Month: December 2006

Ends versus means on global warming

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

This month’s Newspoll on nuclear power plants, as reported in The Australian yesterday, again highlights the political complexity of the greenhouse issue. While several polls confirm that the public believes global warming to be a major issue, they do not accept the most feasible ways of reducing emissions. In this poll, 50% are against nuclear power plants, and only 35% are in favour – with most of the remaining 15% of unsure respondents likely to go for a negative response if pressed (if people are forced to choose they tend to go for status quo options; all the more so on an issue ripe for scare campaigns like this one).

Due to the particular history of this issue, with opposition to uranium mining an article of faith on the left, we have the situation of Labor voters being considerably more likely (80%/60%) than Coalition voters to think global warming is a serious issue but considerably less likely (29%/51%) than Coalition voters to support a way of significantly reducing emissions. It is another example of the reluctance of left-of-centre voters to see politics and policy in pragmatic terms.

Bob Brown’s vendetta against the Exclusive Brethren

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

The wacky Christian sect the Exclusive Brethren has been in the stocks this week. Some of the attacks, like today’s story in The Age about covering up child abuse, are fair criticism – even if offences by someone who has already been thrown out of the Brethren and convicted of his crimes are hardly front page lead story material.

But other stories reflect as badly on those generating the news as on the Brethren – if not more so. They document attempts by Greens Senator Bob Brown to use instruments of the state to get at a religion he does not like.

Brown started this off with (another) attempt to have a Senate inquiry into the Brethren. Their offence? They had written to the Attorney-General proposing changes to family law. These were not sensible suggestions and as The Age reported:

Mr Ruddock’s response to the Brethren’s approach gave them little joy. The Government’s changes would “emphasise the rights of the child and the right of the child to know both their parents,” he wrote.

Ministers receive lots of letters with crackpot ideas (I used to have to coordinate responses to some of them). But the remedy is not punishing their senders by hauling them before Senate inquiries. It is polite letters explaining why the government cannot take up their proposals. Every citizen has a right to put their views to government without harassment.
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Contrasting takes on how much the government contributes to uni costs

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

The data from Figure 4.1 reveal that there has been a radical change in the nature of funding, particularly from 1987 to 2000. … the increase in revenue coming from students, which went from just a couple of per cent to about 25 per cent.

Bruce Chapman, Government Managing Risk, Routledge, London & New York, 2006, p.55.

Bruce Chapman, who developed the original scheme for the Hawke-Keating government, yesterday disputed the Howard Government’s claims that students are paying only about 25 per cent of the cost of a degree. …
“Does it stop people going to university? The answer to that seems to be no. But the next question is how much should students pay compared to taxpayers. We’re now at a level of about 45 per cent of the recurrent cost. I think the case for making that higher is very weak.”

Bruce Chapman, The Australian, 29 December 2006.

Ok, he’s not being completely inconsistent. The book – in an annoying feature of academic publishing – uses old data and the same basis for assessing the student contribution as the government, looking at what percentage of the whole university enterprise students pay for and not just the teaching component.

On my calculations, Chapman as reported this morning is right on the student contribution to the nominal cost of their tuition (ie, ignoring the cross-subsidy from fee-paying students), though if we allowed for likely bad debt it goes down to 38%. But in a debate where no data or fudged data are the norm, Bruce shouldn’t be surprised if his own words are quoted back at him.

Contrasting takes on the lady in the wheelie bin

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

KATHERINE SCHWEITZER lived a remarkable life: Holocaust survivor, refugee, wife, a generous benefactor to good causes in Sydney.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 2006.

A woman who was a member of a social group of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, which included Ms Schweitzer, put forward a premise that she may have argued with a taxi driver. “She was a terrible racist,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “She didn’t like Aborigines, or any other race.

“She didn’t like any advantages they were gaining.”

The Australian, 29 December 2006.

Another reminder of the complexities of ‘racism’ – that even those who have been its victims do now always draw the conclusions we might expect.

Supply does not equal demand in higher ed

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

According to an article in The Australian this morning on increased first year university enrolments:

AUSTRALIANS are turning to university in an effort to improve their career prospects, reversing a trend of school-leavers taking advantage of record low unemployment and the resources boom to land full-time jobs.
The latest commonwealth figures reveal a 6 per cent jump in first-year enrolments for Australian undergraduates last year,…
Part of the boost can be attributed to extra places being created as a result of measures by the Howard Government. …

Chief executive of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee John Mullarvey said the latest enrolment figures were “very positive”.

“It shows that demand (for university) is still high despite the economy booming,” he said.

Note the wobble between demand-based explanations (Mullarvey/journalist Dorothy Illing’s analysis) and supply-based explanations (extra places available). In market-based industries, this distinction may not be that important, since suppliers generally work to keep supply as closely aligned to demand as possible. But in higher education, where though trending downward most students are still enrolled under a centrally allocated system, the distinction between supply and demand is crucial.

Without proper price signals, in higher education overall demand always exceeds overall supply (because the low price encourages demand and discourages supply). So the increase in places noted in the article, plus the new private higher education providers taking extra students thanks to FEE-HELP loans, reduced excess demand.

But we can’t infer from this that there has been any reversal of a trend toward school leavers preferring to do something else, at least for a while. Between 2005 and 2006, demand as recorded by the centralised admissions agencies actually went down. Since these agencies are the main route into university for school leavers, the demand figures are consistent with school leavers continuing to prefer doing something other than study in the short term (though the initial demand figures for 2007 suggest that this trend might reverse itself slightly next year).
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Matt Wade impersonates Ross Gittins

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

“Ross Gittins is on leave” the SMH‘s opinion page noted this morning, but we have not been spared a Wednesday Ross Gittins column. If anything, stand-in columnist Matt Wade’s effort this morning is lamer even than Ross’s standard debunking of economic growth.

