verging_on_random

Hyperbole rules

Extract from a news release by the opposition’s new environment spokesperson, Peter Garrett:

Ten years of inaction on climate change by the Howard Government is jeopardising our critical tourism and agriculture sectors.

Peter we know the Howard mob like to distort the truth and even make things up but that’s no reason for you to do the same thing.

It’s implicit in this statement that somehow the Howard Government could have done something over the last 10 years to make a real difference to climate change, thereby protecting our tourism and agricultural sectors. Informed people understand, as Peter Garrett surely understands, that this is pure bullshit.

This kind of over-simplification is ultimately self-defeating. It frames the argument in terms of “The government can stop climate change” (Labor)/”There’s no point us doing anything unless the Chinese/Indians/Americans are also involved” (Coalition). Framed in these terms, the Coalition is more nearly correct; but the argument shouldn’t be framed in those terms in the first place. Instead of playing into Howard’s hands Garrett should be explaining the real deficiencies in the government’s position and the measures that Labor would take in government. These should be given some meaning for ordinary people beyond the mantra of ‘ratify Kyoto’, which gives no clue at all about the action that will follow.

We expect simplistic arguments and dishonest tactics from Howard’s mob; we deserve better from the alternative government.

And the voice of the redneck was heard in the land

I thought I’d share part of a comment that was made on another blog. It’s written in response to a suggestion in a comment of mine that the countries that invaded Iraq should do everything in their power to make restitution to the Iraqi people for the misery we’ve inflicted on them. Here’s the response:

Bollocks. We have offered them a path to peace, prosperity and democracy.  They have chosen terrorism and civil war.  We owe them nothing.  They have dug their own graves.  Now they can lie in them.

It’s hard to conceive of an attitude that better combines sheer ignorance of the facts, blind ideological distortion of reality, lack of normal human compassion and above all, rabid contempt for the people whose country we helped to invade and destroy.

If you have trouble believing that anybody could be such a complete arsehole you can read the whole exchange here, but I certainly don’t recommend it.

The sandstone fence

Two events this year have provided sharp reminders of the ignorance and closed thinking that affects so many Australians. One was the refusal by a majority of Toowoomba residents to approve a recycled water scheme for their city, despite the critical water shortages they are facing. The second happened this week, a few hundred km down the New England Highway, where Tamworth representatives objected to having Sudanese refugees housed in their town.

According to news reports:

Tamworth City Council voted this week to spurn an offer by the Department of Immigration to resettle the families for fear it could lead to a repetition of the Cronulla riots, said the Mayor, James Treloar.

Cr Treloar told the Herald people were worried that allowing the families to move to Tamworth “could lead to a Cronulla riots-type situation. Ask the people at Cronulla if they want more refugees.”

Other residents were apparently concerned about the refugees “coming and drinking our water supply, or taking our jobs, that sort of thing”. Hell yeah, we’re talking about five whole families here, and the way these foreigners breed that probably means about 50 people. That would destroy the whole local Tamworth economy, no way a town of a mere 50,000 residents could absorb a shock like that. And water’s in short enough supply without newcomers from Africa of all places, where the natives are notoriously profligate with the enormous water surpluses.

Apologists for the town said the real reason for opposition was that the refugees’ health problems would stretch the local medical facilities to breaking point. I love how irrational people so often pretend that the grounds for their bigotry are concern for the other people - you know, we’re not prejudiced, it’s just in their own interests that they live somewhere else where they can get proper medical care. I guess the Sudanese would also be scared by all the cows and horses and they wouldn’t be able to work out the bus timetable and gosh, they just wouldn’t feel comfortable in Tamworth. Much better to settle them some place like Lakemba with all the other terrorists refugees.

The deep vein of racism that our prime minister taps so skilfully remains as virulent now as it was when the Hanson maggot gathered so much popular support. We witnessed yet another example during the week when a young Australian of the year handed back her award after hysterical front-page news stories that she’d been questioned by police . Not charged or anything, just questioned. So why t f was this such a big story, with Morris Iemma falling over himself in his haste to dissociate himself from the girl? Well she’s a Muslim ….. ooooohh, say no more.

The racist ugliness that has been a feature of Australian society since European occupation is just as potent as ever. I think it’s a mistake to deny it or to minimise its importance by arguing that it’s only evident amongst a minority of the population. That might be true but the majority seems content to put up with their bigotry, which amounts to condoning it.

