Belshaw’s World: why are we crushing our schools?

We presently live in a measurement obsessed world, a world of inputs, outputs and outcomes, of key performance indicators. This is a world of league tables, of standardization and uniformity, of professionalisation and accreditation.

We live in a world obsessed with risk avoidance with its associated concepts of informed consent, duty of care and risk management or mitigation strategies.

I was a strong supporter of the education reforms that began in 1988 spear-headed by Commonwealth Education Minister Dawkins because I saw them as a way of freeing up the education and training sector.

I still support many of the concepts. However, I now think that the practical effects have become quite pernicious.

Over the last few years of my daughters’ schooling, I watched what I saw as the erosion of the ethos of their school with sadness and a degree of anger.

This process stands out in my mind as a series of events.

The circulars from the school telling us of new Government requirements increased. We were required to provide new information and sign new forms.

The range of activities open to our daughters began to contract because of perceived risk. We went to our first information session on a forthcoming excursion.

A confused parent said to me “well, that was a waste of time. We know all that. Why are we here?”

“It’s got nothing to do with us”, I replied. “It’s for the school’s legal protection, so that they can say that we have given informed consent.”

Teachers began to complain privately about the new loads placed upon them. The school suddenly demanded that parents sign in at the office before going onto school grounds.

Those of us at the school all of the time for meetings or to attend sporting events simply ignored this. However, I noticed that new parents were beginning to comply.

New security cameras were introduced, followed by guards. Then came a new central security system with various alarms and self locking doors. Lock down and lock out had arrived.

This was being done, the school explained in a circular, “for the protection of your daughters.” You could be forgiven for thinking that the school had a significant security problem. It did not.

Fees continued to rise faster than inflation to pay for the new administrative staff required to meet increasing Government reporting requirements, as well as all the new security arrangements.

On legal grounds, the school decided that it could no longer coordinate the preparation of the traditional year 12 annual. The students would have to do this for themselves.

At eldest’s year 12 formal in 2005, students were banded with hospital style bands that allowed those over 18 to buy single drinks. Parents were allowed to have wine on their tables.

Two years later youngest’s year 12 formal was held at a posh Sydney hotel.

The event had to be completely dry for all. There were the usual pre-formal parties. However, upon arrival at the hotel, the kids were not just bag searched but also breathalysed. Any recording a positive reading were not allowed to enter.

Parents went ballistic. The security guards explained that they had no choice; they must comply with new NSW Government legislation.

By nine o’clock most parents had adjourned to the bar. By 11.30, half an hour before the official close, the ball room was empty as kids moved off to the after-formal parties.

Last year to the fury of my daughters and their friends, the school abolished muck-up day. This had been a pretty mild affair run under tight controls. Even this was now seen as too dangerous.

I could, perhaps, live with all this if the standard of education had improved. It declined, crushed by the growing burden of compliance and risk avoidance.

To answer my last question.

New England’s first major airline was, appropriately, called New England Airways.

Formed by George A Robinson, the Lismore headquartered company began a bi-weekly Lismore-Brisbane service in August 1931. This was later extended to a Lismore-Sydney service, creating the first Brisbane- Sydney service. The company grew to be one of the first national carriers.

Now for my next question. What is the connection between Dorrigo, cattle ranching in Wyoming and the imperial courts of Europe?

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 21 January 2009. This post brings my columns up to date with exception of the column appearing in today's Express.

In future I will publish them on a Wednesday, thus lagging them by one week after publication.

Belshaw’s World: The wonders of blogging

Australia has a long history of literary hoaxes.

Five months in the making, the latest sting was carefully planned. Would Keith Windschuttle as editor of Quadrant accept a bogus article on genetic engineering carefully crafted to appeal to his perceived prejudices?

The answer was yes. Bait taken, the on-line journal Crickey then revealed that it was a hoax.

The bloggosphere, along with many journalists from the conventional media, went wild. Who was the fictitious Sharon Gould who had written the hoax article?

