A Chat with Friends 2

I notice that Neil is trying to get me to respond to another meme. I may do so, but first I want to continue the chat begun in my last post.

There I mentioned the post by marcellous, The most expensive convenience shop in the world: the most boring film. Leaving aside the question of convenience stores, the modern equivalent of the old corner store, I have to agree that Deeply poetic, visually stunning and painterly abstraction are all code words for slow. Very slow.

When I read this comment I went on a different track, wondering when the phrase "code word" emerged. We all know what it means, a word that is used as a symbol for another meaning. But when did it begin?

I do not know. One day I will find out! However, and more to the point, I have enjoyed marcellous's comments on the film festival.

Gordon Smith continues his journey through the outback. I often mention Gordon's photo blog. This time journey is the wrong phrase since rain has forced Gordon has spent far more time in one place than expected. There is only so much one can do in Innamincka while waiting for things to fine up!

My introductory post on Australia's water wars - one day I will complete the rest of this series - drew comments from anon who disagreed with my definition of New England. Anon referred me to a protest blog - a Clarence Valley protest - on Malcolm Turnbull's great water grab for the Clarence.

Now I suspect that anon may well be Judith Melville, the author of the protest blog. This may not be true, but in any case I have enjoyed the conversation.

The blog is very new, but for reasons regular readers will understand, I strongly support the use of blogs as a device to articulate protest and do like blogs from what I see as part of my own area even where I disagree on points of detail. So do visit and encourage Judith to keep posting.

As an aside, I was pleased that Judith changed her blog lay out between my first and second visit. Assuming that I am not completely confused as to memory and mixing blogs together, I found the light writing on a dark background very hard to read.

Thomas, please take note. Those of us now forced to wear glasses find light on dark difficult to read, especially where one has lost the main pair and has therefore been forced to use an earlier variety.

I was pleased to note that Adrian had taken a break from the PhD and obtained a regular job for a period because, as I said in my comment, I thought that it would be helpful. A number of us were worried that Adrian would stop posting.

David Anderson continues his good posts on View Italy. I especially liked his post on the Venetian island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni because this was a place that I had heard about from an old mate, Noric Dilanchian. An Armenian by background, Noric has been educating me on Armenian issues for a number of years.

I am out of time. I still have multiple friends to mention, but this will have to wait until a later point.

A Chat with Friends

I do not feel like trying anything too serious tonight. It has been a long day and I am very tired. So I thought that I would chat just with that very small group that I think if as my blogging friends. Those who I know read this blog from time to time.

Thomas and I are in agreement. Neither of us thought that Neil could avoid fiddling again with his blog layout. Just not possible. Makes me want to fiddle again with the layout of this blog within the limitations set by the blogger system. But not tonight!

Neil, I will come to the memorial service for Lord M if I can. That day is my last day under the current contract. This may be extended, but may not. If not, I may well be stuck at Ashfield. Kevin, thank you for your donation to Lord M. Like you, I feel that I know him through Neil.

Lexcen, I cannot share your love of boobs, although a scene in Clubland reminded me that I once did! It's partly all this talk of cysts and breast cancer, partly the discovery that the anatomy in question appears to be not all that sensitive. But lingerie is still interesting.

Legal Eagle has continued her record with a series of remarkably good posts. Her post, the subtle knife, raised an issue that has since entered the main stream media, the right of Sikhs to wear ceremonial daggers in schools. Both the post and the comments on the posts draw out some of the issues.

I find it interesting that secular society in Australia, and other countries too, is now really struggling to come to grips with those in society who still have religious faith and/or traditional beliefs. I have been meaning to write a post on this for some time just to disentangle the issues in my mind.

A comment by marcellous caught my attention: "I really hate the tendency which because of our authoritarian historical origins, is particularly strong in Australia, to go for the “one rule fits all” approach." Marcellous, I agree.

