2011/03/30

The Bitter End

Ponting Retires From Captaincy

I feel like I've been watching Ricky Ponting for a long time. If there's one sporting figure that makes me feel old, it's actually Ricky Ponting. Not Derek Jeter or Roger Federer or even Tiger Woods. But then he's always made me feel that way since he broke into the test side as a 19 year old prodigy. It's very strange to see him at this point in his career being pushed out of his position which looked like a birthright on the way up. The vitriol poured on the man is even more remarkable given his accomplishments as a player. Everybody carries on about Don Bradman, but by all accounts he was equally obnoxious in person if not more so than Ricky Ponting. I get it that there's some part of a professional athlete's job description to be likeable, but I've always felt people are asking way too much of this guy.

Maybe I'm a bit weird that way. I can handle Barry Bonds being Bary Bonds, Canseco being Canseco, Clemens being Clemens; steroids and lies and bad attitudes and rudeness and all. I don't expect them to be role models. I liked John McEnroe at his rudest. I liked Michael Jordan at his most disdainful, Charles Barkley at his most pugnacious and Shane Heal for standing toe to toe with Sir Charles at the Atlanta Olympics, screaming back at his face. Ricky sledges? "Why not?" I thought. Sledge away, son. He wins ugly? Sure beats losing beautifully.

Anyway, he quit the captaincy today and the obits on his captaincy are in.
The difference was as simple as Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, who played all the Waugh years, and all the Mark Taylor years before him, but only half of Ponting’s. Indubitably, a cricket captain is only as good as his team. Ponting’s was much turned over, became brittle and unstable, yet somehow was allowed to grow old and stagnant, too. It was also distracted by the Indian Premier League revolution.

It was said of Sir Donald Bradman that his unique advantage as captain was himself as batsman. It could be said of captain Ponting that he had only himself upon who to rely. Ponting batted at No. 3 throughout his tenure, indeed has batted in that keystone position exclusively for the past 10 years. It is a singular feat of shouldered responsibility; Sachin Tendulkar, for instance, has never played a Test innings at No. 3.

In his insistence to bat so high, Ponting was in the end too stubborn. The strain showed in other aspects of his captaincy, and grew. But Ponting’s fault was to care too much rather than too little. Besides, no likely usurper emerged, either as captain or No. 3, a detail that tells of Australia’s cricketing decline.

Well I've been saying for about 6years that we don't have as bright a future beyond Ponting as we once thought. So it surprises me a little bit that people are so keen to consign him to the dustbin.
Can he bat any better? Very doubtful. He might strike the occasional vein of form but they will be fewer and last less time with every passing season.

And, with every match he plays on, the reinvigoration of the Australian cricket team is further delayed. How many ageing batsmen can the team carry? Already there are Simon Katich and Mike Hussey, both almost 36. Age marks the prospects of both, yet Katich and Hussey have far more to prove and therefore more reason to play on than Ponting who, despite his record as a thrice-losing Ashes captain, has achieved everything in the game that he could have ever dreamed of.

Each night Julia Gillard must stick pins in her Kevin07 doll; Tony Abbott can doubtless see the face of Malcolm Turnbull every time he pounds the heavy bag. Don't make Michael Clarke carry the baggage of an old leader into a new future.

I don't know about all that. Seems to me they should just let him bat and see what's left in the tank before kicking him to the curb. It's not as if there are better batsmen a-plenty. In its longest run, it's only going to be another couple of summers and then he will well and truly be gone. But you might wait another lifetime to see a batsman as amazing as Ricky Ponting play for Australia. I just don't get the vitriol. You'd think he slept with everybody's spouse - thrice.

2011/03/27

Won't Have Kristina To Dick Around Anymore

No Splintering To The Left

I have to admit that I must be pretty radical when it comes to the political spectrum. I'm not exactly a communist - far from it, but I sure as hell don't run with the conservatives come hell or high water. Which chased me into my choice of voting Green. I don't regret it even though in my seat, the Green candidate won't come close to the line. The Liberal Candidate ended up with a 25% or so swing in his favour according to the election night telecast on TV. (Thanks Angela D'Amore, you are the gift that keeps on giving, like a Herpes virus).

I'm a little amused that Kerry O'Brien started off the night by saying it was going to be a bloodbath, everybody knows the result; the only question is just how much of a bloodbath. Even more amusing was the ALP colour commentator they had - Luke Foley, I think he's called - who came across as somebody with an IQ of about 75. He had to admit it was catastrophic, the resulting devastation was going to be cataclysmic and that the ALP were going to have to do a lot of soul searching. Well, d'uh.

I guess nobody looks smart when their heads are getting beaten in; and yet even he had one reason to crow and that was that Carmel Tebbutt was likely to hold Marrickville against Fiona Byrne, and went on to bag out Fiona Byrne for being a terrible  candidate for the Greens.

Which all got me to thinking how much of the ALP vote that might have been swinging votes and traditional votes ran to the right into the arms of the Liberal and National Parties. Luke Foley was saying that the 'Labor Heartland' no longer exists. That might be true, and by extension this might be one of those elections that changes the state for ever. The ALP may not be able to win in NSW until well past 2020. And if the Hawke-Keating years and  the Howard years proved something, 10+years can change the culture of a place dramatically. NSW might turn into an arch-conservative state.

So where does that leave me with my radicalised environmental vote? Gagging on my recycled materials wooden spoon.

The Rush To The Right

Given the sort of miasma and nauseating whirlwind that was the Labor government of the last 4 years, it's not surprising that the middle rushed to the right, just pull the handbrakes on the craziness. I don't know if it's even a rational choice given that 79% of the electorate don't know what the Coalition's policies are and that 65% voted them in.
The poll is at odds with predictions that the gap between the parties would narrow as voters paid more attention closer to the election. It suggests voters switched off long ago.

Asked how much they felt they knew about the Coalition's policies, 79 per cent said they knew either ''little'' or ''nothing at all'', with just 21 per cent saying they knew a lot.

Knowledge of Labor's policies was slightly better, with 68 per cent saying they knew little or nothing and 31 per cent saying they knew a lot.

This could mean that a lot of people are going to wake up tomorrow and wonder just what the hell they've done but I guess it's too late for that now. The ALP haven't done much for the image of stability. That Karl Bitar fellow and 'protected' US informant Mark 'The Mole' Arbib have done over Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees,while doing the same Federally for Kevin Rudd and helping Julia Gillard to a hung Parliament has made the ALP a laughingstock in most conversations I've come across.

The unfortunate upshot is that it's pushed a lot of people to the right, and it amazes me how unimaginative people are when it comes to their politics. Here's the thing. I voted Greens last time too, but I preferenced ALP. If Nathan Rees was still Premier, I might have been persuaded to still vote ALP even. As soon as they dumped Rees and put in Kenneally I vowed they would not get my vote, and it's a sentiment that's been shared by many people I've spoken to. I'm amazed that most of the people who felt that way took it as a cue to vote in Barry O'Farrell, but I guess that's the 2 party system for you.

In any case, it's not like all is lost for the ALP faithful of NSW. It's just a bleeding state election to kick out a tired, over-ripe, incompetent ALP government. Surely some of those who ran to vote in Barry O'Farrell will come back as prodigal votes. It's the nature of politics.

Can The Greens Get Beyond The Marginalia Of Politics?

On the basis of tonight's result, I think this is going to be a tougher ask than I thought. So far it's counting about 11%. That suggests that:

  • 10 out of 11% are crackpot socialists and tree-hugging hippies and dope-smoking Newtown-ites.

