Shaking up the universities

published as 'New lessons'

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 22 December 2008, p. 19.

by Roy Hay

The Bradley Report into Australia’s higher education handed down this week is a weighty document at 304 pages and with 46 separate recommendations, so it is not to be taken lightly or quickly. The report points out that Australia is slipping behind other countries in its higher education provision, at a time when international competition requiring a highly educated population is increasing. It sets goals of raising the proportion of 25–34 year olds with at least a first degree from its current 29% to 40% by 2020. It also aims to increase the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in higher education, including indigenous people, those living in rural and remote areas and those from low socio-economic backgrounds. A demand driven system is to be achieved by providing funding to students so they can select and pay for the higher education of their choice.
This assumes that students know what they want to study and where best to do so. This is a good and responsible position to start from. But in practice many students find that when they get to university or another institution of higher education, the subject and the way it is taught or the conditions attached to it are not what they expected or wanted. So they change. Can the institutions respond quickly enough to accommodate this? Should they be driven by a student popularity poll or by what the university or what society says they should be taught? For example, we are clearly short of scientists and mathematicians and health professionals, having to import these skills often from poorer countries that also lack the numbers they need. But if Australian students assess that they would prefer to do arts or social sciences should the institutions of higher learning simply become suppliers of liberal arts? There is a get-out clause in the report that would allow the government to exclude a course of study from the demand-driven system if it wished to regulate student or graduate numbers. This micro-management in turn would have implications for the institutions and the students.
Some of the analysis of key issues in the report is acute and if acted upon could ameliorate the damage done to universities in recent years. For example, ‘There are now clear signs that the quality of the educational experience is declining; the established mechanisms for assuring quality nationally need updating; and student-to-staff ratios are unacceptably high.’ Also, the underfunding of research infrastructure leads to universities cross-subsidising research from funds obtained for teaching which results in a further decline in the student experience.
The report recommends that the Australian Government should assume full responsibility for the regulation of higher education in Australia, but qualifies this by saying it is important to retain a strong element of local knowledge and responsiveness. A new independent regulatory body is required to implement policy and ensure compliance. The regulatory body must be independent of government to ensure objectivity in its decision-making and advice.
The report suggests that universities should not all be alike, and broadly there should be three types of institution, comprehensive universities (with research strength in three or more broad areas), specialist universities (research in one or two broad areas) and other higher education institutions (with scholarship but no research requirement).
Independently of the report, and potentially at variance from it, is a separate quality assurance exercise being developed in the research area, which is trying to move away from the current practice of measuring inputs and quantities towards outputs and quality.
Informed sources indicate that Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education, who commissioned the report in March this year, is not at all pleased by certain of the recommendations. The government will not respond formally to the report until March next year, but it will be surprising if it is implemented in full. In particular the proposed funding is likely to come under close scrutiny. There is a political dimension. Is the minister spread too thin? Having done a sterling job with industrial relations is she going to be able to deliver this part of the education revolution the Rudd government promised before and after taking office?
Professor Stuart Macintyre of the University of Melbourne, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts, who also chaired the recent advisory panel on a new national history curriculum, suggests that breaking down the unified national system of universities into three tiers will promote a drift from regional universities and some metropolitan ones to the more prestigious ones. He thinks a national accreditation scheme is likely to be resisted by some of the leading universities, who are already self-accrediting, and by the states.
Deakin University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sally Walker argues ‘that many of the proposals reflect Deakin's goals as set out in our Strategic Plan - Delivering Effective Partnerships. In some cases, if the recommendation is approved by the Australian Government, we will receive assistance to achieve our objectives.’ The extent of the similarity between Deakin's goals and the aims of the Review Panel is striking. For example, the Report says: ‘Providers in regional and remote areas need to be encouraged and supported to build up partnerships with local communities, providers in other sectors of education, business and industry.’ But she is aware, ‘There will be challenges for Deakin, particularly in relation to research, but Deakin has always risen to challenges and I have no doubt that it will continue to do so.’

Happy and upwardly mobile

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 15 December 2008, p. 17.

by Roy Hay

My wife is profoundly deaf and even with two hearing aids finds oral communication, particularly in areas where there is high ambient noise, very difficult. So when she takes part in quiz games, she can’t hear the questions, (which those who don’t know of her affliction thinks indicates that she is stupid) though when someone explains them to her clearly she gets most of them right.
For years I have insisted that she have a mobile phone for emergencies. It was an old-fashioned brick, which lay uncharged for most of the time, in the bottom of her handbag. She could not hear it ring even when it was charged and she could never remember my numbers, though at least they were programmed into the phone’s memory. Its use in emergencies was thus pretty fraught anyway.
She was very resistant to my updating it. ‘What do I need a mobile phone for? The kids can email me,’ she said. I tried to explain that modern children and grandchildren have bypassed email and now communicate by text messages, pictures and videos, sent via their mobiles. ‘If you want your children to contact you, you need to make it easy for them, so we should update your mobile.
So off to the telephone shop in town, where the staff are actually helpful, and truthful. The young lass with whom I quite often deal even telling me not to get myself an iPhone, which I covet, because the price gouging by the phone companies over contracts and the phone itself is appalling. ‘You can possibly get one on ebay,’ she hinted. Anyway my request this time was for a prepaid phone and one with a loud ring tone, vibrating facility (my wife says she always wanted a vibrator!) and high volume output. Only $79 later I was ready to leave the shop, when I asked about the fact that the $10 initial credit ran out in 30 days. ‘What about lumps of prepaid usage in future?’ I asked. ‘You can buy 6 months worth for $30 but that runs out at the end of that time,’ was the reply. Since my wife was on a $5 a month emergency contract there was no advantage. ‘Simply take the SIM card out of the old phone and put it into the new and you can keep the number and everything,’ says my helpful person.
So off home with the phone which my wife quite liked when I dropped the lightweight, slim unit in a fetching bronze or turquoise case into her hand. We live in Teesdale, right on the fringes of mobile reception. There is none in my study, a tiny and variable amount in the front room of the house, and a couple of bars of reception at times in the paddock.
Unlike me, her first strategy was to read the manual. But modern mobile phone manuals are pretty useless for neophytes. All the key things you need to know are not there, like how do you correct an error? How do you save your carefully programmed screen background? But my wife is persistent and pernickety. She has learned how to send text messages and accompanying photographs, how to do speed dialling, how to store material in one or other of the memories and what her own mobile phone number is. Up till now she had never used it.
From mid-afternoon yesterday until bedtime, much later than usual, she was engrossed in pressing buttons and trying things. Since she was on a $5 plan for emergencies only, goodness knows what she will have racked up by the time she has cracked everything.
She took it down to the shop with her this morning and I had to ring her to test it. She tells me she heard it ring and felt it vibrate and she could hear me clearly on it. Mind you, it was pretty quiet on the bike path and if she was somewhere with high background noise it would be a different story.
My daughter, who is up to date with most modern technology, has been very patient. Sending pictures of the grandchildren and grammatically correct full-text messages to begin with and then introducing the abbreviations and short cuts. Next she sent the url for the website which has 41 pages of ‘txt abbreviations’. A plaintive mother asked, ‘Do I have to learn them all?’
But she is definitely into the twenty–first century now.

Competitive education: Is that what we want?

Published as 'Lifting the bar',

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 1 December 2008, p. 17.

By Roy Hay

Isn’t it fascinating when you have Rupert Murdoch and Julia Gillard singing from the same song sheet?
Rupert Murdoch’s fourth Boyer Lecture was aimed directly at ‘our public education systems [which] are a disgrace. Despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less—especially for those who are most vulnerable in our society’. Other countries, and he cites Finland, Korea and Singapore, are leaving us behind. In a competitive world we have to set much higher expectations for our students and hold schools accountable when they fail.
Much of what he has to say is sound and has the backing of the current Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. In her introduction to an education forum in Melbourne earlier this week she stressed that the current government wanted a transformational change in Australian schools. She brought the Chancellor of the New York Department of Education Joel Klein to explain the changes he has presided over in that city. Gillard claims that Klein has ‘demonstrated that change has to be systematic, that it has to focus unrelentingly on quality improvement and that we must demand high standards of achievement from every student no matter how disadvantaged’.
‘The people who need a solid education to lift them out of deprived circumstances are the people who are falling further and further behind. That is unacceptable to me,’ Murdoch says. Rural areas, indigenous communities and inner urban poor areas tend to have under-resourced schools relative to the needs of their students. As Gillard points out, ‘A child from a working class family is only half as likely as a child from a high income family to go on to tertiary study.’ While tertiary study may be expensive, its contribution to the life-time earning stream of the recipient is massive and growing. A country like Australia which cannot compete in wage costs needs to offset that by greater investment in human capital, in the skills and knowledge of its workforce at all levels.
All three contributors to the debate want greater transparency and accountability, because lack of these hides failures, the sheeting home of responsibility and the ability to focus on where greater effort and investment are needed. That information needs to be available to parents and students, not just to educational bureaucrats and politicians.
So far so good, but let’s just be a little careful about some of the arguments being advanced. Murdoch asserts that ‘corporate leaders know better than government officials the skills that people need to get ahead in the 21st century’. Where is the evidence for this blanket statement? Of course, we have to improve basic literacy and numeracy, and students would benefit from exposure to the kind of conditions they would face in various forms of employment to help them make rational, informed choices of career. But there is a danger if we make a competitive industrial model the key to our educational system we may finish up with a vocational training structure rather than an educational one.
We have had examples in the past where we have tried to use a competitive model. In England in the 19th century it was called payment by results and it was abandoned as a failure. Measurement in education is one of the critical areas. It has its uses but also its limits. It is vital for accountability but it can be narrowing and misleading. It may well result in concentrating only on producing what is measurable and hence not valuing that which is not, or what is more difficult to measure, quality and variety.
Everyone will have his or her own experience from schooling of those occasions when an enthusiastic and capable teacher managed to awaken a love of learning and puzzle solving. When individuality and difference was encouraged and it helped change your view of the world. Whatever we do in the education revolution we have to retain that core of what it means to educate rather than train someone for the complex world we live in.

Human capital and technology

Published as 'Battle of carrot versus stick,'

Geelong Advertiser, Thursday 13 November 2008, p. 23.

