Communications reform

John Quiggin14 Comments

My piece in yesterday’s Fin is over the fold. I go into full free-market mode attacking the government’s deal with the monopolists. Ken Davidson in the Age goes the other way, arguing for tight regulation in the public interest, but I can’t see this ever happening to Murdoch or even Packer jnr. On the other hand, I guess we’re not going to see their spectrum taken away and auctioned off either. On the whole, though, I think the only useful intervention here is support for a strong public broadcasting sector. As far as the commercial networks go, the best hope is to encourage the kind of outside competition made possible by digital technology.

The point on which Ken and I agree, I think, is that we now have the worst of both worlds: lots of intervention, but in the interests of monopolists, not the public.
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The traditionality of modernity (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin18 Comments

As was pointed out in the comments to my karate post, the observation that most traditions are invented is getting somewhat traditional itself, going back as it does to the exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.

So maybe it’s time to turn all this around, and make the point that we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.
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TV time

John Quiggin29 Comments

I don’t watch a lot of commercial TV these days. Apart from the news, Futurama is pretty much it. But I’ve noticed that programs no longer seem to start and end at the advertised time. I heard somewhere that this is a deliberate strategy to stop people changing channels. If correct, this is both deplorable and self-defeating. Deplorable because the TV networks have been given a monopoly by the government: if they want to keep it, they should at least act responsibly.

Self-defeating because there are so many alternatives, including DVDs and the internets, not to mention good old-fashioned books. The collective effect of this kind of gaming is that commercial TV as a whole is even less attractive.

BTW, I’ll be in tomorrow’s (thursdays) Fin, responding to Coonan’s media package. Shorter JQ: It s*x.

Guest post

John Quiggin6 Comments

Reader Jane Harris addresses the vexed question “How many umpires?”, first in econospeak and then in verse. The occasion is an AFL proposal to allow goal and boundary umps to award free kicks.

Comments welcome (rhyming couplets please)
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The interest rate bears …

John Quiggin45 Comments

… of whom I am one, are starting to growl again.

The cenral tenet of interest rate bearishness is that if interest rates are low enough to generate negative savings, as is the case in the US and Australia, they are too low to be sustained. The counterargument, put most forcefully by Ben Bernanke is that someone must be willing to lend at these low interest rates, and this lending must reflect a “global savings glut”. Bears respond that the supposed glut does not reflect savings by households or business, but is really a liquidity glut created by expansionary monetary policy around the world, which must eventually come to an end, or be dissipated in inflation.
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Anyone but Beazley, yet again

John Quiggin62 Comments

With the news that Kim Beazley now has the support of 18 per cent of Australian voters, relative to the solid, but still unimpressive, alternative of John Howard, hasn’t the time come to bring his sorry political career to an end?

After a ministerial career distinguished only by longevity, and a series of failures as Opposition leader, the one thing Beazley had going for him was his reputation as a good bloke. Whether or not this reputation was deserved in the past, Beazley has trashed it by his support for the vindictive purges organised by the Victorian Right against independents and Latham supporters. Typically for Beazley, having done the wrong thing, he couldn’t even deliver the goods, as Simon Crean managed to convince enough of the voters stacked in by Conroy that they should think for themselves.

My first preferences for a replacement are, not surprisingly, Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard. But I’d settle for anyone (except Conroy, I guess) who could muster a majority of the Caucus.

Replug

John Quiggin3 Comments

A bit late I’ll remind people that the first of the “BrisScience” lectures is on tonight. The lectures will involve a number of excellent scientists giving lectures on their topics of interest for the general public. The website is here. All of the lectures are free, there is one talk a month, and they will all be held in the Judith Wright Center of Contemporary Arts in the Valley.

The first lecture is by John Mattick on “junk” DNA, which IIRC has been the subject of a very dubious intellectual property claim by an Australian entrepreneur. But the talk won’t be about IP, which should make it more interesting for about 99 per cent of the potential audience. John argues that the extra DNA is the opposite of junk: it may be ultimately responsible for the development of all life more complex than bacteria.

Milosevic is dead. Hooray?

John Quiggin52 Comments

Like John Howard, I won’t be shedding any tears over Slobodan Milosevic, whose death, apparently from natural causes, has been announced.

An obvious question raised by his death is whether (and how) his trial on a variety of war crimes charges could have been accelerated. The fact that he will never be properly convicted is certainly unfortunate. Even if it would have had no short run impact on opinion among Serbian nationalists, it would have helped to set the historical record straight. Milosevic’s death increases the urgency of capturing his main instruments, Mladic and Karadzic, whose connection to the crimes of the Bosnian war is more immediate, and whose trial could drive home the evil of Milosevic’s policies.

Still, the long trial in The Hague is better than the alternative on offer in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein, whose wars cost millions of lives, is being tried, and may be executed, for a comparatively minor crime, but one which is politically convenient for the purposes of victors’ justice.