News That's Fit To Punt - 7/Oct/2016

Ross Higgins (1931 -2016)

The only thing I know Ross Higgins from was that execrable show 'Kingswood Country'. 'Kingswood Country' loomed over the early1980s like a cloud of politically incorrect humour disguised as witticisms. As Ted Bullpitt, Ross Higgins was the star of the show that ostensibly poked fun at the suburbanite with a narrow mind. The problem was that if you lived in the suburbs back then, you were surrounded by people who took it as validation of their politically incorrect positions.

I'm not entirely sure where Ross Higgins stood in relationship to his creation; there was an element where the character was much larger than the show so Higgins ended up plugging insecticide in his Ted Bullpitt persona. One thing that was clear that I could see was that Ted Bullpitt crystallised a certain kind of cultural posture in Australia that goes around bullying migrants.

In the case of St Ives High School where I was in 1980, it manifested itself as a massive bullying of a kid in the year above me, who was from Chile. Yes, in St. Ives, that was the closest thing the local orcs could find to calling a 'bloody wog'. The bullying was merciless and pretty much out of control on the school bus, outside of the school grounds where the teachers could not see.

It was one of the most unfair treatments of a fellow student I have ever seen - and believe me, until 6months before then, I'd been living in New York City. If this was racism, I'd never seen anything so fierce and awful; and if this was xenophobia I'd never seen anything so hostile and full of hate. Ted Bullpitt wasn't inciting the hated, that much is true. The problem was that the weekly does of Ted Bullpitt on TV was legitimating this hideous bullying through validating this persona. It gave kids licence to be as vile and horrid. It was no joke, it was more identity politics gone completely wrong.

So the two things I've never really forgiven are St. Ives High School and 'Kingswood Country'. As for Ross Higgins, I'll never really know.

Selling The Poles

What might pass for the Coalition Government's Anti-Arts Anti-Sports policy, a Coalition Senator wants to investigate cutting all  government funding to sport and the arts, as well as selling off 'Blue Poles'.

The firesale was necessary to fix Australia's bloated budget deficit, he argued – although the $350 million painting represents only about 0.07 per cent of the country's $470 billion gross national debt. 

Appearing on Melbourne's 3AW radio with Neil Mitchell, Senator Paterson was asked where the belt-tightening would end. 

"Why do we fund $7 billion a year into the arts and who knows how many billions into sport?" Mitchell asked. "Maybe we reassess and say let's fix some grassroots problems and forget about sport and the arts?" 

"I agree, Neil," Senator Paterson replied. "$39 billion deficit last year. It's not a time when we can really be affording luxury. We've got to look at all areas of spending. 

"I find it difficult to understand why Australia is so generous when it comes to professional sport. Given that there's a lot of private funding for professional sport, I don't think it's really necessary for us to be funding it from our taxes." 

Senator Paterson also volunteered Australia Post as "the next cab off the rank" for full privatisation, but drew the line at junking the $200 million same-sex marriage plebiscite to save money. "It's something we took to the election," he said.

It's sort of funny when you consider the Liberal Government in NSW wants to sell off the electricity poles, there might be some Freudian meme in there somewhere.

There's at the famous story of some ministers wanting to cut arts funding in the UK during World War II and Winston Churchill responding "then why are we fighting this war?" Surely somewhere in the dim dark past the conservatives were for the arts. It's only because they hated the counter-culture so much in the 1960s that they've alienated themselves from the arts and by extension cultural undertakings in this country. There's a reason why there are so many philistines walking around Australia; it's because the Coalition has worked very hard to create them so that they can vote for the Coalition. It shouldn't surprise us that with the absolute dearth of brain power going towards the right that the best they can throw up is a 28 year old Senator with the mind of a philistine, a body of a philistine, but not the same philistine.

It gets worse:

Speaking to Fairfax Media later, Senator Paterson declined to go into further detail about axing funding for sport and the arts. "One privatisation a day is enough," he said, clarifying that he was making "a general philosophical point" about the use of taxpayers' money. 

"When you've got a $40 billion budget deficit, every item of spending needs to be scrutinised more closely," he said. "Let's fight that battle once I've got Blue Poles privatised - uh, sold." 

Senator Paterson said former prime minister John Howard and former treasurer Peter Costello exemplified debt reduction strategies because they mixed structural budget repair with privatisation, such as the sale of Telstra. 

"They would not have been able to pay back the debt with just one or the other. You have to do a bit of everything," he said. 

His main objection to Blue Poles was that it was an American artwork with little cultural value here. "It's a great painting and it's had a huge impact on the art world, but it's not Australian," he told 3AW.