By Roy Hay

Rupert Murdoch’s second Boyer Lecture on the ABC ‘Who’s afraid of new technology?’ was a challenging call to Australians to embrace the opportunities of the new rather than bemoan its collateral damage. But it harboured a contradiction at its very centre. Murdoch began with a tale about the Luddites, who destroyed stocking frames and weaving machines in the early nineteenth century in a violent protest against one aspect of the technological change of their day. He went on, ‘After a while, a number of the leading luddites were arrested and brought to trial. Some were hanged. Some were thrown into prison. And some were transported here to Australia, where they became among our first settlers. They were treated very harshly. But they were truly prisoners of the past.’
The lecture then addressed three subjects. ‘First, why technology is a good thing despite the unsettling changes it brings. Second, in business terms, how technology is putting a greater premium on what is awkwardly called “human capital”. Finally … what all this means for Australia's future.’ It is that middle element which contains the contradiction, for Murdoch insists that what distinguishes progressive enterprise is not its equipment or its technology but the skills of its people. He quotes Bill Gates, ‘take our 20 best people away, and I tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company’.
Now my story about the Luddites is that they had the human capital of their day and so they were dumped on the scrap heap or hanged or transported for demanding that their skills should be valued. If they had been offered a clearly articulated alternative rather than redundancy and could see how they could adapt to the new world, then my guess is that they would have gone in that direction. But it is easier for those who want to change technology to junk those who resist rather than ensure that they have a chance to adapt to it in their own way.
If you do want a model of what is possible in the new world, then the little island of Samso in Denmark might be a better one to consider. In this windswept little scrap of land in the Kattegat, an inlet of the North Sea, the 4100 inhabitants have embarked on a renewable energy project that has cut their carbon footprint by 140 per cent and they now export millions of kilowatt hours of electricity to the rest of Denmark. Wind turbines along the coast, fields full of solar panels, biomass and wood chip power generators and efficient hot water distribution systems supply the people’s needs but with a substantial surplus which brings in revenue. Nothing was imposed on these people. They won a competition to take part in the experiment and everything is owned by local collectives or individuals. Sure there was significant public investment, from the Danish government and the European Union, but a substantial part of the average $US18500 cost per islander has come out of their own pockets. ‘The crucial point that we have shown that if you want to change how we generate energy you have to start at the community level and not impose technology on people,’ says Soren Harmensen, the former environmental studies teacher who helped get the Samso experiment under way.
Now Rupert Murdoch will quite rightly come back and say that this only reinforces another of his messages about the importance of education, resilience and risk taking by the people. It certainly shows that people can and do adopt technological and other changes when it is in their interests to do so. So the carrot might be better than the stick after all.

New ways in history

Published as 'Balancing act'

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 20 October 2008, p. 15.

By Roy Hay

While most attention has focused on the provision of computers to students in our schools as the key element of the proposed education revolution, perhaps a more significant change is forecast in the new approach to teaching history. A new national history curriculum is being drafted and the role of history in the overall education of our children is to be enhanced. It is none too soon that this is happening.
The history which the curriculum advisory committee recommended this week ‘should have a broad and comprehensive foundation from which its implications for Australia can be grasped’. In other words students can only understand Australia properly if they appreciate how it fits into the history of the world and our region. Some people have seized on this as a downgrading of Australian history, but it is arguable that Australian history will become more interesting in this new approach. The distinctiveness of Australian experience, as well as the common elements we share with other parts of the world and their peoples will come into clearer focus.
Factual knowledge, the basis of current understanding of ‘chronology, geography, institutional arrangements, material circumstances and belief systems’, will be a key element particularly in the early years of historical study. As students develop the capacity for thinking historically they can gradually appreciate how historical knowledge is obtained, modified and developed through research. The arguments which lie behind historical judgments can then come into play. By the time students reach the later years of school they will be equipped to tackle historical debates and the uncertainty which will always exist about even the most well-accepted facts.
Conservative commentators wish to continue the history wars and have tried to make capital out of the background of the chair of the history advisory group, Professor Stuart Macintyre of the University of Melbourne. But the group he leads includes historians and educators from across the political spectrum and the recommendations and the advice offered is driven by a concern to make history informative, relevant and exciting for our diverse range of students. A high proportion of these students have both domestic and overseas heritages and the world they are living in is now much more interconnected than it has ever been in human history. The resources available for the study of history have also multiplied so the critical skills necessary to interpret and analyse that material and draw well-founded conclusions are more important than ever.
The committee argues that too close a specification of the detail of the curriculum will be counterproductive as experience of the compulsory history syllabus for Years 9 and 10 in New South Wales showed. Engagement with history has increased since content and close control were relaxed in that state. At junior secondary level the suggestion is that history should cover four very broad elements—from the very earliest human existence to around 500 AD, from then until the origins of the modern period around 1750, modern history from 1750 to the present, and finally Australian history from around 1900 to now. The first three phases should be taught as world history, with Australia’s place therein as a significant component. In Years 11 and 12 more specialised units will continue to be offered, along with the possibility of research project work and methodologies as currently offered in New South Wales.
History does not exist in isolation and the committee is quite explicit that literacy, numeracy, information and communications technology, languages, the arts and civics should be linked in fruitful ways with the teaching of history. Overall, history should occupy about ten per cent of teaching time and be a substantial contribution to the national curriculum. It is a challenging agenda and the opportunity exists for everyone to comment on the draft advice over the next few months, before detailed work on the curriculum commences next year. To make the new syllabus work will need a concerted effort to train history teachers and upgrade the knowledge of existing ones for at present many of those teaching history have not studied the discipline. As always, enthusiastic and knowledgeable teachers are the key to success in any field of education.

Experience: Is it all it is cracked up to be

Published as 'Vice squad'

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 6 October 2008, p. 15.

By Roy Hay

Much is being made in the United States election campaigns of the relative levels of experience and inexperience of the candidates for president and vice-president. Yet if history is anything to go by, then it is not clear that anything prepares a person to serve as president of the United States. Some of the most successful presidents have had relatively little relevant training for the position, while some others, who seemed extremely well qualified, made, at best, a poor fist of the role.
Harry Truman was pitched into the job when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office in April 1945 only a couple of months into his fourth term as president. He had been a Senator for Missouri since 1934 and had chaired a wartime committee that helped cut waste in the supply of munitions to the armed services. But he had not been consulted on international affairs by Roosevelt and within days he had to make the decisions to test and then use the atomic bomb for the first, and so far the only occasion, in military conflict. He also had to settle the post-war shape of the world with Stalin and Churchill and was behind the Marshall Plan for European recovery and the setting up of the United Nations. His catchcry, ‘the buck stops here’ reflected his willingness to accept the responsibility for his decisions. At times in his presidency his approval rating was as low as that of George W Bush today. But most judges now would say that Truman was one of the best American presidents.
Ronald Reagan’s career as a Hollywood B-film actor and two terms as governor of California hardly prepared him for the White House, for which he stood unsuccessfully twice before securing the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1980. He had originally been a Democrat when he entered politics. His economic policies in practice were often the complete opposite of the philosophical position he professed. Having come to power on the basis of campaign for small government he instituted a massive growth in government spending on the military and presided over an arms race that helped to bring about the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism. He too gets a favourable assessment from most commentators today.
Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer who spent some time working in Australia and founded the Zinc Corporation along with William Baillieu. During the First World War he organised food supplies and relief in Europe and served as the secretary of commerce under two presidents—Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge—in the 1920s. But when he became Republican president himself in 1928 it was just in time to preside over the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression. All his practical experience and economic knowledge did not equip him to deal with this catastrophe. High tariffs and high taxation made things worse not better.
In more recent times, John F Kennedy had less political experience than his opponent Richard Nixon, when he won in 1960, while Nixon, with all his accumulated knowledge, ruined his international successes with low-level incompetence and corruption at home, when he eventually won in 1968 and again in 1972. He resigned in 1974 to head off impeachment for his role in the Watergate scandal cover-up. I doubt if history will be kind to George W Bush, who had a strong political pedigree and two terms as governor of Texas but showed himself to be unable to cope with major crises at home and abroad. In his case it is probably more deficiencies of character than lack of experience that is at the bottom of his problems.
So though experience will be used as a stick to beat candidates in the current election run-in, it is arguable that this is not the key feature that should determine the outcome. It might be strength of character and a willingness to learn how to deal with new and unforeseen issues for which the voters should be looking.

Dealing with Telstra

Published as 'Quality first'

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 29 September 2008, p. 17.

By Roy Hay

I hold no shares in Telstra, but I have been a customer of the telco and its predecessor the publicly owned company since we arrived in Australia in 1977. Back in July this year we received a letter from Telstra inviting us to adopt electronic on-line billing in order to help save the environment by reducing the amount of paper used by the company. Most of the transactions I undertake these days are done electronically and I am happy with the services provided by my banks and a number of other utilities and companies, but I was not prepared to accede to its request and here are some of the reasons.
We have all our services combined on one bill, including home phone, two mobile phones, Bigpond broadband, wireless internet and global roaming. Our normal monthly bill for these services is of the order of $200.00. In April following a trip to New Zealand we received a bill for $3,961.30, which we queried. Luckily I had the information about our usage of global roaming while we were overseas and the experience of previous uses while in the United Kingdom on two occasions last year. My request to reduce the bill by $3752.57 was accepted by Telstra. I subsequently asked Telstra to tell me why the error had occurred but I have had no reply to date.
In June 2008, having paid our bill by EFT, I received an email purporting to be from Telstra telling me that it had been unable to process our payment. I was assured by a Telstra person that payment had been received. She said the email might not be a legitimate Telstra one caused by a ‘computer glitch’, her words. Next month the same thing happened. The woman I spoke to confirmed that the account had been paid, then transferred me to the billing department where a young man told me that Telstra had been changing its computer systems for two years and that two errors were quite understandable and that, while he apologised for the inconvenience, nothing could be done because systems were not perfect! His manner suggested that the service provided was adequate and that I should just accept the fact. I told him that was unacceptable. The same thing has happened again this month.
On more than one occasion this year I have tried to use the link on the email alerting me to the fact that my bill is available to access the bill. But I failed to gain access to the bill electronically. If I cannot access the electronic version, I am not prepared to be without a paper bill and a fully itemised one.
Telstra present this as saving trees. I think only the most gullible would accept this as the primary reason for the change. If everyone went to online billing, Telstra would save postage and paper costs. The shareholders might benefit, but in the absence of serious competition we, the customers, would not necessarily share in these savings.
The leaflet accompanying Telstra’s letter makes clear that I will be unable to access details of my calls and usage during an unspecified change-over period to new systems. It advises that I keep track of usage but gives me no means of doing so. I cannot check on line, or even through customer services personnel. Yet Telstra claims it will be able to bill me accurately. How so?
So I will continue to require paper billing and I suspect many Telstra customers will do when they understand what is happening. Thus its attempt to encourage people to use online billing may well backfire and result in higher costs. I think Telstra should reconsider its position and improve the quality of services offered to the point where people feel that they have confidence in those services and can embrace them without serious risk to themselves. A letter to the CEO of Telstra making these points in July remains unanswered.

