Tracking coverage of the bushfires in Victoria over the past week, one story’s niggled at my logic systems.

Insurers count the cost of fire devastation – SMH, February 13.

The insurance industry said Government intervention after such disasters did not help reduce the strain on the industry and contributed to a moral hazard where people were less likely to hold private insurance.

Paul Giles, from the Insurance Council of Australia, said: “Those people who do insure look at people who don’t insure and say, ‘Well, I’ve been paying my insurance premiums for a number of years, why do I bother if the Government steps in?”‘.

Mr Giles said the fire services levy and stamp duty accounted for up to 40 per cent of home and contents insurance premiums, and governments would be better off encouraging people to take out private insurance.

It’s a beguiling argument, and it works logically. People tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll be bailed out. But context is everything.

‘Moral hazard’ isn’t applied evenly. In the past year, as this article points out, large insurers and banks have gone to governments, hat in hand, for bailout money.

Months ago, when the president announced a paltry plan to help out a few of the millions of homeowners who got caught in the sub-prime loan mess, he reiterated the credo: “It’s not government’s job to bail out … those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford.” Days ago, when he endorsed the giant Fed bailout of Wall Street, the president signaled it was government’s job to bail out big bankers who had made decisions to buy and sell risky securities they knew (or should have known) they could not afford.

At the same time, Australia faces escalating climate risks – bushfires, floods, sea level rise and storm surge. How prepared are insurers for these things, are they adequately prepared for the payouts?

Beyond all that, evidence is increasing that we just don’t know how to assess risk.

Say, hypothetically speaking, you were asked to come up with some panel ideas for an upcoming festival.

On writing.

And you came up with a few half-baked ideas and they really went for them, but then you were forced to actually come up with the goods. What would you do?

So, seeing as you’re an occasional blogger, the first panel might be something about blogging.

The best who live in Sydney?

• Frockwriter
• Sydney Observatory
• City of Sound
• Nosey In Newtown
• Fresh and New

Who would you choose? What would you make them talk about? How do you avoid the dreaded love-in that usually happens at these things?

On another panel, you might want some proper writers. Like novelists and journalists. Being a festival, about writing. But because you’re obsessed with music, it has to have a music element.

Do you get silly?

• how music ruined me and saved me as a writer
• are lyrics good love advice?

Or serious?

• if music has gone through a billion changes and revolutions and genre-births – sampling, mash-ups, etc – how come writing hasn’t quite followed suit?” (Twittering and mobile phone novels aside.)

Or do you just throw that all away and put a bunch of writers and musicians on a stage together and stage and let them battle it out?

As you can see this is all just a ruse to get my blog posting up. There’s no way a festival would ever ask for panel ideas this half-baked.

Mark Oliver Everett writes like someone who’s used to having a great voice and timing to give his words nuance. Like a radio broadcaster… or a rock star, which he is. Everett’s the guy behind mid-90s group Eels (‘Novocaine For The Soul’).

(Pic from The Guardian)

His father was Hugh Everett III, who came up with the ‘many worlds’ theory of quantum physics.

Everett writes like you write a good pop song – simple and direct. It can seem a little plain, but like any songwriter worth his publishing contract, his book, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, has a story. His book – written before there are actually any grandchildren on the scene – is a warts and all memoir that dives deep into his childhood. And it’s messy.

He dealt with the death of every member of his immediate family by recording a series of increasingly popular records (despite constant battles with record labels), including Electro-Shock Blues and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.

We don’t think that much about the emotional lives of snarling, pouting, grinting rock stars. OK so that’s not entirely true – the likes of Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin or Britney Spears do clog up plenty of column inches.

It’s pretty rare to get a frank insight into one of their lives – unless it comes with a truckload of self-pity, self-aggrandisement or at the very least self-consciousness. Most say, the songs speak for themselves.

But in this case, I’ve rarely had time for Eels’s records, and it was only the unrelenting thrust of his story that inspired me to listen back to records. They still didn’t do that much for me, but I love that Everett’s story was engrossing enough to make me want to hear his music.

It’s weird blogging while all hell breaks loose in Victoria, but I’m totally caught up in the response to the horrific fires at work, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who needs to escape.

Over a month after 2009 expired, I’m checking my diary and of the list of records I need to spend a bit of time with, these are left.

Uncle Tupelo
Phillippe Grancher
Focus Group and the Ghost Box catalogue
Arthur Russell
United States of America

I mean I’ve heard one or more songs by all these people/groups – but I haven’t spent enough time, don’t have their albums. Need to.

I have a show on Sydney radio station FBI 94.5 and every week they ask a presenter to come up with a short list of things to check. This week, it’s me.

LISTENING to D.N.E.

I love Eugene Carchesio’s take on this world. In Someone’s Universe, his show at the Brisbane gallery of modern art Queensland Art Gallery, Carchesio filled a room with matchbox sculptures that catch the light just so, and wonderful miniature paintings and sketches. Someone’s world indeed, I was sad to leave. But if the likes of Young Marble Giants or Vincent Over The Sink get you excited, you should try Carchesio through his reissued classic (as D.N.E.), 47 Songs Humans Shouldn’t Sing.

EATING Gelato

Summer days are all about the cold treats. But if Mr Whippy soft serve doesn’t cut it, don’t fret. The Italian version is what you’re after. Gelato Messina (241 Victoria Street, Darlinghurst) constantly experiments with flavours: I recommend Sicilian trifle, choc-mint or pistachio. Don’t sleep on this one, get it while it’s hot.

READING Won Magazine #4

Won Magazine stands out from the milling crowd of do-it-yourself publishers. The tabloid style quarterly art mag might get ink on your fingers. But big pages and ace layout give breathing room to the beautiful images and long Q & A interviews with painters and photographers and writers and disco icons and fashion designers – people who’ve got things to say. Not always easy to find on the street, but worth the effort.

TALKING ABOUT Leonard Cohen

Can a 75-year-old Canadian with a line in mystical religion, poetry and pop really rock the stage as much as everyone’s been saying? More sax solos than Kenny G. Spontaneous standing ovation before he even started. It was cheesy and hilarious as hell, poignant too. All the hits – ‘Chelsea Hotel,’ ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘Everybody Knows’ – quite unlike any other show, and as great as I could have hoped.

Open a newspaper.

Any one, really. Among the usual stuff, at least one journalist will be covering the global media meltdown – the wave of newspaper closures triggered by classifieds/advertising shifting to the web. Fairfax dispatched a crowd of journos last year, and Glenn Dyer at Crikey says News is about to get rid of a bunch more. Global crises are always good copy. And journos love to cover their own patch.

But come December/January, something funny happens. Just when readers are ready to really sink their teeth into a quality paper, the big papers shut shop. Send the journos on hols, batten down the hatches, send out a thinned down paper packed with syndicated content and fluffy features.

Television used to do this. Fill out the summer (non-ratings) months with repeats and low quality programs. But if you lose your audience, the ratings mean nothing. Filesharing new shows (delayed by the local networks) has given audiences an alternative, and in many cases they’re not going back.

It’s much easier to find the alternative to print online.

For the moment, there are still plenty of benefits to reading the broadsheet. Discovering articles of interest, rather than searching for specific topics, is still better in print (despite the best efforts of Delicious et al). But with print fighting an ultimately losing battle to keep readers in the habit of buying their papers, you’d think they’d change tack.

Old news, I guess, given the papers are back to normal. But this year’s shaping up to be a pivotal one.