Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Chill, Bill

Bill Clinton did not inhale. Or more accurately, he said he didn't inhale. Remember, he was trying to secure the Democrat nomination for President at the time. This was in 1992 - years before the idea of a President who had to quit cocaine and stop drinking before he could achieve anything was really imaginable.

Bill said he didn't like it and he didn't inhale, which leads to the conclusion that it was the
mouth feel of the smoke that he had a problem with. Anyway he got the nomination, won the election and proceeded to squander the biggest political talent most observers had ever seen. He was, famously, distracted by one thing and another. But I digress.

Times have changed. Barack Obama has admitted he did inhale. Frequently. "That was kind of the point." Well, yes.
But he hasn't won his party's nomination yet, let alone anything else.

One of these men has clearly been more honest than the other - and one is the greatest political talent...etc. But the point is both were talking about the past, their youth. Because that's when most people use cannabis. They try it when they're at high school or university and it peaks in their 20's - the decade marked by independent income and freedom from parental shackles - then it drops away markedly.

But the latest National Drug Household Survey shows that the beginners, the school-age users, are disappearing. Ten years ago, 35% of boys had recently used cannabis when surveyed. Last year it was a shade over 13%. It's the same story with girls - in 1998 about 34% had recently gotten stoned; last year it was 12.7%. Something is going on, but what?

I won't know until the morning, when I ask Jan Copeland, head of the new
National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre, but there is a long journalistic tradition of guessing and I'm nothing if not a traditionalist. Firstly ecstacy use is increasing, rapidly becoming the drug of choice for younger people. Secondly, cannabis use is associated with tobacco use and smoking is trending down.

Actually I think these reasons are connected. Tobacco is not healthy,
as discussed here before, and it's not seen as such a cool choice anymore. Whereas e is seen as 'healthier' - it doesn't make you cough or wheeze, it doesn't make you smell, it doesn't send you outside or offend anyone. It makes most people feel amazing and wanting to engage with the world. Cannabis doesn't do that - it's renowned for making people feel hungry, happy and sleepy. But it can also make people withdrawn, uncommunicative and paranoid. Stack all that up and it's an easy call. Sorted.

I will ask, though really most of the interview will be about cannabis and addiction. Because, yes, it turns out that if you're my age, your Dad was right after all - there is now evidence that cannabis can be a
drug of addiction and also lead to real health problems.


Luckily for Bill Clinton, he'll never know.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Pack of Bankers

A few years ago there was an ad on the telly. The scene: it's summer, there are kids in the pool, a barbie is going nicely. A woman says to a man she's just met, "So, what do you do?".

"I'm a banker."

Everything freezes - all other conversation, the kids in the pool, even the dog turns to look.

Pause.

"I'm with St George."

"Oh!" the woman says - almost sighs really - and everything is back to normal.
Cue voiceover and pictures of the banker engaging in conversation just like a normal good bloke.

It was a great ad (sadly I can't find a link to it) which cast the
St George Bank as different, more human, nicer than all the other banks. This approach is still very much part of the bank's brand today. But the real reason this was such a great ad was that banks were really on the nose.

Nobody, apart from a
couple of radio broadcasters, had anything good to say about them. They were seen as ruthless profiteers, growing fat on the banking fees and charges paid by almost everyone.

Nine years on, I wonder how much public affection there is for banks at the moment.

Interest rates are up. Technically, this is not the banks' fault. The cost of their money has been increasing, partly because the Reserve Bank wants to get to grips with inflation and partly because since the collapse of the US sub prime market all risk is more expensive.

The banks' first responsibility is to their shareholders. Indeed, the market would punish them if it was not, so the banks have to pass on the costs of borrowing money to their customers. But most people don't care about all that, what they care about is that interest rates are going up - at a time when petrol, fruit and veg and rents are shooting up too.

That's the context. On top of that have come
one or two stories that don't help the banks at all when it comes to winning hearts and minds. And now, another one, from the other side of the world about our old friend: fees and charges.