  • Only the extra 1% represent the people who jumped to the left. The 20% swing to the right represent the middle.


I think 1% is an incredibly hard basis to build a platform upon when you're already outnumbered 10 to 1 by the loonies in your own party. 13% at the Federal election was a good showing, but in closer examination, the Greens are still the party of feral-loonies, druggies, hippies the dispossessed and socialist-idiots.

By contrast, at 50% of the vote, the current crop of Coalition voters are people with desperate mortgages and the NIMBY crowd. Laura Norder didn't even factor into it this time around.

One Final Thought About Kristina Kenneally

I'll be flayed for writing this, but what the hell. Everything else is going down in flames.

I'm thinking that Kristina Kenneally has to represent the end of the line of that crappy brand of 1980s feminism that saw male chauvinism layered in to every text and wrote post-modern essays about gender politics in Shakespeare to Bananarama. Let's call it, 'Quota Feminism' for want of a better tag. It gave us Verity Firth and Carmel Tebbutt and Angela D'Amore and Virginia Judge and Kristina Kenneally in an awful hurry.

Here's the thing: If that line of thinking really had merit, Kenneally and company would have been more persuasive figures - And I do say this with my deepest condolences to the Po-Mo 1980s feminists I know, but the rise of Kristina Kenneally (and to some extent Julia Gillard) has got to be one of the more abstruse and disaffecting manifestations of that line of thinking.

Was it any good? Goodness, the proof sure is in the pudding tonight, isn't it? Half the electorate ran screaming to a patriarchal-looking Barry O'Farrell. Doubtless Germaine Greer is going to write an article for The Observer over in the UK saying how this proves we're all sexist shits in NSW, and how Kristina Kenneally was defeated by the forces of backward oppressive patriarchal men. But you see, that's exactly where the ideological rot is at.

2011/03/26

On The Eve Of The NSW Election

Vote Green

I was at the usual shop picking up lunch when I ran into some people I always meet. One of them said he was thinking of voting for the Greens. The other was a gnarled mechanic in overalls saying the Greens want to bring in death duties. I interjected, "well why not?"

"Kerry Packer said why should his family give up money so you can misuse it?" the older guy retorted.

"For the common good. That's why. I mean Jamie Packer didn't exactly work for that money. Why the hell should he get such a big head start in life on account of his dad being obscenely rich?"

"Yeah but if my mum dies and she leaves half a million, why should the government tax that?"

"For the common good."

"...But they'll only waste that."

"...and you'd only sit on it for you own pleasure. How's that helping anybody? If it's all the same, the 15% they would take from it would be put to better use than you sitting on it," I offered. "I mean, you didn't earn it. Your mum did; and when she goes, she can't take it with her, so a portion may as well go to the state, because the state probably looked after her as much as you with its hospitals and doctors and nurses."

You should have seen the guy's expression. He was apoplectic with rage. I said, "mate, don't worry. I think they should tax everybody more, but that's just me. We don't pay enough taxes as it is and we wonder why our hospitals are clogged with waiting lists."

He looked even angier.

"I mean, tax everybody. Who really cares?" I continued. "The money you get taxed, do you really miss it? There's still enough for you to pay your bills and pay your rent and still have a drink with your mates. I mean what were you going to do with it that was going to change other people's lives? That's what governments do, so give them what they need."

"...But they'll waste it," he offered again. "That's what governments do. They waste it."

"What? On hospitals and ambulances and police and emergency rescue workers and all that? Roads and trains and water and sewerage treatment and electricity? How about schools for kids, day care centres for infants and libraries and colleges and TAFE? Apprenticeship schemes where you got your training, it's all a waste is it?"

"Bullshit mate," he snarled, grabbed his lunch, and stormed out. Couldn't say I blamed him. I'd hate to be harangued by me while picking up my lunch too.

The first guy said, "I've been back to Greece and when you go to the country side, they have nothing. No roads, no schools, no sewerage or running water. It's like medieval times. They don't even know about taxes. Never even heard of the idea, let alone paid it. And the place is so backwards and they wonder why. So yeah, taxes are fine by me," he said.

Apparently, that's the way things are in the spiritual home of democracy and a country racked with sovereign debt issues.

So vote green, peeps! Vote for higher taxes for the rich. Get a little Bolshy. Higher taxes never killed anybody.

2011/03/23

Libya In The Targetsight

Peace Through War

In one of those weird turns of history, NATO are at war with colonel Gadhafi's Libya. It came together around much French diplomacy as well as Kevin Rudd flying around telling people the rebels of Libya needed a no-fly zone to at least have an even chance to oust Colonel Gadhafi.
On a political level, Mr Sarkozy badly wanted to restore the credibility of French diplomacy after failing to read the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and then Egypt. Last month, he had to get rid of his foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, after she not only offered French security “savoir faire” to the Tunisian regime just days before it fell, but then failed to explain her links to a businessman close to the deposed rulers. French diplomats have been mortified by the damage this did to the country’s standing. Moreover, Mr Sarkozy had personal reasons to want to turn the screws on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who last week called him a “clown”, and whose son, Saif al-Islam,  alleged without evidence that Libya had helped to finance his 2007 presidential-election campaign (a claim denied by the Elysée).

Another factor has been the arrival of Alain Juppé to replace Ms Alliot-Marie. A former prime minister, and one-time foreign minister, he has brought heavyweight experience to the job. Initially hesitant about intervening militarily, he laid down various conditions for backing the establishment of a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace: it would need the international legitimacy of a clear United Nations Security Council resolution; it should not be a NATO operation because of the Alliance’s image in the Arab world as an American tool; it would need at least symbolic Arab military participation; and it would require an explicit call from the Arab world.

Last week, Mr Juppé cancelled a trip to Berlin at the last moment to fly to New York to plead France’s case in person at the UN Security Council on March 17th. (The speech carried distinct echoes of that by Dominique de Villepin, a former foreign minister, who argued just as passionately against military intervention in Iraq in 2003.) By the time resolution 1973 was passed, and with the nod of the Arab League, all of Mr Juppé’s conditions had been, broadly, met. The Paris summit tied up the loose ends, and supplied non-Western legitimacy, however symbolic. On French television a few hours after French fighter jets had begun to strike Libyan tanks, Mr Juppé spoke persuasively and calmly of “calculated risks”, and the restoration of French honour in defending its values.

If you add in that wars can help politicians in the polls, maybe it's not surprising. Wars are an interesting adjunct to the post GFC landscape as the West now has ample motivation to go and fight a gratuitous war to increase military spending and by extension help the GDP. America is less motivated to join this war because it's already got Afghanistan, and barely got out of Iraq having gone there exactly to shore up markets after 9/11. Of course thre's the dirty big debt that got racked up to think about, but nobody is capable of dealing with that.

The other thing to watch of course is oil price. Libyan crude is actually the best crude in the world and goes into airplanes. So not only will the oil price rise, it will likely rise in a way so as to hurt airline margins. It's not something that will show up immediately but you can bet your bottom dollar this is going to hurt industries around the world. The longer the action continues in Libya, the more we're going to line ourselves up for GFC part 2. The ideal scenario is a quick finish, but it's actually hard to see an endgame in the Libyan contest. Do these rebels really have what it takes to oust Gadhafi from his lair/bunker/stronghold in Tripoli? It's a good question sure to worry at least more than Nikolas Sarkozy or Mr Juppé.

