Where do you start?

It is not surprising that Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Human Rights Commission, gave a thoughtful, though provoking provocateur’s address at the Sydney Salon last night (22^nd August 2016).  It is a little more surprising that she laid the blame for Australia’s recent performance on human rights issues at least partially at the feet of the Australian courts.  However, coming from such an eminent jurist, it is hard to ignore her criticism.  She cited the recent decision in the High Court of New Guinea which effectively outlawed the Manus Island detention centre on the grounds that it breached the right to personal liberty in the PNG constitution. By comparison, the Australian High Court found the existing framework of third country detention centres to be legally and constitutionally valid.  She cited a further comparison between the USA Supreme Court ruling in 2015 which legalised same sex marriage, and the lack of any similar rulings locally.

The reason for these discrepancies is, of course, the lack of a guarantee of basic human rights in the Australian Constitution. Triggs examined why this is so, and more importantly, why it has not changed.  She concluded that there was a strong suspicion of judge made law in Australia.  Suspicion by the general public is understandable. After all, the normal citizen most often meets judges in the minor courts defending drink driving charges. However there is suspicion by the political classes in general.  In this connection, she cited Bob Carr whose vocal opposition to a Bill of Rights in 2009 put paid to Frank Brennan’s efforts to bring this legal instrument to life.  She noted the practical and legal objections to a Bill of Rights, but also observed that the New Zealand Bill of Rights which was enacted in 1990 has not had the dire outcomes that were predicted by Carr and others.  Politicians, of course, see the ability of Judges and courts to overturn their laws as an unjustified curtailment of their power.  Anyone with even a few years of high school history under the belt, will know that curtailment of executive power is exactly what is intended by the doctrine of the separation of powers which gives courts the right to review laws.  It is the foundation of representative democracy, unfortunately crumbling in the Australian context.  The transformation of parliament into a rubber stamp for the ruling party is a further demolition of the basic checks and balances in the system.

The outcome of this situation is that Australia is increasingly held in contempt in international forums for its treatment of first peoples, for its policy on asylum seekers and, surprisingly, the extent of domestic violence.  Most of the international conventions covering these issues, while often based on major Australian contributions, have never been adopted under Australian law.  No one seems to know, few seem to care.

The dog whistle here is racism.  The founding fathers were unwilling to institute a bill of rights into the Australian Constitution as it was seen as an avenue of challenge to the White Australia Policy.  Perhaps it still is.

One of the more depressing points that Professor Triggs shared with the Salon was the result of a survey which illustrated that a large proportion of the Australian population did not know that Australia had a constitution, but an overwhelming majority were prepared to rely on rights which flowed from the American constitution “Taking the 5^th”. Perhaps the answer lies in education.  However, education is in the hands of the politicians who insist that Australian Students learn about Kokoda Track and Gallipoli at least five or six times during a standard school education, but they never learn about the critical concept of the separation of powers or, so it seems, the difference between the Australian Constitution and US television programs.

There were, of course, many questions and discussion points raised, but the one I had for her was this.  I am angry about the trashing of Australia’s reputation, I am horrified by the acts carried out by our government in my name, I am mortified by the unleashing of petty (small, not unimportant) racism and vilification.  I am appalled by the treatment of women and the still unconscionable response of a significant part of the police force.  Yet, even as a white privileged male, I feel powerless.  I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know where to start to find out what to do. I only know I want to act.

Professor Triggs response did not immediately provide me with clarity or direction.  In summary she said (my words), this is a democracy, numbers are important. Stand up and be counted.  Speak out wherever possible.

It seemed unsatisfactory, but I realise that the problem is the strength and frequency of the wrong voices.  Sydney Salon is one place where considered and thoughtful voices have a forum.  I hope this post will allow that discussion to continue.

Managing Information - Zotero

Increasingly the information arriving on the desk of business people comes in the form of the PDF document. Whether the document is the latest industry research, a board report, a tender document, the annual accounts of a subsidiary or a myriad of other information, it arrives as the attachment to an email and lives in the jungle that is the personal electronic filing system that emerges from a chaotic or busy workflow. When that document arrives, invited or not, it demands to be consumed, processed, stored, indexed, referenced, analysed and included.

Increasingly, I have become frustrated by these demands.  I find an interesting paper on Risk Management which I would like to use in a future lecture on the subject, but when the time comes I may not even remember I have it. I gather together a pile of research to support a due diligence study into a potential purchase of a port asset, but I find myself buried in folders, subfolders and strange file names. When I do read something relevant and want to use it, I have difficulty tracking it down when it comes to the final report preparation time and I find it time-consuming to include reference to it in my paper.  I read board papers from one of the companies which I serve, but spend hours searching through earlier editions to track the development of an issue.

