Is it time to do the kindest thing to Australian television?

Some 28 years ago, due to the success of The Comedy Company, I was invited to speak at the National Press Club in Canberra. In my address, I said that it was only by pure luck that the show made it onto air in the first place because it was so hard for people outside "the industry"  to sell a program to one of Australia’s three commercial networks.  (It was equally hard to sell a program to the ABC but that is a subject for another time.)

Because of this, I said I looked forward, perhaps overoptimistically, to a time when there might be more than just three commercial networks that producers could approach to get their programs on air. Some press reported that I had “surprised” the audience by “calling for deregulation” but in fact I was not in favour of deregulation. I was just, like many others, frustrated by the three-way monopoly that has dominated Australian television through my lifetime What I was calling for was more competition.

The justification for the limited number of broadcasters in the Australian industry was always the limited VHF and UHF bandwidth thus the potential diversity presented by the switch to digital broadcasting which allowed a greater number of channels on air was seen as a great opportunity to break down this tri-opoly. The established networks however were very quick to make sure that they would operate any new channels that appeared. For many years they lobbied the government feverishly for the ability to multi-channel, arguing that they were losing money due to competition from DVDs, computer games and the Internet. The government finally amended the broadcasting regulations to allow the existing networks to broadcast on several channels simultaneously.

The result, as we now see, is basically a disaster and has not even made a difference to the profitability of the channels; they continue to lose money and to complain about competition from other sources such as Netflix.

Multi-channelling by a single broadcaster was, of course a bizarre notion from the outset. If a broadcaster could not attract sufficient viewers to make one channel profitable, how could they attract enough to make several channels profitable? Surely having multiple channels would only divide an already shrinking audience, which is exactly was has happened. And wouldn’t operating three channels entail purchasing three times the amount of programs? But, of course, there was never any intention of broadcasting three times the amount of programs or, at least, paid programs. Of the more than twenty channels we now have, about a third of them are shopping channels, that is to say, channels which only screen advertisements. The programming on these channels is therefore not only free, the advertisers pay the networks for the time. This is a television dream – to have advertising income but no actual programs.

The other multi-channels also involve little or no program outlays; they either screen time-delayed programs which have already been shown on the primary channel, or inexpensive repeats.

In fact is that the real benefits of multi-channelling were:

1.       The circumvention of any restrictions on advertising. Once upon a time the Broadcasting Control Board (remember them) put limits on the amount of advertising a channel could screen per hour. The Australian government abandoned that idea many years ago, opting, in response to the constant whingeing from the networks, for the absurd principle of “self-regulation.”  The result is that networks are now permitted to run as many ads per hour as they think the audience can stand, and to even run channels that are 24 hour-a-day continuous advertisements.

2.       The circumvention of any kinds of quotas on original Australian drama or children’s drama. One might have expected that, if a network was obliged to screen 100 hours of original prime time drama per year when running one channel, it would have to screen 300 hours of such material when running three channels, but that is not the deal. Whatever quotas now exist, and they appear to have been pretty much abandoned, the networks can spread them across all of their multi-channels.

3.       The ability to schedule programs across several channels at different times allowed the FTA broadcasters to meet the of challenge of Foxtel by offering similar flexibility in viewing times. (We must remember that for twenty years the networks were terrified of Foxtel which now seems like a minor problem compared to the Internet and is itself now facing the same sorts of problems from on-line entertainment as the FTA broadcasters.)

4.       The granting of commercial digital channels exclusively to the existing networks shored them up from any challenge from new players entering the scene. Thus the one opportunity in the last 50 years to throw the industry open to new players came and went without incident and the potential revolution that digital broadcasting might have triggered was thwarted.

The other question that has dominated network operators has been how to establish a pay-per-view system. All networks were keen to set up their own pay services like Stan and have canvassed all sorts of ways to move their programming onto the Internet where it can be pay-walled, only to be overshadowed by the services like Netflix that strode onto the field armed with a vast library of US movie and TV titles.  

Now, in response to further sobbing and bawling from the networks, the government has agreed to dispense with licence fees, meaning that three large companies are being granted access to big slabs of precious broadcasting bandwidth (technically a public asset like a mining tenement) without having to pay any kind of royalty to the nation.

In other words, the television industry now occupies a position almost identical to that of the (former) Australian car industry except that it doesn’t employ enough people to justify direct government subsidies. Rather, successive Australian governments have supported it by removing almost every requirement relating to social responsibility and, more importantly, refusing to let competitors enter the market.

Indeed, when people talk about the "television industry" they are not talking about the technology as a whole; they are referring to three companies which dominate it.

