I expanded on my arguments against reducing HECS-HELP debt in exchange for community service for the Higher Education Supplement on Wednesday, but I am yet to convince everyone I have spoken to about the idea.

My main objection is to the link between community service and student debt, since I disputed the synergies between the two. If taxapayers are going to support community service, they should try to recruit the best candidates for the available work, whether or not they have student debt.

Against this view, I was pointed to Andrew Leigh’s comments in his AFR column:

Each year, approximately 75,000 young Americans participate in AmeriCorps, and many continue to work with the community after their service year ends. Implemented here, a similar program might have practical benefits for underprivileged communities. But its ‘eye-opening’ benefits could be greater still - giving affluent suburban youth a chance to spend a year facing disadvantage in all its complexity. Read the rest of this entry »

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’ and ‘divisiveness’ during the Howard years, and from the other side about the supposedly dire consequences of ‘multiculturalism’ during the Hawke and Keating years, attitudinal research suggests that ’social cohesion’ remains high. Australians overwhelmingly have a ’sense of belonging’, whether born here (96.9%) or overseas (94.4%). Pride in the Australian way of life is high whether the respondent was born here (94.4%) or overseas (90.4%). Migrants are slightly more likely (81.4%) than those born here (79.6%) to think that Australia is a land of economic opportunity and that their life will be improved in three or four years (55.6%/46%).

This isn’t to say, of course, that things go smoothly all the time. A quarter of respondents had experienced discrimination at some time in their lives because of their ethnic or national background, and 8% on the basis of their religion. 6% say they experience discrimination on a regular basis of once a month or more. This is broadly consistent with previous research.
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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 is up 7% on the previous year.

Looking back at the history of this question, there are upward spikes after governments change, and downward spikes when election promises are broken (Keating’s L-A-W tax cuts in the 1994 and 1995 surveys, and the ‘non-core’ promises in the 1997 and 1998 surveys). With Ruddmania, the spike this year was bigger than the 4% after the 1983 and 1996 changes of government. It is unlikely that the average ethics and honesty levels of politicians have changed much, but with the passing of Howard and arrival of Rudd some Australians are prepared to upgrade their ratings.

Though there is evidence that the numbers respond to real-world changes, this series is a very poor predictor of how voters will feel about individual politicians. Read the rest of this entry »

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 was statements by Laurie Ferguson, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services, that refugees needed to be spread more widely rather than concentrating them in particular areas.

As with the SMH story, no statistical evidence was provided of the scale (or indeed, beyond principal’s unverified reports, reality) of this white flight. But let’s assume it’s true to some extent. If as we know parental background is an important predictor of school success, then the children of parents with poor English language skills, and who in the case of African refugees particularly may not be literate in any language, are not going to be ideal classmates, whatever exotic opportunities they may provide for cross-cultural experiences.

In a government school system still based primarily on people attending their closest school, the concentration of refugees in public housing that is also geographically concentrated means that refugee kids will form a large percentage of students in some schools.
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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,”

- Barry McGaw

McGaw is quoted in the context of an article about the proliferation of new ‘faith-based’ independent schools. Of course nobody can know for sure what the long-term consequences of these schools might be. But history provides an interesting case study, the role of Catholics in a majority Protestant society, Australia. For centuries, Catholics and Protestants viewed each other with suspicion, and though very rarely violent this was true in Australia as well. Catholics have always maintained separate schools. According to the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), more than half of all current Catholics attended Catholic schools, government-funded since the 1960s. Only one of the Protestant groups (the Baptists) even gets to 20% ‘other non-government school’ attendance. And being very numerous, Catholics could if they wanted to create a society of their own within Australian society. But do they?

I’m sure most readers could reflect a moment on their own social circles and realise that Catholics are an integrated, and integral, part of Australian society. The AuSSA finds Catholics are more likely to join unions than Australians in general, and have average rates of participation in sports groups and voluntary associations (though perhaps Catholic, I can’t tell from the data). They are more likely than the general population to agree that being a good citizen requires understanding other people’s opinions. Despite the Pope’s views, they are more likely than the general population to support gay marriage. Half of them even agree that public schools don’t receive their fair share of the budget. In 1996, a third of them were married to Protestants. I doubt the public school lobby can find any evidence that heading on to fifty years of state aid has made Catholics more isolated or more a ’sub-group’. But of course why bother with data when prejudice can get the conclusion you want with no effort?

One of the frustrating things about the public school lobby is how rarely they seriously argue their case. Ironically enough, their belief in public schooling seems to be based on faith.

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 be stamped out. He quotes Dawkins describing Catholic education as child abuse, and Harris wanting ‘public schools [to] “announce the death of God” to their students’.

Linker prefers, as I do, ‘liberal atheism’, which is to:

…accept, … that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way–that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not.

