The underlying problem with the Voice was that it was, in effect, a revived and remodelled ATSIC, and Albanese was unwilling to defend that. Hence, all the footwork around the famous "details", pointing to the Calma-Langton report as showing everything we needed to know, while backgrounding that the government wasn't committed to the ideas in that report at all.
Finally, I’m sorry my first two threads were so long that I had to split them. But I just loved this article, plus Paul Norton’s comment and link about wicked problems, so sharing my experiences felt relevant and cathartic.
well what a refreshing read that was TD and as a bonus you offered solutions in the last 2 paragraphs. They are of course the answer to good governance for the national good.... but in practice perhaps unachievable. Keeping up with the important goings-on is hard work & besides how do you decide what's important for the citizenry? Furthermore hasn't politics been simplified to a corporate duopoly model that relies on apathy. From what I see the vast majority are too busy just getting by to have the time to commit to active participation. Besides is it not engineered that way. Just go with either of the two brands. Simple. Getting rid of the two brands that's what we've got to change.
(The Australian Audit office later audited this program. They made their usual quibbles about process - but missed a $15million mistake. At the same time this was happening, a year or two into the program, the government ran out of GFC money for building new classrooms etc (the policy which kept tradies working and probably kept Australia out of recession) - and realized they needed to give Victoria an extra $150m or so. So there was a one line cabinet decision saying “give $150m from our program to Victoria.” But it didn’t change what by then were the legal boundaries for spending from our program, so I had to tell Vic Planning Dept, find some building project you are already doing, which invariably were mainly privately funded with a bit of state cash, promise to include x residences at $y below “ market value” and ask us for this amount (and named the exact amount cabinet has told us to give them). Then - always in face to face meetings - explain the reason, how the promise was meaningless, just alter their existing plans (which from memory were high rise inner city residential developments) add the extra funding and the necessary promises (including pointless bank guarantee). Eventually they understood, and submitted what we needed. Except it was all GST inclusive, and they were due the amount GST exclusive, as that was how our funding worked. (Basically because the GST comes out of a different bucket of funding, most of which gets returned: too complicated to explain here, but more pointless accounting crap for me to get my head around.) So that would mean we would be taking 15% less from our program than the cabinet instruction told us to do. I spoke to my boss: we have to tell the Vics to increase the amount by roughly $17m, so that what we pay from our program comes to the right amount. No, we’ve saved money she said. And the wonderful National Audit Office never picked this up. They just quibbled, grumbled about process, pointless shit designed to look like an audit - but missed the $15 million rip off. Another typical example of bureaucracy in practice.)
Anyway, I got out of that line of work a while ago, and I’m retraining to be a teacher at primary school level. Might as well do something useful, is my thinking. Something that actually is useful, teaching kids. But here too the current fads pervade. “You must ensure your teaching methods are evidence-based”, I hear repeatedly from lecturers. (I try not to groan audibly, as in social “science”, like social policy, evidence-based in practice means doing what you think is best then finding some vaguely relevant and plausible reason to support it.) But, like data and evidence based, science is the best marketing tool around. For teaching children to read, the current fad describes itself as the “Science of Reading” or SoR, using the magic quinella of “science” along with pointless capital letters for added “validity”. Then it hits the trifecta by also supposedly linking this “pedagogy” to neuroscience, but that field is in its infancy and there’s no actual evidence from neuroscientists to support the education academics peddling it as the reason to increase focus on phonics. (If you search, you’ll find where a group of real neuroscientists wrote a public letter disavowing the connection to learning to read to what they are learning from brain scans, usually performed on people with very serious brain disabilities, with any proof that more phonics is best. But, of course, what really drives all of this is money, not the public good (and finally my post returns to the theme of this article!). Countless Edubusinesses create new phonics programs, claim that they are backed by Science and Neuroscience (sounds even better, plain science is a bit old hat now for marketing), and countless schools, state education departments, even tertiary institutions pay vast amounts of money to private corporations, who are by definition interested in profit not public benefit.
