Problems in Indonesian live meat exports

Both today (The art of being politically boring) and yesterday's post (The rise of issues based morality politics) dealt with problems in current politics and public administration.

Even as I was writing, another example was emerging.

On Monday of last week, the Australian ABC Four Corners Program aired an expose on the treatment of Australian live cattle exports at certain Indonesian abattoirs. The graphic coverage blew up into a storm. Last night, the Australian Government announced a suspension of all Australian live cattle exports to Indonesia.

As I write, there are 1600 cattle sitting at Port Headland intended for export that no one knows what to do with. Australia's oldest agricultural company has been forced to call for a trading halt in its shares while it assesses the impact of the decision.  According to Rick Britton, the mayor of Boulia in Queensland’s central west, the ban will send some beef producers out of business. Local meat sales have dropped.

Now to the special interest groups who oppose any form of meat consumption or who who oppose live meat exports of any type, all this is great. But their success comes at a cost.

Looking at the Indonesian news coverage, this has been pretty fair, recognising that there is a problem.  The Jakarta Post's Australia suspends live cattle trade to Indonesia is an example. I was also interested in some of the comments on stories.

On the Jakarta Post, Dan from Australia began the discussion:

This is a positive start, however there are already 100,000 australian cattle in indo right now being fattened for cruel islamic turture.

I will never forget or forgive indo for this barbarism. I S**T on your culture and mohamed. When I take a p*ss I do so in the direction of mecca

The responses to Dan were remarkably restrained. There was recognition that there was a problem, along with comments that the treatment as outlined was inconsistent with Halal.  The story on the Jakarta Globe, Govt Must Not Overreact to Threat From Australia was also restrained. However, here I noted one comment from iraira.

Don't get defensive, local government must thoroughly verify and take action against bad abattoirs. No matter where the cattle were from, they must be killed instantly and be spared from torture. Isn't torturing animal haram ? On the other hand, we have to be confident that with 340mil population; Aussie NEED US more than we need them; they can stop the export anytime they want. If they want to export the canned meat, DON'T BUY. Remember, it's our money. What we have to do is to be united. United to push bad abattoirs to improve their practise and united not to let Aussie bully us. They'll soon change their mind, believe me. Money talks.

Now this comment puts the whole issue in perspective.

Indonesia is a separate country with a different culture. We can choose on on moral grounds, and the whole Australian debate is about morality, not to sell live animals to Indonesia. We cannot control Indonesian responses. Australia is presently just important enough to have some influence if we sell. We have no influence if we don't.

In all this, I am presuming, I do not know, that:

• The Australian Government consulted Indonesia. Surely one could not cut off a major food source without doing that?
• The Australian Government considered the local economic implications and possible responses. Surely one would not take action without doing that?
• The Australian Government had an idea as to how to deal with the problem in Indonesia so that we can sell there.If not, it's a blind response.

I wish that I could be confident.

The art of being politically boring

Yesterday's post, The rise of issues based morality politics, I said in part:

I am not alone when I assert that the Australian system of Government has become less effective over recent years. Part of the reason for this lies in the rise of issues based politics combined with a see problem, fix problem mind set. We expect Government to fix things, but only those things that we consider to be in some way right.

In the withering glare of the twenty four hour media cycle with its insatiable thirst for new material and its love of issues based adversarial politics, the capacity of Government and its advisers to actually think shrinks. All Governments spend their time running around doing things and responding to things on a quick-quick basis within that space set by fluctuating public opinion as orchestrated by the advocates. The media watches the whole process waiting for the inevitable misstep.

In April, former Labor Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner published Sideshow, dumbing down democracy.

He argues there are two key rules now governing the practice of Australian politics - "look like you're doing something" and "don't offend anyone who matters".

"Australian politics is like a Hollywood blockbuster - all special effects and no plot," Mr Tanner said.

So I am expressing somewhat similar views to Mr Tanner. Like him, I was involved in policy setting if on the official side in the 1980s when it still did seem possible to debate policy as policy, when the content was more important than than the pretty wrapping, ideas more important than mechanical measures.

I concluded yesterday's post by suggesting that politicians didn't have to keep playing the same game, that to illustrate this my next post would be called simply the art of being boring.

I suppose that you could argue that being boring comes naturally to me. You only have to read some of my posts! But being boring as a political device?

I discovered the art of being boring by accident.

At the time I was in an official job that required me to deal with the press for the first time. I am not talking about the type of daily contact that you might see in a Minister's office, but every week or so. Contact also built up over time because journalists found me useful.

The issues that I was dealing with were not normally the headline issues such as tax, macroeconomics or industrial relations. Still, they were not insignificant since judgements about things such as industry assistance, about Government civil and defence procurement, about technology development, all have very direct impacts.

  Dealing with the media as an official can be difficult because of the rules that you have to follow. Here I am not talking just about the official rules, but also the principles involved and the interaction between those principles and the official rules.

