BearCave.Biz

2008-05-10T14:53:00.008+10:00

The above picture is Ian at the Launceston homeground of his much loved Tasmanian-sponsored Hawks AFL footy club.

2008-01-29T15:17:00.002+11:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 16: San Diego, United States of America

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2008-01-29T15:17:00.001+11:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 15: Las Vegas to San Diego, United States of America

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2008-01-29T15:15:00.000+11:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 14: Las Vegas, United States of America

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2008-01-29T15:13:00.000+11:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 13: Lufthansa Flight from London to Frankfurt to Los Angeles, flying over Greenland, then onwards domestic flight to Las Vegas, United States of America

Mad Mon: Left Hotel early morning took tube to
Heathrow. We were to Catch Lufthansa Flight 4725 departing
mid morning to Frankfurt where we were to transit.

Stood in a long a long time, Finally Ian was checked in but Justin rejected
Flight overbooked. Taken to a supervisor who was a smart “bitch”
said we would be compensated.

We said we had onward connection In Frankfurt. Finally we were checked in (although still had a hassle with getting bags put through) to Los Angeles with
business class to Frankfurt.

Good view of Frankfurt City (Modern Buildings) Had to use monorail to transfer to different terminal.
Caught flight Lufthansa 450 to Los Angeles. Passed over Greenland Justin thought there were ships in the ocean they were actually icebergs.

Passed over Canada Northern USA saw Las Vegas and Lake Mead
finally landing in LA late afternoon.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10/9/07: (Mon) Took awhile to clear customs in LA We were
photographed and fingerprinted. Also had to take off shoes
to go through security screening. Left the International (Tom
Bradley) walked to terminal one.

Took US Airways Flight to Las Vegas (Evening Flight) Arrived Vegas 9.30pm City Lights
were nice. Met at airport by Justin’s friend from San Francisco -
his name was Kyle - he escorted us to our hotel which was in
the downtown or Freemont Street area.

This place not rundown anymore and is known know as the “Freemont Street Experience”
Kyle took us to near buy “ABC” store to buy drinks etc he then
Stayed with us to around two am.

A nice guy, he left as he had a early flight the next morning.

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2008-01-29T15:06:00.000+11:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 12: Southampton, United Kingdom

IAN'S DIARY

After what was our fourth breakfeast at this hotel
(not as good as hostels in Germany). Headed by Tube to Waterloo
station. The cost for both of us for a round trip ticket to Southhampton was AUD $126 it was only hour and half train trip. That was a (relatively) cheap day ticket.

Travelled out of London via Clapham junction and Wimbleton. Nice countryside passed Winchester (King Arthur) and to Southhampton Parkway Station. Met by contact Gary who kindly drove us around for the afternoon (Ian’s feet appreciated this).

First Stop was Chilworth Manor and the “Beehive Cottage” which was at the entrance to manor Little cottage that Justin and family use to live in when he was a baby (Justin born in the United Kingdom in 1975).

Next stop was to the waterfront saw what a big Harbour Southhampton has. Tried to imagine where the Titanic might had sailed from. Then we went to a park where there was a memorial to the Titanic especially to those who were killed.

Went to main shopping strip and because of feet finally brought some expensive
Runners from a sports store. Gary next drove us to Portsmouth
had a view from a lookout overlooking the town.

There were a lot of military places on this hill also could see naval base in the distance.

Finally went into the town had a walk(Ian’s feet still bad)
In main shopping strip saw a “Woolworths”also Dehahams and a Marks and Spencer store.

We were then taken back to Gary and his partner’s (Pete) house. Pete arrived from a dog show was a very nice home. Ian rested his feet...at the same time tried to find
out if they were interested in some “fun” (casual encounter) - was declined. Gary saying he was going to work. We were left “wondering” (having been given an earlier impression that they were interested in us).

Pete then drove us to Southhampton General Hospital where Justin
was born. We were then taken to station said goodbye to Pete and
caught a late afternoon train back to London. Had a quiet night at
hotel.

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-08T13:06:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 11: London, United Kingdom

IAN'S DIARY

This was to be a big day Ian’s feet were bath both swelling and Blisters. Despite this still headed of on another walking tour this one was to be four hours.

And was free local Englishman was the guide. Started at London bridge along the Thames for a while then up into the streets Visited:Bank of England,Temple,“Jack the Ripper” territory, St Pauls, Australia House, Fleet Street, West end theatres.

A break at this pub which I think the tour guide got a “kick back from Special deal beer and a very ordinary burger five pounds. Then on to Trafagar Square. Nelsons Column. Then went past the mall to Whitehall,downing street and past Churchills war cabinet rooms.

Finally finished up at Westmnister Abbey/Big Ben We slipped away early to avoid tip.

On tube to Harrods feet going crazy Brought Anti-aging cream and
No sugar chocolate.

Had a good look at Harrods. Finally back to Hotel Tried resting as we were going to club later.

Feet bad - finally gave in. Got Justin to take me to emergency room Chelsea Westminister Hospital Charged 10 pounds for Taxi which only
went a couple of blocks.Waited 3 hours to be seen. Tension between Ian and Justin.

Doctor did not seem to think it was too serious and gave me
anti-biotics for infection/cough. Managed to get taxi back to Hotel.

After much heated discussion and Justin asking me to go with him,
At 2am we got a Taxi (24 pounds) to XXL London (near London Bridge towards east end) Was (ultimately) disappointed with club - left after a short time Taxi cost 18 pounds to go back Could not use Tube as it closes down around midnight. Managed to get a few hours rest

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-07T13:03:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 10: Windsor Castle, Bath and Stonehenge: Regional England of the United Kingdom

IAN'S DIARY

This was the day for day tour out of London.

We had to get to Victoria Coach Station near Victoria Tube Station.

We were running late had trouble finding coach station then when
We got there confusion as to what (Evans Tour Company) we were
Going on. Finally under way.

Passed by the back of Buckingham Palace and headed out of London Passed by Heathrow then in distance we could see our first Stop “Windsor Castle” - Made our
way through a market to castle entrance only had a couple of hours saw inside state apartments St Georges Chapel had photo taken with one of the guards, a little shopping then off no time to eat.

Headed west for a fair way to Bath Could see Bristol and the hills in Wales in the distance. Had a quick look at Roman Baths water was dirty did have a drink of some filtered water. Bath was beautiful city managed to shop and buy a new flash drive.

Heading out of Bath saw a large “white horse” outlined on a hill
noted that we were at one stage only 30ks from Southhampton.

Arrived at Stonehenge one of the 7 Wonders of the world.

Not allowed to get really close to it as it “crumbling” The roads
Around the site were full of traffic slowing down to look I think
We were in the area called Salisbury Plains. Finally after long day
Headed back to London In the Suburbs passed by Twickenham
Stadium Crossed Thames River(ugly at low tide) a couple of times.

Luckily we were first to be dropped of in Earls Court Outside a Tesco Supermarket which we went into and did some shopping.

That night did some washing and internet café.

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-06T13:02:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 9: London, United Kingdom

IAN'S DIARY

Take it easy kind of day. We did some washing at
same time using internet café in Earls Court (Think computer here
might have corrupted my flash drive therefore loosing some photos.

Spent time at Post Office looking at sending packages home. Finally Justin sent two packages home by surface mail which as of writing this had not arrived.

Took Tube to City of London (Bank).

Found Lloyds of London (Insurance) Ian had always wanted to go there and go inside.

Due to security not allowed was only able to
Walk past entrance and have a quick look. Noted unusual design
Of building. Walked past the Bank of England. .

Also on the way Back to Earls Court in Oxford Street Area went to RoB London (the gay adult shop).

That evening met Shiho Sawada a Japanese
Girl Ian use to baby sit in Melbourne twenty years before. This
was in the days that Ian used to work for Japanese Insurance
Company.

Her father was the Melbourne Rep. Went to Filipino
Restaurant food was good. Had a early night.

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-05T13:01:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 8: Train from Munich to Frankfurt, Germany & Plane to London, United Kingdom

IAN'S DIARY

After quick breaky took ICE train direct to Frankfurt
Airport. Nice scenery - Passed Stutgart saw Mercedes factory also train station was “a dead end” ie train in and out same direction Crossed Rhine River at Manheim
was was a inland port.

Four Hour Train trip and we arrived at airport Lufthansa flight 4728 to London Heathrow arriving lunchtime. Saw great view London ie Buckingham Palace

LONDON

Kylie, Ian’s neice, was at Heathrow waiting for us
she had flown in from Dublin for the day. We headed for the Airport Tube station knowing that had been industrial action affecting the London Underground Picadilly Line still running.

Purchased a “oyster card” 25 pounds included a trip into London
And would last until we left At station tried to take photos
But security guard told us of. No photos in Tube Station.

Travelled to Earls Court.

Kylie came back later and we headed of on the Tube. First stop was Knightsbridge and Harrods then to Westminister. We crossed
The river and went to “London Eye” Kylie and Justin went up Ian
Declined.

I just sat and rested they took photos I purchased a photo
Taken by the operators of Kylie and Justin.

Afterwards traveled by Tube and ended up at an Australian Pub in Covent Gardens.

Kylie insisted on us having a beer - Really both of us not up to it.
got told of by staff for going out back and “spilling” beer.

Later we returned to Earls Court said goodbye to Kylie and called it a night. (Kylie had to get up early to go to airport)

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-04T12:59:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 7: Munich, Germany & Salzburg, Austria

IAN'S DIARY:

After another great hostel breakfast made our way
to Dachau again to be there when concentration camp opened.

Saw “Death Ovens” Ian was very moved by this they were as the Americans found them at the end of the war. There were German school children having a tour around as well.

Saw barracks...no real time to look at museum.

Rushed back to Munich just in time to catch train to Salzburg - Weather cold and raining. Passed through Bavarian countryside also passed Berghesgarden. (could
not see remains Hitler’s retreat due to weather).

Crossed border into Austria over large river - could have been the Danuabe. Reached Salzburg station found our way mainly by asking as we went to square where “Sound of Music” tour started.

From There was confusion with toilets there what we thought were mens were actually womens toilets.

Tour took us to places where movie filmed. Learned that movie
Was not actually based on the real story.

For instance where in the last scene the family was escaping over mountains to Switzerland.

These mountains in real terms actually lead to Germany and to where Hitlers retreat was. Anyway saw a couple of houses used in Movie saw rotunda used for “16 going on 17”

Took half hour ride out to Mondsee weather bad Saw area where opening scene filmed ie the hills. Saw church where wedding took place.

Returned to Salzburg end of tour a bit of shopping then due to fact both of us unwell took a early train back to Munich

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-03T12:53:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 6: Berlin to Munich, Germany

IAN'S DIARY

Monday after another good breakfeast headed out early
in rain (weather had been good till then reasonably warm)
to Reichstag Had difficulty finding a station nearby.

Passed by “Fuhruerbunker” to get there. In pouring rain found ourselves
outside building. Heavy security to get inside There is a dome
on the top where the people can look down on the politicians.

Took taxi to get back to Hostel (no time to dry off which was a
Costly mistake as we got cough/colds next few days) Then another
Taxi Tegel Airport (went of freeway and also passed through some interesting suburbs) Lufthansa flight 221 to Munich (about one hour).

At Munich Bus from plane to terminal.

Arrived Munich around Lunchtime found train station had difficulty using ticket machine. No one would help us eventually was able to work it out. Airport a long way from the city and our Hostel was very close to main train station.

We took a train and bus to Dachau concentration camp did not know (thery're open everyday) but on Mondays.

This sort of thing is closed in Germany (on Mondays). Went back to Munich and ended up at ”HB” beerhall. We had very large schooners of beer.

Lot of singing happening here and this is were Hitler started Nazi
Party.

We had McDonalds at Munich Station think frys were off
Costly as this was the start of stomach problems.
Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-02T14:05:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 5: Berlin, Germany

IAN'S DIARY:
2/9/07:(Sun) Once again had a good breakfeast at Hostel collected “doggie” bag for later. Had a couple of hours rest At lunchtime followed the same path as previous day back to Brandenburg Gate for “Berlin city “ walking tour.

Unlike previous day this tour was promoted as “free” but later we ended up paying a “tip” The tour was taken by the American girl that originally met us the previous day. This tour did cover some of the areas covered the previous day. We did this time visit “checkpoint Charlie” or as we were told “cold war disneyland”. There were fake American and Russian soldiers facing of against each other which was similar
too that seen at the Brandenburg Gate.

Despite being extremely tired, Ian continued on as this was another 4 hour walking tour.

Tour then moved on mainly through the old East Berlin. Past
A shop where buildings on a small scale were moulded in chocolate (Reichstag Titanic were examples). We ended up in the university quarter in particular the “Humbolt University”.

Here a lot of building had either survived and/or being repaired after war The “imposing” building feeling was there again. In a square we saw a memorial to the night in the 1930’s when the nazi’s burnt a lot of books. You look at the glass window in ground and see a lot of empty book cases.

Also in this square was a large catherdral and opera house where Wagner performed.Tour then went to the Memorial “to unknown soldier” saw buildings that East
German’s had started to restore but failed to complete Also saw this communication tower in Alexandraplatz that the East Germans had to call (in secret) help from the west to complete.

Ian was glad that tour finally concluded as he was very tired sore feet as well
In a park opposite this old church here the tour guide gave us a few
Stories about the wall coming down in 1989 (ie two old women had border passes but due to bungling by East Germans guards let the masses through as well) Also heard story about East German government spokesman reading incorrect statement to press in which he announced that border with the west would be opened.

After asking various people finally found station. Took train across
City to Olympic Stadium The 2006 soccer world cup held here. Also 1936 nazi Olympic games held here saw some evidence of this. Eventually headed back to Hostel.

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-09-01T13:50:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 4: Berlin, Germany

IAN'S DIARY:
1/9/07: Had good Buffet Breakfeast Plenty of food Made up rolls for later in day used a “doggie” bag. Had a rest Around Lunchtime went by “M46’ Bus to Zoological Station.

In front of Dunkin Donunts met along with others walking tour guide (American Girl) She escorted us to Under De Linden Station which brought us To Brandenburg Gate. We joined “Third Reich” walking tour Once again let by an American this time a guy by the name of “par” Before we started noticed in this square Hotel where Michael Jackson Dangled a baby from window.

This tour was a highlight for Ian. We walked along the Whilhelmstrasse which was the Nazi Government area.Although most of buildings were destroyed by either bombing or Russians.

There are photos displayed along with a story of what went on there. Saw where the “Reichchancellory” was. The Air Ministry
Building is the only large Nazi Building to Survive Americans
And British did not Bomb it during war. East Germans used it
As “The ministries of ministries” It is now the German Government Finance Building.

At the only Section of the Berlin War to survive saw outdoor display depicting victims of the nazi era. This section happens to be at the Old Gestapo Headquarters
Where they are currently excavating the torture Chamber.

We then went through the Potsdammer plaza which was a upmarket part of West Berlin then back into the old East Berlin to a place behind the old “Reichchancellory” (this area is now apartment blocks build by East Germans).

Here was the spot of the “Fuhrerbunker” It is a park/carpark dogs urinate there.
Ian stood on spot where below me was the rubble of Hitler’s Bedroom this is where he and Eva Braun committed suicide.

Nearby (Like a stones throw)was the “Holecaust” memorial
Hundreds of “coffin” like cement blocks in the ground all
Black in color. The tour then concluded as we were in the
Vicinity of the Brandenburg Gate Before this saw a Nazi Art work
That was placed in a building near the gate. We also went into
A underground station where the East Germans had used part of the old “Chancellory” Building ie marble to build station.

The old East Berlin subway had lines that did go in and out of West Berlin
Here the stations were “closed” so people could not get off.
Walking tour was about 4 hours and Ian was feeling very tired
Took subway back to Hostel Around corner from Hostel was
The old city hall building for West Berlin (President Kennedy
Made famous speech from Balcony here whilst here) This
Building I think was repaired after war to its former state
It is a large and imposing building which was typical of
What we saw in the older buildings in Germany

After several Hours rest Andrew came at ten pm to take
us to a party in Pankow. This would be the last time we saw
him as could not take us to Airport on Monday. This party
was once again in an old factory area a long way out in the Suburbs old East Berlin lucky for us later on it was close to station (end of line).

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-08-31T13:34:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 3: Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, Deutsche Bahn train to Berlin, Germany

IAN'S DIARY:
An hour into a 12 Hour flight over Bay of Bengal: Air Pocket. People were screaming including Justin, Ian was half asleep but felt it. Crew were running Around in a panic speaking in German/ Some of our food for Dinner was Lost. Flew over New Dehli Afhganistan Old Soviet Union including Ukraine Poland then on to Germany.

31/8/07: Arrived Frankfurt Airport around 5.30am Local Time Got through customs ok managed to find our way to ICE (Long Distance Train Station). Could not find any trains going to Berlin No staff around to ask questions. Found another passenger who Told us to go into Frankfurt main Station and get train there. Took a train that had come from Munich and went into Frankfurt There managed to use Public Phone and ring contact (Andrew) in Berlin. Train took 4.5 hours and traveled at fairly high speed Through pretty villages and towns noticed hundreds of wind turbines.

Realized we were approaching Berlin as went through Station “Berlin Spandau” Arrived main Station around Lunchtime. Met by Andrew who drove as to Meininger Hostel in Schoneberg On the way saw Brandeburg Gate. Andrew gave us a quick tour around Schoneberg.

On the way to Hostel went to a Aldi Store. At post office we disovered Bayrischer underground Station which we used a bit over coming days as it was nearest one To Hostel. Did washing at Hostel had problems with Washing Machine.

We had a rest for 4 hours then around ten that night left for Nightclub. Got a bit confused and bit lost using underground we following a group of people. (Saw Large building “Allianz”) to find venue I think venue was in a old factory East Berlin next to a river (I think the Spree). Enjoyed Party left around dawn.

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon.

2007-08-30T20:07:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 2: Singapore

IAN'S DIARY:
30/8/07: Had good buffet breakfeast Hotel At 8.30am picked up and taken to a collection point for a city tour. Tour guide Phillipe Highlights were Visit “Sea Lion” iconic symbol on waterfront, Chinese Temple, Botanic Gardens/Orchids ,craft store , Indian Market where Justin brought his Ring.Also saw how majority of Population lived in apartments and also saw the upmarket area as well. Returned to hotel in heavy rain and heavy Traffic early pm Had Hotel room till 6.30 pm so tried to relax Both of us went for a swim in Hotel Pool. Posted package back home used Internet Café.

Checked out 6.30pm had till.815pm to wait or transfer to Airport While waiting went to a Nearby Department Store called Robinson. Prices a bit expensive as was those we discovered later that night At Changi Airport. Transferred to Airport, Lufthansa flight 779 Originating in Jakarta and bound for Frankfurt.

Justin's Diary and Photos from Singapore published soon...

2007-08-30T16:43:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007

This is my first opportunity to go around the world, heading west from Australia. I'm writing to you today from Singapore in South-East Asia.

Please check the "Around The World Discovery" feature at the top of this blog's side bar for updates.

I will eventually post the best of my holiday pics and more detailed review of my holiday once it is complete.

...From Justin

2007-08-29T20:03:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007 - Day 1: Melbourne to Singapore

IAN'S DIARY
29/8/07: Arrived from Melbourne 9pm. Met at Changi Airport And Transferred to Le Meridien Hotel Orchard Road Went For a late night walk discovered we were in a shopping /market area Had late night snack (chicken/rice) very Tasty

Justin's Diary and Photos published soon...

2007-08-24T16:14:00.000+10:00

Around The World Discovery 2007

Less than 5 days to go!

2007-08-14T23:39:00.000+10:00

The Purrfect Portrait of my Boyfriend.

Ian is a very loving guy and I believe I capture this very well in this picture. I'm very lucky that we've got closer now than we've ever been.

All my love,

Justin.

2007-07-30T13:03:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report:
Politics, Policy & The Synergies and Separations between Left and Right.

SOON

BearCave.Biz will soon have analysis of former Prime Minister Paul Keating's recent speech at the Sydney Film School.

The above photograph is from the film 'Under The Tuscan Sun' and I'll soon explain its relevance to my writing article.

The focus of this article is the recent, controversial public address by former Prime Minister Paul Keating to the Sydney Film School, and the rather standard response the Mainstream Media provided to it (the “think before you speak, Mr. Keating” response of our newspaper editors),

Here’s a small extract of what Mr. Keating said in his speech:

“A patriot will not exclude a person from another race from the community where they have lived side-by-side and whom he has known for many years, but a nationalist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his kind of people or, more likely, his kind of thinking.

Shades there of John Howard's discomfort with Australia's multicultural community, and the distrust of its Islamic community.

When John Howard famously advertised his wears in the 2004 election, his advertisement said, "We decide who comes here and when they come". The "we" of course was not meant to be all of us, but only some of us. And the "some of us" are the people Howard believes are keepers of the Holy Grail, the sentries at the gate of the true Australia, not the cosmopolitan one of the so-called elites.”

This is not an altogether unfamiliar argument – “the cosmopolitan versus the conservative” is one way to describe the opposing groups of the culture wars in Politics.

What sparked controversy was Mr. Keating’s mention of Adolf Hitler in the same speech he is being critical of current day Prime Minister John Howard, the same man that beat Paul Keating in the 1996 federal election.

According to Ed from The Age, in his article titled Think before you speak:

"Mr Keating's subject, "Film and Art in the Australia of Nationalism and Cynicism", was indeed worthwhile, evoking differences between nationalism and patriotism.

Then Mr Keating went too far, by referring to Adolf Hitler's thoughts on nationalism. Whatever the relevance, however painstaking Mr Keating was in stressing he was not making a comparison with Mr Howard, there was still an unfortunate and unavoidable feeling of guilt by association.

It is a pity for Mr Keating, who is an intelligent and cultured man, that his gravitas is so often diminished by shrillness and what appears to be cold-hearted revenge rather than rational argument."

A similar interpretation of Keating's speech was demonstrated by The Herald Sun's Ed in his article titled Keating's Gaffe:

"It is one thing to ridicule your political enemies with clever invective, but to mention the PM and a genocidal maniac in the same breath is well beyond the pale and deserves the fullest condemnation.

Is the whiff of an election inspiring the old war horse to relive his glory days?"

Then there's Ed from The Australian, who declares in his article titled Editorial: Cut! Keating's big picture is a loser:

"With the scent of a potential Labor victory in the air, Mr Keating has seized the opportunity to dust off the "vision thing". Mr Keating clearly speaks for many who are looking to Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd to deliver them from what they consider to be the hurtful, racist, arts-hating Howard conservatives. In doing so, Mr Keating claims the virtue of a patriot, as opposed to the nasty nationalist Mr Howard who has followed the exclusionary example of Margaret Thatcher and Adolf Hitler."

My article intends to challenge these responses from our newspaper editors, as well as provide a quite different reading and interpretation of Paul Keating's speech.

ALSO SOON

August 2007 will also feature more news and issues that support my current Marketing & Communication studies. August 2007 is also the month for the biggest event going on in my life (and Ian's life) for the year.

2007-06-12T22:08:00.000+10:00

The Northern Tassie Report

Soon I'll be posting recent photos from my short trip last month to Northern Tasmania(Launceston, Devonport, Burnie and surrounds) as well as the remainder of my photos from last year's North America holiday.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Ian introducing me to his home town of Devonport, along with another photo taken in
Launceston

2007-05-20T00:24:00.000+10:00

Don't Worry, Be Happy...and Eat!

Friends of my boyfriend Ian last year introduced us to Borneo Cafe and Noodle Bar in Chelsea, on Melbourne's Bayside.

Ever since, this has been our favorite place to eat, due mainly to their amazing Chicken Tom Yum Soup and Rotti Bread with Peanut Butter Sauce.

On Friday Night, we also discovered how good their main dishes can get. Their Thai Red Curry Beef and Chicken Dish contained broccoli and pumpkin and was dipped in Coconut Milk Sauce.

Two reasons we keep going back are because their prices are very affordable and their awesome healthy Malaysian food leaves us feeling replenished like nothing else we've eaten.

Consequently, Friday Night at Borneo also proved for myself and Ian to be a replenishment of spending quality, stress-free time together.

Many issues have arisen lately that have us worried about the future, particularly life threatening problems Ian faces that have developed from his diabetes, but we're slowly learning that certain moments need to be cherished and relaxed enough to be pause for thought.

Borneo Cafe and Noodle Bar is our place to "Don't Worry, Be Happy...and Eat!".

It is an integral part of our newfound philosophy that "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" to keep Ian determined and our relationship strong.

...This message written with love from Justin.

2007-05-15T11:48:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART THREE: CHICKEN OR EGG? (Questions)
Questions that send us on journeys in our minds

I agree with the Prime Minister when he today writes:

"No self-styled expert comes close to matching the sum total of creativity, ideas and roften tacit knowledge that exists in every home, every place of learning" [1]

I would include in that, the knowledge one can gain from insightful astrological readings :)

Take this very handy bit of general advice from my (Leo) stars today, written by the ever-reliable Jonathan Cainer:

"Some things are obvious; you really don't have to think about them. Others are subtle; you can easily miss their meaning. We all know this. It's just that we can't always tell the difference. We waste much time seeking hidden depth in the simply superficial or we dismiss as irrelevant something that deserves a lot more thought. You now suspect that there may be more to a certain story than meets the eye. Trust that inkling. Continue to ask smart questions and you will soon get helpful answers".

I suspect there's a lot of truth to this, especially given it is now right to "question" just what impact Industrial Relations is having on federal election voting intentions and how likely this will force a change of Government at federal level?

Just what are the superficial claims being made by sectional interests and what questions deserve a lot more thought than they are currently being given?

For example, let's consider which of the two following examples deserves to be more considered as a superficial claim (doesn't deserve as much in-depth questioning) and which one might be too easily dismissed as irrelevant to Mainstream Media debate (there hasn't been enough questioning)?

Example One, from today's front page of The Australian:

"Risk of Rudd" premiums are being written into construction contracts by building firms, concerned that a Labor victory at the federal election due late this year would re-empower unions on the nation's building sites.

"There is increasing trepidation and concern by commercial builders of the uncertainty of the ALP's industrial relations policy relating to the building and construction industry," Master Builders Australia chief executive Wilhelm Harnisch told The Australian. [1]

The Prime Minister has quickly picked up on the use of this new rhetoric "the risk of Rudd", warning of a ripple effect throughout the economy that the Master Builders Australia are concerned may happen because of the prospect of Labor-orchestrated legislation.

Example Two:

Paul Gollan wrote a new book called Employee Representation in Non-Union Firms, published by Sage Publications in January.

While Gollan does not agree with the unfair dismissal legislation he agrees with some elements of the Australian Fair Pay Commission which was established with the Work Choices legislation.

"This commission was established with a mandate to identify the economic circumstances of the unemployed and the low paid," says Gollan.

"This commission was established with a mandate to identify the economic circumstances of the unemployed and the low paid," says Gollan. "While many of my own colleagues, the trade union movement and the ALP have disagreed with its establishment, to me it is a positive development.

"I believe that sort of approach to ascertain and evaluate the impact of minium wages and also look at welfare, social security, training, the taxation system and how that mix actually affects people is a positive step. Hopefully we can find out if we can really balance the issue of welfare reform, taxation and minimum wages."

The important take-away message here is "questioning how" that mix actually affects people. Here's a guy not pretending to know all there is to know.

The truth is that both the above examples deal with "managing the risk of uncertainty". The difference is that one example is "more macro" and the second example is "more micro".

I'm someone who is concerned that the Mainstream Media is giving "microscopic analysis to macro-environmental issues" simply because the Macro ones enable the Government to "stay on message" its anti-union message, while not nearly enough time is spent in the Mainstream Media "questioning the mix of instruments used" to give low income and low skilled people a hand up.

Instead, we seem to be getting the superficial claims that we're on a one-way street towards the deregulation of the labour market (in other words, moving forward "without question"), so I find Jill Murray's article in The Age rather refreshing. She writes:

"Rod Cameron's bald assertion that Australians want an unregulated labour market demonstrates the dangers to our political discourse when complex issues become sound bites.

Just what our working lives would look like without this backbone of entitlements is a question few can answer from personal experience." [2]

I would go further and assert that very little of the rhetoric being put out there by Big Business Australia, the Howard Government and sections of the Mainstream Media "relates well" to people's personal experience.

Which is why I'm thankful my area of study right now happens to be Public Relations. It is helping me to see who else out there in the Public Domain really ought to be studying it alongside me, instead of thinking all they need to do to win the IR debate is place terms like "Risk of Rudd" inside quotation marks (for your own sake, I hope you're reading this, Ed from The Australian :)

...From Justin

References:

[1] John Howard: Learning isn't just about the economy
An education system dedicated to choice, quality and diversity can improve our lives, argues the Prime Minister
May 15, 2007, The Australian

[2] Unregulated labour markets do not exist, Jill Murray
May 15, 2007, The Age

*The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot (The Left)
Part Two - Eggs Benedict (The Right)
Part Three: Chicken or Egg? (Questions)
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk (Concepts)
Part Six: The Egg Timer (Process)
Part Seven: The Egg Carton (Hierarchy)
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs (Relationships)
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen (Lobbying)
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets (Context)
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2007-05-10T20:42:00.000+10:00

Federal Budget 2007

I share a similar concern to former Prime Minister Paul Keating. He
recently told ABC Radio's Eleanor Hall that Kevin Rudd is not
adequately selling his policy to "react" to conservative claims of an
Industrial Relations "rollback":

Says Mr. Keating:

"The key point, the key point, is that the old pre-1993 system had
compulsory arbitration and leap frogging, that's what gave us the
contagion, that's what gave us always the high inflation rate.

That's gone and Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are not bringing it back"

However, even if Mr Rudd successfully counteracts, that's really only
dealing with one-third of the election-winning equation. Let's call
this one-third "the reactive challenge" - to deal with the straw man
being raised against Labor - that Rudd is too pressured by "Union
bosses" and the Peter Hendy type warnings that the pre-WorkChoices IR
model was one designed for the 1890s.

The second third of the election winning equation is "the proactive
challenge" - which means, as Christian Kerr from Crikey.com writes -
to "relate matters to individual experience".

The irony of the Liberal Party "representing liberalism" is that the
alternative to "big government socialism" has actually turned out to
be "big government conservatism".

We're getting all the good news in big numbers, without the all the
important detail about how Mr. Howard's "human dividend" is
distributed. In other words, the Liberals are asking us to put faith
in the economics of "aggregate development" rather than relating
economic development to our own individual "personal development"
experience.

Labor needs to "reposition" the politics to reflect policy, rather
than the other way around.

This differs from what's happening now, which is that economic policy
is rather "detached" from politics, except for the Government
promotion of "big, aggregate numbers".

Consequently, instead of a debate about "achieving greater
productivity growth, relating to individual experience", we're getting
a "microscoping of individual experience" - as evidenced by the silly
headline on the front cover of The Australian this morning - "Tribal
Warfare: McMansion Dwellers versus Latte Sippers" - a modern day
"microscoping of a minority group, represented as a threat to the
majority interest" - just like Stalin "microscoped attention" towards
the Kulaks in Soviet Russia.

Finally, there's the last-third of the equation - "the planning
challenge" - an especially big struggle over resources and stability
within modern day oppositions.

