Local democracy in action

On Thursday I went to the "Free Public Forum" for Norwood, Payneham and St Peters residents.

Here are some observations and comments:

Present

Mayor Bria; Councillors Dottore, Duke, Kleanthi, Marcetucci, Minney, Moore, Pasalidis, Stock, Whitington, Winderlich and Wormald; several council staff including CEO Barone for some of the time; the MP for Norwood Vini Ciccarrello, and about 60-70 others ( I didn't count them but in any event it was difficult to distinguish between council staff and others).

Moderator and meeting management

The MC/ Moderator was Alan Shepherd(?) who did a good job by setting and generally sticking to some simple ground rules such as (1) asking everybody to limit their questions to a minute and (2) setting a fixed finishing time. I thought it was reasonable to only allow one question per person at a time, but was disappointed that I wasn't given an opportunity to ask another of my questions after everyone else had had a go: perhpas I should have just gone up and grabbed the microphone as someone else did!

Councillors' performance

Apart from the absentee councillors (no apologies were reported, so draw your own conclusions about this) some councillors said nothing, others little while the three W s (councillors Whitington, Winderlich and Wormald) impressed with their grasp of a range of topics and their openness to fresh ideas.

Is confession good for Christian's soul?

On Friday The Independent Weekly's Indaily newsletter accused Crikey's Christian Kerr of lifting one of its stories without attribution:

Open letter to Crikey: Dear Christian Kerr, Insider loves that old adage about imitation and sincere flattery. We also feel independent media sources like ours should certainly stick together. So thanks for using yesterday's Indaily item - The Travelling Wortleys - in today's Crikey. Insider's pleased you liked it so much you used it almost word for word. But does New Media mean we give up that old-fashioned practice of citing each other? Please join us, however, in apologising to the Wortleys for getting their son's age wrong - we've been told he's actually younger.

I'm looking forward to Crikey's response.

Katherine floods: are the authorities on top of the situation?

From the ABC website today at 1:48pm:

Emergency services in the Northern Territory town of Katherine have acknowledged several houses in the town could have water up to their roofs.Last night Counter Disaster Commander Kate Vanderlaan said she had no reports of severe damage to homes.

Today she acknowledged as many as 12 houses in the north of the town could be covered up to their roofs.

At 8:30 am AEST today the ABC website posted this:

Katherine residents have woken up to uncertainty about the water levels in the flooded town.Authorities were saying the river had peaked overnight, but is now expected to reach 19.2 metres at the Katherine River bridge later this morning.This conflicts with advice from police and the weather bureau that the river peaked overnight....Overnight the weather bureau said the water level at the bridge was slowly falling but police now expect the water to go up.

Lee was travelling through Katherine when the roads closed and spent the night on a camp bed in the high school gym.He says he feels uncertain about today.

"Regular updates would be a big improvement on things at the moment, we're sort of in the dark," he said."Unless you crowd around the radio nobody knows what's going on."

To its credit the Northern Territory News has not ducked the issue:

Commander Kate Vanderlaan conceded last night that the initial assessment of the Katherine Region Counter Disaster Planning Committee just hours prior to the evacuation of the town may have been incorrect.

She said her statement at an 8am press conference that the ``urgency is not there at the moment'' was based on a glitch in the system that measured the height of floodwaters at Katherine Gorge _ the driving force behind the massive flow.

``The level of flooding was slightly surprising,'' she said.

``But at least the gorge is going down now.''

And now, another ABC website posting at 6:00pm AEST, including this

Emergency services in flood-stricken Katherine say the flooding could have been been better managed but they are relatively happy with how information was communicated.Authorities in Katherine waited until late yesterday morning to sound the evacuation siren prompting an exodus from the north, south and centre of the town.

Resident Laurel Martin says the alarm could have been raised sooner. "A lot of them say they didn't have a lot of warning this time," she said.

But resident Ray Newman disagrees."I think they had plenty of warning around the place here and I think Katherine was pretty prepared for it," he said.

