I am completely pissed off!

As I write helicopters circle overhead.

Tonight was the launch of the Alex Buzo company. I will write about this later. Now I want to register a complaint.

I support APEC and am happy for President Bush to be here. I do not complain about either. My complaint is with the NSW Government.

Tonight coming home our main road was blocked. No explanation, other than that Mr Bush was coming. So we went a different route, wife and daughter swearing. Road blocked.

This time I got out. I went to the police and asked how we might get home. They did not know. They said we had to wait for an hour or so. We tried to ring ABC local radio - 702 - to complain. They were not interested.

Because we know the area well we found another, this time open, road. So now we are at home.

But why could the police not help us? Mr Bush was going down one road. They could have told us how to get home. By not telling us, they actually told us what road he was travelling on. And I could have got to that road based on the pattern of road blocks.

Note that my complaint is not about APEC nor Mr Bush. Just the briefing supplied to the police to help those affected.

Next morning

Sleep has probably restored some perspective. I accept that the police had a difficult task. Still, in the pre-planning they should have paid more attention to the advice to be provided to those affected.

Another Good Day

Photo: The famous APEC fence.

Yesterday (Sunday) was both Helen's (eldest) birthday and Father's Day. It turned out to be rather a good day.

The day began with a visit to the city.

We had all heard so much about the security precautions being introduced for the APEC meeting including the APEC Wall - the wall being constructed to protect the visiting dignitaries - that we thought that the city would be dreadful.

In fact, the opposite was true. There was almost no one there. The roads were clear in a way I had not seen for years. Parking was a breeze. We began to think that a repeat APEC meeting would be a bloody good thing!

Our immediate target was a pair of sunglasses for eldest. When we arrived at Chanel they were still shut. So family went for Dee's coffee, while I wandered off to see the wall. I walked a fair bit towards the quay, but did not find the said object. Perhaps just as well, given that a pair of poor innocent German tourists who tried to photograph it were briefly held and had their photos destroyed.

I do love Australians. Wall jokes are already proliferating. Indeed, one Sydney radio station wondered if we should all rush down with sledge hammers to get a piece, working on the principle that such bits might be worth a fair bit of money.

A caller suggested that the wall was the southern edge of the Great Wall of China.This made me wonder, and this comment will only have meaning to those who can get Australian commercial TV, if the purpose of the wall was to keep the rabbits out of Sydney!

I realised as I wandered through the city that I had not been into town for several months. So in some ways I saw it afresh, a bit like a visitor. There seems to have been quite a bit of tarting up. Certainly I noticed a fair bit of new building as well as small decorative things.

Like many Australians, I find elements of the official security response to APEC including the purchase of the infamous water cannon quite over the top. However, I do not share the apparent umbrage about APEC itself.

APEC plays a useful role, especially at the unseen, below the top, level in facilitating links. Like it or not, Australia has to live in a globalising world. Business, trade and inter-Government cooperation all depend upon overlapping contact networks.

People think of this in terms of head-line relationships, Bush-Howard for example. In my view, it is the links at business and officials level that are of longer term importance.

Australia is a small country in population and economic terms. We are also in some ways an increasingly insular country. We actually need the links created through bodies such as APEC far more than bigger, more important, places.

I rejoined the family at Chanel, before moving on to David Jones' Elizabeth Street store. For the benefit of international readers, this is one of Sydney's iconic department stores. Again, few people, making the visit very pleasant. I noticed the overseas visitors stopping to listen to the pianist playing in the foyer, one of DJ's trademarks.

Sunglasses selected and put on lay-by, down too Dymocks in George Street to look at books. I browsed the shelves looking at, among others, social researcher Hugh Mackay's latest book on changes in Australian society. Here I was struck by the suggestion that Australian society is now beginning to apply the same exclusion suasion techniques previously used on smokers to children.

While I am not normally a great supporter of Hugh Mackay largely because I often do not agree with his value sets, this suggestion did resonate. I still smoke, so I know all about this side of the equation. But children?

Thinking about it, I have seen a sharp decline in tolerance towards children and young people.