As Michelle Grattan says this morning in The Age about a Post-Budget
Rudd:

"(Rudd) finds himself like the cook whose cupboard has been raided
just before he has to serve up a very important meal".

...From Justin

2007-04-28T13:48:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART EIGHT: FREE RANGE EGGS (Relationships)
Forces and Responses that affect a whole range of Human Experience

In case you're drowning in a sea of rhetoric from following Kevin Rudd's Labor Party Conference speech, allow me to critically interpret some important sentences:

Sky News quotes Kevin Rudd as saying that:

"Australia is approaching a "Crossroads" - honouring our heritage, celebrating what we have achieved but always anticipating what we still must do to secure our future" and says Labor is best to navigate the future." [1]

Here’s a more detailed extraction of Mr. Rudd’s speech to support Mr. Rudd’s thinking about “Crossroads”:

"The conservatives,at their worst, so anchored in the past, so dedicated to the status quo, failing often to even acknowledge the challenges of the future.

"We stand for something bigger than ourselves and our self interest. They, once the window dressing is removed, do not.

"Having seized control of the Senate at the last election, rather than embrace the challenges of the future, they succumbed to the ideologies of the past

"Introduced unfair industrial relations laws… laws which all reasonable Australians now recognise as having gone just too far.

"Having restored fundamentals (of fairness), our intention is to face with confidence, determination and fresh ideas the great challenges of our nation's future.

Our task is to express and embody the hopes for change now rising like a tide in the hearts and minds of the Australian people, by the policies we define and refine here.” [2]

I think "crossroads", combined with the above-mentioned supporting sentences, is a highly useful metaphor to use when contemplating the future as it recognises the change process and phases of decision-making we all make when in transition.

However, because I advocate the concept of "personal development" in my writing, I'm less enthusiastic about the following comparison made between Mr. Rudd’s party and the conservatives:

Labor, Mr Rudd said, stood for the country and the planet where the conservatives "stand for their three great ennobling values of me, myself and I".

In reponse, Ed from The Australian asserts:

“Mr Rudd's speech was high on rhetoric but light on substance.” [3]

For once, Ed gets a free kick, because I challenge Mr. Rudd's use of "Me, Myself and I" in the context of only being "an ennobling value" of aristocrats, rather than "an important and urgent, individual personality balancing act” that needs to be valued to successfully balance transition against risk, (to borrow the wording of recent author and former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe).

Small Business author Michael E. Gerber explains the lopsidedness that exists between three individual personalities (what I will define “Me, Myself & I”) inherent in all of us - and how this lopsidedness affects the balance between transition and risk.

These personalities are the the entrepreneurial (competency in turning the most trivial condition into exceptional opportunity), the managerial (compentency in pragmatism) and the technical (compentency in getting things done).

Because few of us are compentent enough to perform such an inherent balancing act, our reliance on "the other", our relationships, becomes important to provide the balance needed to manage risk. [4]

This is a synthesis of ideas likely to be overlooked by Mr. Rudd by giving priority to "lowest common denominator” criticisms of the conservatives, not dissimilar to the rhetoric used by Mark Latham.

On the issue of public language, the fringe media needs to keep both the pollies and the mainstream media in check when it comes to the use of rhetoric and determine whether the language used is more policy or politically motivated.

A personal paradox for me is that while I publicly declare I'm a Labor voter, I have little time for the "repetitive Howard-centric criticism" offered by many on the Left.

Mr. Rudd claims that Labor values are ones which "unite rather than divide us".

The concept I advocate - "personal development" will “unite elements” of individualism (the "Me, Myself and I" concept) and collectivism (the importance of various relationships to individual success – what I define as the goal of “Equality of knowledge interrelationships for the personal development and implementation of strategy”.).

I regard the concept of “collectivism versus individualism” to be a political fault-line of the past, even though this doesn’t translate to an advocacy of Australian Workplace Agreements (because the issue of “equality” will still be critical in defining a new fault-line to differentiate the major parties). Post-modern interpretations of this old fault-line are not likely to influence my thinking.

Also, as an advocate who writes with “the interest of low-income earners” in mind, first and foremost, rather than adding to the conga line of those writing to shore up support from the middle-classes, I also urge Kevin Rudd to measure his thinking against those thinkers with philosophical backgrounds not confined to politics. Thinkers such as Michael E. Gerber, Charles Handy and Jack Trout (more about "how" in future articles).

The Australian's Paul Kelly is correct when he says:

"It is always heartening to be told one represents the future. This is even more heartening when the message and the transition it embodies seems so painless and sacrifice free". [5]

Indeed, Labor’s rhetoric deserves to be scrutinised on the basis of how an alternative government policy platform will facilitate the balance of transition and risk for ordinary workers.

However, The Australian newspaper seems to believe that the only way Kevin Rudd can measure his thinking is against the Tony Blair "third way" experience.

Kevin Rudd should not be fooled by The Australian’s attempt to coerce federal Labor into becoming a “Howard-Lite” alternative which leaves its core readership with a choice at the ballot box, but leaves other Australians feeling their vote is worthless.

References:

[1] Sky News Online

[2] http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/files/ruddspeech.pdf

[3] Ed from The Australian, 28th April 2007

[4] Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth Revisited. 1995 Harper Business. Page 28

[5] Paul Kelly in The Australian, 28th April 2007

*The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot (The Left)
Part Two - Eggs Benedict (The Right)
Part Three: Chicken or Egg? (Questions)
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk (Concepts)
Part Six: The Egg Timer (Process)
Part Seven: The Egg Carton (Hierarchy)
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs (Relationships)
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen (Lobbying)
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets (Context)
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2007-04-15T16:00:00.000+10:00

Fortnightly Footprints: 2nd – 15th April, 2007

Small traces of big happenings in Marketing & Communication: Issue Concepts, Important Details, Publics and Self-Concept.

Publics: Kevin Rudd's relationship with Channel Seven's Sunrise

Ed from The Sunday Mail in Brisbane questions whether federal opposition leader Kevin Rudd has a Public Relations problem if he continues his Friday Morning appearance on Channel Seven's 'Sunrise' program:

Ed claims:

"The prime ministership of Australia is a serious business. Morning television is not. And it has become apparent that Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd cannot aspire to one while being a regular on the other.

What might have been appropriate when he was Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, seizing every bit of exposure he could, is no longer appropriate now he is Opposition Leader and must relate to all Australians.

The prime minister – or the aspirant – must be able to converse with all Australians in all forums but a certain gravitas and dignity come with the highest elected office in the land.

Prime Minister John Howard is a master of spreading himself across the media, but Mr Rudd is in danger of being portrayed as a television puppet"

Also according to Ed, due to Mr.Rudd's association and with Sunrise, combined with an alleged misuse of Anzac Day ceremony by Sunrise:

"The squeaky-clean image (Rudd) has so assiduously cultivated is tarnished and a critical electorate will be more willing to look for fault. It is no less than he demanded during the AWB crisis."

However, Ed may need to be reminded that Morning Television was once significantly more "serious" when Channel Nine's 'Today' Show operated unchallenged.

Morning Television's challenge of being the poor cousin of Breakfast Radio is not dissimilar to the challenge of State Opposition Leaders being almost invisible compared with the visibility of State Premiers.

Both Sunrise and Kevin Rudd have "successfully challenged the formula" of relating to their publics.

So it is interesting to note how some of our newspaper editors insist on imposing old fashioned and dated opinions on how Public Relations should work.

Equally interesting is noting that Joe Hockey has also stayed with Sunrise, despite the obvious facts that (i) he has been promoted to the position of Employment Minister and (ii) John Howard's "human dividend" rhetoric is directly tied to the issue of debating the economics of jobs and relating to the general public.

Clearly, this "dog's breakfast criticism" of Kevin Rudd is being cooked up using pots and kettles.

...From Justin

Important Detail: 30 year low unemployment rate

David Uren, Economics correspondent from The Australian newspaper reports on the latest ABS jobless statistics

His summary analysis: "The number of looking for work fell below half a million to 488,700, the lowest number since December 1989, according figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Prime Minister John Howard described the fall in the number of unemployed as "the greatest human dividend of all".

Employers are increasingly finding their full-time workers from part-time workers. The number of part time jobs has been steady at 2.9 million since August 2005, while there have been about 300,000 full-time jobs created since then."

According to ABC-TV 'Insiders', the two major parties are divided on how these figures were arrived at, with Employment Minister Joe Hockey on Channel Seven's 'Sunrise' disputing Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's claims that it's the result of $55 billion entering, then flowing through the Australian economy through the Resources (Mining) Boom.

Mr. Hockey's counter-claim is that the number one jobs growth has been in construction industries, followed by accomodation, cafes and restaurants.

The political position being argued by John Howard and his minister Joe Hockey is clear.

Calling employment the "the greatest human dividend of all" acknowledges everybody in the economy as a stakeholder in prosperity, but only in a very "generic sense" (that is to say: suitable for broad range of publics - usable or suitable in a variety of contexts)

Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

However, the most excellent article written about Industrial Relations this week did not adhere to partisan positioning. It is "Mind-Shift required to change workplace culture" by Paul Gollan and is published in The Weekend Australian Financial Review (14-15 April 2007).

His argument is that it is imperative that employers shift their IR focus from legal compliance to better performance.

I would add that this should also be the Howard Government's imperative.

For this reason, Joe Hockey should release "all detail" relating to Australian Workplace Agreements in order to be the subject of review, "not just the good news data".

Issue Concept: Wet Economics versus Dry Economics.

Finally, there’s an opportunity in this nation for a “robust and engaging debate” on an economic, rather than a “social” or “cultural” fault line. Yet I wonder if anybody in the mainstream media will actually even notice the opportunity, let alone seize on it.

Madonna once performed the lyrics:

“Music makes the people come together
Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel”

Similarly, the so called “culture war” debates, driven by small-l liberal concerns on the left, and ultra-conservative concerns on the right, have mixed bourgeoisie and rebel to the point that:

1. leftist bourgeoisie is at “cultural war” with rightist bourgeoisie; and
2. low-to-middle income earners who may once have rebelled against unfair working conditions have either risen above their station (become so-called “aspirational”) or are “stationary battlers” that have become lost in the wilderness and can’t easily find their way back to a platform of political influence.

These two facts, in a nutshell, explain the very poor concept of economic debate in Australia.

Quite simply, economic debate should be for life – it should be “robust”, not just kept for budget time and interest rate decision days, just as “A Dog Is For Life, Not Just For Christmas”.

Economic debate should also be “engaging” to prevent a new form of “forgotten people” in politics – namely non-unionised, low-skilled and low-income earners.

And my reasoning for insisting we have a poor concept of economic debate, both in the mainstream media and wider community, will not actually be delivered from “pure” economic perspective, rather from my developing perspective as a marketing and communication student.

I would argue, a more “synthetic” perspective is needed for an alternative “wet economic” position to the “dry economic argument” we’re getting way too often in the mainstream media.

For example, I could not go pass the article written in today’s edition of The Australian newspaper by David Burchell, a humanities teacher at the University of Western Sydney.

His article “reinforces” the almost religious belief that underpins dry economic argument – “Don’t look back – there’s only ever going forward with economic reform”.

I’ve been collecting many examples lately of this perpetual propaganda being spoon fed to a general public – a public failing to recognise just how this careful wording is chosen to protect sectional interest lobbies.

The time has arrived to scrutinise our mainstream media editors, who are demonstrating their ignorance of “all that could be known” about economic perspective by blindly accepting the “public relations” line that there’s only ever “moving forward” with economic reform.

I intend borrowing from the language of project management, the modern language of advanced global workplaces, to underpin my alternative argument with the term “moving iteratively”.

This is “very deliberate positioning” because it’s not the same as saying “moving backwards”. Rather, it’s about “selectively repeating steps” in the process of developing economic, social and multicultural policy (for a global world).

It also presents a direct challenge to the “Don’t stop, never look back” propaganda that the mainstream media relies heavily on so that their writers “appear” to offer an intelligent insight into economic policy development.

The problem is that the subtext is almost always the same – “moving forward always requires never looking backwards”. Article after article has the same “take-away message” that cons an uncertain and worried electorate (what we now have) to not dare question the logic of “never repeating steps”. It is a deliberate attempt to shut down debate on any economic fault line whatsoever.

Consequently, we have an unchallenged “dry economic argument”, while the soft-left try to convince us they can solve all the world’s problems by debating the hard-right on “social and cultural issues only”.

The early days of the war in Iraq, combined with the leftist economic evasiveness that resulted in the landslide election loss against federal Labor in 2004 and the continual hardline defence by the CFMEU over threats to the jobs of its forestry and mining workers, puts in major doubt the capacity of the anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-development synthesis of the small-l liberal left to argue reasonably.

On the other hand, the reason Kevin Rudd is right when he insists he’s “doing a Kevin” rather than “doing a Tony” (Blair) is because the conservatives have already hijacked the Tony Blair story and argued it as “reason for Labor to move rightwards” rather than engage in more complex (but not necessarily obscure) thinking.

In fact, it’s such a hijacking that David Burchell resorts to using these words in his article:

“Despite his recent efforts at political philosophy, Rudd is not equipped or inclined to bring a violent philosophical transformation to Labor”.

This misunderstands what Labor needs to philosophically achieve. We don’t need a “purely economic” perspective which brings about “violent philosophical transformation” of the Labor Party and what it stands for.

However, it’s equally true that we don’t need the sort of small-l liberal evasiveness of economic debate that ultimately lost Labor the last federal election and gave John Howard his Senate rule to bring about many questionable changes to Industrial Relations and the way Australia thinks about productivity in a “project-oriented”, global working culture.

Note that I really underline the term “project oriented” when talking about “the way of the modern workplace” and setting goals for productivity.

Kevin Rudd’s vision for a national broadband network is an interesting move, but to seriously develop a complex economic system that is information technology-driven, he must also speak the language of projects – because projects are not just about using technological tools and techniques – projects are about people and an affected society.

To quote Lindsay Tanner in today’s Herald Sun (Melbourne):

“Equip our businesses and students with the tools they need to succeed in a highly competitive world.”

Recognising how people develop a “user-friendly” economic system – one that is a product of society. How we develop and use the system determines how that system affects society.

The starting point for speaking the language of projects is to challenge the dry economic position of “moving forward by never looking back” with “moving iteratively”.

Certainly, you’ll hear me use that term, and variations of it, this year in my writing.

…From Justin

2007-04-01T01:55:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Ten: San Francisco, California + Day Eleven (April 2): Hollywood, California, ahead of Qantas flight home to Australia

Details soon. Sorry I haven't had the time intended to complete the upload of my holiday snaps. However, this will happen soon, along with some short stories that explain the reason for some of the photos taken.

You'll find this North America 2006 series soon archived in the "travel and leisure diary" features section on the side bar of this blog.

In the meantime, click here to see my photos from my first full days in New York City, as well as pictures from my Amtrak train journey across New York State, from NYC to Niagra Falls.

This series is an activity aimed at supporting the development of my multimedia computer use.

...From Justin

2007-03-31T17:24:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Nine: Knott's Berry Farm, California

Details soon...

...From Justin

2007-03-30T11:06:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Eight: Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico

Details soon...

...From Justin

2007-03-29T01:14:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Seven: Plane > JFK to LAX, Train > Los Angeles-Anaheim-San Diego, California

Details soon...

...From Justin

2007-03-28T08:20:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Six: Niagra Falls, Ontario, Canada

Details soon...

...From Justin

2007-03-27T02:13:00.000+10:00

Striving Together

My boyfriend Ian is unwell due to a battle with diabetes, which has forced me to confront many relationship issues I haven't confronted in my previous relationships.

This note is specifically intended for Ian to read - to let him know that no matter what happens, he's not alone. He is striving with me.

...Love Justin

2007-03-27T02:10:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Five: New York State

Details soon...

In the meantime, click here to see my photos from my first full days in New York City, as well as pictures from my Amtrak train journey across New York State, from NYC to Niagra Falls.

...From Justin

2007-03-26T14:33:00.001+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Four: New York City

Details soon...

In the meantime, click here to view photos from my first and second full days in New York City

...From Justin

2007-03-25T16:06:00.000+10:00

North America 2006 - Day Three: New York City

Details soon...

In the meantime, click here to view photos of my first full day in New York City.

...From Justin

2007-03-24T15:40:00.000+11:00

North America 2006 - Day Two: Washington D.C.

Detail soon...

In the meantime, click here to see my pictures of the nation's capitol.

...From Justin

2007-03-23T12:08:00.000+11:00

North America 2006 - Day One: Plane to New York, Train to Washington D.C.

It was one year ago today I experienced an extended day lasting 40 hours, which took me from the Yarra River of Melbourne Australia to the steps of the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C.

This was not my first trip overseas (as I was born in England, my arrival into Australia as a baby was my first destination overseas :) but it was my first solitary journey overseas, my first trip to east coast USA and also the first North American experience in which I got to cross into Canada and Mexico.

It was also my first attempt at digital photography :)

Click here

to see my 40-hour journey from Melbourne to Los Angeles to New York to Washington D.C.

I'll be adding info about my holiday experience soon, including info about my the radio stations and programs I most liked.

What I remember most about that day was feeling empowered by having made the journey on my own and testing my own skills.

...From Justin

2007-03-20T01:03:00.000+11:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART SEVEN: THE EGG CARTON (Hierarchy)
The Binary of Integration and Differentiation

Lately, I've been "group blogging" on Larvatus Prodeo , a mainly left-wing political discussion web site.

For this reason, well respected writer Margaret Simons visited LP and asked the question: "Let us assume that the Howard years are about to end. What has the Left learned from the years of the culture wars?"

Amongst the responses was a bloke named Jack and I subsequently responded to his very insightful post.

You can read the entire thread here, including Jack's input and my response.

I think Jack has been very insightful, both in providing a background briefing about the culture wars and providing his perspective on the issue.

Here’s a bit of a review of what he said and the reasons I took note of certain comments:

Jack says:

“A modern liberal order is composed of individual autonomies regulated by accountable institutional authority. The principle of private choice and public voice works at personal, professional and political scales eg romantic families, catallactic economies and democratic polities.

These sub-systems require integration as much as differentiation in order to work well. It may be that we need should encourage more mindless conformism amongst minorities if they want to get ahead.”

I would agree with this, except that I’d substitute “mindless conformism” with “mindful conformism”.

I’d then strongly suggest what we need to be collectively mindful of: that the binary of integration and differentiation is essential for “strategic thinking”.

Consider some examples of strategic thinking in various disciplines:

In Economics, this binary would appear to help provide a conceptual understanding of Adam Smith’s “division of labour” theory of productivity.

In Marketing, the integration part of the the binary would appear to help us understand Michael Porter’s model of the value chain (in summary, making strategic decisions in a co-ordinated manner to ultimately create greater value for customers and the business) while the differentiation part of the binary adds the competitive dimension to Marketing in which customers must be given reason to buy from a particular business instead of its competitors. Jack Trout regards strategy as being “all about differentiation”. Wow, what a coincidence :)
Yet when we get to Politics, a strong sense of national identity (integration) is being targeted directly against multiculturalism (differentiation) by the conservatives.

Try and think of how many other disciplines you could apply this binary of integration and differentiation to and you’ll soon begin to question the wisdom of automatically assuming that integration is more important than differentiation (or vice versa).

For the benefit of effective strategic thinking, the two concepts - integration and differentiation - should be, first and foremost - treated as a binary, not as two contrasting ideas locked into a battle until the death of one or the other.

Jack says:

“Moreover, the New Left has a bad habit of encouraging minorities to practice identity politics. This may not be the best for progress. The Old Left did not urge that workers keep their blue collars. It fought for education and social equity. “The best thing about the working class is leaving it.” P. Keating”

I like the idea of The Old Left. As a low income earner myself, I think the Old Left agenda is more important to me than the New Left agenda.

Yet I can’t help feeling that the Conservatives have “adjusted” these Old Left values to suit their side of politics - hence we have “Howard’s aspirationals”.

These days, we can even get the words “battler” and “aspirational” used in an interchangeable way. In fact, all that’s left to do now is to change the names of all Centrelink payments to “aspirational allowance” and we’ll have a totally classless society :)
The problem, of course, is that it’s many times easier to seek the hope of social status than the satisfaction of social equity. Which of course, is why we’re at times talking about aspirations when we should be talking about achievements.

Finally, Jack says:

“The problem is that we know more about the present than we do about the future. And social complexity is increasing at a rate faster than our ability to comprehend it.”

I’m so glad someone has the honesty to admit this.

The one constant challenge shared by those in Adam Smith’s day and those of the modern day is the need to simplify complex ideas and relationships.

Unfortunately, so much of that complexity seems to be edited from recognition by stale ideologies and dogma.

So instead of a “strategic thinking”debate in Politics, we get a brinkmanship of wedge politics called “the culture war”.

…From Justin

P.S. - I’ve found out I actually have a copy of Margaret Simon’s Quarterly Essay (Issue 15 2004). I hope I can find time to read it to help me reflect some more on this particular debate.

The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot (The Left)
Part Two - Eggs Benedict (The Right)
Part Three: Chicken or Egg? (Questions)
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk (Concepts)
Part Six: The Egg Timer (Process)
Part Seven: The Egg Carton (Hierarchy)
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs (Relationships)
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen (Lobbying)
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets (Context)
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2007-03-13T01:20:00.000+11:00

Hinch sets an example to guide health perspective

I first published the following article to the aus.radio.broadcast newsgroup last week:

I prefer to think that we're all flawed. Therefore, we always have
challenges ahead of us just waiting to happen. That's why we also all
need to have some compassion in our store. You never know exactly
when you may need the compassion of other people.

I think it's great that Hinch decided to tell his story and make an
example of himself. In doing so, he's considering others, in the
knowledge that we're all flawed and need to learn from each other to
create preventative measures to problems, therefore furthering
society.

Hinch places emphasis on the theme of preventative measure when he
spoke yesterday:

"Like me you probably don't realise - or don't want to know - that
your liver is the most important organ in your body. True, your heart
keeps you alive but it is merely a pump. The liver is the Bridge
sending out messages to the ship 24 hours a day to prevent a
shipwreck."

I didn't get to see the TV report, but listened to Vega's breakfast
team discuss the matter, as well as heard Hinch himself yesterday.

I hope he gets through this problem and can move forward.

...From Justin (listener of Hinch since 2001)

2007-03-02T00:31:00.000+11:00

When a word's meaning is clouded in a poof of smoke

Fortnightly Footprints: Second Fortnight
Small traces of big happenings in Communication & Mediated Politics

According to radio industry news site www.radioinfo.com.au :
On the eve of the Sydney Mardi Gras, the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal has dismissed the "pillow biter" complaint against John Laws.

In 2004 the 2UE John Laws show broadcast comments calling Queer Eye star Carson Kressley a "pillow biter" and "pompous little pansy prig."
I'm quite sure that the right judgment has been made in this matter.
I've had rather a lot to say about this issue before, so I've decided
to reiterate my original thoughts by republishing them, as well as
adding a few extra thoughts.

I wrote in response to another poster on the newsgroup aus.radio.broadcast - Nov 4 2004, 11:48 pm:

"ßlaine" wrote:
> His comments were exactly the fodder his target audience (demographically)
> seeks from him. Reassurance that what they know and cherish
> hasn't all turned to mulch yet. They are not into change. Demean
> them if you like but they pay the bills, and they are significant in
> number.
> Showbiz. Tub-thumping at it's best. From what I've read here,
> it's worked. He has a crowd.

Not only Showbiz, but 'the fortress of arrogance' as Mr. Laws likes to
call it. In that context, the premise of the program is a touch comical
because John Laws is effectively sending himself up in the way he introduces
his program.

All presentation must have context. It's part and parcel of
connecting with an audience. Even Mark Day in his weekly media column in The
Australian raises the point that in-depth investigative journalism can suffer
from a lack of context.

Yet 'in-depth' portrayal of gay people in the media is
precisely what gay activists campaign for. To them, 'in-depth' has to
mean queers not getting exploited in any form........... even at the
expense of the context you need to connect with an audience.

(Examples of 'politically-incorrect' programs for gay activists to
complain about: 'There's something about Miriam' was 'deceptive' -
transgenders should not be portrayed as liars.......... The L-Word has no lesbians
driving trucks - not all lesbians wear lipstick and will be a turn-on
for the straight male.......... there's almost never any bears in Queer As
Folk, instead there's only body-beautifuls who go clubbing a lot :)

So the gay lobby fight hard to present our 'deviant' lifestyle as
'normal and as diverse as any other', rather than go to work on promoting
greater tolerance for 'deviation' - the concept that deviation is not sick,
rather deviation is just........, deviation.

That's why a gay activist like Gary Burns will feel 'deeply offended'
whenhe hears the remarks made by John Laws, even if the context in which
the
remarks are made are 'light-hearted'.

Gary Burns is getting all upset because 'context' is getting in the
way
of............'the truth!'.

According to Today Tonight on Channel 7, Gary Burns was saying that:
"Not all homosexual males are as flamboyant as Carson Kressley."

Yet I'm tipping that more people will side with John Laws than Gary
Burns because the context in which The John Laws Show is presented is
'comical', while the context in which the Gary Burns' rebuttal was made is 'too
direct' to persuade the 2UE audience that his claim is true.

It's the age-old principle of 'You can lead a horse to water, but you
can't make him drink.'.

Saying to some John Laws listeners that "not all gays are flamboyant"
is like saying to some nightclubbers "don't take that tablet, it will
harm your health".

Face facts, since when did 'facts' have anything to do with persuading
people?

'Truth' is always obscured by 'perception'. Your truth is rarely
someone else's truth.

So, yeah, some people will get a laugh at the expense of the poofter.
And yet..........still much better to leave those comments in the context
of being 'light-hearted' instead of letting the issue grow legs and
turning that same John Laws audience angry by taking legal action against
their favourite radio personality.

Fuck it, I'd rather take the stage with Carson Kressley or Julian
Clary than distance myself from them. That's because many people know how to
laugh at other people, but only a few have the skill to laugh at themselves.

Gay activists really ought to save their energy for more genuine
injustices that have a reverberating, negative effect on the lives of queer
people.

Heck, even poofters use the word.........poofter :)

At the last match held in Sydney between West Tigers and Melbourne
Storm, I got called a 'poofter' by a Tigers supporter for the shame of walking
away from a Storm loss on Tigers' home ground while wearing a Storm jersey.

He wasn't thinking about me when he said that..............he was just
smarting over his team's win.

Well, those were my thoughts in 2004.

I feel some of that thinking has been vindicated by today's decision,
but I would now like to put some extra emphasis on the point I made
about the concept of "deviation".

The Encrata Dictionary gives meaning to this word as being
unacceptable behaviour or attitude: behaviour or an attitude that is
sharply different from a customary, traditional, or generally accepted
standard

Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All
rights reserved.

You can't have acceptance of what might otherwise be considered
deviant behavior unless people first feel tolerant of hearing
alternative viewpoints.

I doubt you achieve tolerance without there being some shared, common
attitudes. You can only achieve that common ground by reasoning with
people, yet Gary Burns talks in terms of "dissuading" John Laws rather
than "persuading" him.

That's why you get this "double-speak" from Mr. Burns that one minute
sounds like he's got a social justice cause, then the next minute
sounds like he's promoting intolerance towards John Laws:

To quote Mr. Burns:

"I didn't win on this occasion, but I will continue in my mission to
dissuade hate in society."

In a further shot at Laws, Burns said the broadcaster's "souffle went
poof ten years ago".

How is it this guy is allowed to put the word "poof" in a context of
humor, yet John Laws is being charged with the same crime?

There's not equity in that at all, which is why gays are generally
better placed on forming an opinion about this issue that's contrary
to the radical, dare I say "left-wing" position of Gary Burns.

At the risk of sounding like a columnist from The Australian newspaper
(which refers constantly to the semantic use of the term "left-
wing" :)

I've also been in search of other evidence other than
today's ruling to verify my belief that it's very healthy to have
contrary opinions about political activism within the gay community,
rather than assume that views about homosexuality within the gay
community are confined to an uncompromising activism displayed by Gary
Burns, who I doubt is widely representative of modern gay Australia.

Having positioned against that term "left-wing", it's not then
necessary for me to put forward what others might call a
"conservative" viewpoint. If I'm "right-wing" on this particular
issue, it's only because I'm being a polemicist, based on intuition,
not based on trying to ingratiate my views so that they might one day
get published in The Australian newspaper :)

That said, there are journalists and writers in the world, though few
in number, that have identified as "gay conservatives" and at the very
least, I'm keen to explore and/or advance the concept of providing a
contrary "gay-right-wing" view to some of the views held by public gay
voices.

Because this is a relatively narrow exploration of cultural and
political study, I may be relying heavily on the few gay conservative
writings that are available, as these provide some sort of foundation
in which to develop my own point of view - the view of being a
polemicist, regardless of whether it results in me being a political
conservative (that likes Kylie, goes clubbing, is interested in gay-
bear culture and is generally a low-income earner - not exactly a
profile that fits a conservative, but I can still be a polemicist :)

Which is why I find great support listening to voices like Melanie
Philips, a columnist with the Daily Mail in the UK, who Michael Duffy
interviewed this week on ABC Radio National's Counterpoint program.

Here's a portion of the transcript which indirectly applies to the
misdirection of some left-wing activism and the use of words in
context, issues that seem central to the Gary Burns/John Laws story,
and my desire to part company with Gary Burn's representation of gay
issues, instead offering an alternative view:

Melanie Phillips: I parted company from the left quite dramatically,
and because the left does not tolerate any dissent and because the
left thinks that anyone who is not of the left is automatically of the
right and not only of the right but that all right-wingers are off the
moral map and beyond the moral pale, thus I have been categorised but
it's not a categorisation that I myself would recognise or accept.

Michael Duffy: Is that a lonely position in Britain or are there lots
of people, polemicists such as yourself?

Melanie Phillips: Not many people are taking this position in the
media as such. Most people make a kind of conventional transition from
being of the left as conventionally understood to the conservative
position as conventionally understood. Not many people regard
themselves as I tend to do as a kind of embattled traditional liberal
in a world where language itself has become very confused and debased
and we're all talking at cross-purposes because we all use these words
differently.

Certainly, the use of the word "poof", by John Laws in one context and
by Gary Burns in another, is worthy of a critical analysis for
posterity, perhaps to assure the gay community that today's decision
is a win for free speech, not a loss for gay activism.

What I do not want to do is be seen as "an abject self promoter who
attacks fellow gays with a view to ingratiating myself with the
straight powers that be.". That like the few gay conservatives that
do exist, "there is in fact, an almost innocent quality about their
polemics."

That's quoting from Paul Robinson's book 'Queer Wars - the new gay
right and its critics' and I hope I can somehow integrate the study of
this book into my first or second semester study program this year.
Therefore giving me a chance to articulate my critical viewpoint of
this issue as clearly as I can.

...From Justin

2007-02-26T11:36:00.000+11:00

(((radioactive))) D.C. explores the one-man-band radio station

Project Manager:
the 'development cycle' of a radio station's internal structure and
external environment.

D.C. Phase II: INFORM AND ALIGN (organising)

I can relate to the one-man band problem in a small narrowcasting
operation. I've been engaged in the struggle for five years.

There's - just - too - much - to - do!

