Tony 'I live to freeload' Abbott and the public purse

Remember when Prime Minister Tony Abbott made a great show of rejecting an alleged 2.4 per cent increase to his $507,338 per annum parliamentary salary – even though the remuneration tribunal had made it clear he was never getting an increase in 2014 in the first place?

Well, the Remuneration Tribunal Determination 2014/16: Members of Parliament –Travelling Allowance has been published and it seems that from 31 August 2014 he still has a rather generous allowance for those many nights staying in a self-contained flat at the Australian Federal Police training college in Canberra:

Prime Minister shall be provided with accommodation and sustenance up to a limit of $560 for each overnight stay in a place other than an official establishment or the Prime Minister’s home base. Accommodation and sustenance at official establishments shall be provided at government expense…..

In exceptional circumstances, the Commonwealth may pay the accommodation and sustenance costs incurred by the Prime Minister

where those costs exceed $560 where:

(i) those costs are incurred in respect of overnight stays in a place other than an official establishment or the Prime Minister’s home base; and

(ii) the overnight stay is occasioned by official business as the Prime Minister

Abbott already takes full advantage of his prime ministerial travel allowance:

Snapshot from The Canberra Times 27 August 2014

UPDATE

Unfortunately for Abbott, his pork pies to his senators have also come back to haunt him as those leaks to the media continue.

The Sydney Morning Herald 28 August 2014:

Tony Abbott broke with tradition and skipped an annual black tie dinner held for government senators when he attended a party fund-raiser in Melbourne on Monday night….

Almost every government senator attended the dinner at the Boathouse restaurant in Canberra. The leader is always invited and usually attends, Fairfax has been told.

This year Deputy Liberal Leader Julie Bishop and Nationals Leader Warren Truss were the Coalition star attractions.

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said Mr Abbott "receives a lot of requests to attend functions. Unfortunately, he can't accommodate them all".

The spokeswoman said "none of the dates proposed for the Coalition senators' dinner could be accommodated".

The dinner is always scheduled for the first Monday night of the first sitting week after the winter break.

One source said Mr Abbott's absence from the dinner was partly behind Senator Macdonald's decision to publicly question the Prime Minister's priorities.

They expressed surprise that the Prime Minister would choose to attend a fund-raiser instead of spending time with senators, some of whom have openly opposed the leadership on budget measures, the Racial Discrimination Act and the planned parental leave scheme. 

The Australian 28 August 2014:

LIBERAL and Nationals senators were gathering for their annual black-tie dinner on Monday night when a whisper went around the room that Tony Abbott wouldn’t be coming. As they chattered over drinks at the Boat House restaurant in Canberra, the senators heard the Prime Minister had to skip the event this year to attend to national security matters.

Only the next day did they learn they had been rubbed out of their leader’s diary so he could get to a fundraising dinner in Melbourne the same night….

Whether the grievance is a dinner cancellation, a late arrival or an overnight policy switch on racial discrimination laws, the backbench sees a recurring problem: a lack of respect for party colleagues…..

Tuesday’s meeting heard a rebuke about the “brains trust” in the Prime Minister’s office that keeps springing surprises on the backbench, while several MPs warned about the unpopularity of budget measures including the $7 copayment on GP visits.

Victorian Liberal Russell Broadbent challenged Education Minister Christopher Pyne on the $5 billion cuts to university funding.

NSW Liberal Russell Matheson questioned whether key ­policies were being neglected by merging portfolios such as health and sport and aged care.

Queensland Liberal National Party MP Warren Entsch was sharply critical of the way MPs would first learn of decisions by reading about them in the newspapers.

That point was drummed home when one MP stood to complain about the way Abbott abandoned the amendments to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act without any consultation with the backbench.

“We may as well not exist, that’s what it comes down to,” said one member of the party room yesterday.

The argument from MPs is that if they are consulted they have some ownership of the outcome. Right now, they feel, they are being denied the opportunity to be even seen to contribute to a decision, let alone get the ear of the leader.

As usual, some of the concerns focus on Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, who is blamed for the “command and control” style of government.

Readfearn picks apart Tony Abbott's favoured climate science denier

Graham Readfearn writing in The Guardian, on Abbott Government chief business adviser Maurice Newman’s claim that the world should prepare for global cooling which was published in The Australian on 14 August 2014:

Growing evidence?

At the beginning of the column, Newman claims a recent article in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics “adds to growing evidence that climate change is determined by the sun, not humans”.

