The holiday season is almost upon us, and many readers’ holiday plans may well include a visit to my adopted home town of Brisbane. My own plans entail a visit to my original home town of Melbourne, but I digress.
Visitors to Brisbane will notice that a significant new component of the city’s transport infrastructure is the growing network of dedicated busways. Each of the busway stations is equipped with an electronic information board purporting to display information on impending bus arrivals at the station. You are hereby advised that reading and interpreting the information displayed on the information board is, well, somewhat counter-intuitive. Continue reading ‘Travellers’ tip – how to read a Brisbane Busway information board’
As a VFL/AFL footballer, he “boasted neither elegance nor athleticism, but Justin Madden was one of the most supremely effective ruckmen of recent times”. As a minister in the Bracks and Brumby Labor governments, he’s arguably made one of the more successful transitions from sport to politics, notwithstanding the factional hackery of his staff (see here for some of the skullduggery inflicted). Madden is an architect by training, and has made noises in the past about the profilgate environmental footprint of the McMansions springing up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. But, as Planning Minister, he’s presided over the continual watering-down of Melbourne 2030, a planning strategy that was supposed to contain Melbourne’s sprawl and encourage higher-density housing. This watering down has been heavily criticized, not least by the editorial staff of The Age. So it’s not entirely surprising that he’s bobbed up with an op-ed defending the government’s planning policies. Unfortunately, it displays a talent for evading one’s opponents never displayed by Madden on the footy field:
I totally reject the sort of intellectual superiority of some “planning experts” that would dictate an inflexible planning solution. People deserve choice. If they want to live in tram-track suburbs, good planning gives them the choice to do that. If growing suburbs on the fringe of the city meet their needs, then there must be appropriate supply. Too often the debate is hijacked either by a cultural snobbery against growth suburbs on the city fringe, or a self-serving not-in-my-backyard-ism against development in established areas.
I’m all for an honest and continuing debate about how best to manage Melbourne and Victoria’s growth. But I won’t stand for cultural snobbery and NIMBY-ism being dressed up as public debate.
I might have mentioned in passing here, and I know I’ve said on Facebook, that I’ve become interested lately in exploring some themes which don’t really seem to fit into the LP space, and also in a more personal form of blogging, and indeed, a more writerly form of blogging.
One of the issues I’ve been interested in discussing is the complex intersections of the religious, the spiritual and the social. That’s in part from a place based perspective – associated in particular with the continuing life of Saint Mary’s, South Brisbane – and in part from a radical Catholic position. In the process of so doing, I’ve been addressing some themes both personal and philosophical.
I’m not entirely certain the ‘one size fits all’ blog works for this sort of discussion. I’m also not interested in getting into an argument about the existence of God, or whether all religion is evil, or Richard Dawkins, or whatnot. That sort of thing might have its place, but it’s rarely conducted with much intellectual rigour, and it simply doesn’t do anything for me.
Anyway, I write this really just to highlight some of what I’m doing for the benefit of those who enjoy my writing and appreciate my perspective. Continue reading ‘Blogging otherwise…’
A lot of my academic and consultancy work at the moment is focused on online urbanism, distributed knowledge and urban creativity. I’m loath to use the term ‘action research’ loosely, but this form of public sociology is really impossible to separate from creative practice. One of the projects I’ve been working on with some lovely and talented colleagues is about to launch itself on the world, and now has its own web presence – BrisCulture.
While literature about Creative Cities abounds, every city has its own urbanism and its own distinct culture. A ‘one size fits all’ model doesn’t map neatly onto the specificities of place. While Brisbane is now on the arts map with new cultural infrastructure capable of attracting visitors in the hundreds and thousands to major exhibitions and events, what of the sustainability of the city’s everyday lived cultural experience and production? Our town has proved its value in fostering distinctive and innovative forms of cultural practice – the germination of the music scene in the Valley or the arrival of grunge lit being notable moments in time. But much of this activity takes place ‘underground’ – it bubbles up alchemically from below; drawing energy from serendipitous connections and a sense of locale. Although we welcome the era of government support, public art and creative industries policy, we contend that embedding, celebrating and fostering emergent practice is a task still to be thought out.
