Congratulations to PM Rudd on Q&A

Australian PM Rudd is to be congratulated for his willingness to participate in an unscripted free-flowing nationally televised ABC Q&A session with a group of young people at Australia's Old Parliament House in Canberra. He is also to be congratulated for the way the transcript appeared so quickly on the PM's own website (here).

As it happened, today's post on my New England blog, Belshaw's World - crisis in the Westminster system, publishes my Armidale Express column of 3 February 2010. I publish them there with a week's lag because the columns are not included in the on-line edition of the Express. The column was triggered by constitutional events in Canada and deals with the role of Parliament. 

As I read the transcript, I thought that Mr Rudd's willingness to expose himself in this way was a sign of continued health in Australia's system.

In some ways, the transcript makes for excruciating reading.

Political debate in this country has become very stylised: keep on message; answer the question you want to answer rather than the question asked; try to tailor the message to the audience; attack the other side. Journalists and politicians alike are caught in this game.

This type of approach doesn't work in the more free-flowing format of an unscripted Q&A with a very mixed audience and Mr Rudd struggled. The opening questions on the failure of the Rudd Government to deliver on its promises caught him off-balance. Twittering began and it wasn't positive. I was interested in the following exchange mid-point:

JONES: Okay. You're watching Q&A. Remember you can send your web or video questions to our website. The address is on the screen, or join the Twitter conversation. And in just a matter of interest tonight - we have a matter of interest here. Apparently tonight's program has peaked as the number one trending topic on Twitter worldwide. That's hard to believe, isn't it? Okay. But apparently it's true.

PM: I'd like to know how you knew that?

JONES: I didn't know that but someone has told me that, evidently.

I am sure that Mr Rudd and his advisers will review the transcript and indeed they need to do so. Mr Rudd became far too involved in the detail and wrong footed himself on several occasions because of his failure to focus properly on core principles.

To someone like me who is interested in the way things work (and don't!) the Q&A session was quite wonderful because, in getting Mr Rudd off-balance, it was just so revealing. I will write on this more in later posts.

I suspect that the reaction of Mr Rudd's minders to the whole thing will be to advise him not to do it again! That, to my mind, would be a mistake. He and we need this type of thing because it forces focus outside the bounds of the stylised Canberra political dance.

Once again, congratulations to Mr Rudd on his willingness to take the risk of participation.

Postscript:

As you might expect, there is a range of opinion on Mr Rudd's performance. Here are a few random blog reactions:

• Rudd with more Qs than As
• Whatever happened to the vision thing?
• Rudd on Q&A
• KRudd Q & A
• At the end of the day, the kids caned Kevin on Q&A

We all have our own perspectives of course. What did surprise me (I may have used the wrong search terms - I have done that before) was the apparently small number of blog responses outside the small number of usual suspects. I include myself in the latter group.  

Education and Australian skilled migration: a policy catastrophe?

I am still trying to get my mind around the changes announced 8 February 2009 to Australia's skilled migration rules. You will find a copy of the Minister's announcement here. More information is provided here on the Department's web site. The simplest explanation can be found in a speech the Minister gave.

On the surface, it seems sensible to tighten rules that had clearly become open to abuse, so I had no problem there. What did surprise me, however, was the apparent scale of the impact at personal level.

As with so many policy changes, the devil lies in the detail.

After looking at the official statement and at the associated press coverage, I am still not sure that I fully understand. However, the following summarises the position as best I can.

The Minister's announcement describes the first change in this way.

20 000 would-be migrants will have their applications cancelled and receive a refund.

All offshore General Skilled Migration applications lodged before 1 September 2007 will have their applications withdrawn. These are people who applied overseas under easier standards, including lower English language skills and a less rigorous work experience requirement. It is expected about 20 000 people fall into this category. The department will refund their visa application charge at an estimated cost of $14 million. Average applications cost between $1500 and $2000 and most contain more than one person.

Leaving aside the unfortunate turn of phrase "would-be migrants", the media has generally reported this, Al Jazeera or the Times of India are examples, in terms of number of applications cancelled. This is the headline number - "Australia to cancel 20,000 visa applications" Times of India - that grabbed initial global media attention.

In fact, while the Minister's release itself is somewhat ambiguous, it is clear that we are talking about people. At an average visa cost of $1,800, roughly the mid point of the average application fees quoted, we are talking about perhaps 7,800 applications covering 20,000 people.

Some of the media reports linked this change to students. We don't actually know who the applicants are now or indeed where they are at present. Without trawling through all the detail, I am left with the impression that these applicants are under the general program, still living offshore. The Minister described them in this way in his speech:    

First, for persons who applied from overseas before September 2007, the Government has determined to end their uncertainty by withdrawing these applications. About 20 000 people fall into this category.

The unfortunate situation was that these people applied when English language and work experience requirements were easier than they now are, and their backgrounds placed them low down the queue under priority processing arrangements.

As a result, they are unlikely to have ever been granted a visa. The Government will refund their visa application charge.

I am not sure why this item was listed first in the Minister's release, thus ensuring global media attention. At first I thought that it might be another case of Ministerial testosterone. In fact, it seems to be a badly handled case of a Government trying to do the right thing.

The real kicker in the announcement in terms of its impact on people lies in its effects on students presently studying in Australia, especially in the vocational sector.