You wonder why so much of the world continues to be happy relying on oil for fuel when it is so vulnerable to events in the middle east. One would have thought that other industries might have put on more pressure for energy companies and the like to look for better alternatives that don't put us all at the whims of dictators and Arab militants and other assorted complications that are opaque, irrational, and willfully hostile and difficult. I mean, do people like say, Steve Jobs or George Soros or Steve Ballmer or the guy running General Motors these days really enjoy this affecting their share prices?

Here We Go Again

You Can't Judge Film by Its Audiences

But you can sure judge a flop by its dismal figures.
It proved to be a disastrous weekend at the box office as three Australian films - Griff the Invisible, The Reef and A Heartbeat Away - failed dismally to connect with local audiences.

Of the three, Griff the Invisible did best, taking a modest $66,344 on 20 screens, its so-so per-screen score of $3317 suggesting it will drop out of the top 20 by next week. That is, of course, unless a miracle occurs and the film becomes an unexpected word-of-mouth hit.

The Reef did poorly with its $58,196 take on 36 screens, its per-screen figure of $1617 indicating very little interest.

Worst of all, though, was A Heartbeat Away. The $7 million film directed by first-time film director Gale Edwards took a dire $44,204 on 77 screens, its abysmal screen average of $574 being among the worst of any Australian film in recent memory. The film's unqualified failure conjured the spectre of The Tender Hook, the 2008 Australian film that also cost $7 million and which took less than $60,000.

The combined take of all three films - $168,744 - was less than what the Liam Neeson actioner Unknown took across its fifth weekend. ($187,255 on 102 screens).

The figures speak for themselves, but just to be sure, none of them are on track to make any money back. The bottom of the article reads like this:
So the last thing the enterprise needs is catastrophic, clueless weekends like the one we've just had.

Sad enough that the films themselves reflected common shortcomings in so many local films. Just as sad was the lack of marketplace nous that has often seen good Australian films die at the box office. Three local films coming out the same weekend as two tent-pole Hollywood studio films? It's almost as if the films didn't want audiences.

If the weekend has any upside it's of being symbolic of the type of event we thought was behind us. Certainly the spectacle of an all-but-unwatchable $7 million Australian film playing to virtually no audience is something that should have been consigned to the past - and something Australian cinema can ill afford to indulge or repeat.

So just some general points:

* The issue of marketing remains key. Many people say they've never even heard of these films.

* How a debut film director can be allowed to helm a $7 million production has angered many, and with good cause. You could have made four Wolf Creeks for that. What happened to the idea of earning that kind of budget with a proven track record of successful smaller films?

* Quality script development continues to draw focus. People are clearly tired of industry rhetoric about how "the story is all", especially when those stories simply don't play.

* The hope is that this dreadful weekend might be the tail end of an era where these long-standing problems ruled. With a new audience-orientated mindset apparently governing production now, this weekend might be the final death throe of an old way of doing things. That's the prayer, anyway.

* Critics going "soft" on local films has again come up. CineTopia states again, for the record, that we NEVER go soft on a film, for whatever reason. The notion of giving Australian films a two-star tariff to encourage "support" for it is worse than useless, it's counter-productive. For what is to be gained by encouraging people to see films you think stink?

Goodness. Aren't they words of wisdom? But it keeps repeating. I'm sick of blogging about how AWFUL the whole venture of 'Australian Film Industry' has become. Yesterday I spent some time talking to my contact out at a funding body and they're just looking for good story ideas as much as the next studio. But screenwriting in this country is so weak, and the scripts out there are actually really mundane or terrible or worse, nonsensical. There's been 2 decades of neglect and the whole population of writers are in deprivation shock.But here are some problem areas that come from the neglect:

  • Nobody knows what to write about because of budget reasons.

  • Nobody knows who to write for, because most have never thought about the demographic of film viewers.

  • Nobody knows how to deliver the craft. I'm sorry but that's the assessment.

  • Nobody wants to see Australian films just because they're Australian.

  • Nobody in the private sector wants to *invest* in such a losing venture. Nobody in their right mind anyway.


The bottom lines is that it's still early to see if anything can come back; but these kinds of weekends are not encouraging. I could say more but I don't have the energy any more. It's too frustrating.

Piracy Isn't Killing The Industry

On the same day in the SMH, we get this article. The interesting bit is here:
In February last year, the anti-piracy arm of the music industry, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), put out a thunderous press release claiming it had helped police "shut down one of Australia's largest illegal music burning operations" in Melbourne.

Acting on information from MIPI, police seized "close to 100 CD burners and approximately 25,000 discs containing pirate music housed in a suburban CD store".

MIPI's general manager, Sabiene Heindl, said at the time: "This is one of the largest and most blatant illegal music burning labs that we have seen for some time."

It was only this year that the case finally ground its way through the courts and further details were released.

Of the 25,000 "pirate" CDs that MIPI claimed it seized, 14,600 were blanks, while the remaining discs were mostly of Asian artists which the store, Lucky Bubble, had a licence to reproduce.

Less than 100 of the discs were proven to be pirated copies and the charges were dropped to the lowest possible level. The manager of the store, who claims the handful of pirated discs were placed in his shop by staff, in the end was let go with a $1500 fine.

It's a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and years in jail that MIPI warned about in its press release.

So, no, there is no big piracy operation going on out there. Just the old internet bit torrent thing that MIPI can't do anything about. So it's really a laugh when you see that REALLY LOUD announcement that goes "you wouldn't steal, so you shouldn't pirate" that kicks off half the DVDs out there, wherein they mount that argument that piracy is destroying the future of the Australian Film Industry.

Ah, no.

It's crappy films and crappy development and crappy government development agencies and government funding as corporate welfare that keeps Australian film genuinely uncompetitive, that is killing the future of this industry. If you want my opinion, 20 years of this stuff has already made it comatose.

Hey Look, Russell's Still Doing OK

He's just bought a $10m house in Rose Bay. He's doing great. He could have bought a almost one and a half Australian movie flops with that money.

2011/03/20

Splintering To The Left, Part II

There was a time the ALP were the catch-all socially progressive party in Australia. Then they split over communism and while they stayed split, they had no chance to win government. Then they went back to being a big catch-all socially progressive party and were able to win government under Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and then Kevin Rudd. The recent development of the splintering to the left then is something that is likely to hamper the ALP's ability to form government on its own. Peter Hartcher has this article in the SMH.
As an electoral edifice, Labor has long stood on two pillars. One is the working-class vote. The other is the progressive vote. In April last year, Labor detonated one of those pillars.

The fatal moment was when Kevin Rudd walked away from the fight on "the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time" by deferring his emissions trading scheme.

And when Gillard unseated Rudd, she moved the government further and further to the right, further and further away from its progressive voter base. Gillard cut a quick and dirty deal with the multinationals on the mining tax, promised to put asylum seekers in East Timor, and signalled a total abandonment of serious action on climate change with her "citizens' assembly''.

A silly notion persists that Gillard is somehow on the left of Labor politics and Rudd was on the right. The truth is the opposite. Gillard was further right than Rudd on every major policy issue. That helps explain why Rudd's lead assassins were from the Right faction and his last diehard defenders from the Left.

The result? Labor lost 676,000 primary votes at last year's election while the Greens picked up 491,000. In other words, the Greens picked up three-quarters as many votes as Labor lost. We cannot know for certain that these were disillusioned and disgusted Labor voters going across to the Greens. But it's a pretty safe assumption that the vast bulk were.

Labor self-destructed as the party of the progressive vote. The Greens staged their best performance yet with 12 per cent of the vote and Labor's was one of its worst.