Speaking of marcellous, he has been posting on the Sydney Film Festival. I especially liked his post The most expensive convenience shop in the world: the most boring film.

I am out of time. I will continue this post tomorrow.

Clubland - the new Australian Film Success

I have just seen Clubland. I did not have time to do a full post, but wanted to provide a short initial comment. Frustration.

For some reason Blogger is in one of those moods that will not allow me to upload photos. It used to happen all the time in the old system, much less so in the new. The net effect is that instead of doing a short post and going to bed, I found myself spending an hour without results. As I said, frustration.

It is a very good movie and will, I think, be a considerable box office success. But more on that when I can actually load pictures!

Prisoners and the Right to Vote

Why, I wonder, does no one really object to the fact that prisoners in Australian jails cannot vote? I was talking about this to someone the other day and they could see no problem. Yet it worries me.

The right to vote is the most fundamental democratic right, the building block from which our whole structure grows. If the state can take this away, then (or so it seems to me) we have a problem.

My friend simply said that if someone had committed a crime and had been sent to jail then it was right that they lost the right to vote. But where do we draw the line?

To my mind, if the state can take the right away for reason x, then they can also do so for reason y.

The key thing is the principle. The right to vote is either absolute or it is not. If not, then the only thing we are debating is the circumstances in which the right may be taken away. I am sure that Mr Hitler could define many reasons why the right to vote should be limited.

Postscript 16 June

My thanks to people for their comments on this post. I see that Legal Eagle has put up a post linked to this issue that includes a link to the transcript of the High Court Hearings on the matter. It will be interesting to see how the Court rules.

Photos and Copyright Problems

Like all bloggers, I use photos from a variety of sources to illustrate my stories.

In some cases such as Gordon Smith's wonderful photos, I have permission. In other cases, I have to make judgements as to whether the photos are on public record or whether use of the photos would in some way be classified as fair dealing.

Photos from news outlets fall in this second class. Here I try to ensure that I attribute the photo properly with a link back to the source. My thinking is that this makes ownership clear and acts to promote the news outlet in question. Should I be challenged on this practice, I would obviously remove the photo.

Recently I have found a new problem. Some of the news outlets I draw from have photo shows. These are great. But, as in the case of the Sydney Morning Herald, I find that I cannot give a proper URL for the photos. So while I can still copy the photo, I cannot really promote the original source. For that reason, I have decided not to use such photos in future.

Treatment of Risk in Public Policy

Photo: Gordon Smith, Snake in the Grass. One of the natural hazards of the Australian bush. A 5 ft long and venomous Red-bellied black snake in search of supper. Red-bellied black snakes are shy. Leave them alone and they will leave you alone. Poke them, and you will get bitten.

Continuing my musings on the modern obsession with risk, in my post ICAC and the NSW HSC - the Legalisation of Australian Life, I suggested that:

Our focus on risk and on legal responses complicates and distorts the whole policy process from beginning to end, from the way we define the problem to be addressed through the definition of solutions to the application of the selected solutions.

In this post I want to look at some of the reasons why this is so.

The problem begins with us, in the way we define the things we consider to be important, in the way we respond when things go wrong.

Take, as an example, the pre-occupation with law and order.

We have all had direct or indirect experiences with crime.

In my case, I was burgled twice in Queanbeyan, we have been burgled three times in Sydney, a car was stolen while we were staying at South West Rocks. Aunt Kay's bag was stolen from her house in Armidale. My eldest has had her bag stolen twice, once at the pub, once at a party. So on this list alone we have five burglaries, one car theft, three cases of petty theft.

People affected in this way become concerned and demand responses. Politicians respond by beating the law and order drum.

This is not new - from memory, the phrase law and order dates back to at least the sixties - but it has all become more intense in recent years. Our prison populations have exploded, with an increasing proportion of the population and especially the young criminalised - classified as criminals.

The difficulty in all this is that the perceived problem - the risk of crime - is usually a symptom of a broader problem.