Back in the early Nineties, British broadcasting television consisted of three BBC channels, one ITV channel which was the commercial channel and Channel 4 which was financed from advertising revenue from ITV. Time on ITV was allocated to various companies who held licences to broadcast on the network at various times and in various territories. For example, as its name suggests, London Weekend Television had a licence to broadcast in London on Weekends. Companies like Thames Television, Granada, TV-AM, Anglia and Yorkshire Television etc had licences for other times and other places. Those licences tended to be automatically renewed until Margaret Thatcher put an end to it. She decided to put all those licences up for auction, which not only raised a large amount of money for the national coffers (Carlton outbid Thames with a £43 million per annum offer) and led to massive changes in commercial broadcasting.

The licences granted to Australian television broadcasters have been rubber-stamped for over 50 years. The notion of a licence being cancelled has never been contemplated, even when networks went out of business or changed owners or even had foreign owners prompting the question, “What would it take for an Australian network to lose its broadcast licence?”

The answer it appears, is nothing. Not only has the idea of cancelling an operator’s licence never been considered, licences are able to be bought and sold without the new owner having to pass any kind of suitability test.

The bottom line is that the Australian television industry is probably the most protected industry in the country, and one wonders why this is so. In an age where Facebook has more to do with deciding elections than print or  television, the networks' political influence is surely waning and they certainly don't have entire towns dependent on them for employment. And despite all the government's commitment to fostering Australian talent and supporting the film industry, current network programming consists almost universally of "reality" shows (drama programs made without writers or actors) and franchised international gameshows and talent quests.

Perhaps all the politicians have shares in Google and Netflix and are content to sit back and watch the television networks disintegrate from the corrosion of their own incompetence. 

But surely it's cruel to watch them suffer like this. Perhaps it's time to take Australian television to the vet and do the kindest thing?

The Best Words - Trump, Hanson and language.

The rise of Donald Trump like some grotesque balloon in the Thanksgiving Parade and the rise of Pauline Hanson from the grave like some political zombie have a lot to do with words. In particular they have a lot to do with the power of spoken words as opposed to written words.

Written words have shaped the modern world. Prior to Gutenberg, books existed but they were expensive and accessible only to a small section of society. The printing press made books available to almost everyone. This not only changed the way information flowed, it even changed the way people thought.

Prior to printing, ideas were communicated primarily by speech – the priest preached from the pulpit, the master instructed the apprentice, the mayor made public announcements in the village square. Speech had one overriding virtue: it was public. One person can communicate to many people at once: a congregation, a brigade, a classroom, even a large crowd if a PA system is available. In other ways it is, however, limited. Firstly by time. People usually cannot listen to someone talking for more than a couple of hours as anyone who has endured a Speech Night knows. And informal verbal communication, such as the conversations people have in a bar or at a barbecue, is even more limited. These discussions generally consist of short blocks of speech delivered alternately by the participants, often hastily when the topic is controversial.  Also, no one has editorial control over a conversation and the discussion can quickly veer off into other topics as new ideas are introduced.

Books, on the other hand, are not time limited. While a lecture or a speech may last an hour, reading a book can take twenty hours or fifty hours. Also, books are carefully prepared and constructed. The author has control and the flow of ideas is not interrupted. Thus a book can communicate more complex and extensive ideas than a speaker and those ideas can be enhanced by references, quotations, footnotes and illustrations. Most significantly, reading is a silent activity making it a private communication between the author and the reader.

Books thus brought about two major changes to the world.

Firstly, reading created the notion of the personal intellect. One of the strengths of communicating through speech is that everyone gets the same message which is important if there is something everyone needs to know. But it can also however be seen as a limitation, even a form of oppression. With the advent of books, rather than being educated, instructed and informed en masse, individuals could assemble their own library of books and develop their own views of the world. And because books contain more complex ideas and more information than spoken language, an intellect formed by reading is more sophisticated and better informed than one shaped solely by weekly sermons at the church and local gossip. The advent of books not only gave individuals the ability to develop their own personal intellects, it was perhaps the first time that the whole idea of a person having their own view of the world was realised.

(It has also been surmised that reading books was the first private and independent activity that women ever experienced.)

Of course books can include ideas that contradict the prevailing beliefs in the community which is why the Nazis were quick to burn books, knowing they could might cause people to doubt or question the propaganda blaring from the loudspeakers of the Third Reich. But despite bannings and burnings, books continued to be read and gradually eroded the old Medieval culture which was based mainly on verbal communication.

Reading however did not just change the channels and sources of information: it changed the way people thought. Speech is delivered in relatively short sentences that are most devoid of qualifications, exceptions and caveats. A mind formed by solely by speech tends to have simplistic concepts that are regarded as immutable “facts”. Written language, however, with its toolkit of adjectival, adverbial and conditional clauses, complex sentence structure, capacity to cross-reference and pursue the implications of arguments and hypotheses, and ability to lay out discussions two-dimensionally rather than in a simple linear narrative, awakens the reader to the complexity of ideas, the interdependence of concepts and ultimately the tentative and ongoing nature of all intellectual inquiry. Books, unless they are specifically designed not to, smash certainty and with it, prejudice.

