The Age tried hard to find negatives in the Mapping Social Cohesion report released today, but
…while [co-author] Professor Andrew Markus said the study had “highlighted some issues which can be taken up”, he said the overall picture was a “very positive one”.
Despite all the fuss about ‘dog whistles’ [...]
As Andrew’s longtime webhost I thought I should let you all know I’ll be moving this site to a new server in the coming week.
Andrew has been volunteered by yours truly to be the first guinea pig for a blogging service I am putting together aimed at Australian bloggers. This [...]
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been given a standing ovation by the 1002 delegates to the Australia 2020 Summit in Parliament House.
Make that 1001 delegates, at most. While I was in the room, needless to say I was not among those giving the PM [...]
Polling on federalism is pretty rare, but in a new ANU Poll they have replicated a 1979 question that asked:
Do you think the state governments should give some powers to the federal government, or do you think the federal government has enough powers already?
In the last 30 years, the [...]
No matter how many times Bob Birrell updates his argument that we need more graduates, he gets lots of publicity. This morning was no exception. According to The Age
THE Federal Government should massively increase university places rather than offer 450,000 new training places if it wants to equip [...]
As reported The Age this morning, the Climate Institute has released another of its regular public opinion reports. Climate change continues to be another case study in the difference between repeating the conventional wisdom back to pollsters and taking responsibility for an issue that, if the conventional wisdom [...]
According to a story in today’s Sydney Sun-Herald, the National Union of Students is calling for an inquiry into the ‘economic impact of student debt’. Unfortunately for them, the human interest aspect of the story - one Joy Kyriacou (who by I am sure by complete coincidence has [...]
The ‘progressive’ think-tank Per Capita was launched a year ago today. It’s off to a fairly slow start. Many blogs which are mainly hobbies for their contributor(s), including this one, have produced far material in the last twelve months than has Per Capita. And most of what Per Capita [...]
According to the latest Morgan Poll on the ethics and honesty of various professions, more people now rate federal MPs highly on those measures than at any time since they started asking the question in 1979. Admittedly, only 23% rate federal MPs highly for ethics and honesty, but that [...]
In January I was sceptical, based on studies of student work and academic results, that increasing Youth Allowance to reduce work hours would pay academic dividends.
The first results (pdf) from the Australian Survey of Student Engagement reinforce the conclusion that the average 15 hours a week that [...]
For many commentators, the political right is just a blur. The various labels - conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative, New Right, economic rationalist - are thrown around according to fashion as much as meaning. Six years ago (pdf) I wrote an article on how ‘New Right’ was largely squeezed out by [...]
Note: I am satisfied, based on Chris Miller’s comment (at 8 below), that he and his family did have a bad experience with Emirates well beyond an erroneous phone call for which an apology would have been sufficient.
Last month, British backpacker Michael Edgeley suffered chest pains on an Emirates [...]
It is common in public opinion research for people’s average assessment of their own circumstances to differ considerably from their assessment of the average for others. Usually, they think that their own situation is better than other people’s. One reason for this is that media reports more bad news [...]
Part of what keeps a new progressive alliance from forming is that people mistake differences in ideas about how the world works for differences in moral principles. Left-leaning liberals look at the policies classical liberals support and assume that the motivation is to redistribute income from the poor to the [...]
In response to my implied criticism of Andrew Leigh for assuming that increases in inequality are bad and decreases good, but never specifying for what level of inequality would satisfy him, commenter Leopold responds:
one could turn the criticism around. Liberals believe in liberty - but how much [...]
According to Don Arthur, classical liberals don’t really belong with conservatives. Australian conservatives are ‘market friendly’, but they don’t rate individual liberty that highly so they aren’t really liberals. What keeps classical liberals with conservatives is less ideology than
social networks and personal loyalties. Most of Australia’s classical liberals [...]
While Liberal students search out biased academics, it is good to see that Young Labor is joining NUS in pursuing one of the big problems in higher education, price control.
As readers may recall, NUS is supporting an increase in the maximum student contribution amount so that amenities fees [...]