That’s the task we’ve set ourselves. It sounds ambitious, but it’s realisable because we’re approaching it as an exercise in making connections and fostering the art of public conversation and collaborative policy making. You can read about the project at BrisCulture and stay tuned for our first event. As part of the 2009 Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival, we are hosting a joint event with The Centre for Policy Development, and in conjunction with the Eidos Institute, on the 26th of May at the Old School of Arts in Ann Street, Brisbane – Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation. This will only be the beginning – we’re conceiving BrisCulture as a rolling series of events, policy interventions, performances and conversations which exists in a virtual locale as well as in the spaces of the city.
If you’re interested in all this, whether as a Brisbanite, an occasional visitor, or just curious about the town, I’d encourage you to join our Facebook group, which will be utilised to keep everyone in the loop. I’m very excited about this project, and I think it will lead to some really interesting things!
At Pineapple Party Time, I’ve written a sequel to my earlier post on the political difficulties both the LNP and ALP are having in constructing a campaign which can appeal across the “new” and “old” Queensland – a trick Peter Beattie managed.
In other election news, William Bowe has chanced his hand at a seat by seat prediction.
Judging by some conversations I was having this morning, and some buzz on FB over the weekend, a lot of folk are starting to focus on the reality of what Queensland will be if the LNP wins government. No doubt there’s not much mileage in it for Anna Bligh, but there is truth in the perception that the absence of an authoritarian regime and a much freer climate more supportive of creative endeavour has made a real difference to both a lot of Queenslanders who might otherwise have done the well worn trek to Melbourne, Sydney or elsewhere and also to the diversification of our state’s economy into knowledge industries of all kinds. There’s some real apprehension around about the clock being wound back.
This might, of course, be dismissed as a set of metropolitan concerns. I doubt that’s true. Cities such as Toowoomba, Ipswich, Townsville, Rockhampton and others are increasingly promoting themselves as university towns, as creative and educational hubs. Some of the Brisbane v. the regions and elite v. populist stereotypes beloved of just about everyone on either side of the purported dividing line may be false, or at least much blurrier than usually conceived.
Still, the geographical and cultural spread of Queensland makes elections here hard to read – or rather, for those sitting in Brisbane, harder to read as the crow flies further. There are real gaps between social and cultural and economic interests in this big state which are difficult to bridge. Whether we end up with an LNP government holding fewer metropolitan seats than Labor, or a Labor government with a much diminished regional representation (or a minority government whose complexion is determined by rural and regional independents), the next state administration is going to find it more challenging to govern in the interests of all Queenslanders.
That’s particularly because – on both sides – the vision has been so barren.
It probably won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the Obama administration’s very large to do list includes the future of General Motors and Ford and the closely linked issue of climate change and energy efficiency. Funding has been cobbled together to keep the big auto makers afloat for the next little while – after a bunch of Republican senators proclaimed the virtues of “free markets” while incidentally championing non-union car plants in their own Southern states. The legislative sausage machine can be such a boondoggle factory in the US that it’s probably hoping for far too much for any rational way forward for a restructured car industry to emerge from all the argy-bargy, as someone who believes in “making things” would have it.
What that path might look like is discernible from an excellent article in the New York Review of Books by economic historian Emma Rothschild. She’s critical – rightly in my view – of the oscillation between short termism and a horizon that’s seemingly so far in the future that it never need factor into political calculation when it comes to immediate action. 2050 is an aeon in politics. Her analysis also has the virtue of examining the American auto industry within the contexts of car culture and actually existing inequality – quite pointedly shining a light on both inequalities in access to transport and the actual as opposed to imagined patterns of residential demographics. One can only hope that the sort of thinking her piece embodies makes it onto the table in one way or another.
