Strange Bedfellows

Senator Andrew Bartlett, one of the star bloggers in my Missing Link portfolio, or case-load, or whatever the hell you want to call it, has been having a little trouble with political allies lately. Twice last week he was embarrassed to find himself agreeing with long-standing opponents or adversaries. First it was Greg Sheridan, then it was Peter Slipper.

After reading this report in Saturday's The Age on Julia Gillard's latest proposals for education reform, I find myself in the unpleasant position of agreeing - at least in part - with education warrior Kevin Donnelly. I suppose it's some consolation that I don't find myself agreeing with Andrew Bolt who has endorsed Gillard's push for parents to get details on school performance. I'm agin it.

The sticking point, for me, is in this section of the story:

The [Federal] Government plans to publish the annual results of individual primary and secondary schools on national literacy and numeracy tests, which begin next month, for students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9.

It will also talk to the states about measuring how schools "add value" to students, and is keen for a reporting system that reflects the challenges faced by each school, for instance through socioeconomic data, or trends between similar schools. (emphasis added)

Excuse me, but what planet are we on here? What sort of education policy aims to "add value" to school students? Aren't they valuable enough already, as people in their own right? That's why I'm in uncomfortable agreement with Kevin Donnelly right now - because in this piece, about the 2020 summit briefing paper Education, Skills and the Productivity Agenda he's right on the money:

The first mistake is to define education in terms of its economic and utilitarian value.

Education, instead of being dealt with in its own right, is valued for its ability to contribute to “prosperity, productivity and global competitiveness”, completely ignoring the cultural role of learning...

I suppose it's some consolation that after that point Donnelly pretty much drops the money again and by the end of the piece he's implying that the purpose of education is to preserve culture by storing it in students' brains ("And the fundamental question of the purpose of education in an age when many of the young are disengaged and culturally illiterate is not on the agenda."). But that's not that much consolation. When we have the Federal Minister for Education talking about schools "value adding" to students its pretty clear who's captured the education debate and where the debate's headed.

Who benefits when students are treated as commodities and education is about "value adding"? Not the hapless bloody students, that's for sure.

Will It Make Media Watch?

News Limited loyalist, Bernard Slattery, has joined a certain nursery-rhyme cow, thanks to reports in The National Rupert that journalists at The Age are in open revolt against the sale of the newspaper's soul to commercial interests (reports here and here). According to Bernard:

A common but wrong accusation from lefties is that News Corp editors and journalists are commanded from the top to publish the company line. Such a claim is never directed at the luvvies’ preferred news outlets. Thus, there was a certain smugness in News offices this week when the left-preferred opposition was caught disseminating propaganda.

Bernard's first sentence is incorrect - the standard "leftie" accusation against News Limited editors and journalists is that they're a bunch of ignorant, group-thinking sheep whose faith in the company line is so deep-seated that no command from the top is needed to keep their toes where they should be.

The ructions at The Age have been caused, in part, by Fairfax's participation in the promotion of Earth Hour, and the way “Reporters were pressured not to write negative stories and story topics followed a schedule drafted by Earth Hour organisers.” Bernard looks to that other favourite news outlet of "the luvvies" and asks:

Will it make Media Watch, though?

It already has, Bernie. Us "luvvies" knew about it by Tuesday night at the latest. And The Age journalists' grievances about the treatment given to published correspondence from a certain R Walker of Melbourne didn't come as a complete surprise either.

Hedunits

I used to be a big fan of Wire in the Blood, that TV crime drama that regularly turns up on the ABC. Now I'm not so sure.

Yesterday, I got lucky when I was leafing through the old magazines in the waiting room of my personal head care specialist - there were three old New Yorkers in the stack. One of them was the November 12, 2007 edition, which included "Dangerous Minds - Criminal profiling made easy." by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell totally demolishes the "Hedunit" genre of crime fiction and the real-world profilers don't come out looking too flash either.

Wire in the Blood is a good example of the "Hedunit":

We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of the profiler that it is easy to lose sight of how audacious the genre is. The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nephew, the shadowy European. That’s a Whodunit. In the profiling genre, the net is narrowed. The crime scene doesn’t initiate our search for the killer. It defines the killer for us. The profiler sifts through the case materials, looks off into the distance, and knows ... Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits.

In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. That’s for local law enforcement. He takes the meeting. Often, he doesn’t write down his predictions. It’s up to the visiting police officers to take notes. He does not feel the need to involve himself in the subsequent investigation, or even, it turns out, to justify his predictions... (my emphasis)

Hence in Wire in the Blood we get all those scenes where Tony Hill stands in front of a visual aid with high production value - in the last series that I saw, a large computer touch screen which allowed him to open up crime scene photographs and drag them around the screen with the touch of a finger - saying in an agitated voice: "it doesn't make sense: this is all carefully planned and organised, this is chaotic, impulsive."

Very quickly Tony realises that the crimes are being committed by not one, but two killers. Then the writers add a final plot twist - it's actually one killer with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Of course Wire in the Blood is fiction. But it's a very persuasive form of fiction - a lot of work is put into the production to give it realism. The effect of the Hedunit genre on our understanding of crime and policing is similar to the CSI Effect. We see Tony Hill, brilliant clinical psychologist, reading a crime scene for insights into the personality of a killer and we are gulled into thinking that things actually work that way - after all, modern writers of crime fiction do a lot of research to make their stories plausible, don't they*?

The problem isn't restricted to fiction where background research is distorted for literary or dramatic effect. Hedunits are also presented as non-fiction, in the memoirs of profilers themselves. It's one such memoir that inspires Gladwell's coverage of the history of profiling and his assault on profiling's inflated reputation:

There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization.

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

For more on what those psychologists at the University of Liverpool found, you'll have to Gladwell's original article. Just be warned - if you're a fan of Hedunits, it's the biggest spoiler of all. You might even find yourself erupting into uncontrollable laughter next time you see Tony Hill do his shtick with the crime scene photos.

