The political decline of federalism

April 17, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Polling on federalism is pretty rare, but in a new ANU Poll they have replicated a 1979 question that asked:

Do you think the state governments should give some powers to the federal government, or do you think the federal government has enough powers already?

In the last 30 years, the proportion of people thinking that more powers should be given to the feds has more than doubled, from 17% to 40%. Unfortunately, respondents were not asked which powers should be handed over.

On the question of whether the federal government should provide more money to the states, the proportion opposing it increased from 30% to 38%, perhaps because respondents doubt it would be spent competently.

The second question highlights, however, what is wrong with Australian federalism – not so much the formal division of powers, but the states’ reliance on federal funding. Until that is fixed, the system will never work.

Do we have too few graduates?

April 16, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

No matter how many times Bob Birrell updates his argument that we need more graduates, he gets lots of publicity. This morning was no exception. According to The Age

THE Federal Government should massively increase university places rather than offer 450,000 new training places if it wants to equip young Australians with the skills needed in future, a Monash University study has argued.

Similar stories appeared in the SMH and The Australian.

The basic argument goes like this: there is strong employment growth in managerial, professional and associate professional occupations. However, growth in university commencements has been much lower, and even fell in a few disciplines between 2002 and 2006. Employers have had to use migrants to fill vacancies. Therefore we need more graduates.

However, on closer examination of the evidence the argument falls apart. Of these three broad occupational groups, only professionals are truly dominated by graduates. As I noted in my paper on this issue last year (pdf), only about 20% of associate professionals have degrees. Indeed, the category has now been abolished by the ABS and the occupations that it used to cover distributed to other broad groups. Some of them have gone to ‘professionals’ and ‘managers’, but most went to occupations that do not normally require degrees.

Similarly, ABS Education and Work 2007 shows that less than a third of managers have degrees. Presumably many of them are in small businesses. Perhaps they would be better managers if they had degrees. But we cannot assume that a growth in managerial positions will require an equivalent number of graduates. Even among professionals, 30% don’t have degrees.
Continue reading “Do we have too few graduates?” →

The real greenhouse denialists, part 2

April 15, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 29 Comments

As reported The Age this morning, the Climate Institute has released another of its regular public opinion reports. Climate change continues to be another case study in the difference between repeating the conventional wisdom back to pollsters and taking responsibility for an issue that, if the conventional wisdom is right, has consequences for the lifestyles of us all.

As in earlier research, the level of concern about climate change is very high, at around 90%. 80% want the government to give the issue a high priority.

It’s when we get to the solutions that, as usual, things start to unravel. Three-quarters support laws to ensure all new electricity comes from clean energy sources. 87% support 25% of electricity coming from wind and solar sources by 2020. As wind electricity currently costs twice as much as coal-generated electricity, that is going to add significantly to power bills – especially as a hefty carbon charge on coal is going to be needed to make wind power financially feasible.

But how much extra are people prepared to pay for electricity? Even with their previous answers creating pressure for personal responsibility, and no real cost involved, 28% of respondents said that they were not prepared to pay anything more for clean energy. Another 32% said they were only prepared to pay another $10 a month (or about 10% more if the last ABS expenditure survey is a guide). Only 7% were in the more realistic range of $40 or $50 a month (if we can assume some technological advance and economising in response to higher prices).

Back in the real world of politics, Kevin Rudd was today announcing a scheme to reduce rather than increase energy prices.

As I said last year:

This is the greenhouse ‘denialist’ problem – not a few conservatives arguing that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, but a public that accepts the theory but rejects the consequences of their beliefs.

Taxpayer-funded overseas holidays for graduates: the latest NUS anti-HECS argument

April 13, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

According to a story in today’s Sydney Sun-Herald, the National Union of Students is calling for an inquiry into the ‘economic impact of student debt’. Unfortunately for them, the human interest aspect of the story – one Joy Kyriacou (who by I am sure by complete coincidence has the same surname as former NUS President Daniel Kyriacou) – could not get her lines straight and revealed NUS’s campaign as the shameless rent-seeking that it is:

Ms Kyriacou, who graduated with a Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts from the University of NSW in 2006, said the $16,000 student debt burden was stopping her from saving for other things, like her first overseas trip or a house deposit. (italics added)

Of course it was bad enough that we were being asked to to finance a special first home buyers grant for graduates. But now we are being asked to fund their overseas holidays as well. Even by the very low standards of arguments against HECS, this one is a shocker. Continue reading “Taxpayer-funded overseas holidays for graduates: the latest NUS anti-HECS argument” →

Per Capita at one

April 11, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

The ‘progressive’ think-tank Per Capita was launched a year ago today. It’s off to a fairly slow start. Many blogs which are mainly hobbies for their contributor(s), including this one, have produced far material in the last twelve months than has Per Capita. And most of what Per Capita has produced are newspaper opinion pieces, which take only slightly longer than a substantive blog post to write.

Unusually for a think-tank, they don’t seem to have any published research. The closest thing I could find was a ‘Dear Prime Minister’ (lefties love open letters) publication called ‘Memo to a Progressive Prime Minister’, but this is more of a manifesto with endnotes than a traditional think-tank research paper.

Presumably the research is still coming – there is a page on their website promising it – but so far they are lacking what gives think-tanks credibility and profile. With most of the social democratic talent either with secure university jobs or in one of the hundreds of government staffer jobs currently available to them, perhaps Per Capita is struggling to find people to do their research.

If they can lift their output, the manifesto provides some support for commenter John of Newtown’s suggestion last week that Per Capita was a ‘progressive fusionist’ institution. There are market-based policy suggestions in the manifesto, including a national water market and even a proposal for students to sell shares in their future income stream (the CIS was there first on that one, of course). At the same time, there are calls for ‘public investment’, but investment based on proper analysis of costs and benefits.