That said, I've also found that there's an inverse relationship
between the impossible task of doing everything yourself in the long-
term and the need to do everything yourself in the short-term.

As I've learnt, volunteer help will not stick around unless they can
see that you have your own act together from the beginning.

The Australian's small business writer Peter Switzer advises you that
in the early days, do everything yourself. Certainly, have your long-
term goals, but also have a hierarchy of goals: short, medium and long-
term goals.

You will gain the respect and confidence of volunteers by by showing
them how you've achieved all your short-term goals: such as mastering
your automation system, creating a music-selection system, a
production schedule, etc.

In other words, make your short-term goals all the stuff you can do as
a one-man band, and do not move forward until you've achieved every
single one them.

You ought to accept early that you'll need volunteers to grow, yet if
you bring them in too early, you'll have no control of the
situation.

This is why I reiterate the concept of a hierarchy of goals. As
marketing authorities Jack Trout and Al Ries advise: strategy and
timing are the Himalayas of marketing your business. You need to know
not just what you need to do, but when you need to do it.

Try to get a good feeling for when it is an appropriate time to grow
using volunteers. Do not stress yourself "with volunteers" before the
right time and do not stress yourself "without volunteers" when it is
time to grow.

Business acumen is another issue you need to be mindful of. That is,
take an interest in the issue of running a business generally, not
just a radio station.

Become acquainted with two business writers in particular.

If you only read one book on small business from cover to cover, read
The E-Myth Revisted by Michael E. Gerber.

Then get to know Peter Switzer, the small business editor of The
Australian newspaper, who has also published a great book called 350
Ways To Grow Your Small Business, which is not only a local business
best seller but has been translated for the Chinese market:

http://switzer.yahoostore.com.au/page/peter_switzer.html

The Australian is a great small business newspaper:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/index/0,,5010941,00.html

Finally, in addition to the issues of setting up your hierarchy of
goals and developing business acumen, there's the issue of
association.

I would suggest:

* Get in contact with ANRA. I'm not yet a member myself, but I intend
to be in the future:
http://www.anra.org.au/

* Consider joining your local Tafe college. If you participate even
in part-time and short studies, you should be entitled to access a
rich database of information in their library for up to 12 months of
the year.

The Monash University Business and Economics School Q-Manual can help
you search for information in the library.

In summary:

* Develop a hierarchy of goals, at first achieving short-term goals
and then delegating the achievement of short-term goals to volunteers
as you gradually work toward achieving medium and long-term goals.
More about this in Chapter 14 of The E-Myth Revisted.

* Develop business acumen: Take an interest in business generally,
not just in radio; and

* Develop association: become a networking operation, not a one-man
operation.

Regards,

Justin - overcoming the one-man-band challenge.

(((radioactive))) D.C.
The development cycle in action

Project Planner - the push-pull process model:

(((push)))
Identify forces exerting pressure by looking around, using planning
data;

D.C. Phase I: Dirty Data Pusher (planning)
D.C. Phase II: Inform & Align (organising)

(((pull)))
Getting it together by looking forward, then looking back, using
progress data;

D.C. Phase III: Journey of the Luddite (leading, controlling)
D.C. Phase IV: Lost or found in translation (reviewing)

Skill builder model:

Learn, practice and reinforce 21 management skills in planning,
organising, leading

2007-01-30T00:40:00.000+11:00

Returning sooner than the McNaught Comet: 14 February 2007

I'm a busy boy right now - perhaps too busy to post for a few more days yet. So this message is just to let you know that my next post isn't too far away :)

...From Justin

2007-01-25T15:26:00.000+11:00

Even Homer Simpson makes decisions

Fortnightly Footprints: First fortnight -
Small traces of big happenings in Marketing & Media.

INTRODUCTION

From the textbook ‘Foundations of Management’:

Individuals at all levels make decisions. That is, they make choices from two or more alternatives.

For instance, top-level managers make decisions about their organisation’s goals, where to locate manufacturing facilities, what new markets to move into and what products or services to offer.

Middle-to-lower managers make decisions about setting weekly or monthly production schedules, handling problems that arise, allocating pay rises and selecting or disciplining employees.

But making decisions is not something only the managers do.

All organisational members make decisions that affect their jobs and the organisation they work for.

How do they make those decisions?

Although decision-making is typically described as ‘choosing between alternatives’, that view is too simplistic. Why?

Because decision making is a comprehensive process, not just a simple act of choosing between alternatives. Even for something as ‘straightforward’ as deciding where to go for lunch, you do more than just choose between a hamburger and a sandwich.

Granted, you may not spend a lot of time ‘contemplating’ the lunch decision, but you still engage in the steps in (a) decision-making ‘process’. [1]

Decisiveness - The Essence of Good Management

Lee Iacocca - executive of Chrysler Motors in the 1980s.

“If I had to sum up in one word the qualities that make a good manager, I’d say that it all comes down to decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers in the world and you can gather all the charts and numbers, but in the end you have to bring all your information together, set up a timetable and act.” [2]

Here’s a proposed guide to following Lee Iacocca’s approach in a ‘detailed process’, in which the ‘straightforwardness’ of ‘contemplating’ decision-making varies.

It is borrowed from a Monash University lecture:

Fact Finding (Remembering and Understanding)

Remembering
Recalling information
Recognising
Listing
Describing

Understanding
Explaining ideas and concepts
Interpreting
Summarising
Paraphrasing
Classifying
Explaining

Scheduling: (Applying and Analysing)

Applying
Using information in an unfamiliar situation
Implementing
Carrying Out
Using
Executing

Analysing
Breaking information into parts
To explore understanding & Relationships
Comparing
Organising
Deconstructing
Interrogating
Finding

Action (Evaluating and Creating)

Evaluating
Justifying a decision or course of action
Checking
Hypothesising
Critiquing
Experimenting
Recommending
Judging

Creating
Linking information together in new ways
Generating new ideas or products
Proposing alternative solutions
(Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions”) [3]

Finding the right mix from all the above:

Josiah Gilbert Holland: “There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, all things in succession. That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.”

Noel Whittacker: As Brian Tracy explained in his best selling audio tape course
‘The Psychology of Success’, many studies have shown that success is like baking a cake - if you use the right ingredients and mix them properly the result is predictable.

You can therefore move confidently forward, safe in the knowledge that if you follow certain clearly defined steps the results will come. [3]

…Edited by Justin.

Resources:

[1] Robbins, Bergman, Stagg, Coulter. Foundations of Management. 2006 Pearson Education Australia. Page 208.
[2] Ries, Al and Trout, Jack. Marketing Warfare. 1986 Plume. Page 209
[3] Whittaker, Noel. Getting It Together. 1993 Simon & Schuster. Pages 18-19, 154

2007-01-23T09:16:00.000+11:00

(((radioactive))) D.C.

Project Manager:
the 'development cycle' of a radio station's internal structure and external environment.

D.C. Phase II: INFORM AND ALIGN (organising)

This post was first published on the aus.radio.broadcast newsgroup on Christmas Eve 2006.

Some initial thoughts to get started:

Strategic thinker Stuart Wells writes:

Simplicity means fewer things. It can also be many things organised in
some clear way". [1]

While it is reasonable to say that "finding some clear way" results
in a radio station "format" (the clarity of focusing on a few
things), it also recognises the importance of "assuming
formlessness" (reorganising).

Judging by the content of Wayne Mac's recent publication 'Don't
touch that dial', audience segmentation that evolved in the 1970s
explains why we have the distinct formats like news-talk, rock, pop and
easy listening that still exist today - formats that focus on a
certain combination of program elements.

"In the early to mid '70s, stations from the main markets more or
less fell into common format groupings. This allowed many to form
alliances in programming, news and sales." [2]

However, the book also explains how radio further "reorganised"
through the 1980s, introducing new formats, music, technology and
players.

These days, a distinction could be made between the specific activities
required in finding form (innovation), getting results from the format
(quantification) and keeping form (orchestration). There's a good
chance that your station is engaged in all three activities
simultaneously by "continuously reorganising the format". [3][4]

Steve Warren comments on the consequences of this dynamic process:

"A radio marketplace is an ever-changing environment. Some stations
will change personnel. Some will add more news. Some will change the
music direction, while others will change their format altogether.

How a station defines its own format may differ from how its audience
defines it. Many stations have given up defining themselves by format
and have sought other ways to make their programming remembered." [5]

In 2002, DMG's Paul Thompson acknowledged that finding "some clear
way" is as much about assuming formlessness as it is about finding
form, attributing this to the competition between radio stations:

"We've got to keep our concentration. There's no time to
celebrate in this business. Knocking them (the competition) off today
only means they'll knock you off tomorrow. This is a very fluid
business. There is no one blowing a whistle to say the game has ended.
It doesn't end - it just ebbs and flows.

There is no full time. There is no winner." [6]

It's also true that while the game has to be initiated, there's no
definite starting point in the cycle that begins this process, just as
there's no definite end point, apart from the goals your station sets
(which, as I'm sure you understand, are subject to change).

The reason I start the theory writing today in Phase II of the
development cycle is precisely because the general project of radio
station management, and all specific projects that exist under the
authority of the management, runs through a cycle.

It is not a linear journey from thought to action. You can start the
development cycle in any phase of the cycle. As a project develops,
the duration of phases will also vary and phases will even start to
overlap because of the skills required to get tasks done.

Writes Stuart Wells:

"A circle symbolizes no beginning and no end. Thinking does not have
a natural stopping point. It ends when you have a conclusion you
choose to live with even if more input, more perceiving, will bring you
new and interesting information.

There is no obligation in thinking to consider all the information
potentially available." [1]

Rather, what causes you to "need to know more" is disciplined by
the need to set internal standards of competent skill (which impacts
the internal structure) or competition with others (in the external
environment).

As Michael E. Gerber writes:

Innovation, quantification and orchestration become the practice that
brings us and our opponent - whoever that may be - to the discovery
of our limits, our weaknesses, our strengths. [4]

This is the "ever-reorganising" internal structure and external
environment of a radio station that all the activities within it must
reflect.

In following articles, I'm going to focus on specific activities of
radio station operations:

Adding instalments of insight into these activities and taking the
development of these activities at least one-way around the four phases
of the radioactive development cycle at a time (that said - parts of
the cycle can be repeated for the one project as much as required to
get the desired result).

The first specific project is intended to be "music selection and
scheduling", but I do expect to be working on a number of projects
concurrently.

I hope you enjoy this new series of radio station development, which
will return here in January.

Have a great Christmas Day.

...From Justin Christie.

(((resources)))

[1] Wells, Stuart. Choosing the future - The power of strategic
thinking. 1998 Butterworth-Heinemann. Pages 98, 59.

[2] Mac, Wayne. Don't touch that dial: Hits 'n' Memories of
Australian Radio. 2005 WDJM. Page 142

[3] Grey, Anne Marie & Skildum-Reid, Kim. The sponsorship seeker's
toolkit, second edition. 2003 McGraw-Hill Australia. Page V.

[4] Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth - Why most small businesses don't
work and what to do about it. 1995 Harper Business. Page 117, 264.

[5] Warren, Steve. Radio: The Book - For creative, professional
programming, fourth edition. 2005 Elsevier Focal Press. Pages 45, 42.

[6] On the crest of a radio wave. Written by Mark Day. The
Australian, Media. 25 April-1 May 2002.

(((radioactive))) D.C.
The development cycle in action

Project Planner - the push-pull process model:

(((push)))
Identify forces exerting pressure by looking around, using planning
data;

D.C. Phase I: Dirty Data Pusher (planning)
D.C. Phase II: Inform & Align (organising)

(((pull)))
Getting it together by looking forward, then looking back, using
progress data;

D.C. Phase III: Journey of the Luddite (leading, controlling)
D.C. Phase IV: Lost or found in translation (reviewing)

Skill builder model:

Learn, practice and reinforce 21 management skills in planning,
organising, leading

2007-01-20T14:52:00.000+11:00

The Last Word on Kim Beazley

Fortnightly Footprints: Second Fortnight supplement
Small traces of big happenings in Communication and Mediated Politics

How far removed from your subject do you need to be to observe it in a way that others more fully engrossed in the subject cannot see?

That is the question I ask myself after The Australian’s Christopher Pearson labelled former opposition leader Kim Beazley’s interview this week by the Sydney Morning Herald as “self-indulgent”.

Writes Mr. Pearson:

Beazley is still clinging to the consoling fantasy that "Labor would have won" had he remained leader. He told The Sydney Morning Herald in the interview, published on Wednesday, it would win anyway under Kevin Rudd because "I think Howard's played out". [1]

In saying this, Pearson is comforted by the fact that none of us really know for sure if circumstances would have favoured Kim Beazley when it really mattered - the official 2007 election period later this year.

He points to Beazley’s seemingly bad net approval ratings, without mentioning that the Coalition had lost a significant majority of newspaper opinion polls on Beazley’s watch.

Pearson also maintains there were signs that few of the potential swinging voters were listening to him any more, without mentioning how difficult it was for Beazley to get his message across when the press gallery were flatly refusing to listen to Mr. Beazley’s reasoning. Pearson makes no mention of political pundits driven by the desire to install a Labor leader more attuned with their own reasoning.

Christopher Pearson, quite unconvincingly attempts to make his subject “the pouting rejected leader”, in the much the same league as those pesky pouting ex-Liberal leaders John Hewson and Malcolm Fraser - men who refuse to stop reminding the public that the Liberals are no longer the liberals.

Pearson’s attempt to create a Labor equivalent of the pouting ex-leader is by driving a wedge between Kim Beazley and the rest of the Labor Party:

Writes Mr. Pearson:

Mention of the middle ground brings me to the sting in the tail of the Beazley interview. He predicted that the election campaign would be "quietish and logical", because Rudd and Howard are both conservatives. "Both Kevin and Howard, in personal demeanour and presentation, stick to the centre. Neither of them is histrionic when it comes to making a political argument."

On the face of it, this is a bland statement of the obvious. Yet describing Howard as a man of the centre is dramatically at odds with Rudd's rhetoric in the past four months and rather gives the game away. How can backbenchers be expected to paint Howard as a Hayekian zealot and market fundamentalist when Beazley's given the lie to it? Who will now be persuaded of the red in tooth and claw character of "Howard's Brutopia" apart from true believers who'll swallow anything if it's repeated often enough? [1]

Either Christopher Pearson fails to adequately interpret Kim Beazley’s 1998 biography, or he assumes his readers wouldn’t bother themselves with the same task.

Mr. Beazley’s present appraisal of John Howard isn’t the result of him no longer being as fully engrossed with Labor’s inevitable attempt to reposition John Howard in the minds of voters.

Rather, the Beazley biography reminds us of a long-term, mutual respect between Kim Beazley and John Howard (Check pages 277 and 413) that transcends their partisan differences.

“I have a great deal of respect for John Howard,” said Kim Beazley in 1996, “He is the most substantial conservative politician of his generation.” [2]

It is unfortunate that from the moment Beazley spoke these words at his first press conference as Labor leader in 1996, many of the political pundits in our mainstream media failed to understand the merits of taking such a conciliatory approach to engaging your opponent, notwithstanding the reality that Paul Keating’s polarising approach of calling John Howard a ‘mangy maggot’ had resulted in helping make John Howard a prime minister.

Today’s article by Christopher Pearson only confirms that so many of our political pundits still don’t understand Beazley’s approach: pundits that are always “too fully engrossed” in “the leadership question” to contemplate Beazley’s alternative approach of thinking in a more total, systematic way about persuading the voting public.

Last month, I questioned whether the latest feeding frenzy by the mainstream media over the Labor leadership was justified.

Now I question this attempt by Mr. Pearson to be so harshly critical of Beazley’s latest words, which not only sensibly recognises a shift in the political centre (battles are not just won, battlefields are shifted - Am I right, Mr. Pearson?), but also warns of a battle of survival ahead for whoever loses the next federal election.

Somehow Pearson reads Beazley as being in a purely fanciful mindset (to quote Pearson: “a long-serving minister and opposition leader retreating into cloud-cuckoo land over the circumstances of his departure”) rather than being intuitively analytical.

I say “intuitively analytical” because Kim Beazley had long learnt a lesson I’m sure many of our media pundits still haven’t learnt even as we enter this federal election year. A lesson for Labor that gives “relevance to the Beazley approach” in 2007, instead of consigning Kim Beazley’s thinking to the pesky pouting ex-leader league.

A lesson available on page 441 of Kim Beazley’s biography:

Certain events (in 1997) had drawn the public’s attention to his position as an alternative Prime Minister. He was equally conscious of what lay behind that rise.

“The press always looks for symbols,” Beazley notes, “and being Opposition Leader, I suppose I was conscious of seizing opportunities to make those symbols stand out, but the reality of our rise is the graft underneath.

We are now an alternative government basically because of this graft: getting our psychology right, getting going on issues again, getting our thinking straight.

Every now and then, it is nice to get a break, and every now and then you get a symbolic thing or an issue that gives you a break. But it was the graft that helped us most.” [2]

Despite a last minute lack of conviction about former Labor leader Mark Latham from the mainstream media during the last federal election, can there really be any doubt that “the last honeymoon period” awarded to an opposition leader in 2004 was attuned with the interests and reasoning of the press gallery, while the Howard Government’s spin unit was attuned with the “the graft underneath” that Beazley speaks of?

Now, things have gone full circle, with our mainstream media proprietors declaring yet another “honeymoon period”, just when the public’s attention is on the cricket, the tennis and any other summer retreat from politics (even much of the ABC’s current affairs unit is still on holiday :)

The marching band of good “intention” had started up yet again, while the agents of spin get ready to pay closer “attention” to “the real game” which happens later this year.

Meanwhile, Beazley’s insights into how things really work - the total systematic approach to persuading voters - the approach that won Beazley the popular vote in 1998, and ultimately won most opinion polls for Labor over the last two years - sits there in a decade-old biography, written about a man Christopher Pearson now labels as “being self indulgent”.

Yet given all that Kim Beazley has done to maintain a competitive opposition, given his ability to read the critical success factors of the day and consequently demonstrate such resilience as a parliamentarian, Labor would be wise to consider that paying attention to a few objective words from Kim Beazley “now” may save much frustration and many hours of implementing their marketing plan “later”.

They’d also be wise to remember what sort of character has the courage to stand back from the media engrossments and see the full picture of what it takes to persuade the voting public:

Once said newspaper columnist Malcolm McGregor from the Financial Review, speaking on ABC’s Four Corners:

“In Kim, the Labor Party has a leader for the first time since Chifley, who doesn’t suffer from a major personality disorder.”

The last word on Kim Beazley goes to another former Labor Leader - Bill Hayden:

“Kim has a wide range of personality styles. He can be mild and persuasive, or good humoured and entertaining. But when he’s got to be, he can be as tough as blazes.” [2]

…From Justin

[1]

Christopher Pearson

: Defeat will do Labor good. The Australian, January 20, 2007

[2] FitzSimons, Peter. Beazley. 1998 Harper-Collins. 276, 411, 441-442

2007-01-17T22:26:00.000+11:00

(((radioactive))) D.C.

D.C. PHASE IV: LOST (OR FOUND) IN TRANSLATION (Review)
Attitude Determines Success: How to avoid being a modern day Marie-Antoinette

Almost twelve years ago I found a Frisbee in the front yard of my old family property with the words “attitude determines success” printed on it.

With limited life experience at the time, it was difficult for me to put this advice that “attitude determines success” into any meaningful context, except to assume it meant having a positive mental attitude - to face circumstances as challenges rather than as problems.

Twelve years later, I now believe I can finally put those words into a meaningful context that better helps me understand what happens in the world.

What I’ve been able to make sense of is that it’s not just your attitude that determines a successful outcome, but the attitude of others you must deal with.

The challenge is to synchronise the attitudes of others with your own attitude. Unfortunately, this can be very difficult in practice.

Consider the fate of Marie-Antoinette, the last queen of France before the French Revolution happened, whose story has recently been made into a film.

Infamously reputed to have said “let them eat cake” in response to the discontented, breadless French people she ruled over, Marie-Antoinette’s message stuck in people’s minds, even ‘til this day, for all the wrong reasons.

One scene in the movie, set in the year 1789, acts as an important analogy of what happens when the attitudes of the world “out there” and the attitudes of the world “in here” fail to be synchronised:

Seeing the French people violently marching on Versailles, the indulgent palace lived in by the French royal family, while Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI continued allowing themselves to be sheltered by the pomp of their aristocracy.

“From early on, Marie-Antoinette acquired the most dangerous of attitudes:

As a young princess in Austria she was endlessly flattered and cajoled. As the future queen of the French court she was the centre of everyone’s attention. She never learned to charm or please other people, to become attuned to their individual psychologies.

She never had to work to get her way, to use calculation or cunning, or the arts of persuasion. And like everybody who is indulged from an early age, she evolved into a monster of insensitivity.” [1]

According to Michael E. Gerber, bridging the gap between unsynchronised attitudes, requires bridging a gap between the “outside world” (of consumer behaviour) and the “inside world” (of individuals or organisations engaged in marketing their ideas, products or services).

“If the world is going to be changed (to reach success) we must first change our lives. It’s a yearning, for form (innovation), for control (quantification) and for structure (orchestration).
And for something else as well. Something more personal. Something less distinct, yet much more intimately connected with who we are as human beings. It’s a yearning for relationship - with ourselves and the world.

Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration become the practice that brings us to the discovery of our limits, our weakness, our strength. To the discovery of what really works in the world rather than what our imaginations might wish would work.

Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration become our source of learning, for creating, for expanding beyond our self-imposed limits. [2]

Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are words which define the three components of “the marketing concept” - meaning the consumer is the focal point of all marketing activities.
Jane Earnshaw, promotions and marketing director for Vega 95.3FM and Vega 91.5FM, recently talked about the marketing concept, especially the challenge of keeping up with consumer (in this case, listener) behaviour.

"It's no secret that initially the (Vega marketing) concept was too complex, which was surprising for everybody because it was so well researched," Ms Earnshaw admitted. [3]

I’m not about to suggest that DMG have been so out of touch with listeners that their headquarters deserve to be renamed the Versailles, but it is important to draw some parallel between the historic Marie-Antoinette experience and modern day individuals and organisations that fail to fully grasp the marketing concept.

In such a competitively intense world - one that operates far more global than in 1789, individuals or organisations don’t need to be as out of touch as Marie-Antoinette to still fail to synchronise attitudes and get the marketing concept right.

Consider how the world has evolved since 1789, as Federal Minister Joe Hockey recently writes:
In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman talks about three eras of globalisation. The first began when Columbus set sail in 1492, lasted until 1800, and involved trade between nation states. The second era, according to Friedman, spanned the next 200 years and was driven by multinational companies propelled by falling transport and (later) telecommunications costs. And the third era is one where some individuals and small groups are able to collaborate on a global platform made possible by the convergence of the personal computer and high-speed internet. [4]

These days, it can be a something quite subtle, rather than an elaborate error of judgement like the one made by Marie-Antoinette that causes an idea, product or service to fail to stick it out in the marketplace, or to stick it out for the wrong reasons.

As the connections between your world “in here” and the world “out there” have become more complex with advancements in technology, so has the marketing concept of making the consumer the focal point of all marketing activities.

Says Jane Earnshaw from Vega:

"It's always hard when researching a new station because you're asking about the incumbents and what they don't like about them and also asking about something that doesn't exist yet. But the (audience) behaviour just didn't match the insights." [3]

This disparity between the initial market research insights and the audience behaviour outcomes highlights the challenge of developing a plan that can eventually be translated into a result - The challenge of making “attitude determine success”, as printed on my Frisbee.
Squeezed in between DMG’s targeting of the younger Nova brand and an Over 50s audience dispersed across FM music and AM talk formats, Vega is left exposed to the competitive intensity that exists within the hotly contested 25-54 age bracket.

At first, it thought it could bring more listeners into the FM radio listener pool by introducing a hybrid format that combined talk and music, especially in the breakfast, morning and drive shifts.

What they’ve since learnt, having simplified the format to mainly music outside the breakfast shift, is that as well as needing a format with a specified target audience, Vega also needs to be attuned to “consumer behaviour”.

As well as their own advertising and promotion to influence consumer decision-making outcomes, listeners are also sensitive to situational and social factors when evaluating the alternative radio stations they might listen to, while individual factors can also cause a listener either choose or avoid Vega, or perhaps review an initial decision to listen to Vega.

One example of individual factors affecting the decision is “attitude”.

Attitude is not the only individual factor to consider - there’s also motivation, perception, learning, age, lifestyle and personality.

For example, a “brand attitude strategy” can be grouped into two dimensions, requiring a consideration of not only attitude, but motivation as well:

- Type of decision: target audience regards the radio station as either ‘low involvement’ (trial experience sufficient) or ‘high involvement’ (search and conviction required); and

- Type of motivation: the taget audience seeks the radio station for ‘informational reasons’ (to reduce or turn off a negative motivation) or ‘transformational enhancement reasons’ (to turn on a positive motivation. At this point, one thinks about the Mix 101.1/106.3/106.5 slogan ‘Feel Good’). [5]

I have two theories that might explain why Vega have struggled to synchronise attitudes with the listener and enable the two parties to “respond” to each other.

The first theory is that when Vega first started, it was a ‘high involvement’ decision for some listeners to make (search and conviction required). This caused what’s known as a ‘cognitive dissonance’ - an inconsistency between the values identified in the initial research and the consumer behaviour realised upon the outcome.

Cognitive dissonance can arise when the consumer becomes aware that unchosen alternatives (in this case, other radio stations) have desirable attributes, leading the consumer (in this case, the listener) to wonder whether they made the right decision.

It could be that with the original Vega ‘on your wavelength’ format, listeners were simply not prepared to risk benefiting from the attributes incumbent stations offered.

The other theory is that for another set of listeners that primarily keep radio “in the background” while listening, the decision about whether to listen to Vega would be a ‘low involvement’ decision, a consequence being that for some listeners, radio listening has already become a routine decision, stunting awareness of Vega.

Routine-decision making explains how we have such announcers as Derryn Hinch or Bruce Mansfield on 3AW (surviving and thriving on the same station for much of 20 years) or Grubby and Dee Dee at breakfast on Gold 104 (almost always hosting a breakfast or morning shift in Melbourne for 20 years).

A routine decision is when the consumer relies on past experience or learning (learning and age being two of the listed individual factors of decision-making) to convert a problem into a situation in which no decision is required. [6]

When you consider the constraints of consumer behaviour, then multiply that with the Vega’s requirement not to take away younger audience from Nova and the difficulties of launching an Over-55’s format on FM (at least for the time being), it’s easier to appreciate that you don’t need to be a classic Marie-Antoinette (born to an era when aristocracy was expected to rule unchallenged) to be a modern day Marie-Antoinette (failure to respond to the consumer in an era where you’re highly challenged by competitive intensity)

No doubt Vega’s initial research canvassed all the social, situational and individual factors that influence consumer decision-making, but the reason I focus specifically on the individual factor of “attitude” is because it can be viewed as ‘a learned disposition to “respond” in a consistently favourable or unfavourable manner with respect to a given object (the object being the radio station).”

If the listener responds favourably, this hopefully translates into the successful outcome of “a satisfied listener”, leading to repeat business (known in radio listening terms as ‘frequency’ or ‘increased time spent listening’)

Contrast this with the classic Marie-Antoinette experience of facing “a dissatisfied French people”. Her experience offers a warning to modern day struggles both individuals and organisations can have with the marketing concept:

“Marie-Antoinette became the focus of an entire country’s “dissatisfaction” because it is so infuriating to meet a person who makes no effort to attempt to persuade you. Do not imagine that she represents a bygone era. Her type is today more common than ever.

Such types live in their own bubble - they seem to feel they are born kings and queens - and that attention is owed them.

They do not consider anybody else’s nature (consumer behaviour), but bulldoze over people with the self-righteous arrogance of a Marie-Antoinette.

Such “attitudes” are disastrous. At all times, you must attend to those around you, gauging at their particular psychology, tailoring your words to what you know will entice them and seduce them. [1]

For example, while I tend to disagree with Conservative politics, no one could easily argue that Prime Minister John Howard is a modern day Marie-Antoinette.

Reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

Howard is a great believer in what he calls "perpetual election campaigning", or as the US political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have tagged it, "permanent campaigning".

Finding the right balance between policy and politics is the key to governing successfully in the era of the permanent campaign.

Since 2001 Howard has been unmatched as a political leader. While he goes to great lengths to stay in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters (insert the term “consumer behaviour” here), his fourth term has also been about achieving long-term personal goals.

Permanent campaigning involves parties in government using the considerable resources of the state to ensure their re-election.

Those resources include government advertising and access to ministers for party donors (insert the words “persuade, entice and seduce” here) [7]

In the complex world highlighted earlier by Joe Hockey, you cannot orientate ideas, products and services (innovation) without determining customer needs and wants and seeking their “response” to keep up with changes in customer’s behaviour (quantification) and in turn synchronise these consumer attitudes with your own by integrating all marketing activities in the organisation (orchestration) in a way that adjusts to the feedback you’re getting from the consumer (in this case, the listener) and ultimately gives you the discipline that enables you to be a better persuader than your competition.

“Synchronising attitudes” is important to:

(i) become attuned to individual consumer psychologies instead of trying to force your way into people’s hearts and minds; and

(ii) respond to the competitive intensity of this modern, global world by softening up the resistant, playing on what they hold dear (transformational motivations - conveying messages which imply the use of your idea, product or service will have a positive effect) and what they fear (informational motivations - messages about ideas, products or services that cure problems).

Never forgetting there are intense, competing forces working against your ability to win over hearts and minds of consumers. These competitors will gladly assist in your fall from favour with consumers.

It would appear that the radio industry can learn something from this concept of permanent campaigning adopted by politicians, especially considering what was said by DMG Radio’s Paul Thompson in 2002:

"We've got to keep our concentration. There's no time to
celebrate in this business. Knocking them (the competition) off today
only means they'll knock you off tomorrow. This is a very fluid
business. There is no one blowing a whistle to say the game has ended.
It doesn't end - it just ebbs and flows.

There is no full time. There is no winner." [8]

Currently, it is quite reasonable to say that Vega are more attuned to the marketing concept than they were this time last year.

…From Justin

(((resources)))

[1] Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. 1998 Hodder Books. Law 43: Work on the hearts and minds of others. Pages 367-370.
[2] Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth. 1995 Harper-Collins. Pages 261-264.
[3] DMG finetunes Vega campaign - Michael Bodey, The Australian newspaper. January 15, 2007.

[4] Joe Hockey: Workers won't be fooled by rhetoric, The Australian newspaper. January 10, 2007
[5] Power, Mike & Balderstone, Bob & Gyles, Stan. Direct Marketing. 2000 McGraw-Hill. Chapter 3: The Process of Integrated Marketing Communications. Figure 3.4: Brand attitude strategy simplified.
[6] McColl-Kennedy & J.R. Kiel, G.C. Marketing: A Strategic Approach. Pages 83-91
[7] More sceptics this time on the trail of the never-ending campaign. Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington, Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. January 12, 2007
[8] On the crest of a radio wave. Written by Mark Day. The
Australian, Media. 25 April-1 May 2002.