Take, as an example, cabinet matters. Provision of information on cabinet discussions was a breach of the law. Once a decision was announced, then factual briefing was relatively easy. But how do you brief when a matter has yet to be announced or decided, when a no comment may actually be very revealing? Further, how do you brief when you actually need informed discussion as part of the process?

This is high risk territory. Make a mistake, and you embarrass Government, minister and department. Sometimes I really sweated to the point that I had difficulty in keeping my voice calm. I had to take calls knowing that I was on a tight rope.

I had the advantage that I knew the Minister's and Department's position, that on the matters in question my own area generally had clear longer term objectives. I also had the advantage that my role in talking to the press was known to the Minister, his office and the Department. I didn't report on every media contact, but I did brief. To a degree, I was protected from error.

As an aside, the type of role I played is no longer really possible in a world of centralisation and information control, but that's another story.

I was also protected by the journalists themselves. Of the fifty or so background briefings I gave during this period, my confidence was never betrayed. Not once. It was partly a matter that journalists knew that I was trying to be helpful within my limits, more a question of ethics.

Have things changed? Not as much as you might think. Journalists have a job to do. My more recent experience has been that if you recognise that, if both sides are aware of limits, if you are straight, then the same rules apply.

The class of journalist with an idea in mind who are trying to set the story up, those for whom you are just canon fodder, is not new and has to be dealt with in a different way. I am talking about journalists as a whole.

I may seem to have come a long way from the art of being boring, but there is a link.

By nature, I like to explain, to educate. By nature, I tend to give both sides, to try to outline issues. By nature, I want to be helpful. Here I discovered a fascinating thing.

Journalists work on deadlines. Journalists have to simplify. Journalists need a headline story. Journalists often do not have a lot of background knowledge. I actually killed a lot of stories including some that I wanted by simply over-providing information, by being fair. There no way that all this could be turned into a story without work that was not possible within deadline limits. I, and through me the story, had become just too boring!

Once I realised this, I used it to my advantage.

Now this gets me to my point.

Politicians simply do not have to play by current rules. Rather than playing to the immediate game, the need for instant media gratification and points scoring, it is open to them to be boring by providing information, by explaining, by setting out both sides to assist people to make their own decisions.

Just at present, we are in a world dominated by conflicting opinions in which there is little scope for debate on ideas or on evidence. People turn off.

Now people also turn off if you are boring. Don't I know it! But there is an interesting thing here. People may not listen at the time, but they do respect people who try to explain. They also respect people who respect their views.

New policy, real change, takes a long time. You have to be patient, boring if you like. You have to plug away. Further, you can't win on everything. If your score card is dominated by immediate perceptions of gains and losses, measured by opinion polls and degrees of positive coverage, then it doesn't matter a damn in the longer term beyond the damage that you do.

I am not being naive when I say things need to change. I am well aware of practical realities. All I am saying is that if the game is crap, either don't play or at least change the rules.    

The rise of issues based morality politics

Back in May, my first quick reaction (Gillard's refugee deal)  to the Australian Government's refugee proposals was instinctively positive. It quickly became clear (When perfection's not possible: Gillard & refugees) that my view was not shared by all.

Since then, I have watched the whole affair spin out of control with a degree of bemusement. As I write, there are reports that an MOU with Malaysia is close to signature. This may help the Government re-assert a measure of control over the issue.

The thing that most interested but also concerned me about the whole matter was the nature of the debate. The unusual sight of independent MP Andrew Wilkie and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott both arguing that the Government had lost its moral compass was actually pretty typical of the whole thing.

Morality has an important place in politics. However, we seem to be in a period in this country where morality has devolved to assertion of rigid positions on an issue by issue basis. This actually makes it very hard to have a sensible discussion on the issues themselves; "morality" becomes an issue driven end point rather than sets of principles to guide discussion and decision. The winner is the person who can in some way assert or create a moral majority, to use a US phrase from a different context, or at least create a strong enough position that the pain of opposing them becomes too great.

I am not alone when I assert that the Australian system of Government has become less effective over recent years. Part of the reason for this lies in the rise of issues based politics combined with a see problem, fix problem mind set. We expect Government to fix things, but only those things that we consider to be in some way right.

In the withering glare of the twenty four hour media cycle with its insatiable thirst for new material and its love of issues based adversarial politics, the capacity of Government and its advisers to actually think shrinks. All Governments spend their time running around doing things and responding to things on a quick-quick basis within that space set by fluctuating public opinion as orchestrated by the advocates. The media watches the whole process waiting for the inevitable misstep.

In all this, Government is its own worst enemy. In playing to the media cycle and the advocates, Governments have ceased to set agendas. Politicians don't have to play this game. To illustrate this, my next post will be called simply the art of being boring.    

