Club Troppo

Adobe and me only barely get on. Their readers keep crashing. Anyway they’ve recently upgraded their reader and in chrome it displays pdf files very much as if they are html files – rather than bringing up the clunky old reader within the browser. All very nice. But there’s a big problem – for me anyway. Now I can’t figure out how to save the pdf files. When I go to ‘save page as’ sometimes it will save a pdf file, but often it saves an html page, and that’s with a big blank on the screen (where the pdf goes). Not helpful, I think you’ll agree. I’ve also tried printing the page as a pdf using my trusty cute pdf program. But that doesn’t work – just producing a pdf of the browser page I can see before me.

Is Adobe really ‘upgrading’ its free reader to degrade its usefulness to force us to buy the full program?  Somehow I suspect a stuff-up rather than a conspiracy.  Can someone please enlighten me (and others) as to how to save pdf files when they open up in my browser now the dinky (and clunky) additional toolbar with a little disc icon no longer loads? I’ve had a bit of a look on the Adobe forum without success. I’m using Chrome, but expect the problem will be the same in other browsers.

In this week’s Missing Link Friday — a former Costello adviser compares Australia’s tax and welfare system to a platypus (follow the links to find out why), Tyler Cowen starts a debate about inequality in America, bloggers worry about the demise of serious political journalism and an American 5 year old makes national news by dressing as a girl.

(Continued)

ABC The Drum/Unleashed editor Jonathan Green a couple of days ago:

Waiting until just after 3.30 this afternoon before fronting the media and addressing today’s asylum seeker tragedy made Opposition spokesman Scott Morrison look the model of restraint. “A day of sadness as worst fears realised,” he said.

The blogosphere was not so circumspect.

Michelle Grattan in today’s SMH/Age:

The politicians desperately tried to avoid sounding ”political” as the shocking news of the smashed boat and destroyed lives unfolded on Wednesday, with the television images of boiling sea, treacherous rocks and floating bodies and debris.

In the blogosphere, there was no such restraint. Passion and fury reigned, with claims of blood on Labor hands, calls for Julia Gillard to resign, and not a little distasteful triumphalism about prior warnings.

Why bother to have an original thought when you’re a senior MSM journalist?  Why bother about accuracy for that matter?  In fact, as Troppo readers know, I monitor almost 300 blogs every single day to compile the Missing Link Daily digest, and I haven’t come across this alleged appalling blogosphere behaviour.  Where I have struck exactly the poisonous rubbish Green and Grattan describe is in the pages of the Fairfax media of which Ms Grattan is a senior editor. This morning it published  Rob Oakeshott’s distasteful retailing (under the guise of deep public-spirited concern) of alleged rumours that the Gillard government might have been complicit in deliberately failing to intercept the doomed asylum seeker vessel. Moreover, Fairfax senior journalist David Marr raised this allegation yesterday, entirely without any evidentiary or other basis.  In turn the “rumours” to which Oakeshott refers appear themselves to have been initiated by MSM stories in which, in the immediate aftermath of first news of the tragedy, they went and sought comment from usual suspects Pamela Curr and Tony Kevin who gleefully (and predictably – that’s why the MSM interviewed them in the first place) suggested a SIEV X-style government/navy conspiracy to let the asylum seekers drown.

Then we have senior Murdoch journalists  Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair, whose “blame game” output is equally distasteful (Gillard has “blood on her hands”).  Bolt and Blair were Green and Grattan’s sole nominated examples of blogosphere perfidy, but neither are members of the blogosphere in any meaningful sense.  In fact they’re the spearhead of MSM efforts to de-fang and appropriate blogging and somehow turn a buck out of it.  No doubt Green and Grattan’s dishonest efforts at blurring the distinction between MSM and blogosphere, and then pinning the sins of the former on the latter, is part of that strategy too.  Trevor Cook had a great post on this subject the other day:

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For five years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>’.

With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch ‘Best Blog Posts of 2010?. On Line Opinion will publish the best 40 or so nominated posts over the course of January. This year the judging panel includes Ken Parish and Nicholas Gruen of Club Troppo, Helen ‘skepticlawyer’ Dale, On Line Opinion’s Graham Young and one or two others still to be tagged and hog-tied.

The objective, as always, is to gather some of the best blog writing in one place. It’s a showcase or anthology rather than a contest.  There will be no “Best Blog Post of 2010? award, just publication over the festive season of 40 of the best as nominated by readers and “culled” to a manageable number by our judging panel.

Posts will enter the pool by two channels. First of all, to ensure there is a decent sample, our judging panel will feel free to make nominations from our own subjective memories of excellent blogging.   The second channel is you. We would like you to nominate your own favourite posts. This includes posts you’ve read and posts you’ve written. As far as self-nomination goes, in case there are writers out there who are inhibited by modesty, keep in mind that there is no winner, so we are not asking you to claim that any post of yours is the best post of 2010. We just want to exhibit your wares. Please make our lives easier by supplying a list of the three posts of which you are most proud.

