It’s still hard though. 5,300.  Loss by 130 + to a team that probably won’t make the finals. I walked very slowly to my car.

It was clearly also tough on the coach, Kevin Sheedy, whose post match press conference revealed the pressures brought to bear on the club that has so many millions of dollars riding on its long term success.  In the press conference, as outlined here, he isolated two key concerns for the club – its growth as a playing group and growth of a supporter base.  They are the main issues affecting the club and will be for the next five years.

For passionate Melbourne based football fans, Sheedy’s comments will echo loudly in the next week. He places the blame on the current performance of the Giants at the feet of existing powerful clubs unwilling to let go of existing stars whose presence at a club like the Giants would make an immediate and profound difference. As can be seen by the presence of Gary Ablett Jnr at the Suns, as well as the work of Chad Cornes last year at the Giants, experience and body development count a great deal towards the success of a team in AFL. You just can’t build a team entirely on the promise of 19 year olds.  From where I sit, if there were two more experienced players in the back, two more experienced players in the forward line, the difference would be marked.   You will hear, however, on the SEN talkback in Melbourne that clubs “shouldn’t be giving up players they developed” from a range of passionate fans.  I can understand their point. The idea of transfer, however, is a feature of most football codes in the world, but is considered sacrilege by many in AFL.

This is a key difference between the on field success of the Western Sydney Wanderers and the Giants. The Wanderers had players of varying levels of talent and experience – with key outstanding players like Ono, which helped to create a team that was quick to mature and blossom. This is why their sudden success of the year shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was.  Soccer (I will call it soccer here, as distinct from Australian Football) easily transfers players from other clubs, it’s part of their game.  In AFL, it is a major, painful sticking point.

What we will also hear is reaction to his other comment – already he is being accused of being a racist.

“…That was probably a reminder of what the Swans have been telling us. (Sydney chairman) Richard Colless says you’re going to do it hard early.  So it just tells everybody how tough it’s going to be to build the club. We don’t have the recruiting officer called the immigration department, recruiting fans for (successful A-League soccer club) Western Sydney Wanderers.  We’ve got to start a whole new ballpark and go and find fans.”

It’s a silly comment, a clumsy, insensitive attempt at humour and should not have been made. What I suspect Sheedy was trying to say was that soccer has a wide following from people who come from overseas to Australia while AFL, being home grown, doesn’t have that natural, from birth support. It is an accurate observation to make, especially when we consider that the soccer mad UK is the source of the third highest number of migrants to Australia.

Source Country for Immigration Statistics, 2011 – 12 – from DIAC.

It is also the case that soccer’s supporter base in Western Sydney was well established amongst various British, Irish and non – British migrant communities long before the Wanderers came along. This explains why the Wanderer support base was quick to form. Due to that heritage, I still think Western Sydney should have had a soccer team before Sydney.  I was a supporter of the Parramatta Power back in the NSL days.  That the Wanderers was a hurried afterthought was an indictment on the A League’s founders.  However, maybe because it was an afterthought that it’s been a success.  Perhaps, if there had been more planning, Parramatta Leagues club might have stumbled in and repeated the mistakes they made with the Parramatta Power.  Due to the fact almost all games are played at Parramatta, the Wanderers are little more than a reborn Power, but this time with genuine grassroots engagement, as opposed to top – down control.

Thus, what Sheedy should have said in the press conference is that AFL doesn’t have the same cultural roots in Western Sydney as sports like soccer and rugby league and this makes it a hard, long sell.  But he didn’t, thus leading us to what will be a bit of a storm on which the media will feed for a while.

Sheedy did come out and explain his comments on Twitter later in the evening, which fit into what I suspected he meant -

What he will find very quickly though, that it’s a thorny field, talking about immigration and Western Sydney.  Accusations of dog whistling are always quick to form whenever immigration is mentioned.  It will be interesting to see where this issue heads. Soccer fans will be furious, saying that it shows that Anglo Celtic people like Sheedy see soccer as “wogball” and only played by European migrants. Yet others will see it as sour grapes because the Giants haven’t built the support that the Wanderers have.  In truth, I don’t think Sheedy should have mentioned the Wanderers at all in comparison to the Giants. They play at a different time of the year for a start and the codes don’t necessarily compete for juniors.  The two junior codes play on a different day – Saturday is soccer day, Sunday is AFL day in Sydney.

Ultimately, Sheedy should have focused on the fact there’s still work to be done on the team and on the poor mother’s day scheduling. It would have been less controversial and not make it into an us and them issue. The Giants and the Wanderers should not be fighting against each other, no matter what journalists will ask and write in their articles comparing the two codes.

As for what might happen next, I think we will see Sheedy on the TV in Sydney a bit this week, apologising, showing how he likes the cultural diversity in Western Sydney as well as soccer.  In Melbourne, however, he will be quizzed about “stealing” players from the successful clubs.

For me, though, it’s just been a hard Sunday. The Giants have a long way to go, in terms of team and crowd development. I sincerely hope these comments don’t make people think Giants fans and staffers are all racists and that we hate soccer. I just want to see better efforts from the players and more people to be part of what should be a great AFL club representing one of the best – and most misunderstood – parts of Australia.