The alcopops tax revisited

Back in 2008, the Rudd Government decided to impose a special tax on alcopops, ready mixed drinks liked by the young. The aim was to reduce drinking by young people.

I wasn't impressed. In Alcopops and mixed drinks - The Head strikes I expressed my reservations. I thought that it would simply shift drinking to other forms of alcohol, that it wasn't very sensible. Initially the opposition opposed the measure, but then weakened.

Well, what happened? We now have some data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Apparent consumption of ready mixed drinks dropped by 30 per in 2008-2009 and then a further 1.9 per cent in 2009-2010. So far so good. However, increase in consumption of wines and spirits increased. The apparent per capita consumption of alcohol was the same in 2009-10 as it was the previous year and only slightly down (.17 of a litre) from 2007-2008.

Now it may be that young people consumed less and others more. Still, it doesn't appear to have been a very successful policy measure, and that was my point.            

Saturday Morning Musings on a changing Australia

I am going away today for a birthday party on the NSW Southern Highlands. For those who don't know Australia, the Southern Highlands is a Tablelands' area midway between Sydney and Canberra. Depending on where you live in Sydney or Canberra, it's about a ninety minute drive.

The Southern Highlands' closeness to Sydney and the direct rail connection made it a popular place to escape Sydney heat. Many big homes, mansions, were built. Then time passed it by. Forty years ago it it was a sleepy area, but has now been reinvigorated as a week end holiday destination for people from Sydney or Canberra. Most of the big old homes have been turned into accommodation or resorts, with a large conference or meeting component.

Today's Sydney Morning Herald carried a story on Treasury modelling projecting likely changes in the Australian economy over the rest of the decade. While I have a degree of scepticism about some of the hype surrounding the mining boom (Australia's golden egg?), no one doubts that Australia is changing.

It's not just economic change, but also the demographic changes that I have written about before. Both the structure and distribution of the Australian population are shifting. You see this best when you drop below the gross numbers too look at the effects in particular areas or localities.

I know that I have often written about this, but I find it endlessly fascinating. There is a world of difference between Sydney's melting pot suburbs and the Southern Highlands, between both areas and, say, the Pilbara region of Western Australia.     

As I write, the left of centre advocacy group GetUp has launched a national TV campaign trying to force the banning of the export of live animals for overseas slaughter. The campaign features images of mistreated cattle and sheep exported from Australia to Indonesia and the Middle East and will air on free-to-air and pay TV.

GetUp is an interesting phenomenon and itself a sign of change.

Internet based, it draws from very particular demographics and has provided a vehicle for organising opinion in those demographics. To survive, GetUp has to identify those issues popular within its support base to the point that people will contribute money. No money, no campaigns, no GetUp. It's really as simple as that.

  Also as I write, insurance company AAMI has announced that it is closing its branch structure and will in future rely just on the Internet and on call centres.

  I must leave. I will continue this post tomorrow.

Continuing

Just back from the Southern Highlands.

We stayed last night at Berrima (and here), one of the oldest towns in NSW. After settling in and getting changed, we set out to find Southern Highland Wines where the birthday party was being held. This proved to be more difficult than expected in the dark. We kept on driving past mansions on acreage with large gates and hedges. Finally we ended up on a dirt road that effectively finished in a creek.  We turned round and finally found the winery after getting new instructions. There was no light at the front gate, and the winery  proved to be some distance from the road.  Still, we finally got there!

It was a mixed group of family and friends at the party from multiple places but with a strong a strong country connection. Fuelled by nice wine and food, conversation ranged widely from real estate to wool prices all linked by past shared experiences.  

This morning we had some coffee at Berrima before starting out. Little Berrima was quite crowded. While there were young couples and family groups, the average age was quite a bit older than you would see in Sydney. It was almost exclusively an Anglo group, dressed in much the same way you might see in Canberra on a Sunday morning at Manuka. Tweeds, scarves, designer jeans with boots, wool pullovers 

Coffee finished, we drove down to have lunch at our friends' house at Burradoo just outside Bowral. I will do a post later on the Southern Highlands for it's an interesting area, but for the moment I am just continuing my apparently disconnected muse. Burradoo is apparently one of the two most expensive areas on the Southern Highlands with many big houses and a very English feel.

From Burradoo we drove back to Sydney. Checking news on my arrival, the Sydney GetUp rally for action on climate change had apparently attracted 8,000 people, while independent North Queensland MP Bob Katter has launched a new political party to represent country interests.

To cook tea, I went down to Anzac Parade at Kingsford to get some additional vegetables. Walking along the street, the people there were around seventy per cent Asian. Some were clearly students at the nearby University of New South Wales, but others were first generation Australian if not more from their accents.

On arrival home, my wife was on the phone trying to help her mother download the new Sydney Morning Herald Ipad App. She, my mother-in-law,  was struggling, and we couldn't help her because the SMH web site really didn't provide proper guidance.