Not sexist! Not racist! Don’t tell Lot’s Wife!
Back in the 1980s, it was left-wing students who used to complain about lecturers expressing inappropriate political views. Due to an attack on him in the Monash student newspaper Lot’s Wife, my criminal law lecturer, the late Kumar Amarasekara, had to preface his [...]
As other bloggers said last week, I survived the cull of middle-aged men living in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra to be selected for the 2020 talkfest. I’m in the stream called ‘productivity agenda - education, skills, training, science and innovation’.
According to the invitation letter I received today, [...]
How does your demographic theory work with the “battlers” phenomenon? Was it merely transitory?
- asks commenter Leon Di Stefano.
I don’t think anyone has quite worked out how to define ‘battler’ in an easily defensible way. Peter Brent wrote a paper (pdf) a few years ago showing that [...]
I have long been pessimistic about demographic trends in Liberal support. Last May Ian Watson, using data from both the Australian Election Survey and Newspoll, clearly showed problems for the Liberals in that their support was concentrated in older cohorts.
This week, Watson has updated the Newspoll [...]
Sinclair Davidson’s suggestion that the most formidable opponents of small government are conservatives rather than social democrats is interesting. I wonder whether this could lead to a realignment of Australian politics.
- commenter Winton Bates, in a comments thread prompted by a post on how the rich paid an increasing [...]
The National Union of Students had a flop last week with a very poorly attended ‘national day of action’. But they showed smarter tactics in peddling this story to The Age for a slow news Easter Monday.
The story opened this way:
THE Federal Government is under growing pressure [...]
Over Friday and Saturday, The Age (as commenter Brendan pointed out) ran its own version of the SMH’s ‘white flight’ from government schools story, adding in refugees in Victoria to the Lebanese and Aboriginal students in NSW allegedly causing an Anglo-Asian flight to private schools. The news hook [...]
The Australian Workers’ Union commissioned Roy Morgan Research to conduct a poll on the idea that half Labor’s promised tax cuts should be diverted to superannuation.
As in the Galaxy poll of Queenslanders a couple of weeks earlier, a bit over a third of voters wanted [...]
Media reports this morning are claiming that a ‘confidential draft report’ to the federal government shows that plastic shopping bag use soared last year:
Bag use dropped steadily to 3.36 billion a year in 2006, but spiked back up to 4.84 billion in 2007, the report said.
Now I can think [...]
I have argued before for the social democratic tendencies of the former Howard government. One basis for doing so is that upper income earners during the Howard years provided an increasing share of the government’s total income tax revenue.
With the release yesterday of the ATO’s 2005-06 income tax [...]
The Age this morning reports the findings of 2006 census analysis I did wearing my University of Melbourne hat.
It looks at 18 and 19 year olds living at home (so we can see parental occupation and household income) to see how socieconomic background affects university and TAFE attendance rates. [...]
“I would say to all members of the family of the crew of HMAS Sydney, our Government sends our condolences for the loss of these brave young men.
“This is a day … which begins a process of closure for many families of the crew of the Sydney. [emphasis added]
- Prime [...]
Last year I suggested that all schools, and not just private schools as now, be funded on the basis of the average socieconomic status of their parents. In today’s Weekend Australian, Julia Gillard is reported as suggesting this as well.
It’s not quite clear, though, what her version [...]
Yesterday Education Minister Julia Gillard announced a major review of higher education policy, to report by the end of the year. The terms of reference are sensible enough. But I hope we will get over the bout of OECDitis on display in the Minister’s speech to the AFR [...]
A quick student politics quiz:
1. Which student political movement believes that student charges should be increased:
a) The National Union of Students
b) The Australian Liberal Students Federation
2. Which student political movement believes that additional student charges would a significant disincentive to participating in higher education?
a) The National Union of Students
[...]
The SMH this week has been taken with the idea of ‘white flight’ from public schools. On Monday they told us that:
WHITE students are fleeing public schools, leaving behind those of Aboriginal and Middle Eastern origin, a secret report by high school principals reveals. …
In New England, in [...]