(((radioactive))) D.C.
The development cycle in action

Project Planner - the push-pull process model:

(((push)))

Identify forces exerting pressure by looking around, using planning
data;

D.C. Phase I: Dirty Data Pusher (planning)
D.C. Phase II: Inform & Align (organising)

(((pull)))

Getting it together by looking forward, then looking back, using
progress data;

D.C. Phase III: Journey of the Luddite (leading, controlling)
D.C. Phase IV: Lost or found in translation (reviewing)

Skill builder model:
Learn, practice and reinforce 21 management skills in planning,
organising, leading and controlling.

2007-01-15T13:28:00.000+11:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART ONE: EGGS MARX THE SPOT
Reviewing left-wing political performance

Two recent essays from leading Australian intellectuals are the subjects of my criticism in today’s essay.

These two individuals happen to be newly appointed federal opposition leader Kevin Rudd, and Clive Hamilton, the executive director of the Australia Institute, an independent think-tank based at the Australian National University.

However, do not expect this critique to be a conservative packaging.

Both Kevin Rudd and Clive Hamilton present insightful points of view that in turn act as raw materials in the manufacture of my own viewpoint.

They have also helped others to articulate their points of view.

For example, after Kevin Rudd’s recent essays, there has been this newspaper article from Melbourne journalist James Norman:

“I am part of a generation that has been lead astray by commercialism, consumerism and political manipulation.

Churches are among the few places where people can gather to ponder the really important issues.

They are places people come together as citizens rather than as mindless consumers.
I believe in the separation of church and state, but a generation of politicians seems subservient to market fundamentalism.

I don't see a contradiction between human reason and compassionate religiosity.” [1]

While Anglican Archbishop Peter Jenson shows his appreciation for Clive Hamilton’s insights:
“Secularism fails to support the central concern of the truly human life: relationships, the very point that Mr Hamilton and so many others are making. And Australians regard relationships and families as their chief source of happiness.” [2]

Yet my own experiences cause me to question whether the rhetoric of standing against “mindless consumerism” and standing for “a truly human life” actually translates into targeted policies that assist the low-skilled worker and long-term unemployed, both of which can often be expected to be living in poverty.

I also have cause to be concerned about the ideological perspective of studying “marketing” which criticises the role of marketing in our society.

This perspective of criticism isn’t new. As far back as 1963, Vance Packard criticised marketers for manipulating consumers and for creating waste and pollution. [3]

However, if there’s reason to play close attention to the influence of such similar criticism today, it is because those who nominate to criticise “market fundamentalism”, at the risk of only emphasising a critical view of marketing above all other possible perspectives about the subject, just happen to be middle-income earning voices who have simultaneously been beneficiaries of economic prosperity and intellectual abundance.

“Not being heard” are lower-paid workers and some long-term unemployed that “struggle to compete in the market”, and consequently are not spoilt by anything more than a negligible dose of “mindless consumerism” to begin with. In fact, their low wage condition will probably often force them to be more “mindful consumers” than the rest of the population.

These are the sections of society I believe could benefit from our leaders emphasising perspectives about marketing “other than” the one that’s ideologically, yet quite selectively, opposed to the practice of marketing.

Some will claim that I’m taking the left-wing, social democratic stand against market fundamentalism “out of context” by suggesting this implies a stand against the discipline of marketing.

Yet try and look at things from my point of view. A view developed not only from being a low-wage earner myself, but also being a marketing student.

While I currently struggle with a mortgage while only getting paid Austudy allowance (naturally, an unsustainable position I have to address as soon as possible), our intellectuals on the Left are effectively asking me to feel sorry for the “victims” of consumerism in more affluent “Middle Australia”.

Contrast this experience with Clive Hamilton’s assertion that the only votes in the federal election that really matter are those “mindless consumers” that need to be saved from themselves:

“No progress has yet been made towards putting theoretical flesh on the policy bones and attempt to “renew” social democracy, leaving daylight visible on the other side of the skeleton (by “the other side”, Mr. Hamilton appears to acknowledge the “conservative liberal democrats”).

The constituency for whom social democratic policies were traditionally designed has shrunk dramatically.

Although there may be no agreement on whether 5 per cent or 15 per cent of Australians live in poverty, it is untenable that the principal social problem confronting modern Australia is widespread material depravation.

Exaggerating the extent of depravation locks social democrats into an anachronistic understanding of the world, one whose foundations have been destroyed by decades of unsustained economic growth, and this in turn prevents them from developing a progressive political vision that resonates with the times.” [4]

A distinction needs to be made here.

The number of “materially deprived” may have shrunk into a voting segment too small to tip the balance of a federal election, but this doesn’t mean their problems have shrunk.

I would even contemplate that restoring theoretical flesh on the policy bones of social democracy “without placing low-income earners at the centre of attention” could actually compound the material depravation of low-income earners, which in turns affects the rest of society.

No matter what “reasons” Clive Hamilton presents that suggests that the battle for the hearts and minds of voters resonates only with the 80% most affluent, consumer-drunk majority, one quote from Charles Handy sums up why, soon or later, it will be a mistake to discard the importance of the 20% most materially deprived in our society:

“George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the reasonable man responds to the world, while the unreasonable man tries to make the world respond to him”.

Don’t expect low income earners to “see reason” about why, budget after budget, election campaign after election campaign, their needs are considered “sub-optimal” for the greater good of “Middle Australia”.

Especially while some of the poorest people continue to vote Liberal or National, Labor has more to worry about than whether the might of small-l liberal, middle-class voters could conceivably swing an election result.

While Clive Hamilton can be admired as one of “the unreasonable men” that challenge the status quo and therefore possibly drives “social” progress, Richard Koch also refers to the same George Bernard Shaw quote to point out that apart from social progress as “a reason to challenge status quo”, other reasons for progress include the evolutionary, the scientific and the personal.

It is “personal development”, rather than “social progress” that I wish to put at the heart of the social democratic matter. I wish to contemplate “what if” you make personal development the essence that gives purpose to the marketing concept?

Clive Hamilton insists that in rich countries, “the principal purpose” of consumption spending is no longer to satisfy needs but to find and express a personal identity, an identity then “exploited” by marketers.

He also insists that improving well-being requires “a partial withdrawal” from the market, including “an active resistance” to the market value of individualism, amongst resistance to other market values. A “society” based on a downshifting ethic.

Finally, Mr. Hamilton asserts “the new politics of well-being” would recognise when the values of the market intrude into areas of life where they do not belong and - deaf to the “self interested” cries for more “choice”, “development” and “economic freedom”.

This misses the point that “the marketing concept” - the consumer being the focal point of all marketing activities - need not be the exclusive domain of profit motives to give purpose to. [3][4]

In fact, a broader perspective of the subject of marketing reveals this not to be the case.
While I am in full-time study mode, I’m absorbing the many perspectives about marketing “other than” the ideological critic perspective - including competition policy, helping consumers to make informed choices, public-sector marketing, microeconomics, another perspective called ‘the positive approach’ and last, but not least - the major perspective of my studies that I believe can be applied to strategic thinking about “personal development” within the labour market - namely, “the strategic marketing management approach”. [3]

In a nutshell, this approach would regard “relationship building” as a chief source of personal development. The happiness and well-being is intended to follow afterwards.

When I next write an article for my other serial - The Wet Economic Six Pack - I would like to explain in detail why I believe it would be valuable for the overall benefit of society if a “personal development” socialisation objective gave purpose to the strategic marketing management approach.

I will explain why I believe the modern day socialisation objective of Left-wing politics (as distinct from the the original socialist aspiration of the Australian Labor Party) ought to be:
“Equality of knowledge interrelationships for the personal development and implementation of strategy”.

This has been a carefully worded socialisation objective, with two “reasonable objectives” in mind:

One is to acknowledge Charles Handy’s case that discontinuous change, however uncomfortable, is only the only way forward for a society that would prefer to put on blinders to the world around it. I believe this objective is supported by a recent quote from U.S. Democrats Senator Hilary Clinton, who stated that it was time for the United States to begin the journey back from the partisan, ideological division to the vital, dynamic centre [5]

The other objective forms a dichotomy with the first objective, which provides a counter view for balance, one which expects certain characteristic patterns of class struggle “to recur”, but with infinite and unpredictable variety. I believe this objective is supported by a famous quote from British labourite Anthony Crosland - “What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity. [6]

Contemplate for one moment, the contrast between “this” and “that”.

This - a return to asking many of the same socialist questions of the past - “Is equal opportunity enough? What about length of climb? What about unequal distribution of rewards?” -, but with a refreshed view towards personal development, and in turn for the ultimate benefit of a society that, to quote Charlie Forsyth, is far more concerned with the outcomes of policy than their ideological origins, [7] [8] and

That - the Kevin Rudd/Clive Hamilton “new politics” approach which distances itself from Socialism, yet sticks with this concept of “social progress” that isn’t necessarily even intended to “directly benefit” the lowest paid people.

As reported recently by The Age newspaper:

NEW Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has decisively moved to modernise the Labor Party's view of itself, rejecting socialism as an "arcane, 19th-century" doctrine and defining Labor's values as equality, solidarity and sustainability.

"It's critical that when we say to the Australian people that we want to construct an alternative vision for Australia, that they know the values for which we stand. Socialism isn't one of them," Mr Rudd told The Age.

"Any political party has to be absolutely confident in the objectives for which they stand. I am not a socialist. I have never been a socialist and I never will be a socialist." [9]

Indeed, Labor needs to be “confident” in the objectives for which it stands, but Mr. Rudd risks failing to truly represent “the vital dynamic centre” by being “absolutely confident”.
The strategic aim of my two “reasonable objectives” in support of my socialisation objective is not to find “absolute answers”, but to facilitate a process in which all ideas - new, old, and new again - can be the “subject of review” and questioned - as one phase in a cyclical process that then repeats itself, over and over again. I interpret Hilary Clinton as urging Americans to “abandon absolutism” for exactly this “type of dynamism”.

The dichotomy that both reasonable objectives form in support of the socialisation objective also aim to balance the future (the first reasonable objective) with the past (the second reasonable objective), because of what conservative Mark Steyn says in his recent ‘End of the World’ speech in August last year:

“It's simply not possible to build a society if you teach the people in that society that everything that has gone before them is completely worthless.

No society can survive when it conciously unmoors itself from its own inheritance” [10]

If we’re objective enough to recognise that future generations will inherit a debt of environmental problems, surely we can also recognise that sooner or later, both future generations and the current exceptions to the rule of prosperity may have the revisit the burning questions that Socialism first raised many decades ago.

I sincerely hope that should my essay get within close reach of Kevin Rudd or Clive Hamilton, they recognise this certainly isn’t a conservative critique of their views. Far from it.

Rather, this essay, and those that will follow, are in fact the by-product of their thinking, but will only be interpreted as such if these men are prepared to have their “absolutely confident” ideas challenged.

…From Justin

[1] Norman, James. Churches fight the good fight. Herald Sun, 11 January 2007
[2] Religion Report. ABC Radio National, 3 January 2007
[3] McColl-Kennedy, J.R. and Kiel, G.C. Marketing: A Strategic Approach. Pages 28-29
[4] Hamilton, Clive. What’s Left? The death of social democracy. Quarterly Essay21/2006. Pages 29, 57-58
[5] Handy, Charles 'The Age of Unreason'.
[6] Koch, Richard. The 80/20 Principle. 1997 Nicholas Brealey. Page 14.
[7] Crosland, Anthony. The future of Socialism.
[8] Forsyth, Charlie. Right v left or right v wrong? - sourced
from Online Opinion. Wednesday, 29 November 2006
[9] Rudd rejects socialism, Michael Gordon and Michelle Grattan
December 14, 2006
[10] Mark Steyn's End of the World Tour. Counterpoint, ABC Radio National. 25 December 2006.

The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk
Part Six: The Egg Timer
Part Seven: The Egg Carton
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2007-01-14T00:13:00.000+11:00

Fortnightly Footprints

Second Fortnight:
Small traces of big happenings in Communications & Mediated Politics.

My first ever communication & mediated politics theme on my blog makes sense
of the term "mediated politics": contemplating what role media
plays in constructing our personal and collective views of the world.

The current state of media-political liason.......and why blogging alone cannot break the stranglehold of the culture wars - Written by Peter McMahon:

The failure of Australia's media in covering politics is a huge
problem for our democracy. Journalists are the intermediaries between
the people and the arcane world of politics, and we rely on them to
interpret events meaningfully. If they are continually biased or lazy,
then the electorate cannot make reasoned judgments and democracy cannot
function.

About 20 years ago I worked in Parliament House, Canberra, for a Labor
senator where I encountered the Canberra press gallery.

In our office we made constant efforts to alert journalists to issues
of substance, but they were rarely interested.

Three realities - the ignorance and personal bias of journalists; the
failure of journalists to actually find stories; and their inaccuracy
in reporting when they did - typified my experience with political
journalism.

For people whose profession is finding out things, they usually know
bugger all.

Furthermore, their apparent disinterest in reading any social theory
means they inevitably follow the latest trend with the true zealotry of
the truly ignorant.

There is some talk that blogging will revolutionise political news and
debate, but this seems unrealistic to me. Blogs are already following
the money as the big boys move in, and research indicates that they
polarise, as opposed to inform, opinions. With no blog more
authoritative than another, you go to the blogs that agree with you.

This lack of credibility is a hugely important matter. Any functioning
society needs an ideological centre, some commonly accepted ideas
around which debate can revolve. Australia's commercial media have
given up this role of maintaining core debates.

There are undoubtedly powerful commercial pressures that act against
good journalism, but political journalists need to recall that fair and
accurate reporting and informed debate are essential for a functioning
society. If these things fail, the society will fail too, and this has
to be bad for profits. [1]

Demonstrated consequences of what happens if the commercial media lose the role of maintaining core debates - Written by Simon Kearney:

As soon as Fiji's military leader Commodore Frank Bainimarama had
declared himself interim President, his troops went straight to the
country's oldest newspaper, the Fiji Times to eliminate any criticism
of the new regime.

The power of the media has grown since 1987. Back then Fiji had a
fledgling television station and handful of newspapers and radio
stations. Now with the internet, there is a vibrant questioning young
media pack that would do any country proud. [2]

The Age talks about us (the people) and them (the politicians)..........
- Writes Ed from The Age:

(Kevin Rudd's) self-styled "listening tour" has really been a two-way
aural exercise: the new Opposition Leader and his deputy listening to
the electorate; the electorate listening to them - all ears, you
might say. It has also been mutually beneficial in that we have found
out as much about Mr Rudd as we presume he has about us.

His intention to reclaim the centre of political idealism as well as
concentrate more on external matters than internal politics. [3]

..........but what about the mediated politics "in between" us and them?
- Written by Charlie Forsyth

There's been a lot of talk over the past few years about the
so-called culture wars. It's a fight between the traditional left and
right in politics to direct public debate, opinion and institutions in
favour of certain ideological viewpoints. The problem is a majority of
our society couldn't care less.

It's a conflict rooted in the historical ideologies of the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s. Many Australians, particularly of my generation and
younger, would look quizzically upon these divisions, if at all.
This is a war of generals without armies. Each salvo is "right, left,
right, left ...", but very few are marching.

Full of over-generalisations, straw men and name-calling, it is largely
irrelevant to a society far more concerned with the outcomes of policy
than their ideological origins. Let alone the tough-guy labels of left,
soft, wet versus right, hard, dry.

The real things we worry about are day-to-day concerns of
relationships, work and money.

Most of us, by the way, actually don't worry too much at all, despite
the constant barrage of concerns we are told to have by the politicians
and the media. Often mistaken for apathy, the political disengagement
attributed to younger generations is actually a rejection of the
politicians and the old divides.

Many friends with no interest in politics do not relate at all to most
political leaders, left or right. Instead we engage within our own,
small sphere of influence.

Our concerns are not manifest via activism, protest or anything overtly
political - rather through our friends, purchasing choices, popular
culture and entertainment.

Australians are smarter, more cynical, sensitive, independent and
selfless than the generals of both sides believe. [4]

Media dissemination of the Labor leadership challenge - Written by
Matt Price

The Australian defends their media disseminator role in Kim Beazley's
demise as leader of the federal opposition:

Beazley's former chief-of-staff (Michael Costello), has long accused
The Australian, most recently in his regular Friday column in this
newspaper, of strategically deploying Newspoll to exert maximum
uncomfortable pressure on his old boss.

Timed for what those in the trade know as "maximum news value".

The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell: "When you arrange
a poll like that in the circumstance, you know it has the potential to
make a bit of impact."

Impact is what all editors desire of their publications and The
Australian under Mitchell exerts an extraordinary amount in Canberra.
Its circulation is relatively small when measured against major
metropolitan dailies, but readership includes every federal MP,
wherever they are in the land, and most early morning radio producers,
especially those employed by the ABC. [5]

Can Rudd be more a master of his own image than Beazley or Latham?

- Writes Mark Bahnisch, blogger with Larvatus Prodeo:

Beazley's strategy wasn't exactly small target. He'd enunciated
themes, and released detailed policy. The problem was that the media
was sick of him, and didn't report it.

But Beazley meant what he said about being a safe pair of hands. While
his weaknesses were well known, he was also less susceptible to the
slings and arrows of government attack, simply because his basic image
was that of someone who wouldn't frighten the horses.

Beazley must have also thought that WorkChoices would lead to a
government defeat.

He spent a lot of time campaigning in the community on IR, largely
beneath the government radar. As Labor leader, Beazley froze the front
bench in place to keep a lid on internal dissension. As it turns out,
that was a "bridge too far".

But he was also right to suggest that he was a good campaigner, if not
a good closer.

The basic idea was keeping Labor within reach of victory, then wheeling
out the big policy guns for the campaign itself.

Such a strategy won't be available to Team Rudd.

The main political danger he faces has been correctly identified by
government strategists. He's a canvas on which the Liberals can apply
thick daubs of negative paint. His image is not well entrenched enough
in the public mind to allow him to paint his own picture, unless he
works really hard at his craft.

What Rudd needs to do is to pull together all the strands of Labor
policy into a convincing narrative. That's something the ALP hasn't
had since the days of Keating, though Latham went close to telling a
compelling story about aspiration. But in the end Latham ran on
Labor's positives: and left the government clear air on its own
strengths.

Rudd won't be as susceptible as Latham to being characterised as a
dangerous choice, because he's more disciplined and balanced as a
politician and a person. But he does need to come to terms with the
fact that Howard has cleverly stolen much of the ALP's ground on
issues. If he can't do this with a story that really does enunciate a
coherent vision for Australia, he risks the fate of far too many
opposition leaders - appearing purely negative. [6]

The views that matter - within the bounds of a culture war? Or out on the periphery of strategy-making? - Written by Gary Hamel in 1996

If you want to create a point of view about the future, if you want to
craft a meaningful strategy, you have to create in your company a
hierarchy of imagination.

And that means giving a disproportionate share of the voice to people
who up until now have been disenfranchised from the strategy-making
process.

It means giving up a disproportionate share of voice to the young
people. It means giving a disproportionate share of voice to the
geographic periphery of your organisation - because, typically, the
father out you are from headquarters, the more creative people are:

They don't have the dead wood of bureaucracy and orthodoxy on them.
And it means giving a disproportionate share of voice to newcomers.

That, to me, is leadership.

Leadership is when the senior group of executives has the combination
of confidence in their ability to contribute and the humility to
recognise what they can learn from others.

Those are the attributes that make them willing to learn from others.
Those are the attributes that make them willing to create a hierarchy
of imagination.

And to involve many new and different voices in the process of charting
the future. [7]

Rudd's competent liason with the media so far - written by Matt
Price

Rudd's remarkably high ratings in voters' assessment of his
decisiveness, vision, likeability and other traits belie his rookie
status. That people feel they know Rudd well enough to make a judgment
is a testimony to his incredible dedication to self-promotion, which
has attracted ridicule and opprobrium over the past five years, but
which is now paying off.

It was an act of self-serving genius that entrenched Kevinism as a
fixture on the Seven Network's stupendously popular Sunrise program.
When the idiosyncratic "Mel'n'Kochie" experiment began, producers
banned politicians from appearing on the fluffy breakfast show until
Rudd turned up with a blueprint for a chatty segment featuring himself,
of course, flying weekly from Brisbane to Sydney to team up with a
compliant Liberal.

Against their better instincts, the Sunrise people relented and Rudd
began a regular Friday segment nattering with Ross Cameron, ex-member
for Parramatta. One week Cameron called in absent and arranged for Joe
Hockey as a replacement. The Sunrise producers took an instant shine to
Hockey and placed a ban on Cameron. Hockey demurred, saying he didn't
want to shaft a friend but Sunrise declared the segment over if he
didn't climb on board. Cameron took no offence at the snub, but it was
Rudd's incessant pleading which changed Hockey's mind.

All this occurred when barely 90,000 people were watching - now the
television phenomenon attracts close to 500,000 slavishly loyal viewers
and the Sunrise show is in the driver's seat of the Rudd bandwagon. [8]

...Edited by Justin.

Resources.

[1] The failure of Australia's political media. By Peter McMahon,
sourced from Online Opinion - posted Friday, 8 December 2006
[2] Fiji under threat of censorship. Simon Kearney, Suva The
Australian. December 07, 2006.
[3] You've listened well, Mr Rudd. What have you learned? - The Age
editorial, December 20, 2006
[4] Right v left or right v wrong? - By Charlie Forsyth - sourced
from Online Opinion. Wednesday, 29 November 2006
[5] Polls' role in the bombing campaign
Matt Price - December 07, 2006
[6] Team Rudd By Mark Bahbisch - sourced from Online Opinion ,
Thursday, 7 December 2006
[7] Hamel, Gary. Rethinking the future: Reinventing the basis for
competition. 1996 Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Page 91.
[8] Age of Kevinism gets a dream run, so far - Matt Price, The
Australian. 16 December, 2006

2007-01-12T11:40:00.000+11:00

Books that shake the apple cart

As promised, here is a list of books that might/would be referred to in my writing, if only I can/could afford the time and/or money to read them all :)

Still, it is worth publishing, even if only for the benefit of allowing my reader to gain an oversight of the general themes intended to be addressed in my three feature article serials published on BearCave.Biz – namely (((radioactive))) D.C., The Scrambled Eggs Report and The Wet Economic Six Pack.

In their 1991 book ‘Horse Sense’, marketing authors Jack Trout and Al Ries discuss the challenges of recognising goods ideas that need nurturing:

“All right, you’ve suspended judgement and are mentally prepared to change your mind. How do you recognise a good idea that needs nurturing?

A fair question that isn’t easily answered. But here are some guidelines:

Is it a first?
Is it bold?
Is it obvious?
Is it simple?
Will it upset the apple cart?
Is the idea timely?

From this list of guidelines, I have drawn the name of my booklist – ‘Books that shake the apple cart’.

To make this a quality list of books, I will gradually tidy up this list by adding (or sometimes subtracting) book titles , adding analytical comments, and website links. Note that not all books listed here have complete publisher’s details, but I will remedy this soon:

Here’s the current list, last updated 12 January 2007:

(((radioactive))) D.C.

Book’s I’ve purchased:

Stuart Wells. Choosing the future - The power of strategic
thinking. 1998 Butterworth-Heinemann.

Steve Warren. Radio: The Book - For creative, professional
programming, fourth edition. 2005 Elsevier Focal Press.

Wayne Mac. Don't touch that dial: Hits 'n' Memories of
Australian Radio. 2005 WDJM.

Anne Marie Grey & Kim Skildum-Reid. The sponsorship seeker's
toolkit, second edition. 2003 McGraw-Hill Australia.

Michael E. Gerber. The E-Myth - Why most small businesses don't
work and what to do about it. 1995 Harper Business.

Guy Kawasaki. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

THE SCRAMBLED EGGS REPORT

Books I’ve purchased:

Paul Robinson - Queer Wars - the new gay Right and its critics

(This is a book that attempts to understand gay conservatism. It refers to TV show Queer As folk and prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan. It might come in handy on the communication-side of my studies)

Books not purchased:

The complete idiot's guide to philosophy

(I’m currently using the Complete Idiot’s guide to project management – these are very well presented books)

Nigel Warburton: Thinking from A-Z

(Be able to spot poor reasoning and diversionary ploys)

Martin Versfeld -The philosophers Cookbook

(In addition The Scrambled Eggs Report, here’s another author that agrees that food preparation can be a very handy metaphor :)

Malcolm Fraser - Common Ground - issues that should bind and not divide

The angry right- why conservatives keep getting it wrong - S. T. Joshi

(Including a chapter on American radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh)

The War on democracy - Conservative opinion in the Australian Press - Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler

(Download a book summary here)

God's politics – why the American Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it : Jim Wallis

(Reference to the tipping point, the concept also written about by Malcolm Gladwell)

Nancy Soderberg : The superpower myth- the use and misuse of American might

(Foreword by former U.S. president Bill Clinton)

THE WET ECONOMIC SIX PACK

(Note: The three levels of strategic thinking in this report are called the Surface Level, Interface Level and Coalface Level.)

Books not purchased:

The Complete Idiots guide to American government: a citizen’s primer on how Fundraising affects access, influence and democracy

(Help with my Surface Level thinking)

Little America - Australia, the 51st state - Erik Paul

(Help with my Surface Level thinking)

Margaret Thatcher's Revolution - How it happened and what it meant –

(Since growing tired of reading endless single-paragraph-length appraisals of Thatcher in newspaper opinions, I gather it’s overdue that I understand the exact context in which Thatcher’s rule operated. Help with my Surface Level thinking).

Attention deficit democracy - James Bovard

(Includes reference to the term: “big picture myopia”. Help with my Interface Level thinking)

The seduction of unreason- the intellectual romance with fascism: from Nietzsche to Post-modernism.

(Help with my Interface Level thinking)

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding North Korea

(In an age of globalisation, it is important to have some understanding of this very isolated communist state by contemplating a left-wing extreme of economic disengagement and its consequences.

Click here to read Terry Lane's profile of the on-going tension between North Korea and the United States and its allies, South Korea's attempts to normalise relations with the north, and the complex internal state of this insular communist nation

Help with my Interface Level thinking)

Limiting democracy - the erosion of electoral rights in Australia - Colin A. Hughes and Brian Costar

(Help with my Interface Level and Coalface Level thinking)

Edited by H.K. Colebatch: Beyond the policy cycle: The policy process in Australia

(Includes references to the words “context” and “networks”. Hooray, somebody has actually pre-empted some of my own thoughts :) (Help with my Coalface Level thinking)

Anthony Crosland - The future of Socialism

(First published in 1956 - Recently re- released. Contemplates whether segregation during formative years intensifies inequalities in later life – It asks the question: Is equal opportunity enough? What about length of climb, or unequal distribution of rewards?

This book now features a foreword from Gordon Brown, possibly Britain’s next prime minister. Help with my Coalface Level thinking)

Jim Colllins - Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why business thinking is not the answer (help with my Coalface Level thinking)

Bill Gates- At the speed of thought (Help with my Coalface Level thinking)

2007-01-10T02:26:00.000+11:00

Fortnightly Footprints

First fortnight:
Small traces of big happenings in Marketing & Media.

This post originally published on the general discussion forum at
Online Opinion:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=351

Freethinker wrote:

"Most of our lives are controlled in one way or another if we allow
them to be - tv, radio, advertising, politicians etc.

We live in an interesting 'Matrix' type world, where we actually
believe that we have freedom but our freedoms are controlled by the
powers that be."

Australian Intellectual Clive Hamilton believes our identities are
defined by the influence market forces have on our consumption
behaviour, resulting in new forms of exploitation and loss of an
authentic, liberated self identity:

"Socialism emphasised the relationship of individuals to means of
production. Today it is not production but consumption that is the key,
in particular the relationships of individuals to the goods they buy
and the influence of marketing in the formation of those
relationships." (Quarterly Essay 21/2006)

A marketing student myself, I have reason to be sceptical of
Clive Hamilton's claim that "liberation" from marketing-influenced
consumption is the key to self-control, rather than "equal rights" in
the participation of production.

It's not just political ideology emphasising the relationship of
individuals to means of production. Consider the discipline of Project
Management:

Since workforces have become team (project) oriented, instead of
permanent job title oriented, it's worth noting that "controls"
occur throughout project lifecycles to manage activities, interactions
and transitions (from one phase of the project to the next).

Do you control the projects you work on or do the projects control you?

It is rather ironic that I can put this question to you after studying
Project Management as part of my "marketing course", while also
learning how to exploit your consumption behaviour and ultimately deny
you from achieving a self-controlled, authentic, liberated identity :)

Be careful how you separately analyse different production and
consumption games.

"It's easy to fall into the trap of analysing these separate games
in isolation, imagining that there's no larger game."
(Brandenburger, Nalebuff. 'Co-Opetition'. 1996 Currency Doubleday)

Understanding, playing off and changing links between games are "the
levers of strategy". The key to self-control in the 21st century is
to "master strategic thinking". Understanding politics is only part
of this task.

...From Justin
Posted by BearCave, Sunday, 7 January 2007 7:58:20 PM

2007-01-03T13:44:00.000+11:00

Happy New Year from Sydney

Yesterday was a great start to 2007. I've spent five of the last six
New Years Eve nights on Sydney Harbour to witness the world's biggest
fireworks display (I missed 2005-06 because it was compulsory to work
the night if I wanted to keep my job, at the time :)

2Day FM had the honour of simulcasting the official Sydney NYE
fireworks soundtrack for the world's biggest fireworks display, this
year based on the Diamond Jubilee of the Sydney Harbour theme.

Today (Jan. the second) has also been a good day in Sydney, before I
get back on the bus and go home (to Melbourne) tommorow morning.

Today I've done a bit of a "scoping study" of the issues I ought to
find time to analyse and interpret in 2007, my year for marketing and
communications studies.

I started the study quite early, listening to 2GB's overnight fill-in
host interview the night editor of The Daily Telegraph.

Page 16 of today's Tele reports on Channel Ten's "sub-standard"
coverage of the New Years Eve fireworks.

Promoted by Ten as an "innovative approach" to celebrating New Years
Eve, 2GB averaged more than ten complaints an hour in response to the
program aired on Ten.

One caller - Sally - was critical of a promo for the musical 'Priscilla
- queen of the desert', which aired on Ten at 9:25pm.

"It was just straight out sexual," cried Sally, "men dressed as women
with great big boobs and whatever."

There was more to the complaints than Sally's concern, but I focus on
Sally because I could make an equally controversial statement that
suggests that even the some of the most blokey, straight-looking males
in Sydney are as gay as they get :)

I'm only talking about the bears, but it's still true.

Aw, poor Sally. So easily shocked. She needs to meet a gay bear and
understand the Priscilla thing is quite a narrow interpretation of
"poofters", even though it is only drag queens in the promo shouting
"Go poofters".

That said, family viewing time should not be taken out of context.
Sally's concerns reflect a marketing problem for Channel Ten.

I think this situation highlights the need to understand the
distinction between "standard branding" and "contextual branding".

Ten's standard branding is that it is a "younger demographic viewing
network" than Seven and Nine. Contextual branding probably doesn't fit
the standard branding mould and could possibly be defined as "content
that can only appear within logical contexts".

AFL broadcasting is probably an example of contextual branding on
Channel Ten. Imagine how "lacking in context" their broadcasts would
be if they got Hot Dogs from Ten's Up Late Game Show to call the
football. I settle my case already.

Perhaps in future (if there is a New Years Eve future for Ten), the
Sydney New Year coverage should be classed a contextual branding event
instead of being made to meet the standard branding youth-oriented
criteria.

