Thanks Yuri.

I’ve writtern about space before but the section below from this piece I did after the death of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew in 2003 still captures well my thoughts about the grandest of achievements.

I believe there are myriad reasons for people to meet the continued challenge of exploration in space: scientific, technological, economic and finally, perhaps, simply because it is there. The same reason we climb mountains and sail seas. It enriches our spirit.

That is not the only reason. But for mine, it is the best. Look at the names of the shuttles: Enterprise, Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavour, Challenger and Columbia. These are not just names of historic sea-going vessels; they are also the names of some of the strongest elements of the human spirit.

That spirit did not die when Columbia broke up. Even if the public had become complacent about the hazards of travel into space, the Columbia crew had not. They knew the risks, and they accepted them. Throughout their training, during the mission and on their way home, they embraced the contradictions. As should we.

Yuri Gagarin died before we conquered the Moon. But he took a small step and a giant leap too.

 It is also, bad for democracy.

 The format is pretty simple – host Tony Jones leads five other people in an hour-long discussion about issues of the day. Questions can come from a live audience or from people who have submitted online.

 The problem for Q&A is how it structures its panels.

 Since it began in 2008 Q&A has aired 94 episodes. Only four those episodes have featured a panel entirely devoid of politicians. A massive 96.75% of episodes have featured one or more politicians (or former pollies) on the panel.

 And tonight kicks off in a similar vein with two prominent former politicians included.

 The messages this sends is pretty clear – all issues need political solutions. An informed citizenry can’t solve problems on its own.

 Too much of our daily lives are framed by expectations that politicians ‘will fix it.’ Too often we look to politicians – and just to politicians – to solve our problems. Q&A reinforces this.

 I wouldn’t suggest politicians don’t appear at all, or even that politicians don’t appear on a significant number of episodes. But once you invite one politician on, you invariably have to invite someone from the other side on to balance things out. And political dialogue is a very particular kind of dialogue that isn’t always suited to illuminating a topic inside the space of an hour.

 So here’s a humble suggestion, Q&A. Instead of only having one episode out of every 25 as a pollie free zone, how about you aim for one in every four. I’m sure people would watch the show if the episodes featuring politician panellists dropped from almost 97% of the total to just 75%.

 It’s important to hear from our political leaders, and that we get to question them about the issues of the day. But Q&A could play a bigger role encouraging broader social discourse if it refrained from taking the easy option when putting together its panels. Let’s hear from more business leaders, more young people, more writers, more internet entrepeneurs about their thoughts on solutions to our problems. It will actually help imp[rove our democratic discourse.

There’s been some good analysis of what implementing the recommendations could mean for Australian authors, booksellers and publishers. And there’ll be plenty more to come, which I might do a wrap up of next week. I don’t want to revisit those arguments now because, frankly, others have done it in more depth.

My interest today is Appendix F.

Appendix F is titled: “Design of financial support for book producers”. It analyses grants and literary prizes for authors and publishers. They don’t offer much of an explicit opinion on the Public and Education Lending Right schemes, which compensate authors for books borrowed from public and educational libraries. Except they make the point that most authors receiving payments under PLR and ELR get small amounts; only a few get the big bucks, which seems code for saying it’s not much use when it comes to author incomes. Many authors will tell you different.

Stick with me, I’m getting to the Sean Williams hatred real soon.

The Productivity Commission suggests, that instead of inefficient grants to individual authors and various organisations:

Subsidies to book producers ideally should be delivered only for books that yield material cultural and educational externalities that would not otherwise be generated. The externality value of books, and the likelihood that it would be generated without a dedicated subsidy, is likely to vary between classes or genres of books, as well as within them, and so ideally subsidies should vary to reflect these differences.

And which class of books do they say are likely to offer more value?

Among the diversity of the adult trade sector, Australian stories, histories and biographies are examples of books which are more likely to generate cultural externalities than generic fiction or some non-fictional material such as Australian-authored computer manuals.

There’s the hatred. Sean Williams – a great Australian storyteller – writes some of that dreaded generic fiction. No PLR or ELR for him. The Productivity Commission says instead subsidies could be dished out by a panel of assessors who – as they suggest – should probably give the science fiction section a big miss.

But it’s not just Williams. The productivity hates any number of great Aussie speculative fiction authors like Karen Miller and Marianne de Pierres. They probably don’t hate Margo Lanagan quite so much but only because she writes lots of those great youth-oriented page-turning cultural externalities yarns.

