Saturday Morning Musings - Aboriginal blogs, more on "The Daily Telegraph Test" and the need for simplification

Photo: Will Owen, Kata Tjuta

As presently mentioned on the side bar, Will Owen's Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American Eye has been running some absolutely stunning photos of Northern Australia and its Aboriginal art and artists.

Will's latest post, Art Centres and the Business of Blogging, referred in part to Aboriginal arts blogs in Northern Australia. I will write something on these, but in the meantime in response to a challenge from Will I have done a post on simple blogging tips.

By the way, Will, I took the liberty of showing your blog to daughter Clare, thinking that some of your photos might generate story ideas. She thought that the photos were great, but might not take up my gentle prodding. Life is just too busy, I suspect, even for the discipline of interesting blogging.

Still on Clare, you may find Clare's post Wild Thang! - schoolies stories interesting. After my recent excursion into inedible teachers, Clare clearly gets her spelling from me.

What do I say about the story? Clare did warn me that I might not want to read it. But I did laugh!

My post on The evils of "The Daily Telegraph Test" led one of the David's, Kangaroo Valley I think, to chide me in a comment. He wrote:

Jim, leaving aside your delicious mis-choice of word, I would like to make a comment on your conclusion: "I would simply note that Telegraph readers are not going to subject the piece to critical analysis".

This strikes me as an elitist view of a fairly large proportion of the NSW population based on circulation figures? This is not your usual thoughtful stance.

Ninglun said the story is stupid but damaging. I agree - but on the other hand, it sold papers, and probably won't be remembered beyond the next large headline.

I always understood that the prime role of a newspaper editor was to make a profit, and that this is achieved largely by maintaining or increasing circulation and, hence, advertising support. Questions of truth, fairness, and accuracy are buried way down in the mission statement - if considered at all.

More to the point, I would be very interested to see the generalisations that you would attach to the other main newspapers in NSW.

And how you would support your opinion (as you more usually do) - as opposed to just baldly stating it.

A brief amplification to clarify things and, hopefully, ease David's concerns.

One of the problems I have been discussing on this blog is what I see as a decline in the effectiveness of public policy and administration.

This, I have suggested, is partially a function of the growing complexity of public administration. In complex systems of all types it becomes harder to see relationships across the whole system, so that actions in one area flow across in often unseen and unexpected ways into other areas.

I have also suggested that the problem lies in part in the wholesale application of particular approaches such as our obsession with standards, quantification and measurement, leading to a cascade of performance objectives and performance indicators of such scale and complexity that no one can follow them or see the relationships.

All this is further complicated by the tendency of all Governments to respond in an ad hoc fashion, introducing measures in response to particular pressures that either cannot be achieved or are, in fact, counter productive.

To my mind, the media plays a particular role here because of the pressures it creates by focusing on narrow specifics.

I have written a number of posts attempting to show how interaction across the media (all forms) can create what amounts to a fire storm, a feeding frenzy, that prevents rational discussion.

The fact that there is such a phrase as "the Daily Telegraph Test" within the NSW public sector is an example of what I mean.

Of course public servants should be concerned about questions of ethics and probity. Inevitably, they have to take into account in their advice possible media responses. But, I would suggest, when a phrase like "the Daily Telegraph Test" comes into usage, we have a problem at political and administrative levels.

The point of my post was to show how this works in practice.

As David said, the Telegraph story is stupid and damaging. As he also said, media businesses are just that, businesses. But the practical effect of the story could well be further restrictions on the employment of public servants with any form of criminal conviction or even criminal charge.

Now that may or may not be a good thing. But if it were to happen, it would be happening for the wrong reasons.

My comment on Daily Telegraph readers was not a comment on Tele readers as compared to, say, Sydney Morning Herald readers. The same argument applies.

Newspaper readers do not have the time nor, in some cases, the skill to deconstruct newspaper arguments.

More broadly, I would argue that few Australians - and that includes politicians and public servants - have the capacity to really understand or comment on the general workings of Government simply because the system has become so complex. They can only focus on specifics - specific cases, specific actions, specific proposals.

Now one could argue that this has always been the case. I would argue that the problem has become far worse with the rise of systemic complexity.

I gave health as an example in a previous post. Here the system is riven with complexities and conflicts of interest.