The problem with this statement is that the journal article in question did not even consider the interactions between the sun and long-term climate change.

Even one of the climate sceptic websites that recently featured this research, said: “Unfortunately, it was beyond the scope of this paper to address the potential impact of solar activity on climate.”

Professor Steve Sherwood, director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, explains:

Evidence that the sun influences climate has decreased, not increased. About a decade ago calculations showed the sun caused about 10 per cent of the warming observed since the late 1800s, but it is now estimated to be only about 5 per cent. This new paper does not change these estimates at all, it is only an attempt to extend the sunspot record back to times before direct observations began a few hundred years ago. The paper makes no mention of climate, because it does not have any new implications for climate.

Since 1980, during which time we have seen strong warming, solar output has if anything declined slightly. In fact, it is looking increasingly doubtful that the sun even had much to do with the so-called “little ice age”, which most mainstream scientists used to attribute to the minimum in sunspot activity at roughly the same time, but now looks to have been caused mainly by volcanic eruptions.

Newman tells his readers that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe had “validated” a hypothesis from Danish physicist Professor Henrik Svensmark that “the sun alters the climate” by interacting with cosmic rays.

The former ASX chairman makes it sound like a done deal. But what did the lead author of that research actually think? Did it “confirm the hypothesis” that the sun alters the climate “by influencing cosmic ray influx and cloud formation” as Newman had claimed?

Professor Jasper Kirby, who led the research, said at the time “it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step”.

So that’s a no, then (minor nit, as Nature also explained, the experiment didn’t use the LHC, as Newman had claimed, but rather the same bit of kit – a particle accelerator - that feeds the LHC).

Newman and the IPCC

Newman wrote that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “and its acolytes” tend to “pay scant attention” to science that might “relegate human causes” as the driver of climate change.

Professor Sherwood was a Lead Author on the latest IPCC report chapter to look at these cosmic ray claims. He told me:

In writing the relevant section of the report, we examined Svensmark’s work along with many other relevant studies. It is quite clear that the evidence suggesting that cosmic rays influence cloud cover, does not hold up to scrutiny. The IPCC is quite comprehensive in assessing the scientific literature and making an overall assessment. If there is any cherry-picking going on, it is by the so-called skeptics, who typically focus on a tiny handful of papers and often draw unwarranted inferences from them not made by the authors themselves, as Newman has done in this case.

Sly misrepresentation

Newman name checks other organisations and scientists to try and bolster his argument.

He quotes work by “leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood, of Reading University” to try and convince readers that the sun might be the dominant driver of the climate.

But Newman doesn’t mention what Lockwood actually thinks about these claims of cosmic rays or the sun dictating global temperatures

After his work was misrepresented in the British press last year, Lockwood responded on the website Carbon Brief:

So what do we think the effect of a return to Maunder minimum conditions on global mean temperatures would be? The answer is very little.

In a paper with scientists from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, we used an energy balance model to show the slowing in anthropogenic global warming associated with decline in solar irradiance to Maunder minimum levels.

We found the likely reduction in warming by 2100 would be between 0.06 and 0.1 degrees Celsius, a very small fraction of the warming we’re due to experience as a result of human activity.

I sent Newman’s article to Lockwood to ask if he felt his work and his views were being fairly represented. Suffice to say he’s not too happy. He wrote:

The wording in the quote you sent me is a very sly misrepresentation. As a scientist I try to write sentences that are unambiguous ... but this is deliberately ambiguous to make it look like I am saying something that I certainly am not. I have never, ever written anything whatsoever about the “year without summer”, so I have never ever connected it to solar variability and the Dalton minimum. So if I trim the sentence down to “... Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, found 24 occasions in the past 10,000 years when the sun was declining as it is now, but could find none where the decline was as fast. He says a return of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) is ‘more likely than not’” Then I would be happy - but the addition of the phrase which included “the year without summer” makes it look like I am connecting that year to the Dalton minimum which I certainly am not. There is absolutely no credible evidence whatsoever that the “year without summer” was either caused by low solar activity or was in any way significant as an indicator of global climate trend.

I also asked Lockwood what he thought of Newman’s claim that there was “growing evidence that climate change is determined by the sun, not humans”. Lockwood said:

[This claim] is, frankly, scientifically ludicrous. There are a few papers that use inadequate statistical techniques to claim a link between global temperatures and solar activity. Proper significance testing against an appropriate noise model invariably shows that the probability that these sun-global climate connections are purely coincidental is extremely high and that they have been selected whilst a very large number of counter examples have been ignored. This is bad science: it’s equivalent to finding on albino rabbit and declaring all rabbits are albino.