As Jason has already informed Catallaxy readers, the 2008 Mont Pelerin Society Essay Competition is on. The prizes are pretty good - trips to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Tokyo over September 7-12 this year, plus US$2,500 for first prize, $1,500 for second prize, and $1,000 for [...]
In this week’s Campus Review, John Quiggin in polemical mode takes aim at for-profit higher education. He claims ‘for profit education has been a consistent failure in all times and places’ , with some ‘limited exceptions’ in vocational training.
Curiously, he provides very little evidence of the failure [...]
The CIS Liberty and Society seminar is coming up again. It’s a weekend live-in seminar on classical liberal ideas for university students and recent graduates. It covers political philosophy, economics, law and social policy. It’s a bit like a good blog with high-quality comments - there are lots of [...]
There is a strange disconnect between the debate on political donations laws, with yet more regulation proposed by the Prime Minister yesterday, and with the problems faced by Australian governments.
We have plenty of bad policies, yet very few of them have even plausible, let alone proven, links to political [...]
Universities Australia, formerly the AVCC, today released a paper suggesting that HELP student loan repayments be securitised.
Versions of this idea have been around for many years. In the past, people in the finance industry have wanted to buy the stream of future repayments from previous HECS debts (now [...]
HUNDREDS of university students in Victoria have turned to prostitution to pay their way through higher education, The Sunday Age has learnt. (emphasis added)
What does the Sunday Age mean it has ‘learnt’ that some prostitutes are students?
A quick search of the files would reveal that this is old [...]
Stephen Kirchner draws my attention to a Galaxy/Courier-Mail poll of 800 Queenslanders that:
found 55 per cent of respondents would prefer the proposed tax cuts to be delivered as extra payments to their superannuation fund. This included a majority of Labor and Coalition supporters.
Only 38 per cent of people [...]
These people often form a narrowly focused school that is aimed at cementing the faith it’s based on … If we continue as we are, I think we’ll just become more and more isolated sub-groups in our community,”
McGaw is quoted in the context of an article about [...]
I am an atheist, but as Damon Linker argued in The New Republic last year, atheism is divided in its attitudes towards religion. Linker’s article is a critique of the ‘ideological atheism’ of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, which believes religion is a dangerous superstition that must [...]
The 2006 ABS time use survey results were issued today, giving us another chance to review the claims of left-familists that our time needs their regulation.
The ABS classifies time according to activities, but also into the categories of ‘necessary time’, such as sleeping, eating, and personal hygiene; ‘contracted [...]
If this morning’s Newspoll (pdf) on which party would best handle various issues is right, the Coalition’s policy change to support signing of the Kyoto protocol has seen it drop 10% to 15% as the party that would best handle the environment. That’s their lowest score on the evironment [...]
Between mid-1997, when Newspoll first asked its respondents about whether the ’stolen children’ should receive an apology, and a Galaxy/GetUp poll in early February 2008 on whether its respondents agreed with the goverment’s decision to say sorry to the ’stolen generation’, public opinion moved only 5%, from 50% in [...]
Youth Minister Kate Ellis has announced a ‘consultation’ on the impact of voluntary student unionism. There is a discussion paper available here.
With three weeks to get submissions in, it sounds like the government wants its views confirmed rather than informed. The fun here will be watching all the [...]
The 2007 federal election wasn’t the rout I feared , and so we are (probably…) not in the situation in which an unelectable opposition rather than good performance keeps the government in power. But a poll in today’s Sydney Sun-Herald shows the unfortunate long-term consequences of such defeats, [...]
According to The Age’s report, one passage in particular of Brendan Nelson’s ’sorry’ speech seemed to upset the crowds watching the broadcast:
Alcohol, welfare without responsibilities, isolation from the economic mainstream, corrupt management of resources, nepotism, political buck-passing between governments with divided responsibilities, lack of home ownership, under-policing and [...]