I have recognised these problems for a long time but never had a useful tool to address.  Last month I found Zotero.

Zotero started life as a reference manager to manage bibliographic data for use by researchers or students in the humanities.  Since its initial release in 2006 by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, it has developed into a repository for pdf files, saved web pages and all types of documents and media including Microsoft Office Documents, photographs, sound files and screen shots.  It allows these files to be grouped into collections, even allowing a single item to be grouped into many different collections.  It supports tags and notes. It can automatically import or find the metadata and related bibliographic information for use in bibliographies or citations. Outlines, annotations and highlights can be captured from a pdf file, and your own notes and documents can be generated and grouped with the other collection items without leaving the software.

These features all support the Humanities student preparing a term paper, but what of the application to the business environment?  Perhaps I can best illustrate by describing the workflow I adopted in preparing a discussion paper on Risk Management.

I started by creating a collection in Zotero, and worked through my computer hard disk adding things to the collection. This collection included the Risk Management Standard and the accompanying Guidelines.  I also added some papers I had downloaded from Sydney University Library, some survey reports prepared by Deloitte over the years, and some of my own lectures and notes.  I searched the internet for some illustrative Creative Commons photographs and clipped them directly to Zotero.  I captured some web pages prepared by the Tasmanian Government and others by Infrastructure Australia for later reading.

I used a Zotero add-in to place copies of all these files onto my iPad for review in GoodReader, and spend my spare time on planes, in airports and the dentists waiting room to mark up and annotate the documents.  They were all waiting for me in Zotero when I next sat down to work on the paper and I quickly imported all the markups and notes to form the basis of my writing task.  I could use Zotero to go straight to the source of the markup and reread the section or the whole report if necessary, and I could create a reference list and citations from the best sources I found.

This only touches the surface of how useful the program has become to me. It is hard to overestimate the value of collecting all relevant information together in one place, carefully referenced and ready for review.  One particular strength of this feature is that when I prepare regular reports, say monthly or quarterly, I have the full documentation of the previous report at my fingertips.  I am also starting to compile my reference material on a few key subject areas into a reference collection in Zotero, including notes and resources.

The hardest thing about the information age is finding the needle in the haystack, Zotero arranges the haystack.  Most importantly it is free!

 Here.

 Have a look at it and let me know how you use it.

Salon Returns to French Roots

The Sydney Salon emerged from the concept of the Salons of the Paris Enlightment where discussion was seeded by speakers and moved in the direction the audience chose to take it.  So it was fitting that the most recent event was held at the Grand Café in the Alliance Française. The guest speaker this time was H.E. Christophe Lecourtier, Ambassador of France to Australia, and he was ably balanced by Dr Adam Possamai, Professor of Sociology at Western Sydney University who grew up in Belgium.  The topic chosen was The New French Culture - Meeting Tomorrow's Challenges, but it was the challenges of today which cast a shadow over the meeting.  It had been less than two weeks after the Nice Truck Attack of 14th July, 2016.

The ambassador took us on a walk through French history and in doing so he made the point that France as a nation had been formed by different groups coming together around a philosophical view of the rights of man. It was not always easy.  There was the 800 year long Royal project to bring together a range of disparate peoples under one King. There was a revolution, Napoleon and his excursion into Europe, and several revolutions and restorations over the following century. It then took several attempts to establish a republic, only to see its very basis shattered by the First World War.  The confidence did not come back into the French psychè until after the establishment of the EU.  Now France is faced with terrorism, challenges to the EU through Brexit and economic issues flowing from Greece and the challenge to the Euro.

In spite of these challenges, the overall message from the Ambassador was optimistic.  Throughout history, France has been able to bring groups together, work out how to live and prosper and find unity in division.  It may take some time, but it is not impossible that it will happen again.

Possamai gave a different view. He noted in a short speech that his Italian family had lived for four generations in Belgium, but he was still considered an immigrant.  By contrast, whenever he applies for a re-entry visa to Australia, where he now lives, he is invited to become a citizen.  Belgium is not France and Australian immigration officials don't necessarily make everyone welcome, but the point about integration was well made.