This is all true. Hartcher then analyses the ructions in terms of moves to the left and right which are all very valid, but I then thought it actually doesn't capture the whole problem. For instance, I've largely been a voter for the ALP in the Hawke-Keating years through to Kevin Rudd because it was always imperative to stop John Howard. John Howard actually represented the nastiest, meanest, smallest-minded social conservatives of this country, so at each and every election it was important to for me to vote against and vote out John Howard's electoral support.

But over time I've found myself at odds with my own voting: I am a free market capitalist. I was for the GST and not against it; I've not really been a unionist rank-and-file kind of ALP guy, I'm not a Catholic, and I'm not really invested in Socialism. I just hated John Howard and everything he stood for - entitlement and preserving entitlement including the entitlement to be racist bigoted and mean. I still think, "well, fuck you John Howward, fuck you very much" when I cast my mind to his prime ministership, which is not very grown-up of me, but that is the visceral loathing I've felt. I probably loathe Tony Abbott far less than that, though I do hold him in utter contempt for his Catholic-Church-driven hyper-idiotic nonsense positions on global warming.

So, the point is, the big tent of the Australian Labor Party was always a coalition of those who didn't like John Howard and the vestiges of White Australia Policy Squat-ocracy. To that end the ALP has knitted together the SBS demographic and the ABC demographic against the Channel Nine demographic, with the Channel Seven demographic as the swinging centre. (Channel Ten doesn't get a vote because its audiences are under 16, but I guess they are the 'yoof' vote).

Ultimately the limits of the ALP is that it can't be all things to all people in a world of very complex issues and social needs. It can't be that Bolshy socially progressive party and cater to the Catholic DLP right faction. It can't be totally committed to environmental policies while looking after the interests of the big end of business. It can't be corruption-free when it takes in organised ethnic votes.

And in a world of boutique consumerism where special needs are catered for by specialist services, it is inevitable that political parties begin to splinter around the urgency of the multiple individual policy positions. That is to say, the rise of the Greens is as the boutique political party for those who put environmental concerns ahead of things like workplace policies or gay marriage. Equally, the appearance of something like the Australian Sex Party in the last federal election is an expression of a party that places sexual and gender politics ahead of say, envrionmental policies. If you poked them deeply enough (pardon the pun) one would find they're probably about as equally progressive as one another.

It might be the case that this signals the end of the ALP as the one-party fits all progressive party in Australia, but it shouldn't diminish it from being a broker for all these ideas and policies.

Fail Safe

Acts of God And Risk

I've been pondering the issue of nuclear power in light of the Fukushima crisis, and I have to say the problems of how things got to this point are so complicated that it's impossible to pin the blame on any one thing. The Fukushima plant was designed with earthquakes and tsunami threats in mind. They set the bar for earthquakes at 8.0 or so which was the magnitude of the quake in Tokyo, 1923. The tsunami threat was set for waves that were 6m high. In reality, what brought Fukushima undone was a 9.0 earthquake that unleashed 1500 times more energy than the 1995 Kobe quake, and a tsunami that was 12m high. In both instances, the spec the plant had to withstand was much larger than anything in recent record.

And there's crux number one. How far back would one have to go to fin the maximum threat, and how much more redundancy would one have to add on top? Even if they had added 20% to the largest threat recorded, the plant would have been built to 8.4 magnitude and 7.2m high waves. The unforeseen is by definition is unforeseen.

Subsequent to the two overpowering threats that manifested were 2 diesel generators for back up that failed, as well as a third battery system that also failed to kick in. All the fail-safes and redundancies were overwhelmed.  The fact that the system didn't go into immediate meltdown is some kind of testament to the engineering. Can all of this really be ascribed to the fault of the engineers? Isn't this more like what insurers call 'An Act of God'?

I'm not trying to redeem the nuclear power industry or Japanese engineering here, because at the end of the day there is an ongoing crisis that is threatening all of Fukushima prefecture and possible North-East Japan. What I do want to bring up is the nature of risk. Every time we drive a car we take a risk, every time we take the train we take a risk; society is actually built up on managed risks and underlying them all are assumptions on what is manageable and safe. For the better part of 40years, the nuclear plant in Fukushima ran without having a major hiccup until a series of overwhelming events. A rational person has to put that into the equation of benefits to balance against the risks.

So now I'm thinking aloud here, wondering if the case for nuclear is legitimately dead. Here's an intellectual exercise: Let's say the same plant was built in Australia and run with equal effectiveness. If it were away from the coast and rivers, chances are it's not going to be subjected to magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and tsunamis. What could possibly happen?

About the only thing I can think of off-hand are bushfires. But what if it had an exclusion zone around it? Again the question comes up as to what would be a legitimately safe exclusion zone to counter all bushfires? We could only figure out the worst bushfire and then calculate a 20% redundancy on top of the worst case scenario we know. But what if the disaster that strikes is twice the size of the previous worst?

The same problem is in fact what struck Brisbane and the Wivenhoe in the recent flood. The Wivenhoe dam was designed with the worst case on record in mind. The flood that eventually came had twice as much water as the previous recorded worst case.

I guess actuaries are busy doing their sums on this kind of thing, and doubtless there are mathematical formulae that address these things, and even then I'm guessing they will be found out to be faulty by the next disaster. Which leads me to think there's a structural problem with all of projection of worst case scenarios. Stock traders and commodity traders are always quick to point out that past performance is no promise of future performance. This is at its core the same problem with inductive reasoning.
The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge. That is, what is the justification for either:

  • generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white," before the discovery of black swans) or

  • presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the Principle of Uniformity of Nature.


The problem calls into question all empirical claims made in everyday life or through the scientific method. Although the problem arguably dates back to the Pyrrhonism of ancient philosophy, David Hume introduced it in the mid-18th century, with the most notable response provided by Karl Popper two centuries later. A more recent, probability-based extension is the "no-free-lunch theorem for supervised learning" of Wolpert and Macready.

Philosopher John Vickers concluded that we should use induction, not because it yields certainties, like deduction, but because it is a method that can correct itself - and is thus more likely to bring us closer to truth than other methods.[1].

Now this ultimately goes to Karl Popper and falsifiablity:
According to Popper, the problem of induction as usually conceived is asking the wrong question: it is asking how to justify theories given they cannot be justified by induction. Popper argued that justification is not needed at all, and seeking justification "begs for an authoritarian answer". Instead, Popper said, what should be done is to look to find and correct errors.[20] Popper regarded theories that have survived criticism as better corroborated in proportion to the amount and stringency of the criticism, but, in sharp contrast to the inductivist theories of knowledge, emphatically as less[21] likely to be true. Popper held that seeking for theories with a high probability of being true was a false goal that is in conflict with the search for knowledge. Science should seek for theories that are most probably false on the one hand (which is the same as saying that they are highly falsifiable and so there are lots of ways that they could turn out to be wrong), but still all actual attempts to falsify them have failed so far (that they are highly corroborated).

That's all well and good for knowledge, but for design and engineering, this has practical, real world problems. And I don't mean this lightly. The main problem we're seeing is that the critique comes in the guise of out of control, super-scale disasters. We only get to see the failure point of designs when a sufficiently large disaster strikes. On that scale, the trials of the Fukushima plant are inordinate challenges. They are beyond what could have been reasonably expected; the unreasonable-ness if you like, of the challenge is in a sense falsifying the design.

