How the Liberals won Brunswick . . . for Labor.

It is usually assumed the Liberal Party decision to preference Labor before the Greens prevented the Greens from winning up to four seats in the recent Victorian election. In Brunswick this was very definitely the case.

This election saw a reversal of previous Liberal preference activity which very clearly 'saved' Brunswick for Labor.

And becuase Labor had already decided it was more important to beat the Greens in the inner city than preserve their middle suburban seats, the Liberal's late decision to preference the Greens last completely wrong-footed the Labor machine, which suddenly found itself having invested heavily in seats it would now almost certainly hold, and not into the seats it eventually lost.

In a big way, the Labor Party was committing the same mistake for which the suburban voters punished the Labor government. That is, faced with an inner city threat more sharp in perception than reality, the Labor party poured money into the inner city and ignored the suburbs, where their lack of commitment to solving real problems cost the Labor party government.

First to Brunswick. This chart shows the first preference votes in Brunswick elections 1999 to 2010:

Obviously there are serious qualifications required in discerning meaning from this chart. For example, the electorate has changed size and there has always been a brace of independents and smaller parties running. But Blind Freddy can get the drift.

In practice crunch time comes after all the independents' and minor Parties' votes are distributed and the Liberal preferences come into play.

In 2006 before Liberal preferences were distributed Labor had 16,295 votes to the Greens' 10,823. The Liberals by then had 6170, and these went 4612 to the Greens and only 1558 to Labour. The Greens were never going to win that one.

In 2010 the story was different. Before the Liberal preferences were distributed this time Labor had 14,538 but the Greens had 14,556. That's right, the Greens were actually ahead by a mere 18 votes before the Liberal preferences were distributed. This time the Liberals had 7350 votes by the final round, and these went 2477 to the Greens but 4873 to Labor. In 2006, 25% of Liberal preferences went to Labor. In 2010, 66% of Liberal preferences went to Labor. While it is worth noting that 1141 of these Liberal votes had not originally been 1st preference Liberal votes, it is still clear that it was Liberal voters who delivered Brunswick to Labor.

The next issue is about money. The rumour currently doing the rounds in Brunswick is that Labor spent about $300,000 on the Brunswick campaign, and the Greens about $20,000. I have no idea of the exact amounts but it was clear that Labor was spending a seriously big bucket of dosh here during the campaign. It did them no good. It was, in fact, a big mistake. If the aim was to get Green voters to vote Labor it clearly failed, as once again first preference votes decreased for Labor but increased for the Greens. There was even an increase in the Liberal vote. Whatever the aim of that spend it was wasted. Worse, it was money that was not spent on campaigns in the middle suburbs, where Labor was hammered, and where they lost government.

Obviously resources are always limited and the Labor Party had to decide where to prioritise its spending. If, as seems likely, the Labor Party thought it more important to defeat the Greens in the inner city than to ward off the Liberals in the middle suburbs this strategy was an absolute failure in both those aims. The first preference votes show it was not the money that saved them in Brunswick but Liberal preferences. These are preferences that are unlikely to be changed by Labor advertising, as to be a Liberal in Brunswick must require a particularly solid loyalty to the Liberal faith. This loyalty is evidenced by the relatively disciplined march of preferences away from the Greens in 2010 compared to 2006. No number of billboards will change those voters' minds.

The sad reality for Labor is that had they spent the money they wasted in Brunswick (and I assume likewise the other four inner city seats) in the middle suburban seats that were clearly pissed by the government's ignoring their problems the Labor Party might still be in power.

But Labor couldn't do that, because it was too wrapped up fighting a perceived enemy in the inner city, and ignoring the middle suburbs. Their election loss is itself a neat summation of their government's failure.

Of course, hindsight is easier. But even before the Liberals announced their decision to put the Greens last the Labor Party was wrong to fight so expensively in Brunswick. If the Liberals had not put the Greens last Labor may indeed have lost a number of inner city seats to the Greens. But they would have had a better chance in the middle suburbs they subsequently lost. Had they held some of these seats the result could have been either a returned Labor government or a minority Labor government with Greens holding the balance of power. The Greens would have supported a minority Labor government because if they didn't they would be crucified at the next election.

In the end the Liberal decision to put the Greens last, because it came so late in the campaign, nullified this possibility. But only because by that time Labor had already spent itself fighting a series of battles it didn't need to fight, and thus losing the bigger battles it really needed to win.

Source for voting numbers is the Victorian Electoral Commission website.

Senator Milne's Motion 17th Nov 2010

This is from p62 of the Senate Hansard from yesterday. You can find the full Hansard here:

http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/hanssen.htm

This is the text of a motion Senator Milne (Greens) wishes to put to the Senate. It is a clear example of the hypocrisy of the ALP when it comes to the environment, and of their cynical manipulation of the electorate through base propaganda.

"Senator Milne to move on the next day of sitting:

That the Senate—

(a) notes:

(i) that the planned Wandoan coal mine in Queensland

would, at its peak coal production, contribute

the equivalent of 0.17 per cent of total global

emissions according to Xstrata's own numbers,

(ii) that approximately 108 of the 186 world nations

have annual domestic emissions less than what

will result from this single mine each year,

(iii) that the emissions from burning this coal would

neither be affected by a domestic carbon price nor

be relevant to the mine's assessment under the Environment

Protection and Biodiversity Conservation

Act 1999 (the Act),

(iv) the statement by the Prime Minister on 17 November

2010 that 'it is up to this generation of

people and the generations coming up fast behind

it to take the action necessary to tackle climate

change', and

(v) the hypocrisy of approving new coal mines while

arguing that climate change is real and urgent; and

(b) calls on the Government to give itself the power to

stop such hugely polluting developments by introducing

a long-promised greenhouse trigger into the Act."

Short thesis summary: Government regulation of the private sector in Australia.

This is an extremely shortened version of the thesis proposal that was accepted. It is meant only as a basic summary.

Introduction

This thesis will analyse the growth and decline of that part of the international education industry aligned to the migration desires of its students to investigate ways in which governments go about creating regulatory and legislative frameworks to encourage and guide commercial activity in the furtherance of social aims while operating in a global economy.

Governance, Globalisation and Education:

Since the late 20^th Century the process of framing legislative and regulatory conditions to foster commercial activity in the furtherance of the social aims of a singular polity has become more difficult for a number of reasons, and particularly in the new service sectors. The rapid development of technology as driver and result of globalisation has meant that commercial entities in the services sectors are particularly nimble in creating systems to capture opportunities across individual polities as opportunities arise. In education, this has lead to conflict between the inherently national interests of single states and the international interests and capabilities of commercial entities and markets.

Farrell (2003) notes the anxiety about international trade in education services that arises in the national perspective held by singular polities:

There is concern among national education authorities over whether greater openness to trade in international education services through the GATS mechanism of the WTO represents a threat to the nature of education as a public good. (Farell 2003, p. 244)

While he notes that:

International education has grown rapidly over the last decade, driven by technological change and a growing demand for increasingly specialised education and training in developed countries. (Farell 2003, p. 247)

He also notes that individual polities generally sense that internationalisation can potentially present a threat to their own interests:

Most barriers to trade in services take the form of domestic regulations. In the area of education services, typical stated objectives of the regulations in place are to promote or protect culture and national traditions, as well as to provide training and education for consumers. (Farell 2003, p.247)

The enduring sovereignty of governments over different specific regional areas means regulatory changes in one polity, and in the interests of one polity, will impact upon the nature and scope of the commercial activity within that polity. But because of the international nature of commercial activities, government regulation in one polity can also change commercial activity in other polities, which can in turn have varying effects on the people of that other polity. The gap then between the capabilities of commercial entities to capture opportunities and government capabilities to create regulatory frameworks designed to foster or guide commercial activities has both national and international ramifications, while the polities themselves generally only feel accountable to the people who make up the individual polity. At the same time, the commercial entities themselves are becoming faster, more effective, and more integral to the provision of services nationally and internationally.

