In Australia we are in the early stages of a federal election.

The interesting thing about this election is that it was preceded first by a "palace coup" in which the deputy Prime Minister essentially ousted the existing and elected PM. This took place, it appears, as the result of the party apparatchiks determining that the polls indicated a fast decline in support for Kevin Rudd.

That dwindling support came in sync with a massive TV campaign funded by the mining industry in response to his announcement of a significant increase in resources taxes that they would be required to pay. However, tended to be forgotten was that it also took place against a background of Rudd's failure to move on his core election promise to address climate change - as he said, "the greatest moral challenge of our times".

So that saw Julia Gillard become PM and that immediately meant that she had to move to ensure that there was a real mandate to operate - hence the move to a general election.

Julia Gillard has now re-engaged with the mining industry and their ad campaign has gone away. And she has announced that she will convene a panel from the public constituted from a broad cross section of the community to recommend on climate change policy. Talk about a failure to address the situation! As the leader of the opposition, and hence the alternate prime minister says, we already have a panel constituted from the public to determine policy - its called parliament.

In Australia we have a rather unique electoral system. First we have compulsory voting. That means that everyone over 18 years old is required to vote. Second we have a preference system. That means that when you vote, you don't just vote for your first choice. You also vote for your 2nd, 3rd etc choices. As a result what happens is that the votes are deployed in such a way as to ultimately bring about a two contender race where the first past the post in terms of primary votes may not necessarily be the winner.

In the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday there was a letter by the Professor of Economics at the University of Sydney, Tony, Aspromourgos. In it he talks about the way that the preferential voting system actually drives a race to the bottom in terms of policy, with both of the major parties vying to be as centrist as possible.

It also creates an impossible choice for a lot of voters.

I saw this first hand yesterday in the main street of Berry, where I live. Ben van der Wijngaart, the Greens candidate was doing a stint on the street, shaking hands and meeting local people. He had a few other Greens people around who were handing out literature to people who might be interested.

While I was standing nearby and talking to a few of the people involved (full disclosure: I am a member of The Greens) I was amazed by the number of people who specifically asked how the Greens preferences would flow on election day. There had been an announcement during the week that the Greens had done a deal with the ALP (The Labour Party), but the Greens continue to encourage voters to make their own choices when it comes to the way their preferences flow to the candidates representing the major parties.

The people who asked the question made it clear that they would not vote Green if it meant that preferences would flow to Labour - and to a party that was not committed to actively addressing climate change by the implementation of a carbon tax or trading scheme.

Of course the problem here is that the opposition changed leaders as well because of the fact that their previous leader (Malcolm Turnbull) was prepared to adopt a trading scheme in conjunction with the previous PM (Kevin Rudd). The current opposition leader has been on record as saying that he doesn't believe in climate change.

So this is the dilemma: Whichever way that people vote, ultimately their votes get tallied in such a way as to lead to a choice of two. Its kind of like the way that bidding for Google ad words works. The winner just has to make the highest bid. The price is determined from the second highest bid. So democracy in Australia now gets down to us all having to vote but ultimately having no choice, because neither party actually wants to do what the public wants.

I happen to believe that a majority of the Australian public want a number of things. They want action on climate change for sure. They believe that it is happening and they believe that it needs to be addressed immediately. They base that on the scientific community's reports and recommendations. (Exclude from here those recalcitrant scientists who don't believe in climate change, but are not climate scientists and do not not have sufficient citations to their names to be taken seriously, notwithstanding the fact that some of them have the letters P, H and D after their names).

The public also want leadership. They want decisions to be made by the people that are elected based on their best judgments and their ability to access expert opinion. They don't want to be asked every couple of months to have to make assessments themselves.

But they also want to be able to require their elected representatives to be accountable. And those representatives are now more exposed to the vagaries of public opinion than ever before as a result of twitter, blogs, and social media.

The problem is that the politicians appear to have totally misread what they need to do. They don't need to take a poll before they go to the bathroom. They do need to listen to what the people are really saying. The people are saying that they want the politicians to make serious and weighty decisions and to provide leadership. This is a case of needing to be bold and to be prepared to wear the consequences. This is a time when politicians need to think of the importance of their decision making for the country and not just about whether they are going to be re-elected.