Take, as an example, the theft of our car by two aboriginal youths from Macksville who then used it to conduct a mini crime spree. They were caught and have probably ended up swelling the ever growing number of Aboriginal young in the NSW jail system.

Here I cannot regard their actions as a law and order problem, although the trashing of the car was indeed a breach of the law and was certainly a problem for us. Rather, their actions were a symptom of a broader problem, the lack of opportunities for the young in that area and especially the Aboriginal young.

So my response has been to campaign in my own limited way through this and the New England Australia blog for action to improve economic development in the Mid North Coast. Without this, the problem will simply perpetuate itself.

My point in citing the law and order case is simply to suggest that the public response - our response - to the perceived risk of law breaking and the consequent response from law makers does not really address the core problem, but instead arguably makes things worse.

We, the public, then compound the problem by our general response when something goes wrong.

The management literature suggests that a good manager is one whose decisions are more often right than wrong. There is still an acceptance that some decisions will be bad. The position in the public sector is very different. There the focus is on the 5 per cent of decisions that go badly wrong, not the mass of decisions that are right to some degree.

This has always been true and is one of the reasons why the dynamics of public policy are so different from decision making in the private sector. However, recently the problem has, I think, become much worse because our collective approach to risk and the avoidance of risk makes for much harsher responses when failures occur.

If we, the public, attack our Governments and political leaders when something goes wrong in the way we do now, then we cannot blame them for moving to positions that will avoid risk while trying to meet our demands for action.

Those who read this blog will know that I have been very critical of the NSW Government. I do not resile from those criticisms. However, I have recently had cause to look at a range of internal NSW documentation from Cabinet decisions through Cabinet Minutes to various process documentation.

For obvious reasons I cannot comment on specifics. I can say that the need to avoid risk of one type or another is pervasive. But I find myself in the odd position given my public statements that I can sympathise and understand. I may disagree and think that it leads to sub-optimal policy responses, but the Government is working within the bounds that we, the public, have set by our responses.

I cannot give specific details, but will try to illustrate by a generalised example.

Say we have a problem. The best response is action x, but it carries risk y. If x occurs, we will get a really good result. See, Neil, I am still avoiding the use of a certain word. But if y happens, then the opposition and public will heavily attack the Government.

The alternative is action z. This really is sub-optimal, but carries reduced or no risk. Who can blame the Government in this case for going with z? We, the public, have ensured this result.

Risk - lock out and lock down arrive in Australian schools

This post continues my discussion about society's approach to risk because I find that that the issue is niggling away at my mind.

Over the last few years I have watched with a degree of disquiet the rising obsession with security and risk minimisation in my daughters' school. The process has been cumulative.

This school used to be a friendly, open place, a school that I as a parent spent a lot of time in, a vibrant community with students, teachers and parents there from early in the morning until late afternoon. No more, I fear.

I do not remember precisely all the changes because it has been a slow erosion. Rather, I remember key points.

I remember the end of study club, the arrangement whereby parents could leave their older children at the school under supervision until 6, with the kids then being able to have dinner with the boarders if the parent was delayed. As I remember it at the time, the risks to the school from this service had become to great.

I remember the cameras going up round the school, something that made me feel sorry for the students. I remember when teachers were required to carry security ID with them. I remember when the school introduced rules requiring parents to report to the office before going onto the school grounds, something that I and I suspect most other parents ignore simply because it lacks practicality.

This year security has reached a new crescendo. New locking systems have been installed to go with the new security guards. Mind you, these guards do have one plus from a pupil perspective in that they all carry sets of keys, something that makes it easier to get into locked areas if, for example, your bag has been locked in.

Now we have reached a new level with the arrival of locked out and locked in. These terms come from the prison system and have been popularised because of the US experience including Columbine.

In locked out, school gates shut automatically. The pupils go on with their activities, but the school is "secure". In locked down, marked by a special siren, pupils must get to the nearest classroom before the doors lock automatically. They must then ring the school office and wait for further instructions.

