Monthly Archives: September 2011

Geelong: Easy . . .

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Well my track record isn’t too flash. I predicted a Collingwood win last year for the first final – and they controlled the game and used their control to kick points rather than goals and then let the Sainters back in. Then I predicted a Sainters win in the replay, more out of worry than anything else. Having outlined my thoughts in the post, on re-reading them they seemed to add up to a Collingwood win. Which was what happened.

Anyway this year is different. Somehow it hasn’t felt the same. Perhaps that’s because I don’t have tickets – as I did to both games last year.

Anyway, I’m already in mourning. I can’t see how we are going to win.

If I were to set out the way to win the premiership it would be the way Geelong have managed this season. The basic strategy behind the game changes subtly as sides come up with new approaches.  But it takes the best part of a year at least to catch up with some new strategy. Thus we’ve seen Sydney get a premiership from flooding, and then they were unpicked. Then we saw the Saints doing something similar but somehow better. In each case both Sydney and the Saints didn’t have a very good bunch of players. They had a new strategy and players who were thoroughly drilled in how to make it work and they became almost impossible to beat.

The reason it takes time to peg such a strategy back is that, apart from figuring out exactly what they’re up to, you then have to figure out what to do about it. Collingwood has had its forward press going sufficiently well to win last year, but being the worrier I am I was always worried about Geelong, not just because they’ve got the fastest, most direct attacking game in the business, but because they added defence – copied from us – to that strategy.

They had it well enough worked out by early this year that they stopped us – when we had been pretty much unstoppable. One of their players said before the first of the two encounters something to this effect. “We want to be competitive, because we’ve changed our way of playing and if we lose but are competitive it will show that we’re learning”. And learning they were. So I didn’t want them to crush us in the last round of the home and away games. But they did.

More alarming still is that as I read in an article that someone else may remember and link to (I can’t find it) that Geelong’s stats have changed dramatically in the last five or six games. Their average kick length and kick to handball ratio has gone way up. They’ve basically come up with a way of getting the strengths of their attacking game without the downsides of inattention to defence. And they’re tearing other sides apart.

Whether deliberately or not, this new style hasn’t been really shown to the world for long enough for people to figure out how to unpick it, let alone drill the necessary skills and structures into their players to do so. So I reckon we’re in a lot of trouble. Tehy will pick us apart in just the way Hawthorn picked us apart last week – with lots of pressure against us in defence to stop us getting our run out of defence and with lots of long direct kicking zig-zagging down the centre of the ground and leading out from full forward.

Anyway, Malthouse is quite a smart fellow and so maybe he’ll come up with some response to this new challenge. But I’d feel a lot better if there was six months or so to actually get it right.

Anyway, we’ll see . . . Continue reading →

Inequality in Australia – are the rich getting richer and the poor poorer?

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Cross posted from Inside Story

Australians like to think of themselves as egalitarian, and in the past Australians also liked to believe that we had a relatively equal distribution of income and wealth.  As early as the 1880s, visitors to Australia apparently remarked on the greater equality of the distribution of wealth, with the lack of a poor class, comfortable incomes being in the majority, and millionaires few and far between.

As late as 1967, Harold Holt said he did not know of any free country in the world where “what is produced by the community is more fairly and evenly distributed among the community than Australia”.  From the 1980s onwards, however, this view of Australia became subject to reappraisal.  As noted by John Hirst  “‘Egalitarianism – see under myths’: so runs the index entry in a standard sociological text on Australian society…” Continue reading →

Missing Link Friday – 30 September 2011

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Spoken like a true utilitarian: "If we really want the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we should be electing psychopathic, Machiavellian misanthropes", writes Roger McShane (via Will Wilkinson).

I love you so much … that I’m going to ruin your life: Tigtog on the perils of manipulative relationships.

The five stages of Gillard grief: "The stages of grief when a political leader is doomed differ a little in sequence from the classic Kubler-Ross order", says John Quiggin.

Michael Stutchbury returns to the Fin: "The Australian Financial Review has launched another successful raid on The Australian, announcing Michael Stutchbury as editor-in-chief of the newspaper", reports Mumbrella.

