Month: December 2006

Talking to ourselves

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

According to a media survey, blogs are now registering as a source of news, with 2% of people turning first to blogs for news of events in Australia, after scoring a ‘*’ last year. But TV (42%) and radio (21%) still dominate, reflecting their superior news gathering and delivery capacities. Slightly more people – 3% – turn to blogs for ‘political background’. I thought blogs might have done better on this question; this is one area in which I think some blogs do quite well.

But blogs have found their niche in providing ‘views and opinions of people like me’, with 7% of people turning first to blogs to have their prejudices reinforced. Talkback radio and ‘newspapers/magazines’ (an annoying blurring of quite different forms of media) also do better on this count than on providing ‘political background’. That this is blogs’ strength is not suprising. With low set-up and running costs, blogs can target niche viewpoints (such as classical liberalism:)) more effectively than media that require large audiences to be economically viable. Overall, though, these figures remind us that blogs have very limited capacity to influence how the public sees the world. Our audience is mostly people who agree with us already.

Too few good jobs for graduates

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

Three lots of graduate employment data were released this week. For recent graduates, the good news in that unemployment has dropped to 5.5%, though another 12% are in part-time or casual jobs and looking for full-time work. But for graduates overall, the ABS finds that unemployment is only 2.4%. Today’s ABS job search data shows that half of unemployed graduates have been out of work for 8 weeks or less. Just 0.4% of graduates in the labour market have been unemployed for 6 months or more.

But does this mean that Bob Birrell is right that we have too few graduates? The latest ABS graduate employment data again shows that he is wrong. Many graduates are employed in jobs that do not require degrees, such as clerical or sales jobs. Counting them and unemployed graduates together, and we have a ‘reserve’ graduate workforce of more than 460,000 people. That’s equivalent to nearly three years of university completions.
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What is the likely effect of the citizenship test on public opinion?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The Australian political class is convinced that Australians are racists and John Howard uses that racism to political advantage. With the citizenship test announced yesterday, Malcolm Fraser pondered:

Why have a new citizenship test for migrants and a flurry of talk about values reared their heads at this point? Is it about creating fear in the minds of many Australians? Is this the politics of race? Is the government using code to say that Moslems are different and that they don???t fit in?

Richard Farmer referred to the ‘transparent nature of Howard’s appeal to prejudice’. Peter van Vliet of the Ethnic Affairs Council warned that:

Now, as the 2007 election approaches we have a new race card, this time focusing on the enemy within.

But perhaps this has things the wrong way around. Howard does know that the Australian community is uneasy about some migrant groups. Already back in the 1980s, Muslims did worst in a social distance survey. The long list of PR disasters since isn’t going to have improved Islam’s image. But Howard is also a strong believer in social cohesion and that most Australians are not racists. As my article in the previous link shows, while many Australians will admit to ‘prejudices’, public opinion research also suggests that most Australians are not closed to any particular group, provided that they try to ‘fit in’. On this logic, greater confidence that people are meeting ‘fitting in’ criteria could increase acceptance of migrant groups, and a citizenship test is one way to demonstrate that migrants have made a reasonable attempt to fit in.
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The hilarious reincarnation of the DLP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

The surprise election of two Democratic Labor Party candidates to the Victorian Legislative Council has bloggers appalled. ‘Proportionate my arse’ says Urban Creature. ‘For crying out loud, not again’ laments GrodsCorp. ‘Mr Lefty’ condemns the ‘unbelievable f***ing hypocrites in the ALP’, whose preference deals helped it happen.

But more than any of this, it is just hilarious. I burst out laughing when told the news last night. The Democrats should not give up! Kim Beazley should not give up! If the DLP can come back to political life, anyone can. And the irony of Labor preferences bringing back the people who kept them in Opposition for so long makes it all the more amusing.

People say that proportional representation is more democratic than single member electorates. But what it seems to do in Australia is elect candidates that have negligible primary vote support, but manage to stitch up preference deals with the major parties that the PR system was designed to balance.

The citizenship test for Hyperbolia

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

The government’s announcement of a citizenship test put today’s Crikey contributors into an intense competition as to who could come up with the highest level of hyperbole. Richard Farmer started off with an allusion to the White Australia Policy and its infamous dicatation test:

Just as his predecessor a century ago hid the real anti-Chinese reason behind the dictation test, there was no mention yesterday of the growing fear and resentment of Muslims in the Australian community. This Prime Minister is trying to get the political benefit of pandering to anti-Muslim feeling without having to say so.