These conferences have a various array of themes, concepts and types of presentation tools being used. Powerpoints were the rage until recently, replaced in part by videos and the swooshing of Prezi.  While business conferences are usually closed door affairs, however, teacher conferences are marked these days by the lines of teachers tweeting what is being said so that their PLN – Professional Learning Network – can read what is being said.  These teachers are more than aware that there are many teachers who cannot make conferences, due mainly to cost and family commitments.  They tweet so those colleagues and friends can keep up to date.   It is not, as many other teachers used to say at such conferences, a “rude thing to do”. It’s the opposite.

I say this because there is another strain of conference concept emerging – the TED talks. Teachers are aware of TED, largely because there’s not a term goes by where teachers see a TED talk being transmitted during an inservice day. This is not a bad thing – TED talks are often excellent, informative and can be inspiring.

What is intriguing, however, is how regional TED talks are organised and run. In 2012, the first TED talk in Sydney (at least, the first of which I was aware), was held at Carriageworks, in Redfern – a relatively low key venue for the ideas being spread. It was a free event, but one had to “apply” for entry with an interesting biography. Each potential audience member had to prove just how interesting they were to be provided entry to the event. The deciding panel therefore became some kind of doormen outside the hottest thought club in town. I wasn’t cool enough – I thought back and realised I should have just made something up. Something like this:

I am a cutting edge thought leader and shaper living in one of the most culturally intriguing parts of Australia’s most cosmopolitan city. I believe ideas are the key to unlocking the potential all of us have in continuing the cultural conversation and defining the paradigms of our age.

On the day, I put the question out as to whether those of us too uncool for entry could at least read the ideas from the comfort of our lounge rooms. I was told that the TED organisers were not allowing tweeting from inside the room from audience members. This astonished me, considering that the whole philosophy of TED is “Ideas Worth Spreading”. Ideas worth spreading, but not as individual people.  It seems from this policy that the way they practice their “Ideas Worth Spreading” idea is through their website. And to the cool people in the room.

Flash forward to 2013 and TED in Sydney has graduated to the Sydney Opera House – a much more expensive venue to hire. There was also, this time around, a ticket cost – $120 – for those who got in. I don’t know if they still had the Thought Club Doormen this time around. You would have thought so, however – TED seemed to be the hottest ticket in town for people interested in Thoughts. If you’re on the outside, you can watch the live stream at home or the videos afterwards.  But not reading tweets.

The cult of TED has been interesting to follow – and I think summarised pretty well in this Twitter conversation between the President of the NSW Independent Education Union, Dick Shearman, radio and newspaper veteran Mike Carlton and I:

The adherents of TED do sound a bit like evangelical Christians after emerging from a particularly inspiring church service – high on the propagation of simple, effectively communicated ideas.  You also don’t hear many dissenting voices TED being broadcast – restricting the tweets would certainly do that. It is also a bit Hillsong in that they do like to have the flashy, highly attractive venue and control over the material presented.

This is not to say TED is a bad thing, or that all of the presenters and their ideas aren’t excellent – I was pleased, for example, that Lisa Murray, the City of Sydney Historian, was appreciated for her work during yesterday’s event.  Her work, and that of other presenters, needs celebration and profile.  I do wonder, however, whether people who saw her talk would have gone to the other talks that she would deliver around the City as a part of her role, or just went because it was TED – and therefore cool.

I would be interested, too, whether the organisers of TED would ever contemplate a TEDxPenrith, where ideas could be propagated by a range of people to an audience keen to engage with ideas. This is because there are people who live in the region interested in ideas about society, the planet, education, history and the rest. The cynic in me guesses that it will never happen – TED seem to want the big flashy settings for the videos to get the clicks from their audience. You would wonder too if they would attract some of the Thought Leaders of our Age to make the trip out west.

Andrew Bolt doesn’t see the need to have a Twitter account – his audience would feed him all he needs for his deliberate misrepresentation of everything that occurs on various platforms. This is his blog post, posted on April 28 at 5.55 am.

Bolt is less a journalist, more a self created ringmaster of a circus built for lunatics. (Though the other day, I was speaking to a reasonable fellow netball dad who came out with the phrase “I agree with Andrew Bolt…” which startled me).  What is surprising, however, is that the source of his post is a senior journalist in a non News Ltd outlet. It’s from Chris Johnson, National Political Correspondent, writing in the Age.  This article highlights much of what is wrong with media’s relationship with politics and social media. As ever in my deconstructions, the original article is in italics.

The left takes a turn for the ugly as power slips through Labor’s grasp

Also predictable, symbolic and as ephemeral was the reaction to an interview conducted the night before by Leigh Sales of the aspirant Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. Abbott seemed to be much better prepared with his asinine talking points and circular logic than previously, and being in a studio where he didn’t have to look Sales in the eye seemed to also help his ability to appear to deflect close scrutiny.  The interview made him look like a robot who was barely remembering his purpose and come out with the absurd line “I’m growing” – even though he has spent more than three years in his current role.  It was Abbott as his most Lathamesque – I’m talking the sanitised “no crudity” Latham. The Latham who seemed to have been force fed a diet of an electronic Beethoven’s 9th before he was put on stage.   The reaction was predictable in that the crowd of Labor megaphones crashed in on Sales for not eviscerating Abbott. One of the more dignified variations of this criticism came in the Labor leaning Australians For Honest Politics blog project, where Peter Clarke, after a fairly thorough deconstruction of every question Sales gave, concluded with questions such as these :

In short, what is actually happening behind the scenes at 730 to leech this program of its effectiveness just when we need it most to do its fourth estate job effectively without fear or favour?

