News That's Fit To Punt - 30/Nov/2016

Can't Do Anything Right

It's really strange that it took a Liberal Government to put a light rail link in from scratch. Unsurprisingly, they've done a pretty bad job of it.

The NSW government failed to "effectively plan and procure" Sydney's $2.1 billion inner-city light rail project, resulting in a blowout in costs and reduced benefits. 

In a scathing report released on Wednesday, NSW Auditor-General Margaret Crawford said the government's management of the light rail project "suffered many of the same problems" as found with the $16.8 billion WestConnex motorway and the Albert "Tibby" Cotter bridge at Moore Park."Common problems include tight timeframes without justification, project scope defined too narrowly, underestimated costs and overestimated benefits," her report found.

The 2013 business case for the light rail line from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kensington in the city's east budgeted on the project costing $1.6 billion, but a year later it had blown out to $2.1 billion.

They were in such a hurry to green light major infrastructure, they seem to have literally thrown money at it willy-nilly. As with WasteConnex, they've shot through the budget, but they don't really care. No, no, no. Because when you think about it, all the money wasted goes into the lobby that asked for these infrastructure projects and it's the tax payer who foots the bill. The excesses are simply gravy.

It's amazing how vested interests can control a political party so effectively and the only people complain are those directly impacted. The rest of the polity just lets it happen.

But Do They Have The Balls To Follow Through?

Yes, the Federal government in its time of budget shortfalls finally notices the billions going offshore from Australia in the guise of LNG.

The numbers begged not to be ignored by Canberra. 

LNG revenue was set to mushroom from $5 billion to $60 billion over a decade but PRRT returns would sink from a paltry $1.2 billion to a frankly embarrassing $800 million. 

Currently, the only PRRT payments are coming from mature oil rig operations in Bass Strait. 

Effectively, Australia is giving away 85.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for free. Well, to be sold by fossil fuel companies to Japan, Korea and China. 

It was a dogged group of Tax Justice Network advocates - the same people who launched the corporate tax avoidance research that eventually resulted in the Coalition's diverted profit tax - who saw the scandal in the PRRT. 

TJN spokesman Mark Zirnsak, strategist Anthony Reed and researcher Jason Ward drilled into frightening numbers that contributed to a series of stories acknowledged by shadow treasurer Chris Bowen on Wednesday as having precipitated political action this week. 

Morrison's announcement of a "comprehensive" inquiry led by respected bureaucrat Mike Callaghan was a moment where the fiscal wood has been separated from the trees by Morrison.

So Scott Morrison is going to have a comprehensive inquiry he says. This is the government that killed the Mining Rent Resources Tax, so you wonder how they are going to get their silly little heads around 180 degrees in the opposite direction and actually get revenue from what is rightfully for and of Australia. We'll see how that goes. Lord knows there's enough stupid in Canberra but money is money and this is money just slipping off shore without any discussion, let alone any argument.

Dolly Is Dead

No, not the cloned sheep. It's the printed version of that magazine for young girls that is coming to an end.

In a statement, Bauer said the magazine is "responding to the changing demands of how readers engage with the brand by switching it to an exclusively digital model". 

It said November was the biggest month for online traffic in Dolly's history. 

"It is estimated that Dolly will hit 1.2 million [online] sessions this month," Bauer said. "As a result, Dolly magazine will cease to be published bi-monthly. 

"Dolly.com.au will continue to cover breaking celebrity news, fashion, beauty and lifestyle content, with popular fixtures such as Dolly Doctor."

A number of staff are expected to be impacted.

It's interesting that Bauer are putting out the line that the magazine is going to continue as an on-line entity, but that's a bit like saying people live on after death as ghosts and this is a good thing for seances. The writing is on the wall. Nobody buys magazines any more least of all those born this side of the Sydney Olympics. You can't sell media to people who are used to getting it for free.

It's amazing because if they're ceasing to print, they're giving up the ad revenue as well. It has got to be a sure sign that the rest of the magazine businesses are on death row. If there is a demographic coming through that doesn't buy magazines, you can see that there are a whole bunch of magazines that cater to the older demographic that will succumb to this generation not buying media as they grow older. When you add that tot he people turning off free-to-air TV, the mainstream media as we knew it is in massive retreat. Dolly quitting is indeed the canary in the coal mine of mainstream media.

You wonder if anybody will be able to do media and make money in the next 20 years.
So, yes, I'm calling it as a very significant moment.

