Current politics and, better, Springwood remembered

Well, the carbon tax legislation passed the House of Representatives and will pass the Senate. I think that we can really put this one aside for the moment. I have a sense of relief; I am really sick of talking about the same issue.

Now that WA National MP Tony Crook has said that he won't support the border protection legislation, the Government has no chance of getting it through the Reps. They knew they could not get it through the Senate, but there were tactical reasons for wanting it to pass the Reps.

On Twitter, Paul Barratt wondered: So onshore processing it is. Can't help thinking asylum seekers will be punished for this somehow. I am not sure what else Paul could have expected. Between the Greens, Labor and Liberal with their entrenched positions, there was little scope for a sensible outcome.

Frustrated with politics, I have been spending some time down nostalgia lane with cousin Jamie's photo collection. Talk about memories. I have been trying to work out how best to use some of the photos to tell stories. And then I get sidetracked.

This photo is taken at Springwood in the Blue Mountains in September 1952. From left to right Cecily (we had been staying with Cecily and her Mum), brother David, Mum and I. We are due to catch the train to Sydney to then catch the train to Armidale. I am carrying my gum boots. Mum wanted to throw them out, they were too small really, but I wouldn't agree. Then to my eternal mortification, I left them on the train when we got off in Armidale. Sigh.    

For those outside Australia, the Blue Mountains lie to the west of Sydney and are quite cold as is my home town of Armidale. You can see this in the clothes. You can also see that the clothes are more formal than today. David is wearing a tie, as in fact am I.

I really loved this particular holiday. Looking at Jamie's photos, I think that I can probably tell the story in a way that might bring it alive.  It's actually more fun than worrying too much about current policy! This is another shot. From left to right Cecily, David, me, Mary.

I really was keen on Mary, a friend of Cecily's. Still, more details will have to wait for another post.  

Myth of the mobile Australian

I first became aware of the myth of the mobile Australian back in 1980. Then, like most Australians, I accepted the view that Australians and especially young Australians were happy to move for work or adventure. After all, I worked in Canberra where everybody came from somewhere else!

There was a mining boom at the time, with problems in getting people to move to take jobs. Someone pointed to data suggesting that job mobility in Australia had declined quite sharply. I was surprised and asked why. The primary reason given was the rise of the two income household. 

Track forward.

A few years ago friends visited Australia from the US: Sally is US, Dave Australian. We were talking about universities and university choices.

In choosing universities, our daughters had opted for the local: any hope that I might have had that one or other might continue the UNE tradition was long gone;  even Canberra and the ANU were too far away from Sydney to be considered. Sally compared the Australian position to the US where it was normal to move to get the university of your choice. 

This local Australian stickiness was not in fact new.

During the very rapid growth in the Canberra based Commonwealth Public Service in the 1960s, the Service struggled to recruit graduates from Sydney or Melbourne: there were sufficient local job opportunities, so people stayed at home. I found exactly the same thing when I was involved in graduate recruitment a decade later.  Our recruits came from universities where local job opportunities were less. That's one of the reasons why, for example, the Armidale based University of New England came to have such a disproportionate share of senior people in Government relative to its size. There were no jobs in Armidale.

Australia has always been an urbanised country. Arguably, we were the world's first such country outside the city states. However, the current population dominance of the metro centres is both old and new.

Population was relatively centralised in the first period of European settlement. However, the population then spread with pastoral and later mining and agricultural expansion. In NSW, for example, Sydney's share of the state population fell to around a third. The growth in the capital cities relative to other parts of the country from the 1880s attracted attention because it was seen as unusual. The rise of the capital cities is one constant theme in the early official Australian year books.

The Australian population was clearly very mobile in the earlier periods of European settlement. People moved for work and in search of wealth. By the 1880s, the population was becoming less mobile with the rise of urban centres - the rise of the town is one theme in the history of colonial Australia. From then, mobility was primarily one way, to the capital cities.

Today the Governor-General Quentin Bryce and former cricket champion Glenn McGrath are combining to launch the Australian Year of the Farmer. Had you heard of it? I hadn't.

Population mobility in the nineteenth century and then the drift to the cities in the first part of the twentieth century meant that there were close family interconnections between country and city. Australia may have been urbanised, but people still had connections with the country.

These connections have attenuated with time. A survey released in conjunction with the Australian Year of the Farmer found that 22 per cent of city dwellers never visited a rural area, 69 per cent did so only once a year. The Year of the Farmer aims to reintroduce Australians to the country. The need for such a program would have seemed incomprehensible even fifty years ago.

