Club Troppo

From the  1891 Taranaki Herald

I was rung today for a comment on second hand car imports by the Global Mail. Here’s a Guardian blog about it. I didn’t know what it was, but that just shows how out of touch I am here at my terminal. It’s a philanthropically funded newspaper. And it’s philanthropically funded by Graeme Wood, who founded Wotif – which I used just last week to book the hotel I’m staying in tonight. So that’s all very good it seems to me, though I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit too journalist heavy for my liking – I’d like to see someone with the kind of money that’s gone into the site trying to cultivate citizen journalism as a vigorous adjunct. Then again, perhaps they do, I’ve only had a very quick squiz so far, and thought I’d let others who don’t know of it, know.

On second hand cars, in 2002 or thereabouts, the Productivity Commission recommended that the prohibitive tariff on second hand cars remain, that we subsidise the industry – roughly as we now do – all in order to reduce tariffs down to 5% which will probably generate more costs than benefits. So much for economics. Over the fold is the PC’s explanation for why we should prohibit the import of second hand cars.

(Continued)

We are all in Tom Watson’s debt for pursuing the corruption of the Murdoch press as vigorously as he has – and continues to. I have had some dealings with Tom arising from my involvement in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, in addition to continuing his pursuit of the Murdoch press he has just been caught up in a strange set of events. His intern, it seems took to his Twitter account when he was in a meeting and tweeted something which mentioned rape. If you mention rape this stirs up trouble.  And what the hell was she doing on his Twitter account? Who knows, but it was a very stupid thing to do, which she very quickly admitted on Twitter.

This caused the predictable avalanche of nonsense in the media. Tom acted pretty kindly, didn’t sack the silly idiot who had tweeted on his account, and then published this account. It ends in these propositions.

8. The intern has not been sacked nor was she ever going to be. She’s young. We all make mistakes.
9. I know her well enough to know she’ll never do this sort of thing again.
10. And yes, I know I should have logged out. I really do. Thank you to the people who pointed that out.
11. For those that have asked – all my tweets, other than the two this morning, are my own.
12. Though my account wasn’t technically ‘hacked’, yes, I do understand the irony of what happened.
13. Once again, I am sorry.

Now the British are different to us.  They’re more sticklers for form. So if Tom wants to apologise, then technically yes, the buck stops with him. He runs the office and ‘takes responsibility’ for what happens.

But beyond that?  He’s in his own office and I don’t agree that he ‘really should’ have assumed that one of his staff would hijack his online ID, even for a joke, just as he shouldn’t assume that she would forge his signature, or (for that matter) video a visiting guest on the dunny. As for ‘irony’ – Tom’s role as a minister in the Blair Government was to promote these online tools and train others in them. Well OK, admit the irony, but strictly speaking there’s not much irony. Someone stuffed up.

I can’t help thinking that a right leaning politician wouldn’t be bowing and scraping. Enough of the apologies Tom. Leave them to Rupert Murdoch – even if he doesn’t mean them.

It’s a strange thing. Film festivals are great things. Yet in my case I see them come, think “I’d like to go to some of those movies” and an awful lot of the time I don’t manage to make it. We have two sectors – the commercial sector that advertises its little head off and serves up dreck and then festivals, which are full of gems, and if they’re not gems there are lots of interesting movies. But they come and go and the movies never get the time to get word of mouth going about them.  And the main alternative source of information is the festival catalogue – which like most marketing may give you information, but they want you to go, so you can’t trust them when they say what a great movie something is.

Now one can go through their catalogue and their timetable and then high-tail it off to Google or Rotten Tomatoes and read film reviews. But is there a better way? At one stage I talked Paul Martin who wrote a great blog on Melbourne films to post on Troppo.  A couple of posts later came this on his site:

In essence, I am finding my own truth, my core self, and understanding how my life experiences have veiled me to that truth. I realise now how deluded and clouded much of my personality has been, including my writing in this medium. My writing will now have a greater personal integrity and be aligned to the Spiritual content and values of whatever I place here whether it be critiquing a movie or chatting to you about the events of my life as this blogger.

Stay tuned – my mentor says actions will speak louder.

And that was the end of that.

So if someone can rustle up a film critic for Troppo that would be just fine.  And would anyone like to make any recommendations of what films I should see in the coming French Film Festival and explain why?

Next month I’m doing a gig for Rotary where I’m going to be on a panel with a demographer and a climatologist and they’re going to ask us to say what will happen in the next 20 years.

In five minutes.

That’s five minutes each – so there’s plenty of time. I get to talk about the economy.

I already know that I won’t be playing the clairvoyant but will suggest that the best questions about the future are what things we can do to make it better. It will look much like today, though we’ll be richer, mining will (presumably) be a lot bigger and other traded sectors commensurately smaller. Anyway, if I were to think about the biggest challenge it’s inequality. It’s hard not to see rewards to the stars getting higher. And trade and technology will continue to undermine the wages of the unskilled.

I thought I might quote the work of Mike Norton who was written up by Dan Ariely in one of those ‘smarties for 2012′ columns as follows;

There’s a significant amount of literature on the theory that, as people become richer, they don’t necessarily become happier. Norton asked instead whether people know how to use money to buy happiness. [Mike] asked: if you give money to people, what do they do with it? The answer was that they spend it on themselves. He then posited: what if we ask people to spend money on other people? His research revealed that those people are actually happier as a consequence. This worked with individuals, and also with groups — when people spent money on people they worked with, the team became more productive. He and I have been working together to try to figure out what level of wealth inequality people in developed countries are willing to tolerate. What we found is that people want to live in societies that are much more equal and much fairer than currently. So why are we willing to tolerate the current level of inequality? We don’t have the answer for this yet.

