Author: Andrew Norton

Crook analysis of think-tanks

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Marcus Smith and Peter Marden are not the only people who believe think-tanks can be analysed without giving any serious attention to what they say or do. Andrew Crook, author of this piece in today’s Crikey on the new Melbourne University-based think-tank the Grattan Institute, seems to share their approach.

Though the Grattan Institute is yet to publish anything, or appoint any staff other than a CEO with no obvious partisan or ideological background, Crook claims that

it’s shaping up as a quasi arm of government that replaces frank and fearless advice with something eminently more pliable. The irony is that the Rudd Government’s obsession with experts … reflects less a return to a disinterested public service and more a proliferation of pick-and-mix advice witnessed at 2020. Grattan is looking like a permanent 2020, staffed by wonks rather than celebrities.

The ‘evidence’ for this is the usual follow-the-money logic (the feds kicked in some cash) and some rather imaginative guesswork from some members of the board, which along with some people with Labor connections includes some less well-known Ruddites such as my former boss and Liberal Minister David Kemp.

Crook’s analysis of the general think-tank scene is no better:

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Academic quality control

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

I’ve had a lot on over the last week and didn’t get to read the report of the Senate inquiry into academic bias until last night.

I was rather surprised to find that my post on the subject, along with comments from Conrad, Leopold, and Andrew Elder in the comments thread, appears to have influenced the majority (ie, Labor) report. They describe my argument that this issue is about the professionalism of staff, and not the academic freedom of students, as a ‘fair summing up of the issue’.

Alas, the minority report from Coalition Senators suggests that the Nelson-Bishop micromanaging mindset is alive and well in the Opposition, recommending that a Charter of Academic Freedoms for students be imposed on universities as a condition of funding. Even if we take all the Liberal student and Young Liberal allegations at face value, we will only have a small number of cases, and as the majority report noted, there is no sign that they have pursued existing avenues of complaint. I can’t see that yet another layer of bureaucracy is needed.

And clearly Coalition Senators have not have learnt their lesson on political donations, proposing that universities now be caught in the disclosure net, with universities required to reveal donations over an unspecified level. This seems to be in response to a complaint from Jewish organisations about Arab funding of research centres. But I can think of at least one instance in which this rule would have stood in the way of an 8-figure sum being donated for medical research.

The lack of external quality control of courses and teaching at universities is an issue, but it needs to be approached carefully and systematically, rather than creating yet more ad hoc rules which cause more problems than they solve.

Do international students take uni places from Australians?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

In a Weekend Australian opinion piece attacking the government’s ending of undergraduate full-fee places at public universities, Glenda Korporaal says that

Far from creating a warm, multicultural glow, the over-reliance on foreign students has led to an undercurrent of resentment among many young Australians, who feel these students are depriving them and their mates of places at good universities (italics added)

In a reform of the last Howard Budget, universities no longer have absolute limits on the numbers of local students they can enrol. However, government policy still provides strong financial disincentives to take domestic undergraduates.

Up to 5% more than their quota number of student places, universities receive roughly the same as they would for within-quota students (ie the government subsidy plus the student contribution amount). Over that, they get the student contribution amount only. In most cases, international student fees will be significantly higher than either amount – twice as much or more than for within-quota students in some courses in the ‘good’ universities.

So now the key problem is less quantity constraints than price control. Australian students are not allowed to compete on price with international students. They are priced out of the market – not through prices being set too high, as the left supposes, but through prices being set too low.
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Max Teichmann, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

In his Weekend Australian column, Christopher Pearson reports the death of Max Teichmann. In recent years, Teichmann had been a regular at the Catholic paleocon magazine News Weekly. But when I took Teichmann’s Monash University subject on populism a very large number of years ago he was still a man of the left.

As Gerard Henderson’s amazing files record, this passage by Teichmann on the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government included the Australian left’s characteristic hyperbolic style:

At the beginning of 1932 Germany was a Weimar Republic semi-democracy. By the end of 1933 she was a dictatorship. … But in terms of a narrow, legalistic interpretation of the German constitution, Hindenburg’s action appeared justified. Within eight months Adolf Hitler was to be prime minister of Germany. ….

The similarities between Germany 1932 and Australia 1975 do not end there. The Nazis gained support by exploiting people’s fears about inflation and unemployment; by promising all things to all men, in terms so vague so as to defy analysis; by kicking the communist can; by posing as defenders of the constitution and of law and order, while busily subverting all these things.

In my experience, Teichmann was a likeable character but a long way from being a model professional academic. Our lectures were straight after lunch, which Teichmann sometimes appeared to have spent at the bar in the university staff club. The lectures were often rambling. But my most vivid memory of him is from the populism exam. He came to see us just before we started. ‘You’d have to die in the exam to fail this one,’ he assured us. He wasn’t going to meet too many academic standards, and we didn’t have to either.