The second thing that books did was to create the middle class. From the 16^th century onwards, the main feature that distinguished the lower class from the middle class was the ownership of books. The middle class was, essentially, the class that could read, a definition which still holds theoretically today. “White collar” citizens (a classification that did not exist before the invention of books) may earn less than tradespeople, mine workers or construction labourers but being able to read and write extended slabs of text (i.e. get a college degree) defines them as being members of a higher class.

So, more than any other thing, books and the literate, educated middle class that read them created the modern world. The concept of the personal intellect led inevitably to the notion of having a personal and private relationship with God, i.e. Protestantism and writing and publishing over time led to science, economics, political theory and eventually democracy.

Which brings us to Trump and Hanson.

While reading and writing created our world, politicians (or should we say, wise politicians) know that not everyone reads and especially, not everyone reads history, economics or political texts. In fact, very few people read “serious” literature at all. The way to the electorate’s heart is still via spoken language and that must be language that is understood by the majority of people. We still remember people, even educated people, recoiling at Kevin Rudd’s tendency to descend into bureaucratic gobbledygook with such terms as “programmatic specificity.” No one likes a smart-arse.

In contrast, the political power of politicians such as Churchill, Roosevelt, Menzies and Obama lay in their ability to communicate important ideas in language that was understandable yet powerful. But those speakers might be regarded as assuming some basic level of literacy and readership among the population. Churchill, Roosevelt and Menzies were certainly speaking to a population that read. When those politicians spoke, they spoke a language that was informed by written language. They formed sentences such as you might construct on a page – simpler and shorter indeed – but containing elements of imagery, carefully chosen words and rhythms such as you might find in written text.

But what of a world where communication and entertainment is dominated by movies, television, radio and the Internet? What of a world where people get their news, as has been claimed, from Facebook and politicians are interviewed on morning television shows? The Internet is not, in general, a haven for carefully constructed prose. Indeed, the most widely used forum for political discussion on the Internet, Twitter, specifically disallows any serious comment by limiting all communications to 140 characters!!  I can’t put enough exclamation points after that sentence. That is not just a limitation on comment size, it is a limitation on THOUGHT. And this is a channel that is used by Donald Trump and which all politicians are being urged by their minders to master.

And that brings us to Hanson. People will say they agree with Hanson’s policies but they not really policies at all. They are really just the sort of things people say in pubs collected and presented as a political manifesto. Hanson doesn’t even (and this is her strength) even bother to re-word these comments into formal political language: she expresses them in pretty much the same words as they are when uttered around the barbecue.

Similarly, Trump has stolen a considerable number of Republican voters away from the main party by expressing ideas in terms that are essentially non-literate. He speaks in short simple sentences devoid of any complicating dependent clauses: “I will build a wall. And I will get Mexico to pay for it.” No qualifications, amplifications or explanations. Now in office, Trump continues to make these utterances such as “We are going to tax imports from Mexico.” without any further information of how such a taxation scheme might work.  And this seems to have resonated with a considerable number of American voters who see Trump as a good straight, plain speaking antidote to the “political elites” (readers) which Hillary Clinton unfortunately came to represent.

And so we have perhaps returned to a pre-Gutenberg world. The middle class is no longer defined by the number of books they own but by the type of coffee they drink (quarter-strength soy latte with Fair Trade beans), the Prius they drive (I’m saving the environment – no you're not), the width of their flat screen TV (all the better to watch Married At First Sight) and the fact they voted for a black president in 2008 (but not so much in 2012). In a world where even educated Americans speak in clichés, wear slogans on their t-shirts, post sampler-type homilies on Facebook, go on endlessly and narcissistically about loving yourself and living your dream, where emojis replace long complicated blocks of text such as “Love you”, perhaps Trump is actually right when he says he has “the best words”.  

The problem with CGI resurrections or why Grand Moff Tarkin is still uncanny

Many people were surprised to find that Rogue One featured an actor who died in 1994.  I must admit that when Peter Cushing appeared on screen as Grand Moff Tarkin, Governor of the Outland Regions, I was rather taken aback. I was pretty sure he was dead and this was a computer recreation or should I say resurrection. However, regardless of whether my historical knowledge was correct, within a few seconds I was pretty sure this was a computer image. It was almost completely convincing but there was still something wrong.

What that thing was, was movement.

Since 3D animation was first pioneered, people have talked about the “uncanny valley.” This is the problem that while we can accept the stylised faces of humans such as those in Toy Story, when we attempt to create faces that attempt to replicate faces that look “real”, there is something odd about them, even creepy. The paradox lies in the fact that, strangely, the closer we get to replicating the shape, colour, texture and luminance of real faces, the more odd they seem.

I think that much of the problem of uncanniness arises because CGI people tend to look “mechanical” – not in their structure or texture but in their movements.  For faces - apart from ones like models' which have been botoxed into paralysis – are never still. Perhaps this is why some photographic models look like CGI.