It’s surely a time when a lot of taken for granted assumptions should be questioned, and industry rentseeking and dealmaking as usual should come under closer scrutiny. In this country, too, as we rush to preserve manufacturing skills and jobs we might pause and reflect on the fact that manufacturing is going down the gurgler not just here or in the developed world but in developing countries as well. That was recently highlighted by The Economist, which of course offers the predictable recipe of doing nothing and letting the market rip, as it were. But one need not adopt that ideological view to think that some of the work that was done last year on the Australian car industry and innovation and so forth might need a lot of rethinking.
In the course of my research, I’ve been reading lots of net history. There are exceptions to the rule, but the same dichotomised themes tend to recur again and again without resolution, and as a number of authors, including the excellent Fred Turner, point out – too many concepts have been taken over from 90s style cyber-utopians and Californian boosters without much reflection on their adequacy. One of those is Howard Rheingold’s “virtual community” (and to be fair to Rheingold, he’s much more nuanced than some of his academic epigones!)… We seem to be stuck in a hermeneutic circle – of the bad kind – suspended between online writing as media substitute and online communication as pure public sphere. If what occurs online falls short of either (heavily) ideal(ised) type, then it appears to fall into the worthless category by default.
A further sequel to the LNP/Courier-Mail early election mania – Springborg backer Clive Palmer’s 18 year old son, Michael, who’s the LNP candidate for the safe Labor seat of Nudgee, has had a bit more publicity for saying dumb stuff than 18 year old candidates in safe seats usually get. Palmer was slapped down by Tim Nicholls for demanding that Anna Bligh call an election for February 21. Apparently, after the frenzied LNP/Courier-Mail election speculation fest, they’ve now always been committed to seeing that Labor serves a full term.
That’s nice for them, because that’s always been the most probable outcome. Although I do worry about the sunstroke and skin cancer risks unnecessarily run by all those LNP rank & filers sweating it out campaigning on street corners over the Christmas holidays. Treasurer Andrew Fraser reinforced this on Friday in an interview with the Fin Review, discussing the preparations for the June budget and observing:
Anyone who trots out the line the election timing has anything to do with avoiding a June Budget is ill-informed, mostly stupid and probably politically motivated.
I don’t know if he was thinking of The Borg, who judging by the fact that Mark McArdle and Tim Nicholls have been doing all the running for the LNP in the media, is still on hols. Perhaps Lawrence never expected a February poll. Or it may be the ultimate small target strategy. But with Bligh taking a higher profile and announcing good things like a new park at the top of the Kangaroo Point cliffs on crown land overlooking the river and running around the shop spruiking jobs initiatives, they might like to contemplate actually coming up with a political strategy now that Labor’s kicking off its re-election plan.
Commenter Angharad discusses Kevin Rudd’s homelessness white paper which didn’t get much discussion because of its timing, but deserves some because of the importance of the issue. -MB
A few days before Christmas, Kevin Rudd launched a white paper on homelessness The Road Home with far less fan fare than the climate change white paper a few weeks earlier.
The white paper was, on the whole, well received by the homelessness policy community [disclaimer – I was close to the action on this one]. It sets out a strategy and identifies targets like “halve overall homelessness by 2020” and “offer accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it.” It’s been signed off by COAG and has a substantial increase in funds. So far, so good and it has as a better chance of succeeding than anything currently in place.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? And indeed since Christmas Eve? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
The New Farm festivities kicked off with a deeply spiritual mood before Midnight Mass (Italian style, described here) @ Casa Bahnisch. Surrounded by angelic presences we were! You can see the Holy Spirit church steps where we enjoyed pannetone and sparkling wine here at flickr.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
On Friday night, I met some friends for a cocktail @ The Bowery (and I recommend a Southside as a good summer drink…) before sauntering down to the always excellent Jugglers Art Space on Brunswick Street for their last opening of the year – The X Show – a compendium of some of their most popular artists of 2008. Jugglers is an excellent space – with the beer garden like space at the back surrounded by graffiti covered walls being a much more pleasant venue for a drink (and the wines were $4.50 a glass) than in some smaller and more conventional galleries. I also particularly enjoyed Abigael Whittaker’s artwork, and I’m looking forward to her solo exhibition next year. We then retired to Pho Kim Lan on the Chinatown mall for a vego feast and a few bottles of white from the bottlo at the Elephant and Wheelbarrow which has unaccountably gone minimalist in terms of selection. Perhaps they’re concentrating on shovelling out beer and alcopops to the partying masses. But a thoroughly enjoyable dinner with very pleasant company!
