April 21, 2008 | Graham

Guns don’t kill people, and people don’t do it as much.

John Howard told a joke against himself at a Liberal Party function in Brisbane (as reported by the SMH).

“The other was that his diplomacy needed work. Asked at a function at the George H. W. Bush presidential library in Texas to name his top three achievements, he started with gun control. No-one in the Texas audience clapped.”

But what if gun control didn’t achieve anything? Then the joke would be on us.
This press release from the University of Sydney suggests the ban may have achieved nothing.

“In a new peer-reviewed study, Dr Samara McPhedran from the School of Psychology, and her colleague Dr Jeanine Baker, show that the accumulated studies on Australia’s 1996 gun bans and half billion dollar ‘buyback’ do not point to an impact….
The study evaluated whether past published studies on the impact of the 1996 laws on firearm related homicide and suicide are consistent with one another.
“Using different analysis methods and time periods, none of the four studies found evidence for an impact of the laws on the pre-existing decline in firearm homicides,” said Dr McPhedran.
“The statistical outcomes were in complete agreement, even though the conclusions varied.”…

These findings could create quite a storm at Sydney Uni. How will Professor Simon Chapman (the same anti-smoking campaigner who drove Nick Greiner from the University Senate because he was the Australian chairman of British American Tobacco) react, given he also has virulent views on gun control.
I wonder if Kevin Rudd will also add gun control to the list of John Howard’s failures, along with taxation policy?

Posted by Graham at 9:53 pm | Comments (4) |
Filed under: Australian Politics

April 20, 2008 | Graham

One of the biggest ideas is ours!

Despite my pessimism, it appears that the Governance stream came up with a worthwhile eDemocracy Big Idea – a government portal to be called www.your.gov.au (or maybe www.yourgov.gov.au, but that looks clumsy when you write it down). According to Kate Crawford, who apparently submitted the idea, the portal will give access to all government documents and allow citizens to submit ideas to the cabinet.
It’s not exactly a new idea. This submission (PDF 190 KB) of January 2005 to the Victorian Parliament’s Inquiry into Electronic Democracy is a reasonably comprehensive manifesto of what The National Forum has been trying to achieve. It’s three years old, and I wouldn’t do things quite this way anymore, but it advocates a portal, and a lot more.
One of the major risks of a project like this will be “bureaucratic capture”. That’s one reason that our project hasn’t got any further than it has. The public service doesn’t like scrutiny, or accountability, which is what the proposal should be all about.
If bureaucrats get their hands on any such portal it is likely to be low-risk and boring. At the least it will get what Stephen Coleman calls the “aesthetics of engagement” wrong.
It needs a new structure, and a new type of administrator who is part public servant, but also part journalist, publisher and editor. We describe the ideal structure as an ABC of the Internet, but it’s not a job that the ABC could do.
Anyone who wants an example of what I am talking about only needs to look at the 2020 Summit websites which were about as inviting as filing cabinets.
We’ve been pushing the idea since 2001, so it’s gratifying to see it seriously get onto a list with an Australian government, and we’ll be happy to bend anyone’s ear about it.

