1) Following last years media law changes, the ACMA has introduced a new register for rural and regional radio stations. Stations have to regularly report their levels of ‘local presence’ - staffing, facilities etc - so that the regulator can, if a ‘trigger event’ occurs, compel the station to maintain the current level. In this way, the regulations to protect local radio punish local radio. And seriously, what is a ‘trigger event’?

2) Stephen Conroy, elaborating on Labor’s plan to pay for a fibre network, identifies a core federal government policy mistake; allowing competition:

Senator Conroy is not afraid to admit to mistakes by past Labor governments. In fact his broadband policy could well have been informed by the Keating (and then Howard) governments’ failure to halt the duplicate rollout of hybrid fibre coaxial cable by Telstra and Optus in the mid-1990s.

“It was clearly a failure of policy by government. There should have been a better effort to get an access regime that didn’t result in billions of dollars being wasted,” he said.

If this is indicative of the conditions Labor will set on the new fibre network - no facilities based competition - then the cost of the new network isn’t just the $4.7billion of Future Fund money, its also the lost opportunities for private sector competition in communications infrastructure.

Birthdays can be fun: “Europe’s 50th Anniversary Clown Show”

Member states were told by the Commission to organize celebrations around the continent for their apathetic publics, although they balked at a plan for simultaneous dance festivals. According to the BBC, “it reminded them of Soviet-style mass participation ‘fun’.” Yet Belgium hosted a veteran rock concert, Denmark gave away free buns, Ireland organized a “Prayer for Europe,” Luxembourg arranged a circular walk, Romania established a European Union Internet chat-room, and Spain produced a giant puzzle, while Slovenia offered free parachute jumps (very liberating—a chance to escape the EU, perhaps?). France, meanwhile, abandoned its once famous artistic originality to produce a film about a Parisian barmaid who rekindles her passion for a German officer from the Nazi occupation when they meet again on precisely May 9, 1950, the day that Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister called for the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community. Who says that Soviet-style, mass-participation fun is dead?

Slovenia wins.

EU official: Microsoft’s behavior ‘unacceptable’

European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes hit out at Microsoft in comments to European parliamentarians Thursday, saying it is “unacceptable” that the company continues to gain market share using tactics that were outlawed in the Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling against the software vendor.

a) If regulations imposed on Microsoft aren’t having the intended consequences, whose fault is that? Microsoft’s, or the people who designed the regulations?

b) Does it strike anybody else that what the commissioner considers ‘unacceptable’ part is not Microsoft’s level of adherence to the law, but that its market share has continued to rise regardless? She seems more unhappy that Microsoft is designing a product people desire, despite all her efforts to dissuade it.

Daniel Mitchell posts at the Cato blog the State Department’s guide to what other countries should do to properly combat money-laundering:

…anti-money laundering laws have been an expensive failure. They costs billions of dollars yet there is no peer-reviewed literature showing that they have any impact on crime. Heck, they don’t even stop crooks from laundering funds. Yet the myopic bureaucrats at the State Department publish an annual report hectoring other nations to make their anti-money laundering laws more intrusive and burdensome.

Mitchell links to Richard Rahn’s article in the Washington Times on some of the sillier requests.

But what about Australia? We’re doing well: in 2007, we have displayed an ‘exemplary leadership role in emphasizing money laundering/terrorist finance issues and trends within the Asia/Pacific region’. But this leadership role is achieved by increasing regulations in the the already heavily regulated financial sector:

The AML/CTF (anti-money laundering/counterterrorism financing) Act covers the financial sector, gambling, bullion dealing and any other professionals or businesses that provide particular designated services and imposes a number of obligations including customer due diligence, reporting requirements, record keeping, and establishing AML/CTF programs….

The Australian Government will consider a second tranche of reforms (to begin in 2007), extending to real estate agents, jewelers, and specified nonfinancial legal and accounting services.

One of the major sources of the dramatic increase in regulatory activity over the last decade has been the globalisation of regulation. In part this has been due to the globalisation of the markets it is intended to regulate, but as the State Department’s discussion of Australian money-laundering law reveals, much of it is under the auspices of security. These sources add to the regulatory burden of the financial industry significantly, even without much activity by Australian legislators.