Racism, xenophobia and mindless hatred of ‘the other’ are not just problems because they are morally repugnant. They are also problems because they threaten our peace and security, both internally and externally. A lot of people have been scared into silence on these matters by the blatant intimidation of the talk-back radio thugs and the sneering about ‘political correctness’ by community figures from the prime minister down. In such a climate rampant prejudice and bigotry take over and fools like the mayor of Tamworth feel emboldened, to use the new buzz word, to make fatuous statements implying that the Cronulla riots were somehow caused by refugees.

It would be nice to think Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard will show some leadership on these issues and begin the slow process of restoring basic decency to public debate in Australia. However, I won’t hold my breath waiting. I fear their strategy is going to consist mainly of hoping everyone’s sick and tired of Howard.

The Greens, with all their faults, continue to look like the only party that offers a genuine alternative future for Australia.

Not the ABC News

I watched the ABC News tonight. I used to do it religiously, every night, but lately I’ve been doing it less and less, partly because it largely consists of people re-hashing stories that were in the newspaper I read 12 hours earlier, and partly because the rest of the stories had already been adequately covered in my RSS feeds.

Tonight I was interested to find out what was happening on the bushfire fronts. I didn’t find out, unfortunately. What I did have to endure was several minutes of John bleedin’ Howard mouthing inanities as he visited some fire fighters, followed by about 30 seconds of Kevin Rudd doing the same thing (thereby demonstrating the ABC’s commitment to ‘balance’ in all its shows).

This maintains the tedious trend that Tim Dunlop first noted in his blog months ago: the media no longer reports news, it reports what politicians - especially John Howard - say about the news. Howard visiting fire fighters to tell them they’re great has become far more newsworthy than anything the fire fighters themselves might have done.

It’s lazy ‘journalism’. Instead of reporting news, all they do is collect the prime minister’s schedule for the day from their email and follow him around like puppies, faithfully recording every banality and conveying it to the Australian public. It’s a sad commentary on the levels to which the Australian media has sunk, and it also shows how easy it is for incumbent governments to manipulate the contents of the ‘news’ that gets delivered via the mass media.

Governments all over the world (excepting a few countries like Iran and China that are prepared to implement overt censorship) must be tearing their hair out in frustration at their inability to massage the content of online blogs. I’m sure they’ll come up with something sooner or later.

The battlers struggle on

It’s too early to tell yet but I hope Kevin Rudd makes one important improvement to national political discourse by scrapping this bullshit of Kim Beazley’s about his ‘compact with middle Australia’. It’s bad enough having to put up with Howard’s crap about the battlers who can’t afford a new Toyota Landcruiser unless they defer their Austrian skiing holiday without Labor getting into the act.

Sometimes it seems that politics in this country is all about pandering to shallow rednecks whose sole interest is in getting as rich as possible as quickly as possible. Movements in interest rates are the focus of the media because they affect the ability of these ‘ordinary Australians’ to pay off the loans on their three investment properties.

These somewhat sour thoughts were prompted by reading today that the average Australian will spend $857 on Christmas presents this year. Eight hundred and fifty seven fucking dollars … most of it on useless rubbish that will not be appreciated by the recipients, but at least it will let those who give show that they’re as capable as the next man of wasting their money on empty gestures. It will give them a warm inner glow as they relax after Christmas dinner and moan about the iniquitous amounts of tax they have to pay so the government can coddle dole bludgers, single mums and overpaid public servants.

Eight hundred and fifty seven dollars … that’s about three weeks’ total income for someone on what many ‘middle Australians’ sneeringly call ‘welfare’. Eight hundred and fifty seven dollars squandered on ‘clothes, toys and DVDs’ … well hey, middle Australians need a shitload more clothes, toys and DVDs. I mean that’s the magic formula for true happiness.

At office Christmas parties now it seems to be accepted practice that everyone kicks in 10 or 20 dollars to buy someone a present that is deliberately, purposefully useless. It’s all terrific fun don’t you know, all in the spirit of the festive season, except that the joke wears a bit thin after the first 10 stupid presents get opened and chucked away … it gets even thinner when you suspect that a few members of staff who really are battlers had to cough up their 20 bucks with a forced smile, because that money was earmarked to buy some prawns for Christmas dinner as a special treat.