You can make your nominations in three ways:

1. List them in the comments thread to the call for nominations post here at Club Troppo;

2. Send it to On Line Opinion submissions@onlineopinion.com.au

3. Send an email to: ken dot parish at cdu dot edu dot au .

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Last of the year.  We’re going into recess until after New Year.  BTW We’ll be doing Best Blog Posts again in conjunction with Online Opinion.  I’ll post a more detailed notice later today.

• Sinclair Davidson on Oakeshott’s peddling “rumour” that govt colluded in sinking Xmas Island boat http://bit.ly/gXZwru
• Jack Marx on asylum seekers (MSM “blog” but too good to ignore) http://bit.ly/egPTJs
• Saul Eslake: ‘Two speed economy’ nothing new http://bit.ly/dLt0Sy
• Nicholas Gruen: “I couldn’t understand why he had no shoes” Govt 2.0 success story + xmas cautionary tale http://bit.ly/gY6lBo
• Ben Eltham: Why do unis still support the Australian Literary Review? http://bit.ly/fkhlyk
• Eric Martin: The Reign of Witches Has Not Passed (treatment of alleged Wikileaker Bradley Manning) http://bit.ly/enOjfk
• Stubborn Mule: Australia’s Chinese growth engine http://bit.ly/ig2MM1
• Douglas Muir: Murder and organ harvesting in Albania http://bit.ly/hq57Bq
• As China ditches communism for despotic state capitalism, Chinese intellectuals turning to Leo Strauss for insight http://bit.ly/haGce6
• Andrei Lankov: How to Stop the Next Korean War http://bit.ly/gxSDOH
• Rob Lyons: The many myths of Erin Brockovich http://bit.ly/dOrU1k
• Brian Landers: Nations must be allowed to go bust http://bit.ly/eCsuqx
• Andrew Exum: 5 Ways to Win the War in Afghanistan http://bit.ly/hV0wuk Ahmed Rashid on how to get out http://bit.ly/fRHx7I
• Brian Bahnisch’s climate change clippings at LP http://bit.ly/hNK20Y

During the Government 2.0 inquiry a Web 2.0 enthusiast in the Qld police force wrote me an email suggesting that life wasn’t easy for web 2.0 inside his agency. I stayed in touch but wasn’t really able to do much other than encourage in various ways. Anyway, he says that things are very different now – perhaps to some extent because of the Govt 2.0 Taskforce work, but probably more because it’s the zeitgeist to look at how these new platforms can be used to help address the missions of various agencies.

A few days ago he referred me to this link in Facebook. Apart from the choice of platform there’s nothing very ‘hip’ about it, but it’s a great use of the immediacy of social media. Anyway, check out the link if you like, or read my edited version of it below. And read it before you go on any long Christmas drives.

I couldn’t understand why he had no shoes.

He was wearing a dark suit and socks but no shoes.

He was about 80 years of age.

He was dead.

It was dark and he had been crossing the road when he was hit by a car and thrown onto the footpath.

Later we would find out that he had been visiting his wife.  She was in hospital.  It was the first time they had been apart in their married life of over 50 years.

He had caught a train and was walking to their house from the railway station. He must have misjudged the speed of the approaching car as he tried to cross the road near their house.

It was my first fatal and as is the case for most police it was early in my service as a young and inexperienced constable.

He had been wearing shoes.  We found them when we were looking for the probable point of impact.

It was the shoes that showed us where his last moment was.  They were on the roadway together.

He must have stopped and looked towards the headlights that were about to illuminate the end of his life.  The intense force of the impact had lifted him out of them and they were left there as silent witnesses.

(Continued)

A recent Op Ed originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age, 15th December 2010.

The re-emergence of the mining boom, temporarily de-railed by the global financial crisis, as a key driver of Australia’s economic prospects has been accompanied by a revival of the talk about a ‘two-speed’ economy that became commonplace during the first phase of the boom. This talk holds that the mining sector is booming while the rest of the economy is “struggling”; and similarly that the north and west of the country are powering ahead while the south-east (where the bulk of the population lives) is stagnating – and, inevitably, that the Government ought to do something about it.

This talk was simplistic then, and it is simplistic now.

Significant divergences in the economic fortunes of different regions or sectors of an economy as large and diverse as Australia’s are by no means unusual.

In the last two decades there has never been a gap of less than 2 percentage points between the annual growth rates of the fastest- and slowest-growing States or Territories. And that gap has actually been smaller in recent years than it used to be. Over the past five years, the margin between the growth rates of real gross State product of the fastest- and slowest-growing States or Territories has averaged 3.7 percentage points – 1.5 percentage points less than this margin averaged during the 1990s, and again during the first half of the past decade. (Continued)

I’ve decided to start posting the Missing Link Daily Twitter production here as a daily digest. Note that I cover “alternative media” (non-MSM fairly loosely defined) as well as blogs. Feedback welcome.  Anyway I’ll be suspending it for Christmas in a couple of days.