My university, for example, and I believe many others, purchase a tool called Turnitin. The company (of the same name) uses its database to check for plagiarism. Fair enough - except there are many other such tools available for nothing. Best of all, the university also forces every student to submit every assignment to Turnitin - AND grant them an inalienable, no time limit, license to the intellectual property of every single piece of work submitted to them. So I still own the intellectual property of the work I submit - but along with 750 million other students (yes 750 million, and growing), I’m also forced to grant a private company access and the right to use - including for profit - my intellectual property. Just imagine the knowledge bank this private company now has, ever growing, to use as it pleases! Its latest scam is it promises it can check for students’ use of AI in their essays. I discovered this when my first submitted assignment came back with a stern warning. We were told to have an introductory paragraph which effectively restated the assignment to explain what would follow. As an ex-bureaucrat, this is something I can do with ease, and wrote a succinct, very generic and non personal, introductory paragraph. “Written by AI” said Turnitin! This was my first encounter with the new Turnitin AI checker - and other than the usual spellcheck, I had never even looked at any of the 100s of AI tools on sale for students to fool lazy academics. “Is spellcheck ok?” I asked. “No problem.” “But isn’t that AI?” Oh, that’s fine. So I googled Turnitin and AI tools generally, and had a play with the supposedly brilliant chatGPT (4). As I logically and intuitively expected, there are already 100s of AI tools promising to write essays which won’t get picked up by Turnitin. Well doh! How can one AI tool reliably detect other AI tools? (Reminds me of a great novel, The Tin Men, written in the 1960s, where a scientist is trying to program two computers to work out what to do when placed on a raft which will sink unless one of them jumps off. But I digress!) Yet tertiary institutions are paying big bucks for this rubbish program Turnitin and worst of all giving away every students’ every piece of intellectual property! What a scam. There are now a few articles about this (but last time I tried leaving this post to copy and post a link, I lost the whole post). Google Turnitin, AI detection, Washington Post and you will see what I mean. There are a few good scholarly articles criticizing Turnitin too - from before the recently introduced bullshit about AI detection. I’ll find that link and post it below this post.
My overall point is how much this article resonated, amplified and expanded my worries about how the human race will survive. Politics is such a mess, extremists on the rise, privatization has been a disaster, tech is brilliant but never quite works seamlessly - and now my 81yo friend is being forced to attend videoconferences to get his much needed knee replacement. He can barely use his phone for texts, video conferencing is too difficult. But that’s the health department’s cost cutting measure.
What will stop this chase by the privileged few for even greater riches, and return society’s focus to doing things “for the greater good”? I’ve got no idea, but just see us rushing more and more quickly into oblivion.
This article resonated particularly with me, especially the use of the wonderful HL Mencken quotation (“every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible - and wrong”). Then Paul Norton’s comment, and link to information about “wicked problems” really solidified thoughts which have been drifting around my brain for ages. For many years, I was a moderately senior bureaucrat in the social policy area. For the past 20 years or so, the oft-repeated mantra has been for “evidence-based” policy and policy advice. It’s the sort of meaningless statement in every department’s “mission statement” or other such supposedly overarching departmental requirement. More recently, “big data” was added to the fad. In practice, it just creates absurd situations as my first task at the “Executive Level 2” in a social policy department. (I can’t recall its name at the time, as it changed so often, but it’s the one which does things like set the policy which Service Australia must follow, dish out funding for each Minister’s or Government’s pet social project.) At that time, it also had Housing tacked onto its responsibilities, and I was recruited to implement an election commitment (henceforth “promise”).
The promise was that $500 million would be allocated to increase the amount of available low cost housing. Its only legal / legislative basis was a few short dot points of a cabinet decision, available to view only with high clearance, and notes only permitted. The Minister, I suspect under instruction, was told to get the money out of the door quickly, and then even more quickly because the GFC hit. So we bureaucrats scrambled to come up with something plausible, which the Minister would then authorise. All done within a couple of months, and by 30 June 2008 we had the first tranche of $50m paid out. But then the ridiculous stuff really kicked in, when the internal department auditors examined our work. “Where is the program logic? Where is the evidence this will help?” And referred me to various internal requirements with the noble aim of making sensible policy. But this wasn’t policy developed from evidence. It was meeting a promise, an election commitment no less (and arguably a stupid one, state 3 tax cuts come to mind) - and doing what we bureaucrats were doing what we are required to do, and that is do what the Minister / Government / Cabinet legally instructed us to do. “Oh, you can’t put that in the policy rationale”, the “auditors” claimed. So in one drunken night (because who could perform such a pointless task sober), I wrote the biggest load of bullshit supposedly giving an evidence base that, say, giving a local government $10m to set up water/power/road infrastructure for a new development, which they would “guarantee” would include a specific number of houses at a specific amount below the market price. Except, the amount of reduction were usually $10,000 per residence, and the Valuations Office gave us clear advice that measuring whether such a promise was met, noting the houses wouldn’t be built for five to ten years after the money was provided, world be impossible. “Market value” is so variable, and how could anyone prove it had been delivered? More pertinently, what Australian Government would demand the particular funding recipient, mainly local governments, plus some State Government departments repay the funding multiple years later? (At the time, the news was full of the revelation that $2 billion given to the NT Govt specifically for First Nations people had been spent on building nice offices in Darwin. Was the NT Govt asked to repay the money? Of course not, the feds pay money to States and Territories, asking for it back would be political suicide!)
