5 Random Semi-Related Posts

• Super Hornets are Go (4 comments)
• Internet filtering trials begin! (1 comments)

Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon has announced that the controversial purchase of 24 Super Hornet aircraft will go ahead.

The review of the Howard government’s decision to buy the aircraft — at a total cost of $6 billion even though the RAAF hadn’t wanted them — reached some damaging conclusions, including:

• There has been a lack of sound, long-term air combat capability planning decisions by the former Government over the course of the last decade.
• The retirement of the F-111 was made in haste but is now irreversible. The cost of turning the F-111 back on would be enormous and crews and skills have already moved on.
• The former Government’s decision to leave Australia’s air defences in the hands of the Joint Strike Fighter project was a flawed leap of faith in scheduling terms and combined with the quick decision to retire the F-111 early, allowed an air combat capability gap to emerge.
• The subsequent timetable the former Government put on the acquisition of an interim fighter left Defence planners with no choice but to recommend the Super Hornet. No other suitable aircraft could be produced to meet the 2010 deadline the former Government had set. One year on, that is now even more so the case.

Cancelling the order would still incur a financial penalty and create “undesirable tensions”, and the final conclusions is that “the Super Hornet is an excellent aircraft… and is the only aircraft which can meet the small delivery window created by the former Government’s poor planning processes and politically-driven responses.”

As a shareholder in Australia Inc, I’d like to know why the former “board members” allowed this to happen. When company directors are negligent they become personally liable so why, given the report’s damning conclusions, does Brendan Nelson not become personally liable?

Why were established evaluation and purchasing processes ignored? What is the connection between former defence minister Brendan Nelson (a member of the Liberal Party), and the then chairman of Boeing Australia, Andrew Peacock, a former leader of the Liberal Party?

Hat-tip to Tim Dunlop, who also notes:

[D]o you make procurement decisions on the basis of strategy or is it on occasion necessary to build strategy around procurements that have already been made? I mean, the White Paper may be still six months away but it is hardly as if it is being written from scratch. It looks like Fitzgibbon has decided that getting the Super Hornet decision locked away was the more important factor and is happy enough to make strategy decisions with the Super Hornets in the mix. To paraphrase another Defence Minister/Secretary, sometimes you do strategy on the basis on the equipment you have.

As in this case. We’re buying the Super Hornets because, essentially, it’s the only choice left.

[Photo: A US Navy (USN) F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft, Strike Fighter Squadron 115 (VFA-115), Naval Air Station (NAS) Lemoore, California (CA), launches from catapult three during flight operations on board the USN Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. US Navy via Wikipedia.]

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• John Howard’s “Margin of Terror” (3 comments)
• Costello Snark 2003 (0 comments)

Yesterday was the deadline for purveyors of filters to register their interest with Enex TestLab, the Melbourne company running the trials. As they said in a newspaper ad:

We invite vendors of all types (hardware appliances, software — proprietary or open-source) of ISP-based internet content filters to participate.

The products will be tested in a “controlled environment” (i.e. the lab) in the first half of 2008, and then the “field trials” happen in the second half.

But looking at the original request for tender at AusTender, this “just” seems to be another exercise in seeing what’s available in the marketplace, rather than providing a “solution” [ugh!] which implements specific policy goals.

The successful tenderer will be responsible for establishing a test environment and reporting on:

• the effectiveness of content filtering products at the ISP level in blocking illegal and inappropriate content;
• determining whether the operation of content filtering products at the ISP level would introduce delays into an ISP’s network;
• an analysis of the features presently available in content filtering products at the ISP level; and
• what capabilities current products have in regards to filtering non web-based content.

In one sense this is all well and good: the government is evaluating products before purchase. That certainly makes a change from the previous government’s purchase of Super Hornets! But a really, really important step has been skipped: defining the policy goal in clean, unambiguous and testable form.

No-one seems to be willing or able to explain “inappropriate”.

And maybe that’s the point. It’s the government’s job to create the laws that we want and administer them, not make value judgements about “propriety” — which is about “conventionally accepted standards of behaviour or morality”.

And why is the government treating the Internet so differently from other communication media?

As Rick Welykochy said earlier today:

I’d bet my lunch that most Australian parents consider that violence on TV and film is not appropriate for children and probably does cause some behavioural harm.

If this government is going to embark on a journey of censoring broadcast media like the Internet, it would only seem logical that they also do the same for all broadcast media. To single out just one medium would be hypocritical and politically self-serving, with reduced benefit to society. Or one would think.

Which begs the question of how we currently protect children from inappropriate content. Would it be that up to now, adult supervision has been adequate in providing this protection? And why cannot the same supervision be provided for the Internet?

Why indeed. Any theories? Might it maybe have something to do with the fact that politicians still see the “old media” proprietors as powerful brokers, people who wouldn’t take kindly to suggestions of a compulsory filter on TV sets?

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