Counter-disaster commander Kate Vanderlaan says the shelters had to be ready before the sirens triggered evacuations.
"It could've been better, anything could've been better," she said.

No further comment.

Local democracy in action

Tonight the local council is holding a public forum, to which I am going.

I will be asking about three matters:

1. Why the council precludes residents affected by proposed significant developments (in the plain English, not the planners', meaning of that term) from being heard when the matter is before the Development Assessment Panel.

2. Why the council does not provide elected members with appropriate support, particularly IT support (including internet and email facilities), to enable them to interact more effectively with their electors.

3. Why the council has not cut the protruding branch of the tree shown in this photo, despite my asking twice in the last few months (and both times being assured by council staff that it would be done).

I will report here on what happens.

More on those cartoons and US-Israel relations

Today's Australian has two items which caught my eye: an opinion piece by John Birmingham "Cartoonists are not in the foreign service" and a Cut and Paste digest of three comments on that LRB/ Harvard article on US-Israel relations (see my post on 4 April).

Birmingham's piece IMO is eminently sensible. Here's an extract:

Alexander Downer, The Sydney Morning Herald and other sanctimonious critics should lighten up: Bill Leak was right about Indonesia's treatment of West Papua...When Leak sat down to frame his full colour, and slightly off-colour, reply, he was simply doing what he does as well as any editorial cartoonist in the world, spinning a witty and - ahem - penetrating joke off a developing news story. Leak's role is not to further Australian national interests, to salve wounded egos or to make life easier for the likes of Howard or Yudhoyono.

The three commentators quoted in Cut and Paste are also drawing (or redrawing) well marked lines in the sand regarding their respective positions. Eliot Cohen in the Washington Post (for the full article see here) gets really worked up about the attack: "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic" is the headline in the original . Michael Ledeen from the National Review Online (full article here) writes in similar vein: "This is anti-Semitism in the grand tradition".

Mark Mazower in the Financial Times (full article only available on subscription) takes the contrary view, which is closer to mine:

Brandishing the big stick of anti-Semitism against all and sundry helps no one: it lumps together serious critique with crackpot ravings, does a signal disservice to those who really suffered from it in the past and stifles a badly needed debate within the US. There is no reason why the partnership between the US and Israel should not be susceptible to the same kind of cost-benefit analysis as any other area of policy. After all, no special relationship lasts forever: ask the Brits.

I like his distinction between serious critique and crackpot ravings. I've heard some comments which tend towards the latter at question times at Robert Fisk presentations, but that doesn't make me think that Fisk or the authors of the paper should be silenced.

Floods in Katherine

[Update 4.35pm 6 April: for ABC news update 4.36pm AEDT (c 30 mins ago) see here. ]

It's hard for the occasional dry season visitor like me to envisage the impact of the flooding in Katherine.

The ABC website has a story "Katherine flood threat eases" which is at odds with what I've just heard on ABC RN 's Bush Telegraph and the midday news, both of which spoke about how earlier estimates needed to be revised.

Bush Telegraph , a program always worth listening to, had an especially graphic direct broadcast from a reporter in Katherine who very calmly described the slowly rising floodwaters. (As I post this isn't yet on the website but deserves to be).

The website report (dated 9.50am AEST) today says:

The commander of the counter-disaster committee managing the floods in Katherine in the Northern Territory says water is still rising in some parts of town although the immediate threat has lessened.

Commander Kate Vanderlaan says the water height at the gorge north of Katherine has begun to drop for the first time in several days.

The Katherine River in Katherine is expected to reach 18.8 metres at about 12:00pm (ACST).

Commander Vanderlaan is reluctant to say the worst is over.

"There are some rises in Donnigan Crescent through the drains near the hospital and at Gorge road there is some water rising there, we're keeping a close eye on that," she said.

Meanwhile, Member for Arnhem Barbara McCarthy says 15 buildings have been swamped by flooding at the Beswick community east of Katherine.