As with so many things, mobility is not clear cut. We clearly have a mobility issue within Australia as evidenced simply by the rise of FIFO, the fly in, fly out worker. The rise and fall of the mining towns that once were a feature of Australian life have been replaced by an urbanised workforce that simply visits. Now politicians worry about ways to get people to move.

There are some complicated issues here that extend well beyond the simple question of mobility. For example, the shortage of experienced engineers in Australia means that mining developments bring in overseas engineers. In writing specifications, those engineers use terms and specs that they are familiar with; this favours overseas product. Arguably, we are getting neither the local benefits from development nor some of the down stream benefits that we once expected.

While some areas struggle to get workers, while overall mobility is down, the Australian population still moves. However, the pattern of mobility is different.

One element is the increased importance of life style considerations.

The flight to the sea that saw large increases in population in certain parts of the coastal strip was driven by life style considerations rather than jobs. Indeed, the jobs weren't there when the population started moving and those jobs that have come have been lower level service jobs. The end result in places has been social dislocation.

A second element in the changing pattern of mobility has been the changing patterns of migration to this country. The new settlers are mobile, but in different ways.

During the first period of mass migration after the Second World War, the new settlers actually spread quite widely, if with concentrations in particular areas. The Greek families that came to Armidale, for example, formed links with each other. Their children and grandchildren left to pursue new opportunities, but links remained. The Greek families may no longer live in Armidale, but they still hold regular gatherings.

I have the strong impression that this type of cross-geographic linking within Australia no longer occurs. I know Sydney best. The Chinese and Indian young, for example, are mobile but between Sydney and their home countries or, sometimes, other parts of Asia. They are much less likely to move within Australia. This reflects changing economic conditions, as well as cultural factors.

I first became really aware of the locational impacts of culture a few years ago when looking at problems associated with attracting professionals to regional NSW. The Asian emphasis on education meant that many professional courses, those with the highest entry scores, were increasingly dominated by Asian students including both overseas and local born. Those students were highly unlikely to leave Sydney upon graduation; they had no links with and limited knowledge of the rest of NSW.

I haven't attempted to spell out all elements in this muse, simply point to what I see as some features. Mobility is important because it affects economic activity. It is also important because it affects attitudes and cultures. The common assumption that the Australian population is relatively mobile acts to conceal quite significant demographic changes.  

Olympic Dam up, CopperString down

The proposed expansion of BHP's Olympic Dam project has now received environmental approvals. The sheer size of the project beggars imagination. I just wanted to record the link for later reference and discussion.

While Olympic Dam is up, CopperString is down. Ever heard of it?  I actually hadn't.

In the period immediately after the Australian Federal elections when independent MP Bob Katter was spruking the idea of a North Queensland energy corridor, I took the whole thing with a grain of salt. Turns out I was wrong, there was a little more to it than that.

On 3 September this year on Crikey, Bernard Keane and Wendy Bacon in Bob Katter, energy corridors and conflicts of interest got their knickers into a real twist over the whole project. It turns out that the energy corridor, map below, had more substance than I realised.

Well, Bernard and Wendy need not have worried. The project's viability heavily depended on a decision by Mt Isa Mines as to electricity sourcing.

Xstrata had been mulling three strategies to ensure future energy supply for its Mt Isa mining operations: the extension of the current sole supplier, the gas-fired Mica power station (an idea it dumped a while ago); go for another gas-fired station; or participate in the CopperString project that would link Mt Isa with the grid at Townsville via a 1000km transmission line, and unlock a series of renewable energy projects, including wind, solar, biomass and geothermal found in between.

Now hopes of building one of Australia’s largest renewable energy hubs in north Queensland appear to have been dashed after Xstrata signed a deal with AGL Energy to build a gas-fired power station in Mt Isa.

There was something very Queensland about the whole thing, remember the Cape York Space Port?, but that doesn't make the idea wrong.

One of the really big problems now starting to emerge in Australia is the growing gap between structures and capital assets based on previous economics and those likely to hold in the future. But that's a matter for another post. 

Age, generations & the understanding of culture

I had a post part prepared yesterday morning and then had to put it aside.

The delay was part Rugby induced. Both Saturday and Sunday's games (there were two each day) were very good. Australia won over the South African Springboks to get through to the semi finals. There the Wallabies meet the All Blacks, so there are going to be tears on one side or other of the ditch.  

The Rugby was not the only reason for the delay.

