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respond to the needs and interests of a growing body of students who seek to master digital media and information and communication technology (ICT) for successful careers in the fine and performing arts, journalism, design, organizational communication, and related fields, and who value an education that can provide them with a deep understanding of the meaning and impact of ICT across a wide range of human endeavors, from the local to the global and from the historical to the contemporary.

The full proposal can be downloaded here. It involves establishing new disciplines in Information Studies and Design Studies, as well as bringing together established disciplines such as Architecture and Environmental Design; Art and Art History; Communication; Film Studies; Journalism and Mass Communication; Music; and Theatre and Dance. As the proposal notes:

New areas of emphasis in the College, which could become topics for undergraduate and graduate degrees, minors, or certificates, will include the design, management, and study of social media; experimental digital arts and technology; gaming and animation; media entrepreneurship; multimedia digital publishing; narrative for emergent media; networked organizations; and sound/audio and visual design for digital arts and media.

The College will emphasize creativity; media fluency; design thinking; collaborative, project-centered learning; practical, marketable skills and an applied curriculum; and a core education in the liberal arts and sciences.

I am pleased to say that I was invited to the University of Colorado in March 2012 to discuss the development of the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT, and the experience of bringing together an array of disciplines into a new institutional formation. I have noted that some of the programs that go in a similar direction to that developed at QUT, and proposed at CU, include:

• UCLA Design Media Arts, University of California, USA;
• School of Arts, Media and Design, University of Westminster, UK;
• School of Arts and Communication (Konst, kultur och kommunikation – K3), Malmo University, Sweden;
• Media Design and Multimedia Arts, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy;
• School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;
• New School for Public Engagement, New York, USA.

As my colleague Brian McNair has noted elsewhere, the University of Colorado suspended entry into its prestigious journalism program in 2010, on the basis of an external report finding that there was insufficient research among the Faculty, and the program had not kept pace with changes in the media industry. This was despite high student enrolments and a strong track record of placing graduates in the news media industry. The new configuration, referred to as Journalism-Plus, stresses additional coursework outside of the Journalism major.

Double click to enlarge graph

Working from the left of the graph, the progress of The Greens from 1998 to 2001 came in no small part from Brown’s ability to use Meg Lees’ endorsement of a modified version of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to capture the votes of disaffected Democrats’ supporters. Correctly sensing that, despite their origins as a breakaway party of the Liberals’ left, most Democrats supporters were politically left-of-centre, Brown was able to use the GST decision to marginalise the Democrats, and establish the Greens as the most significant third party of the two. The fact that, some years on, the former Democrats’ leader Andrew Bartlett could re-emerge as a leading figure in The Greens confirm the wisdom of this initial move.

The period from 2001 to about 2005 marks the second peak in Greens’ support. Here, as shown in the graph, a lot of this support came directly from ALP voters. This is the period dominated by the asylum seeker issue, mandatory detention, and the sending of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. As is well known, all of these issues present Labor with considerable problems – and still do – and the Greens’ unequivocal opposition to mandatory detention and the war in Iraq clearly mark out the Greens as a party of the Left. Whereas Labor voters who were disaffected from the Hawke and Keating governments had nowhere much else to go could now go to the Greens.

The impact of this shift in the inner cities, and among particular constituencies (such as students and those associated with universities, for example, as well as most of my Facebook friends) was substantial, and remains important. Scott Bennett’s 2008 study observes the rise in the Greens’ support to 18 per cent among people under 25, people with a university degree, and people with “no religion” in the period between the 2001 and 2004 Federal elections.

The third growth spurt for The Greens comes after a significant dip over 2006-2007, which coincides with a surge in ALP support under the leadership of Kevin Rudd. From 2008 to 2010, Greens support continues to grow, leading to the 13 per cent Senate vote in the June 2010 Federal election, and The Greens winning their first Federal lower house seat. Adam Bandt won Melbourne, a haven for people under 25, people with university degrees, ex-ALP members, and people with “no religion”. Many similar seats, such as Grayndler in inner Sydney, Melbourne Ports, and Denison in Tasmania, now appeared open to electing Greens members in the near future.

But there are a couple of things to note here. While the decision by The Greens to vote down the ETS in the Senate, and the resulting turmoil in Federal Labor that leads to the deposing of Rudd for Julia Gillard, brings some gains to The Greens, much of their improvement in voting figures preceded the ETS decision. This suggests that The Greens were operating a more generic “left” alternative to Labor well before the ETS vote, where Greens voters wanted a Labor government, albeit one that was more “left” on particular issues, such as the environment, same-sex marriage or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

The other big development is that while The Greens continue to poll well, at 11-12 per cent, this remains the figure in the face of one of the greatest collapses in support for the ALP when in government in its history. Labor’s first preference votes have fallen from 50%+ in 2007 to the mid-40s over 2009-2010, to a point now where a figure above 30 per cent is welcomed as a sign of recovery. Over this period, the 15-20 per cent of voters who have ceased to support Labor have almost entirely gone over to the Coalition. Moreover, they have done so after the decision to introduce a Carbon Tax was announced in February 2011, and they have gone to a Coalition led by the arch-nemesis of the Greens/left, Tony Abbott.

