According to The Age, next Wednesday will see a new ‘progressive’ think-tank launched, Per Capita.

This idea has been floating around for a while - I gave them some advice many months ago - so it will be interesting to see how well it goes.

I have had doubts about whether their organisational structure is the right one. For example, when advertising for an Executive Director earlier this year they wanted a rare mix of skills -

You probably have
• an advanced degree
• a reputation as a ‘thought leader’
• an understanding of how ideas, economics and politics interact, including professional public policy experience
• professional management experience, sufficient to manage a small but complex organisation
• strong communications skills, including experience of the electronic media and an ability to write well
• adaptability, flexibility and problem-solving expertise and an entrepreneurial mind-set
• a background in public policy, politics, the media, academia, management consultancy or business.

but then offered only a 12 month contract.

Unsurprisingly, the successful applicant, David Hetherington, doesn’t obviously meet more than a few points on this wish-list. I could find only one published article, this four-year old Online Opinion piece, which is just a summary of the standard union line on minimum wages.

The policy director, Michael Cooney, is a long-time ALP staffer. He’ll bring strong political connections and policy experience to the job, but like Hetherington he has no pre-existing intellectual reputation based on published work. And how long would he stay once a Rudd government started recruiting?
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According to Robert Manne in today’s Age

THE right in Australia is greedy. Even though it now dominates political commentary on commercial radio and television and throughout the Murdoch press, for the past decade it has been conducting a concerted campaign to root out the pitiful remnants of left-wing thinking still found inside the ABC. The long campaign has been conducted by Quadrant and The Australian; by think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies (emphasis added)

In fact, the CIS has been rather more interested in appearing on the ABC than rooting out the ‘pitiful remnants of left-wing thinking’ still to be found wandering its corridors. When I put ‘ABC bias’ in in the CIS’s search engine it turned up only three passing references. When I put ‘centre for independent studies’ in the ABC search engine I get 520 documents, and there are more that just refer to the ‘CIS’.

As I explained in a Catallaxy post last year, I’m not a fan of the ‘ABC bias’ argument. It’s not that I think ABC staff don’t lean to the left; left-wing causes do get more coverage there than elsewhere (though this mainly shows in issue selection; they do try to provide balance once they have picked a topic). But I doubt this greatly increases the total of leftist broadcasting in Australia compared to what we would have without the ABC. There’s a market for leftist ideas, as The Age shows in making money out of a soft left broadsheet and book publishers show by making money out of selling books denouncing capitalism, US foreign policy etc etc. So if it wasn’t the ABC it would be some other institution.

I think this makes the preoccupation with ‘ABC bias’ a strategic mistake by the political right. Even if the ABC’s ‘pitiful remnants’ were left to wander the streets of Ultimo and Southbank (and wherever their studios are in other cities) nothing much would change in the overall political complexion of Australian debate. Devoting significant energy to achieving a reform that would make little practical difference is a mistake the CIS has avoided making.

Aside from strategy, the ABC actually has many virtues to go with its few vices - it gives far more time to explain complex ideas than other radio stations, most of the news programmes are pretty good, and best of all it schedules lots of excellent English television. Yes, I know, ‘middle class welfare’, but one of the few federal government services I actually use for all the taxes I pay.

Never in the history of think-tanks has a research proposal received so much publicity. Starting, so far as I can tell, in The Guardian, it spread through the world, including the front page of this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald. The problem (according to The Guardian):

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

Professor Q, who has joined the chorus of criticism, has also tracked down a copy of the original letter (pdf) the AEI sent to prospective authors.

It really is hard to see what the fuss is about. There is a political consensus that something needs to be done about climate change, not because we are necessarily 100% certain about the science, but because policymakers cannot do nothing in the face of potentially catastrophic risks. Few decisions are made with perfect information. But I cannot see that there is anything to be lost from continuing to hear from the sceptics, and that the sponsoring body once took some money from Exxon or has staff that once worked for Bush tells us little that is useful.

Like most of the right-wing think-tanks the AEI does not do hired gun research and does not get itself in the position of leftist NGOs of having a dominant funder that can influence their public statements. It only gets 17% of its annual funding from corporations, suggesting that the capacity of any one company to have an influence would be very limited even in theory, and probably near zero in practice.

As I have said in many posts, arguments stand or fall on their merits, and the claim that (as the AEI letter asserts) the IPCC process has biases or that the AEI has taken Exxon money alerts us to potential issues with each, but does not spare us the effort of actually listening to what they have to say. The AEI was not offering $10,000 for quick spin. It was offering $10,000 for 7,500- 10,000 words by December 2007. It’s hardly a huge sum for a long paper from an expert.

The charge of McCarthyism is terribly over-used, but launching such a prominent and widespread attack on research that hasn’t even been written is resonant of Senator McCarthy’s attacks on those he suspected - sometimes correctly, often not - of being communists.