That’s Grant Hunter‘s crazed marsupial/bunny cover for Cyclic Defrost #23.

Inside you can find Grant’s favourite record sleeves and an in-depth interview with the Novocastrian – by Shaun Prescott, who also turns in a killer feature on another steel city institution: Castings. Also interviews with Mata & Must, Chihei Hatakeyama, Pimmon, Peaking Lights, Jon Hassell, Swoop Swoop, and Tim Exile, and Tim Koch selects. The Cyclic website, which also features hundreds of record reviews, is set for a major revamp any day too.

I interviewed Paul Gough for a piece about his music (Pimmon) and radio (ABC, FBI, etc) making – the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum section ran a shorter version of the piece on June 13, but for some reason not online (download here). So writing it up for Cyclic gave me a chance work on it a bit more, use a few more of my sources, and run it online.

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.

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.