Discussion

I now want to pull these apparently disconnected things together.

To say that Australia is changing is a truism. The Treasury modelling is an example of that change, for Treasury is projecting fundamental shifts in the power structures within the Australian economy. Our present migration statistics are leading to fundamental demographic change. The difference between the Southern Highlands and Anzac Parade is an example of that change.

Different people with different histories, backgrounds and linkages value and interpret things in different ways. You can only really see this working itself out at the local level. If you go from parts of Sydney to the Southern Highlands or the Pilbara, you could be living in different countries. People neither talk nor think in quite the same way.  

On top of these changes, we have technological change as evidenced by the AAMI or Ipad examples. We can think of these changes along two dimensions.

The first dimension is the economic and structural effects of the technological changes.

As the internet gathers steam, no one can be sure of just how the change effects will work through. Take, as an example, the impact on retailing. Assume that one third of retail sales are carried out on-line in twenty years' time. Assume that as a consequence one third of retail jobs vanish. What then will happen to things like the big shopping centres? What will happen to the communities such as the NSW North Coast where retailing is a disproportionate employer?

The second dimension is the social and political effects.

Take GetUp as an example GetUp draws from a particular demographic. This demographic is a majority in some areas. In other areas, GetUp provides a vehicle for uniting people with common views across space even where they may be a small minority.

I am struggling to articulate ideas because my thinking is cloudy. But pity the poor political parties.

They have to find a way of reaching a population organised into electorates that are becoming more diverse. They also have to manage special interest movements sitting on top of an increasingly diverse electorate that combine views on particular interests. Favour one position and you lose support elsewhere. Oppose it, and the same thing happens.

I will pause here simply because my thinking is so cloudy.    

Australia's golden egg?

Interesting views from Commonwealth Treasury head Martin Parkinson appearing before Senate economics committee in an estimates hearing.

According the report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Dr Parkinson suggested that Australia was about to enter a boom that should last decades. To his mind, it would be a golden age propelled by high export prices, enhanced mining capacity and a once-in-a-century global realignment.

The dollar was unlikely to go back to where it was, and manufacturing would shrink in importance to the economy, perhaps even faster than it has been.

Around $380 billion of mining investment was already under way or committed over the next five years. In the coming year $83 billion would be invested in enhanced mining capacity, up from $51 billion in the financial year about to end.

The report also says:

Dr Parkinson said the discussion about the importance of mining was ''quite bizarre".

"Mining is 8 per cent of gross domestic product … but there's a very important 92 per cent of GDP which is out there which for some reason we have stopped talking about."

I couldn't help being struck by the incongruity between these last words and the emphasis on on Australia's new golden age. Dr Parkinson may be right, but it's a bit hard to avoid getting caught up in the hype.

Another report in the Australian takes a somewhat different approach. There Dr Parkinson is reported as conceding that his department's failure to forecast the strength of the resources boom resulted in opportunities for reform being squandered during the Howard government. Treasury's refusal to believe that increases in commodity prices would be sustained meant that from 2003, the revenue consistently came in ahead of forecasts.

Dr Parkinson said the error was one of two major failings in Treasury's forecasting history.

"One, in the early 1990s, was when inflation started to come down and we didn't believe it and the second, in the period since 2003, when we chased the terms of trade up."

I think that we can add a third to Dr Parkinson's list.

In 1979 and 1980, the rise in international energy prices flowing from the second oils shock led to an investment boom. In 1980, the Treasury driven Economic Strategy Interdepartmental Committee of which I was a junior member representing the Department of Industry and Commerce was greatly concerned with the best way of managing the boom. The issues were just the same as those today.

The problem was that the boom failed to arrive on the expected scale. Higher global energy prices flowed through into an international economic downturn that essentially stopped the boom in its tracks.

Today is a little different. We already have significant productive capacity, while the number of projects actually underway is much higher. However, what happened in 1980-1981 is still a useful corrective.

  It is actually quite easy to think of sets of circumstances that might halt or at least reduce the expected boom. To paint a worst case scenario:

• The re-balancing currently underway in the Chinese economy might tip over into contraction
• High Australian costs plus skills bottlenecks slow investment at a time when projects in other places are getting underway, leading to increased global supply
• Action required to halt global warming leads to longer term downturn in coal demand.

In combination, these things would affect short, medium and long term demand for and supply of Australian resources.

I am not saying that these things will happen. I am simply saying that the time to count the golden egg is when it's been actually laid.

Twitter, privacy & the court system

This one passed me by. I record it now.