The irony of this is that each of the leading figures in politics in this country is sitting on a knife edge. Not only are their decisions going to impact on every one of us, but also on the system itself. If they don't make the right decisions they are going to lead us to the edge of chaos, and possibly beyond.

The system that we have appears to now have been gamed by the players sufficiently as to ensure that it is broken. Just like increasing the rigidity of copyright laws has brought chaos to the recorded music industry, so too is the system that we currently have leading to the ultimate destruction of the system itself.

We need to now have a new category on the ballot papers in Australia. It should be "None Of The Above".

I have been asked to run the History 2.0 course for third year students at University of Wollongong this Spring. I think it is going to be fun - certainly for me anyway. And hopefully will be interesting and engaging for the students too!

I started a blog for the course to capture some of the material that I will be referencing, and to generally give those students who are really interested in the subject the opportunity to explore outside of the time constraints of the lecture or tutorials.

It is located here for anyone interested in the material that I will be presenting.

I had dinner with Johnny H on Sunday night, and he was telling me that he was in the process of selling his Beemer because it was about to hit a bit inflection point in terms of depreciation - 150,000kms. My Prius had its 140,000km service on Tuesday (yesterday) so I thought maybe I should check out its current valuation as a trade in while I was at the Toyota dealership.

It turned out that the trade in valuation on a new Prius (with a ticket price of about $45k) was going to be $12,500. Pretty dreadful as a trade in price, I thought, since you can always get about a couple of grand of the sticker price if you don't have a trade in. That would mean that the real value of the Prius right now is a shade less than $10k.

I told the sales guy that it was probably going to be cheaper for me to just keep driving the current vehicle. After all, it goes really well, and it looks pretty similar to the new model.

That led to me having a really interesting discussion with the sales guy about relative values and prices for a variety of vehicles and while this is purely anecdotal material it seems to have some quite far reaching implications for prices and values of consumer products generally.

First up, I was told that for any vehicle that was going to appeal to a youth market the magic number for major depreciation is 100,000 km. Back in the days when we measured in miles, he told me, it was 100,000 miles. Of course a kilometer is only five eighths of a  mile so that translates into 60,000 miles. And at the same time vehicles have become a lot more reliable. But there is magic in the zero it appears.

I was telling him about some of the cars that I had had over the years and the relative reliability and prices that I had paid. The car that I had prior to the Prius was a Hyundai Grandeur, I told Chris, the sales guy at Toyota, who was a crusty grey-haired and quietly spoken guy in his late 60's, I would figure. He told me that he had, in fact, owned the local Hyundai dealership and had sold out of it. I told him how incredibly reliable it had been and we talked a bit about how Hyundai had modeled its quality control strategy on Toyota's. And yet, we both agreed, the Hyundai brand seems to struggle with consumers in terms of perception of value.

Chris told me that in his opinion Toyota would soon have to compete with Hyundai's warranty program because it was hugely competitive in terms of new car sales. He also said that in general, and across all brands, it would be hard to find a bad vehicle. Occasionally a lemon slips through, but in general cars, these days, are pretty much all of good quality when they come out of the factory. They have to be because the competition is so fierce.

So that led me to conclude a couple of things:

1. That there is a massive disparity between price and quality when you put the ruler across multiple brands - but particularly when you do it in the second hand market.
2. That persuading a consumer as to the value of a brand is now the only thing that stands between success and failure for major car companies.

Now you may have already thought about this. But what is it that drives you (no pun intended) to decide on which car you are going to buy? Is it reviews in the papers or on line? Do you always buy a new car because you want a "virgin" vehicle? Do you really consider the price/value question - that subtle balance between what the functional use of the vehicle is and what the brand "says" about you?

Going back to the discussion with Chris: He told me that one of the Hyundai vehicles that depreciates the fastest is the 4-wheel drive Terracan. His view, as a motor car professional, was that virtually zero 4 wheel drive vehicles sold today (other than utes and other trade vehicles) were ever put through their paces off road. His view was that the perception from purchasers of second hand vehicles is that anyone who owns a 4-wheel drive must have done some off road driving and bashed the bejeesus out of the vehicle by the time it gets to 100,000k's but the reality is that it is just a car with a slightly bigger carbon footprint.

