Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: politics

A question of relevance – why the PM welcomes bloggers
The Prime Minister’s courting of bloggers in the run up to the Australian Federal election later this year shows how credibility and relevance are most important assets for any media outlet.

Late last year the Prime Minister invited bloggers to Kirribilli House for lunch then to dinner during her Rooty Hill adventure a few weeks ago.

The press gallery grumbled and wrote patronising articles about North Shore mummy bloggers but failed to recognise the real threat to the established media outlets – these writers are more relevant to people’s lives than the machinations of ‘anonymous political sources’, sports stars or Hollywood celebrities.

Now the Prime Minister is giving one on one exclusive interviews to some of those bloggers, something that will irritate the nation’s political journalists even further.

Old media’s loss of relevance

The press galleries’ problem though is relevance, which lies at the heart of any successful media outlet.

In 1831 when The Sydney Herald’s first edition was published, the front page was made up of advertisements and shipping notices as it was with all newspapers of the time.

That was relevant to the readers, they paid 7d – not an insubstantial amount in 1831 – to find out the latest in shipping movements, real estate sales and livestock prices which were essential to life and business in the colony.

It wasn’t until 1944 that the now Sydney Morning Herald moved news to the front page, the London Times held out until 1966. What was now relevant to readers were photos and wire stories from around the world.

Papers continued to do well despite the introduction of radio in the 1930s and TV in the 1950s because they were continued to be relevant to their readers. If you were looking a job, a house or where to take your mum for her 60th birthday then the local newspaper was the place to look.

The shift to sensationalism

In the 1980s all the media – newspapers, TV and radio stations – started a shift to sensationalism and infotainment and steadily all became less relevant to the populations they served.

At the time media outlets got away with it as there was no-where else for people to get news. If you didn’t like stories about Princess Di’s wedding dress then you had to curl up in the corner with a good book.

Then the web came along.

All of a sudden engaged readers could get relevant information from all over the world.

With social media and blogs, reporting Kim Kardishian’s latest wardrobe malfunction raised a ‘so what’ from an audience that learned about it two days ago on TMZ, the Huffington Post or Facebook.

Making matters much, much worse were the advertising rivers of gold moved to specialist websites and Google.

Newspaper executives found their revenues were evaporating and they worked their way deeper into the quicksand by cutting costs in the areas where their editorial strengths lay, making them even less relevant to the readerships they want to serve.

Relevant lifestyles

Today the mummy bloggers – along with the food bloggers, travel bloggers and political bloggers – are attracting audiences with relevant, useful content that the audience can engage with.

Last week’s embarrassing circus in Canberra was an example of how irrelevant the media, and much of politics, has become to the average Australian.

Indeed it’s interesting to contrast the self important Canberra press gallery pushing non-stories while fawning over their discredited ‘anonymous party sources’ with the genuinely questioning tone of the some of the bloggers.

So the mainstream, established media can kiss the mummy bloggers’ backsides; if they can’t find relevance in today’s society then they may as well shut up shop.

For politicians relevance is important too – political parties that pitch themselves to 19th Century class struggles or 1980s corporatist ideologies are as irrelevant to today’s society as the Soviet Communist Party.

It would serve the Prime Minister and her staff well to listen closely to what the mummy bloggers and their readers are saying.

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March 26, 2013
More National Broadband woes
This is not good for the National Broadband Network project; contractor Service Stream announced it was handing back the Northern Territory rollout contracts to the Australian Security Exchange this morning.

It raises serious questions about the timetable of the project.

Service Stream advises that Syntheo, a 50/50 joint venture with Lend Lease, has reached agreement with

NBN Co to hand back the remainder of its design and construction activities in the Northern Territory. Syntheo is committed to working with NBN Co to complete its work in Western Australia and South Australia.

Given NBNCo abandoned its construction tender in April 2011 amidst hints of price fixing by contractors, this is a worrying development that indicates those ‘overpriced quotes’ may have been closer to the money after all.

I’ll be writing something up later today for IT News.

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March 20, 2013
Australia welcomes the multi generational mortgage
At the height of the Japanese property boom in the 1980s, the hundred year mortgage came into being.

Pushing payments onto children and grand-children was the only way home prices could continue to rise once they hit levels which the average Japanese worker could ever afford with a more traditional twenty or thirty year mortgage.

Twenty five years later Australia finds itself in a similar position as parents guarantee their childrens’ mortgages.

Repeating the Japanese mistake

While the Japanese looked to sticking their mortgages onto their kids and grandkids, Down Under the kids are fighting back and getting mum and dad to underwrite their unaffordable loans.

This weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald features in its property section the story of how Sharon and Graeme Bruce guaranteed their son’s and his fiance’s mortgage in Sydney’s inner suburbs.

While the story isn’t clear on the size of the deposit (which isn’t surprising given the SMH’s shoddy editing), it appears the Bruces’ have guaranteed around $300,000 so his son and future daughter-in-law can grab a five bedroom, 1.45 million dollar mansion.

One wonders what great businesses Matt and Hannah could build if mum and dad were prepared to stump up a similar amount to invest in a start up?

