Crikey

Spotted 1: Joe Hockey, and media flunky pack (Steve Price, Ross Greenwood etc etc ) dining/celebrating in back courtyard of popular Italian restaurant in Woollahra. Celebrating something? Who paid? Wrecked everyone’s night!

Spotted 2: James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch waltzing through the lobby of the Burswood Hotel and Casino in Perth yesterday. With them was a substantial entourage, and James was look well fed. What are they cooking up?

Journos at The Age not happy with killjoy CEO Don Churchill’s decision to hold The Age staff Christmas Party on a Monday night. Attendance numbers for the knees-up at the Hyatt’s Spice Bar next Monday evening are well down, according to scribes, because hardly anyone wants a party at the start of the working week. Journo wags pointing to another Scrooge-like  cost-saving initiative by management.

And you have to pay to go to The Sunday Age Christmas party:

From: XXXXXXX@theage.com.au
To: …
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:01:17 +1100
Subject: Sunday Age Christmas party

Hey guys,

The excitement is building, the tension is palpable and the countdown is on: six sleeps until The Sunday Age Christmas party. Wednesday, December 16, Waterside Hotel on the Deck, from 6pm. Now, I’ve just been told that the people at the Waterside need final numbers for this for catering by first thing tomorrow morning. So that means I need confirmation of who is attending by then. Apologies to those who have only found out about the party in the last couple of days.

To those who have already paid or confirmed via email that they’ll be coming please disregard this. To those who have not, PLEASE do so before tomorrow morning! Either send me an email telling me you’re coming then pay on the night or, even better, throw some cash in my account AND send me an email as the money will probably take a couple of days to clear.

The cost is $29.50. My bank account details are: XXXXXX, the account’s name is XXXX XXXXXX, the BSB is XXXXXX and the account number is XXXXXX.

For those who do not confirm by tomorrow morning, you are still welcome. But it means you won’t have access to the delicious BBQ food and the (limited) bar tab graciously bestowed on us by high up.

Sorry again to those who only found out about the party this week. Hope to catch you on the 16th.

XXXX

These are ten big questions buzzing around the newspaper and magazine industry today:

1. Is the newspaper industry body, The Newspaper Works, an illegal cartel?
2. Why did Fairfax and the Magazine Publishers of Australia yesterday pull out of the plans by Newspaper Works to set up a new readership measurement system — to a furious response by News Limited, who are driving the move to dump Roy Morgan research.
3. Why have most of the biggest industry players — Fairfax, ACP, Pacific Magazines —  abandoned The Newspaper Works scheme?
4. Could it be that their lawyers advised them that being part of such a plan constituted collusion and cartel behaviour under the Trade Practices Act?
5. Is News Limited’s obsession with getting “better” research likely to end up in legal action from the ACCC?
6. Why does News Ltd want a different readership research system anyway?
7. Could it be because yet-to-be-released Morgan figures on “sectional readership” show that many parts of newspapers, including the inserted colour magazines, have less than half the readers of the host newspaper?
8. If that’s the case, will newspapers be forced to reduce their advertising rates by the number of people not reading those sections?
9. Is the device of setting up a separate company to run The Newspaper Works research a way of circumventing the Trade Practices Act?
10. What’s in it for Fairfax to break away from their own industry body and incite the fury of John Hartigan and News Ltd?

True fictions: Abbott’s ‘Shadow’ Cabinet:

Opening of the new Clem 7 Under River Tunnel in Brisbane. The tunnel is way ahead of schedule, and the council is already scheduling tourist bus tours through it. Much speculation abounds as to its likely official opening date, but one insider has it that the date will be Sunday February 14, St Valentine’s Day, making it the Tunnel of Love!

Interesting reference in today’s article from The Guardian (UK) entitled “This anti-green backlash is a gift to brutish regimes”:

A right-leaning Australian journalist told me that, for conservatives there, “climate change is now morphing from a science issue into yet another front line in the culture wars, in which any obsession of the inner-city, mung-bean-flavoured-tofu-eating, latte-slurping political/academic/media class is automatically the target of resentment and scorn”.

Anyone got a hunch who it could be?

Why is Hornsby Mental Health Unit being rebuilt?

Why is it that City of Sydney councillors Irene Doutney and Shayne Mallard attended the 2009 Christmas party of United Resource Management (URM) while the company was in the middle of a contract competition with SMS Municipal Services and Veolia Environmental Services for the City of Sydney residential garbage and recycling collection services?

Considering that a few weeks after the party URM were awarded the contract … Given that Shayne Mallard was also a councillor for South Sydney council when its recycling contract was awarded to URM a few short years ago, it would seem URM has a few good friends sitting on the CoS council.

Ms Jonas is on the money. Universities have been stacking on executive staff  (for reasons largely to do with federal government demands and the need to get in the cash) while economising on teaching staff, heads of academic departments are caught in the middle.

Many of them have the best of intentions but little training in managing very scarce resources. Hence, good people say and do very bad things. The worst thing of all is that young and creative scholars rightly see no future.

Finally, Melbourne has its problems but so do other places. The corridor talk around universities makes the moaning of farmers sound like a glee club. Some digging will pay dividends.

Re. Yesterday’s Telstra drone wondering about the televisions being installed at his office, I used to work for Telstra and we had the giant plasmas installed in our office a few years ago and the explanation they gave us was the it was to improve the corporate image of the office in case clients or stakeholders were ever to come through, but is terrible for workers as you have to listen to Telstra ads and jingles all day.

BioSIRT — a state-federal biosecurity system project that has been going for years, costing millions and still has not delivered.  Some states are pulling out. Start here and start asking questions.