Author Archive for Guest Poster

Guest post by the Search Foundation: The global financial crisis

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1 week, 6 days ago
in Activism, Economics, International, Markets and Sociology
. 33 Comments

MB writes: The Search Foundation, working with Professor Frank Stilwell of Sydney University, has prepared a short statement on the global financial crisis and possible responses. The idea behind the statement is to stimulate thought about a progressive agenda among unions and progressive organisations, and the Foundation itself will be working on an agenda for concrete reform proposals directed at refocusing the economic debate on the “the core needs of working Australians”. I don’t necessarily endorse the whole of the statement, but I think it’s well worth posting here to stimulate debate.

The global financial crisis

The global financial crisis has dominated the headlines for months and has affected countries all around the world. Although national governments have stepped in to prevent the collapse of the financial system, the world is heading for a major recession. Australians nearing retirement have seen the value of their super fall dramatically while workers face the prospect of job losses and falling house prices as the financial crisis hits the rest of the economy. So, how did this happen and what can we do about it?

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Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?

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3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Australiana, Climate change, Developing world, Economics, Environment, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, Government, Immigration, International, Markets, Policy, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 12 Comments

Director of the Centre for Policy Development Miriam Lyons writes:

Barack Obama’s victory represents a watershed in American history, but it will also have ramifications around the world. Before I head out to celebrate I thought I’d just bash out a few quick notes on some of the policy implications for Australia of this momentous turnaround in the state of US politics:

Climate change

Today’s election result heralds the rise of Green Keynesianism. The US economy is in the toilet and smart economists are advocating direct investment over a more consumer-based fiscal stimulus. Democrats in Congress got a head start last year with the Green Jobs Act, and elements of the President-elect’s energy and environment policies look a lot like a ‘Green New Deal’. This from Time Magazine:

He wants to launch an “Apollo project” to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: “The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit.” But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, “because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt.” A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and “there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy … That’s going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.”

Calls for a Green New Deal are also starting to gain traction in the UK - and the UN. This can only help the chances of Australia’s version of the Apollo alliance, which released the ‘Green Gold Rush’ report last week calling for investment in green-collar jobs growth.

The Obama campaign’s target for emissions cuts was 80% by 2050 - a fair way ahead of Oz Labor’s as-yet-unaltered election promise of 60% by 2050. With the Arctic ice-sheet melting rapidly even an 80% target is too low for a developed country like the US, but it should certainly give Professor Ross Garnaut reason to revise his pessimism about the likely outcome of the Copenhagen round of climate negotiations. It’s worth noting that the Obama campaign’s climate and energy platform specifically called for 100% auctioning of permits.

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Guest post by Ben Eltham: Australia Council changes bathwater, loses babies

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1 month ago
in Culture, Policy and Sociology
. 63 Comments

Republished from yesterday’s Crikey with permission.

The Australia Council, an organisation in almost constant flux, has again spun the bingo barrel and pulled out a new round of surprises in its funding announcements — this time in the theatre sector. Eleven new companies have been granted triennial funding by the Council’s Theatre Board, while the same number have had their funding axed.

The announcement continues a recent history of wrenching change in the Commonwealth’s arts funding agency. In 2005, then-CEO Jeniffer Bott pushed through an organisation-wide restructure (labelled a “refocussing”) that led to two of the Australia Council’s funding boards being abolished. Out went specific Boards to support new media and digital arts, and community arts. In came some impressive-sounding “community partnerships” and a special department called the “Inter-Arts Agency”.

As respected ANU academic Jennifer Craik has argued in her book Re-Visioning Arts and Cultural Policy the Bott restructure was not really about addressing the major issues facing the Australia Council and its client organisations. Instead, “the restructure was more about bureau politics than policy reform.”

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Guest post by SocProf: When Management Creates Labour Pain

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2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Authoritarianism, Ethics, Feminism, Health, Industrial Relations, International, Markets, Sociology and Women
. 20 Comments

MB writes: Lost, it would appear, in the government’s focus on productivity as the ruling motif of the workplace is any consideration of the human costs of work in the new economy. I had hoped that Julia Gillard might bring a focus on industrial democracy and the quality of working life to her role as Industrial Relations Minister, but, to date, that’s a hope that appears a futile one. Nevertheless, I agree with David Coats that we need to politicise “bad work”, as I’ve suggested before, and that may well be a contribution largely to be made by civil society. Anyway, when I read this post at The Global Sociology Blog, I thought it cohered well with this effort, and so I asked SocProf if we could post it at LP, and I’m delighted that she agreed.

Dominic Huez, an MD specialized in questions of labor-related medical conditions, has a book out, Souffrir au Travail: Comprendre Pour Agir, that connects illness and suffering to management practices. He recently had a chat hosted by Le Monde. Here is the digest version of what was discussed.

