Results from the 2011 Pacific Islands' Forum

On Wednesday I provided a preliminary report (Pacific Island Forum, China & Australia's future migration) on the Pacific Island Forum. This has now wrapped up. Most of the leaders are staying on for the first match in the Rugby World Cup, although Australian PM Gillard is flying home.

On 7 September, the Pacific Island Leaders issued a joint statement with the UN Secretary General. This was followed on 6 September by the formal communiqué. The joint statement is attached to the communiqué.

As with all these things, there is something a little eye glazing about the English. However, some key points follow.

Climate Change

There was again a major focus on climate change, a continuing concern to small, low lying island states. The presence of the UN Secretary General and the President of the European Union added force here.

As we have seen, international actions on any topic can proceed at glacial pace. Still, I was struck by the disconnect between Australian domestic political discussion on this topic as compared to the Forum discussions and the remarks in Australia of the UN Secretary General and EU President.

I have commented before about the problems that can flow from disconnects between Australian political discourse and broader regional and international considerations.

If, as many Australians now assume, a Coalition Government comes to power at the next elections, it will be interesting to see just it manages the climate change issue internationally. I would have thought that it might face some difficulties.

Sustainable Development

There were many words about sustainable development set in the context of plans and agreements that few Australians would have heard of. It's interesting how "sustainable development" has become such buzz words at so many levels.

From a practical perspective, the immediate key economic areas are tourism, agriculture and fisheries. Continued growth in population in Australia and New Zealand does provide an increasing base load for tourism.

Fisheries involves particular issues with Island countries lacking the effective power to limit fishing in their zones. Both Australia and New Zealand have been providing increasing support here. While this area is largely of the Australian public radar, it is a potential future flash point.

Education

As you might expect, there was a considerable focus on education. As mentioned in the previous post, Australia and New Zealand announced that they would work to ensure 500,000 more children in the Pacific are enrolled in school and that 75 percent of children can read by the age of 10 by 2021 (joint press release here). Australia will also continue to support the Australia Pacific Technical College.

In a practical sense, this type of support also benefits Australia and New Zealand, given present and prospective levels of emigration to those two countries.

Trade and Labour Mobility

In the communiqué:

Leaders noted the high priority placed by the region on the successful conclusion to the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations in 2012. Leaders agreed that negotiations on the Pacific Islands Countries Trade Agreement (PICTA) Trade in Services and the Temporary Movement of Natural Persons and PACER Plus would also be progressed as matters of priority, and that they continue to be kept informed of progress. Leaders urged those countries yet to complete arrangements to trade under PICTA to do so forthwith.

These various negotiations have dragged on.

Australia and New Zealand are natural sources of work for those from Pacific Island nations. New Zealand has a Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme while Australia has a Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme. Under the pilot scheme, Pacific workers come to Australia for four to six months to work for horticultural enterprises who demonstrate that they cannot find enough local labour to meet their seasonal harvest needs.

The Australian Government has now announced that workers from Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu will have the opportunity to join those from Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu already participating in the pilot scheme.

I wrote on this scheme when it was first announced. It benefits both the horticulture industry and Pacific Island countries. I had wondered how it was going. Numbers still seem to me to be quite small with something over 560 workers recruited so far.

Fiji

Fiji remains suspended from the Forum, although attitudes appear to be softening a little. Fiji is another of the Pacific flash point areas from an Australian perspective since no one can really forecast what might happen there. A not inconsiderable proportion of Australia's Indian population are in fact Fijian Indians who have previously fled to country.

Should trouble break out in Fiji or elsewhere in the Pacific, Australia would be in a degree of trouble given that poor maintenance and consequent forced Navy ship withdrawals has decimated the country's Naval  lift capacity.

Papua New Guinea

In my August regional media round up (Media round up on Australia's rim) I commented on my own lack of knowledge about some regional issues and linkages.

Have a look at this story in the Sydney Morning Herald by Jo Chandler, Dying on Australia's doorstep. The child is not from Somalia, but is a six year old TB patient not very far from Australia's boundaries.

Of all the Pacific Forum countries, PNG poses the greatest potential problem for Australia. It's not just the threat of political instability, but that of disease.

I know I probably get boring on this one, but it really is a case of out of sight, out of mind.

My Armidale Express column this week, it will come up later on my New England blog, was in part a plea to stop our obsessive focus in Australian political discourse on a limited range of issues. Leave aside the disease issues, if PNG goes really sour then Australia could end up with a boat people problem measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Postscript

Useful article on the Forum by Nic Maclellan in New Matilda, Island Leaders Drowned Out At Forum.

Has Google's Panda damaged blogging?

I made a passing reference in a postscript to my last post, At home with Julia is bad TV, to my realisation about the impact of changing Google search algorithms. I also noted that this was something that I would write about a little later.

In writing the postscript to the last post I did extensive web searches using both the general Google search facility and Google blog search. Here I want to report on what I found in terms of the pattern of the searches themselves.

At its peak I used Google blog search very extensively.  I am interested in what my fellow bloggers say. I found this absolutely invaluable in providing an alternative point of view.

In recent months, I have noticed a progressive degradation in the value of Google blog search. I am not sure just when it began, but it is quite noticeable. The number of posts listed has dropped, the composition of posts listed has shifted from independent bloggers towards big outfits including the main stream media. 

In using Google blog search to try to find posts on At Home with Julie I found very little. I thought that was odd. Then I noticed something - my own post on the matter was not recorded. That led me to notice a broader trend.

I am used to my posts being picked up immediately by Google search and Google blog search. Yet when I looked I found that this was no longer so. No less than seven of my most immediate posts across three blogs had yet to register. They were now blind to all but my regular visitors or those who came in through platforms such as Twitter.

This is no small thing since 85% of my traffic comes through search engines.

The key seems to lie in the new Google search algorithm called Panda. Now here I have another gripe. I found a very good description of Panda, but it's vanished when I try to replicate the search!

Most of we independent bloggers cannot afford what is called SEO or search engine optimisation. We rely on our content and cross-links from other bloggers for our profile, leading to inclusion in Google search. It appears that we can no longer do so.

