Nanny land

A friend from France recently asked me why Australians seemed to have little problem with their governments giving them advice in the form of media and advertising campaigns that urge people to change their lifestyles. Certainly Australia is home to many publicity drives that urge us to stop smoking, to slow down on the roads, to check our superannuation accounts and so on. The French would, at least according to my friend, be far less tolerant of government 'interference' in their private lives.

Are Australians too trusting of their governments? Has the "nanny state" taken over down under? Certainly Australian political history gives less cause for concern than that of most countries. The USA was settled by pilgrims feeling religious persecution at the hands of government in the UK. Later, the civil war there killed more people than all of America's other wars on foreign soil. The Germans have particularly traumatic memories with democratically government that turn themselves into genocidal dictatorships. The French too have been through a famous revolution that went wrong and still have memories of the collaborationist Vichy government during WWII that shipped thousands of French citizens to extermination and forced labour in the Third Reich. Australian politics, in comparison, are, thankfully more like a Sunday kindergarten picnic.

It is not that the legal situation in the USA, France or Australia is radically different. Smoking in indoor public places is banned in all three. Driving when drunk is also illegal. Perhaps Australian governments are more proactive. After all, the point of such laws is to bring about behavioural change. And prevention is the best cure. It is a better outcome for all concerned if people abstain from drink driving before the law gets involved. Similarly, there are financial benefits for nations that have a healthier population. With the skyrocketing cost of medical treatment in most Western countries, this is more true now than ever. So maybe a publicity campaign with a policy objective makes good sense.

Dame Edna Everage is reputed to have said that if Germany was the "fatherland" and England was the "motherland", then Australia was "auntie land". Maybe she meant to say "nanny land".

A bit rich

This week's edition of the Economist newspaper features a sadly imbalanced and ignorant attack on public sector unions. Membership of these workers' groups have remained relatively high as unions in the private sector have fallen over the last twenty years. This fact throws up two questions: why is the public sector still heavily unionised and why are membership densities in the private sector down. The first question assumes that there is some sort of unwritten number that represents the ideal level of union membership that the public sector is unhealthily above. That is the question that the Economist pursues instead of asking why private sector unions are below a healthy level. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the more unionised a national workforce is the higher the standard of living is.

The central argument of the article is that the public sector unions are facing a challenge as governments in many countries impose financial cuts on their respective public sectors. Up to quite recently German school history text books were infamous for treating the Third Reich as something akin to a natural disaster that was unfortunately visited on the population. Now the Economist is doing the same with the current economic crisis. It writes that 'Governments almost everywhere — particularly in the rich world — are being forced to cut back public spending' with the result that public employees are being asked to carry the can. The article omits to mention by who or what the governments are being forced. Presumable some sort of unavoidable natural disaster like the arrival of Nazism in Germany. In fact what is behind the difficulties of governments are the failings of the banks and financial sector. The article makes no attempt to explain why public sector employees should be asked to rescue the banks when they are the last who were responsible for the financial debacle.

This is not a question of pinning the blame. But it is very hard to learn from mistakes when the analysis is blind to the real cause. The disastrous state of public finances in Greece, Ireland, the UK and the USA is due to the enormous mistakes of private sector banks, not public sector employees and their unions.

Demise of the retail dinosaurs?

Some of Australia's largest retailers are calling for a change in tax laws to reduce the difference between their prices and those of online competitors, particularly those from overseas. So far retailer's appeals have rightly earned little sympathy. These corporate heavies seem to think that a ten percent saving from avoiding the relevant tax makes the difference between in-store and online shopping. They seem determined to insist that consumers shop on retailers' terms. Instead, what we may be witnessing is the death of a business model and the triumph of a new one with far reaching repercussions.

The essence of traditional high-street retailing consists of attracting customers into visiting a store in a convenient location and making the experience so rewarding that they will come again. But the rents for such real estate are high and every square meter has to be used to maximize returns. There is a whole science behind how retailers use shelf space and shop layouts to boost sales. The simple physical stature of the average human sets limits on  shelving, and that is just the beginning. The alternative model - filling online orders from a warehouse in a low-rent area on the urban fringe - has a lot going for it. Retailers can stock more goods per square meter of floor space because shelves can extend much higher and there are no inefficient hierarchies of good and bad shelf space. These benefits are further multiplied if automated retrieval systems are used. The benefit for consumers are lower prices, greater product variety and choice. A good website is also much easier to use and search for product comparisons and information than it is to get reliable information from shop-floor staff who are often just school kids on holiday jobs with little idea about what they are selling. 

A wider shift away from antiquated bricks and mortar retailing to online shopping would free up valuable inner-urban real estate for housing, cultural and leisure activities or public space. The death of the retail dinosaurs could be the birth of a better urban landscape.