Posted by Graham at 9:59 pm | Comments (2) |
Filed under: Australian Politics

April 18, 2008 | Graham

Not going to the summit

You really can’t ignore the 2020 Summit, so here goes. But first a declaration.
Not only did I nominate for the summit, but we also tendered to provide an online collaborative workspace for it, as well as lobbying for a website for the summit where the rest of Australia could be involved in the collaboration. We were unsuccessful on all counts. The Chairman of The National Forum Nicholas Gruen is, however, a delegate, although I imagine this is not because he is our chair.
Another declaration is that The National Forum does receive support from Melbourne University and enjoys a good relationship with Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis, who is also the Chair of the 2020 Summit.
For the last 9 years I’ve been dedicated to pursuing ways of opening up democratic networks using the Internet. We’ve made submissions directly to governments and to government inquiries about what they should do, all without success. On Line Opinion is a visible part of that commitment, as are the other sites published by The National Forum, which include the iParliament, What the people want, and OzElections. The citizen journalism sites we have built with QUT and SBS, partly funded by the Australian Research Council, are also part of the matrix of sites seeking to deepen democratic interaction using the Internet.
In terms of organisations dedicated to promoting eDemocracy, in Australia there is only one – us.
That is not to say that the only people interested in this area are part of the National Forum, there are a number of people who have made significant contributions, but scanning through the governance stream of the summit, I can’t see any of their names.
The closest to an eDemocracy organisation that will be represented there is GetUp, the online lobbying outfit.
It seems obvious to me that the one really “big idea” of this century actually is the Internet. No doubt it will make its presence felt in the productivity agenda, where Nicholas sits, but it is genuinely perplexing that it appears to have been marginalised in the governance stream.
I thought about making a submission to the summit, but decided against. There will be literally thousands. If there is an institutional bias against an area of interest, any ideas in that area are likely to get buried. And without anyone in the stream who has demonstrated an interest in this area, who would carry the torch?
I alternate between optimism for the summit and pessimism. I have a lot of faith in the power of engagement to find solutions. In some ways On Line Opinion is an on-going 2020 summit where anyone can make a submission, but where everyone is invited.
This similarity gives us some opportunities. Watching the 2020 Summit from afar, like most of my compatriots, may help me to envision how we might move On Line Opinion the next step. Perhaps my really big idea will be something that will flow out of the summit, as an implication, rather than something that might flow in as an input.
It may be a brave experiment, or it may end-up as the meat for a million press releases. Either way, the summit is likely to change the way that we think about how we do politics.

Posted by Graham at 9:18 am | Comments (2) |
Filed under: Australian Politics

April 17, 2008 | Graham

Is JK Rowling a witch?

Is JK Rowling a witch? It would appear to be a reasonable question given her performance in prosecuting a case against Steven Vander Ark for daring to have compiled The Harry Potter Lexicon.
The judge is urging both sides to settle, drawing on well-known legal precedents from Dicken’s Bleak House. I hope they don’t and that Vander Ark’s publisher RDR Books triumphs.
Rowling’s complaint is essentially that Vander Ark is seeking to unjustly enrich himself from her intellectual property by publishing a work which is derivative.
This is at best hysterical, and at worst exhibits the controlling behaviour of her archvillain, Voldemort. Perhaps JKR is actually a Death Eater. (Is “Death Eater” hyphenated? Wouldn’t it be great to have a lexicon so I could check).
The purpose of writing a novel for profit is so that people will derive things from it. Some of the things that we derive are solitary pleasures, and others are communal like book clubs. The Lexicon is a fan’s act of sharing, so is like a book club. If there were no derivations, there would be little point in publishing a novel in the first place.
Vander Ark has been running the Lexicon online, and this book is the result. Rowlings appears to have no problem with the website, so why should she have a problem with the material on the website being re-arranged as a book? Irrespective of which, the reason she wrote the book was so that people would talk about it. The more they talk, the more she sells and the richer she gets.
Indeed, Mr Vander Ark could probably mount a case that she is profiting off him as he contributes to the general HP hysteria.
Logically, if she wins this case she could move on and try to restrain book reviewers from reviewing the book, or insisting that they only do so under licence from her – there’s nothing more derivative and parasitic than the life of a literary critic.
Even if she doesn’t move beyond Mr Vander Ark, it would encourage other authors to push the boundaries, stifling discussion.
And if her proposition succeeds it is not too hard to see even more novel applications. Perhaps the Catholic Church might assert their rights over the use of the crucifix to dictate how it can be used.
It would be even worse if the parties settled. That would send the message that the law is so unsettled, that rich plaintiffs should be able to blackmail defendants into abiding by rights that they might not have in the first place.
I like the Harry Potter books, but it would seem that their author is just another greedy billionaire monopolist whose lust for power threatens to bring anything but a happy ending.