There are now gated communities where children are not allowed. People are less tolerant about the presence of children in public places, far less likely to smile indulgently, far more likely to complain about noise and disruption. Children are classified as a good thing, but only if they are both unseen and unheard.

With my interest caught, I will buy the book.

From Dymocks to Fatima's for lunch with some of Denise's family. Founded 38 years ago by a Lebanese family fleeing civil war, Fatima's is one of Sydney's best known Lebanese eating places. The place sometimes gets mixed reviews, but we have been eating here for a very long time and have always found the food good and reasonably priced. And it's certainly children friendly.

My family still laugh at me sometimes because of the way I get chatting to people. I just like finding out things. It's fun. Anyway, in this case I got chatting to the grandson and found out all sorts of things about the family's flight from Lebanon. Fragmentary stuff in a short conversation, but it all adds texture.

Then home for a short nap. In all, a very good day.

Welcome Visitor 16,000

Just back from inight at Sydney University's International House where my wife is chair of council. I go to IH functions quite frequently as the handbag and enjoy them.

While I was out, visitor 16,000 arrived via a google search on Australian elections 2007. Coincidentally, visitor 8,000 arrived on the New England Australia blog on Friday, so this blog has just twice as many visitors.

While visitor numbers are small compared with Neil's (Ninglun's) blog, I am still pleased. I know that I could increase traffic if I was more focused and disciplined, but this is still my personal meanderings. I am actually amazed that I have been able to keep up regular posts despite the pressures. Over August I put up 63 posts on my various blogs, an average of two per day.

Time for bed.

The last hockey match

This morning, as on so many Saturday mornings, I took Clare to play hockey. This morning was also different because it was her last hockey match for the school, indeed the last ever school sporting event that I will attend as a parent.

Reflecting the occasion, there were more parents in attendance than usual. The team took to the field with unusual player combinations. Later, we learned why.

Much of the first period was spent round our team's goal circle. Clare defended well, but still let two through. Then came a further goal just after the start of the second half. Three nil.

The team opened their play up. Attack after attack finally gave them their first goal. Indeed, the first goal of the season. Parents go wild.

With such open attack, the other side were constantly getting through, running the length of the field into attack within the goal circle. Scrambling defence with Clare playing superbly - four saves in the space of forty seconds at one point- keeps them out. Another goal.

Now parents and team are ignited. One more goal and then we can play for victory. Attack after attack on a flagging team that came into the match needing to win to be in the finals, but confident that they could against the bottom team.

Not to be, I fear. There was just not enough time, with the final score 3-2. Still, team and parents felt that they had won.

I mentioned strange player combinations. Because it was the last match, the coach put all positions other than goal into two buckets and the team drew them out. So people played all over the place.

Given the team's performance, the coach said that her entire work came down to this. She should have started with two buckets!

Many things come into team performance. Still, we did finish the last game on a high for girls and parents.

Judith Wright's South of My Days

Neil (Ninglun's) Friday Australian poem was Judith Wright's South of My Days.

I love this poem. I did not want to repeat Neil's material, so instead I have put a post up on the New England Australia blog talking a little about the poem and its context.

Rugby, the world game - the bottom five countries

Photo: Portugal's rugby team who have made it through to the Rugby World Cup.

I love Rugby. This year I had hoped to be in France with eldest daughter who also loves the game. But then cash collapsed. So just not possible. But we will still be there in spirit.

Few people realise that Rugby is an increasingly international game. Just to illustrate this, the bottom five international teams are:

• At number 95, Bosnia & Herzegovina
• Number 94 is Finland
• then number 93 is Israel
• followed by Vanuatu on 92
• and then Bulgaria on 91,

Eat your heart out, Rugby League. I could not even find your equivalent table.

The Rise and Rise of Australian Laws

Back in 1926, the New England politician David Drummond complained about the increasing volume of legislation being passed by the NSW parliament.

Drummond was not opposed to state action. Far from it. His point was the problems created by the increasing volume of legislation.

My thanks to Club Troppo and Nicholas Gruen for the above chart. You can see how much worse the problem has become.