Today, of course, is the LP Christmas Drinks in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney – so I shall see some of you there and let me raise a metaphorical glass in festive spirit to all LPers everywhere! No doubt there’ll be a separate thread or threads on the drinks at a later point. Details of venues, etc, are here.
If you’d like to see a higher res version of any of the images, click through and then click on ‘full view’ once you’re inside the gallery.
I’m not at all so sure that the connection between current crisis and future speculation (or speculative futures) is as straightforward as Felix Gilman suggests at Ecstatic Days, but I find these questions quite the fascinating nevertheless:
Economic collapse, the heat death of the earth, and the forthcoming resource wars of the 2010s: what do these things mean for genre fiction? Some subgenres will prosper, presumably, others will decline. As we are plunged into a real-life gothic-punk nightmare, what people are looking for in escapism and exoticism seems likely to change.
What’s going to happen to all those books about gritty decaying Dickensian cities once we’re all actually living in one?
Test case: pirates. There’s been a bit of a resurgence of pirate stories recently. Fun and light-hearted escapism, with just a touch of tongue-in-cheek jokiness. What’s going to happen to the demand for pirate stories now that pirates are actually a problem again?
No one would every accuse the LNP leader Lawrence “the Borg” Springborg of being poll driven, would they? I mean… surely it’s a coincidence that the latest Galaxy Poll on state voting intentions found Labor leading strongest on transport and the LNP releasing a transport policy for Brisbane commuters the same day?
The said policy is an amalgam of the undercosted, weird (extra carriages on trains which won’t fit on the station) and possibly unfeasible, according to the government. But in the grand tradition of governments, Labor are claiming they were already thinking of the most apparently popular bit of the Borg’s train agenda, and may well steal it, but they wouldn’t be doing that because they were already… etc. The neatness of this trick is that the government can actually do something about what the opposition can only talk about, and at the same time it provides some dangerous incentives for the LNP to remain a policy free zone.
But, leaving aside the politics for a moment, The Borg’s initative is to have free fares for early and late commuters heading to and from the CBD by rail – from 6am to 7am and from 6pm to 7pm. The idea – supposed to reduce overcrowding on peak hour trains – is said to have been borrowed from a Melbourne iniative, which is what Labor are now saying they’ve been looking at for some time. Any Melbs folks care to tell us Quincelanders how it’s worked out in practice?
Getting back to the politics, Springborg combined his announcement with the launch of his own new form of transport – a campaign bus called “The Borg Express”. The visuals suggest part of his problem – the very self-centred (or if you prefer, leadership focused) nature of his campaign. I haven’t seen any qualitative polling on this, but I’d strongly suspect the LNP doesn’t have much of a brand, and the worst of both the Libs and the Nats might be haunting its image. The Borg has a lot riding on his own self-presentation, and the LNP must be hoping all the eggs in this particular basket don’t break as The Borg Express wends its way around.
The CCC has again released adverse findings after yet another investigation into local government, this time into the mayor of the City of Cockburn. He’s standing aside while the findings are investigated by an independent inquiry. I don’t really want to write about the findings themselves; they’re pretty self-explanatory. But a story that has come up during the saga raises a troubling issue about the ability of the powerful to quash democratic protest.
Residents of Cockburn have been collecting signatures for a petition calling on the Local Government Minister to sack the councillors. According to a report in Cockburn’s local community newspaper this week, staff at the council have been contacting shopping centres asking them to remove the protestors.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
A lot of my academic and consultancy work at the moment is focused on online urbanism, distributed knowledge and urban creativity. I’m loath to use the term ‘action research’ loosely, but this form of public sociology is really impossible to separate from creative practice. One of the projects I’ve been working on with some lovely and talented colleagues is about to launch itself on the world, and now has its own web presence – 
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