In long comment streams, the bloggers compared notes, using hints in the article to check previous writing. This literary detective work allowed them to quickly zero in on a former blogger and free-lance writer called Katherine Wilson. Finally, Crickey revealed that the author was indeed Katherine Wilson.

Those of you who are interested in finding out more can follow the links through in this post of mine - http://belshaw.blogspot.com/2009/01/sunday-snippets-blogging-meander.html.

Why do I mention this? Well, blogging has changed from its original meaning of web log, a personal diary, to part of main stream journalism. In doing so, it has become a critical personal and professional tool.

Just to put all this in perspective, I am not an A-list blogger, one of those who generate huge traffic volumes. Even so, last year my blogs received over 53,000 visits. The stories I wrote have been picked up by fellow bloggers in many countries and lead, among other things, to this column.

A test before I go on. How many of you know that there is an Armidale based photo blog that has been classified by Australia’s National Library as worthy of permanent preservation in their electronic archive? The answer is Gordon Smith’s lookANDsee - http://las.new-england.net.au/.

I love Gordon’s blog and, with his permission, use his photos to illustrate stories.

Blogging is constantly evolving.

The supply of free platforms such as Google’s blogger supported rapid growth to the point that there are now more than seventy five million blogs worldwide. As you might expect with such a huge number, the standard is quite variable. Further, there is a high churn factor with new blogs starting all the time, others stopping. Burn-out is common.

The idea of community is central to blogging.

Each long-running blog gathers its own readership. This is generally small, with most blog traffic generated by search engines. However, these small communities are overlapped and linked because bloggers tend to cluster, drawn together by some shared interest. This creates what I call the village – you have your own personal friends, but then there is a much bigger group that you know or know of and sometimes chat to.

Like any village, there can be wars – flame fights that can get nasty. There are also the normal legal risks that apply to any form of publication. This has led to the development of what we can think of as blogging manners, a set of rules designed to aid polite discussion.

Blogging is a remarkably useful way of keeping in touch. Unlike the conventional search engines, Google blog search allows you to search for posts on topics by date. With such a large number of bloggers worldwide, new developments get picked up very quickly.

Over the tumultuous days of October, I followed the global financial crisis quite closely. To do this, I used conventional web sources such as media and official sites. However, I also used blog search to find out breaking developments from different parts of the world. This was actually far faster than the conventional resources.

In all this, how does New England rank in the blogging world? Not well, I fear.

So far I have identified just thirty three blogs across the broader New England. Some such as Gordon’s are very good, but many are barely updated.

This is a far smaller number than I would have expected, given the area’s population. To my mind, it is a symptom of a broader problem, the area’s failure to use the internet in an effective fashion. However, that’s the subject for another column!

To finish with my usual question. What was the name of the first major airline established in New England? Again, I am talking broader New England. And, no, it wasn’t East West Airlines. That was the second.

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 14 January 2009

Round the New England Blogging Traps - 2

It has been quite a while since I did a New England blogging round up. Far too long in fact.

Tim Christie from Newcastle seems to have been on blogging leave. However, a little while ago he had a rather nice story of a tour of South Australia. This photo of a SA vineyard is an example of the great photos illustrating the story. 

Still in Newcastle, there was a great post on Mulubinba Moments. Updates from this part of the world is simply a report of domestic life and travels, but a very good one.

Michael J Bayly's The Wild Reed is a US based blog written from a Roman Catholic perspective with a special focus on gay issues. I have included it as New England blog because Michael is from Gunnedah.

In this context, a return visit to Gunnedah triggered My "Bone Country", an extremely good nostalgic look at Gunnedah past and present. The post begins with a quote from Rosanne Cash's Western Wall.   

Red dust settles deep in my skin.
I don’t where it starts or where I begin.

Gaye has decided to put her nature blog Hunter Valley Backyard Nature largely on hold for the present. However, she is maintaining her personal blog journal, Snippets and sentiments. This has some very good posts set against a Hunter Valley background.