* - That is we assume that screen writers in the US and the UK do. Give Australian TV producers a million dollar budget for a series and they'll want every possible cent of that million up on screen, with Georgie Parker in the lead female role. The writers can produce any old tosh they like , as long as it's at least up to the standard of Neighbours and Home and Away.

Screen Shot

Does Don Aitken Take Aspirin?

The blogosphere today resounds with plaudits for Professor Don Aitken, eminent historian and political scientist, and respected academic, after this report in the Opposition Orifice that Professor Aitken doesn't believe that the science of global warming stacks up:

The eminent historian and political scientist said in a speech called A Cool Look at Global Warming, which has received little public attention, that he was urged not to express his contrary views to orthodox thinking because he would be demonised.

He says critics who question the impact of global warming are commonly ignored or attacked because "scientist activists" from a quasi-religious movement have spread a flawed message that "the science is settled" and "the debate is over"...

Although not a scientist, he has brought his critical approach as an experienced academic accustomed to testing theories to a debate he says so far lacks clear evidence.

Aitken hits all the usual "skeptical" talking points - the computer models are crook, it's all a beat-up by those "activist scientists" who silence critics with the threat of Soviet style demonisation then very late in the article declares one of his own misgivings about the science:

[Aitken] says an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide over the past century is agreed, some of it due to fossil fuels, cement-making and agriculture. However, normal production of CO2 is not known, and it makes up only a tiny part of the atmosphere. "How does a small increase in a very small component have such a large apparent effect? The truth is that no one has yet shown that it does." (emphasis added)

Which brings us to the question of aspirin. When I get a headache - a really bad headache - I usually resort to a taking a couple of aspirin tablets, at 250 milligrams to 300 milligrams a tablet. I'm of about average weight for my height - let's say 80 kg. That's 80,000,000 milligrams. How can such a tiny amount of aspirin diffused through all that body mass possibly cure my headache?

A similar question that might trouble Professor Aitken in his sleep is how can he be sure that he will wake up in his bed tomorrow, and not floating around in outer space, when the gravitational constant is so damned small?

The real risk Professor Aitken has taken in declaring his skepticism isn't that "activist scientists" will call him a madman; it's that they'll take him for a fool.

Anti-PC Beat Up of the Week

Oteha Valley School in Auckland has achieved global notoriety with a "ban" on children bringing birthday cake to school. In the most recent edition of the school newsletter the principal of Oteha Valley School made the following request to parents:

The tradition [of] taking a cake or sweets to the preschool centre on your child’s birthday has moved into schools over the past few years. However, the Ministry of Education’s new National Administrative Guidelines for healthy eating will not encompass birthday treats... We still love to celebrate your child’s birthday with them but, as from the beginning of Term 2, please do not send any food to share with the class.

I'm not sure when this "tradition" started, or how. My guess is that it's a fairly recent development, started by some status-conscious pander of a parent who decided that their special child wasn't getting their fair share of recognition at the local kinder. Someone who figured that the way to improve their snotty little brat's popularity was to bribe the other kiddies. You can imagine the playground conversations about the little bugger can't you: "Tarquin might be a nathty little thit, but hith mummy maketh real nithe birthday caketh."

By the time I learnt of the story (through Bernard Slattery's blog, Bernard being something of a go-to guy if you're looking for ridiculous anti-PC media beat-ups) that request had been turned into an order:

Oteha Valley School in Auckland has told parents not to allow their children to bring birthday cakes to school for friends to share, The New Zealand Herald reported Friday. (AFP)

CHILDREN in a New Zealand school have been banned from taking cakes to the classroom to share on their birthdays, due to new government guidelines on healthy eating. (The Scotsman, for crying out loud)

In keeping with standard tabloid practice, none of the outlets who carried the "PC killjoys deprive kiddies of birthday cake" bothered with the school's side of the story or checked the school newsletter. Other news organisations weren't so slack:

The principal of an Auckland primary school says the media seems more upset about a ban on birthday cakes than parents are...

Principal Megan Bowden says there were no qualms from students about the loss of their birthday tradition - which has attracted nationwide attention.(New Zealand's TV3)

With 400 students, there is a birthday at least every day at the school. Baking was flying in the door, and Principal Megan Bowden had no choice but to place a ban on the humble birthday cake.

Bowden says the government's healthy food guidelines are one of the reasons for the ban.

But she says many parents were also thinking that it was compulsory to provide birthday cake.

"We think parents shouldn't have to pay out extravagant money just to bring cake to school for their children's birthday. There are lots of other ways of celebrating a children's birthday without having to share food."

Bowden says some parents like to manage what their kids eat, and are unable to do that if dessert is being provided at school.

She estimates sometimes a classroom would have up to four cakes in a week before the ban. (TVNZ

That's right, TV3 and TVNZ actually talked to the school's principal before they got on their high horses about cake-deprived kiddie victims of political correctness and wowserism. The real story, it turns out, is this - a school principal decided to ask parents to desist from a practice that might have been putting other parents to unnecessary expense and undermining the authority of those weird, abberant parents who want their kids to have a healthy diet. That seems an entirely appropriate way to deal with the issue.

One question to finish with - who is actually being deprived here? Is it the kids, or is it those idiot parents who take pride in the fact that little Tarquin always has the biggest and best cake to take to school on his birthday? Think about it.

Randomised Trials in Education - Towards A Practical Approach

Dr Andrew Leigh of the Australian National University, would like to see public policy become more evidence based, particularly in the field of education. He has suggested that randomised trials of the effects of factors such as teachers' salaries and class sizes on educational outcomes would be desirable, to give policy makers, and the rest of us, the information needed to make sound decisions on education policy. In this post I will outline a practical scheme for conducting such a randomised trial.

The trial will require at least four schools. Due to the rigorous controls that are outlined below, these schools will need to be newly constructed - I propose that a National Institute of Experimental Education (NIEE) be established, to manage these experimental schools. Specific details of school organisation are detailed below.