Image: Cobalt 123

Europe's new cultural capitals

Turku, Finland and Tallinn,Estonia are the two European capitals of culture for 2011. They assume the mantle from Istanbul, Essen in Germany and Pecs in Hungary.

Turku is located west of the Finnish capital Helsinki and has chosen to highlight the links between culture and wellbeing. According to a DW report, doctors in Turku will even be able to prescribe attendance at cultural events. Turku is an old university city and the links between the arts and the sciences are also an element of the coming year in the Finnish city.

Tallinn is the capital of Estonia, one of three Baltic countries freed from Russian rule when the Soviet Union melted in history. The city's old town is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site and hopes that the focus on culture during 2011 will further boost its bid to be seen as a modern and progressive European state.

A mixed media year

For media companies and their newspapers 2010 was a year of contradictions and mixed signals. The launch of the iPad in April was hailed as the great white hope for media corporations desperate to find a profitable niche in an online world in which readers of news have come to expect free access to news. In July Rupert Murdoch's Times began charging readers to read articles on its website and other Murdoch papers are to follow. Many other newspapers have continued the race to the bottom as they retreat from any role as bastions of serious journalism in the public interest. Investigative journalism has all but disappeared from the mainstream media. Instead, newspapers have become hardly distinguishable from junk mail advertising brochures and lifestyle magazines.

In response we have seen a further growth in the importance of bloggers and other "independent" players the most famous of which is now Wikileaks. It is indicative of the current media landscape that the "investigative" side of this story was undertaken by a group of radicals and not by the media.

And to wrap up the year Hungary's right-wing government under Viktor Orbán has recently announced new laws to curtail press freedom in that country. That alone may seem unsurprising given Hungary's past experience with a Communist dictatorship but things were meant to have changed. Orbán's country is now a member of the European Union and on 1 January assumes its rotating presidency. A serious dispute about the nature of press freedom has broken out between the Hungarian government and many other members of the EU. It is a debate on which the Union should not compromise. A financially healthy, free and critical media is at the heart of democracy.

Where's your Ring?

Everybody wants a Ring these days. Wagner's Ring. Yes, it seems that every self-respecting opera house wants to have a production of Richard Wagner's four-part operatic epic - The Ring of the Nibelungen - in their repertoire. In Germany alone, Lübeck, Hannover, Essen, Hamburg Berlin and Frankfurt all currently have one. And now Opera Australia wants to get in on the act. It is mounting a co-production that will premiere in Melbourne in 2013.

But why? Performing Wagner's Ring is the biggest undertaking in the opera world. And opera has in recent years gone all out to position itself as a an artform of spectacle, especially in countries such as Australia that do not have a long opera tradition dating back centuries. That is fine. There are certainly many spectacular moments in opera, especially in the late-nineteenth century repertoire which dominates our stages. But there is more to opera than just the big, the loud and the lengthy. And it is this side that is getting blended out, with the result that many people who are not grabbed by the bombastic, the romantic and tragic are turned off by the whole operatic genre. Two of these best opera performances I have seen in the last twelve months have been relatively small affairs: Benjamin Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw and Joseph Haydn's comedy Il Mondo Della Luna. Both were at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wagner's Ring. But both are still very much "operas", in the best sense. It is only when we get a rich variety of fare that we really come to appreciate what a thrilling, exciting and rewarding form opera can be. And one with much wider appeal than it currently has in Australia. Let's have the Ring but balance it with some more varied and less-frequently heard repertoire.

Image: Kugel

Chasing tails

These days youth audience programs are all the range amongst arts companies. We are bombarded with dire warnings that the audience for the mainstream arts are "dying out" and companies are throwing large amounts of money to make themselves seem more attractive to the all-important under-35s. This is, of course, money that is coming out of production budgets. The idea seems to be that we should all like the same thing, that our arts companies should be everything to everybody, that there is something wrong if people under and over 35 don't have the same tastes. Some of these programs remind me of the over-50s who squeeze into the fashions of 20-somethings in the vain attempt to convince themselves that they are still young and 'hip', no matter how ridiculous the result.

But isn't a “bum on a seat" "a bum on a seat” no matter what age it is? Is the emphasis on youth alienating the older and more mature audience, which has always been the core audience for the “heritage” arts? There is also a demographic argument that says that the population is ageing and that in terms of pure numbers the population – and therefore the potential audience – is growing fastest in the over-50 bracket, so why throw large amounts of money at a population sector that is numerically in decline?

There is quite a bit of “group think” going on in this debate, i.e. “if all the other arts companies are chasing the youth market then we had better do that too”. Maybe a company that says, “we are going to different, we are going to look after a more mature audience” would be highly successful, if for no other reason than they would differentiate themselves from the rest of the industry. Or is that kind of diversity too frightening to our arts companies?

Image St Stev