Sloppy research is unhealthy

I remember when libertarians had initiative in questioning the basic assumptions of how we govern ourselves, and are governed. You still get small numbers of classical liberals, like Stephen Kirchner or Andrew Norton, who bother to do research to test their theories, but these tend to be the exception. Even Jason Soon will do this to some extent, and when he doesn't you can criticise him for it knowing that he recognises sloppy research is a bad thing.

I suspect that the disappointment of John Howard, who talked a good game about small government when in opposition but who abandoned libertarianism once in office, has turned libertarians to cynicism. These days, libertarians distinguish themselves by pooh-poohing any suggestion that comes up, that any change at all will be worse that what we have and might get.

The prime example of this is silly Chris Berg.

The Federal Government's Preventative Health Taskforce has spent the past year coming up with creative little ideas ...

Because any idea they could have is "little", or even "bad"(see below) eh Chris?

On Tuesday, the taskforce delivered its recommendations to Canberra. But they've been dripping out their proposals to the media for a few weeks.

Indeed, the taskforce seems to have adopted a tactic new to policy debate: if you propose enough bad ideas in a short enough space of time, it's impossible to rebut them all.

Assuming that the only thing to do with these ideas is to rebut them, or that you have the knowledge to distinguish a good idea from a bad one.

One of the least convincing ideas is the one that has got the most attention: subsidised gym membership and fitness equipment to tackle obesity.

Yes, gyms can be expensive ... Maybe we are all craven, stingy fatties, but if we are, then it'd be a good bet that we're lazy too. A few small tax breaks or a small government-sponsored reduction in the price of a gym membership is not exactly a compelling motivator to cast aside the pizza boxes and pump weights.

Speak for yourself, Chris. Nobody is going on a jihad against pizza. A few small tax breaks don't necessarily help all the causes for which charities are set up, but the tax deduction signals a social good that adds some incentive (and you can donate less than the price of a mobile phone plan). Where did that figure come from? I'd suggest the fact that few gym memberships are used to their full value makes this a blunt instrument for achieving desired ends, and would like to see a bit of research into that. Blithe sneering doesn't help anyone.

What also doesn't help are fatuous celebrity references. Is Gwynneth Paltrow (an American lady who used to act in films) the only person you know of who goes to gyms? Does she endorse your policy, or oppose it, and would it matter either way Chris?

One of the more prominent anti-smoking proposals of the taskforce is to scrub cigarette packs of all brand identification — logos, colours, everything — as if stencilled gold foil pasted onto a cardboard box is all it takes to eliminate an individual's willpower.

The nature of an addiction is that ingesting more of the product represents a continued failure of willpower, Chris, not a demonstration of it. You'd find that out if you'd done a bit of research, fellow (there are plenty of celebrities who are addicted to nicotine, why not use them for your next piece?).

Are there really that many people who want to quit smoking, but keep being drawn back by the shiny wrapping, like a nicotine-addled magpie?

Apparently - that would explain why nicotine companies spend millions producing said packaging in that manner. As this is against the wide public interest, to reverse this would discourage non-addicts from taking it up while reinforcing its lack of appeal to those who are addicted. There's plenty of information on this if only you'd research, fellow.

We're a lot further down the nanny state's slippery slope than anybody could have predicted a few decades ago.

Not really, and again a bit of research would put the lie to that.

In the 1940s, for example, the Nazi state had been in operation for more than a decade: governments to the west and east of Germany were devoting considerable resources to its destruction. The Marshall Plan and the Warsaw Pact poured many millions of taxpayer dollars toward rebuilding societies and economies devastated by war. In the face of all this state activity, men like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek complained that various states were re-enserfing the populations who paid taxes, voted and were governed. This took considerable gall but they became recognised as great thinkers once the postwar states were strong enough to be sneered at. An English writer named George Orwell wrote a number of essays and books in which he foresaw what you call the "nanny state", Chris.

There's a big chasm between the medical world and the world of public policy ... They may have good intentions. Nobody wants Australia to be needlessly unhealthy.

You've missed the point, Chris, and that's why your article is so silly.

The health system in this country is overwhelmingly state-funded, and as such there is a public interest in driving down health costs. The demand on our health system is increasingly as a result of "lifestyle factors", ailments where the sufferer could have avoided being in a position where they need expensive medical care if only they had avoided certain addictions, or other behaviours which ultimately impose great cost on individual and state.

What would constitute needful unhealthiness? Does anyone need to be unhealthy?

But these medicos with ambitious regulatory proposals rarely consider some critical questions. Will there be unintended consequences? (Such as drinkers changing from alcopops to hard spirits since the tax was increased.)

Will there be unintended consequences of anything? Why bother getting out of bed? What made you think the alcopops tax was imposed by "medicos"? I thought it was politicians who did that. I'd be interested in seeing the research on that, and if you have it might add some of the credibility you currently lack.

There is an almost unanimous agreement among public health lobbyists and the commentariat that the Government should ban junk food advertising to children. But the Royal Journal of Medicine argues there is "no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children's food consumption".