People not only have individual faces and individual voices but individual ways of moving. They stand differently, walk differently and move their hands, eyes and heads differently. Some of these are subtle and some more obvious. Patterns of bodily movement are so distinct that we are able to recognise people from far away, long before we can see their faces or body details, just from the way they walk.

Alec Guinness once said that in order to find a character, he had to know how the character walked. What he was suggesting was that gait can be an indicator of personality.  Generations of actors have given us a range of distinctive walking and even standing styles, from James Cagney’s square shouldered, confrontational stance often with fists held clenched in front, ready for action, to John Wayne’s lumbering, rolling walk with head tilted up and arms hanging loosely at his sides or a thumb hooked into his belt. Dustin Hoffman displays an odd jerky way of walking as does, strangely, the very physically different James Caan. Some actors are constantly moving, while others remain almost perfectly still. Some remain in one pose for a while and then move suddenly into another one.  It’s not just a matter of height and weight but the way we move our bodies idiosyncratically.

In Rogue One, Darth Vader is “bodied” (is that the physical equivalent of “voiced”?) by Daniel Naprous and Spencer Wilding. They were presumably chosen because they could match the height and power of 6’6” body-builder David Prowse who was the original Vader. Indeed, when Darth Vader appears in Rogue One, the body has the same impact and yet…. there’s something different about the walk. It’s not quite how Prowse used to move.

The notion that we are identified and interpreted by our body language makes sense. After all, animals judge each other’s mood by physical cues – raised hackles, bared teeth, defensive postures. We too are constantly reading, even if not fully aware of it, the emotions and intentions of others through tiny clues. Store security staff learn to spot shoplifters from their physical behaviour, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they are acting “casual.” We know when our friends or partners are lying because of almost imperceptible changes in their expressions or bodily movements meaning that we are more accustomed than we realise to their characteristic physical behaviour.

I have a friend who always turns his head about 30 degrees to the side, alternating from left to right, when he is listening to you. I have another who always leans forward across a table for emphasis when telling you something. When we watch television we might notice how Nigella Lawson looks sideways at the camera as she cooks, smiling an almost sly smile, while other cooks maintain almost no eye contact at all or just flash an occasional glance. David Attenborough is always sitting or squatting comfortably with simple hand gestures for emphasis while Tony Robinson seems always to be charging around antiquities sites hands waving as he makes some historical point. What is interesting is that once their normal way of moving is established, people rarely move like someone else. Attenborough is unlikely ever to be seen walking along a breakwater, shoulders hunched and hands plunged into his pockets like Neil Oliver or tramping stoically across an old battlefield like David Starkey.

The way people hold themselves, walk, move their hands, angle their heads, shift their weight, look around, look at you, or not look at you, are all part of their individual physical personality.  In the case of the Grand Moff, it seems the animators managed to construct a reasonable facsimile of Peter Cushing’s face and body, and voice artist Guy Henry managed a believable reproduction of his voice but capturing the minutiae of Cushing’s body language, as with Darth Vader, was more difficult. The great challenge for 3D (re-)animators is not just to create pore-accurate models of living or deceased actors but to be able to capture the unique signature that habitual behaviour has stamped on their physical actions. Then they will have truly reproduced the sense of a real human being.
  
Ian McFadyen Jan 2017

What People Don’t Understand about the Rich.

People, particularly socialists, don’t understand the Rich

They’re always complaining about how rich rich people are, and how they’re getting richer. They’re always making comparisons between the incomes of average families and the incomes of the rich and the super rich. It is often seen as morally offensive, if not a crime against humanity, that someone can hack away at a dull job five days a week and take home $700 after tax while a CEO basks in a three million dollar a year salary and media barons can have assets amounting to billions.

Well, I’ve got a flash for everyone. The wealth of these people is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a sign that we’re all doing well.  Of course I agree that it’s annoying. There’s no argument there. We all wish we had that kind of money. Many of us probably deserve to have money much more than these rich people - many of whom are greedy, dull and not even that intelligent - but to complain about the inequality of wealth in society in general is not only a waste of time but is a misunderstanding of what it actually means.

Many people see the disparity between incomes of normal people and the superrich as an indictment of western society. It isn’t. In fact, the wealth of the super-rich is an indication of the success of western society. The wealth of the billionaires is a by-product of the collective wealth of the society as a whole. In other words: the rich are only rich because we are.

Socialists have never grasped this. The basic tenet of Socialism has always been that the rich are rich because the rest of us are poor - the idea being that somehow it’s a zero-sum game - that there’s a finite pool of wealth and the rich have taken more than their share; that somehow it’s our money that they’re spending. This notion was developed by Marx who theorised that capitalists in the 19^th century got rich by stealing the wealth created by the workers. The problem is that Marx, although he wrote a book called Das Kapital, never really understood the basic principle of capital. He saw industrialists as a new version of the old European aristocracy and industrial workers as a new class of serfs condemned to labour for centuries to keep their capitalist masters wealthy.