Chris told me that the problem of the Hyundai brand is well understood by the executives in Korea. As a result they have introduced a brand and product strategy that puts an "I" at the beginning of each product name - like the iLoad for their small van. They are trying to get a rub off from Apple, presumably, in using the letter "I". But clearly they are trying to reduce the negative emotional resonance of the corporate name in identifying the products. That has got to be a really hard trick to pull off. But this is a company with huge resources, and they use agencies whose stock in trade is to get their clients to spend as much money as is feasible and can be backed up with credible research.

Now think about this. There is a company in India by the name of Tata. Over the last couple of years they have purchased a number of really big old UK brands. They bought Jaguar and Land Rover for starters. They also bought a company called Corus. That company used to be called British Steel. They are also the biggest manufacturer of cars in India, which is, along with China, the highest growth nation in the world as far as cars are concerned. In fact Tata is exporting cars into China!

Tata clearly has both the vision and the balance sheet to be a major force in the automotive sector. How will they deploy their brands and their ownership of other parts of the supply chain to competitively take on the major European and Japanese manufacturers. Time will tell.

In the mean time I have decided that I am not going to replace the Prius. It has the potential to do another 100,000 k's with ease. And during that time I am going to start looking for a bargain price second hand Hyundai as its replacement...

Podcasts - or more importantly time shifted audio content - are, I believe, one of the great information accelerators of our age.

I subscribe to a number of feeds mainly from NPR in the US, the BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia. I listen to them in the car on my commute to and from the University of Wollongong or Sydney...

The ABC possibly does the best Science radio show anywhere in the world with the Robin Williams program. NPR does some brilliant political debate and humour, as does the BBC. And they all do great shows in the field of Humanities.

Yesterday I was listening to an ABC program called Big Ideas - which is a bit patchy in terms of delivering on the promise of its title, but the most recent show is absolutely sensational. It is a lecture given by Professor Tim Jackson from the University of Surrey. He discusses the dilemma of growth and sustainability. Absolutely riveting stuff.

This is broadly the thrust of his hypothesis:

Economies aspire to deliver greater labour productivity each year. That means delivering more products, more margin, etc with the same number of workers, machines, raw materials etc. each year.

So next year you would do the same amount as this year but with fewer people.

So if your economy is not growing, labour productivity is putting people out of work.

Politicians understand that productivity equals jobs. And jobs equals votes. So more jobs means more terms in office.

At the same time we understand more and more that the capacity of the planet is finite, so you can't keep growing infinitely in a system that has finite boundaries. That means that there is an inherent problem in the system. At the same time de-growth has been found to be unstable. So we have the prospect of unsustainability on the one hand, and instability on the other.

That is the set up.

He then goes on to talk about the fact that carbon activity has fallen by about a third over the last two decades as a result of innovation and efficiency. That is the good news. The bad news is that scale has had more impact than efficiency and the net result is that since 1990 carbon emissions have increased by 40%.

He then goes on to look at what the real requirements would be in order to create a stable carbon output, in a world in the year 2050 of 9 Billion people - which is what has been predicted based on normal population growth - and all aspiring to Western levels of income, and all expecting their incomes to grow at 2% per annum.

How far and fast would technology innovation have to go to achieve the goal of carbon dioxide stability?

The task is to reduce the output of carbon from 760 grams per dollar of economic activity down to less than 6 grams of carbon. And if you want to move the needle back in terms of quantity of carbon in the atmosphere you have to actually go backwards from that number.

The problem is that no one has conceived of an economy that has as its primary goal to scrub carbon out of the atmosphere. We don't know what the products or services are that would achieve this and we have no legislative or regulatory framework for getting there either. And yet this is absolutely what is required if we are to follow the concept that politicians are spruiking all over the world, that we can achieve equity for all people and have continued consumption of products and have jobs and that we can hit our global carbon target.

I could tell you more, but frankly, you should listen to the lecture and get it straight from the horse's mouth.

What I would say, though, is that this - what I would call -  an evidence-based approach to the practical realities of life is very useful. We need to take this on board because there is no doubt that at some point in time we are going to hit against the boundaries placed on us by the physical limitations of the planet...

... unless of course, we are able to transition out of our carbon life form into another... which is where Ray Kurzweil is headed in his thinking. While that may well be the next stage of evolution, at this point in time, I think it is more useful to think about what will happen to both society, and to consumerism, and to technology as the meme that Tim Jackson is driving takes hold in society.

