The article – Autism coal link study stalled by government – is written as a straight science piece, but it’s a pretty poor example of the genre. The journalist appears to have pretty much just run straight off a presser, and done no background research at all.

The director of the Swinburne Autism Bio-Research Initiative, David Austin, said the data on autism incidence by postcode could quickly answer the question of whether mercury emissions from power stations are implicated in babies and infants developing the disorder.

Well, Swinburne University actually exists, which is better than most mercury/autism “researchers” manage.

When Professor Austin requested the information after a review of international scientific literature confirmed ”a mercury-autism relationship”…

Really? There go some alarm bells…

A University of Texas study two years ago found a statistically significant link between the amount of mercury released from industrial sources such as coal-fired power stations and increased autism rates.

That would be this study, which has been pretty roundly criticised since its release.

There’s no mention at all in the news article that the scientific consensus is that mercury has nothing to do with autism spectrum disorders. Nothing at all. That’s not to say they shouldn’t necessarily have published this article, but the journalist should certainly have mentioned (high, wide and often) that these ideas are well outside the scientific mainstream.

And even more alarm bells went off after a quick visit to the website of the Swinburne Autism Bio-Research Initiative.

The first thing to note is that, while they’re based out of Swinburne University they are privately funded: SABRI is privately funded and supported by Swinburne University of Technology. Our capacity to undertake critically important research is limited only by the level of funding we receive. We have several research projects that require urgent funding..

The major link on the Selected Publications section is to the Autism Research Institute References.

The Autism Research Institute is a fairly notorious anti-vaccination institute, and the linked document is shot through with references to studies conducted by disgraced autism researcher Andrew Wakefield, plus the Geiers and a plethora of others with poor reputations in the mainstream scientific community.

And at least four of the five links in the “Helpful Links” section go to known anti-vaccination campaign groups (I don’t know anything about the Mindd Foundation, though I wouldn’t be too hopeful).

And their major media link? An article from the UK’s Daily Mail.

‘Nuff said.

Their research is there to be downloaded.

Now, I’m not qualified to criticise their research in depth – but I will make a couple of points.

There are eight articles published, in seven publications.

A couple of the journals stand out from the start – like Contemporary Hypnosis, for example. Not the place you’d usually look for groundbreaking autism spectrum disorder research, you’d have thought.

And Autism Insights, which comes with something of a dubious history.

And can the journal Electronic Journal of Applied Psychology: Innovations in Autism, in which one of their articles is published, be the same Electronic Journal of Applied Psychology that two SABRI members (including one of the study authors) edit?? Surely not.

I don’t know much about the others – they appear respectable, to be fair, if small.

The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, for example, has a five year impact factor of 1.897 (that’s not great), and is ranked 49/77 among toxicology journals, 58/122 among Public, Environmental & Occupational Health and 78/180 from Environmental Sciences.

Not dodgy, but not the major publications of the genre, either.

But it’s not a particularly strong list of publications, even leaving the publishing journals aside.

An epidemiological analysis of the ‘autism as mercury poisoning’ hypothesis is a lit review, no epidemiology (on the part of the author) involved.

Gastrointestinal microbiology in autistic spectrum disorder: a review also appears to be a lit review, rather than original research, though I can’t access the full paper.

And even to my inexpert eye An investigation of porphyrinuria in Australian children with Autism has some serious problems.

The major references are to two studies conducted by Nataf and the Geier father and son team, that purport to show elevated level of mercury in urine samples is a marker for autism spectrum disorders, and (in the case of the Geier paper) that giving kids with ASD chelating agents is a Good Idea.

These papers and their authors have been debunked around the internet. There’s no need to repeat that work here – you easily can do your own research if you’re interested.

The interesting thing with the Austin/Shandley paper, though, is that while it’s cited as confirming those two earlier studies it uses their research to supply the control group for their own (41 patient) study.

So, there’s no control group in the Australian study, and it uses data generated in earlier studies to confirm their results.

Make of that what you will.

To be fair, I don’t know much about SABRI other than what I’ve been able to discover in an hour poking about tonight. Maybe they’re genuinely seeking for the truth of the matter. Maybe there’s some link between coal fired power stations and autism (though the current state of the science says it’s unlikely).

There’s little doubt, though, that anything SABRI puts out in public could bear a little scrutiny given where they appear to line up in the autism wars.

So why didn’t the Fairfax journo look a little harder, seek another source, or – if it had to run at all – at least balance the article out with comment from a more mainstream representative of the science of the disorder?