The March IPA Review has just returned from the printers - in full, glorious colour, I might add! - it should be in newsagents in the next couple of days. But, as always, there is a mouthwatering selection of articles up on the website already. (www.ipa.org.au)

…including the cover story, “Islam’s free market heritage“, by Andrew Kemp and myself, which exposes a rarely discussed strain of Islamic thought. Particular emphasis in the article is given to Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth century historiographer, sociologist and economist whose economic thought was far ahead of his time.

But to fully appreciate the high-quality and intellectual breadth of the March 2007 edition of the IPA Review - our 60th year in publication - you will have to get your hands on a copy.

I was asked to elaborate on the arguments behind the Crikey piece from last week for Communications Day, a telco industry newletter. It’s up on the IPA website now: “Inventing market failure“

I had a letter in Crikey today, responding to a piece yesterday:

Joshua Gans argues that if Australian broadband becomes an election issue, it could result in poorly conceived public policy. He is overly generous to the government - isn’t existing telecommunications policy already poor?

But in order to avoid “haphazard” fiscal indiscipline, Gans recommends, as a solution, systematic fiscal indiscipline. Gans proposes a re-nationalisation of the telecommunications industry, with the government itself rolling out new communications networks across the country. He argues that a range of subsidies already exist for broadband investment, so why not just combine them into one massive subsidy? But it would be much better to simply eliminate those subsidies.

In the United States, Verizon has invested US$18 billion in fibre-optic cable straight to the home. This investment would not have been commercially possible if the Verizon was required to give access to the facilities to all other parties at a price determined by a regulator, like it would be in Australia. It’s a risky investment. The industry is so dynamic that new technologies can outflank the best thought plans.

But at least, if it doesn’t pay off, US taxpayers won’t be left with the bill. However, under Gans’ socialised infrastructure plan, Australian taxpayers will assume all the risk of network investment, and telecommunications companies will assume the reward. Instead, it would be much more sensible to allow companies to build networks free from the threat of over-bearing regulations.

But Gans sets a high bar for regulatory reform, arguing that if a government ever amends the Trade Practices Act, it will compromise the independence of the regulator, the ACCC. This is to elevate the current law embodied within the Trade Practices Act to something other than what it is; an Act of Parliament.

Problems with the Trade Practices Act are obvious from the fact that its provisions on such matters as forced access to infrastructure are far more draconian in Australia than in other jurisdictions. This is exacerbated by activist regulatory bodies willfully interpreting the Act’s provisions to enlarge their own powers.

There’s a big gap between the silent era and today. It isn’t silence that makes silent films hard to watch, it is the myriad of changes between the first few decades of the twentieth century and today about what we find entertaining.

Silent films are, for instance, often interminably slow. In the event that that Woodrow Wilson did describe The Birth of a Nation as ‘history writ with lightning’, it would have to go down as one of the most inaccurate film reviews ever - D.W. Griffith takes 3 long hours to unravel his tale of the Confederacy and the KKK.

It probably doesn’t help that the majority of the silent films that have lasted are what we would now call arthouse films. The artistic breakthroughs of Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov make no attempt to engage the audience, for both ideological and aesthetic reasons. It is little remarked upon today, but it doesn’t come as a surprise that these films weren’t very popular. Regardless, these are the films available to modern audiences trying to dip their toes into silent movies.

All of which is an introduction to a silent movie which is strikingly modern. Chemi bebia (My Grandmother) is a Georgian satire of Soviet bureaucracy, banned immediately after its production in 1929. The brilliant Russian literary absurdism, almost entirely absent from the pre-war Russian film canon, was proudly imported into this obscure Georgian comedy.

Jesse Walker provides a background to My Grandmother in his review at Reason.

The film is especially critical of the patronage system of bureaucracy and hilariously sarcastic about the Youth Communist League who ‘never rest’. It is experimental without being ‘hard’ - animation and stop-motion photography are used with for comedy rather than art.

In 2007, with a steady stream of never-ending red tape reviews and commissions, My Grandmother could provide the Productivity Commission with a great motivational tool - the film ends with a worker screaming, ‘death to bureaucracy, death to red tape’. An important message.

Another problem with many releases of silent movies is the often wildly inappropriate accompanying music - sometimes it is better to play your own playlist over the top. But the DVD of My Grandmother has been released by the San Francisco composer Beth Custer, and the jazz soundtrack fits perfectly. It would be hard to find a better introduction to silent movies than this neglected comedy.

As always, click on the thumbnail to see the rest of the picture.