The two of us: Geoff and Tim Harcourt

"Airport economist" Tim Harcourt, 52, teaches at the University of NSW alongside his dad, leading economic theorist Geoff Harcourt, 86, whose influence accounts for his politics – if not their shared profession.

GEOFF: Tim was an extraordinarily happy baby, until he was one and a half. He got measles on the boat back from the United Kingdom. I had been at Cambridge for 18 months on leave from the University of Adelaide, lecturing and refining the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. When we came back he was miserable, pining for his old home. In the UK, we'd had this little Ford Prefect. In Adelaide, whenever a Ford Prefect drove by his face just lit up. He thought he was back in Cambridge.

When he was four we all went to Japan for four months. On our return he suddenly realised he was home in Adelaide. He couldn't keep the grin off his face for a week. He is the most proudly Australian of our four children, even though he's the only one born overseas. But that insecurity has probably never gone away. He seems to be Mr Cool, Crocodile Dundee, but beneath that he is anxious.

Working at Austrade and for the trade union movement has been part of that patriotism. He has toyed with running as a Labor candidate, which isn't surprising given the meetings and rallies we have taken him to. His mother Joan, still alive, was an abortion law reformer and a Labor candidate. He featured in her campaign poster, aged three. But I don't think he should go into politics. If he wanted to I have no doubt they would take him up. He is one of the best people I know at explaining economics.

But he hates Canberra. Bill Kelty sent him there for six months in the 1990s while he was ACTU chief economist and he was miserable. He loves Sydney and his family is important to him. He has an American wife and two adopted children, one from China and the other from Taiwan. 

Tim found out my father had changed the family surname from Harkowitz to Harcourt. I knew we were Jewish, but I didn't know that. My father's parents emigrated from Transylvania and Poland in the early 1900s. My mother wanted to fit in. Only when she died did my father talk about the name to Tim. Tim took Jewishness on board, but not in a religious way. He celebrates Jewish and Christian and Buddhist festivals in keeping with his mixed family.

I don't think he wants to change the world as much as I did. He is more of a pragmatist. As Austrade's chief economist he had no real job description, so he made it up as he went along, promoting trade and economics and also promoting himself along the way. He is one of the best people I know at explaining economics.

Now at university we have coffee or lunch every day. It's like being at home.

TIM: My dad had a broken nose the day I was born, from playing cricket in Cambridge. Growing up in Adelaide, he took me to all my footy and cricket games, and took me to his. My older brother and sister missed out because of the Vietnam War. Dad was too busy with the Campaign for Peace in Vietnam. He would convene meetings at our house attended by the likes of the then South Australian Labor premier Don Dunstan and future ministers Mick Young and Neal Blewett. I'd interview them on my cassette recorder as they arrived, pretending to be Norman Gunston.

I didn't know about the danger we were in. Years later, when I was at Austrade, I got death threats after I wrote about multiculturalism and my adopted Chinese child. My dad told me to take them seriously. During the Vietnam War we had received them at all hours of the day and night. Someone tried to blow up our Holden. For a while we had police protection.

Former prime minister Bob Hawke said something about his dad that applies to my dad, that he was "kindness personified". Mine is generous, even to his enemies. He has turned several into friends. Hawke's dad was a Congregationalist minister. I reckon mine is a minister in different clothes. He could have been a rabbi.

I was shocked when I discovered our family name had been Harkowitz. My grandmother wanted to assimilate, so she sent my dad to Wesley College in Melbourne, run by Methodists. It's where he developed his love of sport. He used to say that if you played football, they thought you were only "half a Yid". He called himself the only Methodist Jew in Adelaide.

He used to help out the South Australian Trades and Labor Council in wage cases. I would go as a schoolboy and sit in the courtroom. I decided then and there that I wanted to work for the Council of Trades Unions. That's why I studied economics, not because of Dad. I went to see the president of the ACTU, Cliff Dolan, at 15. He said to work there you needed a trade or a degree in economics or law, and he said they had plenty of lawyers, so economics might be the better bet.

At university, I didn't learn much about Dad's contribution. He helped develop what is known as post-Keynesian economics. It was only in the later years when they taught me about Keynes and the work of my dad that economics made sense. It had been like learning the New Testament without the Old.

The job offer from the University of NSW came out of the blue in 2011. They wanted someone who could popularise economics, which I'd done in The Airport Economist. I am the J.W. Nevile Fellow in Economics. John Nevile is one of my dad's closest colleagues. When he visits, he uses the same office as Dad, just down the corridor. For 28 years I saw Dad nearly every day, then not as much. Now, I'm blessed to get to see him whenever I'm at work in Sydney. 

In The Good Weekend

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Why Richard Thaler thinks we've two brains, in one body

The winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Economics nearly lost his first job as soon as he got it.

As a young professor, Richard Thaler designed an exam that would easily sort the students into three categories: the superstars, those who understood things well enough, and those that couldn't. It worked, but he faced a revolt. The average score turned out to be just 72 out of 100.

The number out of 100 made no difference to the eventual grades. The As, Bs, and Cs were awarded in accordance with the standard grading curve, and he told his students so. But he says they still "hated my exam, and they were none too happy with me".

Worried he wouldn't keep his job, he redesigned the exam (but not the questions, and not the ultimate allocation of As, Bs and Cs) so that it was marked out of 137 instead of 100.

"The students were delighted! No one's actual grade was affected, but everyone was happy," he wrote in his 2015 book Misbehaving.

He chose 137 for two reasons. "First, it produced an average score well into the 90s, with some students even getting scores above 100, generating a reaction approaching ecstasy. Second, because dividing one's score by 137 was not easy to do in one's head, most students did not seem to bother to convert their scores into percentages."

He even said so, writing to his students that the scoring system had "no effect on the grade you get in the course, but it seems to make you happier". None of them complained again.

A few years ago I took part in a mass experiment conducted by one of Thaler's colleagues. He asked each of us to take out our driver's licence and write the last two digits of the identification number at the top of a page. Then he showed us a bottle of red wine and asked up to write at the bottom of the page our guess as to what it was worth; anything between 00 and 99 dollars.

Astonishingly, those of us with licences whose last two digits spelled out a low number thought the wine was cheap. Those whose licences produced a high number thought it was expensive.

In both cases we were misled by an anchor; the students by the anchor of 100, and those of us in the experiment by the digits at the end of our licence numbers. As Thaler accumulated more and more examples, and tested them in experiments, he set them out in a list on his backboard entitled "dumb stuff people do".