The United States financial crisis and Australia

published as 'China Syndrome'

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 20 September 2008, p. 33.

By Roy Hay

I wonder about the implications of the financial and economic crisis in the United States and the impact it will have on the Australian economy and in particular on our larger business institutions. Will it just result some swingeing cost cutting and the sacking of large numbers of workers or will it produce a little more humility and appreciation that without customers and staff firms are nothing? The environment in which our firms are operating—at home and abroad—is becoming more volatile and so it will require a great deal of courage and resilience to take a longer view rather than a slash and burn approach to costs and services.
So far the response has been predictable with the protected banks cutting staff despite record profits. Telstra has weighed in with another cut of several hundred jobs at a time when its service record is abysmal. The ‘millionaires factory’ that was Macquarie Bank is in crisis as its share price plummets. Given that it played at the risky end of the market during the boom, it is not surprising that it becomes highly exposed when things turn sour. It was always thus in financial bubbles.
Should the market be allowed to take its course? This is the position you would expect the free marketers to adopt. And a case can be made in ‘normal’ circumstances when markets are working? But when you get major market failure, because no one knows the value of the ‘assets’ being considered for trading, it is arguable that the pain to the masses of people whose only involvement in the system is as employees or indirect investors through their superannuation funds will far outweigh the costs of state intervention and regulation.
In previous cases of total panic when confidence in the financial system collapsed some form of external, that is external to the market, action eventually occurred and helped produce recovery. In the major bank panics of 1847 or the first Baring crisis in 1890, the German hyperinflation of 1923 or the Wall Street crash of 1929 that is what happened. In the first case it was the Bank of England which intervened, in the second a consortium of national banks, the third saw the Weimar government intervene and in the fourth we had the Great Depression because there was little or no state intervention until Rooseveldt’s New Deal.
Why should the operations of a casino produce the best possible result, when no one really knows the value of the assets which were being traded yesterday or today? To believe this requires blind faith rather than economic analysis. It can take an external jolt to bring people to their senses and create the breathing space in which a more orderly winding up of financial messes can occur.
The scale of the current crisis is beyond the comprehension of most of us. The concept of a trillion dollars (though that is only a billion in the English rather than the American use of the word) is unimaginable. Globalisation of financial markets means that the scale of operations has been expanded well beyond the capacity of existing regulatory systems which are still based on national units. Though some optimists believe that Australia is ‘decoupled’ from the United States economy and therefore insulated to some degree from the current crisis on Wall Street, the linkages through other major financial centres have serious implications for us.
If the Chinese get spooked about the value of their investments in America which are currently helping to underpin that economy then the crisis in the United States will get significantly worse. The Chinese sovereign wealth fund, the investment arm of the Chinese government, is being asked to help bail out Merrill Lynch one of only two surviving large American investment banks. The chances of the Chinese being able to sustain their rapid export growth if the American economy goes into serious depression are slim and that will rebound on us.
If the response of firms and institutions is solely to take out the costs of the subsequent adjustment on their employees then the existing inequalities in our society will be compounded and it will take even longer for recovery to occur.

The irresponsibility of the current opposition in economic policy only mirrors that in which they indulged when they were in office. In those days however the international system was booming, exports of minerals and energy were growing and wage costs were constrained by Work Choices and the improvement in the terms of trade. Peter Costello might like to believe he was a hugely successful Treasurer, but it would have taken an economic nincompoop to prevent this country from enjoying the world boom of the first decade of the century. Huge surpluses on the budget were generated but frittered away in consumption, particularly in pre-election giveaways rather than in long-term investment in skills, research and development and infrastructure.
The current episode comes on top of some long run trends affecting Australia and one or two short run blips, some of which have been favourable and others adverse. For example, our terms of trade have improved dramatically in the last eighteen months. In other words the price of our exports has been rising while our imports have been stable or falling. This is explained by the demand for our minerals and energy resources on the one hand, and the relatively low labour costs in China and Asia which have held down what we pay for manufactured imports. Look, for example, at the price of an electric drill or a steam iron made in China, or most of the mass-produced clothing we buy.
Sharp fall in the value of the Australian dollar relative to the greenback does not bode well. Less sharp decline against the trade weighted index, but any loss of value removes some of the constraint on inflation which we enjoyed when our dollar was stronger.
Neo-cons and free marketeers are not so noisy just now as the U S government bails out mortgage firms, banks and now insurance companies. The legacy of George W Bush looks more shocking each day. By overplaying his hand in Iraq and not concentrating on Afghanistan and by cutting taxes when the costs of both wars were growing rapidly he helped fuel the boom which led to the current crisis. His successor, whoever he or she is, will have some serious sorting out to do.

Climate change policy in an era of uncertainty

published as 'Pollution is nothing new'

Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday 6 August 2008, p. 00.

By Roy Hay

The debate on climate change policy is becomingly increasingly strident and certainly baffling to many Australians who seem to be well disposed to the idea that we ought to do something about it. They remain puzzled about the science and confused as to policy. The scientists themselves are still arguing about fundamental issues, so uncertainties remain at that level too.
Perhaps a look back to an earlier era when some similar issues occurred might be instructive. In the early to mid-nineteenth century in England, at the height of the industrial revolution, people were dying in thousands from cholera, and pollution was choking the atmosphere and the waterways of the industrial shock cities like Manchester. Technological change was occurring very rapidly, disrupting traditional forms of employment and replacing them with new ones, often in different parts of the country. Urban squalor was probably at its absolute and relative worst. Congestion, overcrowding and poverty was the lot of the mass of the people in cities and the death rate there was far higher than in the countryside from where many of the people had come in search of a better standard of living.
A series of shocking reports on urban conditions by political radicals like Frederick Engels, the sponsor of Karl Marx, and social investigators like Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, brought the evils to light. But what to do about them?
The science and medicine of the causes of disease was in its infancy. Connections between water-borne and interpersonal transmission of the vectors of epidemics was not understood. The notion that a miasma of ill vapours rather than bacilli caused or transmitted plagues was argued strongly by some medical people.
Those who could afford to move, left the urban centres and migrated into suburbs where the air was clearer and the streets were cleaner. But they remained vulnerable as long as drinking water was polluted by sewage and food was contaminated by uncleanliness. So cleaning up the environment was critical.
This was the era in which the United Kingdom was as close to the laissez-faire model of government so beloved of the Des Moore and the current members of the Institute of Public Affairs, who believe that everything should be left to the market. But as Oliver MacDonagh and Tony Dingle, two fine economic historians who made a close study of the pattern of government growth and the reform of the urban environment in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century showed, the actions of a dedicated group of public servants and political activists instituted a series of policies which tackled urban pollution, the ‘monster nuisance of all’, effectively for that generation. In doing so these pioneers helped create the statistical and quantitative basis for research which underpinned the development of knowledge in the next era.
No one would claim that all the reforms mentioned were driven by this relatively small cadre of individuals. Some of the improvements were environmental rather than medical. For example, the replacement of earth floors in houses by wood or stone helped reduce dirt-borne diseases. Some demographers argue that this had a greater impact on mortality rates than medical improvements per se.
Now I am aware that this is an argument by analogy and one from history, but what it shows is that policy changes to deal with acknowledged issues need not wait until the science is incontrovertible. If we hang around until the climate change science is settled once and for all we may be reminded of the saying of another economic historian, John Maynard Keynes—‘in the long run we are all dead’.

History and mythology in education

published as ' Footy facts'

Geelong Advertiser, Thurday 31 July 2008, p. 21.

By Roy Hay

The Newspapers in Education column of the Geelong Advertiser is one of many excellent services this paper provides for teachers and their students. Presenting issues in the news and setting out information about them in an interesting and thoughtful way is a good start to stimulating teaching. Having written for the Geelong Advertiser for more than 20 years, I know how difficult it is to compress and distil difficult arguments into a form which can be both historically accurate and accessible to young readers. But today’s Discovery column Origins of Footy is very misleading in a number of ways and I think needs to be corrected.
Football of various kinds was being played in Melbourne before 1858, but it was not Australian Rules, since even the Melbourne Rules were not written down, as far as we know, until 1859. Those Melbourne Rules of 1859 were based on the practice of a number of English public schools, including those of Rugby school, which Tom Wills attended. There is no evidence whatsoever of Irish or Aboriginal influence on the form of those rules. Incidentally we need to keep in mind the distinction between the rules of the game played at Rugby School and the game of rugby as it developed later in the nineteenth century, and then bifurcated into rugby union and rugby league with the onset of professionalism.
Tom Wills was a highly influential figure in the practice of the Australian game, though many of his suggestions for innovations were not adopted. For example, he wanted Rugby School Rules, a crossbar as in the Rugby game, a designated kicker and an oval ball. None of these was adopted initially. He did have a part to play in the use of an oval ball later and it is possible he helped develop the Geelong running game, something that needs further exploration.
Wills spent some of his youth among Aboriginal children and picked up some language, but in all his correspondence and that of his family there is not a single reference to any Aboriginal links to the code of football developed in Melbourne and Geelong in the 1850s. Marngrook was one of many Aboriginal cultural practices or games using balls of various kinds, but one surviving etching of Aboriginal children which some people suggest shows them playing kick to kick tells us more about modern imagination than what they were actually doing. In the description by William Blandowski he says, ‘The aim of the game: never let the ball touch the ground.’ So the game was closer to what we called ‘keepy uppy’ in Scotland, that is soccer not Australian Rules! But I am not suggesting that Australian Aborigines invented Association Football, honestly.
It is important that students learn about myths in society and their power to influence people of current and later generations. That can be the first step to distinguishing between myths, memories and history. I have been asked to write the chapter on the origins of football in Geelong for a new history of the Geelong Football Club to be published next year. I hope in the course of the historical research for this chapter I will be able to do justice to all the contributions to the development of the game. I will be delighted if I can find any links between the games of the indigenous people and those of the Europeans, who also had species of football in their sporting activities long before 1859.
The Geelong Club was not the second-oldest club of any football code in the world. The Sheffield Football Club was founded in 1857 before Melbourne and Geelong and is recognised as the first Association Football club by the world governing body, FIFA.
Finally if teachers want to find further material on Aboriginal games which can be used in schools to help youngsters understand aspects of indigenous culture they should turn to the work of Ken Edwards. His recent project for the Australian Sports Commission has just been published—Ken Edwards, with assistance by Troy Meston, Yulunga: Traditional Indigenous Games, Indigenous Sport Program of the Australian Sports Commission, Canberra, 2008. See also his earlier book: Ken Edwards, Choopadoo: Games from the Dreamtime, QUT Publications, Brisbane, 1999.