The target isn't always the market and the market is not always the
target. This principle explains why McDonald's do not sell Big Macs in
Australia until after 10:30 in the morning :)

Between 5am and 7am today, I listened attentively to Grant Goldman on
2SM 1269AM. He presents a well-informed and conversational program,
raising many issues of the day and taking calls from across 2SM's
regional Supernetwork of listeners.

So much more to write about, including a list of issues I intend to
research and blog about in 2007, plus a booklist of books purchased and
books I'd like to read in 2007, if only there really was the time to
even get through the big scoping list I compiled today.

More from Justin shortly.

2006-12-07T16:43:00.000+11:00

A good beginning makes a good ending

My headline is today is an English proverb recently published in a newspaper.

18 months of tertiary study has taught me that the ability to impact a successful work outcome rapidly deteriorates the closer you get to a deadline.

Nevertheless, it is very easy to fall behind where you want to be.

Structured thinking, scheduling and having the energy to get the required tasks done all play an acting part in impacting a successful work outcome.

As is probably to be expected, I realise this better now than at the start of this year. For no matter how much time and energy I put into my orientation at the start of the year, the accumulation of experience soon taught me that the acting parts of study do not always come together in an ideal way.

One must therefore also build a tolerance for 'rough readiness'. Sometimes I've been forced to complete actions without having all the facts I would like, while working to a schedule I know is far from organised.

I now approach 2007 knowing that as many as 11 months of the year ahead may require more of this rough readiness to perform.

Therefore, the challenge of the weeks ahead is to take advantage of a more restful time - starting with training myself in some new skills to better facilitate a concerted, long-term study effort.

Hopefully giving 2007 its best possible beginning, especially as my need to return to work is already running weeks late and my transition from tafe to university now commences.

So, that's the all blogging I can provide for my readers just right now.

Please return here some time, hopefully early in 2007 for more news and opinion, especially about issues in media and politics, from a Marketing Communications perspective.

Until then, my online posts will now resume exclusively on the aus.radio.broadcast newsgroup.

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

...From Justin

2006-12-04T05:17:00.000+11:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report: Cat amongst the pigeons

Labor’s new challenge: Putting a 'modern democratic socialist' cat amongst the 'culture war' pigeons

PART ELEVEN: ONE EGG, MANY BASKETS
Each challenge takes place in a larger context

A week ago the editor of The Australian was profound in saying that “voters are in no mood for taking risks with the divided or ill-prepared”.
It’s an interesting statement because I think it reveals much about today’s context of political debate.

My intepretation of that statement’s three parts are:

1. The divided party – an imbalance of attention between seeking ideal internal leadership and engaging with an externally-directed strategy

2. The ill-prepared campaign – The ability to impact success rapidly deteriorates as an electoral campaign cycle progresses; and

3. The voter contemplating risk against reward – this is not merely a challenge in itself. This challenge also takes place in the larger context of how valuable one person’s vote is.

Over the next week, you’ll probably read lots in the press about Labor’s prospects for uniting a divided party and whether they have a strong enough campaign to challenge the seemingly mighty P.M. John Howard.

What I wish to focus on today is the voter who is left to make that final marginal decision – contemplating the risk of changing government against the potential reward for doing so.

I want my reader to consider this single challenge as a game – taking place in a larger context where everybody else’s vote impacts on ‘the value of your individual vote’ to make a difference.

Then consider the scope of the game you are playing. For example, how did it get to be that the scope of the game many voters played in 2004 was narrowed down to the concerns over interest rates?

How could it be that voters decided that Labor was too much of a ‘risk’, only to be ‘rewarded’ with the removal of their hard-earned rights in the workplace?

Did the average swinging voter really know what game they were playing when they made that last marginal decision in 2004?

“You may think you know what game you’re playing, but that game is invariably part of a larger one. There’s always a larger game.” [1]

In retrospect, has the decision by a great many voters to allow the scope of their voting game to be narrowed to an emphasis on interest rates been a good or bad thing?

Has such thinking delivered them value?

How will the consequences, intended or unintended, impact on their subsequent thinking about how they vote the next time?

Is their thinking about risk delivering the prosperity of reward?

The answer to that question is that: we don’t entirely know.

One reason for this was revealed in the House of Representatives last week by Labor minister Stephen Smith, in regards to how rewarding WorkChoices is for the workers:

“The (Howard) Government says: 'Let's rely on the data'. There's only one problem: when it comes to this area (impact on pay and conditions), the government has now deliberately hidden the data. Come November, at Senate estimates, it refused to release that data (from the Office of the Employment Advocate)”. [2]

Graham Maddox writes that:

“Despite the arguments of the Australian Democrats about the ideological bondage of the major parties, the conventional wisdom is that the Australian parties are non-ideological, being motivated purely by electoral advantage. The voters are said to be drawn by material interests alone, and to follow the parties offering the best hope of financial gain” [3]

Yet what is the impact on ‘the value of your individual vote’ to make a difference when your subsequent vote is “misinformed” by the ideological decision by the Howard Government to only release the data on WorkChoices that gives it the power the narrow the scope of the next voting game you play?

How can you assess the risks and rewards if you have not been adequately informed of any ‘problems’ there may be with WorkChoices, and what ‘opportunities’ there may be to push for change to the legislation?

“You may think you know what game you are playing, but that game is invariably part of a larger one.”

In other words the “thinking about risk against rewards” game is linked to the game that precedes it (the “thinking about opportunities or problems” game) and the game that follows it (the “reality of the outcome” game).

When fed back into a loop, these three games combine in a larger context to form a strategic thinking life cycle.

How can “the reality” of WorkChoices be all good if there’s an “ideological decision” made in “the reality of the outcome” game, in which the Howard Government controls the release of the data?

How does the consequence of this game “feed back” into the strategic thinking cycle in which you repeat playing the “opportunity/problem” game, followed by playing the “risk/reward” game at election time, choosing between the alternative governments?

Does it occur to you that the government has some control over the narrowing or widening of your game’s scope?

This is because of the inescapable fact that all games are linked. All games (or challenges, to use another word) are part of the one big game – a larger context – a strategic overview.

A line from Hamlet states:

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.

If prosperity is meant to be bound up with Australia’s support of the Howard Government (based on their claims to be better economic managers than Labor) then I challenge voters to test their faith in John Howard by considering financial advisor Noel Whittacker’s endorsement of the Napoleon Hill classic ‘Think and Grow Rich’, which influenced Mr. Whittacker to write:

“Habits of success take over your thinking. Like compound interest, that progress will gather speed as time passes.” [8]

In other words, the actions that ultimately result in compound interest in the bank is a by-product of successful strategic thinking.

This is why it is so important to be objective about the links between games:

The “thinking about problems and opportunities” game, followed by the “thinking about risks against rewards” game, followed by the “thinking through the reality of the outcome” game, which then “feeds back” into a strategic thinking lifecycle with “compounded impact” that determines the value of your individual vote (since some voters will be “better informed” than others.

Distil these games into an equation:

Opportunity game + risk game + reality game = the strategic thinking life cycle.

Each challenge takes place in a larger context, constantly adjusting the scope of the issues you’ll assess when making your vote count.

If “growing rich” is a by-product of “thinking rich”, then why is the Howard Government intent on “impoverishing the strategic thinking of low-paid workers” by adopting ‘selective Stalinism’ and banning the release of data?

Kim Beazley, our federal opposition leader – one of the most important jobs in the country – recently rose in parliament to condemn the banning of this data:

“This is pure eastern European circa 1950s. Stalinism - pure Stalinism; that's all there is to it - in which information is simply shut down because the truth is inconvenient.”.

Yet this ‘selective Stalinism’ did not get reported in the mainstream media, as far as I can tell.

I recently wrote in my blog that such important speeches as the many I have heard from Kim Beazley is vital ‘raw material’ waiting for journalists and opinion-makers to pick them up and to progress the influence of those speeches.

However, a recent article published by The Age newspaper, written by Paul Rodan, a senior honorary research fellow in the school of political and social inquiry at Monash University, absolutely convinced me that on the issue of opposition leadership, The Age newspaper has given opinion-making priority over journalism:

“Already, endless "Kim" jokes are doing the rounds and if a party leader is no longer taken seriously, but is instead providing the ‘raw material’ for stand-up comics, then the gig is up.” [4]

When you feel you have an important criticism to make about the mainstream media’s scarce use of Kim Beazley’s parliamentary speeches, centred on the term ‘raw material’, only to have the scope of your argument narrowed down to a cheap and insensitive shot at the opposition leader, that made by Paul Rodan, it is little wonder that The Age newspaper is utterly focused on “narrowing the scope” of Labor’s electability to “the challenge of opposition leadership change”, with no declaration of the role they have played in the bigger game of providing balanced coverage towards Kim Beazley.

“Even when a player (like the mainstream media as a voting influence) seems to be narrowing the scope of a game, it’s the player’s power in some bigger game that makes this maneuver possible”. [1]

You see, as long as Mr. Beazley remains opposition leader, the editor of The Age says:

“It must be asked of Beazley, when he speaks, is anyone really listening any more except when his tongue gets twisted?”.

Well, Ed – I can answer your question with enough certainty to know that Paul Rodan isn’t listening.

So certain that his readers don’t listen to Beazley, the editor of The Age “narrows the scope” of Beazley coverage to emphasising the toungue-twisting episodes.

Yet in anticiptation of ‘Messiah Monday’ (that’s today folks), the editor of The Sunday Age writes:

“With an election due next year, Australia deserves a harder and deeper debate.

This is not to say that we are advocating a change of government; rather, that the interests of all voters are best served by a rigorous parliament and a feisty, disciplined and viable alternative government.”

Harder and deeper debate?

Does this translate to breadth of opinion?

Well, to directly quote the editor of The Age, the reality is that:

“We don't want their (Herald Sun) readers; it's a different market. Our market is pretty well a pure AB market, right? Why do we operate in that marketplace? Because it's a marketplace which is first of all intellectually or journalistically, to me interesting, because readers come to the newspaper wanting a serious, mature, considered read if you like.” [5]

In other words, the information fed through the broader media from The Age newspaper is, first and foremost, intended to reflect the views and opinions of an elite readership market.

Therefore, the scope of risks and rewards that voters are informed enough to make decisions about at the ballot box is not necessarily wider just because the debate is deepened.

It is for this reason that I am highly sceptical of the middle-class debates known as ‘the culture wars’ – believing them to be in-depth debates that are desperately lacking in breadth of opinion.

I reject the Age editor’s 25 November claim that the Labor Party only chose Kim Beazley because he was the anthesis of his predecessor Mark Latham. The real reason for The Age’s lack of enthusiasm for Kim Beazley is due to their own bigger game, their own bigger challenge, of reflecting the views of their core AB readership.

The danger facing the ALP is that campaigns must unfold over time – with an expectation of slow-build up that isn’t dissimilar to the democratic socialist expectation of gradually unfolding new society.

This is in fact the anthesis of the ‘haste makes waste’ outcome we now see in the Age Poll today, which has Labor significantly leading the Coalition.

To remind the reader of a quote I used here last week:

Says Marketing authors Jack Trout and Al Ries:“The commander who has a large reserve force is in a dominant position. Nor is it always necessary or even desirable, to commit all your reserves to every battle”. [5]

Remembering that all challenges are linked to a larger context. Each phase in the strategic thinking lifecycle has a new challenge. Each of those challenges require reserve forces. It is for this reason I do argue today’s leadership challenge is an act of haste.

Which is why comments made by the the editor of The Age on 25 November confirm not an understanding of strategic overview (the larger context), but instead the treatment of the Labor leadership as an ideology:

“As leader, he (Kim Beazley) must bear responsibility for failing to establish in the public mind a coherent critique of the Government.”

Much closer to the truth is that the mainstream media have done all they can to deny Beazley the message stickiness and scope of context he needs to cut through. While that hasn’t prevented Beazley from leading Labor on a trend of competitive poll performances, it gives the ideologues who desire to narrow the scope of public debate to ‘the culture wars’, a chance to attack Beazley the moment he trips over anything.

Make no mistake – ‘the culture wars’ – fought between a “divided elite of AB Readers” is poison against Labor’s future prospects.

An aversion for “class wars”, which is what many have mistaken the recent union campaigns as being, is no excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater – “consciousness of class identity amongst ordinary workers”.

The “class consciousness leads to class war” propaganda actually ignores the modern day reality that the virtues of cooperation apply to “the marketability of workers” just as much, if not more, than the virtues of workers competing against each other on merit.

This is a consciousness of class identity that also happens to put a cat amongst the pigeons of the narrow-in-scope ‘culture war’ debates.

The concept of the strategic overview – the idea that all challenges take place in a larger context, makes sense of why the principles of democratic socialism relates enough to “the marketability of workers” that it deserves to be interpreted for modern times.

Graham Maddox writes:

“Under Kim Beazley, it (Labor) has returned to its moral criticism of the capitalist state.”

Shock Horror!

Someone “questioning” the capitalist state!

Isn’t that Marxist?

Or, is it more the case that our understanding of Capitalism is such a stew, that our biased mainstream media lives in denial of the fact that Beazley is doing the only thing you can do to find ‘a coherent plan’ for the Left of politics – to question the status quo of our economic system.

Graham Maddox writes:

“There are two sides to the moralist tendency of socialism.”

Guys, in modern day “marketing speak” you can easily “substitute” the moralist tendency with situation analysis of opportunities and problems.

This is an important point that applies to the first phase in my “three phase strategic thinking lifecycle” – opportunity > risk > reality – that just happens to match democratic socialism philosophy:

“Opportunity for all - where economy meets society. The modern Labor Party would set equality of opportunity as its highest aspiration. Every person should have the same opportunity for a happy, fulfilling life. And every person should be equipped with the same capacity to take advantage of opportunities presented to them.”. [6]

That said, the one problem with “equality of opportunity”, a liberal concept more than it is a democratic socialist concept, is that it doesn’t take into account this challenge, this game, as taking place in a larger context – the context of the strategic overview – the strategic thinking development cycle.

Only by doing this can you understand how the potential for equality of opportunity in the “opportunity” phase of the strategic thinking life cycle is impaired by the next phase of “risk”, in which the scope is issues decided upon at the ballot box is influenced by powerful media and political forces, while the third phase of “reality”
also impairs the proper analysis of opportunities and threats because the Howard Government only wants to release the data that supports the freezing of its conservative ideology.

So, in actual fact, modern day democratic socialism is really just “marketability of workers” and is a cat amongst the pigeons of the culture wars because this is one issue that finds no place within the “AB Reader divide”.

Marketing authors Jack Trout and Al Ries state very clearly what John Howard’s “enterprise worker” rhetoric doesn’t explain:

“Any proper noun is a brand. You are a brand. And if you want to be truly successful in life, you should consider yourself a brand and act accordingly.” [7]

Effectively, if everyone is a brand, then everyone is a marketer. I define the role of the marketer as:

One who identifies the opportunity (or problem), the risks involved and the reality (will the plan deliver reward, or will it have to be reviewed?).

The socialisation objective of 2007 is simply “equality of planning process for the purpose of personal development”.

Why?

So that everyone has a marketing plan. It makes perfect sense that in our globalised world, you can’t leave home without it.

In the end, it’s so simple – yet so easy to overlook because of the problem identified by David McKnight, who addresses the larger context of the strategic overview of opportunity > risk > reality, when he writes:

The problems of the Left reside at the level of ideas and philosophy. Tinkering with policies, presentation and leadership is not enough". [7]

It is my understanding of what Kim Beazley – my political hero - stands for that has guided my exploration of the challenges low-income earners face in the 21st century.

This is why my support of Kim Beazley’s leadership is solid and uncompromised – and will remain so until the end.

…From Justin

Resources:

[1] Brandenburger, Adam M. and Nalebuff, Barry J. Co-opetition. 1996 Currency Doubleday. Chapter 8: Scope, Section 5: The Larger Game. Page 260.

[2] http://www.aph.gov.au/Hansard/reps/dailys/dr301106.pdf

[3] Maddox, Graham. Australian Democracy in theory and practice. Pearson Longman. Chapter 7: Australian Political Ideas and Doctrines. Page 327.

[4] Time to say farewell, Kim, By Paul Rodan. Published in The Age newspaper.
November 22, 2006

[5] Trout, Jack and Ries, Al. Marketing Warfare. 1986 Plume. Pages 202, 209.

[6]http://www.cis.org.au/events/policymakers/emerson_lecture/Emerson_lecture_06.pdf

[7] Ries, Al and Ries, Laura. The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. 1998 HaperCollins Books. Page 5: What is a brand?

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk
Part Six: The Egg Timer
Part Seven: The Egg Carton
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2006-12-03T17:05:00.000+11:00

Cat amongst the pigeons

My final word on the Labor leadership ballot - to be published in a few hours time.

2006-12-01T23:22:00.000+11:00

Labor's general need for strong strategy is greater than any specific need for leadership change

Kevin Rudd will challenge Kim Beazley for leadership of the ALP on Monday.

I have extracted three particular unedited letters from the Matt Price Blog at http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mattprice/ because they echo some of my concerns that everybody is making the great mistake of focusing too much on leadership and not enough on the strategic overview.

Strong Strategy = addressing leadership, message stickiness and context

REGARDING KIM BEAZLEY - THE CURRENT LEADER
aussie battler of Heidelberg writes on
01 December at 12:50 PM:

Beazley has shown some fancy footwork for once by calling a spill for the entire Labor front bench; effectively meaning that many Labor MPs will be too concerned about their own positions than changing leader.

Rudd knows that this is his only realistic shot at the leadership because of the anticipated push to install Bill Shorten straight into the leadership after next year’s election.

This leadership challenge just seems so unnecessary and utterly stupid. If Rudd wants the leadership so badly he should have challenged Beazley after Latham’s breakdown in 2005; thus saving Labor from repeating the same mistake that resulted in the 2004 election embarrassment.

Another factor going against the Rudd challenge will be next year’s NSW state election, which will suffocate the much needed exposure of a new leader there.

Futhermore, anyone who knows anything about polls knows that it’s all about long-term trends.

Aside from the most recent Newspoll, Labor’s primary was highly competitive at 39 per cent or above from March 2006 to September 2006.

Moreover, the validity of personal approval ratings has to be questioned, particularly after the Victorian state election where Ted Bailleu trailed Steve Bracks by just 10 points in terms of personal approval ratings (58-48), yet on election night the Liberals got smashed.

Expect Beazley to be returned to the leadership on Monday; expect the unions to slightly change tack in the campaign against the government’s IR laws, targeting swinging social conservatives who are uneasy about the impact of the reforms on families; expect Labor to make moderate gains next year in NSW and Queensland.

And expect to see Shorten to seriously contest the leadership after the next election.

REGARDING THE STICKINESS OF LABOR'S MESSAGE:
Michael of Newcastle writes on
01 December at 05:08 PM:

Why is this not a battle of ideas, and instead only a battle of personalities? It would actually matter if the ALP were voting on a new policy direction, or a new idea, instead of simply a new face to deliver the same old, carping, reactionary, out-dated, irrelevant message.

REGARDING THE CONTEXT IN WHICH LABOR MUST COMPETE WITH HOWARD
Christine of Hobart writes on
01 December at 06:19 PM:

Absolutely agree, Matt of Sydney. This is brilliant orchestration by Howard and the “Australian”

Labor was down in the polls a fortnight ago, and suddenly Beazley has to go. The fact that Labor is ahead, and has been for three quarters of recent polls doesn’t count. Every day, there’s an article in the Australian about how dreadful Beazley is. Interesting that it’s come at just the point when the AWB report comes out.

I also agree that it doesn’t matter who wins the vote on Monday. If it’s not Beazley, which I think will be a pity, Rudd and or Gillard will be torn to shreds in very short order. I’ve no doubt the dirt machines are already working at full throttle to make sure they can destroy whoever gets the job.

It’s also interesting that this has happened today after Beazley gave one of his best speeches yesterday in Melbourne at the rally. But did that get the coverage it deserved? Of course not. It was all about how the MCG wasn’t full. The fact that three train lines were out of action at the time due to signal failure (how convenient) hardly rated a mention as a reason why the Melbourne rally wasn’t so well attended. But what about Sydney? That wasn’t the same disappointment, so it didn’t get the attention.

We are being manipulated on a daily basis by the press. Censorship by omission, placing of articles, concentration on those things which disadvantage Labor, and those which build up the Liberals - it’s all part of a huge and obvious pattern.

So get ready for a character assassination of whomever is elected on Monday as Labor leader. Not immediately, but when something goes wrong for the Government.

2006-12-01T02:36:00.000+11:00

What's really needed to lift federal Labor: A comprehensive response to Beazley's critics

Recently, as part of my tafe marketing course, I developed an understanding of what it means to "roll back" a decision.

What surprised me about my discovery is how these words that have been used to haunt federal opposition leader Kim Beazley over the course of time are actually words so integral to understanding how the process of decision-making works.

Consider, for example, the sequence in which decisions are made in the economic theory of "trickle-down" (the economic system identified in my blog series 'The Wet Economic Six Pack' as 'The Waterfall')

"Trickle-down" being the economic theory that financial and other benefits received by big businesses gradually spread to benefit the rest of society [1]

However, an opposing point of view (what I'll be calling 'The Soda Fountain') can be
extracted from the discipline of project management.

This discipline teaches us that strategic thinking cannot be limited to thinking exclusively in sequence (in waterfall)

That's because strategic thinking is much more iterative than this. Like a fountain, and unlike a waterfall, water goes up as well as down - that is - steps are reviewed and repeated, and decisions are "rolled back" if necessary to gain greater understanding of alternative options.

Without the learning and understanding gained by reviewing steps in a sequence of decision-making, "the trickle-down effect" may not deliver the desired result, with limited options remaining to fix unintended consequences.

This is a very short example of the very comprehensive response I will be launching beyond the mainstream media's "desperate days campaign" that has been orchestrated by Fairfax, News Ltd and the ABC to cause maximum damage to Kim Beazley's leadership of the ALP.

While I accept that there are elements within the federal ALP that contribute to the uncertainty now clouding Mr. Beazley's future, what's caused the most damage has been the mainstream media's willingness to base their journalism on speculation and discretion, at the expense of upholding standard measurements of Kim Beazley's performance as leader.

The bias that has been demonstrated by these three media organisations will be comprehensively responded to - with no more regard given to their reputations than they have shown for Kim Beazley.

...From Justin

[1] Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

2006-11-30T01:21:00.000+11:00

Generation Y declares 'Bracksy' the winner

As I was about to step onto the platform of Melbourne Central railway station last Saturday night, I overheard a young man ask his mates whether anyone knew if John Howard had won the election.

I informed him that Steve Bracks had won the election.

“Bracksy!” he replied with a grin.

The good news for Steve Bracks is that, while this young man may not have been attentive about which election was held, he at least knows the Steve Bracks brand as “Bracksy” in much the same way many young Australians know the McDonalds brand as “Maccas”.

2006-11-28T10:49:00.000+11:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report: ‘Loaded Newspoll’ tell us that black is white.

PARTS NINE AND TEN: A BIG FAT HEN
The weight of decision-making criteria, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous

From Michael E. Gerber’s small business book ‘The E-Myth’ :

“As Theodore Levitt says in his stunning book, Marketing for Business Growth, “Discretion is the enemy of order, standardisation, and quality.”” [1]

When I switched on the radio this morning to hear the heavy emphasis given to Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley’s latest fall in the Newspoll, I expected to see negative changes in the standard measurements of the Newspoll –

- The primary vote (Labor went up 2 points to 39%),
- The two-party preferred (Labor returned to leading the Coalition 51% to 49%),
- The preferred Prime Minister (Howard went up 1 point to 55% and Beazley remained on 25%), and
- Performance (Howard slightly down, with Beazley’s approval (down 6 to 28%) and disapproval (up 8 to 58%) being the most significant change in the standard results. [2]

The message I have heard on one radio station this morning is this: the lead story is that Kim Beazley’s performance is worsening, while the party vote went up

Even this basic summary of the results is the point at which the news reporting in our mainstream media begins leaning towards bias.

Despite predictions from within the federal opposition itself that Labor would suffer a fall in Newspoll support, Labor maintained competitiveness in three of the four standard measurements.

But what’s really breathtaking about the mainstream media’s continued stubborn bias against Kim Beazley’s leadership is that to merely question Beazley leadership according to his performance figures (objectively measured against Howard’s performance) will never be enough if Labor continues its trend of building back its primary and two-party preferred votes.

Regardless of which of those two standard criteria is the most important (the truth differs according to context), a rise in both inevitably dilutes the importance of the leader’s performance.

It also follows that a boost in these two standard criteria has “a trickle-down effect” on the how the public judge performance of Kim Beazley.

I assure you that this is exactly the result our biased mainstream media are passionately working against. What’s at stake here is the media construct often referred to as ‘the culture wars’ – a continuous commitment by both the social-Left and social-Right to “raise whatever issue required” that distracts the general public from economic debate.

The debate of ‘the culture wars’ in the media are loaded with support, for a mix of common and distinct reasons, by both the Fairfax media and the ABC on the social-Left, and the Murdoch media empire on the social-Right. The culture wars are also supported by smaller circulating publications on the flanks, while many politicians and sectional interest groups provide the resources for the media to feed on.

I certainly do not make this allegation against the mainstream media without intending to support my claims with evidence. This evidence will be delivered in my blog in a committed way as my writing progresses.

Today, I only need begin by pointing out a measure of Kim Beazley’s resilient career in politics is that Newspoll had to load their results with not just one, but two “discretionary criteria” in their attempt to divide support of the opposition, just one day after the editor of The Australian newspaper himself declared that “voters are in no mood for taking risks with the divided or ill-prepared”.

A day later, the same newspaper is doing all it can to make sure it adds as much “discretionary criteria” to its own poll – “criteria that measures the federal opposition against itself” rather than against the government.

So compromised is “the order, standardisation, and quality” of this Newspoll that only three names appear in the question about who makes the best choice for leader of the Labor party – Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Kim Beazley – while four names appear in the far-fetched “dream team” question about who is the best team to lead the Labor Party – Kevin Rudd/Julia Gillard or Kim Beazley/Jenny Macklin.

Already before this poll was taken, both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have publicly demonstrated their willingness to show a united front and keep their own leadership desires in reserve.

Says Marketing authors Jack Trout and Al Ries:

“The commander who has a large reserve force is in a dominant position. Nor is it always necessary or even desirable, to commit all your reserves to every battle”. [3]

Contrast this to the “double-loaded extra criteria” Newspoll had to pile on in their desperate bid continue building up the culture war’s house of cards.

Not that it’s been enough to stop Labor restoring the majority of its standard results that have, whether others like it or not, been delivered under Beazley’s leadership. Even Jack Trout in the same book I just quoted is mature enough to know the difference between ideal internal leadership and externally-directed strategy.

Mark Latham already demonstrated that one can be present in the absence of the other. While Mark Latham’s strength was providing that ideal internal leadership, Kim Beazley’s strength has been an ability to guide Labor towards externally-directed strategy. After all, Labor does actually have to engage with the concerns “out there” rather than “in here”. It is on this key point that the mainstream media continues to “live in bitter denial”, as demonstrated by today’s loaded Newspoll.

So obsessed with confirming its own true story, the mainstream media is even prepared to compromise the “the order, standardisation, and quality” of its own polling so that they deny the federal Labor Party their own true story – “a story that reflects the concerns” of ordinary Australians.

Writes Michael E. Gerber:

“You can’t understand the value of an entire process by separating it from its parts, or its parts from the process. Because once you separate the parts of a process (as The Australian has attempted to do by headlining Labor’s win in the two-party preferred vote: “Unhappy voters dump Beazley for Rudd”, effectively telling us that the black result is a white result), once you take a process apart (break it down into what this report calls “scrambled elements”), there is no process.

There is no movement whatsoever. There is only this thing or that. There is no beginning, no middle, no end (in other words, no plan). There’s no story, there’s only an event frozen in time (The interface level of my spin-off series ‘The Wet Economic Six Pack’ addresses the “refreezing of ideology”)

You’re describing an action stripped of its purpose, its meaning, its vitality”. [1]

This is the dangerous, highly risky environment that envelopes the mainstream media’s extreme, one-sided argument for leadership changes in the federal ALP.

There’s only one “reasonable way to deal with the unreasonable” in these circumstances – that is to challenge any credibility ‘the culture wars’ may have remaining beyond the mid-term elections in the United States that have already shaken its flimsy foundations.

This amounts to demonstrating a healthy scepticism towards both ends of the newspaper spectrum – most notably The Age on the Left and The Australian on Right.

…From Justin

Resources:

[1] Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth. 1995 Harper-Collins. Pages 125-128.
[2] Voters dumping Beazley for Rudd: Dennis Shanahan, Political Editor
The Australian - November 28, 2006
[3] Trout, Jack and Ries, Al. Marketing Warfare. 1986 Plume. Pages 202, 209.

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot

Part Two - Eggs Benedict

Part Three: Chicken or Egg?

Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)

Part Five: The Egg Yolk

Part Six: The Egg Timer

Part Seven: The Egg Carton

Part Eight: Free Range Eggs

Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen

Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets

Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2006-11-23T00:34:00.000+11:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report: A conga line of media bias against Kim Beazley

PART TWELVE: QUAIL EGGS (QUARKS & QUIRKS)
Integration of previously scrambled elements into a coherent plan

Laurie Oakes writes in this week’s edition of The Bulletin:

“The odds are that Beazley will hang on to lead Labor into next year’s election campaign. It would take a major catalyst – that is, another serious stuff-up by the Labor leader, or a disastrous poll – to change that.

But Beazley clearly fears that the situation could change. That is why he is being so timid over the question of a front-bench reshuffle. As I have written before, a reshuffle would produce losers, and Beazley is afraid of adding to the group of caucus malcontents.”

What I have just quoted is the only fair and balanced comments you will read this week in the mainstream media. Yet even that is not giving credit to all of Laurie Oakes’ article, which is just as scathing of the federal opposition leader as other articles which appear this week in The Age and The Australian newspapers (with the exception of The Australian’s Michael Costello providing a scarce counterpoint).

Indeed, these comments from Mr. Oakes are thought provoking. Another article in The Bulletin highlights the opportunity that’s seemingly escaped the grasp of federal Labor: “The tired 10-year-old Howard Government in a rut or outright crisis in just about every major policy position – Iraq, national security, interest rates, the environment, and workplace relations.”

To quote a historical quote by Elizabeth Seton – “When so rich a harvest is before us, why do we not gather it? All is in our hands if we will but use it.”

With such a rich harvest of issues, why doesn’t Mr. Beazley risk a reshuffle of frontbench responsibilities?

I dare say that such a manoeuvre may yet form “part of a strategy” that delivers a result for Labor - to differentiate itself from the Coalition in a beneficial and well targeted way.

However, this is as close to consensus as I’ll get with our extremely biased mainstream media. The almost completely one-sided view being presented is that there’s now a trade-off between Kim Beazley leading Labor to the next election and Labor’s ability to win that election.

In all, there are at least four critics I’ll be responding to between now and Christmas (need it take that long) before the final draft of this article is completed – the first being the above-quoted Laurie Oaks.

