in policy direction, or at least revisiting the fundamental assumptions on which the whole edifice of mandatory universal detention is based. There are three major motivating factors underpinning the policy:

1. To deter boat arrivals by making it as difficult as possible for them to access the full range of legal assistance or indeed to access judicial review at all;
2. In the case of both the Howard government’s Pacific Solution and Julia Gillard’s proposed Timor Solution, to deter boat arrivals by creating the impression that enlisting with the people smugglers won’t gain them any advantage.  Because they are being detained in another country Australia is under no obligation under the Refugee Convention to offer them protection unless it chooses;
3. Last but certainly not least, to give hostile voters the impression that the government is being suitably tough on “queue jumpers” and “illegal arrivals”.

The force of each of these factors is highly dubious, even if you’re a hard-headed realist unimpressed by “bleeding heart” arguments about human rights of the vulnerable and dispossessed.

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How do people respond to evidence of their own privilege? Some will deny it. They’ll try to tell you that earning $90,000+ per year makes them a middle income earner. Others will ignore it. And others still will try to justify it — they’ll say they deserve to be better off than others, or that a system that creates income and wealth differences ultimately benefits everyone.

But some people will confront their privilege head on. And when they do, they may decide that they don’t deserve it and that their advantages don’t always benefit people who are less well off than they are. One response to this is to feel guilty. Guilt is an extremely unpleasant emotion. And the risk is that we’ll take shortcuts to make it go away.

Many people believe that our current patterns of energy consumption are unsustainable. The carbon emissions we generate when drive our cars, cool our houses and fly between cities are contributing to potentially catastrophic climate change — change that will affect less privileged people far more than it will affect us. In the future, people will look back at how we lived, and they will condemn us for it.

The risk is that governments will create policies that help privileged people to feel less guilty but that don’t actually reduce carbon emissions. In a couple of recent posts at Translations, Joel Pringle argues that the NSW Solar Bonus Scheme was exactly that kind of policy. In his most recent post on the issue he writes:

The politics of the issue are quite simple: people like to feel as if they are contributing to carbon emission reductions, and measure their success in ways that are easy to see and simple to understand (put solar panel on roof, reduce reliance on evil coal-fired power stations, be a good person). And Governments love giving voters money for things that are popular among voters, even if the popularity is misguided.

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A fertile collaboration

A brief reflection, albeit belated, on the passing of Henryk Górecki won’t be out of place in such a hive as ours of classical music enthusiasts.

The Polish composer secured immortality with his Third Symphony. It’s a shame the expression ‘achingly beautiful’ has become debased currency, because occasionally something comes along that genuinely merits the description, and the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs was one of them. And there seems to be a near universal consensus on the quality of the work, which is unusual for any composer of the post-WWII period. I looked at the customer reviews for the London Sinfonietta recording on Amazon; all but five out of 120 awarded five stars. (For comparison, Phillip Glass’s Akhnaten, another well regarded piece, of comparable substance and vintage, scored 24/34.)

Had he not composed that symphony (completed in 1976 but not recorded or distributed in ‘The West’ until 1992) Górecki would have remained almost unknown outside of Poland. His reward was not just well-deserved acclaim for that work (offset by celebrity, which he hated), but greater attention for earlier works and, more importantly, some commissions resulting in major compositions that might not otherwise have seen the light of day. (Continued)

Cheating students, immortal hamburgers, housing nutters and a cunning plan to improve the affordability of Grange Hermitage, all feature in this week’s Missing Link Friday.

Lies, lies and more lies

Joe Hockey is an expert at deception, writes Ad astra at The Political Sword. The star-bound blogger questions Hockey’s claims about debt and interest rates in a long post that begins with a discourse on the nature of truth.

Skepticlawyer considers another kind of deception — students who hire someone else to write their university assignments. In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education ‘Ed Dante’ writes about his career as a ‘essay mill‘ writer. Obviously his customers want to be sure their assignment is in capable hands and he doesn’t hesitate to reassure them:

… part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dante claims to have written around 5,000 pages of scholarly work over the past year and hopes to earn around $66,000. A few readers have done the math and concluded that he is either hopelessly underpaid or lying about how much work he’s doing.

Understandably teachers are worried about being duped. At Core Economics, Kwanghui Lim suggests relying more heavily on exams: "one can correlate the student’s exam performance with their term paper, and to some extent this acts as a way to smoke out the cheaters".

How worried should teachers be about essay mills? Earlier this year American blogger Dan Ariely decided to find out. Together with Aline Grüneisen Ariely approached four essay mills and ordered a typical college term paper … on the subject of cheating.

After ploughing through pages of poorly written, sloppily referenced gibberish, Ariely concluded that "the day is not here where students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades for them".

It’s not just students who claim credit for work that’s not their own. According to editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association, ghost writing is common in medical journals. Drug companies pay ghostwriters to author papers that are published under the names of academic authors.

At the Scholarly Kitchen Phil Davis published an interview with a ghost.

(Continued)

I have a dim recollection that somewhere someone has done a set of graphs of the rapidly contracting time horizons of scientists’ and economists’ predictions of environmental and economic problems arising from climate change, biodiversity reduction, risk to food supply and energy resource inaccessibility and the like.

If these graphs don’t exist, they should. (I’m talking about graphing contracting time horizons of reputable predictions here).

One potentially graphable set of predictions concern the economically useful future of coal.

(Continued)

I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share.

The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com.  Ever.  Discuss.

My ideal final episode:  Oils Aint Oils appear at the Ferntree Gully Hotel and are joined on-stage  by the real Oils including Garrett, but the concert is disrupted by a fire in the ceiling caused by faulty pink batts.  Meanwhile …