Ethnicity, ideology and the sometimes slippery concept of Australian "independence" - Part Two: Australian Identity

Graphic: Castle Hill Rebellion, 1804.

In the first post in this series, Ethnicity, ideology and the sometimes slippery concept of Australian "independence" - Part One: "Independence", I explored the evolution of the Australian independence from a historical perspective. I suggested that this had evolved in ways not always well presented in current histories with their us (Australia)/them (British, London)focus.

The second part of this series discusses the evolving sense of Australian nationalism and the relationship between this and different streams in Australian thought. This is a far harder task.

The term independence itself is capable of many definitions and is in any event a continuum. However, it is framed by, and can at least be assessed in terms of, specific historical events. By contrast, the evolution of our sense of identity and of the changing nature of Australian nationalism is far harder to assess because it centres not just on symbols, but on the changing way Australians think of themselves. We are what we think. But what have we thought?

The problem is made more complex because current modes of thought always create a barrier to our understanding of our past.

Take, as an example, the current use of the terms "Anglo" and "Anglo-Celtic." These modern labels have no validity in a historical sense, although their use may be of interest to later historians. Coined for current purposes, they actually create a mental barrier to our understanding of the past.

The popularity of the term "Celtic" is quite recent. The joining of "Anglo" with "Celtic" is even more recent, creating a combination that conceals one of the great divides of Australian history.

In historical terms, the islands from which Australia's first European settlers came were a melting pot marked over millennia by invasion after invasion of new settlers. Despite this, perhaps because of it, the principalities and kingdoms that emerged in historical terms were stubbornly separate, often at war with each other. The history of the Isles is littered with war.

Religious divides added to tensions. Here the Reformation is central because of the divide it created between the Roman Catholic Church on one side, the rise of Protestantism on the other. This played out within and between the kingdoms within the Isles, set within a broader framework of Western European religious and political conflict.

The place that would become Australia was settled from 1788 by people from various parts of the Isles. Others would come and make their individual contribution, but it was the people from the Isles who dominated especially in the first period.

I make this point because Australia was a mixed ethnic and religious society from the beginning, bringing together in one place people from homelands and especially England, Ireland and Scotland that were very different. People carried their history, religion and culture with them - they did not cease to be who they were just because of their transhipment.

There had been deep divides in Scotland between Roman Catholic and Protestant. The Presbyterian Church itself displayed a remarkable tendency to schism, a capacity and fury for theological debate that would be carried over to the new colony. The defeat of the Jacobite uprising in 1745 and the reprisals that followed were still recent history at the time that Sydney was settled.

In Ireland, too, national and religious divides were powerful. The political tensions associated with the English Reformation, fears about the loyalty of Irish vassals, led to a series of military campaigns to assert English control over Ireland. New settlers were planted from England and Scotland to form loyal Protestant communities.

By 1788, Ireland was governed by a local parliament whose electors excluded the 85 per cent Roman Catholic population, helping further strengthen bitter sectarian divides. In 1798 rebellion at Wexford culminated in the Battle of Vinegar Hill when 10,000 British troops successfully attacked the rebel headquarters. A number of the defeated rebels were sent to Australia as convicts.

In 1801, the Irish Parliament was abolished and Ireland became an integral part of a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union. However, Roman Catholics were still banned from the Westminster Parliament. It would be 1829 before this restriction was lifted.

Far away in the remote convict settlement at Sydney, maintenance of order was a key official concern. This was no easy task.

In 1804 rebellion broke out among the Irish convicts.

Led by Phillip Cunningham, a veteran of the 1798 Wexford rebellion, and William Johnston, another Irish convict at Castle Hill, the intent was for the 500 convicts at Castle Hill to rise, meet with with nearly 1,000 convicts from the Hawkesbury River area then March on Parramatta and Sydney. The rebellion began on 4 March 1804. Ineptly led, it was crushed a week later.

This early period of Australian history established three key features of Australia and the Australian character.

The need to maintain order among a divided population, along with the politically influential Scots Presbyterian presence, effectively mandated a secular society. The Church of England might be the church of the establishment, but it would never be the established church.

The need to maintain order, the colony's manpower needs, as well as the rise of the emancipist (ex-convict) class, required a pragmatic approach. Society could not be as rigidly organised, the laws could not be as rigidly enforced, things had to be done just to get by. By modern standards, these were harsh times. However, convict NSW also had a freedom, a social license, that is completely alien to today's three strikes and you are out mentality.