This is no small thing. It's not just my personal gripe about my own posts. but also and more importantly that I can no longer rely on Google blog search to bring me the material that I need.

Personally, I think that that's a bit of a disaster. Have you found the same thing?

Postscript:

A comment from kvd made me realise that I need to distinguish clearly between two things.

The first is the general impact of Panda. Checking around the web, there appear to have been five versions of Panda. As I indicated in an earlier post, the early releases of Panda had a dramatic impact on traffic on some popular sites. You will get a feel for this if you have a quick scan here.

According to an article by Tom Foremski in ZDNet, Panda does not apply to blogs. I don't think that's right.

The chart from Google stats shows page views on this blog. Ignore the start and end points. This stats collection started in May 2009, hence the sharp rise, while the September number is obviously part month only.

While many factors affect the stats, the rise in January and then again in April coincide, I think, with Panda release dates. While I did comment on the impact of Panda in general, I wasn't especially focused on it since I was doing okay. I did comment on the May rise in traffic because I didn't understand why.

Now look at the quite sharp decline in traffic from the end of May, bottoming in July. At first I thought that I had just become too boring! However, when I looked at the stats for page visits I found that one long-standing high traffic post had vanished from the stats. While my stats did not allow me to check properly, I had the impression that this post was not alone. The only explanation that I could come to was a change in search engine algorithms.

The second and possibly linked issue is the change in Google blog search. Here I have noticed two things.

Broadly, it seems to have become less representative both in it's recording of posts and of links. As I noted in the post, this was a problem for me in that I actually relied on it as a device for both keeping me in touch with the blogosphere and for information and comment on certain types of issues.

Then I realised that it appeared to be no longer recording some of my own posts. To be very precise, in general checking I search on "jm Belshaw". Up until recently, Blog Search brought up my latest posts almost instantaneously. As I write, the most recent post included is five days old.

I suspect, I am not sure, that this is partly linked to Panda. However, there may be other explanations.

As part of my tests this morning, I searched on "at home with Julia is bad TV", the title of last night's post. At the time, it was not picked up directly on either blog search or general search, although it did appear via a link from a fellow blogger.

In a search tonight, it is now picked up in general search. However, the references on blog search are still from a fellow blogger plus one Personal Reflections reference to it under a post heading that has nothing to do with it at all! Since it  was caught by the general robots if with an increased lag, this suggests to me that there has been a change on the blogger side as well.

At home with Julia is bad TV

I see from Twitter (#athomewithjulia) that the first episode of ABC's At Home with Julia has its fans. I thought that it was dreadful. My wife went ballistic.

I will largely leave my wife's views to one side. She is a strong feminist with somewhat different political views to mine. She said, among other things, that the program depended on the fact that Julia was a women, that it was actually stereotyping. I suspect that's right.

I and eldest daughter insisted that we watch it. My wife was already objecting on the basis of the promos. Eldest and I thought that we should give it a go. Eldest left in the middle, but I watched it to the end.

My first reaction to the opening scenes may seem an odd one. I thought if factually unrealistic. To make it work, they had to distort simple things like the actual operations of the Lodge, the Australian PM's residence. That nagged.

As the program went on, there were some funny lines. But increasingly, I thought that it was little more than a stitching together of cameo stereotypes designed to appeal to a fairly narrow audience. I say fairly narrow because, in a way, it was a series of in-jokes of a particular type.

Looking at the Twitter feed, those who liked it generally gave examples of parodies that they agreed with.

All these things are a matter of judgement, of style, of attitude. In the end, the thing that really turned me off was simply the feeling that it was all deeply disrespectful. I really don't like the Australian PM being treated in this way.

I am not going to say that you should not watch it, although viewers outside Australia are likely to find it obscure in the extreme. Indeed, I would suggest that those who haven't seen it and have reasonably strong stomachs do so. Yes, this may help the ABC in the short tem in increasing ratings, but you need to see it to understand both the anti and pro reactions.

I won't watch it again. The program was intensely parochial, inward looking and somewhat smutty. To somewhat distort a tweet from a Twitter colleague, it was a bit like Benny Hill but without the fun.

Postscript

Given the number of positive reactions to the show, I became curious about the pattern of likes and dislikes. This led me to do a two hour web search on reactions.

One outcome of that was a realisation about the impact of changing Google search algorithms, something that I will write about a little later.

On the negative side, one common theme was simply that the show wouldn't have been produced if Julia Gillard was a man. This came not just from feminists, although many of the this type of comments did come from feminists. Rather, people resented the portrayal of Tim.

A second negative theme was that of disrespect, not disrespect of Julia Gillard as PM, but of the office of Australian PM, disrespect for people. The TV Week blog attempted to address this issue. There David Knox wrote:

Not for a minute do I subscribe to the theory that to undertake this comedy is disrespectful. If The Greeks and Shakespeare could take aim at authority, so can we. In fact in this country, affectionate mocking is a national sport. Gillard can wear it like a badge of honour. Amanda Bishop might even deliver her a poll boost. David Knox

Maybe. I am not sure that "affectionate mocking" is a national sport, although mocking certainly is. However, this show was personalised so that it dealt not with authority, but with relationships.

I should note here that the majority of TV reviewers that I scanned liked the show. They saw it as good TV.

One of the difficulties with satirical shows is that they are in fact fiction.

Good satirical shows bear the same type of relationship to life that cartoons bear to people, politics and events. They accentuate certain features. However, they are not life. The further the gap between the show and life, the bigger the problem.

One of the things that I found interesting about the positive comments lay in the number of people who appeared to believe that the show was actually a satirical version of reality in the way that, say, Yes Minister was. It is not. The show actually has little connection with the way things work.

The greatest number of positive comments were addressed to specific gags or cameos. Like many satirical shows, one's response depends upon one's starting point. One person's highlight may be deeply offensive to someone else. There is nothing wrong with this, that's satire, but it's always interesting to try to plot just what appeals to whom.