Has the constant drumbeat of partisan attack on the ABC generally and Sales personally ultimately had the “desired effect”?

Like a lot of what we are seeing as media scrutiny from the Labor leaning news sites, these loaded rhetorical questions and the conclusion of the piece featured more than a whiff of conspiracy theories about the downfall of the ABC as a bastion of truth, justice and the progressive way.  Who is “we”? How did Sales “let down” “we” with her questions. The “we”, I suspect, are those who wish Abbott to be taken down by the likes of Sales.  As for the concept of “partisan attack”, I am assuming Clarke is referring to the conservative attacks by the likes of Chris Kenny and Gerard Henderson. Reading Twitter, however, that concept of “partisan attack” is a two way street. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t.  As for “desired effect” – again, I assume Clarke is referring to a conservative desire.  It sounds more like conspiracy than based on known evidence of any kind of actual instructions issued to Sales.

This agonising examination of the ABC by progressive commentators is painful and self defeating – as is covered so well in this blog post. It misses a wider point – that obsessively analysing single interviews misses wider shifts and movements in the election.   Most people from the areas in which I have lived and worked – where this election is being fought – especially a lot of swinging voters, don’t watch the ABC very much. My Kitchen Rules would have been where a lot of them would be watching TV at the time of the Abbottbot interview. Or maybe, earlier on, they were The Project, if they were interested in politics. If they are to watch the ABC at all, it wouldn’t be this far out from an election.

These things pass. Less We Forget was more evidence of the fact we as a community don’t use the word “Lest” in everyday conversation and in our media – it usually only exists for most people in the phrase “Lest We Forget”. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that people have misheard the word and are getting it wrong – I dare say most of those people have now learnt their lesson or will do so soon enough. It doesn’t, however, show the downfall of civilisation, as much as misplaced apostrophes doesn’t show the incompetence of our education system.  Anyone expressing genuine outrage and judgmental attitudes towards “Less We Forget”, revealed quite a bit about the people getting outraged at something so trivial.

Catherine Deveny, too, exists as an outrage lightning rod – she’s not unique in having an outrageous opinion – but she does like to speak what is often unspoken and is uncompromising in asserting her right to express them.  Deveny’s tweets are to ANZAC Day what the Queen’s Message is to Christmas. People don’t have to watch. The chief difference is that people these days don’t put themselves through the act of watching the Queen, just to be outraged by what she says.

As for the idea of football on ANZAC Day, which Wednesday night’s Mad As Hell (it’s at the start of the episode) lampooned so beautifully, the ANZAC Day game was just an idea Kevin Sheedy had in his garden – thinking that an ANZAC Day match might be a nice way to commemorate soldiers who fought at war and Bruce Ruxton, the Collingwood loving RSL head, agreed.  A way for people to enjoy some football after the commemoration of war. It’s not a hijack of the ANZAC legend for a football game – though the awarding of the best on ground for “best exhibiting the ANZAC spirit” is fairly absurd. That is unless someone has shot some Turkish soldiers, been shot at, has contracted trench foot or has devised an ingenious retreat whilst playing the game.

Sometimes it’s good to just forget and move on from obsessions. I understand why the Labor megaphones both on Twitter and in blogs get frustrated. The ALP have not had a great run from various media outlets, especially News Ltd.  That’s why there’s been the need to establish “Independent” media outlets that act as anti- News Ltd. They are good pressure valves.  I understand the excitement that a 730 report appearance by Abbott instils in people. But they forget the long game and the hectoring, blatantly partisan nature of the tweets and blogs have the effect of turning off a number of people in the same way as The Australian has to non rusted on Liberal supporters.  It should be reassuring for them that there will be more TV appearances for Tony Abbott. More importantly, he will also have to appear on commercial TV, where he has been less than convincing at times.  Plus, if he wins the election, there will be three years of having to step around the landmines that Abbott perceives every time he appears on TV.

In the end, there will also be more occasions for daily, largely impotent outrage. We should be forgetting about the ephemeral and trivial nonsense arguments that are so easy to fall into on Twitter. The less we forget about what is truly important, however, is something we should consider.

Not all sport reporting is breathless gossip and small stories exploded into massively vital ones. There are notable exceptions in terms of excellent sport writers and broadcasters – people like Brad Walter, Neil Cordy, Richard Hinds, Gideon Haigh, Jarrod Kimber, Francis Leach, Deb Spillane, Caroline Wilson and Malcolm Knox (there are more, fill in the gaps…).  These writers and commentators have a way of fitting sport into a wider context, showing why it should matter to us why things happen in sport.  Most sport writers, however, don’t.  Part of the issue for sport writers is that of “access”- which is often used as a way of justifying an amount of what is written.

Access to all available players and sporting officials is a key claim towards authority for sport writer – we often read “I was at Whitten Oval today, and…” or “Deep inside Panthers, I was talking to Phil Gould about…”. It’s often mentioned in an irrelevant context – such as when a piece on A League starts with something David Gallop texted Phil Rothfield.  This question of access is also often used as a defence of their articles by the sport writers on Twitter – the “I talked to X, I saw Y, you didn’t” approach.  It’s a similar phenomenon to whenever we hear from Canberra Press Gallery journalists about their level of acces to those notorious “anonymous sources” from the ALP. That level of access raises various questions:

1. Does being too close personally to the figures involved affects the level of objectivity and clarity of the author?

2. Does the level of access renders all “outsider” commentary on sport irrelevant and without authority

3. Does access render the articles as being “safe”, due to the fear of the journalist losing that level of access that allows him or her to write their pieces?