It challenges the traditions of religion, of politics, finance and even of enlightenment thinking. And each of those has a lot of momentum within nations and societies. But hopefully there will be a way of bringing those disparate forces together to understand that we need to be thinking about and discussing these matters now...

The EFF has a pretty useful reference page in place for anyone who wants to get a quick update on some of the most vexation questions about IP - particularly with respect to media. (Tip of the hat to John Pin for pointing it out).

The reality is that we are moving into a really important period of human endeavor right now in so many areas of technology, culture and history - not to mention law!

As corporate power is concentrated in fewer and fewer companies and as the enabling power of digital communications technologies allows greater flexibility in terms of how information flows, it is inevitable that the large and powerful companies will try to ensure that their stock in trade continues to hold value.

That is reasonable. The problem comes when their tactics involve them stopping access to information. (For the purposes of this brief post I would consider anything that is able to be resolved into zeroes and ones as information).

The reality is that we are living in a transitional period - we are still analogue beings but we exist in a digital ideas marketplace, where communication takes place faster than the blink of an eye. At some point in the future we may all have to become digital beings in order to continue to exist - perhaps embedded in silicon chips in some servers somewhere - rather than as a carbon based life form.

If that is going to be the case, we had better make sure that we do not become digital slaves to some Matrix like digital corporation. The only way we can do that is by ensuring that new laws are created that create a new Bill of Digital Rights. These digital rights should ensure that in the digital realm information that is of critical value to people should be able to be accessed under a 'fair access' provision.

This should mean that any news information, or technical information or research information (and probably a whole lot more besides) should be able to be accessed by everyone at any time, without any charge whatsoever. In fact I believe that this information should be able to be accessed without it impinging on any data charges that are in effect.

I have just read one of the most thoughtful pieces about media and the internet... "The Slow Media Manifesto" (and a tip of the hat to Bruce Sterling).

Here is the pre-amble to the manifesto:


I love the idea of a slowness to the creation of content in the same way that there is a slow food movement. The idea of there being care and thought given to content and that there is originality of thought is just sensational!

Amazing isn't it. We are a week in to a new Prime Minister. We are perhaps only days away from a Federal Election being announced. The probability is that there will be a deal done with the miners over the super profits tax before an election is announced... Why else would you announce an election, unless you had that one in the bag?

And as this stuff plays out, things remain totally superficial in most respects, because the predominant force in political visibility are lawyers. Not to say that lawyers are superficial by any means. But the reality is that lawyers think that all things can be solved through negotiation and adherence to regulation.

That may be true when you are dealing with human matters. Matters of property, matters of agreed rights, matters of human law. But human law does not include the laws of nature. The laws of nature are absolute. Light will only travel at the speed of light. You can't put up a speed limit and regulate it. In nature there are no speeding fines.

Similarly you can't undo what BP has wrought in the Gulf by fines or by legislating that there is a clean up. After the event doesn't fix the problem.

Governments full of lawyers ultimately don't work in today's economic, social and technological environment.

We need to have a system whereby people who get elected must have qualifications that give them real understanding of the way things work.

We need for government to have a quota of lawyers where once you hit the ceiling, you just can't get elected until someone else who is a lawyer stands down. Then we need for scientists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists and so on to be able to get elected.

How for instance can you have the legislation and the budgetary allocation that relates to the NBN being controlled by a lawyer? I'm sure that Stephen Conroy is a gifted politician with a lot to give the country. But the intricacies of telecommunications capability now means that we actually need not just some technical advisors to be on a minister's staff but for the minister himself or herself to be seriously well read in terms of the speciality that they are involved in. The same goes for science and engineering.

I mean, think about it: If you were in a war, would you rather have the army, navy and airforce run by lawyers or by people who had studied military history and tactics and strategy?

The world is getting more and more complicated by the day. The bureaucrats become smarter and smarter at managing the perception of the public. But unless we have some real understanding and insight inside the walls of political power there is no way that we are going to be able to survive the challenges of our times.

And here is a quirky video that you may find inspirational in its own way...

Amazing to think that it wasn't too long ago that EMI Records ruled the waves...

This was the company that in the '60's brought us the Beatles, The Beach Boys, Gerry And the Pacemakers, Freddy And The Dreamers... Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Cliff Richard, The Band...

And then more recently artists such as Kim Carnes, Coldplay, The Chemical Brothers, Crowded House, Lily Allen... the list goes on....