And the last couple of pars make it clear the department is acting within pretty clear ethical boundaries:

A department spokeswoman said that under government protocols, data referring to fewer than 20 individuals would not be released to protect privacy.

”Professor Austin asked for specific data by postcode. Most of this data would refer to less than 20 individuals,” she said.

So why is a researcher going to the media to try to pressure the minister to overrule those guidelines? And why is the media helping them do so, particularly when a quick bit of research throws up plenty of concerns about the researchers?

It’s an interesting piece but she falls, like most others who’ve been talking about the issue, into the trap of assuming the default target for subscriptions will be individuals and the general public.

I doubt very much that it will be. There will be very few people at News Ltd that will be under the misapprehension that consumers will pay for content – the studies are pretty clear, and their analysts are in the business of making money off clear plans, not blind hope.

Unless you keep the subscription rates very low (less than $30 a year, say), there would be little prospect of getting individual subscriptions for basic news content – and that money would probably be more of a hassle to collect than the revenue is worth.

But there’s an alternate model. My guess is that the primary target for subscriptions will be businesses, and other larger organisations – particularly targeted and packaged subscriptions, as discussed in the Mark Day piece Simons linked to.

I wouldn’t pay $100 a year to access the Oz online, but I reckon there’s a chance my employer would drop several times that get access for our entire office – particularly if they could sell us a package that was relevant to our business.

In a previous life I worked as a flack in local government, and I would have almost certainly found the room in our budget for subs to the Oz, the West, and maybe a couple of others.

It would have been irritating, and there would have been some resistance at first, but I know eventually we would have dropped a few hundred dollars on subscriptions for the major papers if we needed to do so to ensure online access for our staff. And if News Ltd was able to limit access to targeted sections (and, say, thereby prevent people from spending time reading the sport and entertainment sections on work time), so much the better. Our CEO would have called it a productivity bonus and named it cheap at the price.

It’s a model that has had some success, particularly in specialised sectors: Pharma in Focus and MiningNews.net are two good local examples, and there’s a raft of other small publishers around the world that have had significant success in producing good journalism for a targeted audience, particularly when it’s business paying for the subscription.

If News charges a sliding scale (based on numbers of people accessing the site through a corporate subscription) to corporations, governments and NGOs for targeted content then there’s plenty of money to be made. Major players like BHP wouldn’t think twice about dropping $10,000 on a company wide subscription, and other organisations would probably feel the same way.

It will almost certainly come at the cost of their subscription to the paper copies of the papers – but News and the rest know they’re dying anyway, so what do they care?

Ever.

This was an election where all of the ALP’s problems over the last 6-8 years came home to roost.

There was no central theme. The campaign material was ugly, late out, badly written, and largely unrelated to anything voters actually cared about.

The central campaign was a shambles, courtesy of a complete disconnect between the Parliamentary Labor party, party office, and the lay ALP membership.

Local campaigns were worse – added to little or no leadership from Stirling St was the placement of inexperienced and incompetent teams in a large number of individual local campaigns. People who had either no campaigning experience, no recent campaigning experience, or who were completely subservient to the sitting members for whom they worked.

Add to this lazy and complacent sitting members, who assumed Buswell would take the Liberal party to the election, did no work as a consequence and are now looking about for someone else to blame.

Add to this a poll-based campaign which had its agenda set from data collected by a polling company that, it would now appear, knew fuck all about anything.

Add to this a lack of political operatives with a marginal seat campaigning background in ministerial offices – a key way of making sure that community concerns about sensitive issues are recognised and dealt with, and the best way of ensuring that ministers and the premier are aware what the actual issues are.

Add to this the complete inability of the Carpenter government to capitalise on its record of being a generally competent government – or even mention it during the campaign. Despite the usual media angst, there are no real problems in health and lauranorder in WA, and the looming infrastructure issues are largely in hand.

Add to this the fact that a two term government appears to have been outspent by a Liberal party that was broke and widely regarded as unelectable as recently as a month ago. How, a month before the election, was Stirling St not up to the armpits in cash?

Make no mistake, the ALP lost the campaign – Barnett didn’t win it. And they’ve lost, whether they’re able to form a minority government or not. While a Barnett government will be unstable, a returned Carpenter government will be worse – the presence of Michelle Roberts in the caucus room, at the very least, will ensure that.

They got beat because it was the worst run political campaign in recent history.

Sure, there was a generally hostile media environment (with Paul Armstrong at the West, in particular, intent on playing kingmaker at the state government level), a number of running (CCC, for example) issues, a Premier with little direct experience of formal campaigning and questionable political instincts, a botched preselection process which saw a number of sitting members dumped, and general voter fatigue with the government.