For a trial on the effects of class sizes and teachers salaries four distinct school regimes are needed:

School One: a school with low teacher pay and large class sizes;
School Two: a school with low teacher pay and small class sizes;
School Three: a school with high teacher pay and large class sizes;
School Four: a school with high teacher pay and small class sizes.

This requirement is dictated by the difficulty of constructing an appropriate control group for such a randomised trial; a control group of children who are not schooled at all might create problems for Australian society at large and it is difficult to identify anything that might serve as an educational placebo.

Blinding - of the kind applied in clinical trials of medical treatments - will be difficult but not impossible.

First, students in each of the schools must be kept in ignorance of the existence of the other schools in the trial, and indeed, the existence of any schools unlike the one that they are attending. This can be achieved by drafting representative random samples of children of school entry entry age from all states. The Federal Parliament will need to pass legislation conferring this power on the NIEE.

Similarly, teachers must be selected at random - without regard for experience or competence - from across the states, and the National Institute of Experimental Education will need the power to draft teachers in this way. Teachers drafted to the NIEE will be placed on strict employment contracts stipulating, in particular, that in no way are they to alert the students to the fact that an NIEE school is not a normal school. Heavy sanctions, possibly including criminal penalties, will be imposed on any NIEE teacher breaching this term of their employment contract.

To rigorously control for possible exogenous factors (such as differences in home environment), all students at NIEE schools will be boarders. A rigorous security regime to ensure their separation from the outside world will be maintained. To prevent students inadvertently learning of the existence of other schools which might differ from their own, students will have no access to radio, television, print media or the internet.

A viable first trial would consist of six years of primary education under such conditions, followed by release of half of the experimental students into the general population, where their academic performance in secondary school would be closely monitored.

The other half of the experimental population would receive a further six years of schooling under the above conditions, and their performance on standard university entrance examinations analysed. After their release into the general population, NIEE researchers would monitor their performance in tertiary education.

Longitudinal monitoring of NIEE schooled students is also indicated to establish the effects of these four distinct educational regimes in preparing students for stable employment and social relationships.

News Limited Eats One of Its Own

Robyn Wuth is a columnist at The Gold Coast Bulletin, one of News Limited's provincial papers. Today she scored a spot in the Brisbane Courier Mail, with an open letter to Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh. Headlined "Robyn appeals to the Premier" the open letter is actually a hectoring list of incoherent demands.

Before we look at the letter, it's worth taking a look at Wuth's previous form as a journalist. Our first source will be this Conference paper, "Journalists Trying to Make a Quid, Politicians Seeking Re-election and Tightrope-walking Judges: Three-ring circus or democracy in action?" by Justice Margaret McMurdo, President of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Queensland. It was presented at the ANU National Institute of Social Sciences & Law conference on confidence in the courts in February 2007.

In the paper, Justice Margaret McMurdo describes a little brou-ha-ha that resulted from a judgement made by Justice Philip McMurdo in the case of Attorney-General for the State of Queensland v Sutherland. Sutherland had served the full term of a 20 year prison sentence for crimes including manslaughter and rape. The Queensland Attorney-General wanted Sutherland kept in prison under a continuing detention order. The full 16 page judgement in is available here (PDF); it was published on September 27, 2006.

On October 6, The Gold Coast Bulletin published as its page 1 story Psycho killer next door by Robyn Wuth:

A sexually sadistic psychopath who police say is one of the most dangerous offenders ever to be released on the Gold Coast is now living in a house, pictured above, next door to a children's playground at Nerang.

... Shocked local residents have reacted with anger at the revelation the convicted killer had moved into their area without them being warned. Sutherland was convicted of the 1987 strangulation death in Bundaberg of 47 year old Paula Peters, which he said was the result of a bondage sex act gone wrong...

... A warning issued to the Gold Coast police and leaked to The Gold Coast Bulletin describes
Sutherland as a serious danger to the community (as quoted by Justice McMurdo)

Inside the paper, Wuth's report continued, under the headline "Fury at psycho killers release":

A killer diagnosed as a 'sexually sadistic psychopath' who the Government believes is so dangerous he should never be released is living at Nerang next to a children's playground.

Paul Vincent Sutherland ... is now living unsupervised in a modest three-bedroom brick home
on Nerang-Beaudesert Road.

... Shocked neighbours and nearby residents were horrified to learn a convicted killer was their new neighbour. One nearby resident who has young children burst into tears when told how close she lived to the killer. (as quoted by Justice McMurdo, emphasis added)

Right now I'm wondering who told that mother of young children about Sutherland, to elicit that tearful response. Any suggestion that it was Wuth herself would be pointless speculation - no competent tabloid journalist, whether they worked in print, radio or television, would forego the opportunity to pass on such distressing news and report the reaction.

The outcome of Wuth's report was a political controversy which drew in Acting Premier Anna Bligh. On October 7, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported, under the headline "'Terror Next Door – Nerang breathes easy after killer taken away", that Sutherland had been moved out of Nerang. In that article, Wuth and a colleague, J Gibbons, got stuck into the judge responsible for his release:

Residents were outraged Sutherland had been allowed to move into the suburb and blamed Justice Margaret McMurdo, the judge who refused the State Government appeal to keep Sutherland behind bars and granted his freedom.

Despite acknowledging Sutherland was 'more likely to reoffend', Justice McMurdo decided his release was an 'acceptable risk' to the Nerang community, while she lived safely in an exclusive inner-Brisbane suburb in her secure $2 million mansion.

The later report includes interviews with outraged local worthies: once again, routine stuff for a competent tabloid journalist in any medium. For the rest of the story, I suggest you look at Justice McMurdo's conference paper. A google search for more recent news of Sutherland turns up little dating beyond that paper - a clear case of no news is no news - good or bad. For the time being, Sutherland isn't sensation fodder.