There have been many studies, including ones that I have been involved in, that show the solar influence on global mean surface temperatures is extremely small. I personally think there is evidence for some interesting effects in winter (and only in winter, and there are compelling scientific reasons why only in winter) in locations that are strongly influenced by the northern hemisphere jet stream.

However these effects are re-distributions of temperature and so, for example, if Europe suffers a cold winter, Greenland has a warmer one. Hence these are regional and season climate changes and quite distinct from global climate changes.

That looks like one less Christmas card for Maurice Newman.

But there’s still more to go at here. Newman quotes a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology Philip Tetlock as saying: “When journal reviewers, editors and funding agencies feel the same way about a course, they are less likely to detect and correct potential logical or methodological bias.”

The quote is actually a decade old and comes from an article published in the journal Political Psychology.

Newman probably got it trawling the blogs of climate sceptics (an article discussing the paper was reposted on the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation website earlier this month), which is where, in my view, he probably gets most of his ideas about climate science.

You might think, given the context of the article, that Tetlock was talking about environmental science or climate change.

But no. The Tetlock article was discussing his concerns about the preservation of the discipline of “political psychology”. Most of the article is discussing issues around war and peace and racism.

Unlawful developer donations scandal getting closer to NSW North Coast Nationals

The Sydney Morning Herald 17 August 2014:

                                             

Mr Cadell [NSW Nationals regional co-ordinator] is also listed as an adviser for the project, to lobby for a coal loader, in the email sent to two executives of Mr Tinkler’s company Buildev – Darren Williams and David Sharpe – on April 20, 2011.

Mr Tinkler had made a $50,000 donation to the federal and NSW Nationals three weeks earlier, Electoral Commission records show.

Echo NetDaily 19 August 2014:

A prominent Tweed businessman gave the National Party a $175,000 loan after the ban on developer donations came into effect in 2009, Sydney media has revealed.

The revelation this morning has sparked calls for the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) to probe developer donations to the National Party on the north coast in the same way the state Liberal Party has been investigated.

The current ICAC investigation into illegal developer donations has led to the resignation or standing aside of up to 10 NSW Liberal MPs and forced Newcastle’s mayor to quit in disgrace.

The National Party, according to a News Corporation report, faces having to repay a $3,000 donation it received for its state election campaign after it emerged that it came from leading Tweed National Party identity Idwall Richards, who is also a Kingscliff developer.

Labor’s shadow minister for the north coast, Walt Secord, said, ‘It appears that prohibited donations aren’t just the sole domain of the NSW Liberal Party, it seems that the north coast Nationals are in the same murky territory’.

The Daily Telegraph report this morning names Mr Richards, owner of Rico Investments, as the businessman who gave the $175,000 loan to the National Party, but both he and the party claimed it was a loan for the federal election campaign and therefore did not come under the donor laws.

Mr Richards, according to the report, said he did not believe he was a developer, but he signed a letter earlier this year as the ‘proprietor’ of Real Living Projects Pty Ltd, which built the Azura development at Kingscliff Beach.

In the letter, Mr Richards says: ‘We had the pleasure of working with the Cullen Group on our luxury multi-residential and commercial development at Azura–Kingscliff Beach’.

Perhaps it also not too late for NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption investigators to direct their attention to North Coast Nationals' 2011 shenanigans.

Joe Hockey either told a political lie to the Australian Parliament and voters then or is doing so now

Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey continues to alter facts to suit the questions being asked or the audience he is addressing and, if that means telling untruths to Parliament and voters then that is what he will do.

THEN

Australian Government Budget 2014-15 Overviews - Health presented to the Australian Parliament on 13 May 2014 by Joe Hockey:

ABC Q&A program on 19 May 2014:

Given that of the $7, $2 goes to the doctor…

NOW

House of Representatives House TV Joe Hockey speaking during Question Time on 26 August 2014:

It is a payment for a service….We are asking Australians to pay $7 when they go and visit a GP. That goes to the GP. The bottom line is it’s a payment for service. [my red bolding]

If the total $7 doesn’t go to the GP then it is not a genuine payment for service – it is a payment with an indirect tax attached.

So does the GP keep the money, Mr. Hockey? Or have you introduced another tax?

