If one good thing could come out of these terrible fires, it’s that people might stop using “Canberra” as a synonym for the Federal government instead of what it is, an Australian city and the home of ordinary Australians who will, I am sure, overcome this disaster.

I probably won’t be posting much for the next couple of days, while I digest the impact of the dreadful fires in Canberra. As far as I can tell at present, my family and friends there haven’t been badly affected, though I haven’t heard news yet of some ANU colleagues who live in areas that have been hit hard. As usual, I can’t find much to say in the face of disasters like this, except to extend my sympathy to all those affected.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. The protagonist is a deserter from the Confederate armies, trying to make his way back home to the woman he hopes to marry. It’s bleak, but also inspiring.

I’m also continuing to reread the many works of Anthony Trollope. He’s my kind of writer, a craftsman rather than an artist. He claimed to turn out 2500 words before breakfast, and to regularly write at a rate of 250 words per quarter-hour. I suspect this is gilding the lily a bit . Even if he didn’t spend hours agonising over le mot juste, this pace would imply that he knew exactly what he was going to write when he started, allowing no time even for rearranging sentences. Nevertheless, with 47 3-volume novels to his credit, he must have averaged around 1000 words of final output every working day. I read somewhere that George Orwell wrote nearly 200 000 words in a single year. He would have been using a typewriter, as opposed to Trollope’s pen and ink. Of course, the romantics despise this kind of thing, but my view is that the more you write, the more good stuff you write.

Blue Thunder (A Modern Bluey Brink)

There once was a trendy who scorned worldly wealth
And devoted his life to a search for good health,
He spent all his money at his local health store
Took potions in gallons and pills by the score

But sad to relate every time that it rained
His house it was flooded from roots in the drains
To cure it the landlord gave him a pill
To flush down his dunny, them tree roots to kill

Next morning he followed his usual routine
By swallowing tablets in number thirteen
But somehow or other one extra crept in
It was big, it was blue, it was bitter as sin

This pill was so big that it stuck in his throat
It made him to splutter and it made him to choke
But he swallowed it down like he knew that he should
If it tasted that vile, well it had to be good

Now soon he was stricken with aches and with pains
As the pill started working to clear out his drains
He was stuck on the dunny for a night and a day
Weighed fifteen pounds less when he staggered away

Well it made him feel weak but it made him feel pure
So he told all his friends of his miracle cure
They asked him the secret but he wouldn’t tell
After buying for years he had something to sell

And now he is running his own health food shop
Selling soya bean sausage and Gaylord’s green glop
And his own extra-specialty, cure for all ills
They’re bio-dynamical Blue Thunder Pills

I just thought I’d record this statement (made in connection with the discovery of empty chemical warheads in Iraq) by Andrew Sullivan for future reference

There can be no further excuses. Saddam had one absolutely last chance and he lied. If we do not go to war now, then Bush, in turn, will have been shown to have lied in his countless statements declaring zero tolerance for future violations.

Given Sullivan’s generally hagiographic style in relation to Bush, even a future conditional use of the word ‘lie’ is striking.

While I’m on this point, today’s Age reproduces a piece from the LA Times giving some factual background, including the point:

Dozens of rockets are usually fired at once, to try to ensure that enemy troops are enveloped in a thick concentration of chemicals.

This seems relevant in assessing the status of the 12 warheads found so far.

Following my posts the Windschuttle controversy, I promised to put forward some ideas on the current policy problems facing Aboriginal Australians, and particularly the problem of economic development. It’s always problematic for white ‘experts’ to tell black communities what to do and I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to do this. Although I have given economic advice to Aboriginal organisations on a range of issues, I don’t regard myself as an expert on the problems facing Aboriginal communities. My perspective on the issue comes more from a consideration of the general economic problems of rural Australia and particularly the general decline in population and employment.

Discussion of economic policy for rural and remote Aboriginal communities often poses a dichotomy between passive reliance on government welfare and economic independence. The assumption is that reliance on government is inherently demoralising.

I have come to the conclusion that, at least in the terms in which economic independence is commonly understood, this kind of thinking is mistaken. Against a background of generally declining demand for labour in rural and remote Australia, it is unlikely that the majority of Aboriginal communities will ever be economically independent in the sense that they produce enough in terms of market goods and services, to ‘pay their way’ in a free-market economy, even with an inflow of capital income from land and mineral rights. Aboriginal communities have all the economic problems facing declining country towns as well as the additional difficulties arising from a century or more of dispossession and discrimination. If most country towns can’t find a way to hold enough jobs for a generally shrinking population, it seems impossible that Aboriginal communities, many with growing populations, can ever ‘pay their way’.