Funny that. If you're going to complain about a work of art hanging in the National ArtGallery not being Australian, you might want to invest in Australian artists a bit more not less. You know, through arts fundings, through state organs like the Australia Council. (God, I don't think I can do this much longer, pointing out the logical inconsistencies of an intellectually deficient government.  I really ought to quit.)

There are people who would love it that the government funding for the Arts was in the order of $40 billion, and that it could be cut. Ah, would that it were so simple.

"'T'werrrrr." That we do elect such imbeciles says a lot about our polity; but then so do all the other things this government does and says.

News That's Fit To Punt - 13/May/2015

We Live In A Peeping Tom Kind Of World

Pleiades had this link for me today. It's about how the NSA surveillance reaches and, to not put too fine a point on it, they reach everywhere for everybody.

Few people, for example, are aware that a NSA program known as TREASUREMAP is being developed to continuously map every Internet connection — cellphones, laptops, tablets — of everyone on the planet, including Americans. 

“Map the entire Internet,” says the top secret NSA slide. “Any device, anywhere, all the time.” It adds that the program will allow “Computer Attack/Exploit Planning” as well as “Network Reconnaissance.” 

One reason for the public’s lukewarm concern is what might be called NSA fatigue. There is now a sort of acceptance of highly intrusive surveillance as the new normal, the result of a bombardment of news stories on the topic. 

I asked Snowden about this. “It does become the problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic,” he replied, “where today we have the violation of one person’s rights is a tragedy and the violation of a million is a statistic. The NSA is violating the rights of every American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can numb us. That can leave us feeling disempowered, disenfranchised.”

In the same way, at the start of a war, the numbers of Americans killed are front-page stories, no matter how small. But two years into the conflict, the numbers, even if far greater, are usually buried deep inside a paper or far down a news site’s home page.

So basically, if a crime is blatant and big enough, we stop caring. I guess there's some democratic insight into that. We all get taxed. We all get perved. If it's a burden of civilisation that falls upon us equally, maybe we just stop seeing it as an issue and just "learn to love the bomb", so to speak.

That being said...

In addition, stories about NSA surveillance face the added burden of being technically complex, involving eye-glazing descriptions of sophisticated interception techniques and analytical capabilities. Though they may affect virtually every American, such as the telephone metadata program, because of the enormous secrecy involved, it is difficult to identify specific victims. 

The way the surveillance story appeared also decreased its potential impact. Those given custody of the documents decided to spread the wealth for a more democratic assessment of the revelations. They distributed them through a wide variety of media — from start-up Web publications to leading foreign newspapers.

One document from the NSA director, for example, indicates that the agency was spying on visits to porn sites by people, making no distinction between foreigners and “U.S. persons,” U.S. citizens or permanent residents. He then recommended using that information to secretly discredit them, whom he labeled as “radicalizers.” But because this was revealed by The Huffington Post, an online publication viewed as progressive, and was never reported by mainstream papers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, the revelation never received the attention it deserved.

That bits a lot more troubling. Even if this blog has nothing to do with porn, the NSA probably has you tagged as a 'radicalized' (sic) entity. Worse still, the powers that allowed the NSA to do this in America are up for renewal. It's been 14years since 9/11 and really, they have very little to show for doing all this perving.

What Next? The Academy Of Degenerate Art?

The picture of a publicly elected official handing out money to artists directly is not a good look. The Arts Council adds a kind of layer of respectability because presumably some committee meets and adds a cushion between the powers of the day and the artists seeking a grant. But why bother with the semblance of respectable distance when you can just control the budget and hand it out to your favourites?

$104.8 million over four years has been ripped out of the Australia Council’s budget to create a new slush fund, apparently to be decided at the discretion of the Arts Minister of the day. 

The funding cuts total $29 million in the coming year, a cut of 16 per cent for the Australia Council on 2014’s appropriation.
'The National Centre for Excellence in the Arts will allow for a truly national approach to arts funding and will deliver on a number of Government priorities including national access to high quality arts and cultural experiences,' Minister Brandis wrote in a media release.

The budget also removes $5.2 million in funding from the Australia Council, and gives it to Creative Partnerships Australia 'to foster private sector support for the arts'.
In the ministerial media release that accompanies the announcement, Minister Brandis launched a veiled attack on the independence and arms-length funding processes of the Australia Council. 

'Funds for these programmes will be transferred to the Ministry for the Arts from the Australia Council, ensuring that government support is available for a broader range of arts and cultural activities,' Brandis states in the media release.

