Author: ericknight

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Downton Abbey and a Spectator Diary

I finished the second season of Downton Abbey this evening and, whilst I don’t usually write about television on my site, this post will be an exception.

In my opinion, Downtown Abbey is British costume drama at its finest. The writing is tight and the ideas are provoking. For some, the pleasure of Downton is all in the landscape and interiors. I think this misses what Downton is really about: a journey into the heart and soul of British conservatism at a time of extraordinary change. It is written and created by Julian Fellowes with all the attention to detail and tone which only Fellowes can pull off with conviction.

In the first season, we are introduced to a family wrestling with questions of inheritance. At first blush, this might seem like a fairly superficial storyline. And it is. Inheritance is merely the tool which Fellowes uses to explore deeper themes: duty, custom, custodianship. The family at the centre of the drama is that of Lord Grantham. In one of his finer moments, Lord Grantham is found walking the grounds of Downtown Abbey talking to his eldest daughter, Lady Mary, about her future. When she speaks out against the responsibilities of carrying Downton in her older age, Lord Grantham reveals something about his own motivations. He is not the owner of a great estate, he tells his daughter. He is merely its custodian – seeking to improve on what he has been entrusted until his children and their children after him can do something better with it.

It is the sentiment of the British country Tory, something we too rarely hear about in the Australian headlines but which I think is alive in this country. Speaking to friends who have grown up in rural Australia, there is a deep sense of duty to the land and building a local family. It often explains the unusual connections in rural politics between the conservatives and those with green views. Indeed one of Britain’s finest conservative thinkers, Roger Scruton, has recently penned Green Philosophy: how to think seriously about the planet. It draws on the connection between conservatism and environmental conservation. There is a great willingness in political conservatism to nurture what is handed down to us, including the environment. This might surprise some with a less patient view of the conservative thinking and the political right.

The second series moves through the First World War and is equally fascinating (if not a little more fanciful at times) than the first season. We get relatively few shots of the Western front and far more shots from the home front. The challenges of duty at home is brought home by excellent performances from Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham) and Maggie Smith (the Countess of Grantham), amongst others. However, the Bates character is challenging– a stoic with a poor sense of judgment.

I’ve been meaning to publish something on the politics of Downton Abbey for a while now, and there may yet be an opportunity. The Spectator is an obvious home for such a piece, but there is so much British content in the Australian edition that it might be a bit much. However, I had a Diary in the Spectator recently which may interest. It is here. It includes thoughts from my recent book tour and covers the reflections of a young person publishing their ideas in book form for the first time. The Spectator Diary is a special piece of writing and it was an honour to be invited to write one. The British diaries are the best. They are understated in a way writing rarely is these days.

Malcolm Turnbull gave a great speech for the book earlier this month. You can read his speech here. For other recent pieces, look out for ABC local radio. I was on ABC Evenings recently with Dominic Knight. An interview I did with James O’Loghlin also recently got broadcasted a second time.

I’ll be doing an event or two at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May. The schedule is out this week, I think, so look out in the newspapers for more details. Reframe is selling well. It was the #3 bestseller for political/social science books across the country this time last month. Let’s hope it can keep it up!

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In conversation at Gleebooks

Since my last post, the Government has had a leadership spill, lost its Foreign Minister, and regained another. Sorry for being a bit slow to update.

I inadvertently got caught up in the drama. I had arrived in the ABC studios in Sydney to be a guest on ABC the Drum with Judith Sloan from the Australian and Michael Gleeson of Hawker Britton. I got talking to someone in the foyer and arrived just before 6 to find the studio in pandemonium. Cameras were diverted to Washington where the Foreign Minister was speaking live from an empty hotel lobby. The response in the studio was mixed. Some were elated that their show had been bumped and could get home early. Others were less cheerful about the Government in crisis. When I mentioned casually that it brought forward the prospect of an election I got death stares from a few cameramen.

