RED HILL, a film written and directed by first-time feature-film maker Patrick Hughes, is a cinematic masterpiece. This is one Australian film not to miss when Sony release it in December.
The story starts unfurling from the opening moment - a panorama shot of the Victorian alpine country shrouded by white fog. It is a sheer joy to watch because everything on screen is shot for maximum impact.
If you thought Animal Kingdom was good - you ain't seen nothing! For me, Animal Kingdom was a small television story shot for television but shown on the big screen.
Red Hill is cinema - a big story shot for the big screen.
This is ... will be ... an icon of the Australian cinematic drama, alongside Peter Weir's Gallipoli, Phil Noyce's Newsfront. Perhaps Red Hill producer Greg McLean, who wrote, directed and produced Wolf Creek in 2005, helped Hughes realise the full potential of this film and achieve a level of excellence no one ever expects any more from Australian film. It's a thriller and it's an intense, gory ride - it's like Die Hard on steroids without the cute humour.
Introducing the Brisbane preview, Sony's Australian MD Stephen Basil-Jones, mentioned that it has been called Australia's No Country For Old Men. It may be on par for excellence but it's not as bloody.
Red Hill truly is the vision of an amazing auteur - Hughes edited the film also. His fluency in cinematic grammar lifts a good script to a great film because of the expressiveness of every shot and the extraordinary design - the use of props and locations. This must have been one hell of a shoot with so many different camera angles. There's no sign of laziness or lack of imagination.
Every shot is part of an intricate design to reveal the story, the character of a town, it's police and the city cop who's just transfered into the supposedly sleepy little community.
It's perfectly cast and the actors give the performances of their lives. The film positively bristles because of the stunning character portrayals by all of them including Steve Bisley, as Red Hill's top cop Old Bill, and Tommy Lewis, as the ultimate human terminator - the town's former top black tracker.
Hughes works for a multi-award-winning company called Radical Media which produces everything from musical videos, such as Justin Bieber's Somebody To Love, to the amazing new media experiment called, The Johnny Cash Project. They've put up a video of Johnny Cash online and engineered it so anyone can take any frame of the video and turn it into a piece of art in whatever style they like. These frames are inserted into the video to create a new video from the original one which is a collaborative work of online art. You can see every frame and the name of the artists on a timeline. It is worth a look.
When Opposition Leader Tony Abbott talks about Labor's inability to manage the finances of this country because of their poor credentials who are you going to trust - Tony Abbott or a Nobel Prize-winning economist?
Will you trust Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank whose theories and research won him a Nobel Prize or Tony Abbott?
He gave the UQ Centenary Oration on Monday at the University of Queensland.
Professor Stiglitz told a packed UQ Centre that Australia's economic stimulus package was the best designed in the world.
AND he said natural resources - coal, iron ore - should be properly valued at market just like the electromagnetic spectrum.
The government auctions the spectrum to the highest bidders who want to operate mobile phone networks, cable companies, television and radio stations.
Basically, a country - like Australia - will end up poor if doesn't get the best price for its assets - and natural assets are not renewable, once they are gone they are gone. If the proceeds from the sale of these assets are not invested in infrastructure to support and grow other sectors the economy (manufacturing and value-adding, goods creation) then a country and it's people will not prosper - HELLO! HELLO! Drowning not waving.
"It should be subtracted from Gross Domestic Product (GDP)," he said. "You are selling off assets at a very low price if you don't have adequate taxes on mining - you are being cheated," he said to audience applause.
He thinks resources should be auctioned off to the highest bidder - the free market at work. Of course, the mining industry will make all kinds of threats.
To everyone's amusement he joked about how mining companies bamboozled, threatened and bribed governments of developing, fragile nations.
"I assume that's not the case in Australia," he mused.
To prosper, a country needs to set up a stabilization fund (from a mining tax, if not a resources auction) for nation building.
This is what he calls an investment fund for building infrastructure and to grow value-adding industries, maintain education, job creation.
Not only that but the sell-off of natural resources should appear on a country's accounts as a kind of depreciation of assets - otherwise the accounts are not accurate.
((This kind of faulty accounting by banks led to the lovely GFC - Global Financial Crisis.))
He made these comments at the end of the oration after he explained the difference between the financial sector and the economy - the economy is not the financial sector.
The financial sector (the banks and regulators) are the culprits behind the global financial crisis which has crippled the global economy. Apparently, moneylenders have been skimming 40 percent of the profits from companies that actually make and produce things. His big point was that this is not really the role of the financial sector. The financial sector's job is to support economic growth, not cripple it.
"Finance is a means to an end," he said. "The lack of balance between the financial sector and the economic sector was actually the real problem in this economic crisis (NOT the real estate bubble)."
He said the bubble was not real - the imbalance is reality.
And no government is doing very much to redress this problem - the big bailout of banks in the USA basically allowed these culprits to continue "business as usual" by transferring something like $$US4 Trillion dollars of bad debt to the public sector. He's actually amazed at the fact that these guys - the bankers and the regulators (who don't really believe in regulation) - aren't even embarrassed. They didn't use the bailout money to extend credit to the struggling economy, to grow (or save) businesses and jobs. No. They just padded their own bottom lines. It's one of the reasons why, he says, the global economy is going to be staggering around for a long time to come yet.
The solution? Proper regulation.