4. Does close access reduce sport commentary and writing to the detailed reportage of intimate details of day to day activities in the sport?

The insistence on “access” (often called “unprecedented access”) as well as experience in sport is something we see dominating sport coverage and commentary. This is why the AFL dedicated channel on Foxtel, is filled with former players or newspaper writers who have “access”.  Or Eddie McGuire (there can’t be many Chairmen of any organisations that would be allowed to their own TV show – imagine “Rupert Murdoch Tonight” or the “Alan Joyce Show”). Even the Supercoach Show, a show for people who like playing fantasy football, is now hosted by a former footballer, Brad Johnson, who doesn’t seem to know very much about the Supercoach game.  The result is that we have the same talking heads, with their unparalleled access, treading the line of being uncontroversial and largely uncritical of the game or the wider cultural impact of the game.  An exception to this is the ABC program “Offsiders”, which is often controversial – even if the panellists are Insiders with Access.  It will be a while until we see a Fan Forum show on Fox Sports, where people with no access will be able to discuss issues and comment on the game.

When it comes to be experienced or someone with access, this also shuts out and marginalises a significant sector of sport fans, commentators and writers – female fans, commentators and writers. Fox Footy is like the Marylebone and Melbourne Cricket Clubs of eras past – men only.  Women aren’t anywhere to be seen, even the week where it was Women’s Round in the AFL was advertised as “Christmas in July” on the channel. This means that sideline commentators like Barry Hall, when speaking about the “unprecedented access” the channel had to Port Adelaide’s preparations for their March 31 game, said “the women will be disappointed we haven’t got cameras in the change room”. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink…  This theme of marginalised female sport fans, commentators and writers is a continuing one. They can be poor “victims” of a partner who likes fantasy football, removed from TV commentary in the case of Kelli Underwood, or the idea that women are best employed writing about women’s sport.  Women in commercial football seem to be best employed as readers of sporting odds or as the giggling sidekick – a role Fifi Box played for a while in the NRL Footy Show – or as a target of disgusting activities undertaken by Sam Newman in the AFL Footy Show with a Caroline Wilson mannequin.  The exception to this is the ABC, with Underwood doing commentary for them, the continuing presence of Simone Thurtell and Karen Tighe on Grandstand, as well as Deb Spillane both hosting Northern Grandstand and her “Hens FC” panel show.

A solution to all of this – as it has been for the political news community, is for the blogosphere to pick up where traditional sport media leaves off and create blogs and media hubs that provide honest, varied views about sport and the wider context of sport.  One about various sports, no matter the gender of the sportspeople. Where a range of good writers write about sport in a meaningful way – but without being fussed about “access”, “exclusives” and other old media methods of excluding readers and possible contributors. We don’t have many templates for such a site.

The US has Grantland, which is an ESPN project. One of the best features in that was one that demonstrates the issue of being a journalist with access as against being a sport fan and member of society demanding the truth, explored by the creator of Grantland, Bill Simmons.  None of our sport broadcasters present such a forum.  I’m also not talking about Bound for Glory news, which is a commendable attempt at alternative sport writing featuring a range of writers, but is limited, in that it mainly concerns itself about AFL and that world.  I am speaking about a sport version somewhere between The Drum or Ausvotes 2013, which has a clean, accessible front page as well as writers who are free to contribute their pieces, no matter their “background” in sport. Not sure whether this will ever happen, but it would be nice if it did.

Being in a NSW workplace as I have been all my life, I am the only person I know who plays AFL fantasy football. I am fully aware that if I was a teacher in Victoria, I would have had to develop a pretty sophisticated understanding of the workings of the comps, both to keep up with Monday morning staffroom conversations, but also have something to talk about down at the pub on a Friday night. A female teacher friend of mine, in order to have something to talk about, decided to have fun with the concept some time ago and selects a team each year that contains players selected entirely on the basis of their names being a double entendre. Hence, Sidebottom, Suckling, Swallow (x2), Goldsack, Ryder, Plowman, Johncock… (you get the picture). For me, though, it’s a case of having no pressure to be some kind of King of the Staffroom, it’s purely diverting and fun.

In order to help fuel the obsessions, there’s a whole internet community dedicated to the numbers and machinations of the two fantasy football competitions. Amongst the best of these are Dream Team Talk, which features the occasional Youtube show with three friendly blokes talking at a pub; Supercoach Paige, which features one of the few women who talks fantasy football; a page with an amusing title picture, Sargeant Supercoach and probably one of the more interesting projects attempting to emulate 1970s football language, Jock Reynolds. These weeks have been spent trying to work out what all the numbers mean. That’s why my Twitter feed has me following a range of DT and SC experts, all talking in a foreign language. That’s why I’ll have commentary on which sauce bottle Rudd has shaken followed by cries of “Broughton isn’t rebounding the ball in the NAB Cup game”, “Ross Lyon really hates DT coaches”, “This game in Renmark has produced awesome numbers for Port”, “Swan is a definite lock”, “What do you mean Tom Mitchell isn’t playing???”, et cetera. As with any concept foreign to me, it fascinates with its coruscations.