Learning from the tour

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 28 July 2008, p. 21.

By Roy Hay

Like many people I have had a flickering interest in the Tour de France for many years, especially when someone one knew about was taking part. Long ago in the UK it was guys like Tommy Simpson and the continental superstars like Jacques Anquetil, Eddie Merckz and Miguel Indurain who caught my imagination. Their efforts seemed inhuman, and sadly in Simpson’s case and that of others the performance could only be sustained by chemical supplements. Recent high profile drug cases have brought the issue to the centre of debate about the Tour once again. Does catching at least 3 more cheats this year show that the sport is inherently addicted, or does it indicate that it is, at last, successfully cleaning up its act? For those riders who are doing it entirely clean it must be intolerably frustrating to keep finding others who regard breaking the rules as a price worth paying as long as they are not caught.
The wider argument about drugs in sport remains. In the case of young female gymnasts, for example, a case can be made that their training regime has depleted their developing bodies of a range of necessary substances and that replacing these artificially could be justified as therapeutic rather than performance enhancing as such. A recent biography of an American gymnast details the horrors of the gruelling training she undertook, though in the end she concludes that it was necessary for success and that she did not regret it.
I suspect most Tour de France cyclists would also be positive about their experience. Australian Simon Gerrans won a stage this year and claims that he took up cycling on the advice of a neighbour and an Australian cycling legend Phil Anderson. Gerrans had been injured and Anderson told him to ‘get on his bike’ as part of the recovery process. With the rising cost of fuel and Australia’s growing obesity problem, perhaps the Gerrans solution is one we might all adopt.
The Tour also provides some lessons on how to cover a sports event on television. Following its brilliant use of background pieces on the culture of the cities where World Cup football matches took place, the SBS team, led by Les Murray, has made the geography and gastronomy of France, Spain and Italy an integral part of the coverage. One friend I know has his Michelin guide open with its maps and local information to supplement what he sees on the screen. The pictures vary from brilliant panoramas of the countryside through which the Tour is passing to extraordinary close-ups of the strain on the faces of the cyclists as they cope with mountain climbs or bunch sprints. The guys who fly the helicopters and ride the motorcycles to bring us these pictures are almost as much the heroes as the cyclists.
Everyone agrees that the commentary team, particularly the exemplary Phil Liggett and the knowledgeable Paul Sherwen, who rode the tour several times himself, provide a superb blend of information and sense of excitement. They almost make the intricate tactics and strategies of the Tour comprehensible to non-experts. Unlike many of our local sports commentators who still bombard us with meaningless statistics or a radio-type treatment of events we have just seen, the Tour boys focus on relevant information which extends our understanding of what we are watching.
Finally, while the commentators are well aware of their Australian audience and the importance of covering the performance of tour favourite Cadel Evans and perennial stars such as Robbie McEwen and Stuart O’Grady, this is never at the expense of the person or the team which is doing the business at the time, no matter where they come from. I hope, though I don’t expect, when it comes to the Olympics that there will be the same appreciation of those who happen to be competing against our Australian athletes.

Economics of climate change, part one

published as 'Reality check'

Geelong Advertiser, Friday 11 July 2008, p. 21.

By Roy Hay

The 500-page Garnaut report on what Australia should do about climate change is not your average bedtime reading, but we will all have to come to terms with its arguments, sooner rather than later. While there seems to be general support in the community for the idea that we ought to do something about what human beings are doing to their only home, there is less agreement on what we should do and the consequences of not doing anything, or doing the wrong thing.
One of Garnaut’s main notions is that we should set up a carbon-trading scheme to help encourage a move away from the generation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The idea is that a price should be set for the emission of a certain quantity of the polluting gases and industry, including power generation, should bid for what are effectively licenses or tradeable certificates to produce that amount of pollutants. If the industry becomes more efficient and cleaner (or has a smaller carbon footprint, as they say), then it can sell the unused amount of its licenses or certificates in the open market. An entity which needs more capacity to pollute can buy that on the market at the going price. The costs of these permissions to pollute will be passed on to customers, but the incentive to reduce the quantity of emissions will now be clear to all. Some entities will be carbon neutral; that is, their emissions will be matched exactly by the amount of carbon they absorb in the production process. Others will be able to absorb more than they emit and hence earn carbon credits, which can be traded.
Garnaut has not included agriculture in his scheme so far. This is a big gap since methane is more polluting than carbon dioxide and animals generate more methane than industry does carbon dioxide. It is true that methane, the exhaust gas of ruminant animals, hangs about in the atmosphere—like a bad smell—for only about 12 years whereas carbon dioxide is around for twice or three times as long. But as Garnaut makes clear, if we allow exceptions, then some other parts of our economy and society have to pay more or reduce their emissions further. The absence of agriculture means other sectors have to carry more of the cost of adjustment to our new world.
There is some unease that recently the Premier of Victoria approved a new brown coal-fired power station for the Latrobe Valley. While this may produce more greenhouse gases than say a gas, solar, nuclear or wind powered plant, the new power station will be significantly more efficient than existing base load generators at Yallourn and Loy Yang. For some time to come the bulk of base load power in Victoria will continue to be produced from brown coal, and this is what makes us among the worst per capita emitters in the world. But we need to think very seriously about how to replace that by more efficient forms of coal-fired production and the so-called alternative green forms.
There is a high degree of uncertainty at the moment about the likely pattern of technical change in the area of energy efficiency. If we could be certain which technology was going to produce the best outcome it would be an easier, though probably not a costless decision. But there is a risk involved that high investment may yield very little return.
Australia is not, as some suggest, leading the world in carbon trading or energy efficient technology. New Zealand and several European States are ahead of us and are making much bigger cuts in their energy consumption and pollution. We can learn from their experience, but in return there are some promising signs that we are beginning to develop expertise which can be turned into export sales. The deep drilling into the core of the earth to release geo-thermal energy in the north of South Australia is looking very promising. Our solar industry has already spawned some successes, though one of the best of these (a firm making large-scale solar energy capture arrays) has already relocated to the United States. The sequestration of carbon in underground sinks has also begun, though it will be some time before the environmental effects are fully assessed and understood. Our wind and water-power capacity and experience is growing and the first experiments in harnessing the waves for something other than surfing are being planned.
It would be good if Australians could see climate change as a challenge rather than a threat, as it tends to be portrayed in some of the more alarmist quarters. It would be even better if the two main political parties could take a slightly longer view of what is required and accept, as Garnaut insists, that a bipartisan approach to the issues involved would be preferable. By all means let’s keep an open mind over the new technologies and the time it will take to implement all the measures necessary, but can we pull together on the broad outlines of this approach to climate change for our children’s sake?

Who says sport and politics don’t mix?

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 21 June 2008, p. 43.

By Roy Hay

Who says sport and politics don’t mix? At the personal level they definitely do. In Geelong we have had a number of political representatives who owed a great deal to their previous sporting careers. Sir Hubert Oppermann’s stellar cycling performances in the 1920s and 1930s paved the way for an equally illustrious Federal parliamentary stint as a Liberal MHR for Corio from 1949 to 1967. He was Minister for Shipping and Transport and later Minister for Immigration under Bob Menzies and Harold Holt. Neil ‘Nipper’ Tresize, Geelong’s nuggety captain and premiership player in 1951 and 1952, won the Victorian seat of Geelong for the Australian Labor Party in 1964 and was Minister for Sport from 1982 to 1992.
Ian Cover missed out on a career on the field but turned his contribution to the Coodabeens into a political success as a Member of the Legislative Council of Victoria from 1996 to 2002 and a shadow minister for Sport and Recreation and later Racing.
John Curtin, Australia’s wartime prime minister from 1941 to 1945, played football for Brunswick in the Victorian Football Association between 1903 and 1907. The story is that in his first attempt for public office, he stood for secretary of the club and was defeated.
Victoria’s current Planning Minister is Justin ‘Harry’ Madden, Carlton ruckman and another premiership player. Like the others he always had more strings to his bow than just his capacity and skill as a player. A qualified architect and designer of the façade of the entrance to Waverley Park, he hides a very sharp mind under an everyman personality.
But he was not the first Carlton player to make a career in Victorian politics. As readers of this column will know I have been involved in the debates about the origins of Australian Rules football. When researching the topic I used the work of a Scottish settler in the Western District, William Dawson, who provided a detailed account of the Aboriginal game of marngrook. His book was published in 1881. Towards the end of his account he noted, ‘nor is the fact of an aborigine being a good football player considered to entitle him to assist in making laws for the tribe to which he belongs’. When I read that, I thought it was just a throwaway line. But then I remembered that Richard Twopenny, who wrote Town Life in Australia which came out in 1883, mentioned ‘Some measure of the popularity of the game may be gathered from the fact that the member who has sat in the last three parliaments for the most important working-man’s constituency owes his seat entirely to his prowess on behalf of the local football club. In no other way has he, or does he pretend to have the slightest qualifications.’
So, I thought, perhaps there was a real person who provoked these comments. I consulted my sports history colleagues Robin Grow and Mark Pennings. Sure enough, John ‘Jack’ Gardiner, former captain of Carlton, defeated the sitting member for the Victorian lower house seat of Carlton at the election of January 1880 and held it until 1891. He continued to play for his club until 1883. He was a fast-moving defender and managed to kick four goals in his career. In Parliament he was not so conspicuous, though in his second term, while still a young man in political terms, he spoke out against the attempt by another young man in a hurry, Alfred Deakin, when the latter moved a motion to shorten parliamentary speeches, surely one of the most beneficial proposals to come before any legislature. After he was defeated in 1891, Gardiner became a Melbourne City Councillor and, after a brief retirement to the country, returned and represented the Victoria ward for almost 30 years. He was still an Alderman when he died on 29 October 1929 at the age of 81. His death coincided with Black Monday of the Wall Street Crash, but the two events are probably not connected.

