9th State

Be part of it - you're welcome

The New Institute was initiated in 2004 to include people who live beyond Australia's capital cities in the national debate of politics and policy.

It is a not-for-profit incorporated association - which means it is regulated by the NSW Office of Fair Trading and owned by its members, although non-members are welcome to attend its events.  The result has been an organisation evolving to reflect the needs and desires of its members.

Events are organised by a management committee, consisting of the founders and a small number of volunteers who have arranged speakers, venues, and all the details.

Events have taken the form of presentations, by one speaker or a panel, held in venues that suit the particular subject, speaker and audience.  They usually begin at 6.30pm on a weekday, and conclude by 8pm. They have all been, as at August 2005, in Newcastle - Australia's most populous non-capital city.  The founders considered it the logical place to start, but the Institute's name, as you will notice, is not "Newcastle": the founders hope to spread the Institute beyond one city, preferably to include the whole of non-metropolitan Australia.

The Institute provides a platform for ideas and discussion.  It does not endorse any particular point of view, but encourages dissent and diversity. It has a small core of beliefs, however:

• Australian democracy belongs to all who live in Australia
• Postcode is not an indicator of talent or ability
• Debate itself is valuable, and its value is independent of what is being said

Topics and speakers have included:

• sex and Rugby League (Assoc Professor Catharine Lumby, Sydney University and Tony Butterfield, executive officer of the Rugby League Players' Association
• classical literature, the ANZAC legend and the war on terror (Dr Bernie Curran, Newcastle University)
• the 50th anniversary of the polio vaccine and polio today (Ms Norrie Stevens, who had polio as a child, Dr Gordon Kerridge, who treated her over more than a decade, and Dr Craig Dalton, head of population health in the Hunter-New England Area Health Service)
• public interest advocacy and Cornelia Rau (Assoc Professor Ray Watterson of the Newcastle University Legal Centre, the Rau family's legal advisory team)
• a discussion of the 2004 election 10 days before the poll led by Margo Kingston, political commentator and author of Not Happy, John.

The largest audience was for the pre-election event with Margo Kingston.  It would be invidious to name which speaker generated the greatest number of requests for a return engagement, but it is safe to say not many would guess from the topic that it would prove so satisfying and popular.

It has also proven a timely mixture.  Margo Kingston's timing was obvious; but Catharine Lumby and Tony Butterfield spoke just three nights before the Newcastle Knights' completely unforeseen - but not unpredictable, if you were listening on the night  - adventures on a road trip almost brought the club undone. And Ray Watterson spoke a week after the Palmer report was published.

To that extent, the Institute has achieved its objective of involving people in the national debate, of informing people in a genuinely timely manner on topics of genuninely current interest.

If you would like to be part of the Institute, all that is required is your attendance at a meeting.  Check our coming events at http://fivers.typepad.com/newinstitute  If you would like to support the Institute further and play a role in its work, click on the e-mail link in the column at right. The Institute's rules and a membership form can be downloaded from this site or from links at right.

This web site also contains some of the media reports and commentary on the Institute and its events.  We hope their inclusion will give you more idea of where we have been and where we are heading.  It's a work in progress, and you are welcome to be part of it and help shape its future.

RECLAIMING OUR DEMOCRACY

Now is the time to reclaim our democracy

Author: John Miner Date: 30/09/2004 Newcastle Herald Section: News  Page: 9

WHEN his turn to be an official in the government of Athens some 2500 years ago came around again, Sophocles told Pericles that he didn't want to do it.

He was writing a play and, anyway, politics was not his business.

Pericles replied that the man who says politics is not his business has no business.

He could be severe, that Pericles. But his was a concise description of the ideal democracy, owned and run by the people themselves.

Nothing shows more clearly than a federal election campaign that we still have the framework for a participatory democracy.

John Howard or Mark Latham will be our Prime Minister after October 9. Who chooses? Their parties have chosen them, and now it's our turn.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it's all happening Somewhere Else. Inevitably the campaign is reported as big policy, analysed by the big guns in Canberra.

In fact, the Lower Hunter is twice as important as Canberra to the election. There are five seats in this area, only two in the ACT.

Laurie Oakes gets the same number of votes as you do. Wherever you live is where the election really takes place.

More people live beyond Australia's eight capital cities than live in NSW. The New Institute was established to ensure Australians living beyond the capital cities a place in setting the agenda of the continuing national policy debate.

It would be silly to assume that more than a third of the Australian people have nothing to contribute just because of their postcode.

Our involvement should be more than an occasional delegation to Canberra or Macquarie Street to address a particular issue. The New Institute wants to open a two-way channel for continuing discussion.

