While I don’t think facts alone can settle all or even a majority of debates in contemporary politics, the most productive debates are usually around evidence and empirical relationships.

I don’t believe that more than a small minority of people acquire their basic worldview from reading or intellectual reflection. Worldviews are largely the product of socialisation, life experience, and personality. While I have an enduring interest in political philosophy, and especially liberal political philosophy, I don’t think this kind of intellectual endeavour is primarily about persuading people who are not already in the same broad ideological space. Rather, political philosophy helps turn the intuitions that come from a general worldview into something more coherent. For this reason, my overtly classical liberal writing has been aimed mostly at people who share some of my normative assumptions, rather than a wider audience.

People are far more open to persuasion on empirical grounds, and this is one reason I have generally taken this approach (apart from being the kind of person who reads ABS reports out of pure interest). While some people insist on their own idiosyncratic take on what the facts are, not many flatly deny that empirical evidence is important. The way I read Grattan’s approach, it is to work in this empirical space – not denying that more ideological perspectives are important, but leaving those to other people and organisations. So that’s what I will be doing too during my time with Grattan.

I decided that the easiest way to keep blogging while keeping within a slightly narrower brief was to set up a new blog, andrewnorton.net.au. This blog will stay online, but from 15 August 2011 upates will be at the new blog.

Though it required some quick extra calculations from me, the figure below shows trends in the proportion of full-time equivalent students who are full fee. The proportion went from a bit over a quarter in 2001, to more than 40% in 2009. The trend will have reversed since: the over-enrolment frenzy for Commonwealth-supported students is pushing up their numbers, while full-fee undergraduate domestics are being phased out and international student numbers are down. If we are lucky, DEEWR will produce the exact numbers sometime late in 2012.

I have no sympathy for the old higher education system, run in the interests of institutions rather than students. We should not narrow students’ options so they have to end up at a regional university, if they want a university education at all. But nor should we deprive universities like UNE of the tools of competition, particularly on price.

The figure below, from a University of Melbourne analysis of international student fees, shows that regional unis have charged low fees to give themselves market share. Indeed, on average several of them earn roughly the same amount for an international as a domestic student (the figure also gives quite a few clues as to how the money is spent).

Barber’s solution, it will surprise nobody who has observed regional higher education politics, is another government handout – a $4,000 student contribution discount. The hapless taxpayer is spending enough on higher education already, and regional unis have to learn to deliver an attractive service rather than rely on handouts. But I certainly share Barber’s concern that a voucher system without price competition will have some unintended consequences that are in nobody’s interests.

Mr Wood said his donation was motivated by disappointment with Labor and Coalition policies on climate change and the environment.

“I didn’t think either of those parties were being effective,” he said. “They were being driven by people with vested interests.“(emphasis added)

But in an a story for the Weekend AFR (paywall) Wood says that he:

..saw the $1.6 million donation as a defensive move that saved him many millions of dollars.

“I was a bit concerned that if the Coalition got in a lot of my investments in environmental causes would have been down the plughole.”

Admittedly Wood’s environmental investments do not from this article seem highly oriented towards returning a profit. But what is a ‘vested’ interest and what a ‘public’ interest position is often not self-evident; those who face financial ruin from environmentalist causes would presumably see themselves as representing a public interest, and Wood’s desire to protect his investment in those causes as a vested interest.

The purpose of these laws is to reveal the identities of financial supporters of political parties. While Business First is undoubtedly in technical breach of the law, what The Age isn’t telling you is that it had no donors large enough to require disclosure. If they had followed the law, Business First’s AEC form would, like the vast majority of forms submitted to the AEC, have received no attention at all because it contains nothing of any interest.

The Commonwealth Electoral Act is probably the most disobeyed piece of legislation on the Commonwealth statute books. While this is mostly people avoiding their legal obligation to turn up to the polling booths, there is also widespread non-compliance with the paperwork required to be a political entity or a donor above the threshold.

