The pond coughs gasps and splutters with the IPA, Patrick Carlyon, Fiona Phillips and soccer thugs ...

(Above: found here and while you're at it, why not see how climate change and smoking denialism go hand in hand here).


So many things to fill the pond to overflowing, so little time.

There is, for example, the recent High Court decision to allow the plain packaging of cigarettes without splashing any cash at big tobacco.

Naturally this has brought out all sorts of loons, wringing their hands in anguish about the nanny state.

Never mind that as soon as you mention the nanny state, you lose the argument, you hopeless nannies.

As if anyone should give a flying fuck about an industry which has lied to, cheated and killed its customers in abundance, even after it knew it was peddling a deadly killer (and if you grew up in a working class family, as the pond did, you'd see your nearest and dearest, your close and distant family and friends, ushered to meet the grim reaper in unimaginably painful ways).

The best news? Those serial spreaders of FUD, the Institute of Public Affairs, have copped a pie in the face, along with the pie that landed in the moosh of their clients in the tobacco industry.

Remember the sort of idle chatter you could find in press releases like Plain packaging may require up to $3.4 million taxpayer gift annually to big tobacco and film companies:

"IPA calculations show that the taxpayer compensation could amount to as much as $357 million to film companies annually, and $3 billion for tobacco companies annually because of these laws".

IPA calculations! What cackling geese. Why they're as bad as the industries they take their dollar from. Whenever Chris Berg tries to sound sensible, he should remember he's working in little better than a verbal brothel.

Naturally the Murdoch press is out and about too, with Patrick Carlyon wringing his hands for the HUN and The Punch in Big bad tobacco is actually a pretty soft target.

Carlyon's argument is a pretty soft one, running the usual slippery slope routine beloved of HUNsters (it comes in handy for gay marriage too).

Carlyon gets off to a flying start by mocking anyone who's ever lost a family member, continues on by celebrating the vices of humanity, then concocts some kool humour about how smoking never made anyone drive a Commodore into a pole, or was involved in rape.

It's so profoundly idiotic, it makes your average village idiot akin to Plato.

But there's no stopping Carlyon, so off he goes, seemingly demanding action on alcohol and fast food, only to explain how we love our grog and our KFC, and how wrong it would be to do anything about it.

Well there's one relief. If they ever do lay-offs at the HUN, and Carlyon draws a short straw, he should be able to pick up a jim dandy job at the IPA.

This is about the first time the federal government has had a win in yonks, so good luck to them. Will anyone ever be so bold as to snatch the marijuana market out of the hands of crims and put it in ugly plain packets, rampant with health warnings and doled out by bureaucrats? There'll come a time, but it'll be a time coming.

Happily it's a bumper day for bleats at The Punch, and the pond was beguiled by Fiona Phillips' poignant story that leads off Steal digital content and you steal a nation's prosperity:

When I was about six years old, I bought my first album: ABBA. It was the one which featured Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Bjorn in a vintage car on the cover.
Before I engaged in the transaction, my mother advised me that the purchase was going to require all my “big money”. That is, all my 20 and 50 cent pieces. A big deal when you only received 20 cents a week in pocket money.
My mother offered me an alternative: my best friend’s mother (who owned the album) could make me a tape instead. No, I responded. I didn’t want a tape. I wanted to buy the album. In making that decision, I was placing a value on ABBA’s music. And although I did not realise it at the time, that was my first interaction with economics and copyright.

Ah, it brings a tear to the eye of the pond. A six year old aware of intellectual property rights, and willing to stump up for the real deal, instead of a sordid pirated tape.

And if you share that tear, has the pond got just the pack of cigarettes to sort out that persistent cough that's been troubling you ...

After starting off in such a ripper way, Phillips gets better and better, as she broods about a report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers on the Economic Contribution of Australia's Copyright Industries (oh let's cap the words because they're so Significant).

Strangely she doesn't bother providing a link to the report (you can get it as a ppt here).

Possibly that's because the first page of the report would tell you that it was prepared by PwC for the Australian Copyright Council, and the next thing you know you'd be noting that the disingenuous Phillips is the executive director of the Australian Copyright Council, and the next thing you know you'd be looking up the ACC, and discovering it's funded by the Australia Council nee the Australian Government (more about it here).

Yes, it's part of that grand bureaucratic poo bah circle of quangos and mangoes celebrating the work of government funding:

The report shows that copyright industries make a significant contribution to the Australian economy. For example, in 2011 copyright industries generated AUD$93.2 billion which is equivalent to 6.6 percent of GDP and employed more than 900,000 people or 8 per cent of Australia’s workforce.

Splendid stuff. The pond has spent plenty of time in the salt mine of economic multipliers and reports justifying the expenditure of government money on the arts, and who's to argue with a bit of pork barreling.

Where things stick in the craw is the crazy notion that somehow all this constitutes an industry run on the lines of the United States model. It brings Phillips to tears again:

Children may no longer go to a record shop to purchase their first album in the way I did all those years ago, but I hope they will long be able to experience the thrill of using their own hard earned cash to buy content from their favourite artist.

Here's the thing. Let's take feature film and high end television production as an example. This "industry" operates courtesy of extensive government funding, delivered via the agency Screen Australia.

The funding is delivered in a way that sees extensive losses. If you were to run a company on the same basis, it would fold within the year.