I had wanted to discuss cultural variations within and across Australia, a post triggered by comments on Saturday's post, Saturday morning musings - rain, Terra Nova & The Slap. I still think that what I wanted to argue was right, but I ran into a problem.

I have commented before that our personal knowledge of the past is effectively limited to the three generations before us, and diminishes with each generation back. The same type of pattern actually applies to our knowledge of the present as well. 

As children, we know our age group plus have some feeling for all those above. Our knowledge of the age groups coming after us is less. This creates an asymmetry that increases with age. Our direct knowledge of what people think and feel across generations is diminished.   

Things such as work, social activities and our families do keep us in touch with younger age groups. We may not agree, but we have access. If that access is taken away, we quickly lose touch. Retired people do not age more than a person of their age still working, but they often seem to because the world around them has moved on.

Take another example.

Between them, the girls were at school for over fourteen years if we include preschool. During that time, we were mixing with parents, teachers and indeed kids all the time. I had at least some feel for the school world, for the concerns of those involved.

Even with this level of contact, the same type of asymmetry existed; the school is like the broader community writ small. By the end of the girls' time at school, both were commenting on what that they saw as the changes in the attitudes and behaviour of girls just entering secondary school as compared to them. There was, they thought, less respect for rules.

I have no idea as to the accuracy of this view. I do know just how quickly school vanished from my horizon after the girls left and with it all the knowledge and concerns that I once had.

Australia is a very varied country, far more so than most Australians realise. The way people think is separated by locale, position in society, family history. These divisions have increased with time: Australia has become more variegated; almost unconsciously, Australians have become more tribal. Communications technology and mass media give an increased if superficial sense of "one country"; drop below this and difference abounds.

This is where my problem comes in. Given my age and range of contacts, I hesitated to draw conclusions about, say, the special features of Melbourne today. I actually have a blind spot in certain age groups, a blind spot accentuated by geography. 

I actually know Melbourne quite well and have done so for many years. When I first visited the city as a sixteen year old, my initial reaction was a sense of difference from Sydney, the metro centre I knew best, as well as from Armidale. I almost could have been an another country. In some ways, this is still my view. 

I am generally comfortable with my cultural analysis of Melbourne and of the differences between Melbourne and other parts of Australia, although some of this dates back to academic work I did in the early 1980s as well as to my still earlier experiences. Melbourne consciously plays to this difference, as in the city's reinvention of itself as a life style centre.

However, when I come to look at specific groups from specific areas or of specific ages, when I move from the general to the particular, I have to careful what I say. I cannot be certain.

I will complete the post since the topic of cultural differences across time and space interests me. In the meantime, I doesn't do me any harm to realise gaps in my own thinking. 

Saturday morning musings - rain, Terra Nova & The Slap

This morning I browsed the Australian papers as I usually do looking for story ideas. Not inspiring.

There are perhaps things that I should comment on: I have said before that I would write something on the renewed interest in industry policy, but my heart isn't in it! Then if the constant beat up in The Australian about Mr Rudd's interest in regaining his position as PM has any validity, perhaps we should revisit the reasons why he lost the position. Not the ostensible political reasons, but the underlying problems in approach that laid the basis for subsequent problems. Has the leopard in fact changed his spots, or will it be more of the same? Again, my heart isn't in it.

It's a gloomy morning here in Sydney. It's been quite wet across much of South Eastern Australia. Many of the irrigation and water supply dams are close to full. Just as the long dry spell was cited as evidence of climate change, now the wet is being cited as evidence for the opposite. Oh well.      

  Actually, the rainfall one is interesting. This is the latest Australian Bureau of  Meteorology rainfall projections suggesting that the northern half of the country is likely to experience above average rainfall, below average in the far south east. Australia is a big country, so there are always considerable variations within the bigger patterns.

Staying roughly with climate, last night eldest and I watched the first long episode of Terra Nova. Described as Lost meets Jurassic Park, the series begins in 2149; life on planet Earth is threatened with extinction due to dwindling worldwide air quality and overpopulation. Scientists discover a rift in space-time that allows people to travel 85 million years back in time to the late Cretaceous period of a prehistoric Earth, but in an alternate timeline thus avoiding paradoxes caused by reverse-flow time travel, offering a chance to save humanity.

I didn't know that the series was filmed in South East Queensland, nor that production was much delayed by heavy rain. This can be a very wet area. Charles Chauvel's 1949 epic Sons Of Mathew suffered similar problems to Terra Nova.

I quite enjoyed Terra Nova, eldest loved it. However, I hope that it's not too much like Lost. I got lost in Lost!

