In The Australian this morning, Dennis Glover puts the case for the Per Capita think-tank because

The alternative to the CIS-Institute of Public Affairs view, therefore, has to come from elsewhere [ie, not from the Old Left]….

In the absence of a strong contest, the intellectual ideas of the Australian Right are now in danger of hardening into an ideological dogma, dominated by prefabricated and increasingly predictable soundbites.

Now the CIS is all for competition. But it is not clear to me that it is promoting ‘ideological dogma’ against the fresh thinking that might come out of a ‘new progressive agenda’ set by Per Capita.

Per Capita, for example, thinks that a huge increase in public and private investment in education will reduce poverty and increase per capita income. The ‘private’ part is perhaps controversial on the left, but the basic argument about the importance of education is orthodoxy. Every survey finds that the public wants more money spent on education.

Fresh (or at least fresher, since studying intellectual and political history suggests that genuinely new ideas are very rare indeed) thinking would be to question this orthodoxy. Perhaps for example Andrew Leigh’s research showing that we are spending more on schools but getting worse results. Or Peter Saunders’ argument that raising the school leaving age is a bad idea. Or my point that many graduates are working in jobs that don’t need university qualifications.

Perhaps we do, overall, need more spending on education. But in education policy, this is the dogma that needs testing in debate.
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Last year Guy Pearse, adopting the pose of a Liberal dissident, authored a 417-page conspiracy theory called High and Dry. The book argued that John Howard’s climate change stance was the result of the fossil fuel lobby and ‘neo-liberal’ think-tanks. Pearse’s imagination was running so wild on the CIS’s role that I was incorporated into the conspiracy, despite my silence on the issue.

I’m now wondering who will feature in the Labor version of High and Dry. Yesterday in Crikey (here for subscribers) Pearse said:

Kevin Rudd may not look like he’s following John Howard on climate change, but he may well be. The strategy and rhetoric are more polished, but the confusion between polluter interests and the national interest seems much the same.

While the CIS isn’t featuring in this version of the story (though perhaps when Rudd turned up a the CIS to give a speech attacking our beliefs it was really just a cover, and we control him too), the argument that this is about polluter lobby groups is still there.
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After my post noting that ‘progressive’ think-tank Per Capita hadn’t published any research in their first year, they did put out this paper on employment services. But their output is still modest, and I wondered whether with so many other job opportunities for left-leaning people Per Capita was having trouble recruiting staff to do their work.

Despite Per Capita’s slow start, the idea that think-tanks might be a useful vehicle for the left persists (rather than an alternative theory that the right uses them because they don’t have other institutional backing like universities and unions). According to a report in The Age

LEFT-wing unions are funding a new think tank, Catalyst Australia, as they aim to counter the influence of such right-wing rivals as the Institute of Public Affairs.

Catalyst Australia’s executive director, Jo-anne Schofield, said the group aimed to engage in the work-life balance debate and to challenge current thinking on economics.

With financial backing from cave-dwelling unions like the CFMEU and the MUA we can be confident there will be little of the fresh thinking promised by Per Capita. Their name has already been taken by a corporate teambuilding outfit. And I think think-tanks can generally make their most useful contribution early in the issue cycle, rather than issues that have already been around for years like work-life balance. But we will see.

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 has produced are newspaper opinion pieces, which take only slightly longer than a substantive blog post to write.

Unusually for a think-tank, they don’t seem to have any published research. The closest thing I could find was a ‘Dear Prime Minister’ (lefties love open letters) publication called ‘Memo to a Progressive Prime Minister’, but this is more of a manifesto with endnotes than a traditional think-tank research paper.

Presumably the research is still coming - there is a page on their website promising it - but so far they are lacking what gives think-tanks credibility and profile. With most of the social democratic talent either with secure university jobs or in one of the hundreds of government staffer jobs currently available to them, perhaps Per Capita is struggling to find people to do their research.

If they can lift their output, the manifesto provides some support for commenter John of Newtown’s suggestion last week that Per Capita was a ‘progressive fusionist’ institution. There are market-based policy suggestions in the manifesto, including a national water market and even a proposal for students to sell shares in their future income stream (the CIS was there first on that one, of course). At the same time, there are calls for ‘public investment’, but investment based on proper analysis of costs and benefits.

All that is a significant improvement on much other ‘progressive’ thinking, and from a liberal ‘fusionist’ perspective on really-existing conservatism, which too easily ends up as National Party agragrian socialism, particularly on issues like water. I hope Per Capita succeeds. But for the moment it looks like they are finding out how hard it is to run a think-tank.
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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 ‘economic rationalism’, which in turn was being challenged by ‘neoliberalism’, now the favourite. Despite the irrelevance of ‘neoconservatism’ to Australian politics, it is frequently used here as if it had some descriptive power. In the blogosphere we debate posts on what classical liberalism and conservatism have in common, but journalists don’t even know that there is a difference.

I was reminded of this twice over the last few days, first in this George Megalogenis piece and again when I read Monday’s Crikey. According to the radical leftist Jeff Sparrow,

Remember Katherine Betts’ The Great Divide? Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians? Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class? Mark Latham’s From the Suburbs? The decades worth of columns in The Australian; the reports churning out from the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies?

The narrative was always the same. A chasm separated ordinary, decent Howard-voting Australians from an arrogant tertiary-educated, intellectual elite: a clutch of sneering know-it-alls who wanted to overrun the country with immigrants, make everyone guilty about Aborigines and brainwash the youth with Parisian post-modernist mumbo-jumbo.