In 1980 I was a member of a Regulation Review Taskforce established by the Fraser Government. We looked at page after page of Government regulation.

The problem in each case was that laws and supporting regulations had been established to meet a particular need. Any attempt to handle excessive regulation on a case by case basis was bound to fail because you came into argument with those supporting the need.

The only solution was a systemic change that would make it harder for Governments to regulate. And that was not possible.

Strange Musings

I see that Lexcen is suffering from lack of inspiration. Mind you, Lexcen, I did laugh at your cantina sign. You still have the ability to capture the odd in life.

Neil is suffering from HSC marking. I sympathise.

This week youngest handed in the last of her HSC major projects in visual arts and design and technology. So that's done. I really will be glad when we get through this year.

Geoff Robinson continues to put up some rather good posts on his blog. Geoff's thoughts are informed by deeper reading than I have time to do at present, so I always learn something.

Population bomb versus demographic cliff. The posts on demography matters continue to make me think about this.

There is no doubt, at least in my mind, that the continuing growth in world population is a problem. Yet the very rapid decline in the past birthrate in some countries is now creating its own very real problems, creating what has been called a demographic cliff in which population and incomes both fall.

While I have written about this a little, there are issues here that I must explore in more detail. I actually think that demographic change is going to have a more important influence over the next forty years than climate change, yet few people are talking about it.

I used to read a lot of science fiction. A rather neat if depressing plot would be one combining the worst outcomes of demography and climate change. I was going to set out the plot. But, who knows, I might still write it!

This, however, leads me to a current topic, the Australian outbreak of horse flue.

Listening to people talk, I am not sure that enough Australians have yet got the point, the way that this outbreak illustrates the damage that might be done by a major outbreak of animal diseases on this still fortunately isolated continent.

It appears at this point that the disease may have escaped from a quarantine facility, although no one has been able to trace the exact cause. This comes on top of the escape of foot and mouth in the UK.

All this makes me a lot more cautious about some of the WTO attacks on Australia's refusal to admit some primary products, stating risk of animal diseases as a problem. It really is.

Enough of this for tonight. I must try to catch up on other things.

Australian Perspective - Why I am not a conservative

Now this post is triggered by a comment Neil Whitfield made: As my in many ways quite conservative friend Jim Belshaw says.

Neil, old friend, I am not conservative. Old fashioned sometimes, a tag I actually wear with some pride, but not conservative. I just belong to a different minority tradition, perhaps several traditions, in Australian thought.

To illustrate by an example.

If I had my way, I would tear NSW down, limiting that state to just Sydney and the Blue Mountains so that the Sydney Government could get on with what it does best, representing Sydney. This view may be wrong, but it's hardly conservative because it involves fundamental change.

Before going on, a definitional note. The Wikipedia story on conservatism is not bad. It says:

Conservatism is a term used to describe political philosophies that favor tradition and gradual change, where tradition refers to religious, cultural, or nationally defined beliefs and customs. The term is derived from the Latin, conservāre, to conserve; "to keep, guard, observe".

Now I do like the idea of conserving appropriately defined. I am also not opposed to tradition. But sometimes the established order has to be torn down. Sometimes, it is necessary to mount a counter view.

If you look at my attacks on the intellectual orthodoxy that came out of the seventies, and this includes some of my comments on multiculturalism, I am opposed to its rigidity, the way in which it has shut out alternative views.

But this does not mean that I am opposed to Australia as a pluralist society. Pretty obviously, I support this.

If you look at my attacks on some elements of Howard Government philosophy, I am opposed to what I see as the rigid orthodoxy and the little nationalism of what has become the alternative orthodoxy.

Now my position here is a little complex in that I do have some sympathy with some of the elements in that position as originally articulated.

For example, I actually think that there are many good features in the New Zealand model of public administration as articulated by the New Zealand Treasury. I supported and still support the way in which it tried to break down an imperfect system. It's just that the application in practice, and especially in NSW, is a gross distortion of the original principles.

When it comes to values, I am an old fashioned liberal. My support for individual liberties, for the values of what is now called civil society, is profound. But it also reflects my fairly limited but still influential study of ethics as part of Philosophy I at New England.

