Author: Andrew Norton

Minority support for a 2010 emissions reduction scheme

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Today’s Newpoll finds opinion on climate change action rather more affected by the financial crisis than the Climate Institute’s poll last week suggested.

While the Climate Institute found 22% agreeing that the financial crisis meant that action on climate change should be delayed, Newspoll found 30% supporting a delay. On top of that 21% of respondents were against a carbon pollution reduction scheme, nearly double the 11% opposition Newspoll found in response to a differently-worded question back in July. Wtith 5% uncommitted, if Newspoll is right only a minority – 44% – now supports the government’s scheme of a 2010 implementation of an ETS.

The poor presentation of the Climate Change Institute results makes it difficult to fully analyse the reasons for the very different conclusions the polls reach. But Newspoll’s question on delay pointed out that energy ‘may become more expensive’, a better question in balancing the competing considerations, and so more likely to approximate the ‘real world’ reactions to an ETS.

Victorian government still committed to anti-democratic reforms

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

The Age‘s headline reads ‘Backdown on activist councillors’, in reference to the anti-democratic bill currently before the Parliament restricting the freedom of councillors to vote on matters they had previously been involved in, limiting rights of financial support for candidates, and denying voters the capacity to choose candidates committed to defending their interests.

The actual amendments have not yet been put to the Parliament, but based on Minister Richard Wynne’s media release the bill is still very unsatisfactory.

Rather than any objection to or submission on a proposal, the bill now proposes to cover only parties to a civil actions or VCAT appeals, or those who lodge objections to a planning permit. But as I argued last week, if a candidate runs on issues relating to the same subject as a civil action, VCAT appeal, or planning objection, the election victory turns the ‘private’ interest into a ‘public’ interest as well.

And there is no word about changing the absurd requirement that councillors keep complex records of who donates to them and then match them against all matters they have to decide on in council meetings.

I’m yet to hear what the Liberals will do on this bill – the Greens are still leading the fight. But I am hoping that the Liberals will come good.

Is HECS a tax?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

Commenter Charles objects to HECS as

an exotic tax aimed at passing education costs to the next generation

Though until 2004 I thought that HECS could reasonably be classified as a tax, that analysis would have been disputed by the courts. Under the Constitution, there is a distinction between taxes and fees for services, and arguably HECS was a fee for service, in that the person who paid it became entitled to a specific service in return.

However, HECS had other attributes of a tax: it was set by the government, it went to the government, and was mostly collected by the Australian Taxation Office (up-front payments went direct to universities, but as money owed to the Commonwealth, with an adjustment to the government income of universities as a result). It made the Australian tax-welfare system mildly more progressive than it would otherwise have been.

But since the student contribution amount system came into force in 2005, I do not think ‘tax’ is the best description of this payment.
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Labor’s faulty uni intuitions cost taxpayers $562 million

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

Fulfilling an election promise, this year’s budget contained:

$562.2 million over four years to encourage students to study maths and science and compensate universities. From 1 January 2009, the maximum annual student contribution amount for maths and science will be reduced to the lowest ‘national priority’ rate for new students.

As I pointed out when Labor first announced this plan in early 2007, it rests on two false assumptions.

The first assumption is that choices between broad academic disciplines are driven by relative prices. There is no evidence in the history of changing HECS levels that this is the case. A moment’s reflection explains why: for most people, a choice of course is a career decision, and who in their right mind would choose a field that did not interest them to save a few thousand dollars in eight or nine years time (when their HECS repayments would finish earlier than would otherwise be the case)? And for students motivated by money, a few thousand dollars in tuition costs is not going to change substantially the lifetime earning relativities between occupations.
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Good political fortune not helping Democrat unhappiness

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

You’d think that these were happy times for the American left. The Bush Presidency is ending in dismal failure, as they always thought it would. The Democrat candidate for the Presidency is now a near-certainty, and better still he is an African-American near-certainty. They’ll control the Congress. ‘Neolilberalism’ is being blamed for the financial market meltdown, and left-wing ideas about regulation are suddenly respectable. The American rich have lost amazing amounts of money; American inequality will be vastly diminished (sure, by tearing the rich down rather than by helping the poor, but the left has always favoured both strategies).

Yet according to latest Pew happiness research, Democrats remain much less happy than Republicans. They are more than twice as likely to say that they are ‘not too happy’. And Republicans are half as likely again as Democrats to describe themselves as ‘very happy’. The 25% Democrat ‘very happy’ is at its lowest level in a time series going back to 1972.

According to Pew, Republicans are happier than Democrats because:
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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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