Under previous arrangements, students acquiring skills listed on the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL) could be reasonably sure of obtaining permanent residence. Now MODL has been abolished with new, more tightly targeted arrangements to be put in place. This means that current students who have enrolled on the expectation of gaining permanent residency may no longer be able to do so.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article, Nick O'Malley provides a little of the history, if in a strongly weighted way.   

Facing a skills shortage, in 2001 the Howard government allowed overseas students to apply for permanent residency while here, and to work here until their applications were processed. I thought and still think that this was a pretty good idea. However, in 2005 the scheme was further expanded to cover skilled and semi-skilled trades in short supply included in MODL, Migration Occupations in Demand List.

The problem that then arose is that the combination of study with almost certain permanent residency led to an immigration driven explosion in student numbers. Between 2003 and 2009, the number of overseas vocational students jumped from 48,573 to 212,538.

The system had to change. The presence of some shonky operators supported by a network of immigration agents had become a national scandal. Yet the very change itself adds to what O'Malley correctly describes as a policy catastrophe.

The scale of the disaster is increased because it comes on top of the previous scandals and of the problems that have arisen with Indian students, a group heavily represented in the growth in student numbers.

The change affects not just the 213,000 current vocational students, but also the large numbers studying at Australian universities many of whom have also been attracted by the possibility of permanent residence. These students now face a more uncertain future. 

The Government has defined transition provisions, although for some reason (a lack of sensitivity perhaps because of the domestic focus?) these are buried in the detail rather than featured as a major point. I quote:

The government recognises that the changes will affect some overseas students currently in Australia intending to apply for permanent residence.

Those international students who hold a vocational, higher education or postgraduate student visa will still be able to apply for a permanent visa if their occupation is on the new Skilled Occupations List. If their occupation is not on the new SOL, they will have until 31 December 2012 to apply for a temporary skilled graduate visa on completion of their studies which will enable them to spend up to 18 months in Australia to acquire work experience and seek sponsorship from an employer.

Again, the devil lies in the detail, so we will have to wait to see what all this means. It will be six months, for example, before the new SOL will be ready. In the meantime, students (and their parents and friends) will have to live with uncertainty.

I do think that the fact that the Government has these still to be fully defined transition provisions in place should be recognised, although we also need to understand the distress and uncertainty created for students and their families. We also need to recognise that there will be flow on effects.

Part of these will come from the impact on Australia's international reputation. Based on the wording of the material, I just don't think that the Government has yet fully recognised this.

Part of the flow on effects will be economic, the impact on our international education sector. To the degree that growth has been driven the migration effect, the changes will have an immediate impact on student numbers, adding to pressures already present from previous problems.

The pressures will be most acute in the vocational sector. I would not be surprised to see this more than halve in size over the next twelve to eighteen months. There will be some flow on-effects in the university sector as well, although here we just don't know the proportion of migration driven demand (I suspect it's quite high) nor the possible extent of reputational effects.

While it will take a little while for these effects to come through, we need to be aware of them. We are talking big numbers here. If I interpret the stats correctly, the international higher education sector was worth $8.9 billion in 2009, the vocational sector $3.4 billion. 

Why computer-lock in damages performance

I am not posting here today.

A question from Winton Bates on my last post, Sunday Essay - why it's hard to break out of the box, as to what I meant by computer lock-in started me thinking and led to me writing Problems with computer lock-in.

This took me far longer than it should have, simply because I was trying to flesh out my own views. 

Sunday Essay - why it's hard to break out of the box

I seem to be in a narrowing thought phase, just at present, and its annoying me. By narrowing thought I mean simply that my interests seem to have narrowed.

Like most regular bloggers, I read a lot of other people's writing for ideas and inspiration. I still do, but I am not getting the same type of sparkle that I used too. I am not suggesting here that the problem lies in a change in the writing of those I read; the problem lies in my own responses.

Thinking about it, boredom is one factor. I just get tired of topics and so, I suspect, do my readers

Take the My School web site as an example: after five posts on this blog, one on another blog, I really don't want to say a lot more. I have worked through the issues to my own satisfaction. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion I reached came right at the end when I concluded:

I am slowly forming the view that one outcome may be a highly unexpected one from Minister Gillard's viewpoint, the partial discrediting of the NAPLAN tests themselves.

I don't mean by this that the NAPLAN tests will go away. Rather, looking in detail at the pattern of responses I think that parents and the various school communities, unlike Governments, actually have the capacity to treat the tests as just one and not necessarily the most important indicator of school performance. I don't need to say anymore for the moment.

One major sub-text in the My School debate is the old question of performance measurement and the linked question of key performance indicators.

I have been banging away at this one for a number of years in both my public policy and management writing. Indicators are not bad in themselves, but they can become quite pernicious when they become the central objective, crowding out other things.

We can see this in the policy discussions about Australia's Indigenous people, another long running theme.

I don't expect the current Rudd Government policy in this area to achieve very much in real terms. It starts from a false measure, national statistics that are in fact averages that conceal the great diversity in Indigenous condition and history across the country. Based on this false measure, it then attempts to apply universal approaches that again fail to recognise the diversity in Aboriginal condition, are Northern Territory dominated, use an inappropriate geographical measure in ARIA and fail to properly analyse and address the root causes of disadvantage. In doing so, it actually stigmatises all Aboriginal peoples by measurement.