Ms McCarthy and Labor Senator Trish Crossin say they have chosen to remain in Katherine throughout the flooding to lend support to people in the region.

Ms McCarthy says people in the Beswick community have been working around the clock and are desperately in need of support from emergency services.

"They are absolutely exhausted, they need support, they need emergency services to come out with more volunteers in Beswick," she said.

"We need tents up in the higher area of Beswick to support those people who've been moved out of those 15 houses in the community."

Stranded

Six people have spent the night stranded on Gorge Road north-east of Katherine after the river broke its banks upstream yesterday afternoon.

Their houses were swamped, forcing the residents to seek higher ground on the road.

One of the residents said that his neighbour has nursed four sick children in his vehicle through the night after Police and Emergency Services refused to assist them.

"We spoke to the police in town here and they said we can't do nothing" he said.

"I said to them 'can you get the state emergency out here?' and he said we can't even do that."

This updated report (12:37 pmAEST) has just been posted on the ABC website:

Evacuation siren sounds in Katherine

Northern Territory police have sounded the flood siren in the town of Katherine ordering the compulsory evacuation of residents in low lying areas.

Police are alerting all residents in Katherine North, Katherine South and the town centre to move to higher ground.

Police say people should collect food and bedding and go to four staging posts to be picked up by buses to take them to shelter.

The four posts are the Clyde Fenton Primary School, the Happy Corner Store and the Riverbank Drive near Cross and Crawford Street.

At midday ACST, the Katherine River level was recorded at 18.67 metres at the Katherine River Bridge.

The flood waters are just centimetres below the town bridge and rising.

Katherine Mayor Anne Shepherd says she is concerned that people are not bringing enough food with them to emergency shelters.

She says council staff are taking food to an industrial cool room to maintain supplies.

"I've just driven over here. It took 45 minutes because the water is across the road just near the Visitor Information Centre," she said.

"We went through some quite deep water, actually, and there's a big back-up of traffic there of people trying to get back over this side of town.

"Of course, the siren has gone off now."

Fifteen buildings have reportedly been swamped by flooding at the Beswick community east of Katherine.'

Let's hope that Commander Vanderlaan (who has previously been in the national public eye for her involvement in the Falconio case) and her team are able to minimise injury and property damage (and that the ABC is able to keep its news bulletins and website up to date) .

Support for ABC

This week's New Matilda includes two items about the ABC. The first is an editorial by Jose Borghino "Slagging the ABC" includes a letter to Minister Coonan from Quentin Dempster, candidate for the apparently-about-to-be-cancelled election for a staff elected director. QD goes for the Minister with all guns blazing, and in a manner which at times is self-serving (see the last para for example).

Borghino has the final, apt, word: "It smells to me like the Culture Wars have just found another battlefield. "

The second, by Tony Moore (commissioning editor of Pluto Press) "Election for all ABC Board members"comes out of left field flying a kite recommending that all ABC Board members, and other Commonwealth statutory authority board members as well, should be elected.

A good idea? Well, yes, but how practicable is it? I think that the Great Australian apathy would operate to defeat whatever idealistic motives Tony has in mind. In my experience most Australians don't care much about exercising their democratic rights: leave federal and state elections alone and look at the turnout in local council polls. Even in the corporate world how many shareholders actually go to AGMs etc?

Worthy thoughts,Tony, but can you break them down into some more easily digestible chunks?

Fisk and Klemperer

Once again Robert Fisk has produced another very good article "A lesson from the Holocaust for us all" in which he uses the Victor Klemperer diaries I Shall Bear Witness (covering 1933- 1942) and To The Bitter End (1942-45) as a launching platform to rebut Iranian holocaust denial.

I've also read the diaries so understand where Fisk is coming from, especially his emphatically expressed view that there is no basis for denying the holocaust of European Jews initiated by the Third Reich (but actively supported by many non-Germans). He goes beyond this and shows that Klemperer, who with his wife maintained an almost unbelievable stoicism in the face of gradually increasing persecution and humiliation, was still able to express sympathy for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism. My summary is inadequate: read the article for yourself. If that leads you to read the Klemperer Diaries, so much the better.