As is always the case, it took me until 4am the next day to articulate the question that was troubling me.  After watching the SBS series on Versailles, it is hard to avoid the impression that the eight century long royal project was based on violence.  It also met a violent end, for although the revolution was based on noble philosophies, it ended in a reign of terror. Napoleon continued the tradition, as did the later republics in 1871, although not as successfully.  Modern France thought nothing of exploding nuclear bombs in the pacific and sabotaging the Rainbow Warrior.  France was keen to involve itself in the Arab Conflicts and has made several incursions into former colonies to put down rebellions even as far away as New Caledonia in 1988.

In addition, the French enthusiasm for export of arms to many of the world conflict zones (for example Mirage Jet fighters to the South African Apartheid regime in the 1970s) continues unabated.

A different view of the current troubles is that perhaps France is reaping what it has, for so long, sown.

Sydney Salon, in the meantime, maintains its provocative edge.

Jennifer Oriel and Female Victimhood

Jennifer Oriel, a recent contributor to the right wing think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, provided an opinion piece to the Australian on 23 September 2015 which was breathtaking in its inaccuracy, curiously unabashed in its misrepresentation of recent history and laughingly inconsistent and self-defeating in is argument.  Evenso, it is still not worth paying the $4 The Australian is demanding for the opportunity to read it, so if you are curious I recommend a search of Google News.

MalcolmTurnbull Ends the Era of Female Victimhood

The third paragraph dives deep into her argument:-

“In six short days, the new Prime Minister has put an end to the era of female victimhood. His ministry is brimming with women keen to make a mark on federal politics, including the country’s first female defence minister.”

Oriel’s argument relies on the proposition that the appointment of 5 women to the Turnbull Cabinet represents the establishment of an era where people are appointed to Cabinet posts by virtue of their individual merits.  As a consequence, she announces the end of the opportunity for feminists, particularly those from the “hard left” to complain about discrimination. This is an end of the age of victimhood. Further, she posits, the age of merit will not be the nirvana for these hard left women that they may have anticipated. They are, of course, bereft of the merit so ably demonstrated by the conservative members of society so beloved of the IPA. Accordingly, they will not be troubling the current status quo which is of course full of meritorious men and a few women who can aspire to the great heights of their male betters - five at last count.

She illustrates the lack of merit by a discussion of that clearly unmeritorious hard left ideologue, Gillian Triggs and the evil Julia Gillard who launched into a diatribe about misogyny because that great egalitarian Tony Abbot looked at his watch.  She clearly did not watch the video and see the trigger.

I will not seek to defend either Triggs or Gillard.  The claims of the article are just too ridiculous to give credence to and don’t deserve to be prolonged by a response.  However, I cannot stand by and see logic so badly mauled in the name of opinion. 

The first observation is that if the appointment of 5 women represents the end of the age of victimhood and the beginning of the age of meritocracy, then prior to that time, the appointments were not made on merit.  Accordingly, the prior claims of discrimination are valid.  The idea of victimhood, an invention of the right wing media, was not kept alive by leftist complaints, but by the fact that discrimination was rife.

Secondly, if 5 women out of 24 cabinet members represents a cabinet based on merit, all the statistics which demonstrate clearly that for twenty years or more girls outscore boys at every level of education from preschool to post graduate must somehow not be related to merit. (see for example ABSGender differences in educational achievement )

Thirdly, if a society which maintains a 20% and rising gender pay gap suddenly becomes discrimination free as a result of the appointment of 5 women to cabinet, I have misunderstood discrimination. (Pay Gap Data)

And of course, the right wing garbage bin of “minority politics” to which she consigned the greater than 51% of our society comprising women – herself included – should rightly have been assigned to the Liberal Party which holds government by grace of a coalition with the National Party, while attracting less than 35% of the popular vote.  That however is not minority politics but the age of meritocracy.  If you are born to rule you deserve to rule.

“Perhaps women in public life should consider feeling less and thinking more, but such dedication to logic requires evidence, mental effort and the disciplined inhibition of emotional impulse: all anathema to hard left ideology.”

I will assume all readers were sufficiently amused by the above paragraph which accused the rest of the world of being driven by hard line ideology and not the logic, facts and evidence so clearly set out in her article. 

Clearly, she has nothing to gain from a meritocracy.

The vexed issue of ‘Mandate’

The Australian election has just played itself out over the last weekend and today we are already hearing the claim that the winners in the House of Representatives have a mandate for all their policies and the Senators should just support them.  This is a common theme just after an election and not just from one party or group.

For those not up on the Australian system, it is similar in many ways to the US system.  There are two houses of parliament, a lower house or House of Representatives and an upper house of review called the Senate.  The Senate is notionally a state house, and each state selects an equal number of senators by proportional representation using a preferential voting system.