My aim is to explain how their collectively one-sided argument we are getting about Kim Beazley is resulting in “a conga line of analysis paralysis” – as these biased writers confuse their ideologically-driven desire for a Kevin Rudd – Julia Gillard joint leadership alternative with having a coherent plan to get Labor elected into Government late next year.

This conga line, including an honorary research fellow from Monash University who wrote in The Age, are very quick to point out the problems and what may seem to be missed opportunities.

They are not so quick to acknowledge that you only have a coherent plan if you’ve integrated the opportunities, risks and reality into an outlook.

Take the issue of a frontbench reshuffle. Whatever opportunities there may be, Beazley does need to take the risks into account when making his decision and make the best assessment he possibly can about the reality before him.

In the book Marketing Warfare, authors Jack Trout and Al Ries make a distinction between “the Himalayas of Marketing” – strategy and timing – with everything else: what they label “the Catskills of Marketing” (Catskills are a range of low mountains in East New York).

For example, the timing of a frontbench reshuffle may well be an opportunity that carries far less risk for Kim Beazley at a calculated point in the next six months when the media have less opportunity to speculate on the suitability of Beazley as Labor leader.

With no change in the Labor leadership likely before the next election anyway, Beazley should only remember three words from this week:

“Opportunity, Risk, Reality”.

No, they don’t come from that honorary research fellow from Monash University – who achieved nothing more with his anti-Beazley article than add to the conga line I’ll be speaking out against over the next few weeks.

Rather, these words come from two very well presented Advanced Diploma students at Chisholm Institute who yesterday encapsulated the role of the marketer: one who identifies the opportunity (or problem), the risks involved and the reality (will the plan deliver reward, or will it have to be reviewed?).

I say to Laurie Oakes – however timid Beazley may be about a holding a frontbench reshuffle that happens to coincide with “peak Conga Line season”, his unwillingness to risk change at this precise time may well be the difference between a reshuffle that makes a genuine contribution to a coherent plan, and one that produces nothing more than a “Catskill result”.

Labor cannot afford to confuse “scrambled elements” with a coherent plan. Mr. Beazley is not necessarily unwise to take heed of the risks involved.

In this article, I would define “scrambled elements” as being such elements that might hold together months of interesting news articles about Mark Latham back in 2004, yet didn’t produce a coherent enough plan to actually deliver a desired, ultimate result.

Despite his scathing critique of Kim Beazley, perhaps the reason Laurie Oakes still doubts the much media-hyped Rudd-Gillard joint ticket idea is because he suspects, as I do, that it doesn’t amount to a coherent plan.

More later…

…From Justin.

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Now appearing in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk
Part Six: The Egg Timer
Part Seven: The Egg Carton
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2006-11-18T21:02:00.000+11:00

News that travels quickly and widely can also travel wildly.

Errol Simper from The Australian writes:

At some stage in your life some kind of mental osmosis lets you know people are just people, no matter what their title or community standing. The human condition is a controlling thing. We're all flawed. There's no purpose to setting anyone up as the unassailable embodiment of goodness or greatness. They'll always disappoint, just as we so frequently disappoint ourselves. [1]

Such is the case with federal opposition leader Kim Beazley, who yesterday confused the name of Republican political campaigner Karl Rove with comedian Rove McManus while expressing sympathy to McManus for the loss of his wife Belinda Emmett.

This incident reminds me of a newspaper article I used for on-air discussion on my Kix FM morning radio program back in 1999.

It’s worth mentioning it on this occasion because it demonstrates the claim made by Matt Price in The Australian today that such gaffes as the one made by Mr. Beazley can travel quickly and widely. [2]

Dated Monday, February 8, 1999:

“Mariah Carey was one of the first celebrities to comment on the death of the King of Jordan. Mariah told CNN, "I'm inconsolable at the present time. I was a very good friend of Jordan, he was probably the greatest basketball player this country has ever seen, we will never see his like again."

When told by reporters that it was King Hussein of Jordan who had died and not Michael Jordan, Mariah was then led away by her security in a state of 'confusion.'”

Almost eight years later, the Beazley gaffe gave me reason to hunt down the Mariah Carey gaffe as part of my brainstorming exercise for this article, and what I found surprised me:

The news about the Mariah Carey gaffe travelled quickly and widely, just as Matt Price suggests can happen, yet the actual story was false:

“No, Mariah didn't say this to CNN, nor did the snippet above appear in USA Today. The whole thing is another fabricated quote designed to make Mariah Carey appear foolishly ignorant and self-absorbed, much like the earlier hoax about her statements concerning starving children.

This one appears to have originated with a joke posted to the newsgroups alt.music.mariah.carey and alt.fan.madonna on 7 February 1999, with the USA Today and CNN attributions added later.”. [3]

In contrast, the Beazley gaffe is true, yet the editor of The Age newspaper today demonstrates how quickly the truth can be turned into myth, very oddly describing Mr. Beazley’s admission of “misspeaking” as a form of “Newspeak”.

“Mr Beazley too often "mis-speaks". There have been trivial examples — such as calling Sydney radio personality Alan Jones, Alan James — and more substantial ones. In August his confusion between Ian Macfarlane, then Reserve Bank head, and the federal minister of that name indicated a lack of preparation for a press conference.

This unattractive example of "Newspeak" is how the would-be prime minister described his confusion.

This may seem like small stuff, hardly worth worrying about, but if a potential prime minister is unable to get small details right, how can the public be expected to trust him with things that really matter.” [4]

Funny that – I can’t actually remember the last time The Age analysed any of Kim Beazley’s speeches about “things that really matter”. I’ll be interested to find out if The Age is willing to remind me of those occasions that seem to have slipped from my memory.

Especially given there’s no shortage of passionate Beazley speeches. They’re all recorded on the Hansard – raw material waiting for journalists and opinion-makers to pick them up and to progress the influence of those speeches.

Unlike the Beazley gaffes, however, the mainstream media is not nearly as willing to quickly and widely spread the influence of those speeches.

The consequence is Ed’s “wild accusation” that Beazley’s straightforward line of defence – that he had “misspoken” – is a form of Orwellian Newspeak.

Having checked the Encarta Dictionary for the word “misspoken”, my very clear understanding about Ed’s false representation of Kim Beazley is one that compares hares and tortoises:

That the editor of The Age has behaved like the hare - making a rushed, ill-considered comment that deserves to be compared with the above thoughts of Errol Simper – who behaves more like the tortoise.

The Age paints Kim Beazley as the “Newspeak” spin doctor, yet Beazley says nothing in his apology that even hints of anything other than a straightforward admission of fault. All he’s done is admit to being human.

This overreaching use of the Beazley gaffe is clearly driven by The Age’s overt editorial drive to push for a leadership change in the federal Labor Party:

“A week ago, it seemed risky for Labor to contemplate changing its leadership so close to next year's election; now sticking with the status quo could be the greater risk.”

Actually, “the greatest risk” for Labor is if the media successfully turn Kim Beazley into an exceedingly negative caricature of his real self – just like they tried to paint an exceedingly positive caricature of Mark Latham.

The opinion polls have proven that both extreme approaches can successfully take the attention off the “things that really matter” to voters.

However, as the crucial U.S. election fight for Virginia demonstrated, George Allen’s attempt at constructing a caricature of opponent Jim Webb was not enough to distract voters from their real concerns. George Allen was narrowly defeated and the limits of influence held by the hard-right wing media in the U.S. was left exposed.

That says to me that while the mainstream media fancy themselves as the “kingmakers” of government, there is a limit to their influence.

Especially should readers make a fair judgement about the anti-Beazley rhetoric of The Age editorial by comparing it with the pro-Latham rhetoric made by The Age’s Shaun Carney in January 2004:

“Latham’s leadership, built as it is on an intensely personal – some would say idiosyncratic – view of political action, presents a profound challenge to Howard”. [5]

Those comments turned out to be “a wild observation”, and one that was far from accurate.

More proof that we’re all flawed in some way – not just Kim Beazley.

…From Justin

[1] Portrait of the radio star as a flawed man A CERTAIN SCRIBE Errol Simper November 09, 2006
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20724310-14622,00.html
[2] Matt Price: Cynical ploy rebounds on Bomber THE SKETCH Matt Price November 18, 2006
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20778291-601,00.html
[3] http://www.snopes.com/quotes/carey2.htm
[4] Today’s editorial in The Age:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/memo-leaders-the-answers-are-blowing-in-the-wind/2006/11/17/1163266779337.html
[5] Wide of the Mark. The Reader Magazine – 28 January 2005.

2006-11-14T03:25:00.000+11:00

The Wet Economic Six Pack - Special 'Airhead' Edition

COALFACE LEVEL: CANS IN CONTEXT
The relative strengths of driving and resisting forces

After last week’s mid-term election results in the United States, it should now be officially recognised that when communism was buried under the fall of the Berlin Wall, so was ‘conservative’ commonsense.

The very commonsense the ancient Chinese symbolised their understanding of with the yin-yang.

Communism in the main was swallowed by a rapidly changing world.So just why should American, or even Australian ‘conservatives’ be surprised if instead of enjoying some kind of permanent ascendency, they are instead the next to be swallowed up into the change vortex?

Certainly, this is the outlook for Conservatives, if Democrat Joe Biden is any authority on the matter.

As was reported by The Weekend Australian:

>Democrat Joe Biden, who is set to become chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee, predicts Republicans will close the "chapter in that book of the sort of hard-Right conservative movement", just as Democrats had to abandon their big-government philosophy, which reigned from 1932 to 1980, when voters turfed out president Jimmy Carter. Biden was Carter's campaign chief.< [1]

No doubt there are ‘specific’ reasons that explain the fall of Republican domination in the United States Congress – reasons such as growing anxiousness about the war in Iraq – reasons quite different to those specific causes of communism’s fall.

In this essay, I want to deal with a ‘general reason’ that suggests the fall of the Republicans was due to their own ‘resistance to change’.This is despite their intention to be ‘drivers of change’, especially in regards to globalisation and democracy in the Middle East.

The ‘Coalface Level’ of this report is modelled on Kurt Lewin’s ‘force field analysis’. A method that proposes that two sets of forces operate in any system – forces that operate for change (the driving forces) and forces that operate against change (the resisting forces). If the two forces are equal in strength then the system is in equilibrium [2]

To give purpose to the use of this model, I then limit the terms of reference to three words – the same words that are analysed and synthesised for project plans on the ‘Surface Level’ of this report.These three words – management, environment and systems – are treated here as systems in which opposing forces operate within.These opposing forces then form The Wet Economic Six Pack – our ‘cans in context’:

1st Can in the Six Pack: Management: The Scattergun
2nd Can in the Six Pack: Management: The Archer
3rd Can in the Six Pack: Environment: The Macro
4th Can in the Six Pack: Environment: The Micro
5th Can in the Six Pack: Systems: The Waterfall
6th Can in the Six Pack: Systems: The Soda Fountain

Whether any one of our ‘cans in context’ represents a driving force or a resisting force……depends on the ‘context’ of the issue being raised here.

In its completed form, this essay will contain a feast of thoughts from a wide range of thinkers. A few of these include:

· Marketing Guru Jack Trout – on the two basic problems likely to have troubled the Republicans in the mid-term elections. Plus, a word on resources;

· We’ll be synthesising the words of Jack Trout with the recent words of Hilary Clinton, who said last week that it was time for the United States to begin the journey back from the partisan, ideological division to the vital, dynamic centre. As part of putting ‘the macro can in context’, we’ll take a look at the ‘environmental uncertainty matrix’ to explain why Clinton’s carefully considered words have resonance;

· Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – Republican or Independent? Writes the editor of The Australian newspaper this morning: “As the US election result shows, the race is on for the centre. California's republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, provides the stand-out example of political survival through reinvention. He ditched unpopular policies and captured the centre, and with it almost 80 per cent of the vote.”

· Australian editor and journalist Shelley Gare will help set the economic theme of this essay as I suggest how her insight into issues is somewhat similar to the insight of British business philosopher Charles Handy;

· Michael Duffy adds insight to my essay with two recent interviews he has conducted on his ABC Radio program ‘Counterpoint’; and

· Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley will be putting ‘the macro can in context’ with a recent speech made in the House of Representatives about an Industrial Relations matter that relates to recent concerns I have been expressing here.

Time restricts me from completing this rather long essay at this time.

Perhaps two, even three weeks will be required.

Meanwhile, my main priority right now is completing the final weeks of my tafe year.

So, as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say - I'll be back.

…From Justin

References

[1] Geoff Elliott – Remaking America. Published inside The Weekend Australian. 11 November 2006
[2] Robbins, Bergman, Stagg, Coulter. Foundations of Management, 2nd Edition.

*** Refresh your senses - The Wet Economic Six Pack ***

A Scrambled Eggs Special Report on Commerce -"Management of Environmental Systems" - applied to three levels of strategic thinking:

Surface Level - Crosswords in Strategy
Interface Level - Monkeys in the Middle
Coalface Level - Cans in Context

2006-11-14T03:17:00.000+11:00

The Wet Economic Six Pack

INTERFACE LEVEL - MONKEYS IN THE MIDDLE
The unfreezing, changing and refreezing of ideas

A is for 'antecendent': See no evil
B is for 'belief': Hear no evil
C is for 'consequences': Speak no evil
D is for 'dispute': Disputing the three wise monkeys

*** satire ***

Syme addresses Winston in a scene from George Owell's political satire 'Nineteen Eighty-Four':
"You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston.

I've read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally.

Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and and its useless shades of meaning.

You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly 'one' word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten, the range of conciousness smaller". [1]

*** real life ***

Today, in an article titled 'Multiculturalism is a dirty word", The Australian newspaper's Cath Hart reports:

THE Howard Government is looking to scrap the word "multiculturalism" as part of a major revamp of ethnic policy.

In a move seen as a shift in emphasis away from fostering diversity and towards increasing integration and responsibility among migrants, the government is canvassing alternative words to describe how ethnic communities harmoniously integrate into Australian society.

Mr Robb, parliamentary secretary for Multicultural Affairs, said:

"I expressed my frustration that the term is not often helpful because different people listen to it and give different meanings to it and a lot of the others expressed similar frustrations," Mr Robb said. Victorian multiculturalism commissioner Mr Soliman said:

"Our understanding was there was a lot of effort to find an alternative name to the multiculturalism policy because it carried negative connotations,"

"I suggested 'multiculturalism II' because it implies that it was evolving." Another suggestion was the "integration policy".

Professor Tom Stannate said he was concerned about the new policy.

"Clearly Andrew Robb and the cabinet are doing a whole lot of reshaping and developing a whole new vocabulary and so forth.

I expect references to unity and diversity will be lost from the new policy because of the diversity thing going out." [2]

*** Nineteen Eighty-Four: Fact or Fiction ? ***

Yes folks - I am about to suggest that Nineteen Eight-Four is not entirely fiction.

While the Howard Government is not about the regulate the English Dictionary, which is what 'The Party' does in George Owell's satire, there is, I believe, truth to George Orwell's observation that a government expressing its 'beliefs' with zeal isn't enough to turn a situation favouring those beliefs into status quo. Orthodoxy also requires appealing to our unconciousness.

Philip Adams, in a rather timely fashion, can be quoted today as saying:

"We are amazing creatures, combining this great gift for connecting things into what we call consciousness - yet capable of remaining profoundly and dangerously ignorant." [3]

Our great gift for connecting things into what we call consciousness is what this report identifies as "synthesis". The surface level model of The Wet Economic Six Pack uses a "crossword" metaphor to demonstrate how identical words can be used both Downwards (for analysis) or Across (for synthesis).

Today's article, on the interface level of this report, uses 'a change process model' to demonstrate how 'antecedents' (situations that trigger a response) cause 'beliefs' to be either challenged (unfrozen) or reinforced (refrozen), and what 'consequences' (the way be behave) result from a combination of our conscious and unconscious thinking.

Business author Michael E. Gerber writes:

"Its job (your conscious mind) is to gather the information needed for a decision. Most of what it does, however, is unconscious, that is, automatic, habitual." [4]

A 'consequence' of this is highlighted by Philip Adams: that we are capable of remaining profoundly and dangerously ignorant.

Before you consider the Howard Government's proposed renaming of Australia's ethnic policy - from 'multiculturalism' to 'integration' - as not that bigger deal, at least question the relevance of why the political Right-wingers have campaigned so heavily against a word that was intended to celebrate diversity and tolerance?

Why has the meaning of the word 'multiculturalism' been divided between those that still believe in its original intent and those that believe multiculturalism is effectively a breeding ground for Islamic Fascism?

Or - more to the point - why are the acts of extreme global terrorists, people that will never represent any social norm - cause any of us to question normal multiculturalism with such zeal that there's a push to "unfreeze its entire meaning" and then leads us to "a refreezing of a whole new word" to take its place?

To the conscious mind, "the surface level of thinking", this seems a sensible move: A shift in emphasis away from fostering diversity and towards increasing integration and responsibility among migrants.

This shift in emphasis appears to be a response to a new cultural challenge to democracy as we know it - that going quite against the grain of the multicultural ideal, there needs to be a response to the fact that since 2001 - "new fracture lines emerged in which distinct cultural groups, such as Muslims, would never converge with the Christian West" [5].

The change process model works like this:

Multiculturalism is "unfrozen" as an old orthodoxy (Oldspeak) by those sceptics, largely on the Right-wing of politics, who articulate a need for a change in thinking.

This change process has pretty much been underway in Australia since the events of Tampa coincided with 9/11 in the year 2001.

Since the M.V. Tampa entered into our national consciousness, so has this word "integration" (the Newspeak) that's so keenly positioned against "multiculturalism" (the Oldspeak) by those on the political Right.

The shift in emphasis is to move from multiculturalism to integration, then to "refreeze"" the changed idea in the hope that it increases "the driving forces" that break the old status quo of putting diversity and tolerance first, while reducing the influence of the "restraining forces" that threaten to scrutinise the new situation - restraining forces like the "latte sipping, inner city elites" that the conservative writers persist in making a myth of.

If George Orwell's theory works in reality, I believe there's an "unintended consequence" that will result from the refreezing of ethnic policy under the name of "integration".

However, even though I myself am merely a "flat white sipping, outer surbanite", that's unlikely to be enough to spare me facing accusations of being a far-Left conspiracy theorist, alongside the "latte sipping, inner city elites" :)

So I'm quite wary of the so-called Latte Left's poorly executed scepticism of the terrorist threat, which recently empowered conservative columnist Andrew Bolt to mock The Age newspaper by quoting this little Nineteen Eighty-Four metaphor:

"Choruses a comrade from The Age: "It is impossible not to see a parallel between 1984's propaganda enemy Goldstein (an enemy invented by Big Brother to scare citizens into obedience), and the bogeyman image of Osama bin Laden."

That's right - the (Melbourne International Arts) festival headlined 1984 to pleasure those who'd love to imagine George Bush as a modern Stalin, a US jail for terrorists as a Soviet gulag and Osama bin Laden as just a bogeyman whipped up by government propagandists." [6]

The problem with reading too much into the semantics used in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that in real life, "a shift in semantics" alone is not capable of brainwashing people into a state of absolute conformity (totalitarianism) that we see happen in George Orwell's story.

In fact, this shift in semantics is a quite normal part of politics - "Us versus them" is a forever shifting battle in sematics "that will occur regardless" of whether people are governed by totalitarianism or democracy:

Two examples of current day politics prove this point:

Under totalitarianism in North Korea:

"The U.S. extreme threat of a nuclear war and sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK to conduct a nuclear test, an essential process for bolstering nuclear deterrent, as a self-defense measure in response," the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement, using its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. [7]

Under democracy in the United States, as reported today in The Age:

"The Republican Party's strategy has been to target key seats with ad campaigns that, on the whole, are breathtaking in their nastiness and level of personal abuse.

In Virginia, an increasingly desperate George Allen has taken to using ads to accuse Jim Webb of being in favour of child sex and sexual perversion, based on the fact that in some of Webb's acclaimed war novels there are characters who have sex with under-age girls in the brothels of Bankok and Saigon". [8]

Most people in a democracy are "conscious enough" to know that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't really democratic at all, yet you can bet that the congress election campaign of George Allen is deliberately targeted to the "unconscious, automatic, habitual" thinking of a select segment of voters in Virginia.

My great concern about the use of the word "integration" replacing the word "multiculturism" is my belief that:

The Howard Government wish to reinforce that word often enough for Australians to develop a quite "unconscious, habitual belief" that how the rest of the world "integrates" into our social behaviour "is of greater consequence" to our well-being than what methods of integration are adopted by Australian government, business firms and individual citizens to "integrate" our national economy into the world economy.

In other words, I am asserting that increased scutiny of "social integration" is encouraged by the Howard Government and its most core supporters as a pretext against any increased scrutiny of Australia's "economic integration" with the rest of the world.

Scrutiny of issues such as the diligent management of foreign workers, microeconomic concerns of the individual worker in a globalised economy, socioeconomic infrastructure, marketing infrastructure, global trading relationships and the resulting balances of trade between Australia and the rest of the world.

I do believe that these are issues that the Howard Government does not want us voters to be conscious about.

I challenge my reader that you cannot be "truly conscious of what integration is all about" without being conscious of everything important to your well-being that relates to the subject.

I do believe that a heavy emphasis on replacing multiculturalism with so-called "integration", while ignoring everything else that is important about "socioeconomic integation as a whole", is bad for the economy.

Over time, the terms of reference I refer to in The Wet Economic Six Pack - "management, environment and systems" - will be used to expand this point of view.

A chapter of Alex Carey's 20-year old book 'Taking the risk out of democracy' has a chapter dedicated to George Owell's writing called 'The Orwellian Diversion'.

In this chapter, he says something that I think is relevant to the danger of freezing the meaning of a word like "integration" into our national identity, especially as we are destined to face a course of rapidly changing global economic integration - a time when the word "integration" will take on "a considerable number of meanings".

Writes Mr. Carey:

"I would argue that the abandonment of an interconnected view of the community is deeper and more dangerous than ever before. Its course is not due to a natural inevitability but is held in place, almost artificially, by the bitter divisions of our world.". [9]

Freezing a word like "integration" to mean, above anything else, how migrants integrate into our community (by turning this word into the name of a government department about ethnic affairs) is simply the Howard Government diverting attention away from scrutiny over economic management - which is now very much to do with finding our place in an integrated, global economy. Of course, the question I haven't yet answered is "why?"

Why would the Howard Government do this?

To "concentrate your conciousness", that's why.

Consider this metaphor:

"To play any game well, you first have to learn the rules, or principles of the game. And second, you have to forget about them. That is, you have to learn to play without thinking about the rules. A good tennis player doesn't think about how to hold the racquet or the finer points of stroke-making while playing the game. A tennis player concentrates on outplaying the opponent" [10] Under no circumstances does the Howard Government want to raise the consciousness of Middle Australia to the possibility that it's made any decisions that causes it to be in opposition to their interests.

Their use of the word "integration" is designed to reinforce a new behaviour of nationalism.....or, at it was known ten years ago - a behaviour of "one nation" thinking.

It wants the ordinary person in Middle Australia to learn and practice "one narrow meaning of integration" until that word leaves your conscious mind and gets buried into your unconscious mind.

This abuse of the word "integration", at a time when people's decision-making depends on an intellectual grasp of integration issues that needs to be much broader.

Writes Michael E. Gerber:

"Its not your conscious mind that has to make the decisions, it's your unconscious mind." How we learn, practice and reinforce our understanding of a word like "integration" has long-term strategic implications for our national economic interest that I will raise in future articles of The Wet Economic Six Pack.

The core backers of the Howard Government - big business - know damn well that "the real consequences of integration" relate to both "global economic integration of our national economy" and "the integrative growth strategies of our firms".

For this reason, the word "integration" is meant to be of equal importance to every Howard Government department, not just the ethnic policy-making department.

To oppose a plural interpretation of the word "multiculturalism" is not in the interests of democracy either, no matter which side of the debate you sit on.

So I urge all Australian moderates to oppose the Howard Government's intention to destroy the example we have set for the world - the world's richest multiculturalism.

How is "the destruction of words" like multiculturalism any different from the political correctness that PM John Howard has claimed to be so sceptical of?

Or is John Howard no longer the same man that Australians first elected in 1996?

...From Justin

References:

[1] Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1970 Penguin Books
[2] 'Multiculturalism is a dirty word", The Australian - 4 November 2006
[3] Google with your mind - Phillip Adams November 04, 2006
[4] Gerber, Michael. The E-Myth. 1995 Harper Business
[5] The Australian's 2026 - A vision for the nation's future. Published recently in The Australian [6] http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20611763-25717,00.html
[7] http://www.kfmb.com/printable/?id=65352
[8] Michael Gawenda reports in The Age - 4 November 2006 [9] Carey, Alex. Taking the risk out of democracy. 1995 UNSW Press. [10] Trout, Jack and Ries, Al. Marketing Warfare. 1986 Plume.

*** Refresh your senses - The Wet Economic Six Pack ***

A Scrambled Eggs Special Report on Commerce - "Management of Environmental Systems" - applied to three levels of strategic thinking:

Surface Level - Crosswords in Strategy
Interface Level - Monkeys in The Middle
Coalface Level - Cans in Context

2006-11-02T10:52:00.000+11:00

Senator Steve Fielding is placing "fraudulence first" to evade diligent understanding of gay issues

(i) An example of complex relationships:

http://www.aare.edu.au/02pap/gil02454.htm

Suicide is now the leading cause of death by injury in Australia ahead of car accidents and homicide, and it is the largest single cause of death in Australian men. In recent years, several reports have linked homosexual orientation to youth suicide. Studies estimate nearly 30 percent of gay youths attempt suicide (Nicholas and Howard, 1998), but the complex relationship between the two has not been studied.

(ii) An example of how the dumb-down politics of the fraudulent “culture wars” is skilfully marketed by Family First, specifically in regards to their anti-gay rhetoric:

http://www.familyfirst.org.au/ffimages/File/Victoria/Media%20Releases/FF15%20Oct%2029%202006%20Extreme%20Greens%20are%20anti-family%20and%20anti-business1.pdf

According to this press release, homosexuality is being “promoted” to school kids.

What does this mean?

Are teenagers being allowed to “understand” the diversity of people they interact with, or are they being encouraged to “choose” between being straight or gay?

I challenge Mr. Fielding to “demonstrate diligence” and give us the answer to this question.

Otherwise, I urge the general public to consider weasel words like “promoted”, used in this context, to be evidence of Senator Steve Fielding doing all he can "to get himself promoted", while evading any diligent understanding of the issue itself.

The message of Family First is “manufactured” to reposition homosexuality as an act of extremism, while evading any diligent understanding of complex lives because “Stephen Fielding’s sole purpose” was to get a political slogan “distributed” through the most popular media possible.

Senator Steve Fielding – shame on you.

So full of political “intention” that you pay no “attention” to the people you attack.

...From Justin

2006-10-30T09:42:00.000+11:00

radioactive*dc

DC Skill Builder 18:

PLANNING AND CONTROLLING THE PROCESSING OF INFORMATION

I find myself constantly frustrated when I review over how much information I collect that ultimately doesn’t get used.

This only adds to the frustration of:

* finding it difficult to create a report that links different bits of information together;
* not adequately determining the actions of a project or;
* making a decision that turns out to be less informed, or too informed, than it needed to have been.

Essentially, there are three steps to processing and managing information in order to put it to use in a project:

* collecting it
* analysing it
* synthesising it

After this week hearing Phillip Adams on ABC Radio interview Chris Masters, author of the controversial Jonestown book, I’ve moved somewhat closer to realising that such information collecting and processing skill takes a lifetime to master.

“No Shit Sherlock”, you may be thinking.

However, it is not enough just to “learn” and “practice” information collection and processing, along with other skills I hope to address in this series.

It is also important to find case studies of experienced people like Chris Masters who are already putting the same skills to use as this “reinforces” the behaviours one can expect are associated with the skill.

Chris Masters has spent years collecting information about Alan Jones, yet debate raged last week about how “pertinent” the information collected about Alan Jones by Chris Masters has proven to be.

Two critics this week have included prominent gay advocate Rodney Croome and conservative-opinionated newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt.

The opinion of Rodney Croome reinforces something said by author Malcolm Gladwell – that the world, much as we want it to, does not accord with our intuition.

Here, Mr. Croome questions the intuition of the investigative journalist in regards to Jonestown:

“The way he (Chris Masters) relates Alan Jones’ sexuality to his public life is superficial.He continues to highlight what, for me, are the least important links, I guess because they seem like the most tangible, or because they are what the eyes of investigative journalists are trained to see.

For example, in defending his book Masters argues that“…Jones's sexuality is central to his persona because of his habits of picking favourites and cultivating young men, dating back to his days as a teacher at the exclusive all-male King's School in Sydney.”There are in fact many far more important reasons sexuality is central to Jones’ persona.

Jones is just an extreme and very successful example of how most same-sex attracted men respond, at some point in their lives, to the unfriendliness and unpredictability of their world.”

While the Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt also questions how information collected by Chris Masters is pertinent to understanding Alan Jones, presenting a distinctly conservative perspective on the issue:

“There is much to criticise about Alan Jones.

The former Wallabies coach has at times been brutal in using his power as Sydney's top-rating talk-show host, and has a squalid record of selling his opinions to corporate bidders.

Attack all that if you like, and his politics, too. But no one could decently defend what has now been done to him by Chris Masters.

What evidence does Masters have that Jones "struggles" at all with being gay?

In his own defence, Chris Masters says that:

“In the past week I have been called homophobic, a champion of the Left and very brave. I am none of these things. It is more that a history in investigative journalism encourages me to pursue difficult and important subjects.

The subject here is power and the abuse of power. It is what I have been taught to confront. Why should it be different because Alan Jones works in my industry?

Given the reaction so far, would I have done it differently?

You could always make it better. Writing about a controversial and hostile subject is a fraught process, but I was not lazy about collecting information and did my best to be thorough.” [1]

The above three perspectives about the same subject differ so much because each author have different values of what information they consider to be pertinent to understanding Alan Jones.

So, which author ended up providing the best informed opinion?

Was it the gay advocate, Rodney Croome?
http://www.rodneycroome.id.au/weblog.php

Was it the conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt?
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20639689-25717,00.html

Was it the investigative journalist, Chris Masters?
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2006/1774631.htm

In the end, I am satisfied with one particular thing that Chris Masters said to Phillip Adams, as it provides at least some legitimacy to the entire debate of the last seven days:

“I know people disagree with me, but I think something like sexuality is prominent in your identity. It’s central to who you are, and for me to get around it...I mean, you could argue with the way that I dealt with it. Nobody’s going to get this perfectly right, but I don’t think you could argue that I didn’t need to look at it.”

Certainly, I am one such critic who questions the way Mr. Masters dealt with the issue, writing earlier this week:

“Triple M's SpoonMan (Brian Carlton), who I have heard previously speak in favour of Alan Jones during one New Years Eve broadcast on 2GB, has just gone to air and expressed his criticism of Chris Masters' "elephant in the room" defense of making homosexuality the prominent theme of the biography.

So I am not alone in questioning the appropriateness of the Chris Masters approach, which I suspect is an academic approach to dealing with a personal issue.”

However, this is not to say that Chris Masters should have said nothing at all about Jones’ private life.

Whatever his approach to the issue, it’s still his investigative journalistic intuition that created the context for a potentially productive logic to develop about debates concerning Alan Jones in particular, and the general issue of homosexuality in public profile.