To do this properly, I would need to go through and draw up a table with the gag or cameo on one side, the likely audience on the other. It would be fascinating to do this, but I don't have the time. So let me cut to the chase with gut judgments based just on my limited scan:

• The show is not likely to appeal to many of those on the Coalition side of politics who are most against Labor or Ms Gillard because they are on the other side of many of the sight gags.
• The show is not likely to appeal to Labor diehards who will see it as another attack on the Government even though they may enjoy specific cameos.
• The show is likely to appeal to left of centre people disaffected with the Government who already hold the views and perceptions underlying the cameos.

That's enough for now. I do want to do a serious post on Google, blogging and search engines.        

Pacific Island Forum, China & Australia's future migration

The Pacific Island Forum (and here) meeting is getting underway In Auckland. An editorial in the New Zealand Herald provides a good summary of the importance of this meeting marked as it is by an unusually large presence of world leaders.

One initiative to be announced is a new schools program. I quote from the New Zealand Herald story:    

Over the next four years New Zealand will fund an extra $145 million and Australia $158 million to address the large numbers of kids that do not go to school.

The target is to enrol half of the one million school-aged children not going to school for at least six years of schooling. They have also set a literacy goal for 2021 - of getting 75 per cent of all children in the region to be able to read by the age of 10.

As well as the rise in basic education funding, New Zealand will also spend $122 million in scholarships and training over the same period.

In an apparent segue, Peter Martin and David Cohen had an interesting post on the interpreter, an interview with Tang Qifang, Asia specialist at the foreign ministry-affiliated China Institute of International Studies: Through Chinese eyes: Tang Qifang (part 1).

I found it interesting in general, I know far less than I should about Chinese foreign policy, but I was also struck by the references to Indonesia and ASEAN. I quote:

From Linda: how does China assess Indonesia's current trajectory in the international arena? How would China hope to see Indonesia's role develop in Southeast Asia and further afield?

Indonesia is the biggest country in Southeast Asia, and it has always wanted to take a key role in the region. But the leadership of the ASEAN countries is not really held by any certain country. Although Indonesia is very big and very important, not only in Southeast Asia, but in the Asia-Pacific region, but so far it hasn't managed to take as important a role as it wants to. Maybe that's why Indonesia is very eager to make active communications not only in Southeast Asia but also in other areas of international cooperation, and we can see that especially in climate change, where Indonesia takes a very active role.

From Ho Yi Jian: Could you describe the state of Southeast Asian expertise in China?

In China, frankly speaking, I don't think there's enough expertise in Southeast Asia is to support the corporations and the government. There are specialists in Southeast Asian languages, for example, in the foreign languages universities, but most of them only specialize in language.  There is also very important expertise in the provinces near to Southeast Asian countries, like Guangxi province, and Yunnan province, and Guizhou province, because they have the advantage of communication. Of course, there are some military institutes, but they are secret. They're very powerful, but we don't know what they are doing. Even I don't know. They do very good research, but we cannot share them.

Just last month I attended an academic conference, and someone said that Southeast Asian countries are not as important to China as in the past, that China is not just a power in East Asia, but also in the Asia Pacific, so it should focus on dealing with other big powers, like the US, like Japan, even countries in Latin America. I will never agree with this kind of analysis — I think your closest neighbors should be your closest friends.

In Australia's case, ASEAN and the Pacific Forum countries are Australia's closest neighbours. I have argued before that Australia has been neglectful of both groups and especially Indonesia within ASEAN. If you like, we are doing a China and for the same reasons. 

I note here that in a story in the Australia on 27 August 2011, Northern neglect: bring education to south east asia, says Woolcott, Richard Woolcott argued in the context of higher education that Australia was neglecting its near north and especially Indonesia. There is something of an irony here that, in relative terms "White Australia" educated far more Indonesians than "modern multicultural Australia" and did so at the Australian taxpayers' expense. To provide a perspective on this, I quote from another story in the Australian:      

AUSTRALIA'S university sector is seen as a shop and no longer as a bridge between cultures, according to distinguished Indonesian academic Sangkot Marzuki.

Professor Marzuki said this was one reason for the low level of scientific and research collaboration between the two countries.

"When I came 40 years ago to Australia, I came looking for a better education," he said. "Now Indonesians see Australia as a shop to buy a degree and to earn the opportunity to get a good job."

Professor Marzuki, a Monash University alumnus who has spent half his career in Australia, spoke last week at a University of Sydney forum on education and development in the Asia-Pacific.

"There was a change, about 30 years ago, where Australia suddenly saw higher education as a commodity rather than before that as a bridge between two cultures," he told the HES.

Under the 1951 Colombo Plan, the Australian taxpayer helped to educate more than 40,000 students from the region as part of an attempt to promote stability and development. "All of us who went to Australia [before the commercialised era in higher education] feel very grateful," Professor Marzuki said. This had a value in terms of diplomacy, he said.

To put a purely personal perspective on this, I know my daughters' friends really well. Both are at university now. I started at university in 1963, forty eight years ago, something I find a little frightening. Their Australian friends are much more ethnically mixed than my equivalent group, reflecting the changes in the composition of Australian society. Yet for every overseas Asian student that they are friends with, I was friendly with twenty. They simply have less contact, less opportunity for contact, than I did.

If China is neglecting South-East Asia in relative terms, it is still active there and in the Pacific. That is one of the challenges Australia faces in foreign policy terms. How does the country deal with this?

Another important challenge lies in the inevitable Pacificisation of Australia. Back in August 2007 in Pacific Perspective - Pasifika and New Zealand's Future, I looked at this process in a New Zealand context. The same process is happening in Australia, although Australia's larger size makes the process slower. 

Australia already has large groups from Pacific Island countries. We will continue to attract migrants direct and via New Zealand. If some of the worst case scenarios happen - climate change or state collapse in Papua New Guinea - the flow could become a flood.

I haven't attempted to quantify scope, but my gut feeling is that those from Pacific Forum countries and their children excluding non-Maori New Zealand could well exceed one million within ten years.

In December 2009, an article in the New Zealand Herald reported estimated that 126,000 of the 765,000 people in the world with Maori ancestry, one in six, now lived in Australia. To this we have to add groups from all the Pacific Forum countries.

I have no personal problems with this. It will certainly help us in the Rugby!