Similar problems arise in other areas of public policy from alcopops to NSW driving licenses to higher education targets to the Federal Government's latest child welfare initiatives, all of which I have written about. Again, in writing I now find myself unenthusiastic, if not bored.

I am not saying that I have given up on all these things, I guess that I will keep banging away, but my heart isn't in it.

Throughout my professional career, I have had greatest impact where I have been able to stand outside the conventional box, looking in. This is not easy, for the the box is very powerful in cultural terms, more so when embedded in performance indicators and all the supporting systems. The starting point always lies in research, analysis that questions existing performance, that asks not just why, but also what-if? From this, comes new ideas that then need to be tested.

Of itself, the capacity to stand outside the box is not sufficient. You then have to be able to do, to actually shift the box. Again, this is not easy, for the very forces that made it difficult to think outside the box will also act to defend the box.

I am not a technician, although I have necessarily worked as one from time to time. A technician works on particular tasks as assigned. To the degree that a technician is concerned with change or improvement, it is within the box.

While I can work as a technician, I have usually worked as, and classified myself as, a change agent, someone who consciously attempts to go outside the box. This can create difficulties: the most common criticism levelled at me throughout my professional career is simply that I don't do as I am told, that I attempt to do things outside the role or task narrowly defined. I can't help myself. I am fairly results focused. If I see a problem that can be fixed or a better way of doing things, I am likely to try to bring it about.

This is generally not an issue when working as a consultant, for there I am working to agreed bounds. While I have a professional responsibility that includes advising if I think that something might not work, pointing out alternatives, at the end of it all the client is responsible.

Different issues arise when working within an organisation, for then my identification is with the organisation, its reputation and the things that it is meant to achieve. I find it far harder to limit myself to, and only to, the immediate role as narrowly defined. As a consultant, I can and should walk away from an assignment that I know will fail. As a staff member, I am meant to get on and do it.

My own experience has been that significant meaningful change is quite difficult to achieve because it requires the right people at the right time, a time when the box is weakened for some reason. There have been, I suppose, only two occasions in my working life where I have been responsible for such change.

There have been far more cases where I have achieved small shifts. I have a list of these and take great pleasure in them, for sometimes very little changes can have longer term effects.

To take a small recent example, demonstrating that the distribution of, and change within, Aboriginal population varies from that of the broader population is quite useful when social housing planning has been based on trends within the broader population. An area classified as low priority from a general social housing perspective may in fact be a high priority area when considering Aboriginal housing needs. 

My statement that significant meaningful change is quite difficult to achieve because it requires the right people at the right time, a time when the box is weakened for some reason, may seem odd since we have seen wave after wave of change over recent decades.

Let me disentangle this a little, unpack they would say in current management jargon.

When thinking outside the box at an organisational or individual policy level, the broader changes set a context. They are things that you have to take into account. Further, all those broader change patterns have certain common features.

The first is the influence of fad and fashion, always powerful in management. This leads to the second feature, the herd instinct, the mass adoption of particular approaches once a certain critical point is reached. The third feature follows from the second, the entrenchment of particular practices so that they in turn become an impediment to change.

To illustrate this, consider the focus on measurement. This began in the world of engineering and industry. To improve production, you have to be able to measure things. The quality movement then followed.

The idea of standards began in the early days of industrialisation and of globalisation driven by the simple need to make different bits together better. It was sensible to have, say, common screw sizes. The quality movement came later and focused, as the names says, on ways of improving and standardising quality. The two movements fused with the wide spread of quality and standardisation ideas into public policy and business management.

The requirement to measure things was central to these trends. However, the trends spread into new areas where measurement was far less certain. Today, measurement is the standard orthodoxy, the thing that actually has to be broken if real change is to be brought about.

If I was asked what was the biggest single impediment to change today I would say the computer.

The adoption of computers and IT more broadly has been one of the greatest causes of economic growth because it allowed existing things to be done more efficiently, new things to be done that could not be done before. Yet, as any IT professional knows, there is a considerable difference between simply computerising existing systems (this will certainly make them more efficient) and the design of completely new systems likely to yield the greatest benefit from the new technology.

I first came across the problem of computer lock-in a number of years ago when facilitating the development of a strategic plan for the Australian subsidiary of a global IT company.

Everybody at the workshop agreed that the company's IT and knowledge management systems no long properly reflected either company needs or the marketplace. Everybody also agreed that the sheer cost of changing the system meant that senior management would not agree. They just had to work around it.

You see, once entrenched, the computer protects what is at the expense of what might be.        

Saturday Morning Musings - content, distribution and Rupert Murdoch

There was something hauntingly familiar about Rupert Murdoch's declaration that News Corporation was "on the cusp of a digital dynasty".

Back in the late 1980s, one of the major assignments of my then consulting team was to model trends in the global communications environment for Telecom Corporate Strategy. Our focus was qualitative rather than quantitative, the definition of key trends and their interaction with each other.

To do this, we analysed the corporate strategies of a large number of major players across the computing, media, pay TV, communications and film sectors, drawing conclusions as to how all this might fit together. Our conclusions on the equipment side have not stood the test of time, but we actually got the services and content side pretty right.

This was the period during which Mr Murdoch was making the decisions that would determine the future shape of the News' empire. To list just a few:

• 1983 News International acquires 80% of Satellite Television UK for one pound plus debts. Renamed Sky Channel in January 1984,
• May 1985. Murdoch and Marvin Davis announce intention to develop a network of independent US TV stations as a fourth marketing force
• July 1985 Murdoch acquires 50% of the parent company for 20th Century Fox
• 1989 Sky launches Sky New in the UK as Europe's first 24 hour news channel.
• 1990 Sky and rival British Satellite Broadcasting Co merge to form BSkyB.