Ultimately, it wants to make listening when the regions speak the default setting for decision-makers, instead of something we have to fight for.

It's not as hard as you might expect. Simply talking about new ideas has generated interest in the institute. There is an appetite in the media and the community for fresh ideas and new voices.

The institute aims at making Newcastle the biggest population centre beyond the capital cities seems a logical starting point to be a regular stop on the intellectual campaign trail.

The institute has invited as its first "external" speaker the lawyer, journalist and author of Not Happy, John, Margo Kingston.

Margo's book shows a passionate belief that democracy belongs to us, not to "them".

The institute won't endorse speakers. It believes in providing a stage for many voices.

But it does share Margo Kingston's belief that everyone is entitled to a voice, everyone is entitled to hear a case tested by debate.

The New Institute is delighted to bring the election closer to home by having Margo in Newcastle in the shadow of polling day to speak about reclaiming our democracy.

John Miner is a founder and committee member of the New Institute. Margo Kingston will speak at Newcastle Panthers from 6pm tonight.

NO SUCH THING AS ANCIENT HISTORY

The Herald's weekly columnist, Su Cruickshank, reports on Dr Bernie Curran's presentation, From Troy to Gallipoli to 9/11.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

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RULES OF THE INSTITUTE

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CONGRATULATIONS, MARGO: IT'S AN ELECTION!

Citizens, not consumers

IT was refreshing to participate in Thursday night's forum at Panthers Newcastle when feisty journalist Margo Kingston outlined the serious threat she saw to our democracy that John Howard presents.

Prominent members of the Labor, Liberal and Greens parties, among others, listened to the call for a return of grassroots democracy and the small-l liberal principles that are the foundation of Australian values.

Ms Kingston called for cross-party action to save a democracy she said was being systematically dismantled by John Howard.

They had carelessly led us into our first war of aggression, against the will of the people. They had decided that robust liberal democracy was an impediment to big business and big media.

She said they had replaced good governance with rigid control, populist manipulation, misinformation and outright lies.

Let's move on from the shallow "we need to become a swinging seat" to a values-based stand that says to all governments: "We are citizens, not consumers." We, the people, can make a difference.

Congratulations to the New Institute for inviting Margo Kingston, attracting cross-party participation and lifting the debate out of the hip-pocket and into the heart of Australian citizenship.

Ellen Davis-Meehan

PHILIP O'NEILL: HONEYSUCKLE

SOMETIMES arguments are best had out in the open. This is one.

Last week The Herald reported that a clear majority of Hunter residents were happy with the developments along the Newcastle harbour foreshore, which we know as Honeysuckle.

The Honeysuckle Development Corporation commissioned the survey and its general manager, Angus Dawson, was reported to be pleased with its findings.

Yet Elizabeth Farrelly, provocative columnist from the Sydney Morning Herald, is unhappy with Honeysuckle. Very unhappy.

If you haven't read Farrelly's epistle by now, you should. I bet Angus Dawson has. You'll find it in the opinion section at www.smh. com.au.

Perhaps it, and criticisms like it occasional but spirited prompted the development corporation's search for public support.

Personally, I place more importance on strong argument rather than on claims about public support based on polling, especially when the issue is one as important as the redevelopment of 50 hectares of prime harbourside land.

Unfortunately, according to Farrelly, following the recent round of development at Honeysuckle, Newcastle has "wedged multi-storey barriers of view-guzzling, mind-numbing mediocrity between itself and its focus, the harbour". Ouch.

Honeysuckle, according to Farrelly, has produced a wall of buildings that just "sit there closing streets, blocking views, dominating the boardwalk like a lifeless copy of some American communitarian dream". As a consequence, for Farrelly, Honeysuckle is "a poetic opportunity dramatically and deliberately missed".

Yet why would Farrelly point her pen northward? Since when has a columnist from Sin City wondered out loud about Novocastrian welfare? Why pick on Newcastle?

Well, Farrelly makes a stunning declaration, anointing Newcastle as "one of the country's perhaps the world's most spectacularly sited towns blessed with a street grid that runs willy-nilly over the topography". Mmmm, nice.

Crucially, Honeysuckle the public land, the buckets of taxpayers' money, the special planning powers presents Newcastle with an opportunity, according to Farrelly, "to give those pretty, steep, tree-lined streets a harbour terminus [which] would give the city a sense of full-blooded presence it hasn't had for a long, long time, if ever".

These are confronting arguments. They are also words of urgency, for a lot of Farrelly's words are about opportunities already lost though Farrelly is not the first epistle writer to warn non-believers of little time left.

Honeysuckle aside, Farrelly offers one of the clearest storylines about Newcastle's industrial history that I have yet encountered.