"Dumb" was too harsh. We are lazy more than we are than dumb. Most of us could make a proper guess as to the value of a bottle of wine, and most of us could work out percentages, but, as Thaler puts it, we have "limited time and brainpower". We find it easier not to bother, to fall back on shortcuts.

And yet mainstream economics has been built around the assumption that we are always calculating and mostly getting it right. When shown that we don't, that we consistently get things wrong, traditionalist economists have excuses: "If the stakes are high enough people will get it right; in the real world people learn and avoid mistakes; in aggregate errors cancel out," and so on.

Thaler's greatest contribution has been to show that our mistakes aren't random; that they are predictable, and that they are often worse when the decisions are big. We are good at grocery shopping. We do it all the time. But only rarely do we buy a house, or enrol in a savings plan. It's these decisions that we often get spectacularly wrong, in predictable ways.

One of his greatest practical contributions has been "Save More Tomorrow", a US scheme in which companies sign up their employees not to squirrel away more of their pay packet today (when it would hurt) but to do it later, when they get a pay rise. It came from his insight that rather than acting as if we are rational when it comes to decisions about saving and splurging (or dieting and eating) we act as if we are two separate beings fighting for control of ourselves.

It's been more or less proven. In one experiment, economists from Columbia and Stanford universities offered 6000 Americans the chance to take part in a lottery. They were given a choice of what to accept as a prize: either $55 in cash, or a lesser-value $50 bottle of wine. Astonishingly, about a quarter chose the wine.

When asked why, they said things like: "If I chose the cash, I would probably spend it on something I need rather than something I would really enjoy" and: "This way I will have to pamper myself ." Part of them is trying to escape from a straitjacket strapped on by the other part.

Thaler might be best known for his appearance in the movie The Big Short where he explained collateralised debt obligations to the pop star Selena Gomez; and also for his co-written book Nudge, now used as something of a guide by governments in the UK, the US, and now Australia and NSW who have set up behavioural economics units. He is on to something big.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

 

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The bonds that fell to earth. Bowie's part in the financial crisis

Did David Bowie spark the global financial crisis?

It was a question seriously asked after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

A decade earlier in 1997 he pioneered what came to be called Bowie Bonds. The first was essentially a long-term loan to him in return for the future revenue from the 287 tracks he released before 1990.

He and his financial engineer collected $55 million. The bond holders collected the rights to the income from singles such as Space Oddity, Heroes, Changes and Ashes to Ashes. After 10 years Bowie had to return the $55 million (plus interest) and the bond holders had to return to rights to income from his tracks.

Securitisation, as it was called, had been around for a while, but Bowie showed it could be used for almost anything. By the late 2000s it was being used on an industrial scale to bundle the future income from bad US home loans with the future income from good ones and offload it to unsuspecting investors.

In the new movie The Big Short opening in Australia on Thursday Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling outline what happened.

Bowie got the better end of his deal.

His bonds were given a AAA credit rating. Prudential Insurance bought the lot. Yet by 2004 they were downgraded to just above junk status. The growth of the internet and body blows to the traditional method of distribution meant his catalogue performed far worse than thought.

He knew it was going to happen.

An early internet service provider (he set up BowieNet at about the time Malcolm Turnbull helped set up Ozemail) he foresaw the arrival of digital downloads and streaming services years before they took off...

Here he is talking to the New York Times in 2002:

"I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen."

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he said. "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."

Bowie didn't spark the financial crisis. He was ahead of his time in applying to music the techniques that sparked the crisis.

As always, he spawned imitators. To this day a Los Angeles firm called Royalty Advance gives artists a quick cash advance on their royalties. But those artists are unlikely to ever do anything like as well out of securitising the future as Bowie.

A man of his time, and beyond his time, he was a one-off.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

 

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"A crime", "absurd". Stiglitz on the budget changes to health and education

The government's plan to deregulate universities is "a crime" and the move for co-payments for medical services is "absurd" in the view of visiting Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Asked by Fairfax Media to nominate the two biggest mistakes the government could make that would take it down the American path of widening inequality and economic stagnation, Professor Stiglitz chose the budget changes to university fees and Medicare. Each would make Australia more like the US.

"Countries that imitate the American model are kidding themselves," he said. "It seems that some people here would like to emulate the American model. I don't fully understand the logic."

In the lead-up to the budget Education Minister Christopher Pyne said Australia had much to learn about universities from overseas, "not least … from our friends in the United States".

Professor Stiglitz said Australia had "a system that is really a model for the rest of the world", and deregulating fees would move the entire system in the wrong direction.

"Trying to pretend that universities are like private markets is absurd. The worst-functioning part of the US educational market at the tertiary level is the private for-profit system,'' he said. ''It is a disaster. It excels in one area, exploiting poor children.

"If you're rich your parents can pay the fees, but if you are poor you are going to worry about how much debt you're undertaking.

"It is a way of closing off opportunity and that's why the US doesn't have educational opportunity.

"While we in the US are trying to re-regulate universities, you are talking about deregulating them. It really is a crime."

Professor Stiglitz said Australia also had one of the best healthcare systems in the world.

"Your outcome per dollar is probably the best or one of the best. Your equality of access is one of the best...

"Why would anybody … try to make your system like the American system? The US is at the bottom.

"As for talk about a price signal, people don't make decisions about medical tests and procedures based on price. Maybe for cosmetic surgery they do, but for poor people, price signals price them out."

He said the typical inflation-adjusted income of a US household was lower than it was 25 years ago. The typical inflation-adjusted income of a male full-time worker was its lowest in 40 years.

"You have to say that the American market model has failed. It's a very strong statement for someone who believes in a market economy. But at the bottom it's even worse. The minimum wage is about where it was almost a half century ago."

Asked what Australia had done right that the US had not, he said: "unions".

“You have been able to maintain stronger trade unions than the United States. The absence of any protection for workers, any bargaining power, has had adverse effects in the United States.

“You have a minimum wage of around $15 an hour. We have a minimum wage of $8 an hour. That pulls down our entire wage structure.”

The elite, the top one per cent are not too concerned. When you have so much inequality those at the top say: I don't need public transportation, I have a helicopter, I don't need public schools, I don't need all these other public services and so the result of that is - you look at America today we have some of the best universities, but our average education performance is mediocre.”

Professor Stiglitz nominated politics as the reason for enormous advances in wealth and income at the top of the US distribution, and falling living standards in the middle and below.