On 14 May in Privacy in a cyber-glasshouse world, Ken Parish looked at privacy issues. He concluded:

The effect of the ALRC (Australian Law Reform Commission) recommendation would be to institute for the first time in Australia a direct and immediate right to litigate through the courts for serious breaches of privacy.  As things currently stand, breaches of personal privacy are only directly actionable if they happen to involve the commission of some existing recognised civil cause of action e.g. infringement of intellectual property rights if someone’s photos or diaries are acquired and republished without their permission (as the St Kilda Schoolgirl is alleged to have done with photos of Nick Riewoldt); or if the acquisition of privacy-infringing material involves an actionable trespass.  You can mount a respectable argument that the current patchwork system provides sufficient protection of privacy and that any legislated general right to litigate for privacy infringement runs too much risk of recreating the old high stakes defamation litigation lottery under a new guise.

  Ten days later in Privacy in a cyber-glasshouse world – post-script, Ken said in part:

On the other hand, the “outing” of Ryan Giggs suggests that, whatever we might think as individuals about whether a right to privacy should exist, the borderless and almost universal nature of the Internet means that a court in any given country is unlikely to be able effectively or for very long to prevent disclosure of information about the identity of a person about whom salacious rumours are circulating.  In one sense I suppose that’s not very different from the social situation in western societies before the urbanisation of the 18th and 19th centuries.  Most people lived in villages and knew everyone else’s business anyway.  Rights to privacy in that sense are just an artefact of a short period of history when the practical anonymity conferred by large urban agglomerations of people had not yet been rendered ineffective by Wikileaks, Twitter, blogs and Facebook and the underlying Internet architecture that makes it almost impossible for the courts of a single country to keep information confidential.

Now Super injunctions, privacy and Twitter, Legal Eagle extends the discussion. She concluded:

Like Ken, I feel that we do not have a right to prurient information about celebrities: but whether the law can actually control the dissemination of such information in the present climate is quite another question.

This discussion actually bears upon other questions previously discussed on a variety of blogs: the way in which comments on social media can entangle people in a variety of potential legal actions; the responsibilities of providers such as Twitter for the comments made; the nature of cross-border issues and conflicts in a porous world; and the risk that remedies introduced for one purpose may lead to adverse results in other connections.

I am recording the discussion now because I think the issues are important. So I don't detract from Legal Eagle's latest post, feel free to comment there rather than here.        

Public policy & Australia's failing universities

This one has been well covered in the general Australian media (Kim Carr bows to rank rebellion over journal rankings for example) and on blogs (cf Legal Eagle's ERA journal rankings are dead – hurrah, hurrah!), but I wanted to make a personal comment.

Over the last few years I have written a fair bit on the misuse of measurement in both management and public policy. A key part of my argument has been that you tend to get what you measure, with things not measured or easily measurable pushed to the side. It's part of a trend to what I have called mechanistic management and is directly linked to thought patterns created by the rise of the computer.

I have had a particular interest in the education sector for a very long time.  For that reason, part of my writing covered the application of measurement approaches and associated mechanistic management in Australian higher education. I also looked at the rise of corporatist approaches in higher education.

When ERA or Excellence in Research for Australia (don't you love the modern public lingo?) was launched, I looked at it because it seemed to me that it was just another complication inflicted on universities. I then became very concerned because it seemed to me that it, and especially the way journal rankings were being applied, were actually twisting research.

I admit to my biases here. There is first the general bias flowing from previously reached conclusions. Then, too, there were my specific concerns about ERA's impact on multidisciplinary working and on some of the subject areas that I have a specific love for.

The decision by Minister Carr to alter the way that  journals are ranked under ERA is a recognition that the problems I pointed to were occurring, although I think that both the Minister and his education bureaucrats could benefit from a course in plain English. I find their material hard to digest. However, it does nothing to allay my broader concerns.

Tonight on the ABC's 7.30 report Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan placed great emphasis on the role that the Government's broad education reforms would play in improving productivity. I blinked.

So far as Australian higher education is concerned, I know of no evidence to suggest that all the tinkering and changes of recent years, perhaps the last twenty years, has led to any improvement in the standards of Australian higher education. Indeed, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest the opposite.

What do I mean by standards?

I start with the quality of education received by students. Note that I am using the word education, not training. Class sizes have increased, while the level of personal interaction between staff and students has declined. Industry complains about the standards of graduates. The computing and communications tools that should support education have become a substitute for education.

I work in the on-line world. I have worked as a strategic consultant and trainer for much of the last twenty years. Central to my work has been the concept of fitness for purpose. That concept has been largely lost in the need for mass delivery in the most cost-effective fashion.

Turning now to research. Here things get so complicated that I find it hard to know where to begin.

I said that I had biases, so let me start with a purely personal perspective. In some of the areas that I am interested in, there is actually less research done now than there was twenty or even thirty years ago. The last book on the prehistory of Northern NSW was published in 1974. There has been fight after fight just to retain basic agricultural research facilities.

More broadly, across Australia the quantum of free research has diminished. Research has become the handmaiden of other interests. It has also become tied up in increasingly complex and unstable policies and procedures.    