Along with the considerable level of unease about the effects of globalisation, particularly on higher education (Yang 2003), there has grown an understanding that globalisation may require a new way of thinking about the role of the state, or the way the state goes about playing its role:

While the problems of orthodox economic liberalism have become increasingly apparent, it is also evident that older orthodoxies that placed the state in a dominating economic role are not viable. (MacEwan 1999, p. 3)

This disconnect between the international capabilities of commercial entities and the national interests of singular polities creates great complexity around regulation when individual governments seek to design regulatory systems aimed at utilising commercial activity to further social aims:

Over-regulation can be as damaging, and even more damaging, as under regulation, especially in the new services sectors, where the dynamics of technological change and convergence between sectors make it particularly hard to regulate in a timely manner. Regulation has to be flexible enough not to stifle development . . . Regulators need to understand the consequences of the regimes and regulatory structures that they have erected. The political economy approach to regulation needs to define major interest groups engaged in regulatory rent-seeking, while the public interest approach is aimed at correcting various market failure situations. (Findlay & Sidorenko 2003, p. 3)

Concern about this is not necessarily new. Grant (1997), says:

The development of economic globalisation has not been counter-balanced by the development of appropriate mechanisms of governance. The 1980s [!!] have seen an accelerating process of economic globalisation, but a relatively limited development of political structures that can regulate this process . . . International firms create the need for improved international governance, but they do not and cannot provide it. (Grant 1997, p. 319)

Rogers Hollingsworth and Boyer (1997) have noted:

The old but pervasive dichotomy between states and markets has to be discarded, to be replaced by a broader array of institutional arrangements, which mix in varying degree the pursuit of individual self interest and social obligations, relations among equals, and power symmetries. . . Because each type of institutional arrangement simultaneously exhibits strengths and weaknesses, its performance and viability depends on the precise context and configurations of interests within which it is embedded. No single institution can pretend to have universal or eternal superiority – even such a celebrated institution as the invisible hand of the market. . . In the real world, any economy consists of a combination of institutional arrangements, all of which complement each other and thus acquire some efficiency. No institutional configuration can simply be borrowed and implemented in any given social setting. Institutional arrangements evolve according to a distinct logic within each society . . . Institutions are not static entities defined once and for all, but they continuously respond to changing contexts and emerging structural crises. This is of special importance, given the present transformation occurring in social systems of production and the changing status of sub-national regions, nation-states, and the world economy. (Rogers Hollingsworth & Boyer 1997, p. 53)

Governments are thus faced with the task of creating regulatory regimes that attempt to control or guide commercial activity but can generally only do so for spaces within their borders, while at the same time entities involved in commercial activity are becoming increasingly transnational either in themselves or through networks of entities.

Commercial and governmental organisations in the end fundamentally rely on each other, the one in order to pursue its commercial interests and the other to build the very polity it seeks to govern. The continuing acceptance of the sovereignty of governments means their ability to have populations and commercial entities generally obey their legislative and regulatory regimes will continue, but the increasing internationalisation of commercial activity means these regulations will need to be designed and implemented in ways that understand their effects and can in practice optimise social advantages through guiding and leveraging the increasing technological and international abilities of commercial entities. As this process of internationalisation and technological change continues, the way government goes about regulating may also need to change, and this thesis explores this issue.

The creation of the Education-Migration pathway as a case study in Government intervention in markets in a globalised economy:

The history of the creation and closure of the education-migration pathway provides a very useful and vivid example of governments designing legislative frameworks that foster commercial growth in order to achieve social aims. In addition, it is an example of governments doing so in an area of activity known to be highly globalised. Indeed one might even say that because it is to do with migration it is definitively globalised.

Governments in Australia have a long history of facilitating opportunities for commercial growth as a means of furthering social aims (Wells, 1989). The forms of these opportunities have varied from directly funded incentives such as the old assisted passage or the modern funded traineeships, to the deliberate construction of legislative and regulatory frameworks designed to advantage (or disadvantage) various modes of commercial activity.

In the late 1990's there was a widely held view that Australia was suffering from a skills shortage (DEST, 2002). Though there is some debate about the veracity of claims regarding the extent of the shortage (Mitchell & Quirk 2005), the perception in government that the skills shortage did exist was strong (Birrell, Hawthorne & Richardson, 2006, p.10).

One of the strategies adopted by the Commonwealth to ameliorate the effects of the skills shortage was to create a new skilled migration pathway for international students studying in Australia. This pathway required prospective migrants to become qualified, in Australia, in any of a number of specific trades.

Australia obviously has a long history of immigration, and so a long history of governmental regulation of immigration. The idea of international students happening to subsequently become skilled migrants is not in itself a new idea, but the creation of a specific pathway for this stream of skilled migrants, for the fulfilment of specific skill needs and thus social aims, was new, and held several key advantages. Ziguras and Siew-Fang Law (2006) nominated four:

First, they [international students who subsequently become skilled migrants] increase the recruiting country's pool of highly trained workers, who are increasingly important for economic development. Second, most economically developed societies have low birth rates and ageing populations, and recruiting young people who are at the beginning of their working lives helps to sustain the number of working-age adults needed to support the growing pool of retired elderly. Third, graduates of the recruiting country's own tertiary institutions are more readily employed than foreign graduates. Fourth, the prospect of migration gives some countries a marketing advantage in recruiting fee-paying international students, which is particularly significant in countries in which education is a major export industry. (Ziguras & Siew-Fang Law, 2006, pp59-76)

For parts of the private sector of international education in Australia a number of factors were aligning. Providers who were able to effectively bring together the large demand for the ability to migrate to Australia with the new pathways enabling people to do so, would benefit.

At the same time, advances in technology made possible the creation of new processing systems, both commercial and governmental, that meant the procedure for prospective migrants applying for student visas and enrolling in registered courses became significantly less burdensome in terms of time and money. Also, the rapid rise of the middle classes in India and China, along with the spread of better ICT and financial instruments in those countries, meant the number of people with both a desire to come to Australia and the means to do so was increasing (Das, G 2002).

In terms of achieving the social aim of increasing the number of prospective migrants using this new pathway, the scheme worked. In 2001-02 the number of onshore applicants who nominated their occupation as Cook or Hairdresser was 70. In 2004-2005 it was 470 (Birrell, Hawthorne & Richardson, 2006, p.15). In 2007 - 2008 more than 5,000 skilled migration visas for Cooks and Hairdressers were granted, and in 2010 there are currently 17,594 valid applications made by people nominating their occupation as Cook or Hairdresser (House of Representatives, 2010).

However, this astonishing success in terms of numbers of people attempting to access this migration pathway brought with it a number of problems. Not the least is the plain number problem that while the Commonwealth is issuing 61,500 skilled visas in the 2010 budget year, there are already over 147,000 applicants for skilled migration awaiting a decision on their application, the vast majority of whom are graduated international students (House of Representatives, 2010).

The Commonwealth government has been acutely aware of this problem for some time, and has progressively changed the requirements for onshore skilled migration applicants since 2008. The cumulative effect of these changes is to close the pathway previously created. This has resulted in a number of social ramifications that were perhaps unseen and even unseeable at the time the legislative framework was implemented (Maley, 2010), (Bachelard, 2010).

While the program itself may be regarded positively or negatively depending on the varying ethical schemas one might apply, this thesis seeks to explore the ways in which the creation and closing of the program illuminates issues around how governments might go about regulating commercial activity in the new globalised world across the broad spectrum of attempts to achieve social aims by fostering commercial activity.

Australia, House of Representatives, 26th May 2010, Hansard (Laurie Ferguson, MP Reid)

Bachelard, M (2010, 6th June) 'Student Drop Hits Economy', The Age

Birrell, B, Hawthorne, L and Richardson, S. 2006, Evaluation of the General Skilled Migration Categories, Dept of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Canberra

Das, G, 2004 India Unbound: the social and economic revolution from independence to the global information age, Anchor Books, New York

DEST, 2002 ' Nature and Causes of Skills Shortages', Reflections from the Commonwealth National Industry Skills Initiative Working Groups, DEST, Canberra

Farrell, R 2003, 'Barriers to trade in education services', in A Siderenko and C Findlay (eds.), Regulation and Market Access, Asia Pacific Press, Australia, pp. 244 - 277.

Findlay & Sidorenko 2003 (eds.) Regulation and Market Access, Asia Pacific Press, Australia, p3.

Grant, W 1997 ' Perspectives on Globalization and Economic Coordination' in J Rogers Hollingsworth and R Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 319 - 336

MacEwan, A 1999 Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets and Alternatives for the 21st Century, Zed Book, London

Maley, P (2010, 17th of May) 'Hairdressers out as migrant skills list gets a trim' The Australian

Mitchell, W & Quirk, V 2005, Skills shortages in Australia: concepts and reality, Centre of Full Employment and Equity, University of Newcastle, Australia

Rogers Hollingsworth, J & Boyer R 1997 'The variety of institutional arrangements and their complementarity in modern economies', in J Rogers Hollingsworth and R Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 49 - 54

Yang, R 'Globalisation and Higher Education Development: A Critical Analysis', International Review of Education, 2003 pp. 269 - 291.

