Meanwhile, we need real action and debate on:

* what to do about climate change…

Damn right. The North Pole is melting.

I repeat:

The. North. Pole. Is. Melting.

Now this is just one story among many clamoring for attention on our front pages, and obviously the story does not develop as quickly as bodies in car boots and share price fluctuations etc, but on a scale of importance it’s not just “well up there”, it’s pretty much the same as an asteroid heading to earth.

And everyone is like “Yeah yeah we know” and politicians have in on their agendas to do something sometime soon…

* get public tranport funded federally (at least 50%)

That’s a good idea, in keeping with the notion raised in another thread that Australia is basically a large city.

Meanwhile, we need real action and debate on:

* what to do about climate change and refocussing the Australian economy to lower carbon emissions

* address ongoing issues with indigenous Australia in pretty much the opposite way in which Captain Brough & Master Howard are proceeding

* get public tranport funded federally (at least 50%)

* get public education up from our very low OECD ranking

etc,

And what do we get? Hissy fits on the last day of parliament. Hectoring and abuse. Questions not answered. Personal attacks. Sheesh. I think we are watching history in the making. Our politicians are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as we sail to hit the last iceberg in the world.

I think we need a system where major political parties don’t exist. Fancy either Labor or Liberal back room boys coming up with a workable roadmap for our future? All they are capable of is biffo.

I’ll try to put something up on my blog sometime over the weekend about the Royal Commission motion, but it wasn’t a piece of legislation (sadly), just an ‘in-principle’ resolution passed without debate.

But I guess it does relate back to my initial point - not only was there 30 pieces of legislation passed into law, but also some other issues and debates about significant issues which received next to zero media (and thus in most cases public) attention.

I notice one of the new laws did receive a bit of front page coverage in today’s Australian - unfortunately three days after it had already passed the Senate. Shouting matches in Question Time are obviously more significant than new laws where the “Australian Crime Commission has been granted star-chamber powers to drag people in for questioning without disclosing the reasons why they are being quizzed.”

The question asked whether it was this accentuation of the news/comment cycle that made it difficult for Andrews and the government to respond effectively, and in fact whether the speed of the cycle left Ministers and their pressers blindsided. I strongly suspect there’s something in that.

The very idea that an issue is released from a minister’s office without it having been assessed and weighed for possible media impact is laughable. So too is the assumption from the often self-important Barns that instacommentary has lasting value (as a story) or impact (in terms of shaping political perceptions and outcomes).

… reading about things like the stoush over Therese Rein’s business affairs that these events had occurred years ago rather than only a few months back.

Such is the pace of politics and news that we’re living in a sort of eternal present …

First, it’s hardly new that if you do something that upset people, you may get away with it at the time but it might come back to bite you later, when you’d most rather it didn’t. Second, this is the only way of getting around the clever-clever PR strategy of releasing information that might give rise to negative coverage.

One possible consequence of the sheer quantity of information overwhelming the quality of reflection is to further empower message shapers who do understand the mediascape and the time horizons

Fuck the mediascape and ignore the time horizons. Not all information is of equal value. If salmon can swim against the currents of mighty rivers (without having to swallow every drop that flows by them) in order to get where they have to go and do what they have to do, then people can filter out unnecessary information and consider it.

Overall, the saddest aspect of this week has been the whole political sideshow.

What an effete, lame critique this is. If it’s a sideshow you can ignore it. Why is it any more sad than it was last week, or this time last year; and will next week be more sad or less?

Who remembers what the big political debates of say three weeks ago were?

Kim, three weeks ago I was paying tax, and concerned about education and house prices and climate change, amongst other things. I probably read something pertinent but I can’t remember it now. Everyone strapped to the hypecycle way back then was obviously wasting their time.

I’m glad I’m not a professional politician, and cheers for Andrew Bartlett plugging away in a wilful disconnect from the hypecycle.

And I still think there are legs in AWB

Damn right Phil. The news cycle can kiss my arse (update: it does, actually. More news to come, stay tuned).

It seems to me that the GG has taken the gloves off. It is frantic for the Libs to be returned and any semblance of objectivity has been totally abandoned. Which makes it a bit hard to see any difference between th enational broadsheet and any other political blog, other than circulation figures.

If it turns out to be the last act of his parliamentary career, he can be proud of it.

Current Senate continues in office til July as it’s not a double dissolution election.

Presumably it’s modesty that prevents Andrew from saying that one of them is down to him.

Well perhaps not exactly legislation, more he got an unanimous motion up, which invites, allows, challenges, the government to set up a royal commission into child abuse. Presumably the terms of reference can include examination of what’s going on in the territory, and heiner can be dealt with once and for all.

I haven’t got to the hansard of the motion and debate yet, but maybe Andrew can be prevailed upon to tell us of his thinking and hopes on this.

I, for one, congratulate him on it. If it turns out to be the last act of his parliamentary career, he can be proud of it. It shows that intelligence and good-will can really can turn a sow’s ear (Barnaby and Piers’ Rofe) into a silk purse.

Thank you Senator. Three cheers for Andrew.

Great pot, Mark.

Well in that case, stop hogging it and pass it around!

Great post.

Given the ease with which phrases such as ‘eternal present’, ‘hypercycle of news’ and the like seem to roll off the metaphorical tongue, do you think its tied in with the same trends outside the realms of politics?

The whole thing just makes me think of Baudrillard.

Baudrillard provides an interesting vocabulary, but his theories are hyperbolic at best. He is good to read as science fiction, such as his idea that in the 1980’s history started going backwards (hence, as he said, the Year 2000 will never take place).

But I think the phrase “eternal present” comes from Eric Hobsbawm’s “perpetual present”… coined in the introduction to “Age of Extremes”. I’ve probably got this image severely misinterpreted, but the image that immediately came to my mind was Nietzsche’s “noon”, where the shortest shadows are cast. Its seems to me to imply a flattening of affect and diminishing returns.

But jusst imagine for a scond how the requirement to write under your owwn residentiial adress might improvee discourse. And someone explain to me why that idea is so wrong, btw?

For a start, someone could get fired up, head over to your house and kill you (or at least do a bit of damage).

Some of your argument looks quite interesting. But the notion of reinstating the central importance of ‘authorial transparenccy and acountability’ seems a little misguided.

Blogs and internet communication don’t stand in opposition to traditional ‘authorial’ modes of reporting. It’s an adjunct.

Yes, there are a lot of anonymous people on teh interwebs. The way that good information/opinion/commentary is sorted is via the reader actually reading information and making up his/her own mind. Yes, there’s a lot of crap on teh interwebs. But there’s a lot of crap everywhere (Sturgeon’s law surely applies here: “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.”)

I’m still confused about what exactly is meant by ‘authorial accountability’ as well. You write something that someone else disagrees with, or is just plain BS. So what? You can get called for it on the interwebs as much as anywhere else (although in this case it’s publically available, as opposed to the MSM which rarely publishes retractions). What’s the accountability mechanism? Does someone come around to your house and give you a black eye or something?