At the risk of sounding like a killjoy, might I suggest that middle Australia’s obsession with endless consumption has evolved into sheer mindless self-indulgence. The wind is being sown …. prepare to reap the whirlwind. OMG i came over all Old Testament there for a minute.

Norton Sukware and WorkChoices

I’m currently engaged in an interminable online argument with the Symantec Corporation over problems renewing my subscription to Norton Systemworks, software that we have all been terrorised into buying even though I sometimes suspect that the threats are vastly over-stated.

I won’t bore you with all the details, suffice to say that the renewal process that was supposed to renew my subscription didn’t. The only thing it succeeded in doing was taking my money. So with a sinking heart I contacted the Symantec ‘help’ desk, reflecting as I did so that in many years of computing experience I have yet to encounter a help desk that lives up to its name.

As I feared, the suggestions arriving at two-daily intervals from Symantec have an elegant circularity, as they work their way through the standard responses to customer problem 3(a)[iv] and then begin again. None of the suggestions works of course, but you already knew that. I’m just waiting for the inevitable suggestion that goes something like this: “Lovell sorry you have big problem with our product, please to follow this link and delete all software then reinstall Windows, all fixed then no problem have nice day woo-hoo!’, following which I will write off my $80 and go buy McAfee software from Harvey Norman. I swore off them two years ago when their online subscription renewal fucked up, but at least they didn’t get to take any of my money in the process.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with WorkChoices, it’s this. We argue in Customer Service courses that poor customer service costs a business money in the long-run. There are several reasons for this but I want to concentrate on one in particular: it’s that the cost of handling customer complaints gets built into a firm’s overheads and can end up being a major cost that eats into profits.

For that reason to be true, a firm has to be actually bearing the cost of handling customer complaints. Under a traditional employment relationship that would be the case. Symantec would be paying help desk operators by the hour; the more hours they have to spend resolving a customer complaint the more it will cost Symantec. Symantec therefore bears the risks associated with poor product design and delivery, and its management has a motive to improve the firm’s systems. If it doesn’t do this profits will decline, shareholders will demand action and the delinquent managers will have to lift their game.

That’s what micro-economic theory says will happen anyway. But it all hangs on workers being paid for time on the job. Imagine for a moment - and I stress that I have no idea what employment relationships are at Symantec*, I’m developing a purely hypothetical example - imagine that help desk operators had been signed up to AWAs and were paid not by time but by results. In other words instead of getting $1,000 for attending work for 38 hours each week, they were required to attend work 38 hours each week and got paid $10 per customer complaint but only after it had been satisfactorily resolved. In other words it doesn’t matter if the problem is fixed after 1 email or 101, the employee gets paid the same. Supporters of WorkChoices would applaud such a result because they would argue it ‘encourages greater efficiency’ by giving workers an incentive to find the right solution quickly.

This is an example of what many employers call ‘flexibility’, a catch-all term that is code for ‘pass risk to employees‘. If help-desk operators are paid a flat fee to resolve customer complaints, Symantec management has no incentive to improve product design or management systems. Workers might have an incentive to find the solution quickly but if the system is faulty or the workers don’t have the right training, that incentive won’t translate into good customer service. Of course the firm might lose a few customers but it’s in an oligopolistic situation and if its main competitor adopts a similarly cavalier attitude to customer service it won’t actually suffer a competitive disadvantage.

Most comments on WorkChoices have focused on the narrow issues of unfair dismissal or pay cuts. The long-term ramifications are much, much broader. By taking a giant step towards restoring a laissez-faire labour market, WorkChoices will change many aspects of our economy and society in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.

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*In fact, if the language in the ‘help’ emails is a reliable indication, the Symantec operators are located in a galaxy far, far away.

Old and emotional

I was gonna write a vicious entry about the dessicated old bastards who run this country but it will keep. I don’t have the heart for it tonight because I just watched the ABC Schools Spectacular. Every year that show makes me so proud, not that I have anything to do with it, but I want to laugh and weep at the same time and tonight was no exception.

If you’ve never watched it the loss is yours. There’s more talent on display in 90 minutes than you’ll see in a complete series of ‘Australian Idol’, but more important than that is the spirit that infuses the whole production. There’s no glorification of the individual, half the time you never even get told who’s performing, and the whole exercise is characterised by sheer joy on the part of all the participants.