Wells, A 1989, Constructing Capitalism. An economic history of eastern Australia, 1788-1901, Allen and Unwin, Sydney

Ziguras, C and Siew-Fang Law 2006, Recruiting international students as skilled migrants: the global 'skills race' as viewed from Australia and Malaysia in Globalisation, Societies and Education Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 59–76

The Independents' Long Weekend

Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Life throws us moral quandaries, and Oakeshott and Windsor (O&W) are certainly in the middle of one now. I can not speculate re Katter because I can not imagine what penguins slip around that man's brain and also because I have a history with him which I can not go into right now but in summary involved a heated argument and physical contact at about 3am at a hot dog stand in Canberra about fifteen years ago.

But I will be very interested to see how O&W go. In essence they have to decide between their jobs and their consciences. If they support Gillard they will almost certainly be thrown from Parliament at the next election. If they support Abbott they will need to convince themselves in some way that he is not the whacko nutjob they both know he is. They have been waiting two weeks for the Liberal party to convince their consciences that it would be ok to support Abbott, and for two weeks the Liberals have fluffed the opportunity.

The constituents of their seats are as anti-Labor as Adam Bandt's Melbourne constituents are anti-Liberal. If you can for a second imagine what would happen to the Green vote at the next election if Bandt had supported the Liberals, then you must understand that the same rapid evaporation of support will follow for O&W if they support Labor.

The problem is O&W are more politically engaged than their constituents. While they obviously understand they have a duty to represent the views of their electorates, they concurrently realise better than their constituents what a fruitloop Abbott really is. The most morally smooth way out for them would be if they could be convinced (or even just find an excuse to justify the belief that) Abbott is not going to be such an absolute baboon in office and that therefore O&W, as rational, experienced, non-fruitloop human beings could possibly countenance supporting him. Unfortunately for them the Liberals have not been able to provide the necessary lubricant to make this intellectual and moral transition viable for a thinking person.

And this is sharp in the souls of O&W because they must be imagining the counter-scenario. If they support Gillard they will be deluged with blame for every Labor pinko policy that comes out. And be sure of this - someone in their electorates will call every Labor policy pinko-commie rubbish. And also be sure of this - that being called something is often the same as being something in politics. The facts don't matter. What does matter is the being-together-with-a-common-enemy. In their electorates the common enemy is Labor. If the independents support Labor, they are joining the common enemy.

The National Party would have a field day. They would heap curse and blame upon the independents who have stolen their votes. They would seek to rebuild legitimacy by doing this. It would be very ugly indeed, but providing the electorate with a figure of hate upon which they can heap the blame for everything the government says and does will not be a tactic that fails to draw support in their seats. O&W, of all people, know this already.

The Coalition knows it has lost the intellectual argument over who would be better to run the country. That's why they have switched to their red-baiting tactics today. It is an appeal directly to the constituents of O&W, and a very clear reminder to O&W that they will lose their seats if they support Labor.

It is also by default an admission that when the conservatives present their arguments in detail to people who have the time and intelligence to understand and judge their arguments, their arguments fail dismally. All they can do now is pander to the base prejudices of the constituents and by that appeal to the base instinct of O&W for political survival, and hope that trumps any conclusions O&W may have come to through rational thinking.

Lastly, there is the Parliament itself. Eventually Julia will almost certainly ask Quentin for permission to try to form a government. On the floor the conservatives will then put up a motion of no confidence. The independents will then be put solidly on the spot to support one or the other. If they support Julia they will be signing their own political death warrants. If they support Tony they will be betraying their own consciences.

That will be an interesting moment.

What they are not mentioning about immigration.

If you are under the impression that lowering skilled immigration to around 180,000 per year will result in our population being less than 36 million in 2050 you're wrong. The numbers both parties are using come from the Intergenerational Report 2010 (IGR). That report says that if we increase skilled immigration to 180,000 per annum we should reach 36 million by 2050. Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison actually acknowledged this in the initial immigration debate on the ABC. But somehow, in the general spin of an election campaign the message of the IGR got twisted into almost its exact opposite.

The IGR is also quite clear in showing that if its predictions are right, even this level of immigration will not necessarily ameliorate the effects of the problem the IGR was set up to look at in the first case. That is, the problem of Australia's ageing population.

Using migration and total population estimates from the IGR while failing to realise the framework problems the IGR is actually reporting on gives the electorate only half the story. The small half of the story.

The big part of the story is that even if we keep up that level of skilled migration, by 2050 there will be only 2.7 working aged people to every person aged over 65. Today there are 5 working aged people per aged person. And in 1970 there were 7.5 working aged people per aged person.

This is the reality that underpins our population problems. We need more people in order to support our ageing population, yet we are unwilling to accept more people if that means more congestion and further harm to our natural environment.

But unless we can more than double the productivity of every working aged person by 2050 we really have no choice other than to grow the population.

Of course, we could figure out some way of removing more old people. Labor have gone somewhat down this path by simply raising the retirement age for anyone who is currently under 52. But even this measure, implemented between 2017 and 2023, will not give us anything like the space we need to solve the problem.

It is also worth noting that we are not alone in this. Most of the Western World faces similar problems with an ageing population. This means the people we bring into the country to fill the gap will almost certainly come from China, India and South East Asia. Recent changes to migration rules are not doing anything toward making us a more attractive, or even viable, destination for people from these regions.

But in the medium term we must engage with these people. It is also in our long-term interest to design and implement a steady and predictable migration program, not one that changes with the short term election cycles as its primary motivation. The sooner we start bringing these people in, the longer their communities will have to assimilate and settle into the broader Australian community.

We also need the time to build infrastructure, and avoid the environmental impacts of having more people here.

The problem then is not about if we want to have a population of 36 million in 2050, but how we can reach that number while preserving our natural environment, providing adequate infrastructure and, while we're at it, doubling the productivity of the people. That is a challenge. Pretending to simplify this problem to mere number trading and racial dog-whistling does the electorate no service.

On Emotions

First up, to even use the term 'emotion' is to perch barefoot and precarious upon a stalagmite that has beguiled philosophy for millennia. From Plato's Forms to Russell's Paradox about classes and to modern versions of 'qualia' that problem is about the idea that there is a thing, and then there is the idea of a thing. 'Emotion' is not itself an emotion. Modern philosophy continues to do good work on objects and ideas like 'table', 'The King of France', 'red', 'word', 'meaning', and even 'goat'; but emotion and words like 'happiness', 'regret' or 'impatience' have not received anywhere near the amount of serious attention as word relations and meanings like 'red', 'bat', or 'meaning'.

Emotions are different to things in two ways. Firstly, they are considered to be existentially different things to physical things. Secondly, they attract different judgements than do things.

But even regarding the first, there is considerable room for overlap about the way emotions and things are considered to be different things. For example, the emotion 'disgruntled' is not considered to exist in the same way as this computer, and that difference is largely to do with the perceived physicality of the different things. The computer is hard-sided and exists in space, while 'disgruntled' does not seem to have any edges, and exists not-in-space, and comes and goes, while the computer seems to obtain a certain permanency by its separate physical existence.

Yet actually the 'computer'-ness of this intricately arranged mess of plastic and wires is like an emotion I seep through the physicality of those bits and pieces that make up the computer in front of me. And the 'computer'-ness of these bits and pieces is transient. One day this computer will come apart and be a less usefully coherent tangle of wires and green boards. Being a 'computer' is the transient 'emotion' I impose on all those bits and pieces at the moment.

My 'disgruntle', while not apparently physically separate from me, has some advantages in existence not held by basic physical objects. It moves around with me. When I turn away from the computer I no longer see the computer, but my disgruntle is with me whichever way I turn. Not many physical objects have this ability to exist wherever I am, regardless of where I look (except my body itself). In this sense 'disgruntles's' existence could be more 'real' than the physical existence of the computer. Taking the analogy one step further, perhaps just as 'computer' is like the 'emotion' that defines and creates something out of the bits and pieces in front of me, perhaps the emotions I have running through the wobblier mass of my organic existence are just the same – a creating and defining set of characteristics that go toward me being. Disgruntled (or 'Human') does exist in space after all: it is to my flesh as computer is to the plastic bits in front of me. One day my body will cease to be in its current form and my disgruntled-ness will cease to happen to it, just as 'computer'-ness will cease to happen to the computer once it falls apart. After all, my body predates my consciousness and will continue to exist for some time once my consciousness ceases. I remember Joel Marks writing about this somewhere.