This introduces the third feature, the desire for order itself, especially among the emerging middle classes. Here one of the enduring features of Australian history have been the attempts of the middle classes to impose order on the broader population. In many ways Australia is a very conformist society.

All this affected language and society. Australia has never been a classless society. However, the egalitarianism of language and attitude, what John Hurst has called a democracy of manners, dates I think from this early period.

While NSW may have been a secular society, the sectarian divide between Roman Catholic and Anglican or Protestant continued, due in part to the carefully maintained dominance of the Irish Church over the the Australian Church. This meant that Irish attitudes and issues continued to play out in Australia. There was a clear and in many ways ghettoed divide between the majority population and the separate Catholic minority, a divide that was mirrored across education, social, cultural and economic and political life, that still exercises a powerful influence in Australia today.

The existence of an Australian dialect is one feature of the Australian character on which all can agree. This emerged among the currency lads and lasses, the locally born, quite early. A tri-partite language subdivision emerged, later described in terms of English-Australian, educated Australian, broad Australian.

It is not clear to me why the variations in the Australian dialect should have become socially and education based, with so little regional variation. As a historian and social analyst with a particular interest in regional history, I know just how deep the variations are between different parts of Australia.

Part of the answer lies in the then mobility of the Australian population. The Australian population, especially the working class population, was in a state of constant flux across Australia searching for new opportunities. The educated elites were also mobile within Australia and the broader Empire.

Part of the answer probably lies as well in the emergence of centralised education systems. Later, the spread of radio was important because of the way that the ABC in particular mandated a certain type of spoken English.

Part of answer also lies in the evolving Australian social structures that gave rise to the tri-partite division in the first place.

English-Australian was the domain of the new public (public in the English sense) and private schools that emerged over the nineteenth century to provide education to the wealthier elites. Especially in girl's schools, elocution (the speaking of proper English) was very important.

Educated Australian became the domain of school teachers and the small but growing number of university graduates.

Broad Australian was the language of the working class and of the bush.

The evolving concepts of Australia and Australian were inextricably entwined with ethnicity and social class, as was the evolution of the political parties. In turn, both played out in the evolution of Australian thought.

I will discuss this in my next post.

Ethnicity, ideology and the sometimes slippery concept of Australian "independence" - Part One: "Independence"

A contemporary (c1810) propaganda cartoon of Bligh's arrest produced to show Governor Bligh as a coward hiding under his bed.

In 3 September 1939 - the Second World War starts I said in part:

On 1 September German troops invaded Poland following a staged incident to provide a nominal justification. In response, Britain and France declared war on 3 September. The Dominions including Australia followed with independent declarations on the same day.

In a correction, anon noted that:

Australia had not ratified the Statute of Westminster and therefore was not able to independently declare war. We were hostage to England's (or should that be Britain's?) foreign policy.

Now anon is technically correct on the first point - the Australian Parliament did not ratify the Statute until 1942. It is the second sentence that I want to discuss in the context of the evolving sense of and presentation of Australian nationalism.

To set a context, in the period immediately after European settlement, formal political control rested with Westminster and its local representative, the Governor. Even then distance meant a degree of local autonomy.

Local interests were no mere ciphers. Australia's only military coup, the 1808 overthrow of Governor Bligh by the NSW Corp creating a military Government that ruled until 1810, was based on clashes of interest that played out in Sydney and the halls of Westminster.

Between 1836 and 1859, various parts of NSW were separated to form new colonies - South Australia (1836), New Zealand (1840), Victoria (1851) and Queensland (1859). Western Australia and Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) were separate identities from the beginning.

The creation of South Australia and the separation of New Zealand were driven from Britain. Victoria and Queensland were driven more by local interests who wanted independence from Sydney control. The moves were opposed by Sydney interests who, in the case of Queensland, were able to get the proposed border shifted north.

In 1825 an appointed Legislative Council was created in NSW. This was followed by the grant of self-government under elected parliaments beginning with Victoria in 1852, the year after separation from NSW. From this point, the individual colonies had effective control over local matters.

The colonies were no mere ciphers for London. This held even in foreign policy areas where the colonies were active in trying to protect what they saw as their own interests to, as in Queensland's 1883 annexation of the southern coast of New Guinea, the sometimes distress of Westminster.