In a largely unrecognised way, Australia and New Zealand's provision of economic aid and especially educational assistance to Pacific Forum countries is actually enhancing the skills of those who will come to both countries in the future. I think that's important. 

Let me finish with some statistics that I found surprising. If we look just at Papua and New Guinea, Department of Immigration and Citizenship statistics suggest that in 2006 Australia had 20,402 PNG born residents. That's lower than I would have expected and is likely to change significantly over the next ten years. However, it's not that that surprised me.

• The main languages spoken at home by Papua New Guinea-born people in Australia were English (79.7 per cent), Cantonese (6.0 per cent) and Pidgin, nfd (3.8 per cent). Cantonese! That's a reflection of the migration to Australia of PNG's Chinese ethnic population after independence.
• At the time of the 2006 Census, the median individual weekly income for the Papua New Guinea-born in Australia aged 15 years and over was $593, compared with $431 for all overseas-born and $488 for all Australia-born. So the children of PNG immigrants did better than the Australian average.
• At the 2006 Census, 58.8 per cent of the Papua New Guinea-born aged 15 years and over had some form of higher non school qualifications compared to 52.5 per cent of the Australian population. So our PNG immigrants were better educated than the Australian average.
• Among Papua New Guinea-born people aged 15 years and over at the 2006 census, the participation rate in the labour force was 73.3 per cent and the unemployment rate was 5.1 per cent. The corresponding rates in the total Australian population were 64.6 and 5.2 per cent respectively. Again, the PNG immigrants did better in workforce terms than the rest of Australia.

Looking at the stats, I really hadn't expected PNG migrants to be doing, on average, better than the rest of the Australian population.

A visit to the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes

Greek Trip, Day 15, Saturday 2 October 2010, Rhodes End

Continuing our trip story from Popes, Knights, Mussolini & Rhodes, the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes is housed in the medieval building of the Hospital of the Knights. The building was begun in 1440 by Grand Master de Lastic with money bequeathed by his predecessor, Fluvian, and completed in 1489 by Grand Master d'Aubusson.

We simply didn't allow time at the Museum. It sprawls with a series of exhibitions or galleries tracking the Island's complicated history.

I ended up making a beeline to the newly opened Minoan gallery.

In earlier posts (The remarkable story of Arthur Evans, Knossos and the Minoans, Akrotiri, Greece and the passage of time) I explained a little of my fascination with the Minoans. I hadn't actually realised prior to the trip just how widely distributed the Minoan influence was. Now I was looking at the same thing in another place.

Sadly, I wasn't allowed to take photos, but I found it fascinating.

I know that many of my readers do not share my somewhat obsessive love of history. It's an addiction, a fascination with the discovery of patterns. I made the point in an earlier post that part of the story of the Greek Islands can be seen in terms of access to water (this was necessary for life) and the sea (trade allowed growth in wealth.) However, you also have to understand location.

Over the centuries, the sea facilitated the spread of Minoan influence and the growth in Minoan wealth. Location affected the Minoans because they had access to the advanced civilisations in what is now the Middle East. To the north on what is now the Greek mainland, another civilisation grew called the Mycenaean that supplanted the Minoans. Then this collapsed, creating a dark age.

For those who want to know more about the history of this long period, I have found a very useful resource, The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean, prepared by Dartmouth College.

I spent far too much time with the Minoans, so that it was getting dark when I emerged and had to scoot to see things. This wasn't helped by poor lighting in many places (the photo will give you a feel), nor by the extended history covered by the museum.

According to Wikipedia, in the 8th century BC, the island's settlements started to form, with the coming of the Dorians, who built the three important cities of Lindos, Ialyssos and Kameiros, which together with Kos, Cnidus and Halicarnassus (on the mainland) made up the so-called Dorian Hexapolis (Greek for six cities). I have left the Wikipedia links so that you can explore if you want.

The Persians invaded and overran the island, but were in turn defeated by forces from Athens in 478 BC. The cities joined the Athenian League. When the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC, Rhodes remained largely neutral, although it remained a member of the League. The war lasted until 404 BC, but by this time Rhodes had withdrawn entirely from the conflict and decided to go her own way.

In 408 BC, the cities on Rhodes united to form one territory. They built the city of Rhodes, a new capital on the northern end of the island. From then until Alexander the Great's conquest of Rhodes in 332 BC, life seems to have been turbulent. However, Alexander marked the start of of a long period of great prosperity for Rhodes.

Under the successor empires that followed Alexander's death, Rhodes became an ally of the Ptolemies who established a new Egyptian dynasty that ruled there until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. Rhodes then became a part of the Roman Empire and subsequently the Byzantine Empire.

All this and subsequent history is mirrored in the Museum. You can see why one can get museumed  out!

Just thinking about it in terms of my own interests in using history to help promote tourism in New England, there is a very real skill in the way history needs to be presented to provide context.

The complexity of Rhodes' history is far greater than that of Australia. Yet the challenge is the same. Without history, the museum artifacts lack context. Yet with too much history, it is easy to become even more confused!

After finally gathering all our party, we wandered back to our hotel for a wash, a pre-dinner drink and then out to dinner.

I have no recollection as to where we went, nor did I take any notes! It clearly didn't stand out in my mind as to food.

Tomorrow we drive to Lindos, passing through three very different worlds in one day.

School funding, higher education, Treasury round-up & the law

In the end I didn't post yesterday. I didn't feel like it!   

I am working on the next Greek travel post. In the meantime, a few snippets.

The Gonski review of the funding of Australian schools has released four commissioned research reports for public comment. I have only a a chance to do a very quick review, but there is some interesting material there.

The Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Work Place Relations has released 2010 statistics for Australian higher education. For newspaper coverage here. 

Change keeps rumbling along in Australian higher education.

Back in October 2010 at the request of fellow blogger Thomas, I wrote a post (UNE's strategic positioning) looking at UNE's strategic alliances and especially UNE's relationship with the University of Sydney. Under the Sydney alliance, UNE would use its school entry program to recruit students from lower socio-economic backgrounds who could then go on to Sydney University should they choose after successfully completing first year at UNE. 