The point is that drawing a simple line between things and emotions and saying the difference is somehow in the existential differences between these two phenomena is problematic to say the least. Perhaps happiness happens to me in the same way as 'apple' happens to that roundish red thing over there.

But it is true that things and emotions attract judgements in different ways. We might say that table is 'bad', but what we really mean is that it does not conform with the way we wish the table to be. We don't mean the table is evil, or somehow morally delinquent. Nor do we call a table 'mopey' or 'bored'. Of the two things, we are more likely to make normative (in the ethics sense) judgements about emotions than about things. Strictly speaking, saying a table is bad is an understandable kind of non-ethical normative statement, but the crux here is that it is non-ethical. But once we understand the murkiness around the idea that emotions are non-things, as argued above, it can also seem sometimes uncomfortable to make ethically normative statements about emotions.

For example, most people would probably agree with a general statement like: 'Happiness is good'.

For me this is a pretty difficult statement to come to grips with. Firstly, there is no consensus about what 'happiness' actually means. And if we can't agree on what it is, we can hardly go adding normative descriptors to it and expecting agreement. Secondly, what does 'good' mean here? It could mean morally good, or it could just mean that it somehow feels good. Often there is a conflation of these two senses of good when it comes to feeling, well, good. Some are perhaps more comfortable with this conflation (see John Stuart Mill as an example) than others (see entire history of Catholicism as example). My point is that from an analytic point of view this conflation is probably epistemically unnecessary, even if it is morally twisty.

Of course one could theoretically necessitate 'good' with 'happiness' in a kind of Kripkean meaning-shackle, that is, define one as being necessary for the other's existence. But this would require us to either decouple normative ethical concerns from the term 'good', or else submerge all normative ethical concerns into the idea of happiness.

That is, we can either have meaningful statements like 'It's sometimes bad to be happy', or we can not. If we can that's cool, but we then have to reject the statement that 'It's good to be happy'. But if we can not have bad happiness, if we can only say 'It's good to be happy'; then (so long as we grant that sometimes people can feel good and happy about doing morally wrong things) we have to allow for there to be instances when good does not equal ethical righteousness, or else we have to define happiness as being in itself an ethically righteous thing to be, or define happy as being itself ethical righteousness, regardless of other conditions.

And that is just too slippery for me.

We know there is something that happens physically when someone says truthfully that they are happy. And if you were to concurrently ask that truthful person if they feel good, they will almost certainly answer in the affirmative. But I would posit that they are merely repeating themselves when they do so, and not taking into their sphere of current experience any ethically normative concern outside of the idea that it feels good to feel happy. They feel good, they feel happy. The person means the same thing, but they do not necessarily mean (intentionally or not) that it is good (ethically) to feel happy.

This is just an example, and it obviously revolves around the duplicitous nature of the word 'good'. But you will find that this problem occurs with many emotion words. The problem arises because we are treating emotion words, and emotions, as something other than objects. We seem to wish them a position on a ladder of meaning that we do not wish upon physical objects. We require that 'happiness' or 'boredom' have some non-physical ideal relation to a matrix of ethical or religious or philosophical ideology. This in effect treats emotions similarly to the way philosophers used to treat 'meanings', and yes I am thinking of early Wittgenstein here. It leads to similar contradictions, and yes I am thinking of Russell and of later Wittgenstein here.

Instead, we need to free emotions of their 'meanings'. It is neither 'good', nor 'bad', to feel happy. Or better: 'goodness' or 'badness' has nothing to do with 'happiness'. There is no necessary connection between good and happy, or sad and bad. Sometimes you will be happy. Sometimes you will be sad. These need no more than that in order to exist.

Thinking that they do, and saddling them and us with ideologically fraught value judgements merely confuses the issue of meaning, and causes all sorts of grief in many ways. And that's bad.

Summer in Three Places: Different ways of getting wet.

Melbourne

Sunfire over rippling sheen,

and the slow rock of low waves.

Boats bobbing on water, quiet and ignored.

The heat dreams between creaking trees,

and the imaginable cold and clean grasp

of bay water.

So you shine, and this whole slow-motion world of days

vanishes into you.

You're laughing at the seagulls.

You're dropping twigs onto the water.

You're breathing quietly in your cup

of air – the frame of your ribs

embraces your physical heart. An insect

traces arcs across still water near the pier

and the heat keeps pressing.

Sydney

madness. Unbuckled streets engine their own noise.

Familiar muscular roads bulge with cars

but not faces.

The freshly radiant leaf-world reaches and splashes

green between houses, flats. Water you can feel flowing, pushing

thickly through the air itself,

and just over the ridge of orange rooves, your strung wires

looping and lazy in the teary haze, and nearby somewhere:

The ocean massing her shoreline.

Near Byrneside

Fragrant life has muddy fingers, and when he jumps

he tucks his knees up under his chin. Splashing in

the cool brown channel, a scatter cloud of insects whooshes away.

You can smell the freshness of horseshit, and you silent on the bank,

rest into long, faun grass. He appears again,

shaking the water from his head, serious about climbing out

to jump in again. He is practicing for the Olympics, just in case

Channel diving ever gets put in, you never know.

Tech Convergence and Vertical Integration in Publishing

Once you have released yourself from any delusions about being published by a commercial publisher, and from the idiotic idea of making real money from your writing, and flown up on the freedom that realisation gives you, you may want to (sigh) self publish.

I am completely cool with the idea that no publisher in OZ will touch my book. Probably that's a result of my completely giving up on the idea of writing for a clientele of regular human-type book buyers. In this way me and the publishers of Australia have a pretty solid understanding. Of course that didn't stop me sending it to them. They are a powerful network and their endorsement is respected and they still largely control which novels get to stick their heads up above the ever-rolling media ocean and at least get heard about by the public. So you'd be mad not to give it a go. A series of polite rejection letters followed with glacial regularity.

So now I am considering getting a few copies done for friends and family. Last time I looked at this the costs were just completely ridiculous. This time I am pleasantly surprised. But let me be absolutely clear – this is not a commercial operation. This is the whoopsie-bang version of stapling a poetry chapbook together and trading it for smokes in the university bar. In this case the copies will be given away, though of course if anyone decides they want to give cash that proposition will not be rejected.

My specs were 400 pages with a two colour cover in standard novel format. I wanted quotes for 1, 10, 25 and 100.

Quotes from four PoDs in Australia:

Quote 1: AUD11.08 per book if you get a minimum 100 printed

Quote 2: AUD11.08 per book with a minimum 10 printed

Quote 3: AUD14.25 per book for 25 copies, or AUD12.96 per book for 30

Quote 4: AUD35.60 per book for 10, or AUD16.41 per book for 100

[I can't put the actual names of the companies here alongside the quote because their individual emails have those confidentiality phrases at the bottom, and the quotes may vary according to location or something I don't know about. But if you would like to know the names of the companies I approached send me a direct email jkspencer_200@yahoo.com ]

Now combine that realisation with an understanding of these companies:

www.completelynovel.com, will do PoD and delivery in UK/US for ridiculously low prices.

www.smashwords.com, will manage your listing in all e-book spaces.

These are just two examples, there are other similar outfits around, though I think completelynovel.com is the first to offer the whole lot.

One starts to wonder why bother with Publishers anyway? There is no reason to think that going with a traditional publisher is going to get your book wider distribution among your intended audience (particularly if your target audience is about 25 people), nor to think publishers are going to get you more money for the effort. If you accept you are never going to be able to give up your day job, why not seek to maximise control and ROI?

On the other hand, what if you are a really well known writer like say John Birmingham or Margaret Atwood, both of whom are active users of e-networks? (I chose these two to illustrate the variety of writers now engaging with the Interverse). Wouldn't these costs also present an opportunity to an established writer? Here's the rub. If you are not JB or Margaret Atwood, ie you're not going to sell thousands of books: why go with a publisher who's hardly going to support you anyway, and you get only like 10% of the cover price? Get your own 100 copies printed and take 50% of the cover price. In other words, for every 5 books a publisher sells you can make the same amount of money selling 1. This of course assumes you don't use booksellers or any other ticket-clippers as a distribution channel.