'Arts funding has until now been limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts will make funding available to a wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia’s audiences.'

What Mr. Brandis means by 'a wider range', God only knows (as in, "God Help Us All, God Help Us All"). The Arts Council already helps props up the vast village of cottage industries that subsist on government largesse, creating the propaganda that there is worthy Australian Arts - that while the average Australian might not opt to partake of it in any meaningful sense, we'd like to wave around at foreigners as something else to look at in-between a Koala and a Kangaroo. It's hard to say one liked Australia Council before but it's equally hard to say that what George Brandis is doing is any kind of improvement.

Oh, and they cut Screen Australia again. I admit I take great sadistic delight in this. It's more proof that your enemy's enemy is not your friend but still of some bloody use.

Speaking Of Western Civilisation

It so happens to turn out that the guy who started 'Jim's Mowing' has a PhD in history.

Who knew that the Jim behind Jim’s Mowing has a PhD in history? It turns out that Jim Penman only became an entrepreneur because couldn’t get a job as an academic.
Founding and running Jim’s Group has kept Penman pretty busy, but he snatched time here and there to continue his research and published various articles in peer-reviewed journals. Now, 32 years after completing his doctorate at Latrobe University, Penman has published a book called Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West. As the name suggests, Penman believes that Western Civilisation is already decades into a decline that could be terminal.  

His book applies the study of epigenetics – a branch of biology that looks at changes in genetic expression as a result of environmental influences rather than changes to the DNA sequence. Penman’s premise with biohistory is that trends in history have roots in biology – and there is more of this in the book and also on the website where there are two videos explaining the theory. 

It's quite an interesting interview. I can't say I agree with the man, his politics sucks, but he does make some interesting points. He thinks Western Civilisation is in rapid decline.

BRW: What is the cause of this civilisation decline? 

JP: “It’s to do with wealth. It’s the same thing that occurred in the Roman Empire and every other civilisation. When you become wealthy and urbanised, it changes temperaments and behaviours in a way that makes people less disciplined, less hard working, in the end less enterprising. It takes a few generations to take place and epigenetics explains why that happens. People think that technology is going to save us but in fact technology makes it worse because it makes us so rich.” 

BRW: Yet you said that Jim’s Group was investing heavily in technology – can it also be a force for good? 

JP: “Technology makes it worse to the extent that it makes everybody rich and that makes us have too much food. But technology that makes us understand the science to fight against those effects would be a good thing. If we could find a way to reverse it so people would not be inclined to eat too much and naturally want to eat less and be more disciplined in their lives, that would be a good thing.

“Technology is very exciting – Jim’s Group right now is investing heavily in new efficiencies and systems and I love it and think it’s fantastic, but we’ve got to use it in good ways not bad ways. Nitrogen-fixing technology is fantastic and helps us feed the world but it also makes it possible to have huge explosions and devastating wars.

I'm not sure I even agree with that last sentence for instance. He seems be a man beset by ideas about civilisation he can't let go, but he's blind to his own ideological bias.

News That's Fit To Punt - 26/Oct/2012

The Currency War

The Australian currency has been stuck above parity for some time and not even the lowering of interest rates has provided any 'relief' for the export industries of Australia.Except there's no relief in sight.

Pleiades sent in this link today as a kind of heads-up.

According to (ANZ boss Mike) Smith, the Reserve Bank criteria for interest rate decisions should be dominated by the dollar. I pointed out yesterday that the currency wars and the money printing taking place in Europe and the US could send the Australian dollar much higher. Smith says that the huge liquidity in the system is going to start speculation on commodities and with the consequent higher prices will come an Australian dollar that goes even higher.

Interest rates become the only weapon the Reserve Bank has to prevent the further damage that is in store for our employment creating industries like tourism, education and manufacturing.

Mike Smith adds that central bankers are far wiser than he on these matters. I think Smith is absolutely right about everything except that last point. Smith is mixing in global markets every day and he is hearing concern around the regions about the repercussions of the US and European money printing and the currency war.

The contention there is that the Reserve Bank should probably cut interest rates in order not to  attract foreign interest in our currency. Forget the housing bubble, just go to near zero interest rates.

I've been pondering that on this afternoon, and I think this is a crock. The cost of living in Australia is so far out of line with the CPI that nobody believes the inflation figures any more - they think it's much higher. This suggests that the interest rates should be sitting much higher than where they've been for at least a good decade. Mike Smith asking for the interest rates to be lowered is effective asking for there to be so much cheap money, it should inflate the value of property once again. In other words, the ANZ Bank chief is asking for a Price Keeping Operation to be staged out of the RBA.