Many donors either aren’t aware that they have to comply or, understandably enough, can’t be bothered redundantly repeating what the political parties are already reporting. And the political parties themselves are decentralised voluntary organisations, which makes monitoring everything that is going on and ensuring compliance quite difficult (which seems to have been the case with Business First, which from yesterday’s report appears to have been in breach of Liberal Party rules as well as the Electoral Act).

At a workshop on electoral law I attended a couple of weeks ago, a paper from someone from the NSW Election Funding Authority reported that they still had 1,500 unresolved compliance issues from the two years to mid-2010. Since then, reforms to the law have massively increased complexity and the compliance burden on political actors. Non-compliance is likely to skyrocket. If as seems likely similar laws are enacted federally, we could be looking at 10,000+ non-compliance cases over an electoral cycle.

Some of the inevitable stuff-ups will result in stories like those we have seen in The Age the last couple of days, with reputations harmed over trivial breaches of the law. Another reason to keep the laws as simple as possible, keep all minor political activity out of the regulatory system, and only focus on the big donors and spenders that might raise issues worthy of media and public attention.

At lunchtime Thursday, Czech President Vaclav Klaus will give a Deakin lecture on the future of personal and economic freedom, at Melbourne University at lunchtime. For details email deakinlecture@gmail.com

And on Thursday evening at Federation Square in Melbourne, Oxford VC Andrew Hamilton will speak at a Grattan Institute event on how to create a world class university. You can book here.

And the ad for the Policy editor job is here.

The figure below looks at males with income around the 75th percentile for their qualification in 2006, and tells a different story. In their 20s, earnings are fairly similar between the three groups (in the rather crude way I have had to do this, the ‘all graduates’ aged 25-29 just missed out on the next income bracket, and if the test had been ‘all non-arts graduates’ may have made it).

By their 30s, arts graduates in this part of the income distribution are clearly pulling away from the certificate III/IV people. But they are not gaining on all graduates. Indeed, the gap is likely to be larger than shown at the median, because graduates at the 75th percentile are ticking the highest census income category of $2,000 a week or more. We can’t tell from this data source how much they are earning, other than that it must be over $500 a week more than an arts graduate in the same relative position.

Another area in which the law is biased against third parties is government advertising, such as the carbon tax ads launched at the weekend by the federal government. The federal rules have the following provisions:

Campaign materials must not try to foster a positive impression of a particular political party or promote party political interests.

Campaign materials must not:

*mention the party in Government by name;
* directly attack or scorn the views, policies or actions of others such as the policies and
opinions of opposition parties or groups;
* include party political slogans or images;
* be designed to influence public support for a political party, a candidate for election, a Minister or a Member of Parliament; or
* refer or link to the web sites of politicians or political parties.

Of course whether or not the ads can be genuinely non-partisan is a matter of dispute, but there is at least some self-discipline on using government advertising as a vehicle for inter-party competition (though these rules have no statutory basis). However except for the provision on directly attacking or scorning opposition groups, as opposed to parties, these guidelines give governments a free hand to run taxpayer-funded campaigns contrary to the interests or views of third parties.

The imbalances between government and third parties caused by government advertising were the one point on which my discussant last week (Marian Sawer) appeared to at least partly agree with my presentation. However my point wasn’t that I think these ad campaigns should be capped or prohibited. It was that if third party campaigns are capped or prohibited on some ‘political equality’ rationale this has implications for government advertising as well. The ALP submission to the parliamentary review does not mention this issue.

My preferred position is not that government advertising be capped (though of course spending on ads, as with any government expenditure, should be carefully scrutinised). There is a case for governments not being restricted to ‘free’ forms of communication, for being able to use a more diverse range of persuasive techniques and media to communicate with audiences who don’t read or watch the news. And given the many issues governments are involved with, it is hard to determine a figure that would be an appropriate cap.

But if the policy goal is to even up political contests, we can hardly leave government advertising out of the equation. Perhaps one solution is to define expenditure caps around issues, and restrict government spending on advertising to whatever a third party can spend.