Then our department’s legal people got involved - after contracts had been agreed and announced but not yet signed. “You must make each funding recipient take out a bank guarantee that they will repay the money, otherwise this department could be held responsible for stupid spending”, said the departmental legal gurus. But of course that wasn’t in the selection criteria, so what happened was we made each recipient get a quote for the guarantee, added that amount to the amount they would receive, and paid that amount upfront first upon contract signing, saying you only get the rest when we receive the bank guarantee from you. Which, eventually, happened - although most of the recipients found it bizarre that they were actually being required to keep to a contract promise before getting their next payment. Apparently, after 13 years of Howard Govt pork barrelling, that was unheard of. “You expect us to meet the contract to get the payments?” they all asked in amazement. So what this all meant in practice was that the Australian Government paid funds to banks (via the funding recipient) to get meaningless guarantees to meet a promise that could never be measured anyway, and so went $10-20m of the $500m, which was supposedly allocated to increase the availability of affordable housing. The ultimate bureaucratic response to a wicked problem, to which a politician / party had made a Mencken-like “simple, direct, plausible” election commitment, which would supposedly solve the problem.
The underlying problem with the Voice was that it was, in effect, a revived and remodelled ATSIC, and Albanese was unwilling to defend that. Hence, all the footwork around the famous "details", pointing to the Calma-Langton report as showing everything we needed to know, while backgrounding that the government wasn't committed to the ideas in that report at all.
Wicked problems don't have innocent solutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Finally, I’m sorry my first two threads were so long that I had to split them. But I just loved this article, plus Paul Norton’s comment and link about wicked problems, so sharing my experiences felt relevant and cathartic.
And this was published online in a scholarly reviewed education site:
https://hybridpedagogy.org/resisting-edtech/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/01/chatgpt-cheating-detection-turnitin/
Article on the stupidity of Turnitin. (Apologies if it is paywalled. It wasn’t for me though.)
well what a refreshing read that was TD and as a bonus you offered solutions in the last 2 paragraphs. They are of course the answer to good governance for the national good.... but in practice perhaps unachievable. Keeping up with the important goings-on is hard work & besides how do you decide what's important for the citizenry? Furthermore hasn't politics been simplified to a corporate duopoly model that relies on apathy. From what I see the vast majority are too busy just getting by to have the time to commit to active participation. Besides is it not engineered that way. Just go with either of the two brands. Simple. Getting rid of the two brands that's what we've got to change.
Continuing
(The Australian Audit office later audited this program. They made their usual quibbles about process - but missed a $15million mistake. At the same time this was happening, a year or two into the program, the government ran out of GFC money for building new classrooms etc (the policy which kept tradies working and probably kept Australia out of recession) - and realized they needed to give Victoria an extra $150m or so. So there was a one line cabinet decision saying “give $150m from our program to Victoria.” But it didn’t change what by then were the legal boundaries for spending from our program, so I had to tell Vic Planning Dept, find some building project you are already doing, which invariably were mainly privately funded with a bit of state cash, promise to include x residences at $y below “ market value” and ask us for this amount (and named the exact amount cabinet has told us to give them). Then - always in face to face meetings - explain the reason, how the promise was meaningless, just alter their existing plans (which from memory were high rise inner city residential developments) add the extra funding and the necessary promises (including pointless bank guarantee). Eventually they understood, and submitted what we needed. Except it was all GST inclusive, and they were due the amount GST exclusive, as that was how our funding worked. (Basically because the GST comes out of a different bucket of funding, most of which gets returned: too complicated to explain here, but more pointless accounting crap for me to get my head around.) So that would mean we would be taking 15% less from our program than the cabinet instruction told us to do. I spoke to my boss: we have to tell the Vics to increase the amount by roughly $17m, so that what we pay from our program comes to the right amount. No, we’ve saved money she said. And the wonderful National Audit Office never picked this up. They just quibbled, grumbled about process, pointless shit designed to look like an audit - but missed the $15 million rip off. Another typical example of bureaucracy in practice.)