Some of Wuth's recent op-ed columns are archived at The Gold Coast Bulletin. They make interesting reading - individually incoherent and rambling, as a whole collection capricious and inconsistent. On February 16th, Wuth had this to say about Kevin Rudd's apology to the stolen generation:

... It's insincere, it solves nothing but it was a lovely photo opportunity.

We said it to make you feel better ... did it work?

...

To be honest, I'm sick of all this namby-pamby boo-hooing about bloody saying sorry.

...

For every Aboriginal child who was stolen, another was saved, some were given a chance to change their lives.

It's a shame they refused to take it.

...

But I have to say sorry.

Sorry for giving you free medical care, for giving you money, for building you homes which you vandalised and destroyed and treated with contempt and we paid to fix.

Sorry for developing large farms and properties, which today feed your people.

Sorry for providing you with warm clothing made of fabric to replace the animal skins you used before.

Sorry for building roads and railway tracks between cities and building cars so that you no longer have to walk over harsh terrain.

The fact is, we won.

All right?

We came in and we killed lots of them and we took their land and we're not giving it back, unless the High Court makes us and then, frankly, the High Court will have to go.

Then on April 4, she had this to say about the Northern Territory intervention:

IT'S Australian apartheid. I hate to say I told you so ... who am I kidding? I love to say I told you so.

I've made up a special dance which I'm doing right now.

Remember when Kevin Rudd said 'I'm sorry'?

In a column that inspired a tirade, I said it was 'insincere'.

Well, I told you so.

While Kevin Rudd said sorry before the cameras and posed for the lovely pictures and puffed out his chest and preened like a proud little pigeon, behind the scenes it was a completely different story.

The Labor Government, in its wisdom, has wound back any attempt to open up the Aboriginal territories to all-comers and reinstated the permit system to ensure all communities remain closed. A better word? Hidden.

That means these communities can become taboo territory rife with sexual abuse, alcoholism and violence -- completely closed to normal scrutiny.

...

The bottom line is we -- all Australians -- are not allowed to go a part of our own country without permission. This is similar to the system once used in South Africa. My colleague Ken Vernon, who spent 25 years reporting on apartheid South Africa, says the same type of permit system applied to the black 'homelands' created under apartheid, with the same result.

"The black homelands became cesspools of crime, corruption and nepotism, exempt from the prying eyes of journalists, where local leaders became virtual dictators whose word was law."

Sound familiar? Is that what we want to happen here? Is that the image we want to send to the world -- Australia, the new pariah state?

As I said, incoherent and inconsistent. The only thing the two columns have in common is their ranting, self-righteous tone.

On Saturday, 29 March, Robyn Wuth's cousin, Carmel Wuth, was raped and killed by Maurizo Perini, a resident of the same aged-care facility as Ms Wuth. The Queensland Opposition is already demanding an inquiry into the killing, and how a "psycho" came to be living in an aged care facility. And that's not all they're demanding:

Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg demanded Perini be tried in the courts rather than "disappear" into Queensland's mental health system.

Robyn Wuth is making similar demands in her open letter to Anna Bligh:

If mental illness is a defence and the accused person never faces trial, I am supposed simply to contain my rage.

I am supposed to respect his privacy. I want this man to have a fair trial, to have his day in court and for justice to be served.

I watch closely as it unfolds. A man has been charged, but what are the chances he will ever face trial? I suspect none. Already, the accused has been ordered by the courts to undergo an advanced mental health assessment in a secure facility in a Brisbane hospital.

And so it begins.

What begins is the process which might see Perini '"disappear" into Queensland's mental health system; if the courts find that Perini is unfit to plead, there obviously won't be a trial. That's a painful result for the Wuth family, but one that can't be avoided if the law is to be fair to both Carmel Wuth's family and to Maurizo Perini. Of course that's much easier for me to say from a considerable geographic distance and the position of someone who isn't personally acquainted with the Wuth family.

Human decency - of the kind Wuth and her peers expect, even demand, of their readers - dictates that we feel sorrow for Carmel Wuth and the Wuth family and outrage on their behalf. I'm having a bit of trouble with that right now, thanks to The Gold Coast Bulletin's latest article on the Carmel Wuth murder "Elderly in dark as psychos move in", by Kathleen Donaghy:

RETIREES and the elderly are moving into unregulated aged hostels and retirement villages with no idea they could be living next to somebody who is mentally ill.

The dire lack of supported accommodation on the Gold Coast has forced people with mental health problems into homes with the old and frail, sometimes with devastating consequences, according to carers and mental health advocates.

At the same time, no laws exist to prevent ordinary hostels from using 'retirement' or 'aged' in their names.

The controversy surrounding aged accommodation has come to a head after the horrific killing of Carmel Wuth, 77, who had been living in the Trinity Gardens Retirement Hostel, which is open to all ages.

What is the The Gold Coast Bulletin agitating for this time, besides a day in court for Maurizo Perini, fit to plead or not. You can get some idea from Wuth's open letter:

How can I put my faith in a system that placed a strong 36-year-old man in a retirement village, among the elderly in the first place?

A system that prefers to shove the mentally ill out the door and into the community.

A system that closed the asylums years ago.

A system that ludicrously relies on the mentally ill to self-medicate, without proper supervision and support...

Time and time again we see cases where the mentally ill are involved in horrendous crimes of violence.

This is an ignorant, fearful view of mental illness - Robyn Wuth wants all the loonies locked up in asylums where they belong, so that, in future, the aged in nursing homes and young mothers in suburbia, need never be upset by a tabloid journalist asking "How do you feel knowing that your next door neighbour is a psycho?" Never mind that in most cases of mental illness, the people who are at most risk of harm are the patients themselves, who might top themselves, or harm themselves in other ways, if unmedicated.

Towards the end of her open letter, Wuth declares:

All these years, I have interviewed so many people whose lives have been touched by tragedy.

For the first time in my life, I understand.

