Author: Andrew Norton

My trip to Planet Irf

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

At his blog Planet Irf, Irfan Yusuf claims that I – along with Michael Duffy, who was interviewing me – am guilty of inconsistency. As readers may have gathered, I do not like inconsistency. Irfan says:

During the interview, Norton and Duffy discussed the relationship between racism and immigration. They both seemed to agree that opposition to immigration during the latter half of the twentieth century in Australia wasn’t necessarily to do with racism but was more an issue of the fear among Australian workers of migrants taking jobs….

Later in the conversation, Norton Duffy state that immigration increased under the Howard government. This, they alleged, meant that the Howard government (and presumably John Howard) were therefore not racist.

So if you support the pursuit of policies that lead to an increase in immigration, you simply cannot be racist. But if you oppose immigration, you aren’t necessarily racist. Go figure.

It seems fairly simple to me: the Howard government and the Australian people are accused of White Australia style racism. But support for an immigration policy that includes record numbers of people with dark skins and exotic beliefs is inconsistent with this interpretation of the last decade. A strong racist would always oppose a policy that let in so many people from cultures they did not like. Because there are few strong racists, migration opinion is driven by other factors.

Support for the migration policy is, however, consistent with lower-level prejudices. Social distance surveys show that letting people into the country is one thing, but letting them into your life another. There can be large attitudinal gaps between migration and marriage. So while I can’t recall what I said to Duffy in that interview, I very much doubt that I claimed that ‘if you support the pursuit of policies that lead to an increase in immigration, you simply cannot be racist.’

After all, I was being interviewed about an article that showed why that was not the case.

Are the politics of climate change easier or harder than the politics of economic reform?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

On the Sunday programme yesterday (about 6 minutes in), Laurie Oakes asked Ross Garnaut whether it was politically possible to implement the radical reforms needed to reduce carbon emissions.

In his reply Garnaut drew an analogy with trade liberalisation – a reform in which he played a distinguished part during the Hawke government. Public opinion has been consistently protectionist, Garnaut noted, yet politicians successfully implemented Australia’s transition from a highly protected to a largely open economy. They did so without major electoral consequences.

Garnaut argues that, politically speaking, we are starting well ahead of where we were with trade reform, since large majorities accept the need for change. Garnaut acknowledges the difficulties in moving from this generalised support for action to specific measures, but thinks it can be done.

The two issue starting points are, contrary to what Garnaut suggests, quite similar. The basic goal of the economic reform process – essentially to restore Australia’s economic prosperity – was a point of near-consensus, just as the need to do something about climate change is now. It was the means of getting there that generated controversy. Protection was a means, not an end, and we should not compare opinion on that with views on the goal of slowing or stopping climate change. In each reform case, we have a popular aim, but no easy way of getting there.
Continue reading “Are the politics of climate change easier or harder than the politics of economic reform?” →

Why is opinion on taxing and spending changing?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

This decade has shown the most favourable attitudes towards more government spending since the late 1960s. In a standard question on whether respondents would prefer reduced taxes or more spending on social services, the proportion saying reduced taxes dropped from 57% in 1996 to 34% in 2007. Support for the more spending option increased from 17% support in 1996 to 47% in 2007. (The numbers from 1993 onwards can be seen at p.29 of this compilation of Australian Election Survey results (pdf)).

But why has opinion changed? The Age this morning reports one theory:

Ian McAllister, who has been one of the principal investigators for the ANU study since 1987 and is a professor of political science at the university, says the changing mood reflects greater support for collectivist solutions to social and economic problems.

This is due in some part to a growing cynicism towards privatisation, a view that it has gone too far, or at least far enough…. Then there’s the jump in private school fees and the cost of higher education, and the rise of private health insurance, which almost half the population now has. Juxtapose this with reports of public hospital waiting lists growing and some schools across the country needing major renovations.

Though I am the exception among the handful of public opinion researchers looking at this data, I don’t think this explains what is going on. The AES itself has results which are inconsistent with an ideological shift being a major factor. For this to drive support for more social spending nearly tripling in a decade, we would expect to see a significant leftward shift in the AES question which asks respondents to place themselves on a numbered left (0) to right (10) scale. There is leftward movement, but not by much: from on average 5.46 in 1996 to 5.29 in 2007. The electorate is stable in the political centre, but has substantially changed its opinion on taxing and spending. Continue reading “Why is opinion on taxing and spending changing?” →

Why are men absent from fertility theories?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

Five years ago, I wrote a paper (pdf) critiquing the idea that HECS contributed to childlessness among female graduates.

Though my conclusion of no effect was supported by an article in the Journal of Population Research last year, using the HILDA survey which has a question on student debt, one of my main theories as to why female graduates have a low average number of children continues to be largely overlooked – and surprisingly so, I think.