I am sorry, but these precautions do not add to either my happiness nor to my sense of security.

I am not happy because they add hundreds of dollars to school fees at a time when we have been struggling to keep up with fees growing far faster than the rate of inflation.

I do not feel more secure because they make me think about risks that I would never have regarded as significant in an Australian context. Here the school seems to be telling me that my daughters do face those risks. I actually think that all this is silly, but I cannot help thinking about it.

In all this, the school to me has become a darker, gloomier, place. Further, in trying to minimise risks school has opened itself to new risks.

When youngest was hurt on school playground equipment and had to be taken to hospital to have her arm set, I regarded this simply as one of the normal risks of life. It was not the school's fault. The thought of sueing did not cross my mind.

My attitude has changed in the context of lock out and lock down. If the school has put in place these precautions and made us pay for them whether I like it or not, then if something goes wrong I would seriously consider sueing because the school has accepted responsibility.

Postscript

Youngest, a stickler for accuracy, saw this post and made me change one point along with a short lecture on the need to check my facts. I had to hang my head in shame!

ICAC and the NSW HSC - the Legalisation of Australian Life

In my last post I spoke of the investigation carried out by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) into NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) marking. There I said in part:

Am I wrong in finding it strange that the State's peak anti-corruption body should carry as the lead story on its house paper a matter that involves no official corruption at all - there is no suggestion that there were bribes to officials - and is is any event a matter first for the education system to correct?

In talking to people later, I found to my surprise that I was very much in a minority in that the first reaction of many when I talked about the issue was simply so-what. They could not see a problem. Many did when I talked about the issues involved, but the first reaction suggests that this is another area where my own views are out of kilter with the prevailing mood.

In responding to this, I want to focus on three points: risk, legalisation and policy failure.

I mentioned in my earlier post that the ICAC house paper mentioned the word risk 18 times in eight pages. This is a sign of a broader problem, the way in which we as a society have become obsessed with the identification, avoidance and management of risk.

From my viewpoint I really do mean obsessed, in that thinking about risk has become all pervasive, affecting every aspect of life.

We can see it in the rise of the number of permission slips from schools that parents must sign, slips whose primary purpose is to protect the school from legal risk. We can see it in the proliferation of security guards, security cameras and now gated communications intended to protect us from the risk of crime and violence. We can see it in the progressive removal of things such as playground equipment to avoid the risk of injury. We can see it in official language, policy development and procedures where risk identification, avoidance and management has become a if not the central issue.

There is nothing wrong with taking risk into account. The problem is that the cumulative affect of all this is to affect the way we that we worry, act, think and interact with each other. The world has become a darker, more complex place.

This links to a second problem, the legalisation of life, the way in which society and its political leaders look to law to deal with problems.

Somebody said, I have no idea whether or not this is true, that each of us now faces over 32,000 pages of legislation intended to control our personal behaviour. I don't know about you, but I am now long past the point that I can know, let alone understand, every single legal obligation placed upon me. Add to this all the quasi-legal and procedural requirements coming from Australia's various levels of Government and we have a mess.

Our desire to avoid risk, our use of laws and legal mechanisms of one type or another, brings me to my third point, the way that these things in combination are helping create what I see as a growing failure in public policy.

Good public policy starts with proper definition of the problem to be addressed. Then we have to define the right responses, the right way to address the problem. This includes a decision as to whether we should attempt to address the problem at all. Then we have to implement the policy approach in an effective way. Policy failure can occur at any point along this process.

Our focus on risk and on legal responses complicates and distorts the whole policy process from beginning to end, from the way we define the problem to be addressed through the definition of solutions to the application of the selected solutions.

I see no easy solution to this because it requires a change in the way that society thinks, a change to our embedded reactions.