You'd have to have a heart of stone and a head of balsa to read that without smiling at the irony of a sensation-monger feeding herself into the sensation-mill.

Postscript: I think I'll treat myself to a hiatus now. Comments are disabled so that:

• Anyone who wants to slag me off for being callous and ghoulish has to do it elsewhere, where I don't have to read them;


• I don't have to spend a lot of time deleting defamatory comments about Robyn Wuth, The Gold Coast Bulletin or any other person or organisation mentioned in this post.

Qu(ot)e?

At the risk of stooping to the level of culture warrior by broad-brushing an entire subgroup of the community, it must be said that the chest-beaters on the Left and Right of our national discourse are surprisingly naive in the ways of politics. They think governments run nations when, in fact, they manage them as best they can. They mistake the limits of power for cowardice and think the exercise of policy reform is an exact science.

This isn't a comment against individuals, but against a style of writing that assumes only one version of Australia, be it Left or Right, is the true expression of national identity. Australia is open and closed. It has three established mainstreams: the traditional white male, the tertiary-educated woman and the Australia-born children of immigrants. Each brings a slightly different perspective to national identity, depending on the topic.

This level of complexity escapes the cultural warriors because they need caricatures of good and evil.

George Megalogenis in the Australian Literary Review.

Got that everyone? To understand Australian society in all its complexity, one stereotype is not enough. You need three.

Same Old Same Old

According to HL Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. It's equally impossible to lose a political debate, or personal credibility, by underestimating the attention span and incuriosity of the Australian public. Especially on the internet.

A recent study by two Harvard University economists - Radha Iyengar, Jonathan Monten - published at the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has been picked up by defenders of the war in Iraq as a rhetorical big stick, leftists for the whacking of. If you can't afford the $5 (US) NBER charges for electronic delivery of the paper, you can get some idea of its content from this US News report.

I first learnt of the study from this post on Andrew Bolt's blog - "Leftists Lie, Iraqis Die":

It comes with lots of important caveats, and yet:

Are insurgents in Iraq emboldened by voices in the news media expressing dissent or calling for troop withdrawals from Iraq? The short answer, according to a pair of Harvard economists, is yes.

Kudos to Bolt for mentioning that the study included "lots of important caveats"; no kudos for that inflammatory title and omitting those important caveats from his own coverage of the study. No kudos, either, for ignoring the ending of that US News report:

But before partisans go wild on both sides of the aisle, here are just three of the important caveats to this study:

• The city of Baghdad, for a variety of reasons, was excluded from the report. The authors contend that looking at the outside provinces, where 65 percent of insurgent attacks take place, is a better way to understand the effect they have discovered. Other population centers like Mosul, Basra, Kirkuk, and Najaf were included in the study.
  


• The study does not take into account overall cost and benefit of public debate. Past research has shown that public debate has a positive effect on military strategy, for example, and, in the case of Iraq, might be a factor in forcing the Iraqi government to more quickly accept responsibility for internal security.
  


• It was not possible, from the data available, to determine whether insurgent groups increased the overall number of attacks against American and Iraqi targets in the wake of public dissent and debate or simply changed the timing of those attacks. This means that insurgents may not be increasing the number of attacks after all but simply changing the days on which they attack in response to media reports. (emphasis added)

That last caveat rather detracts from Bolt's implied argument, that the left should jolly well shut up about Iraq - not that he's in favour of limiting free speech, of course, he just wishes that opponents of the war would wake up to themselves. It's not known, from the study, whether public dissent leads to new attacks, or whether the insurgents are timing their attacks to coincide with periods of public dissent.

Bolt's argument, such as it is, is tenuous. And pretty childish. "Every time you say that going to war in Iraq was a mistake Iraqis die" is little better than "Every time you say I don't believe in fairies a fairy dies."

I don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in fairies. That's three blokes who won't be going to the next Sydney Mardi Gras.

Bolt's argument is made even more tenuous by that last caveat - if debate merely influences the timing of the attacks, rather than the overall number, it becomes a case of "Every time you say you don't believe in fairies a poofter bashing happens".

I don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in fairies. That's three blokes I've just put into intensive care.

If you want to limit the chances of a skeptical reader - a potential critic - finding those caveats, you do as Currency Lad has done in this post. You link to the NBER abstract, which doesn't mention those embarassing caveats at all:

Finally, given the emboldening effect of anti-Bush agitprop and mendacious journalism, it would help if some observers grew up. If only they were as serious about liberty and peace as they are about "global warming."

There's one caveat to the study that US News doesn't list - perhaps it's omitted from the NBER paper as well. It's too bleeding obvious to rate a mention.

In the US, in particular, it's difficult to stifle dissent from government policy completely, because of that well known First Amendment to the Constitution. In Australia the protections are weaker but we like to at least pay lip service to the idea that we're a democratic society where freedom of speech is valued and respected.

There's a very obvious double standard in play in both cases. Bolt and the Currency Lad have this week lauded the publication of Geert Wilders' Fitna on the web as a victory for free speech. Yet here we see them advocating restraint of free speech when it comes to discussion of Iraq. Debate on that thorny topic would be best conducted if one side - the critics of the war - just kept their mouths shut. Critics of Fitna, those who dare to suggest that Wilders' film shouldn't have been published - bad evil opponents of free speech. Bolt and Currency Lad, who would like public debate on Iraq to be conducted without the participation of the war's opponents - defenders of "responsible" free speech.

There's a name for that. It's one of the words that George Orwell is credited with introducing into the dictionary: doublethink.

When Is a Shortage not a Shortage?

When it's an "affordability crisis" of course.