Staying with TV, on Thursday night I started watching The Slap on SBC TV. Both the original book and the TV series received rave reviews. The Australian's Peter Craven is an example. I hadn't read the book, but was attracted to the TV series by the reviews. I switched off after 15 minutes.

I accept that I am clearly not representative. Neil Whitfield takes a different view, while the first episode on Thursday night came in at number 5 in the mainland capital city ratings with 946,000 viewers. Interestingly, it did better in Sydney than Melbourne. For the benefit of international readers, there can be very significant differences in viewer patterns across Australia reflecting parochial as well as cultural differences.

Out of curiosity, I did some browsing round looking for comments. Most, not all, were positive. However, I'm not sure how many agreed with this comment from Peter Craven. 

The Slap happens to be one of the most elaborate and richly orchestrated representations of the ethnic mix of contemporary Australia put together and it carries, as if it were incidental, that part of Tsiolkas’s mission with a subtlety and assuredness that the book can scarcely match.

It's not necessarily that people disagreed, rather that this wasn't the issue they focused on as compared to corporal punishment, breast feeding, issues of discipline with children, even who had the best bum. The comments on this ABC sponsored post will give you a feel. One of the twitter streams is here.

I accept that it's all a matter of taste. I just felt that's life too short to bother. 

Federations, the EU and lessons for Australia

I enjoyed reading A misbegotten Union – Guest post by Lorenzo on problems faced by the EU and especially the euro. I thought that there was some interesting material there, although I may not agree on all points. As sometimes (always?) happens, my thoughts went onto a bit of a tangent linked to the issues.

Please read the post and comments. The relatively brief thoughts that follow parallel but do not substitute. Their genesis lies in the references to Australia in the discussion.

Managing Difference

In a comment, I made the point that in any entity – club, country or supra-national body – the critical issue to survival and effectiveness is recognition of and management of difference.

In our thinking whether it be at social, community, management, political or public policy levels, we focus on objectives, commonalities, the need to win over opposition. We generally don't think of the management of difference as a long term process; difference is something to be overcome now.

A Federal system with its division of powers is one way of handling difference because it allows different things to be done in different ways using different decision processes: sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it works then doesn't; sometimes it doesn't and then does work. There is no single result.

In Australia, most national organisations were federations because the country was a federation. As the power of the Commonwealth grew, national organisations moved towards centralised unitary models. Sometimes this worked, but in other cases it failed because the centralised structures could not accommodate the differences that had been reflected in the previous federal structures. The final result was a proliferation of bodies.

Group Think

On the euro, Lorenzo wrote:

In the way supporting the Euro was treated as what the “good people” did, with only fools and cranks opposed, we can see starkly the problems of cognitive conformity. There is considerable social science support for the proposition that cognitive conformity leads to bad decision-making. The conformity acts to limit the information available, or used, and the questions asked. If the conformity becomes a matter of mutually supporting status based on marker-opinions (“good and clever people believe x, stupid and wicked people believe y”) then the effect is magnified. Supporting the “European project”, in all its harmonising glory, has long since become what “good people” support and only mad folk and cranks (or worse) oppose or seriously criticise; so even the questions, let alone facts, that the “wicked” opponents cite are to be dismissed.

The dominant group in any group or club or country has its own way of thinking that it regards as right. Those who challenge that way of thinking may be regarded as insane (the history of the concept of insanity is instructive here), immoral, simply idiotic, dangerous or just misled. The labels are always imposed by the dominant group.

This is as true in Australia today as it is in Europe. It creates a myopia that is very hard to break through.

In case you think that I am totally opposed to group think, I am not. It's actually necessary for social functioning. My problem lies in the way it can blind us.

EU as federation

The EU calls itself a political and economic union. That's group think. The EU is to my mind a federation in just the same way that Australia is a federation. It may be a federation that, at least among some, yearns for an utopian union, yet it's still a federation! The confusion in thinking between union and thinking bedevils EU life including the euro.

Lessons

  I actually think that Australia can offer a lot of lessons to Europe. Does this sound extreme?

• Australia is an operating federation that has been wrestling with many of the same problems as Europe for far longer than the EU has existed.
• Australia has been in a Free Trade Agreement with New Zealand since 1965, in a fuller agreement with NZ since 1983. The levels of formal constitutional integration between the two countries may not be as great as the EU, but actual integration is arguably greater
• Many of the issues are the same.

Europe can offer lessons to Australia.

I have real problems with some aspects of current Australian group think. For example, while I expect the Australian Federation to survive, I don't expect it to survive in its current form. Again, I expect the relationships that Australia is involved in to change quite significantly. 