Why is the new Kindle Fire so cheap?: "The battle of the tablets is not a battle of devices, but a battle of ecosystems", argues Erik Brynjolfsson at Digitopoly. Amazon can afford to sell Kindle’s at a low price because "the profit stream from Amazon’s media products is boosted every time another customer buys a Kindle".

Why not use cheap content to sell expensive tablets? Responding to a post by Matt Yglesias, Joshua Gans offers a rationale for Amazon’s business model.

It’s obvious (once you know the answer): Common sense makes the world seem more orderly than it really is, writes Duncan Watts at Freakonomics.

Maybe we could automate Missing Link: Chris Wilson builds a robotic replacement for blogger Jason Kottke. According to Farhad Manjoo, it’s not doing too badly.

Manly and Collingwood

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The two finals for the oval ball codes do not just share a weekend this year. Two of the finalists – Collingwood in the AFL and Manly in the NRL – have the undisputed status of being “the team everyone likes to hate” in their respective leagues. Yet they are far from similar clubs and the root of this hate is a striking contrast.

The source of hatred for Manly is easy to understand. Manly are “silvertails”, a moniker popularised by Roy Masters whilst coaching Western Suburbs in the late 1970s. Wests were then based in Lidcombe and Masters developed a mythology of class resentment for his under resourced team of “fibros”. It managed to inspire a brutal theatre for audiences, but ultimately failed on two counts – they didn’t win a premiership and rather than inspiring a siege mentality against all of Wests’ opponents, it instead inspired a league wide hatred of the prosperous, well resourced, player stealing team ensconced on the insular peninsular. The ultimate beneficiary was Newcastle in 1997. This folklore still inspires documentaries today.

Collingwood - Stereotyped

The hatred of Collingwood is less easily encapsulated. Occasionally someone will suggest it is due to resentment of the team’s early 20th century success, which seems unlikely. Was dislike transmitted by geriatric fans that could actually remember Collingwood success? And why did the same resentment fall on teams like St George or South Sydney whom had similar periods of dominance in league? Over the years I’ve asked people, and searched internet forums and when one got past vague generalisations that could apply to any team, certain imagery made a habit of reappearing . Of “rats”, of “tatts”, of “flanno” and “missing teeth” [fn1] and of “Winnie Reds up sleeves”. Or I could just browse the facebook page devoted to asking “Why are Collingwood supporters roaming the streets? Shouldn’t they be in jail?”, or this one, or this one…. Hmm….

When the Western Suburbs Magpies consciously adopted proletarian semiotics, their Emmanuel Goldstein drew everyone else’s hate. When these semiotics are applied to the Collingwood Magpies, they became Goldstein.

Why this difference? It’s unlikely to be a root difference in the culture of the cities that form the core of each competition given Sydney and Melbourne are as alike as any two large cities in the world (the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding). Topography does make class differences more apparent in Sydney, but how would this explain this observed difference? Continue reading →

The Bolt case: racial defamation done cheap

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I was all set to fulminate against the evils of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the wake of the Federal Court’s verdict against Bolt and publisher News Ltd in Eatock v Bolt.

And then it turns out the the Bolt case is not, after all, the perfect opportunity to argue bravely for freedom of expression.

Because Eatock v Bolt turns out to be very much like a defamation trial. One of the two things that the Bolt case makes clearest is that if you’re defamed in an issue about race, and you care about redress rather than money (refreshing!), then the Racial Discrimination Act is the best place to go. Someone else pays the costs and the burden of proof is much lower.

That we have essentially a special offence of racial defamation in Australia is a peculiar result of the Act that I had not realised until now. If like me you don’t much like affirmative action, this is not a good result for the country, regardless of what you think about defamation law. But it’s not as bad as result as it might have been if the case had been decided on other grounds.

OK, step back. As Jonathan Holmes has eloquently pointed out, section 18C is awful legislation. It was inserted into the Act in 1995 by the Keating government with the rest of Part IIA of the Act. Part IIA is headed “Prohibition of offensive behaviour based on racial hatred”, but section 18C it doesn’t fight racial hatred at all. Instead it outlaws certain types of speech and writing so long as they are reasonably likely to offend some people, and as long as the utterances in question are said or written because of those people’s race. This is bad and stupid in its own right, because almost anything you might say or write about race is reasonably likely to offend someone. The Act is also apt to make a lot of people feel that their views are being censored. The likely end result is racial disharmony, the opposite of the result this lousy law was supposed to have.