For reasons that I will come to a little later, modern Australians sometimes have difficult in understanding the nature of relations in the Empire, squeezing it into a them (the Brits) and us (the Ozzies) model. Really, there was only us.

You can see this if you think of the Empire as akin to Australia today.

There was the central government (Canberra, London) concerned with the interests of the Empire as a whole. Then there were the states (the various colonies) focused on their own concerns. The key difference between the two is that the Australian colonies had far more real power and independence than do the Australian states today.

I think that this is important because the them/us model acts to conceal things.

The treatment of the Aborigines did not come out of London, we did that. The adoption of protectionism in a generally free trade Empire did not come out of London. We did that. The adoption of the White Australia policy did not come out of London. We did that. Our over-reliance on the Imperial shield in the period leading up to the Second World war did not come out of London. We did that.

In all these cases, the British Government had a different view tempered by British social attitudes and the needs of a global trading Empire and Imperial power.

While the various colonies had very real powers, the creation of the Australian Federation ended what we now call the colonial period - itself an often mis-used word in an Australian context. The adoption of protectionism by the new Australian Parliament was the first independent trade act, the adoption of the White Australia policy our first foreign policy act.

The subsequent evolution of Australian official policy took place within an evolving Commonwealth and Empire. We entered the First World War as part of Empire. We, along with the other Dominions, signed the Treaty of Versaille in our own rights if within an Imperial umbrella and then became members of the League of Nations.

The role played by Australian Prime Minister William Morris Hughes (and here, here) in the period leading up to the signing of the Treaty is instructive.

Like a leading state politician today, Hughes was an Imperial (aka national) as well as Australian (aka state) political player. Determined to punish Germany, fearful of Japan, determined to protect what he saw as Australian as well as the Imperial interest, Hughes played an active role in British politics at electoral and Government level.

When I first studied Australian history, Hughes role was presented as the first successful exercise of an independent Australian foreign policy. It was not, nor was it successful except to the degree that Hughes got his own way. His desire to make Germany pay, his success in tightening sanctions on Germany, his alienation of Japan, all contributed to the subsequent Second World War.

The next major step in the evolution of Australia's national role came in 1926. There at the 1926 Imperial Conference, the governments of the Dominions and of the United Kingdom endorsed the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which declared that the Dominions were autonomous members of the British Empire, equal to each other and to the United Kingdom. The 1931 Statute of Westminster gave legal effect to the Balfour Declaration, declaring that the Parliament of the United Kingdom no longer had any legislative authority over the Dominions.

Initially Australia chose not ratify the Statute and did so for its own foreign policy reasons, the desire not to weaken Imperial links and protections in the face of the rise of Japan. We finally did so in 1942 when Japanese military success led to a greater focus on the US relationship.

The fact that Australia had not ratified the Statute did not affect constitutional practice.

In April 1933, 68 per cent of electors at a referendum in Western Australia voted for the state to leave the Commonwealth of Australia with the aim of becoming a separate Dominion within the British Empire. The state government sent a delegation to Westminster to cause the result to be enacted, but the British Parliament refused to intervene on the grounds that it was a matter for the Commonwealth of Australia. As a result no action was taken.

The last residual formal residual vestiges of the power of the British Parliament over the Dominions were finally removed by the Canada Act 1982, the Australia Act 1986, and the New Zealand Constitution Act 1986.

If you look at this potted history, you can see how the concept of Australian independence has evolved in ways not always well presented in current histories with their us/them focus. In the second part of this post, I will look at the evolving sense of Australian nationalism and the relationship between this and different streams in Australian thought.

3 September 1939 - the Second World War starts

Photo: Hitler inspects German troops invading Poland

I hadn't realised the oddity of the Australian Government selecting 3 September as the date to celebrate War in the Pacific Day until I realised that 3 September actually marked the start of the Second World War.

On 1 September German troops invaded Poland following a staged incident to provide a nominal justification. In response, Britain and France declared war on 3 September. The Dominions including Australia followed with independent declarations on the same day.

How very odd that the significance of the date has not been recognised in Australia. I may have missed it, but I have not seen a single story.