After I'd looked over my selections for Missing Link today, I made the mistake of re-reading this one, and following the link to the web page of the Senate Select Committee on Housing Affordability in Australia. Then I got really stupid and looked at the committes's terms of reference:

That a select committee, to be known as the Select Committee on Housing Affordability in Australia be established to inquire into and report upon:

The barriers to home ownership in Australia, including:
a. the taxes and levies imposed by state and territory governments;
b. the rate of release of new land by state and territory governments;
c. proposed assistance for first home owners by state, territory and the Commonwealth governments and their effectiveness in the absence of increased supply;
d. the role of all levels of government in facilitating affordable home ownership;
e. the effect on the market of government intervention in the housing sector including planning and industrial relations laws;
f. the role of financial institutions in home lending; and
g. the contribution of home ownership to retirement incomes.

After reading that, I decided that I was a lot less revved up to do write up a submission to the inquiry, because the committee is basically wasting its time and I see no good reason to sacrifice any of my time on such a pointless exercise.

Calling the current state of the housing market in Australia a " housing affordability crisis" is like calling a doubling of the price of caviar in Manhattan (caused let's imagine, by a sudden die-back in Black Sea sturgeon populations) a "caviar affordability crisis*". What we have is a housing shortage, in both rental housing and mortgaged housing.

Calling the housing shortage an "affordability crisis" is simply a way of avoiding this unpleasant fact. I have very low expectations of a committee whose terms of reference avoid the real issue with a euphemism. And when those same terms of reference refer explicitly to "barriers to home ownership" it's pretty clear that the fix is in. The committee's job is to come up with a package of "reform proposals" that will appeal to "working families" without putting any of the major corporate players in the housing market off-side.

(I'll stop there if you don't mind. Enjoyable as this recent prolific posting over a wide range of topics has been, it's not a good sign when too many ideas come too easily. There'll be plenty of time for more later.)

* I could have done a whole post riffing on that concept, but April Fool's day is over. Another opportunity missed!

The Law - not a Complete Ass After All?

The case of Thomas Towle, recently convicted of six counts of dangerous driving causing death and four of dangerous driving causing injury is back in the news, with today's Age carrying reports on the sentencing and reactions to it. The Age also provides a link to this transcript of Justice Philip Cummins' sentencing remarks.

True to previous form - when the Towle jury found him not guilty of the more serious charge of culpable driving - The Age has focussed its coverage on the grief of the families of Towles' victims, pitching the story as human interest. It's not alone - a Google News search turns up plenty of reports on the Towle case, from both our major newsprint suppliers.

I don't intend to discuss any of these reports in this post - I'll be sticking to the transcript of the sentencing. The media spin on the story is familiar - it's an obvious outrage, a scandal to society and so on and so forth. And to help convince us of that, once again, the grief of the families of Towle's victims is to be made a public spectacle. None dare call this exploitation because it's being done by the most reputable of journalists, with the consent and participation of the families themselves. It's all in the public interest, too. That's why the case is getting so much coverage; it's got nothing to do with advancing careers or boosting circulation, or audience share, and hence advertising revenue at all.

Cummins J begins his sentencing with this simple statement:

1 This is a most tragic case.

That's where you would stop if you were looking to verbal Cummins J to depict him as an unfit judge, out of touch with community standards like all too many of our judiciary, because in his next remarks he makes it very clear where he believes the responsibility - the blame if you insist - for this tragedy lies:

2 Six loving and loved children, on the threshold of adulthood and with their lives before them, have had their lives taken from them. Their grieving families have been left distraught and devastated. Four more children have been seriously injured and will always bear the trauma inflicted upon them, as will their families also. A whole cohort of good young persons have been traumatised and afflicted. All because of your criminal and dangerous driving, Mr Towle. (emphasis added)

After reviewing the facts of the case, the judge delivers a few remarks that might indicate a slight difference of opinion between judge and jury on the culpable driving charge:

12 A most serious element of your criminal driving was not physical but psychological: you knew that there were, or were likely to be, numerous children in the area of the party house. You knew that they were, or were likely to be, a couple of kilometres (1.8 kilometres in fact) along Myall Street going east from your brother’s house, because you had just traversed it going west. You knew they were, or were likely to be, not far from the two curves in Myall Street, because you had just been there. You had just been reminded of it by your younger brother. Your knowledge that there were, or were likely to be, numerous persons in the relevant area is an especially egregious element of your dangerous driving, Mr Towle.

13 This is not a case of unexpected circumstances. This is not a case of a momentary lapse of attention. This is a case of multi-faceted lack of attention at high speed at night and with knowledge of risk. And with terrible consequences.

14 The jury found you not guilty on all counts of culpable driving causing death (counts 1–6)[2] and of negligent driving causing serious injury (counts 7-10)[3], as well as the other counts, and found you guilty on the alternative counts to counts 1-10, namely dangerous driving causing death or serious injury.[4] It is for those dangerous driving offences that you are to be sentenced, Mr Towle. It is essential that the sentences, and the facts found in sentencing, are consistent with and faithful to the jury’s verdicts. The proper construction of the jury’s verdicts, in my view, is not that the jury were not satisfied of the constituent driving elements alleged of speed, inattention and knowledge, but that the jury characterised that driving – not the consequences, but the driving – not as gross criminal negligence[5], but as dangerous. I proceed on that basis. (emphasis added)

When Justice Cummins turns to the principles of sentencing that he will apply to the case (starting at section 20), he gives the impression that he's scraping around for enough bricks to make up at least a decent fraction of a ton:

23 By operation of law, those sentences are to be served concurrently unless I order otherwise. Therefore I turn to the question of cumulation of these sentences.

...

25 ...There is no principle of law or of logic which requires that in the case of multiple offences arising from the one course of conduct, the total sentence must be no more than the maximum legislative penalty for one of them. To require that the total be no more than the maximum for one would indeed reduce human victims to mere numbers; or, in the words of the illustrious President in DPP v Solomon, to a “meaningless statistic”. Neither parliament nor the courts so reduce people...

The rest of the judgement consists largely of Justice Cummins' reasons for arriving at a final sentence (with cumulation for some of the offences) of 10 years imprisonment with a minimum of 7 years before parole. The question of whether this might be overturned on appeal I leave to the law bloggers.

