In the news this morning, which I do usually read while drinking my coffee, I noticed yet another tragic accidental death in Melbourne involving a car and a pedestrian which in turn reminded me of the Miranda troll earlier in the week about cars and bike riders. Now I ride my bikes, have done for most of my life and hope to do so for a while yet. I reckon they are a great form of transport in the modern city and given a reasonable level of ability most people can hop on a bike and get from a to b. Cheap, non-polluting and good exercise.
I also confess I am one of those bike riders who give bike riders a bad name on the road, I go through red lights, cut across the road, dodging traffic and nicking onto the footpath when the road is blocked. Frankly I must drive some drivers into fits of rage and I have received plenty of abuse for it. The best trick is the bogan in the holden ute who winds down his window to shout abuse at me just before he passes me on the road and makes sure he get uncomfortably close as he passes. Which is fine except for one thing.
As today’s news indicates, when it comes to people versus car moving, physics intrude. Quite simply the mass of even a small car moving at 40 or 50 kilometres an hour is pretty much a death sentence to a human being, be they a pedestrian or a cyclist. Cars are lethal weapons.
As a bike rider you instinctively understand that your life on the road is very much in your hands, those that don’t soon learn. Which brings me to road rules. Frankly they suck as far as riding is concerned. Traffic lights are for cars. Roundabouts, of which Canberra has more than its fair share, are diabolical when there’s traffic. And the nice little bike lanes on the side of the road that sometimes appear are great for collecting all the broken bits of glass that are guaranteed to give you a puncture on the way home when its raining and not so good when you have to pull out into the traffic to go around a stationary vehicle whose driver just decided to stop and consult their gps.
Bottom line, its not my fault that driving is such a stressful part of everyday life, in fact I’m doing my bit to try and help the problem of traffic congestion so the next time you see a bike rider do something that pisses you off just remember its their skin and you are sitting inside Oz’s number one killing machine.
Before the last election the Labor party committed to restoring the position of a staff elected representative on the ABC board, a position abolished by Howard who also went on to stack the ABC board with the likes of Keith Windshuttle, Janet Albrechtsen and a host of other right wingers. Not surprisingly the board appointed a former Liberal party staffer, businessman Mark Scott to the position of CEO thereby completing the right wing takeover of the top level of the ABC.
Plenty of commentators have labelled the staff position on the ABC board as some kind of throwback to the heyday of socialism but few of these commentators actually have any real idea how disconnected management in the ABC is from the actual business of making and distributing media. Of course the politics of the management agenda since the demise of the staff position has been to attack the independent productive capacity of the ABC in radio and TV through a process of amalgamations, realignments and outsourcing while also pursuing an idealogically motivated witch hunt in search of left wing bias in news and current affairs. While the bill proposed by the government is a small step in the bringing more transparency back into the ABC it remains to be seen whether or not the bill get passed and how long it takes before the position gets filled.
In the meantime it is also worth noting that Mark Scott collected an additional $30,000 last year bringing his pay to somewhere between $645,000 and $659,999. Meanwhile, the poor non-executive board members, like Janet, collect a measly figure somewhere between $45,000 and $60,000 – hardly seems worth their while. Obviously with that sort of money on offer, the new independent Nomination Panel will have a hard time finding quality replacements for the likes of Keith and Janet, even if the only thing the board does is turn up to half a dozen meetings every year.
This is a rather dubious article from Miranda as she weakly mixes some dry humour with authoritarian concerns for the rule of law in a poorly judged attempt to provoke some controversy. It suffers from a limited perspective, the view from a comfortable middle class yuppy lifestyle which might include the odd casual sunday afternoon cycle down the footpath to the local coffee shop. According to Miranda it
“is classic angry cyclist behaviour”
born out of a
“1990s slogan ”the road is there to share” … It’s a big fat lie.”
As commentators to her article observe, all she is really doing is fanning the flames of division that already exist on the roads vis-a-vis cars and cyclists. One of her respondents sums it up this way:
To a car driver, a minor accident could mean damage to the car. To the cyclist, a collision means potentially serious injury or death.
But the article is more than a simple tactic to generate a bit of traffic for the SMH, it also reveals how the mainstream media is captive to the voices of the establishment. There is the affront to civility caused by an anonymous angry cyclist, there are the concerns of the Transport Workers Union, there is the interest of law and order as represented by the police who have generously released the CCTV material and spoken on the record in the accompanying video and then, because it’s really all the fault of the government, there is the weird association of Nathan Rees and the closing of the Sydney Harbour Bridge for a picnic with the story about bus vs cyclist.