“I agree with Thomas Piketty who in his new study says inequality began growing at the start of the 1980s. I think President Reagan's election was a marking point. That’s when the rhetoric about small government took over.”

With weaker regulations, particularly in the financial sector, it became easier for firms to lobby governments for favours than to obey rules. The result was the global financial crisis.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

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Remembering Arch McKirdy, the man who made the ABC real

The presenter of Australia's most popular radio program had a wicked secret he kept from his 1960’s ABC audience.

After ten each night he introduced it with the words: “This is Arch McKirdy inviting you to ...relax with me.”

Over time the gap between the “to” and “relax” became longer and longer. During the break he would turn off the microphone and glare through the glass into the ABC Forbes Street control room with a “watch how long I am going to stretch it tonight” expression. The staff would squirm as the gap grew and grew.

After seemed like an eternity he would turn his microphone back on and finish the introduction. Then he would then turn it off, hit the talkback button and roar with laughter.

Arch and Relax with Me were legends well before he joined the ABC.

Born in country Victoria into a musical family (his father ran country dances and encouraged Arch to play drums and guitar) he auditioned for the job of cadet announcer at 3TR Sale in 1941 at the age of 17.

Its sister station 3SH in Swan Hill was short staffed because of the war and he moved there for a few months before joining the army, on the usual condition that he could return to his job when the war ended. Within two years the army had shifted him to its entertainment unit where he toured the Pacific for the rest of the war becoming a singer and comedian and mixing with some of Australia’s best jazz musicians.

Back in Victoria he did a music appreciation course and then headed to Sydney and 2UW where he took over Bobby Limb’s midday show and then an evening program called Starlight Serenade which he renamed Relax With Me.

‘Modern jazz’ would have been one description of the music, although he preferred the less-specific “music for adults” which gave him licence to play whatever seemed right for the mood he was trying to create in the minutes leading up til midnight. Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald made frequent appearances as did Artie Shaw and Louis Armstrong who would drop in and play their favourite records when they were in town. More than a radio program, it was a chance to “sit down, share a piece of music and talk together”.

Tobacco giant Philip Morris noticed and showered dollars at the program and at Arch personally, moving their money with him as he moved to 2SM and then 2GB, all the time presenting Relax With Me and all the time sponsored by Ardath cigarettes.

In his 2005 ABC Andrew Ollie memorial lecture broadcaster John Doyle recalled his family sitting around the lounge room in at night in the 1950s “letting Arch McKirdy guide us through Benny Golson or Oscar Peterson or Charlie Parker.”

“With voice alone he fashioned the smoky atmosphere of a New York Jazz Club,” Doyle said. “His live commercials for Ardath had him ignoring the copy and the ad would sometimes be reduced to a pause, followed by the sound of a match being struck and an ecstatic draw.”

(Arch discretely moonlighted for one of the other Philip Morris brands, intoning unseen in radio, television and cinema advertisements: “Where there’s a Man, there’s a Marlboro” - a source of amusement to those who knew the wiry and diminutive figure.)

All the while he was juggling parallel careers as a co-host Channel 7 children's television show The Land of Make Believe and as the promoter of jazz concerts showcasing Australian talents such as Don Burrows and Julie Bailey.

At the height of his commercial fame in 1964 he infuriated Philip Morris by moving Relax with Me and his audience to the ABC where it could no longer be sponsored but would be heard coast to coast seven nights a week. He said he did it partly because he could see the way the commercial radio was moving. The Top 40 would soon smother other programs.

An “odd fit” at first according to ABC colleague Margaret Throsby he soon made the program the nation’s most popular, drawing listeners in to a mesmerising mix of quietly spoken intimacy and sensuous sounds.

Throsby says he told her the title of the program was iconic.

“I don’t use that lightly. He used to say more babies had been conceived to his program than any other,” she says. “I hung on his every word. He was a gentle man and a gentleman, and a generous man, who really deeply understood what broadcasting is all about.”

Then in November 1972 after 2403 shows for the ABC and aged just 48 he moved into management. His new title “Director of Radio Presentation” scarcely seemed worthy of one of Australia’s most loved broadcasters. Yet Arch had plans for the job few in the ABC of time foresaw.

For next two decades he took by the hand young broadcasters such as Norman Swan, Geraldine Doogue and Fran Kelly, teaching them to speak not the Queen’s English as the had previously been required, but how to do something closer to making love to their audience.

He would start by telling them to put the width of a fist between their lips and the microphone, and then ask them to imagine a personal friend on the other side (for him it was his wife Margaret). Then he would ask them to talk to that person; not to read ‘one, word, at, a, time’, but to talk in groupsofwords, breathing and pausing naturally while thinking about what they were telling that person and why.

Many of his students would have once been regarded as unsuited for broadcasting. But he never tried to change their voices, merely how they were used.

“It was about your brain as much as your voice,” said Doogue. “His contention was that you had to remove every barrier between yourself and your audience, to let people see who you were. And you had to like who you were.”

Arch himself went further. He would recall how during Relax with Me he would occasionally pretend to forget a an artist’s career highlight, ask for help and then thank the listener who phoned in. He never wanted to be seen as anything other than the listener’s friend.

He probably gave different advice to everyone who saw him.

“He was a brilliant diagnostician,” said Swan.” He would zero in on a small problem, your particular problem, and fix it.”

“It was bespoke service,” said Doogue. “He would unlock whatever it was that worked for you, because your voice is so personal. He would never offer too much, because confidence is fragile.”

In the early 2000s he worked at SBS, training ethnic broadcasters to speak real English, rather than the stilted sentences they had thought were appropriate. At the SBS Dateline he would come down from his home in the Blue Mountains to guide video journalists through the process of talking to viewers as if they were on location.

He died on August 26 aged 89 surrounded by family. He left behind his first wife Frances and her sons Grant, Mark and John and his second wife Margaret and daughter Megan.

And he left behind a legacy greater than his on-air contribution. The generation that followed communicates naturally in large part because of Arch.

His grandson Lewis is on Triple J. On Friday August 30 ABC Jazz paid a tribute to Arch by re-broadcasting his final two hour show. The tribute started at 2pm, as Lewis was doing his show. The synchronicity of two McKirdys broadcasting simultaneously on ABC radio made the tribute more poignant.

Peter Martin was trained by Arch McKirdy. Peter Wall worked with Arch McKirdy on Relax With Me and is a former ABC radio manager.