Australian myopia and the origins of football

Published as 'Evidence the key to our game's origins'

The Age, Saturday 31 May 2008, Insight, p. 9.

by Roy Hay

Perhaps we might make a little more sense out of the arguments which have been going on about Aboriginal influences on the origins of football in this country if we looked beyond our shores. I suggest three places. The first is the United Kingdom where there is a very similar argument going on about the relative importance of the university men who codified the rules of Association Football in the mid-nineteenth century and those ‘lesser breeds without the law’ who played football in various parts of the country and made rules for it and had small sided games and didn’t just engage in mayhem. These outsiders do not figure largely in the dominant stories of the origins of football in Britain, but the careful empirical research of a number of scholars including Neil Tranter, John Goulstone, Richard Holt, Adrian Harvey, John Hutchinson, Alan Metcalfe and Hugh Hornby has cumulatively shown how important they were. Not necessarily in writing the rules, but in explaining why there was such an explosion of popularity of the game in the United Kingdom in the second half of the nineteenth century. What unites all these researchers is that they have spent hours searching for contemporary evidence of what was actually taking place around the country. In one sense they have it easier. They are dealing with a literate society which has left much conventional written material, but they also wrestle with other forms of communication including oral traditions. They don’t accept the oral traditions as gospel, but subject them to testing and triangulation and realise that what is handed down in stories from one generation to another changes according to many influences, including modern political and ideological concerns.
The second place is East Africa where imperialists and colonists discovered many strange practices. The classic case was Tutsi high jumping. If you went to visit the king he would send a couple of his young men to jump over you, to put you in your place and show your relative subordinate position. Needless to say people marvelled at the athletic feat, and perhaps unsurprisingly the German colonists in East Africa produced some iconic images, one of which showed a young Tutsi leaping over a bar suspended between two forked sticks with the Duke of Mecklenburg standing almost underneath. The heights achieved appeared to be well above the world record for the high jump at the time. But you can scour the records of the Olympic games or athletic meetings and you will not find any Tutsi high jumpers. As John Bale puts it the Europeans ‘imagined Olympians’ thinking that these skills would translate into athletic performance to stagger the world. But they did not.
Similarly, in our third case, when the Australian Society for Sports History published an article by a Chinese scholar Professor Ling Hongling, of Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, arguing that golf had originated in China from the practice of chuiwan, there was an international furore led by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. The article was complete with illustrations showing Chinese participants swinging clubs at balls and knocking them into pits in the ground, and the Professor argued ‘we may safely deduce that it is due to the propagation of Chinese Chuiwan that golf has been able to emerge in the West as a mature game’. The R&A begged to differ. ‘Stick and ball games have been around for centuries but golf as we know it today—played over 18 holes—clearly originated in Scotland’, was its reaction. The R&A’s imperial view is reflected on its website:‘At the China Golf Development Forum held in Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, the R&A Director of Golf Development, Duncan Weir, presented a commemorative plate to the Vice Executive Chairman of the China Golf Association, Mr Hu, to mark 20 years of golf in China’.
So ancient and ongoing cultural activities may translate into or influence modern sports, but they may not and we need to examine what happened in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century very closely if we are to answer the questions raised about Aboriginal influence on the early inchoate years of what became Australian Rules. We will short change Aboriginal people and indeed the people of Australia if we don’t do the same sort of research in Australian history.
John Harms’ suggestion in his excellent account of the debate in Insight last week that ‘indigenous Australians should not have to prove their story to the community’ will just not do. It undermines the very people it is designed to protect. Of course the oral tradition is important, as it is in other societies, but untriangulated, unexamined, untested it is not history. The same, of course, applies to all varieties of Australian and world history including the oral components about which I have been researching and writing since the 1960s.
Martin Flanagan has conceded there is no evidence of Aboriginal influence on the drawing up of the rules. But he thinks that through Tom Wills there was an influence on the early inchoate game. That to me is possible, though the things we know about his innovations include the shape of the ball and perhaps the Geelong running game and a proposal for the rugby crossbar. None of these seem to relate to what little we know about the form of the various Aboriginal games.
My fear, reinforced by John Harms’s last section, is that anyone from a non-indigenous background who raises these legitimate historical questions will be pilloried by journalists and others as anti-Aboriginal. So let me say I will be delighted if we can find the evidence of the type which has emerged from disciplined historical research in the United Kingdom to show that there was a link between indigenous games and our fledgling game, but at the moment I have to remain sceptical.

Footy celebrations and origin myths

Published as 'PC Footbrawl'

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 17 May 2008, p. 37.

By Roy Hay

Here in Australia we have one of best games of football on the planet. That’s not just my judgment. Way back in 1883, Richard Twopenny, who had played rugby union, soccer and footy pronounced, ‘I suppose it is a heresy for an old Marlburian [his English public school] to own it, but after having played all three games, Rugby, Association and Victorian—the first several hundred times, the second a few dozen times, and the third a couple of score of times—I feel bound to say that the Victorian game is by far the most scientific, the most amusing both to players and onlookers, and altogether the best.’

But where did the game come from? This year the Australian Football League has chosen to celebrate 150 years of football and has published a blockbuster of a book and restarted a debate about the origins of the game. Journalist Martin Flanagan asserts that we have a bastard of a game which is influenced by English, Irish and Aboriginal traditions. He admits that Aborigines had no part in drawing up the first rules of the game in 1859, but argues that, through Tom Wills, some aspects of Aboriginal culture and specifically the game of marngrook, had a conscious or unconscious impact on the early game. The rediscovery of an etching from the 1850s which apparently shows some young Aborigines lining up to play kick to kick with a possum-skin ball seemed to lend weight to that notion.

The problem is that there is no contemporary evidence that Wills saw Aborigines playing marngrook and in none of his or his family’s correspondence or in published sources about Wills is there any mention of Aboriginal sport. His involvement with the Aboriginal cricketers who toured England in 1868 does not prove that he brought marngrook ideas to football.

He certainly was a man who pushed the boundaries of all the sports in which he took part. He was called for throwing in cricket for his overarm bowling. He was upbraided for using an oval ball instead of a round one in football. He may well have influenced Geelong’s running game which was a feature of the first decade or so of football. But was any of this specifically derived from his experience among Aboriginal youth? Nothing in his writing or writing about him suggests so until the late 20th century and even the notion of ‘a game of our own’ is only attributed to him for the first time in 1914.

Australia and footy are not alone in having founding myths. Baseball, rugby union, and golf all have their origin stories, each of which has been demolished by historians, but which cling to the popular mind and the sporting bodies like limpets. Political correctness and wishful thinking conspire in rewriting history to correspond with the present fashion.

Thanks to John Bale and others we are much more aware that some forms of indigenous cultural practices which bore some apparent similarity to modern sports had no direct relationship with them. His masterly dissection of Tutsi high jumping, Gusimbuka-urukiramende, demonstrates that a skill which appeared to be superior to that of any competitive sportsperson of the late nineteenth century did not translate into athletic performance. Many team games with balls have been claimed to be distant ancestors of Association Football, but none has a direct connection to that which was codified in England in the mid-nineteenth century.

So I don’t think we need a founding myth for footy; it stands on its own feet. And the Aboriginal contribution to the game in last half-century, from Doug Nicholls and Polly Farmer to Andrew MacLeod and Adam Goodes, is a superb heritage to have without trying to claim a role in its origins in advance of finding relevant evidence. But that does not mean we should stop looking for that evidence.

The real cost of Australian sport

published as 'Untold story of sports rorts'

Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday, 14 May 2008, p. 23.

By Roy Hay

Have you ever wondered how much our national obsession with sport costs us? As a died in the wool sports nut, I sometimes wonder myself. There are issues which worry me and two of the most important are the extent of existing public subsidies to sporting bodies and the lack of transparency in its provision. Then there are subsidiary questions about the distribution of funds between sports, about which there are massive public misconceptions, and the failure to meet head-on the claims by the sporting bodies that their contribution to health and well-being in society justifies the funding or subsidies or tax breaks they receive.

It is time for a little bit of clear thinking and research on all these topics. Interestingly the Minister for Sport, Kate Ellis, has just announced a review of funding for Australian sporting organisations by the new board of the Australian Sports Commission.

It is more than a decade since Kerrie Levy asked whether the privileged tax status of the Australian Football League should be reconsidered. At that time, and as far as is known to this day, the AFL has an exemption from income tax on its ‘profits’ at a time when it has been transformed into a non-profit making sporting body into a massive corporate enterprise. The public subsidy in the form of tax foregone is not widely known and while it can be justified there has been relatively little debate on the subject.

In the community more generally there are signs of an emerging concern about the distribution of public moneys to sports, as for example in Ballarat, where the substantial share of resources going to male football and cricket clubs has been called in question. In Geelong, state and local authorities have contributed very significantly to the development of Skilled Stadium citing the contribution to the local economy which is said to flow from the playing of nine AFL matches there each year.

The Formula One Grand Prix illustrates the difficulty in establishing the extent of public support, for as soon as you try to obtain relevant data you run into the blank wall of ‘commercial in confidence’ claims by the sporting body, Melbourne Major Events and the State authorities. One suspects that the Grand Prix organisation, like the generals in the First World War, keeps three sets of statistics, one to fool the public, one to fool the politicians and one to fool themselves.

The scale and extent of public sponsorship of sport through Quit, TAC, Vic Health and similar bodies has not been thoroughly measured, nor has the effectiveness of these programs been compared with other more direct measures to achieve socially beneficial outcomes. Frank Lowy obtained around $15 million from the Federal Government, basically without strings, in order to pay off the debts incurred by the Australian Soccer Federation and its immediate successors and the Football Federation of Australia has now gained Federal support for a bid to host the World Cup in Australia in 2018.

Since Malcolm Fraser committed funding for the Australian Institute of Sport and for the promotion of elite sport, in part to improve the disastrous medal tally at the Montreal Olympics, the public contribution has grown significantly. It is an interesting back of the envelope calculation to work out how much each medal won in Athens cost the nation. Will the Beijing ones be more or less expensive?