Posted by Graham at 12:55 pm | Comments (12) |
Filed under: Ethics

April 17, 2008 | Graham

Fuel fools

The federal government’s new FuelWatch is likely to be as effective in lowering prices as those proposals contained in nuisance emails that still circulate the Internet. The ones that say we can force petrol companies to lower prices by boycotting one of the petrol brands for a while, the idea being that the company boycotted will be forced to lower prices in desperation, which will send the whole market down. Just like this proposal, some of those emails even come to me from otherwise apparently intelligent people.
Petrol retailing is a very competitive business. It’s high volume, which makes skinny margins possible, but in many cases, fuel is the loss-leader which gets you into the convenience store attached to the petrol station where more money is sometimes made from the sale of a Mars bar than a whole tank of petrol.
To think that forcing some additional transparency on the industry is going to make more than a widow’s mite of difference to the average family budget is pure fantasy.
Kevin Rudd has had an impressive couple of weeks overseas, but the good impressions will sour quickly without a compelling narrative for some of our looming domestic problems. Voters won’t thank him for gallivanting around overseas polishing his Mandarin if they’re struggling to pay petrol and mortgage bills off a shrinking asset base. Instead of wasting millions of dollars (I think I heard the figure 45 on radio, but can’t track it down) pretending that the government can do something to lower the price of fuel, they ought to be talking up the fact that fuel will inevitably increase in price.
And by “they” I guess I mean Wayne Swan, who as Treasurer is the Minister for Bad News. The only way Australians are going to decrease their fuel bills into the future is to drive smaller cars, hop on their pushbikes, or get shanks’s pony into their Reeboks more often. If we’re serious about global warming, and/or accept the realities of peak oil, then it’s the inevitable anyway.
A by-product of levelling with the Australian people is that a serious chat could do more to contain inflation than a couple of RBA rate hikes.

Posted by Graham at 3:46 am | Comments (1) |
Filed under: Economics

April 16, 2008 | Ronda Jambe

What could be better than sliced bread?

It is not trivial that ‘earning our daily bread’ is synonymous, even in the 21st century, with the most fundamental economic elements: do something so that you can eat. The only societies that don’t measure their success in terms of their daily bread are the societies that are equally dependent on other grains or starches: corn in Mexico, potatos in Latinoamerica, and of course rice in Asia.
If we are conscious at all, we hear the distant reports of food riots in Egypt (only a few dead, so far) and the Philippines as background noise, the creaking adjustments of an increasingly interdependent economy to the new imperatives of climate change, population explosion and burgeoning demand, plus crops for energy vs food. We are not, and cannot be touched by such events. Or so goes the ‘conventional wisdom’. For that, read 3 monkeys who are deaf, dumb, and blind to the emerging global order.
A recent article in the San Francisco Indymedia: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/04/12/18492403.php asks how far the US is from food riots. Comments include the perennial debate about eating meat (as it is so much more resource intensive than grains) and the role of biofuels (which divert land from food in favour of inputs for McCars). Naturally, (a word that needs unwraping in this context) we would not expect the major media outlets in the US, including their public broadcaster, to canvass such issues. We might still hear about it in Australia, but only the wonks who fetishise Aunty would be paying attention. Well, that’s me, and I hope it’s you, too.
How is it that all of a sudden, within the last 6 months, food security has mushroomed on the radar screen? People have always been starving, somewhere, for multiple reasons. But now the big global institutions, such as the IMF and the UN, are warning about the implications from the 33-odd countries that are on the brink of severe social disruption as a result of rising food prices.
Part of the answer can be found in 2 articles published in New Scientist (April 05). One was about pandemics, and how they can shut down multiple systems quickly. One problem is that in closely coupled systems, where every change impacts on the other elements, collapse can be triggered by small events, like the absence of a key worker due to illness. Another dimension is that in a system with little redundancy, there is little margin for failure. The tightly coupled systems that now provide our food are designed to have no slack, as that is costly. That means just in time delivery and small stockpiles. For sure, global stockpiles of essential foods are smaller now than ever before.
That means less wastage due to rotting and insects, but it also means less flexibility in a situation where supplies might falter. For these reasons, highly complex, advanced societies like our are more vulnerable to severe shocks than more simple societies where food production and consumption are linked more directly but less efficiently.
Consider New Orleans, but perhaps you’d rather not. I’ve just started The Shock Doctrine, by the brilliant Naomi Klein. She argues that the Milton Friedman approach of waiting until disaster hits, and then plunging in with privitisation, has been applied to set up ‘voucher’ schools there. The destruction of public housing was openly described as an opportunity – not for better public housing, but for new condos.
The theme is that severe shocks to our social and economic and environmental systems are being met with a tightening of the noose of economic concentration, rather than a re-think about how best to avoid future disasters or re-orient the systems towards sustainability.
Back to the basics of bread. For our own western European derived society, the importance of bread is as basic as ‘lord’ and ‘lady’. The lady was the ‘bread-kneader’ and the lord was the bread keeper, and therefore the master of the household. (For more detail on this, see the site of the cunning Canadian linguist: billcasselman.com)
I conclude that food security will always be central to political power. The world has not really moved beyond this. This realisation was triggered when late last year I read the classic Food in History by Reay Tannahill. The evolution of ways to prepare basic grains for sustenance was eye-opening. In future blogs I will reveal to you how I intend to deal with these distant, yet daunting threats to the fundamentals of our existence. In the meantime, perhaps we should revive a few recipes for wheat chaff soaked in soured sheep milk.

