Club Troppo

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.

Occasionally I get so distracted by the way someone writes that I can’t concentrate on what they’re saying. Here’s John Howard in today’s Financial Review:

To adopt Shakespeare, Meryl Streep came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. This was attempted — in the film The Iron Lady — by the simple, but telling, device of retailing Thatcher’s story through a series of retrospectives of the retired prime minister, clearly afflicted by dementia.

Howard made some good points in his review, but I had the blue pencil out after the second word. There are only a couple of things I thought were outright errors. Most of the distraction came from Howard’s writing style.

Is it just me?

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)

A Twitter randomised trial: "I have a confession to make", writes Andrew Leigh, "I’m a twitter-sceptic." But in keeping with his evidence-based approach to decision making, Andrew Leigh MP is embarking on a one month randomised trial. @aleighmp

Why libertarians need to talk with the left and how to do it: "Between Left and Right, the reality remains that the Left is still closer to our ideals. They are more likely to agree with our social liberalism and foreign policy even though they are economic interventionists." James Peron, Moorfield Storey Blog.

Men who argue with goats: They love a good argument at Menzies House.

… or with Cory Bernardi: "Throughout history it has been demonstrated that any government that becomes too big eventually is forced to accrue a level of debt that cannot be sustained." Cory Bernardi.

The biggest government in the world? "The Congressional Budget Office report … says that annual deficits will remain in the $1 trillion range for the next several years if Bush-era tax cuts slated to expire in December are extended, as commonly assumed." NBC Politics.

So what about the Nordics? "If heavy taxation has harmful economic effects, why have Denmark and Sweden performed similarly to the United States during a period of several decades in which their taxes were much higher than America’s?" Lane Kenworthy.

In praise of private equity: "The difficult truth that virtually no politician is prepared to acknowledge is that the road to job creation runs through job destruction." Reihan Salam.

The introvert’s lament: Social butterflies are annoying. Overdressed Anarchist.

Op shopping: Justin Campbell finds a copy of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose in an op shop. "I quickly grabbed hold of the book and guarded it in case someone else wanted to buy it", he writes. "The bewildered shopkeeper seemed surprised at my excitement."

The fate of Mrs Petrov’s lost shoe: Apparently Sir Les Paterson has it.

It’s on again folks. Crikey subscribers on the group subscription I organise have begun getting presubscription emails. Whether you are a subscriber already or not, you can subscribe through this means and qualify for the discounts Crikey offer. 

Prices keep rising, and they’ve risen again this year. Here’s the schedule.

If you want to join the subscription, please email me on ngruen AT gmail.

Then in a few weeks from now I’ll shoot a list of names and email addresses to Crikey and they’ll follow up.

Group Subscriptions
3-5 Members – $125
6-9 Members – $115
10-19 Members – $105
20-49 Members – $95
50+ Members – $85

Post-postscript: Having sent a bcc email to all current group subscribers earlier today, we’re now at 53 subscribers with more dribbling in – so it looks like the lowest fee is assured.

Not so long ago ALP politicians controlled the governments of every state. I think they still did at the end of 07, though I may be wrong. In any event, it was an obvious opportunity an amazingly rare opportunity. For that reason I spent a bit of time on this blog and on the phone trying to see what kind of political project one might erect from it. Because political aspirations are not terribly bold today, and because of the structure of things, it might have been necessary to be fairly modest.  But this post contains a record of 12 ideas which resulted from some blog based brainstorming.

What became of it? Nothing much in a policy sense. But the states did band together in a political exercise to resist John Howard’s soft climate change denialism and it was politically successful, and was a good stroke of policy because it meant that, coming into national government they were about six months ahead of the pace with the Garnaut process.

Otherwise, I don’t think anything much happened, though I’d be happy to be corrected below.

Meanwhile the newly Liberal Governments of NSW and Victoria have announced a reform partnership.  The public material is full of fine sounding intentions, though I expect it’s too early to see what comes out of it. But the fact that they occupy 57 percent of the Australia economy is significant.  Whatever they can agree to harmonise between themselves, and this seems a major focus of the activity, would create quite a strong ‘attractor’ for others to copy. And it does seem that they got the idea of doing something together a little quicker than their ALP counterparts.