The sports bodies tell you they are only fighting their corner and that they are contributing to the health of the nation, setting an example, doing good work in the community and generally deserve more and more largesse. The trick for them is to get it by stealth (tax relief) or for some ‘worthy national object’, like bidding to host the World Cup. I have no great objections to them getting public support, but I just want it to be transparent and measured against other real needs in our society. And I would like them to be accountable for it. This is one thing Prime Minister Rudd seems keen to achieve for his own ministers, so why not do the same for sport and each year we could have a chance to question its stewardship of the grants, subsidies, sponsorship and tax forgone. It might make them a little more appreciative of the contribution which we, the public, already make. And it would waken the rest of us up to the sheer scale of public subventions, which would also be no bad thing. And the sports bodies should never be allowed to shelter behind ‘commercial in confidence’ in respect of public money.

Baffled by strange errors

Geelong Advertiser, Thursday, 20 March 2008, p. 19.

by Roy Hay

I was in my favourite local computer store the other day picking up some new software and discussing the glitches and behaviours which my machines display from time to time. ‘Intermittent strange errors’ is how my computer shop person described them. ‘Wonderful’, I said, ‘you have just given me the title for a column.’
Sometimes when I press a button or key one thing, the thing I hoped would happen, does. But the next time, something different occurs and I can’t see why. ‘Oh, you have to go into System Preferences and switch off Active Corners,’ says the guru. You go blank. The mind seizes up. You try to write down some of this gobbledegook in the hope that it will deal with that issue, knowing that if you have missed a step, you will have set up a whole chain of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s unintended consequences.
As my wife pointed out if cars or aeroplanes had these problems there would be riots, or as the delightful Sheila Allison wrote:
‘However, I can think of things that reliably make me grumpy. Microsoft Word can turn the air in my office blue. I know it's a great program but I resent the fact that I’m expected to find time to read a 500-page manual every time a new version comes out that I have to go into it and turn off things that I didn’t turn on and didn’t know were there! And then suddenly the program does something I didn't tell it to do. Qantas has a policy that if an aircraft does something that the pilot did not ask it to do, they switch to manual control and report it to Boeing who send people out from Seattle to investigate. I would like to see the same thing happen with Word!’
Have you noticed how when installing new software or an update there will be a little message box telling you how long it will take to complete the operation. Let’s say it announces 30 minutes at the outset. Time for a cup of coffee you think. But just as you get out of your chair, it is suddenly down to 15 minutes, and a shortly afterwards, 7 minutes. I might as well wait till it is finished, you decide. Under a minute, finishing session comes up. But then it is like an American football match or a basketball game. The last minute lasts for half an hour. You could have had lunch, not just coffee.
Then when you start the new software you have to learn its peculiarities and try to second-guess the effects it will have on the people with whom you have to correspond. They might not have the latest systems and hence your deathless prose may be totally inaccessible. If, like me, you use a Mac, then you have to remember to tell PC users to add .doc or .xls to the file name if it does not open. Now Microsoft has a new format .docx which is not compatible with older versions, or at least cannot be read by older machines. I’m bound to forget when writing to old friends overseas. Friendships in danger because of a kiss, or the sign for it.
I admit that I am the cause of some of my problems. Just as every shelf in the house, apart from those in the kitchen, is full of books, so my computers are stuffed with old files some going back to the dawn of civilisation or at least 1984. All kept in the usually unfulfilled expectation that I will need them at some time in the future. Faint hope. Sure the experts tell you to back-up your files but keeping them in multiple copies on your hard drive is not the answer. Like Linus and his security blanket I can’t bear to part with them. Just in case.

Tough Treaty

Geelong Advertiser, Tuesday 4 March 2008, p. 13.

by Roy Hay

As Australians embark on coming to terms with some of the episodes in their past, including what happens after an apology to the stolen generation, it is interesting to compare what has happened here with Aotearoa New Zealand where a treaty with the Maori has been in existence since 1840. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed by more than 500 Maori chiefs over a period of several months. It remains a major influence on relations between the different groups in the country, even though circumstances have changed considerably. The Maori and the English versions of the Treaty differed and have been a source of issues ever since. The Maoris understood they were secured in possession of their land but granted protection, while the British thought they had sovereignty and control. In practice many Maori were dispossessed of their land by the newcomers and there was sporadic and sometimes effective resistance for several years.

Yet it was only in 1975 that the Waitangi Tribunal was set up to consider breaches to the treaty. In 1995 the Office of Treaty Settlements began negotiations over outstanding claims about Crown acts and omissions, primarily about land and other deprivations, and just under $NZ800 ($A730) million in compensation has been paid. A number of Deeds of Settlement have been agreed and the Office and other government departments have a continuing role in monitoring compliance with these agreements. Some of the sums paid to Maori groups have been put to very good use in the creation of flourishing business and investment concerns which now generate ongoing income and employment.

Maori have been able to obtain far more direct political representation in New Zealand than Aborigines in Australia. The Maori Representation Act of 1867 created four Maori parliamentary seats. It was intended as a temporary measure until the Maori joined the general electorate. At the time it was based on tribal identification and geographical areas. Now it is considered obsolete because many Maori no longer have close links to their traditional tribal areas. Of the 21 Maori in the New Zealand parliament in 2007 only seven sit for Maori seats. Only half the eligible Maori choose to register on Maori rolls.

The New Zealand parliament is a unicameral one, that is it has only one house. Voting is by a mixed member proportional system in which electors vote twice, once for a party, which determines the composition of the parliament, and once for a local member, which decides who will fill the seats. It sounds complex but seems to be widely accepted and understood by the voters.

On the surface, relations between the various groups in New Zealand society seem harmonious. Maori language and culture is widely celebrated and taught in schools. But at least one group of Maori continues to press for an independent state within New Zealand and there was an incident last year when the police claimed to have broken up a major terrorist campaign, though the exercise may have been completely botched and was certainly highly controversial.

As with Aborigines in Australia, Maori life expectancy and levels of income are lower than those of the rest of the population. There is considerable poverty, in rural areas of the country in particular. Rates of imprisonment and unemployment among Maori are higher. Drug and alcohol abuse is visible and widespread. So imbalances within New Zealand society remain, though they are not, on the whole, as great as in Australia. New Zealand experience shows that there are ways of making progress in improving relations between disparate groups in society.

When we contemplate reconciliation with the descendants of our Aboriginal population we need to ensure that the content and form of any agreements mean the same to all the parties involved, if we are to reduce the potential for future strife. The former Governor-General, Sir William Deane, said in 1996, ‘Theoretically, there could be national reconciliation without any redress at all of the dispossession and other wrongs sustained by the Aborigines. As a practical matter, however, it is apparent that recognition of the need for appropriate redress for present disadvantage flowing from past injustice and oppression is a pre-requisite of reconciliation. There is, I believe, widespread acceptance of such a need.’

Chickens coming home to roost

Geelong Advertiser, Thursday 24 January 2008, p. 19.

by Roy Hay

As the United States home loan debacle continues to bring low major American financial houses and the Australian stock market sheds all its gains over the last two years people are understandably worried about what will happen next. Politicians in both countries intone that the fundamentals of their respective economies are sound and investors should take a long-term view and not panic. They would say that, of course.

Some of the problems faced by both countries are long standing ones which need to be tackled if the sort of volatility we have seen in recent weeks is to be avoided. Both Australia and the United States have been running massive current account deficits for a decade or more. As long as the rest of the world is prepared to continue lending to finance this gap between what we earn from the rest of the world and what we buy from it, then things can jog along. Countries like China, whose cheap manufactured goods sell widely in the Australia and the United States, have an interest in the health of the buying economies and thus continue to support the deficits. But there will come a point when they begin to wonder whether that is supportable indefinitely. It is not necessary for the tap to be turned off completely; just reducing the flow a little can put Australia and the United States in a position where they will have to address issues they have conveniently ignored.

Some people argue that since the share of our exports going to the United States and the proportion of our imports we derive from it have declined in recent decades we have become ‘uncoupled’ from the American economy. The spectacular growth of mineral exports to Asia is supposed to provide a sustaining element for us in the face of a potential American downturn. But the signs are that China is taking steps to slow its growth, revaluing its currency and concentrating more on raising the very low living standards of the mass of its domestic population. Again this does not mean that our exports to Asia and China in particular will cease, but just that the rate of growth will decline, putting further pressure on Australia to reduce its current account deficit by finding alternative markets and improving its domestic productivity.

This is where what will be seen as the wasted Howard years will now have a delayed effect. Though the Howard-Costello team did wonders in reducing government debt and producing surpluses, sometimes much underestimated, in their years in government, they did very little to address the ballooning current account deficit and the underlying productivity of the economy. Shortages of skilled labour are pushing up costs and prices at home making inflation worse at a time when reducing these should be a priority. Kevin Rudd’s plans for an education revolution, strategic investment in productivity improvement and infrastructure development are all long-run policies whose immediate effect will be marginal.

So fasten your seat-belts, don’t panic, but we are in for a rocky ride in the next few months and years. There is a lot of underlying strength in Australia and its economy but it is Pollyanna economics to think that we will not be seriously affected by what is happening in the world economy. Similarly, the remedies for our structural problems will require sacrifices and it would be good to think that the new government will endeavour to see that these are more equitably shared across the whole community, particularly in the case of those who have done very well out of the boom years.

Preying on the poor

Published as 'Death, taxes and insurers'

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 12 January 2008, p. 33.

by Roy Hay

Winding up my mother-in-law’s small estate after her death has been a salutary experience for my wife, her only surviving daughter and executor, and for me. My mother-in-law was typical of her generation of working-class people in the United Kingdom who grew up experiencing the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression. I often used to joke with her that she was responsible for the last of these, because she saved every candle end and piece of string and brown paper she had. I used to say to her, ‘You should have been out spending what little money you had on good Keynesian principles to help to keep the shopping tills ringing and hence people employed making goods and providing services.’

But this week we got evidence of another typical feature of the experience of that generation. For many of the poor the thought of a pauper’s funeral, where there was no money to pay for proper funeral expenses, was the greatest fear. The indignity involved was to be avoided at all costs. So Mam would pay a penny a week to an insurance company whose representative would call every so often to collect it. When the policy was taken out in 1937 as Britain came out of the Depression she was a healthy 23-year-old and the sum assured was £17.50. Later the premium rose to two pence per week and in 1975 the payments stopped and the policy was converted into a ‘free policy’. In 2008, 33 years later, we received a cheque from the successor company for £28.15 ($64.00). Her funeral and wake cost roughly one hundred times that amount!