Is this in Britain, or some part of Britain, or is it universal? If so, why haven't food companies cottoned on to this and axed their marketing departments? Did you have to wade past voluminous research to the contrary to find one piece that may support your view (or may not - volume, chapter and page no. please Chris).

Our peak communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which has repeatedly looked at the issue over the past decade, agrees.

Thank goodness they agree with Chris Berg, otherwise they'd just be another mob of bureaucratic busybodies.

Nevertheless, we still get vacuous claims about "pester-power" — claims which seem to be driven by the belief that only the government can stop kids nagging their parents.

Advertising is meant to inform consumers of their options in the market. Younger children do not earn nor control sufficient money or freedom to get to junkfood stores and consume said products, and they lack the ability to discern implicit claims against their wider self-interest. Advertisers know this: they seek to manipulate children into altering adults' purchasing behaviour toward the commercial interests of producers (= advertisers' clients), in an emotional manner, away from the interests of the children and the healthcare system. See how it works, Chris?

In modern capitalism, costs are foisted onto government if that's the cheapest place for them to be. That's why the healthcare system is government-run: it's cheaper to offset healthcare costs as part of government than have the market provide them. Every country in the world bar one accepts this, and the US looks increasingly likely to take this step once they realise the sneers of people like Chris Berg count for nothing. It's cheaper and easier for the state to have a monopoly of violence, and there are other issues besides: once you accept that you can understand the place of the state within a capitalist society. You'll be a better Research Fellow for such a realisation.

Mark Twain was concerned that giving the government the power to "meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens" risked people losing their "independence of thought and action".

Yes, and Twain was a funny man, wasn't he? Always calling for this or that to be banned. Richard Doll hadn't reported on nicotine addiction and lung cancer during Twain's life, and there's been plenty more research done since then. New and different information can often required new and different responses, Chris.

The Melbourne curmudgeon is a cliché tradition in The Age. Columnists like Keith Dunstan or Ranald Macdonald wrote columns in favour of the rotary-dial telephone or against teabags, or that Aussie Rules football was better when players weren't paid to play it - but these were always leavened with a genuine understanding of the alternate viewpoint, they were well-written and witty. Kenneth Davidson writes grim columns against capitalism in all its forms, hoping Melbourne will become like East Berlin c.1958, but he at least will draw on empirical research to support the platform from which he whinges. They are running Berg in the hope that he might be a "young fogey", but he isn't a patch on these other grumpies.

Berg is wilfully ignorant of that at which he sneers, making a mockery of the "research fellow" tag and those who slapped it on him. By treating his opponents' points as beneath him, he denies himself both intellectual respect for his own position and personal respect for any generosity toward theirs. Andrew Norton takes great pains to be civil and respectful to those who takes a different view, and to fail to do so fails to advance your cause - such as it is.

Safety in numbers

In the US Senate, the Democrats can claim sixty of that body's hundred members. In theory this enables them to votes as a bloc to introduce legislation, free of the threat of filibuster from the Republicans. In practice the conventional wisdom has it that this may be a bit more fraught, as this article demonstrates:

Keeping occasional mavericks like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana in the fold could prove vexing. At the same time, senators at the more liberal end of the spectrum have been known to balk when they feel legislation has been too heavily tailored to appeal to more moderate and conservative Democrats ...

“Sixty is an important threshold, but we shouldn’t overstate it,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Al Franken is going to put the wind at our back. But we are not a monolithic caucus.”

In the US, Senators tend to be self-made people and are more directly answerable to their home-state constituencies than Australian Senators are, as this piece illustrates. Of course they are going to assert their independence, particularly from people who played no part in helping them get there.

President Obama is not only popular, but his agenda addresses a number of key issues that have been unresolved in US politics: access to healthcare; the degree to which Iraq needs US forces to maintain public order and national integrity; and the regulation of the finance sector, the search for a system that will prevent a recurrence of the current situation without creating other problems down the track. He might not have all the answers and if his agenda is tweaked here and there, his record as a facilitator and a coalition-builder suggests he will accept these.

If Obama gets his agenda through, his popularity will be cemented: not just hope but achievement, on issues that count to people. The fact that polling shows huge majorities for healthcare reform, which always seem to be scuttled, watered down or filibustered out of existence by a Congress elected by those same people, is one of the conundrums of US politics. If Obama were to break and recast this debate in favour of service delivery that works for people who need healthcare, it would set him up with the greats who have not shied away from seemingly intractable issues, but tackled them head-on even at great cost.

If he fails then he's just like all the other Presidents, really. Clinton got re-elected despite failing at healthcare reform and Bush II was re-elected after dismissing its importance outright. Obama has recast politics in lots of ways, and it's a pity that The New York Times article fails to acknowledge that.

The wolfish glee from Republican commentators that the last President to enjoy a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate was Jimmy Carter in 1975-79 appears misplaced: in the late 1970s the Republicans recovered from the near-fatal blow of Watergate thanks to the leadership of Reagan and intellectual depth provided by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and others.

