On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:
> However, the presence of Bill Clinton, the chance for publications to sign
> on as a WCIT media sponsor (and therefore put out an advertising pitch), and
> the assurance that there will be Important Government Announcements made at
> the congress ... all of these things add up to a Really Good Excuse to blow
> some budget on a big trip to Adelaide.
X-Alternative-Subject: This Was the Week That Was Adelaide
To put things into perspective, I'm located on North Terrace where the
WCIT is being held.
WCIT, Adelaide Festival, Fringe, university O'Week and the HRH visit are
all happening this week. In the next few weeks are Writers Week, the
Clipsal 500 car race and, with any luck, we might get just one state
Premier :-)
You can walk through the WCIT site and not see anyone. You have to squeeze
past the 20 meters surrounding FringeTix (both are on the route I walk to
work). A back of the envelope calculation suggests that the Fringe
handles about double the finances of WCIT. The Fringe is recurs every
two years (the years when WOMADelaide isn't on).
HRH Eilizabeth II was doing a 'meet the folk' walk down a North Terrace
side street. It was packed about 8 deep down the length of the street.
On the former President's limo route to a charity function was one car,
parked on a grassy knoll. The $2,500 charity dinner for Womens and
Childrens Hospital attracted about the same number of people as WCIT
(although there's obviously some overlap).
The most economically significant event this week was a dispute between
BHP OneSteel and its workers, who went on strike. There seems to be a
fair bit of old-fashioned industrial relations argy-bargy on both sides;
both wanting to secure particular concessions before OneSteel is sold.
As a result of the strike about 5,000 people have been sent home from the
two car plants and three whitegood plants.
It has also been interesting to compare the governments massive response
to WCIT and its near-total disregard of the IETF meeting (held at the same
convention center in 2000).
The most effective thing the government could have done this week would be
to introduce some amicability into relations between OneSteel management
and staff. The most effective long-run thing the government could have
done this week was to ensure that capacity upgrades to the Port Augusta
electricity generating plant were still going to occur despite a change in
NRG ownership. All very removed from IT, and very much the same sort of
issues that government faced twenty years ago.
On the humorous side, HRH did a good job of handling the "Premier" and the
"leader of the coalition that will shortly form government". Clinton,
perhaps being a realist politican, called them the "former Premier" and
"future Premier", to the great annoyance of the yet-to-conceed and
still-legally-premier "former Premier".
Regards,
Glen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Sun Mar 31 2002 - 03:10:03 EST