More ABC RN mind food

In the last few days I've heard some interesting programs on ABC RN, including two pairs which complement each other nicely. Yesterday's Life Matters item about Australian Lebanese Muslim disadvantage, complemented this week's Counterpoint story "Are Australians racist?".

Monday night's Late Night Live featured a sprightly sounding 74 yo author of a recently published book Don't Call Me Grumpy: What Older Men Really Want. A different take on the theme of ageing and its challenges was given by Life Matters on Tuesday.

Cricket snippets

Australia scrape home against South Africa

A narrow win to Australia , though by many accounts (inc radio and the scorecard) the South Africans fought hard. The umpiring apparently favoured the visitors, especially Mike Hussey in the second innings.

Where in Goa did India beat England?

Yes, India won but why does almost everyone describe the venue as "Goa", which is not a city but a state? I was curious to find out exactly where the "Nehru Stadium" is. Eventually Cricinfo furnished the answer for those prepared to drill down into its data: it is in Margao, the largest city in the south of the state and near Benaulim where I stayed for a few relaxing days last year, though a hour by bus from Panjim the capital. Panjim has also hosted first class cricket most notably a match in 1989 where Tamil Nadu made 6/912 with two players making triple centuries.

What's happened to Billy?

Has Billy Bowden discreetly been demoted or even put out to pasture? Here's his record from Cricinfo):

Test debut	New Zealand v Australia at Auckland - Mar 11-15, 2000 scorecard
Last Test	Australia v South Africa at Sydney - Jan 2-6, 2006 scorecard
Test matches	35
ODI debut	New Zealand v Sri Lanka at Hamilton - Mar 29, 1995 scorecard
Last ODI	New Zealand v West Indies at Napier - Mar 1, 2006 scorecard
ODI matches	87

No test since January and no ODI for a month (and that only in NZ where he wasn't even the "elite" panellist ) ?

This is what Cricinfo said about him in 2004

Some eccentrics are born. Others thrust eccentricity upon themselves. Step forward, Brent "Billy" Bowden, the New Zealand umpiring sensation who shot to fame with a zany array of embellished signals and a preposterous eye for showmanship. Bowden turned to umpiring after the onset of arthritis in his early-twenties, and earned a reputation for giving batsmen out with a curiously bent finger. Suitably encouraged, he threw out the rule-book which states that the best cricket officials are the ones that go unnoticed, and added a whole host of whacky twists to his daily routine. The most celebrated of these is his hop-on-one-leg-and-reach-for-Jesus signal for six, and he seems pre-programmed to pose throughout a match, even when ducking for his life as a pull-shot rockets through square-leg. His critics are just waiting for the day he comes a cropper, but to his credit he very rarely does, and his decision-making skills are almost without equal among the ICC's elite panel.

The last sentence is probably overdue for revision.

More about Robert Fisk

This week's Independent Weekly republishes a Robert Fisk piece from the London Independent. The full article is not available on either publication's website but can be found here.

This one is Fisk at his best, linking the past with the present and always looking at events from a fresh perspective. Here's a sample:

"Gallipoli was the West's greatest 20th-century defeat at the hands of a Muslim army. You must have a heart of stone not to be moved by New Zealand's casualties at Gallipoli. Out of 8,450 soldiers sent to fight in Turkey, 2,721 were killed and 4,752 wounded. What other nation can claim an 88 per cent casualty rate in battle?"

If you're interested in hearing more, ABC RN's Big Ideas recently broadcast a lecture RF gave at the Sydney Ideas Festival this year which you can download.