Australia’s property obsession

Sadly we’ll never know – in Australia, the smart money gets a job, pays off a mortgage and accumulates wealth through investment properties. What cows are to African tribesmen, negatively geared units are to the Australian middle class.

The hundred year strategy hasn’t worked too well for Japan, with a declining population those mortgages entered into a boom level 1980s values now don’t look so attractive and are one large reason for the nation’s lost decades.

In Australia, things aren’t likely to work so well either. The Baby Boomers and Lucky Generationals – those born from 1930 to 1945 – guaranteeing their kids’ and grandkids’ mortgages are relying on ever increasing property prices.

This is understandable given that few of them have any experience of long term stagnation, let alone decline, of property values but it leaves them incredibly exposed should the Aussie housing market slump.

Can an Aussie property decline happen?

Many Australians, particularly those with vested interests, maintain such a decline can’t happen but the prospects aren’t good as the SMH story shows;

The couple had attempted to buy a small terrace in Newtown but kept getting pipped at the post by other young professional couples. At a higher price point they had no competition.

Despite his parents’ generosity he said he would still need to rent out a few of the rooms to help pay for the mortgage.

So Matt can’t afford the mortgage. That’s not good starting point and one that could cost his parents dearly, which they don’t seem to care about much.

”Obviously my dad guaranteeing the loan was the only way we were going to purchase this,” Mr Bruce said. ”You need to have a 20 per cent deposit otherwise the banks want you to pay insurance … it’s a bit of a rort really.”

It’s fair to call mortgage insurance a rort – as it certainly is – but its purpose is to protect the banks should a mortgagee default and the financiers find themselves out of pocket.

With Matt’s parents getting him out of paying that insurance his bank has much better default protection, equity in his parents’ property.

Guaranteeing risk and misery

I’m not privy to the finances of Sharon and Bruce, but most of their contemporaries can ill afford to lose several hundred thousand dollars in home equity in their later years.

That is where Australia’s multi-generational mortgages could turn very nasty, very quickly as older Australians find themselves having to deliver on the guarantees they gave on behalf of their over committed offspring.

In Japan, it’s taken a long time for the population to realise their national wealth has been squandered on twenty years of propping up unsustainable property prices and economic policies.

One wonders how long it will takes Australians to realise the same has happened to them and what the political reaction will be.

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March 10, 2013
One street, five networks – the madness of rethinking the NBN
In Technology Spectator today I write about how Australia is risking repeating the mistakes the colonies made with railway gauges on much more grand scale with telecommunications technologies.

With talk of re scoping the National Broadband Network project, despite being four years into a ten year undertaking, it’s important to understand just how foolish this would be an what a mess it will create.

To illustrate this, I’ve gone for a walk along a Sydney street on the Lower North Shore. This suburb is less than 5km from the city’s central business district.

The pillar at the end of the street

At the end of this typical suburban street is a little gray, well guarded but battered pillar. This box is important as it contains the connections to the local telephone network and its replacement will house the distribution equipment for a fibre network regardless of what type is installed.

Interestingly, just the presence of the pillar and the associated manholes nearby indicates there is already fibre in the neighbourhood, one aspect in the NBN debate that’s overlooked is that optical fibre is standard for telco backhaul and distribution networks.

The only reason fibre hasn’t already been rolled out to homes and businesses is the sunk cost of the copper cables. When it’s necessary to replace an entire copper system as in New York after Hurricane Sandy or in South Brisbane after the local phone exchange was sold, then fibre is what telcos will install as its cheaper to maintain.

Plain old telephone lines

Walking down the street we find the first example are those who are going to be stuck with the old copper network under a fibre to the node solution.

What’s notable about that pole is its shocking state – in itself it illustrates just how Australia’s telecommunications networks have been allowed to run down with the underinvestment of the last twenty years.

There’s a very chance the householders connected to those phone lines won’t be able to sustain a reliable ADSL or FTTN connection because of the state of the wires.

Remember, this pole isn’t in some remote part of rural Australia, should you be brave enough to climb it you’d have a wonderful view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, North Sydney and the city. Its state illustrates that underinvestment is just as much a problem in the suburbs as it is in the bush.

Using the Pay-TV network

One the alternatives being touted is using the Pay TV network cables – know as Hybre Fiber Coaxial, or HFC – to carry the broadband signal.

Here’s an example of the Foxtel installations and the poor work quality stands out immediately. The connection on the left is notable for its rain catching properties which doesn’t bode well for what’s happening to the coax cables in the duct lurking beneath the footpath.

As an aside, the sort of poor quality workmanship found in the cable rollout is another risk to the NBN as it appears NBNCo is repeating Foxtel’s mistake of screwing the installation contractors into the ground on their rates. The result is really low quality work which won’t stand the test of time.

Making HFC even less useful is the fact that most Australian properties can’t connect to it.

In one of the best of examples of the drooling incompetence of Australia’s political ‘elite’, the 1990s Keating government managed to engineer a situation where the two cable companies rolled out their networks to the same places – 30% of the country got two networks while the rest received nothing.

The real problem though with the HFC network is that most Australians who can get it haven’t bothered – take up rates in the areas cable is available struggle to hit 50%. So an Abbot government would actually have to pay to connect households to a service they’ve never wanted.