They celebrated some of the things that should be a source of pride for us, like multiculturalism and the Eureka flag, in a totally unselfconscious way. It wasn’t a political statement, just an expression of pride in their country, warts and all. And the energy! It made me feel grand just to see them.

The local Kingscliff kids were fuckin’ awesome … they are every year.

The Schools Spectacular reminds me of what a wonderful country this could be and how beautiful, talented, generous and full of life our kids are. I vote we let them run the place for a year and see what happens … they could scarcely do a worse job than the current mob.

Planning for Iraq

Remember the Watergate tapes? The recordings of presidential conversations in the Oval Office that helped force Nixon’s resignation? Well some tapes have surfaced of the way Dubya planned the invasion of Iraq. Here’s a sample:

Rumsfeld: We need a plan that works and a plan that doesn’t work.

Bush: Why do we need a plan that doesn’t work?

Rumsfeld: So we can tell which plan to use.

Bush: If we only have one plan, there won’t be any confusion.

Rumsfeld: Too risky. It mightn’t be the one that works. This way one of them will work …

OK I lie , these are actually lines written by John Clarke for a forthcoming stage show about Bib and Bub and the Banksia Men. But I bet he got his inspiration from the White House.

Neo-con madness

Remember how Saddam Hussein was constantly compared to Hitler by many supporters of the Iraq invasion? Displaying either appalling historical ignorance or a truly awesome level of irrationality, we were repeatedly told that not invading Iraq would be an act of ‘appeasement’. “Stop this crazy guy now or he’ll try to take over the world” they screamed, cheerfully ignoring the fact that Saddam had neither the means nor the ambition to do any such thing.

Anyway it looks like they were right in principle but wrong in the detail. It turns out it wasn’t Iraq after all that is bent on world conquest, it’s Iran. Yeah well I used to get the two countries confused too, you’d think they would have given them better names eh. How about this for a breathtakingly incisive piece of analysis:

Iran is a resources rich country of 69 million people (up from 39 million in 1970) led by fanatics not easily if ever deterred … Germany was a resources rich country of 70 million in 1939 when it launched its wars of aggression in its world region. At some point the U.S. will have to confront the “true menace,” and not by offering up its neighbors or its object of hatred, Israel.

Well they’ve convinced me. The spooky coincidences are overwhelming*. Let’s bomb the fuckin’ place into oblivion now I say!

One hopes that people who think like this have been so thoroughly discredited by the Iraq catastrophe that they no longer have any influence on American foreign policy. But I wouldn’t count on it. And the Bush presidency still has 772 days to run. You can do a lot of damage in 772 days, especially if you’re convinced that you’re on a mission from god.

*Except that Germany wasn’t ‘resource-rich’ in 1939 or at any other time before or since. But that still leaves the coincidence about population, which is overwhelmingly convincing to any right-thinking person.

Libs condemn Hansonism!! Oh wait …

Howard and his colleagues have frequently been criticised for failing to distance themselves from the blatant ignorance, racism and bigotry expressed by Pauline Hanson. They have often seemed to disagree with her using carefully chosen words that suggest she’s got a good heart but maybe goes a bit over the top at times. Presumably the intention is to signal to rednecks and bigots that the Liberal Party actually thinks much the same as Hanson but political caution prevents them saying so.

Hanson has now announced that she’s considering standing for parliament again and here’s one minister’s reaction:

HOCKEY: Well she’s entitled to have her view, she’s entitled to run and people will decide. But I disagree with a number of the views which she’s expressed and I think a number of people would.

Joe you just ‘disagree’ with ‘a number’ of her views. Presumably that means there are some you agree with. Which ones are they, can you tell us? That black Africans should be barred from entering the country because they’re all riddled with disease? That Muslims are trying to kill Christmas by banning carol singing? That Muslims want to close all our public swimming pools?

Here’s what Andrew Bartlett from the Democrats had to say:

“Once again Pauline Hanson opens her mouth and spreads offensive urban myths that bear no resemblance to reality,” Bartlett said in a statement.

How about saying something like that Joe? Oh wait, that might upset some of your redneck supporters who couldn’t care less whether they’re urban myths or not, they just love any excuse to hate people who don’t match their narrow conception of what it means to be ‘Australian’. No doubt some media commentators will praise you for your political astuteness.

I condemn you for your moral opportunism.