Damn you Bob Brown

I just had a flash of inspiration. Usually I have them while I’m out jogging lurching but the weather was too crappy to lurch today so I had this flash while I was cooking tea instead (roast chicken if you’re interested).

Anyway I suddenly realised why governments in developed countries can never be expected to do anything constructive about global warming. It’s because those governments and their alternatives* are run by people who have spent the last 20 years entertaining themselves at the expense of the Greens. To turn around now and adopt sensible policies about global warming would be to admit that for 20 years the Greens had been right and they, the smirking unimaginative suits, had been capital ‘W’ Wrong. And they’ll never do it. Their pride won’t permit it.

In Australia there’s even less chance because the Greens spokesperson for all that period has been Bob Brown. For someone like Tip Costello to admit that he’s been wrong while a self-confessed ho-mo-sexule like Bob Brown had been correct is expecting way too much of human nature. It would mean that all those years of ‘green queen’ jokes were revealed for the childish bigotry they actually were. It’s not gunna happen. Forget it. They’d rather drown - literally - than concede that the Greens in general and Bob Brown in particular are their intellectual and moral superiors.

On such petty matters does the fate of nations hang.

…..

*Excepting a few European countries like Germany where Green parties have had more than fringe support, which probably explains why the EU is the only governmental institution in the world to get serious about global warming, pathetically ineffectual though its actions have been.

One more reason not to go

Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink

Somehow “Give your mouth a good rinse please” will never sound the same again.

They’re customers, stupid

For a little while now the Fairfax press and the ABC have been running a series of shock horror stories about higher education. The gist is that universities and other post-secondary colleges have been accepting international student enrolments even though the students might struggle to complete their courses successfully. Not only that, but the students’ real motivation for enrolling might not be the sheer joy of learning but the crass desire to get some extra points to count towards permanent residency in the glorious land down under.

Lots of people seem to think that these stories, if true, are absolutely dreadful. Poor old Central Queensland University, which for some reason has been singled out for special treatment (maybe because Melbourne is a funny place to find a campus for a Rockhampton university) has had to announce some kind of inquiry and Julie Bishop, the responsible minister who gives me the absolute creeps with her humourless gimlet-eyed primness, has tut-tutted all over the place and requested that any evidence of wrong-doing be sent to her and she’ll look into it. She promised to look into so much stuff on the 7.30 Report the other night that she’ll be busy for weeks, which is good I guess because it will delay her mad ideological campaign to fuck up public schools even more than her predecessors did.

I find the whole thing morbidly entertaining.  It’s like watching car manufacturers being lambasted for not making sure that people who buy cars can drive properly, or for selling them to folk who only want them to impress the neighbours instead of, well, driving them. It’s a great example of the cognitive dissonance that exists amongst pollies and pundits in the media who demand that (a) everything should be forced to be as competitive and efficient as possible all the time, while simultaneously (b) providers of essential services should observe some vague public interest ideals that don’t apply to the private sector. As lots of people have been telling them for years, you can have one or the other but not both, but they persist in pretending that you can. Either they just don’t listen or they’re really dumb.

What’s the background to this latest non-story? Well for years and years Australians have been told that we have to expose ourselves to the forces of global competition or perish. At first this only applied to the production of tradeable commodities but in no time it spread to everything. Want to justify selling off infrastructure to overseas interests, introducing a GST or having the most anti-union IR laws of any ‘democratic’ country in the world? Piece of cake … just say you have to do it to be globally competitive.

Higher education wasn’t exempt of course. Year after year, governments cut funding. When universities complained, they were told to get competitive. Higher education is a market, they were told. Find ways to raise your own money. So they have.

Most Australians don’t know half of the things that have been done to higher education in this country in the name of becoming competitive and succeeding in the marketplace. For a little while life was great; lots of fee-paying students came from Asian countries and the money rolled in. Howard’s mob said “See that wasn’t so hard” and cut government funding some more. However the party was never going to last.

Other countries’ universities woke up to the opportunities and started aggressively chasing Asian students. And let’s face it, if you’re a South Korean with the choice of graduating from a university based in Paris vs one in Nambour, which one has the greater cachet? As it got harder to recruit students, it became more tempting to admit ones whose English proficiency meant they’d missed out on their first choice universities.

Even amongst the teaming hordes of Asia, the number of comparatively wealthy families prepared to send their kids overseas to study for three years or more is finite. Accordingly the government’s wish has come true, and Australian universities are competing in a scary marketplace against a horde of others to attract students customers whose numbers have peaked. It’s a classic case where demand is stable and supply is increasing, and any economics student knows what that means. In an entirely predictable manner, suppliers are using increasingly desperate tactics to chase customers and the market is awash with agents working on commission, partnership agreements with local institutions and so on.

Into this seething Hayekian marketplace the Australian government has thrown its own bonus - get one of several nominated Australian credentials and you get extra points towards a permanent residency visa. This of course is the jackpot for some students. Australian campuses are suddenly full of international students who originally enrolled in IT or horticulture or something but who now realise that the vocation to which they have been called all their lives is truly … accounting. Transfer me to the Master of Professional Accounting degree immediately please … no, it’s complete coincidence that accountants have been deemed by the government to be in short supply.

Off topic … how many freakin’ accountants do we need for chrissake? Anyways ….

