Politics – Page 67 – Stilgherrian

12 October 200912 October 2009

Should court hearings be streamed live?

I don’t know whether it’s the first time an Australian legal trial has been covered live via Twitter, but the Twitter coverage of the AFACT v iiNet hearing in the Federal Court is breathing new life into court reporting. So, why don’t we just stream everything live to the Internet, audio and video?

That’s the question I ask in my first opinion piece for ZDNet Australia, Twitter in court: Why not streaming video?, which was posted on Friday afternoon after I’d spent half the week watching ZDNet.com.au‘s Liam Tung and The Australian‘s Andrew Colley bring us their observations as the case unfolded.

As it happens, the ban on live broadcast coverage from courtrooms dates back to the 1930s. Although there have been experiments with TV coverage, it’s still rare. But apart from the obvious cases where you’d want to keep it banned, why shouldn’t we allow it? That’s what I explore over at ZDNet.com.au. Have a read and let me know what you think.

If you want to follow the hearing, which is expected to last until mid-November, monitor the Twitter hashtag #iitrial.

10 October 200910 October 2009

Instant Experts on Obama and the Nobel

I am now an expert on international politics and will pass judgement on and provide analysis of the Nobel Peace Prize going to Barack Obama, just like every other fuckhead.

It’s Swedish. And it’s glittery. Just like Abba. A “Black Abba”, if you wish. Afghanistan is Obama’s Waterloo. Discuss.

[This post is based on a couple of tweets from last night. 1, 2. Someone thought it was amusing. I wanted to link the word “Waterloo” to some explanatory material, but was stuck. Which link?]

08 October 200926 August 2020

Letter from Newcastle

“That ‘This is Not Art’ thing this weekend, it’s like a fucking freak show walking past,” says the old guy in the yellow-tiled front bar of The Clarendon Hotel.

It’s just gone noon on Saturday. Apart from ’Pong and I having a burger and beer, he’s the only customer. His worldview of what Newcastle‘s Hunter Street should be like is challenged by the stream of paste-white black-clad comic fans, straggly-bearded eco-hippies, random hipsters and nose-ringed alternagothpunkteendykes strolling past the boarded-up shopfronts.

Noticing a skinny guy wearing yellow overalls and a torn red-striped t-shirt, our frowning drinker puts down his VB. “Hey, is there a circus in town? Because I can see a clown”, he calls out to the barman.

The barman smiles politely, but says nothing.

“Hey, is there a circus in town?”, he mutters, and takes another sip. He looks out at the soulless office buildings that replaced the landscape of his memory, in silence.

Yet these weird out-of-towners, with their experimental robotics, knitting and YouTube mashups, have brought more life to this industrial city’s ailing heart than any grandiose “development” plan.

Continue reading “Letter from Newcastle”

28 September 200925 December 2009

Talking Government 2.0 on Radio National

Further to my appearance on Radio National’s Future Tense talking Telstra and corporate transparency, last week a little more of my recorded interview was used in their program on Participatory democracy, Web 2.0 and the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

My main point was that people will expect the Government 2.0 Taskforce to do a lot of things — especially given their massive brief — and yet they’ll be disbanded at the end of the year.

There are going to be expectations that there’ll be something really significant to put on the table by Christmas, and yet it’s all uncertain. The uncertainties in all this are incredible. We’re expecting this group of people to essentially solve all of the problems of government 2.0 and have this grand road map in just a few months. It’s an enormous bullet point list of stuff that they’ve got to achieve. And now that people are starting to look at it, they’re realising we’re only at the very early stages of people starting to agree on what the questions might mean, let alone what the answers might look at. And my gut feeling is people are starting to be a bit hesitant about ‘Hey, are we actually going to get something of value at the end of this, or is it just another of the Rudd government’s talkfests to make it look like we’ve got something happening but there’s no real end result?’ I mean the Australia 2020 Summit, did we ever get anything really concrete out of that?

Duncan Riley essentially agreed. But I found the response from Nicholas Gruen, who chairs the Taskforce, interesting.

Gruen says that unlike most government inquiries — and he’s been on eight — this time the recommendations aren’t the important thing. It’s more about educating everyone — including the public service and politicians.

Click through to the program for the full transcript or, for a limited time at least, to listen to the podcast.

27 September 200926 August 2020

Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!

Stilgherrian – Risk vs paranoia from Penny Sharpe on Vimeo.

Penny Sharpe MLC asked me to say something controversial at her NSW Sphere event back on 4 September. Here it is. The full video and transcript (below) of my somewhat rambling discussion of the challenges facing the Government 2.0 revolution.

Hi. I’m Stilgherrian, and I’m avoiding the whole projection thing today.

My presentation, the long name was “Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!”, and I just want to spend a few minutes throwing in some ideas which might trigger some discussion point around those, those words.

Continue reading “Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!”

21 September 200921 September 2009

Empty remnants of John Howard

Yesterday ’Pong and I journeyed to Epping in Sydney’s north-west suburbs to photograph this monument to history: John Howard’s campaign office for the 2007 federal election. It’s still empty almost two years later.

Epping seemed strangely bleak. This was far from being the only empty shop on Beecroft Road. Signs were dilapidated. In the alley behind the shops, magpies rummaged through restaurant garbage bins in search of food. The eucalypt smoke enshrouding the suburb — the result of back-burning operation before summer — didn’t help.

Two years ago posts referencing John Howard dominated this website’s tag cloud. It’s been a long time since he was Prime Minister, but he’s still prominent here and in the mainstream media through things like his Menzies Lecture — and that was a strange attempt to stamp his own rhetoric onto Australia’s political history.

I wonder how long it’ll be until we stop hearing about the miserable old toad?