Is the Sunburnt Revolution on its way?

Since coming to office in September 2013 the Abbott Government has treated Australia to a level of political contempt that the vast majority of voters have not experienced before in their lifetime.

Individually and collectively Abbott and his colleagues have; strewn the political landscape with broken election promises, uttered misleading statements and downright lies, indulged in episodes of egotistical political posturing, casually displayed racism, sexism and cronyism, been wantonly cruel when setting social and economic policies, constantly attacked the principles of equity and equality, ignored the nation's obligations under United Nations conventions, attempted to further erode separation of church and state, increased public debt with little to show for it, flaunted an intention to grow the divide between the mega-rich, rich & the merely comfortable off to downright poor, entered into an unhealthy relationship with a media empire, shown a chronic inability to accept responsibility for any bad Coalition decision made since the last federal election and, threatened both senators and voters with more oppressive measures if the remainder of the unfair 2014-15 budget is not passed.

Individual voters have muttered, yelled, shrieked, cursed, blogged or tweeted their displeasure by the droves. They have written letters to the editor, sent letters to government, banded together to publish open letters and, marched in their tens of thousands.

In the face of all this antipathy, the Abbott Government has merely increased its ideology-driven destruction for destruction's sake, convinced that all will be well by the time the next election rolls around.

However, I suspect that Abbott’s call for everyone to join his brown shirted, jackbooted Team Australia will turn out to be that step too far and the Prime Minister, his Cabinet, state senators and local MPs are about to discover how practiced the populace is at quietly stubborn subversion and sustained non-violent civil resistance – skills which have been honed down the generations since those early days of the first colony.

If the Sunburnt Revolution becomes a reality, then Liberal and National Party politicians will have nowhere left to hide by the time they are publicly booted off that Canberra hill.

The 73 million reasons why the Abbott Government is intent on crushing public broadcasting in Australia

American media mogul Rupert Murdoch and News Corp made no secret of the fact that they supported the Liberal-National Coalition gaining federal government and backed Tony Abbott's bid for prime ministership in the September 2013 Australian federal election.

This support was enthusiastically and sometimes crudely expressed:

www.reddit.com

In his turn Tony Abbott has kept his close links with News Corp since he became prime minister: for example attempting to change the racial discrimination act after a News Corp journalist was found to have breached this act; briefing Rupert Murdoch personally before informing his cabinet of a major policy initiative; attending The Daily Telegraph post-budget party; and  informing The Daily Telegraph before his parliamentary colleagues of changes to data retention policy.

In the Abbott Government's first budget this 'alliance' with Rupert Murdoch continued – funding cuts and loss of a media platform befell public broadcasting which co-incidentally happens to be a major player on the Australian media scene:

The full extent of the ABC threat to News Corp isn't clear until you closely examine their competing activities.

First there's television, and the years-long saga of the ABC's Asia Pacific service, a national vanity project costing tens of millions a year, which the Howard government begged Jonathan Shier to take on in 2001. After the ABC began producing a reasonable, if low-cost, service, News coveted it for Sky News (of which News Corp has an interest via its holding in one-third owner BSkyB) to improve its international clout at taxpayer expense and tried twice, in 2005 and 2010, to win it, getting knocked back both times, although for very different reasons the second time around.

Then there's ABC News 24, a direct rival to Sky News itself and to News Corp's half-owned Foxtel, which carries Sky News. News 24 reaches about 14% of metropolitan audiences a week, far ahead of Sky News.

And free-to-air: Lachlan Murdoch's Ten Network has been regularly losing its third spot in the evening television ratings to the ABC. The ABC pointed out yesterday that it had lifted its prime-time share to a 14.6 share, up 1 percentage point from 2012 and the best performance of any free-to-air network this year. Ten's share fell and in fact spent all of 2013 behind the ABC, consigning it to fourth in metro markets, while its regional performance was even worse. ABC management has simply outclassed Lachlan's conga line of executives. The former head of ABC TV, Kim Dalton, was behind the suite of programs that enabled the ABC to have programs that viewers wanted to watch when Ten imploded in August of 2012, and continued to slide this year. Lachlan Murdoch has removed two CEOs and is now on his third in three years. Ten's problems are as much his problems as those of the poor decision making by former management.