Rejecting “stress” as the proper concept to define his subject, Huez prefers to use “suffering at work” as the correct one that can be caused by a lack of recognition by one’s peers or bosses. In a very Durkheimian fashion, he explains that the dynamics of recognition are essential to one’s identity-at-work and to one’s health.

For Huez, there are two main mechanisms at the root of psychopathologies at work (in both senses):

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The Poll Bludger’s live blog of the WA count [continued from The Poll Bludger]

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2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Notices and State/Territory Elections
. 39 Comments

MB: William’s been having problems with his database crashing, so he’s going to conclude his liveblogging of the WA election poll count here if the problems continue.

10.48pm. I’ll wrap it up here and carry on over at my place, so enormous thanks to Mark Bahnisch for allowing me to clog up his page. The Liberals have gained Ocean Reef, North West, Jandakot, Swan Hills, Mount Lawley, Bunbury, Darling Range, Kingsley, Wanneroo, Southern River and apparently Morley. Varying degrees of doubt remain about Riverton, Forrestfield, Collie-Preston and Morley. Labor might make a notional gain of Albany. Former Labor independent John Bowler has won Kalgoorlie from the Liberals. Labor may have lost Kwinana to independent Carol Adams. Independents Janet Woollard in Alfred Cove and Sue Walker in Nedlands may or may not lose their seats to the Liberals. The numbers are 27 to 29 for Labor plus Labor independents, with either one or two of the latter; 26 to 28 for the Liberals plus Liberal independents, also with one to three of the latter; and four for the Nationals.

Continue reading ‘The Poll Bludger’s live blog of the WA count [continued from The Poll Bludger]’

Guest post by Jason Wilson: GetUp!’s Project Democracy

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Guest Poster
2 months, 4 weeks ago
in Activism, Blogging and Media
. 11 Comments

The new Senate is our focus in this iteration of a new feature on our website - Project Democracy. That’s nice because, on the organisation’s third birthday, this returns GetUp! to our initial emphasis on making the Senate a genuine house of review. (We’ll bring the Reps on-stream later). PD brings a new emphasis on offering tools for political engagement alongside GetUp’s established practice of campaigning on issues that matter to Australians. We hope it will make our representatives less remote from all of us - we all know that Senators can sometimes appear slightly detached from their State-wide contituencies.

The site will include a number of tools that we hope will break down some of the barriers in Australian political life – between citizens, and between communities and their representatives. PD rolls together a number of features that might be familiar from other places. But by putting them together, we hope we’ll be more of a “one-stop shop” for citizen engagement with the parliament, and building local activist networks.

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Guest post by Ben Eltham: Useless pack of Bankers

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3 months ago
in Media, Polls and Sociology
. 19 Comments

Earlier this week at New Matilda, I explored the growing problem of the media’s fascination with corporate-backed reports and surveys. There’s already been plenty of discussion here about the BCA report into emissions trading, and my colleage Ben Pobije put a satirical skewer through Bernard Salt’s pop demography.

I want to specifically have a look at BankWest and the latest edition of that bank’s so-called “Quality of Life Index”. This report got a massive free kick from a range of media outlets. Even the ABC had no problem covering the report, making sure they included the corporate sponsor’s brand when referring to the “BankWest Quality of Life Index” on ABC TV news, before going on to give BankWest executive Ian Corfield some free media on the national broadcaster. A Google News search on this topic yielded 167 mentions — not bad going for a report that has some serious methodological flaws.

The BankWest study because it shows just how easily busy journalists and credulous media outlets can be taken in by what appears to be rigorous research. The media reported the findings of the report with little analysis of what it actually said, and no examination of the dubious reasoning behind its impressive league tables of best and worst local government areas in the nation. “The BankWest Quality of Life Index has debunked the myth of Australians’ ’sea-change’ and ‘tree-change’ desires,” is how the ABC story led.

No, it hasn’t. Continue reading ‘Guest post by Ben Eltham: Useless pack of Bankers’

Guest post by Possum Comitatus: Betting markets in the absence of the polls

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3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Media, Polls, Sociology and State/Territory Elections
. 7 Comments

MB writes: I’ve always been of the view that the “wisdom of the crowd” hypothesis doesn’t work very well in the case of prediction markets for elections - because the number of insiders who have relevant information not available to anyone else is miniscule. One instance I followed closely was the Queensland state election - where the odds for the number of seats Labor would win very closely paralleled what the polls and the pundits were saying. I actually did have a bit of inside info, and I made about 1500 bucks, which I couldn’t have done if there’d been tons of people with access to such info. Possum’s piece in Crikey today, I think goes some way to confirming my view that the markets are basically parasitic on the polls because in the absence of any, punters went with “received wisdom”, which got the result spectacularly wrong.