Even from these few dates, you can see the Murdoch strategy of acquisition of control over content and distribution. There were some pretty gutsy decisions here in commercial terms, and indeed some observers doubted that News could survive.

Rupert Murdoch is still following the same strategy as before, control content and distribution. However, it is not clear to me that News is in fact on the "cusp of a digital dynasty", at least so far as the new media is concerned.

The acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and the subsequent migration of some of its content through other parts of the Empire fits with the content/distribution model. However, the MySpace acquisition was far more problematic because it took News into a new and far more unstable space, one in which the company had limited experience. I wasn't quite sure how it fitted with the traditional Murdoch approach. 

We all recognise that the conventional newspapers are under some threat. A discussion with my own editor captured one part of this threat rather neatly.

When I asked him why my columns were not on line, he said that he wanted people to buy and read the newspaper! Apart from the implied compliment, his point was that on-line content could cannibalise the print audience.

Accepting that I am not as familiar with strategic issues in the media area as I once was, quite a bit of the discussion around the print media and its interface with on-line world makes me uncomfortable. I just have the feeling that it's missing the point.

I think that part of my discomfort lies in a feeling that people may simply be analysing the market place in too simplistic a fashion. Take, as an example, the Armidale Express or Rural Press's other regional outlets.

My editor is quite right to worry about cannibalisation. However, I would argue he also risks conflating newspaper audience and the web audience. The two overlap, but are not the same.

For every person now living in Armidale, there are more than ten people living outside Armidale who have some connection with the place. The total number of University of New England graduates alone exceeds the city's current population by a factor of at least three. I don't think that it's impossible to develop a web strategy that effectively segments the marketplace into two, protecting the print paper while reaching out to a broader audience.

I have used the Express as an example because I find it helpful always to test general thoughts with specific examples. It also points to the need to distinguish between general trends and those linked to specific organisations or outlets.

The decline in the print media does appear to be a broad trend, although it is less pronounced in Australia in general, less pronounced still in regional Australia. I have argued before that this reflects in part Australia's better newspaper distribution system.

People's discretionary time is limited, the competition for that time ever increasing. This is, I think, the core reason why paper sales have declined, why paper numbers have diminished. I used to buy two, even three, newspapers per day. I no longer have the time to read them.

Yet while this broad trend is there, the actual position of newspapers varies greatly and needs to be taken into account.

A particular problem here is that the modes of thought involved in running a conventional media business - TV as well as print - can create real blinkers on original thought.

Take, as an example, the Packer controlled Channel Nine web site. Being rude, this is a web site designed by people who think that a thirty second sound grab is news, that only the sensational sells. This is TV thinking, but doesn't work very well on a web site where you not only want to attract people in, but also hold them for a little while.

The one real source of content, the old Bulletin, was not only not integrated into the Nine site, but was also closed without any attempt to extract value from its content. I doubt that's a mistake Mr Murdoch would have made.

Time to finish this particular muse. I will probably come back to these issues in a later post because they still fascinate me.    

Will My School destroy NAPLAN?

My main post today, History of the New England New State Movement 2 - defining New England, is on the New England's History blog. This took a fair while to write, so just a brief note here.

I really don't want to write any more on the My School web site at this point. However, I did want to record a few of the stories around so that I could go back for later review:

• I see that Neil has run two more posts linked to this issue, Three US stories with resonance for Australians and  Just a bit more on My School site. I see that Neil is going to look at South Sydney schools in the way I did Armidale schools. Here I also have an assessment from the Armidale Express of the somewhat scathing reactions of local principals, private as well as public.
• In Schools sharpen up their profiles, the SMH reports that some eighty schools have asked if they could update their school descriptions. I am not surprised. From my tour of NSW schools, some of the descriptions read like mandated mission statements following a standard template.
• In  Students get new subject: the test, the Australian reports that Victorian public schools are being told to "explicitly teach" for the national literacy and numeracy tests as part of a drive to lift the state's overall performance with the release of nationwide test results.

I think that is going to a little while yet before the effects of My School web site really filter through. Like everything, there will be some good and bad. Tightening up school descriptions of what they do is good, teaching to test is bad.

I am slowly forming the view that one outcome may be a highly unexpected one from Minister Gillard's viewpoint, the partial discrediting of the NAPLAN tests themselves.

By now I must have read the best part of 50 newspaper reports on this one, including a lot of stories in the local press across New England. The need to exercise care with NAPLAN is an almost universal school level response even from schools that have benefited in some way. I wonder who parents are going to believe in the end, the Feds or their school?         

Family history, Indian students and climate change

This morning I devoted my main time to writing Inverell District Family History Group reorganises after fire disaster.

As an aside, I really am very pleased at the way the New England, Australia blog has begun to gather traction. This is a niche area blog. When I began I really wondered if any one would read it. Now as I track towards the 30,000 visitor mark with a still small number of daily return visitors, I feel that I am getting somewhere.

This is important to me. I try to make the stories reasonably varied and interesting without losing sight of my primary objective, the promotion of New England. Increased traffic means that the blog can better serve my primary objective.     