Essentially British banks have been coining it in, especially through fees for unauthorised overdrafts (where more has come out of your account than you have in it). The
Office of Fair Trading estimates these fees alone are worth £3.5 billion every year. It's taking the banks to court. Now the High Court has ruled that this comes under unfair contract rules supposed to protect the public. It is going to be years before this legal process is finished but it could end up with the British banks having to pay back rather a lot of money: £9 billion (+ the half billion they've already handed over). You can hear the Brits cheering from here.

The thing is though, Australian banks are doing pretty well out of fees and charges.
Choice estimates that in 2006, they raked in $4 billion from credit card and account holders who paid late, inadvertantly went over their limit, or had a cheque (that somebody else had written) bounce.

Choice, along with the
Consumer Action Law Centre, is having a red hot go at the banks on this. There's a Senate Inquiry due to report in September. And Steve Fielding, the Family First Senator for Victoria, has a private member's bill that would stop banks charging more than their costs for dishonoured periodic payments, direct debits or cheques. With one thing and another, it doesn't look like being an annus mirabilis for Australian banks.

All in all then, you wouldn't be completely astonished if somewhere, somehow, the bankers were having a few words in some influential ears.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Capital Idea

I am in the middle of a few days off work and have been away, hence the lack of blogging from me.

The first thing to say is how restorative that particular combination is. Not working and going away - in my experience you have to do both - is a wonderful tonic. The perceptive Peter Martin has written about the
value of not working, that is, the value of not working to a person who usually works. He could not be more spot on.

I get to not work for seven weeks a year. In Australian terms, that's rather a lot of not working. (In American terms it's an astronomical amount of not working). It tends to break down into a four-week break over summer and three one-week breaks through the year. I get up later and spend more time with the kids. There's always a
child-friendly movie and an associated visit to a certain global fast food chain which the kids love and I enjoy more than I should. There's usually plenty of time out doors, though this week in Sydney it hasn't been good.

But we haven't been in Sydney. We've been in Canberra, my home town. I have lived exactly 6 and a half years in
Canberra. But six of those years were 14 to 20, a pretty crucial period in most lives. Because of that, and because my mum is there, (and two of my sisters with attendant nephews and nieces) it is my home town. Years ago, I felt like a Londoner, an Australian Londoner, but it did feel like home. I like living in Sydney and it is home but it will never be my home town. Canberra, with it's distinct, proper seasons, hills, bush and family very much is. It's a city that mostly has blue skies, and true to form, it was glorious.

We stayed at my mum's house. My son and I walked up the bike track from O'Connor to the facility that most people still think of as
Bruce Stadium, and we watched the Brumbies come home the stronger against the much fancied Sharks from South Africa. The next day we went to some friends' house for lunch, then on to my niece's 8th birthday party as the afternoon became evening. On Monday we went to the wonderful Questacon - there was just us and about 20-thousand kids there - then I caught up with a Canberra bloke who lives in Sydney for lunch. Another friend, down from Sydney to visit her sister-in-law, popped in for an hour, and then my sister came around for a cup of tea. It was wonderful.

Canberra is a much maligned town. It's news shorthand for the government. Everybody knows jokes about public servants. It is one of the few places in our hot country with really cold winters. But it's actually a great place to live and a fantastic place to bring up kids. It's clean and green, though not as green as everyone would like (it really needs some rain). Compared to all of the state capitals (bar Hobart) it's easy to get around, and because it's the national capital it has wonderful facilities for such a small place.

At lunch yesterday with my friend, I met a senior public servant who came from
Sunshine Coast in the mid 80s. His oldest is in year 12 and other child is in year 8. He'd be about 50, so in a few years when the kids have finished school he could do the 54/11 and live anywhere he wanted. Or, he could keep working and get a transfer. Go home to the sunshine on the Sunshine Coast. He's not going anywhere.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Physicists driving cabs

Quick, what's the most ethnically diverse city in the world?