There is no coherent opposition in the United States. It's a rabble, it is intellectually exhausted and leaderless. Republicans and their chattering-class supporters are in no position to telegraph, let alone land, any blows on Obama. Their adoration of Reagan has blinded them to the idea that the way that Democrats felt in the early-to-mid '80s is similar to that facing Republicans today.

Obama Administration figures seeking to persuade Senators Nelson, Bayh and Landrieu above could do worse than take them to listen to the howl of the void that lies beyond their position. Where are the votes for a Democrat against the best chance of healthcare reform in a generation? Where do you go, and how do you come back from there?

By the end of this year, if they haven't already, the thoughts of US politicians will turn to the elections of 2010. here are the Senators up for re-election. Let's look at their chances whether or not Obama gets his agenda through:

• Boxer, Barbara - (D - CA), Inouye, Daniel K. - (D - HI), Mikulski, Barbara A. - (D - MD) and Murray, Patty - (D - WA) are among the more liberal Senators. They are unlikely to be anything but strong supporters of Obama on healthcare, the environment, economy and other issues, and have waited so long for a supportive President they are unlikely to block his initiatives for the sake of purity. Anyway, they have all been in politics longer than Obama has and have strong followings in their home states.


• Bennett, Robert F. - (R - UT), Coburn, Tom - (R - OK), Crapo, Mike - (R - ID), DeMint, Jim - (R - SC), Grassley, Chuck - (R - IA), Shelby, Richard C. - (R - AL) are the incorrigibles. The reverse of the above, they're safe in their home states if they block Obama at every turn.


• Bond, Christopher S. - (R - MO), Brownback, Sam - (R - KS), Bunning, Jim - (R - KY), Burr, Richard - (R - NC), Isakson, Johnny - (R - GA), Martinez, Mel - (R - FL), McCain, John - (R - AZ) and Murkowski, Lisa - (R - AK) - they all fancy themselves as part of the preceding group but are actually highly vulnerable if there's a swing on. All are from states where Obama did well last year, and it will count against them if they have nothing to show but having stonewalled Obama.


• Gregg, Judd - (R - NH), Thune, John - (R - SD), Vitter, David - (R - LA), Voinovich, George V. - (R - OH) are all dead meat. These guys were all elected on the coat-tails of Bush in 2004. Gregg was offered a political lifeline by Obama and turned it down, and Vitter was caught paying a prostitute to roleplay with him wearing a nappy; he comes from the state that still hasn't recovered from Hurricane Katrina. If you think Obama has been bold by scraping together 60 Senators, wait until it gets to 64 or even 70.


• Then there's the Democrats: Burris, Roland W. - (D - IL) and Specter, Arlen - (D - PA) are likely to be rolled by Democrats in their own states, who will owe President Obama - unless they throw themselves on the President's mercy. It is entirely possible that Reid, Harry - (D - NV) will also be devoured by a netroots campaign.

The rest of them are Democrats, who may have some amendments but are unlikely to spike key legislation altogether.

Senator Robert C. Byrd, the 91-year-old West Virginia Democrat, just finished a hospital stay of more than a month due to a staph infection. Aides could not predict whether Mr. Byrd would be voting regularly when the Senate returns from its Fourth of July break ... Mr. Byrd might be a tough sell on the global warming bill, given strong resistance in his coal-producing state.

Byrd was on the wrong side of history with the Civil Rights Act and may not wish to be so again - but then again, he might. This might be true of any Democrat who were to replace Byrd as well. The challenge is to put a major solar/wind/other new-power plant in West Virginia, not as a sop but to sow them what the future could look like, to include them and give them confidence in it.

Opposition from Byrd, even if present, need not mean a filibuster - many a time the two Republican Senators from Maine (neither of whom are up for election in 2010) have been prevailed upon to produce a result that hardliners on either side could not bully through.

The parallel is less with Carter than with FDR and Truman: when the Republicans lost office in 1932 for misjudging the Great Depression, they were gone for twenty years because at every election the Democrats were addressing the issues of their day. The Republicans may have been big men in the localities which elected them, stuck firmly to old ways, but they seemed to shy away from the big issues of their age - and so it is again now.

What does this mean for Australia? Not much. Any chance that the US might water down some of the peculiarly anti-Australian measures in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (honey?) are pretty much stuffed, as is the idea of Australian motor plants making key components for US vehicles. I hope it will mean a better deal for New Zealand than the freeze-out they've received since 1985, but somehow I doubt it.

Night thoughts from John Hartigan

I read the John Hartigan transcript. Two things struck me:

1. it was exactly like John B. Fairfax's back-to-the-future routine; and


2. how utterly clueless it is; talking about thinking outside the box while at the same time insisting that anyone outside the box is gone for all money.

It started with contradictions: rousing words (if you read the transcript, which Hartigan controls), timidly delivered (if you saw the video, which he doesn't control).

What it will take is a complete rethink of the very essence of what is “news”.