The punters who line up to pay for an Australian feature film have already paid for a substantial part of the financing of said Australian feature film via their taxes (the amount of pre-sales and other finance available internationally to run into Australian budgets has dropped off in recent years, forcing the proportion of government funding to go higher).

So when someone gets gooey eyed about the "creative industries", and the "copyright industries", and the native film "industry" they're actually celebrating government funding.

Of course, copyright industries are not purely quantifiable in economic terms. They make a huge contribution to Australian culture. The grin on my face when I emerged from watching The Sapphires on the weekend is testament to that.

Put it another way. The grin on Phillips' face was available because The Sapphires was substantially funded by the Australian federal government.

This funding will continue on the basis of its cultural benefits, not on some guff about the quantifiable economic benefits in terms of sales and industry.

That's the way it's been since the revival kicked off in the nineteen seventies. Phillips harks back to the days of Barry McKenzie and Picnic at Hanging Rock, but in those days the industry was supported by several funding bodies which turned into the Australian Film Commission and then by tax breaks under the 10B/10BA tax schemes.

And where once there was an indie model for authors and musicians, these days a lot more government funding is doled out in this area by the Australia Council, supporting people in producing product which would be unsustainable using conventional commercial models. Let's not even get into a discussion of the funding of symphony orchestras, the opera, the ballet and other high end cultural outings.

Inevitably the comments below the fold didn't address the nub of the argument, as opposed to righteous anger and sounding off about how a little downloading is okay and how the United States rips off Australian purchasers (don't get the pond started on the failed and now utterly irrelevant region coding for DVDs, and other US attempts to corral and treat consumers with contempt, now reciprocated with a vengeance by consumers).

And that's the danger for naive government bodies trying to explain the benefits of Australian cultural productions by rabbiting on about how they're important industries being harmed by theft.

The key losers are the dominant US studios and record companies and book publishers, and who gives a toss or sheds a tear of them? After all, the now dominant US book publishers made their initial fortunes by ripping off blind the likes of Charles Dickens (and how that stuck in Dickens' craw).

Here's the real intellectual theft.

The pond has already helped fund films like The Sapphires, and now will have to stump up at the cinema door, sending a measly portion back to the government funder ... after the exhibitors, the distributors - most of them in the Australian market U.S. owned or dominated - and all the other sharks in the supply chain have punched the ticket.

With the government investor also punching its ticket to claw back a portion of revenue, that leaves most of the creative team on the production with a modest smell of three fifths of fuck all.

Sad to say, nine out of ten Australian productions never get near a cooee of a profit.

No amount of gobbledegook and PwC reports will alter this fundamental transaction, nor will ACC arguments about the importance of the copyright industries sound like anything but an apology for the rorting and supply issues of complacent international industry giants ...

Who's going to cry a river because that complacency has seen music, film and lately books get themselves into serious trouble.

Next time Phillips should try writing a piece with the header Stop government funding and you stop Australians enjoying the cultural works the government funds, and leave her garbled confused tales, mingling the plight of retailing with production financing mechanisms, to United States snake oil peddlers.

And don't worry about the good old USA. It's already made out like a bandit thanks to the onerous free trade agreement completely mucked up by the Howard government.

Ditto Phillips' tales of commerciality versus actual returns, and completely useless comparisons to Singapore (a city state for the love of the absent lord) and Canada should be given a rest.

Canada's home grown cultural scene is even more dependent on government subsidy for its production and arts sector, while spending lavishly so that the local industry can be ravished by runaway Hollywood productions heading north for the tax breaks.

As does Australia, though the high dollar has made it hard to stay in the game.

How anyone could sob into their coffee about the benefits of Baz Lurhmann making a quintessential story about the United States, The Great Gatsby, with tax breaks rumoured to be worth over $A 40 million, is beyond the pond (here - it gets even more secretive furtive when it comes to the tax break given to X Men Origins, here).

It's just another boondoggle, and you can bet while the studios bank the tax breaks, they also keep the profits.

And while we're at it, please, no more sorry tales about six year olds forking out hard earned cash for ABBA. Sheesh, it was Reg Grundy who made the film about ABBA down under, and lordy how he's eked out a miserable existence in the Bahamas ever since ...

And now for something completely different, because a follower of Python does what a Python must do. Here's an Egyptian soccer riot:

Here's an English soccer riot:

And here's an English footballer moaning 'Football has lost touch with reality': Owen won't take children to matches.

And here - for post-modern, ironic juxtaposition is an Australian soccer brawl, as recorded in 'Just not acceptable': brawl breaks out between rival football fans.

By golly, it's a miracle the brawlers found someone to brawl with. Talk about desolation angels.

Why was the pond swamped by an image of Paul Hogan drawing a flare and saying 'that's not a riot, this is a riot'.

Brawl? Yes Australian soccer can't manage a decent riot, or beat the Scots in a 'friendly' (Socceroos lose 3-1 to Scotland).

The pond proudly boasts of never having attended a soccer match or a horse race at any time anywhere ...ever. Please don't ask why, but please allow the pond a little pleasure at the strange sights sport can sometimes provide.

No doubt the sporting industries would benefit from a bunch of twaddle by Fiona Phillips about how a nation's prosperity is entwined with its sporting prowess ... as if we haven't had enough of all that this past month.