Month: October 2008

One in five conditionally support climate change policy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

Not for the first time, inadequate presentation of a Climate Institute survey makes it hard to interpret the results.

Their latest online Auspoll survey asks the important question of whether people believe that ‘turmoil in financial markets’ means that government ‘should delay action on climate change’. The results are agree 22%, disagree 36%, and ‘no real opinion’ 16%. What the other 26% thought is not explained, though it may be that they have dropped the ‘strongly agree’ from the table. If that’s the case, 62% disagree.

The 22% matches the approximately one in five in other polling who favour a strategic approach to climate change abatement which is dependent on general conditions.

Conflict of interest laws vs democracy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

One of the West’s great cultural and political achievements is the idea of an ‘office’, the idea that certain roles should be performed in the interests of persons other than the person who fills that role at a particular time. While tribal cultures see little or nothing wrong with their leaders handing out ‘public’ privileges to their friends, relatives and cronies, in the West this is now seen as a ‘conflict of interest’, if not corrupt.

But in many cases the line between personal and public interest in a matter is far from clear. The Age this morning reports on legislation before the Victorian Parliament that in my view redefines legitimate political interests in the outcome of issues as personal interests. In the future, local councillors may be prevented from voting on the very motions before council they may have been elected to support or oppose.

For example, they will be held to have become an ‘interested party’ if they have lodged an appeal in relation to a council decision, or have made an objection or submission. Say the Council wants to cut down the trees in your street, or redirect its traffic, or let someone build a house that overshadows your garden. You go through the normal processes to protect your interests, by making an objection. This fails.

So you run for election on one of these issues, win a mandate to act on them, and then because of your earlier steps to protect your interests you cannot vote on the matter. Not only are you deprived of your right to vote, but the democratic will of the people who supported you is also frustrated.
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Will Australian universities be hit by an employment domino effect?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

For the last decade or so, Australian universities have been funded by what has been called a reverse Colombo plan – a reference to the post-war scheme that brought thousands of Asian students to Australia on scholarships. Back then, Australians funded Asian education. Now, Asian students fund Australian education through the fees they pay. Without them, the Australian higher education system would collapse.

Obviously, students from much poorer countries than Australia like India and China – our two largest markets – are not doing this because they altruistically want to fund the human capital of middle class Australians. Many of them come here as students because they want to migrate. A 2006 survey of international students by Australian Education International found that about two-thirds of them planned to apply for permanent residence.

The ease with which international students have been able to migrate has owed much to the growth in skilled migration quotas during the Howard years (and continuing in Rudd’s first year), combined with rule changes favouring former international students. Historically, migration levels rise with employment levels, and the Howard government was no exception to this pattern.
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Is Australia the world’s fattest nation?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

According to yesterday’s SMH,

Australia has overtaken the US to become the fattest nation in the world, with more than 9 million adults rated as obese or overweight.

But is this true? According to the most recent Australian National Health Survey, 35.4% of Australians over the age of 18 are overweight, and another 17.9% are obese, making 53.3% of us fat. That’s about 7.4 million people.

According to the American National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 66% of Americans are overweight or obese, with 31.4% obese.

Both surveys class people with a Body Mass Index of over 30 as obese, and those with a BMI of 25 or more but less than 30 as overweight.

So while we are a nation of fatties, on these statistics we are still a fair way from being the world’s fattest, our 53% lagging well behind the American 66%.

So where did the SMH claim come from?
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A silver lining in the ideological storm clouds?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

In the AFR yesterday my CIS colleagues Gaurav Sodhi and Jeremy Sammut see a rare silver lining in the ideological storm clouds of the financial market meltdown. The driver of bloated government – the easy money flowing into Treasury’s coffers during a long boom – is about to slow. And

[as] government revenues [] fall, [] there won’t be the same scope for irresponsible spending promises. This is no bad thing. More straitened times give governments an excellent opportunity to implement unpopular measures, strike down bad policy, and enact new reforms.

History suggests that real cuts in spending are very rare, occurring only at the tail end of long periods of severe deficits. Dire fiscal necessity can let politicians get away with truly tough decisions; it is not enough that money is tight or spending programs are a waste of money. The largely petty savings in the first Rudd Budget, despite the big talk about spending constraint and the start of a new government being politically the most favourable time to make cuts, suggest how hard governments find tackling the areas that drive big-dollar spending: welfare, health, education and defence.
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And the losers are…

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

With the partial exception of Stephen Kirchner, the government’s spending-the-surplus extravaganza is receiving a positive reaction.

Yet there has been very little about what was going to happen to the surplus, particularly the planned contributins to the Education Investment Fund and the Health and Hospitals Fund. One of the Prime Minister’s media releases yesterday referred to speeding up spending from these funds, but this seems to be a separate issue from how much money will eventually find its way into them.