I’m not sure what the controversy is here. After all, we already ask citizenship applicants questions in English, to which they must reply in English. Perhaps the test will be harder, though this is not clear from what has been released so far. It will be internet-based rather than interview-based, but that can cut both ways. Some people find reading and writing easier than conversation, but others do not. In any case, to most people an English requirement will seem like common sense. In the 2003 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 92% of people thought speaking English was important for being truly Australian. Views were much the same among respondents who did not speak English at home – 90% agreement on its importance. Seven of the eight Arabic speakers in the sample held the same view. Nor is a belief in the need to speak English a sudden response to a ‘Muslim’ problem; 86% of respondents felt this way in a 1995 survey.

If a Newspoll in September is any guide, support drops off a bit when questions about Australia’s way of life are added to the English requirement, but not by much: 77% support overall. But Irfan Yusuf sees something much more sinister:

It is for Australians to decide how their culture (or should that be cultures?) is defined. It isn???t for governments to legislate to create a class of new citizens bound to one version of this culture. I believe there is a place in the world for government-sponsored and legislated culture. It???s called North Korea.

I think Irfan and Farmer have just passed the citizenship test for the state of Hyperbolia; whether they have made a useful contribution to debate in Australia is much less clear.

Has Howard delivered on Hanson’s maiden speech goals?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 37 Comments

So Pauline Hanson is planning another go at politics. This time the problem isn’t Aborigines or Asians, it’s Africans and Muslims:

“We’re bringing in people from South Africa at the moment, there’s a huge amount coming into Australia, who have diseases, they’ve got AIDS,” Ms Hanson told AAP…..

But Ms Hanson said politicians had gone too far in affording rights to minority groups and she was angered at the loss of Australian traditions because of Muslims. “Our governments have bent over backwards to look after them (Muslims) and their needs, and regardless of what the Australian people think,” she said.

“You can’t have schools not sing Christmas carols because it upsets others, you can’t close swimming baths because Muslim women want to swim in private, that’s not Australian.”

Ms Hanson is not the only person dipping into their bag of prejudices. Christopher Scanlon, a co-editor of the radical left Arena Magazine, is taking the argument that Howard is the respectable face of Hansonism for another trip around the Fitzroy block.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, just note that the party that disowned her has now delivered on every single one of the substantive policies proposed in Hanson’s maiden speech.

Unfortnately for Scanlon’s argument this is an exaggeration, and a big one, as anyone who bothered to check Hanson’s maiden speech would realise. If Hanson stood for anything, it was reducing Asian immigration:
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Why is attractiveness more important in male candidates?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

In Andrew Leigh and Amy King’s paper on politicians’ beauty (pdf) they found that looks matter more for male candidates than female candidates.

In the paper, and in The Age’s report, they suggest that ‘dumb blonde’ stereotypes might lead voters to judge attractive women negatively:

“This may be because female beauty carries negative connotations in the minds of some voters,” said Dr Leigh.

Perhaps. But I think there is an explanation that fits better with what they have found makes a difference – that candidate attractiveness has most effect where the candidate is a challenger and where voters are older, poorer, and have low levels of education. What all this suggests is that attractiveness is used to choose between candidates when voters don’t have other more reliable sources of information to hand, because the challenger is previously unknown to them and/or they don’t know much about politics.

The Australian Election Survey suggests that women are less likely than men to have the political information they need to choose between candidates. In the 2004 Australian Election Survey, 24.2% of women rated their interest in politics as ‘not much’ or ‘none’, compared to 17.5% of men. Interest in the campaign itself was even lower, with 27.4% of women and 24% of men presumably going to the polling booth having absorbed very little information about any of the candidates.

Presuming that most people react more strongly to opposite-sex beauty than same-sex beauty, this means that there is a larger pool of people predisposed to using male beauty as a proxy than female beauty. It would explain why attractive men seem to influence the vote more than attractive women.

Some Whitlam nostalgia of my own

~ Andrew Norton ~ 37 Comments

Though Whitlamite nostalgia can be a poor guide for contemporary public policy, it is at least understandable that Labor’s true believers remember those years fondly. But when they start indulging in Menzies nostalgia something very odd is going on. In his first speech to Parliament after becoming leader, Kevin Rudd said:

…this modern Liberal Party, is that it is not the Liberal Party of old. If you go back and read what Bob Menzies had to say about social responsibility and social justice, there is no way that Bob Menzies would fit into the world view that we are now being offered. You see, the member for Kooyong recently delivered a speech on Bob Menzies?? legacy within the Liberal Party on these questions of social responsibility. It is quite clear when you read that clearly that there has been an ocean of change between that Liberal Party and what it stood for, despite our criticisms of it and our disagreements with it at the time, and the market fundamentalism which has overtaken the current Liberal Party.

It’s another example of the strange meme that recontructs the conservative Robert Menzies as some kind of left-leaning social democrat. In a fiscal fact-checking exercise sadly lacking among those making this claim about Menzies, today I visited the economics library at Melbourne University to see just how the Menzies government’s spending levels compared with that of John Howard’s government.
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