When I was a young research student I investigated the operations of the ‘penny a week funeral funds’ in the early part of the 20th century. I was well aware of the way they preyed on the fears of the poor. Many folks were unable to keep up the payments on the policies when they were unemployed or ill and consequently they lost their contributions. Others might lose the original policy and the company would refuse to pay out. That happened to my family many years ago. For others who kept their side of the bargain to the end, the returns were derisory. In most cases inflation would have eaten away the real value of the outcome when it finally appeared. The people concerned would have been better off putting their money in a bank even at the nugatory rates of interest offered on small savings accounts.

Some of the companies involved were among the biggest names in life assurance in the United Kingdom, if not the world. They managed to con David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, into major concessions when National Insurance was introduced in Britain in 1911. Now most of them have been incorporated in global enterprises with tentacles which stretch into some of the most impoverished parts of the world. They are an important conduit through which funds are sucked out of these areas to underpin the profits of the metropolitan conglomerates. To some this may simply be a reflection of the way global capitalism works in the twenty-first century, but it just brings home to me in personal terms the result of the research I did 40 years ago. To compound the matter, the company took longer to process the tiny payment than any other organisation we had to deal with after my mother-in-law died.

Some traditions shortlived

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 5 January 2008, p. 31.

by Roy Hay

The turn of the year is a time to take stock. But why? What is it about certain dates or events which cause us to set them apart to be celebrated, commemorated or marked with some ceremony or recapitulation?

Our ancestors have been doing it for aeons. Ancient monuments like the pyramids and Stonehenge were constructed to focus on a specific point in the solar or lunar calendar. The various phases of the agricultural year provided a reason to hold feasts and festivals, which helped tide you through to the next, perhaps. Many religions mark particular events in their founding stories or myths. Birthdays have been around for long enough.

Now one of the drivers is commercialism. Our manufacturers and retailers just love special days which they have either invented or certainly promoted—Boxing Day sales being one. Many businesses do over half their business in a few weeks leading up to and immediately after Christmas. The shortness of popular memory enables them to claim these things are traditional, though often the way they fit into the calendar today is of very recent origin.

What of the traditional Boxing Day test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground or the Anzac Day blockbuster at the footy? Since when did these games become traditional? In 1990 the Melbourne test match against Pakistan was played in mid-January. Collingwood versus Essendon on 25 April is an even more recent innovation.

Sporting bodies play lip service to their history for much of the time. When the AFL decided it needed to mark the first games of what later became Australian Rules in 1858 they initially intended to commission a scholarly history of the code. But very soon they realised that might be a critical exercise which would point out some inconvenient features of the game’s development so they decided on a celebratory exercise instead. So watch what happens this year as the match between Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College in 1858 is commemorated though it was not played under Australian Rules at all and was not a club game.

Frank Lowy and his cohorts have changed the face of the round ball game in Australia and for a while they wanted to break completely with their past. Now they are becoming more self-confident about the A-League and the value of the Socceroos as the flagship of the code. So they turn back to celebrating the award of caps starting with Alex Gibb who captained the first Australian international team which took on New Zealand in Dunedin in 1922.

In cricket a hundred runs is greeted as a major milestone. As Mark Taylor said a propos of Sachin Tendulkar’s recent propensity to get out in the 90s, three times on 99, ‘It is only one run, but it is worth so much more!’ But why? What about the poor bowlers? They have had the very rare ‘hat-tricks’ for long enough, so they have had to invent ‘5-for’ as a celebration of their own prowess.

So it seems we have a penchant for marking events and taking stock, but the things we use are not always set in stone and change as our perspective or our needs alter. Perhaps that is no bad thing, but it should make us a bit more careful or aware of the ways in which we are using our notions of the past.

Overdoing it

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 15 December 2007, p. 39.

by Roy Hay

We sometimes get a very distorted view of Australia’s place in the world from our media. Reading the accounts of the Bali climate change conference, you might conclude that the key event was our new Prime Minister’s announcement that Australia would, at last, ratify the Kyoto agreement. This was a belated gesture if ever there was one, given that Australia had been one of the early promoters of that accord.

The notion that this catapults us into a leadership role in the post-Kyoto negotiations is wishful thinking. The reality is that the big issues are being discussed behind the scenes by the United States, the Europeans, Japan and China, and the Labor government’s decision to await the results of the inquiry led by Ross Garnaut further circumscribes our capacity to ‘lead the world’. Furthermore, though our per capita emission record is woeful, because there are only 21 million Australians on an island half as big as the moon, we could shut down our carbon emissions completely and it would only make a small dent in the world’s production of greenhouse gases.

It is not only in big international matters that the media needs to be read very carefully if you are to get the proportions right. Journalists in print, radio and television, with perhaps the honourable exception of SBS, are always looking for the local angle on a news story. I have to plead guilty myself. When I was working in Melbourne on Victorian Premier League soccer matches, my colleague Greg Blake used to call me Cyclops—the one-eyed North Geelong supporter. Mind you, North won the Premier League at the first attempt after it was promoted from the State League Division One, something which has never been achieved since, so there was a basis for my predilection for the Geelong team.

A paper like the Geelong Advertiser always has to tread a fine line between being a critical analyst of international, national and local issues and the voice of the city and its region, which implies an element of promotion. Its very name Advertiser, which John Pascoe Fawkner and James Harrison gave it way back in 1843, captures the latter approach. But for a while it had an additional word on the masthead, the Intelligencer, when it merged with a short-lived paper with that name. That title reflected both a reporting element—news of shipping and market movements—and a critical take on local and national political issues.

Of course we all want to read about people we know and their doings, or people whose names are well known on the local scene even if we do not have first-hand knowledge of them. But this can easily result in a dangerous local boosterism which sets expectations both for the person concerned and for us in our capacity as readers, which are often very difficult to fulfil. The second half of last season’s football activities showed this, both in the way the media treated Geelong’s Cats and in the extraordinary lengths to which the club went ‘to keep a lid on it’.

Training in discounting ‘hype’ and taking a broader perspective is a key element in education at all levels. Being able to see when the local is being overemphasised in the interests of attracting readers is vital for a critical reading of the media. Of course Australians are not alone in all this. The same focus on the local can be found in media around the world. But perhaps our distance from other major centres and our relatively small population means we have to be especially careful not to overestimate our role and influence.

Christmas reading

Geelong Advertiser, Tuesday 4 December 2007, p. 13.

by Roy Hay

It is the season of publishers’ catalogues, booksellers promotions, book launches and serendipitous strolls around the bookshops of Geelong and Melbourne trying to turn up something for presents, something for reading and sometimes just something to savour, to fondle, to smell and to hold in your hands and marvel at the wonder of a new book. Though we are bombarded by electronic games and gizmos, electronic books and talking books, there is nothing still to compare with a freshly printed book just out of the wrapper, whether it arrives by air or is picked from the box. It is a sensual, visual and anticipatory pleasure like no other.

Local authors and editors are doing well this year. My colleague Simon Townley’s Year of the Cat is already going gangbusters with its brilliant evocation of the football club’s stellar season. Each game is lovingly recounted by a different writer, united only in their support for the local heroes. Tom Spurling and Geoff Peel have taken up another great idea by bringing together a selection of writing on Geelong from Matthew Flinders and Rudyard Kipling to Gideon Haigh and Joshua Wright. Their collection The View from Flinders Peak will be a marvellous resource for schools but it is a great read with its huge variety of offerings. I have to admit that my colleague Marnie Haig-Muir and I have a piece in it too, so forgive the self-promotion. We also launched The Boys on Newtown Hill: A History of St Joseph’s College, Geelong last month.

John Harms is a Geelong football club supporter and is also represented in the Spurling and Peel volume, but his great work for the year is the The Footy Almanac 2007: The AFL season one game at a time, edited and organised with another great grass-roots football writer Paul Daffey. The publishing company set up to produce this book is called Malarkey Publications and its logo is an irresistible shot of the thighs of the great number 5 for the Cats. Blurbs collected from writers praising a new book are not always a sure guide to the value of its contents, but Garrie Hutchinson’s claim that ‘the reports are so interesting you might want to read about West Coast playing Fremantle’ rings true. Anyone with an interest in Geelong and its people, not just the football club, will read and savour John Harms’ contributions for he understands us like few others.

My crime and thrillers reading this year has already been stimulated by Ian Rankin’s final (?) Rebus novel Exit Music, which takes the great Edinburgh detective into retirement. You get the feeling that there is more to come, however, and the betting is that Rebus’s side-kick Siobhan Clarke might become the focus of future encounters with the seedy underbelly of Scotland’s capital city. Val McDermid is back on form with Beneath the Bleeding, involving profiler Tony Hill and his police colleague Carol Jordan, though my wife found suspending her disbelief hard with this one. I have been holding off reading the latest Robert Harris novel Ghost, about the ghost writer of the biography of a former prime minister, in the hope that I can keep it until the Christmas break, but my resolution is weak where books are concerned.

And finally there are a couple of books about the round ball code which I am savouring. From Sheffield with Love by Brendan Murphy celebrates the history of the world’s oldest football club, preceding the Melbourne and Geelong footy clubs by a year or two. And there is a paperback edition of David Goldblatt’s mammoth account of world football, The Ball is Round, to keep anyone who wants to understand the game and the David Beckham phenomenon going until well into 2008.

Hanging Ben out to dry, ignoring Dick

Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday 21 November 2007, p. 19.

by Roy Hay

When sports officials want to bring someone to heel they often resort to an omnibus charge of bringing the game into disrepute. This has always existed as a weapon in most of the major codes, but its use has become more frequent in recent times, in part because of the increased power and influence of the sponsors of sport, who now seem to believe they own the games. This explains not only the use of the charge but also against whom it may be directed.