Take a question that I have not discussed on this blog, my views on gay marriage.

I support civil unions for gays. I support legal recognition of the joint rights of gay couples. I do not support gay marriage because the term "marriage" carries very specific connotations linked back to our Christian heritage, so that the application of the term "marriage" creates tensions and problems among much larger groups in society.

This may change. But for the present, my view is that we need to find a solution that gives gays the legal and indeed symbolic things that they need, while recognising the views of the larger group.

I have a profound love of and respect for our core institutions. Perhaps I can be classified as a conservative in this area, although the views I hold are very much minority views even among those classified as "conservative".

I have a profound respect for Parliamentary government. To me, Parliament along with the courts are key institutions in our system.

Too many of our current politicians see Parliament as a hoop to be gone through on the way to power and control. Here they are no different from the divine right monarchists. I see little difference between King Charles and his views of the divine right of executive Government and current Australian Governments, although we can at least still get rid of these.

The NSW Country Party leader Mick Bruxner articulated this well in his belief that when you became an MP you had an obligation to Parliament as an institution.

So far as the courts are concerned, lawyers and the legal system are the independent umpires standing between us and the unbridled exercise of executive power. If you look at Hicks and more recently Haneef, the legal profession has played a powerful role in forcing us to look at questions of liberty and principle.

Turning now to my continued focus on our history and the need to understand this.

My argument here is simple. If Australians are cut off from their broader past, then they lose sight of the very foundations of our civil society. In so doing, they risk becoming victims of those who wish to use the past to support their current nostrums. And I put the citizenship test in this class.

To finish with Ted Wheelwright, the part subject of my last post.

I did not start preparing a post on Ted because I agreed with him. I do not, although I accept that he was a gifted teacher. But I also accept that he occupied a valuable and legitimate place in Australian thinking. I accept that that place needs to be explained.

And I find it sad that I, who did not generally agree with him, should be more worried about preserving his place in the history of Australian thought than those who I would have expected to articulate the story.

Postscript

I was pleased that this post was picked up by Club Troppo's Missing Link review and that, as a consequence, a number of people have visited. Welcome. Do feel free to comment.

History of Australian (and New Zealand?) Thought - musings

Yesterday almost in a fit of absent mindedness I created a new blog, called History of Australian Thought. Or should it be History of Australian and New Zealand Thought?

I need a new blog like a hole in the head. I am not maintaining all my current blogs properly, and even in trying to do this I am not doing other things that I should be doing. So any new blog could only proceed if it was to be a multiple contributor blog. But why all this?

So much that I write about is really an exploration of the way Australians' think, have thought, might think. In writing, I constantly come across things that I do not know.

This week I was looking at an interesting post by Stephen Downes on the culture wars and Canada.

My first thought was that Stephen's writing and the links would be of great interest to Neil and would indeed provide him with ammunition in our continuing discussions on multiculturalism or, to use my current term, polyculturalism (and here). Stephen's post followed some thinking that I had done on Sydney vs Melbourne and Australian identity, triggered in part by the experiences of Splau, a Melbourne university student currently on exchange in Montreal.

As I looked further at Stephen's posts and the links, I noticed two further things.

The first was the way in which the relations between Canada and the US continue to affect Canadian thinking about themselves. Something similar happens in New Zealand in the context of New Zealand Australian relations. The second was the continuing commonalities in thought patterns between Australia, New Zealand and at least Anglophone Canada. I do not understand enough about Francophone Canada to comment here, although I found Splau's discussion of her experiences very interesting.

At the same time, I wanted to write a piece on this blog about the death of Ted Wheelwright. I did not know Ted personally, but wanted to set his life in an intellectual and historical context because I thought that this was important.

For those who do not know who Ted was, he was an economist and an Associate Professor at Sydney University. A left wing radical, gifted teacher and something of a stormy petrel, Ted sat at the cusp of a change in Australian thought, politics and history. The disputes within Sydney University about the teaching of political economy were not just about about changes in the economics profession, itself an important story, but also about ideology and values.