The producers bumped Alain de Botton. He had been invited to talk about his new book Religion for Atheists. I’d stored up a great story to use on Mr de Botton in case we got stuck with no material. It didn’t turn out that way in the end. He left for dinner and they asked if I would do 3 minutes on Reframe and the Labor leadership. My thoughts have been lost somewhere in the 24 hour news cycle but a friend in Darwin saw it. I have a related piece coming out on it soon in the Spectator.

If you want to know more and you’re in Sydney this week come to Gleebooks on Wednesday! I’ll be speaking with Tanveer Ahmed on the book and other things. It should be a good night and we’ll kick on across the road afterwards.

Eric Knight in conversation with Tanveer Ahmed

Gleebooks – 49 Glebe Point Road

6pm for 6.30pm with a book signing afterwards

More details here

I’m also on James O’Loghlin Sunday Evenings on ABC local radio. I’ve already done the interview but I think they’re playing it this week or next. Tune in if you’re keen to learn about fish colonies in Turkey, participatory budgeting in Brazil, ambient orbs and more!

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Events in Melbourne this week…

This week the Reframe book tour heads down to Melbourne for a mixed set of radio interviews and events. I’ve listed them below in case you’re interested:

On radio, I’m doing:

  • The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine – on Monday from 11am
  • Interview on 3RRR – on Tuesday morning around 10.40am
  • Steve Vizard on Melbourne Talk Radio  – on Tuesday around 12.40pm

I’ll also be doing two events:

  • Debut Mondays at the Wheeler Centre – on Monday from 6.15pm
  • Book launch at Readings bookshop in Carlton – on Tuesday from 6.30pm

Finally, on Wednesday I’ll be doing a panel on ABC TV The Drum.

Feel free to come by or tune in if you’re around!

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Solving ‘race’ and other stuff with John Safran and Waleed Aly

Walking into the Tardis studios in the ABC, you get the impression it’s been there for a long time. Pictures of athletes, in black and white, hang on the wall with old-school microphones held to their faces. Noni Hazlehurst also hangs there. The set from Playschool is still strangely familiar to me. I obviously did a lot of my best work watching that show.

I was in the studio yesterday to do a series of radio interviews. Tardis is the booth you go to when you’re speaking on a program outside of Sydney. You sit in a little room with a microphone and talk to a blank wall. I was on Steve Austin’s morning program in Brisbane. I then left Tardis to speak with Richard Glover on 702 Drive in the afternoon. Richard is a super energetic guy and we had a great chat. Sitting in the studio,  it reminded how much of Drive is taken up with traffic reports!

In the evening, instead of heading out early on a date for Valentine’s Day, I was on air with Waleed Aly and John Safran on Radio National Drive. You can hear it here. John Safran pulls out some hilarious stuff on his show Race Relations…all of it slightly kooky. I think he must have worked out pretty quickly that I’m Eurasian because his first comment on the book was the picture of the back. Safran, of course, has Asian heritage as he explains here. You’d think between a Jewish guy, a Muslim and an Asian, we’d have solved the world’s race problems. Reading today’s papers, looks like Reuters missed the show.

I’ll be in Dymocks George Street, Sydney today 12.30-1.30pm signing books. If you’re at a loose end over lunch swing by and say hi.

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Annabel Crabb on Reframe – ABC The Drum

As the news cycle rumbled back into action this week, it struck me that we have lost something in Australian politics. We have lost the art of communicating major political reform. The mining tax is still kicking around the Senate. Advertising to sell the carbon tax has made it back into the papers. Lots of stuff has happened, but much less has been completed. Why is that?

My view is that our politicians have been more focused on winning the news cycle than they have on bringing people along with them. They know how to spring announcements at the last minute so they get good coverage. They know how to bring out the dead in quiet times of the year, so that certain issues slip under the radar. Other tactics seem harder to explain – like dropping the carbon tax and proposing a mining tax on either side of a weekend back in 2010.