On the other hand, if you are JB or Margaret Atwood, why go with a publisher when you could so easily set up your own website and supply chain and sell directly through your own distribution channel to your already established readers? And again, you'd get like $10 per book instead of $2 per book from your publisher. Even if you only sell half as many books you're still two and a half times better off financially. And believe me, if JB or Margaret Atwood announced they were going to drop their publishers and sell only through their website that in itself would generate publicity and drive sales further.

This is the inevitable squeeze the Publishers have to deal with. In business terms it's nothing new, it's just the convergence of technology creating easier paths to vertical integration. This has been happening since the birth of capitalism. Some might even say it is one of the driving forces of capitalism. It's just that it is happening faster now, and as I have been in Corporate Land for a while I didn't notice the speed at which it is occurring in publishing.

The publishers used to control a valve through which production flowed. The tightness of that valve was the barrier to entry of being able to afford to publish a book with a printer who required a minimum print run of a few thousand. But that's gone daddy-o. The other valve was access to exclusive distribution channels to the public through bookstores. That one has also gone.

The point is emphatically not that now suddenly you will be able make money out of writing because these barriers have gone. If you're a weirdo like me there's probably only a market of a few dozen people who would buy your book anyway, regardless of the production methods and distribution channels used. But even if you are a writer who can command a large following, you also have no need to accept the losses incurred when you go through the old barriers / valves. And that is what is terrifyingly beautiful. Be as cynical or as wondrous as you want, but I truly believe this convergence is going to have as radical an impact as the Gutenberg Press. And the impact will not just be in the number of books printed and read, but in the exponential expansion of the ideas that get out into the world.

Because importantly, the Gutenberg Press not only increased the production of normally approved texts, it also provided the opportunity for texts that previously would never have been published to come out. Then, the removal of a layer of control (the Church) allowed texts that would not have been approved to get printed, so long as you had enough money. The publishers are / were essentially just groups of people with enough money and access to networks to engage printers at a price that made it economically reasonable for the printers to print. They controlled production and access, they were the entities who gave permission for something to get out into world or vanish. But they won't be for much longer. And THAT is what is going to change the world.

Of course this is not going to happen by next Wednesday. In the meantime those publishers that survive will evolve. Just as when this kind of convergence occurs in any other industry the survivors will be those who can specialise, capture new valves, or provide a new value proposition. My hunch is that specialist publishers of high quality lit will survive, more as marketing services providers and editorial selectors for their own readership. Publishers like Sleepers in Melbourne are probably on to a fairly good thing in that they have built a brand that has value in terms of their ability to select kick-ass books. If they publish something I want to read it because their opinion on what is worth my reading has been proven. I follow Sleepers per se, just as much as any of their writers. Whereas you take someone like HarperCollins, well, I don't really believe their spin, their publishing activity is so wide that they are too far removed from my own interest for me to believe them.

You can see there is a parallel here, in that what publishers like Sleepers are doing is getting closer to the consumer, in essence following the shrinking chain and building trust (which is 'brand') and thus creating a value proposition.

Alternatively publishers can do what completelynovel.com is seeking to do and position themselves as a convenient tool for writers/readers to communicate. This is not exactly the same as a valve as the barrier to entry is so low in this model that there needs to be some other kind of proposition to keep customers buying. We'll see.

Update: Here's a fantastic video about all this by Richard Nash.

On Success and Failure

This is going to twist around a bit.

One of the great lies this society propagates is about determination and success. It goes something like this:

If you really believe in what you want to do, and you work really hard at it, eventually you will succeed.

Even on brief reflection this is arrant nonsense, for what makes those who succeed so remarkable is that they have done so while many others have failed. Even people who have worked harder, with more determination, and for longer.

Our efforts towards achievement occur within a network of so many interconnected contingencies and just plain happenstances that to claim that the cause of anyone's 'success' can be solely ascribed to their personal effort is just ridiculous. Of course, nothing would occur without effort (except for within the ranks of the uber rich), but effort alone (assuming you are not uber rich) will not make you 'successful'.

This effort to success argument is endlessly repeated by those who have already achieved 'success', and as you will necessarily never hear from those who have not achieved that 'success' in the space in which 'successful' people proselytise to us, the room for any other argument is small. For example, you will never see a failed talk-show host on their own talk-show talking about how it is not just hard work that makes you a successful talk-show host because if you did, they would not be a failed talk-show host. Or, I often read of 'successful' writers claiming that you will succeed if you keep working hard at the writing etc, but of course you will never read in a major publication a failed writer writing about how they worked hard at their writing for fifty years but never succeeded, because again, if you did read it they wouldn't have been a 'failure'. (This blog an exception).

One of the reasons we so often hear this argument is that people who have achieved success often feel a need to justify to themselves and others the disproportionate possession of the world's resources (money) that success has given them. They like to tell themselves and us that it is not as a result of mere chance and luck they have become rich, but as a just reward for serious efforts undertaken by themselves, in the face of great hardship blah blah blah.

One danger in the hard work breeds success argument is that it makes people who work hard and don't succeed feel that perhaps they are not working hard enough, when in reality no amount of hard work is going to result in their success. It makes them anxious that perhaps they have 'failed' through their own fault when this is not the case.

Another danger is of course in the equation of success with riches.

I am wary here of seeming to put out some other trite platitude about the attainment of riches not being a worthy assessment of success, when for society-at-large, the attainment of wealth is seen as the evidence of success. Certainly the attainment of poverty is not often considered a successful outcome to an endeavour. But it is still valid to decouple the attainment of wealth from the attainment of success.

That might sound strange but I strongly believe it is important if you want to be happy. Now, this needs to be seriously tempered with the condition that whatever you do you have a modicum of material wellness. If you are skint you have no choice. But if we can get one step beyond this and assume just for the moment that you do have the ability to feed, house and put clothes on your family, only then can we talk about what personal success might mean beyond the admittedly large and first hurdle of getting a job.

In societal terms I myself have experienced a modicum of failure and success in my own humble measure. I have seen great failure and success in societal terms in others. I do not believe that really hard work has anything to do with it as I have worked just as hard and failed in societal terms as I have and succeeded in those terms. This is where this post is going to twist, for I have come to agree with the great lie mentioned above, so long as it is decoupled from the belief of success necessarily equalling wealth, and so long as we understand that a certain amount of material well-being must be present to satisfy basic needs. That is, you are not homeless.

[Parallel to this is the phenomenon I have seen repeatedly: That many people I have met who have attained wealth have not actuality chased it as an end in itself. The wealth has come as a by-product of chance, hard work and luck as well as, sometimes, bastardry. For we should never mistake, as the wealthy often do, the attainment of wealth with the practice of virtue. This common false attribution itself leads to all sorts of wickedness which I will not go into here.]

Conversely, I have known people who have attained wealth but not success if we equate success with happiness. I suspect this is because happiness needs to grow from a real personal achievement, and when someone becomes wealthy from sources not related to their own achievement; and they can not mislead themselves into believing otherwise, their wealth really does become hollow. I have known seriously sad wealthy people. Before I knew people like this I would have dismissed their sadness as affectation, and railed at their thanklessness to the fates that bestowed them such advantage. But now that I have sat with them, drank with them, heard their stories, I know that it is possible to be wealthy and a complete failure. I really pity them.

Of course I have also known happy rich people. Some are happy because they honestly believe they deserve their wealth. Some are happy because they can just accept and even revel in the sheer good luck they had to acquire wealth. Some are all these kinds in one.

But the truth within the great lie is that so long as you accept that whatever it is you do will probably not result in you being wealthy, if you completely separate being wealthy from being successful and replace it with a definition of success along the lines of the endeavour itself, then hard work and determination can get you great success, which for many is probably the mastery of some trade or activity.

For example, I have come to realise that for me personally the completion of my fourth novel has given me by far a greater feeling of success than the project of my last job. The novel will almost certainly never be commercially published, never make me any money, and has cost me a great deal both financially and in time. But I believe it works. It does what I set out to make it do. Or, I know it is the best that I can do at this time. I will shortly put it aside and start another, but for the rest of my life I shall notch it up as a really great achievement. My last job was no failure, it was a wonderful time and afforded me the ability to have time off to write the novel. But the job will fade in memory. My daughter in twenty years time will probably not even know what that job was, but I feel certain that if she reads the manuscript she will be proud. That, my friends, is success.

Remembering fifteen.

I think of her poster: butterfly-like

patches in pastel colours, the heads

of The Cure emerging from black.