  We live in a pecking order world in which research "excellence" has to be benchmarked against some form of international standard. But to what end? Why have we adopted this approach?

To illustrate what I mean, let me start with a very basic question, using one of the criteria used to justify current approaches.

Is the research carried out in Australia in the first decade of the twenty first century likely to yield the same relative national benefits in economic terms to that carried out in, say, the 1920s? I think that the answer is almost certainly no and for a very practical reason: the 1920s' research and especially that in agriculture was driven by local needs and involved local people. Results went into application quite quickly. That is not true today.

Again, we come back to a measurement confusion.

The big research intensive Australian universities attempting to compete in an international market for students and research funds greatly value internationally competitive research measured by standard indices for both ego and competitive reasons. Whether they provide a good education is quite a different question.

If the aim of Government policy in the university research area is to support international marketing efforts by Australian universities, then fine. But it is not. Official policy actually rests on two key assumptions.

The first is that measuring research excellence by some form of international benchmark is good in itself. The second is that achievement of such an outcome will somehow flow into some form of economic and social benefit for Australia. Neither assumption is actually very sensible.

In my years as a manager and consultant, I have often noticed how both management and official rhetoric actually reflects what is happening on ground in a strangely distorted mirror like way. The emphasis on the importance of people in the 1990s coincided with restructuring and process re-engineering. The emphasis on the importance of brands and branding coincided with the greatest period of brand destruction in history. To my mind, the current policy rhetoric in higher education with its emphasis on standards is very similar.

Australian higher education is actually becoming something of a mess. This may sound extreme. Perhaps it is. But consider the following bits of evidence in no particular order:

• Scandals over marking driven by overseas student needs have affected a number of universities
• Our universities are marked by a large increase in the number of casuals on one side and a rapidly aging permanent academic workforce on the other. Replacement of the academic workforce is becoming a very real issue, and it's actually not clear where the people will come from despite the presence of the casuals
• Heavy reliance on overseas full fee paying students has created very real vulnerabilities, as evidenced by Monash lay-offs
• Course instability has become a significant problem for students as offerings are withdrawn or restructured
• Many disciplines have vanished in specific universities since they cannot be justified on low numbers given the financial metrics now applied. With the move to "competitive" universities, I have put competitive in inverted commas because its not real competition, Universities Australia has promoted the idea of hub and spoke universities just to retain some teaching in niche areas.

And in all this, many students themselves are simply unhappy with the current standard of offerings.

I accept that I am old fashioned and out of touch, a dinosaur in the modern Australian university era. Yet as I listened to a conversation the other night about a possible private-public partnership involving an Australian university, I couldn't help being struck by the disconnect between that conversation and the real role of universities.

Finally, I have brought up a page consolidating some of my past posts on higher education. It doesn't include some of the supporting management posts.

Blog traffic, adsense & audiences

In yesterday's post How do you deal with frustration?, I mentioned that there were a fair number of interesting things around. Today, I plan to mention some of them. This post focuses on blog traffic.

The graph shows visits (yellow) plus page views (yellow plus red) to this blog to end May 2011. I am still not sure why my traffic has risen.

My stats don't allow me to properly track visitor composition. I know from spot checks that return visits have increased, but they are still only around 25 per day; search engines continue to dominate traffic.

Google has changed its search algorithms, and I wondered how this affected traffic. I haven't really focused on these changes, but I do know of one firm in my immediate environment whose web traffic halved as a consequence of the changes. This has had a devastating effect on the business. I actually need to look at this (the Google changes) at some point for purely professional reasons.

Measured by page views, the most popular posts over the last month were:

• Report of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, year ended 30 June 1940 227 page views
• Sunday Essay - the importance of quiet time in a crowded world 125 page views
• The Importance of Family History 104 page views
• Sunday essay - dust storms, environmental change and the romance of agriculture 91 page views
• Flood levy's, public policy & the Australian spirit 84 page views
• Australian painters - William Dobell 83 page views
• People, biography & the New England tradition 75 page views
• Australia Day and the Dangers of Personal Pontification 72 page views
• Australian history and the migrant experience 67 page views
• Storm clouds over the Australian Federation 48 page views

I am never quite sure what data like this means, nor what to do with it. However, I thought it might be of interest to fellow bloggers and those interested in the broader web if I made some fairly random comments on patterns and implications.   

Google Adsense

Like many bloggers, I carry adsense ads. Prior to the global financial crisis, my revenue from this source had been increasing slowly, although it was never huge. Still, small lump sum payments of $100 plus three or four times a year were not unhelpful. They funded a dinner or consumables or just the weekly food budget.

Since the GFC, my revenue from this source has more than halved even though my overall traffic has increased substantially. 

One factor was the GFC itself. I could see this immediately in the numbers. A second a change in payment patterns.

