With the government’s insulation scheme looking a bit like it might leave a purple patch, I am wondering why in the past two days I have had two phone calls from subcontinent-based telemarketers trying to get me to buy roof insulation under the grant. Both have hung up very quickly when I pointed out my number was on the DO NOT CALL register. So not only are the insulators ignoring installation safety standards in their rush for the pot of gold — they seem to be dodging Australian telemarketing law as well!

There is more to the Bernie Carolan/Transport Ticketing Authority story than your tipster wrote yesterday and for once it seems that a Government purge has saved a good CEO who was at risk.

The word going around transport circles late last year was that the new public transport operators (who “own” Metlink) wanted him gone as CEO.  This is despite him being a very popular and well-regarded CEO who has made great strides to bring public transport to the people.

By recruiting him to the TTA, the Government has actually saved one of the best public transport voices in Melbourne, who was at risk.

Big-spending ANZ. Have you heard that due to limited parking in their new building that they have organised private buses to ferry executives a few hundred metre down the road to and from their cars?  Meanwhile, pregnant women have to make their own way by foot from car parks on the other side of Docklands.  From what they used to be like, sounds like Mike Smith is an old school banker with no sense of reality.  Totally unAustralian for an iconic Australian company.

Norton Rose sent an email to people today saying there’ll be salary increases for most of their lawyers this month.  Let’s hope that catches on. My firm cancelled salary reviews this year after retrenching anyone who sat down long enough to be fired during the financial crisis but still managed to deliver an increase in profit to partners. “More than just the law”, oh please!

Not true that Fairfax Melbourne “failed to heed the warnings” from the ” downtrodden employees at the Canberra Times and the “scorched earth approach of Bryan McCarthy and Rural Press”.  Rural Press had a willing foot soldier in the form of ex-New Zealand News Ltd manager Don Churchill. Anti-union Churchill has made even hardened Rural Press types blush with his mean-spirited approach to managing The Age.  Despite plummeting revenues and circulation, chameleon Churchill is well and truly at home at the new Rural Press.

A glimpse at what the DSM-V might look like. Where psychiatrists get really confused is in their ridiculously futile attempts to squeeze presenting symptoms (or perceived behaviours) into a disease framework. In reality, symptoms (or behaviours) cluster differently in each individual and from individual to individual and differently again, across space and time. So unlike cancer, just say, where a “pattern” of symptoms exists, the symptoms of the so-called mental illnesses do not adhere to any such patterns.

Even the big daddy of all mental illnesses, schizophrenia, is subjectively and culturally bound in terms of how it is experienced and expressed. Psychiatrists would never concede, out of professional pride if not also the tight yoke of big pharma around their throats, that calling symptoms or behaviours a specific “illness” is fraudulent, but that is what it is.

Better to chuck the whole DSM concept and focus instead on how we might respond creatively, respectfully and holistically to the distressing behaviours with which people can be afflicted.

Re. Conroy’s gift to Free To Air commercial broadcasters. The argument that they require a reduced licence fee because of their continuing Australian content obligations is laughable when one has witnessed over the past 20 years the huge decline in real terms of the licence fees paid for Australian television drama. Wherever possible Federal and State subsidy agencies have been forced to top up these licence fees.

Sketch comedy, after much lobbying by a now disgraced media individual in Melbourne was defined as drama by the ABA in 1995, a genre that can be made for half the price of an average drama.  Then New Zealand drama was treated as Australian after the CER High Court case. Ever wondered why you see  NZ dramas over summer or late at night in supposed prime time? And those New Zealand docu-soaps also continue to fulfil the Australian content quota requirements.

The further gift of commercial networks being able to directly access for new drama and existing drama up to 65 hours in length, the Producer Offset of 20% of eligible production expenditure. Mr Conroy should be ashamed and embarrassed. No analysis, no performance appraisal, no preconditions … a gift.

Train travel as art… While the train I was on paused at Sydney’s Town Hall station yesterday morning I noticed the automatic PA system seemed to be stuck. While it usually says “the train on platform 16 goes to etc etc…” it was just a soothing female voice saying “the train… the train… the train…”. It was very postmodern and I quietly enjoyed it. Not sure about the other commuters though.