Lachlan Murdoch also slashed and burnt the previous Ten management's carefully developed news and current affairs presence, at a time when the ABC was strengthening its position as the most trusted source of news for Australians across radio and television, far ahead of commercial broadcasters and newspapers — with News Corp's increasingly biased mastheads bringing up the rear as Australia's least-trusted newspapers.

"Plainly there are good leaks involving government secrets, which embarrass the ALP, and bad leaks, which make life difficult for the Coalition."

The ABC's online iView service is also a threat. It's now the most popular TV replay source online, and it competes directly, and for free, with Foxtel.

ABC Radio also competes directly with Lachlan's DMG radio stations in each state capital; Nova FM only beats the ABC's metropolitan local stations in Brisbane and Perth. And ABC Radio is planning a development that will not be greeted warmly by News or Ten or DMG Australia. Fairfax won't be happy either. In an email to staff two weeks ago, ABC Radio head Kate Dundas revealed that, among a long list of changes and new ideas, were state-based online news editions planned for 2014, a new e-mag for Radio National, a huge revamp of the Triple J Dig multiplatform, and a second online music stream for Classic FM.

Probably the most important will be the first version of the ABC audio player — the audio equivalent of iView. Podcasts for programs such as Conversations (which attracts hundreds of thousands of listeners a month) and RN programs will move to this new player site. ABC Radio Multiplatform also has a lot planned for 2014, with mobile versions of key sites like ABC Rural, Dig Music and ABC Local news sites.

The suspicion arises that Tony Abbott will increase pressure on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) whilst he has the power to do so. 

Given that on 20 August 2014 Crikey.com.au revealed a further motive for this pressure - the parlous state of News Corp in Australia:

Combined with the sharp earnings drop already reported in 2013-14, and with circulation and advertising revenues continuing to decline, the accounts suggest News Corp's Australian newspapers, including the national, metro and regional publications, will struggle to break even this financial year.

The confidential operating accounts for News Corp Australia have never been seen by investors and provide a detailed picture of a print business in rapid decline, with swingeing cost-cuts, cover price increases, new digital subscriptions and digital advertising failing to make up for the loss of revenues from advertising and circulation……

The accounts were produced last year just as Murdoch spun off his troubled print media assets worldwide from the profitable Fox film and cable television empire in the United States, in the wake of the UK phone-hacking scandal.

News Corp was spun out on June 28, 2013, from the renamed 21st Century Fox, and houses mastheads including The Wall Street Journal and New York Post in the US, the Times and Sun in the UK, News' Australian newspapers, plus book publisher Harper Collins, Foxtel and Fox Sports in Australia, and a 62% stake in ASX-listed REA Group, which operates the successful realestate.com.au website

Listed on the NASDAQ and the ASX, News Corporation, valued at $11 billion, goes to considerable lengths to avoid breaking revenue or earnings down by country or masthead, lumping its worldwide newspaper operations plus other businesses together into the "news and information" segment, which accounts for 71% of the group's total revenue, and only offering finer detail selectively.

Crikey can reveal that, amid a forest of negative brackets, revenue from News Corp's Australian newspapers fell 14% to $1.9 billion in 2012-13, with circulation revenue dropping 5% and advertising revenue falling 18%, while operating income fell 67% to $94 million.

Within the division, The Australian stands out as the worst performer: revenues dropped 20% from $135 million to 108 million in 2012-13, while operating income fell 41% from a loss of $19 million to a loss of $27 million. After depreciation, the masthead's operating loss fell to $30 million.

The profit drop in newspapers was only partly offset by growth in other operations like REA Group and Fox Sports, with total operating income falling 38% to $221 million. After income from investments including Foxtel, the group recorded a total profit before interest or tax of $367 million, down 28%.....

the heavy falls in print have continued if not accelerated through 2013-14. This is confirmed in News Corp's most recent quarterly earnings update and annual report, showing the Australian newspapers are dragging on recovering newspaper operations in the US and UK, as well as divisions reporting profit growth, such as book publishing.

News reported that earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation from Australian newspapers fell by US $67 million in 2013-14, or $73 million — which by Crikey's estimate represents roughly an 80% fall on the previous year, nearly wiping out the division's entire operating income. The division dragged heavily on the news and information segment, which reported a 16% drop in EBITDA in 2013-14.

The operating accounts show Melbourne's Herald Sun was the mainstay of News Corp in Australia, with the weekday paper generating revenues of $250 million in 2012-13, down 13.5% on the year before, and operating income of $35 million, down 41%. Revenue for the Sunday edition fell 17% to $75 million, while operating income fell 31% to $21 million.