So unless something changes dramatically, The Greens may retain their 2010 level of support under Christine Milne as their new leader. But it will almost certainly be in the context of being in opposition to an Abbott government, that will credit its election to the Gillard government’s decision in February 2011 to introduce a Carbon Tax. The Coalition will also continually taunt Labor to publicly disown the policy, as they were themselves required to publicly disown Work Choices after the 2007 election. And I strongly suspect there will be fewer ALP “true believers” in a Carbon Tax after the next Federal election than there are Coalition “true believers” in labour market reform along the lines of Work Choices.

In the face of this, Labor will face some real questions about its future relationship to The Greens. The Greens will also face the question of whether they wish to aim for continued growth in electoral support, and how to do so. This would have to entail attracting some Coalition voters, as there will be fewer and fewer disaffected ALP voters to pick off. I suspect that this goes very much against the instincts of The Greens’ rank and file supporter base.

There are certainly valid points that Phillips makes. The point that the much talked about “crisis of journalism” is actually a crisis of traditional news business models, at a time which in other respects is an exciting one for journalism, is well made. Similarly, the limits to the Huffington Post-type business model, where more and more content is aggregated, and drawn from as many non-paid sources as possible, are timely and important.

The question remains of, as Phillips puts it:

Journalism, done well, is an expensive business and it has to be paid for. The question is not whether it should be paid for but how.

The problem is that Phillips’ answer enters into the realms of conspiracy theory. Phillips again notes that the question “lies in finding a way to get citizens not only to participate but also to pay for the journalism we all need”. Indeed it does.

But in wondering why we cannot simply make micropayments that do not “require anything more than clicking yes to a button that asks us to pay a few pence to view an article?”, Phillips proposes that:

Maybe the real reason why we cannot have a simple payments system, that doesn’t require complex and off-putting log-ins, is because that would prevent the big players from getting their hands on all that private data. It is in the interests of big players to keep small players out of the game and they are doing it by telling us that information wants to be free.

The problem is not the inability to make micropayments. The online porn industry is based around micropayments, and is estimated by some to account for up to 30% of online data being transmitted. Rather, the problem is getting some of that spare cash directed towards payments for news.

Historically, news has been a bundled product. In its print form, news items were bundled with other forms of content (TV guides, racing forms, classifieds, sports results, share prices, crosswords etc.), wrapped up with advertising, and sold to us for a fairly nominal price.

In the online space, the advertising rates are far lower, as Phillips correctly observes, the classifieds have essentially gone elsewhere on the Web – although several news sites run a nice side line in dating services – and getting the public to pay anything remains the challenge. One reason is that – and Phillips may not like this point being made – is that any commercial media product based on a payment system competes with content made freely available by the BBC and other public service media.

But whatever the reasons, and whatever the challenges, the problem is not that people cannot make micropayments. Everyone in the news business would like a micropayments system that worked: there is no “big media” interest in stopping it. The challenge remains that of producing the journalism that people will pay for, and turning the vicious cycle that Phillips describes into a more virtuous one.

A podcast is expected to be available shortly. It will, however, lack my reference to Keyser Soze in describing how net libertarians view the Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, made in the Q&A that followed the talk.

Thanks very much to Evonne Miller and Alan McKee from the Creative Industries Faculty for getting this event together.

Hope to see you there. If not possible, we will be aiming to podcast the event.

Sample points are:

• the internet has been a shot in the arm for many sectors of australian media, driving growth for books, games, movies, and radio. even where there has been offline contraction, online growth has helped compensate.
• online media’s share of income from news, current affairs, and education has doubled to 10 percent since 2007.
• the increasing accessibility of the internet is driving a cultural change in australia. for example, it is making niche content readily available and enabling remote communities to play a more active role in the economy.
• the arts also are doing well. the revenues for performing arts are up by 20 percent. An example of the internet’s impact is that a fifth of Australia’s opera audience is now online.

Launched on the eve of the Convergence Review Committee presenting its Final Report to the Minister for Broadband, Communicatiosn and the Digital Economy, Sen. Stephen Conroy, the report can be seen in part as a rebuttal to the proposals in the Convergence Review’s Interim Report that companies such as Google, as “Content Service Enterprises”, needed to contribute to a local content production fund in order to safeguard Australian cultural production in an era of media convergence.

The electorate runs from the Brisbane CBD along the Brisbane River to New Farm and Newstead on the east, goes to affluent Windsor in the north, and runs out to Newmarket and Kelvin Grove on the west. It includes such iconic inner Brisbane suburbs as Fortitude Valley, Spring Hill and Bowen Hills. If there is any part of Brisbane that is not “suburban” in the manner in which it is popularly understood, it would be this electorate.

Most parts of the electorate have been the subject of intensive inner-urban redevelopment strategies, ranging from the redevelopment of warehouses and woolsheds at Newstead to the Urban Village at Kelvin Grove around the QUT campus. These new developments are often accompanied by some form of “creative cluster” rhetoric, and major arts sites such as the Powerhouse Museum are in the electorate, between New Farm and Newstead.