It's not New York. It's not London. It's not Melbourne (though like Melbourne it's rather flat).

It's
Toronto. Allegedly. I say allegedly because I find it hard to believe that NY and London aren't ahead on that score, they're both much bigger after all. But there it is, Toronto is the world's most ethnically diverse city. Really.

Half the population wasn't born in Canada and more than 150 languages are spoken every day. But to me that's not the mind-boggling statistic. This is: 100-thousand immigrants arrive there every year. Australia's total immigration is 150-thousand a year.

Traditionally immigrant groups arrive, cop a bit of prejudice from those already there, put their heads down, work like
Trojans, and send their kids to university. It's not easy, it's bloody hard, but they benefit and the countries they arrive in - Australia, Canada, USA - benefit even more. But that system is breaking down, these days everything needs to happen faster.

In Toronto, they've done the research. The region is heading for a labour market growth of zero without immigration. They have big impending and current skills shortages. Everybody needs professionals (not lawyers obviously but teachers, engineers, doctors and accountants) and Toronto is no different, but it also needs sheet metal workers, an occupation with an average age in the 50s.

So the city has 100-thousand new arrivals from outside Canada every year and genuine problems in its labour market. This means too many proverbial physicists driving cabs, and indeed there is a bit of that. Except the Torontonians have started squaring the circle - they set up an organisation aimed at getting immigrants into work. It's called
TRIEC, short for Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, and much easier to say quickly. It doesn't deliver services, it works like a broker, or convenor - essentially it gets people together. This modest approach turns out to be very effective.

TRIEC is still fairly new. It has a smallish intern program, which has an 85% success rate in getting people into work. It has a larger mentor program that generates similarly impressive results. It has a
website that encourages the employment of immigrants. It has begun addressing the culture by engaging with the region's business schools and HR professionals. It has done all this in a bit over four years and it isn't really a branch of government. Instead TRIEC was created after the stakeholders of Toronto had a good, hard look at their city and the future it was likely to face.

The burghers of Toronto have been proactive, thoughtful and practical. They haven't solved their problems yet - TRIEC's ultimate aim is to go out of business - but they have made an impressive start. Good on them.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Big Three Oh

Louise Brown will be 30 in July. Doubtless she feels as ambiguous about that as the rest of us do when confronted with a significant birthday. But her big day is being noted by the likes of me because Louise Brown is a bit special - she was the world's first 'test-tube' baby.

How quaint that phrase seems now. How long since you heard anyone say it, "test-tube baby"? Technically Louise Brown was the result of a successful in vitro fertilisation (IVF). In the 30 years since she was born, IVF has been joined by a suite of other procedures. These days they are all grouped into something called Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART).

Over the last decade or so, the use of ART has become almost commonplace. So commonplace it's easy to think it's unremarkable. That would be a mistake - these technologies are remarkable, they have brought more than a million children into the lives of people who otherwise could not have had them. But the technologies aren't perfect. They are expensive, intrusive, physically uncomfortable and emotionally confronting. They often fail and that failure rate climbs quickly when the would-be parents, especially the would-be mothers, are older.

Older is a relative term. Most of us, these days, do not think of women in their late 30s as 'older'. But in fertility terms, they are. Fertility begins to drop at around 35 in most women as egg quality declines. It's inexorable and irreversible. And, with the best will in the world and enough money to go through many 'cycles' of treatment, the result can still be no baby and heartbreak*.

Who then ought to be allowed access to ART? This is the question asked and answered in Tom Frame's Children on Demand. The head of the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University is one of Australia's most prolific public intellectuals. He's cranking out books faster than many professional footballers can read them. Dr Frame is also an adoptee and the impact this has had on him affects every word. He is completely upfront about this.