Despite the best efforts of members of this very friendly and helpful Twitter crew (especially fellow Giants member and Dream Team Talk contributor, @RLGriffin85 and that outstanding AFL news source, @janinemcglynn), I still don’t entirely understand how the numbers work. This includes the differences between Dream Team and Supercoach. Both use quite different statistical formulas. All I have worked out really is that some players touch the ball more and get involved in the game, which gives them more numbers. But champion players like Adam Goodes and Nick Malceski aren’t really all that good for the fantasy competitions. Even my favourite player in the AFL, Kieren Jack, is barely mentioned. Apparently it hurts him to be playing with other champion players. What I have learned, however, is that the games are actually outstanding learning activities – especially in terms of providing a workout in terms of statistics, mathematics and speculation based on evidence. This is why parents shouldn’t get too worried if their children like a bit of fantasy football activity.

As an exercise in attempting to understand this world of numbers, statistics and the like, I decided to select two teams in each competition. One is my regular all sides team – the one where I have attempted to listen to all of the advice and tips from the various sources. The other is my Northern States team, consisting of players for the Sydney Swans, GWS Giants, Gold Coast Suns and Brisbane Lions. This is partially because I wanted to track how players from the Swans and Giants go in the competitions, and partially because I am very fond of any team operating in the “league states”. This is why the DT / SC crew like giving me advice on my all sides team, but are sometimes profoundly puzzled by the Northern States team. They possibly don’t understand what it’s like for a Western Sydney boy to have four sides north of the Murray to watch. Plus, they have the torrent of “coaches” asking questions about their legitimate teams. “What about Fyfe?” is more pressing than “why don’t any of these teams have cheap rookies that will get a game?”

Here are my Northern States teams – the Northern States teams are both named in honour of the Flamboyant Icon of Northern States AFL, Warwick Capper.

Dream Team

Super Coach

Then there is the All States team, built from all of the rumours, comments, research.

Dream Team

Super Coach

Summarising the gap between my political Twitter friends and the Fantasy Footyheads, almost no-one took up my invitation to join my “Flamboyant League”, also named for Mr. Capper. That is to be expected though, the worlds have almost no intersection.

Today is the big day for Fantasy Football chat and last minute panics as the numbers of changes that can be made becomes restricted. The Crean Bun Fight barely rated a blip yesterday in their world. Brad Crouch’s non selection for Adelaide made more of an impact. I hope they all remember it really is just fun rather than a reflection of their abilities as people. But maybe that’s just the view from an isolated Sydney person. Ultimately, however, I’m glad this type of thing exists. Otherwise, we’d all just be more than a little depressed about the state of play in this country.

Question 1. Why is it always high fee paying private schools that are used as examples of the independent schooling sector?

Read the Sydney Morning Herald, and funding of the high fee paying private schools like Kings, Scots, Pymble Ladies’ College and the like is a frequent visitor to its pages. It’s almost as if the Herald aren’t aware of Catholic systemic, community Christian and Islamic schools. For it is these schools, out in the suburbs, that receive the bulk of Federal education funding for independent schools. Yet what we see time and again are pictures of new swimming pools and rugby fields, which works to polarise and sensationalise, rather than discuss the complexity of the education system.

It is also the case that many advocates of public schooling want to target independent schools, so they make the high fee paying ones the symbol of the wastefulness of government spending. It could also be that many of these advocates live in relatively affluent areas, where the main schooling options are public schools and the high fee paying school. The question remains – why not look at the schools that receive most of the money, not the lucky few that benefit from former students and from well paid parents.

Question 2. Why Don’t We Hear About Teacher Recruitment Issues?

When I started out in teaching, I could not get a permanent posting. Three years of living in the western suburbs of Sydney, being available to be placed in a Western Suburbs public school and nothing. So, like many teachers in the western suburbs, I worked in blocks, on temporary contracts. Financial security non existent – especially if I was after day to day casual work. This situation remains to this day. Teachers on temporary contracts – often in the same school – who can’t be upgraded to permanency. Teachers on blocks who can’t get an interview for a position or get pushed up “the list”.

It is a worthwhile conversation to have about teach quality. But imagine the quality one could have if more young teachers could gain permanent placements. Somewhere. If that school is considered to be a “rough” school, then provide support to that teacher and encourage support networks.

Question 3. Why Must People Attack Sides?

The education debate is often torpedoed by comments from people – like Catherine Deveny – who insist on labelling parents who choose to send their students to independent schools. Or label supporters of independent schools as “elitists” who “support Knox getting another rugby field”. On the other side, we have people who support education choice by making uninformed and prejudiced comments about the “type” of student who goes to a “typical” public school. We get a polarised dichotomy that doesn’t help. Schools aren’t easily placed into boxes or stereotypes, so attempting to do so by taking a “side” is probably unproductive – but still people do it.

Question 4. Why Aren’t We Talking About Increasing All School Funding?

The old argument about whether independent schools should get funding from governments was fought and lost quite some time ago. Considering that it seems most politicians from the ALP and Liberal Party either went to an independent school, their children go to one – or, more importantly – are frequently lobbied by voting parents of students who attend these schools – funding of independent schools will be a continuing reality for a while.

This is why, maybe, the conversation could turn to discussing whether all school funding should be increased, at the expense of areas where the need isn’t as great, such as defence or asylum seeker processing. The government that stands up and says “we are actually increasing funding for all schools” would actually receive a lot of support – especially in that Western Sydney area people go on about. As I said in my post on education in Ausvotes 2013 – education is very important – for parents who send their kids to all schools. More important than stopping boats and transport.