In August, the two universities announced details for the first year intake to commence in 2012. The release said in part:     

Under the ‘Alternative Entry Pathway’ opportunity, which will be offered jointly by the partner universities, current Year 12 students from more than 60 eligible high schools in Sydney and on the NSW coast (full list available at http://www.une.edu.au/usyd) can apply to study the first year of selected degrees on campus at the University of New England. In year two of their degree students can transition to the University of Sydney, provided they have made satisfactory progress in their first year of study in approved majors and units at the University of New England.

One side effect of the deal is to further advantage students from the broader New England in terms of university access, something I discussed last back in 2007 in Drought, Higher Education and Mental Traps.

UNE has also announced a deal with international education services provider Pearson. I quote from the release:

The partnership entails world-standard delivery and marketing of UNE online courses throughout the nation and overseas. It is the first partnership of its kind in the tertiary sector outside the United States.

It will provide a guaranteed revenue stream for the University and is expected to increase external student numbers each year.

Through the partnership with the University, Pearson will make its online systems and marketing expertise available to enhance the way UNE delivers its distance education course material.

I am still trying to get my mind round the patterns of dynamic change in Australian higher education in general and their impact on New England's universities in particular. However, I am also interested in the emphasis on technology and on-line education. It is far from clear to me that we have the best working model.

On 3 September 2011, the Australian Treasury released its latest economic round up. Again, I haven't had time to absorb it properly, but it contains some interesting material including an analysis of the performance of the Australian economy during the global financial crisis. The Department places greater weight on the impact of the stimulus package than the Opposition would allow.

In June there was a brief discussion on the meaning of law (Whigs, law & the concept of progress, Has The Law (caps) lost meaning?) Noric Dilanchian has now drawn my attention to a US legal blog, Inside the Law School Scam, that takes a very jaundiced view on the law and its teaching. It's worth a read for those interested.

Well, that's all for now, folks. 

Popes, Knights, Mussolini & Rhodes

Greek Trip, Day 15, Saturday 2 October 2010, Rhodes continued

Continuing the story of our Greek trip from Walking the walls of Rhodes, climbing down from the walls, we founds ourselves back in the mediaeval world of Rhodes.

Our challenge now was to find our hotel in the narrow mediaeval streets!

My wife had checked the map, and knew where we were going, so I followed along behind. We followed the wall back, and finally found the hotel.

This proved to be a nice place with an internal courtyard. Taking one look at the courtyard, the group sent me out to buy things for our usual picnic lunch.

Do you know, I couldn't find a supermarket or small store?

I followed the street we had come back, and then went in the opposite direction. While old Rhodes is still small, it was far larger than the Greek Island towns that I was used too. There were, in fact, far fewer eating places of all types relative to geography. Finally, I came back and admitted defeat. Then, with my wife's assistance (!), we finally found a supermarket.

We settled down in the courtyard with our bread, cheese, wine and a variety of nibbles to plan the rest of the day. We wanted to see the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes and the archaeological museum.

In introduced the Knights and mediaeval Rhodes in my last post because the physical architecture of Rhodes is dominated by the mediaeval period. It seemed easiest to come in this way. However, like other parts of the Greek Islands, history is not straight forward, but overlaps, leaving an overlapping pattern on the human and physical landscape.

The Eastern Roman Empire, what we now generally call the Byzantine Empire, may have become Greek in cultural terms, but did not forget that it was the Roman Empire. As the Western Empire declined, the East made continuing attempts to preserve the west, to recreate the Empire. The Pope in Rome continued to assert a claim to primacy, but also had to manage the shifting balances of political and military power in the west, including the continuing Byzantine presence in Italy as well as Norman incursions into Byzantine territory in Italy and beyond. 

During the long centuries, the eastern and western wings of the Catholic Church drifted apart beset by politics as well as theological differences. In 1054 AD a great schism occurred leading to real separation.

When in 1095 the Byzantine Emperor sought help from Pope Urban II to defend his Empire against the invading Turks, one of the things motivating Pope Urban to offer support was his desire to reunite the Church. This was to fall foul of politics, theology and dynastic ambitions. 

The modern dividing lines between the distribution of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Catholic adherents as well as Christian and Muslim adherents all reflect the shifting balances of power in these previous periods.     

The Knights of Rhodes were today what would be called a multinational organisation. They owed formal allegiance to the Pope and combined people from many language groups. To manage this, they were organised into tongues whose masters reported to the order's grand master.

The newly constructed Palace of the Grand Masters allowed for this division into tongues. However, it appears that the Palace today is not the same as the original Palace. Oh no, that would be far to easy!

The Palace was built on the site of the previous Byzantine citadel. Then, when Rhodes fell to the Ottomans in 1522, it became an Ottoman fortress.

In 1856, a huge ammunition explosion destroyed part of the palace. When the Kingdom of Italy seized Rhodes in 1912 from the Ottoman Empire, the Italians rebuilt the palace in a grandiose pseudo-medieval style as a holiday residence for Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, and later for Benito Mussolini. Rhodes would be formally part of Italy until 1947 when it was transferred to Greece for the first time. 

Now all these mind glazing dates are quite significant. I will talk about the Italian period in more detail later when we come to visit the Mussolini built resort of Kalithera Themi. For the moment, I just want to note that the history of Rhodes and the broader Dodecanese Islands has its own unique features.

I keep saying that history and individual visions of history exercise a deep influence on Greek history. To many Greek nationalists, the Byzantine influence, the dream of recreating the great Greek empire, has had powerful appeal. Mussolini, too, suffered from the same disease with his dream of recreating the (Western) Roman Empire.

In 1919, war broke out between Greece and Turkey. The end result was was what would be called today ethnic cleansing. More than a million Greek speakers, half a million Turkish speakers, were relocated.

Rhodes under Italian control was spared this bloodshed and forced dispossession. As a consequence, the Island retained a significant Muslim minority population.

The photo shows the Mosque of Suleiman which is currently being restored. The mosque of Suleiman was built soon after the Turks occupied the city of Rhodes in 1522 on the site of the destroyed Christian Church of the Apostles.

As we walked up the hill from our hotel towards the museum, we passed the site of the huge explosion of 1856 and then walked down the street to the museum.