Essentially Tom Frame believes that ART should not be available to a couple in which either the man or the woman isn't contributing their DNA. He argues that women should not be able to use donor sperm from a man they do not know, or even that widows be permitted to use the sperm of a man they used to know exceedingly well - their dead husband. He also believes that gay and lesbian couples should not be granted access to ART. And he's not keen on surrogacy either.

Apart from the issue of surrogacy, his motivation is a concern for the welfare and well-being of the child that may result. But if you want to know exactly why he holds these concerns, and why the ethicist Leslie Cannold disagrees with him, you'll need to listen to the show.

*This should not imply that all fertility problems are women's problems. A bit under half are men's problems and sometimes the problem seems to belong to the couple. Worst of all, about 15% of the time the infertility cannot be explained with the investigations we have now.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Let them eat cake or something

We have two truly outstanding science communicators in Australia. One is my colleague Robyn Williams. The other is Julian Cribb. Robyn is a broadcaster, the broadcaster really. Julian works for himself these days, rather than a paper, but he remains the doyen of science writers. He is clear, fluent and explains the otherwise inexplicable. His latest effort is as scary as something that rhymes with duck.

In a nutshell, the world is running out of food. One indicator is that our reserves of grains would not last two months. It's easy, in these days of no-wheat diets, to forget what that means. Grains are the great staple foods of the world - especially rice, maize and wheat. If we run out of grains, the planet goes to hell in a handbasket.

You may have noticed that filling your handbasket (alright, trolley) at the supermarket is costing more. Australia's drought has pushed up the prices of fruit, vegetables and meat. Lately, there's been increases in the cost of bread, flour, rice and the already exhorbitant breakfast cereals. That's because wheat, rice and barley have all become more expensive.

If you live in Australia, you're not going to starve. Food will get more expensive but not impossible to come by. Actually food really is going to get rather pricier. We've been living in an era of cheap food which has lasted for decades. (Though, as one of five children in a family growing up in the 70s, I remember when chicken was "too dear"). There are lots of reasons all this cheap food was possible, and this isn't the place to go through them all, but two are fundamental: land and water.

Much of the world's best arable land is now being paved over. Cities are built on it. And golf courses. (I am conflicted about golf courses - I find them beguilingly attractive but know that in most environments they are about the most wasteful use of land and resources). Even in Sydney, where I live, the arable land is vanishing because it's becoming too valuable to be farmed. That's one reason.

Another is that the world's topsoil, that magic, fertile layer 5-20 centimetres thick, is disappearing. Wind, farming practices and rain are taking it to the sea. And speaking of water, cheap food is predicated on cheap water. Mostly the water hasn't been so much cheap as ludicrously undervalued. This is gradually changing, and it may be that that supply and demand produce a tipping point where prices increase very rapidly indeed.

But if the end of cheap food in Australia is an inconvenience, or even another source of pressure on working families, that's as nothing to the impact we're already seeing in some parts of the world. There have been riots over food in the last couple of weeks - people have died.

Food and water security have been the great drivers of conflict throughout history. We have tended to focus on the who in these disputes - which people, which ethnic groups, which nations? But the why has usually been about resources - most of the time about food and water. Cribb points out that if people can't get food where they live, they move. The UNHCR currently helps almost 33 million people, who are either refugees or have been "internally displaced". That figure is likely to rise as global warming continues to impact on crop growth in Africa and Asia.

Julian Cribb is clear-eyed about what needs to happen - he suggests 12 changes that would make a difference. Among them, a massive investment in agricultural research; speeding up the transfer of new technologies to farmers the world over; the development of "green cities", which recycle their own water and waste and grow some of their own food.

The 2020 Summit is next weekend in Canberra. I do hope someone going will mention all this.



Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Thoughts on Smoking

If you want to commit suicide, but not yet, you could do a lot worse than begin smoking. With a few special exceptions, smoking is the worst thing you can do to yourself. Indeed, it's often been said, cigarettes are the only legally available product that when used as directed will kill the user and injure others.