But those people in the WA ALP now looking for someone to blame – every MP who failed to get returned, every staffer newly out of a job, every political wannabe currently staring at the wreckage of their ambition – wants to pay close attention to the top part of that list, because the reasons they were weeping into their Crown lagers last night were the product of eight years of inattention and lack of political forethought, not one man’s decision to call an election six months early.

Resurrected Liberal leader Colin “Don’t mention the canal” Barnett is promising that he’s not Troy Buswell. And doesn’t at all look like the kind of bloke who could be caught sniffing chairs.

The first night is all about predictability – Barnett is claiming that the snap election has been called because Labor is running scared (of him, presumably). Carpenter is denying that the snap election has been called to take advantage of the leadership turmoil in the Liberal ranks.

Despite some rustlings of dissent from the local commentariat – local political commentators are largely calling the move a political mistake – a call based largely, I suspect, on the idea that if Barnett isn’t as thoroughly unpopular as Buswell was, the Libs should therefore cruise to an easy win.

There may be something to that view – certainly Buswell was regarded in WA with the kind of amused contempt that makes it difficult to get any political traction, and it is entirely possible that WA electors have forgotten exactly why it is they didn’t vote for Barnett last time. And there is no doubt at all that Carpenter isn’t held in the same regard as Geoff Gallop, and certainly doesn’t have the same campaigning experience as his predecessor.

But when you consider the raw mechanics of Carpenter’s decision, it starts to look like a potentially very good decision indeed.

Consider this:

Item: Barnett has been in the job for a day. He probably hasn’t even appointed a chief of staff, let alone a strong trusted team around him.

Item: Barnett and WA Liberal President Barry Court hate each other. Court has been leading the public charge defending Buswell’s leadership in recent weeks, and has clearly been caught out badly by the sudden change in heart in the parliamentary party. This is something that could probably have been talked out, given time – but they don’t have time.

Item: A change in leadership means the Libs have no campaign material prepared – no photos of the leader, no photos of the leader with candidates, no pre-prepared ads for television, their style guide is suddenly is out of date – they have close to nothing, unless party office is a lot more organised than they’ve seemed to be over the last six months.

Item: A change of leadership always means a change of policy (don’t mention the canal, dammit!). While the Libs to date have been pretty thin on publicly stated policy, they presumably have some stashed away for the election. Not only will the leader’s new office have to go through this, the risk they run is that a shadow minister will get caught on the hop, and be promptly contradicted by the new leader. Now, as Rudd’s run amply demonstrates, you can get away with this a couple of times in a campaign, but maybe not so much when your opponent’s narrative is all about portraying you as clueless and disorganised.

Item: Barnett is not popular with the lay Liberal Party. Again, you can get over this, but not in the two days Barnett has had. This will hurt on the ground, in a way it shouldn’t.

Item: The WA Libs have very little money – corporate and wealthy individual donors haven’t been kicking in to a campaign they have presumed doomed by Buswell’s chair sniffing antics. There now isn’t much time to fix this – individual candidates may have cash but party office does not. And while WA Labor’s fundraising efforts have been pitiful compared to the rampant corruption corporate schmoozing seen in other states, they have enough of a war chest to make a proper run at it.

Item: A snap election means that government departments won’t have time to get properly non-partisan in time for the election. The WA government has a bunch of health, apprenticeship and Laura Norder ads running at the moment, and it will probably take a week or so for those that are still pre-booked to get withdrawn. Free advertising for the incumbent doesn’t always win an election, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, particularly when you have a ready made excuse…

Item: The Olympics will suck all of the oxygen out of everything for the next month. Getting traction is going to be very difficult, which also won’t hurt the incumbent.

Figure: Labor is ready for this campaign, the Libs are not. Confusion in the ranks will cost them at least a week of a very short campaign while they fix their material and get it out onto the ground. This will hurt, when there’s not much oxygen to be had late in the campaign.

Figure: The confusion will cost Barnett more time and energy putting out spot fires, minor f*ck-ups and policy blunders than it will Carpenter – and that will play into the Labor narrative. Snap campaigns take discipline to survive, and Labor will have that in spades.

Figure: Both Barnett and Carpenter get a bit… how can we put it… tetchy… under pressure. But Barnett’s under more pressure now, and everyone knows it – especially him.

Figure: The internecine internal Liberal warfare will spill over into public. It’s been going on too long not to. At the very least, Matt Birney will spit the dummy at some stage.

Money where mouth is: despite its many flaws, this Labor government has one more term in it. Labor by eight seats.