Ideological atheists would take the side of two critics of church schools quoted in today’s Age. In a feature article, psychologist Louise Samway as reported as saying of Christian schools:

these schools are balkanising the community, “driving us apart”. “Values are the foundation of human bonding,” the psychologist and educationist told The Age. “If we don’t have agreed values that everyone can understand and respect, that are common, it leads to a whole lot of disparate sub-groups that are suspicious of each other.”

More importantly, Barry McGaw, head of the new National Curriculum Board, is quoted in a news article as saying:

Read the rest of this entry »

At the Stephen Smith versus Julie Bishop education debate at the Melbourne Institute on Thursday, they discussed their mutual plans for a national curriculum. While I think this a bad idea, the aspect that appeals to many people is helping people who move interstate. Smith claimed that we are an increasingly mobile society. But is this true?

Back in 2004, I wrote a post questioning this conventional wisdom. I reported then:

The first time the census asked about any residential move in the last 5 years, in 1971, 60.6% had not moved. The last time they asked, in 2001, it was 57.6%.

Most of these moves are to places nearby. Only 4.8% of the population moved interstate between 1996 and 2001, compared to 4.4% between 1966 and 1971. The 4.8% is the lowest rate since the 1971 to 1976 period; it peaked at 5.5% between 1986 and 1991

Since then, of course, we’ve had another census. Though the ABS has not yet put out a publication on population mobility, the census website allows you to create tables yourself on many topics, including internal migration (I wish they would do this for other datasets).
Read the rest of this entry »

Twice in recent months I have become involved in blogosphere debates about claimed conflicts of interest. First I disputed James Farrell’s argument that ABC TV news needed to disclose the fact that finance presenter Alan Kohler also operates a financial advice newsletter, which in turn is partly financed by a firm that had links with companies that Kohler reported on for the ABC. Then this week I questioned Andrew Leigh’s suggestion that Westpac CEO Gail Kelly had a conflict of interest when she was reported suggesting that the RBA would not increase interest rates again this year. According to Andrew L:

nowhere does the journalist mention the key commercial conflict: people who expect a rate rise will be less likely to buy a Westpac variable rate mortgage.

The basic problem behind the concept ‘conflict of interest’ is that the different roles people play can have different interests attached to them. There is said to be a ‘conflict of interest’ where a personal interest might be put ahead of the interests of those relying on the person’s words or actions.

The ‘interests’ in conflict often have different definitions. The personal interest seems almost always, as it was in the two blog cases, to be related to financial or material gain, for the individual, or those associated with the individual. Other personal interests don’t seem to classed as potential conflicts, even if they could be seen to be bad for other reasons. If someone offers commentary on interest rates because they like getting their name mentioned in the media, that isn’t going to be seen as a conflict of interest, despite that person’s interest in publicity.

The interests with which the personal financial interest is conflicting are far more varied. Read the rest of this entry »

There was more evidence in a Morgan poll earlier this week that ABC bias is perhaps the most lost of the lost conservative causes. In Morgan’s survey of media bias, just 2.5% of respondents could specify the ABC or one of its presenters as being biased to the left.

Overall, the survey suggests that perceptions of media bias are more the result of respondent bias than of specific grievances. While 24% of respondents thought that newspaper journalists were too left-leaning, only 3.5% could name a specific journalist or newspaper as being too left-wing. Similarly, of the 19% of respondents who thought that newspaper journalists were too right-leaning, only 3.5% could name a specific journalist or newspaper. Further, most of the journalists nominated as ‘biased’ to the left or right are columnists, and to say that a columnist is biased isn’t necessarily a criticism.

There is a similar phenomenon at work in attitudes towards politicians, in which politicians in general receive lower ratings for trust than the most well-known politicians (including the Prime Minister, even after years of people accusing him of being ‘tricky’ or a liar). Stereotypes are poor predictors of attitudes to specific members of the class of person being stereotyped.

Back in May, when the ABS released its working time statistics, left-familist John Buchanan went on the offensive:

“It is not just family life, but community life that is being compromised,” said the director of the Workplace Research Centre at Sydney University, John Buchanan. “It just rips the heart out of the football team.”

Yesterday, the ABS released its 2006 voluntary work statistics, showing yet again that left-familist analysis owes more to its ideological assumptions than to empirical social science. Despite two rounds of IR reform since they started these surveys in 1995, the volunteering rate continues to increase, though at a lower overall rate.

The figures were 1995 - 23.6%, 2000- 31.8%, 2002 - 34.4%, 2006 - 35.4%. Unfortunately there is no specific information on football teams (though only work for the team, rather than playing, would be counted) but young men aged 18-24 showed above average increases in volunteering between the two surveys. Indeed, the increase between the last two surveys was driven by the 18-44 year olds, with older age groups showing minor increases or decline.

Also inconsistent with the time poverty argument, those in professional and managerial jobs and higher income groups (two socioeconomic characteristics linked with long work hours) had above average volunteering rates.

The survey confirms that social capital breeds further social capital. Read the rest of this entry »