Unsurprisingly, the economic costs of smoking are vast. The premature deaths, ill health and lost productivity that cigarettes cause quickly becomes a very large number in dollar terms. In 2005, the last year that figures are available, smoking cost Australia $31.5 billion. That's about $1500 for every single person in the country, or about 2/3 of the federal government's total health budget of $45 billion.

So, anything that reduces the number of cigarettes people smoke has to be good for the country. Governments invest in helping people quit through information campaigns and telephone helplines, they raise taxes on tobacco (providing a win-win as far as Treasury's concerned) and they have progressively introduced bans on where people can smoke. Let's take them one at a time.

There's evidence that telephone helplines, especially when advertised in mass media, do have an impact. Counselling seems to be better than no counselling. But the small-government, low taxation, libertarian think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies says it's a myth that higher spending on preventive medicine will reduce health costs in the future.

Actually, the researcher who argued this, Jeremy Sammut came into the studio and when I put the example of smoking to him, he qualified. Essentially he believes that public information campaigns don't work by themselves, but that smoking has been reduced with a multi-pronged approach of increased taxes (and thus increased prices) and bans.

But it turns out to be more interesting than that, because smokers, like all addicts, are making rational choices. This idea, of a rational addict, seems bleeding obvious but it was a revolutionary insight 20 years ago when first put forward by two Chicago economists, Gary Becker & Kevin Murphy.

If you're addicted to cigarettes and you know the tax on tobacco is about to increase, you have a powerful incentive to quit. In fact, you really have an incentive to quit now, before the tax increases. Building on their initial research, this is exactly what Becker and Murphy found - more smokers began trying to quit after tax increases were announced but before they came in.

But what if you can't quit, or you didn't realise the price was going up? Then you have to pay more for each cigarette. As a rational smoker, not able to quit, you have a choice - you can wear the price rise and pay more, or you can smoke fewer cigarettes. Which do you choose?

It turns out that you smoke fewer but smoke harder. You suck it down to your toes. Not only that, you don't leave the ciggy lying around in the ashtray, you get it into you - after all, it's costing you a fortune. Francesca Cornaglia, who's at Queen Mary College and LSE, (and a colleague, Jérôme Adda) worked this out in a rather elegant way. They measured the levels of cotinine (a by-product of the body breaking down nicotine) in smokers who reported buying fewer cigarettes. Essentially it stayed constant.

The only way to pull that off is take more and deeper drags of each cigarette. Unfortunately the filters in cigarettes become less efficient as they're used - they're clogging up with gunk. So in the second half of a cigarette, more of that gunk is getting into the smoker's lungs. The gunk is not made of antioxidants and omega III, it's a cocktail of enormously toxic chemicals. You really don't want more of this stuff going into your body. All of which means that increasing taxes will result in some smokers using cigarettes in a more unhealthy way!

That's one unintended consequence of well-meaning public policy. Now Cornaglia and Adda have found another - this time it's connected to smoking bans. You can't smoke on public transport, in schools or shopping malls, or inside workplaces. You can't smoke at the cinema or restaurants either, or - increasingly - in pubs and clubs. So what's a rational smoker to do?

The answer depends on how easy it is to substitute the public space for a private one. Schools and shopping malls don't have a private equivalent. Neither do most workplaces. But the cinema does, so do restaurants and pubs. They're all to be found under one roof - the home.

The two London-based economists found that a ban on smoking where there's a private alternative (the home) drives up smoking in that place. So if you stop people smoking in pubs or cinemas, they simply drink at home and watch DVDs. The effect of this is to create two classes of people, neither of whom smoke: winners and losers.