I used to get paid when my credit balance reached $US100. At the time, the Australian dollar was worth 70 cents US. Google then changed its rules. I now get paid when my credit balance reaches $Aus150. The Australian dollar is worth $1.07 US. The practical effect is that I have to earn twice as much before I get paid.

A further factor is a change in my own blogging approach, a decline in the purely professional, an increase in variety of posts. This makes it harder for the Google algorithms to target my blogs.

Now some of my fellow bloggers might argue that none of this matters. We don't blog for the money. We don't, but from a purely personal perspective those little payments are quite important, more important since I cut back from some activities to better focus on writing.

I don't have an answer on this one, just some ideas that I am going to test and will report on.

The Role of Twitter

I joined Twitter as an experiment, and was in fact very sceptical. Twitter has its problems, including a tendency to crash through overload. It's not loading even as I write. Yet it has become a very valuable tool for bloggers.

I have found this at two levels.

First, it provides a vehicle for recording things that you just don't have time to blog about at that point but which you think are interesting. Send a tweet and you have a record, potentially add value to others.

Secondly, you can use it to alert others on your posts. Then your readers who are interested can retweet, adding to your reach.

I don't get a lot of traffic through Twitter as compared to, say, Google search. Last month I received twenty visits from Twitter as compared to more than three thousand via Google. However, those who come via Twitter are more actually likely to stay and read. And, really, that's what counts.

Nationalisation of search engines

We all tend to think of Google as Google. In fact, there are a number of country Google search engines that give different search results. Looking at my own traffic over the last month, I found:

• www.google.com.au 2,153 visits
• www.google.com 965 visits
• www.google.co.uk 277 visits
• www.google.ca 123 visits
• www.google.co.in 95 visits
• www.google.co.nz 62 visits

Now, to a degree the visits simply reflect the home country of the visitor. However, and this something that I am not clear on, they may also reflect variations in weighting on those  web sites. Is it just the varying country pages, or is it more than that?

In any event, and I think that this is important from a professional viewpoint, I certainly  use the local pages on country search engines all the time.

Variations in audience

Each blog serves a different audience. For generalist blogs like this one, that can be quite varied.

Looking at my stats, I break my audience up in this way:

• There are those who come through search engines and are measured by 00.00 time on this blog. They find me, check me and leave because I am not relevant to their immediate need. Looking at my most recent stats, they appear to dominate my visitor traffic.
• On the surface, this is a bit humiliating! However, It's really just the reality of search engines. Where I can do more is on certain posts that get a lot of traffic where I may be able to update and improve the visitor experience.
• Linking to the last point, to what degree do we as bloggers have responsibility to update and correct?
• Then I have my regular visitors. I think of this in terms of circles from regular commeters out.  Here I have a feel for their interests.

In all this, while audience is important, most bloggers write for their won sake. Yet it's still interesting to muse on just what needs to be done to meet the varying needs of those who come. But that's the subject of another post!     

How do you deal with frustration?

I am sitting here tonight just feeling frustrated and bored. I know that I shouldn't.

My stats show me this blog will achieve record figures in May on both visits and page views. There are many things around that I am interested in, some good stories that would probably interest a broader readership. I have been invited to write a short piece on the Vincent family for the new companion to the Australian Media. My old school first VI has beaten both Grammar and Sydney High School. My eldest daughter who I dearly love will be home soon. Yet it's all ashes in my mouth.

Have you ever read John Buchan's John McNab? It's actually a very good yarn about successful British leaders in the first part of the last century who get bored and need to do something new. They become poachers.

I am not like them. National politics doesn't quake at my very word, much as I would like it. Yet the feeling is the same.

This morning when I was trying to write my Armidale Express column I really didn't feel like it. At 5am I was trying to drag the words out. Mind you, I am annoyed with the Express. They have cropped my photo and reduced my prominence as part of their new layout. I would swear the typeface is smaller. This certainly doesn't help my mood. Or has my mood affected my perceptions?

Assuming that I am one of the characters in John McNab. What would you advise me? And no, horse stealing in a country where this is a capital offence is not on the list, nor am I prepared to join the crew of a tramp steamer! 

Storm clouds over the Australian Federation

Just over a week ago in Saturday Morning Musings - the WA royalties stoush I reported on the growing financial clash between the Australian and West Australian Governments. There I said in part that if I was in the WA Treasury I would be advising the Government to hold to their line. I also commented that the results of this dispute may well be critical in the evolution of the next stage of the Australian Federation.

Since then the issue has continued to gather steam. See, as examples, Fiscal Federalism pushed to breaking point and Western Australia shuns Canberra, eyes China.

I will comment in more detail later and also try to put the dispute into a broader context. There is, I think, a tendency in Australia's eastern states still to treat the whole matter as a bit of a side-show. However, to my mind it is actually more important than most of the political issues dominating present main stream media coverage because the outcome may actually change the way Australian Government works.