In The Sydney Morning Herald

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Fine words about Michelle Grattan

From Mark Baker:

"Readers, other journalists and even editors have at times faulted her for not taking a stick to politicians and policies as forcefully as they would like. But what can look like undue caution, even timidity, is mostly the product of a ferocious commitment to accuracy, balance and fairness. The dividend is that when she does take a stand it carries greater authority. Her method has earned a remarkable degree of trust and respect on both sides of politics."







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Who'd have thought? Michelle Grattan fronts own news conference

Just now:

Sunanda Creagh in The Conversation:

Political journalist Michelle Grattan joins University of Canberra and The Conversation

One of Australia’s best-known journalists, Michelle Grattan AO, will leave her role as political editor of The Age newspaper to join University of Canberra as a professorial fellow and become an associate editor for The Conversation.

A member of the Canberra parliamentary press gallery for more than 40 years, Ms Grattan’s new role at the university will include teaching and research projects in politics and political communication, lecturing, public commentary and strategic advice, the university said in a press release.

She will join The Conversation as Associate Editor (Politics) and Chief Political Correspondent.

“I am delighted to be associated with the university and look forward to contributing to its academic life, and especially to engaging with its students, while being able to continue to pursue political journalism,” Ms Grattan said.

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker said he was highly pleased to welcome Ms Grattan to the university.

“She will add to our contemporary and real-world teaching and research and be an invaluable source of advice,” he said.

Andrew Jaspan, editor of The Conversation and former editor of The Age said he was “truly delighted and honoured to be working again with Michelle”.

“I thoroughly appreciated her advice, professionalism and acute political savvy while working with her at The Age. She epitomises the very best in political journalism,” Mr Jaspan said.

“Stephen Parker, the VC at Canberra University, has made this happen and we are indebted to his commitment to quality journalism and academic leadership,” he said.

“And because we publish everything under Creative Commons, every other media outlet is free to share and republish Michelle’s journalism. As with any national treasure, she is too good not to be shared.”

Professorial fellowships are equivalent to becoming a full professor and are awarded to people who have made a significant contribution in their professional life.

Ms Grattan is a former editor of The Canberra Times, author of several books and has also reported for the Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald.

She was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2004 for her contribution to journalism in Australia.

Jenna Price, lecturer in journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney, said Ms Grattan would make a great contribution to teaching the next generation of journalists.

“I think not only the students but also her new colleagues at the University of Canberra are fortunate in getting an academic and practitioner with real wisdom and experience,” said Ms Price, who worked under Ms Grattan at The Canberra Times.

“She not only brings recent experience but 40 years of focus and energy, unparallelled in Australia political reporting.”

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You use a computer, you think you're safe...

Wednesday column

You sign up for a web service. You violate the terms and conditions. What’s the worst that could happen?

Aaron Swartz was 24. No saint, he hid a laptop and a hard drive in a cupboard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, signed up to the journal storage service JSOTR, and began downloading.

Some five million journal articles later (there was apparently an allowable limit, but neither JSTOR nor the MIT enforced it) he was arrested and charged with computer fraud.

JSTOR didn’t want him charged. It felt he had merely broken a contract. It asked for the copies back and left it at that. Going further would be “like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking out too many books from the library,” was how one of his friends put it.

If Swartz had broken any other sort of contract, say one involving real estate or the purchase of a multi-million dollar corporation, the authorities couldn’t have touched him. Those sort of contracts, no matter how big, are settled between the parties, through litigation if necessary.

But in the United States contracts involving computing services are different. The US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes it a crime to violate a website’s terms of service where a sum of more than $5000 is involved. There doesn’t need to be a victim and it doesn’t need to complain.

The secret service took over the investigation, just as it had that of Bradley Manning who is charged with handing classified files to WikiLeaks, also in part under the disturbingly broad Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Boasting of its “aggressive stance in the investigation of computer intrusions” the service swept together enough charges to put the 24-year old in jail for a jaw-dropping 35 years (although six months or laughed out of court might have been more likely).

An Obama appointee, Attorney Carmen Ortiz grandstanded, issuing a press release declaring: “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” Her office refused to plea-bargain unless Swartz pleaded guilty to every single charge.

On January 11, two years into his ordeal, Swartz killed himself... He was 26. At last week’s funeral his father said he was “pushed to his death by the government”.

An expert in computer protection who was to speak at the trial said if he had been asked whether what Swartz did was wrong he would have replied that it was “inconsiderate, in the same way it is inconsiderate to write a cheque at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library”.

“I know a criminal hack when I see it,” he wrote. “Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”

It looks as if the authorities wanted to make an example of Swartz. He was part of the successful fight against the punative Stop Online Piracy Act. At age 13 he helped design the RSS code that many of us use today to keep up to date with websites. He had previously distributed for free costly US court records and come to the attention of the FBI.

In extraordinary intervention shortly before his death JSTOR made a limited version of its service available to the public free worldwide. It may have been what Swartz was trying to achieve. In a tribute it described Swartz as “a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit”.

“The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset,” it confirmed. “Our mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge”.

In response Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has drafted ‘Aaron’s Law’, an amendment to the Computer Fraud Act that would specifically prevent violations to the terms and conditions of a web service being treated as crimes. But she’ll be up against as powerful forces as if she taken on the gun lobby.

They extend to Australia.

Early one morning in 2003 the Australian Federal Police raided the weatherboard house Hew Griffiths shared with his father on the NSW central coast and charged him with breaking a US law.

His crime had been to share illegally-downloaded software. He had never been to the United States. Like most Australians he had assumed he wasn’t subject to US law.

John Howard’s justice minister Chris Ellison refused to intervene (the government was negotiating the US-Australia free trade agreement at the time). Griffiths became the first foreign national anywhere to be forcibly taken to the United States to face copyright charges.

“Whether committed with a gun or a keyboard – theft is theft,” declared US attorney Chuck Rosenberg, hailing the precedent. “For those inclined to steal intellectual property here, or from halfway around the world, they are on notice that we can and will reach them.”

Facing ten years in prison, Griffiths pleaded guilty and served six months. He was well-treated. He told me later the US is “good at running prisons”. The three years he had spent in Sydney’s Silverwater Detention Centre fighting the extradition were much less pleasant.

