James Murdoch resigns...

This quote from a friend of mine on Facebook really got me thinking

The fact that none of the Murdochs are sitting in gaol cells in the U.K. - while Julian Assange is under house arrest and Bradley Manning rots in a U.S. miltitary prison on suspicion - speaks volumes about the state of justice in the world.

- Glenn D.

It's a valid point. Julian Assange has been charged with supplied information that was obtained illegitimately, and yet News Corporation does it via mass phone-hacking and their directors don't get any punishment (as of yet) at all.

What's the difference? The Murdochs have money and power. They have so much influence in the media that they can write a news story, true or not, about a politician or public figure and the public will believe it. The power is right there to destroy a politician's career or a celebrity's good standing in the community. The fact that James resigned right at the time of the handing down of a report into the scandalous news collection practices at "News of the World" reeks of suspicion.

All Assange has done is create a conduit for leaked documents - he gets them submitted to his website. He doesn't solicit them or obtain them through illegal channels - people in possession of this information volunteer it to Wikileaks. How the leakers got hold of it is another story, and that's their cross to bear, not Julian's. News International has been the instigator of the illegal access to information and then publishes it - vastly different in behaviour to the Wikileaks problem.

The world needs change...and fast.

Leadership crisis over

Finally the leadership debacle in Canberra is over! Julia reigned supreme, for better or for worse. Maybe now, Mr Rudd will stop poking his head in the spotlight and just let people get on with running the country.

The Federal 3-Ring circus

All we've heard about in the news over the last few days in the leadership battle between the current and the former Prime Ministers of this country. It's driving me absolutely bloody crazy.

JUST SORT IT OUT ALREADY, PEOPLE!!! Get back to running the country, and do it as soon as possible.

All this reported* argy-bargy is doing major damage to the ALP brand, to the point where a lot of people, who wouldn't normally vote Liberal, will do so at the next election to prove to the Labor party that this kind of behaviour is wasting our time and wearing out your welcome.

* I flagged the term "reported" because I fear that most of this rubbish has been perpetuated by a number of media outlets who need to "drum up", or "invent" news in order to sell newspapers. Getting leaks from inside parliament, reporting on posts from Twitter, reporting opinion as fact - there's bigger issues to report on, rather than throwing Mentos into the metaphorical Diet-Coke bottle that is parliament.

Australia Day revisited...

I have just finished watching Media Watch on the ABC. Sure enough, they took a look at the drama that unfolded after Tony Abbott's statement to the media regarding the Aboriginal tent embassy.

I meant to write a piece about this at the time. The major issue is that Tony Abbott never said the words he was attributed as having said. As much as I'm not much of a fan of the guy, I will go into bat for him and defend the fact that he didn't say "tear down the Tent Embassy".

So who twisted his words? Ironically enough, it was the right-wing conservative talkback radio station 2UE in Sydney who did. Then, to make matters worse, it was later revealed one of the Prime Minster's media advisors told a union official who told a member of the tent embassy and then it all ended in a riot.

No-one is advocating that the Tent embassy should be removed. The indigenous people of this country are still fighting for their rights and much of what they wish to see discussed in the halls of parliament still hasn't been discussed. They have a right to peaceful protest like anybody else.

Also, no-one is supporting the behaviours of the protesters on Australian Day either. Or the actions of the police. Both sides say the other was violent, and that the other started it, so we'll never know the real story behind that one.

The one thing that Media Watch did pull out of this entire sorry saga was some of the comments left on the Yahoo7 web page about the story, by people who think that anonymity on the internet gives them the right to be racist. I'm sorry, but it doesn't. Free speech comes with a responsibility to use it wisely. It is not an open slather-fest to slander one and all because you think you can. But more on that later.

It was a sad chapter in the history of Australian race relations and one that I think is far from over....

Mega-upload's mega crash

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Convergence of Media in Australia

Ok, first of all I must disclose, before I start this rant, that I support Australian music 100% and I always will.

I have been following closely the progress of, and submissions to, a media review panel set up by the Australian Government into the convergence of distribution methods used by media organisations in this country.

By convergence, we mean that the various media organisations now have a variety of means in which to disseminate their content - through terrestrial broadcasting, the internet, digital broadcasting and the like. Convergence largely means that using all of these outlets, radio stations can almost be regarded as something more than just a radio station, because of the various other ways they can deliver their services now. Newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald now disseminate their news via the internet. They even have WebTV set up and also they show video news on alot of their stories. The internet has allowed far more methods of communication for newspapers that just in print.

I have been reading a few of the submissions to the review panel (which can be found here), and while some submissions make some good points, some, like the Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) submission and the Austereo submission make one particular point that is highly laughable and somewhat disturbing:

That the Australian content quotas should be dropped.

I, for one, think this is a ridiculous proposal, however I will examine the issues for and against.

As pointed out in the submission from the Music Council of Australia, Australian music quotas exist purely because of the behaviour of Commercial radio programmers. Local content quotas were first introduced in the late 1940s and have steadily increased over the years to a minimum of 25% locally produced music across all music played, and 6.5% of that must be new or recently produced Australian music.