In this post I simply want to update a few posts. 

In my post Problem ownership and Indian students - it's time to draw the line I tried to make the point that with an issue like this, the only thing that we could control was our own responses.  In this context, Victorian Premier Brumby's  latest spray - Brumby accuses Indian media of double standards - was simple not helpful. 

Nor, for that matter, was Indian High Commissioner Singh's apparently stinging complaint to the Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, over the attacks in Melbourne, labelling Victoria a state ''in denial'' over the severity of the problem. Apart from the constitutional issues involved in complaining to the GG rather than the PM, this is just political grandstanding of the same type as Premier Brumby's complaints.

While Australia has a duty of care to Indian students, we cannot guarantee them a higher degree of safety than applies to all Australian residents. The fact that one case widely reported as racial violence, that of Jaspreet Singh, may have had nothing to do with racial violence, is neither here nor there. To the degree that ethnic violence exists, we need to address it.

In the long term, the current problems don't matter a damn unless we choose so. Australia already has a large and loyal Indian community. Looking forward ten years, this community is going to be much larger. We have to worry about and look after our own Indian people, not worry too much about immediate problems.

In  Water Wars - the Darling floods I spoke of some of the problems and conflicts that could arise over water policy. The Darling Flood waters are now entering the Murray River. With any luck, the tropical rains over the far northern headwaters of the Darling - there are current flood warnings for the Warrego and Paroo rivers - will bring a further flush later. Without moving away from the points in my post, the NSW Government seems to have handled this one pretty well in managing conflicts between water uses.

I have yet to look at the Australian opposition's new policy proposals on climate change. However, there are a few points I want to make.

The swirling currents around this issue have had some very odd effects from my viewpoint.

Just at present, those who are opposed in one way or another to the concept of climate change have moved from social pariahs to the ascendant. The visit by Lord Monkton to Australia has attracted quite remarkable grass roots interest. Note, by the way, the sneer in this report:

What an Australian scene - a scrubbed, white crowd hanging off a viscount's every word. Rank was everything at the Press Club. "Lord … lord … lord," intoned Ian Plimer as he introduced fellow climate sceptic Christopher Monckton. "My Lords," began the visiting peer with a wry smile. "That's me …''

Regardless of my own views on Lord Monkton, this is crap.

Now in all this, my position has not changed a great deal, although I think that my thinking has become more refined. However, the swirling changes in public opinion mean that I have been moved from somewhat to the right of the political spectrum to the left. And all this without raising a finger!

My position can be summarised this way.

For the present, I accept the majority scientific position that human induced climate change is a problem. We need to respond to this. However, I have also been concerned for some time that group think in the scientific community has, to some extent, crowded out alternative views and that this has dangers.

To be quite fair here, I do make a distinction between the view of scientists and the way this has been interpreted. In this context, I have been quite cranky about the way that certain environmental groups as well as some politicians have used climate change to support proposals that actually have very little to do with climate change.

I have been especially concerned about what I call the lock-in effect, the way in which policy debate has become constrained by simple one-size fits all solutions. This lead me to explore in my own simplistic way different options including soil sequestration.

To my mind, Tony Abbott's biggest contribution to the debate is the way he has forced discussion of other alternatives.

Now here I quote Peter Cosier from the Wentworth Group of scientists, hardly an anti-change group!

  "The whole issue of using landscapes to help us with climate change and get multiple benefits is now a mainstream public debate," he said.

"Six months ago, we were struggling to get people to take notice of this issue at all." Back then, the group released a report stating that Australia could store an additional 1000 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in soils and vegetation each year.

Mr Cosier said it is possible for Australia to cut carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 from storing carbon in vegetation and soils.

This, the recognition of alternatives, is actually quite a big step forward in the debate.

I am sorry, but I no longer like the cut and thrust of political debate intended to support particular positions. It used to be fun, but now its boring.

I need information that will help me to make up my own mind. I also want to see a variety of alternatives tested. At the end of the day we may come back to an emissions trading scheme as part of the mix.

To finish this post, one of the silliest things that Lord Monkton said to my mind was let's wait for ten years. Then, if its a problem, we can do something about it.

I would turn this on its head.

Given the scientific consensus, let's do something about it now. If, then, at the end of the ten years we know that the global warning argument is wrong, we can change direction. It's really a simple benefit-cost analysis. The net costs of waiting are greater than the net costs of doing something now and getting it wrong.  

Finally, in all this let's keep talking about options and choices. 

Generational change - an example

I often talk about the nature of generational change, as well the way this links to broader change within the community. I thought that a simple photo might flesh out the point.

This photo is of two students at the University of New England taken in 1963. That's 47 years ago, not a long time in human terms.

Look, first, at the gowns. All students at UNE had to wear green gowns as a mark of the University's place within the university tradition.

The girl on the left has three gold bars on her gown, to signify the fact that she is in third year.

The wearing of gowns was abolished in the 1970's following student pressure. This was part of the broader social change sweeping all universities. It, was, I think, a mistake in marketing terms. But in the 1970s, at a time when UNE was struggling to cope with increased numbers, who could have envisaged an environment in which all universities would have to compete for students?

Look now at their faces. When I came to UNE, third and fourth year students seemed just so far advanced. Perhaps they still do to new first year students, although I doubt it. The girls seem quite mature and indeed they were.

So what? Both are, in fact, just twenty.