• Crikey roundup of Xmas Island sinking tragedy coverage;  Ken Parish on bastardry from both extremes
• Clare Sambrook focuses on Britain’s punitive asylum seeker detention policies
• Khalid Koser: Responding to Boat Arrivals in Australia: Time for a Reality Check (Lowy Inst)
• Richard Farmer: Rudd’s conduct of foreign affairs is revenge served cold
• David Alexander argues Australia has found politically viable way of keeping the state both fair and relatively small
• Juan Cole: Fox News ordered journos to spin global warming; Fox also makes you stupid
• Alex White: Essential climate graphs for dealing with your denialist uncle at Xmas lunch
• Brendan O’Neill focuses on watering down of the criminal law double jeopardy rule in Britain
• Overlawyered: Maccas subject of California class action over Happy Meals with toys
• Wagner et al on tender-based alternative to emissions trading or carbon taxation
• December edition of feminist blogging carnival (links to lots of feminist posts)
• Kevin Donnelly on latest PISA international comparisons of literacy, numeracy of oz 15 year olds
• Lucía Atehortúa: Farming in cities could help feed the world
• Simon Grove: Forestry still getting a bum rap
• Joshua Hammer: Nelson Mandela combined greatness with pettiness, compassion with coldness, altruism with selfishness

Apparently thirty or more asylum seekers drowned as SIEV sinks under Christmas Island cliffs.

It’s bound to have huge domestic political ramifications. Andrew Bolt is already fulminating and demanding Gillard’s resignation. He’s an odious twerp but has a point at least in so far as the voyage to Australia in small leaky boats is incredibly dangerous, and a policy mix which deters decisions to chance it has at least that to recommend it.

However, Bolt’s argument contains an assumption that continuation of the Pacific/Nauru Solution would have resulted in ongoing low arrival numbers. As I argued in my previous post canvassing abolition of universal mandatory detention, that assumption is highly dubious given that it only became general public knowledge shortly before the Howard government was defeated in 2007 that most of the Nauru detainees were being progressively granted protection visas and allowed into Australia. We can’t be certain that numbers of boat arrivals would have risen inexorably from that point irrespective of which party was in power, but it’s a reasonable suspicion that demagogues like Bolt fail even to mention let alone seriously consider.¹1. KP: The extent to which the Howard government feared precisely such an upward trajectory is demonstrated by a dodgy deal they did only months before losing power whereby “asylum seekers detained on Nauru can be sent to the US once their claims are approved, while US-bound Haitian refugees detained in Guantanamo Bay can be resettled in Australia.” It was clearly hoped that this might somehow maintain for a while longer the illusion that enlisting with the people smugglers was not a shortcut to permanent residence in Australia. How they imagined that conveying a message that you might get permanent residence in the US instead would be a deterrent is less evident! [↩] Far better for circulation to foment simplistic fear and loathing.

In any event, it’s looking like an ugly political debate in the lead-up to Christmas. Meanwhile let’s hope most of these people have been rescued.

Update – It sounds likely to be substantially more than 30 killed. Meanwhile, and on the opposite side of the ideological divide from Andrew Bolt, the aptly named refugee activist Pamela Curr seems to be rehearsing a Tony Kevin imitation by implying the likelihood of a conspiracy between politicians and military personnel to allow the asylum seekers to drown. There’s a certain sad irony in the fact that this sort of contemptible imputation is now being visited on the Labor government, given that some of its members happily colluded in the Senate Committee into SIEV X failing decisively to reject similar imputations against the Howard government. Disasters bring out the best and worst in human nature. Oh yes, and Tim Blair predictably combines the Bolt “blame Julia” line with (justifiably) sledging David Marr for joining the Tony Kevin imitators and suggesting a navy/government conspiracy to let them drown.

Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Coalition has a slight variation on the blame game. ”The Australian government are to blame.  They should be processing people in Indonesia. …”  Well, er, the Howard government tried that, spending $25 million on a refugee processing centre at Tanjung Pinang.  It didn’t work.  So too did the Rudd government, eventually persuading the Tamils on board the Oceanic Viking to disembark and go to Tanjung Pinang on a promise that they would be accepted into Australia within 12 weeks if found to be refugees.  Twenty five of them were still waiting 9 months later.  As Fairfax’s Lindsay Murdoch observed at the time: “Jakarta’s military and political elite are adamant that Indonesia will not become a major transit point for asylum seekers.”²2. KP: Here’s the latest on the Oceanic Viking asylum seekers [↩]

Some of the axe-grinders who seek to mislead Australians that there is some magic solution to the asylum seeker issue may well be sincere, but they’re certainly not helping to engender rational debate aimed at achieving a workable if unavoidably imperfect policy.

Yes folks, progress might be painfully slow, but we’re gradually moving the idea of independent fiscal policy from “you dreamers just don’t understand the real world” category to the “you’ve gotta get hip, you’ve gotta get real reform” category.

The OECD has published another article about independent fiscal policy. I’ve not had time to go through it yet, but here’s the abstract and a link – for the record.

The fiscal position has deteriorated sharply, leading to large deficits and adding to high debt levels. Some countries have experienced financing pressures. Detailed multi-year plans to stabilise the public finances are required. Prolonged fiscal consolidation and reforms will be needed to bring debt to a more prudent level, increase the ability to withstand future shocks and to prepare for future ageing costs.
Working Paper No 829: Improving fiscal performance through fiscal councils