Marx’s error was that he saw capitalism as a system where workers laboured in the mines and factories that were owned by an entrepreneur class, to produce goods and services which were then consumed by the middle class. Thus, the middle class would enjoy ever-improving standards of living while the workers continued to live in squalor. What Marx didn’t understand was that for capitalism to work, workers themselves had to become consumers of the goods they produced and, because capitalism constantly reduces the cost of goods, their standards of living would gradually rise. Marx’s prediction of the proletariat enduring a state of permanent servitude was disproved just by observing the living conditions of workers in the 1950s as compared with the  living conditions in the 1850s.

Unions will claim that the improvement in conditions is due to the efforts of the trade union movement, decades of  strikes, go-slows, rallies, lock-outs, picket lines and lobbying, however this is simply not true. Workers’ wages, compared to managers wages and upper management wages are no higher now that they ever were, in fact in some cases workers’ wages have fallen in comparison to executives.

So if workers aren’t really being paid any better. How come they’re better off? How can skilled and unskilled workers own cars and television sets and even pay off homes?

Okay, a lesson in basic economics.

Imagine a tailor in the days before industrialisation. The tailor makes shirts for a living. Hand cutting and stitching, he can make 5 shirts a week. Let’s also say he needs $100 a week to pay his rent, put food on the table, buy shoes for his children and buy cloth and cotton for the shirts. He really can’t afford to charge less than $20 a shirt and hope he sells all the shirts he makes.

Now comes an industrialist who calculates that by setting up a factory with sewing machines and power cutters he can produce 1000 shirts a week, using only 50 employees. To do this, the industrialist will have to persuade someone to put up many thousands of dollar to equip the factory. If he’s lucky he will find one very rich person willing to invest. Early in the industrial revolution, many of the financiers were aristocrats. Alternatively, the industrialist can sell shares in the company to a large number of people who have smaller though still substantial sums of money to invest. Whatever the ownership structure however, the important thing is that the investors get a return on their money. Unless they make a reasonable return, they might as well  leave the cash it in the bank and get interest. And given that there’s always a risk in such a venture - the shirts may not sell - the return will have to be sufficient to coax them take the risk.

Let’s say that our industrialist raises $100,000 in capital and sets up a factory with modern textile technology. He hires 50 people to operate the machines and they go into production. They produce 1000 shirts a week, meaning each employee is now producing four times the number of shirts that the tailor did working on his own. If the industrialist pays his workers the same wage as the tailor was seeking - $100 a week - the wages bill will be $5000 a week. If the factory sells the shirts at a wholesale price of $7 it will get a weekly income of $7,000, enough to cover the wages bill and the cost of materials, plus overheads, cost of repairs and pay the investors a 10% dividend ($10,000) at the end of the year. This dividend represents a profit to the investors of about 20 cents a shirt.

This venture has now created wealth. Firstly, of course, it has created wealth for the investors who are making more than if they just left their money in the bank. But it has also created wealth for the public. People are now able to buy a shirt for a retail price of $10 instead of $20. (The factory doesn’t sell direct like the tailor so there’s a mark-up in the store.) This means that when a customer buys a shirt, they have $10 more left over than they used to. This allows them to consider buying something else. Even though the investors are making a profit of 20 cents per shirt, the customer has actually made a bigger profit of $10 on each shirt.

The point is that the savings that result from using modern technology and production methods are shared between the investor and the customer and the customer gets the greater share.

But what of the poor tailor, you say? He’s been put out of a job. Yes, unless he is one of the 50 people working in the factory, he has,. Because of mechanisation the factory will never need as many textile workers as there were tailors, so even if all the people in the factory are ex-tailors, there will still be tailors left over. So what are they to do?

The answer lies in the fact that people now have $10 left over after buying a shirt. This means that they can buy other goods which perhaps they could not afford before. Suddenly there is a general demand for more goods and services and more factories and businesses spring up to serve that need. Our tailor may not get a job in a garment factory but he might end up making crockery or furniture or working in one of the new emporiums that sell all the new consumer items.

Working in a factory may seem repetitious and depersonalised but the tailor will soon realise there are benefits: his wage is regular and reliable and he doesn’t have to provide his own equipment or materials. He too notices too that when he buys shoes for his kids, the price has dropped considerably. He too can afford things than he once couldn’t.

What has happened right across the society is that millions of people are suddenly able to access goods and services that once they couldn’t. For example, prior to the industrial revolution in England, few working class people could afford china. Their cups, plates and mugs tended to be tinplate, enamel or even wood. By industrialising the production of china cups and saucers, Josiah Wedgewood enabled millions of Britons to drink out of porcelain cups and teapots for the first time - something which was also a health benefit as porcelain is impervious to bacteria.