Posted by Ronda Jambe at 2:45 pm | Comments Off on What could be better than sliced bread? |
Filed under: Health

April 15, 2008 | Graham

What goes down will go up even higher

House prices are falling and interest rates are rising, which is bad news for existing home buyers, and new home buyers too. Doesn’t sound right, but it is unfortunately true.
Unless we fix the underlying supply and demand problems in housing, lower house prices will only be temporary, and will in fact eventually lead to even higher prices.
It works like this. Current falls in house prices are directly attributable to higher interest rates. The higher interest rates are partly an effect of the RBA attempting to rein economic activity in, but even more an effect of the fall in confidence in the real economy caused by the sub-prime crisis in the US.
In the past in my experience when interest rates have risen it has caused a crash in house prices which has been exaccerbated by housing supply continuing to grow at the same time that the economy contracts or slows, leading to a decrease in demand at the same time as there is an increase in supply. The combination of the two led to a stagnation in the price of existing housing, and a dramatic decrease in the price of vacant land and speculative developments to a price which allowed the market to clear.
The sharply lower prices eventually allow new entrants to enter the market and housing prices stabilise and start to increase again.
This time there will be no over-run of supply, because we aren’t building enough housing to cope with the increase in the population to start with, and the increase in interest rates, and the sheer unavailability of money at any price for certain types of purposes, means that a dip in prices will increase the under-supply. So when rates come down again, there will be even fewer dwellings available per capita, which will lead to an even more severe increase in prices than would otherwise have been the case.
There are two things that Australian governments need to do to solve the problem. One is to increase the amount of housing available. This would have to involve a combination of fast-tracking development of existing land banks, as well as lowering regulatory and taxation barriers to building new housing. This could involve the government using its ample borrowing powers to provide funding that the commercial debt markets currently can’t – it could even be an investment opportunity for the Future Fund.
Another is to decrease unnecessary demand, and the easiest way to do this is to slow the immigration intake. This would mean that some industries would endure labour shortages, but in an economy which is now running at near capacity choices have to be made. Better that the population is housed at reasonable cost, than that, for example, restaurants have all the wait persons they need. I for one would be happy to cook at home, particularly if I owned it.

Posted by Graham at 10:02 am | Comments (7) |
Filed under: Housing

April 10, 2008 | Ronda Jambe

Quick! Kill the Moggie! Save the Planet!

Visiting friends from Wellington informed me last weekend that they won’t be having a pet when they move to their ‘intentional community’ near Nelson. (That’s an evolved form of the kibbutz, think Nimbin with broadband. )
They brought to my attention that cats have a large carbon footprint:0.6 apparently, not that I really grasp what that means.
I thought it over, and after they left I turned regretfully to my ageing Burmese. He has clocked up 18 people years, a beige sage, a veritable Buddhist of an old man cat, a Catte Latte. I reached for him, and put my hands around his soft furry neck. As my fingers tightened around his throat, his little motor started up. That did it, time for a line in the sand.
Unequivocally, under no circumstances, ever, will I give up my pussy cat. As important as global warming is, there are other considerations. The world will just have to cope with my moggie’s carbon paw print.
puss for blog.jpg
There are ways to rationalise this choice, although some will see the following argument as just another justification of an indulgent air head burgeoisetta. (Well, everybody’s got to identify with a peer group)
My vendetta is with over-consumption, particularly as manifested orally. That’s right, what goes in the mouth. While there is credible research pointing to lack of sleep as a facilitator of obesity, and certainly urban design and stressed out lifestyles play a part, in the end hardly anyone has to be obese.
Consider the 7 deadly sins: Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Gluttony, Envy, Pride, and my personal favorite, Lust (that geranium of emotions, ubiquitous, hardy, and such a distraction in my youth).
The 7 deadly sins have been a fascination for me after seeing a set of prints, perhaps lithographs, that a man I knew created in Sydney. They were intricate, disturbing, but beautiful. Years later, in 1980, when we fell upon each other again in San Francisco (after I spotted his unusual name on a database at work) he was selling off his last copies of these. One of my lasting regrets is that I didn’t fork out the $200 for a set. He needed the cash, but I was an overly frugal single parent. Funny how we regret the things we passed up.
Also interesting that it is difficult to add to this list, which has been around since at least the 6th century. (I recommend the Wiki entry as background.) We may have found ways to combine them, is all. But of these, the only one which really broadcasts its presence when you walk down the street is Gluttony. The others take a little more familiarity to uncover. Therefore, Gluttony is a breech of ettiquette. Seeing entire gaggles of obese families waddling through the food court of a mall is enough to put you off your chicken caesar.
Several commentators to my previous blogs have kindly pointed out the calculations for measuring the cost-effectiveness of solar energy and associated batteries. It must be possible to calculate how much we could save environmentally if all the obese people just trimmed down. No just in the obvious items such as health care and food, but in fabric, timber, rubbish, space on public transport, and air fuel. An article last year did discuss the extra cost in road fuels in the US as a result of super-sizing their society.
While making simultaneous pronouncements about global warming and ‘the war on obesity’ , our fragmented political thinkers don’t dare connect these dots.
Is there any instrumentality that might actually look at the tax payers’ money going into CCS (that’s carbon capture and storage, and we’ll be hearing about it endlessly for the next 10 years, until they decide it was, after all, a furphy) and compare it with simpler measures, like reducing the impact of over-consumption on our total well being?
When they do, they might call a spade a spade, and talk about the 7 deadly sins in environmental terms. When they get around to doing the numbers, I hope they include a metric that takes into account the fact that fat people don’t purr.