Mechanistic management and Mr Rudd's education revolution

Neil Whitfield has been discussing the Rudd/Gillard plans for change in the education system. I have not commented to this point because I have yet to read the detail of what has been said.

While I still have to read the detail, I am drawn now to comment because of the overall impression that I have formed based on reporting. However, my comments must be remain qualified because I have not looked at the detail.

In a recent post, Mechanistic Management - the sometimes fallacy of planning, I talked about what I saw as problems in current approaches to planning. This post is in fact just one in a whole series of posts exploring what I see as growing problems in the application, in fact misapplication, of ideas and techniques that I once supported.

I make this point because I want to alert readers to my own biases, the point from which my comments start.

To my mind, there is something old fashioned and mechanistic in Mr Rudd's education revolution. It is simply the latest flowering of an approach that no longer really works. In fact, an extension of the approach applied by the Howard Government. To understand this, we need to look at main themes in the education revolution.

The first element is the emphasis on measurement. I support measurement. However, the problem with application of simple measurement based management approaches is that they focus responses on things that can be measured. Many educational results are not easily measured, especially in the short term.

The second element is the emphasis on transparency and accountability. Again, I support transparency and accountability. However, on their own they are slippery terms.

Transparency first. Transparency simply means being able to see how things work, how decisions are made, what the results are. This is not quite the same thing as receipt of information on specific aspects of performance, the current Rudd Government focus.

Accountability second. Here we have to ask, accountability for what and to whom?

As a parent, my daughters' old school and its teachers were accountable to me for my daughters' education. The school was also accountable to the NSW and Federal Government who regulated and funded.

As a NSW taxpayer, the NSW Government was accountable to me for its expenditure on school education. As a Federal taxpayer, the Federal Government was also accountable to me for its education spend.

These accountabilities can and do conflict.

As a parent with limited cash, I resented the way that Government controls and reporting requirements driven in part be accountability requirements forced up fees. As a parent with his own education ideas, I resented the way in which (and despite school statements to the contrary) league table requirements affected actual teaching.

The third element in the Rudd approach is national uniformity. This uniformity can be both a good and bad thing and at the same time.

A uniform system means that things are standardised. This may make it easier to move children between schools in different jurisdictions. It may make it easier for employers to make standard judgements. At the same time, a varied system allows for experimentation, for test. I have long complained about the way in which the very centralised NSW system works against particular areas and schools

Uniformity is also a sign of the fourth element, the application of standards based approaches.

I support standards based approaches so long as their limitations are recognised. The purpose of a standard is to ensure a consistent output or result. However, there are two difficulties here. The first lies in the definition of the standard. The second is that performance then zeros in on the standard - things that exceed the standard or lie outside the standard are less likely to happen.

A related semantic problem is that the word "standard" can carry the connotation "good" instead of the real meaning "consistent". A standard car is not the same as a good car.

The fifth, linked, element in the Rudd approach is payment by performance, whether at individual teacher, school or system level. This follows logically from the measurement emphasis, but also links to sets of ideas (beliefs, really) connected with performance based pay. Again, performance for what purpose?

The sixth element in Mr Rudd's education revolution lies in its focus on the role of education as an economic driver, training people as inputs to the national economy.

This is a very old idea. As an example, the changes to the various state technical education systems at the turn of the twentieth century was driven by what was then called the new education. In turn, this drew from the political and economic rivalry between the old European empires.

Yes, education is an important economic driver. But it is more than this, because education is linked to our society's ideals and values, the very things that makes us Australian.

In all this, the whole Rudd education is bound up in the semantics of modern managerialism, set within the bounds of past ideas. I would feel a lot more comfortable if there was more discussion of ideas, less focus on specific activities.

Postscript

I see from today's Sydney Morning Herald that NSW Universities have been accused of inflating their UAI scores, setting cut-offs and then admitting students who in fact fall below the mark cut-off.

Of course they are. I would too if I were a Vice Chancellor. Now that the UAI entry scores have become a competitive measure for ranking universities, their real usefulness is much diminished.

Postscript 2

Still on the SMH, I see that Gerard Henderson does not agree with my assessment of Mr Rudd's education revolution. Still, we are at least in agreement that Mr Rudd is old-school!

The wheels continue to come off the Haneef case

I find myself in an odd position after the latest revelations in the Haneef matter.