What we need are strong leaders who have the capacity to walk us through issues. That often requires time rather than just media intensity. Media technology may have changed with the 24 hour news cycle but people are still the same. They need to be presented problems in the right way and work through them bit by bit.

 I had the privilege of being interviewed by Annabel Crabb on The Drum last night about this and Reframe. See our interview here at about 34.05 minutes. Annabel is fantastically energetic and really loves Reframe! I’ll leave her to promote it in her own words. 

I also went along to the Stanton Library yesterday to give a talk to about 50 people about my story behind writing the book. It’s a fantastic library in North Sydney and I used to go to day care next door! The Constant Reader, who are the local bookshop, were there in full force as was my aunt who is one of the local councillors in North Sydney. The talk will be up on the Stanton website soon.

That was Day 1 of the Reframe road show. Today’s task  – a longer conversation on Triple J with Tom Tilley around 5.30pm about the book!

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Reframe is here!

It’s taken several years of work, but REFRAME finally hit bookshelves across Australia this week!

I first got news it was on sale when my cousin messaged me from Manuka to say he’d bought a copy in Canberra. It was then spotted in Melbourne airport and Potts Point. I finally saw it yesterday when I walked into Dymocks on Hunter St in the city and signed a heap of copies. I was going to upload a picture -it’s on the bestsellers shelf! – but my computer isn’t cooperating.

You can buy the e-version here and buy delivered and discounted hard copies here.

Reframe is the story of how we make really big decisions in a world with short attention spans. One of my colleagues turned to me last night after reading a few chapters and said it took him until chapter 3 to realize what my thesis was.”You’re not necessarily telling us Eric Knight’s answer to every problem,” he said. “You’re telling us how to solve the problems ourselves.”

I’ve got The Essay in today’s News Review. It’s being published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Buy a copy today! It’s 1700 words on some of the big ideas from the book.

If you want more, I’ll be giving a talk at Stanton Library at 1-2pm on Thursday this week. It will be the tale of some the personal stories from the book.

The details are here and below:

Where: Stanton Library, 234 Miller St, North Sydney

When: Thursday, February 9th

Time: 1-2pm

Cost: Free, with book signing

More news soon, but happy reading!

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Comment to Quarterly Essay 42: Fair Share – Country and City in Australia

In the last Quarterly Essay, the Australian historian Judith Brett took on the topic of our country’s regional politics. Her essay was called Fair Share: Country and City in Australia. It was a well written narrative, describing the changing geography of the Australian economy from life off the sheep’s back to a set of urban metropolises.

I wrote a comment to her essay, which was published in the current Quarterly Essay by Robert Manne. In the comment, I raise two points. One: Brett’s essay is tinged with nostalgia for a time when bank managers ran country towns and were the patrons of their local golf clubs. Now, she says, economic rationalization means that local country communities have been replaced by the cold, hard parsimony of ATM machines.

I am close to Brett’s sentimental attachment to country life. My grandfather and great –grandfather were both bank managers at the Commonwealth Bank. But her essay begs a question: would we be better off with a world without ATM machines? Brett blames economic rationalization, but when is this just progress. Getting the measure of this difference is important if we are to find the right way forward.

My second point is that Brett misses the full measure of what’s happening in regional Australia. True, country towns are fading. But the regions are being lit up by another kind of politics: mining. Far from being dead, regional politics is rapidly changing from agrarian power to mining power.

There are important implications which flow from this, not least the responsibility which mining conglomerates owe to local communities. This politics underpins a number of headline issues:  Chinese foreign ownership of regional mines, the encroachment of mining tenements on to prime agricultural land, amongst others. These debates can be dressed up as xenophobia, food security, or protectionism. In the end, though, I think they represent an uncertainty in the electorate with the rapid changes afoot in the economy.

To read more of my comment, buy at copy of the Quarterly Essay, subscribe online here, or get in touch with me.