Here it’s important to note that wealth doesn’t just mean cash in hand, or the value of material assets. Wealth also includes having better health, financial security, leisure time and access to recreational and cultural activities. Many of these things are also created through investment. Institutions such as schools, museums, galleries, parks, libraries and holiday resorts are in their own way also means of creating wealth through “mass production.” Schools, for example, can be seen as an efficient way of providing “mass” education to the children of families who could not afford a private tutor or governess.

The important thing to remember, however, is that the whole capitalist process doesn’t work unless the customers buy the goods on offer. The manufacturer has to either offer a products at a lower price, or a better product at the same price than their competitors.

And there will always be competitors. Our hypothetical shirt manufacturer won’t have the field to themselves. Soon other factories will set up offering either better shirts, or the same quality shirts at a cheaper price. Faster machines or more efficient work practices could drop the price of shirts to $9 or $8. The manufacturer has to continually improve their product and the efficiency of production to stay in business. This means that the customers are continually being offered better goods, and cheaper goods and every time the price of goods drops, the customers' wealth increases. Even if their pay packet remains relatively the same, the money in it becomes worth more and more over time. Hence a workers wage which once only put modest food on the table and the meanest of clothing today pays for food, power, phone, petrol, home insurance and entertainment.

 And therein lies the basic principal of wealth. Investors only make money if the customer does. The wealth which flows to the investor is a share of the wealth which flows to the customer.  If the customer’s wealth does not increase, the investor generally doesn’t make any money.  And the amount of money the investor or the manufacturer makes is a rough indicator of how much wealth they’ve created in the society.

Take Bill Gates for example. He’s worth, on the basis of his shares, many billions of dollars. In real terms, on a cash basis, he’s worth hundreds of millions. This is because he was instrumental in marketing a series of computer operating systems from MS-DOS working up to Windows 10 which enabled an entire generation to run personal computers. Bill’s wealth may seem excessive but if you look at it on a per-computer basis, the number of computers running Microsoft software in the world is around one billion. If Bill Gates were entitled to only one dollar for each of them he would have a billion in cash - more than any other billionaire actually has (since most of their wealth is calculated from the value of their assets.)  Compared to that one dollar which goes to Bill, how much wealth has the owner of the computer gained? The ability to access the Internet, send emails, write documents, play games, print photos, run businesses. schools, hospitals, airlines, newspapers and so on. When you consider the value of the software to the user and society in general, a dollar payment to Bill doesn’t seem that much. It’s just the huge size of the consumer base that makes him so wealthy.

So we shouldn’t writhe with resentment when we see the very rich building their multi-million dollar homes and buying entre islands. They’re only rich because they’ve made us all richer.

But there’s another reason why we shouldn’t resent them. We need them.

As said earlier, the industrialist who has an idea how to produce something better and cheaper needs to find investors. The problem with investment is that it is always risky. It would be nice if an entrepreneur could raise all their finance from ordinary people - what are called “Mom and Pop” investors in the U.S.

But there’s a problem with “Mom and Pop” investors.

Mom and Pop can’t afford to lose their life savings. Every so often entrepreneurs do persuade thousands  of ordinary people to invest in their projects and fund managers invest their clients’ savings in their schemes that all too often end in tears. Many a family has been ruined by investing in a speculative investment scheme that was “guaranteed gilt-edge blue-chip.”  The fact is that many – perhaps most - business ventures fail. So what is needed for economic development is a pool of people who are so rich that they can afford to lose millions of dollars and not actually go broke.

Fortunately there are such people. And they are worth their weight in gold. Literally. If we didn’t have people who could take a loss of several million on an investment and still be able to go on investing, our society would come to a standstill.

Actually it’s amazing that rich people do risk their money in new ventures when they could just keep it in the bank. That’s what happens when a depression occurs. During a depression, the rich don’t lose their money, they just stop investing. The result is that they stay rich but everyone else gets poor. Getting out of a depression is basically about getting the rich to invest again. The only way of explaining why they do invest is just greed. So as Gordon Gekko said “Greed is good.”  If it weren’t for greed the rich would simply keep their money in the bank and spend it on luxuries.

So, even though the rich are greedy, and boring and not even that bright, we need the little darlings to help us get richer. Every time you feel resentment that you are poor but Warren Buffet is rich, look around your house and realise that everything you have, the phone, the carpet, the television, the computer, the fridge, the stove, even the coffee mug on the sink only exist because at some point, some rich person sank a couple of million dollars into factory or a telephone company and made them all possible. So let’s not begrudge them their huge but alienating houses, their expensive but ugly clothes and their vacuous relationships - they’ve earned them and we should let them enjoy them. It’s the least we can do.

Shorten is right to oppose this unnecessary and undemocratic plebiscite.

Lord knows, I am not a supporter of the Labour Party but Bill Shorten is right to oppose a plebiscite over same-sex marriage.

I mean let's be clear. This notion of holding a plebiscite on the question of  same-sex marriage was simply a trick. It was a delaying tactic, a stick thrown in front of same-sex marriage campaigners to trip them up and impede the progress towards removing one of the last remaining obstacles to equality for gay people.