I struggled in preparing the post because the information I needed to present Ted properly was simply not there or, more precisely, at least not easily accessible. Further, in looking at Ted's life I was struck again by the New Zealand influence on Australian intellectual life.

The two new economics professors at Sydney University appointed at the end of the 1960s - Warren Hogan and Colin Simkin - who were involved as protagonists in the other side of the political economy dispute were both New Zealand trained. They joined a long group of gifted New Zealand academics.

Pound for pound, New Zealand's contribution to at least Western intellectual life arguably dwarfs that of Australia. I am left wondering, as I have wondered before, what it was about this small community on the other side of the world that created so many leading academics.

In all this, I did some web searches on "history of Australian thought" and then on "history of New Zealand thought". I got two hits on the first, none on the second.

Is this important? I think so. It's not just that I am interested. In a very real sense we are what we think. So it's interesting to be able to set thoughts in a context, to understand what and why we think in the way we do.

Hence my idea of a new blog. But this will only work if we have a number of contributors. I say this for two reasons.

First, it makes the burden of posting easier. Good blogs require regular posts.

Secondly and more importantly, a blog of this type requires different perspectives if it is to work. Take Ted Wheelwright as an example.

I felt then and still feel now that some of his thinking was wrong-headed. I agree with some of his key points - the importance of values in economics and of institutional economics - but disagree with others.

So because I know something about economics and the economics profession I can put his work in one context. But I am not necessarily going to be able to talk about his role in the evolution of Australian left thought in a sensible and informed way.

Anyway, I would be very interested to learn if there is anyone else prepared to contribute to a blog dedicated to the history Australian (and New Zealand) thought.

Sydney's Beer Culture

Back on 16 August I ran a story on the Regional Australia blog about the differences between Sydney and Melbourne.

This week the Sydney media has run hot on a proposal by Sydney's Lord Mayor to change the licensing laws to allow a wider variety of small cafes and bars. Part of her argument lies in the fact that Sydney is losing out to Melbourne.

Now the rigid and archaic NSW licensing laws are an example of something that I have complained about, the fact that rigid uniformity - national or state - is not always a good thing. Licensing laws are a good example of this. However, that was not what I wanted to write about.

In reading the SMH story on the issue, I was struck by an apparent quote from the president of the NSW Hotel's Association. He was quoted as saying:

Sydneysiders may not be barbarians, he said, but they did not "want to sit in a hole and drink chardonnay and read a book".

"People can sit down, talk about history, chew the fat and gaze into each other's eyes and all this sort of baloney but it's pie in the sky stuff".

"That's not what Sydney wants."

If accurately reported, I find this quite remarkable.

I, for one, like sitting down with a glass of chardonnay (and many other things) to read a book. I certainly like talking about history. Chewing the fat sounds good. Gazing into eyes also sounds good, although my wife may have something to say here.

Now I am not a Sydneysider. Nor am I nineteen. I am not opposed to the pub scene, but I really do find Melbourne very civilised. And Paris, or Venice, or Florence, or Rome. But not Sydney.

Common Australian Political Myths - National standards (uniformities) are a good thing

This is the second most popular Australian political myth after having too many politicians. It just sounds so very very sensible. Surely, as one nation, we should have common standards throughout the country? Or the state, for that matter.

The reality is very different. A national approach my help. Or it may hinder. It all depends upon the circumstances. And upon the definitions used.

Australia has been experiencing a minerals boom. Unlike past booms where heavy demand in one sector has led to a wages explosion across sectors, this time wage rises have been quarantined. As a consequence, the boom has continued because inflationary pressures have stayed down.

Both parties have claimed credit for this and for the same reason. Each argues that their approach has destroyed the previous nationally uniform system under which a wage rise in any area was transmitted to the broader economy because of a standardised uniform national system that worked regardless of variations in industry or geographic circumstance.

So here we have a case where there is general agreement that a centralised, uniform, system did not work.

I could give many examples. At this point, I would only argue that every argument on national standards or uniform approaches needs to be tested on the facts, not simply assumed to be a good thing.