Miranda may well be questioning the right of motorised transport to a dominant and monopoly position on the roads but if she is her article completely ignores the social and environmental benefits that cycling, as a mode of commuting, provides to society as a whole. It’s unfortunate that things have degenerated to this point, but until people like Miranda and organisations like the SMH start to seriously question the given moral authority of the car driving public over and above our concerns for the safety of cyclist and pedestrians, until then, things are only going to get worse.
Articles like Miranda’s don’t help, especially when they include the caricature of an oversized cyclist equipped with chariot styled spikes threatening a poor defenceless undersized car and its driver. Funny how easily we can personalise a car and demonise a cyclist. Fans of Jeremy Clarkson (Cyclists take up too much room and don’t pay to be there) will feel utterly vindicated in their belief that car driving is a right not a privilege.
Jeez Kev I though you might have talked about the what it means for people instead of how important it is for “the prosperity of our economy”. Has anyone else noticed just how inculcated the notion of “our economy” has become in everyday speech. Garrett was prancing around at the National Press Club yesterday, talking about how important the arts are to “our economy” which was probably just as well since it meant he didn’t have to answer any difficult questions about his parties’ plan to dismantle the local publishing industry so booksellers can sell cheaper books. Selling books is of course also about “our economy” just like selling shitloads of coal to the world is about “our economy”.
Its time “our economy” got shoved where the sun doesn’t shine. We need to start talking about “our ecology” or “our planet” or even “our humanity”. How the hell do people like Kevin reconcile the idea of megacities of 7 or 8 million with our current destruction of the biosphere? Is there a column in Kevin’s little chart of accounts for the environment, where does the water come from when the dams dry up and how high will the cost of housing be given they aren’t making any more land last time I looked…
And what’s with the Oz just running Kev’s speech without any context? Are they trying to outdo the ABC as the official government mouthpiece? Kev’s website has the speech so you might think the talented and diligent journalists at News.corp might have taken some time to do some journalism on Kevin’s plan for the future.
Even Catalyst is reporting on the concerns of scientists over human activity and its consequences. Jellyfish aren’t fish and fish feed a large percentage of the worlds population despite our depredations. A quick look on the net uncovered 2005 figures, which underlines the food problem for Asia, 70% of the world consumption of fish occurs there. So the question is can science save us from ourselves?
The human race seems collectively unable to accept the consequences of an unlimited growth mentality in a ecologically interdependent world. We hunt species to the point of extinction, dump our waste indiscriminately, and burn whatever we can in order to keep the wheels of industry turning. It seems hopeless.
I wonder what the future humans of the next century will think of us, if they manage to exist?
Canberra isn’t usually the place for big public protests and yesterday’s 350.org rally was fairly typical of the Canberra protest scene. A good number of the usual suspects rocked up in their Subarus although the biking student collective were also out in force. It was a fine day, the grass is always green on Capital Hill and the trees provided a nice bit of shade for a collection of speakers who addressed the crowd on the necessity of a global agreement around carbon at 350ppm.
The evidence presented wasn’t news. A climate palaeontologist from the ANU summarised some of the worse predictions for the near future, the melting ice, the flooding, the droughts, the shift in climatic zones. A Getup rep talked about green jobs, there was an amusing little routine involving crowd participation before Rod Quantock amused us with his account of Steve Fielding, Wilson Tuckey and Andrew Bolt, an unholy trio of climate change denialists. He also alerted the crowd to this little gem hiding on the internet.
Yes, its true, climate change due to human activity isn’t just a 21st century idea. It would be nice to think the elected political representatives will grasp the small window of opportunity to affect some relatively peaceful but necessarily radical changes that might see a greener cleaner world emerge, one that might devote its awesome manufacturing and engineering talents to replace the vast array of wasteful carbon emitters currently in existence, one that might take seriously the idea of reforesting the planet but, the reality seems to be business as usual.
Which brings us to the logical conclusion, one that others have already foreseen and a more likely contributor to the security state that is gradually taking hold in western democracies. The mainstream media, the political elites and big business have far too much invested in the status quo. Their game is FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt. Stick with them and somehow everything will be ok. Politicians making promises in public, TV ads showing how concerned the coal industry is, the mainstream media always seeking to “balance” the picture. But what is the picture?