We have never been challenged as we are now, to justify why someone should pay for our content.
I believe people will pay for content if it is:

- Original...

- Exclusive...

- Has the authority

- and is relevant to our audiences.

Journalism that doesn’t help people live their lives is going to be a low-value commodity.

The boldness of the demand for a rethink is completely undermined by the clichés that followed:

• Paying for AP/Reuters/[other News Ltd franchises] content isn't original, and neither is rehashing a press release - but it is the very essence of journalism.


• Nobody gives a damn about "exclusive", as I've said earlier. Old wankers like Hartigan who could spend a whole day skiting and taunting the opposition value this highly; the rest of us, not so much.


• By "authority", Hartigan means "bombastic" or "sneering". Fuck that.

I'll give you the last one: but how would Hartigan know? Focus groups? Editorial-office bull sessions: "Nah, what the punters really want is ...". You don't stampede your way into a position of market dominance and then go all soft about what the punters want. The punters will take whatever News Ltd bloody well feels like printing, that's what made this company and this country.

How many journalists in this room have written a story recently that was original, exclusive, highly relevant and genuinely useful to your audience?

I’m not saying there haven’t been stories like this. But, there have been too few.

This is where you need leadership, Hartigan - from yourself, and those snivelling bums you call your editors. Tomorrow's Daily Murdoch will be full of the very stuff you decry, and next week's, and next year's - and if you try to change it you are history, because you didn't get where you are by bucking the culture of News Ltd.

Newspapers in the US are disappearing left, right and centre.

Fewer papers are being sold and in my view it’s because many of them are largely boring and irrelevant to their readership. Their content is ubiquitous rather than unique.

If you listen to breakfast and morning radio in the capital cities - directly, in the case of 2GB/3AW/etc. and indirectly on the ABC, you can pick up the audio version of The Daily Murdoch.

It has been assumed, without any rigorous scrutiny, that Australian newspapers will go the same way as their US and British peers.

Some say the trends are the same; we are just a year or two behind.

Frankly, I’m dismayed at how many Australian journalists seem to accept this. Some are even willing to stick their byline on this opinion.

I mean, at its most basic, it’s just bad reporting. There’s almost no evidence.

There's some harsh language there, an opening barrage designed to dissuade scrutiny of what follows:

Even in the past year, the decline in ad revenue in Australia is a fraction of what’s been happening overseas.

The falls in circulation and readership here are very modest compared to American and British papers.

In the latest Australian audit, when you’d expect a big drop, overall sales were flat.

Readership in Australia has been relatively stable over 10 years, but, as I said earlier, it’s been decimated in the US and the UK.

When Hartigan said "there's almost no evidence", you'd expect him to go all stat-happy like he was with his outline of the decline of US and UK newspapers. If The New York Times want to announce that it has lost $70m, that's up to them - but don't expect Hartigan to announce how much his own papers are haemmorrhaging, and don't expect the bluster to convince you otherwise. To say "there's almost no evidence" is Hartigan's way of saying, "there is evidence, but if I don't show you then you probably won't find out", which is the opposite of the sort of journalism he'd want you to think he's offering.

... what about the journalism?

If I had a Power Point presentation I could summarise this whole speech with two points on one slide:

1. If you want to attract readers, break stories people want to read.

2. Give them something they can’t get anywhere else, make it relevant and useful and let them get involved.

See that: let them get involved. Careful, big fella - if people want to get involved they'd be independent bloggers. Perhaps you think that you can determine what it is that they're involved in?

There are plenty of examples.

The British MP expenses scandal has sold an extra million copies of the UK Daily Telegraph since the story broke in May.

It wasn’t simply because the Telegraph paid for a leak.

It assigned dozens of people to the story, spent weeks preparing its coverage and had a brilliant strategy for breaking and then staying in front of the story. It broke it online and then really went to town in print.

Without question, the moral authority of the paper and the depth and quality of its coverage made it a story that only a newspaper could own in this way.

London's Tele is not a News Ltd paper. If it was, it would never have put the raw files on its website an invited the public to do their own trawling, thus getting details out earlier. Instead, Hartigan would have kept it all in-house and released the info when he was good and ready - and he'd be playing favourites with it, too, rather than the admirable let-the-cards-fall-where-they-may attitude of the Tele.

In Australia we had the Victorian bushfires. It wasn’t exclusive to News obviously. But our coverage was unique.

We sold an extra half a million newspapers in the week following Black Saturday. Our website traffic more than doubled ... Who can forget the images of the fireman sharing his water bottle with the Sam the Koala, perhaps the iconic image of the tragedy?

The images that appeared on television around the world carried the water mark not of Seven, Nine or Ten but of heraldsun.com.au.

That'd be the image insinuated into the February story, even though that koala was injured two weeks or so before those fires? Sneaky and dishonest, just what you'd expect from News - iconic all right.

Three weeks later, we published a book which immediately became the number one non-fiction best seller with every cent going to fire victims.

Flatly untrue.

The Australian relaunched its business section online last June. We hired people, spent some serious money.

