Month: March 2008

Yet another student prostitute story

~ Andrew Norton ~ 45 Comments

HUNDREDS of university students in Victoria have turned to prostitution to pay their way through higher education, The Sunday Age has learnt. (emphasis added)

What does the Sunday Age mean it has ‘learnt’ that some prostitutes are students?

A quick search of the files would reveal that this is old news, a repeatedly re-discovered ‘finding’. That a few hundred of Victoria’s 180,000 or so university students are sex workers is no more surprising than that thousands of them are waiters.

As is usual when the media follows up on the student sex workers, they are far more level-headed about it than the people who think it is a problem:

For 18 months Amy has been combining her studies for a science-based degree with evening work in the city’s brothels.

“I’m sure that some people would be shocked at what I do, but in my mind it really is just a job,” she says.

As I have argued in the past, student prostitution is no cause for policy action. Most students work, and if some choose to work fewer hours for more money in less-pleasant jobs this is no cause for concern.

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Student prostitute stories:

From the Uniting Church – Herald Sun, 10 October 2008.

Tax and super

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

Stephen Kirchner draws my attention to a Galaxy/Courier-Mail poll of 800 Queenslanders that:

found 55 per cent of respondents would prefer the proposed tax cuts to be delivered as extra payments to their superannuation fund. This included a majority of Labor and Coalition supporters.

Only 38 per cent of people wanted the money upfront through lower taxes.

That’s a very similar result to a Newspoll last May, in which a supplementary tax & spend question warning respondents that tax cuts would be inflationary saw opinion on tax cuts shift from 66% in favour to 33%, with the proportion against going from 19% to 53%.

The public seems to have paid a suprising amount of attention to the macroeconomic debates over the role of fiscal policy in inflation and interest rate outcomes.

There is, however, an important difference between this week’s Galaxy poll and last year’s Newspoll. As Stephen notes, people could get the tax cuts and voluntarily put the money into super. He suggests that the logic might be as follows:
Continue reading “Tax and super” →