Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
The politics of the Coalition’s climate policy announcement has already been covered by Mark, but the policy also contains some pretty dodgy accounting, as I argued in my piece yesterday for New Matilda.
Today I thought I’d take some time to unpick those rubbery carbon reduction figures. Continue reading ‘Putting a figure on the Coalition’s shadow carbon price’
Above: Escape From Woomera, screenshot.
Marcus Westbury’s column for The Age has been exploring some really interesting topics in cultural policy. His most recent column is one of his best. Now posted on his blog, the article examines the relative responses of the ABC and the Australia Council to the disruptive cultural transformations wrought by digital technologies.
Westbury argues that while the ABC has done surprisingly well, “the “Australia Council has retreated further and further away from engagement in contemporary culture. The results are on the board to see.” More over the fold.
Continue reading ‘Marcus Westbury on why the Australia Council doesn’t get digital culture’
In Fairfax’s relaunched National Times, Guy Rundle has a perceptive but inconsistent piece on the unsustainability of parallel importation restrictions (often abbreviated to PIR) for Australian books:
Though the chief opponents of PIR have been the large book chains and their tame flacks, the main game in terms of radically cheapening and improving the flow of information and culture should be the abolition of territorial controls altogether.
History shows new and wider modes of circulating knowledge, debate and information are the means by which entrenched power and unquestioned authority is challenged. Just as the printing press destroyed the monasteries, and made possible the Reformation.
This seems genuinely liberatory, so why are so many of the cultural left against it?
Continue reading ‘Guy Rundle on parallel import restrictions for books’
KPMG consultant and media columnist Bernard Salt has been available for comment on just about any social or demographic topic for some years now. These comments rarely do justice to the hard work of statistical analysis performed by real demographers, for instance at the ABS, but journalists and editors rarely let that get in the way of a choice quote or column by this ubiquitous “commentator and advisor to corporate Australia on consumer, cultural and demographic trends.”
Salt is the master of the sweeping generalisation and throw-away insult. Today’s comments in the Murdoch press are a good example:
“Migration figures out this week show Australia’s population is still growing at record rates, and these people must live somewhere. They go to the most affordable areas, and the fastest growing area at the moment is Melbourne’s western front – places like Werribee, where you can still pick up a house and land package for less than $260,000,” Mr Salt said.
“The urban elite think that if something is more than walking distance from their terrace house boundary, it must be unsophisticated and uncivilised.
“It’s the modern version of the cultural cringe that you need to be near cafes, bars and restaurants for this culture to rub off on you. People are living just as meaningful lives going to little athletics, to church and the local sausage sizzle. This satellite existence is the new Australia.”
Actually, no it’s not.
This year I had the opportunity to attend the Federal budget lock-up in Parliament House in Canberra, for New Matilda. You can read my analysis of the budget over at New Matilda (I called it “a gamble posing as prudence”), but I thought some LP readers might also be interested in what the lockup was like. John Quiggin has also posted about it too.
Over at New Matilda, I’ve had a look at the career of Meredith Hellicar, the Chairwoman of James Hardie Industries since 2004 and a Director of the company since 1992.
Hellicar’s career tells us a lot about the ethics of Australia’s business leaders. Despite her pivotal role in one of the most immoral corporate acts in Australian history, Hellicar was a popular member of Australia’s business elite.
First, the context. Asbestos has killed more than 7,000 Australians, many of them workers for James Hardie Industries. Many workers have now successfully sued James Hardie for the asbestos exposure that has caused mesothelioma and other lethal cancers.
In early 2001, James Hardie’s board of directors hatched a plan to try and escape from the company’s massive asbestos liabilities. They stripped most of the company’s assets and placed them in a new holding company based in The Netherlands, where they wouldn’t be legally liable for the dying workers in Australia.Then they lied to the Australian Stock Exchange, claiming that their Australian operation was “fully funded” to meet the asbestos claims of dying workers. James Hardie even tried to write off its payments to asbestos victims as a tax refund.