Since then unique visitors to the site have more than doubled. Page impressions have increased seven fold. Advertising revenue has already recouped the investment.

True, they have stolen a march on The Daily Fairfax - apart from Ian Verrender, none of them are much chop. Ross Gittins has gone off the boil and Dizzy Lizzie Knight (Kath's sister) was never any good.

Pumpkin soup is very big on Tuesdays.

This is an incredibly powerful proposition to take to an advertiser.

But, as journalism, it absolutely nails the criteria I mentioned earlier. The content is original, it’s exclusive and people actually use it.

Good luck with patenting "pumpkin soup", Hartigan. Good luck with selling advertising space when people are reading the means to avoid having to buy the product. Just because you think your customers and advertisers are dills, doesn't mean they are.

In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

Andrew Keen, in his book The Cult of the Amateur, cites Hurricane Katrina as an example when:
“reports from people at the scene helped spread unfounded rumours, inflated body counts and erroneous reports of rapes and gang violence in the New Orleans Superdome – all later debunked by mainstream news media”.

First they were spread by mainstream media, and then they were debunked - it's all about churn, Harto! Yesterday's fishwrappers and nobody remembers, eh!

The other thing to point out here is how Hartigan blasted those who thought US media = Australian media were lazy, yet here he's found some peanut who says US blogs = Australian blogs, and he's fine with that. He has no idea about Australian blogs - excellent!

Citizen journalists, he says, simply don’t have the resources to bring us reliable news. They lack not only expertise and training but access to decision makers and reliable sources.

Anyone can crunch a press release down, you don't need "access"for that. The fact that I don't go drinking at the Holy Grail means that I'm more likely, not less, to break a political story that might discomfit denizens of that bar. You don't need access, and access isn't that valuable - it's the consequences of the decisions made that counts, and the consequences of those decisions are often imperceptible to those with "access". Perspective is more important than "access".

The difference, he says, between professionals and amateurs is that bloggers don’t go to jail for their work

No, bloggers are a bit smarter than that. It's the job of editors and lawyers to get the story out without the journo having to do time - but that would require innovative thinking, wouldn't it? You'll note, Hartigan, that it is Godwin Grech rather than Steve Lewis who is in the gun at the moment.

Like Keating’s famous “all tip and no iceberg”, it could be said that the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insight.

Other way around. If it was no insight, you'd let the story stand. The whole idea of this post, this blog and others like it is to provide the insight that the original source has failed.

As Robert Thomsen of The Wall Street Journal says: “The blogs and comment sites are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation. And their cynicism about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting it.”

Tonight for dinner I ate some fish - this does not make me an "echo chamber" for fish and nor does it make the fish more important than me. You're fodder for this blog Hartigan - it may be the most important thing you do.

It started as a moralising soapbox; boasting about its lack of standards.

Almost all news outlets do this, boasting that they are not bound by the standards of truth to which they hold interview subjects.

In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart.

Blogs and a large number of comment sites specialise in political extremism and personal vilification.

"Blogosphere"is such a silly expression: blogs are far more diverse than the groupthink in the journosphere. How can you be innovative when your thoughts are hobbled by silly expressions? Are all blogs everywhere as politically extreme as The Australian?

Radical sweeping statements unsubstantiated with evidence are common.

It sure is, Johnny boy - but then, that's what you get for reading News Ltd.

One Australian blogger who shoots first and checks facts later is proud to boast that his site is “Not wrong for long”.

Mainstream media understands, most of the time, that comment and opinion is legitimised by evidence.

And when that evidence comes in after News Ltd has gone to press, it conducts ad hominem attacks and ignores the correction, only to print it months later at the bottom of an obscure page if forced to do so by the Press Council. I prefer “Not wrong for long”: it is another nail in the coffin of the "scoop". No blog would have printed the Pauline Hanson pictures, or failed to pull them once the error became clear.

Good journalism is expensive.

The Huffington Post recently announced it will spend $US1.75 million on a new investigative journalism unit to produce original content.

But it is not being funded by subscribers or advertisers, it’s being bankrolled by philanthropy.

The Australian has never made a profit: it is underpinned by philanthropy from the Murdoch Family, and produces second-rate journalism at best.

Take this list of important stories of recent years:

- John Howard’s leadership promise to Peter Costello;

- Marcus Einfeld’s downfall;

- Bundaberg Hospital’s trail of death;

- Tougher restrictions on P Plate drivers;

- New laws that mean rape victims don’t have to give evidence in open court.

These stories had two things in common.

First, they had serious impact and influence – on everything from a change of government, to the conviction of criminals to new legislation.

Second, they were all broken by tabloid newspapers.

Mostly bullshit:

• Howard-Costello? Oh, please. The biggest load of bullshit, utterly empty of content and importance.


• Einfeld? Political gloating, and vastly overstated in its importance. Just because Einfeld lied about his driving doesn't mean he lied about Toomelah.


• P Plate drivers? Vilification pure and simple. The roads are no safer and those people are no better drivers.