On that issue, the amount contributed to the special investment funds was to be ‘subject to final budget outcomes’, so presumably they are taking a double hit: lower surpluses or even deficits in the coming years, and the current surplus spent on handouts to families, pensioners, and home buyers.

It reinforces the need for universities to disconnect themselves from the budget cycle as much as possible, and to receive their income through markets.

Popular Buddhists

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

In commenting on my post on the increasing popularity of Muslims, Bruce said:

I think that comparing attitudes towards Muslims and and non-Muslim Asians would be a good comparison, since both groups have increases in immigration over a similar period. My guess is that positive attitudes towards non-Muslim Asians would have increased significantly more.

To recap, Muslims increased their positive low social distance rating (welcome as family member or close friend) between 1988 and 2007 by 14.5%, and reduced their negative high social distance rating (keep out of country or have as visitor only) by 8%.

In the world of religion, which seems to have been marked by significant increases in tolerance over the last 20 years, Bruce’s prediction is correct. For Buddhists, their positive low social distance rating is up 23.4% to 51.9%, and their negative low social distance rating is down 20.5% to 5.4%. Perhaps there is a Dalai Lama effect here; Eastern religions have long held a fascination for some Westerners.

But on ethnicity, the changes are less marked. The mainly Buddhist Vietnamese have seen their positive rating increase by 9.7% to 36.3% (less than the Muslim 38.5%), and their negative rating drop by 19% to 13.2% (better than the Muslim 24.5%).

I am surprised by the positive social distance advantage of Muslims over Vietnamese, and some initial further investigation indicates that the questions were in separate sections of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007, which were answered by different people. Maybe there is an issue with the sample.

The last post (I hope) on postmodern conservatism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

On Friday Postmodern Conservatism in Australia co-author Matthew Sharpe left in the comments thread a large number of responses to my original post on his book. My responses on the main issue of how to characterise recent Australian conservatism:

On whether we have “postmodern” conservatism:

The main claim is that Howard’s appeal to ‘our values’, the ‘mainstream’ is relativist. It relies on the idea that ‘our values’ ‘are not ours because they are just, but just because they are ours.’

When conservatives criticise ‘relativism’ they are usually attacking the idea that all cultures are equal. A better description of the conservative argument here would be ‘particularist’ – the idea that our culture has value at least partly because it is ours, because of our historical experience. It is consistent with – and usually implies or expressly states – the idea that our culture is better than other cultures, which is not a ‘relativist’ notion. All conservatives have a particularist element to their thought (though as I noted in a slightly different context, complicated when the particular culture they are preserving has universal elements to them, liberalism and Christianity being the two most important in the West). So I am not convinced that calling contemporary conservatives ‘postmodern’ clarifies their thinking or distinguishes them from past Australian conservatives.
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Is the ANU better than Stanford?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

On the front page of The Australian‘s print edition today a headline reads:

ANU pips Stanford

The internet headline was a little less counter-intuitive, but the story the same. It’s a reference to the 2008 Times Higher Education rankings which puts the ANU at 16th in the world, and Stanford at 17th.

Now the ANU is a perfectly respectable university. But the THE rankings have been widely criticised, and results like this will not help the case for the defence.

The biggest criticism of the THE is their heavy reliance on subjective measures. 40% of the ranking is based on academic peer review, which is done by emailing tens of thousands of academics with an internet survey. The response rate is typically poor, and the response quality doubtful. One potential benefit of rankings is that use of objective information can correct impressionistic views of universities, but this method tends to reinforce the latter. The Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings use purely objective measures (though the weightings are subjective; I don’t think there is any way to make these objective). But while the THE rankings are dubious on this measure, this isn’t what’s dividing the ANU and Stanford. They both get the maximum score of 100.
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The surprising increase in Muslim popularity

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

John Howard’s critics believed that he at least pandered to, if not stirred up, anti-Muslim sentiment. According to Malcolm Fraser:

for a variety of reasons, but not least because the Government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. (italics added)

What we’ve lacked in assessing these claims is comparable survey data over time that lets us track changing views towards Muslims. Now that has changed. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007 has partially unlocked the results of their social distance question on Muslims, enabling a comparision with the same question asked in the Issues in Multicultural Australia Survey 1988.

The results are not what I expected. Especially since 2001, Islam has suffered one PR disaster after another. Yet over the nearly 20 years since 1988, Muslims have improved their position in the social distance survey.

In 1988, 24% of the Australian population would either welcome a Muslim into their family or as a close friend. By 2007, that was up to 38.5%. In 1988, 32% of the Australian population wanted either to keep Muslims out of the country or to have them as visitors only. That had dropped to 24.5% by 2007.

Overall, Muslims are the least popular group – the Jehovah’s Witness will find fewer people who want them in their house (31%) but also fewer who want to keep them out of the country (16%) – but to improve their position despite all that has happened is a good result.
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