Thoughtcrime

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out from the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother ...

As the ministry staff filed out of the room to return to their work, there was a murmur of discussion of the artistic merits of the day's hate. Syme, who was working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary declared that he found the mise-en-scene in the opening sequence particularly effective. Winston winced at the term mise-en-scene. It wasn't just OldSpeak, it was the affected Bourgeois dialect of Oldspeak, another indication that Syme with his careless enthusiasms was headed for vaporisation. Parsons loudly declared that anyone who wasn't moved by the sheer technical brilliance of today's Hate was obviously a traitor to Ingsoc - a stock opinion that he repeated every day. He glared around looking for signs of treason but every face upon which his glance fell showed the same enthusiastic approbation of today's film.

Word of the Day: petty

petty adj ... 1 unimportant; trivial (petty complaints). 2 small-minded, mean, contemptible (petty revenges)
...

A handy little word petty - both of those two usages (from the Australian Pocket Oxford) are very apt when it comes to the blogosphere - it's full of people writing about unimportant trivial things (their dogs, their cats, their knitting, their artistic aspirations) and occasionally indulging in some petty revenges. Past experience shows that I'm not above it and recent experience here at this blog shows that even some of the petty* oracles of the newspaper op-ed pages aren't above it either.

Thanks to Sitemeter, I've noticed a couple of spikes in traffic recently - one last week, and one today. They've come from Andrew Bolt's blog, via this Google cache page. The original blog page is here. You'd be hard put to find any difference between the Google cache version and the original page, because the original hasn't been touched in four years. The page certainly hasn't been deleted, despite the fact that some of the contents - in particular a post on Bolt where I got it signally wrong - are a bit of an embarrassment.

The most embarrassing thing about that 2004 post is that, having wrongly accused Bolt of verballing a Federal Court judge, I found myself with a little "boy who cried wolf" problem in September 2005. See "The Extended O'Loughlin J" on this page. Or the Google cache version if you suspect that I've got at it in the past five minutes.

I'm not sure what Bolt is trying to achieve with all this linkage he's been providing me lately - perhaps he's decided to cash in a few get squares for all the bad things I've written about him in the past. Still, they're the sort of get-squares a less petty man might come to regret. Slipping a petty revenge on a minor blogger into a post paying out on Jenny Macklin doesn't really look a lot like cool, clear-headed analysis.

* - 3 minor, inferior, on a small scale (petty princes) [op cit]

Hand Models Wanted

While I was strolling down the street on my way to Uni last week, I noticed a couple of very attractive pieces of hard-rubbish lying on the nature strip - two 51cm x 60cm MDF offcuts. If I clean them up and put a couple of coats of that gesso stuff on them, they'll provide very suitable surfaces for painting on.

I already have one drawing that I want to paint up, but as I was thinking about it, I inevitably came up with the idea of elaborating it (bloody subconscious) so now I'm stuck with finding eight volunteers - four male, four female - who're prepared to sit around for an hour or two while I draw various sketches of their hands.

Some token remuneration, in the form of tea (or coffee) and Tim Tams, might be offered. It will give your right hand something to do while I draw the left, and vice versa.

Why not just use my own hands, you ask? Well, the only one of those I can draw with any facility is the right one, since I'm left handed. I think that a painting of a lot of allegedly different pairs of hands which are all, in fact, the one hand variously misrepresented would lack a bit of verisimilitude.

Environmental Movements in pre-History

It all started with a bunch of proto-human hominids living those rift valleys on the east coast of Africa. The rift valleys provided a fairly substantial slab of environment but, as the number of proto-hominids increased, they noted that for some reason, there was getting to be less and less environment to go around as time went on.

Eventually things declined to the point where there was a lot of proto-bickering about who should get to use which bits of the limited supply of the environment, and how often, and so on and so forth. The end result of this proto-political process was most likely that the upstarts who were demanding more of the environment(the proto-progressives) were kicked out of the rift valleys by those who already held the territory (the proto-conservatives). This was a proto-win-win-solution; the proto-conservatives were rid of the unwanted disruptive element, while the proto-progressives discovered that there was a lot more environment outside the rift valleys. This event was the beginning of the prehistoric era of environmental movements.

During this prehistoric era, the initial experience of kicking those disruptive proto-progressives out the clan or tribal territory to go off and find a new bit of environment where they could fulfil their proto-utopian fantasies (or perhaps their utopian proto-fantasies - in the absence of more information on prehistoric human psychology, it could be either) was repeated over tens of thousands of years as humanities ancestors spread first through Africa, then into Europe.

The pre-historic era of environmental movements ended roughly 40,000 years ago when a group of human settled a large, rather arid island continent that would later be dubbed Terra Nullius. From that point onwards, the option of taking off to find a new hitherto unused slab of environment when you found yourself with not enough environment to go round was no longer available.

"As Clever as It Gets"

Crikey (which I don't receive) and The Australian have both reported on recent changes to the Antarctic Ice sheets which have left one - the Wilkins Ice Shelf - at risk of breaking free from the rest. The reports are most likely based on this British Antarctic Survey (BAS) press release.

But don't be fooled by any of it, particularly statements from self-styled scientists:

Professor [David] Vaughan, who in 1993 predicted that the northern part of Wilkins Ice Shelf was likely to be lost within 30 years if climate warming on the Peninsula were to continue at the same rate, says,

"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened. I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread – we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

If the Wilkins shelf does detach, Professor Vaughn would be well advised to stop and consider this before he claims an "I told you so" - despite the impressive size of the Wilkins shelf there's plenty more Antarctic ice where that came from. And while the BAS gets its knickers in a knot because "Several ice shelves have retreated in the past 30 years - six of them collapsing completely (Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.)", wiser folk, like Jennifer Marohasy are keeping their sang-froid. Because at a mere 0.3% of the total ice sheet, the Wilkins sheet is an insignificant fraction of all the ice that would have to be melted before the sheet is gone completely. As long as the rest stays put, we evidently have nothing to worry about, because anthropogenic global warming can't be happening. Stands to reason, dunnit?