• Evidence in rape cases: I think Paul Sheehan at The Daily Fairfax had a hand in that. Just a bit.

That leaves Bundaberg Hospital: sure, but who gives a shit who broke that story? It only became an issue once it got too big for one outlet to "own" it.

In recent years, many of the most important national stories were the fruit of time-consuming, expensive, painstaking investigative journalism, predominantly by The Australian.

Stories like:

- The Australian Wheat Board scandal;

- Children Overboard;

- Mohammed Haneef;

- the tragedies on Palm Island and at Arakun.

It is no coincidence The Australian broke these stories and produced coverage of national significance and impact; because The Australian has made the biggest investment in journalism of any paper in the country.

It is no coincidence The Australian broke these stories because it was so embedded with the Howard Government that it leaked those stories to its house organ.

People will pay for it if it is good enough. By good enough I mean that it will have to be:

- well researched;

- brilliantly written'

- perceptive and intelligent;

- professionally edited;

- accurate and reliable.

This is not the territory in which aggregator sites or amateur bloggers will do well.

This is the natural terrain of the well-trained, professional, experienced, clever journalist.

Hartigan's vision is the very sort of thing of which Australian journalism falls short in every way but rhetoric. It's back to the future for News Ltd. None of the above describes The Punch, for example. They're paying journalists more but imposing the same standards that current staff seem to limbo under with ease.

To see the bankruptcy of Hartigan's case, see this non-story. Christian Kerr's basic value-add is to say: "yeah, what he said", after the boss has spoken. Bloggers are readers, discerning readers, and people like Hartigan are intent on patronising us. Some future.

Vactoria

Sooner or later the Liberals will have to replace many of the MPs who survived the 2007 election with those who have something to contribute to the future. I have mentioned that there is plenty of dead wood there, but the great state of Victoria is, however unwittingly, doing its bit to show us what the future of the Liberal Party will look like: a reprise of the immediate past.

The only Federal Liberal MPs to have entered Parliament since the 2007 election, Jamie Briggs and Scott Ryan, were ex-staffers. We now face a prospect where "renewal" means replacing a sitting MP with a staffer.

First, there was the winnable seat with the proud name of Deakin in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs, once held by a nice-but-dim man named Phil Barresi. Labor won the seat in 2007 and you have to fancy their chances there again - not because of anything to do with Canberra silliness over utes or even big-picture issues surrounding economic management - but because the Liberals preselected Barresi again. His only real competition was another former MP who was even sillier than Barresi.

Then, there was the preselection that won all the headlines: Kooyong, where a staffer won.

Now there are vacancies in Aston (Chris Pearce, whose behaviour during the Apology signalled his lack of both commitment to and suitability for high office), Wannon (David Hawker, the guy who replaced Malcolm Fraser and achieved nothing other than the attainment of titles) and Higgins. In each case, staffers are touted as frontrunners, a dreary prospect of perpetuating a situation where these would-be MPs:

• see themselves as relay stations for Liberal policy - and Howard-era policy at that - rather than shapers of it;


• have so absorbed the disunity-is-death theme that they fail to realise that paralysis and lack of moral courage are toxic too;


• do not and cannot look at the issues facing this country without the excruciating question of What Would Howard Do (WWHD)?


• the disconnect between the voter revulsion surrounding Parliamentary theatre and those who are awestruck practitioners of it will widen;


• think that every issue which cannot have Howard rubrics applied to it is too hard or infra dig; and


• perpetuate this myth that Experience with the Media is essential to operating in Canberra, rather than learned on the job by a reasonably intelligent person.

It is an indictment on the Victorian Liberals that these jewels are not placed into better hands. The fact that only staffers can handle the toxic swamp, and that eminent Victorians who've been sounded out at various Clubs for their interest have laughingly scorned their advances. Why is it that only staffers are getting sucked into this vacuum? Is it any less of a vacuum for their being there?

Power failure

Here is a post in favour of renewable energy that doesn't really address environmental issues, but rather the business and political impacts of the current non-policies of this country.

(I believe that human pollution leads to a rise in global temperatures and that rising temperatures affect our environment dramatically, and for the worse. I take that as a given in what follows and am not interested in hair-splitting and water-muddying that might indicate otherwise: I have always been offended by pumping filth into the sky, and its climate impact just makes this worse. Like most people I'm not a scientist, so I'm ill-equipped to wage a scientific discussion anyway: but from a risk perspective it's better to act against carbon pollution than to accept fud as an excuse for doing nothing.)

The Federal government sent a whole lot of solar-power installers to the wall after it was first elected. People had been encouraged by small-scale incentives from then-Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, invested in solar power and waited for the Rudd government to be even more environmentally-friendly than the Howard government ... only to be horribly let down and financially disadvantaged.

Surely, those from coalmining and -burning companies should have seen that as a stay of execution rather than a win.

Renewable energy was raised at the 2020 Summit and we were promised a clear response to that: nothing yet. Again, we were promised a response after Garnaut: still nothing, a bit of faffing about 5% in the face of climate-driven deterioration of the Antarctic and the Great Barrier Reef.