Probably the cruellest part of all with the HFC proposal is the coax network itself is approaching the end of its life and most will be replaced with fibre within a decade. So we’re not saving a cent, just kicking costs down the road.

Apartment living

Even if you lived in that thirty percent of the country that did get pay-TV cable along their street, you were out of luck if you lived in an apartment or townhouse as few strata committees were interested in paying Foxtel install cables and Optus was never interested in MDUs – Multi Dwelling Units in telco-speak.

A little way down the street from the houses photographed above are a group of town houses. Under the current NBN plans, this complex will get fibre. Under the coalition’s it will be stuck with copper.

The worst case scenario is a “fibre to the basement” solution where the fibre is run into the building’s distribution frame and then it’s up to the owners to make the connection using the existing copper phone lines.

In many cases it will never happen as strata managers and committees would keep putting it off, or they’d choose the lowest cost option which would exacerbate the poor work of the overworked NBN contractors.

Tower living

Next door to those townhouses is an eight story apartment block. These people risk being the biggest losers in the new telco environment.

The problem for tower block dwellers is the low quality of the buildings and the lack of space for fibre telco risers. Under the fibre to the premises proposal some of these blocks are going to pose serious challenges to NBNCo.

Should the fibre to the basement proposal go ahead, many of the notoriously penny pinching owners corporations won’t complete the installation.

It’s highly likely that many Australian apartment dwellers are going to find themselves on wireless or LTE (mobile phone) connections for the foreseeable future as both the telco policies and poor building standards are going to deny them access to high speed fibre. This is going to have financial consequences for many landlords.

The risk for businesses

Most Australian businesses which occupy office buildings or industrial estates and they are going to be affected in the same way as apartment dwellers. The solution proposed by the coalition is that they should pay for their own fibre connections. Some will, many won’t and we’ll end up with another set of connections in our commercial districts.

One street, five networks

So just on one suburban street we could have people connecting through the old copper network, the HFC pay TV network, fibre to the basement, wireless and direct fibre for those who can afford it.

This is madness.

What’s even greater madness is that we’re four years into the National Broadband Network project and we’re talking about changing the scope for what’s been billed as one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australian history.

Praying the luck continues

The Technology Spectator starts off with a comparison to the railway gauge madness of the 1850s. There’s an interesting parallel today.

Two weeks ago, the Australian Financial Review reported that millions had been spent on lawyers and consultant fees on Sydney’s North Western railway yet no work has been done.

On the same day, Business Insider published a story on the extensions to New York’s Long Island Railroad.

Around the world governments from New York to Nairobi are getting on with building infrastructure. In the meantime Australia struggles with building tram lines.

When we do decide to build a major project we get four years into it and decide to change our minds.

The nation dodged a bullet despite having made bad choices with roads and railways in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries. Australia prospered despite those poor decisions.

If we can’t get telecommunications right then we better hope the luck continues through the 21st Century.

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March 1, 2013
Do kids really need laptops in school?
Are laptop computers really essential to educating our kids? Fairfax media reports this weekend that the Australian Federal government’s laptops in education scheme is near collapse.

What stands out from the story are the quotes from educators;

Chatswood High School principal Sue Low said her school was providing laptops to students in year 9 but the uncertainty over future plans was unsettling.

“Laptops are now just as much of the culture of education as are pens and paper,” she said. “To not have certainty over how we will administer laptops to our students is very disruptive, and we need that certainty as soon as possible.”

Some schools have come up with their own solution to the problem. One NSW school has made arrangements with a private provider under which parents can buy a laptop for $1341 or rent-to-buy for $90 with monthly payments of about $50.

That computers are important is not a debate, but are we putting to much emphasis on the tools and not enough on what education is trying to achieve?

One educator said a decade ago that they could teach an 80 year old to use a computer in a few hours, but an illiterate 15 year old may be lost for life. This is truer today than it was then.

Computers are flooding our lives with information and the tools to gather that information are intuitive and don’t need 12 years of school to master.

What we are all need are the critical and mathematical skills to filter out the dross and misinformation that floods onto our screens.

Old and young have the belief that if something is on the web, then it must be true. The biggest challenge for parents and teachers with the web is convincing kids that cutting and pasting huge slabs of Wikipedia into an assignment isn’t research.

Not that this is just a problem in the classroom – plenty of politicians, business leaders and time poor journalists have been caught out plagiarising Wikipedia and other websites.

In recent times I’ve been to a lot of ‘future of media’ events where the importance of ‘data journalism’ has been raised. What really sticks out listening to these is how poorly equipped both young and old journalists are to evaluate the data they’ve gathered.

This isn’t just a problem in journalism – almost every occupation needs these skills. We could argue those skills are essential for citizens who want to participate in a modern democracy.

Computers, and coding skills, are important but we risk giving students the skills of today rather than giving them the foundations to adopt the skills of tomorrow.

We also risk making technological choices that risk education departments, schools and kids being locked into one vendor or system.

Giving every child a laptop is not a replacement for them having the critical, literacy and numeracy skills to participate in 21st Century society.

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February 3, 2013