...] ago there was a flair up with Bolt over Somali crime numbers, where Bolt couldn’t ignore what was said here (our readership is too widespread, and there was far too much mirth going on in the blogosphere at [...

However, if I’m informed that you’ll take him on re Insiders, I’ll review my position. A young woman journalist from WA used to give him some stick, and I enjoyed that. The ABC must be desperate to renew his position. Getting depressed early on a Sunday Morning is not fun! He probably misuses stats re indigenous people too – like his arguments re the stolen generations. A real turd!

I’m assuming refugees don’t within a few years fit into wealthy demographic, I’m just wondering if we can tell who the victims are – I just suspect – and hope you can show with stats that not only are the victims largely ‘local’ but that rich white old blokes like Andrew have a snowflakes chance in hell of being victims.

And stepping back from the fun and humor, if his odds of being a victim are relatively low, it makes the contrast between concern for the community (I mean the refugee community) is incredibly relevant and appropriate, but that concern Bolt style for the rich white old community is pretty stupid?

Just a thought or two. Feel free to slam dunk me with facts.

My point though, was whether there was enough expertise and resourced to cope with the specific problems of the Somali community in Australia. The programs that you allude to have had varying degrees of success in Australia, but I dare say that the trauma experienced by the some members of the Somali community, and the difficulty of adapting to life in Australia, presents a unique set of challenges that I am not convinced our social services (volunteer or governmental) are able to cope with. Australia’s success with correcting indigenous disadvantage doesn’t leave me with a lot of hope I am afraid.

Your last paragraph is an example of the type of writing you should employ more often. In my view, the “netroots” phenomenon is over-rated. It is a good tool for mobilising action and opinion amongst people that already agree with you, but a pretty poor tool for altering the views, even at the margin, of those that don’t. In my view you could do a whole lot more good by writing a series of op-eds in the Herald Sun that make nuanced use of data and demonstrate the flaws and undesirable social implications of the views of reactionary commentators. Perhaps they wouldn’t publish you, I don’t know. An interesting alternative would be to challenge Bolt to a town hall debate in one of the suburbs that the Somali community is concentrated in.

I’m probably being unrealistic, but what I see around me in the blogosphere is the polarisation of political debate, and certainly not a meaningful dialogue that might form the basis of compromise and enhanced cohesion.

On your first point, if we look at what actually works in terms of succesful community economic development programs – not only here but generally around the world – it’s mostly small scale programs at the local level. Scale is a bit of a killer here because moving beyond the local level requires coordination between often different organisations run by different people with often different interests, management practices and resources. Scale also starts diluting the programs – if you start out with a program tailored to the needs of one community (let’s say it’s a program that tries to use sports participation as a substitute for criminal activity for young adult males – a popular one around the world) in a particular place, if you increase the size of that program to include new areas, the program has to then change to accommodate the different circumstances that each community may bring to the table (from the type of sport you use, the local culture of the target group, the public relations angle used to build broader community support, the different needs of any business sponsors, the different circumstances of the criminality of the young adult males etc etc). Each additional community added to the program requires increased flexibility of the program as a whole, which can often lead to diluting the tailored nature of the program (and reduce it’s success level) to accommodate it’s expansion.

It need not be the case, but in practice often is.

Scale brings better economics and funding capabilities to a program, but can often come at the cost of reduced effectiveness if the people or organisation running the program refuses to give a large amount of autonomy to the individual programs operating on the ground (and we need to remember here as well, the ‘empire building’ that goes on in the community development sector is just appalling).

A community of 2600 people is not too big. I used to do a fair bit with small rural based programs and nearly all of these were for towns with less than 5000 in population. For communities smaller than about 2000 or so, the danger becomes not getting a critical mass of community participants – which kills programs stone cold dead.

On your second point, to be very clear about this – I didn’t accuse Bolt of being a racist.

A divisive little twat with a simplistic grasp of reality, that shows an ambivalence bordering on irresponsibility when it comes to using sensitive data – yes, but not a racist. Racism is an overused and abused pejorative.

The battle for the hearts and minds of the broader Australian community isn’t happening directly on the net in this country at the moment – we have yet to reach that point of audience penetration. Indirectly is another story – but that works mostly through community contact – feeding a relatively small number people information to use at their BBQs, their workplaces and their social get togethers, enabling a small group to influence one much much larger of their peers. The Australian netroots (for a lack of any better term) has hit that point, but that’s all we’ve hit.

Finally, the more serious the issue, the more I find humour is important to convey the message. This pisses a few people off – especially those the sarcasm is aimed squarely at, that believe respect should be assumed because of who they are rather than earned through what they do. But sometimes people need the mickey taken out of them.

It’s not going to convince everyone – it never can. One bloke that should know better summed up a common theme on what’s being said about this article: “He approvingly quotes an editorial that gets it wrong, agrees more or less with Bolt’s numbers, but says Bolt is wrong because the truth will set the rednecks running”.

Sometimes people will just stick their fingers in their ears, stick the brain in park and go “la la la”. It’s not about racism, nor censorship nor having some argument that must be polarised.

It’s about treating the grey nature of observable reality for the complex thing it nearly always is, and using a bit of sensitivity and responsibility when dealing with these issues. That never means not using the data, but it must mean, always, that we keep an eye on the consequences and be as accurate as we possibly can. That will turn a lot of people off – but it still needs to be done.

Bolt’s argument was that the Somalian community were a bunch of crims – but if we drill down into the data just by age alone, the observable reality shows something more complicated and nuanced that leads to an entirely different conclusion. The problem isn’t the community as a whole, but a specific age cohort within the community.

That’s a pretty important thing to acknowledge if we’re interested in either understanding what is really going on, or interested in addressing it. Bolt, by sticking with his simplistic numbers has demonstrated he has an interest in neither.

There is no playing up or down what the observable reality says, the 10-29 year age cohort has a serious problem, yet the rest of the community is statistically the same as the broader Victorian community. While the distinct offender numbers in any given age cohort above 30 for the Somalian community are too small to draw a robust statistical comparison to the broader Victorian population, collectively above the age of 30 the population is large enough and there is no difference.

Too often people expect arguments and disagreements to be polarised with one side arguing black and the other side white. That is not the case here – I’m arguing that the observable reality is more nuanced than the blunt averages might ordinarily suggest, and that the conclusions drawn from those slightly more complex numbers are significantly different to the conclusions drawn by looking at the numbers simplistically.

Cdata online doesn’t appear to allow cross-tabulation of all census information, so ethnicity and income, for instance, can’t be easily pulled out.

As for the crime stats, only gender and ancestry seem to be the classifications released.

Shouldn’t that read “wingnut”. I think “moonbat” is the term of art amongst wingnuts for sane people.