Dichotomy

He keeps himself well-informed and up-to-date on the latest developments in evolutionary psychology; she hasn't grown out of reading her daily horoscope.

Education Revolution? Pull the Other One.

It's going to be interesting to see how Kevin Rudd's "education revolution" progresses over the next couple of years. My prediction is that there isn't going to be any education revolution.

Granted, a lot of parents might get tax rebates on the price of lap-tops that they have bought to further their children's education - an initiative no more misguided than One Laptop Per Child's efforts to provide a free lap-top for every child in the world, and no less effectual in improving their educational prospects. There will be a lot of sound and fury about educational standards - from the Liberals we'll once again hear about the malign legacy of the Maoist long-march through our educational institutions, Kevin Donnelly and others will get on their high horses about the importance of the literary canon and we'll all have a lot of ideological fun raising a thoroughly discordant racket on our own trumpets, while we try to manage the tricky feat of pushing our own barrows at the same time.

In the end there will be a few marginal changes to the education systems of the individual states and territories, the brouhaha will end and we'll all find something else to have equally pointless arguments about. Finally, in at least a decade, the Coalition, or whatever effectual opposition replaces it, will sweep the ALP out of office State by State, and perhaps Federally too. One of its major campaign promises will be to do something once and for all to get the appalling state of our education system sorted. Then we'll have the whole futile debate again, because that's the way we do things in this country.

All of this kerfuffle will be quite beside the point because the outcome of the debate and hence the direction of the "education revolution" has already been determined. Not by any secret conspiracy of the Socialist Left of the ALP, or some coterie of cultural conservatives who have the ear of Kevin Rudd, but by the language which is habitually used when we debate the subject of education and our habit of surrendering education debates to institutional and economic interests. So that what's hyped as revolution turns out a mere tinkering around the edges of the status quo.

I haven't been following Andrew Leigh's writing avidly enough to know whether he's an "education revolutionary", but the evidence of his latest AFR article suggests not. So, in fairness to Andrew, it's worth noting that most of the preceding four paragraphs were written a couple of months ago; they've been sitting around the hard-drive since then, while I waited for either the inspiration to develop the ideas further or a convenient excuse to wheel them out. Nonetheless, his article follows roughly the same rhetorical course that leads from revolutionary hype to bathetic tinkering.

Andrew suggests that the way to make progress on the issue of education funding, is to agree to four basic principles. The first is a motherhood declaration that you'd have a hard time arguing against:

First, the wellbeing of children is more important than anyone else. Teachers and school administrators matter, but the top priority of education policies is to help kids, not adults.

Even teachers and school administrators would have to agree with that one, wouldn't they? Parents - for whom teachers and school administrators are often the natural enemy when it comes to arguments over their kids' education would be especially inclined to agree. Of course Leigh here is constrained by the limitations of the op-ed format - a full catalogue of all the adults whose interests, and perceived interests, need to be discounted in order to focus on the wellbeing of children might well exhaust his word limit. They include politicians and political lobbyists, business proprietors and managers, corporate stockholders, progressive educational theorists, regressive educational theorists and, in some notable instances, parents. On examination, the entire adult community consists of people who are, on occasion, apt to confuse their own professional and personal interests with those of children - theirs, or more usually someone else's - so there's little point in singling out any one social or professional group on that score - be they teachers and educationists or economists.

Andrew's second principle is formally independent of the first but it's a nice rhetorical follow-through:

Second, we should not penalise parents for spending more on their children’s education. To the extent that education has ‘positive externalities’ (higher productivity, more social capital, better civic engagement), we should encourage it. There is a real difference between a policy that says ‘the richer you are, the less the government should give your child’ and one that says ‘the more you spend on your child’s education, the less the government should give you’. The former targets resources to those who need them most, while the latter operates like an education expenditure tax.

This argument is nonsense. How, for example, would an economist suggest that we encourage parents to spend money on their childrens' education? The obvious answer, is a tax rebate on educational expenditures, such as private school fees. How do we avoid directing money to the children of the rich for services that the rich have demonstrated they will pay for themselves anyway - such as the positional good of a privately funded education at one of those elite private schools? By withholding government funding from those services. The proposal here is that instead of funding private education directly, through subsidies to schools, governments sling the money to parents and achieve the same result indirectly. The real difference, in terms that matter to economists? Zero per cent of bugger all.

Third, schools should be judged on outputs, not just inputs. At present, the federal government allocates billions of dollars to private schools, but asks little in return. Taxpayers who fund these schools have a right to demand that they provide empirical data such as test scores, dropout rates, or parental satisfaction surveys.

Excuse me, but what was that first principle again? "First, the wellbeing of children is more important than anyone else." Before we give the taxpayer the right to demand data such as test scores, dropout rates and the results of parental satisfaction surveys, perhaps we should establish that these measures accurately reflect schools' capacity to care for and foster the wellbeing of the child.

Fourth, funding should be transparent. Parents should know precisely how much government funding they bring to their child’s school.

I've got nothing agains transparency in the funding of education but once again, we've lost track of that first principle.

In fact, at no stage in Leigh's article has he examined that issue of the "wellbeing of children". Instead, it's been used a springboard for Leigh to launch into an argument on how education should be funded, not on how schools are to achieve the difficult task of educating children.

And that's why there ain't going to be an education revolution any time soon. Because until we're prepared to tackle that question, looking at what education kids need to prepare themselves for life, and not just a guaranteed place of standing in the labour market and the status hierarchy, a lifetime of usefulness to the nation and the economy, we'll continue to miss the point.

Word of the Day: Portage

Q: How does the navy move a boat across land?

A:


(Naval architecture buffs, and other pedants will no doubt carp and complain that the vessel in the illustration - a hastily drawn aircraft carrier - is a ship, rather than a boat)