In those pre-gap years with a five year secondary course, it was quite normal for a person to start university at sixteen, to complete honours at twenty, to start work at twenty or twenty-one. A person going on to further study might complete their PhD at twenty four or five, a few did it earlier, some later.

This actually goes to the heart of one of the most significant social changes that has taken place in the forty seven years since this photo was taken, the extension of childhood.

In 1963, a first year university student of sixteen or seventeen was classified as a young adult. Today, an eighteen year old is still effectively classified as a child.

I can illustrate the way this affects perceptions quite easily.

As a seventeen year old first year university student I would have been mortified to be classified as a teenager. I would also have thought it absurd.

To my daughters, an eighteen year old is a teenager. The two girls are twenty and twenty two respectively. In education trajectory terms, the twenty year old is where I was at eighteen, the elder daughter where I was at twenty.

I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this, I simply find the process interesting.

      

Technology, dumbing-down and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge

James Farrell had an interesting post On Club Troppo, The pull of immaturity, looking at Mark Bauerlein's book The Dumbest Generation.

I will leave you to read the post, but I did start me musing.

I have a problem with the idea that the new mobile and on-line technology has dumbed down an entire group - those up to thirty - simply because it doesn't fit with my knowledge of the history of the technology itself. It simply hasn't been around for long enough in its current form to have the type of impacts discussed unless, of course, one adds in television.

I am inclined to agree that, at least so far as Australia is concerned, there has been some loss of the previous sense of history, although I do not think that this is limited just to the under thirties. I am constantly surprised at the things my daughters and others do not know.

The traditional rule of thumb that I have always used is that knowledge of the past remains "current" for about three generations, with the depth of knowledge declining as events become more remote. So I knew something about key things that had affected my grandparents, more about those that had affected my parents, still more about things that were current in my own life.

Outside this "current" knowledge, the transmission of historical knowledge between generations depends upon other mechanisms including the school system.

I have previously argued, and still think that I am right, that the 1970s represented a tip decade, a break in the previous continuity of life and thought. One outcome from this has been a decline in historical knowledge. However, this leaves me wondering just how we might actually test all this in historical terms.

This is not an insignificant question.

We can never fully understand the past. Accepting this, the depth of our understanding depends on our ability to get inside the heads of people at a particular time. History is about events and change, so to understand the flow it helps to understand how people's thinking changes with time.

One way of doing this is to look at the information available to people at any point. This actually requires a bit of a shift in thinking.

Traditionally, if I am looking for information on a particular event I will look at the primary and secondary sources directly relevant to that event. So, given my interests, I might browse the Armidale Express over several years looking for specific bits of information.

If, however, I am interested in what people might have thought in a general sense, then I need to look at the pattern in the paper as a whole, including advertisements. I also need to understand what other sources of information might be available.

To illustrate this, take the suggestion that the current generation knows less about current affairs than previous generations.

Accepting that I am not comparing like with like, prior to the Second World War, papers in country NSW carried international news because those papers were still the primary source of information about current events. Knowledge of at least current international affairs was far more limited than today.

So we have to be careful about suggestions that one generation knows less than previous generations on a topic unless we carefully specify just which generations and indeed what topics we are talking about.

My School - the very model of a modern Major-General

My heart sank when I heard Australian Prime Minister Rudd announce that, if re-elected, his Government "would work with the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority to further empower parents by surveying their satisfaction with schools with the survey results to be disclosed on My School." The announcement went on:

The survey could:

- look at the issues of bullying and school safety - whether or not parents felt their child was safe at school, how teachers responded to concerns raised by parents and behaviour management strategies;

- look at how the school works with the community - the range of extra-curricular activities, P&C activities, accessibility to school facilities after hours, administration, the availability of information to parents, opportunities for parent and teachers to communicate;

- look at how the school approaches teaching and learning - look at whether teachers are helpful and easy to talk to, whether parents understand and are involved in the here opportunities to innovate in classrooms and strategies to improve performance;

- look at how the school manages transitions - the availability of information for students about subject selection, post school options and career information, access to guidance officers, support for students transitioning to high school.

This is to be done in the name of more balanced reporting on the My School site. So the site will now include the current information, the promised financial data for each school plus the still to be defined parent satisfaction rating. Who knows what else might be added as the Government responds to continuing criticism?

As a social analyst, I find this type of data fascinating. I also think, as noted previously, that it's going to have significant effects on the directions of education spend. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing if it meant that a greater proportion of funding ended up going to disadvantaged areas.

Mind you, this may well prove to be another poisoned chalice for the Rudd Government. That funding has to come from somewhere so there are going to be losers. Further, if down track (and this is quite likely) the results show no improvement at the bottom, then the Government will have set itself up for another policy failure.

The big problem with the whole system lies in its likely dynamic impacts on schools and school systems. The latest Government announcement extends those effects. While I have discussed some of these previously in passing, I think it worthwhile focusing on them in a little more detail.

To begin with, the new system imposes added costs. It's not just the costs of the web site or of any parent satisfaction survey, although these are not insignificant. The larger if unseen cost lies in the reporting and response costs imposed on schools. These are likely to be quite substantial. Beyond issues associated with straight reporting, principals and teachers will now need to actively manage the school's responses to the information contained on the site and the reactions of others to that information.