Having said that, I will observe that for most of the 20th century, large sections of the Australian workforce did not ‘pay their way’ either, relying instead on tariff protection or subsidy schemes. This did not seem to do much harm to the self-respect of Australian workers. It’s my view that if ‘practical reconciliation’ is taken to include the objective of generating sustainable employment in rural and remote Aboriginal communities, we have to accept that employment will be sustained only with permanent government support, just as was true of large sections of manufacturing industry. The obvious approach is permanent wage subsidies, though in some cases output subsidies to enterprises based in Aboriginal communities might also work.

The closest approach so far has been the Community Employment Development Program under which communities can use social security benefits to pay for useful projects. This scheme (which has elements of ‘work for the dole’) has been possible only because it has been treated as welfare rather than as a labour market program. The idea of a permanent wage subsidy, explicitly confined to rural and remote Aboriginal communities breaks so many policy taboos that it is unlikely to make it on to the policy agenda for a long time. But I can’t see any alternative approach that will generate substantial numbers of permanent jobs.

Can any scientifically literate readers comment on thisABC Report, which says

research reported in the science journal Nature challenges basic beliefs of evolution – that wings evolved only once in insects and that if a trait is lost is cannot be regained.

It also opens a new direction for research because it shows that once a complex figure has evolved it can be maintained over long evolutionary period even if it is not apparent on the outside.

Over a 50 million year period, even though the stick insects did not have wings the genes for creating them appeared to have been maintained.

“The remarkable thing was that they had the ability to generate wings when they needed them,” Mr Whiting explained.

I was under the impression that the standard mechanism in the loss of things like wings was the selection of genes that ‘turned off’ crucial steps in development. If so, it would obviously be easier to reverse this process than to evolve wings for the first time. Am I wrong, or is the article over-dramatizing things?

UpdateThe BG strikes yet again. Brad DeLong has an almost identical reaction with a reference to “Darwin’s Radio ” – must read this.

I was going to comment on the disastrous decision of the US Supreme Court in Ashcroft vs Eldred, upholding new laws which amount to Copyright Perpetuity. I thought I’d point out that Australia still has a more reasonable position where copyright last 50 years after the author’s death, speculate on the implications for the proposed Free Trade Agreement and wrap up with a link to Kim Weatherall and a pithy comment. When I looked at her site, I found

Another thing we can look to, I think, in the current round of Free Trade Negotiations between Australia and the United States, is pressure from the States, freed from the spectre of constitutional challenge, to Australia to extend its copyright terms to match those of the United States. So perhaps what we REALLY need is some pressure back here in Australia.

So my pithy comment is “Me too!”

Ozplogger James Morrow has a piece in Wednesday’s Oz, saying

If a gambler sitting at the Crown Casino in Melbourne knew that the Government would cover his losses, no matter what, he’d have no incentive not to draw to an inside straight or hit on 17. Likewise, a board of directors, if they believe their business is politically “too big to fail” and could qualify for a government bailout, will surely be more inclined to take the sort of big risks that would in the long run cost a gambler his house and car and livelihood.

And though a casino is able to force a loser to pay his debts, in the corporate cowboy world of Adler and Williams, losses go unpaid while the gamblers walk around with huge personal fortunes.

I agree with the sentiment and with Morrow’s concerns about ‘moral hazard’, but I think he has aimed at the wrong target.

It’s not government bailouts that let Adler, Williams, Rich and others walk away from failed companies with their personal fortunes intact. Under the institution of limited liability, this is the rule, not the exception. Assuming the company is not preserved as a going concern, government bailouts of the kind we saw with HIH don’t give any additional help to the managers and shareholders, only the creditors (in this case, policyholders, and in other cases employees).

James writes for Reason and there are quite a few bloggers of a libertarian bent. I’d be interested to read their views on limited liability and, for that matter, personal bankruptcy.

Update As I hoped, this post has generated a lively comments thread. Come and have your say – I’m enjoying the bloggers’ privilege of asking a rhetorical question without revealing my own answer for a while.

PS I forgot to thank Gareth Parker, whose link I followed.

I’ve been arguing for some years that (re)nationalisation should be put back on the policy agenda. The starting point is in reversing obviously failed privatisations, such as that of British Rail. Following the replacement of the private Railtrack company (which owned the network) by the quasi-public Network Rail The Guardian reports the partial renationalisation of track maintenance. More precisely, Network Rail has sacked the private contractors who were doing this job on one of the most accident-prone stretches of track and taken it back in-house.

Network Rail’s announcement was the latest in a series of moves to increase central control over the railways, prompting suggestions of “creeping renationalisation”. In November the strategic rail authority announced that train operators would be moved on to shorter, stricter franchises.

The privatisation of maintenance was at the centre of Ken Loach’s great film The Navigators, which I reviewed for the Canberra Times (my only venture into film reviewing so far). In the review, which is available at Australian Policy Online, I observed

The tendency to shave safety margins an ever-present feature of the privatisation process. It reflects a shift of power from engineers to accountants, and more generally from a production objective to a profit objective.

APO has lots more good stuff and a very nice-looking site.