Rugby League fans should not miss Kurt Gidley's blog simply entitled Kurt Gidley.  Kurt has just been on an overseas trip, lucky bloke, that he obviously enjoyed.

On 18th Century Historical Trekking,1700-1760 (Australia), Keith Burgess has entered a video phase. This is the place for you if you want to know how to make 18th century chocolate or, alternatively, shoot with a muzzle loading musket!

If historical re-enactments do not appeal, try soaring with Jenny's Blog. I see from one post that there were 22 glider launches on one day. Not bad.

I have barely scratched the surface. In future, I will try to do these blogging round-ups on a weekly basis.  

Belshaw’s World: City Spending, Country Saving

This business of writing a weekly column is proving harder than expected.

In blogging, length depends upon purpose. In a column, the length is fixed.

In blogging, if you make a mistake you can correct it. In a column, the mistake is there in cold print for all time, or at least until all copies of the paper decay!

I mention this because in my last column I referred to Kate Henry from Kentucky when I meant Kate Hedges. I emailed Kate as soon as I realized my error. She was, I am relieved to report, very forgiving.

I think that part of my problem was that I was thinking of one Ken Henry at the time, the head of the Commonwealth Treasury. Why? Well, that brings me to the subject of this post.

As you all know, we have just come to the end of a long boom. One feature of that boom was a sharp decline in the savings rate in western countries including Australia. We stopped saving and started spending.

To manage this we borrowed. We could do this because asset prices – real estate and shares in particular – kept rising. This allowed us to increase personal debt.

Our increasing spend meant that we were spending more on goods and services from other countries than we were selling to them. As a consequence, the balance of trade in goods and services in most western countries went into deficit.

This deficit had to be funded by international borrowings. The global trade surplus countries, China in particular, lent us the money we needed to buy their goods!

This had to end and explains why this global economic downturn is so severe. We are paying for our own excesses.

But who in Australia spent and who saved? The following table shows Australian states and territories ranked by their net contribution to the balance on goods and services in 2007-2008. All figures are in $Am.

	Exports	Imports	Balance
WA	68,821	27,337	41,484
South Australia	10,338	7,342	2,996
Queensland	35,346	32,361	2,985
Tasmania	3,640	692	2,948
Northern Territory	4,544	2,581	1,936
ACT	4	14	-10
Victoria	20,539	56,058	-35,519
NSW	30,096	75,907	-45,881

Interesting, isn’t it? All of Australia’s growing private overseas borrowings went to support Victoria and especially NSW. And that means Melbourne and Sydney.

Every Australian economic crash since at least the 1890s has been associated with metropolitan over-spend.

That spend brings more people to the metro cities because that is where the money is.

As the boom ends, some people leave. Emigration from Sydney always increases during the city’s downturns. Yet the sheer concentration of economic activity in Sydney provides a base for the next leveraged upturn as things improve. It seems that we cannot help ourselves.

During the week I had an email from Jack Arnold. Both of us believe that a New England new state is still part of the solution, although we disagree on boundaries. I want the Hunter and Newcastle in, Jack disagrees.

In replying to Jack, I made the point that one of our problems was that since the referendum loss in 1967 we had lost the very intellectual framework required to discuss issues such as new states. Everything has become localized, fragmented, expressed in terms of narrow outputs.

I will deal with this in more detail in later columns. Immediately, I want to answer the question on six New England films.

At random, they include Sons of Mathew (1949), Captain Thunderbolt (1953), Smiley (1953), The Shiralee (1957), Smiley Gets a Gun (1958), Koya No Toseinin (The Drifting Avenger) (1968) and Bootmen (2000). And that’s only a start.

How many did you recognize?

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 7 January 2009

Belshaw’s World: Christmas in New England

In my last column I posed the question:

Who was the New Englander who was reported as Chief of Intelligence for Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz and later became one of Australia’s first spies? A clue: he came from Kentucky.

Kate Hedges from Kentucky responded, correctly, with Harry Freame.