Anyway, I got out of that line of work a while ago, and I’m retraining to be a teacher at primary school level. Might as well do something useful, is my thinking. Something that actually is useful, teaching kids. But here too the current fads pervade. “You must ensure your teaching methods are evidence-based”, I hear repeatedly from lecturers. (I try not to groan audibly, as in social “science”, like social policy, evidence-based in practice means doing what you think is best then finding some vaguely relevant and plausible reason to support it.) But, like data and evidence based, science is the best marketing tool around. For teaching children to read, the current fad describes itself as the “Science of Reading” or SoR, using the magic quinella of “science” along with pointless capital letters for added “validity”. Then it hits the trifecta by also supposedly linking this “pedagogy” to neuroscience, but that field is in its infancy and there’s no actual evidence from neuroscientists to support the education academics peddling it as the reason to increase focus on phonics. (If you search, you’ll find where a group of real neuroscientists wrote a public letter disavowing the connection to learning to read to what they are learning from brain scans, usually performed on people with very serious brain disabilities, with any proof that more phonics is best. But, of course, what really drives all of this is money, not the public good (and finally my post returns to the theme of this article!). Countless Edubusinesses create new phonics programs, claim that they are backed by Science and Neuroscience (sounds even better, plain science is a bit old hat now for marketing), and countless schools, state education departments, even tertiary institutions pay vast amounts of money to private corporations, who are by definition interested in profit not public benefit.
My university, for example, and I believe many others, purchase a tool called Turnitin. The company (of the same name) uses its database to check for plagiarism. Fair enough - except there are many other such tools available for nothing. Best of all, the university also forces every student to submit every assignment to Turnitin - AND grant them an inalienable, no time limit, license to the intellectual property of every single piece of work submitted to them. So I still own the intellectual property of the work I submit - but along with 750 million other students (yes 750 million, and growing), I’m also forced to grant a private company access and the right to use - including for profit - my intellectual property. Just imagine the knowledge bank this private company now has, ever growing, to use as it pleases! Its latest scam is it promises it can check for students’ use of AI in their essays. I discovered this when my first submitted assignment came back with a stern warning. We were told to have an introductory paragraph which effectively restated the assignment to explain what would follow. As an ex-bureaucrat, this is something I can do with ease, and wrote a succinct, very generic and non personal, introductory paragraph. “Written by AI” said Turnitin! This was my first encounter with the new Turnitin AI checker - and other than the usual spellcheck, I had never even looked at any of the 100s of AI tools on sale for students to fool lazy academics. “Is spellcheck ok?” I asked. “No problem.” “But isn’t that AI?” Oh, that’s fine. So I googled Turnitin and AI tools generally, and had a play with the supposedly brilliant chatGPT (4). As I logically and intuitively expected, there are already 100s of AI tools promising to write essays which won’t get picked up by Turnitin. Well doh! How can one AI tool reliably detect other AI tools? (Reminds me of a great novel, The Tin Men, written in the 1960s, where a scientist is trying to program two computers to work out what to do when placed on a raft which will sink unless one of them jumps off. But I digress!) Yet tertiary institutions are paying big bucks for this rubbish program Turnitin and worst of all giving away every students’ every piece of intellectual property! What a scam. There are now a few articles about this (but last time I tried leaving this post to copy and post a link, I lost the whole post). Google Turnitin, AI detection, Washington Post and you will see what I mean. There are a few good scholarly articles criticizing Turnitin too - from before the recently introduced bullshit about AI detection. I’ll find that link and post it below this post.
My overall point is how much this article resonated, amplified and expanded my worries about how the human race will survive. Politics is such a mess, extremists on the rise, privatization has been a disaster, tech is brilliant but never quite works seamlessly - and now my 81yo friend is being forced to attend videoconferences to get his much needed knee replacement. He can barely use his phone for texts, video conferencing is too difficult. But that’s the health department’s cost cutting measure.