First we had ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation). I quote from the Sydney Herald report:

In a damning submission to the Clarke inquiry into the handling of the case, the head of the country's main intelligence agency said it told the government there were no grounds to believe Dr Haneef was linked to, or even knew about, the botched June car bombings.

Then in quick time we had the Australian Federal Police (AFP) statement that Dr Haneef was no longer a person of interest.

The two together have unleashed a wave of criticism of AFP Commissioner Keelty, including calls for his resignation. This is where I find myself in the odd position.

The crux of my original complaints about the handling of the Haneef matter (links at the end of the post) lay in what I saw as failures in process, compassion and common sense. These held independent of the evidence in the case - here the position was still uncertain.

I now have to apply the same test to Mr Keelty in the face of the attacks upon him. It may be that the calls for his resignation are justified. But let's wait here until we have the results of the current inquiry. The current rush to judgement is not dissimilar in some ways to the process originally applied to Dr Haneef.

In all this, what the evidence is now drawing out is something that I have complained about for some time, the failures in due process under the Howard Government. Here I am using the words "due process" not in the formal legal sense, but as a descriptor of administrative processes under Mr Howard's Government.

In looking at the reports on ASIO attitudes, I was struck by the fact that Minister Andrews does not appear to have been informed of ASIO's views.

I have no reason to doubt Mr Andrew's position here. However, it opens a can of worms because we have to ask why Mr Andrews was not so informed. Yes, Mr Andrews was an accident prone Minister. Still, it was the responsibility of his advisers - political, agency and departmental - to ensure that the Minister was informed.

Unfortunately we have seen this problem before. Children Overboard comes to mind.

Returning to my opening theme, let's wait for the report of the Haneef inquiry before we form final views.

The Haneef related posts

• 25 July 2007 . Quid custodit ipsos custodes? - Who will protect us from our protectors - and ourselves?
• July 2007. Haneef Case: a failure in compassion - and common sense
• 1 August 2007. Moral Courage, Fear, Technology and the Decline of the West
• 2 November 2007. More light on the Haneef case
• 23 December 2007, Dr Haneef's Visa Reinstated
• 13 March 2008, Judicial Inquiry into the Haneef case

Political parties are NOT brands

There is a subtle but quite dreadful corruption of thought with the attachment of the word "brand" to political parties. It goes with the adoption of supermarket politics and the use of the word "punter" to describe voters.

Brand is a commercial term. It describes something we buy, something to which marketers have attempted to attach an image or bundle of attributes. Branding sells cars or soap powder.

Political parties are not brands even if they have some of the elements of brands and branding. I do not vote for, or refuse to vote for, a political party because I like the brand. I do so, or refuse to do so, because I like or dislike the things that the party stands for.

Politics is about ideas and actions. Mr Howard did not lose the last election because there were problems with the coalition brand. He lost it because of the Government's actions.

The sad irony in the current popularity of brands and branding, and not just in politics, is that the last few decades have seen the greatest period of brand destruction in modern economic history. Few of Australia's iconic brands of the 1970s survive today.

The application in politics, public policy and public administration of ideas, concepts, drawn from business does not really work.

Elsewhere I have argued for evidence based approaches, including evidence based management. There is no evidence that I know of that the application of business management approaches in the Government sphere has actually improved performance outside very specific and narrowly defined cases.

Business management itself is marked by fads and fancies. These translate into politics and public life with a lag. Current orthodoxies in public administration can be traced back sixty years.

Branding in politics will go for the same reasons that other fads have gone. They do not deliver. In the meantime, we all pay the price.

Postscript

Neil picked this post up in Personal Reflections: Political parties are NOT brands. I hereby deny that I am a Grumpy Old Man, at least on this issue!

Oddly, or perhaps not, if you look at the things that Neil and both write about, you will see that we both share a view that things can be better and that (perhaps idealistically) we still believe that we as individuals can make a difference.

Blog Performance - August 2008

Visitor numbers on my various blogs to end August follow.

Posting has continued to be somewhat irregular because of other pressures, if a little better than the previous month. The decline in traffic created by irregular posting has at least stopped.

• Personal Reflections - 36,476, end July 34,737
• Managing the Professional Services Firm - 17,353, end July 16,758
• New England, Australia - 15,236, end July 14,457
• Regional Living Australia - 10,043, end July 9,618
• Management Perspectives - 5,846, end July 5,613
• New England's History - 2,125, end July 1,934
• History of Australian and New Zealand Thought (joint), 1,171 end July 1,114
• Belshaw sans words - 188, end July 126
• Total - 88,438, end July 84,447, up 3,991.