These quotas exist because commercial radio just did not play locally produced music. Things have not changed at all over the years. Commercial radio has always lauded the new release from America before a local release. Most Australian music that gets played on Commercial rock stations has been played for months prior by the ABC's station Triple J.

Listening back to the history of Triple J and you will find that Australian music wasn't played on radio when the station started, and if it was, you probably couldn't tell it was Aussie. For example, the biggest Oz band in the 1970s was Little River Band, or LRB for short. They were huge in America, because they sounded American. And with lyrics like "Can you guess where I'm calling from? The Las Vegas Hilton...", you'd be forgiven for thinking they were based in LA instead of Melbourne. And yet, this was the standard for Aussie music on commercial radio in those days. Triple J changed that, by actively seeking out new local music and putting it to air. By the time Triple M in Sydney had started playing Midnight Oil (whose music it now plays heavily every day), they'd been featured on JJJ for over 3 years.

The argument against the local content quota, according to Commercial Radio Australia is that all the other content platforms do NOT have local content quotas, and yet commercial radio is bound by legislation to play local music. Fair point. So why not expand the legislation to cover all media outlets? Internet radio streams based in Australia and online content providers in Australia included? I think that'd be great, but it would difficult to police. For example, any Australian resident can start up an online radio station with the US based Live365.com and, being based overseas, could escape the local content rules. Additionally, any Australian can listen to hundreds of radio stations online from the same place and never hear an Australian song in any of it. Keeping track of it all would be a nightmare.

The other argument they make is that the Local content rules often don't fit the station "format". Considering that the local top 50 singles chart has only 5 Australian songs in it, I can see why "hit music/top 40" stations feel this way. However, it should be Radio, more than any other media's job to seek out and promote new music as music, apart from advertising and stupid people who think they're celebrities trying to be funny, is the other core part of their programming.

Southern Cross/Austereo also make the point that, even without the quotas, audiences will still seek out Australian music and then they, the radio stations, will respond to what the listeners want. This is complete and utter rubbish. The core audience of radio stations don't want to research music and discover for themselves. They want to hear it on the radio FIRST before they buy it. If radio don't plug it, there's every chance it won't get heard. To Austereo's credit, they have started a digital radio station called "Radar Radio" which plays unsigned local music, but of late it has seen established overseas bands like Amy Winehouse and Snow Patrol creep into the playlists which means that it could decide to take the overseas music option as a preference, as history shows it has done in the past. It needs to work both ways - listeners tell the station what they like, radio plugs music that the listener hasn't heard and the cycle perpetuates.

It could also be argued that the Australian content quotas don't work anyway. Inevitably Austereo's Triple M get around the local content quotas by playing INXS and Cold Chisel's greatest hits ad nauseum every day, at the expense of local bands. But, there are other stations that have taken the lazy way out, and avoid the Australian music rules by not playing music on air at all. Once great rock stations like 2UE (the first radio station in Sydney to play rock 'n' roll music) and 2SM have both been converted to talkback stations, with grumpy old men ranting and whining across the airwaves 24-7.

There are, of course, a number of barriers to the expansion of the local content quotas, talkback radio notwithstanding. Namely, the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement stipulates that local content quotas are NOT to be increased for the life of the agreement, thus giving ample opportunity for US imports to succeed in our marketplace. I don't see why this is necessary since the commercial media mindset has been for years that anything cultural that has been imported is automatically superior to anything created here. And if that hasn't been the case, then why did (now legendary) local acts like The Seekers, The Bee Gees, The Saints, The Triffids, The Go-Betweens and The Vines all have to go overseas in order to get noticed back in Australia?

It's my view that media can create the audience, and by extension, can create the buzz around a band, if they plug it enough. If radio make the effort and play a record a lot, it can get in peoples heads and then it becomes a hit. But, like it appears to be on most stations in England (except the top 40 ones) and America, that locally produced music is a top priority, over and above anything else. There is no reason why mainstream media in Australia cannot muster the same sort of confidence in the local music scene while still keeping an eye on what's happening overseas....

...and if Commercial radio think they are already doing that, then they are sorely mistaken.

Dear Mr Murdoch

Dear Mr J. Murdoch,

Based on your testimony at the Commons Enquiry yesterday (UK Time), can you please write me a cheque for £700,000? I won't complicate things by telling you what for, or by giving you any legal documents to read.

Seriously. How blind do you have to be to be authorising payments that large to people who complained to you about privacy intrusion, and having documents from QCs detailing illegal activity within your own organisation and then not reading them?

I can concede that News International is a very large corporation with many subsidiaries, and that it is hard to have a handle on everything that could possibly go on within it on a daily basis. But, when the alleged phone tapping was taking place, for a time, you were the Head of the business unit conducting the breaches, and handing large sums of money to high profile victims of the aforesaid breaches. How could you not know what was going on?