Question 5. Why Selective Schools?

This is a NSW specific question. We have academically selective schools that are frequently trumpeted on the league tables produced in the HSC result coverage in the Herald and Telegraph. This is rendered almost meaningless when you regard that these schools take students from other schools and group them together in a place where very good is just mediocre. What we don’t hear is how the academically selective system benefits the whole student. They are just made into their result.

Anyway, these are questions. Come up with some answers. Or not. Your call.

It happens everywhere. Stupid jokes, stupid photos, catty comments in TV shows, offices, wherever.  It’s something that should be stopped, along with refugee demonising and racism.  Problem is, unlike those things, this kind of shaming is given tacit approval in many places and, worse, promotion on what ranks as the worst “reality” show on Australian TV – The Biggest Loser.

It’s difficult to ignore the presence of this show – you could be sitting there, enjoying a decent show like Mr and Mrs Murder and there the ads come on, dripping with slurry music accompanying people saying they feeling “ashamed” of the way they look, saying that basically their lives have no meaning because of their weight.  The show then approves this sentiment by having some shouty personal trainer with Personality Deficiency Syndrome (PDS) shouting at them at some “Fat Camp”, “Loser Central” or some inane name.

There are multiple stories about the ridiculous lengths these people go to at Fat Camp to make massive weight loss their goal – as well as the cheating that went on behind the scenes of the show. That’s not the whole point, though – the show itself is an abomination that should never see the light of the day.  Telling people that they are worthless because they are above a certain weight, plus encouraging weight loss more than 1kg a week (considered by many to be a sensible weight loss goal) is irresponsible.  The kind of spotlight that is put on these people wanting a bit of shame fame (goodness knows why) is just cynical manipulation by TV execs wanting to spin some money from the embarrassment of others. As with Big Brother, I’m not convinced that the contestants on these shows know exactly what kind of post – show life they are in for.  For each person that actually gained some happiness, there would be still others forever known as “Biggest Loser Contestants” in a negative way.

The problem is, though, that people watch this stuff. Week after week, getting emotionally attached, going on “the journey” with them. It’s hard to blame people for getting hooked – TV watchers like intense drama – this show is full of such confected, slow motion tear jerking – and many of the viewers would also have weight “issues”, as the magazines would put it.  But it doesn’t reflect well on our culture when what we are watching on TV is people on treadmills being shouted at by PDS suffering prison warden wannabes in lycra.

There are people, however, who will be blogging about it, tweeting it and it will appear, no matter the muting and list management one can do. On will flash some kind of comment about how “wonderful” someone finds the “journey” to being thin.  Nothing, however, about how their personality or ability to communicate to others will be improved. Nor how stupid it is that their friends and people around them will talk to them differently because they a different size.

This show flushes out, however, those people who do like to discriminate according to size. You’ll hear them talking around the water cooler about this show, admiring the weight loss and talking about those who can’t lose weight in a negative way. These same people are often incapable of talking about things other than their bodies, clothes and how they lost weight with x diet. They are the people who don’t need The Biggest Loser to watch every week, smugly looking down on those who struggle. They need another show altogether.

Frankly, what I want to see on TV is The Biggest Gainer. Find people larger people comfortable with their body image who know things about things other than being weight obsessed. Then get a whole group of personal trainers and teach them to appreciate and engage with culture – art, literature, music, etc. Stop these trainers from wanting to spend all their lives on a treadmill, jogging around in circles and shouting at people – instead have them want to read, listen to Beethoven and talk about things. Gain something worthwhile, instead of turning our TV culture into a wasteland of narcissistic finger pointing.

There are those who are filled with horror with the kind of narcissism, egotism, social segregation and self centred grasping that an Abbott Government would encourage. They should be watching The Biggest Loser and see that it’s already happening, every week. Then stop watching. And never refer to it again.

Political science: altering Abbott’s polarity from negative to positive

Expect some rebranding as the Coalition campaign begins.

‘Abbott is starting the year confident but not complacent.’ Photo: Rob HomerAlways good to have a picture of Abbott trying to look serious and explain something. Looks like it would be home on an Abbott election leaflet.  It would be interesting to compare this to many of the pictures we see of the Prime Minister in media articles.

TONY Abbott is likely to be residing in the PM’s office later this year. Even though the polls have tightened and things can change dramatically, on both sides of politics, that’s the assumption.

From whom? By whom? A pretty big statement to start with – and I can only assume that it’s the press gallery about which she speaks without any provided evidence to the contrary.

A second assumption is that a swag of New South Wales seats will help him get there. It’s no coincidence that Abbott is starting his mini-campaign this morning with a rally (invitation only) of the Liberal faithful in western Sydney’s Lidcombe. The home territory of those ”Howard battlers” is fertile ground for Abbott.