Looking at patterns, total visitor numbers were 3,991 compared to an average of 3,962 per month over June and July, 4,296 in May, 4, 536 in April, 4,294 in March, 3,710 in February, 3,656 in January, 2,844 in December, 3,612 in November.

Total page views in August were 9,859 as compared to 9,292 in July, 10,635 June, 10,846 May, 11,058 in April, 10,969 in March, 9,456 in February, 9,485 in January, 7,447 in December, November 9,239.

Sunday Essay - chick flick books, social change and the desire to escape

Helen's 21st last night, and then I watched South Africa thrash Australia in the Rugby. The first was great, the second depressing. It was like watching a steam-roller in action!

So this morning I am a little fagged out, unable to really concentrate.

I have always found popular fiction an interesting reflection of social trends. I say this because I have been on a bit of a reading binge, reading what I suppose we could describe as the book equivalent of chick flicks. Judi Hendrick's Bread Alone is a US example of the genre.

Back in the fifties and sixties, science fiction was very popular, especially among men. This reflected the then intense fascination with space. Sword and sorcery was a small-sub genre within this.

Science fiction then declined as the interest in space declined, while sword and sorcery morphed into fantasy and became the dominant and far more popular mode. This was paralleled by a growing interest in the broader community in magic, the occult and then new age mysticism.

Today the chick flick books are all about escape, new lives in new places. The fascination with relationships continues, but the really popular sellers carry the new life theme. Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) is a classic film example, based on Frances Mayes's 1996 memoir.

The Australian writer and social commentator Hugh Mackay coined the phrase the dreamy period to describe what he saw as the inward looking, domestic focus of Australia from the second half of the nineties. He also suggests that we are now coming out of this period, taking a more active interest in the broader world, including politics.

I am not sure that I see this, the current interest in Barack Obama not withstanding.

Talking to my daughters' friends or reading Facebook I do find an interest in causes, but very little interest in politics as such or, for that matter, broader world developments. What I do see is a continuing interest in relationships, in the maintenance of the tribe (the young are remarkably tribal) and in social activities.

This is the stay-at-home generation, not just in terms of the family nest but also locality. Talking last night to one of Clare's friends who is doing HSC this year, she said that she was deciding against going to the University of New England, something that she had really wanted to do. When I asked why, it is after all my old university, she said she wanted to stay near home and friends.

This is also the busy generation. Busy socially, busy balancing work and study. Constantly in motion, always connected, this generation has little time for reflection or for quiet spaces.

The interest in chick flick books of the type I am talking about lies, I think, further up the age chain, in the busy generations' parents and their friends. This is sea change, tree change, downsizing country. The young may lose themselves in fantasy, their parents' generations dream of escape.

Postscript

Driving home today (1 September) I listened to a radio interview with Hugh Mackay continuing his argument for the existence of the dreamy generation. I still have problems with this.

Hugh has more evidence than I do because of , among other things, his access to focus group results. But both of us are biased by our own perspectives, while I struggle with the fact that his conclusions do not seem to fit with the evidence as I see it.

I will have to think about this and come back with a later response.

Saturday Morning Musings - reflections on eighteen months with Housing NSW

Yesterday I finished an eighteen month period working within Housing NSW's Office of Community Housing (OCH). The period began with an initial three month's assignment to provide some policy support, then rolled over into project work.

While I had had a fair bit of contact with the NSW system and indeed had been writing on it, this was my first experience working within it. My role meant that I had to be very careful in the material I wrote that drew in any way from that experience. Inevitably, my experiences did influence my writing, but I have tried to avoid any form of direct reference that might in any way compromise either the Department or my official position. Now that I have finished, I have a little more freedom.

In my farewell speech at the afternoon tea yesterday I spoke of the two things I most valued from my time at Housing NSW and OCH.

The first was the people. Quite simply, these are good people who have put up with my sometime foibles and provided friendship and support.

We had a branch lunch on Wednesday, then yesterday Lauvena (my immediate boss) and Christine, my diminutive Chinese friend and colleague who sat just across the aisle from me, took me to a Korean restaurant for lunch. Christine had a present from me, two small Chinese lions that can sit upon my desk.