The new approach rests on the implicit assumption that parents have a choice in where they send their children to school. In fact, many parents do not, especially in country areas. If their school is poorly performing as measured by NAPLAN and if they perceive this to be affecting the school's reputation and their children's future, the only way they can respond is by placing pressure on the school.

Neither parent nor school can do anything about the demographic structures and socio-economic characteristics in the school's catchment area. These are major determinants of NAPLAN performance. All parents can do is to push for more resources and/or encourage the school to focus available resources more on NAPLAN, less on other aspects of education.

Where parents do have choices, and the wealthier the parent the greater the choices, then they move their children to better NAPLAN performing schools. They may also use the information contained on the website to make other choices. For example, they may chose not to send their child to a school with a lower socio-economic rating or a higher proportion of Aboriginal students.

All these factors interconnect. A lower socio-economic ranking generally means a lower NAPLAN rating, while a higher proportion of Aboriginal students generally lowers the school's socio-economic ranking.

Apparently movements between schools may be already happening. Here I quote from the Sydney Morning Herald:      

The state government was unperturbed by reports that some parents were already using the website's findings to move their children to another school.

"Parents know best what is right for their children and any decision to move from one school to another is a matter for parents," a spokeswoman for the NSW Education Minister, Verity Firth, said.

I am not giving a link here. What began as a campaign for free-speech by the paper has morphed into an almost "I told you so" support for the site. As part of this, the paper keeps running links to its league tables in every story. I don't feel that I should support this.

Many parents have, of course, already been taking things such as the composition of student bodies into account in school selection. To this extent, the new information simply provides another piece of information. Still, the net effect is likely be a further reinforcement of the ghetto effect already taking place.

There is very little that schools in general can do to overcome this type of effect beyond focusing on improving their NAPLAN scores as best they can.

If My School is likely to reinforce division at one end of the school spectrum, it may have the opposite effect at the other end in the competition between private and public schools. Again, and as I have noted before, the fact that some public schools do better than private schools on the NAPLAN evens out a competitive playing field that had been weighted in favour of the private sector. You can now expect those private schools most exposed to competition from the public school system to place much greater weight on NAPLAN.

In all, the net effect is that we have now entered an era of NAPLAN based competition among schools and between the public and private sectors.

The next piece of information to go onto the web site, the details of schools' financial positions, is actually very important from a public policy perspective. For the first time, we will have a feel for relative spend between schools at a micro-level. This, too, will feed into the competitive NAPLAN environment. You can expect this information to be analysed and used at school and system level. You can probably also expect new sets of league tables, such as spend per student.

The provision of the information may have some perverse results. In very general terms, smaller and also disadvantaged schools within the public system are likely to show greater per student spend. To give credit where credit is due, all state education systems have been trying to address the question of relative student disadvantage. This may actually make it harder for some disadvantaged schools to ask for more money, notwithstanding poorer NAPLAN performance simply because they are already getting more.

The final round of information now foreshadowed, the satisfaction data, will also have competitive effects. However, the results here are quite problematic.

This type of data shows the position at a point in time. By its nature, it is retrospective. Further, things like bullying rise and fall with time even in the best of schools. The reason for this is bullying is linked not just to school culture, but also to changing school cohorts. Sometimes, you just get a group of bullies.

All this means that this type of information is normally used to guide corrective action within specific institutions. Its inclusion on a web site of this type is quite inappropriate.

Leave aside the problems involved with comparisons between schools where we cannot even be sure that questions will be answered in the same way. Would you report negatives about your children's school if the result is to be seen on a national web site for all to see? What happens if an employer looks at the school reports? A more fundamental problem lies in the way that it will affect parents' school choices.

Parents generally worry about their kids. Presented with apparent evidence that a school has had a problem, I would really have no choice but to reject that school in the absence of detailed investigation of the facts to establish an alternative position. We are all just too busy to do this in most cases.

The school may in fact be addressing the problem, a problem may be emerging in my alternative school, I just can't know this. Unless the survey is really very carefully worded, I suspect that the information may in fact further distort choices for children.

In all this, the sad thing is that the Rudd Government could actually have gone some distance to solving the initial problems raised by the site through careful use of words. All it had to do was to put appropriate qualifications and explanations on the site, warning about misuse of the data. It either did not or chose not to do this.

In all this, I am increasingly reminded that the words of one of my favourite Gilbert and Sullivan songs really apply to Australia's PM in his role as national headmaster:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General,

I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical

From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,

I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,

About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;

I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;

I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,

I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,

In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;

I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,

I know the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes!

Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,

And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.

Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,

And tell you ev'ry detail of Caractacus's uniform:

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon" and "ravelin",

When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,

When such affairs as sorties and surprises I'm more wary at,

And when I know precisely what is meant by "commissariat",

When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,

When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery—

In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy—

You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee.

For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury,

Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;

But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

US Church group arrested in Haiti on child trafficking charges - an interesting document

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 members of a US missionary group, New Life Children’s Refuge, were arrested in Haiti on child trafficking charges. Now I have been following the Haiti story through a missionary blog, The Livesay (Haiti) Weblog. There I had read of attempts to get people into the US for treatment.

I was sufficiently concerned by the story to revisit the Liversay's blog just to make sure that the groups were not connected, then I went on a web search.

To my surprise, what I did find on Google docs was a document entitled New Life Children's Mission, Haiti Rescue Mission setting out what the group hoped to achieve, the logistics involved, along with an appeal for funds.