Certainly there is a populist conservative strain in right-of-centre Australia. But this is not universal. Read the rest of this entry »

Australia’s richest think-tank, The Climate Institute, has been carefully following the model set by board member Clive Hamilton’s The Australia Institute. It feeds the media’s love of public opinion surveys, even targeting the current election media frenzy with polling in marginal seats on climate change. It produces attention-grabbing semi-gimmick research, like their latest report which calculates superannuation costs if action on climate change is delayed (a male of my age will be $1,165.46 a year worse off in retirement, it says with all the spurious precision of economic modelling). Despite Clive’s strict insistence on leisure, both his think-tanks take advantage of slow news weekends to release reports on Sundays.

Yet despite all this the Climate Institute’s profile seems modest. The superannuation report had a bit of media coverage, but nothing like the masses of publicity the Australia Institute can often pull, particularly in the Fairfax papers and on the ABC. The Climate Institute is a new think-tank, of course, and it will take time to build a reputation. But I doubt it will ever do as well as The Australia Institute.

The basic problem is summed up in its statement of purpose:

Established in late 2005, The Climate Institute has a five-year goal of raising public awareness and debate about the dangers to Australia of global warming and to motivate the country to take positive action.

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At the start of the month, I suggested that Guy Pearse, author of High and Dry, a critique of the Howard governmet’s climate change policies, use his wesbite’s ‘Clarifications and corrections’ page to correct the claim that Greg Lindsay had any responsibility for the government’s policies.

My argument was based on the facts that Lindsay has had nothing to say on the topic (which Pearse admits), and that the CIS had published only a handful of articles on climate change, and none for several years. It seemed to me to be a wildly implausible notion of ‘influence’, that all you have to do is print a few pieces and - hey presto! - the government adopts your policy. Strangely, given this theory of influence, my dozens of articles on higher education reform over more than seven years, not to mention my prior role as the actual Ministerial adviser on higher education, have failed to secure the desired outcome. Ditto many CIS policy suggestions on tax, welfare, and other subjects.

Now Pearse has responded to my post, and though he does, near the end, back-pedal a bit, it is mostly a flimsy exercise in guilt by association.
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Younger readers of this blog (Sukrit and Leon I know of, and maybe some lurkers?) might be interested in the CIS Liberty and Society programme, a weekend live-in seminar on classical liberal ideas. The next one is in Sydney over the weekend of 14-16 September, with 6 August the deadline for applications. It’s free, and the CIS will also pay most of your travel expenses if you live outside of Sydney.

For people who have been in the past (it’s been going since 1996) we are planning drinks in Melbourne on 23 August. I’ve emailed everyone we have records of living in Melbourne, but there were a few bouncebacks and there are probably some people who have moved here since they attended L&S. If you are interested in coming email me anorton AT cis.org.au

And for other people who have been in the past, there are a couple of Facebook groups:

This one set up by Jacques Chester, now in Perth.

And this one set up by Robert Wiblin, who is at the ANU.

I was rather surprised to find myself mentioned in the latest greenhouse book, Guy Pearse’s High and Dry. But there I am, on page 244. How I managed to make any appearance in a book on an issue that is a very long way down my list of interests requires some explanation.

High and Dry analyses why (at least until recently) the PM was a climate change sceptic. From what I have read, it is a more detailed version of Clive Hamilton’s book Scorcher, arguing that the influence of the fossil-fuel industry and ‘neo-liberal’ think-tanks explains the PM’s stance (Hamilton, one of Pearse’s PhD supervisors, draws on Pearse’s research).

To argue that ‘neo-liberal’ think-tanks influence Howard, Pearse has to show their connections to the government. And this is where I come in:

Andrew Norton, while not so vocal on greenhouse policy, is another at CIS with close links to the Howard government. He was once an adviser to former environment minister David Kemp.

‘Not so vocal’? ‘Not vocal at all’ would be closer to it. So far as I can find, my only expressed opinion on greenhouse policy was this passing reference in a blog post this February that does not support Pearse’s case:
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Clive Hamilton is back on the new releases shelves with another book, Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change. I’ve dipped into it today, and while there is much criticism of the ‘right-wing’ groups that with the ‘greenhouse mafia’ of fossil fuel industry groups Hamilton believes persuaded the government to go slow on climate change, the initial chapters also have a distinct resemblance to public choice theories favoured by many on the right about how special interest groups capture the political process.

Of course there were other reasons why the government was always likely to lean to the sceptical side of the climate change debate. Industries that produce high levels of greenhouse gas are an important part of the Australian economy, and have contributed significantly to our current prosperity - no government is likely to jeopardise this lightly. As I argued last year when examing polls on the issue, while the public seems to have accepted the alarmist view of climate change, it still seems well short of accepting the measures needed to deal with it. The political commotion that goes with every oil price spike shows how hard it’s going to be to take this issue from abstract principle to practical policies.

Also, there were tribal political reasons for doubting the views of some climate change proponents. As I noted in my review of Hamilton’s Affluenza, he is part of a political tradition that has never much liked modern industrial society. Climate change is a godsend for such people, because it gives them a scientifically respectable way - a way consistent with modern thinking - to oppose material consumption. The instinct of those who like modern industrial soceity would always be to doubt what people like Hamilton say.
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