Worried about Medicare costs and the potential for over-servicing, Minister Wooldridge cuts back on the number of doctors in training, increases the hoops doctors have to go through to get a Medicare certificate. Ten years later we have a major shortage of doctors.

And so it goes on.

To my mind, the simple solution put forward of greater central control is unlikely to have much impact. I think that a much more fundamental simplification is required if our current system is not to choke on its own overloads and complexities.

So much to think and write about - and so little time!

To the degree that I have any strength as a blogger it lies in the fact that I try to provide content. Yet there is so much around of interest to me that I struggle to cover even the tip of it at any any depth at all.

To illustrate with a few very varied examples.

Over on the slowly (very) slowly evolving History of Australian and New Zealand Thought, Rafe put up a post looking at aspects of the Australian Legend. Now this is an area that I would very much like to write something on as a companion piece looking at two very different threads.

The first thread is the changing way in which historians themselves present Australia. I have written a little on this, already, but would very much like to write more.

The second is the changing way in which Australia is presented in literature, film and popular culture.

These are huge topics. However, they can be simplified by focusing on the theme of the Australian Legend itself.

Moving in a very different direction, there has been another child tragedy in New South Wales involving the NSW Department of Community Services and, in this case, also apparently the Department of Housing.

In my discussion on problems in this area I have tried to focus on systemic problems, rather than the detail of the cases. My argument is that we have created an unworkable system.

This argument is part of a broader discussion about longer term trends in public administration, including my post on Mr Rudd and efficiency dividends. Bob Quiggan, a former colleague, responded to this in a comment. Apart from the pleasure of hearing from Bob again, I need to respond to Bob in either an amplified comment or a post, perhaps both.

The nature and extent of systemic failure has been a recurring theme in this broader discussion. If you look at my arguments in the ul-Haque, Hicks, Haneef and AWB (and here) cases you will see that (as in the child welfare case) my core focus has been not on the facts of the case, but the processes involved.

In my discussions on public administration, I also made the point (among others) that changes in public administration are a subset of a broader set of changes at national and international levels. You will find an example here.

I write a lot about changes in Australian society and culture, far too much to even give a representative example. Sometimes this may seem a little old-fashioned. However, it does have a serious purpose.

I am not nostalgic for the past, although I may be nostalgic about elements of the past. I seek to understand what has happened and why. Here one of my recurring concerns - one that also sits at the interface of politics, public administration and public life - has been the way in which (as I see it) Australia has become an increasingly intolerant, harsh, inward looking and risk averse society.

There are many different posts here, exploring different aspects of the problem.

In Why are we so hard on our politicians - and ourselves, I pleaded for the need to cut our politicians, and ourselves, some more slack.

I am out of time. I will continue this post later. In fact, much later!

The post I just referred to was triggered by the attempted suicide of a leading NSW political figure. We then found that he had been suffering from depression.

This post was in part the trigger for a major series of posts on depression. This series focused especially on depression in the workplace and was written from a management perspective, part of my on-going professional aim to try to improve management practices.

But it left open the question in my mind as to the causes of the apparent rapid increase in depression as a medical and social problem.

Now there are all sorts of issues here. One is simply a measurement problem. We now have better statistics, more information. Sometimes an apparent change is in fact no more than a change in record keeping.

A second issue is the way in which we can become or are influenced by what we measure. I have written a fair bit on this in a professional sense because of the impact on management and firm performance. An example with broader implications can be found in my post Problems with Performance Pay.

Then linked to this we have fashion, the way in which particular matters suddenly become a matter of public concern, a concern that then feeds back into society. RSI (Repetition Stress Injury) is a fascinating example here.

RSI suddenly appeared around the mid-eighties as a major work force problem. There were tens of thousands of cases, huge publicity, major changes to working rules to prevent the problem. Then, around ten years later, RSI vanished as a major problem. Did this happen because work place changes had solved the problem, or was it simply a change in society fashions and concerns? Or both? How do we disentangle?

With depression, I am convinced that its rise is connected in part, is a symptom of, changes in society I referred to earlier, the way we have become an increasingly intolerant, harsh, inward looking and risk averse society.

I really struggle with this one because it is an area where I find my own attitudes and instinctive reactions increasingly at variance with apparent social norms.

I am not a libertarian. All societies need need rules to function. Yet the way in which we create and impose rules tells a lot about society.

