Club Troppo

Quadrant magazine kicked off in 1956-57 as a pocket-sized quarterly. James McAuley edited the first 20 issues and these have now become collectors items. I am scanning those 20 issues and the task  is half done but work will have to stop while I go fishing in WA, off Carnarvon.

Due to my limited competence and resources the first 4 issues consist of big pdf files which take some time to load. The following 6 issues load faster but the picture is not so sharp, resembling the somewhat faded original  copy.

http://www.the-rathouse.com/The-McAuley-Quadrants.html

Enjoy!

The guiding principles, from McAuley’s first editorial comment.

 To be Australian in our orientation, because we are interested in this country, its people, its problems, its cultural life, its liberties, and its safety;

To publish work of interest and merit on any topic without regard to the affiliations or repute of the author, the sole requirement being that the material should be worth reading;

Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ‘The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur‘ where I suggest that blogging isn’t about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I’m attacking a straw man:

… just who is saying that blogging is intended to replace professional investigative journalism? And who says it is ‘either/or’? Can’t we have both? One would have thought we had got past this tired "pro" versus "am" debate and got to discussing what makes good journalism irrespective of how the writer is employed.

My post was born out of frustration. While I was skimming through a piece at the The Drum I read this comment by Flubber: "the task of serious investigative political journalism is being undertaken by a dedicated cohort of political bloggers, such as Grogs Gamut, Larvatus Prodeo, The Political Sword, and others." The claim was ridiculous but nobody on the thread questioned it.

Back in 2006, Andrew Norton offered a more realistic view of what popular political blogs might aspire to:

(Continued)

Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur, he writes:

Most mainstream commentary about politics … is tedious, biased echochamber nonsense from pundits with no other life experience than mooching around the Canberra Press Gallery.

Alex argues that the commentary and opinion appearing in newspapers like the Age and the Australian: "is not of any higher quality than the average tertiary educated blogger."

I don’t expect we’ll ever be able to settle this question to everyone’s satisfaction, but maybe we can make a start. Here’s what we’ll do:

1. Go and find your favourite examples of opinion and commentary from an Australian newspaper or blog
2. Post the title and a link in the comments thread. If you like you can also explain why you think it’s a good piece of work.

For this exercise, let’s not get into a discussion about what’s wrong with mainstream media or start criticising particular bloggers or journalists. Let’s concentrate on trying to find the best examples of good writing.

When we’ve got a decent number of examples I’ll create a new post and comments thread so we can compare notes.

In which the queen is sacrificed and all the remaining pieces are involved in the resulting mate. Here.

A popular writer at leading Australian political blog The Political Sword has hit back at "pedantic" criticism of her work. Responding to a series of posts at Club Troppo (an obscure political blog frequented by boring middle-aged men) Feral Skeleton writes:

Some stuffed shirts don’t even realise that their boring little blog has taken to scandal-mongering about someone who writes on another, more popular, blog just because they don’t play by their ‘rules’. How conservative these pathetic, so-called ‘radical centrist’ individuals seem to me with their tut-tutting and new, even more sensorious drivel.

Not that they are going to stop me blogging. I have been going since long before ‘Club Troppo’ came on the scene. With original, thought-provoking blogs that people enjoy reading. And I will be here long after their tendentious little, boring as bat’s pee blog has dried up and blown away due to lack of interest. Which is the way it was sputtering along until they decided to gin up interest in what I have done recently. Which increased their readership, marginally it seems to me, but just goes to prove how I am the interesting one and not them. As in, if my blogs weren’t so powerful, interesting and enjoyable, no one such as they would be taking the time to create a furore about them.

Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story. Investigative journalism takes time, persistence and hard work so it’s no surprise almost all of it is done by professional journalists. Yet I’m constantly reading comments like this:

If you didn’t know already, the task of serious investigative political journalism is being undertaken by a dedicated cohort of political bloggers, such as Grogs Gamut, Larvatus Prodeo, The Political Sword, and others. They are not paid and do it for the love of it, hence they are also not subject to the whims of a proprietor. You’ll get more analysis of policies here than in a month of Sundays in the local rags or TV stations.