Though having a panel to assess subsidy eligibility is probably a bit inefficient. Here’s what they suggest could streamline the process:

An alternative approach to aligning subsidies with potential differences in cultural externalities of books, that may be more suitable for a broad book subsidy scheme, would be to distinguish book content according to generally accepted bibliographic classification systems.

Why bother with a pesky assessment panel – they may let a few genre books through – when you can just wall off the entire science fiction and fantasy section and forget about it? It’s kinda like saying you can go for a jog along any street you want but you’ll only get fit if your route goes through the rich suburbs.

So what type of books are likely to be Productivity Commission pre-approved:

Most obviously, the core ideas that were embodied in books such as The New Testament, The Wealth of Nations, Mein Kampf and The Female Eunuch have had major impacts on how societies operate. Truly ‘iconic’ works are rare, but some books have similar, though smaller, external effects through their influence on people’s views and attitudes.

But watch out for those negative externality generators

For example, some people would see Professor Ian Plimer’s recent book Heaven and Earth — which purports to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change — as generating external costs, to the extent that it weakens community support for measures to reduce greenhouse emissions. Most clearly, books that have the effect of promoting intolerance between groups can diminish certain forms of social capital and generate external costs.

Mein Kampf‘s okay but don’t challenge climate change, okay? (And before anyone throws Godwin’s law back at me, just remember – the Productivity Commission started it). 

And here’s the biggest problem for me. The Productivity Commission started off making an economic argument. And there’s probably an important discussion to have around some of these things. It would be good to pay less for books. But why isn’t the Productivity Commission saying we should drop the GST on books, or force Amazon and other online retailer to pay the 10% tax and reduce their government-regulated competitive advantage. Lets discuss them.

Instead we get this nonsense – essentially an argument over what has literary merit. Stories matter to me, not externalities.

But clearly it’s important to them. So just in case they didn’t check – a note for the Productivity Commission: Cheapest I could find Mein Kampf on Amazon was US$1.46 (without shipping). But if that’s a bit much you can probably get it cheaper if everyone puts in and you buy the order in bulk.

A clear and consistent message

US presidential elections are about creating a narrative – who your candidate is and what they’ll do for the country if you vote for them. The simplicity and consistency of the Obama message was one of the best performances in modern politics. What did Obama believe in? Change and Hope. It was a message he’d started refining in his magnificent speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. It’s a great speech and a clear reminder of how powerful a tool speech-writing and oratory can be.

The McCain narrative was all about his past – his long service to the US in the military, his time in a prisoner of war camp, his seat at the table for many of the major political decisions of the last two decades. It was if they thought time was reversing and McCain was running to be president for 2008 to 2000.

Logistics

Politics mattered in this election. The politics of organisation, of fundraising, of securing volunteers mattered in this election.

The Howard Dean-driven strategy of competing in all states and in every possible county they could paid off big time. I read plenty of reports during the campaign that McCain offices would close early and remain shut on weekends because of a lack of volunteers while Obama offices would still be open until 7pm on weeknights and across the weekend. But more importantly, by refusing to give up on solidly Republican counties, the Democrats made their job easier in battleground states like Virginia and North Carolina. The Democrats could have easily decided to not establish offices or have volunteers in solidly Republican counties where the vote for Bush in 2004 had been in the order of 70% or 75%. But by setting up shop and working hard they managed to reduce the McCain vote in some of those areas to 55% or 60%. They mightn’t have won many of those types of places but that didn’t matter. The broad strategy meant narrowing

In this sense the prolonged primary race between Obama and Clinton helped the Democrats. Each time they went to a new state for a primary they attracted tens of thousands of new voters. The Democrats had access to all these extra names and addresses when the big show came to town. The Obama/Clinton contest had made the party stronger.

Obama’s decision to eschew public financing for his campaign was another political masterstroke. Although it probably delivered the death knell for public financing of’ presidential campaigns it had to be done. The Republican Party itself is still way ahead of the Democrats when it comes to fund raising. In this election the Republican Party raised $100 million more in political donations than their Democrat rivals. So the Obama camp made the strategic decision to ditch the guaranteed $85 million public finance limit and see how much they could raise on their own. This is entirely why Obama was able to outspend McCain three to one for the last month of the campaign.

Tomorrow: Age and Race as Indicators of Change, and The Palin Gambit and other McCain errors

The day after America elected its first African American president I decided to take a wander around Harlem. I took the above photo at the Apollo Theatre on West 125th St, where entertainers like James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight got their start.

The mood in Harlem was vibrant and enthusiastic. I talked to a few people and they were proud of the Obama (or “OB” as many referred to the president-elect) win. They were proud because they had voted for a candidate they wanted rather than just having to settle for a candidate who they thought was the lesser of two evils.