Was it reasonable to design for 8.0magnitude earthquakes when there are 9.0 magnitude earthquakes? Was it reasonable to design for 6m tsunamis when 5m was the highest that had been seen? I'd like to see one argument that is mounted without being post-hoc. It's the post-hoc arguments that are clouding the issue as to whether we can realistically look at any piece of design and find it acceptable.

Anyway, I've been racking my brain in the aftermath of the quake off Sendai, and that's all I've got for you. Some of you are better philosophers. You tell me if we can actually learn anything useful about the risks for which we can and can't design. It seems to me, we're all at a loss, and the triumphal "told you so" heard from our Green friends about nuclear power are actually nothing much more than opportunistic cat calls. And I'm saying this as somebody who is not even pro-nuclear. I just want some truth.

2011/03/18

A New, Clear Dawn

The Tapes Have Recorded Their Names

Okay, so that's about the best line I can cite from Emerson Lake and Palmer's  'Karn Evil 9 Impression 3', but it's strangely fitting what with an apocalyptic sequence of events taking place over in Japan. First there was the magnitude 9.0 Earthquake. Then there was the Tsunami generated by the said earthquake, which wiped out the eastern coastline of Japan, and then the subsequent nuclear reactor problems at Fukushima that have steadily been going towards China Syndrome. "It's sort of a meltdown", "it might be contained," "oh look there's an explosion" sequence has been more or less the picture of panic and chaos. What's really disturbing with the Fukushima power plant situation is that it's really hard to tell what exactly is going on in there.
Workers at the plant have been manually feeding seawater into the reactors to prevent the fuel rods from heating up and melting down after Friday's earthquake and tsunami shut down all the country’s nuclear power plants.

Mr Jaczko, who was briefing US politicians in Washington, said the NRC believed "there has been a hydrogen explosion in this unit due to an uncovering of the fuel in the spent fuel pool".

"We believe that secondary containment has been destroyed and there is no water in the spent fuel pool. And we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures."

Mr Jaczko told journalists later that he received the information "from staff people in Tokyo who are interfacing with their Japanese counterparts".

"I've confirmed that their information is reliable," he said, adding: "It is my great hope that the information is not accurate."

The NRC and US Department of Energy both have experts on site at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the Associated Press reported.

But Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for TEPCO, played down the US concerns and said the "condition is stable" at reactor No.4.

The US Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, also expressed his concern at the US Energy Funds hearing, saying that "the events unfolding in the Japan incidents actually appear to be more serious than Three Mile Island".

"To what extent we don't really know now," he added.

The quick answer is that it is much worse than Three Mile Island and about 3 inches of concrete from Cherobyl. It's going to be a big problem should it really blow. The rate it's going, on shouldn't be surprised. As with Chernobyl, you get the feeling that the officials at Tokyo Electric - TEPCO - hit the denial button pretty hard as things started to go out of control. The Prime Minister Naoto Kan was overheard through his door, yelling at TEPCO's representatives, "In the end there's only you there. Get serious. If you so much as pull out of the reactor area, your company will go under, 100%. I'll guarantee you that!"

By "Get serious," PM Naoto Kan means, draw-your-sword-and-prepare-for-death-serious, which is something that gets lost in the translation. This reported incident has garnered him more bad press but most people I've spoken to agree with him. So the question is, how bad is it really and how bad is it going to get? We may still be in Act 2 of a very drawn out apocalypse of the Nuclear industry in Japan and by extension, elsewhere in the world.

In the mean time, the whole nuclear debate in Australia itself is set to go dead quiet.
There were two strands for the Labor conference to consider: whether Australia should develop a nuclear industry, and whether Labor should adjust its policy allowing uranium to be sold to India.

It's the first strand that's become too fraught. Selling uranium to India is problematic, but still an outside prospect. It will come down to the Prime Minister. If Julia Gillard wants to sell yellowcake to India, then key figures on the Right and the Left will marshal the numbers to support the executive.

But the spectre of post-disaster Japan will also complicate that debate. Opponents will say that if Fukushima can happen in a country such as Japan - a developed country with advanced technological capability and orderly governance - imagine what could happen in India. The Prime Minister will need to want to have the fight, and whether she does - when she has so many other fights at present - is unlikely, but only time will tell.

At one level, Labor's internal truce on the nuclear issue would be good news for Gillard, who is going backwards with the public according to the latest Age/Nielsen and Newspoll surveys.

Voters have watched nonplussed while the Prime Minister has grappled with her cluttered personal history of fixes and formulations, primarily on climate change, but on other issues too - the vexed problem of asylum seekers and, of course, her complicated relationship with the man she replaced.

Deferring the nuclear debate will buy the Prime Minister some restorative Zen in the 24-hour news cycle, but, unfortunately for her, the underlying issues won't go away.

Japan or no Japan, India will still want our uranium. The Americans will still want us to sell it to them. This will remain a significant foreign policy challenge, as it was for her two predecessors, John Howard and Kevin Rudd.

And the broader subject of nuclear energy will come back round again in the political discourse if recent history is a reliable guide.

Rational people don't want nuclear power for its own sake. Only carpetbaggers and boosters will tell you nuclear is a perfect technology. Events in Japan show us nuclear's downside. When it goes bad, it's not just bad, but potentially catastrophic.

This debate is likely to be repeated around the world. As the article says, only the heavily invested will try and convince you of the merits of nuclear. The funny thing is I was in America to see Three Mile Island unfold and I certainly recall the day Chernobyl went up in a radioactive puff. It's amazing the nuclear industry made as much of comeback as it is, after those accidents.

The question that should be asked is whether countries like Iran, Pakistan, India and China really want to be venturing down the nuclear path and take these kinds of risks.

What Happens Next?

This is the curious question, and here's a curious answer in the SMH today.
Despite two decades of stagnant growth on home turf, Japan is the second largest foreign owner of US government securities, with nearly $900 billion of America's public debt. This time it could be the rest of the world that takes a financial hit while the Japanese economy booms.

To understand how this could happen it is necessary to follow the Japanese money. Savings by individuals and money held by Japanese insurers and financial institutions amounts to trillions of dollars in cash, much of which makes its way on to world securities markets. When natural disasters happen in Japan, individuals and companies need this cash to rebuild, and insurance companies need it for payouts.

Earthquake insurance is hard to get for most households in Japan, so much of the cost - estimated at $US100 billion - will have to come from a mountain of ordinary savings held in Japanese financial institutions, much of it invested overseas. For anything that is insured, possibly amounting to between $US10 billion and $US15 billion - the situation is complicated. Japanese insurers will also have to sell overseas assets, but they will be spared the full cost because they have reinsured a lot of their risk with overseas insurance firms, who in turn have reinsured it with other insurers. This insurance trail is a global labyrinth. Japan's risk, it turns out, is the world's risk.

The article is really interesting in that it plays out a scenario where the Japanese trade out those US Treasury bonds to save itself.
Perhaps the biggest difference is the Tokyo government's fiscal position, awash in debt that amounts to two years' worth of GDP. It can ill-afford the generous injections it is making to stabilise markets and the spending that will be needed to restore infrastructure.

If the model plays out as predicted, the sell-off in bonds will continue, and the yen could rise further. The immediate effect on the Japanese economy will likely be to turn an expected 0.3 per cent growth this quarter into negative growth, perhaps sending Japan back into recession. But within a year the rebuilding effort will deliver strong GDP growth. Production of everything from cars to concrete will have to be ramped up to satisfy the expected demand.

If things work out according to that scenario, there are going to be a lot of hurt investors in bonds and insurance companies.