Now here I want to introduce a practical hint, one that I have referred to before. When travelling in a group in which different people have different interests and go at different paces, do set reunion points and times. Otherwise, you will end up with some waiting for very long periods!

In my next post I want to go back much further into the past, to Rhodes well before the period of the Knights. But that will have to wait until tomorrow. 

Personal Reflections reader interests August 11

End month stats time. The graphic shows visits (yellow) and page views (yellow plus red) to this blog to end August 2011. 

The most popular posts on this blog in August were:

• Introducing Delos 167 page views
• Report of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, year ended 30 June 1940 140 page views
• Sunday Snippets - NZ earthquakes, Tomorrow when the War began, wild weather 79 page views
• George Negus, watermelons & the meaning of words 78 page views
• A few of my favourite blogs 68 page views
• The importance of cultural activities 68 page views
• Sunday Snippets - cultural differences between Indonesia and Australia, the wonders of Sydney tribalism 53 page views
• Threads in Belshaw thought 46 page views

Pleasing to see on of the Greek trip posts appear so strongly in the stats. I have about another half dozen posts to go to finish the series, then I can do a single post listing them all in date so that people can follow the whole trip and associated musings. 

Postscript

I have now finished the monthly review of reader interests across three blogs.

A gripe, first. The blogger writing/editing facility sure is clunky. I use Livewriter for most of my posts. If I need to edit using blogger, I seem to lose my formatting and have to reformat. Worse, the changes that have been made to blogger seem to have had a negative impact on the formatting of at least some previous posts. With over 4,000 posts now across blogs, re-editing is an almost impossible nightmare.

While I focus on the most popular posts in the monthly stats, I have also been looking back at posts from the dim and distant past to see what posts still get traffic, what posts don't, what old posts might be worth re-promoting. As you might expect, as you go back in time traffic falls away. In most cases, the posts are not worth re-promoting, although some do contain ideas worthy of development.

Interestingly given the current Australian emphasis on productivity, the first short post I did on productivity - On productivity: a short note - was back on 14 July 2006. There I said in part:

Corporatisation and privatisation of Australia's electricty industry saw large productivity gains. However, some of those gains were due to unsustainable cost cutting on the staff side.

In 2004 I chaired a seminar trying to attract trades people to consider employment opportunities in regional NSW. One of the speakers was from the electricity industry. He said in part that cut backs across the industry in the recruitment and training of linemen had created a major shortage. The industry was now struggling to catch up.

Link this to the productivity question. The initial cuts led to substantial apparent productivity increases. But the industry then had to pay lot more to try to attract immediately available linemen and to train new one. So productivity turned negative.

The point? Beware of apparent trends unless you understand what had happened before.

Now that's a point that's still relevant!

In the more popular posts area, the posts I wrote on Judith Wright's poetry and especially The Poetry of Judith Wright - South of My Days are featuring again because it is that time again in the school year. Many of those posts were linked in some way with posts by my long standing blogging colleague Neil Whitfield.

I went prowling across some of Neil's past blogs looking at those posts. I think that it would be worthwhile for either Neil or I to do a consolidation of the collected posts for they are clearly of continuing interest.

On the history blog in particular, posts linked in some way to Aboriginal history continue to score very well. On this blog, Report of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, year ended 30 June 1940 is the second most popular post since Google started to provide stats by a margin of 1,800 page views over number three. The most popular post is Sunday Essay - the importance of quiet time in a crowded world.

I am conscious that some of the Aboriginal posts that people are searching on badly need updating. Still, I fear that that will have to be for another day!

Refugees and the NSW disease

On Monday I wrote of the New South Walesing of the Federal Government, expressing the forlorn desire that we might get back to discussion on policy. That desire now seems even more forlorn.

The Australian media this morning is dominated by the High Court decision disallowing the Australian Government's Malaysian refugee swap deal. Legal Eagle's Breaking News: High Court declares Malaysian “Solution” illegal provides an initial summary of the legal issues, as does Ken Parish's Driving the final nails into a political coffin.

Insert: Legal Eagle has now posted a very clear analysis of the High Court decision, including an explanation as to why the Government felt so confident - Malaysian Solution Post Mark II. Do read this when you are considering some of the commentary.

It is too early to say what the policy outcomes will be in the refugee area, nor can we assume that they will be positive.  However, from a political perspective, the immediate damage has been substantial. Michelle Grattan's Incompetence and disaster: another grim day for Gillard and Annabel  Crabb's High Court climax to a tale of rambling incompetence will give you a feel.

Terms like New South Walesing or the NSW disease that I and others have applied to the Australian Government must seem quite obscure to international readers. For that reason, I thought that I should describe it in a little more detail.

About NSW

With a population of 7.3 million, NSW is Australia's largest population state. While not the largest state in area, it is still large - 809,444 km² or 312,528 sq m. With 4.4 million people, the Sydney Statistical Division (Sydney plus the NSW Central Coast and the Blue Mountains) contains a substantial majority of the State's population.

NSW has not been an especially well governed state for a very long time. The reasons for this are part institutional, part cultural and part geographic. In recent years, NSW Labor Government performance deteriorated to the point that the term NSW disease was coined to describe the results. But what is the NSW disease? This is best described in terms of symptoms.

 Rise of the Professional Machine

In my recent post cited above, I suggested that the role of Government was to govern. However, to govern you have to be in power. Even twenty  years ago, the ALP's political machine in NSW was seen as a model because of the way it used professional techniques such as polling and focus groups to target policies to particular areas that would yield the best political results.

In NSW, this led to what I called pottage politics in which expenditure of small amounts could be used to attract support in particular seats. Of itself, this was not new. The nineteenth century factional political system used the same process. What was new was the degree of professionalism.

There is nothing wrong with either the desire to attain power, nor in being responsive to needs. However, what occurred in NSW was that professional politics came to dominate. Instead of asking the question how do we sell our policies, the question became what policies will sell and at the lowest cost.

Communications and risk management

As part of the process that I am talking about, concepts of communication and risk management became increasingly important. How do we communicate our message, how do we manage the risks that something might go wrong?