And it was a very clever trick

A plebiscite has the appearance of dealing with a vexed issue in a democratic way even though we have been able to resolve these issues in the past without any resort to plebiscites. We didn’t need a plebiscite to abolish the death penalty in Australia, or to decriminalise homosexual acts. And, most significantly, we didn’t hold a plebiscite before adding the provision “marriage shall be between a man and a woman” a mere ten years ago.

But suddenly we need a plebiscite to remove it.

Now, thanks to this tactic, the argument has arisen that same-sex marriage entails such a huge change to Australia’s culture and society that everyone is entitled to vote on the issue. There are only two problems with this:

1.   It’s not a huge change. It’s a tiny technical change. 

2.   You’re not voting on anything. Unlike a referendum, a plebiscite is not binding. The answer you write on the paper does affect any legislation, except psychologically. A plebiscite is just a 160 million dollar opinion poll which politicians can then refer to as indicator of public opinion. And clearly the results can be used by both sides to justify their position.

To explain the first point above. Despite the issues that are raised by opponents of same-sex marriage, the question is not whether same-sex couples can live together and raise children and generally be regarded as normal families – they are already legally doing that.  Just like a different-sex couples who are living together, same-sex couples are regarded as living in a de facto marriage by the ATO, Centrelink, the Department of Social Services, the Family Court and just about every legal jurisdiction. They already have the same rights, privileges and obligations as different-sex couples. So that’s not the issue.

And it’s not about whether same-sex couples can get married in the sense of having a marriage ceremony. Same-sex couples can already find celebrants and even churches that will perform marriage ceremonies where they make the same vows, with all the same sincerity and solemnity as different-sex couples. The only difference is that, at the end of the wedding ceremony, the different-sex couples get to sign a Marriage Certificate and their marriage is recorded in the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths.

That’s all it comes down to. Signing a certificate. That’s what all the fuss is about.

So, why, given that same-sex couple are already have, for all intents and purposes, the same rights as different-sex couples in regard to tax, inheritances, home loans, superannuation , divorce settlements, child adoption and so on, are opponents of same-sex marriage determined to stop them from having their marriage officially recorded by the Registry Office? The answer can only be - sheer bloody-mindedness. It seems that opponents of same-sex marriage realise they can’t stop same-sex couples living together, raising children, even adopting children and claiming the title of parents but at least they can deny them this one last thing –having their relationship officially recorded in the BDM Registry. Which is really just petty.

And the notion that people have a “right” to vote on this issue is simply incorrect.

It is not a principle of democracy that one group of citizens, regardless of how large it is, can vote to suppress the rights of another group. The most important feature of a right, be it enshrined in a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, Statutes or Common Law is that it applies apply to everyone. This is the nature of Justice: that the rules apply equally to all. Hence, if one person has the right to marry the person of their choosing, then everyone has the right to marry the person of their choosing.

Oddly, I am quite sure that if you polled the opponents of same-sex marriage about arranged marriages – the situation that occurs in some countries where young women and men are simply told who they have to marry – they would repudiate it as barbaric – a violation of the right to choose your own spouse. And yet they take the position that, in Australia, a gay man can only get married to a woman and a gay woman can only marry a man. How is this not the same denial of choice?

The unfortunate situation we find ourselves in is that there are, in Australia, people who enjoy the right and the privilege of being able to marry the person of their choice but who wish to deny that right to others. That denial of what is surely one of the most basic rights, is not something that can be justified by a plebiscite. Even if 90% of the Australian population voted against same-sex marriage it would still be a violation of human rights and thus an invalid vote, just as if a majority of people voted to deny Aboriginal people the right to go to school, or the right of women to be airline pilots. Such votes do occur from time to time in the world but they do not constitute democracy.

Islam is not the real source of the problem.

If we forget about Islam for a minute and actually start profiling the people who commit terrorist acts we find quite a few similarities. The first is that none of them are high or even medium achievers. They were generally poor performers at school, work in low paid jobs and have few if any career prospects. They either have no relationships with women or their relationships are compromised by infidelity, exploitation, bullying or outright violence. Many are hyper-masculinised, engaging in body building and steroid use and, like our own Ivan Milat, they are fond of taking selfies holding weapons.

These young men are found in all societies and they have always been an important resource for political extremists. In the 1920s the Nazi party in Germany recruited young violent thugs, put them in uniforms and called them the SA. They were supposed to “protect” Nazi rallies from disruption but their real job was to beat up political opponents and Jews. The  Communist Party had its own paramilitary force to match them. In Northern Ireland, violent young men were enlisted by both the IRA and the Loyalist defence groups and sent out to kill each other and a lot of innocent civilians.

The practice of recruiting not-too-bright, low-status, angry young men to commit violent acts has been around for hundreds of years: the only thing that has changed is the method of recruitment.