Half of the Senate and all of the House of Representatives are elected every three years.  By convention these elections are held concurrently even though the timing of elections is determined by separate rules.  To overcome the problem, the newly elected members of the senate take their seats in accordance with the timing of the Senate Election, which may be up to seven or eight months after the election.  In the meantime, the old Senate sits.

In a similarity with the British House of Commons, the Prime Minister is the person who can command a majority on the floor of the House of Representatives, while the Head of State is the Governor General, representing the Queen of Australia (who is also Queen of England).

As a result of this arrangement, the Prime Minister is the key political figure in Australian politics.  The now Prime Minister elect, Tony Abbott, campaigned on the policy of abolishing the Carbon Trading scheme, which he called a carbon tax.  Now that he has been elected he is claiming a “mandate” for the abolition of the carbon tax and demanding that the senate, still dominated by parties supporting the Carbon Trading scheme, respect his mandate and pass the legislation abolishing the scheme.

This argument is flawed.  It is built around the concept of winner takes all democracy, which has emerged in the House of Representatives due to the ability of the dominant party to force its legislation through based on numbers.  The current government elect in the House of Representatives received about 53% of the total popular vote, but closer to 60% of the seats. The Senate is, however, a house of review, and due to its proportional representation voting system usually represents the actual split of the electorate more accurately that the House of Representatives.  Further, the conservatism driven by the longer appointment period and the half senate elections each three years means that the Senate does not represent the hot issue of the day, but a longer term average of community opinion.

If a member is elected to either house, it is incumbent on that person to vote according to the policies (s)he proclaimed during the election process.  There is no reason why a senator should change her /his position based on the outcome of the election in the lower house.  Otherwise, there would be no reason to have a senate.

The argument that the Government has a mandate and Senators must support this mandate in the Senate is a logical fallacy, but what else would you expect from politicians?

What Passes for Public Debate

How many times have you heard the words "What passes for public debate in this country"?  It is usually said by someone who has been critical of political discourse or the latest media outrage, who feels (s)he deserves to be served by an idealised version of democracy or press freedom.  Of course, hoping for high quality public debate from either politicians or journalists in mainstream media is always likely to end in frustration.  Neither group is particularly qualified or interested in debate.  Politicians are interested in being re-elected and exercising power, while journalists are focused on writing stories that sell papers to make them enough money to survive and ensure that they are sufficiently famous to keep their jobs.

So, from where will this much lamented high quality public debate emerge?  Obviously, from people interested in public debate!  

Two such people are Kim McKay and Michelle Wood, co-convenors of Sydney Salon.  I attended the second event of Sydney Salon, appropriately on the night of the State of Origin, that other high quality debate that Sydney stops to consume.  Kim and Michelle were inspired by the French  salonnières whose salons were vectors of social and intellectual exchange which helped spread the Enlightenment from its core in Paris to the remainder of France and eventually further afield - even to Sydney, some 250 years later.

Wednesday night's  ‘Provacateur’ was the undoubtedly provocative and entertaining social researcher, Randall Pearce, who addressed the topic: 

A golden voice but a tin ear: why the media has misread community opinion on climate change and where our thinking is headed.

Dr. James Bradfield-Moody kept the discussion flowing and the house in order.

While Pearce sought to reframe the climate change debate to focus on the 80% of Australians who believe climate change is happening, rather than a discussion of whether it is caused by human action, the discussion from the floor expressed the frustration of people who understand and care about the issue, but see it tossed around as a political issue aimed at not losing votes in marginal seats.  The Tony Rudd's about face on the ETS and Kevin Abbott's "non-delivery of an invisible trade to no one" comment, provided a suitable focus for the frustration.  Fortunately there was none of the physical disagreement seen at ANZ Stadium on the same night, and no streaker to conclude the proceedings.

I took two things away from the debate.  Firstly, as a representative of the old white men who were blamed for nearly everything, I felt a little hurt at been described as a "Pale, stale, male".  In particular, I felt that the comment that these people would probably die off soon, solving the problem of "climate skeptics" hit a little close to home.  Oh! The cruelty of youth.  But secondly, as a director of several companies which need to give some strategic thought to the issue of climate change, whatever the cause, I began to wonder what questions I should be asking at the next board meeting.

I am looking forward to the next one, reportedly on gambling to be held on the day before the Melbourne Cup!

What you are reading

I have spent some time recording my travels on my related blog, Gallimaufry Set and now feel ready to start to record my occasional thoughts and observations while at home in Sydney.  Hence, Sydney Noted.  Hope it is worth the read...........