This was not unique to NSW, but is a broader feature of modern politics. However, as political conditions deteriorated in NSW, more and more time was spent on communication and risk management, leaving less time available for other policy development activities.

All new things involve risk. The greater the weigh that you place on risk, the more constrained you become in your capacity to act.

Rise of the media and the commentariat

Things such as sound bites or the twenty four hour news cycle are not unique to NSW. They feed on and interact with the professionalisation of politics because the media requires instant stories, professional politics requires that the message be got out.

The problem is that much effective policy development is long term. Inevitably, policy failures increase with time. As its record of failures increased, the NSW Government became increasingly locked into short term, reactive approaches. One symptom of this was the increasing tendency to go for actions perceived to be immediately attractive to the electorate or groups in the electorate, really the symbols rather than the substance, that would yield a short term hit at minimum immediate cost.

Actions or proposals were packaged and re-packaged for immediate gain. As the media became more hostile, the Government was forced into a narrowing range of options, creating a downward spiral. This fed to an increasingly cynical media. By the end of the NSW Labor period, the media had actually become the real opposition.

Distribution of spoils and the rise of the professional party person

Another feature of the rise of professionalism was the creation of new career paths.

Labor has been in power in NSW for the majority of the last hundred years because of the political demographics of the state. With the professionalisation of politics, Labor came to draw from an increasingly narrow band of people who followed very specific career paths through ALP and trade union structures.

NSW Labor has always played its politics hard. From the 1970s, the Party began increasingly to use power to reward through appointment. I am not talking about formal corruption. Rather, the appointment of sympathisers to a myriad of official and often unpaid positions. In some cases, this actually broke long standing conventions about, for example, the role of MPs.

Pursuit of immediate power and status became dominant in the Party. Bad ministers were protected by their factions, new blood found it hard to break through.

By the last days of the NSW Labor Government, there was a growing disconnect between Party and factional games and electoral realities. The games proceeded regardless.

Centralisation and Control

  To stay on message requires central control. As things became more difficult, the instinctive response was to increase control, to minimise risk and improve targeting.

By the end of the Labor period in NSW ministerial power had declined. Increasingly, the ability of individual ministers to do new things was limited by the need to protect the Government, to ensure control. At official level, centralisation within agencies and in the central coordinating departments of Premiers and Treasury created acute policy constipation.

Everything was controlled. There was little room for new thought, or for those who wanted to do really new things. Even when, as was the case with Premier Morris Iemma at certain points, the Premier as head of Government wanted to do new things, they stumbled on systemic constipation.

Focus on rules, process and reporting

Control requires rules. Risk management requires rules.

By the end of the NSW Labor period, doing things the right way, compliance, had become central. Doing things the right way had become more important than doing the right thing, much more important than doing the new thing. This was complicated further by an ever increasing accretion of controls and rules introduced to correct defects or because they were seen as politically popular, as well as increasingly complicated reporting requirements.  

Agencies and officials struggled under a load that affected both internal administration and service delivery. In some cases, child welfare is an example, systems started to collapse. Output measurements and reporting requirements proliferated. 

Conclusion

Australian readers will note that I have generally not mentioned specific policies in this discussion, nor the question of corruption.

Dealing with corruption first, corruption does tend to rise with rules in the sense that where money is involved more rules means more scope for corruption. That said, and despite the newspaper stories, I know of no evidence that corruption under the later Labor period in NSW was any worse than in previous periods, although the rules designed to prevent corruption did reduce official flexibility.  

On policy, my focus has been on systemic weaknesses: I could have and have cataloged various failures; here my focus is on the underlying causes.

I am, I suppose, something of a natural rebel. I like to achieve. I also want to improve things. I have been campaigning for improvement, for basic reform, for some time.

My knowledge of the way things work makes me a reasonably acute judge of what is likely to go wrong. My character and approach can make it difficult to get messages across.

As I write, I am listening to commentators zeroing in on the immigration issue. Words like death spiral or this Government could not organise a chook raffle are being used.

That may be right. But in the focus on politics and the immediate events, those of us who want to talk about policy or about improvement are simply being crowded out. The way things stand now, we are at risk of doing a NSW, creating a situation where the Australian Government will become dysfunctional, limping along.

The Government may or may not win the next election. In the meantime, let's get on with the business of discussing policy and ways of improving performance.  

A sense of déjà vu about Australian industry policy

The problems faced by Blue Scope Steel has re-opened the question of industry policy. You would think that I would be sympathetic to some of the arguments involved, and indeed I am to some. But my overwhelming feeling was a sense of déjà vu.

I decided that I should write a short post linking to some of my past writing and work. Then as I started to list this, I realised that the posts were a bit too fragmentary, especially for people outside Australia who lacked context.

But for the moment, have a look at Confessions of a Policy Adviser -1- Setting the Scene. Sound familiar? This was 1980. You can see the chaos associated with the need to provide a sudden response. I concluded the post this way:

Quite frankly, this was one of the least satisfying experiences of my professional life. A week end to try to provide sensible advice on this issue was bad enough. But we also lacked the policy framework and supporting analytical tools required to say anything new and useful. So in the end we provided statistics with some fairly superficial supporting analysis. I swore that I would never put myself in this position again.

Against this background, I thought that it might be interesting to explore the way in which policy is developed and implemented, in so doing looking at some of policy debates with a special focus on industry.

Following this post I did write a number of related posts. As I said, upon review they proved to be a bit too fragmentary. Still, upon reflection, I think that it's probably worth re-publishing them in a series with commentary to fill gaps.

I remain very proud of the work that the Belshaviks (to use Bob Quiggin's phrase) did. Part of our success lay in the way we worked from a different perspective. Our failure, and it was a big one, lay in my inability to make changes stick.

While I intend to finish my Greek series, I also feel the need to try to paint a story that will take the question of Australian industrial development (and survival) outside the current political, outside the short term, and put it into a clear historical and policy context.

I really think that we need to do this.   

Walking the walls of Rhodes

Greek Trip, Day 15, Saturday 2 October 2010, Rhodes continued

Continuing from Breakfast in Rhodes, after breakfast we moved off to find the entry to the walls, asking as we went. We still had no idea just what we were doing, although we could see signs of fortifications everywhere.