Returning to my opening example, if people cannot easily see the problem in the involvement of NSW's peak anti-corruption body in the question of HSC English assessments then I think that we have an enormous problem.

Banner Headline: ICAC exposes corruption risks in HCS take-home assessments

I am meant to be still on a no-post regime, but I could not resist this one.

For the benefit of my international readers ICAC stands for the independent Commission against Corruption, the NSW watchdog against official corruption. HSC is the Higher School Certificate, the final school exam in NSW.

Making coffee in the staff room, my eye was caught by the above headline from Corruption Matters, the May edition of the ICAC PR epistle. Because my youngest daughter is doing the HSC I grabbed it to see just what this high level official scandal was.

The story appears to be that a Sydney coaching college was alleged to be assisting students to cheat on their English HSC major projects by providing excessive support. ICAC was not able to substantiate the allegations, but still made some suggestions to the NSW Board of Secondary School Studies as to improved process to minimise risk of corruption.

All this may sound fair enough, but consider this.

Cheating has always been a problem in schools. Key variables include the education system and education management, the school, the teachers and the students.

Where a problem exists, it is the responsibility of the individual institution or, to the degree that the problem is a systemic one, the education system to fix. If the systemic problem comes from a system imposed by Government, then it is Government's responsibility to fix advised by the relevant experts.

Am I wrong in finding it strange that the State's peak anti-corruption body should carry as the lead story on its house paper a matter that involves no official corruption at all - there is no suggestion that there were bribes to officials - and is is any event a matter first for the education system to correct?

Am I wrong in thinking that that body is going outside its core mission?

And am I wrong in worrying about a response that instead of addressing the reasons why this matter might have occurred instead focuses on procedural steps to stop it happening again taking the existing system as a given?
As an aside, the eight page paper mentions the word "risk" in stories no less than 18 times.

Another Short Break

Looking today at my priorities and ever growing list of outstanding actions, I have decided to take a couple of day's break on this blog to allow me to catch up. Assuming, of course, that I can be disciplined enough to do so!

I just need time to catch up on things like outstanding emails as well as some of my professional writing.

A Very Sporting Day - interesting but also odd

Today turned out to be a very sporting day.

It began with the usual Saturday morning hockey at Olympic Park, Clare in goal. This was very much a game in two parts.

Clare's team was all over the place in the first half. The other side attacked and attacked, with five short corners in a few minutes. This pattern continued for most of the half. One had to get through in the end, and it did. Then in the second half the game reversed itself, with constant St Cath's attacks. In the end Kambala won, knocking St Cath's out of the finals. But it was all very exciting.

I am going to miss school sport. There will be another hockey competition next term, and then that's it, bringing to an end twelve years of watching. Where did the years go?

After that I decided to go and watch my old school, The Armidale School, play rugby against Shore. I had been meaning to do so for a while, but TAS's visits to Sydney are irregular and I normally do not find out about them until after the event. This time, Rob Busby - the president of the Sydney branch of the Old Boy's Union - emailed us to let us know that it was on.

I found it a slightly odd if interesting experience.

To begin with, I almost did not get there. I had not been to the grounds before, found I did not have a street directory in the car, so had some trouble finding the place. In the end, I got there almost by accident.

Then I found multiple games on multiple fields, so wandered around a bit in the crowd trying to find the right field. My daughters' school is not huge in numbers, and I forget how big some of these Sydney schools are. Somebody in the crowd said that Shore has 45 rugby teams, making coordination a major exercise.

I have lived in a household of women for the last nineteen years, and this was actually the first time since moving to Sydney that I have been to a sporting event involving boys or indeed had much contact with boys outside family members or my daughter's friends. It was a very different feel.

When I later said this to my eldest, a strong rugby supporter, she just laughed. Apparently the idea of hundreds of rugby playing boys is one of her ideas of heaven!

I finally found the field where the TAS seconds, my old team, were playing. I will talk about the rugby itself in a moment, but the TAS team was coasting.