If this document is authentic, it certainly appears to be so, then we are not are not dealing with child traffickers in the normal sense of the word but with a somewhat naive group trying to do the right thing.  

Sunday Snippets - community development, soil sequestration, remote eye care

At the risk of upsetting KVD, I am not going to write my normal Sunday Essay. I am all written out, and have to focus on other things. Instead, a few Sunday Snippets.

At my request, Kanani kindly posted something that she had originally written as a Facebook note. Now in Newcastle, Armidale and the process of community renewal I have written a localised companion post.

The process of community change does fascinate me. Generally this is dealt with in terms of specific communities. I am also interested in the way change in related communities interacts to create new patterns. This, I think, a neglected topic in both urban and country areas.

Both industry and governments necessarily rely on trend analysis for planning purposes. But what happens if the relationships underlying the trends change? To use the community change example, if interaction between communities creates new patterns, then all the statistics such as population trends may change.

The higher the level of aggregation in the statistics, the more muted become this type of effect. At the same time, the less useful the statistics become for specific planning purposes.

To illustrate all this with a very simple, parochial example.

The population of the New England Tablelands has been stagnant for many years, part of the decline in inland NSW. Between 201 and 2006, the population of the Armidale-Dumaresq local government area, the biggest local government unit on the Tablelands (the bigger Tamworth lies on the Western Slopes) actually declined from 23,920 to 23,368 people.

This type of trend affects Government planning decisions, with resources concentrating in higher growth areas where projected needs are expected to grow. This actually reinforces the existing trend process.

Guyra Shire is 24 miles north of Armidale. Between 2001 and 2006 its population increased marginally. from 4,201 t0 4,220.  Again, this affects allocation of services.

Things change.

In 2005, a major tomato farm opened in Guyra, adding 250 jobs. This created great pressure. The houses weren't there. Now with State Government assistance, the Guyra Council is developing a housing estate to create 50 new blocks intended for mid-price housing. This will free up the pool of lower price existing houses for rental and first home buyers.

In Armidale to the south, the population declines that had been associated with structural change in the city's core industries of education and agriculture bottomed. Job creation began again, if on a smaller scale, Now this and an increase in the birth rate has translated into an an increase in school enrolments. Teachers, one of Armidale's largest occupational groups, had been falling in numbers, adding to stagnation.  More teachers will now be required.

In large part because of its educational base, Armidale did remarkably well out of the Rudd Government's stimulus packages, growing the construction industry and adding to the city's recovery.

Now factor in Guyra. Armidale is the major service centre for Guyra, so a small part of every extra dollar going to Guyra flows on to Armidale, helping growth. In turn, Armidale's growth adds to Guyra's revival, if only because it opens new job opportunities for those living in Guyra.

I accept that these are very micro trends, although in the days when I had money I did pretty well out of Armidale real estate simply because I understood the micro trends. However, my point is that when we come to look at community development the micro and the interactions between the micro is central.

Turning to other matters, the apparent Departmental response from Canberra to Opposition leader Abbot's climate change position struck me as remarkably city-centric. I quote from the Melbourne Age report:        

The Government has moved to torpedo the Coalition's alternative climate change policy, alleging that it would require tens of millions of hectares of trees to be planted, costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

A departmental document estimates 30 million hectares of trees would need to be planted for the Coalition to meet the minimum greenhouse gas reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020.

Trees are city thinking. Trees capture carbon in the wood. Soil sequestration aims to capture carbon in the soil, a very different concept.

The photo shows opposition leader Abbott talking to Liverpool Plains farmer Cam McKellar about soil sequestration. Now, unless I am much mistaken, Cam is very much a blast from my past.

I still don't pretend to any expertise on soil sequestration. However, I note from The Land that an FAO report points to the huge gains to be made from better management of the world's grasslands. Grasslands, not tree lands.

Finally, and still on rural issues, I see from the The Land that the continued decline in rural air services in NSW is placing further strain on the delivery of country services.

However, I was struck by one part of the story. I quote:  

Joanna Barton, the manager of Outback Eye Service, which provides ophthalmology services to remote areas in NSW from Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, said her organisation made at least 52 field trips a year and travelling by car had dramatically increased their workload.

The six eye surgeons she managed now had to fly to Dubbo, then drive several hours, work until 9pm, and leave at noon the next day to return to Dubbo for an afternoon flight to Sydney.

Now as it happens, I dealt with this very specific issue  back in July 2007 in Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia's Aborigines - 5: Policy and Administrative Issues. I was reasonably discrete in that post. However, I will be a little franker now.

As then CEO of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists, I thought that the idea that we could meet eye care needs in remote Western NSW from Prince of Wales in Sydney  was absurd and unsustainable in the longer term.

My alternative was to build ophthalmic capacity in Dubbo, a major city with very poor ophthalmic services. This never got off the ground. One key argument was that we would never get the specialists to go to Dubbo. Other problems lay in the importance of Dubbo as a marketplace for services from Orange, as well as a proposal from the University of New South Wales to set up a service to supply Western NSW remote needs from Sydney.

I regret that I did not push this one harder at the time, but I was involved in other fights aconnected with the restructuring of College services. Ten years later, Dubbo is to my knowledge still poorly serviced, I stand to be corrected here, while the UNSW service is hitting the problems I expected.

I still think that we could have got the specialists to go to Dubbo so long as we designed an attractive enough package.