The other thing that needs to be said is that like the recent Queensland floods this disaster is going to end up stimulating domestic demand. I can't quite fathom the amound of fear of the people getting out of say, the mining sector at the Australian exchange. Alright, Uranium is deservedly down, but surely coal and iron are going to be in much demand as all these places like Queensland, Christchurch and the north of Japan all go into a rebuilding frenzy.

Check out what the Economist has to say about shocks to the share market. These things bounce back. If I had money to spend I would've spent it today buying shares. The Economist also dug up its 1923 reportage of the Great Kanto Earthquake.
As to the repercussion on the trade of the world generally, there are obviously circumstances in which so serious a blow to one of the great trading nations might set up a series of trade crises and precipitate world depression. But, again, the universal stagnation of trade, and the fact that speculation has for this reason been recently restrained within extremely narrow limits, means that commerce generally is not so vulnerable, as is sometimes the case, to a shock to credit. Indeed, looking at the matter from a purely narrow national standpoint, it is conceivable that the momentary withdrawal of Japan from world competition may cause buying by India and China in other markets, and that Great Britain may momentarily benefit from a cause which in the long run will reduce, and not increase, the trade of the world.

The rebuilding of Tokyo will, of course, afford some compensation to the otherwise depressing effects of the disaster. A substantial proportion of the requirements for this purpose will be needed from overseas, which will involve the placing of loans abroad, presumably in London and New York. Some of the sums raised in this way may even be required for purchasing food if it should appear that very large stocks of these requirements have perished or been spoiled, and that internal Japanese resources are insufficient or cannot quickly be mobilised by the Government for the relief measures that will be necessary.

Sounds familiar? That's the sound of history repeating. Cue Shirley Bassey and the Propeller Heads.

2011/03/13

The Christmas Island Breakout

Repeating Pattern In Australian History?

I know there's devastating news going over in the north of Honshu, but the news tonight that caught my attention is this story here about how there was a mass breakout from the detention centre on Christmas Island, with up to 50 people on the loose.
Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul said tension and frustration had been building over delays with processing asylum claims and restrictions placed on movements between compounds on Friday.

"The delays in processing are unforgivable," Mr Rintoul said.

"There are refugees waiting for over 18 months for security clearances after they have been found to be refugees.

"The breakout is reminiscent of the breakouts from Woomera and Port Hedland in the early 2000s as detention conditions became unbearable."

Well, actually if I may be a bit more historical about it, they're also reminiscent of the Cowra breakout during World War II. The POWs in Cowra were also kept in isolation for an extended period of time with virtually no news coming in. The population grew desperate and  restless in the information vacuum, and eventually they decided to take drastic action probably because they felt they couldn't endure the incarceration any more. The next day most of the escapees were rounded up without a problem.

So, Woomera and Port Hedland may be the immediate predecessors, but in my mind it raises the question of how and why this pattern of events keeps recurring in Australia; and perhaps there is something pathological about the polity of this nation.  It's a question that has to be asked. Is there something in our politics that necessitates this kind of detention-and-breakout motif over and over again?

This section here is just as troubling as the above:
"These reports are very disturbing," Senator Hanson-Young said.

"Unfortunately, this isn't a one-off event, it's symptomatic of the desperation these people feel."

Tensions were increasing on Christmas Island, she said.

"It's like a pressure cooker," Hanson-Young said.

It's this kind of report that preceded the breakout in Cowra that went unheeded as well. I think we really should be asking ourselves and our politicians just what in the world we think we're doing with these detention centres. Because right now, they're functioning more like some sadistic state apparatus designed to inflict as much emotional damage to the people inside, while maintaining a Kafka-esque bureaucratic facade to make it more palatable to the public. It's one thing to be putting captured enemy combatants in a war into these places. Asylum seekers on boats is another thing entirely.

If they're going to the bother of shoving these people on Christmas Island, the least they ca do is let them walk free on the Island. This is really, really, really pathetic.

2011/03/12

Sydney's Creative Mojo

Thanks For Caring Anyway, Cate

Cate Blanchett put out a speech earlier this week. She was basically arguing that there could be an arts precinct in the new Barangaroo Walsh Bay development and that it would be great f government would open its purse to allow this to happen.

Pleiades sent me this awesome link, Ben Eltham's reponse over at Crikey:
US academic Jane Jacobs observed in the 1960s that a key aspect of cultural vibrancy was old buildings and cheap space: things that Walsh Bay lacks, despite Upton and Blanchett’s fuzzy call for “assisted rent”. Artists need cheap housing as much as they need cheap workspace, but affordable accommodation workspace is unlikely to be available in a new development in the newest part of Sydney’s CBD.

For those who don’t happen to warm the benches of Walsh Bay’s arts venues, Sydney’s post-Olympic “quandary” is long over. The “new Trade Union Club” that Upton longs for might well be the Red Rattler, or an underground warehouse space in Enmore. New events such as the Underbelly Arts festival and the Imperial Panda festival are springing up to incubate a new generation of emerging practice. The Casula Powerhouse is showing itself to be far more connected and responsive to its local community than the Opera House, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading its loading dock.

What is in Walsh Bay are a lot of subsidised arts companies, which rather suggests the motivation behind Cate and Andrew’s vision. If Australia has an epicentre for public subsidy of the arts, Walsh Bay is it. The STC itself enjoys public funding of more than $2.4 million annually, which could comfortably support dozens of independent theatre  producers or small start-ups. Now there’s an idea for Sydney’s “next adventure”.

I couldn't have said it better myself. It's interesting that Cate Blanchett, who is so successful out in Hollywood and therefore should understand how the market place works, could be pitching for more government subsidies.

Lately I've come to view government subsidies as the kiss of death for any industry in any country. The moment a government starts handing over money directly to its artists or novelists of film makers, they start making crap. It happens because without the market, there's no social meaning to the arts. It doesn't mean that which is populist is good, but that the requirement to at least please the market or a client or a sponsor adds to the discipline of whatever that is being done. it's a sad truth. The moment you stop wanting to wow people and can pull down a paycheck for churning out whimsy, you'll be making crap in no time.

2011/03/11

Singapore For The Wealthy

Why Is It The Entitled Are So Obnoxious?

It must be all that entitlement, right?

Gina "daddy's Money Is Good Money" Rinehart offered up her opinion column today in the SMH arguing that Australia could do better by being more like Singapore.
Despite the country's small size, low population, and lack of resources and local water supply, Singaporeans benefit significantly from the country's policies. Its neighbour Australia is the complete opposite despite wealth generated from vast resources. Why this striking difference?