BTW people, click on some ads on this page for me will you? I need to make a living too. :)

View From The Couch - 19/Oct/2015

What Kind Of Man Reads Playboy?

Sometime last week, it made the news that Playboy magazine was no longer going to feature nude models. A thousand smart alec remarks would have been launched to such news. Instead, the women will be scantily clad, unprovocative poses, but not nude. In a day and age where Australia's leading lad mag 'Zoo' was forced to close shop, it seems rather retrograde that Playboy retreats to a position of further modesty, but perhaps on another level, subtlety is the new 'adult' thing.

At a time when every teenage boy has an internet connected phone and the web is rife with pornography, the magazine has opted to continue featuring women in provocative poses, just not completely nude, the Times said. 

"You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free," Flanders was quoted as saying in the Times. "And so it's just passe at this juncture." 

The magazine that featured Marilyn Monroe on its debut cover in 1953 is making the changes after circulation dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now, the Times said.

That is a relatively slow decline compared to some other magazines. Playboy always elicited strange responses from guys I knew. They would dismiss it as too tame (and therefore lame) next to the more explicit Penthouse magazine, and in the next breath denounce it as all sexist bullshit. Playboy's awkwardness probably lay in its decidedly middle-brow posture which gave it away as somewhat an illegitimate contributor to the public sphere of ideas. It's a quality it shares with Rolling Stone, but of course Rolling Stone magazine gets extra credit from people for dealing with popular music and not naked women. One can't help but think it's a kind prudery because Playboy was no less progressive than Rolling Stone ever was when it came to social mores. 

If you think about 1950s America before Alfred Kinsey threw open his Kinsey Report, there probably wasn't any forum or framework for the discussion of sex and the pleasures of carnality. It might seem quaint today but Playboy probably lifted the blinds on the collective bedrooms of the mind. As a society we've come a long way since those days to the point where any teenager can click on the internet and find the most explicit porn to their choosing. It sure didn't turn out this without Playboy magazine along the way. 

Try this article for the impact of Playboy on the public consciousness:

The November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine is the magazine’s best selling issue of all time. This is not because of the articles, but due to the proliferation of one iconic image from the magazine: that of centrefold model Lena Söderberg. 

The original image was digitised by researches at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) in 1973. Alexander Sawchuk, the assistant professor of electrical engineering, his graduate student and the SIPI lab manager were frantically looking for a new image for a research paper. 

They had already exhausted the stock of usual test images. It was at this moment — according to legend — that a colleague walked in with the November 1972 issue of Playboy. Seeing the predicament that the researches were in, he tore a 5.12-inch strip from the top of the centrefold and fed it to their scanner. As it had a resolution of 100 lines per inch, the resulting image was the perfectly cropped head and shoulders image 512 x 512 pixels in size. 

This image has since been used widely in imaging processing circles. That’s because the nature of the image makes it amenable for testing a wide range of image processing algorithms.

Here's an article that gives you a better digest of Playboy than I can. 

Playboy was always exceptionally decent. Hugh Hefner was helped by a start-up loan from his mother, not Satan. And Playboy had an impeccable record of literary publishing. Ray Bradbury's epochal Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in 1954 and the magazine hosted Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, John Le Carre and John Updike - not at all a shabby list. Presumably, they did not think of themselves as slumming it.

Photographers at work on Playboy included Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and Annie Leibovitz. The magazine interviewed major political figures, including Martin Luther King and President Carter. It was the latter who mournfully explained in 1976 that he had "committed adultery in my heart many times". I think he must have meant "head", because the big truth about erotica is that the real action takes place above the collar, not below the belt. Hence, Playboy's late decision to cover up its nudes does very little to defuse eroticism. In the contest between concealment and display, concealment is almost always more sexy: this is why classic Playboy nudes are actually so deliciously chaste.

That is an amazing list of names to have written and taken photos for Playboy. There is a Japanese edition of Playboy. It is remarkably similar in philosophy to its American source. They too hired some of the great writers and photographers to contribute and in most part it was more edifying than not. Nudes are nice, but the articles were the thing. Not that I've looked at any edition of Playboy since the 1980s so it's hard to say if the standard has been maintained. 

Sometime in the mid 1980s, Andy Summers and Robert Fripp teamed up to give us the album 'Bewitched'. On it is an epic instrumental track 'What Kind of Man Reads Playboy'. I always took it to be an ironic, subtle admission of their prurient interest in pictures of naked ladies. Today, I'm thinking they meant it was a very different kind of man to look past the naked ladies to actually read the amazing articles contained within. 