Of course not everybody shares my opinion of RF. Tim Blair and his acolytes definitely don't, as you can see by clicking on the link. They're all frothed up about his alleged inability to suggest a possible solution (or perhaps a solution they'd agree with) to the Israel - Palestine issue. This is what I posted last October after hearing him speak

in the lecture Fisk didn't propose any solutions, but when asked during question time he suggested that any settlement had to be based on UN Resolution 242
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/59210ce6d04aef61852560c3005da209?OpenDocument. He did acknowledge that the resolution was a starting (or re-starting) not a finishing point but didn't elaborate in any detail.

I heard him repeat this at last month's Writer's Week. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea but it doesn't exactly duck the issue either.

Shadow Minister for Sport?

The Independent Weekly's attempts to broaden its appeal to middle Adelaide have given the recently departed Opposition Leader Rob Kerin an opportunity to demonstrate a new (or perhaps previously unpublicised) skill.

The Weekly's InDaily email service reports:

The Independent Weekly's footy-tipping competition has kicked off, though nobody picked all eight winners for round one. The leader so far is a man who's no stranger to leading: Rob Kerin, tied for equal first. It seems like Mr Kerin is enjoying his new, more relaxed role: not only is he sharpening his footy-tipping skills, but Insider also spotted him knocking a few back at the Welly during the O'Connell Street Food and Wine Affair.

Two conflicting views of Israel

The first has been published in the London Review of Books with an expanded version here ; the second, sharply critical of the first, in the Australian .

The Australian has also printed an extract from a Financial Times article supporting the authors of the LRB paper. Here is an extract:

Doctrinal orthodoxy was flouted last month in a paper on the Israel lobby by two of America's leading political scientists, Stephen Walt from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago. They argue powerfully that extraordinarily effective lobbying in Washington has led to a political consensus that American and Israeli interests are inseparable and identical. Only a British publication, the London Review of Books, was prepared to carry their critique. Moral blackmail - the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and US support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism - is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters. Judgment of the precise value of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper has been swept aside by a wave of condemnation. Their scholarship has been derided and their motives impugned ...On various counts, this is a shame and a self-inflicted wound no society built on freedom should allow ... Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interest.

Time to throw a bucket of cold water over them?

The cartoon war between Australia and Indonesia has increased in intensity with Bill Leak's cartoon in the Weekend Australian.

Gallery: Browse through Bill Leak's cartoons

and today's verbal rejoinder in the Australian .

If you're affronted by the reproduction of the cartoon let me know. I'm all in favour of freedom of speech though sometimes it's not easy to define its boundaries.

ABC TV's Media Watch has also had some difficulty reconciling free speech with good taste and sensitivity. Last week I thought it overstepped the mark with its report about the 2002 cruise ship death. On the program Monica Attard was strongly and rightly critical of the Advertiser's "gutter journalism" for printing a doctored photo of one of the women passengers who was a friend and travelling companion of the deceased, but the support team erred badly by putting the offending photo on the program website.

This week's program, however, IMO handled another delicate matter with more sensitivity.

Debate over benefits and hazards of cycling

It's good to see The Advertiser publishing a story about cycling even if it's one which debunks some research published by statistician Dorothy Robinson in the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ to to uninitiated).

Ms Robinson's conclusions are challenged by public spirited Citizen Cain (aka president of the local AMA branch) , who doesn't disclose how much cycling he's done since he's been in long pants but, as the 'Tiser reports:

"AMA state president, Dr Christopher Cain, yesterday said helmets, which have been compulsory in SA since 1991, were "absolutely beneficial".

"If there are two cyclists in the one accident and there is one with a helmet and one without, the helmet reduces the incidence of head injuries," he said.

Dr Cain said Dr Robertson's theories had "no scientific basis".

"It is an irrational assumption," he said.

Dr Cain said other factors were responsible for her findings, including traffic density, exposure to pollution and the speed at which traffic was moving.

Fast-paced modern living also meant cycling was not always the best transport option, Dr Cain said."