I will write later on the full and quite remarkable story of Harry Freame. In the meantime, Kate told me that there is a display in the Kentucky Hall of photos and stories of past Kentuckians including Harry Freame. When you visit Kentucky you can get the key to the Hall and display from the Kentucky store.

Christmas is a very special time for all of us, marked by our own family rituals.

Growing up, Christmas began with a pine branch buried in a pot. Downtown, brother David and I visited Coles and Penneys with our money clutched in our hands to buy presents.

On Christmas Eve people came round to our house for drinks. We had to go to bed, but were allowed to stay up for a while to meet people.

Christmas Day dawns. On our bed is a Santa sack full of presents. We play with these waiting for our parents to wake up. They do, and we get our presents from them.

Mid morning and we go down to Fah and Gran’s, a block away in Mann Street. This was always open house for our grandparents’ friends and electorate workers. The Mackellars who managed Forglen, Fah’s property, were always there with eldest my age. We talk to people and go outside to play.

Once people have gone, we get another set of presents from our grandparents and aunts. Then to Christmas lunch, always a roast chook. We kids sit in a little sun room off the main dining room.

After lunch we play, rolling down the grass slopes. Sometimes there are special events. I remember one Christmas a piper played, striding up and down the lawns at the back of the house.

Later we go up to the Halpins for late afternoon Christmas drinks.

Time passes. I am living in Canberra, joining the great New England diaspora.

Neville Crew’s 1960s’ research showed that for every one person living on the Tablelands there was one Tablelands’ born person living elsewhere. This pattern is replicated across the broader New England, from the lower Hunter to the boarder. As best as I can work out, if we count those born in the broader New England plus their immediate children, we are talking about more than a million people.

By bus, car, plane and train, many of us try to come home, meeting old friends.

The last time I saw Zivan Milanovich was on the train. Zivan’s dad Branco was groundsman at TAS. I knew Branco, but only in a formal sense. By contrast, Zivan and I were in scouts together, 2^nd Armidale Troop. We were mates.

I suppose that 2^nd Armidale still has a bob a job week equivalent. That year Zivan and I decided to clean shoes in Beardy Street. We stood there, but no one came. Finally we overcame our shyness, started spruking and approaching people. The cash rolled in. I think that we both learned an important lesson, the way in which you have to stand outside yourself to be successful.

Those Christmases were very special times as those dispersed over tens of thousands of miles came together. I cannot do them proper credit in this column, but I remember them well.

To finish with another question. Can you name six feature films connected in some way with New England?

To make things easier for you, I mean from Newcastle to the border. And, yes, Captain Thunderbolt is one. The making of this film is another story I have to tell you from our shared past.

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 31 December 2008

Rivers Run Black: exhibition by Bundjalung artists, Yamba New England 12 January to 7 February 2009

My thanks to North Coast Voices for this story.

Arthouse Australia at Yamba is currently hosting a group exhibition by Bundjalung artists Nancy Torrens, Troy Little, Richard Torrens and Elsie Randal.

More details can found at the exhibition web site,  Rivers Run Black, or phone (02) 6646.1999, email melinda@arthouseaustralia.com for details.

For international readers and especially those who come from the US searching on New England, the Bundalung are a major New England indigenous peoples whose territory stretched from the Clarence Valley into southern Queensland.  

Belshaw's World: A new column, but why is it Belshaw's World?

In Belshaw's World - a new venture I reported that I was now writing a weekly column for The Armidale Express, the third oldest newspaper in New South Wales.

The column is not in the on-line part of the paper, so I have decided to republish it here. That way it exists on-line.

The First Column

I was flattered when Christian Knight asked me to write a weekly column for the Express. But why me and why the title “Belshaw’s World”?

I have always been a frustrated writer. A bit over two years ago I started blogging, Since then I have written some 1,600 posts on my areas of interest. Some are short, mere notes, but many are quite long essays.

The topics reflect my interests and experiences.

I am an economist and historian by training. So economics and history feature.