Bread & Circuses Part 2

So There Was A Protest Yesterday...

Make of this what you will.

Dancers were out in force in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday as part of Australia-wide protests against more than $100m in cuts to the country's top arts funding body, the Australia Council. Around 100 artists and members of the arts industry turned up to perform the so-called 'dance action'. Arts minister George Brandis attracted criticism for his decision to cut funding in the May budget.

I learnt of this protest action late last night at a dinner, marking the launch of Vivid Sydney 2015, which is ironic because Vivid Sydney - as far as anybody can tell - is a kind of state-sponsored arts festival and if people got money from the Australia Council to do artistic things, that too is a State-spomsored art, as much as any arts body person who receives the money from George Brandis' office directly. It's all a kind of propaganda more than proper art, and by proper, I mean art that finds both creation and audience from the artist's own practice and application. Without a doubt it goes to what I wrote about in my recent entry, about bread and circuses.

As somebody whose arts repertoire is rock music and film and writing, it's really quite hard to relate to the artists who need government monies to continue their craft. If you are a ballet dancer or a fine Shakespearean actor, chances are you need to work with some kind of body that gets this state-sponsorship. Those people are working in an area of the arts where the market is no guarantee to sustain you, and in turn, there are heavy cultural reasons to sustain these arts. This is why we have the  theatre companies and dance companies we have - good or not-so-good as they may be. I myself am not a great fan of these big old arts companies but it is clear that we need an active pool of practitioners to sustain the entire arts in general.

That being said, if you play rock music like I do, you fund yourself, and your entire adventures are risks you bear by yourself. Nobody I know ever got an arts grant from the Australia Council to record their rock album; and that's probably the way it should be. As a film maker in Australia, the majority of my production experience has been outside the funding structure. Any time I have approached bodies it has been painful, humiliating, insulting and irrelevant so I can't say I'm a big fan of the government sponsorship model of cinema any more. As for writing, well, here you are reading what I do in my spare hours and there's no government money involved here. I was working on a novel for a while but it's not like I was getting government sponsorship money at any time while I did so. I know writers who do, but it's just different when you take the government's money.

You get the picture. I'm a pretty committed arts practitioner but I have the strong (but odd) 'luxury' of not having to answer to a government body. The exchange for this luxury is that my life is nothing like my friends who are not in the arts. My friends who are in the arts are similarly afflicted with very non-standard living arrangements and family arrangements. It's not a light exchange - it's heavy, man. You do arts in Australia and you can count out the normal arrangements for family unless you're born rich.

Here's an article in the SMH that describes things bit better.

Arts leaders have stepped up their campaign against the federal government's cuts to the Australia Council in a national day of protest that included a "mass dance action" to demonstrate their displeasure. 

About 300 people turned out in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday despite wet conditions and performed the "hoofer dance" from a clip by Melbourne band Fondue Set. 

Speakers echoed Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's comments that the transfer of $105 million from the Australia Council to the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts, controlled by the arts ministry, was a politicised power grab by Arts Minister George Brandis.

Hmmm. 300 people. Like Spartans of Art at the Thermopylae for government funding, dancing in protest.

I was lambasted at the dinner table for not being there at the protest, by an artist who did go to the protest. I told him, for a start I didn't even know it was happening, and secondly I was at work at that time. I got further lambasted for my self-interest but really, who is an artist angry about how government funds the arts to judge somebody who actually has to work for a living in the arts industry, and doesn't have the liberty to go protesting at the drop of a hat?

As I wrote a few days ago, it's not like I'm not sympathetic, but we're talking about entire programs of funding the arts from the government. Colour me somewhat unimpressed. I do understand the problem for people who do rely on the government and may be somewhat institutionalised in their need for the government to dispense its funding in the way it has established for over 45years. George Brandis is cutting off the teat from which they suckle. That would be rough.

The complaint is that George Brandis has taken 104 million dollars out of Australia Council and is going to give it to his favourite artists directly on the basis of ideological alignment. Yes, it totally sucks and is perfectly in line with what the Nazi government did in the 1930s and I say that without any equivocation or exaggeration. It is highly suspect, if not downright rotten. With that part of it, I certainly agree. George Brandis is essentially behaving like Dr. Goebbels but without the Jew-Killing program. I get it.

"So why weren't you there at the protest?" I was asked. "Self-interest kept you away!" the artist thundered.