It seems Michelle needs to do a bit of research before talking about areas outside Melbourne and Canberra. Lidcombe is far from being “home territory” of “Howard battlers” at all. It is in the seat of Reid, which is the home of a variety of nationalities, including many newly arrived refugees.  It is also, these days, a much more marginal seat than in the Howard days, due to a number of factors.  If Michelle knew Sydney well, she’d know that the “Howard Battlers” – a lazy term that fits nicely with the Liberal Party strategy documents of the Howard years – was more associated with seats like Lindsay, Greenway, Macarthur and Hughes; containing suburbs that Mark Latham called the “white flight” areas.  Not Lidcombe at all. The move by Abbott to target Lidcombe as a launch site for a campaign (no, sorry, unofficial mini campaign) is more a rallying cry for a marginal seat strategy.  (I am amused by the idea of the Liberal faithful setting off from their plush suburban digs and setting their GPS devices for Lidcombe.)   Having seen the way members of the Canberra Press Gallery showed little understanding of the western suburbs in 2010, I’m not all that surprised that Grattan would say that Lidcombe is just a Howard battler location. It is more a location, however, where the anti-refugee policies of Abbott would have traction amongst those who live in Reid that were either refugees in another era or boat dwellers of the Anglo Celtic variety.

Labor has a total of seven seats in western Sydney and on the NSW central coast that are sitting on margins of between 0.9 per cent and 5.1 per cent. Labor was extremely lucky with some of these last time and a double miracle is unlikely, although the party will make a big effort – a government industry statement is coming, directed at manufacturing workers in such areas.

“Extremely lucky” and “miracle”. Grattan appears to be positioning the Coalition as being unlucky to not win in the western suburbs seats – as if it should have been inevitable. Not a mention of the possible impact of Coalition workplace policies, which would be pretty close to the top concern of seats like Reid.  Indeed, they have been quiet in the press gallery – and the Liberal Party – about IR for a while.

This week’s Coalition campaigning, complete with TV advertising and a booklet detailing values, directions and those policies already in the marketplace, is all about seeking to persuade people that the Opposition Leader can be ”Mr Positive”. The key message is that the Coalition has a (positive) plan. It’s not the first time such an attempt has been rolled out, but this time it is more extensive and serious.

The news that Grattan is discussing here is the release of an advertising campaign and summing up what the angle of that campaign is. It sounds a bit like those articles one reads in newspapers – in lifestyle sections and on page 46 of local newspapers – that just discuss new ad campaigns – that sound something like this -

“Andre Rieu has signed a contract with Chanel, where he will appear in ads where he will stand still and look wistful, with the breeze blowing through his luxuriant hair. The campaign will be seeking to say the violinist is ‘Mr Soulful’. The key message is that Chanel has a (positive) plan to engage with music fans. The spend on this campaign is significant, so it looks extensive and serious”.

It’s a timeless meme in the media. In the 80s, it would have sounded like this -

“Warwick Capper has signed a contract with Brut, where he will appear in ads where he will stand still and look glamorous, with the breeze blowing through his luxuriant hair. The campaign will be seeking to say the Swans star is ‘Mr Flamboyant’.  The key message is that Brut has a (positive) plan to engage with football fans. The spend on this campaign is significant, so it looks extensive and serious”.  

But I digress. Onwards…

Abbott is starting the year confident but not complacent. He knows from experience how narrow the gap can be between success and failure. In 2009 he obtained the leadership by chance (Joe Hockey almost had it in the bag) and by the smallest of margins; in 2010 he failed by a whisker to get power.

More of the advertorial style, casting Abbott in a positive light. “Confident, not complacent” is a way of describing a footballer starting a season, as to not make them sound like an egotist who thinks everything is easy.  Plus, “by chance” reduces the significance of the campaign by Nick Minchin, amongst others, to install Abbott as opposition leader. “By chance” is a oft repeated half truth.

No wonder he’s risk averse. He won’t contemplate a reshuffle – it just creates whingers. He minimises ”hard” interviews. His office has made an extraordinary effort to counter Labor’s claims that he is ”anti-woman”, with his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, willing to talk publicly about how he encouraged her to use his parliamentary fridge to store her fertility drugs.

It is here we have a list of things reported by the Press Gallery but not really examined or analysed a great deal – Grattan doesn’t seem overly bothered by the idea that Abbott is being allowed to minimise those “hard” interviews, as if he has the right to avoid scrutiny.

He is obsessed with discipline, though seemingly unable to avoid periodic lapses. He knows he can be his own biggest risk. His deep personal unpopularity and his negative branding are problems to which he will apply his usual diligence. But can he change his image? And how much will it matter in the end?

“His usual diligence” is an interesting expression, as is Grattan’s question as to how important his image is.  Image, image, image is the focus of this article. And, as if to confirm this, Hugh Mackay is mentioned – the social researcher who is the go to person for journalists who usually write about social trends and product popularity.

Social researcher Hugh Mackay believes Abbott’s brand – being negative, destructive and dismissive – has been unchanged for so long that it has become ”indelible” and it’s hard to see him being able to break out of it.

Abbott’s Brand confirms the idea that this article is about a product. Abbott is Chanel – or possibly more accurately, Brut. What we don’t see here is any exploration of why he is unpopular – that it might have something to do with more than image.  Then we slip into my favourite quote in the entire article – the moment that in advertisements that are usually prefaced with the line “Don’t take my word for it, let’s ask one of Abbott’s supporters”:

But one of Abbott’s senior colleagues argues: ”He’s strong on the tangibles. He’s an alpha male. Alpha males are runners, jumpers. They build things.” He believes Mr Positive will be convincing.

They build things? They are runners, jumpers? Such a blindingly simplistic view of politics just slides through unchallenged. Or maybe Grattan is just opening the door to the brain of a Modern Liberal, showing that the Liberals really are that superficial.  Talking of superficial, Kevin is never far away…

If Abbott faced another Labor leader – notably Kevin Rudd – things might be different. But the chances of a change to Rudd have faded (and a switch would involve its own huge problems for Labor).