Commenting on the fact that though the US has a per capita GDP it ranks well down the global list for life expectancy (29th, compared to 7th for Australia, according to Wikipedia), Wade says:

The figures suggest Americans have, on average, traded longevity for higher incomes over the past 50 years.

Huh? Life expectancy figures aren’t like happiness statistics, where there is an apparent paradox of stable self-reported happiness while GDP per capita has grown significantly. Life expectancy has gone up almost continually just as GDP in Western countries has increased almost continuously in the post-war period. That’s true of the US and it is true of Australia.

As Wade says, there are various idiosyncracies of the US that help explain why despite on-going improvement it ranks below other developed countries. These contribute to the stark differences between white and black life expectancy, apparent too in Australia on an even greater scale, but our Indigenous population is too small for it to have the same impact on average life expectancy.

But none of Wade’s explanations, with the possible exception of disputed theories about social structures and work conditions, suggest a trade-off between GDP and life expectancy. And to the extent that there is a trade-off, it works in life expectancy’s favour. As annual income grows so too does public and private expenditure on health. The long period of prosperity in Australia over the last decade has seen per capita federal spending on health increase by more than 35% in real terms. This has almost certainly contributed to increased life expectancy over that time.

While nobody thinks that GDP growth alone improves health (as opposed to providing some of the means for doing so), the reasonable inference from Wade’s article that we should not be so concerned about economic growth is wrong. Not only would it deprive us of resources needed to finance improved health care, it would add to the life stresses he suggests are harmful, as unemployment went up again and employed people’s jobs became less secure.

And she was how old when she had her baby?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

The Victorian police have laid charges over a fire that killed a man and destroyed 11 homes deliberately lit bushfire. But do the maths on the accused:

A teenage boy and his mother have been charged with arson after a fire in Gippsland, south-east of Melbourne.

The 29-year-old woman and her 15-year-old son also were charged with reckless conduct endangering life, allowing a fire to remain alight on a day of total fire ban and impeding an investigation.

There was something to be said for the old system in which such boys were put out for adoption, rather than following this all-too-predictable path to the criminal justice system, via educational failure.

Is the review of the Nelson reforms pointless?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Can a review that rules out the only possible solutions to the problems it identifies do any good? That’s the question we face with the first phase of a review of the Nelson reforms announced by the government yesterday.

This part of the review is of the ‘funding clusters’, the dozen discipline groupings that determine how much universities receive for each student place they provide. The total is a combination of the Commonwealth contribution and the student contribution.

Even within the inherent constraints of a centrally planned system this is a mess. The amounts for each cluster have their origins in the ‘relative funding model’ used in the early 1990s to equalise funding between the universities and the old Colleges of Advanced Education (now known as ‘Dawkins universities’) when the distinctions between them were abolished. This was not a costing exercise; it was an examination of historical expenditure. Each discipline was to receive a multiple of a base amount. For example, law places received the base amount, and medicine places 2.7 times that.
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The ANU spins its enrolment problems

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Andrew Leigh is blogging on the Australian National University’s decision to offer school leavers with UAIs (ENTERs for people in other areas) that won’t get them into the university a separate admissions test.

The ANU is selling this ‘as a way to provide greater access and equity’. But when it comes to anything that can affect university status, such as the quality of the student intake, the first assumption ought to be that every university statement is shameless spin.

In this case, a more interesting place to start than the university’s explanation might be the NSW/ACT university application statistics (pdf). Though overall the number of applicants is up, for the ANU first-preference applications are fractionally down. That spells trouble for the ANU, because this year the ANU was about 200 places under-enrolled (less than their quota, that is). Given part-time enrolments, that would translate into more than 200 persons. If that was caused mainly by weak commencing student numbers in 2006, they have double trouble: not only do they need to make up lost numbers, but they have a ‘pipeline’ problem in that their second year cohort will be slightly smaller than they had originally planned.
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The lack of critical thinking in higher ed policy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

They say that university education encourages ‘critical thinking’, but so rarely is that skill applied to university policy itself. At the weekend, Kevin Rudd returned to his anecdotes about higher education:

“We’ve got to look long and hard at how we make higher education affordable for kids from working families right across this country. I’m concerned we’re heading backwards on this, and it’s not good in terms of equity.

“We have young people and their families coming in to our electorate offices saying they don’t know if they can afford to have their kids go to university any more. This is a crying shame. The rest of the world’s investing more in education, skills and training, but public investment by the Howard Government is going backwards.”

Though demand for university places declined over the 2003-2006 period, at current prices it still exceeded aggregate supply (though some universities could not fill places, this was because the quota system of allocating places to universities does not take demand into account).

For 2007, preliminary applications centre data indicates that demand from school leavers is up by 3.8%. What is the point in trying to generate extra demand if there are too few places already? Especially if there are unlikely to be sufficient high-quality jobs at the other end.

In any case, there is no evidence – despite what people coming into Rudd’s electorate office might say – that low SES people are ‘under-represented’ at university once their ENTER scores are taken into account. The Cardak and Ryan research released this year showed that at the Year 12 to university transition point there is no evidence that anything other than ENTER score makes a difference. The problem is that low SES students get relatively weak ENTER scores.
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