Partly because that $104 million will still go to some person(s) in the arts. Just not the regular Australia Council roster recipients. It's not like it got completely taken away from the arts and given to constructing a football stadium or something of the ilk. It's still, presumably going to some other parts of the arts industry who are presumably not so stridently pro-ALP and anti-Coalition. It sucks that it's going to some reactionary, but it's still going to the arts - just not to the classic trendy Left crowd. Is this really as big a protest-worthy-thing as say, asylum seekers on boats being sent to Manus Island?

I still had to explain my Jean-Paul Sartre reasoning from 'Age of Reason' as to why the main character Mathieu does not go fight in Spain during the Spanish civil war. That he would only fight if the war was at his doorstep. Which earned me the charge of "a kind of xenophobia for other forms of arts". But it's unfortunately true. If you're me, it's really hard to sit there and try to relate to the plight of, oh I don't know, something like the Bangarra Dance company when I work for an arts company that worked its way up from the ground up without any direct or indirect government fund injection; or the plight of an artist who needs government funding to pay for materials when I've bought all my gear to do my recordings; or to some writer who needs funding to go buy time to write stuff when all you really need is pen, paper and the commitment to write.

These 300 artists protesting, as self-important as they may be, are so distant to my own experience of being an arts practitioner that they may as well be from ancient Greece. In the broadest strokes, if you were getting money for your work before from the state, and now you are not, the general term for that condition is, you got fired. The reason you get fired at most workplaces is if your work is not good enough. You can protest your layoff all you like and you do get my sympathy as a fellow practitioner, but it does make me wonder if your work is any good at all.

As you can imagine that conversation didn't go down well with the artist at all.

The (Culture) Vultures Are Dying

Book Wars

The possibility of parallel imports of books has got Australian publishers spooked. They're campaigning hard to keep the status quo because bottom line, that's where their margins reside. To this end, they've enlisted the likes of Tim Winton to pitch in on the lobbying. The weird thing is, I think Tim Winton might stand to gain something if these changes were to be brought in, not suffer.

I've been told by people that Tim Winton owes it to front for these publishers, which is why he's lending his name to the lobbying effort. I can imagine that, well enough. I can remember when musicians of certain acclaim took to lobbying against parallel imports of CDs, and that didn't really wash either.

The deal that exists at the moment is that parallel imports are not allowed, and Australian publishers have 30days to put out a book that has been published overseas. So let's say Stephen King puts out a new book. The Australian publisher for Stephen King has 30days to print the Australian edition of the book and get it on the market, and in turn, the American edition does not make it on to our shores - unless somebody orders it through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

What has the publishers irked is that they claim they can't put out the Australian version cheaper than the American or British versions thank to the economies of scale. Therefore they contend that it will be the end of them as publishers of Australian fiction as well.

I've been racking my brains about this a bit because books are interestingly resistant to piracy unlike movies and music. Not that it doesn't exist but it certainly isn't what is going to fell the publishing business as what Piracy has done to music.

The only advantage an Australian publisher would have over an overseas publisher is actually their proximity to Australian writers. You would think that the changes would force them to think of ways to make more money off Australian authors instead. Of course, it's not looking quite that way, and if I can make a character charge against the larger Australian publishers, I'll say this: they haven't exactly been nurturing literature in this nation as well as they would have. In fact they've done a piss poor job for a long time, principally by being lazy and always looking for the safest bets.

Yep, I said. But hey, this is the way this blog is about.

Thus it comes with no surprise that the big publishers don't want changes to the status quo; no, that would mean they'd actually have to go looking for serious talent and invest time in nurturing them and sharing in their risks. You get the feeling that all the big publishers in this country want to do is sell cook books and travelogues instead.

Literature? Forget it.

Just to be sure I asked a small publisher that specialises in poetry - yes, Puncher and Wattman - how all this might affect them and the answer was that it wouldn't. Because they publish Australian poetry, it wasn't as if there were big printing presses in America and UK out to flood the market with competing versions of Australian poetry. And in turn, it's not as if they're going to change their focus from Australian poetry which means the changes aren't going to hit them at all. It sounded like they almost welcomed it.

Then the conversation turned to just how much they were selling and it came down to an interesting observation. Considering how Australians claim to care about Australian culture, it was remarkable how few people actually put their money where their mouths were.

"About 1.5%?" I asked in jest.

1.5% is the market penetration of Australian filmsin the Australian box office. It would surprise me none to find Australian authors have made about the same penetration as their cinematic cousins.