Let me try to illustrate.

At present, landing in Australia you will see signs for Australian and New Zealand passport holders. This is the Australian equivalent of the EU. Tracking forward:

• Within ten years, fifteen at the most, the Pacific islands will be added to this list
• Within fifteen years, twenty at the most, ASEAN countries and especially Indonesia will be added.

This is why I say Europe can offer lessons to Australia, for Europe's experience is relevant to the path Australia is likely to follow as we broaden economic and political integration in Australia's region. I am not suggesting an Oceanic version of the EU, although that is possible. Rather, I think that we are going to see a growing version of the current ANZ CER.

Conclusion

I have wandered a little in this post. I guess that my key points are the need to:

• focus on principles
• recognise difference
• break through barriers imposed by current thinking
• not assume that what seems fixed and immutable now is in fact either.  

Threads for later use

A second post just recording threads for later use.

Via @maximos62, Mark Schaefer's Twitter is Dying—and It’s All Your Fault reports on Mark's perception of Twitter problems, while Neil Whitfield maintains his love affair with Facebook. At some stage, I want to do a consolidation of my own writing on the rise and possible fall of social media.

Staying with maximos62, Digital archives transforming the study of history really concludes that the textbook is dead, at least so far as history is concerned. Two of my Armidale Express columns (Belshaw's World - the online myth, Belshaw's World - online learning no teaching panacea) take a more jaundiced view of the application of the new technology. To my mind, it's not either or but fitness for purpose. What may not be clear from the columns is that there is an interesting and potentially important debate running in Armidale on the role of online teaching triggered by UNE VC Jim Barber's approach.

Still staying with maximos62, What do we do about the decline of Bahasa #Indonesia in #Australia? is as the name says. As Australia has become more multicultural with more native language speakers, the general study of foreign languages has declined. I think that the two are connected.

The Australian Tax forum actually seems to have achieved a little more than I expected in Fiscal imbalance & the tax forum, although the key issue of Commonwealth-State financial relations really wasn't addressed. One issue that did come was the welfare question. I quote from the SMH:

THE Newstart unemployment benefit shrank so much relative to living costs that the cheapest capital city accommodation took all but $16.50 a day, the tax summit has been told.

Peter Whiteford, of the social policy research centre at the University of NSW, told the summit the cheapest one-bedroom accommodation in the Sydney region could be found at Wyong, on the central coast. The Melbourne equivalent would be Melton South on the north-western fringe.

"If you had an unemployment payment and rent assistance, after you paid your rent you would have $16.50 a day for everything else and looking for work," he said. Professor Whiteford was an economist with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Fourteen years ago, before Newstart and the pension were separately indexed, the unemployment benefit was 91 per cent of the single pension. It is now 65 per cent and projected to fall to 33 per cent.

A former productivity commissioner, Judith Sloan, said the gap had become "enormous".

I have written a little on social issues connected with current welfare and job structures and have more to say. I am also becoming increasingly concerned about certain aspects of the debate on aging population.

The Australian remains the best present source on the Forum. However, there is an interesting Internet issue here as the paper moves towards a pay for view system. Will any of the links have given over time survive the transition?

Postscript

Just adding one more for reference via @killcare: The Future of the Book.

In praise of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency

Here in Australia, the ABC has begun running The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency on Sunday nights. I had never heard of the series. We watched it first because my wife had read and loved the books written by Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith.

The agency is located in Gaborone, capital of Botswana.

I knew a little of Botswana, including the fact that it was part of the Commonwealth of Nations and used to be called  Bechuanaland. In retrospect, stamp collecting as a child in combination with the old Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogues gave me a remarkably good introduction to world geography and politics!

While I knew something of Botswana including the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, I hadn't realised what a success story the country had been since gaining independence in 1966. At independence, it was one of the poorest countries in Africa. Today its population of a bit over two million has an average GDP (purchasing power parity) of $US14,800.

Mining and especially diamonds has been central to economic growth, but this wealth has been well managed over an extended period. Successive governments have placed great emphasis on education as the key investment for the future, with education taking up some 21 per cent of government spend.  

The founder of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency is a Motswana woman, Mma Precious Ramotswe, who features as the stories' protagonist and main detective. The episodic novels are as much about the adventures and foibles of different characters as they are about solving mysteries.

In 2007, work began on a film pilot based on the novels. Subsequently the BBC and HBO combined to produce six TV episodes. Both the pilot and the episodes themselves were completely filmed in Botswana. The BBC web site for the series is here. 