She describes the city's engagement with steel and coal as its period of adolescence. It's a simple, helpful phrase; encouraging even. It reminds us that Newcastle had barely 50,000 people in 1901. Very soon, over 100 years on, the Newcastle Statistical Division, the five lower Hunter council areas, will top half-a-million people.

The city has moved on from its role as Australia's prime industrial centre in the nation's 20th-century nation-building project. In the last decade, the city has broken the shackles of dependency on a few large corporations, notably BHP, and weaned itself off the government-development drip.

A bit pock-faced sure, but a new adult stature is obvious. Yet Newcastle's progress to adulthood so far, according to Farrelly, has an "odd half-empty feeling".

Although, only half-empty if you want to take it that way. Around the world many former industrial cities have turned themselves into museums of their past, photo stops for senior citizens and school kids, and little else. Fortunately Newcastle got over the heritage-as-future thing pretty quickly.

Perhaps Newcastle's half-emptiness can be taken as a sign of work-in-progress, as space for Newcastle to grow into, to complete its development, to establish its adult identity, beyond an industrial adolescence. Can't it?

Moreover, while the journey from infancy to the end of adolescence took a century, the leap to adulthood, like with humans, is sudden. And fraught with risk-taking decisions.

Various types of career, style, personality and morality are flirted with, and then they get concreted in place, as identity, in fairly quick time. The boring and mundane are sorted off. The charming, the adventurous, the generous and the bold take prime position.

Farrelly urges us to take our chance for "gorgeousness", for a "full-blooded presence" as a self-confident adult city. Our choice.

Phillip O'Neill is director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at The University of Newcastle. This is an extract from a talk he gave last week to Newcastle's New Institute.

(FIRST PUBLISHED 6 DEC 2004)

WOMEN'S ROLE IN NRL NOT SITTING ON THE SIDELINE

By BROOKE NEWSTEAD

NEWCASTLE residents were given an insight into the increasing role of women in the National Rugby League last night during a public discussion at Newcastle Panthers.

Sydney-based academic and author of the Playing By The Rules report Catharine Lumby and former Knights captain Tony Butterfield were invited by the New Institute to speak about the role of women in rugby league.

Following last year's controversy surrounding the Canterbury Rugby League Club, Professor Lumby was called on by the NRL last year to work closely with players to establish their attitudes towards women and to explore the changing role of women in the sport.

She said the report showed women formed 40 per cent of the NRL fan base.

The study also found that more could be done to acknowledge their role in working to promote NRL.

Professor Lumby and Mr Butterfield joined forces last night to encourage public discussion about the treatment of women by NRL players, and how the roles of players in society has changed over the game's evolution.

They discussed the main recommendation of the report, which found that NRL players should be educated about their high-status role in the media and equipped with the necessary tools to deal with different situations.

"Unfortunately the tendency now is to run the high moral ground and to say these people are bad," Professor Lumby said.

"What we really need to do is discuss it in public and say how can we move on from here."

Mr Butterfield drew on his own experiences in the league and spoke about the changing role of the players.

"What players are finding now is that you can't have your cake and eat it too," he said.

"There's that public scrutiny, but without that it also would not be a professional sport."

He said the role of women was not just a football issue, rather one spanning society.

(FIRST PUBLISHED 6 FEB 2005)

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE

This is a summary of a presentation to The Institute by Vice-Chancellor Nicholas Saunders of the University of Newcastle.  An edited version was published in The Herald (Newcastle) on 23 August 2005

The University of Newcastle had very modest beginnings as a College of the (now) University of New South Wales in the early 1950s, located at Tighes Hill.

In 1965, the University gained its independence.   At that time, the University had fifteen hundred students (many of whom were international students as part of the Columbo Plan), one hundred and fifty hectares of bushland at Shortland and lots of dreams.

This year the University celebrates its fortieth birthday.  Its development over those forty years has been spectacular.

Today, we have:  twenty three thousand students; revenue of more than $300 million per year; a research performance that places us in the Top 10 of Australia’s universities (and well inside the top four percent in the world); highly regarded teaching programs in many disciplines and professions; and multiple campuses at Callaghan, the Newcastle CBD, Ourimbah, Port Macquarie and Tamworth.  Students from eighty countries including one thousand off-shore, study the University’s courses each year.

The communities of the Hunter, Central Coast and mid-North Coast regions have every reason to be proud of their University.  It is a fine institution with a bright future.

The operating environment for Australian universities is difficult at the moment.  We are expected to be less reliant on core government funding and to stand more on our own two feet through the changing of student fees, the conduct of research and consultancies and philanthropy.  Only forty percent or so of the revenue earned by our nation’s universities now comes as core funding from the Federal government, a proportion that is very similar to the 1960s.  The days of high levels of Commonwealth funding experienced in the 1970s and 80s are well and truly over.