There’s some great stuff on Australian blogs, but it’s hardly a replacement for the work of professional journalists. Writing in your pajamas after work might keep you out of reach of the truth-throttling tentacles of teh evil Rupert Murdoch, but it doesn’t leave much time to phone your sources, search public records or crunch numbers.

(Continued)

Does poverty deplete willpower? At This Field is Required, Pamela Stubbart muses over a recent article in the New Republic.

When money isn’t enough. At Larvatus Prodeo, Brian links to a recent column by Ross Gittins and starts a discussion about poverty and social exclusion.

Relative poverty. "Which countries have been most successful in reducing relative poverty in recent decades?" asks Lane Kenworthy at Consider the Evidence.

Meddlesome priest. In the New Statesman Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks out against "quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor" and describes the Cameron government’s ‘big society’ rhetoric as "painfully stale".

Williams also took a swipe at Labour writing: "we are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently and what a left-inspired version of localism might look like." An editorial in the Guardian praised the Archbishop for raising an important issue.

Not everyone welcomed the Archbishop’s foray into politics. At Catallaxy Judith Sloan dismisses him as a "left-wing tosser" while Mark Ferguson at Labour List asks "do we really want to encourage religious leaders to become (party) politicised?"

UKIP member Adam Collyer thinks there isn’t enough talk about deserving and undeserving. "It is eminently clear, and should be to the Archbishop, that some of the poor are indeed “undeserving” – that they really do not want to work and support themselves."

Blogger Archbishop Cranmer observes that Jesus "preached more about money than he did about eternal salvation" before detouring into a discussion of nuances of Greek vocabulary.

In a very recent post I commented on the absence of the one signal in the public market for expertise that might really improve the market for expertise – from the perspective of the public and private interest in efficiency – and that was some surveillance of the extent to which our experts can make worthwhile predictions. Now Robin Hanson documents one such venture – which alas died stillborn.

A well-connected reporter (who I promised I’d keep anonymous) just told me that a major Washington media organization started a project studying major media pundits, and a big part of this project was assessing individual pundit forecast track records. After several months of several folks working on the project, it was killed, supposedly because management decided readers don’t care as much about pundit accuracy as they’d previous thought.

As they say in South Africa “for shame” (the “for” is usually silent).

My Re-imagining Australian federalism post a couple of days ago resulted in an interesting discussion with Mike Pepperday.  Mike argued that my suggestion for tweaking federal division of powers by having the States negotiate for a more adequate assured share of Commonwealth-generated revenue by offering to refer to the Commonwealth under Constitution s 51(xxxvii) some aspects of particular State powers (e.g. control of the waters of the Murray-Darling; policy and prudential but not operational oversight of health and education) was objectionable.  I think it’s a sensible refinement of the division negotiated at the end of the nineteenth century.  It embodies a sort of corporate governance approach to public governance.  That is, the federal government acts as the Board of Directors (policy and prudential oversight); the State government exercises senior operational executive control; and local government bodies and specialist local boards make and implement decisions at the local level.

However, Mike Pepperday’s objection does not relate to whether governance arrangements revised in that way would work better, but to what he sees as a fundamental democratic principle that the suggestion offends:

I do not think we should reason that because Australians won’t pass referendums, their will should be by-passed by using those sections. The two major parties have become tight, closed, little power corporations. It is undemocratic for them to be arranging constitutional power transfers through elite bargaining.

But is this in fact a fundamental democratic principle?  And even if it is, does State referral of powers offend it?  Surely this would only be so if there was some reasonably universal principle that significant changes in public governance arrangements should only be made by popular vote, or that this was the evolved Australian political tradition/culture, or that it was what the Founders who wrote our Constitution actually intended.