Australia’s decision to surrender sovereignty over Griffiths took place as it made another. In order to get the free trade agreement through it agreed to make intellectual property part of Australia’s criminal as well as civil law. Our government (or the US government for that matter) is now free to prosecute an Australian for a breach of copyright and threaten a jail term whether or not the injured party minds. It can be pressed into taking action the injured party would otherwise have to take itself.

The US is pushing for even more in negotiations currently underway over the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

We should say no.

In today's Sydney Morning Herald and Age


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Remembering Ian Wolfe, the man who dragged ABC News into the 21st century

September 12, 1941 - December 16, 2011

When the team from Australian Associated Press walked into their usual contract renegotiation with the ABC at the start of the 1990s they had every reason to think they would get what they wanted.

The ABC had used the AAP’s foreign wire service for half a century, initially for an annual fee of 3000 pounds. Now the fee was reportedly $250,000. AAP wanted more and treated the ABC like a captive client.

Sitting on the other side of the table was the deceptively polite Dr Ian Wolfe, the ABC radio news and current affairs supremo with degrees in politics and psychology. After being told the fee increase was non negotiable he terminated the negotiation, sacked AAP and did a deal with Agence France Presse for a fraction of the price.

For the first time in its history the ABC no longer relied on a service owned by its competitors. Wolfe had already looked on with approval as the man he had appointed executive producer of AM axed its 20-year old recitation of newspaper editorials entitled “What the Papers Say”. Wolfe believed the ABC owed Murdoch and Fairfax nothing.

Then he went in for the kill.

You were glad he was on your side. Protege Robert Bolton put it this way in a bit that was edited out of the excellent obituary he wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Had some of his staff realised how well he had studied human behaviour and weakness they might not have gone into battle with him. They usually lost.”

No longer having a commercial relationship with AAP Wolfe was free to launch an assault on its revenue stream. He set up an ABC wire service to sell news stories specifically written for radio to the commercial stations who had previously been captives of AAP. The stories on Broadcast News Australia were more timely and better-written (for radio). AAP pulled out all stops to maintain its monopoly and succeeded, although things looked dicey for a while. It had learnt what anyone eventually learned who came up against Ian Wolfe - don’t mess with him, don’t mess with the ABC and don’t imagine convention will hold him back.

I was with him as he sat down for a meeting with the Sydney Stock Exchange and explained that their employees would no longer be reading a ten-minute list of share prices on radio national each lunch time. He told me afterwards it felt like axing the daily reading of the river heights on rural radio which he also had done.

He hired me direct from the Commonwealth Treasury and defended me against all manner of people who thought I wasn’t right for radio. Whenever he offered an opinion about how the broadcasting landscape would develop or news would turn out I found him to be right. I sought his advice long after I had left the ABC.

Broadcast News Australia quietly evolved into NewsRadio, quietly because ABC Managing Director David Hill was trying to sack him at the time. Hill later praised Wolfe for one of the most impressive developments in three decades of broadcasting, and also one of the cheapest.

Intensely loyal to the ABC, incredibly smart and disarmingly shy, Ian Wolfe has left us far too soon.

In the November Walkely Magazine



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A half a century since Love Me Do. I don't bloody believe it.

The Guardian:

"Listening to it with fresh ears, Love Me Do sounds unlike anything else in the charts of the day... Love Me Do is weird. It's not compressed to hell.. nor string-sweetened.. It's dry, stark, almost "live": the extreme simplicity of the lyric and, on occasion, the stop/start, almost halting arrangement (check out the oddly burlesque bass drum "boomph" at around 1'52") makes you think that this is a group operating near the limits of their ability.

The lyric, while entirely within period romantic cliches, is both slightly awkward – "love me do": who ever says that when they're chatting someone up? – and direct ("someone like you"). Which makes it a pretty faithful expression of teen courting rituals, with their mixture of uncertainty and desire."

Enjoy.

Read more >>

The finest speech Nixon never gave. What if Armstrong had died on the moon?

July 18, 1969. William Safire prepared a speech:

HT: Gawker, via Boing Boing via Tim Watts

In the words of one commenter: I can imagine Safire writing this, privately pondering the etymological connections of lunar and lunacy. In a genre that requires weight and sober rhythm, it is beyond effective.

In the words of another: Did Bowie get an advance copy?



HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING: The first man on the moon, Guardian July 2009

ALSO RECOMMENDED, AUSTRALIA'S EXCLUSIVE: An audience with Neil Armstrong

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BRW Rich 200: Congratulations Therese Rein

My favourite multimillionaire

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd may for the moment no longer be A-list material, but his wife Therese Rein today joins one of the most exclusive clubs of them all.

Weighing in at $210 million she elbows her way into the BRW Rich 200 list at position 199.

Being a woman puts her in even rarer company. Only 16 women feature in the Business Review Weekly Rich 200, up from 15 last year.

Rarer still, she’s done it herself. BRW editor in chief Kate Mills says most of the people in the list do it from inherited wealth.

Even Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world with $18.87 billion (who again tops the list) did it after inheriting $75 million and mining royalties.

“That should not take away from Gina’s achievement,” says Ms Mills. “She could have done nothing, she could have taken the money and lived a good and happy life. We celebrate the fact that she didn’t. She took on a male-dominated industry and now she sits on top of it.”

Ms Rinehart yesterday suffered an unusual setback, being passed over for a seat on the board of Fairfax Media, publisher of BRW and The Age. The seat went to accountant James Millar, a former head of former Ernst & Young. Ms Rinehart owns 12.8 per cent of Fairfax.

“Therese is different from Gina,” say Ms Mills. “It is very difficult to build up enough wealth to get on the list within a generation. That’s why there are so many families and dynasties on it"....

“Mining magnate Nathan Tinkler is an exception. He has build massive wealth in a single lifetime, but he has done it in a booming sector. Therese is in the welfare sector, it isn’t booming and it is regulation-driven. Every time a law comes out about occupation health and safety, organisations like Therese Rein’s think there is going to be work out there explaining it to people.”

The size of Ms Rein’s wealth was unclear until the election of her husband’s government in 2007 forced her to sell the Australian arm of her employment services agency for what BRW believes was $170 million.

“Not all of that went to her, some of it would have been covered by debt,” says Ms Mills who will not confirm whether she spoke to Ms Rein in preparing the list. “In some ways it is what she did next that was more extraordinary. She went to United Kingdom and took advantage of opportunities opening up under the Blair Labour government and then under the Cameron conservatives.”