Probably a wise question to ask at this point would be "What is your responsibility in this scenario and where does your personal governance of the company extend to?" In other words, when does the buck stop? It's pretty clear some dodgy dealings have been going on, and there's no hiding from that. Even blind Freddie knows that. But, for some reason, you have no idea about any of it? It doesn't make sense.

So, maybe if you could just make out the cheque as soon as possible, and then, by this time in 2013, you'll have no knowledge of it and it will all be sweet?

Thanks,

Me.

Free Trade exposed

Finally, this week Julia Gillard mentioned the failure of international Free Trade.

One of the things that slipped through to the keeper back in the dark days of the Howard Government was the free trade agreement with America. There was little information issued from the government, some modest coverage of it in the media, but little to no details of the agreement. All we kept hearing was that "this is a good thing for Australia". A quick Google Search would take you to the US State department web site where a summary of the agreement could be seen.

In short, it was the product of a close personal alliance between then-PM John Howard and George W. Bush. It reads as though America is protecting their interests and their export dollars while Australia, as usual, lays down on its back while the yanks walk all over the top of us. Just like our airwaves being saturated with American content, the free trade agreement meant that we had to open our borders significantly to allow more US-produced materials while they would increase their imports from Australia by less than 1% of their total import quota.

It turns out that within 12 months of this agreement starting in 2005, the total imports from the US rose to $3.7 billion every 3 months. This makes for a great win for America, but bad for Australia, considering our exchange rate against the greenback at the time was so weak.

In the initial negotiations, the US wanted us to significantly relax our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which makes our prescriptions so affordable, and also to relax our Australian Content quotas on Radio and TV. This has also happened, as it turns out (more on that later, as this is a major gripe with me).

The upshot of all this means that we were sold on the idea that we would be able to have our exports compete on a more level playing field in the US marketplace, but considering their primary industries are already heavily government subsidised, Australian product would look exhorbitantly expensive in comparison to locally made US products in the same instance. Take this quote from Inside.org.au:

"...the United States maintained substantial barriers to Australian imports while gaining not only the removal of nearly all traditional trade barriers, but also influence over a wide range of Australian domestic policy institutions."

The benefits of the agreement for Australia? In short, none. It doesn't, it didn't, and it won't benefit us in the future. The US can just come in and ride roughshod over us, and we can't do anything in return.

The discussion on the repealing of such an agreement by Julia Gillard is one of the smartest things she's said in recent times. Let's hope it goes ahead.

Living beyond 150?

Would you want to live beyond 100?

New technology may soon allow us to live life up to 150 years of age. Would you really want to?

Let's think about some of the wider ramifications of this.

If we retire at 65, you leave yourself a long, long time to decline. Will this push the retirement age up substantially?

If we look at the social justice perspective of this, breaking things down to the haves vs have-nots, how is it fair to raise the retirement age beyond what it is now, especially if you are unable to work due to the inability to afford the use of the drugs?

What about the aged care system, potentially having to support aged people for longer? Ditto the health system, although one could see them making a lot more money out of this idea...

There's no guarantee that everyone will live to the full 150 years. Suppose you do and all your mates only live until, say, 120? It'll potentially make for a lonely existence in the last years...

Discuss.

Tyranny has come to Australia?

What garbage!!!

A Power Play for the Future


Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece re: Carbon Tax vote

In the last week there's been a lot of rhetoric, heresay and conjecture in relation to the Carbon tax vote in parliament last week. A lot of the critics have had some quite colourful things to say in terms of accusing the government of "tyranny" and all kinds of things.

The funniest one is that "democracy has died; tyranny has come to Australia". This is a general view held mostly by listeners to 2GB in Sydney, as evidenced by the comments on the topic from the listeners to the Alan Jones program. However, the view was first provided by certain members of the Federal opposition, most notably from the leader of the National Party, Warren Truss.

The dictionary definition of "tyranny" is:
1. Arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.
2. The government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler.
Pasted from

Forgive me for assuming that our elected representatives in the opposition are highly educated (something that cannot be assumed of the 2GB listenership), but you would think that they would be able to use the term "tyranny" in the correct context and with the correct meaning. Irrespective of what one's opinions of the Carbon tax are, tyranny did NOT happen last week. Democracy is typified by the ability of a person to vote on one topic one way or another, depending on that person's view. The carbon tax reforms, all 19 of them, were VOTED on by a full sitting lower house. This is NOT tyranny, this is democracy.

The vote on the last bill went 74-72 in favour. This is democracy. If it WAS tyranny, the PM would have stood up and said "This is how it's gonna be and there's nothing you can do about it". No vote, no discussion, end of story.

So the coalition lost - suck it up. You still have your chance to defeat it in the Liberal controlled Senate. But you could do us all a favour and stop with the histrionic bleating about tyranny just because your side lost. You're confusing the unthinking viewers of Today Tonight and the mindless sheep that Alan Jones likes to call "listeners". And God knows they don't need to be any more confused than they already are.