The winners are everyone who can now go to restaurants and pubs without breathing other people's smoke. This is really important for the health of the people who work in these places - they become big winners. The losers are literally close to home - they're inside with the smokers - the smokers' children and other relatives.
Which means that some smoking bans will mean more secondary smoke for children of smokers. Once again, not something the policy framers will have been trying to achieve.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Neighbourhood Watch

It was Neighbour Day the other day. A bit over a week ago, Sunday 30th March. It's a brilliant idea - get to know your neighbours, talk to them, foster a greater sense of community caring. It can begin modestly - introduce yourself and give them your phone number. Make sure they know they can ring you if they need to.

Most of us have had neighbours whom we would rather didn't ring. Let's face it, we would rather they weren't our neighbours. But for every one of them, there are people like John and Margaret, who live across the road from me. They've been there for nearly 30 years, raised two kids and aren't going anywhere. They are kind, friendly and enormously tolerant of our curious and talkative children. They know everyone and the entire history of the street, which is handy when you first move in. John has a lot of tools, all of which he seems happy to lend, even to a rank amateur like me. In my first conversation with him, he told they'd thought about moving a few times but couldn't find anywhere as nice as this. I know what he means.

I live in a very leafy part of Sydney. Not wealthy-leafy, but comfortable-leafy. It's a quiet suburb isolated by geography, which means there's no through-traffic. It has a thriving local shops, a school and a lot of green space. The street we're on is short and quickly peters out into bush, there is one street off it that leads to a park with oval, playground and tennis courts. Kids around here really do play in the street - they ride their bikes and skateboards; sometimes they play cricket or kick a football. It's very much about children, this area, and it feels like a bit like the Sydney I grew up in, 30 years ago.

It's not perfect - far from it. You couldn't live here without a car and lots of families have two. There are only a couple of buses an hour through the day and the nearest railway station is a brisk 30 minute walk. If you're really into street life that isn't kids playing, or people walking their dogs, you'd quickly become very bored indeed. Leichhardt, (which I love) it ain't.

It isn't a good place for arachnophobes either, especially at this time of year when there are, I don't know, about a million spiders living in my garden. Most of them are beautiful and useful, some of them are not very nice.

But it does have a feeling of neighbourhood - a sense of community. Last Friday on the show, we did a talkback on this. Not my neighbourhood but the idea of it - how neighbourhoods have changed and are changing. What we've lost and what we've gained.

My guests, Hugh Mackay and Karen Malone, are both smart people who've thought a lot about this issue. And we took calls from listeners too. I thought we'd hear from people with complaints, or at least trenchant observations, about what's going wrong in our neighbourhoods. But what we (mostly) got were optimists and doers - people working to build community, active in their neighbourhoods and getting involved. Many were clear-eyed about the challenges but keen to be part of something.

As a journalist I was hoping for a bit more niggle and grit. As a person I was rather heartened. You can listen if you like.


Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Ethics for Profit

Last night's Four Corners on ABC TV showed how unsavoury lending practices have put some unfortunate borrowers into hot water. Some of it, what happened to these people, was heart-rending. Some of it, the cynical behaviour of the lenders, was sick-making. It showed how far good business practice, or at least, highly profitable business practice, has moved from ethical behaviour.

But my guest on the show today, Jeff Malpas, says this circle can be squared. Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania - and he's been looking at this very area.

Essentially, he says, ethical behaviour requires some very potent skills. Things like attentiveness to the interpersonal context in which one works; decision making & problem solving; empathetic understanding; and emotional maturity. All of these relate to leadership.

Workplaces are mostly short of good leaders and enterprises do better when they can devolve decision-making down to the people in the best position to make them. The more leaders at the appropriate levels, instead of all being at the very top, the better.

For this to work of course there has to be trust. Trust within the organisation that the devolved leadership is up to the task, and trust in the organisation from all its stakeholders. But ethical behaviour, or more accurately an ethical culture, reinforces trust. And trust reinforces ethical culture. It's a virtuous circle.

Jeff Malpas believes that ethical behaviour, and the skills to pull it off, will become increasingly highly valued in the corporate world. (You can find out more here)

I have to say, I hope he's right.