The University of Newcastle has been slow to adjust to the financial imperatives over the last fifteen years and continues to have a higher reliance on Commonwealth revenue than does the university-sector as a whole.  This has constrained the University and has been one factor in our poor financial performance in recent years.

Students and their families now bear an increasing proportion of the cost of their university education through the payment of HECS and fees.  In the year 2000, the HECS charge was, on average, about a third of the total cost of a place at university.  By 2008, it will be, on average, almost one half.  And there are some courses today where the proportion contributed by the student is already much greater than this.  For example, the annual HECS contribution of a Newcastle law student is five times greater than the annual government contribution to that student’s place!

Given the significant financial contribution that students are making to their education, their expectations about the quality of the teaching they receive and their university experience in general, is understandably high.  Universities must respond to these expectations by ensuring that staff, facilities and technological support are of the highest quality possible and that students are placed at the centre of the University’s activities.

Today’s policy environment for universities is uncertain.  Important issues under discussion include the legal basis of universities (and whether they should move from State to Commonwealth legislation); the nature of their activities (and whether there  continues to be the requirement to teach broadly, do research and engage with the community in order to be called a “university”); the measurement and reward of teaching and research excellence (and the tying of very significant sums of money to those outcomes); governance and workplace relations; linkages between TAFE and university sectors (in which the University of Newcastle has a strong reputation); and the ability of universities to collect a compulsory general service fee from students (or so-called voluntary student unionism).

The outcome of these discussions will have a profound effect on the future of our nation’s universities.

Despite these challenges and uncertainties, our University will continue to develop its fine reputation and performance provided that we develop effective strategies to respond to the changed conditions and we create opportunities for ourself.

Successful universities of the future will have a clear sense of purpose.  Just what sort of university do we wish ours to be?

Successful universities will focus their activities, deliver what they choose to do at the highest quality and stop doing other things.  It will not be possible in the future to be “all things to all people”.  This poses a particular challenge for our University, since we have a responsibility to provide broad opportunities to the people of the regions that we serve.  We will continue to be broadly based and to offer both generalist and professional degrees but within that general framework we need to focus on what we do best and what will be of greatest value to our communities.

Successful universities of the future will sustain effective partnerships : with other universities to support the range of courses on offer; with business and industry to support student learning, scholarships and research and development; with alumni for support and fund raising; and with the community to promote leadership, cultural development and harmony, community capacity and economic development.

Successful universities will be flexible in the ways in which they provide teaching, organise and support their staff and fund their activities.

Like other universities established in the 1960s, the University of Newcastle was founded on a set of values that placed research at the centre of our mission, encouraged innovation and engagement with real-life problems, emphasised equity and diversity in student access and staff employment, and highlighted the importance of community service.  These values continue and form the platform on which the future of our University will be built.

I am confident that the University of Newcastle will successfully address the challenges it currently faces and that ten years from now, at its fiftieth birthday, there will be even greater achievements to celebrate.

Nicholas Saunders

22 August 2005

2011 Census: more people; same distribution of population

And that is the story. 

More Australians - nearly 14 million, live in capital cities. 

BUT...the population living beyond the capital cities - 17.5 million - is still greater than the population in even the most populous state (NSW).

News disseminated from capital cities dominates the media; regional news outlets rely on some netwrok feeds and as much local reporting as they can manage with their own resources. Of course the smaller and smallest population centres are outside the capital cities, sometimes so remote from newsrooms that reporting is difficult to afford - and "afford" here applies more to time than money.

The consumer's general impression becomes that all news is disseminated from the capital cities; that all important events and ideas come from capital cities - even though there are 7.5 million other Australians capable of creating, inventing, planning and devising new elements of the national future.

Australia's devotion to voting in electorates of equal size (a tolerance of 10% + or - is usual) reduces the political power of small communities. The limited dissemination of news in regional and rural Australia further reduces the power of non-capital city voters - even though there are more of those in regional Australia than there are in any one State, 

At this point, one should probably consider Zipf's law or its related phenomenon, the law of primates.

In a population, there is usually one numerically dominant centre. The second largest centre is usuallya bout half the size of the primate city ... and so on, so that the defined area has large towns, mid-sized towns and, eventually, a "long tail", i.e. a long list of smaller and smaller localities. 

Zipf's law does not work quite so comfortably in Australia because there were six colonies before Federation, each with its own primate city. Sydney and Melbourne are the largest, but Melbourne is nothing like 50% smaller than Sydney.