Currently the company is in a pretty parlous state by all accounts.

The rumours abound that there isn't enough cash coming in to service the debt from when a hedge fund in the UK bought the company. A month or so ago there were further rumours that a deal to lease the entire catalogue to Sony for several billion dollars for a few years of rights had fallen through...

Over the weekend just gone, I was talking to an old friend who was, at one point in his life, the Managing Director of the company. I asked him if he kept abreast of what was happening at his old alma mater - where he and I had become friends back in the 1970's.

He did and, as only people who have been on the inside can ever know, he shared some insights with me that I found pretty interesting. Not because of what they say about the company, but what they tell you about how management ecosystems work, and why there are such dangers for businesses that you would think would be so utterly bulletproof, and which are not...

So here is the big problem:

Back when the music business was young, artistes got signed for the life of copyright of their recordings. As time went by and the stakes became much more competitive negotiators/lawyers started to get better deals. That meant better royalty rates and it also meant that the period that the masters would be owned by the labels changed from life to a period of time...

While new and great artists were being added to the catalogue there were fresh artists to work with, and there was always the ability to increase royalties and pay advances to extend the period of control that the company had over the masters.

However, once a record company starts to lose market share, and once it has been disrupted by iTunes where there is absolutely no real need for a catalogue artist to have an intermediary standing between it and the consumer, where is the motivation for someone to provide an extended period of control to the company?

In the case of EMI it seems that the Beatles catalogue can't be licensed to a third party without the band's specific permission. In the case of a lot of the artists signed later on, such as Queen and Pink Floyd and others, it seems that the original period of license is coming to an end. What that would suggest is that there is going to be a collapse in the size of the EMI catalogue, which in turn would lead to a collapse in the revenues that will be generated, which in turn would give the company substantially reduced clout in terms of its ability to attract new talent...

You can see where this goes, can't you?

Its got to be a headache of monumental proportions for anyone who is involved in looking at strategy to turn the company around.

So why did it happen?

It happened for the same reason that so many things are happening in so many industries.

It happened first because incompetence was rewarded. "How can that be?", you might ask. "No one in their right mind rewards people who are useless".

Well, I am sorry to have to tell you this, but that is exactly what happens when you get management in place that does not want to hear any argument or criticism of the way that it makes decisions. As a result you get what I saw first hand at EMI. They sent a managing director out to Australia to run the business here at one point in time who was totally out of his depth as far as running a creative business was concerned. He was a lovely chap, but didn't understand marketing and didn't understand talent. He understood numbers well enough, though. That was the period when the company in Australia started losing market share... Then they promoted someone who had run one of the factories to run the company. He was even worse - an absolutely dreadful manager, with a poisonous temper and attitude. And so it continued.

But most of that was hidden behind the incredible momentum of a huge company and a growing departure of people who didn't want to work for psychopathic managers. The ones who stayed on were those hardened souls who were prepared to put their heads down and do what was required to keep the boss happy. They were the ones who had mortgages that needed to be serviced and who just weren't confident or foolhardy enough to say, "shove it!".

Eventually decent management came back into the company and things got back onto an even keel. But this sort of thing must have happened all over the world. The reality of markets and talent was ignored in favour of people with no real ideas or vision.

EMI was not an isolated case. Perhaps the worst time for this was during the period in which the music business was expanding, seemingly exponentially, during the late '80's.

The kind of thinking that leads to this comes largely from big companies believing that they can tough out changes in markets without changing their ways and understanding that new disruptive technologies and innovations don't just change business models. They also fundamentally change the way that consumers think. That change leads to a change in behavior too.

It is this inability to understand the winds of change that are blowing that seems to have brought undone Kevin Rudd, the Australian PM, too.

All over the country, and the world, people are becoming more aware. They know that they can't have everything. But they also know when they are getting the rough end of the pineapple. When the consumers revolt, companies clinging on to old business models need to beware.

It is only through embracing change and adapting to it that a business is able to sustain. Some changes won't be profitable or important, but they need to be considered too. Some changes will be incredibly important. The really hard ones to adapt to are the ones that are likely to be the hardest to stomach - ideas that totally disrupt the very essence of the business itself. And those are the ones that are most important to consider and to work with....

If you are in any doubt about which parts of the climate change debate are true or false, check out this video of Sir David Attenborough talking through what part of CO2 is man made, and what part is natural...