As Stuart Wells writes:

“Intuition is more likely to provide the creative leap to new terrain, whereas logic is more useful in testing the feasibility of the leap.” [2]

Part of understanding why the personal life of Jones is considered important at all requires an understanding of why his unauthorised biographer Chris Masters felt a duty to raise the topic – his attitude that making such a creative leap is expected at be a difficult and maybe even painful process for Mr. Masters himself to endure:

“There’s too many soft stories…the advertising industry is big enough…and there’s not enough difficult stories, so I approached it wearily. I think that broadly, it is right to tackle this taboo subject because it shouldn’t be taboo. That in itself reinforces prejudice.”

It is on this particular point that the values of Chris Masters overlap with the values of Rodney Croome, who writes in support of Masters and against the conservative voices:

“With all the tabloid-style fury, slurs and intimidation they can muster they have to make sure nothing like "Jonestown" happens again, even if that means sacrificing Alan Jones by drawing everyone’s attention to what they say should remain unspoken.”

All this said, a review of determining how pertinent some of the information collected by Chris Masters has eventually been, wouldn’t be complete without this acknowledgment from Masters himself:

“How can I out someone who is already out?”

This point ignores the need for the investigative journalistic intuition of Chris Masters to be tested all the same, especially if all that is achieved in the end is that Alan Jones will still not comment on the issue, the credibility of Jonestown’s content is fiercely contested by conservative writers, and 2GB listeners don’t at all change their listening habits at breakfast time.

Perhaps Mr. Masters should have anticipated that we already knew as much substantial about the sexuality of Alan Jones as we are ever going to learn.

Yet it was Chris Masters’ intuition – his long experience as an investigative journalist – that has informed him to instead consider how:

“It’s so much easier to do investigative journalism in print, so I was able to talk to hundreds and hundreds more people (about Alan Jones).”

So, certainly no scarcity of information to collect, yet Mr. Masters does concede difficulties getting the authenticity of information he considered to be pertinent to his investigation:

“It’s been said that I haven’t spent enough time talking to his friends. I can say I have spoken to friends, and can also say they don’t want to be quoted…but the fear that really worried me was the fear I felt among ordinary people.

I’d finally track the person down and get them on the phone, and they’d just be white with fear about the prospect that they might say something that will get them into trouble…and I wonder about that – when you think about it – why is it so hard to write a book about Alan Jones?”

As Chris Masters is a perennial investigative journalist, you can understand his concerns about democratic speech:

“The joke around Sydney is that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, you’ll get Alan Jones anyway…and it’s not all that funny.”

And yet, the logic that his critics have brought to the debate Chris Masters has put into context does hint that however hard it might be to write about Jones, Chris Masters may have tried too hard in some ways.

To reinforce what Malcolm Gladwell writes:

“The world, as much as we want it to, does not accord with our intuitions. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions”. [3]

If testing the feasibility of making such a creative leap as Masters has is anything like testing the feasibility of catching a wave, then marketing authors Trout and Ries are appropriate to quote on this occasion:

“A fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets lots of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long-term.” [4]

With this in mind, it is important to reinforce the fact that while Chris Masters has been riding a wave of publicity last week, Alan Jones was taking a holiday – and made himself unavailable for comment.

…From Justin

Resources:

[1] Chris Masters: Book critics silent about Jones’s many scandals. Published in The Weekend Australian. October 28-29, 2006.

[2] Wells, Stuart. Choosing the future: the power of strategic thinking. 1998 Butterworth-Heinemann.

[3] Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point – how little things can make a big difference. 2000 Little, Brown.

[4] Trout, Jack and Ries, Al. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. 1993 HarperCollins.

ESTABLISH…..

radioactive*dc – the ‘development cycle’ in action

….. AND ADJUST

radioactive*dc project manager:

DC Phase I: Planning (Dirty Data Pusher)
DC Phase II: Organising (Inform & Align)
DC Phase III: Leading/Controlling (Journey of the Luddite)
DC Phase IV: Reviewing (Lost or Found in Translation)

radioactive*dc skill builder:

Learn, practice and reinforce 21 management skills in planning, organising, leading and controlling.

2006-10-26T00:22:00.000+10:00

The Australian's biased representation of long-term unemployed.

I post here a copy of today's editorial from The Australian, titled "Job snobs, beware".

Over time, I intend to scrutinise each and every part of this editorial, and with very valid concern.

Since first reading about this issue in yesterday's newspaper, I have launched the counter-attack - that the government are "facility fudging", if they think it is okay to put all the media emphasis on the regulation of long-term unemployed (all stick) at the expense of what's being done to "facilitate" the development of the long-term unemployed (no or little carrot).

One thing both sides of this debate will no doubt agree on is that dealing with getting and keeping unemployment well below 5% isn't the same task as getting it down from 10% to 5%.

Which explains why changes are being made.

However, judging by the either ignorant, or arrogant title of Ed's newspaper article, The Australian newspaper mistakes the opposition to the government policy as "job snobs" - precisely because that's the propaganda they want to use to support their their narrow-minded interpretation of strategic thinking, which is all about replacing one culture inside our institutions with another.

It's all about the government's vision for its low-paid national workforce (nationalism) rather than facilitating the personal development of the worker's own individual vision (individualism)

A complete contradiction to the rhetoric of the Right - which will insist to you that Nationalism, and other "ism" variations of top-down command and control, is the stuff of the Left.

If Ed from The Australian cannot even begin to understand and consider how there might be truth to this "paradox", then one has to wonder how he can diligently talk about paradox when he writes:

"THERE is a paradox at the heart of the booming Australian economy. Even though about 155,000 jobs remain unfilled at the height of the present boom, tens of thousands of Australians remain chronically unemployed."

C'mon Ed - you can't resort to simplistic slogans like "job snob", while also accepting that we have a very complex challenge on our hands.

Today I condemn the editor of The Australian for demonstrating media bias, due to his use of the term "job snob" that unfairly represents people who have little, or no political voice.

Regardless of the consequences, my campaign against this "media bias" will continue without fear.

...From Justin Christie.

>From today's edition of The Australian: Job snobs, beware Centrelink reforms are an overdue dose of common sense

THERE is a paradox at the heart of the booming Australian economy. Even though about 155,000 jobs remain unfilled at the height of the present boom, tens of thousands of Australians remain chronically unemployed. Despite our 4.8 per cent unemployment rate about 108,500 individuals have been looking for work for more than a year, half of them having been out of work for more than two years. On Monday, Federal Human Services Minister Joe Hockey said part of the reason for this discrepancy was the vast number of "job snobs" who "find every opportunity to avoid a job at all". To combat the problem he announced a series of commonsense reforms that will make Centrelink more involved in the jobseeking process and require those on welfare to keep detailed records of their quest.

The most amazing thing about these reforms is the fact that they are only now being implemented. While Australia has a responsibility to take care of those people who truly cannot take care of themselves, it upends the social contract to hand money to people who could work, but don't. Forcing benefits recipients to fill out "participation records" will give Centrelink staffers greater ability to check on their clients' progress.

Face-to-face meetings with recipients and follow-up phone calls to potential employers are not only a natural check on dishonesty but an avenue for feedback that can help honest jobseekers. And the US has proved it is possible to move the long-term unemployed into the workforce. One of the most successful initiatives of Bill Clinton's presidency was a welfare reform package that demanded people work for their benefits. Rather than swelling the ranks of the destitute, the program turned lives around and halved the number of Americans on the dole.

Certainly, there are people who are unable to work, and it will always be society's duty to care for them to prevent the growth of a permanent underclass. But there is a danger that offering benefits without responsibilities creates long-term unemployment rather than ameliorates it. Other recent reforms have slashed by nearly a third the number of people on the Newstart incapacitated payment - the last step for many before they join the staggering 712,000 other Australians on the Disability Support Pension - by cracking down on those claiming that depression, alcoholism or a stutter prevent them from holding a job.

The reforms announced on Monday are a natural extension of this process. For as low as Australia's unemployment rate is, it could be brought lower. Today, the economy is running at full tilt and many businesses are gasping for workers. Retraining programs such as the Skills for the Future scheme launched earlier this month should further slice the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Work is a fundamental part of the human condition that gives meaning to our lives and connects us with others. Monday's reforms will ensure more Australians don't miss out on this valuable part of life.

2006-10-24T10:54:00.000+10:00

Howard Government "resorts to nationalism" to regulate long-term unemployed

Given all the "international implications" we're fed about why more and more reform is needed to give the "individual" worker more choice in the workplace, it is interesting to note the Government's latest use of "the monkey in the middle" between the individual and the international marketplace -

Good ol' 20th Century style "nationalism".

To quote the words of Human Services Minister Joe Hockey, about why the government has opted for more stick (regulation) instead of carrot (facility) for the long-term unemployed:

"We make no apology for making people more accountable for the Newstart they receive. If you have the capacity to work, Australia needs you".

No mention of raising the standards of accountability on the government's side of the bargain.

Since the Prime Minister would like to think 4.8% unemployed is "virtual full employment", perhaps it's time to make the spread of prosperity work less like a lottery and add the supplementary number - "the under-employed rate" to each public release of numbers.

Yet don't expect the government to come out of its "virtual world" anytime soon. Not when you consider Joe Hockey's argument that:

“Centrelink is about 'work first' now and this is the most tangible change in the culture of Centrelink in the last two years".

There's that word again folks - "culture".

Culture, culture, culture :)

Our right-wingers just can't get enough of talking about it.

In organisational design, from top to toe, you have your vision, your strategy, your structure, "your culture", and your functional operations.

The government "facilitates" business with services that help them make sense of this complexity in order to help them engage with the wider world. Services such as Austrade:

"Helping Australians do business around the world".

Click here for evidence of the carrots:

http://www.austrade.gov.au/

For the long-term unemployed, no such complex strategic thinking is applied. Instead, we get "slogans" like:

* Job Snobs; and
* Job Avoiders.

Along with even more stick (regulation) instead of facilities (carrots) based on the hypothesis that "most people on the dole were refusing to take jobs", as reported today by The Australian.

A hypothesis that gets passed on as news.

When I was 21 years of age, and on the dole, it did not occur to me that I would have a mortgage and many other grown-up responsibilities within five-to-seven years.

I've had some good fortune, despite many periods of unemployment, but others like me may never engage in the strategic thinking required for "personal development" - a theme sidelined in favour of the cheap "nationalism" approach launched today by the Government.

With 108,500 people out of work for a year, and 56,600 who have been looking for work for more than two years, that adds up to many great reasons to question if the government resorts to "facility fudging" by wanting to puts sticks (regulation) ahead of carrots (in particular - to facilitate more advanced strategic planning to kick-start careers and “encourage long-term vision”).

Certainly, I've very interested in this issue and continue to develop the resources required to keep the government accountable on issues regarding long-term unemployment.

...From Justin

2006-10-23T20:16:00.000+10:00

Alan Jones - entitled to remain silent if he wants it that way

From this morning's ABC Radio National breakfast program:

"It's been a long time coming, and readers over the weekend would have seen some extracts. It's the unofficial biography of Alan Jones, written by ABC journalist Chris Masters.

Jonestown explores the broadcaster's life, from his youth in rural Queensland to his radio success and his power both on and off the air.

The biography was famously dumped by ABC Books over fears of legal action, something the ABC Board said would 'almost certainly result in commercial loss.' "

Hear Chris Masters being interviewed here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2006/1770985.htm

The book also reveals the probability of Jones' homosexuality.

Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Marr on Sunday morning's ABC Insiders program, when asked about the relevance of Alan Jones' sexuality, claims that :

"It is the very basis of his character... and the basis of his career. What it is...is the explanation of his strange character, his love of secretiveness.........."

However, I would suggest that while Mr. Jones is no doubt a complex character (probably gay, while also conservative-opinionated), this does not make him strange.

Lots of gays keep secret about it. If that's "strange", then being strange is quite normal.

I know from experience that it is possible to be "out" to family and friends, yet not always possible to be "out" at work.

Sometimes the presence of other gay staff or a boss that wants an open-environment will influence (or even force) my decision to tell people.

Most of the time, however, I will see how far I can get without raising the issue.

To me, that's just pragmatism.

Being gay in a majority-straight world is a sometimes confusing and slow-changing terrain to negotiate your way through.

Deciding whether or not to tell people is not a decision I can treat in isolation from the myriad of everyday decision making I have to consider in order to make my way through life.

Decisions to do with my specific situation:

Decisions about workplace relations and work performance, paying the bills and mortgage, goal setting, maintaining health and well-being, etc.

Each and every other gay in the global village has his or her own specific situation that also needs to be understood. There's no homogeneous situation to be analysed that applies all the time.

Therefore, being gay and proud of it should not be conditioned to always having to tell people.

...From Justin

2006-10-10T23:54:00.000+10:00

Media Ownership Laws: The Big Guy/Little Guy Principle

As was reported today on radioinfo - www.radioinfo.com.au

New content rules lobbied by rebel National Party senators will force commercial radio stations to run at least enough “live and local” programming per day to fill a 5:30am – 10am breakfast show (or perhaps a breakfast show that runs until 9am, then a “live and local” lunch hour at midday – taking into consideration that syndicated talkback programs like John Laws commence at a standard time of 9am)

It is interesting that out of the three major traditional media (newspaper, television and radio); it is radio that will be specifically targeted with new regulation.

Radioinfo also reports that "two-out-of-three" ownership limits across all markets will allow a radio station owner to also acquire a television station or newspaper, but not both.

At least that’s the plan. What will the implementation look like?

Will it be “two-out-of-three” to safeguard diversity?

Or will “two-out-of-three” most likely translate to television and newspapers getting together – these being the two media industries with the highest shares of advertising expenditure?

Newspapers hold the highest share of total advertising expenditure at 40.2% compared to television's 36.1% share. [1]

Effectively, there’s far greater potential for big media corporations to achieve large economies-of-scale by using the “two-out-of-three” allowance to combine TV and newspapers instead of including radio in such a combination.

Yet it is radio – which attracts closer to 8% of media spend [2] that is having the new content regulation forced upon it.

So it must be considered that a possible implementation of the new media ownership laws will be that radio becomes “the little guy” that is forced to adhere to new content regulation, while the combination of newspaper and television becomes “the big guy” with far greater potential than ever to make profit.

So why the PLAN might be called “two-out-of-three”, the IMPLEMENTATION might well be “Big Guy/Little Guy”.

The Big Guy gets sent to Free Market Paradise, while the Little Guy gets sent to Big Brother Camp.

It will be interesting to contemplate whether I can also apply the Big Guy/Little Guy metaphor to the Howard Government’s Industrial Relations policies :)

…From Justin

Resources:

[1] http://newsmedianet.com.au/home/newsresearch/NewsStory.jsp?navid=1&storyid=11352300

[2]
http://www.businessandlaw.vu.edu.au/cpoint/bho2250/Radio/radio.htm

2006-10-05T17:05:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART THREE: CHICKEN OR EGG?
How political positioning and approach consume and support each other

Fifty years before the micro publishing world of blogging, there was Quadrant Magazine.

If you’ve never heard of this exclusively read journal, you are in a massive majority who haven’t.

The Australian newspaper this week describes this magazine as “small, but influential”.

You may not read Quadrant, but there’s a good chance our newspaper editors do.

The fiftieth anniversary of Quadrant Magazine was celebrated this week by a select 230 conservative intellectuals, including Prime Minister John Howard.

Quadrant’s role in political debate explains how a select few social connectors, information mavens and op-ed opinion page or talkback radio persuaders can trigger (i) the widespread growth of new ideas or (ii) the widespread decline of old ideas.

If my interpretation of the political life cycle is correct, then Quadrant was born in the first phase of such a life cycle – a period of “fluid occurring pattern”, where a dominant political system did not yet exist in the world. Rather, there was a conflict between socialist systems and capitalist systems.

Now there is much more of a “dominant” political system – capitalism – and the Prime Minister believes the thinkers like those who write for Quadrant influenced this outcome:

“It’s important we remember not just the big ideological struggles but also the individuals who took up the cause of cultural freedom and the defence of liberal democracy against its enemies.

“It became all too easy to pretend that the outcome of the Cold War was an inevitable result of large-scale, impersonal forces that ultimately left totalitarianism exhausted and democratic capitalism triumphant," he told the audience at the Four Seasons hotel in Sydney.

"Nothing could be further from the truth. This was a struggle fought by individuals on behalf of the individual spirit." [1]

The Prime Minister also says that Quadrant has “served as a beacon of free and sceptical thought against fashionable leftist views on social, foreign policy and economic issues”. [2]

An apparently fashionable leftist view is the compulsory uniformity of the Labor Party caucus.

Apparently, to be a true liberal, even if you are a Liberal in government, is to be suspicious about the role of government itself – to be able to personally articulate your discontent.

But is that all that distinguishes a liberal from a conformist?

To simply compare voting standards between the Labor and Liberal Parties in order to determine what liberalism is?

In spring of 1957, the editor of Quadrant Magazine wrote much more broadly about liberalism:

“To write about liberalism is to enter a sematic maze. It includes at different turns everything from the most anarchic individualism to a planned social order managed by a beneficent government.”

In other words, the conservatives can be liberal and the socialists can be liberal, depending on the context. You can’t really judge the value of liberalism by conservative or socialist 'positioning' alone. You need to bring each side’s entire 'approach' into question.

That’s because there’s a third phase in the political life cycle that occurs after the ‘fluid occurring pattern phase’ and after the ‘dominant idea phase’. It’s what I’ll be calling the ‘questioning phase’, which then feeds back into a repeat of the cycle, causing a ‘recurring pattern phase’ – where characteristic patterns can recur, yet the circumstances may be different. [3]

Professor Greg Craven, Executive Director of the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy at Curtin University, recently spoke on ABC Radio’s Counterpoint program to explain how the Work Choices legislation may in fact be taken through this cycle:

“The way you hear the Prime Minister talk about the Work Choices legislation as if it's applied Adam Smith, a wonderful laissez-faire system where happy capitalists and workers romp in the meadows, whereas in actual fact it's highly prescriptive; it stops certain things happening, it requires certain things to happen. I do think that when one looks at the Howard government, one does not see the sort of suspicion towards government that you might have seen through Sir Robert Menzies”. [4]

It’s also worth comparing the sceptical thought of Quadrant Magazine fifty years ago with now.

Take this sweeping criticism of the political Left by modern day Quadrant editor, P.P. McGuinness, and you begin to understand why some people are concerned that Quadrant has evolved into a bad influence:

Writes McGuiness about the management at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

“The ABC remains in safe hands. There is no revolutionary, no ideologue, no hot-eyed burning reformer to disturb its ageing and placid dissemination of the small-l liberal platitudes of the past 30 years:

The feminists, the gay-rights advocates, the ecumenical searchers for the meaning of life, the anti-Catholics, the advocates of Papuan independence, the supporters of Fidel Castro and similar Third World dictators and murderers, the America haters can rest secure. So can the Howard haters, long protected by McDonald at the ABC.” [5]

This sweeping attack against the political Left-wing is nothing like what the autumn 1957 editor of Quadrant wrote, which in stark contrast made a clear distinction between the journal’s right-wing opposition to totalitarianism and taking a stand within the context of normal civilised debate:

“Within the normal bounds of civilised politics – where wrongdoing flourishes as a human failing, not on ideological principle – there is always a tension between conservatism and reform, between less and more radical approaches to the unsolved problems of social justice in an industrial society, between the safeguarding or order and the extension of liberty, and to such polarities the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are sometimes loosely applied. In this sense, Quadrant does not wish to be exclusively identified with right or left”.

In other words, Quadrant knew it could not afford to allow it’s positioning against totalitarianism to “consume” its general approach to political debate within the normal bounds of civilised politics. Rather, it considered its general approach to political debate to be precisely what “supported” its tough opposition to left-wing communism.

What the Quadrant of 1957 knew then, but may have forgotten since, is that to properly fight totalitarianism, you have to consider national debate as an "internal-only" conflict in which the challenge is to better understand the nation we live in. To effectively test the nations own standards of democracy, rather than allow only one highly abstract global standard of comparison between totalitarianism and the free world.

For example, Liberal MP Petro Georgiou yesterday raised an important question about how we must test our own national standards in a speech given to the Murray Hill Society of the University of Adelaide:

“I have no doubt that more can and should be done to encourage immigrants to integrate effectively into the Australian community. But in order to do so sensibly, I would like to know pretty precisely what is the scale and nature of the issue. For example, how do we define integration and assess whether it is occurring? Who is not integrating and why is that so – are there attitudinal or language barriers or do they suffer from discriminatory barriers?” [6]

Three words can summarise the challenge – how do we innovate, quantify and orchestrate so-called ‘integration’ ?

There’s a third phase of political lifecycle that takes us beyond “fluid occurring pattern phase” and “dominant idea phase”. It is “a questioning phase” about the implementation of ideas such as Work Choices and tough new immigration laws.

This phase is necessary to get past the rhetoric of a dominant idea, review previous decision-making, and ultimately determine whether or not doing “without” socialism (the defeated idea) still leads to human failings “within” capitalism (the new dominant idea)

I believe that unless we are prepared to test our own national standards of democracy, there’s little accountability to stop a “recurring pattern” of power elites that gradually wrestle control over our lives and make myths out of false dichotomies, which is exactly what happens in totalitarianism regimes.

Part of testing our own standards is asking why the son of Quadrant’s founder has this concern about the modern day Quadrant magazine:

Says Martin Krygier, speaking recently to ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint.

“I think this spirit of dichotomies (I think often false dichotomies) has become dominant (in Quadrant) and I regret it.” [7]

...From Justin

[1] John Howard: Standard bearer in liberal culture, The Australian newspaper.
4 October , 2006.

[2] Howard's Quadrant cameo: fangs for the memories
The Australian newspaper, October 04, 2006

[3] Koch, Richard. The 80/20 Principle. Nicholas Brealey 1997. Page 14

[4] http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2006/1671681.htm#

[5] "P. P. McGuinness: New ABC Tory chief won't rock the boat" – article from The Australian newspaper

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19222154-7583,00.html
[6] Address by Petro Georgiou given to the Murray Hill Society of the University of Adelaide on Wednesday October 4, 2006.

[7] http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2006/1743306.htm

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

This report will now appear in this revised order:

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: The Egg Yolk
Part Six: The Egg Timer
Part Seven: The Egg Carton
Part Eight: Free Range Eggs
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: One egg, many baskets
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2006-09-22T02:58:00.000+10:00

radioactive*dc

DC PHASE IV: LOST OR FOUND IN TRANSLATION

There are two purposes to this report’s fourth phase.

One is to conduct a ‘review’. The other is to maintain ‘outlook’ by being prepared to repeat the cycle, over and over, to learn more.

Michael E. Gerber wrote:

“To fully understand the role any action – or any piece of work – plays in the business as a whole, you have to see it as part of that whole, not as a thing in itself.” [1]

This is to say, from the outset of implementing something new – whether it is radio station management processes, radio program production or a marketer’s advertising program that incorporates the use of radio – there needs to be a strategic objective in place.

A reference to what was originally intended so that it can be better understood what’s actually getting done.

An international marketing example of ‘review’ is the performance of the Disneyland concept:

“While the Disneyland concept worked well in Tokyo, it had a tougher time in Paris. While Japanese have positive mental attitudes toward American pop culture, the Europeans are quite content with their own values. To fix its earlier mistakes, Disney opened a Euro-centric resort, to appeal to indigenous cultures.” [2]

An example of ‘outlook’ was once provided by Peter Brock:

“As you test yourself, you can learn something from it. Those who test themselves frequently and push themselves further and further are those who are growing as human beings, And in my view this doesn’t apply simply to sport – it’s true of all kinds of endeavours.”

…From Justin

Resources:

[1] Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth Revisited. 1995 Harper Business.

[2] Czinkota, Ronkainen, Moffett. Fundamentals of International Business. 2004 Thompson.

[3] Winning Attitudes – Sport’s messages for achievement in life. Various Authors, including Peter Brock. 2000 Australian Olympic Committee.

ESTABLISH………

>>> radioactive*dc >>> the 'development cycle' in action >>>

……... & ADJUST

DC Phase I: Dirty Data Pusher
DC Phase II: Journey of the Luddite
DC Phase III: Inform & Align
DC Phase IV: Lost or Found in Translation

2006-09-18T16:10:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART ONE: EGGS MARX THE SPOT
Reviewing left-wing political performance

Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley, being interviewed last year by ABC Radio’s Monica Attard:

“Let me say from the outset that the fundamental issue in Labor party ideology, in our philosophy, in our approach, is equality of opportunity. And that when we look at things like taxation policy, like health policy, nation-building issues, we look at it through the prism of what gives a chance to ordinary Australians. That's fundamental to us.” [1]

Mr. Beazley well encapsulates the ideology of Centre-Left politics - “equality of opportunity” - and the context in which that ideal needs to apply - “giving a chance to ordinary Australians”.

And just who are ordinary Australians in 2006?

In evaluating the answer to this question, let’s consider one important indicator – a profile of today’s teenager – summarised by Heartbeat Trends director Neer Korn, published earlier this year in Marketing trade journal Ad News:

“There are two things that have proved a constant in teens’ lives for the past decade: John Howard and The Simpsons.

The combination of the two – a conservative government pushing the individual over the community, and a “No sacred cow” philosophy pushing society’s ironies – results in a teenager who believes the only way to get ahead is through helping himself.

“It’s a do-it-yourself society”, Korn says. “The work for the dole scheme works perfectly with the teen mindset: no one should get a free handout”. [2]

Bring together Kim Beazley’s approach to “equality of opportunity” and John Howard’s approach to “pushing the individual over the community”, and some might suggest you identify ‘a third way’ – the way of the “empowered citizen”:

The idea that government should promote equal opportunity for all while granting special privilege to none; an ethic of mutual responsibility that equally rejects the politics of entitlement and the politics of social abandonment; and a new approach to governing that empowers citizens to act for themselves. [3]

‘The third way’ was how British Prime Minister Tony Blair branded the reinvigoration of progressive politics in the late 1990s – a “post-Thatcherism” positioning – Thatcherism having been characterised by a period of privatisation, monetarism, and hostility to (British) trade unions. [4]

Some might suggest that, just like Tony Blair, Kim Beazley’s belief in equality of opportunity also needs to adapt to ‘third way thinking’, since the trend is towards a do-it-yourself society where the Marxist interpretation of social justice is, at the very least, no longer ‘a sacred cow’.

Marxism being the traditional socialist understanding that power derives from “ownership of capital”, while “oppression, injustice and equality (arises) from the struggle between capital and labour” [3]

Two years ago, when I first started writing this report, I might have advocated the rhetoric of the third way, largely because I had little underlying understanding of just what it actually meant, and what unintended consequences it might bring.

Indeed, I did take an initial interest in the third way, because I had already, quite intuitively, developed an understanding of ‘more complex ways of thinking’ than the logic of many Left-Right political fault lines do.

This was because of my experience with the gay community, in particular with the gay-bear sub-culture, which celebrates masculine lifestyle in stark contrast to the gender-bending logic many people apply to having a base understanding of homosexual men.

The gay community was therefore the place to start exploring issues from a third way perspective of putting complexity (scrambled thinking) first, and conflict second.

I was intuitively certain, for example, not to overreact to John Howard’s timing of the 2004 gay marriage ban, which was in the lead up to a federal election predicated on “positioning” Labor’s Mark Latham as cuddling up to a green-left social agenda, while also being a perceived risk to the economy.

So I commenced this report today, two years ago on newsgroups, quoting Lyn Morgain, co-convenor of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, who wrote in the Melbourne-based MCV newspaper at the time:

"It is possible that within a complex world, it's the sheer breadth of issues and concerns that inhibit us from mobilising around a 'gay' agenda.

We are by nature an altruistic group, identifying political concerns across a wide range of issues. Our voting patterns reflect this. We tend not to be single-issue folk."

However, as I gathered more information about this gay marriage issue, it became apparent why you cannot completely ignore ‘conflict’ altogether. Especially not when you consider that on the day of the ban:

(i) the Government had ‘focused’ the ban on gay marriage to sit alongside the introduction of new anti-terrorism laws; very similar to ‘the cavalier approach’ the government would then try to use a year later when the initial intention was to introduce another anti-terror bill, this time restricting debate about the logic of the bill to Melbourne Cup Day 2005; and

(ii) the Government, keen to ‘wedge’ the Labor Opposition on gay-marriage debate, while the Opposition, keen to avoid being wedged, both used their numbers to cut short debate on the bill, the first time the ‘guillotine’ power had been used for almost two years.

The political tactics used were ‘deliberately structured’ by the Government to ‘provoke conflict’ between Gay and Christian lobby groups. So that no amount of altruism could spare many gays and lesbians from feeling that injustice had been done.

An injustice forced by an unassailable logic.

This enables me to reflect on Clive Hamilton’s critique of ‘the third way’:

“The Third Way was characterised by complexity rather than conflict, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that talking about complexity served as a means of avoiding discussion of conflict” [3].

The trouble with ‘the third way’ is that even if you abandon discussion about conflict, this does not mean your adversaries will.

Another harsh reality is that Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ rhetoric comes from a pre-9/11 perspective about the world.

Since 9/11, an entrenched ‘war on terror’ now constantly reminds us how certain conflict is created in a way that’s impossible to ignore.

In fact, the greatest irony of Tony Blair’s rhetoric is that one of Blair’s speeches is constantly singled out in Australian Parliament by John Howard to justify “increasing conflict” with trade unionism.

To quote John Howard, Blair is “a social democrat with the courage to tell his country’s Trades Union Congress in 1997 that rolling back the Thatcher reforms would hurt the most vulnerable sections of British society” [5]

It’s taken just ten years for Tony’s Blair’s ‘third way approach’, which was originally meant to put complexity ahead of conflict, to instead be ‘deconstructed’ into a tool that
‘raises conflict’ between the Howard Government and the trade unions in Australia.

Effectively, ‘the third way’ now gets raised in parliament as a shadow of its former ‘conflict-avoiding’ intent.

‘The third way approach’, used on its own, even if its ideal of equilibrium sounds tempting, fails to explain how Opposition Leader Kim Beazley can succeed in the ultimate aim of winning government.

It will always be ‘simpler’ to ‘establish a position’ on either the Left or the Right of politics. That’s not to say it’s easier, but it is simpler.

It is simpler, even necessary, to create conflict, in order so that we have a political debate at all.

However, it's not so easy to manage the consequences of each action, and the complexity each action adds to the situation.

The political situation therefore does need to be monitored and reviewed.

So which comes first - the chicken or the egg?

Conflict or complexity?

Is it just as hard to 'cause conflict without managing complexity’ as it is to ‘manage complexity without causing conflict’ ?

The answer probably varies according to context.

So regardless of what 'position’ you take on the spectrum between Left and Right, it is always going to be this two-dimensional game of 'approach and positioning'.

What’s ‘scrambled’ about politics is the ‘interaction’ between your ‘approach’ and your ‘positioning’.

The interaction between your “approach” (managing complexity) and your “positioning” (countering the competitive conflict).

To quote Marketing author Jack Trout:

“Beginners who play the positioning game often remark, “How easy is this. You just find a position to call your own.”.

Simple, yes. But easy, no.