- We make ourselves less attractive to investment. Think of those 300-plus Australian companies investing in West Africa, together with multinational companies that have been the largest investors in Australia over decades (for example BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto), that are now making major investments and commitments offshore.
- Australia drowns in red and green tape. Fifteen hundred or more permits, approvals and licences are required to start major projects in Queensland, for instance. We have both state and federal environmental department duplication. Small companies, which were once the backbone of Australia, are increasingly finding the load too onerous.
- Taxes make us less competitive. After the introduction of the GST, which was meant to reduce other taxes, we now face a messy MRRT and carbon tax, making Australia even less competitive on world markets. This will greatly affect our own citizens, particularly those on lower incomes. Why so? If you add tax to thermal coal, which accounts for 80-85 per cent of Australia's power generation, electricity prices will rise to cater for the cost increase, hurting those on low incomes the most. And the problem does not stop with our electricity bills going up. Every item that requires electricity, be it for production, distribution or storage, which encompasses most items we use, will rise in price under MRRT and/or carbon tax imposed on thermal coal. This again not only hurts our export competitiveness, but Australians on low and medium incomes, which includes a very large number of people.
- Our crime record is unacceptable: we should all be able to live safely in our homes and suburbs. Taxation monies that should be spent on more, better paid, better resourced and better trained police are wasted – think of the recent federal government wastage on over-priced school kitchens (that don't even cater for pie warmers in winter), expensive insulation bungles, and dare I repeat, duplication of environmental departments.
Australia needs guest labour. Just think where Australia could be if we welcomed guest labour, even if limited to hot or remote areas or to unskilled and semi-skilled positions. This should be considered on humanitarian grounds alone. Please consider the terrible plight of very poor people in our neighbouring countries in Asia. We should, on humanitarian grounds, give more of these people the opportunity of guest labour work in Australia, so that they can feed and clothe their families and pay for medical and other pressing needs. Singapore, Dubai and even Europe have had guest workers for decades. Also, think about the lack of adequate services for our own war veterans, the elderly and the disabled, and how much better their lives and their carers' lives would be if we gave guest workers temporary visas to assist.
- Skilled guest labourers are also badly needed in Australia. Media reports mention almost daily that major projects are being delayed due to lack of skilled labour and long delays in processing guest labour visas.
- Australia has too much debt. We live beyond our means and continue to discourage and delay business development that could provide more revenue. We'll continue to grow debt for our children to be burdened with until our attitude changes.

So, that's what Australia's richest woman thinks is a good idea. Turn Australia into an oligopoly like Singapore through a flat tax and minimal checks and balances for industry so they can ave a free rein to go and pollute and destroy the environment as much as they like.It's really pathetic how each point can only be understood as being a good idea for all of Australia through the eyes of somebody who wants to make a tonne of money digging up more resources come what may. Let's not forget this is the person who bankrolled the ad campaign that led to Kevin Rudd's collapse in the polls, but also somebody who does not believe in climate change - and therefore somebody we can count amongst the willfully stupid of humanity.

The reason it got my attention more than all the silliness and the egotistical manner in which her own self-interest was dressed up as Australia's general interest (gag me with a spade), was this notion of 'green tape'. The expression occurs more than 3 times in her opinion piece and it made me wonder what kind of brain space invents a term to concertina the entire oversight on behalf of the environment as "green tape". Clearly this woman thinks that all the apparatus of the state that attempts to shore up the interests of the Australian environment is somehow a negative thing that must be overcome and stripped away from the law and simplified out of existence.

And it was at this point I thought, "well, this woman has enough money to not ever have to earn another cent through mining in her life. She couldlive off her vast assets easily." But no, she would like to do some more mining and preferably without any government oversight or public scrutiny, and when she makes even more of a motza, she wants to pay less tax; but what little tax she pays, she wants it to go towards hiring more policemen to fight crime instead of fitting out school kitchens.

On top of all this ill-conceived bullet point half-baked notions, she wants to admonish us that Australia has too much debt. Surely it's not that much debt given that Australia is far from any kind of sovereign risk, and is headed back for surplus by 2013, and frankly is the kind of debt that extracting a bit more tax from the likes of Rinehart couldn't fix. As a general point, it can readily be said if this woman gets to have a public forum to have her stupid entitled say in this manner just because she's the richest woman in Australia, then there's an argument to be made that she is already a danger to Australia as a whole.

I mean, really, this clap trap about government debt is idiotic, but these wealthy people are always carrying on like it's some moral failure if the government takes out a loan to do something constructive like build universities or hospitals. It's not like Rinehart's company never took out a loan to build a mine, is it? On principle we should tax the rich, because they're rich. That will definitely fix the deficit. They might bleat and call it wealth redistribution, but that is the point of good government. That it doesn't allow individual citizens to become so powerful that they interfere with affairs of state through the weight of their money - like Gina Rinehart and Andrew Twiggy Forrest did when they campaigned against the Mining Resources Rent Tax. A good society doesn't let rogue crazies with money scare itself into self-destructive positions.

2011/03/09

The Peasants Are Revolting

Yes, It's Bizarre

You can tell how mature or immature a polity is by the way it deals with issues. In the instance of Australia and climate change, it seems our polity is not as mature as it should be. As Julia Gillard attempts for the third time to put a price on carbon, Tony Abbott and the Ostrich brigade have gone for a kind of scorched-earth school of PR to fight the legislation.

That is to say, when bad news comes your way, you really ought to man up about it and deal with rather than carry on like the problem doesn't exist or get angry that is a problem and it's going to cost you. It's so basic to life and living you'd think that people in their forties and over like most politicians would be able to deal with it as mature, adult human beings. Not the Liberal Party and National Party of this country it seems, and by extension a vocal minority of climate change deniers and assorted climate sceptics who all seem to have a direct line to shock jocks on talk back radio.

To outside observers, all of this looks irrational, which upon careful reflection it does to us rational people on the inside as well.
"The thing that struck me is how the debate has changed here and also that wide perception that I keep hearing that Australia shouldn't go first," she told reporters in Canberra today.

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"Coming from Europe, that sounds slightly bizarre because there are 30 countries in Europe that have had a carbon price ... since the beginning of 2005."

While reluctant to comment on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's campaign against a carbon tax, Ms Duggan pointed out how the British Conservative Party was enthusiastic about an ETS when in opposition.

"During the last Labour government, it wasn't Conservatives saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this,'" she said.

"They said, 'You should be doing more, you should be doing it faster.'"

Ms Duggan also dismissed suggestions that a carbon price would push up electricity prices dramatically, arguing higher oil and commodity prices accounted for three-quarters of the 40 per cent increase in power bills during the first year of an ETS in Britain.

Job losses were also minimal, with the European ETS creating service-sector jobs in Britain.

"I don't think we can think of any jobs losses that are the direct result of carbon policy," Ms Duggan said.

Ms Duggan not only headed Britain's work on international emissions trading and linking but has advised other governments on the European experience. She pointed to some design flaws in Europe's initial emissions scheme.

If you talk to any business head in Australia, you would find that they all accept that a price on carbon is a necessary step. If you ask farmers and the National Party demographic, they will tell you the opportunities available if carbon had a price. And yet, there's the Liberal Party jumping up and down to the tune of climate change Denialistas, which is a bit like running immigration policy in tune to racists (which, they do anyway). The point being, if the Liberal Party was meant to be representing the big business end of town, then surely they've got better things to be doing than carrying on like people who are in the first stage of grief - denial - upon finding out that man-made climate change is wreaking havoc on our economy already. None of it is exactly fresh news.

If Julia Gillard can pull this off with this hung Parliament and put through legislation for pricing carbon, I'd rescind my objections to her rise to the office of Prime Minister. It would be one admirable thing that her government would be doing for posterity. Tony Abbott's place in history might not be so rewarding, even if he successfully delays the carbon price.

2011/03/06

What Price Transport?

The Social Costs Of Infrastructure Costs

Count me as a big sceptic when it comes to infrastructure investment. The whole Private Public Partnership experiments carried out since the mid 1990s has turned out to have been a crock as many infrastructure projects ended up being more tollways that weren't needed. in the mean time the various governments have failed to deliver the kind of infrastructure that is actually needed. Nothing that puts Australian infrastructure on par with other countries gets made, and there never seems to be any will power at any level of government to reduce our reliance on cars.