The Education Department has quietly put on its website (in the file marked ‘Appendices’) the ‘equity’ student enrolment data. It’s more bad news for the ‘HECS deters’ theory, though good news for social mobility. The 2005 25% increase in student contribution amounts has had no negative effect on the [...]
Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan’s valuable paper on school productivity (pdf) received lots of media coverage today, including a page one story in The Australian. They find that numeracy fell over the period 1964 to 2003, and literacy and numeracy fell over the period 1975 to 1998. [...]
Being a longtime political junkie and occasionally involved in campaigns I suggest that, putting the ideologues aside, the driving force in voting behaviour is perceived self-interest.
I’m not so sure. Though there is a complex relationship between opinion on issues and voting behaviour, a self-interest hypothesis at [...]
Over at Club Troppo, Ken Parish is lamenting the risks caused by voter ignorance. In his 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan was even more pessimistic. According to Caplan, somewhat informed voters could be even worse than ignorant voters, because they indulge their wrong [...]
A common trope for the conservative sophist is to claim that all the miseries of modern life were absent in the Edenic golden past, and therefore a return to living in the manner of our ancestors (eg. women barefoot and pregnant),…[emphasis added]
- LP blogger Mercurius
The claim that conservatives want [...]
According to reports in this morning’s papers, drawing on Monday’s ABS international trade figures, education is now Australia’s biggest services export, overtaking tourism by nearly $1 billion for 2007 ($12.5 billion vs $11.5 billion).
But as the ABS doesn’t follow tourists or students around counting how much they spend, [...]
Though not quite in the same league as my Ernie, my friend Simon Caterson is the first entrant in Lavartus Prodeo’s Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. The idea is to highlight arguments built on tenuous links, and Simon is entered for managing to jump from a [...]
Wayne Swan has been working hard over the last few days to blame inflation on the previous government. But will the public believe him?
In the Newspoll series of questions on which party is better to handle various issues, inflation has been one of the Coalition’s strengths. Of the [...]
If I am put in the dock for failing to disclose ‘political expenditure’ to the Australian Electoral Commission, it is comforting to know that every other editor in the country who published an article on the 2007 election will be there with me.
On Friday the AEC published the [...]
Conservative isn’t a political philosophy. It’s a political position which is more about change (or the desire for none) which picks and chooses ideologies to suit its cause.
- commenter John Humphreys today.
If conservatism was just about change, then it could be found, and is found, in a range of [...]
Do conservatives believe in conservatism, or is conservatism whatever conservatives happen to believe? I think commenter Ken Nielsen is right when he says ‘“conservative” means different things to different people in different countries.’ In the very useful introduction to his book Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political [...]
I just don’t see how you can say that economically people should be as free as they can to do the things they want unhindered by the State, but socially the State should be telling them what’s best and how they should structure their lives. It would actually be refreshing [...]
I’m writing the public opinon chapter for a forthcoming book on the Liberal Party’s future, and in the process trying to think more systematically about the concept of ‘issue ownership’ - discussed here before in the context of Mummy party/Daddy party thesis. Rather surprisingly (or perhaps not, for those [...]
By the time I first met Paddy McGuinness, who died yesterday, his persona was much as I would have expected from the columns I had read in The Australian and then the SMH: rather gruff, given to sweeping pronouncements, but showing a very wide range of interests. This was [...]
The Bulletin is to join the the magazine graveyard in my spare room, if I can find a copy of its last issue, supposedly out today (I checked three newsagents, with no sign of it). Its weekly sales had dropped below 60,000, down from 100,000 in the [...]
Why are Australian libertarians suddenly so keen to collapse the ‘broad tent’? You don’t see many social conservatives trying to reform the tax-code according to the Summa.
Political alliances between different ideologies shift with the times. For most of the second half of the 20th century, liberals [...]
Conservative and ‘progressive’ Liberals may disagree on much, but it seems they share at least one attribute - confusing their hopes with our reality. Last December Senator Judith Troeth called for a ‘progressive liberalism’ to restore the party’s electoral fortunes. As I pointed out at the time, the polling [...]