One of the Shore parents commented that you could see the difference between the skill levels and the training available to the two teams. And indeed TAS had coaches there for both the forwards and backs.

I found this very strange because Shore is a rugby school, then I found that our seconds were playing Shore fourths, the firsts Shore thirds! I found this very odd indeed, because when I was playing we played the equivalent level teams. Because TAS was a smaller school, we sometimes lost by reasonable margins - especially against Joeys - but we won a fair bit as well.

In any event, all three TAS teams won, although I thought that both the seconds and firsts - the firsts scored 17 points in very quick time - relaxed in the second half, allowing Shore back into the game.

I found the rugby itself interesting. I have always liked school boy rugby because it is often faster and more free flowing than the adult game, especially at club level. That's still true, but I was struck by the differences since the last time I had watched it all those years ago.

To begin with, the boys were all so much bigger in both height and weight, something I was aware of but had not really realised until I found myself surrounded by school teams. Some of the backs were incredibly fast too. Then the skill levels in some of teams were very high indeed.

All this has opened up a huge gap between the best teams and the rest. I saw several sides absolutely slaughtered as they struggled to contain bigger, faster and better trained opponents.

All this begins very early. A little while ago I put up a story on the Regional Living Australia blog about the visit of the Sunshine Coast Grammar School under twelves to TAS to take part in the annual TAS national primary rugby carnival. I was now seeing the end result of the process.

None of this was available when I started playing. However, there is one downside.

I played six years of school rugby often on hard fields without ever getting hurt beyond a corked leg. There were injuries, but they were rare. A faster, more professional game played by larger boys seems more injury prone.

In the under sixteen match one TAS boy had to be taken from the field by ambulance, although fortunately I understand that he is okay. Within seconds of the start of the match involving the firsts with TAS attacking the Shore line. a TAS back was felled by an apparent high tackle and had to leave the field, with one of the seconds coming on to take his place.

It was a confused piece of play for at least this spectator because it all happened so fast, but one outcome appeared to be a penalty try. Later in the match a Shore player had to leave the field with what looked like a broken or at least damaged wrist.

Would I go again? Yes, I think so, although next time I will bring some company. I met up with some of the TAS old boys at the end, but prior to that I felt somewhat isolated on strange grounds alone in the middle of a crowd of boys and parents none of whom I knew. That, too, was part of the oddness.

A Missing Day

Where did yesterday go?

I try to do at least one post everyday on this blog, but somehow yesterday escaped me. It was just a messed up day. I left the house about 6.45am, getting home twelve hours later. Then I had to prepare tea. By the time I had done this and a few other domestic things I simply felt that I had done enough and wandered off to bed.

Over at New Lines from a Floating Life, I see that Neil has already completed his end month review with a new record in visitor numbers. Deserved because of the content.

During the month Neil changed his format many times to the point one visited just to see where he was now. Neil reckons that the format is now settled. Like Thomas, I find this hard to believe.

Speaking of Thomas, I see that he too has completed his monthly review. Damn! I feel inadequate.

Well, what can I say?

May saw 34 posts, similar to previous months in raw numbers, but time pressures meant that both depth and variety were down. I haven't looked at the numbers in detail, but I think that the reduced quality of posts was reflected in the number of visitors, no real increase in the month.

I have noticed this pattern across my blogs. A drop in frequency and quality of posts leads to visitor numbers stalling then falling. Improve quality and frequency, and numbers come back, but only after a lag. This should not be surprising, but I find both the speed of and relative skew in the process interesting.

Part of the answer here lies in the search engine patterns. A decline in variety and frequency of posts leads quite quickly to lower search engine visibility. Numbers drop. Once search engine visibility is down, it can take a fair bit of time to rebuild it.

Technorati still refuses to visit this site. However, I see from a check there that this blog has just been listed in the blogs.com.au search index. So that's good!

Enough. Its now 6am and I have to start preparing for the day.