It’s an awful law, but it’s a simple one. Someone in a racial group felt offended. Bolt was referring to their race. It didn’t matter whether Andrew Bolt was the lovechild of Mark Twain and Mother Teresa; on the face of it, he’d breached the Act. (Bromberg J’s judgment takes a long time to get to this point.)

The legal question then was whether Bolt could use one of the Act’s exemptions. The Act exempts speech and writing in various circumstances where it’s “said or done reasonably and in good faith”, fairly and in the public interest. You might think this would cover most of what a newspaper columnist would write. This is where I was all set to write about Bolt being punished for his opinions. Continue reading →

The David Solomon Lecture: Government 2.0 a couple of years on . . .

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Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s time.

                                                                                            I

Whether or not I can speak with sufficient insight to be worthy of giving the David Solomon lecture, I possess at least one qualification. I have known David for over thirty years.  As is the way with the illustrious, I knew of him before we met. He was one of the leading political journalists of his day. Yet at a time when he was as well recognised as any, as some were settling into that long period when one’s reputation rises as steadily as one’s powers decline, David was already charting a new course.

While the rest of the first year wannabes struggled, David went from one triumph to another, with the minimum of fuss. I think he was also working for the Financial Review. Then he combined his new qualifications with his journalism to found a landmark publication – a newsletter of analysis of High Court decisions. Interpretation being a foundation of legal thinking, David’s newsletter was a little like the legal commentators of centuries past, influencing the development of the law with its professional interpretation of important cases as they were decided.

I was then re-united with David in 2009 on the Government 2.0 Taskforce.  David had just produced an historic report on open government in Queensland. To her credit the new Queensland Premier Anna Bligh realised his report in law without any serious compromises despite what I imagine were the cautions of her more timorous advisors. That legislation was highly influential in a wave of new Freedom of Information legislation subsequently enacted in most states and at the federal level. This embodies in law the new understanding that – to quote the new Federal Act, “information held by the government is to be managed for public purposes, and is a national resource”.

David was a great help in the Government 2.0 Taskforce helping us keep sight of the wood for the trees. There were a tense few weeks in which what had been an outline was converted into the first proper draft of the report.  Given the mess the early mass of material was in I recall the music that David’s words were in my ears when he told me at a dinner in the Canberra Lakeside Hotel that the report was really starting to take shape. At last I was achieving the standards he’d set at ANU in 1975.

Finally but most importantly, despite his current august title and role in Queensland as Integrity Commissioner, David is, to use a technical term also developed amongst my peer group all those years ago at ANU – a genuine cutie.

II                                                                                                                        

My topic tonight is Government in the age of Web 2.0. Continue reading →

Are you tough minded enough to be with us? Or are you against us?

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Someone familiar with Russian totalitarianism once asked how George Orwell understood it so well without ever having experienced it. It was pointed out that Orwell had been to Eton. Paul Krugman asks how could the guardians of economic orthodoxy all suddenly come out in favour not just of fiscal austerity, which was wrong, but also monetary tightening.

It took bad thinking and bad policy by many players to get us into the state we’re in; rarely in the course of human events have so many worked so hard to do so much damage. But if I had to identify the players who really let us down the most, I think I’d point to European institutions that lent totally spurious intellectual credibility to the Pain Caucus. Specifically:

- The OECD, which a year ago demanded both fiscal austerity and a sharp rise in interest rates, because, well, because. Recently the OECD surveyed Britain, concluded that inflation is likely to decline, unemployment to rise, and that the UK should therefore … continue with fiscal austerity and raise rates. As a correspondent wrote, “What planet are they living on? What planet am I living on?”

- The ECB, which bought totally into the doctrine of expansionary austerity, despite overwhelming evidence that it was false, and proceeded to raise rates in the face of a deeply depressed economy — possibly the straw that breaks the euro’s back.