Max Teichmann, RIP.

Update: The Age’s obituary.

Political styles

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

Ideologies and political movements don’t just have substantive beliefs, they have styles as well.

Conservatism and the cultural left both engage in identity politics. When a dispute is about not just what we should do, but who we are, things – and language – get heated. Conservatives and the cultural left often use stories to make their case. Stories have dramas and excitement not so easily found in a logical argument. It is not coincidence that many conservative intellectuals are historians.

Classical liberals and social democrats tend to be far more cool and analytical in the way they present themselves. They are better at detaching themselves from issues. They will often use statistics rather than stories to make their case. They are more likely to be economists or philosophers than historians.

Left-wing academics have their own style in a particular form of bad writing. Take this passage from the Smith and Marden article on think-tanks:
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Do think tanks follow God or mammon?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 28 Comments

The latest issue of the Australian Journal of Political Science contains an article called ‘Conservative Think Tanks and Public Politics’, by Marcus Smith and Peter Marden. They are against the former and claim to be in favour of the latter.

Smith and Marden don’t seem to able to decide whether think tanks are driven by God or mammon (the possibility that people who work in think-tanks might be sincerely interested in good public policy is not even considered).

The first part of the article is a conventional (left-wing) narrative of how business interests created think-tanks to serve their financial interests. But then it switches to God, arguing that the Christian Right is increasingly influential in the ‘networks of interests associated with conservative think thanks’. According to Smith and Marden, the Christian Right argues that ‘Australia has fallen victim to a culture of permissiveness, rampant materialism, and instant gratification.’ Why commercial interests would want to support opponents of these excellent business opportunities is never made clear.
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Brand power

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

In the end, so that I could support his classical liberal deputy Tim Wilson, I did vote for Labor Party member Peter McMullin for Lord Mayor of Melbourne.

But as it turned out McMullin came third, behind former state Liberal leader Robert Doyle and Adam Bandt of the Greens. The Age‘s Jason Dowling thinks that the council electoral system is rotten:

Doyle had almost twice as many votes as his nearest opponent but any one of five of the 11 candidates who stood for lord mayor could still win. Such a system raises the question of who really decides the outcome: the voters or the back-room dealers who decide preference deals? The best policies — not the best preference deal — should count.

But this isn’t the problem. What the result shows is that brand counts in politics like it does in any other situation where we must make choices based on minimal information. I doubt most voters wanted to read the 23-page booklet they were all sent on the Lord Mayor race, or the large amount of campaign material distributed by the candidates.

So they went first for a name they knew – Doyle – and second for a party they had heard of, the Greens. No other party formally endorsed a candidate.
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All talk and little action on greenpower

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

We know from previous polling that people are reluctant to pay the increased energy prices that will be required under the ETS.

Yesterday the ABS put out some survey results that let us do a revealed preference test on willingness to pay more for greenpower electricity.

In March this year, just under a third of people indicated that they were willing to pay more. But another question on how many are actually paying more came up with a much lower result – 5%. Talk is cheap, greenpower is expensive.

The question about willingness to pay has been asked four times: in 1999, 2002, 2005, and 2008. In the first three surveys willingness to pay was stable on around a quarter of respondents. So the third recorded in 2008 is a clear change.

Yet given the saturation media coverage of climate change issues – I set myself an even bigger task than I realised in going through the results of a daily Google news search for my monitoring of alarmist, denialist and NIMBY stories – it is a clear but small change. There is a major gap between what is required to reduce carbon emissions and what Australians are prepared to do themselves to achieve that reduction.

Over-qualified workers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

NATSEM research released yesterday confirmed that on average higher education pays off. Compared to someone with Year 12 education only, the average graduate will have lifetime earnings of $1.5 million more, after deducting forgone earnings while studying.

But the annual ABS Education and Work survey, released today, again suggests that this average may conceal large variations in actual graduate outcomes. Despite the good-as-it-is going-to-get economic conditions (the survey was carried out in May), 26.3% of graduates were working in jobs that the ABS occupational classifications system says require vocational or no post-secondary education rather than higher education. That’s only .2% lower than last year.

Work I have done on data from the 2006 census suggests that it is the generalist degrees, and particularly arts (with the exception of those with degrees in ‘philosophy and religious studies’), that drag down the average. About 40% of other Arts graduates are in jobs that don’t require higher education.

There are still big gaps in our knowledge about this group of seemingly over-qualified workers, particularly on the extent to which their employment outcomes are either wanted or, if not wanted, temporary.