In October I wrote a post Australia's sad moral decline. The post was meant to be a sarcastic look at certain social changes and controls. I had to hastily insert a preamble to make it clear that I was being sarcastic.

In my previous post, A very odd evening, I talked about the controls and processes adopted at youngest's year 12 formal. Talking to a teacher later, one of Clare's favourites, she said that it was a pity that the few had to spoil it for the many. That's true, but it misses the point.

There have always been problems with the few. Unless one can argue that kids have in some ways got worse, something that I would be reluctant to accept, what has changed is not the problem, but our responses to it. Here I see serious argument in Tasmania that kids should be required to wear school uniform at formals!

These changing attitudes and responses are pervasive and seem to be getting worse. In Risk - lock-out and lock down arrive in Australian schools I talked about the new security arrangements at my daughters' school. These made me uncomfortable, had I thought changed the tone of the school, and certainly did not give me reassurance.

At school level, the kids themselves do try to strike back.

Sometimes they do so simply by finding new and creative ways to break or bend the rules. Here I was struck by the tone of the Head's speech at this week's breaking up, with its heavy emphasis on the need to observe rules.

Sometimes they do so more formally. Here in When its Time to take a Stand I reported on the heartwarming case of a year 5 student at a Sydney school. Following the school's decision to ban running in the playground on safety grounds, she organised a protest that led to running being reinstated.

The focus on rules, risk avoidance and control reduces individual freedom and imposes direct and indirect costs. I commented on some aspects of this earlier in Broken Record - Risk Avoidance and the Burden of Compliance.

At a personal level I resent both the increasing controls and the need to pay for them.

The school's new security features have to be paid for by parents, many of whom are already struggling to meet fees increasing much faster than the rate of inflation.

Excluding all the add-on things, the tickets to the formal cost the family $540. This covered venue, disco machine, a three course meal plus security. I do not know how much the security component was, but given the way in which it was enforced I felt that we got a negative return for it.

One of the difficulties in all this is that the costs of control and compliance are pervasive but not easily seen. The Rudd Government has made regulatory reform, the reduction of the burden and costs of compliance, a key objective. While I welcome this, these costs are just one element in a total cost burden imposed by society attitudes and interlinked Government and media responses.

Take, as an example, the public school that recently tried to hand back a Government grant once it worked out that compliance and reporting costs would exceed the value of the grant. Now it should be possible to actually measure this type of cost.

But how do we measure the cost of more expensive, slower and less effective Government decision making itself?

Resources are limited. As more resources are tied up in compliance activities, fewer resources are available for thinking and doing. As the number of steps and required processes involved in decision making increases, so does the time required to actually get things done. These costs are pervasive, but not easy to measure.

I have written a little, and hope to write a lot more, on change processes at community level and in organisations and society because the topic fascinates me.

In his Scientific Revolution, Kuhn speaks of the way in which scientific paradigms rise, become dominant and then fall in the face of an increasing volume of evidence that cannot be explained by the dominant paradigm. Something similar happens in society. Here my feeling is that our current command and control system is in fact starting to topple under its own weight.

Broken Record - Risk Avoidance and the Burden of Compliance

Yesterday was the usual Saturday morning hockey. Not a good day, the team was not playing well. Clare as goalie saved nine, but let in six.

Usual chat among parents at the start of the match. One parent complained about the treatment of her son at a leading Sydney boys' school, about the school's obsession with rules. This led to a broader conversation about the current Australian obsession with rules, risk avoidance, compliance and security.

The forthcoming APEC meeting is affecting life in Sydney in a variety of ways greater even than the impact of the Olympics. As a simple example, the girl's hockey competition has been cancelled on the Saturday, reducing by one the number of games in what is for most of the team their last season playing for the school. No one objected to the meeting itself, all questioned the scale of the precautions being taken.

As the conversation proceeded, every parent had a different example of the way in which current obsessions from moral hazard through police checks to insurance problems had affected their life. There was a general feeling that something was seriously wrong, few ideas as to how the problem might be addressed.

I have recently written a number of posts dealing with these issues because they concern me. For those that are interested:

In Banner Headline: ICAC exposes corruption risks in HSC take-home assessments (6 June 2007) I expressed surprise at the involvement of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, the State's peak anti-corruption body, in assessing the risks of cheating in the NSW school system.