Of the major tabloids the weekday edition of News' monopoly masthead in Brisbane, The Courier-Mail, suffered the steepest falls, with revenue dropping 18% to $158 million while operating income fell 68% to just $17 million. The Sunday Mail revenues fell 15% to $71 million and operating income fell 33% to $20 million.

The weekday edition of Sydney's Daily Telegraph was another weak performer, with the lowest profit margins at 5%, with revenue dropping 14% to $160 million while operating income fell 65% to just $8 million. The Sunday Telegraph revenues fell 15% to $94 million and operating income fell 53% to $7 million.

At that level Adelaide's Advertiser's weekday editions alone made a much stronger contribution than the Tele in 2012-13, generating revenues of $138 million (down 15%) and operating income of $22 million (down 47%) — without counting the Sunday Mail.

The financial performance of the newspapers has only worsened. In its latest accounts News Corp revealed that overall revenue from the Australian newspapers had fallen by another 18% or US $359 million in 2013-14, compared with the previous year, made up of US $314 million decline in advertising revenue and a US $45 million decline in circulation revenue. Of that, News said US $199 million — a bit over half — reflected the impact of a weaker Australian dollar versus the greenback, which pointed to an 8% decline in revenue in local currency to below $1.8 billion. [my red bolding]

Crikey.com.au 21 August 2014:

Adding the two divisions, to make the comparison easier, circulation revenue at Fairfax grew 13% to $327 million in 2012-13, and another 1% to $331 million in 2013-14. Ad revenue fell 18% in 2012-13 to $1,022 million, and another 15% to $869 million the year after. Total revenue fell 11% to $1,507 million in 2012-13, and another 12 % to $1,333 million in 2013-14. There was a moderate improvement in profitability, however, with EBITDA rising 3% to $269 million in 2012-13 and 1% to $273 million in 2013-14.

In 2012-13, Fairfax's Metro Media division recorded a 17% increase in circulation revenue to $222 million. Advertising revenue fell 21% to $634 million. Total revenue fell 12% to $996 million. In the Regional Media division, circulation revenue fell 4% to $98 million, ad revenue fell 13% to $388 million, and total revenue fell 10% to $511 million. EBITDA at the Metros fell 26% to $76 million and in Regional it fell 16% to $133 million.

In 2013-14, ignoring the restructure of Regional Media into Australian Community Media, the corresponding figures were as follows: Metro Media circulation revenue grew 9% to $228 million while ad revenue fell 14% to $460 million and total revenue fell 9% to $803 million; Community Media circulation revenue fell 7% to $103 million while ad revenue fell 16% to $409 million and total revenue fell 15% to $530 million. On the EBITDA line, the Metros reported a 41% increase to $121 million while Community Media fell 17% to $152 million.

In terms of percentage growth and/or declines, from year to year, the comparison shows Fairfax outperforming the News Corp papers on most measures, counting both revenues and earnings. [my red bolding]

Financial Review 22 August 2014:

The Blue Book showed the average cost of employees at The Australian’s print operations was $178,256. That included associated costs and actual salary, but that still seemed higher than most of the ABC journalists the paper had slammed as overpaid. By comparison, the average cost of employees for the Daily Telegraph was $141,214. The toilers at the Herald Sun made do with $131,944, $125,135 for The Courier Mail, and $90,990 for smaller titles like The Geelong Advertiser. [my red bolding]

Information overload

I have a friend who has recently signed up to an online dating service, he has not paid up his money so he cannot contact the ladies on the web site that have shown an interest in him.

 He can look at the limited data that is on the open source part of the site. He has been inundated with profiles and messages. It has been great for his ego but truthfully it has overwhelmed him as well.

Every time I see him he updates me on the number and profiles, 367 to date, but is frighten to pay up and engage.

Part of his fear is that these are not genuine responses and the other is that they are.

He is overwhelmed by choice.

What I found was amazing was that one of the first questions was on what star sign you are, it seems that my answer, on the cusp of sceptic and sarcasm would not be accepted.

Dating sites are not designed by cynics it seems.

This brings me to what I’m really interested in: there is so much information floating around much of it of dubious quality, so how do you decide what to place a value on and what to dismiss?

We, as a society seem to be suffering from rabbit in the head light syndrome: unable to see what would be in our best interests (get out of the light). So we continue to run within the light of the car, and thereby run harder towards our demise.