Her nimbleness rising in my fingers,

twenty-one years later for no reason

other than I caught today

some similar smell, of cold dust

on grass matting, of her

bare shoulders freshly showered,

of the underside of a new clean pillow,

of the short black hair on the back of her head

where she had had it shaved a month ago –

such a mod, all blacks and purples

and yellow stitched Docs.

Winnie Reds at the end

of platform 2, out of the rain,

and her blue school bag black texta-ed with the names

of bands, symbols.

She wore my grey school jumper in front of her friends

and wrote

an Anarchy sign in blue biro on my wrist,

the first girl I kissed

bought hip flasks of vodka.

And the silver train at night,

swaying to the city;

her legs in black stockings,

her feet crossed confidently on the seats, she's smiling

and her green eyes

right at me.

‘Echuca Soldier’s Wonderful Experience: Taken Prisoner and escapes’

London, 28^th August, 1917. Frank on left. On right is most likely his cousin Lt. Arthur Alder, of II ANZAC Mounted Corps.

Frank Leslie Alder was a 28 year old drover from Echuca when he enlisted in the AIF on 3^rd August, 1915. He was sent to France with the 15^th reinforcements for the 6^th Battalion and taken on strength in the field on 17^th December, 1916.

He served with the 6^th Battalion until the 6^th of April 1917, when he was sent to hospital with trench fever. He spent the rest of the war in England, finally setting sail for Australia on the 14^th January, 1919.

From information in the 6^th Battalion diary and the Official War History I believe the incident described in the letter below happened on the 2^nd of March, 1917 while the Battalion was occupying BARLEY Trench in the FLERS sector. The incident occurred between BARLEY and PORK trenches.

Article appeared in May 1917 in Echuca-Moama newspaper.

'Echuca Soldier's Wonderful Experience: Taken Prisoner and escapes'

In a letter to his father, Mr. James Alder, Pakenham St, Echuca, Alder writing from France March 7 says:

"Since writing my last letter to you I have had a marvellous experience, and must consider myself one of the luckiest men alive. As I told you before, I have joined a Lewis gun section. One night the team I am attached to was sent out to an advanced post, with instructions to come back to the front line by daylight. Well just about half an hour before then two of us were sent back so that we could get the early morning tea for the rest of the boys. We had just got into the front line when Fritz opened up with a very heavy barrage, so we had to keep down. However, a strong patrol party of the enemy took my mate and I prisoners. The first thing we knew was that about thirty Germans were right on us and calling us to surrender, and waving bombs in their hands ready to throw them into our position. Where they came from I don't know where, and as there was a very heavy fog it was impossible to see forty yards ahead. We gave ourselves up and were being taken away in the direction of the enemy lines when our captors ran right into the advanced post we had just left, and where our mates were, and before the boys knew what the enemy was about there were four or five bombs thrown at them. With that they turned the gun onto the Germans, and then there was some yelling. Three or four of the huns dropped, but fortunately me and my mate escaped being hit. Four of our boys were wounded, one of them having his right foot blown clear off. The enemy then turned and ran back in the direction they had come. By this time I was fairly knocked up, but had to keep going with them. Then they turned to the right and almost ran into the 5^th battalion lines. Before they knew where they were the 5^th were firing on them, so we all got into shell holes. We remained there for a few minutes. I made up my mind to take my chance, and bolted for my life about 50 yards into the 5^th battalion lines. The rifle fire was heavy and Fritz had a shot at me while I was on the run, however he missed, and I reached our lines safely. When I was running in I dropped, and I thought I was a 'goner', but when I reached the 5^th btn and looked around Fritz and my mates were going in the opposite direction. By this time there were only about 17 of the enemy left, the others having been killed or wounded. Ten men of the 5^th btn went out to try and turn them and succeeded. Half an hour later Fritz was again in sight and the enemy had to put up their hands. There was only my mate and one of them who were not wounded. How my mate and I escaped being hit is simply marvellous. We were through the barrage twice, missed being hit by machine gun and rifle fire, while all the time the huns were dropping and yelling one after the other. I was fairly settled. I suppose I must have cut out that 50 yard sprint in record time. My mate must have had a more trying time than I did, and I think he was lucky that the huns did not settle him when they saw me doing a 'get'. It was an experience which neither of us wish to go through again, and we have to thank our mates on the machine gun for saving us. Only for their prompt action I might have been in Berlin today. I believe the boy who fired the gun has been recommended and he deserves it. He turned what looked like a successful raid into a failure. His name is Tweedie, and he comes from Ballarat and is only 19 years of age."

COAG, Health Reform, the Henry Tax Review and why this is not really about health.

It's really about money and power, of course.

The trick is in the two promises sitting side by side, to wit, that:

1. The Feds will kick in 2/3^rd of the cost of Hospitals and some Health related activities, and
   
2. The States will give up 1/3^rd of GST revenue in return.
   

The problem is one of these numbers is going up and the other is not. Say you're a Premier. Say you get $10 a year from GST to run the State, which really means Hospitals, Schools and Cops. So now the feds are saying that for Health they will take about $3 of that, and you will put in about $2, which leaves you with $5 for Schools and Cops.

But the cost of Health is rising by about 3% per annum, while tax revenue will remain steady or fall, or will do something we don't yet know about (Henry Tax Review comment coming below). So in a few years' time the PM rocks up and says that Health is now going to cost $5, which means you're going to have to put in about $2.50. Where's the extra 50c to come from? It's got to come out of Schools or Cops. Now as Premier you are in a very pretty position. You can go to the electorate saying you won't put in more money for Hospitals, or you can go to the electorate saying you're going to cut funding to Schools and Cops. Your choice. But oh wait, there's a third option, that is, you can give Schools or Cops to the Feds! That this would happen if the Rudd model went through is an absolute certainty.

Make no mistake, this is what this debate is about. Lurking behind it like a pale kid who's just spewed behind the couch and is hoping no one will smell the vapours rising, is the Henry Tax Review.

We paid our most trusted employees, ie Kevin Rudd and Cabinet, to conduct a review of the Australian Taxation system with an eye to the long term. They then spent our money hiring some very smart people to do this review. The review has come back and now our employees are refusing to show it to us. Instead, they have come back asking us to entirely reorganise the whole shop. Why? Because they say we have to. Where's the Report? Someplace, they say. They'll show it to us later. Don't worry, they say.

Were these people actually employees they would be sacked, and quite possibly we would bring in the police to try to get access to the report we paid them to produce and which they now refuse to give us.

But like most reports we already know the gist of what it's going to say. That is, that the ageing population is going to mean rising costs and stable or falling tax revenues. This will happen across the spectrum of spending, but most acutely in Health. Most of the rising costs in health are about old people living longer. And these people are the baby boomers, a generation that has never been shy about funding its own lifestyles at the cost of other generations, and that still holds the key to political power.

We have to keep in mind the Normal Moronic Notion at the base of our votes. That is, that people would most like to pay less tax and also have better Hospitals and Schools and more Cops. These contradictory wishes segue nicely in our Federation in that the Feds raise income tax (which we want low), while the States provide Hospitals, Schools, and Cops (which we want lots of, and which cost heaps). The introduction of the GST was a neat way of side-stepping this issue when it was dedicated in its entirety to the States. It was in effect a way of raising taxes without seeming to do so, and at the same time chucking more money at Hospitals, Schools and Cops.

If the Feds now want to take control of Health they have a simple way of raising the money to do so at hand, ie raise income taxes. But as that would contradict the first tenet of our Normal Moronic Notion it just can't be done. Option 2 is therefore raid the GST money. But once the States allow the Feds to play the number trick they will be doomed to the inevitable and electorally unacceptable policy positions mentioned above which contradict the second tenet of the Normal Moronic Notion.

As an aside, if this were actually about Health Reform and not about a grab for power the Feds would agree to a pool funding model as suggested by Brumby, one that would protect the real money numbers and prevent the Feds from capturing the States in this policy pincer.

Who will win?
Obviously not us, whatever happens. But in a political sense the States can win this. Firstly, they have the original agreement on the GST, which means if they can force nothing to happen they will win. Secondly, Rudd's threat to take it to a referendum is just stupid. It won't win. The States would simply run against it by showing the people the number trick the Feds are trying to pull. If the States get traction on that we have a situation where a Fed Labor gov't is going against all Labor States and at the same time trying to win a Federal election as a Labor gov't. This would be a disaster for Labor. In the minds of the electorate it would mean that if the Feds are right, then State Labor is bad, and if the States are right, then Fed Labor is bad. Either way, it transforms into 'Labor is bad'. This is why Abbott has been smilingly quiet lately. He's giggling so hard his bike must be wobbling.