I have included an extract of the opening below:

Comment by Eric Knight to Quarterly Essay #42

 In 2006, I visited a little indigenous region called Utopia on the edge of the Central Desert, NT. I hadn’t travelled to Australia’s center before but there, as I looked out on what stretched as far as the eye could see, I began to realize how empty our land really is. Utopia was desperately poor. Dogs scratched around the township looking for food, and old ladies lay in the shade of concrete dugouts to shield themselves from the sun. There was a corner shop, a few houses, and a dusty sports field. Had Utopia once been paradise? Or was it named with the hope that one day its fortunes would change? I don’t know the answer, but I did know the problem with Utopia: it was geography.

            At the time I had just finished reading Momahad Yunus’s Banker to the poor. The Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Laureate had found a way to alleviate his people from poverty by offering them microfinance. Yunus’ scheme worked because Bangladeshis were poor for lack of credit. Before his Grameen Bank, the only resources they had to start a business were what they found in their pockets. The inability to borrow condemned them to poverty, and Yunus’ intervention broke this cycle of poverty.

            As I travelled across the Northern Territory (I was there to help the Central Land Council negotiate pastoral leases), I was less sure that microfinance would work in regional Australia. Distance was our tyranny, not lack of credit. It would take hours to travel between these communities – Yuendumu, Ali Carung, Tennant Creek. Sometimes we would fly by plane, other times we would drive and camp out in a swag overnight. This was cattle country, and local people were held in employment by a piece of paper bounding the pastoralist to his local workers. Without the cattle trade, these places were lost. But with microfinance, these places were not necessarily made better.

            Fair Share: country and city in Australia forces us to confront an important reality: not all of Australia is equal. No matter how industrious we are, or how resilient, nature prevents some communities from being self-sustaining. The afflicted communities change over time: sometimes they are driven to the brink by drought and flood, other times by the flow of economic history. Brett’s essay focuses on the latter. She returns to the great promise of federation – a nation for a continent – and inspires us to our own Manifest Destiny. Her essay reflects two deep traditions within Australian political consciousness. One is conservative – the instinct to nurture local communities and protect what we have etched through history. The other is liberal – the desire to give these communities the skills and resources they need to live the life they value.

            But, at times, Brett takes these two traditions and arrives at strange, almost romantic, conclusions. At the end, she advocates for subsidizing the country and mounts a number of justifications for why – food security, aesthetic pleasure, and nation-building. “The nation needs to confront the possibility that rural and regional Australia might always need a fair degree of subsidization,” she writes “that it will always be more expensive to deliver services to many parts of the Australia than to the city….and that we do all need to share the cost”.

            These are all excellent reasons for why we must do something. But whether the answer is simply to subsidies the country, I am less sure. There is much to consider here. Perhaps I am wrong on microfinance and it would be a good option. Others have argued that we must rescue the best and brightest of regional Australia and send them to metropolitan schools on scholarships. This might create a generation of people like Charlie Perkins, but perhaps it does not solve the problem of those who are left behind.

…

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AFR Opinion – Avoiding modern day protectionism

There is a lot of protectionism going around at the moment. In today’s Australian, the Trade Minister, Craig Emerson, has declared Doha dead. He is calling for side talks for nations who are willing to push for free trade over protectionism.

Australia’s services sector will compete well on a level playing field but what about our value-added goods? It’s easy for a lot of protectionism and sentimentality to creep into Australia’s prospects in advanced manufacturing. The truth is that we already have a lot of natural competitive advantages – a well educated workforce, world-leading expertise in biotech and solar. The problem isn’t getting government to invest more. It’s encouraging private investors to see the light.

I have a piece in today’s Australian Financial Review which distinguishes between these two positions – government subsidies versus an attractive tax incentives. The first (and more instantly gratifying) is a modern day form of protectionism. The second creates the right financial incentives for a prosperous Australian economy.

Click here to read the piece.

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A Dangerous Idea: The Self Start Nation

Alan Noble is a classic start up entrepreneur. In his early years he got experience in one of the world’s largest tech companies, NEC, in Japan. He then left for Silicon Valley, starting up Netmind from scratch. He exited in 2000, selling the company to Nokia just as the dot com bubble burst. He is also an Australian.