Votes in the 2012 state election by booth in Brisbane Central are shown below.

Putting aside the small vote for the Katter-aligned independent Ruth Bonnett, we can identify some trends. There are strong pockets of LNP support through the electorate, including the small booths (thanks, Antony Green) of Ballymore, Newstead and Wilston, and the larger booths at Windsor, St. Pauls Terrace and the Brisbane CBD. In recent history, they would have been counter-balanced by strong ALP support around Kelvin Grove/Herston, Fortitude Valley and around New Farm. But there are two stories here that I would like to tease out.

The first is in the Kelvin Grove/Herston area, dominated by the QUT campus, and with a high university student population. This is where the Greens poll strongest – 20% + of the vote, and there was a similar outcome in the 2010 Federal election. This would be the electorate where the decade-long discussion of whether Labor is losing votes to the Greens has the most resonance, as the combined ALP/Greens vote at these booths is still well over 50%.

But it is not the same story in the New Farm/Merthyr booths. Here the Green vote is more modest (10-15%) and it is the LNP that is polling over, or close to, 50%. New Farm is something of a “poster child” suburb for being hip and diverse, and most likely has the largest gay and lesbian population of any Brisbane area. It is certainly considered more of a creative zone than Kelvin Grove, and less of a traditional suburb than Wilston or Windsor. And yet it is, or is very close to being, an area where the majority of its residents vote LNP.

A few things could be going on here. It could be that the older, more traditional residents of New Farm are gravitating more strongly towards the LNP. Maybe. Or it could be a manifestation of what is known in Britain as the “shy Tory factor“, where people are reluctant to disclose their intentions to vote conservative lest they be deemed heartless or selfish. Perhaps there is a “shy gay Tory factor” here, as it would be hard to imagine that half of New Farm votes LNP without that including a significant number of gay and lesbian voters. Needless to say, they would not be those vocally picketing LNP events, as occurred periodically during the election campaign.

What I have sought to illustrate is that while the Labor vs. Greens tension is playing itself out in some parts of the inner-city electorate of Brisbane Central, such as Kelvin Grove, in other areas the LNP vote is much larger than would be commonly presumed. The latter appears to be the dynamic in New Farm. It will be interesting to see if it is playing itself out in other inner city areas in Australia. If so, it is unexpectedly good news for the conservative parties, whose reach is moving inwards from the outer suburbs to the inner cities, the historic recruiting grounds of the political left.

The idea that the outer suburban electorates in Brisbane are prone to large swings is not new. With population growth from other parts of Australia, new housing developments, and high levels of self-employment, the demographics and political allegiances of suburban Brisbane can be quite volatile.

But voting patterns may be no less volatile in the inner city. I live in the electorate of Brisbane Central, running from New Farm through Fortitude Valley, to the Royal Brisbane Hospital and the sprawling QUT Kelvin Grove campus. In 2004 was held by the Premier, Peter Beattie, with a 25 per cent margin. In 2009, the ALP member Grace Grace held it with a 6 per cent margin.

It is now an LNP seat, held by Robert Cavallucci with a 4 per cent margin. The 2012 election saw a 7.6 per cent swing against the ALP, and a 2.4 per cent swing against the Greens candidate, as Cavallucci got a 10 per cent swing to win almost half of the first preference vote, and almost as much of the vote as the ALP and the Greens combined.

And it is not a one-off result. The Federal seat of Brisbane, which was the last seat decided in the 2010 Federal Election, went to Liberal Teresa Gambaro with 46 per cent of the first preference vote, after being held by the ALP since 1980. After that election, which saw high-profile Greens candidate Andrew Bartlett receive over 20 per cent of the vote, it was certainly clear that this was an area with increasingly volatile voting patterns.

So what? The interesting point is that Brisbane Central, and Anna Bligh’s electorate of South Brisbane on the other side of the river, exemplify a certain type of inner-city electorate. The natural home of university students (and staff), urban professionals and creative types. Gay friendly, with plenty of bike paths, small bars, independent book shops, and of course restaurants and coffee houses, they are the sorts of places that Richard Florida and others saw as the havens of the “creative class”.

So while the suburbs may have heard the siren call – or, as it was more commonly called, the dog-whistle – of conservatism during the Howard government years. Very often, a kind of “suburban realism” was countered to the values of the elites, the “latte set”, those in the inner cities. This was often embraced by those in the inner cities themselves, seeing themselves as beacons of humanity, tolerance and progressive social and cultural values in the face of “Kath & Kim” like suburban philistinism.

What I will be arguing over the next week is that, whatever the “imagined geography”, this is not borne out by voting trends. Using Brisbane Central as a case study, I will look at the voting patterns on a both level to suggest that the LNP is strong in areas where this may not be expected. I’ll also look at patterns in the seat of South Brisbane, where Anna Bligh experienced a 10 per cent 2PP swing, as well as some results in other elections, such as Balmain in the NSW state election.