This is a very multicultural group in the true sense of the word.

Just taking a few examples, Dzenita who has been working very closely with me on my latest project, is a Bosnian Muslim; Lauvena and Christine are Chinese, Esther Filipino, Manju Indian, while Rennie and I are more your traditional Anglo-Celtic stock.

I saw part of my role as providing the traditional Australian element, while everyone else has educated me in turn. At lunch on Wednesday we talked about the way we were able to share our different experiences freely across many different aspects of life and history.

From my perspective, this has been fascinating in the extreme. Dzenita's experiences in a Muslim religious school under communism where the school was not allowed to teach maths and her later experiences during the Bosnian war are two examples. Some of our most interesting discussions have revolved around common things like family structures, food and children.

All this has had a considerable influence on some of the things that I have written about from burqinis to the Olympics.

The second thing that I most valued from my time at Housing NSW and OCH was my increased understanding of the social housing system itself. This was an area that I knew little about, one that is rarely discussed outside the fairly narrow silo of those directly involved. There is more discussion about housing policy, but this is largely driven at the moment by the affordable housing issue. Further, the discussion that does take place, homelessness is an example, is often issues fragmented.

In talking about this I made the point, and I think that it's true, that people in Housing NSW display a continued commitment to their work despite the sometimes difficulties involved.

This is one of the things that has struck me most about the Department. Here I am not talking about ministerial statements, nor about official lines that appear on the Department's web site. Rather, I am talking about the internal stuff from the official internal messages through to the daily conversations. I have been critical of some aspects of Department administration, but this is a place that still cares.

My blogging activities are no secret to my colleagues. I know that some of them have even read them from time to time, although blogging or even reading blogs is not what I would call a mainstream activity!

In talking about the personal and professional things that I intended to do next, I spoke about my plans to continue writing and commentating as one key stream. I also said that one thing that I wanted to do now that I was free of the constraints of my previous position was to add to debate on social housing issues.

I do think that this is important because the NSW social housing system faces very considerable problems.

Social housing in NSW has been cash starved for an extended period.

The immediate response to this was to focus available funds on new supply, creating a maintenance backlog that was hard to meet since new funding continued to be limited. This is not a problem unique to housing. We saw the same in public education at all levels.

The second response was to set access criteria so that available housing went to those most in need. Whatever the social and equity arguments may have been, this had the effect of increasing the proportion of tenants on very low incomes, as well as those with more complex problems.

Social housing rents are income based. The new approach meant that average rents fell, while support costs increased. It also increased the concentration on housing estates of disadvantaged and problem tenants, changing the character of the estates.

The Department also faced a major problem in that demographic and social change meant that its $28 billion housing portfolio - a huge asset - was increasingly located in the wrong places and composed of the wrong type of housing.

In business terms, we have an organisation with falling income, rising costs and an asset structure that no longer meets business needs. The Department has hardly been blind to these problems. Now that I am free, I will explore the nature of its responses in later posts.

Maintenance Reform Program Announced

I did not know as I wrote this post that the Sydney papers were in fact carrying stories of the announcement by NSW Housing Minister Matt Brown of a five year $1.6 billion dollar program to improve maintenance of the 127,000 houses in the NSW public housing system.

Among other things, the money will allow 24,000 properties to be painted externally, 22,500 properties to be painted internally, with 18,000 kitchens to be replaced.

The Minister also announced that the maintenance system would be centralised. Responsibility for fixing and upgrading properties across the state is to be divided into 22 new contracts with the aim of gaining economies of scale. In future, all requests for maintenance are to go through the Housing Contact Centre, the Department's call centre.

The numbers indicate the scale of the problems I spoke of in the post.

Postscript 2

In Neil's post The South Sydney Herald September 2008 the reproduction of the paper's front page carried a story on public housing that I really wanted to check. Each time I tried to do so, the computer crashed - a memory problem I think. Maybe you will have better luck.

Ethnicity in Hurstville - and other Australian cities

I have noticed a number of searches on the topic of ethnicity in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville. HSC essay perhaps?

This search brings them to Economic and demographic change, education, ethnicity and the maintenance of social cohesion in Australia simply because the post contains a reference to Hurstville. So they won't be helped.