The only time there has been any economic stability in the world economy is in the three decades after the Great Depression which heralded good banking regulation - perhaps this is why Baby Boomers have been able to thrive and prosper and pass on well-honed consumption patterns to their offspring. ;)
However, back to the oration.
Professor Stiglitz said that the deregulation started by Thatcher in the UK and Regan in the US basically led us to what we enjoy today - a free market in free fall, an overbloated financial sector, a stumbling economy, people borrowing more than 100 percent of their income to buy overpriced houses, bankers believing they could turn F-rated mortgages into secure A-rated assets worthy of being in the portfolios of pension funds.
Part of the solution is investing in clean new industries and addressing poverty so that more people get jobs and pay taxes and have money to spend to boost the economy - because consumption is key to recovery. He's not a socialist but his research blows apart the idea that the "invisible hand" of self-interest in a free market free of regulation will address imbalances. The GFC proved this again, he said. (Are you listening Tony Abbott?)
He talks about quite simple economic principles which somehow seem to have been covered over by people shoveling shit - sorry those are my words, not his.
And as for Climate Change and the price of carbon and waiting for the rest of the world before we do anything?
Economies are not restructuring because there is no carbon price. The western world worries about the growing and changing consumption patterns of China and India.
Professor Stiglitz doesn't believe the West should begrudge them at all.
It's not consumption that's evil - it's profligacy. WASTE! Now, I wonder who wastes more the West or countries raising people out of poverty?
India and China will follow the wasteful ways of the West if the world fails to set a carbon price and force everyone to consume less to save the planet - the planet will force us to change in the end (*he says).
"If we had agreed to have a price on carbon at Copenhagen that would have been the answer," he said. "It would have provided an increase in global aggregate demand (global economic spending) as firms all over the world needed to retrofit (their business to meet pollution standards)."
Well, no place for this classic song in this election campaign - it's all about quick fixes and empty promises.
There's no sign of that yellow ribbon anywhere...
Three years since the last election but Julia denied us the opportunity to prove this "emotional tie" to Kevin Rudd that every man and his dog in politics (except in Labor's ranks) seems to think the Queensland electorate has.
Who exactly misses Kevin in twenty-10? Tony Abbott and co?
Hearing Tony Abbott complain about "dirty politics" in the Labor ranks and "changing the rules" for personal gain makes me cringe - fingernails down a blackboard cringe.
"""NEVER before has an Australian PM been tossed out like a fly in our soup in the first term of his government""""" - they cry and cry and cry. Except they're NOT crying.
He's putting on his best Lara Bingle face to court us - ask yourselves this: are you Pup? How much did Pup lose in his little Bingle engagement?
And instead of the media commentators pursuing the real issues - like the ABC's AM program which is currently in Darwin talking to real people about issues that affect them - our media commentators provide a forum for the Laras of the political world - and I'm not just talking about the gals here. The Leader of the Opposition is the Leader of the Pack here - the way he chops and changes and dodges and weaves.
At Q and A at Brisbane's Powerhouse this week I was in the audience listening to the familiar refrain that voters in Queensland are "emotionally attached" to Kevin Rudd because they so believed in the Kevin '07 campaign.
I'm sorry but to me it sounds a little like they're trying to make poor Kevin out to be Princess Diana! Princess Di he ain't!
I don't miss him - I didn't think much of his administration until I went to hear a world-renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, speak at the University of Queensland.
I was so surprised that not even the Minister for Small Business, the Right Honorable (but extremely arrogant, or maybe just overwhelmed) Craig Emerson, defended the economic record of his own Government at Qanda - when Barnaby Joyce mouthed off about "THE DEBT".
I thought the Coalition had a good point - Australia's shocking level of debt - until Stiglitz pointed out what the world already knows: Australia's economy shimmers like a rainbow in a ruined global economic landscape BECAUSE the Rudd Government splurged to save people's jobs. Countries - even the USA - are in real trouble for a long while yet. We're in trouble too. Now I'm worried about a Coalition Government cutting spending to reduce debt and tagging us onto the end of the conga line. Somehow a tax on mining profits - a thriving sector of our economy - to reduce debt and pay for infrastructure makes sense.
I got home from Qanda at 11pm on Monday and found my gorgeous, three-month-old puppy had chewed the strap on my favourite (almost new) shoes almost straight through. It reminds me of all these gorgeous election promises - I don't think anyone's immune from teething problems Tony.
All those years that John Howard was cutting the last Labor Government's debt by stripping education and health and infrastructure programs of funding - only to give it away as baby bonuses which were spent on widescreen TVs. That's about all the Coalition Government did for the digital revolution.
I had a few questions I submitted to Qanda such as:
What do election polls actually prove when they do not show people's disillusionment with all sides of politics - particularly for the depressing, tit-for-tat reactive election campaigning?
What does it say about Australia that our politicians argue about how to solve crisis in our basic services - roads, infrastructure, education and health - as opposed to higher creative aspirations to build their dreams and contribute to the future of this country?
Australians have to produce goods and services to earn a living but it seems politicians just puff themselves up and preen with little regard for the aspirations of the nation - what do you think the secret aspirations are of this nation?
Well? Can we hear about this over the last three weeks of this damn election? Forget the damn yellow ribbon. It's covered in carbon soot!
BTW: QandA is so much better when you have Twitter on your screen.