Still, one has to worry when one reads articles like these.
As motorists in the major cities sit in cars gridlocked on highways and commuters stew in packed trains, they cannot help but contemplate a sense of Australia falling behind. Doing nothing about traffic congestion in the capital cities is costing the economy $12.9 billion a year, according to the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics. With the population growing rapidly, this cost is set to rise to $20 billion a year by 2020.

Penny Bingham-Hall, a former strategy boss at the construction company Leighton, says Australia is lagging behind other nations in infrastructure construction because of its ''chronic lack of investment and the short-termism of our political thinking''.

''Australians like to think of their country as a modern developed nation and think of Asia as Third-World. But the world is changing,'' she says. ''When I first started travelling to Asia 20 years ago that thinking may have been accurate but now Asia is boasting some of the best infrastructure in the world.''

Japan has great infrastructure to be sure, but it also has it in excess. How much so? Well, as I covered this a few days ago, they're going to borrow 50trillion yen to top up their 47trillion yen or so tax revenue to service a 220trilion yen budget and debt burden. The missing bit is going to be filled by more government debt. The only reason the Japanese have great infrastructure is because of all the corruption from general construction companies that had politicians in their pockets, and the politicians who green-lit a whole bunch of infrastructure projects as a jobs-for-the-boys routine for well over 60years under a mostly Liberal-Democrat dominated agenda.

I guess it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. In Japan, they went ahead and made the infrastructure while racking up a colossal debt, while in Australia, we're refusing to build the infrastructure because we desperately want our government to stay in surplus. You'd think then that when they put together the Private Public Partnerships in the 1990s, they would have done a better job of picking exactly the kind of infrastructure that was needed, but no they didn't because there was corruption between the NSW government and the boffins at Macquarie Bank that came up with this stuff. That's a lot of Beth Morgans that got laid, so to speak. The point is, as a society we got off relatively light in that only 'the hot money' got burnt:
The recent failures mean governments are under greater pressure to meet the huge shortfall in funding as investors run scared from piling equity into so-called ''greenfield'' infrastructure projects. Leighton has made clear its appetite for investing in such projects has been ''very much reduced''.

''The government does need to bare a big chunk of the responsibility for those failures. After all, it was their tenders which created a model that attracted a lot of hot money,'' says Andrew Chambers, an infrastructure analyst at Austock. ''If the government was going to tender something like that today, the hot money wouldn't be there. The sensible money was never there.''

It's a very strange thing. The future over in Japan is that the Japanese people are going to have to pay for it through increased taxes, or lose their savings through hyper-inflation. In Australia, we're being asked to lose this money in infrastructure through the private sector ripping off investors with inflated traffic forecasts, or by losing it in lost productivity as we all sit in grid-locked traffic. There actually is no "making money" in infrastructure but everybody keeps deluding themselves that infrastructure ought to be this great money-spinner for investors or governments. Maybe everybody needs to go back to the drawing board and re-define how infrastructure actually functions in our society.

2011/03/05

Corporate Welfare

Excuse Me While I Punch This Ticket

This one came in from Pleiades today. It's about how our tax dollars end up helping Hollywood productions and how awful this is.
Confirming Sir Humphrey Appleby’s famous principle that you should “never commission an inquiry without knowing the outcome first”, the federal Arts Department’s 2010 Review of the Australian Independent Screen Production Sector makes a series of rosy findings about the state of the sector and the effectiveness of the government’s Australian Screen Production Incentive, a large tax refund to film producers.

More money is certainly leaving Treasury coffers: the report states that “in the three years since the introduction of the Australian Screen Production Incentive, the government has provided $412.1 million in support through the tax system, compared to $136.7 million in the three years before the package.”

But delve further into the report, and all sorts of questions start to pop up. First and foremost is the crucial question of whether those extra taxpayer dollars are really stimulating an upswing in domestic production across the board, or merely co-financing large Hollywood studio films such as Happy Feet 2 and Australia.

Arts Minister Simon Crean trumpeted the review’s findings. “The boost in government funding is a great achievement and contributing to the viability of the local film production industry,” he announced in a media release.

“Although it’s still early days, the increase in activity, particularly the production of Australian large budget films, such as Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and George Miller’s Happy Feet 2, and the box office performance of films such as Tomorrow, When the War Began shows the government support for the sector is having a significant impact.”

In fact, a close reading of the review suggests that the effect of the new funding arrangements is far less positive than the minister and the department claim. Much of the extra money — $169 million, in fact — has gone to foreign movie studios in the form of international production subsidies, though that’s not a fact that the review chose to highlight. But despite this, levels of foreign production in Australia have actually been falling, as the strengthening Aussie dollar and strong competition from other countries and locations have made the foreign production incentives less attractive.

On the surface, it's true, it is awful; But there are many other considerations, namely just how marketable Australian Films are in the international market place, and what is the likely return on the investment, that couch the awfulness of this happening. A film industry can't exist without an audience for it, has been the painful lesson of the Australian Film Industry during the FFC years. Trying something else is worthwhile.

There are many gremlins in that discussion of what that something else might be as well, but to cut a long story short, in an international distribution market that is half dominated by Hollywood, a film industry would be crazy not to put half its eggs in that basket. Rightly or wrongly (and there are many who say it's all wrong) American cinema dominates the market place in the anglophone world to the extent it is the representative cinema of the English speaking world. The rest of the anglophone cinemas of the UK, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand are in effect voices of the opposition in the wilderness, so to speak.

However, the audience makes no such distinctions. They go out to watch movies they think would be worth their ticket price. If that involves car chases an explosions and sex scenes (but without genitals) then they're happier than quirky Australian films about homosexuals and misfits with no particular point of joy. And God only knows the FFC was responsible for cavalcade of unwanted films like that. As Doug Mulray famously joked, you could have a story like 'Pitch Black and the Seven Pygmies', and if you had a one-legged Aborigine lesbian in it, we could get government funding to turn it into an Australian Film.

On the FFC, the article has this to say:
The review confirms a subtle shift in Australian screen funding priorities away from backing emerging film-makers and new voices and towards big budget, Hollywood-financed productions. This may result in bigger box offices for bigger-budget Australian films — or it may not. The federal government’s last effort at supporting commercial film finance was the Film Film Corporation, a 20-year initiative that acted as a for-profit investor in feature production. The FFC lost more than a billion dollars in that time-frame, booking investment returns of negative 80%.

The new policy gets around this problem by simply giving tax refunds to big producers, regardless of how much money their film eventually makes. And it’s uncapped and open-ended: the bigger the budget of the film, the larger the taxpayer contribution.

Obviously you can't win them all. It would be an ideal world where the Australian Film Industry didn't need any government funding at all. It would be even better if we didn't have to keep qualifying it with being an 'Australian' film industry - just, the film industry in Australia. It would be a nice day when every film made in Australia i a worthy world beater and a classic in cinema to parallel 'Citizen Kane' and 'Battleship Potemkin'. Like, that's ever going to happen.

All the same, because a film industry in Australia isn't viable, and yet there is so much cultural pressure that there ought to be a film industry no matter what, the governments of both Federal and State levels end up handing out monies. Undeniably , it is a bleak form of corporate welfare. The fact that a lot of it goes to Hollywood who don't seem to need it is perhaps besides the point, as it is used to employ Aussies to ply their trades.

Mind you, a better use of the money might be to buy shares in the Hollywood studios and appoint a board member  from Australia who uses his clout and *forces* these studios to make more films with Australian content in Australia. But of course nobody thinks of that, right?

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