After leaving UNE I worked as a public servant in Canberra, including over seven years as a member of the Senior Executive Service. During this time I ran several times for Country Party or National Country Party pre-selection, including one run for Armidale where I lost because of my views on the Vietnam War.

This means that I write a fair bit about public policy, public administration and politics. However, I do not write from a party perspective. My own biases are clear – I describe my political position as Country Party, New England populist or New England New Stater. But in writing I try to explain what is happening and why.

After leaving Canberra, my wife and I established a national consulting business in Armidale in mid 1987. This grew to 17 staff and almost a million dollars in fees, then failed in the crash of 1991. I know what it is like to try to do something new from a regional base and fail. I know what it is like to be broke. Again, I write about this.

We came down to Sydney so that my wife could take a job as CEO with a patent attorney firm. From this point I became primary child care.

I do not regret this. My closeness to my daughters is one of my most valuable assets. However, adjusting working style to this role did impose costs. I write about this.

I also write about the strange tribal customs of Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs and, more broadly, the fragmented world of modern Sydney. In a very real way, the old Sydney that I knew has vanished. Sydney is now a statistical construct.

Christian said that I could write about what I liked, that this was Belshaw’s World. Yet he also knew that New England was ever present in my writing.

By New England I do not mean the Northern Tablelands, nor that strange Sydney Government construct of Tablelands and a bit of the North-West that everybody seems to accept today as New England. I mean the new state New England.

To my mind, Armidale people and institutions live in a much diminished world.

I have a bias. While I am first generation New England measured by birth, I am third (my daughters’ fourth) measured by location.

On mum’s side, my grandfather, David Drummond, arrived in Armidale in 1907 as a farm labourer after being forced to leave school at twelve. He became a member of parliament and education minister, later described as the pre-eminent Australian education minister of the twentieth century.

My father, James Belshaw, arrived in Armidale in 1938 as one of the first staff members. There he met my mother, the first librarian at the College. Some said that Drummond had founded a university to find a husband for his daughter!

I grew up in a world in which dedication to New England was central. This was a world that was both intensely local and regional, but also national and international.

Word limitations prevent me explaining this in my first column. However, it sets a scene.

Let me finish with a question.

Who was the New Englander who was reported as Chief of Intelligence for Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz and later became one of Australia’s first spies? A clue: he came from Kentucky.

Gunnedah childhood story

Do not be surprised if posts come up behind this one. I am very behind in my posts and plan to bring some earlier material up at the date I started it.

My thanks to Neil Whitfield for providing a link to an engaging story from a Gunnedah childhood. The story begins:

My grandson, Michael, was an outdoor boy, and was fascinated by my fowls, especially the white rooster. He was three-years-old, big brown eyes, and brown
body.

I have very clear memories of our own fowls in the backyard.

You can find more here.

SCU, Charles Sturt possible merger disturbs La Trobe

In December in SCU, Charles Sturt University consider merger I reported on the proposed merger between Southern Cross and Charles Sturt Universities. Now I see that the merger worries La Trobe University.

La Trobe who wants to expand its own regional operations opposes the concept of broader regional universities. While I have personal reservations about the SCU/SU because of the way it is likely to fragment New England, I have no sympathy with La Trobe.

The moves by metro universities into regional areas through campus establishment and student attraction to metro campuses simply locks us into the current metro dominated system. They actually detract from the development of Regional Australia.

New England's low internet savvy

I have complained before about the limited use made in New England of the internet and of the associated social networking tools for business, professional and personal purposes. In national terms, the region is running at least four years behind.

Criag Wilson from Media Hunter had an interesting post, Newcastle businesses, media & agencies dipping toes into the social media pond, looking at one aspect of this from a Newcastle perspective.

Craig's assessment was positive in that there is some movement. I was still struck at just how low the real penetration is.

Does this matter? I think that it does, greatly.

The internet in all its myriad forms remains the single greatest marketing platform available to those with limited budgets and especially to those remote from major centres.