At COAG everyone knows this, and it is merely a matter of who blinks first. But overall the States have both the whip hand, and the absolute need to prevent falling into the trap the Feds have set. In the end we will probably get some new bank account. It will be called a 'pool' or something, and they will then fight over control of it.

Lastly, they seem to have forgotten that it is eminently possibly for a State to individually cede power to the Commonwealth, as VIC did with its industrial relations powers under Kennett. If South Australia loves this new model so much why not just independently cede the powers? Or do so in partnership with Queensland? The Commonwealth has not shown that cost savings are to be found in economies of scale that necessarily require all the States to cede at once. So why aren't they ceding these powers individually? Perhaps these States believe they would be relatively better off if they could access money raised in VIC/NSW? No, they can already do that. The real reason is they understand the political implications.

NCC and the Hard Problem

Here are two claims:

1. That while neuroscientists are getting closer to finding the neural correlates for consciousness (NCC) this will not solve the Hard Problem (s). But:
   
2. That is the fault of the Hard Problem, not the neuroscientists.

And briefly:

3. A way forward.

What are the NCCs?

No one really knows, but they are getting close, for example:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527520.400-firing-on-all-neurons-where-consciousness-comes-from.html?page=1

(And a BIG THANKYOU to David Pearce for bringing the link to my attention!!)

Whether this particular work finds NCCs or not, the fact is that many people are working on it and sooner rather than later they will find them.

What is the Hard Problem?

Essentially it is the statement that even when the NCCs are found, this event in itself will not be able to solve such problems as why or how is it that these physical or electric entities seem to transform themselves into the apparently individually unified consciousnesses we all experience.

So,

1. The discovery of NCCs will not solve the Hard Problem:

I have no idea how the engine in my car works, but I know that it does. In theory, someone could explain to me all the different parts of the engine and how they interact to make the car brrmm. But no matter how intricate my knowledge of my car and its constitutive parts becomes, it will get me nowhere near being able to describe what it is like to drive at 150km /h along a dirt track behind Mt. Macedon. No matter how detailed the description of the constitutive parts of my car, the description will not define 'car' in its broadest experiential sense. I am not going to get into a solipsistic Cartesian argument about who is driving the driver of the car, because I don't need to for the point to stand. Whatever the descriptions of the physical workings of my brain, those descriptions will not in themselves describe, let alone define, what it is to have (or do) consciousness.

But this is not at all meant to belittle the search for NCCs. It is important that we find out. It is perhaps the most we can ever do.

2. It's the Hard Problem's fault anyway.

The Hard Problem and its related mysteries are like a retreating mist. Once an answer is found to a question, the Hard Problem ideologues will always be able to draw back further and merely say the answer does not resolve some deeper issue about what it is like to be the consciousness looking at the answer. This is akin to religion's retreat before science. Whereas hundreds of years ago the religious consensus may have been that there really is a physical heaven with angels actually located in the sky, or that a really existent God physically shook the earth to make earthquakes, as science advances so religion retreats into more and more esoteric explanations of what religion itself stands for. Now, I have even heard it posited by the religious that religious entities are themselves constituent of 'those things that can not be answered'. This is beautiful in its impermeability. That is, whatever science discovers, God is that thing that exists further than science's reach. This position would set religion up forever, since there will always be something beyond what science knows. The problem is it fails the falsifiability criteria, the greatness is that it does so deliberately, it indeed defines itself and will go on defining itself as that which does not contain falsifiability. But it still has a popular pull, in that even if we now know that earthquakes are caused by shifting tectonic plates, the religious can simply claim God makes the plates move. Once science established that the interaction of gravity and the earth's core make tectonic plates move, the religious can simply say that God makes the gravity etc, this can go on forever.

The Hard Problem does the same thing. Firstly, in clumsy hands, it can always descend in to the recursive Cartesian spiral alluded to above. That is, what's inside the head of whatever it is inside the head of .....on and on and on. But that is a little simple these days. Secondly, it can do the same thing in disguise. That is, whatever 'explanation' 'science' attempts at defining or describing consciousness it can merely remove itself from the scene, ducking into another room with a plaintive 'But now where am I?' or, 'But what is the meaning of love?'

This is because the tautology of scientific explanations does not fit into realms which define themselves essentially as being non-tautological. We will never come to a conclusion that consciousness = x in the same way as we might say 1 + 1 = 2 (which is a tautological truth). And we will never come to that conclusion because for some consciousness (as religion mentioned above) will always be defined as 'whatever it is that is not reducible to '= x'.

But this is not the fault of the neuroscientists. As Dennett has said regarding magic, people tend to think there is real magic and then there is trickery. And when you explain to someone the mechanics behind a piece of 'magic', they often simply say that right, now you have explained a piece of trickery and you are no closer to showing the mechanics of 'real' magic. Of course, the rub is there is no such thing as 'real magic', only well delivered trickery. The more you explain, the more the required definition recedes.

In the same way, no matter how detailed the description of NCCs, for many they will never be able to 'explain' consciousness because consciousness (like magic) is always defined as that which eludes explanation.

3. The way forward.

Just as in the car example, perhaps we are expecting too much from the mechanics. If I were to seek to more effectively define my car in its wider social or experiential sense I would immediately need to look not at the engine but at the environment in which the car operates. I drive it mostly on roads. It is a social signifier of my family-style life. It is a pretty smooth ride. For most people, in most situations, the 'definition' of their car has nothing to do with the engine or its parts. The 'car' is embedded in a much more complex series of social nuances. And essentially these definitions have virtually nothing to do with what kind of spark plugs are in the car. I would argue that in nearly every case (except when the car breaks down) the most effective and widely used definition for car is not going to be found in the car's parts themselves, but in this wider net of images and considerations about the car.

The problem is some Hard Problem ideologues wish to still locate the Hard Problem in the singularity of an individual's conscious experience (the car itself), while at the same time denying the neuroscientists (mechanics) the ability to define within those parameters. If you restrict the derivation of meaningful statements about consciousness to the individual experience of that consciousness, it is like you are requiring the mechanic to define car somewhere in the engine while at the same time denying that the meaning of car will be located in the engine. You are asking the mechanic to tell you how the spark plugs made it possible for you pull chicks on Lygon St. The mechanic will probably come up with a whole series of causal relations between the kind of spark plugs and the engine and the style of car, but he will never explain the leap between the car and the friendly smile by recourse to the engine alone.

Perhaps we would find more viable explanations for consciousness by decoupling the idea of consciousness from the individual experience of consciousness.

For more information:

For Dennett see:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxqM21qBzw

This guy does a lot of interesting stuff at Monash:

http://arts.monash.edu.au/philosophy/staff/jhohwy.php

Ethical circles get tighter

I am going to make three claims:

1. That although people commonly ascribe universality to statements of ethical values in practice there is none, and that the border between those to whom we ascribe ethical value and those to whom we do not is commonly drawn along geographic, economic and racial boundaries, often working in parallel.
   
2. That this boundary is central to modern Western capitalism's ability to exist, and that the evolution into modern capitalism has really been a shifting of ethical boundaries, rather than the elimination of them.
   
3. That ongoing changes in technology have increased the diffusion of ideas and the movement of people between the geographic boundaries and that modern capitalism's response has been to tighten the circle inside which humans who have ethical value are allowed to exist, thus decreasing the area in which ethically valued humans can exist rather than increasing it.
   

1. There is an ethical boundary.
   

   I imagine there's a new factory opening in my suburb. The owners plan to make it succeed by producing shoes at a much lower cost than their competitors. They say they are going to do this by employing child labour. The plan is to ship in thousands of Indonesian children and house them in long prefabricated huts. The children will work six days a week, ten hours a day. They will be paid next to nothing, and what they are paid they will spend on basic needs provided by the company store. In order to prevent any organising by the children the owners will also be importing certain security personnel who will be engaged in bashing and killing anyone who tries to organise the kids.
   

   For some reason the idea of this happening in my suburb is repugnant, but the knowledge that it is indeed happening in huge areas of the earth and affecting hundreds of millions of people does not in any way prevent masses of people in the West from buying Nike, or virtually any other brand of clothing made in Asia you can name. Why? Because for some reason the idea that it is happening in another country, out of sight, over the pond, abrogates the ethical value these children would have were they working in my country.
   