“In the past year she has done an employment services deal with Cameron’s government worth $1.4 billion over five years. The UK arm of her firm Ingeus is a joint venture with the consulting firm Deloitte, so the income will be shared.”

“She has ridden on the back of what you might call the outsourcing of the state, things such as welfare to work programs. It has happened throughout the West, and Ingeus is now in eight nations.”

Ms Mills is farm from certain Ms Rein will stay in the list. There’s a lot of movement at the bottom as some people join the top 200 and the wealth of others slip below it. The top is more stable, although even there there are surprises. Mining entrepreneur Clive Palmer slipped around $1 billion in the latest survey following a number of deals that didn’t work out.

In an extreme sense membership of the list is voluntary. Some years ago when BRW approached philanthropist Dick Smith to confirm his wealth for the list he said he would would give away assets rather than be on it, which he did, slipping below the cut-off point.

In today's Age


BRW Top 5

Name WEALTH INDUSTRY
Gina Rinehart $29.17 b Resources
Ivan Glasenberg $ 7.40 b Resources
Frank Lowy $6.47 b Property
Andrew Forrest $5.89 b Resources
Anthony Pratt & family $5.45 b Manufacturing, investment

Women – Top 5

NAME WEALTH INDUSTRY
Gina Rinehart $29.17 b Resources
Angela Bennett $2.03 b Resources
Vicky Teoh $525 m Technology
Charlotte Vidor $485 m Property
Imelda Roche $440 m Property

Families – Top 5

NAME WEALTH INDUSTRY
Smorgon $2.63 b Investment, property
Liberman $2.20 b Investment
Besen $2.15 b Property, retail
Wright $1.95 b Resources
Myer $1.94 b Retail, property



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Tomorrow we remember Jimmy Little

There will be a memorial service at the Opera House.

Followed by a celebration concert in the Concert Hall 8.00 pm Thursday.

Musicians are begging to be included. There is a limit of two tickets per person.

All of us who have been touched by Jimmy Little have been forever uplifted.

He is lifting the standards in heaven now, and it's our loss.

Brendah Gallagher created the album Messenger with him.

Here's how he described what happened:

"I met Jimmy Little by accident. I'd gone to an inner-city Sydney venue to see a friend's band and as I breasted the top of the stairs and looked through the front door I could see up on stage a good luoking, fifty-something Aboriginal man resplendent in a red shirt, with a guitar, singing a song. I was instantly drawn to a table in front of the stage by one of the most beautiful voices I had heard. I sat transfixed as Jimmy worked his way through a set of standards with such grace and style that I forgot to go to the bar and buy a drink, very unusual behaviour on my part.

I knew Jimmy's songs from when l was a small boy, particularly "The Royal Telephone" which has become part of the Australian cultural firmament. I'd lost track of him over the years and was pleasantly surprised to find him still performing. All I could think of was getting that voice on tape, so after the gig I introduced myself and solicited his phone number with a view to meeting up in the future. I was won over at once by his trademark gentle nature and courtesy.

In my address book, like most other penple, I write underneath the name and phone number a little note as to who they are e.g. plumber, accountant etc. Under Jimmy Little I wrote 'legend'.

For a long time I'd wanted to cover the Reel's 'Quasimodo's Dream’ as a kind of Texas waliz, very simple and intimate. With Jimmy I had found the perfect interpreter for the song. From that came the idea to revisit other seminal Australian compositions: some well known, others not so. Like Captain Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, it hit me like a diamond bullet. I was very nervous when I first rang Jimmy at home with my idea. It was iike a teenage phone call to your first girlfriend. Will I, won't I, will I ...? I did of course, and Jimmy was very cool about it.

The premiss of the exercise was always that this album should be the grand summit of a very special singer and some very special songs. My job was to be a kind of sonic mid-wife and make a bed for something unique but which was still true to the singer and the songwriters.

Together we began this project in June ‘95 and bit by bit, song by song, between my involvement with Karma County and Jimmy's gngoing touring commitments, we finished it in March '99.

Looking back over the last few years some moments stand out. I remember the day Jimmy recorded the vocal for Down Below at my home studio in Bondi. I asked him to freestyle over the outro, whatever came to mind and was comfortable. I sat back and watched Jimmy, eyes closed, silhouetted against the afternoon sun as he whispered his transcendent monologue, a hot norwester pouring through the open window behind him. If you listen closely you can just hear the fluttering curtains. 0r Jimmy raiding the kitchen cupboard for the honey jar just before a session.

Jimmy always wanted to know what was going on in the songs lyrically. Most of them were unfamiliar to him.

It was an experience muddling my way through explanations of the cynical commentator in Quasimodo's Dream, or the domestic carnage of The Way I Made You Feel, but it was integral to his performance. He ate and breathed these songs.

This is his testament. It is a shining moment in my music career."

Brendah Gallagher Sydney, March 1999.

Now listen:

And listen here live all day Thursday.

@JaneHolley48 ABC Digital Extra will broadcast a celebration concert.

@JaneHolley48‏ And Jimmy Little archival material all day as well. Some lovely interviews and and an Awaye! special.



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Peter Veness, the parliament's tribute

House of Representatives, Tuesday February 7

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Get teary again. Celebrate Peter Veness

In today's Canberra Times:

Press Gallery journalist 'much loved'

BY CHRIS JOHNSON

Most journalists are aware that theirs is a privileged role. To witness first-hand events of importance and to be entrusted with accurately reporting them to the wider community is a position both envious and accountable.

Political journalists in particular are cognisant of the fact that their audiences rely on them to impart true accounts about those who would lead the nation.

No reporter was more aware of that responsibility than was Peter Veness, a highly respected and much-loved member of the Canberra Press Gallery, who died on Sunday night after battling a rare form of brain cancer, diagnosed in 2009.

He didn't quite reach his 28th birthday, yet he was vastly wise beyond his years.

Veness - Pete - was a good friend of mine and I can only write this obituary from that perspective.

This cannot be a dispassionate piece of writing, because Veness was not a dispassionate person.

A larrikins' larrikin by any reckoning. Loud and boisterous, yet with a heart as big as his cheeky grin.

And a sensitivity that could make you weep.

He loved to sledge his mates, but he would do anything for them. He taught all his blokey friends that it was okay to say ''I love you brother'' and really mean it.

Veness arrived at the national capital in 2006 after having earned his stripes as so many young journalists do, in regional Australia.

Proud of his innings at Bathurst's Western Advocate newspaper, the young Veness subsequently joined wire service Australian Associated Press and was assigned to the Canberra bureau in Parliament House.