I was surprised to discover that the series had not been extended because it failed to attract the required ratings. Coming to it cold with no preconceptions, I thought that that it was wonderful. I was also fascinated by the glimpses of Botswana life.

Reading the earlier criticisms, some reviewers complained that it was too episodic, too much cardboard cut-outs. I think that those criticisms completely missed the point. I found that the pilot and first episode created an internally consistent and completely entertaining world. I do recommend the series. 

Postscript

As noted in comments, I need to read the books! I thought that a comment from Barbara Albin should be repeated in full on the post itself.

Hi, I want to add to your comments. I have been trying in the United States to bring this series back for a second season for almost 3 years now. We had a modest 3,000 fans on FB and now we are at almost 29,000 fans thanks to many of you from Australia. The series is now in the hands of HBO, with I believe a little behind the scenes help from Cinechicks and Mr. Alexander McCall Smith. The cast is superb, led by Miss Jill Scott, Miss Anika Noni Rose, Mr. Lucian Msamati and Mr. Desmond Dube along with a great extended cast and crew. We need your help to convince HBO to make a second season. Please join us on http://www.facebook.com/#!/no1ladiesdetectiveagency and you can also email consumeraffairs3@hbo.com and ask for more shows. We need your help. Thank you, Barbara Soloski Albin

Please support Barbara.

Lindos & its acropolis

Greek Trip, Day 16, Sunday 3 October 2010, Rhodes

After Lunch at Lindos, we walked back to the car and drove up into Lindos itself. I have said a little about the town before. Now I need to say a little more.

The following photo taken from the Acropolis looks down on the harbour where we were swimming. You can see how protected the harbour is. That protected harbour made Lindos a natural place of settlement, while its location made it a valuable trading point between Greece and the Phoenicians. By the 8th century BC the original Dorian settlement had become a major trading centre. The town's importance declined after it joined with other cities to found the new city of Rhodes, but it remained an important religious centre. 

   

The "modern" town of Lindos nestles below its acropolis. I say modern, because most buildings apparently date from the 17th century. It's a pretty place with its white houses and narrow streets. The guide book says that many of the houses were once the homes of wealthy admirals, but have since been purchased and restored by "foreign celebrities."  I have no idea about the admirals nor indeed the celebrities! However, I can see why the the place attracts so many tourists now. 

Our main aim in visiting the town itself was actually to visit the acropolis. I had no especial desire to climb up yet more steps after Moni Tsambikas: a very steep hill!, so we decided to go up by donkey.

Now here there was a problem, for we had just missed the last donkey train!

Wife and youngest daughter strode off ahead to walk up. I was going to follow, but got sidetracked. When I looked up Dee and Clare had vanished! I thought of catching up, but the extra effort proved just too much!

I wandered around for a while, and then ended up in the square chatting with a Spanish bloke who bludged a cigarette from me. He had come across from Spain to work on resort developments, but found that work had vanished with the Greek economic collapse. There was no work at home - Spain too has very high unemployment - so he was just eking out a living doing whatever odd jobs he could get.

While we were still picking up details of Greece's economic troubles and the associated demonstrations from the press, as tourists you don't get a real feel of the problems lurking just below the surface.

Listening to wife and daughter on their return, I really should have made the effort to to go up to the acropolis. It's huge and historically variegated.

As you can see from the following photograph, it has a Frankish feel from the outside, and indeed it was occupied and extended by the Knights of Rhodes and then the Ottomans, but the original building is much older than that.         

Wikipedia records that in classical times the acropolis of Lindos was dominated by the massive temple of Athena Lindia, which attained its final form in around 300 BC. In Hellenistic and Roman times the temple precinct grew as more buildings were added. Lindos' role as a religious centre attracted pilgrims from round the Mediterranean including the ubiquitous St Paul who reportedly called on his way to Rome. 

In early medieval times these buildings fell into disuse, and in the 14th century they were partly overlaid by the massive fortress built on the acropolis by the Knights of St John (Rhodes) to defend the island against the Ottomans.

Despite the overlays, enough remains of the earlier structures to give a feel for what once was. Here the Italians with their desire to reclaim the Roman past both helped and hindered through their reconstruction efforts during their occupation of the Dodecanese.   

I do wish that I had visited. I have an added degree of frustration because I found the on-line material on the site quite patchy. 

With the party all back together again, we repacked the car to return to Rhodes.