The Chairwoman of that board was Meredith Hellicar.
You would think that this woman, the person in charge of a company that has killed thousands of its workers and then systematically tried to avoid facing up to its responsibilities, would be a pariah in Australia. You would think that no government or corporation would want to be associated with her.
You would be wrong. Meredith Hellicar was a popular member of Australia’s business elite. She was on the board of AMP, the Sydney Institute, the Sydney Airport, even cancer research centre The Garvan Institute. She was a member of the federal government’s Takeovers Panel. John Howard gave her a Centenary Medal for “services to business.”
Last Thursday a judge found she had acted illegally as a Director of James Hardie. But while former James Hardie workers continue to die, all Merdith Hellicar faces is a fine.
A couple of signposts from the strange new world we live in, both from New York magazine. Vanessa Grigoriadis offers one of the most insightful analysis pieces I’ve seen on Facebook, asking Do You Own Facebook? Or Does It Own You? Chronicling the backlash over Facebook’s Terms of Service and its new look, she also travels to Palo Alto to meet Facebook executives. The trip to Facebook HQ reveals some priceless nuggets about the young people creating this fascinating social experiment.
I took a trip to visit Facebook because I was interested in the way it is remaking social groups of old friends, so I mostly wanted to talk about that, but all these executives wanted to talk about was sharing. And privacy. And control. (Although I did learn the biggest user complaint on the site: the inability to remove unflattering photos of themselves posted by friends.)
Wall Street and and the ASX have rallied hard in approval of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s bank rescue plan. In this post I am going to examine the Geithner plan, try and describe and explain what it is, and then ask whether it will work. Continue reading ‘The Geithner plan: what is it, and will it work?’
Both Marcus Westbury and Nick Pickard lead their blogs with strongly critical posts about recent reports that the NSW government is about to commit to spending $1 billion to renovate Joern Utzon’s iconic Sydney Opera House.
As Westbury writes, “this decision is one that is so staggeringly out of touch with the realities of cultural policy at the moment that it is scary.”
As usual, I find myself in agreement with much of what Marcus writes (more of that below). However, I think there is every reason to be far more optimistic about this decision than the initial outrage from the various unfunded parts of the arts community suggests. It may be that this decision will actually materially advance the cultural policy debate in Australia, by motivating the various forgotten voices in the arts community to finally coalesce into a coherent movement for change.
Continue reading ‘Cultural policy in NSW, or $1 billion to renovate the Sydney Opera House’
Robert Darnton has written a long and interesting article about the Google books class action at the New York Review of Books, entitled Google and the Future of Books.
In the article, Darnton begins by describing a mythologised but historically extant “Republic of Letters” – the Enlightenment, if you like – inhabited by men like Voltaire and Rousseau, Jefferson and Madison. This Republic wasn’t always a wonderful thing, confined as it was to those rich and educated enough to gain entry, but it none-the-less represented a vision of free-and-frank intellectual exchange and discussion which has endured:
One way to understand this system is to draw on the sociology of knowledge, notably Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of literature as a power field composed of contending positions within the rules of a game that itself is subordinate to the dominating forces of society at large. But one needn’t subscribe to Bourdieu’s school of sociology in order to acknowledge the connections between literature and power. Seen from the perspective of the players, the realities of literary life contradicted the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment. Despite its principles, the Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged. Yet I want to invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.
Darnton argues there is a similar tension between the principles of free access and open information embodied by many libraries and educational institutions, and the money and power at stake in the information they generate, distribute and control. He points out that copyright is specifically set down in Article I of the United States Constitution ‘”for limited times” only and subject to the higher purpose of promoting “the progress of science and useful arts.”‘ In the 1780s this meant a 14 year term with one extension. Now, of course, copyright has lengthened to 70 years after the death of the author – which in practice means more than a century. Continue reading ‘The Googlization of Everything’
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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