''You know what a big deal it is for me to be in the gallery?'' he would often confide. ''I'd better not stuff it up.'' Far from stuffing things up, Veness filled his role with professionalism and enthusiasm.

Possessing a keen news sense, he could always be relied on to dig up the quirky and uncover the newsworthy in almost any situation.

During the 2007 election campaign, while covering the John Howard trail, he was one morning the only reporter to rise before 4am to join the then prime minister on one of his famous walks.

The journalists were housed for the night at a resort in the Adelaide hills because there were no rooms left in the city's CBD hotels.

Howard was in the city more than an hour's drive away and if any reporter wanted to join him on the optional early constitutional, it would mean a very early rise.

Most decided to pass, but not Veness.

As it turned out, he got to spend half an hour trying to keep up with Howard while enjoying a one-on-one conversation with him.

''I don't agree with everything he does politically,'' Veness said later in the day. ''But, you know, I kinda like the guy.''

The next week we were on the Kevin Rudd trail and after following him around for a few days, Veness sidled up to me one afternoon and whispered with a smile, ''I don't agree with everything he does politically. But, you know, I kinda like the guy.'' Always the even-handed reporter.

Everyone more than ''kinda'' liked Veness, which is why it hit the Press Gallery hard with the news of his diagnosis. His courageous battle was an inspiration to watch, not least because he insisted he was not the inspiring type.

Combining his loves of music and literature, Veness sometimes wrote album reviews and artist interviews using the pen name Sal Caulfield - mixing his favourite fictional characters Sal Paradise from On the Road and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye.

Born in Canberra before moving to Batemans Bay, Veness had a close family.

After his high school days at Gilgandra, Veness and his family settled in Bathurst, where Veness studied journalism at Charles Sturt University. It was from where he sought out again the sweetheart he first met at Gilgandra, Bec Bignell.

Long-time partners, they married after his diagnosis.

He loved his work, he loved his sport, loved his books and his music. But what Veness loved the most was his wife, his family and his friends.

And yep, ''love you too brother''.


Chris Johnson is chief political correspondent for The Canberra Times

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Peter Veness, the hidden parts

During his final days at Clare Holland House Kevin Rudd phoned and read him psalm after psalm.

Labor MP Andrew Leigh held his hand and stayed with him as if time had stood still. Bishop Stuart Robinson prayed and held his hand. The priests at St Johns came over to offer communion. Friends poured in from all over Australia.

In Peter's hands when he died were the blue teddy bear that had comforted him through three or four years of hospital visits fighting cancer, and a small wooden cross.

Peter Veness was - is - a truly wonderful human being. You can read tributes to him here and here.

He was frightened and brave.

What the tributes gloss over is that he was a Christian. He talked to God and wanted to know him.

He was Chair of St John's Parish Council. He was studying theology at St Mark's.

God made him strong for other people, for his wife Bec, and strong enough to stand up to the cancer that just weeks ago game back for one final attack.

To downplay his faith in Jesus in assessments of his life and his effect on people is to downplay an important part of who he was.

I love Peter. So many of us do.

He'll be remembered at 10.30 this morning at St Johns, and afterwards at the National Press Club.






Here is a feature Peter Veness wrote for his employer AAP in 2009:

I have cancer. I am 25 years old.

By Peter Veness

First it was in my brain and now it's spread to my spine.

I had brain surgery to remove the tumour from my head, which had been missed six months earlier; eight tumours then appeared on my spine.

The doctors give me little hope.

Stuff the doctors who have already killed me; they don't tell me when to die.

These are the same doctors who told me they would eat their hats if there were any tumours on my spine.

Well, get out your knives and forks, boys, and chow down on those Akubras. It's ridiculous that they talk like this but it's exactly what happened to a close friend who was told she almost certainly had cancer only to be diagnosed with a completely different disease that could almost certainly be fixed with antibiotics.

Yes, these diseases are no doubt difficult but surely doctors should not offer such certainty without first doing the science.

The other fun is monthly MRI scans of my brain and spine. An MRI is a small, loud tunnel the patient is fed into and then left there to wonder what is going on for as long as it takes.

At the last visit it took more than two hours and about 10 attempts at finding a vein before the nurse knocked the needle out anyway but at the end the news was good, the cancer hadn't grown.

Amidst all of this is the gut-ripping nausea, from chemotherapy, that keeps you on a constant feed of different drugs, none of which work too well most days.

These regular processes, the reminders that cancer is inside me, are my frustration and my necessary schedule amidst a lot of fear.

I am getting married to the woman of my dreams on September 5.

A few days after being diagnosed with brain cancer, I borrowed mum's sapphire ring and knelt down in the hospital's chapel. Bec thought I was falling over, my balance blown from surgery, but I begged her for patience.

"Will you marry me?"

"You already know the answer."

"Well can I hear it then?"

We were told to bring the wedding forward and are already planning to renew our vows on the day we initially planned to wed late next year.

Sometimes I am angry, other times sad but this I know.

Desperately; with hunger, determination and struggle, I am living a life of no regrets and most definitely our wedding is a part of that.

We've invited the long-lost aunty and the mates we haven't seen in years; having cancer hands an extra urgency to everything. It also seems to give you extra rights, extra legitimacy to do outrageous things.

I have recurring memories of being dunked by waves on the NSW south coast where I spent my childhood nearly drowning and spitting out sand.

Despite the pain in my back from a biopsy on my spine, I am going to drive down the mountains from Canberra to the sand and let one giant wave hit me, drag me under the white foam and bash me.

It's a silly memory, I know, but I would regret not doing it if it is to be for one last time. I don't want to jump out of a plane, sail around the world or climb Mount Everest but I fear spending my final months on the couch watching daytime TV through an inability to make decisions, a fear of moving.

My counsellor - a specialised cancer patient counsellor - must deal with the most harrowing stories every day, and encouraged my life of no regrets. She has had to harshly remind me the likely outcome of all of this is death.

Live a life of no regrets. Don't die wondering.

Even when life is consumed by thoughts of death, of leaving my most loved, of lying in a coffin, of being lowered six feet, there are ways of smiling.

Old, silly jokes still bring a smile to my face and the sight of just about any dog makes me joyous from a childhood spent spilling all my secrets to my loyal blue heeler Bert.

There is one final wish I haven't mentioned.

To live.