Fiscal imbalance & the tax forum

Here in Australia, the Government's national tax forum opened this morning. The forum was one of the preconditions for support of the Gillard Government by country independent Rob Oakshott.

I haven't written on the forum to this point because I do not expect it to achieve very much in the short term. This post explains why.

Problems of Fiscal Imbalance in the Australian Federation

Economists use the term fiscal imbalance to describe situations where there is a divergence between expenditure responsibilities and revenue raising capacity at different levels of Government. The Australian states have major policy responsibilities, but their capacity to raise revenue is increasingly constrained. There is severe and growing fiscal imbalance between the states and commonwealth.

The introduction of the GST was meant to give the states an independent source of growth revenue. In return, the states were meant to remove taxes that created economic efficiencies. It hasn't worked that way. The nature of Commonwealth-State financial arrangements means that the actual allocation of GST money over time is unstable.

The states will not agree to anything that does not give them enhanced freedom to fulfil their constitutional responsibilities.

Commonwealth Policy Lock-in

The Australian Government has put itself into a policy-lock in that actually gives it no room to move outside the purely technical. Key points:

1. The actual revenue effects of any tax changes must be neutral from a Commonwealth perspective.
2. The states are expected to get rid of any economically inefficient taxes such as stamp duty and desirably pay roll tax.  
3. The Commonwealth will not agree to any increase in the GST, although both Rob Oakshott and Tony Windsor have indicated that they might support this. So there is no extra cash for the states here.
4. Proceeds from the proposes minerals resources rent tax have been allocated and locked in stone by the Commonwealth. This tax reduces the longer term tax take by the states (mineral royalties are one of the few present state tax growth areas) but offers them nothing in return.

The practical effect of the Commonwealth position is that the states are expected to absorb the pain with no prospect of gain. No rational government could be expected to accept this position.

Implications

Central to the Commonwealth's position is that it has the divine right to rule. Sadly for it, some might say sadly more broadly, Australia is a federation. Compromise is required.

I may be wrong, but I think that the Feds have got themselves so locked in that compromise is impossible. That's actually not a bad thing.

In some past posts I have explored the problems faced by the states in the context of the Australian constitution. I have suggested that WA in particular has become the flash point because it actually has real choices. It may well be in Australia's national interest for WA to force those choices. Otherwise, the system may just limp on.

If we really want to simplify the tax system, then the question of fiscal imbalance has to be addressed in a realistic way. WA may force that.

Postscript

So far the discussion at the Tax Forum has been reasonably predictable. The Australian has quite full coverage.

kvd asked me to amplify this point: "It may well be in Australia's national interest for WA to force those choices."

The problem of growing fiscal imbalance in the Australian Federation that I discussed above has been well recognised for some time, although I'm not sure that all the practical implications are as well recognised.

Operation of a Federal system in which one part raises money that is then spent by others requires discipline on both sides. That discipline is lacking.

In simple terms, the Commonwealth argues that because it is raising the money, it owes it to the Australian taxpayer to get value for money. Further, the Commonwealth Government is driven by its own electoral imperatives. For both reasons, the funds it provides are increasingly tied to very specific things.

The states are responsible to their voters in setting policy and delivering services within their areas of responsibility. In doing so, their capacity to act in any effective way has been increasingly constrained by their growing financial weakness.

COAG - the Council of Australian Governments - is meant to provide a vehicle for coordinated action across levels of Government. However, COAG has moved from a vehicle for cooperation and reform to a somewhat cumbersome device for asserting Commonwealth control. One side effect has been a decline in the effectiveness of COAG operations. 

The proposed mining resource rent tax provides an example of the problems in the current system. The Commonwealth took the view that this was a national tax and therefore under its control. It announced not just the tax, but also the way it proposed to spend the money. However, to maximise its own spend it had to limit state access to royalties, so the proposals actually represented a transfer of revenue from the states to the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth did not seek to address this issue through cooperative discussions that took both sides into account, but instead attempted to impose its will by fiat. The result has been a something of a mess.

  In theory, it is open to the states as individual entities or in combination to reject Commonwealth funding offers. In practice, the financial weakness of the states has made it hard for any state to resist Commonwealth offers no matter how tied. In doing so, the states further weaken their financial positions and their real freedom of choice. Should a state wish to resist, the Commonwealth can and has threatened to withdraw other funding.

I said earlier that while the general problem of growing fiscal imbalance is well recognised, the practical problems are less well recognised. One example is the growing problems faced by all state treasuries in simply managing their state's financial position in circumstances where funding is tied to a multiplicity of agreements with an increasing proliferation of milestones and performance measures. This can lead to an increasing instability in cash flows that has to be managed by accessing those financial resources still under state control, affecting other state activities.      