Using data from four surveys over a 40 year period, Andrew Leigh’s latest paper (pdf) argues that father-son intergenerational mobiliity is stable in Australia.
In his conclusion, as reported by The Australian, he says:
“On one view, the absence of any significant rise in inter-generational mobility might be regarded [...]
Providing me with my second page one dial-a-quote this week, the SMH this morning leads with a story titled ‘Student debts out of control’. Drawing on an article by Bruce Chapman in this week’s Campus Review, it says:
GRADUATES from private colleges and universities are costing taxpayers more than [...]
At its annual conference last month, the National Union of Students rolled over on compulsory and up-front amenities fees. According to its new president, Angus McFarland, it was a matter of accepting reality. “We were … aware … that the Labor Party had comprehensively ruled out returning to the [...]
I was rather surprised this week to receive a letter, in my capacity as editor of Policy, from the ‘Chief Legal Officer’ of the Australian Electoral Commission. Had I forgotten to vote? No, but it seems I may have ‘failed to focus’ on meeting my obligations under section 314AEB [...]
In addition, I’m not convinced that if all university students in Australia received free education and enough income support to live comfortably that the majority would spend all that extra time studying.
- backroom girl this morning.
In her doubts, backroom girl goes against some higher education orthodoxy. 43% of Australian [...]
The ABS literacy levels by state data published today confirm what the OECD PISA study released in December found - that young Victorians’ literacy levels are well behind what their contemporaries in other states are achieving.
Victoria 15 to 24 year olds are a full 10 percentage points [...]
The next issue of Policy is going to run a series of short articles by CIS researchers on social policy myths. I’m writing about the myth that university charges deter students from low-income backgrounds, one which our new leader believes. There is the associated belief that Whitlam’s free education [...]
Back in the 1980s, some on the left used to call for university admission to be conducted by lottery. Anyone who applied for a course would be selected at random. The left thought it would make it easier for working-class people, who do relatively poorly in admissions systems based on [...]
Newspoll regularly asks voters whether, in the next six months, their standard of living will improve, stay the same, or get worse. Their results always show that supporters of the political party in opposition federally are more pessimistic than supporters of the governing party.
Alasdair Macintyre, Colin McGinn, Andrew Norton, Martha Nussbaum, … John Searle, Peter Singer
- from the contributors list in the 1st quarter 2008 issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine
Philosophically-inclined readers will realise that this is a case of a peasant mixing with the intellectual aristocracy, thanks to the egalitarian institution of [...]
Andrew Leigh asks if I have a view on his suggestion that Australia should create blind trusts for political donations.
There are several pages on this in Andrew L’s co-authored 2004 book Imagining Australia, with the idea also summarised in this SMH op-ed. Instead of giving money [...]
Commenter Matt Marks says that:
The Liberal High Command has totally underestimated GetUp! and I think you are doing the same, albeit to a lesser degree.
A low-level political statement [what I had claimed of GetUp!] does not involve TV ad campaigns, over 200,000 members on their email list [...]
In his speech to the National Press Club yesterday, Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane said this about the role of the ACTU and GetUp! in the campaign:
The ACTU spent over $14 million on television advertising in the twelve months before election day. This was more than either of [...]
Today the Coalition’s Shadow Cabinet officially declared WorkChoices dead. With coincidental but good timing, my Policy article on the ugly WorkChoices polling went online this morning.
Polling published since I wrote the article confirms the findings I report. In the Weekend Australian last Saturday, George Megalogenis cited [...]
The annual ABS Education and Work report is out today, and so another round in the Birrell vs Norton dispute as to whether we have too few, or too many, graduates for labour force needs.
This is the first Education and Work survey using the ABS’s new [...]
In this week’s Higher Education Supplement in The Australian, higher education commentator Gavin Moodie offers the Liberal Opposition some policy advice. Some of it, such as introducing vouchers, unsurprisingly I think is sound. However there is also this:
There would have to be a cap on fees because the whole [...]