   The borders between the countries simply eradicate the need to respect people's ethical value as humans. Now, people might feel uncomfortable about this, they might claim some mitigating factor, or claim that they are in fact concerned about the children's rights, but in practice they are not. There is absolutely no serious political movement in the West with broad popular support dedicated to eradicating this exploitation. It is thus condoned by our actions in continuing to engage it, via buying the products, and by our inaction via our not doing anything to stop it. This is an example of an ethical border primarily drawn on national lines, but race and economic class are still clearly operating.
   

   I imagine that the government has decided that in order to prevent any further increase in inflation they will be taking over the bank accounts of everyone who earns over 100,000 per annum and then issuing to them on a monthly basis enough money to feed their family and pay the mortgage/rent. The rest will be kept in the bank accounts to prevent these people from flooding the economy with their excess cash and thus risking inflation. Again, this would be repugnant were it to happen to people I know, but when the government takes over the bank accounts of aborigines and does exactly the same thing there is no massive electoral backlash. The plain fact is that because the aborigines are poor, and, well, aborigines, the ethical consideration that would be given in the case of the government planning to take over my accounts simply does not apply with the aborigines. They are in this instance outside the border of ethical consideration. That's why the government lifted the Racial Discrimination Act in order to implement their plans. Again, while this ethical border is based on race; economic and geographical borders are still in play.
   

   
   

   I am sure you could think of many more instances where it would appear that our concern for ethical universality is contradicted by actions. But my point is that it is not a contradiction at all once you realise that these ethical boundaries exist, and are used essentially as a part of the society in which we live. The idea that the ethical considerations are universal is simply false, and once you understand that, it ceases to be contradictory.
   

   
   

   An aside: Another example of how the sense of contradiction can fall away by understanding the context in which the action takes place is with politicians lying. At first when a politician makes two apparently contradicting statement like say, 'We want to decrease greenhouse gasses' and 'We are happy to continue brown coal processing in the LaTrobe Valley / logging in Tasmania' it can give one a certain irksome cognitive dissonance. But once you understand that what the politician is actually doing is trying to stay in power, and will say anything to any electorate to do so, then it is no longer a contradiction to make those two statements at the same time as they both serve the purpose of trying to get out a message that will get votes.
   

   
   

   
   

2. That Western capitalism needs the ethical boundaries to exist, and that its history is one of changing boundaries.
   

   
   

   It is not that the developing world is poor and oppressed and we are rich; it is that the developing world is poor and oppressed because we are rich. The two facts are causally related; it is not just chance.
   

   
   

   One way of looking at the development of the Western world is think of it as a continually increasing circle within which people have ethical value. You could trace the growth of this circle in tandem with the extension of the franchise. If we go back to the birth of the industrial revolution, to say the dark days of England, we can see a picture where the owners of the means of production felt they had no ethical responsibility at all regarding the people who worked in the factories. Now this could be a very complicated historical argument and I'm not going to go there right now, this is just an illustration, you'll get the gist.
   

   At the time, the ethical circle was very tight. That is, the only people with much ethical value were propertied English men. Over time, through a long series of struggles, that circle is widened. Men without property get the vote, new governments are elected, mitigating legislation is enacted and enforced, women get the vote, onwards and onwards more and more people get inside the circle of ethical concern. You could use this perspective equally well in Australian or US history. As capitalism develops the ethical circle grows until nearly everyone within the polity is accorded a certain set of rights, becomes ethically valuable.
   

   
   

   But what is equally important is that this circle necessarily does not include everyone who is touched by capitalism. It is essential that concurrent with the expansion of this circle there is yet another, wider circle outside this circle that contains people who are co-opted into capitalism's growth and are not only not given ethical consideration, but are necessarily and deliberately deprived of ethical value as the system grows. For the inner circle of ethically valuable people create and are created by, the wider expanding circle of people who are continually dragged into capitalism and exploited so that the inner circle may continue to grow. You can see this through the abovementioned prism in the growth of the British Empire. Living standards and the ethical value of humans increases at home because of and at the expense of the subjugated people who are drawn into the capitalist system and have no ethical value because of this. From India to China to Africa, the spread of capitalism is one whereby other forms of living are dismantled (along with their own internal ethical circles of value) and the humans, emotionally, geographically, racially and economically are drawn into capitalism's influence as production workers, servants, whatever.
   

   The very reason I can buy clothes that are so cheap is that the people who make them are poor and have no rights.
   

   So while it is undoubtedly true that capitalism has been, overall, a good thing for the living standards of the ruling West, it is not true to say that therefore capitalism raises living standards. In fact, it is only because we have been able to dislocate and oppress people in other countries that we are able to enjoy a high standard of living in our own.
   

   The national border is central to this. It allows for people, say in Vietnam, who are intricately linked with the economy of my country, to be yet disenfranchised from having any say about how that economic system works. The factory workers of China are ultimately employed by the consumers of the US, their lives are dependent upon political and economic decisions made by the representatives of the voters of the US, yet no one would seriously entertain the idea of allowing these factory workers to vote in US elections. As capital and supply chains move across borders they progressively disenfranchise more and more people from being able to have any power over the system in which they live and work; and it does this necessarily. Sure, the circle of people who have ethical value increases, but so does the circle of people who don't.
   

   (And yes I am aware that in recent years the Chinese have actually been lending money to the US so US people can keep buying stuff to keep Chinese people employed. But again, I'm trying to NOT write a whole bloody book here.)
   

   
   

3. Modern technology has made this impossible to continue, and our response has been to tighten the circle.
   

   
   

   Only a few years ago if you were born in Australia you were assumed to be Australian. No longer. Now thousands of people are born here each year who do not have an automatic expectation of a right to vote, or to access any of the privileges full citizens expect. The children of international students, for example, are not citizens. Likewise the children of people here on sponsored working visas. In fact, the whole visa system that has grown up over the last two decades can be seen as a harking back to a situation where there are people resident in the country who are citizens and have all the rights along with that, and people who are resident in the country but do not. I am reminded even as far back as Roman and Greek society, where it was natural that there be citizens, non-citizens, and slaves. This situation is not unique to Australia. Most nations of the Western world now have large resident populations of people who may themselves expect to live their entire lives in the country (whatever the government says) and not be enfranchised, and the same will be visited upon their children. How come suddenly there are hundreds of thousands of people living in Australia who do not have the rights of full citizens? When did this invention of the differentiation between the rights of a 'full' citizen and some other type of being-in-the-country-but-not-having-rights happen? It happened when people from the developing world started coming to Australia in greater numbers after the opening up of South East Asia and the Sub-continent to capitalist expansion. Cheap airfares, complex communication webs make this possible. Of course we have always imported people upon whom we did not visit the rights of full citizenship, but in recent years the number of people in this situation as increased dramatically.
   

   Put simply, as the space to exploit has expanded to almost encompass the entire world and the borders have started spilling over, we have pulled the circle of ethical value in, and drawn it around the idea of being a 'citizen'.
   

   And wherever it is occurring, whether they be fruit pickers in Mildura, or taxi-driving international students in Melbourne, or refugees in Bankstown, the visa laws are specifically written to restrict these people's ability to engage, to get into the circle. The rules are all about where and when and how much work they can do, which community services they can or cannot access, and obviously they can't vote. They are here, and yet economically and politically they are not here. Of course many of these people may become citizens eventually, but my point is about the very act of drawing this circle of ethical concern in, and I think it is clear that there is a large and growing number of people who won't become citizens anyway.
   

   I can only see this situation expanding in the future, as the inner circle of ethically valuable humans increases it will need ever more humans for the outer circle of exploited people who ultimately support the lifestyles of the inner circle people. Once the geographic limitations of the earth are reached, that outer circle will be increasingly defined by race and economic status. We are already seeing a continuing dismantling of the rights of economically disadvantaged people even in the inner circle countries of the West. The growth in the number of resident non-citizens is largely race and class based (as well as obviously deriving from a geographic difference to begin with). The result is that while the number of Australians who are in the inner circle increases, the number of people living in Australia who are in the outer circle also increases, both in raw number and as a proportion of the society from here on.
   

   It starkly challenges our conception of ethical universality even when we admit that this universality has recently often been nation-based, and the creation of different resident classes is a symptom of this challenge. In a sense, it merely brings home the ethical dissonance that was previously less apparent because the borders between the inner circle and the outer circle were more opaque, the exploited people more distant.
   

How will it end? I've got no idea. But I am certain that in order to keep this expansion of the Western lifestyle we need more and more human and natural resources to exploit, and they are running out.