The difficulty is finding an open position that’s also effective. In politics, for example, it’s easy to establish a position on the far right (a conservative position) or the far left (a socialist position). You will undoubtedly pre-empt either position.

You will also lose.

What you must do is find an opening near the centre of the spectrum. You must be slightly conservative in a field of liberals or slightly liberal in a field of conservatives.

This calls for great restraint and subtlety. The big winners in business and in life are people who have found open positions near the centre of the spectrum. Not at the edge”. [6]

Two years later, my advanced understanding of The Scrambled Eggs Report is this: ‘a system of political success’ is bringing together two components – approach and positioning.

You could well further break down these two components in a myriad of ways to address certain challenges, but a starting point for understanding politics is to explain “the interaction” between approach and positioning. It is precisely this “interaction” that defines the scrambling effect.

Developing ‘a system of political success’ is like playing a game of jackstraws.

How you raise an issue and ‘position’ your viewpoint is like the challenge of picking up the top stick without moving any underlying sticks which might compromise your ‘approach’ – your recall, understanding, application, analysis and evaluation of issues.

“Positioning” represents the highest stick in a pack of jackstraws.

“Approach” represents all the underlying sticks.

I question, for example, how much Greens Senator Rachel Siewert really understands about how to ‘approach’ changing social trends, such as the trend I’ve raised here about teenagers, when she opts to say:

"Greens policy has always embraced collective bargaining as the fairest and best ‘approach’.”
"We challenge Mr Beazley to come out and declare whether or not he supports ‘the full ACTU position’ that collective bargaining is the default position." [7]

Here, the Greens opt for ‘a simple position’ that the ACTU’s Greg Combet himself probably suspects would be a positioning success (lots of bark), but an electorol failure (not a lot of bite).
.
Despite the scrutiny the Greens apply to Kim Beazley, it was in fact Mr. Combet’s clumsy mixed messages last week about whether or not ballots are required to precede collective bargaining which demonstrated just how “simple, yet hard” the interaction between positioning and approach really is.

When the Greens challenge Beazley to support “a full position” on collective bargaining, what they are really saying is “support our ‘simpler’ position”.

Demanding that Mr. Beazley engage in "the full conflict" without understanding "the full complexity".

I strongly believe this would be taking on the right ‘positioning’, but 'interacting' with the wrong ‘approach’.

I believe that Kim Beazley is wise to listen to the editor of The Australian newspaper when he cautioned Beazley last weekend against “tying his re-election hopes too tightly to ACTU expectations of a Work Choices rollback.”.

That said, I’m also well aware that if you give the right-wingers an inch, they’ll take a mile.

So Mr. Beazley is “equally advised” to dispute the same editor when he last week writes: “In this new world, the most important relationship will be between employer and employee, rather than between worker and the union collective” [8]

I note with interest how Ed’s comments “conflict” with the Work Choices rhetoric that it is actually the employee who gets “choice” about who their most important relationship will be with.

I thank the editor of The Australian for his honesty, which helps to expose that Work Choices is really just a cultural reorientation of collectivism, rather than facilitating genuine choice for employees.

From now until the next election, Kim Beazley must be steadfastly firm in his dealings with ‘both’ Left and Right commentators:

Always aware that if he gives them an inch, they’ll take a mile.

…From Justin

[1] Kim Beazley – interviewed on ABC Radio’s Sunday Profile Sunday, 20 February 2005
http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s1305688.htm

[2] Marketing to kids and teenagers – 10 things you need to know: Special Report published in Ad News – 7 April 2006.

[3] What’s Left? The death of social democracy – written by Clive Hamilton, published in Quarterly Essay – Issue 21, 2006.

[4] Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

[5] http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech1455.html

[6] Trout, Jack and Ries, Al. Positioning: The battle for your mind. 1981 McGraw-Hill.

[7] http://greens.org.au/mediacentre/mediareleases/senatorsiewert/130906b

[8] Ed from The Australian.

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: One Egg, Many Baskets
Part Six: The Egg Yolk
Part Seven: Free Range Eggs
Part Eight: The Egg Timer
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: The Egg Carton
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2006-09-14T13:18:00.000+10:00

The Wet Economic Six Pack

INTERFACE LEVEL - MONKEYS IN THE MIDDLE

A - See no evil
B - Hear no evil
C - Speak no evil
D - Dispute the three wise monkeys

*** A is for Antithesis in the ABCD Interface model ***

Today in The Age newspaper, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone publicly attacks Opposition Leader Kim Beazley, accusing the Labor leader of xenophobia.

Mr. Beazley has vowed that Labor will not allow migrants to be brought in as a “substitute” for training Australian workers.

Kim Beazley challenges the structural procedures which “threaten” to force down wages.

Beazley dares to mention “the threat of substitutes”, when “combined with” intense rivalry in the labour market (because of employer and end-user demand for cheaper prices), barriers to entry (such as the key investment in a housing mortgage), and government control over the supply of tax return, causing the lowest paid jobs to be over-taxed.

Beazley dares to raise “the new reality” that if we’re to hold accountable a deregulated labour market, where everybody engages with the market “individually”, then “all the business models”, including the “forces model” just demonstrated, need to be “equally applied” to the entire workforce.

No exceptions whatsoever.

In case Senator Vanstone “is too impatient to appreciate” such Marketing models, I refer her to the very model that Mr. Beazley’s concerns “put into context”:

http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/porter.shtml

As Senator Vanstone is too dependant on interpreting what she sees through “culture war binoculars”, she fails to accept the “hypocrisy” in her own use of “folk demons”:

Writes Vanstone:

“Contrary to the strongly held beliefs of ‘the latte left’, the average Australian blue collar worker is not a racist”.

Believe it or not Senator, some of us who are critical of you prefer Flat White coffee.

...From Justin

Resources:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/vanstone-slams-beazley/2006/09/13/1157827020243.html

*** Refresh your senses - The Wet Economic Six Pack ***

The Scrambled Egg Report's focus on Commerce - "Management of Environmental Systems" - applied to three levels of strategic thinking:

Surface Level - Crosswords in Strategy
Interface Level - Monkeys in The Middle
Coalface Level - Cans in Context

2006-09-12T01:10:00.000+10:00

New York, for real

I’m sure everyone recalls where they were the moment that the term ‘9/11’ entered our consciousness. A moment full of chaotic thinking is how I recall 11pm on September 11 – 2001.

I had tuned into Doug Aiton as I did every weeknight after work on Melbourne talk radio 3AK. Because I was not familiar with all the important detail of the New York skyline, I found it difficult to immediately appreciate the magnitude of what had happened in New York.

However, within minutes of listening to Doug relaying the information, the chaotic thinking set in. Another plane had hit the Pentagon building in Washington and I think it was by then that nobody was sure whether this situation would worsen. I do recall Doug conveying a message that the United States was effectively at war.

It was after midnight on March the 29th of this year that I had a very limited opportunity to visit Ground Zero.

Standing there, it was still difficult to imagine what once stood there, even though I’d never seen such a large vacant lot in a city setting.

Being in clear sight of a security guard, and being the only visitor at the time, it was also an uneasy experience, so I only stayed long enough to learn of the plans for the Freedom Tower, which were on display.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Tower)

What instead enabled me to reflect on the significance and magnitude of where I had travelled to was riding my Razor scooter onto the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, the one point in New York City where you can gain a full, breathtaking view of Manhattan.

Not being a car driver, I have relied on using a scooter since year 2000, when the idea of riding one entered my consciousness because of the quirky appearance captured in a magazine that showed a man, dressed in business suit, riding over the Brooklyn Bridge on a Razor-type Scooter.

I figured that if he wasn’t shy of commuting to work on a scooter in New York, I should be fine with getting around Melbourne on a scooter of my own.

It is indeed sad that the next images I would see of the Brooklyn Bridge were the images of 9/11.

Now I can say that I’ve taken back ownership of what I most identify about the Brooklyn Bridge.

It also happens to be the farthest point East that I have travelled to from Australia.

On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, I’m very proud to have chosen New York as the destination for my first trip overseas that I survived on my own.

Although I did cling to the familiar – McDonalds – which also helped me to budget thanks to Mc Griddles for breakfast and their Dollar Menu for other times of the day.

Less familiar to me was purchasing a pizza slice and a Dr. Pepper at about 4 in the morning, on my long journey back from the Brooklyn Bridge to my hostel on Amsterdam Avenue – now a slice reminder of the city that never sleeps.

…From Justin

2006-09-10T00:53:00.000+10:00

The Wet Economic Six Pack -

SURFACE LEVEL: CROSSWORDS IN STRATEGY

>>> Downward: The needs and wants of Analysis <<<

There’s no time quite like Election Time to contemplate the how issues are interpreted and manipulated.

Especially this particular State Election in Queensland, given it recently follows the debate over the interpretation and manipulation of information which lead to the demotion of Pluto’s status as our solar system’s ninth planet.

Not that I need to go past the issues affecting our own planet to highlight this point from author and strategic thinker Stuart Wells:

“Even if we could fully trust quantified data, we would have insufficient insight into the world around us. This form of information, despite its voluminous existence, is only a small piece of the puzzle.

Once we move into other forms of information, we enter the subjective world of human interpretation.

Regardless of its form, there is no end to information, and no end to what we could know about something.” [1]

However, if we are to direct our decision-making, there does need to be an end and a means of getting there.

Through business activity, an end we can seek is high market share and high profit margins through economies of scale, scope and experience [2].

Similarly, voters are setting a goal of growth and eventual prosperity when they appoint a political party to govern. The means of achieving this, through economies of scale, scope and experience, is summed up well by John Howard’s 1996 election campaign slogan “for all of us”.

To quote John Howard from a Four Corners interview held during that election campaign:

“I think above everything else, they will see in me somebody who will govern for all of us and not just for some of us.” [3]

Thinking “above everything else” is the primary purpose of this report’s “surface level” of strategic thinking.

Ten years beyond John Howard’s “for all of us” election campaign, there’s a need for what I will be calling the “crosswords in strategy” model to help demonstrate how, “in the pursuit of endless economic growth”, and election campaigns have evolved since 1996 into being “for most of us” instead.

Before explaining this model, let me explain my concern.

Like author Clive Hamilton, I have a concern about the endless pursuit of growth.

Having read much of his recent Quarterly Essay, I respect that he is an author that needs to be listened to as we are both attempting to understand the same object – the “claimed” economic benefits of free markets. Certainly, much of my thinking is a by-product of the things I read, and I have been reading his essay with great interest.

Yet I’m not so sure whether Mr. Hamilton has demonstrated a crucial understanding of Marketing, my core subject of study, when he writes:

“As opposition to privatisation, free trade, competition policy and deregulation of the financial sector fell away; the conservative and social democratic parties were more and more distinguished by means of product differentiation rather than ideology.

Product differentiation and brand loyalty being marketing concepts, political parties began to hire marketing specialists to help them sell their messages. And in the same way that clever marketing is used to persuade sceptical consumers that one brand of margarine is radically different from other, essentially identical brands, ingenious methods were required to persuade sceptical voters that a political party was radically different from its opponents.” [4]

Yet this is quite a generalisation to make when you consider just how “ingenious” Mark Latham’s 2004 election campaign was.

Actually, one could argue that the 2004 election was a case of “Mark Latham’s product differentiation versus John Howard’s brand loyalty schemes” :)

What Clive Hamilton leaves out of his understanding of Marketing is the role of “positioning” as a marketing concept.

If he really understood this concept, he would be more pragmatic about the limitations of his “new politics of wellbeing”, which he suggests is the answer to the endless pursuit of growth.

Part of his solution suggests a “sidestepping” of the traditional Left-Right debate over who can best manage the economy, instead challenging both major parties “equally” on a set of criteria.

In comparison, I have named this series ‘The Wet Economic Six Pack’ (Wet being “positioned” against Dry) precisely because, as federal Labor painfully learnt in 2004, there is no sidestepping Left-Right debate .

The best you can do is “substitute” Left-Right with Wet-Dry, or Minor-Major (as the minor parties do) but the marketing concept of positioning makes sense of why you cannot actually sidestep it.

Part of my understanding of Positioning comes from Marketing author Peter Rix. Positioning is “the combination of benefit, target and differentiation” [5]

Positioning isn’t just about “repositioning” your competitor (which requires focus – for example, how federal Coalition MPs are constantly ‘focused’ on the conduct of State Labor governments :)

It is also about “repositioning” yourself (which requires ‘managing change’ – for example, how Clive Hamilton does identify in his Quarterly Essay that “the constituency for whom social democratic policies were traditionally designed has shrunk dramatically”.

Indeed, some things Mr. Hamilton has identified are quite valid, but certainly not his attempt to sidestep Left-Right debate, and in doing so, not completely understanding the Marketing concept of “positioning”, and in doing so, not completely understanding Marketing as a whole.

And so we are left with Clive Hamilton’s “subjective world of human interpretation” which is to assert that: “in rich countries, the market has become the enemy rather than the friend of social progress. For all of the economic benefits of free markets, in the end we cannot find true happiness in a shopping centre. The obstacles of the new politics (what Mr. Hamilton calls ‘the new politics of wellbeing’) should not be underestimated. Environmentalists have long recognised how difficult it is to persuade people to change entrenched consumption habits”.

All of this criticism of “wealth consumption”, no matter what particularly good points Mr. Hamilton may make, fails to address economics in the form of analysing its entire life cycle of prosperity, recession and recovery.

Who’s to say that one will always have wealth to consume?

Who’s to say that the Western nations of the world will always be the affluent ones?

A crucial reason for including “surface level” strategic thinking as a concept in this report is that it helps to define just what “the new politics” is really about.

True, the new politics will concern what Mr. Hamilton identifies as a ‘growth fetish’, but it’s a broader concern than just consumption. It also concerns wealth creation and consolidation.

By not focusing so heavily on consumption as Clive Hamilton does, my report doesn’t sidestep the traditional Left-Right/Wet-Dry/Minor-Major debates. The new politics, just like older times, will continue to challenge one party’s policies “less equally” than another’s.

To not do so would be to deny looking at each party’s policies on a case-by-case basis, instead of always relying on some set of criteria which regards “the market”, from the outset – as an enemy.

That would deny “Capitalism in context” (the coalface level of this report focuses on the “cans in context” model of analysis, which aims to identify these imbalances in economic debate).

To not do so also fails to take into account those who, no matter how large or small in number, have never enjoyed the full “benefits” of economic growth because those benefits were never “targeted” to include them in the first place, no matter what the “differentiating” features of the competing party policies.

Benefits + target + differentiation = positioning. The genius of John Howard’s 1996 campaign was not solely because of some clever marketer. I’ve written here before that Marketing is not just the communication, but also the delivery as well.

Let’s focus, for a moment, on Howard’s 1996 delivery. Howard didn’t win the 1996 election based on the traditional politics of “collectivism versus individualism”. He didn’t need to, since the transformation of the Australian economy between 1983 and 1996 had already seen a significant transformation from a collectivised society to a culture of individualism.

Instead, he used one application of the very “crosswords in strategy” model that I aim to demonstrate in my writing. The two dimensions of a crossword – Downward and across – are used here as a metaphor to represent contrasting thought modes. The main set of contrasting thought modes I am concerned in this report is Analysis (Down) versus Synthesis (Across).

An example of Analysis, perhaps without Synthesis, is a comment of Ron McCallum, quoted this week on ABC Radio, in regards to the cause-and-effect relationship between what a politician gets payed and how he or she performs:

“We want to attract some of our best people to give up their careers, to have less time with their families, then we should pay them of a significant amount and I don't think these days for professional and significant people the salary of a Magistrate (now payed the same as a politician) is at all at the top of the range” [6]

Stuart Wells defines “Analysis without Synthesis” as: when we continually subdivide things in our minds, looking at cause-effect connections, and fail to consider more complex interactions”.

It could be, for example, that the pollies’ pay alone needs to be a more complex interaction with other factors before determining the cause of good or bad working performance.

Conversely, an example of Synthesis, perhaps without all the required Analysis, was John Howard’s 1996 election pledge, when asked about his vision of the year 2000:

“Australia is incredibly lucky to have a European heritage, deep connections with North America, but to be geographically cast in the Asian/Pacific region and if we think of ourselves as that strategic intersection, then I think we have a remarkable opportunity to carve a special niche for ourselves in ... in the history of the next century.”

Stuart Wells defines “Synthesis without Analysis” as gradually losing sight of the things we are synthesising: “Synthesis without analysis leads to inaction or ineffective action, because the management of detail, tasks, and so on, is lost. Synthesis, however, allows us to understand how relationships among things change over time. It is this dynamic approach that aids imagining possible futures”.

It is crucial to understand what I’ve just published here to appreciate how changing circumstances impact voter characteristics (by the mid-1990s, the profile of Australian workers had been transformed) and how John Howard successfully promoted a vision about “aspirations”.

Of interest to me is how John Howard articulated this vision with the altruistic slogan “for all of us”. Of equal interest to me are issues concerning economic growth that can be “analysed” as John Howard’s inaction or lack of effective action in executing this vision.

The trouble, as I see it, is that instead of acting on this vision of “altruism”, the Howard Government immediately set about returning us on a path of right-wing driven individualism to further erode the collectivised society.

A path, I believe, that can be taken to the Rightist extreme, just as Communism took collectivism to the Leftist extreme.

Marketing author Jack Trout explains quite precisely why the pursuit of “free market growth” can be taken to the extreme. This is when “growth itself” is allowed to take the credit for growth:

“Growth is the by-product of doing things right. But in itself it is not a worthy goal. In fact, growth is the culprit behind impossible goals.

CEOs pursue growth to ensure their tenures and to increase their take home pay. Wall Street brokers pursue growth to ensure their reputations and to increase their take home pay.

To us, a simpler and more powerful objective is to shoot for share, not profits. As a market emerges, your number one objective should be to establish a dominant market share. Too many companies want to take profits before they have consolidated their position.” [7]

“Shooting for share”, in the context of Mr. Howard’s vision for “Australia as a strategic intersection of the global market”, requires investment in infrastructure and skills – precisely the issues that Opposition Leader Kim Beazley wants to debate John Howard on.

Yet I do believe that John Howard’s “temporary” 1996 practice of altruism was “synthesis without analysis” and that the detail of “how to govern for all of us” has never been “brought to the surface”.

In fact, it’s quite the reverse. As Tasmanian Senator Milne recently raised in federal parliament, who has done a bit of synthesising too:

“This measure (political donations of up to $10,000 without disclosure) is set out so that companies or any group that wants to influence government policy can easily find a way to do so without ever having to comply with an electoral return.

I think this is a crucial issue when put together with the narrowing of the franchise by stopping 80,000 young people from getting on the (electoral) roll.

So you are narrowing the franchise of people who can vote and reducing the number of people who can vote but increasing the ease with which large corporations and the wealthy in the community can influence the outcome of an election. It is clear to me that, whilst you may not be able to steal a ballot box in Australia, you can certainly buy one.” [8]

That “analysis” confirms one example of action that goes quite against the promised 1996 altruism of John Howard governing “for all of us”.

That said, while I make no apologies for being more critical of the Howard-led Coalition than I am with the Beazley-led Labor opposition, the Queensland state election offers me the opportunity to point out “the trickle down effect” of John Howard’s attempt to shift Australia to the political-right, in concert with the endless corporate pursuit of growth:

This week, Professor Ian Lowe, President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, spoke to ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program about the consequences of seeking endless growth:

"Politicians don't think about the consequences of growth. I point people to the example of southern California, which thirty years ago was growing so fast, and that trend has now gone into reverse because they didn't manage the growth process and Los Angeles is now socially and environmentally not a desirable place to live.

And the mobile are moving out and leaving behind those who can't move, so its entirely possible for the climatic advantages which Queensland has and Southern California had thirty years ago to be negated by failing to manage the process of growth. I'm quite struck by the fact that Noosa Shire has decided to manage and limit the growth so that they maintain the quality of life and natural assets that people have moved there for."

Despite these thoughts, a report on ABC Radio National’s breakfast show this week suggests that neither the Queensland Government or its Conservative opposition are “shooting for share” by putting an emphasis on consolidation, not just creation, of growth:

“Most of the campaign promises have, not surprisingly, been directed at the marginal seats, and at winning back wealthy Queenslanders angry that their hospitals are a mess, and there's no water for their gardens.

It's all been about the winning the battle of the middle class and affluent, and “like most campaigns in modern Australian politics”, those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale have fallen off the radar –

Karen Walsh is the president of QCOSS – “(QCOSS has) advocated for the 400,000 people that is estimated are living in poverty in Queensland, and that is ‘growing’ as the population ‘grows’. This election campaign has not focused on any specific needs of those groups.

They will benefit, of course, from an improved health system, one would hope, but their special needs around targeted family support programs, people with disability, getting greater access to support services, neighbourhood centres getting greater capacity to provide services at a local level - neither parties have really addressed some of these social issues, and particularly the issues that end up excluding people.” [9]

One of my marketing texts defines a ‘need’ as when a person feels deprived of something – food, clothing, shelter and so on. The same text defines a ‘want’ as a need that is shaped by a person’s knowledge, culture and personality. [10]

It is of no surprise to me that the intent of government, both federally and at state level, to allow those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale “to fall off the radar” means that “synthesis without analysis” in politics has allowed “the culture wars” of middle and affluent Australians to be regarded as being of greater electoral importance than the needs of our lowest earning Australians.

These ‘cultural’ debates, just like the corporate pursuit of endless profits, is another example of Growth ‘needs’ being replaced by Growth ‘wants’.

Clive Hamilton did get it right when he suggests: “The Liberal treasurer, Peter Costello, can get away with claiming that we are now all working class only because the concept has been deprived of its meaning”.

However, for Clive Hamilton to simply persuade the affluent to “downshift”, cutting their income and therefore cutting their consumption, he misses the point that such a luxury is a by-product of initially “doing things right” in your career, just as corporate growth itself is a by-product of “doing things right”.

This affluent “downshifting” is also not at all going to save the wages of already low-earning Australians from being further “downsized” by John Howard’s new workplace laws.

“Doing things right” is not about endless corporate downsizing or the luxury of affluent downshifting.

“Doing things right” is also certainly not an about an endless diminishing of a collectivised society in favour of a loosely-held together society of individuals.

No, in fact, John Howard had it right……….at least at the start – with his 1996 vision of altruism.

“For all of us” captures the essence of altruism – what this report will also brand “Relationship Recovery” - the development and enhancement of professional relationships in an individual worker’s life, supported in part by government and in part by advocate groups – whether they are associations or worker’s unions.

This is hopefully as far as you get from “marginal seat” politics because the emphasis is instead on taking the value/supply chain concept of business and extending the practice of these thought processes to “every single worker in Australia”.

Relationship Recovery, as an alternative to “increasingly dry, trickle-down” Capitalism, will question how government policy works to the “benefit and targeting” of even a low-paid worker’s “backward, forward and horizontal” integrative growth strategies. These will be explained in detail as this report develops.

With ‘The Wet Economic Six Pack’ it is my intention to take the language of business, and make advancements to the model of Capitalist system, just like we now have a more advanced model of our solar system.

This is how “development” of any system is meant to be – as recent article about dwarf planet Pluto reflects:

“Closer models to reality as it accumulates more evidence. In the process some of the old ideas of reality or the truth are swept away, which jolts people's faith and upsets their sensibilities. [11]

As an upshot, it also hopefully “refreshes people’s sensibilities” – This is the aim of this ongoing report.

No longer can the word “battler” be deprived of its meaning without a significant challenge.

That challenge calls for “an all new” Wet-Dry economic debate for the 21st century.

Written by Justin Christie.

Postscript:

“Understanding and acting upon the relationships among things” is finding a balance between Synthesis and Analysis.

The three “crosswords” I use as terms of reference in this report that needs to be understood and acted upon are “management, environment and systems”.

Each term of reference can be analysed “individually” on any of the three levels of this report, or they can be synthesised “collectively – blended into the whole” on the surface level (Management of environmental systems).

Resources:

[1] Wells, Stuart. Choosing the future: the power of strategic thinking. 1998 Butterworth-Heinemann.

[2] Healy, Genevieve. Strategic Marketing Analysis

[3] Edited transcript of Liz Jackson's interview with John Howard, during the 1996 Election Campaign, for the Four Corners' program "An Average Australian Bloke", first broadcast 19 February, 1996.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2004/s1212701.htm

[4] Hamilton, Clive. What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy. Published in Quarterly Essay – Issue 21, 2006

[5] Rix, Peter. Marketing, A Practical Approach. By Peter Rix. Australia, Mc-Graw-Hill, 2004.

[6] http://www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s71833.htm

[7] Trout, Jack. The Power of Simplicity – a management guide to cutting through the nonsense and doing things right. 1999 McGraw-Hill

8] http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/dailys/ds200606.pdf

[9] Transcripts of ABC Radio National – Life Matters and Breakfast – week commencing 4 September, 2006

[10] McColl-Kennedy, Kiel. Marketing – A Strategic Approach. 2000 Nelson Thompson Learning.[11] Goodbye to Pluto from good, but painfully slow, science - Tim ThwaitesSeptember 8, 2006

*** Refresh your senses - The Wet Economic Six Pack ***

Scrambled Eggs Report focuses on Commerce - "Management of Environmental Systems" -
applied to three levels of strategic thinking:

Surface Level - Crosswords in Strategy
Interface Level - Monkeys in The Middle
Coalface Level - Cans in Context

2006-09-07T14:10:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART FOUR: EGG & BACON (FIRST & FOREMOST)
The relationship between priority setting and communication objectives

On Monday, The Age reported that chairman of the Muslim Community Reference Group, Ameer Ali, has this week said that federal Treasurer Peter Costello's remarks were "provocative, divisive and mischievous".

This is responding to Costello’s call for Muslim leaders to condemn terrorism "unequivocally", and speak out plainly and clearly against radicals in their community.

By Tuesday, Coalition Senator Brandis was defending against criticism from the Left, namely Greens Senator Nettle, regarding the comments of John Howard and Peter Costello, which clearly did “single out” Muslims.

Brandis reminded the Senate that it was the Holt Government which “abolished” the White Australia policy, the Whitlam government which “introduced” multiculturalism and the Fraser Government which “fulfilled” multiculturalism.

As the words “abolished, introduced and fulfilled” demonstrate, all these events happened at different phases in the policy-making process.

However, once these historical events are interpreted from Leftist and Rightist viewpoints, based on recent events, we get the quite “postmodern” outcome of what’s now branded the “multiculturalism versus integration” debate.

Once upon a time, it was “multiculturalism ‘good’, racism ‘bad’”

Now it seems to be “multiculturalism ‘good’, but integration ‘better’”

Because of this evolution in debate, the potential for what author George Orwell branded ‘doublespeak’, in regards to multiculturalism, cannot be ignored.

How different is this position called ‘integration’ from ‘racism’ if it requires sections of the population to be “singled out” ?

How different is the concept of ‘integration’ from ‘White Australia’ if it can breed an inordinate "provocative, divisive and mischievous" fear of others?

The investigation continues...

...From Justin

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: One Egg, Many Baskets
Part Six: The Egg Yolk
Part Seven: Free Range Eggs
Part Eight: The Egg Timer
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: The Egg Carton
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)

2006-08-22T05:30:00.000+10:00

The Wet Economic Six Pack

COALFACE LEVEL: CANS IN CONTEXT

***** 5th Can in the Six Pack: Systems (The Waterfall) *****

Today I profile what this report will brand as ‘trickle down capitalism’ (the waterfall), the traditional understanding of the ‘Capitalist’ political system.

What this report will brand as ‘relationship recovery’ (the soda fountain) will be explored in a future article. It aims to explore the economic lifecycle in a "less sequential, more overlapping" way than I believe the trickle down perspective can make sense of.

Herald Sun newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt last year quoted this line:

“Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.”

This may be true for those following “a very sequential path” from University at 20 through to being executive manager at 40.

Enough experience in the field of work and the process of earning money ought to be able to make anyone see the sense in the system of Capitalism.

Broadcaster Derryn Hinch addresses Capitalism in his address yesterday:

“We don’t have to go as far as Gordon Gecko’s mantra in the movie Wall Street which claimed ‘greed is good’. But making money is no crime. And there was a time in the 1980s when we treated high-flying businessmen like Bond and Skase and Elliott and others as rock stars. As celebrities.

To an extent we still do. That is the 'profligate face' of capitalism. They tried communism in the Soviet Union and it finally crashed. Even in Communist China the capitalist tide is rising.

I don’t say capitalism doesn’t have any ugly side. But it has given us more wealth than many dreamed of. One of the highest basic wages in the world. One of the most generous welfare systems in the world and more annual leave than most.

I know that doesn’t take that sick feeling out of the stomach of somebody who has lost their job. But it’s a fact.” [1]

Resources:

[1] Hinch on Radio 3AW 693AM Melbourne. Monday, August 21, 2006 ©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2006

*** Refresh your senses - The Wet Economic Six Pack ***

The Scrambled Eggs Report focuses on Commerce - "Management of Environmental Systems" - applied to three levels of strategic thinking:

Surface Level - Crosswords in Strategy
Interface Level - Monkeys in The Middle
Coalface Level - Cans in Context

2006-08-19T16:18:00.000+10:00

The Scrambled Eggs Report

PART FOUR: EGG & BACON (FIRST & FOREMOST)
The relationship between priority setting and communication objectives

On Thursday, in the House of Representatives in Canberra, federal education minister Julie Bishop, quoted words spoken by Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and published a few months ago in the Canberra Times:

“…students need to be taught the narrative history of this country…”

She then claims this earlier quote contradicts Beazley’s later opposition to what Ms. Bishop describes as “the history revival”, with Beazley even going as far as dismissing the teaching of traditional Australian history as an elite preoccupation.

When given the chance to provide a personal explanation, Mr. Beazley challenged Bishop's accusation that he had publicly stated two totally inconsistent positions.

“One was to support the idea of narrative history, and the other was to suggest that there ought to be a different priority associated with the advent of (this week’s history summit)”

Mr. Speaker silenced Kim Beazley as he was about to ‘say something balanced’ that certainly doesn’t reflect this week’s Steve Lewis newspaper opinion that Kim Beazley speaks “verbose waffle that too often passes for comment at press conferences”. [1]

Mr. Speaker cut off Beazley’s statement as soon as these words were spoken:

“I believe in the teaching of narrative history, but I also believe now that (Ms. Bishop’s) priority should be apprenticeships……….” [2]

Interesting……….because far from verbose waffle, ‘Kim Beazley states quite clearly’ that we need to walk and chew gum at the same time - we need to address future problems and opportunities if chewing the fat over history is to help modernise our national identity.

...From Justin

[1] Steve Lewis: Discipline, Kim
August 15, 2006

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20126660-7583,00.html

[2] Hansard – House of Reps, 17 August 2006

* The Scrambled Eggs Report - Political "eggspertise" by the dozen *

Part One - Eggs Marx the Spot
Part Two - Eggs Benedict
Part Three: Chicken or Egg?
Part Four: Egg & Bacon (First & Foremost)
Part Five: One Egg, Many Baskets
Part Six: The Egg Yolk
Part Seven: Free Range Eggs
Part Eight: The Egg Timer
Parts Nine and Ten: A Big Fat Hen
Part Eleven: The Egg Carton
Part Twelve: Quail Eggs (Quarks & Quirks)