What will stop this chase by the privileged few for even greater riches, and return society’s focus to doing things “for the greater good”? I’ve got no idea, but just see us rushing more and more quickly into oblivion.
This article resonated particularly with me, especially the use of the wonderful HL Mencken quotation (“every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible - and wrong”). Then Paul Norton’s comment, and link to information about “wicked problems” really solidified thoughts which have been drifting around my brain for ages. For many years, I was a moderately senior bureaucrat in the social policy area. For the past 20 years or so, the oft-repeated mantra has been for “evidence-based” policy and policy advice. It’s the sort of meaningless statement in every department’s “mission statement” or other such supposedly overarching departmental requirement. More recently, “big data” was added to the fad. In practice, it just creates absurd situations as my first task at the “Executive Level 2” in a social policy department. (I can’t recall its name at the time, as it changed so often, but it’s the one which does things like set the policy which Service Australia must follow, dish out funding for each Minister’s or Government’s pet social project.) At that time, it also had Housing tacked onto its responsibilities, and I was recruited to implement an election commitment (henceforth “promise”).
The promise was that $500 million would be allocated to increase the amount of available low cost housing. Its only legal / legislative basis was a few short dot points of a cabinet decision, available to view only with high clearance, and notes only permitted. The Minister, I suspect under instruction, was told to get the money out of the door quickly, and then even more quickly because the GFC hit. So we bureaucrats scrambled to come up with something plausible, which the Minister would then authorise. All done within a couple of months, and by 30 June 2008 we had the first tranche of $50m paid out. But then the ridiculous stuff really kicked in, when the internal department auditors examined our work. “Where is the program logic? Where is the evidence this will help?” And referred me to various internal requirements with the noble aim of making sensible policy. But this wasn’t policy developed from evidence. It was meeting a promise, an election commitment no less (and arguably a stupid one, state 3 tax cuts come to mind) - and doing what we bureaucrats were doing what we are required to do, and that is do what the Minister / Government / Cabinet legally instructed us to do. “Oh, you can’t put that in the policy rationale”, the “auditors” claimed. So in one drunken night (because who could perform such a pointless task sober), I wrote the biggest load of bullshit supposedly giving an evidence base that, say, giving a local government $10m to set up water/power/road infrastructure for a new development, which they would “guarantee” would include a specific number of houses at a specific amount below the market price. Except, the amount of reduction were usually $10,000 per residence, and the Valuations Office gave us clear advice that measuring whether such a promise was met, noting the houses wouldn’t be built for five to ten years after the money was provided, world be impossible. “Market value” is so variable, and how could anyone prove it had been delivered? More pertinently, what Australian Government would demand the particular funding recipient, mainly local governments, plus some State Government departments repay the funding multiple years later? (At the time, the news was full of the revelation that $2 billion given to the NT Govt specifically for First Nations people had been spent on building nice offices in Darwin. Was the NT Govt asked to repay the money? Of course not, the feds pay money to States and Territories, asking for it back would be political suicide!)
Then our department’s legal people got involved - after contracts had been agreed and announced but not yet signed. “You must make each funding recipient take out a bank guarantee that they will repay the money, otherwise this department could be held responsible for stupid spending”, said the departmental legal gurus. But of course that wasn’t in the selection criteria, so what happened was we made each recipient get a quote for the guarantee, added that amount to the amount they would receive, and paid that amount upfront first upon contract signing, saying you only get the rest when we receive the bank guarantee from you. Which, eventually, happened - although most of the recipients found it bizarre that they were actually being required to keep to a contract promise before getting their next payment. Apparently, after 13 years of Howard Govt pork barrelling, that was unheard of. “You expect us to meet the contract to get the payments?” they all asked in amazement. So what this all meant in practice was that the Australian Government paid funds to banks (via the funding recipient) to get meaningless guarantees to meet a promise that could never be measured anyway, and so went $10-20m of the $500m, which was supposedly allocated to increase the availability of affordable housing. The ultimate bureaucratic response to a wicked problem, to which a politician / party had made a Mencken-like “simple, direct, plausible” election commitment, which would supposedly solve the problem.
See next post for rest
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