One imagines the hope there is that if there's so much cheap money around, surely it will get sucked into the property market and reignite those big gains in the banks' balance sheets. You have to wonder if this isn't just another vested interest mouthing off, because it sure sounds like it.

Hewson Slams Vested Interests

There's one thing about John Hewson we can all be certain about - he was Australia' Mitt Romney without the Mormonism but with Economic Rationalism as his religion instead. If nothing else he gave the Liberal Party some kind of ideological frame work from which to work, and some of it has worked out well for Australia.

It's interesting then when he pipes up and lobs a verbal grenade in the direction of the NSW government and its approval of Jamie Packer building a second casino for Sydney.

Dr Hewson said he wasn’t opposed to a hotel or a second casino license for Sydney.
However, the process had to be seen to be clean and above board, and the government shouldn’t give rise to concerns it was being compromised by vested interests.
‘‘This is sort of chipping away at the whole integrity of government process,’’ he said.

So, there's that phrase again: vested interest.

Small Arts Companies Get The Squeeze

Pleiades sent in this one as well, about how small arts companies are getting less money now that everybody is having to look for some austerity.

Exactly why these companies are called “small-to-medium”, by the way, is one of the mysteries of the sector. Most turn over less than $2 million a year, the threshold the Australian Taxation Office considers a “micro-business”. Organisations that the arts calls “medium-sized” are in fact small in any objective sense of the word. Nearly all of them are run on the proverbial smell of the oily rag, with perhaps three or four full-time administrative staff.

This diminutive scale makes many small arts companies vulnerable to the slings and arrows of artistic fortune. They have few assets and little in the way of cash reserves. If the funding disappears, most can’t survive in the long term. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Fremantle-based Deckhair Theatre wind up after 30 years of independent production, and Adelaide choreographer Leigh Warren “go freelance” to keep his dance studio afloat. Both companies have been defunded in recent years.

The problem for the small-to-medium sector is that the funding appears to be drying up. With the Australia Council getting squeezed by the federal government’s efficiency dividend, Commonwealth funding is actually falling in real terms. Nor is any extra pot of gold awaiting beneath an unexpected rainbow. Arts Minister Simon Crean appears to have conceded that he can’t get the National Cultural Policy up this year.

You feel for these arts companies. They have a tougher proposition than film producers for a start.

One of the things that the Liberal Party embraced gingerly toward the end of their time before the Ruddslide was the fact that a lot of people in the arts were small business as well; and that the conservatives' general disregard for the arts and arts funding had created a massive gulf between it and the arts community in Australia. Certainly, under most of John Howard's tenure as PM, the prevailing mood was that all arts participants were left-voting scumbag and deserved not one iota from the public purse. When you realise how many of these small arts companies are around, you wonder why and how a party in favour of small businesses could have treated them with neglect for so long.

In turn, you'd have to say that the ALP for its money has taken for granted that people in the arts are generally more socially progressive and have bred a variety of arts bureaucrats that form a crazy subculture of their own, and choke off the promise of the arts itself. You get the feeling that the ALP is a latter day Stalinist apparatus that seeks to ideologically constrain discourse through the arts by funding particular kinds of things that never makes any money.

So I guess it's not surprising they get slammed by the likes of John Roskam in the AFR:

The health of Australian democracy should not be measured by the number of students enrolled in gender studies.

In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding  published in 1748, David Hume described the work of a certain species of philosopher. What he said could apply to the academics in the humanities in Australia in 2012.

“Though their speculations seem abstract, and even unintelligible to common readers, they aim at the approbation of the learned and the wise; and think themselves sufficiently compensated for the labour of their whole lives, if they can discover some hidden truths, which may contribute to the instruction of posterity.”

The pity is that the majority who teach humanities at Australian universities are a long way from discovering any hidden truths or making a contribution to the instruction of posterity.

That's a bit mean. earlier in the column is a castigation about French critics who forged a path to an unbridled kind of relativism in the late 20th Century that continues to appall moralists the world over; but that's not surprising that a conservative think tank would take offense to Derrida and Foucault. Derrida, of course being that 'Obscurantist Terror' - and there's a war going against terror to this day.

Jokes aside, the two articles give you the distinct feeling that the arts really are not valued or are important in our cultural life in Australia. More to the point, we're a nation of hardened, committed, willful, fully ideological, philistines. It's a shame the arts as a vested interest holds absolutely no sway over the conscience of this nation.