Tim Williams Blog

Australia is beginning to feel the heat from the resources boom. Jobs are now being lost in the export-led manufacturing economy because ,driven ever upwards by the demand for and speculation around, its coal,iron copper,gold ,gas , uranium ,you name it , the dollar exchange rate has reached dizzy levels. It’s now at 1.05 to the US dollar when the historic average is just over 70 cents , and 1.55 to sterling when less than 3 years ago it was at 2.50 to the pound. This is a seismic shift in a short period. If only federal government economic policy had moved as quickly – and in the right direction.

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I haven’t said this in recent years and possibly ever:two cheers for Tony Blair.Come to think of it, possibly one and a half.His comments on the recent riots made some sense to me but were also typically self serving. Essentially, he thinks that blaming the riots on a general moral malaise is wrong and indeed leads to bad policy. Rather he blames a minority of disaffected youth who live lives ‘outside the social mainstream’. The best policy therefore is to target that minority with policy interventions – running from better policing through to welfare penalties on the harder side and parenting lessons on the softer side.

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It took a Riot. This was the name of possibly the best-entitled cabinet paper ever submitted to a government. It was drawn up by Michael Heseltine after the Toxteth and Brixton riots of the early 80s. It advocated not a policing response to an earlier version of the breakdown of law and order in UK cities but a political and economic response.
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I am a fan of a man most British people won’t have heard of – and not enough Australians come to that. His name is Noel Pearson and he has just published ‘Radical Hope : Education and Equality in Australia‘.

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I’ve just sent this note (below)to a number of decision-makers in Wales.  Although it is written about and for Wales it has a wider application. Overburdensome, risk averse public sector procurement rules are everywhere raising barriers to entry to smaller companies and in effect reducing competition. I say this as someone who has worked for a bigger consultancy and won many contracts from the public sector. I also used to advise Ministers on such matters.

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I’ve been trying to work out a basic structure for a strategy document I’m writing for a local authority . I’ve been promiscuous in my research . I’ve hung around with McKinsey. I’ve walked around the block with Tom Peters. I’ve climbed over the barricades with Comrade Lenin (who had a simple and effective template for strategy development and implementation after all, though I don’t think my client is yet ready for revolutionary violence ).
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Last time out I advocated two cheers for Edward Glaeser and his new book Triumph of the City. Only two because much of what he says about the virtues of cities is not new , some of what he advocates in terms of urban regeneration – I paraphrase but it’s reducible to ‘don’t bother’ – is too fatalistic and frankly too American, and sometimes he contradicts himself . What gets him the two cheers however is his understanding of how bad public policy is pushing people out of cities ,creating sprawl and adding to carbon emissions.

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In Politics and the English Language Orwell pointed out that when politicians used obscure or opaque language it was never an accident. They had something to hide. I feel the same about the rebarbative lingo of financiers, sub-prime mortgage money-brokers and other snake-oil salesmen who brought us the Global Financial Crisis. Read more »