I extended the argument the following day in ICAC and the NSW HSC - the Legalisation of Australian Life. There I talked about our current obsession with risk and the way it was leading to the legalisation of Australian life.

Still beating the same drum, on 8 June Risk - lock out and lock down arrive in Australian schools talked about the new security provisions introduced into my daughter's school, provisions that added to fees but did nothing to make me feel more secure about my daughter's safety. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Then on 9 June in Treatment of Risk in Public Policy I suggested that we, the public, were compounding the risk obsession problem by our own responses to events.

After a gap, I returned to the theme on 25 July in Quid custodit ipsos custodes? - Who will protect us from our protectors - and ourselves? In a post script I included a quote from Tacitus that I thought rather neatly summarised the core message in the post: When the republic is at its most corrupt, the laws are most numerous.

Then on 1 August in Moral Courage, Fear, Technology and the Decline of the West I talked, among other things, about the rise of the authoritarian state.

So in all this I have been both consistent and persistent.

I have no doubt that our obsession with risk and moral hazard is starting to choke the life out of our society. Ignoring issues associated with individual freedom and responsibility, the economic costs are becoming huge.

There are the direct costs we can all see, at the simplest level things like increased school fees to cover the additional security. However, I think that these are now dwarfed by indirect costs that are much harder to identify and quantify. These costs arise from the way that our obsessions affect the way we do things.

Compliance requirements affect and complicate every business process. This has direct costs in that compliance has to be paid for. As more resources are devoted to compliance, to maintaining the system, fewer resources are available to actually do new things. But then there are indirect costs as well in that business processes simply become less efficient, more time consuming. So we have fewer real resources because of direct compliance costs, while the yield on those resources that we do have left after compliance costs falls because of reduced efficiency.

I think that most people, like the parents I spoke of earlier, recognise that there is something wrong. There appears to be an almost pervasive sense of unease. What, if anything, might be done about it all is the problem.

The core difficulty lies in the the fact that while there is a measure of agreement that there is something wrong in a general sense, the processes that have created the current position continue. We still want individual things controlled, fixed.

In all this, there is a crunch coming that will force change.

Australians have an expectation that their standard of living will continue to increase. We also have an aging population. The maintenance of living standards in the face of an aging population depends upon productivity increases. This is where the crunch will come.

My suspicion is that impact on productivity of our current obsessions with risk and compliance is now at the point that the required productivity increases will not be possible. In this event, fundamental systemic change is likely to be forced upon us.

Return to list of posts in this series

Broken Record - a new series

Looking back over my various posts, I see recurring themes, in some cases complaints.

I complain often about living in Sydney, that Sydney life is fundamentally uncivilised.

A few days ago I put up a post, Life has just become too bloody complicated, that I then largely deleted because it was too much of a whinge. This post was triggered by my time sheets - I keep personal time sheets recording what I do in ten minute blocks.

When I looked back over these sheets, I could see why I got so little done, why I was so behind. I found that in the preceding fortnight I had less than two hours per day on average including the weekends for personal time, including writing time.

The real killer was the extra travel time associated with current work patterns. Over that fortnight, my average daily travel time was a bit over three hours.

Another example of a recurring theme - an obsession some might say with a degree of fairness - is the damage done to Australia by the disconnection with and sometimes rejection of our own past.

Sometimes we reject it as narrow and racist. At other times, we wrap it in a haze of nostalgia as happened recently with the 1950s. Sometimes we use it as a nationalist symbol as in the preoccupation with our military past. Here I find it sad that that military past sometimes seems the only thing left as an icon on which most Australians can agree. There is a sometimes narrow and inward looking nationalism around in Australia today that past generations would have found very strange, that makes me very uncomfortable.

The reality, at least as I see it, is that the Australian past is not all narrow and racist. The fifties were not some golden age. And British generals were not all incompetent fools trying to kill Australians off.

I have decided to create a new series of posts, the Broken Record series, as a way of sounding-off, of drawing themes together. I know that I already have too many incomplete series, but at least this way I signal to readers that the post is an expression of personal opinion without the attempt at balance that I do try to maintain in my normal posts.

Posts in this series

• 12 August 2007. Broken Record - Risk Avoidance and the Burden of Compliance