There is, I think, growing recognition that the problem of fiscal imbalance needs to be addressed. However, the present practical  dynamics of the Australian Federal system make any effective action just too difficult. Some form of circuit breaker is required. 

Resource rich WA is in an unusual position because it has greater financial freedom. Further, the political dynamics within WA provide a political imperative for the state to assert its position. Should WA do so, it may force a broader review of Commonwealth-State financial relations.

In the absence of such a review, the current system is likely to limp on becoming progressively more complicated and less effective. Systemic problems within the current system are likely to force some changes in the longer term simply because of growing problems of complexity and inefficiency. To my mind, it would be better to address problems now. 

Sunday snippets - stats, Bolt & a dash of sci-fi

I spent some time this morning just wandering round the blogosphere, catching up if you like. I really enjoy this.

It's also end month navel gazing time. So I should comment on that. Perhaps a bit on both!

To begin, the graphic shows visits (yellow) plus page views (yellow plus red) to this blog over the last twelve months or so. Just jogging along.

Normally, I supply details of the most popular posts during the month. However, this time I am going to leave it for the moment.

Bromberg J’s ruling in the Andrew Bolt matter has attracted a fair bit of attention in the Australian blogosphere. Is this a case of free speech or simply sloppy research? Probably both and a bit more!

For those who are interested, Legal Eagle's A more detailed analysis of the Bolt case provides a good intro, while Skepticlawyers' ‘This is a sad day for adequate research’ includes links to other discussion. My own offerings on this matter were:

• 18 October 2010 Andrew Bolt and the question of Aboriginality 
• 10 April 2011 Sunday Essay - Bolt, Aboriginal culture & the nature of Aboriginality
• 15 April 2011 The Australian's Aboriginal broadside.

My primary focus was not so much the question of racial vilification laws nor whether or not Mr Bolt had breached the laws (this was well covered by others), but on some of the more general issues raised about ideas of Aboriginality. I think the 10 April post is still worth reading -  I was pleased to see that it has attracted 322 visits since publication. That's actually not bad!

Gordon Smith of lookANDsee fame has been fiddling with his photos. This one shows the Gold Coast CBD from the convention centre and has a very science fiction feel. It's interesting, even spectacular, but I'm not sure what I feel about this type of photographic enhancement. 

I was a real science fiction fanatic when I was young. Science fiction has largely gone, but the art used in the pulp SF magazines that was then carried through film etc into the present day remains current. It forms part of our visual wall paper. Yet there are some problems with this: I personally lack the capacity to know how to treat such photographs in the way, say, that I can interpret painting; it creates a conflict in my mind between photos as representation and photos as art.  

Staying with SF, back in 1961, Kingsley Amis published a survey of science fiction called new maps of hell. That was a pretty fair description. One recurrent theme was the role of the state in making people happy and contented, using drugs and a variety of social engineering techniques; the rebels, the minority, fought against this.

I thought of this when I read Winton's post Which is the more appropriate policy objective: opportunity or contentment?. It made me uncomfortable.

This isn't a criticism of Winton's analysis, simply a reflection on my part: I really feel that some aspects of current perceptions about the role of the state along with certain technological changes are just a bit too close to the 1950s' new maps of hell for my own comfort. The idea that the state should encourage contentment or, as in the case of Bhutan, focus in some way on Gross National Happiness seems to me to be part of a process of transfer of responsibility from individual to authority. I don't actually like that. 

Turning to another of my favourite bloggers, I join with others in expressing pleasure that Ramana appears to have come through surgery okay. 

Over on Neil's Final Decade, Neil too has been looking at stats. He is much more colourful in his approach!

However, in an apparent segue, I now want to provide an embarrassing photo from Auckland. I suppose it is embarrassing, but there is a point,

On the left is a good looking, excited, bird. On the right is a boring old fart who looks as though he has fallen asleep at the table! In fact, he is reading a guidebook planning what he might look at and later write about.

Reading some of the really good stuff written by my fellow bloggers, I do wonder just how they maintain the quality - and interest. Time to finish. I now have to do some really boring stuff; tidying up.  

Keep Belshaw writing

My thanks, KN, for the donation via paypal to help Belshaw keep writing. My thanks, too, for earlier donations from D and H.

It's not just that the cash is helpful, although that's certainly true since my decision to try to focus on writing has certainly dropped my income. More, it motivates me to keep writing.