So I might run that by them. I’ll be interested to hear what they think. When I think of this it rings true. I think there’s a deep dissonance in people’s attitudes to inequaliy – especially in Australia. They don’t like inequality. They really don’t. But it’s not just that they don’t like it in principle, but then reject the measures in practice.  I think there’s an additional step. If you want to tackle inequality effectively explaining what you’ll do will require abstract thought. You’ll explain that you’ll need capital gains taxes, and high taxes on top marginal incomes. And rent taxes – including green taxes. If you had an hour with everyone in the country you might be able to bring them round, at least those who would be made better off by what you have in mind – which is a large majority.

But that’s not how people make up their mind on these things.  They see that a politician is putting up some tax somewhere (even if it won’t do them a skerrick of harm like the mining tax) and they can easily be made to think “There’s that sneaky politician trying to slip their hand into our pockets”. The fact that it’s proposed by Ken Henry who has no axe to grind and is opposed by self-interested billionaires doesn’t seem to change the dynamic.

Anyway, what do you think I should I talk about?

One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn’t be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks the spot at which it is running and if the car was breaking the road rules it gets a ticket. Improves efficiency and brings in a bit of revenue. What’s there not to like. Anyway, the same idea has been proposed various times in the past but has never managed to be implemented. I don’t know why. But as is so often the case, technology’s capacity to decentralise these decisions is leading the way – with bicycle cams as illustrated above. Handy in court cases.

I’ve been counting those I know who are highly energetic, positive people and who are naturally excited by the possibilities of the web, who have been leaving government employ.  I can think of Darren Whitelaw in Victoria, Mia Garlick in the Commonwealth service (though based in Sydney) and Craig Thomler (Cth, Canberra) who have all pulled or are pulling the plug on Government.

But it’s not all one way. There’s at least one person who’s heading into the bureaucracy – the great Pia Waugh who has been the great Kate Lundy’s staffer for three years.

A bundle of optimism, positivity, equanimity, creativity and capability.

So public sector, I hope you know how lucky you are.

Bad back, sad sack. Yes, folks that’s an inane family saying.

Which brings me to the point of this post which is to say that my back is killing me. I have a bit of a scoleosis but am told by those in the know that it isn’t a big problem or explanation for my back ache – which, according to a physio I went to – who seems good – is some muscular spasm or muscular ‘memory’.  I often feel like someone is poking a knife just below my shoulder blade. It’s bearable most of the time, but just.

Anyway, the physio said such things were quite common, were not easy to treat as skeletal problems. He suggested exercises were unlikely to help much and prescribed a few days of Neurofen. The idea was to banish the muscle memory – but it achieved nothing.

It occured to me that accupuncture or ‘dry needling’ might be worth considering.  Anyway I’d be interested in any suggestions, including miracle healers, from Troppoholics.

Postscript clarification inserted by the time of the eighth comment: I live in Inner Melbourne (but, since you ask prefer cappuccino and tea to latte, though I would subscribe to the folk dictum “better latte then never”).

Tim O’Reilly proposed the slogan “Government as a platform” for his Government 2.0 activities which he’s heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That problem was that it wasn’t so much that no-one had ever had the idea that government might be an enabling resource – a platform in the lingo of Web 2.0. The real problem is that government has no culture of this. Departments are proprietorial and secretive and that’s a tenacious culture which is prevented from evaporating by lots of expectations and structures.

But there is one part of government that has cultivated the culture of ‘Government as a platform’ since its inception around a century and a half or so ago:  The GLAM sector – that’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I couldn’t help noticing when doing the Government 2.0 Taskforce that the GLAM sector were up and at it long before anyone else. The National Library had its newspaper digitisation program and Seb Chan from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum was on our Taskforce and instrumental in getting us to run a mashup competition – and likely instrumental in getting the Powerhouse to become the first museum anywhere in the world to post its historic photos on Flikr and licence them Creative Commons. Seb’s unit built the mashup of baby names in NSW which is fascinating to play with.

I also learned about all the problems the national and state libraries were having getting rights to archive web content that were analogous to their rights as libraries of record to receive a copy of all publications in their jurisdiction from publishers. If they had such rights all they would need would be a robot to go and collect the material and Bob’s your uncle. In fact without this, much of their efforts involve sending people letters to ask their permission to archive their sites. I discussed with various people in libraries of record having such rights which certainly made sense to me.

Anyway, they still don’t have such rights.

Meanwhile . . . they are certainly keen on their rights to printed material as you will observe from this letter I received from the Victorian State Library this week (I might add that The Victorian State Library is a terrific organisation, which I am very fond of, but even terrific organisations do really silly things):

The State Library of Victoria tries to collect a copy of all books, videos, CD’s, CD-ROMs, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers and any other items published in Victoria for permanent preservation in the Library.

To help us in this endeavour, legislation was passed in 1869 requiring publishers to deposit free of charge with the library a copy of every item published in Victoria. Current legislation is contained in section 49 of the Libraries Act 1988 (see enclosed leaflet).

Recently the following publication came to our notice.

The economic value of Australia’s investment in health and medical research: reinforcing the evidence for exceptional returns. 

We look forward to receiving a copy of this publications (sic), as well as any other publications you might not have previously sent us for legal deposit. Please follow the enclosed legal deposit instructions when forwarding publications. (Continued)