By his own admission, Alan’s career is not without its bumps. He now heads Google Australia’s Engineering team and was deeply involved in the technology behind Google Wave, which was commercially unsuccessful. But it is failure, Alan told me over breakfast today, which breeds success in the world of entrepreneurship. Australians, young, fresh out of University and eager to change the world, could do a lot worse then go into business for themselves and just have a go. Not all change comes from political activism.

I fear we might have lost something of this instinct to create something from nothing in Australia. We’re too happy to let others carry the can. I was interviewed by the ABC about my views on Australian innovation yesterday. The interview will be broadcast at 7.30am on Radio National on the Saturday Extra programme and I’ll be on with Alec Cameron, Dean of the Australian School of Business. They were keen to press this point: what can government do to fix the problem. But is government the audience for this message? I’m inclined to say, in the end, no.

The government can help create an attractive investment environment – tax breaks for start ups, incentives to drive private investment into angel investing. But in the end, it requires the scientist with the kooky ideas to network with the great business brain to produce an Australian company which can lead with world.

This is not a hypothetical. Some are already doing it. But unlike our sportsmen and actors, the successes of our great entrepreneurs are rarely broadcast. Sure, we know the big business guys. But what about the small guys – those who strive from small beginnings to be the next Mark Zuckerberg? Telling their stories shows young guns how the job is done. The Americans do this exceptionally well. The British do as well – the TV show Dragon’s Den is a huge success. I’d like the ABC to start an Australian equivalent of Dragon’s Den which shows the go-to-exit on taking good ideas to market.

That, in the end, is the dangerous idea behind my Festival of Dangerous Ideas appearance tomorrow. Australia is a nation of self-starters. But we have lost that of late. And we should not just wait for the government to start it back up.

I have a piece in the Australian’s Entrepreneur magazine today on how small businesses and entrepreneurs can change the world for the better. See the hard copy.

I have another piece for Fairfax App customers today on how our investment culture can drive private investment in our best and brightest from the bottom up. Read it here

You can also tune into Radio National tomorrow here, or better still wait for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas which will be broadcast nation-wide at some point to discuss the future of Australian industry – here. The pessimists point to the cliff at the end of the mining boom. The optimists are busy building the ladders from the bottom up.

On a not entirely unrelated point, I was on ABC The Drum on this Wednesday defending the freedom of speech, which includes with freedom to make mistakes. You don’t have to agree with someone to acknowledge their right to state their view. Click here to watch it.

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SMH Opinion: Make It In Australia

Around the corner from where I live is the old Bond’s singlet factory. For decades the place employed hundreds of workers, weaving the singlets that men and women have worn proudlyin this country for over half a century. It’s shut down now. For a while it was a cafe. More recently it was an art gallery. The building has been restored. But it remains a testament to a time when Australia made stuff.

We still do make things in Australia. They just look different to before. Drugs, chemicals, and mining robotics are being produced across the country without our being fully aware of it. It’s a growth industry, but if more can be done to support advanced manufacturing in Australia, it is the private sector – venture capitalists and growth-led private equity investors – who could have greater confidence in Australian industry. Often it’s Americans who must fly down under to invest in our start up companies. And for one of the world’s largest funds under management industries, we have a remarkably small pool of VC down here.

I have written a piece in today’s SMH here which interest. Feel free to post your thoughts below. Another related piece is here.

I’ll tackle this topic at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday with Alec Cameron, Dean of the Australian School of Business, Alan Noble, head of Google Engineering Australia, and Martin Rogers, CEO of Prima Biomed. We’re sold out, but there should be links into the Festival of Dangerous Ideas event afterwards.

In case you arrive early, I’ll be adjuciating the soapbox gab fest at the Opera House forecourt from 11.45am so come up and say hello. Otherwise join us for a drink at Opera Bar after the event from 4pm