- The BIS, which called for tighter monetary policy just three months ago, to fight a nonexistent inflationary threat. Did I mention that inflation expectations, as measured by the difference between yields on ordinary and index bonds, have been plunging like a stone?

I haven’t developed a full theory of the sociology going on here. But these organizations should be doing some agonized soul-searching, asking how they got it so wrong while posing as high priests of economic expertise.

I don’t have a fully developed one either, but whenever I see this kind of groupthink, especially in economics, I think of years 8-10 at school. You know that time when the opinion of peer group is virtually irresistible. I recall there were codes about how high one wore one’s belt, and the length of your long pants. Too high or too short was death. Now it would have been possible to wear your pants so long or your belt so low as to lapse into parody, but that was pretty easy to judge. So short of that there was a kind of asymmetry. You could be tolerated (at least for your decisions on these things) or decidedly uncool – not really worthy of the normal considerations due to a human being.

And as one might imagine for a species that evolved on the African Savannah where the most important pronouns were ‘us’ and ‘them’ we’re very attuned to who’s in and who’s out. Indeed, as I read today:

[R]esearch has found that if you are wearing a wristband, you are likely to discriminate against someone wearing a different color wristband. But if you are tapping your foot in synch with music, you’re more likely to help a person who is also tapping in the same way.

In economics there’s the same kind of asymmetry – and it’s around all those things like fiscal responsibility, no-pain no gain all that stuff. Now it’s not as if those issues shouldn’t get their due.  Moreover it’s also true that there are some powerful forces pushing against them. Easing is more popular than tightening and that matters in a democracy.  And in normal times these kinds of notions are important. So there’s a role in the eco-system for tough minded no-pain-no-gainedness. But where one needs emergency expansion, as one did in Australia in 2007, or one is in or close to being in a liquidity trap as is much of the developed world, this asymmetry is deadly. It’s horrible to watch the grip on those who are supposed to be trained to be as rational as possible in these situations.

 

Now more than ever . . .

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I’ve been struggling to articulate my objection to little strategic set pieces which appear before policy proposals.  They typically take the salient challenges from conventional wisdom – for instance right now that we’re facing potential environmental catastrophe, sovereign debt crises and various other dangers – and then present the policy proposals they are promoting as particularly well suited to those problems.

Trouble is, the two things are disconnected. My usual reason for doing something – like for instance Windows on Workplaces - is not because it’s uniquely well suited to our particular circumstance but because in virtually any circumstance it would be a good idea. Indeed, though there are exceptions, if one is going to implement some policy, one generally wants some faith that the policy suits any circumstances, because circumstances change.

But just as we incessantly ‘theme’ conferences around the issue du jour, somehow there is this compulsion to present an idea as some response to its specific times.

Speaking of Windows on Workplaces, the US Government publishes detailed data on the way in which different US Government agencies perform on employee satisfaction surveys. BestPlacesToWork.org is an excellent initiative, but couldn’t happen in Australia at least right now, because our own Australian Public Service Commission doesn’t want to publish agency specific data.

Anyway, here’s how BestPlacesToWork tells us why its service matters

Today, America faces high unemployment, a growing federal budget deficit, war in Afghanistan, a major military engagement in Iraq, an aging population, long term-energy needs and a host of other daunting challenges. Now, more than ever, we need effective government and public servants who represent the best and brightest that our nation has to offer.

It also tells us that “The 2010 rankings are the fifth edition of this ongoing series, following the 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009 versions.” and that

The rankings provide a mechanism to hold agency leaders accountable for the health of the organizations they run. They also offer a roadmap for better management and provide an early warning sign for agencies in trouble. Had Congress or government leaders paid attention to the 2003 Best Places survey, for example, they would have found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was last in the employee rankings. That was two years before FEMA’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina, but at the time, few noticed.

So if we need the site now “more than ever”, I guess we needed it less just before Hurricane Katrina hit. I guess those earlier editions should have been forwarded with words to the effect “Now, we need effective government and public servants who represent the best and brightest that our nation has to offer – but times may be coming when we will need it even more.” Continue reading →