Here’s what I know. I’m fifty this year. I have been fortunate to live most of my life in one geographic location. I can remember a different climate to the one we are currently experiencing, the rain fell differently, the hot weather wasn’t as extreme and it was colder for longer, there were more trees and less cars. But it is more than the measurable quantities, it’s a perception that the weather patterns have shifted. I also know that science works and the available science seems to give me a broader explanation for these local phenomena. And then there is the way the world works, what is said and what is done and the disconnect that underpins our consumer mentality. Apparently we do “need” a new plasma high definition TV, we do “need” Fox TV, we do “need” Windows 7, we do “need” to eat at McDonalds, we do “need” someone else to clean up our mess…
It seems what we really need is some honesty about where this is all going. Let those who claim this is all ok reveal their stake in the status quo. The noisy voice of vested interest needs to be shouted down. Like Rod, it seems to me inevitable that the only answer is direct action. It might be the only thing that prevents a global catastrophe.
One of Mark Scott’s greatest achievements, should he retire as CEO tomorrow, would have to be the extent to which he has turned the ABC into a cultural fiefdom for dispensing government funds to the private sector in return for so-called Australian content. In response to a question in a Senate committee the other day Scott portrayed this transition as the –
“way we have migrated a lot of our drama and documentary programs: keeping editorial control but working with the independent production sector.”
What Scott is admitting to is the process of replacing creative productive capacity within the ABC with commercial co-productions using other Australian production houses. Justifying co-productions on the basis that it opens up other financing options is one thing but purposely undermining the in-house capacity of the ABC to produce drama and documentary content is something else, witness the forced disbanding of the Natural History unit of the ABC at a time when public concern was growing over climate change and other environmental problems.
The heart of the matter is the notion of editorial control. Scott and Kim Dalton have spearheaded a dramatic increase in ABC TV’s patronage of external producers, often citing cost effectiveness as a primary incentive. This ignores the substantial investment in infrastructure and personnel that Australians through their taxes have made in the ABC in previous years. Costs continue to rise for the ABC yet actual ABC produced content is declining as more material is outsourced. It is disingenuous of Scott to portray this as financially expedient and deceptive to use the term editorial control without acknowledging the power relationship that exists between senior ABC management and independent producers who are often totally dependent on the ABC for their survival. It is that exercise of financial power over production that motivates a redirection of production from internal ABC units (who have have failed to reflect the views of senior management) to a more vulnerable independent production sector.
But not content with destroying the in-house capacity of the ABC TV to produce anything more than news, current affair and talking head studio material, Mark Scott now wishes to farm out iconic ABC programs to overseas producers. Bananas in Pyjamas (in 3D) is moving off-shore. Notwithstanding the fact that TV has barely managed to make the transition to digital and that HD take-up is still lagging, what is the motivation for a 3D animated version of Bananas? And if the motivation exists, which is dubious, why not exploit the homegrown talents of an industry that despite limitations has still produced oscar award winning animations.
In recent years there has been a distinct trend away from locally produced animation on TV. These figure from Screen Australia show a marked decline in Australian made animations on TV. Yet we continue to train aspiring young Australians in the field of animation. Surely employing Australians to tell Australian stories is implicit in the ABC charter which says the ABC should be
“broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community”
Presumably the only Australian content the ABC is interested in is the free user supplied stuff that will power Mark Scott’s Town Square vision. Paying Australians, let alone paying ABC staff to make content seems like such 20th century idea.
Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:49 am. Add a comment
Sebastian Kaempf talked about the propaganda battle as another front in the “war against terrorism” at the War2.0 conference a few weeks ago. Here’s another example.
Articles like Miranda’s don’t help, especially when they include the caricature of an oversized cyclist equipped with chariot styled spikes threatening a poor defenceless undersized car and its driver. Funny how easily we can personalise a car and demonise a cyclist. Fans of Jeremy Clarkson (Cyclists take up too much room and don’t pay to be there) will feel utterly vindicated in their belief that car driving is a right not a privilege.
Canberra isn’t usually the place for big public protests and yesterday’s 350.org rally was fairly typical of the Canberra protest scene. A good number of the usual suspects rocked up in their Subarus although the biking student collective were also out in force. It was a fine day, the grass is always green on Capital Hill and the trees provided a nice bit of shade for a collection of speakers who addressed the crowd on the necessity of a global agreement around carbon at 350ppm.