On the first point, it is very common for western democratic constitutional systems to provide for constitutional amendment by ordinary legislation enacted by Parliament (rather than by popular vote).   Britain and New Zealand are examples of Westminster systems which employ that method.  Indeed all the Australian States can and do amend their own constitutions by that method (Queensland adopted a brand new constitution as recently as 2001). In federations, it is common for the constitution to provide for amendment by majority vote of the State or provincial parliaments (rather than by popular vote).  That is the case with Canada and the US.  The referral provision in Constitution s 51(xxxvii) effectively provides just such a mechanism.  It provides for the Commonwealth to have law-making power over “matters referred to the Parliament of the Commonwealth by the Parliament or Parliaments of any State or States, but so that the law shall extend only to States by whose Parliaments the matter is referred, or which afterwards adopt the law“.

On the second point, use of the referral power is very much part of the evolved Australian political tradition/culture.  Recent examples of referral  include powers to allow the Commonwealth to enact uniform national corporations law and family law regimes and to supplement anti-terrorism laws in the wake of 9/11.

The third point is in many ways the most interesting.  Did the Founders who drafted the Constitution intend that State referral of powers be used in the way I’m suggesting?  I used the Australian Parliament’s excellent ParlInfo advanced search function to find out.¹1. KP: It allows easy searching of a huge range of resources, including the transcripts of Constitutional Convention debates of the 1890s and Hansard going right back to 1901. [↩]

(Continued)

ABC’s Alan Kohler is touting an idea I floated a few months ago, namely beefing up Infrastructure Australia’s role in assessing federally funded infrastructure projects.  However Kohler advocates stripping politicians of the decision-making power and vesting it entirely in IA (cf Reserve Bank decisions on interest rates).

I strongly disagree.  We elect our politicians and expect them to make the big decisions and govern on our behalf.  There may be some particular decisions like official interest rate policy that are properly made solely on the basis of expert evaluation and that should therefore be left to the experts to make.  But most decisions involve consideration of a wide range of factors including inherently “political” factors about competing spending priorities; political in the sense that they involve subjective judgments about which of several possible decisions should be made.  Factors may be economic, social, cultural or whatever, but they’re not reducible to a formula capable of objective application by unelected experts.  They are, as the High Court says about discretionary decision-making in administrative law, “questions about which reasonable minds may differ”.  In those circumstances only democratic accountability to the people can provide workable safeguards.

That isn’t to deny that IA’s role needs beefing up.  It does.  But its role should be to ensure that government infrastructure spending decisions are properly scrutinised and transparent so that voters can evaluate these inherently political decisions.  We don’t need to vest the actual decision-making power in IA to achieve that, just give it stronger evaluative powers and make it genuinely independent of the government of the day.

Under the current legislation, the IA’s members (mostly Heads of Department) are appointed for relatively short terms and its working staff are public servants and therefore not formally independent of government in any sense. However, the real problem with IA is that its functions only include evaluating the business case for new infrastructure when commissioned to do so by the Minister (see s5(2) and 5(4) of the Infrastructure Australia Act 2008). Naturally the Minister doesn’t do so unless it’s politically expedient.  This problem could be readily fixed.  Simply make all listed IA functions under s 5(2) exercisable if IA itself thinks fit, appoint IA members for longer terms like the RBA, require that only a minority of members can be departmental CEOs and require that at least IA’s senior management are IA employees not public servants.

IA’s transparency function should be boosted by requiring government to report to Parliament within 30 days giving full reasons whenever it makes a significant infrastructure spending decision to fund projects not contained in IA’s Infrastructure Priority Lists, and to report annually on a whole of government basis on the extent to which projects have been funded in accordance with Infrastructure Priority Lists.  That would enable voters to assess the extent to which their elected representatives were engaging in expedient pork-barrelling as opposed to responsible administration in the public interest.