Stalls peppered the streets but there wasn’t much election paraphernalia on offer. Mostly it was just incense stall after incense stall but a few enterprising souls had t-shirts with a picture of Obama and a line saying “We did it”. My favourite was the t-shirt that said: “He’s my president. And he’s black.” (In the interests of full disclosure – I bought my Obama 08 hat yesterday).

I’m working on a post about the main reasons Obama won. I’ll hopefully have that up tonight or tomorrow.

If they said yes, I asked them whether they wanted that young boy or girl to have a chance to be their country’s head of state. Obviously it was a question designed to get a “yes” in response. Well, I’d say to them, you realise under our constitutional monarchy that young child is forbidden from becoming head of state.

It rarely made much of a difference – then again people who bother to call a political office are rarely willing to have their mind changed.

But watching the result of the US election makes me feel the same way. If a minority candidate with a strange name and a Kenyan ancestry can become US president maybe there’s hope for my daughter – born well after the 1999 republic referendum was lost – can become Australia’s head of state.

Here’s hoping.

We spent the last four hours sitting in a dodgy New York bar with an Australian friend of ours watching results come in. While I was nervous for the first hour or so, I got increasingly excited as we saw the results in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.

McCain’s concession speech is gracious but uninspiring. The Obama speech may be different and I wonder whether he’ll focus again on th slogan he ran on: “Change we can believe in.” A great theme to centre a campaign on.

Now it’s time to deliver.

It’s 6pm in New York and we’re heading to a bar shortly to settle in for the night and watch the election results. The mood here is upbeat and very pro-Obama – as you’d expect from New York City.

I took the picture below at the entry to a polling booth about two hours after voting started this morning. The line you see goes to the end of the block, around corner and all the way down the block and around another corner. The wait was about an hour and a half when we went past. By the time we went back on our way home the line had gone, though there may be a post-work surge.

An Obama volunteer I spoke to said turnout was very strong and she had not previously seen lines this long at that polling station.

Polls in Virginia and Indiana close in an hour. If Obama wins those states and McCain can’t turn Pennsylvania around at 8pm the night will already be over for the Arizona senator. That’s change you can believe in.

Tomorrow it’s America’s turn.

Almost every American I spoke to was an Obama support and almost all of them were still concerned about how the vote would go. I am not. Obama has been in front of McCain in every national poll for six weeks. He is not in danger of losing any of the states John Kerry won when he tried to dethrone George W Bush in 2004 and he’s ahead in about a dozen battleground states. Polls are a science and they will not be that wildly inaccurate but like the 2007 Australian election that sent John Howard packing it’s not in the media’s best interest to say it’s all over too soon.

Tonight we arrive in New York and I’m going to scope out a few bars that might be suitable to watch the election in tomorrow night. I’ll try to post as regularly as I can and capture some of the mood before and after the vote tomorrow.

There’s a lot to look forward to on this trip – the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, catching up with buddies at the bar in Calgary, visiting San Franciso and Washington. But I’m most excited by the fact we arrive in New York the night before the presidential election. I love elections (and not just because it’s part of my job to help win them) but there’s such a vibrancy to them. In Brisbane we’ve got a polling booth across the road from us and it’s a great feeling to be able to simply walk out the door and vote.

Come the night of November 4 I’m looking forward to finding the right kind of bar in New York, sitting down and watching the results roll in. It could be interesting if it’s a close result because we’re booked in to have breakfast with a publisher the next morning, and I’m kinda figuring that pulling an all-nighter probably isn’t the done thing. But I’m getting the feeling it won’t be a close thing.

It’s been an interesting campaign. From a political sense it was interesting to watch McCain throw the dice again and again (choosing Palin, halting his campaign to deal with the economic crisis, and raisng the stakes by going super-negative) and lose but I’m just as interested to see the wash-up of the internet and the effect it had on the election.

Lots of people are rushing to say us inter-webbed masses have already won the election for Obama but I’m not sure whether they are confusing cause and effect. I genuinely don’t know. I think the impact is wide but I’m not sure how deep. And I think it could also be a result of Republican ineptitude. Anyway, I’m looking forward to talking about it in the US.

In the meantime, let me leave you with two intersting pieces of information pertinent to the changing face of elections The first is the information people googled during the VP debate. Read some analysis of it here.

The second is the fact You Tube wasn’t even around during the 2004 presidential election, which is a shame because it it was we may have seen more gems like this:

Here’s betting the number of views on YouTube increase tenfold in the next 24 hours.

UPDATE: YouTube received a takedown notice for the video. You can see it here instead.