All that is a significant improvement on much other ‘progressive’ thinking, and from a liberal ‘fusionist’ perspective on really-existing conservatism, which too easily ends up as National Party agragrian socialism, particularly on issues like water. I hope Per Capita succeeds. But for the moment it looks like they are finding out how hard it is to run a think-tank.
.

Does paid work undermine the university experience?

April 9, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

In January I was sceptical, based on studies of student work and academic results, that increasing Youth Allowance to reduce work hours would pay academic dividends.

The first results (pdf) from the Australian Survey of Student Engagement reinforce the conclusion that the average 15 hours a week that undergraduates work for money is not a cause for concern.

The ASSE is based on a questionnaire (in the pdf above), with the questions grouped for analytical purposes according to six scales: academic challenge, active learning, student and staff interactions, enriching educational experiences, supportive learning environment, and work-integrated learning.

It found that, with the exception of work-integrated learning, only those working more than 30 hours a week off campus showed lower results in the various scales. For work-integrated learning those working more than 30 hours did better. Working on-campus was consistently a benefit.

The main reason, I suspect, is that the student lifestyle typically isn’t that busy by the standards of the professional and managerial jobs most students are headed towards. The ASSE finds that more than half of students report spending less than 10 hours a week preparing for class (unfortunately this question is a a bit ambiguous – the prompt is ‘studying, writing, doing homework or lab work, analysing data, rehearsing or other activities’ – which leaves it unclear whether essays or major assignments would be included). Say 15 hours in class, 15 hours at work, and 10 preparing for class, and you have a not very stressful 40 hour week.

This is just a summary report of the ASSE. The questions asked would let us create student timetables covering paid work, class preparation, and campus activities, and compare those with self-reported grade averages. It would be a useful addition to a debate dominated by intuition and anecdote to know more about the relationships between these variables.

The right-wing blur

April 9, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

For many commentators, the political right is just a blur. The various labels – conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative, New Right, economic rationalist – are thrown around according to fashion as much as meaning. Six years ago (pdf) I wrote an article on how ‘New Right’ was largely squeezed out by ‘economic rationalism’, which in turn was being challenged by ‘neoliberalism’, now the favourite. Despite the irrelevance of ‘neoconservatism’ to Australian politics, it is frequently used here as if it had some descriptive power. In the blogosphere we debate posts on what classical liberalism and conservatism have in common, but journalists don’t even know that there is a difference.

I was reminded of this twice over the last few days, first in this George Megalogenis piece and again when I read Monday’s Crikey. According to the radical leftist Jeff Sparrow,

Remember Katherine Betts’ The Great Divide? Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians? Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class? Mark Latham’s From the Suburbs? The decades worth of columns in The Australian; the reports churning out from the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies?

The narrative was always the same. A chasm separated ordinary, decent Howard-voting Australians from an arrogant tertiary-educated, intellectual elite: a clutch of sneering know-it-alls who wanted to overrun the country with immigrants, make everyone guilty about Aborigines and brainwash the youth with Parisian post-modernist mumbo-jumbo.

Certainly there is a populist conservative strain in right-of-centre Australia. But this is not universal. Continue reading “The right-wing blur” →

Compo culture

April 8, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

Note: I am satisfied, based on Chris Miller’s comment (at 8 below), that he and his family did have a bad experience with Emirates well beyond an erroneous phone call for which an apology would have been sufficient.

Last month, British backpacker Michael Edgeley suffered chest pains on an Emirates flight back from Australia. The plane diverted to Mumbai, but sadly Edgeley died in the ambulance at the airport.

Also on the flight was the partner of Chris Miller from Tyneside, along with their two children. Emirates told Miller that his kids had chicken pox. And in a terrible mix-up with Edgeley,

When the backpacker later died, Emirates contacted Mr Miller in error with undertaker details.

Mr Miller said he had received a call from someone saying: “I have a couple of numbers for you, the first number is the undertakers dealing with the body”.

Mr Miller said: “At that point I believed one of my family was dead. I said, ‘What happened, what’s going on?’ but they put the phone down on me.

Mr Miller told the BBC he was hung up on when he asked to know what was going on. Emirates called again after 10 seconds to inform Mr Miller of their mistake. (Italics added)

Emirates has apologised to Miller, as they should. But is Miller satisfied with that?

Mr Miller said Emirates had not offered any compensation despite putting him through “absolute hell”.

Compensation for 10 seconds of “absolute hell”? I think not. If Miller’s family only came to the attention of Emirates by irresponsibly boarding a plane while the kids had a highly contagious disease, the stronger claim for compensation may be in the other direction.

Rating public education

April 8, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

It is common in public opinion research for people’s average assessment of their own circumstances to differ considerably from their assessment of the average for others. Usually, they think that their own situation is better than other people’s. One reason for this is that media reports more bad news than good, giving us an ubalanced impression of how well other people are doing.

Data published recently (xls) by the US National Center for Education Statistics, based on Gallup Poll surveys, shows this pattern of opinion in American evaluations of public schools. On a scale of 1 to 4 (4 being the most positive) public school parents almost always rate their local community school at least 0.5 higher than they rate the nation’s schools. They also always rate their local community school more highly than people who don’t have kids at school, and usually rate the nation’s schools slightly more highly than people who don’t have kids at school.

While in the case of issues like public schools the whole sample is politically relevant, I would take the views of parents as being the more reliable assessment of what is going on American public schools. Generally, they give their local school around 2.5 out of a possible 4.
Continue reading “Rating public education” →