I also have a personal interest because back in the early 1990s my then research group made a number of long term forecasts about likely changes in Australia including fragmentation in the Australian economy. Some of those changes have not happened, others have happened more slowly than expected, but our then thinking remains relevant.

For the present, I just wanted to record the latest reports.

Postscript

Just adding another link: Colin Barnett is doing us all a favour by standing up to Canberra.


   

Sunday short story - a night in Burnie

The lad had caught the bus from Queenstown to Zeehan to join the Westcoaster, the mixed passenger/freight service run by the Emu Bay Railway Company between Zeeehan and Burnie on Tasmania’s North Coast.

The sixteen year old had stayed the night before in Queenstown. Now very short of money at the end of his trip, he had found the cheapest hotel that he could. It was an odd place; the first floor room was small with a rickety old bed, while the bathroom and toilet for the floor actually stuck out at the back of the hotel with large gaps in the wall between the planks providing an expectedly panoramic view of the town.

Queenstown had fascinated him. The raw buildings, the moonlike landscape created by tree felling and pollution, the very sights and sounds of the town, had all exercised a powerful attraction. While he couldn’t afford it, he had spent some of his last money on a guided tour of the Mount Lyell mine workings, one of Australia’s best known mines.

The bus run to Zeehan and Zeehan itself had also interested the lad. Zeehan was like a faded lady whose better times were marked by some grand old buildings now separated by empty paddocks and decay. He found out later that the town had once had a population of 10,000, then rivaling Launceston and Hobart in size.

The lad had grown up in a mining area, and was used to mining ghost towns such as Hillgrove. There he and his brother had clambered all over the workings and played with the old mining equipment. However, West Coast Tasmania was different because of the scale of the remains.

Hillgrove had been quite a big place and for some time. More than 3,000 people had lived there. There had been four churches, six hotels, two schools, a school of arts, a hospital, several banks, a stock exchange, a court house, police station, a technical college, debating society, a temperance league and a cordial factory. The town had its own local paper and was lit by the first hydro-electric plant in Australia.

All that had long gone when the boys first visited Hillgrove, leaving mainly the decaying mining workings and treatment plants. Hillgrove’s closeness to nearby Armidale was part of the reason for the town’s disappearance. Houses had been picked up holus bolus and shipped to Armidale, while other buildings had provided building materials for a growing Armidale.

The lad had wanted to travel on the Emu Bay Railway for some time. Earlier he had acquired a fascination with the stock exchange and its companies. One of those was the Emu Bay Railway, Australia’s only listed private railway. The lad had even tried to buy shares in the company, lured in some way by the notion of the US railway barons that had featured so strongly in some of the books that he had read. Ideas of taking over the railway and in some way building a personal railway empire had toyed with his imagination.

The lad was excited when he joined the train, looking forward to the trip and the wild country that could only then be seen by train. Sadly, lack of sleep from the night before caught up with him, and in the warmth of the train he slept most of the way.

Burnie was a much bigger place than the lad had expected. He decided to sleep out to save money, and found a place in a park near the water. There he put his pack against a tree and got out his sleeping bag to sit on. “You can’t sleep there, dear,” a woman walking her dog in the late afternoon told him. “The police patrol this park, and you will be arrested. There is a camping area just down the road.”

“Bloody civilization”, the lad thought. He put his sleeping bag and groundsheet back in his pack, and decided to wait until dark. In a way, that (waiting) had been a feature of his trip; waiting for lifts, waiting for youth hostels to open, sometimes just waiting for something to happen.

Carrying his pack along the back roads waiting for the next car, he had taken to singing songs from his childhood. “I will go a wandering” was somehow especially satisfying. On those roads, the issues of loneliness or where to stay weren’t so bad. Even though he didn’t have a tent, he had his sleeping bag and knew how to light a fire.

Ideas such as stranger danger and the whole paraphernalia of risk avoidance still lay well in the future. The lad wasn’t oblivious to personal danger – he had taken some pretty hairy hitches – but here in Burnie he wasn’t worried about personal safety at all beyond any risk posed by the police. It was more that he could neither sing nor light a fire. He just had to wait.

With dark, he picked up his pack and walked down the road to find the camping area. He could see no-one, so stepped over the low hedge and found a spot to camp. After the long day, he went to sleep immediately.

It was only waking in the grey light of dawn that the lad realised that he actually had done something silly. Even though the park was largely deserted, it was a caravan park. He had slept on green grass near a green hedge in a green sleeping bag. If a car or van had arrived, they would never have seen him.

Looking around in the dawn light, there was non-one stirring. Quickly re-packing his gear, the lad left the caravan park to find a public toilet he had seen the day before. There he cleaned himself up and started along the road out of town. He was very hungry, but decided to keep the remaining food in his pack until he could find a place to camp.