The Nazis had to personally approach young men who came to their meetings and ask them if they wanted to join. Osama Bin Laden was radicalised by a teacher at his high school. Prayer groups, sporting groups and other social gatherings have served as forums where potential converts are identified and approached. However, the advent of the Internet has brought with it the possibility of  recruitment over distances of thousands of kilometres. Far more effective than pamphlets, and much easier to hide, websites can deliver text, propaganda videos and on-line contact with others already in the organisation.

The Internet also enables remote activation. The genius of ISIS (if we can use that word) has been to see that you don’t need to call your recruits to a meeting, give them uniforms or weapons or even plans. No need to synchronise watches: you simply instruct them to kill non-Muslims by whatever means you have: kitchen knives, axes, a truck and so on, at  any time that you can.

It is important to remember however, that though many of the murders and massacres we have witnessed have been instigated by ISIS, these angry young men are likely to take up arms for a range of causes. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, shot 77 young Nords because he was opposed to Muslims. Gavin Long, the Baton Rouge police killer, was acting out of hatred for white people as was Micah Johnson the Dallas shooter.

So what kinds of people are likely to commit terrorist acts?

The potential terrorist is typically a young male who has little prospect of significant achievement in mainstream society. He is likely to have learning difficulties and low academic achievement. He is unlikely to have mature or equitable relationships women and may express conflict over sexual matters where adolescent attitudes to sex are mixed with deep misogyny. He is likely to feel isolated or discriminated against because of his ethnicity or religion and is likely to react with exaggerated chauvinism in relation to his own cultural heritage and bigotry in relation to others. 

Other predictive traits include aggression, narcissism, intolerance of others’ views, an explosive temper and involvement in petty crime. Most significantly, he will be a young man with a poorly developed sense of self who is looking for, or has found, a male role model on whom to base his own identity. That  male role model may be a teacher, a religious leader, a para-military leader or just a more experienced and charismatic member of a political or terrorist organisation. What he sees in that role model is the person he want to be: a man who is strong, confident, respected, part of a supportive band of brothers.

If society does not offer these poorly-formed, resentful, young men opportunities to achieve a sense of value, ISIS, neo-Nazi groups, motorcycle gangs, drug syndicates and other anti-social organisations will.

Muhammad Ali and the glorification of violence.

I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised that so many people turned out to deliver eulogies on Muhammad Ali. Actors, celebrities, even President Obama, turned up to honour the great man’s achievements. I was not surprised that people should honour Ali for his ebullient personality, courage, devotion to charity and work inspiring marginalised people. I am just a bit surprised that none of these celebrities even mentioned that the way Ali achieved greatness was by punching people until they were unconscious.

After all, that was his job. Punching people.

I know they call it “boxing” but it’s really just “punching.” That’s all boxers do. They stand in a ring and punch each until one of them can’t punch any more. In the Olympics, running is called “running”, hurdling is called “hurdling” and swimming is called “swimming” so why is punching called “boxing”?  The answer is that calling it “boxing” seems to be an attempt to disguise the activity from what it really is which is just fist fighting. Which is, oddly, the very same thing we’re currently trying to eradicate from our streets and homes

After all, it is a little surprising that, at a time when we are running campaigns to stop street violence and teach people that Once Punch Can Kill and eliminate violence in the home, that people should be waxing lyrical about man whose entire career was based on punching people till they fell down or were so injured that the referee would have to stop the fight. At a time when schools are running anti-bullying programs and trying to prevent violence in the playground, it is more than a little disturbing to read biographical articles in which the writers seem to revel in the details of Ali's victories – bloodied faces, opponents sprawling on the canvas. Why are they not troubled that an African-American should find fame by inflicting brain damage on other African-Americans for the entertainment of cheering crowds of morons?

Yes, I know that some people will say boxing is an ‘art.’ But... no. Embroidery is an art. Etching, sculpture, wood carving, poetry and song-writing are arts. Boxing - that is: punching - is a skill just as butchering a carcass or gutting a fish is a skill. It takes practice but its primary purpose is still to inflict damage on a body.  What is possibly most remarkable is that, in other sports, punching someone will get a player sidelined, sin-binned, suspended, fined or even banned from the game. So how is it we tolerate a game where the entire aim is to punch your opponent?

The sickening answer to the contradiction is that there are still people out, mainly men (let’s face it) who think that boxing, punching, fighting, martial arts – whatever you want to call it – is  “manly”; that fighting is some sort of sign of masculinity - even a requirement of masculinity. This, of course, is the underlying cause of street attacks, bar fights, road rage and, ultimately, domestic violence.

So again why,  given the current efforts to remove violence from society and knowing that it causes brain damage, is boxing still legal? And how do we now have an even more violent incarnation of street fighting called "UFC" where combatants kick, gouge, knee and batter each other in a cage?

And most perplexing, what kind of arsehole pays to go and watch this? Over to you world.