Higher education institutions in Australia are now behaving like any other business that’s in a market. I don’t just mean universities of course; some of the things that the TAFE people get up to would make your hair stand on end and the private colleges are just an endless series of horror stories. But what did the government expect? Why do media pundits act shocked and stunned? They’re giving the customers what the customers are prepared to pay for. That’s what suppliers do in a market. Get used to it.

Tackling global warming passively

Not long ago I had some fun at the expense of a dill who had a terrific agenda for fixing up the problems in Iraq. I pointed out that he had a rully neat list of outcomes but he’d done bugger-all to suggest how they might actually be achieved in practice. He neglected to say who should actually do anything to get the ball rolling.

Now some other dill called Murray Hogarth is doing the same thing for global warming. He was writing in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend but unfortunately I can’t find it online so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Anyway here’s Murray’s 5 Point Plan to fix global warming. He begins by writing ‘I propose these core societal changes’. Oh dear. But let’s see them (I couldn’t resist the temptation to [do a bit of heckling] as I summarised them:

• Reinvent our politics … replace the lingering battle of ideologies [like the Clash of Civilisations with the Islamo-fascists Murray? Some people seem rather keen to press on with that one] … ‘Market-based democracy is the model, requiring a central contest of ideas over who can deliver sustainability quickly, effectively and economically’ [but Murray the current ‘contest of ideas’ is about whether global warming is actually caused by people].
• ‘We need corporate leaders who’ll articulate, advocate, invest in and live by an evolved brand of capitalism [WTF is an ‘evolved’ brand of capitalism … unless he means one that hasn’t been deliberately created, in which case why is he telling us what needs to be done to create it?] and who’ll actively campaign for a better world.’ [Ummmm by doing what? Starting blogs? Doing street demos? Bribing politicians?]
• ‘We have to redefine the public interest the media professes to uphold and defend …’ [Are you being part of ‘we’ here Murray as in you’re part of the media that’s gunna do the redefining, or are you gunna do it from outside? No no I’m not having a go at you, just curious]
• ‘We need the environment movement [sorry to keep interrupting but WTF is the ‘environment movement’? Do you mean Bob Brown or what? An address would be helpful … a URL … anything] to claim victory on climate change [what, like Dubya claimed ‘mission accomplished’ jumping out of his ossome warplane on an aircraft carrier? Didn’t work out too well for him] … in the sense that government and especially business is [I think that should be ‘are’ … oh nvm] finally adopting the issues as both legitimate and compelling [so going ‘nah nah nah we were right and you were wrong’ will accomplish what exactly? Oh wait he hasn’t finished yet]. ‘Then they can focus on the last great battle to win the hearts and minds, the votes and the purchasing decisions of consumers.’ [Why can’t they do this until the environment movement declares victory? I must have missed a bit somewhere … nope, can’t see it, damn sub-editor’s mistake I bet].
• [This is the best bit. I’ll quote it in full without cheap shots. Its intrinsic dumbness speaks volumes without any help from me.] ‘Take our values shopping. Beyond the cash register, we must also take social and environmental values to work, on holidays, to our financial advisers and to the ballot box. Real transformation will occur when Australian households unleash people-power through their voices, their votes and their wallets. Engineering this consumer revolution is sustainability’s biggest political and social challenge.’

If you strip away all the flatulent white noise about ‘engineering revolutions’ (how delightfully Leninist!), here’s Murray’s solution for global warming: elect politicians who will do something about it and only buy from businesses who are doing something about it. Holy crap what a brilliant idea! It’s true what they say, the answers are so often staring us in the face and we just don’t see them.

Unfortunately I still have this lingering doubt. It’s all very well to point out this wonderful previously-undiscovered solution to global warming but why isn’t it already under way? Doesn’t someone have to take some positive action to make the changes happen?

Murray’s ahead of me. I bet he’s smiling a warm compassionate smile as he writes ‘Sceptically, you might ask, how much can we really change?’

Hehe Murray, you can read me like a book.

Here’s his response (and yes it does follow straight on from the ‘really change?’ question, no dodgy editing tricks involved on my part):

‘Looking around at our frenetic cities, our credit card-fuelled consumption, an ever-powerful car lobby with its staunch advocates on both sides of politics and bulldozers still clearing land in the bush, it might be difficult to conceptualise a different world. [My thoughts exactly. Gosh he’s perceptive.] Yet in my vision of the future, trees will be treasured, unapproved polluting with CO2 will be a crime and wasting energy and water will become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving, smoking around children or forgetting the sunscreen. Changing to a sustainable future won’t be easy, even for a privileged nation such as Australia, but we’ll do it.’

And you were sceptical! Murray’s fixed it all with vision. It’s only hardened cynics like me who go looking for the missing bits about who is actually supposed to do what to make all these wonderful things come to pass (and Murray should really get out more if he thinks that drink-driving, smoking around kids or forgetting the sunscreen are socially unacceptable in large slabs of Australian society). Maybe it’s all explained in the book he’s written, which I’d love to buy and read but you know how it is … so many books, so little time.

Seriously, if a student handed in crap like this I’d fail it. If a marketing executive made a submission to his boss saying ‘Hey all we need to increase our sales is to get consumers to like our product’ he’d get the sack. But Murray gets paid for it by a quality newspaper.

Anyway gtg, lots of assignments to mark. I tried having a vision where students got great feedback and knew how to improve their work but when I checked the assignments they hadn’t changed. Looks like I have to do something active, dammit.