Greenpeace says that its Newspoll on greenhouse issues shows Kevin Rudd would make himself popular by taking radical steps to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions:
[Greenpeace head of campaigns Steve] Campbell said that this week Mr Rudd had the opportunity to show leadership at the Bali climate talks and help gain [...]
Another Roy Morgan job security survey is out today, and yet again they fail to find the job insecurity the unions would have us believe WorkChoices is causing.
According to the ACTU in March 2007:
Job security for Australian workers has been eroded - with 3,761,000 Australian workers [...]
At the risk of adding day 7 to the bloggish debate, I want to respond to Peter Whiteford’s comments at Andrew L’s blog. Whiteford says:
My reaction to Andrew N’s first post may seem casual, but it is where is the evidence that Australian public schooling is the sort of [...]
Andrew Leigh and I weren’t sure how our ‘bloggish debate’ on whether public schools should be privatised would go. Can you transport an old-media leisurely exchange of views to an instant feedback forum?
The posts, with comments off, did seem to lie dead on the page. They did [...]
Day 5
[Introduction] [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3] [Day 4]
Dear A.L,
As you suggest, former private school students might show more civic attitudes and behaviour than former government school students, but that doesn’t show that the school is the cause. Identifying causes requires much more [...]
A recurrent critique of the Liberal Party is that it is more a conservative party than a liberal party, and that it should become more liberal. This critique has a libertarian version (for example my article on ‘big government conservatism’), and also a ‘progressive’ version, which has found its [...]
Day 4
[Introduction] [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3]
From Andrew Leigh:
Dear A.N.,
Let’s be careful about what we claim for private schools. The fact that private school attendance is positively correlated with civic activity doesn’t tell us anything about the causal impact. It could be that private [...]
Day 3
[Introduction] [Day 1] [Day 2]
Dear A.L.,
Periodically, our politicians rediscover civics in schools. In 1994, the Keating-appointed Civics Expert Group released a report supporting civics and citizenship education. One of their reasons was that a survey, which they had commissioned, revealed widespread ignorance of our political [...]
There is a now familiar aftermath to significant Liberal defeats. People say that the Liberal Party is finished, and needs replacing as the opposition party. BA Santamaria took this view in the mid-1980s (see his essay in Australia at the Crossroads). Norman Abjorensen is the most frequent advocate of this [...]
From Andrew Leigh:
Dear A.N,
I’ve enjoyed your writings on education for some time, so am chuffed to be discussing perhaps the biggest issue in education policy: should we have public schools at all? I’m also pleased for another reason – after a year of getting beaten [...]
[Introduction]
Day 1
Hi A.L,
According to Australian Education Union election advertising, we need a federal government that will put public education first. But do we need public education at all? Would there be anyone calling for it, if we did not have it already?
People are used to the [...]
As Andrew Leigh explains, this week we are trying something a little different, what he calls a ‘bloggish debate’. He mentions Slate’s Breakfast Table as a model, but the exchange of letters has long been used by print publications in the same or subsequent issues to debate issues. [...]
Senator Troeth, a former party vice-president who has been in Parliament for 14 years, told The Age the Costello-dominated committee’s decision to override Mr Baillieu’s bid to run a candidate in last month’s byelection for the state seat of Albert Park was “simply disgraceful”.
- Victorian Liberal Senator Judith Troeth, [...]
One upside of the 2007 election was the failure of celebrity politics. Big names and big dollars were after Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth, yet there was a swing to him of 1.19%, against a NSW swing away from the government of 5.65%.
Across the harbour in Bennelong, Labor’s [...]
I didn’t think Stephen Smith’s performance as Shadow Education Minister warranted his appointment as Minister, but creating a part-time Education Minister - Julia Gillard will have to combine it with being Deputy Prime Minister, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister and Minister for Social Inclusion - is bordering on bizarre. [...]
Back in 2005, Nick Gruen wrote a useful post about the components he liked of the three ideological elements of our political culture: liberalism, conservatism and social democracy. In practice, all major political parties tend to be a mix of the three, but with differing emphasis.
I’d call Labor conservative [...]