Possum writes: If you were to look at the betting markets for the NT election last week, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the ALP had a greater chance of being abducted by the latest outbreak of NT UFO’s than they had of being beaten by the CLP. Yet, with no major pollster running pre-election surveys in the Territory, should we be at all surprised that the markets got it so wrong in terms of the chance of Labor retaining government?

As much as political polling is scorned as reducing important political issues down to little more than horse race commentary, it fulfills one fundamentally important role — it stops people talking sh-t.

From politicians to columnists, from reporters to your average Joe – political polling encourages all but the learned types at The Australian to keep it in their pants.

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Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

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3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War
. 193 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

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Guest post by Marcus Westbury: Flotillas vs. flagships

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3 months, 4 weeks ago
in Art, Brisbane, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Media, Music, Perth, Policy and Urbanism
. 27 Comments

We featured some of Marcus Westbury’s commentary on cultural policy here at LP around the time of the 2020 summit. Here’s a guest post which originally appeared at his blog - it’s the text of a talk he gave to a forum on “Creative People” organised by the Department of Culture and The Arts in Perth as part of the process they’re undertaking of developing a policy framework for Western Australia.

One of my obsessions at the moment and the focus of the next series of Not Quite Art is our changing cultural geography. By that I mean how the cultures that we are exposed to, that influence and obsess us are circulating in the world.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Marcus Westbury: Flotillas vs. flagships’

Guest post by Senator Rachel Siewert: Award modernisation - what’s going on?

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4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Howardia, Industrial Relations, Poverty and Women
. 9 Comments

This issue is something I’d planned to write about but have lacked time to do so. Some very important changes to the legal regulation of working conditions are being made in this country largely beneath the radar of media scrutiny - outside the business press. So I’m happy to post this contribution from Greens Senator for Western Australia, Rachel Siewert. - MB

Senator Rachel Siewert is the Australian Greens spokesperson on Industrial Relations.

Massive upheaval is occurring to Australia’s standard employment conditions and minimum wages, with little to no understanding or public attention.

The ‘award modernisation’ process currently underway in the AIRC, following a request from the Workplace Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, will impact on all Australian workers … either directly through loss of conditions or indirectly through lowering the base from which agreements can be made.

While the Rudd Government likes to compare its IR policy with Work Choices (…so it can say things are slightly better than they might have been), a better way of evaluating their policy is to look at the industrial relations system that existed in Australia before the aberration of Work Choices. On this test the Government is failing to provide adequate protection for workers.

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Guest post by Peter Murphy - Zimbabwe: Despotism or Democracy?

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5 months, 1 week ago
in Developing world, Elections, Feminism, Health, Imperialism, International, Politics, Poverty and Women
. 48 Comments

Peter Murphy from the Zimbabwe Information Centre writes:

Opening Remarks

This story of Zimbabwe and its political, economic and social turmoil is really a story about how women are trying to have their human right to a say in their society, about how the people want to help those millions who have HIV, about how the trade unions want to develop a prosperous, peaceful and just society, about how the professional classes want to create a way of governing that is straightforward, fair and works.

It is a story for the whole of Africa, and that is why all of Africa and in particular South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Botswana are part of this story.

As I write the people of Zimbabwe are being called out to a one-horse election that they don’t want, because it has already been drowned in blood, violence and cheating.

Between the March 29 presidential and parliamentary elections and today, almost 100 activists from the Movement for Democratic Change have been murdered, often in the most terrible way, over 3,000 have been very badly injured through torture, and now about 100,000 have been internally displaced because their homes and property have been looted or completely destroyed.

Zimbabwe now faces a chaotic regime collapse, with perhaps a minimal role for the international community in the immediate crisis.

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AP: That’ll be $2.50 a word for copy-paste, thanks

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Guest Poster
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Culture, Law and Media
. 22 Comments

This guest post is from Lauredhel, crossposted from Hoyden About Town

The blogosphere is starting to buzz. What’s the buzz? AP has kicked up about bloggers posting short, linked excerpts without paying.

Out-law.com says that the Associated Press issued Rogers Cadenhead (of the Drudge Retort) a series of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The stories contained excerpts from 33 to 79 words long of AP stories, with links to the original articles.

The Drudge Retort defends these excerpts as fair use.

Wired reports that the AP has been a little rocked by the blogosphere’s defiant response:

“We need to take a step back. It doesn’t mean we’re going to try to define a legal standard for fair use. All we’re saying, we’re going to figure out how the bloggers can use our content in a way we feel gives them a lot of leeway but still protects us,” Jim Kennedy, an AP vice-president, told Threat Level in an interview.

Kennedy added: “Do we really want to take this fight into the blogosphere? I think the answer to that question is, ‘no we don’t.’ Bloggers are different. That distinction was not being made. To that extent, this has been a helpful episode.”[1]

Continue reading ‘AP: That’ll be $2.50 a word for copy-paste, thanks’