I’ve always thought that institutions that are set up at arms length from government to offer independent advice to governments would be an excellent venue for online discussions to start taking place. An easy opportunity, pretty comprehensively passed up was the Public Service Commissions’s various deliberations on what the codes of public service conduct should be. I would have thought it would have been an ideal matter on with those in the APS might have discussed the issues openly on a blog.  After all it’s APS’ professional business, not ostensibly political or policy business.

Some time ago the PC tried a bit of online engagement, but it had all the usual ‘run by the IT department’ problems and didn’t go anywhere. I discovered with some excitement the unit in the Victorian Bureaucracy which was built in the mould of the PC and which I think is doing a pretty good job was getting into the same game.

Alas VCEConnect is the usual disaster.

VCEC’s original discussion starter on state reform – consists of a single unsigned question asking whether people agree on the three priorities in the draft report.  There’s one comment.

Then there’s a thread on another inquiry into education reform. It asks “In your view, what are the key areas the Victorian Government should focus on? And, more specifically, what actions should the Government take in these areas?” There are two comments.

That’s it. Both posts were put up in November.

If I were asked what I think of VCEConnect I would borrow from Mahatma Ghandi when he was asked what he thought of Western civilisation.

I think it would be a good idea.

I read an article with an attractive title recently. “Complexity and Context-Dependency“.  It’s not very good, but it raises an important point that is important to what I call the psycho-pathology of disciplines and it puts me in mind of something I’ve thought for a long time about policy and politics. I don’t have time to do this subject justice in this post, but thought I’d try to put down a marker.

The paper argues this.

We may look down on other animals, perceiving that they have a biased and limited understanding of the world, but somehow assume that we don’t have analogous biases or limitations that we cannot somehow overcome. Surely this is merely another example of anthropocentric arrogance. That we have had some notable successes at understanding our world and even a systematic set of approaches that has been shown to be useful is not sufficient evidence to assume a lack of limitations and biases.

This astonishing assumption takes many forms in philosophy and discussions about the scientific method. One such is that somehow simplicity is a guide to truth. That is, that simplicity in a model or theory has advantages other than the obvious pragmatic ones (pragmatic virtues are such as: being able to analyze/solve it; being able to have good analogies with which to think about it; needing less data in order to parameterize it; and being able to compute it).

Another version is that everything somehow must be simple if only we can find the right way of looking at it, or formalizing it. It is true that frameworks such as Newtonian Physics are relatively simple (though I doubt many in Newton’s time would have thought so), and using this, many useful models and reliable predictions can be obtained. . . .

I am not going to spend time arguing the above points here. Rather I will consider the case under the anti-anthropocentric assumption, that much of the world around us is organized in a way that is beyond adequate modeling in a sufficiently simple and general manner for us to cope with. . . . Under this, admittedly pessimistic, view the phenomena that are simple enough for us to understand in a scientific manner are the exception – the exception to be sought and struggled for. Under this view, we should make the greatest use of the strengths we have, and seek to acknowledge and mitigate our limitations. Under this view a “Science of Complexity” makes no more sense than a “Science of Non-Red Things”, since both red objects and simple systems are the exception rather than the rule.

Why is it that we can see political benefits from the hyper-connected world produced by Web 2.0 in undemocratic countries but no big apparent improvements in democratic countries? (Continued)

A highlight of my calendar I have to say – since I inadvertently morphed into Mr Innovation and they started inviting me.

Did you have an absolutely fantastic science teacher? Now’s the time to get them some recognition.

NOMINATION CALL
2012 PRIME MINISTER’S PRIZES FOR SCIENCE

We are seeking nominations for Australia’s national science and science teaching awards, which are offered to Australian citizens or those who hold permanent residence status in Australia.

·        The $300,000 Prime Minster’s Prize for Science

·        The $50,000 Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year

·        The $50,000 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year

·        The $50,000 Prime Minster’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools

·        The $50,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools

These prizes are a key element of the Inspiring Australia national initiative to recognise and reward the achievements and successes of Australians in the sciences.

Please share this information with your networks and associates – The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science relies on nominations from across many sectors of our nation, to reward and recognise the outstanding achievements of our Australian science researchers and science teachers.

Closing Date: 27 April 2012, AEST 5.00 pm

Further queries and contact - www.innovation.gov.au/scienceprizes