Posted by Ronda Jambe at 7:46 am | Comments (3) |
Filed under: Ethics

April 03, 2008 | Ronda Jambe

Program on mortgage stress missing a corner

A balanced look it was not: the 4 Corners (ABC) program last Monday showed 3 sides of the figure, but left off a big corner. They did a good job of showing that a) the banks are predatory and irresponsible in their lending practices and b) the regulators are also not up to the task. I remember an article once about ‘why the watchdog never bites’. From the program, which didn’t mention it explicitly, we can also infer that c) the schools and other educators have not done their job, or there wouldn’t be so many suckers out there.
The fourth corner, however, also left unexplored, was d) the role of the borrowers themselves. This is where sensible, prudent people, such as I fancy myself, start to froth and gaggle. The house in western Sydney that was featured as an example of ‘mortgage stress’ was fairly palatial, and inhabited by a couple whose only mention of a job was ‘carpet layer’. The lack of more detailed, multi-faceted reporting started to bring the story’s credibility undone. There was no mention of what sort of income this family had, how much their initial mortgage had been, what their total borrowings from all sources was, and what steps, if any, they had taken to avoid the disaster.
At one point the woman nodded to the child and suggested she pray that they could keep their house. Wonderful for imparting blind faith perhaps, but not much use in managing one’s affairs. At the end of the program, the family was crowded into a double garage, unable to even rent or find short term accommodation. That is sad, but the sight of them surrounded by heaps of consumer goods with probably no resale value countered the image of suffering.
There was no information about whether the wife had tried to seek work: two jobs for her in the short term might have helped. And did they consider taking in boarders, and perhaps shrinking themselves to fit in fewer bedrooms for a while? That would have been one of my strategies, given all the media coverage about the shortage of rental places in Sydney.
And were they growing veggies? Admittedly, that wouldn’t help much, but it wouldn’t hurt, either. Did they go to second hand stores for their clothes, or perhaps cut back on the cable TV subscription, when the pressure got to them? None of this was canvassed, so we can’t really assess how they got into that financial pickle in the first place.
On the surface, it looks like they just bit off more of a house and mortgage than they could chew, and that is primarily their mistake. It was also their responsibility to rectify it, with something more substantial than prayer.
Another example was a young man who had bad debts and then took on more to buy new furniture. Deals that allow you to pay nothing for 4 years have to have a sting in the tail. Surely it is not just arrogance on my part to note that Blind Freddy would know better.
The ABC, and 4 Corners, would serve us better if they didn’t avoid personal responsibility as part of the mix in addressing such issues. Similar analyses have been made of the whole sub-prime smozzle in the US: overreach and collapse.
I close with a reverent nod at that secular priest Nuggett Coombs, who reminded us in one of his last books of the values of frugality and simplicity. Amen.

Posted by Ronda Jambe at 12:41 pm | Comments (23) |
Filed under: Uncategorized
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