The best way of getting data on ethnicity in particular areas is via search on the ABS census data. Here there are two posts that will directly help you to do this:

• How to find and use Australian census data 1 - Languages spoken at home case study
• How to find and use Australian census data 2 - Creating maps and other nice things

The immediate need for information on Hurstville may have passed by the time this post is written. Still, the post may help in future.

£35 on eBay buys details of one million bank accounts

My thanks to IT Wire for this fascinating if worrying story. It begins:

When Andrew Chapman from Oxford, England successfully bid £35 for an old computer on eBay he wasn't expecting to have the details of a million bank accounts thrown in for free...

You can find out the full details here, It would really be very funny if it were not so serious.

The apparent silliness of Headmaster Rudd's truancy plan

I have a post to complete, but Headmaster Rudd's plan to deny welfare recipients their benefits for a period - thirteen weeks has been mentioned - drew my attention because of its apparent silliness, as well as its implied cruelty.

Let's start with a few parameter stats.

Assume that we have a single mum totally dependant on welfare with a thirteen year old daughter, fifteen year old son. I have not been able to check the exact figures, but this family will be receiving per fortnight something like $348 in Family Tax Benefits plus $546 in parenting payments for a total of $894.

This is not a lot of money. If they are renting in the private market place the family will attract some Commonwealth Rent Assistance. Outside regional areas, this family probably cannot afford private rental.

Assume that they are paying $400 per fortnight for a three bedroom cottage. This will attract $126 in rent assistance. After rent, their fortnightly net income is $620 or $44 per day.

They may be in social housing. In this event, they are either not eligible for rent assistance or in NSW, Victoria and Queensland will have it included in rent.

Social housing applies income based rents. This family will pay 25% of income plus 15% of Family Tax Benefits, giving a fortnightly rental of $189. Now the family has a fortnightly net income after housing costs of $705 or $50 per day.

Think about it for a moment. This family has between $44 and $50 to spend per day, or between $15 and $17 per person. Not a lot, is it?

Assume that our fifteen year old son is difficult and is playing truant. Mum loses her income for thirteen weeks.

If they are renting privately they lose their house. If they are in social housing, their rent will drop to minimum, $5 per week in NSW. They will keep their house, but starve.

I don't think that this is good public policy. Am I wrong?

Later

This one is obviously worrying me since I am still thinking about it.

Under questioning, Government ministers said that the proposed action was a last resort, something that would happen in a small number of cases where other things had failed. Further, the intent appears to be to trial the approach in a small number of locations.

Maybe if the proposal had been announced in this way in the first instance I might have had a lessened response. However, it was presented as a major initiative to address a major social problem - this is inconsistent with the last resort line.

In any event, it still strikes me as bad policy because, as described, it is such a blunt instrument.

The first thing to note is that the proposed withdrawal of benefits is a threat and then, if implemented, a punishment. This is different in kind from welfare quarantining.

I suppose one could argue that it is somewhat similar to the actions of the Howard Government in imposing requirements on job seekers. Failure to comply here meant loss of benefits. This is not actually re-assuring, because there is considerable evidence that the Howard Government approach created very considerable hardship in individual cases, including homelessness. It is also not clear that the approach delivered much in the way of benefits.

At least in the job seeker case, there was a clear nexus between the individual and the response. In the case we are talking about now, the punishment can affect the innocent as well as the guilty.

More broadly, we seem to be dealing with a measure generated by a specific problem in specific areas (the failure of Aboriginal parents in certain localities to send their children to school) that is then presented as a universal measure (the failure of certain parents across the country to send their children to school).

The two raise very different issues.

As with the Howard/Brough intervention, it is possible to argue that specific problems require targeted vertical responses. In a sense, this is policy by exception and should be judged in the context of the specific problem, as well as the broader implications of the action. Further, the costs of the response (individual as well as administrative) are self contained and can be seen and measured.

Things become very different if that specific vertical response is then generalised into a horizontal measure applying across the whole country. Now the key questions becomes to what extent are we dealing with a national problem, is this an appropriate response to that problem, what are the gains and costs?

These can be difficult questions to answer in a large complex national system. Just because a thing might work at a local level does not, of itself, make it suitable for national application.

Finishing, a key thing with any policy measure is to try to define the pre-conditions required for it to work, to deliver the desired results. I do not think that this has been done in this case.