Then, finally, we were promised that something would happen once the US put legislation in place. For sure! Well, that legislation has just passed the House, it may well pass the Senate and is hardly likely to be vetoed by President Obama in its current form. Time to get a move on people.

At this rate the Rudd government will be the first Australian government to go to a major international conference without a clearly-defined national interest. This isn't to say that Australia should dictate terms but it never goes empty-handed:

• When Billy Hughes went to the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919, he had a clear agenda for what Australia wanted (and didn't want).


• When Crazy Herb Evatt went to the UN conference in San Francisco, he acted from a clear national interest.


• Same with ANZUS, the Colombo Plan, you name it; throw in your own idea of an important international treaty and the same thing applies.


• Even at Kyoto, then-Environment Minister Robert Hill had some idea what Australia's national interest was, only to have Howard pull it out from under him (you should've resigned Robert; might not've had a cushy pad in Manhattan but at least you'd have some pride and moderates would have something to work with. Oh well.).

I dread to imagine if Rudd had been PM nine decades earlier, with all the concessions given to stablehands, farriers, saddlers and Cobb & Co with the rise of motor vehicles, and handing New Guinea off to the Japanese at Versailles.

When Rudd and Penny Wong go to Copenhagen, they'll be going empty-handed (or to use dramatic wording from another age, "naked into the conference chamber" - but that's too gruesome an image so I'll just go on). Australia's policy and negotiating position would seem to be: I've got no idea, have you?

We can't be sure what the outcomes of Copenhagen might be (even less as we're not in a position to influence them), but the sheer poverty of dithering and trying to please everyone is illustrated by emerging trends which stand to leave Australia far worse off than we are already, but which we would normally expect to put to good use and be much, much better off in all sorts of ways:

• This article suggests that China will rely increasingly on solar power. Three cheers for UNSW for providing the education to Zhengrong Shi, but is it too much to expect that Australia and Australians could have gotten more out of the prospect of a solar-powered China?


• One of the little-reported aspects of the February fires in Victoria was the deployment of the army and other resources to fires that had broken out near Victoria's coalfields. If those coalfields had ignited it would not only have denied that state its entire power source but created a vast underground fire that would have rendered much of the state, including much of Melbourne, uninhabitable - and warmed our part of the planet considerably.


• This one talks about baseload power - but surely it is a nineteenth-century idea that power has to be generated remotely on a massive scale and piped across distance, further dispersing energy wastefully, to multiple undifferentiated users (especially as coal-fired power plants expend something like half their energy cooling themselves). Coal-fired power stations will decline in output over time and other forms of energy such as solar must take up that slack - whether or not you use old-fashioned terms like "baseload".

Solar power should be installed on all new buildings to cater for at least 25% of that building's anticipated usage - never mind the feds, it should be part of local government building permits. This instance of missed opportunity is telling:

Brilliant Australian-listed Dyesol, which makes third generation photovoltaic cells, had to go to Wales and partner with giant manufacturer Corus to commercialise its power-generating "Colourcoat" steel panels. (One wonders how colorbond maker Bluescope Steel missed this opportunity.)

Because Bluescope, presumably, is a typical large Australian company which thinks that the only incentives in business are those created or limited by public policy. Its lobbyists are the sorts of clowns who were either Howard government staffers, or who were so conditioned by the environment of the Howard government that they've internalised that way of thinking, to the commercial detriment of their employer.

Mighell says the supply and installation of PV panels is a "massive opportunity" for his members.

"Show me another industry with the potential for growth for blue-collar workers. There could be 20,000 jobs in the solar industry, if we get our act together."

When old-school union boofheads start to make sense, the impossibility of further dithering or pissant responses like the current ETS become clear.

I believe that Malcolm Turnbull is keen on some form of policy response and is being hamstrung by the same people who persuaded Howard that climate change was a crock, outlined by Guy Pearse and others. They see a number of advantages in keeping up appearances, the poor lambs:

• The "clear air" of policy differentiation from Labor, which"as I've said is a recipe for failure, and what could be clearer for the air than reducing pollution?


• The idea that those companies will provide money and other resources to aid the Coalition, just like they did in '96: with decreasing corporate profits and the polls the way they are, large-scale listed companies are going to donate the same to each major party at best. The Coalition can suck up to them all they like, but when they put their hands out for donations these guys will simply not be there. They can cheer from the sidelines and talk doom-and-gloom about an ETS, but if the Coalition is going to win in 2010 it needs the sort of support that the banks gave Menzies in 1948-49. I can't see that happening, can you?

Hopefully the Liberals will get tired of being made to look out-of-touch and foolish for the sake of people who cannot - and can't have any serious intention to - fulfill their pathetic man-on-horseback rescue fantasies. It may take a landslide to do that - but even then my experience (confirmed by recent history nationally and across different states) shows you can bet there'll be a muffled voice from under the rubble saying "let's not be too hasty".