So Ben Cousins of the West Coast Eagles can be brought within its ambit despite the fact that the police charges against him for drug possession, which triggered the most recent outcry, were very largely dropped. Not surprisingly, since the only drug found in the car he was travelling in was valium. Subsequently Cousins escaped to the United States, where instead of spending all his time in a rehabilitation clinic, he apparently engaged in a cocaine binge before heading briefly for the clinic. Now, Cousins may be a very silly young man, or he may be suffering from an illness, perhaps self-inflicted, but when playing the game he did not, as far as I know, ever fail an official drug test and he did not, apparently, use performance-enhancing, as distinct from ‘recreational’ drugs, used by a significant minority of young men of his age group. So in what precise sense has he brought the game into disrepute?

What then are we to make of the other case which has generated far fewer headlines, that of Richard Pratt, chair of Carlton Football Club and head of the Visy Group of packaging companies? He has been found guilty of defrauding the Australian public, you and me, of millions of dollars by running a cartel to raise prices beyond the level they would have been in open competition. He has been fined substantially for this but retains his position as head of the football club.

It is ironic that when he engages in cartel activity in his business affairs, he is guilty of a crime, but when he is involved in football he takes part in a cartel which is socially sanctioned, the Australian Football League. This body is, as many people have pointed out, a tightly controlled monopoly organisation, many of whose activities are clearly in restraint of trade. Some of them have been challenged and overturned in the past, as for example by Silvio Foschini in a famous case, but others remain, including the draft system which can send an unwilling young player into the den of iniquity which is the West Coast Eagles.

Arguably a convicted person, even if this is a civil rather than a criminal case, is more guilty of bringing the game into disrepute than a recreational-drug user, but don’t expect to see the charge brought by the AFL against the head of the Carlton Football Club. Only a public outcry of equivalent proportions to that against Ben Cousins will do the trick and that only because image is all in the modern sporting world. Others involved with Carlton then might exert some pressure on Pratt to resign, but otherwise his misdemeanours will be swept under the carpet while Cousins is hung out to dry.

An extraordinary, ordinary woman

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 10 November 2007, p. 33.

by Roy Hay

Origins of footy again and a cautionary tale of Tutsi high jumping

published as 'Footy fiction'

Geelong Advertiser, Tuesday 16 October 2007, p. 15.

by Roy Hay

The recent rediscovery of an etching at the Museum of Victoria which appears to show group of Aboriginal children playing kick-to-kick possibly a year before a set of rules was drawn up for the ancestor of the game we play today has rekindled notions of an Aboriginal contribution to the origins of Australian Rules football.

But before we jump to that conclusion, consider the tale of Tutsi high jumping.

In the late nineteenth century German colonists in what was then East Africa and is now Rwanda visited the court of the Tutsi tribe.

There the king sent a couple of his young men to jump over the surprised visitors.

The ceremony was meant to demonstrate the inferiority of the newcomers to their hosts.

At some point thereafter the Duke of Mecklenburg was photographed watching a young Tutsi jump over a bar placed between two forked sticks at a height which exceeded the world record, if such existed, for the high jump at that date.

Yet you can scour the records of athletic performance since that time and you will find no signs of Tutsi holders of world records or Olympic medals for high-jumping.

What was an interesting cultural practice did not translate into a modern sport.

And the same, I’m afraid, may be true of the Aboriginal practices of marn grook played in the Western District of Victoria or the game or activity taking place in Gippsland, which involved leaping high to catch the ball which was discussed at the Sporting Traditions Conference in Canberra this year by Robert Messenger.

Messenger thought that the high mark developed by players like Charlie ‘Commotion’ Pearson, the Essendon star of the 1880s, might have derived from his early experience of what was taking place in the area in which he grew up.

As I have said before, I would love to believe that footy was influenced by Aboriginal practices in its early chaotic days, before it settled down into the sport we know today.

But my training as a social historian causes me to be very sceptical that members of the Melbourne and Geelong middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century, many of whom went to private schools modelled on, and staffed by, products of the English public schools, would look beyond their English models for the game they were evolving.

We know that Tom Wills, our local hero, who had a big influence on the game as it developed in Geelong, wrote an inspirational letter to Bell’s Life calling for a game to keep cricketers fit during the winter months.

And he was heavily involved with the Aboriginal cricketers who made the first Australian cricket tour of England in 1868.

But Wills was educated at Rugby school in England and he had less influence on the development of the rules of Australian football than his cousin Colden Harrison and Messrs Thompson, Hammersley and Smith who looked predominantly to English models.

It is very unfashionable in these days of aggressive Australian nationalism to suggest that we could learn anything from England, but our 19th century predecessors were as keen to demonstrate that they were part and parcel of the British empire as they were to claim any colonial distinctiveness.

And when they sought to draw up rules for what became the pre-eminent domestic code of football it was to England, not to Aboriginal Australia, that they turned for inspiration.

History is always changing and being reinterpreted as new evidence comes to light and new ideas impinge on the way we think about and interpret our history.

It may be that in the future we will find convincing evidence that there was a strong Aboriginal influence on our fledgling game, but so far I remain reluctantly sceptical.

Football and religion

published as 'Praise them'

Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday 10 October 2007, p. 23.

by Roy Hay

The notion of football as a secular religion is an old one. Marx wrote about religion as the opium of the people, the consolation of the oppressed, and many have followed him in more recent times substituting sports of various kinds, including football and baseball, as fulfilling the role in our materialistic world. A few years ago a Deakin University colleague, Steve Alomes, wrote an article which pursued this notion, drawing a range of parallels and touching on the similarities and differences between sport and religion. It is not so long since Geelong folk referred half-jokingly to Gary Ablett, senior, as God, and many (hero) worshipped the brilliant and mercurial player, even though he was destined never to win a premiership for himself or his team. The man himself claimed to have found religion in the midst of his career and attributed some of his stellar performances to the influence of his beliefs. He was embarrassed and upset by any suggestion that he had supernatural powers or the label of deity which some attached to him.

Some thoughts about the connections between football and religion surfaced again in the aftermath of Geelong’s Grand Final victory last week, especially when Father Kevin Dillon conducted a service in St Mary’s Basilica wearing a Geelong football club badge on his vestments and my good friend John Harms wrote an article which appeared under the headline ‘Joy to the world as victory brings peace on earth’. In it he discusses the idea that profound relationships are born of shared suffering. The whole article is suffused with religious imagery as befits the son of a Lutheran minister.

Having just finished researching and writing the history of St Joseph’s College in Newtown, the starting point for the careers of a host of Geelong footballers, including Brownlow medallist, Jimmy Bartel, temporary Mayor of Geelong, Cameron Ling, and All-Australian full-back Matthew Scarlett from the current generation, I am intrigued to know whether their Catholic education had something to do with their success on the field. They had many predecessors, some of whom tasted Premiership victories, including Leo Turner and Bill McMaster, and others who played well but did not such as Barry Stoneham, Damian Bourke and Tim Darcy.

The thing which stands out for me is that these characters were team players first and foremost. Any tendency to lairising was knocked out of them early. I don’t mean they were dull and regimented. They could play with flair and skill and they knew where to find the footy. And they all showed exemplary courage, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness, often overcoming injuries to turn in effective performances for the team. But then I reflect, they were not alone in that if we look through this current Geelong team. The same features shone through the whole of the squad, so it would be pushing things too far to suggest that religion and a religious upbringing was a necessary condition for on-field success.

But what about the fans? It is easy to make facile comparisons between the walls of suburban rooms plastered with images of the football stars and religious iconography. The outpouring of joy, and not a little relief, sparked by the Grand Final success can be compared to a religious revivalist meeting in some ways. There can be little doubt that the euphoria of the occasion and its aftermath have taken some people’s minds off the daily struggle for existence for a while at least, as religion is expected to do. But beyond that we are talking about a sport and as the old Croatian saying goes, ‘Football is the single most important parallel thing in the world’, in other words it is the most important of the unimportant things in life.

It’s Wigan not Paris

By Roy Hay

My wife turned down a trip to Paris this week. We have been married so long, she knows which questions to ask and when I asked if she fancied Paris, quick as flash she said, “Which game is on?” “It is Scotland versus France”, I replied. “It’s a European championship qualifier. If we get through we could go to Austria and Switzerland next year.” No chance. Immovable, she was.

But there is always plan B. If not Paris, why not Wigan? Not Orwellian Wigan of The Road to Wigan Pier, though we drove past the pier and the canal where it is situated, but Wigan Athletic at the JJB stadium. So why did an English premiership match with Fulham succeed where Paris quite failed?

Well, there was the little matter that Geelong boy Josip Skoko, who made his farewell appearance for the Socceroos against Argentina last week, is fighting his way back into the Wigan first team after a long delay over his work permit to play in England at the start of the season. What should have been a straightforward appeal hearing was delayed for several weeks by the death of a member of the panel, leaving Josip in limbo until a few days before the season began.

Then there is the consideration that Fulham has signed our Jan Juc and former Melbourne Victory star, Adrian Leijer. Though the lad has yet to make his debut for Lawrie Sanchez’s team, I thought there was a prospect he might be in the squad and what a story that would be if the two were in opposition, even if only for a few minutes. “My Advertiser career will be over if I don’t pursue this story”, I pleaded. At such moments my wife gives a hollow laugh, which shows she knows when she is being snowed, but she is also generous enough to allow the boy a little leeway now and again. And it was not far off our route north to Scotland once again.

In the end Adrian did not appear, and we had to wait until an hour had passed before Josip took the field. By then Wigan was a goal down and Fulham with its advantage thanks to Craig Dempsey in the first half was sitting on the game, forcing the home side into ever more outrageous hit-and-hope efforts. Cue, Josip Skoko. As soon as he came on there were two brilliant passes to feet, one which the winger did not read, and a caution for the substitute as he spun off his marker using his hands in the process. A picky referee showed the yellow card. Then he was back in defence clearing up another Fulham attack and then at the start of a move which led to Wigan skipper, the former Chelsea full-back Mario Melchiot, going down like a sack of potatoes in the Fulham penalty area. This time the referee gave the penalty and Jason Koumas blasted it past Antti Niemi.

Josip tried to inspire a victory, finding men with excellent passes and showing immense coolness to rob an attacker in his own penalty area then calmly walking around another two before passing the ball out of danger. The crowd loved it.

Afterwards we caught up with him and his wife Ivana and he told us that he had achieved everything he wished for in his career which has taken him to Croatia, Belgium, Turkey, and now England. He was selected for a World Cup though he did not get a start, and I will argue that not playing Josip was Guus Hiddink’s biggest single mistake. “Anything from now on is a bonus”, the modest Geelong boy said, but I think he has a lot more to contribute to the game.