I pray at night, asking my God the seeming simplest of questions: "Will you save me?" I haven't heard back yet.

I often ask myself, what about those times when I'm not fulfilling a wish, not doing something on the bucket list?

There are times spent watching inane night-time TV and putting a load of washing on or, like last week, returning a broken vacuum cleaner for replacement.

These aren't things you dream of doing when your life is given a shortened deadline.

The mundaneness of life continues even when you're dying.

Read more >>

Weekend listening - Stephen Fry's top five songs, chosen for the ABC

It's here. Just hit play.

Oh, and Her's Fry with Lady Ga Ga.

Enjoy.



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What is genius? Ian Carroll, a celebration

Cleverness. Genius. At their core is the ability to spot patterns, usually across contexts.

Ian Carroll was extraordinary.

As executive producer of every one of his TV shows I had friends working on, and as executive producer of the one I worked with him on he would come up with story ideas others were inclined to dismiss as off the pace. And then time and time again, two or so weeks later his idea would turn out to have been exactly the right one. He could do this because he was always taking in information ans seeing the skeleton behind the form, spotting a pattern, seeing how things would pan out. To talk to him was an education.

And I did, long before I worked for him.

He would ring me up out of the blue and say - what do you think about this.

His professional and romantic life was played out on a giant canvas. Yet he was completely self-effacing, shy.

As a force for good in the ABC he was probably unrivaled, yet he was never managing director.

What follows will leave out a lot. There's a lot I don't know. Read about Ian Carroll here and here and here.

In 1985 after working on Nationwide (a precursor to 7.30) he got what he had been lobbying for - a chance to take over ABC television news. Until then ABC TV news had been prepared using ABC radio reporters such as myself and TV reporters who were also required to file for radio. In Sydney they were in separate locations... With no training or tutoring in how to put together television reports and without the opportunity to view the vision, people such as myself made pretty average television stories. ABC TV News even used the radio theme music. On D-Day the two separated. (Not that us radio reporters minded - one had a sign on his door that read "all I want is a day when I can stop working for television".)

To fully take on the commercial networks the new program (called The National) started at the commercial 6.30 pm time slot, rather than the old ABC time of 7.00 pm.

So worried were Nine and Seven they immediately moved forward their bulletins to 6.00 pm where they have remained ever since.

The National ran for 60 minutes and melded news and current affairs, using a news presenter Richard Morecroft and a current affairs presenter - a young, recently on-air pregnant Geraldine Doogue.

ABC traditionalists hated it. At the end of the year ABC TV news returned to 7.00 pm.

But under the apparent form of failure lay a victory. I am sure Carroll knew it.

The old TV news bulletin hadn't returned. The new one was made by the new all-TV staff. (Nor did the old theme return. The theme Carroll introduced in 1986 is still regarded as the best ever. Last year it came in at Number 11 on JJJ's Hot 100).

He had something of a personal victory as well, ending the year with Geraldine Doogue who he later married - the whole thing played out in the gossip pages, especially those of the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

Gerry and Ian were made for each other. The perpetually curious had found the perpetually insightful. And the perpetually shy had found the perpetually outgoing.

Some years later, forewarned the new ABC administration had it in for him, he fled to Nine and Today.

He made Today a cutting edge current affairs show, using the his instinct for knowing days or weeks ahead how something would pan out and what people would talk about.

(Incidentally he turned the other cheek and hired the same Daily Telegraph gossip columnist, who had made his life a misery, as his gossip/society reporter. Not many people would do that. Of course it worked. Carroll wouldn't have doubted it. The man who had caused him anguish was forced to confront the fact he had been dealing with a human being. Later he did the same thing at Four Corners, giving the ABC critic Gerard Henderson a role as guest reporter.)

While in commercial television he conceived LateLine and came back to the ABC with Kerry O'Brien. It worked partly because of Kerry's formidable interviewing skills. But it worked mainly because of the breadth of topics covered and the way in which almost every one was exactly in tune with the times. Carroll again. He read, he thought, he saw patterns.

Then there was Four Corners, the new national 7.30 Report (on which he employed me) and sudden retirement from all program making. He wanted a rest from continually thinking about the news, he told me.

In his new role he was a strategist, helping ABC adjust to new environments and new technology.

He foresaw the way TV reporters would eventually come to edit their own stories. He outlined this to me back in the late 1990s a decade before it happened. Equipment had traditionally been very expensive and staff relatively cheap. So it made sense to work a few pieces of editing equipment hard with dedicated editors. As equipment became dirt cheap and staff relatively expensive there would be little cost in leaving the editing equipment idle, putting one set on each reporters desk... and so on.

He set up the ABC's first add-on digital channels (later temporarily abandoned in a cost-cutting drive) years before the more recent, much praised ABC 2 and ABC 3.

And he saved Australia Television. Seriously. When the part-Murdoch owned Sky News made a bid to replace the ABC as Australian government's overseas television broadcaster during the Howard years, Murdoch was certain to win.

That Murdoch didn't was incredible. Unbelievable. Building the case, building the coalitions, understanding the subtlety of everyone's different positions, winning over a government that wanted to punish the ABC was almost impossible, and nearly killed Ian.

Saving Australia Television will be far easier this time. Well, it ought to be.

Along the way Ian quietly applied to be managing director of SBS TV. He made the mistake of telling the selection panel their mission statement was wrong. Rather than "communicating Australia's living diversity" the SBS should be focused on bringing stories from other nations to Australia.

He didn't get the job, but a few years later the SBS saw the light and adopted his sort of slogan: "Six Billion Stories and Counting". He was right, early.

Ian died last night of cancer, his family and friends gathered around him.

He was impossibly young - 64.

In one year we have lost Murray Sayle, Cathy Carey, Tony Barrell and Ian Carroll. We shouldn't have.

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Rob Chalmers, legend

Rob has produced his final edition of Inside Canberra.

He died yesterday, aged 82, after the sudden final phase of a seven year battle with cancer.

In the press gallery for 60 years, Rob jokingly dismissed Ramsay, Oakes and Grattan as "young pups".

Ramsay says "nobody, in an any capacity – politician, bureaucrat or journalist – has equalled what Rob Chalmers somehow endured in the nation’s parliament, from the day he attended his first Question Time on 7 March 1951".

Always generous, always interested, and for a time a radio voice I grew up with on 2CH, he has been a part of my life for half his 60 years working in Australia's parliament.

Rob can't be replaced.

Rob and his family can be proud of the life he lived.

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