Rudd doesn't have that excuse for dithering - he doesn't have any excuse at all. Let's see Peter Garrett escape from his cage and really sell a policy like he once sold tickets and albums. Rudd could and should use this as our escape hatch from the current global financial crisis rather than dither - the risk of forcing carbon industries into the arms of the Liberals isn't that great, and who thinks they'd make best use of any opportunity?

What was the point of the Nationals?

Apparently Australia has no clearly defined international reputation in terms of food. What, the, was the point of having the Nationals hogging the Trade portfolio in government for eleven years?

As an urban-dweller who'd never vote National I was a bit miffed that the Coalition government turned determinedly away from future-oriented exports in hi-tech, the arts or education - but I assumed that for all their rhetoric they would produce a cracker of an export sector for Australian agriculture.

Sadly, no. Australian food exports have concentrated on bulk commodities rather than specific food types, causing the confusion referred to in the above article. People don't buy bulk commodities, they buy particular products.

One example where Australians have been badly served is with the rise of "New Zealand lamb". It's being marketed as a cut above, the best lamb you can get: but I've been to New Zealand and eaten lamb there - it's no better or worse than the lamb here. Yet, so far behind are we in marketing terms that "Australian lamb" risks becoming like "Dutch champagne" or "Welsh whiskey" - near enough but not good enough. Tim Fischer is using his Vatican post to be close to the FAO (thereby implying that the Ambassador to Italy isn't holding her own) - but to what end? How many people buy food on the FAO's recommendation, and is the FAO in the business of favouring one country's produce over another's?

After all that bellyaching, all that cash poured into nothing farms, you'd think that there would be a better attempt at marketing to Australia's strengths and exporting stuff that meets and exceeds those. If this was a Labor blog, there would be a lot of sunny bullshit here about what marvellous things the Rudd government is doing - but there's nothing to speak of really.

This was a good start, recognising agriculture as food - but it's gone now. Oh well. Glad I'm not a farmer. Perhaps recognising agriculture as food and selling it on that basis might be a better way of doing things - better than whinging to city people and politicians, anyway.

Speaking the same language

It's my own fault, I suppose, but not entirely.

First I read this article in The Australian about how Asian languages were all too hard and that there's quite enough cultural richness in French or German for anyone, thank you very much, which is pretty much the philosophy of language education when I was at school (back then it was Japanese that we were all supposed to be learning). The article was prompted by the recent Wesley report on Asia literacy within Australia, which Slattery seems to regard as beside the point.

I studied Indonesian and loved it. Scraped through, am no expert and still haven't been there, but the language was a revelation. No pictographic characters to learn, a simple grammatical structure and consistent spelling, whose phonetics lend themselves both to simple people speaking clearly as well as cheeky word-games. I realise the language has subtleties and poetry that I never got around to, but I still believe it is a great start in learning a language: in refracting back on English in new ways, in getting an insight into a new culture that viewing pictures cannot convey (learning a language is active learning, more than just reciting dates or knowing what Borobudur looks like).

Foolishly, I wrote a letter to The Australian trying to explain this. Note the heading: it's as though you and I should forget about English and jump on this trendy bandwagon called Asian languages. It's lazy sub-editing, part of a lazy Manichean mentality infecting that organisation. You can complain that sub-editing has been under increasing pressure over recent years, having gone from a sinecure to facing the blowtorch of cost-cutting and technological change in a short period of time: but if that's what you get from sub-editing you can't romanticise it too much. Perhaps I should have known better, but too much of that would let them off the hook.

Thankfully for the wider issue, well-informed and elegantly-written pieces by Jamie Mackie and Katherine Davidsen address the issue, but in terms set by Slattery's article and other treatment by The Australian. The release of the Wesley report, at around the same time as the Defence White Paper and the Prime Minister's proposed regional economic organisation, should have been treated as serious policy by a serious newspaper with a serious foreign editor. Instead, there was Slattery's re-hashed article and some guy who complained about ANU's French program. While this coverage was better than the yeah-whatever treatment it received from The Daily Fairfax, it's still inadequate. The Australian likes to complain about Our Educational Standards but I'd respect Kevin Donnelly a lot more if he at least engaged with some of the ideas that Wesley raises.

As far as Wesley's Key Principle 5, bold action is called for:

• Australian university graduates should be able to sign up for a year's teacher training in any one of the designated countries to teach English, and perhaps whatever it was they graduated in if required by the host country.


• One year of teaching post-training should reduce the student's FEE-HELP debt by a third.


• An equivalent number of graduates from designated countries should be invited here to do a year's teacher training.


• There would be thousands of Australians teaching English throughout Asia, and thousands of Asian-language teachers available to schools here.

This suggestion is the Colombo Plan on steroids. Over time the engagement between Australia and Asian countries would be deep, wide and regarded highly. Australian employers would have a choice of motivated employees with Asian experience, which would eventually work its way into decision-making in various important spheres of life. It promises much for the future of Australia and many other countries; anyone who whinges about the immigration aspects of it is simply not serious about an interesting and prosperous future for this country.