It seems Michelle has finally dropped her fantasy (a shared fantasy with the senior members of the Press Gallery, it seems) of the Rudd return.  I’m surprised Malcolm didn’t make an appearance.

As matters stand, Julia Gillard, while she has clawed back her ratings, is also fundamentally unpopular. Both leaders know that voters are thoroughly fed up with each of them and the hung parliament. Perhaps that’s why the start of this election year has been rather slower than might have been expected. The less visible the leaders are, the happier the public. As Mackay says, this will be a contest where there is no inspirational figure.

Imagine, ratings, superficiality.  It’s like a Theatre of the Absurd play down there in Canberra. Guildenstern’s cry – “Words, words. That’s all we have to go on” from Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turns into “Polls, polls. That’s all we have to go on”.  That and broad statements by “social researchers”.

This week’s Coalition campaign will be emphasising the team, including Julie Bishop, Warren Truss, Hockey (slimmed down with the help of surgery for the battle ahead), Andrew Robb and Malcolm Turnbull. Many promised Abbott ministers are recycled from the Howard ministry, which Abbott sells as one of his positives.

Back to explaining the ad campaign, including the helpful comment that losing weight is a good strategy for fighters.  (I am personally looking forward to seeing just how Warren Truss and Andrew Robb will be “rebranded”)

The Coalition speaks enthusiastically about releasing major policies. Well, soon. Those hanging out for its industrial relations policy, probably its biggest policy test, won’t be getting it this week. It’s hard to think Abbott won’t throw out something in Thursday’s National Press Club speech, but manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne said last week: ”We are not planning on announcing new policy in the next week but we are planning on reminding people of what is already out there.”

No policy still.  I look forward to Grattan’s critical reports about the non release of policy throughout the year, like we received in previous years.  *crickets*

How effectively Abbott sells Mr Positive in coming months could be less important to whether he wins or loses as to the size of his majority.

A Coalition government with a modest margin and an unpopular PM would have no guarantee that fickle voters would be tolerant. Abbott almost overturned a first term Labor government in 2010. A robust buffer is needed to withstand the danger of an electorate that can quickly go sour on new rulers.

There is another reason Abbott needs to do more than just scrape in. A strong lower house vote helps the Senate vote and that could be very important for Abbott. Unless the conservatives get a right-leaning Senate, Labor and Green opposition to Abbott’s promise to repeal the carbon tax might force him to meet his pledge to go to double dissolution. And that would be high risk.

This seems to be the best part of the piece, speaking of some real issues Abbott would face if indeed he has a narrow lead. It seems to be a feature of many of these articles that any decent analysis is left to the end. Pity that the rest of it sounds just like the coverage of a product launch. Or maybe that really is Grattan’s whole point – that the Coalition are just about the image. I would love it if she was being that subtle.

The current fashion, however, is switching to invoking Stalin. This is especially the case when a political party wants an investigation and / or inquiry about something that is going on. Or used to describe parties that want to regulate things.  I can’t remember people objecting too heavily when Keating introduced regulations for the banking sector in the 90s which helped them during the GFC. Or any number of regulations that help us maintain a civil society.  It is regularly called “Stalinist”, for example, to want a media accountable to others, rather than just itself.  It’s become shorthand for reactionaries to label things they see as bad – just name the murderer of millions and you apparently win your argument.  It’s a bit of a amplification from the IPA’s Nanny State label (which, curiously, is the same term used by the tobacco industry whenever Government regulations affect them).

The NSW Greens Senator, Lee Rhiannon, is one of the chief recipients of this Stalinist tag. Michael Danby, the avid Israel supporter in the Labor Government (I mentioned him before in this post), was published in The Punch accusing her of being a Stalinist – even though Stalin was long dead by the time she joined the Socialist Party of Australia in the 1970s.   Wendy Bacon deals with that absurd label here, which appears to be part of a campaign (featuring assorted ALP figures and media outlets) to smear Senator Rhiannon with supposed sins of her past – rather than do the hard work of assessing her record as a politician in NSW and Federally.

But now it’s Barry O’Farrell who is a Stalinist.  Apparently.  The Premier of NSW wants to set in train a strengthening of anti-discrimination laws that would work to convict those who set out to racially vilify.  This has got a range of reactionaries huffing and puffing, expecting their man BOF to tow their line of being able to say and do whatever they like. So, Michael Smith has complained and Menzies House has issued a warning. Andrew Bolt, has gone further, calling O’Farrell an “idiot” and that such an inquiry “is against the spirit of the law” and “straight out of the Leninist playbook”.  Not just Leninist -

But Bolt asked why Mr O’Farrell didn’t simply “set a quota of how many racists he wants hauled before the courts? Why not just do it as Lenin used to do, as Stalin used to do?”

I’m surprised Bolt didn’t mention Lee Rhiannon in this spray. This invocation of Stalin can be seen as being as bad for arguments as Godwin’s Law. So, we need a name for it. I propose the Mercader Principle, after the assassin that Stalin sent in to kill Trotsky.  If you want to kill something, get an assassin to come with a machine gun and an icepick. If you can’t kill it with the machine gun, get the icepick and hack your subject to pieces with it.

The Mercader Principle. Just watch it ramp up this year.