Now at this stage, I need to introduce a little bit of history.

In 1095 AD (or CE depending upon your preference), the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent envoys to Pope Urban II seeking aid against continuing invasion of the Seljuqs (Turks) who had penetrated not far from Constantinople (now Istanbul). The result was the First Crusade, whose primary aim came to be to free the Holy Lands from Muslim (Fatimid) rule.

The North African based Fatimids were in fact divided from and in opposition to the Seljugs on political, dynastic and religious grounds. During uneasy periods of peace and war, the Fatimids had progressively extended their territory at the expense of the Byzantines.  

In July 1099, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders who instead of returning the territory to Byzantine rule established a series of independent principalities, most importantly the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Now I need to introduce a new player. Australians will know them as the Knights of St John, Maltese as the Knights of Malta.

From 600 there had been a hospital in Jerusalem to care for Christian pilgrims. in 1005 Caliph Al Hakim destroyed the hospital and three thousand other buildings in the city. However, the hospital was given approval to re-open in 1023. After the Crusaders took the city, those involved with the care of pilgrims evolved into religious military orders, the Knights Hospitaller.

When the Kingdom of Jerusalem finally fell in 1291, the Knights took refuge in the Kingdom of Cyprus. from there, they decided to seek their own temporal domain, selecting Rhodes, then part of the Byzantine Empire. Still with me? I know that it's complicated, but that's the reality of Greek history.

After over two years of campaigning, the Island fell to the Knights 15 August 1309. Now named the Knights of Rhodes, they rebuilt the city into a model of the medieval ideal. The end result is that the world heritage listed old Rhodes is the largest still inhabited mediaeval centre in Europe.

I said earlier that Rhodes had a very different feel from the other Greek island centres that we had been too. This history is the reason why. If you look up this street, you will see the cobble stones, the medieval buildings.

This was a much tougher world. To hold their new territory, the Knights needed walls to hold of attack in an uncertain world. These were the walls we were going to walk along. Their size is simply unbelievable.   

I tried to find a photo that would give you a feel. This one gives at least a feel for scale. 

I said that the world was an uncertain place.

In 1444 and then again in 1480, the Knights withstood attack. However, in December 1522 Rhodes fell to the huge invading  army of Suleiman the Magnificent. The Knights had ruled Rhodes for 213 years, not much less than the time since Governor Phillip first arrived at Botany Bay in 1788. Rhodes would now be part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 400 hundred years.

The few remaining nights moved first to the Kingdom of Sicily and then to Malta where they set up a new base. The Knights, now known as the Knights of Malta, would rule in Malta until 1798 when Napoleon occupied the Island.  Today the Knights remain with several orders and internationally recognised vestigial powers as a quasi national entity. 

As we walked along the wall in the bright sun, we looked down into the old city on the left, the new city on the right.  Looking now for photos that might best encapsulate the feel, I chose this one from Clare looking down on the old city. It's not the best shot, but it captures some things I want to talk about. Comments follow the photo.

In terms of the modern, you have the jet trails in the sky, the solar hot water systems. Because of the climate, solar hot water systems are quite noticeable. They are everywhere. Then you have the Greek Orthodox dome and behind it to the right, the mosque. Rhodes is an interesting mix of history and cultures.

The following is another shot. Again, you can see the huddle of buildings and the solar hot water systems. In this case you can also see part of one of the internal gardens that are a feature of Rhodes.

We walked on through the sun to the end of the wall. Now to find our hotel, But that's for the next post!

Breakfast in Rhodes

Greek Trip, Day 15, Saturday 2 October 2010, Rhodes

Continuing the story from Paros & the ferry, we landed at Rhodes about 8am and dragged our bags through the already hot sun to wait for the hotel car. The photo will give you a feel for the size of the boat.

Located in the Dodecanes Islands 363 km (226 mi) east-south-east from the Greece mainland and only 18 km (11 mi) from the southern shore of Turkey, Rhodes (Rodos) is quite a large island: shaped like a spearhead, it is 79.7 km (49.5 mi) long, 38 km (24 mi) wide, with a total area of approximately 1,400 square kilometres (541 sq mi) and a coastline of approximately 220 km (137 mi). As we shall see, the Island's location and size is critical to it's history.

The city of Rhodes itself is located at the northern tip of the island. Having deposited our bags in the hotel car, we walked along the waterfront towards the town, entering another part of the complex mosaic that is Greek history, the world of the crusades.

I had read the guidebooks and knew a little of what to expect, However, I had no visual image, nor did the walk towards the town itself give me a real feel. There were signs of old buildings in the distance, but the road we were walking on was quite nondescript - a sort of Greek port modern!  The road curved round, straightened and we found a wall with an unsigned gate in it.  We walked through, and found ourselves in the old city.

At this stage we had a bit of a problem. We literally had no idea where we were, no idea of how to get to our hotel, no idea of what to expect. We were just at some point in an obviously old place!

What to do?  A few cafes were opening, so the group decided to sit down and have some breakfast and work out what to do.  

That was a strange meal. Billed as an English breakfast. it was a Greek tourist idea of same, a strange amalgam of different styles. Please note the glass shoe. Later I was to have a rather bad experience with same.  

Conscious of my budget, I declined breakfast on the grounds that I needed to stretch my legs and went for a quick walk.

I find in a new place where I have no sense of geography that I need to orient myself. Here I had only a rough idea of where north was, nor could I see many obvious landmarks.

The first thing I did was to walk back to where we had entered the old city so that I had that point firmly fixed in my mind. Then back to the face to stroll in the opposite direction. Here I stopped at a square, marked that in my mind and then strolled around that point.

One of the first things I noticed was a sign to the Jewish Quarter. Now that's quite unusual in terms of what I had seen elsewhere. So that was something I needed to follow up on.

The second thing I noticed was the completely different feel of the place after the other Greek Islands I had visited. The architecture was more massive, the smooth street stones had been replaced by rough cobble stones.

Returning to the group, we decided to do a tour of the old city walls since, by accident, they were open that day. It proved to be one of the best things that we had done. Here I will continue the story in my next post.