OK, if "traffic density, exposure to pollution and the speed at which traffic was moving" have "no scientific basis" and are "irrational assumptions" is it any wonder that Dr Robinson's research cuts no ice with the SA AMA? Of course we may well ask how many of his members are cyclists, or would it perhaps just be betterto throw in the towel (or dismount) and concede that Dr Cain is right to say "cycling was not always the best transport option for Adelaide".

I'm a cyclist, but don't want to see cars banned from or levied heavily to enter the miniscule Adelaide CBD. Last year I cycled in central Londonand can confirm that doing so is generally safer there than in central Adelaide. Why? Because, apart from the GBP8/$AU 20 congestion charge in London which discourages cars, bikes in London are allowed to travel in bus lanes, which makes for a much less stressful ride than one along, say, North terrace or Pulteney Street. See one of the photos here for an illustration of this in practice in London (and how a phrygian cap might be an effective alternative to a bike helmet).

ISN'T HAT BORIS: March 30 He's back and Anna looks on smiling as Boris wheels his bike from her flat on Thursday at 7.15pm. He stayed for nearly three hours before leaving seconds ahead of her

BYE BYE: Boris waves fond farewell to secret love Anna after cycling alongside her cab


Not that every cycling story in the global media is this serious: see here for this and other April fool stories (assuming the News of the World one was not intended to be another):

"Sweden's leading daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, scared thousands of bicyclists by claiming that Stockholm's city government would impose speed limits on bicycles in the inner city - to 20 kilometres an hour."

ABC thrift promotes good programming

Insiders and Offsiders, both shown on ABC TV on Sunday morning, deal with politics and sport respectively. They share the same MC (Barrie Cassidy) and the same set, so the ABC is effectively getting two programs for the price of one and a half.

Considering that the two programs are only half an hour apart, Barrie refocuses extremely well between them. Although I was initially sceptical of Offsiders I've come round to it, and it's becoming desirable, though not yet essential, viewing . Much of this is because Barrie obviously is on top of his games (politics, sport and TV presenting) and is able to move both programs forward when they look like flagging (usually when a guest or panellist rabbits on too much).

The Insiders structure is now well-established and the panel, IMO the highlight of the program (though the talking pictures section isn't bad either), usually has enough diversity of opinion to provide a good feisty discussion, even though its members are drawn from a small pool of talent. What about introducing some fresh faces such as Michael Duffy, Christian Kerr or John Quiggin? That said, this morning's discussion was lively: Fran Kelly's quick-witted incisiveness trumped Piers Akerman's harrumphing. You can always tell when Piers is throwing in the towel when he becomes more obsequious (eg"Barrie, if I may say..."). Today he tried to rope Malcolm Farr on to his side by describing one of MF's recent articles as "excellent".

Today's Offsiders panel was dominated by Gideon Haigh, one person who writes and speaks eruditely about both sport and the wider world. I may be biased because cricket is his sport of choice but I'm sure he has many pertinent things about both other sports and politics. The challenge for the producers is to find other panellists who have minds approaching his in depth if not in breadth: today when he used the term "algorithm' to describe the method of assessing Ricky Ponting's batting prowess the other panellists palpably had no idea of what he was saying. They remained silent.

The ABC has done a good thing to replay Insiders, or at least its heart the panel discussion, on the radio - Newsradio - at 1130 am EST. A podcast would make it even more accessible.

More on the ABC Board

In Thursday's Australian Errol Simper had a piece about the ABC entitled "Too much excitement could be bad for Aunty", an oblique reference to Minister Coonan's promise of "exciting hanges" in the offing for the corporation.

Simper makes some apposite comments, such as:

"It may be that Coonan, fresh from trying to recycle the grotesque proposition that public broadcasting should accept advertising, would like the ABC to more closely resemble another statutory body, the old Australian Wheat Board (now known as AWB Ltd). AWB's credo seems to have been that the very least accountability is far too much."

And "The ABC is a publicly funded media organisation. Why board deliberations must be encased within exaggerated silence must forever be a mystery.What happens in the boardroom that would happen so much better in the absence of a staff-elected person? "