My theory turns on the admittedly (and this is why it is surprising) rather obvious point that, despite advances in reproductive medicine, babies are more likely to be born if there is a man in the house, and one likely to stick around long enough to help raise the child. I reported data based on the 1996 census showing that married women in the professional jobs that graduates normally aspire to actually had near-replacement fertility levels. It was the large number of unmarried and childless women pushing down the average.

Unfortunately the marriage factor has been a blind spot in subsequent research that I have seen on this topic. In the Journal of Population Research article they controlled for half a dozen variables, but not whether or not there was a potential father. My suggestion that perhaps one solution to low fertility among female graduates was improved education for boys, to improve the dating market for educated women, was reported as ‘perhaps tongue in cheek’.
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Department of Definitions

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

“It was smoke, not a fire. There’s a big difference,”

– NSW Railcorp spokesperson CieJai Leggett after an electrical fault in a train air conditioning unit caused 1500 people to be evacuated and one taken to hospital.

“What [CityRail] class as a fire and what we class as a fire seem to be two different things. You don’t have smoke without a fire.”

– NSW Fire Brigades spokesman, Craig Brierley.

SMH, 2 July 2008.

“… he was a good boy, he was a good man, everyone he knew loved him,”

– Rose Boulos, sister of murder victim Charlie Boulos, on her deceased brother.

Police said they had established Mr Boulos had been selling and using the drug ‘ice’.

The Age, 1 July 2008.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

– Humpty Dumpty

The real greenhouse denialists, part 3

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

George Megalogenis was in an optimistic mood when he wrote this analysis piece on Newspoll’s carbon emissions trading scheme survey. According to George:

VOTERS want to be led on the issue of climate change, and if leadership means higher prices at the bowser, so be it. …

A strong majority of voters (61 per cent) say a carbon emissions trading scheme could help slow global warming. Almost as many again (56 per cent) are prepared to pay more for energy sources such as petrol, electricity and gas under an ETS.

But another poll, also reported today but in The Age, found that half the population had either never heard of emissions trading or did not know what it was. Only 7% claimed to know a lot about it. This did not, however, stop 72% of voters telling Essential Media Communications (a left-wing PR and polling firm) that they supported a carbon emissions trading scheme.
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Do students have ‘academic freedom’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

The Liberal students/Young Liberals Make Education Fair campaign now has a Senate inquiry behind it. The inquiry’s terms of reference include looking into:

The current level of academic freedom in school and higher education, with particular reference to:

1. the level of intellectual diversity and the impact of ideological, political and cultural prejudice in the teaching of senior secondary education and of courses at Australian universities, …
2. the need for the teaching of senior secondary and university courses to reflect a plurality of views, be accurate, fair, balanced and in context; and
3. ways in which intellectual diversity and contestability of ideas may be promoted and protected, including the concept of a charter of academic freedoms.

Though there is precedent for the idea of academic freedom for students, I don’t think this is a useful concept, especially not for school students or undergraduates. Their main task is to master a body of knowledge, the content of which is to be determined by those with expertise in the field.

In many disciplines, there will be disputes among experts on some issues. As part of learning their subject, students should be made aware of these disputes and able to take a point of view, within the constraints of scholarly argument. But it is reasonable that students be held within established debates rather than able to claim ‘academic freedom’ to take an idiosyncratic perspective.
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Prospect’s dubious list of top public intellectuals

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

The trouble with letting survey respondents select themselves is that the results can be very odd. How likely is it, for example, that even though the Muslim world does not have a single university in the world’s top 500, it nevertheless produces all ten of the world’s top ten public intellectuals, according to the latest Prospect public intellectuals poll?

I must confess to not even having heard of seven of the ten. And what has Tariq Ramadan done in the last three years to push him up from 58 to 8?

If we ignore the campaign to get Muslims to vote and delete the top ten, we have the same situation as in 2005 with Noam Chomsky, who apart from his loyal band of leftist followers is not taken seriously outside linguistics, as number one. Al Gore is number two, perhaps reflecting the fashionability of his issue.

Another problem is that the starting point is Prospect‘s list, with half of the top 10 and 17 of the top 50 in 2008 seemingly not even worth considering in 2005.

There is no easy way to conduct polls like this, but perhaps voters having to write in names without a predetermined list would both include intellectuals Prospect missed, and minimise blog-driven campaigns for particular individuals.

Though this is a marketing gimmick for Prospect, even gimmicks need a certain level of credibility. A list of top universities that put, say, Cairo University above Princeton is not going to be taken seriously. Whatever the merits of Fethullah Gülen, he is not the world’s top public intellectual, and Prospect lacks an even semi-plausible public intellectual ranking.

John Howard vs Charles Darwin?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

The left used to portray John Howard as hostile to multiculturalism. But as Michael Gawenda points out in today’s Age, while Howard wasn’t so keen on multiculturalism of the subsidies for Bolivian folk dancing variety, he was quite happy with the implicit multiculturalism of religious schools. And conversely (though Gawenda does not say this), while the left liked the multiculturalism of ethnic differences, it was (and is) often quite hostile to religious belief, particularly when reinforced by religious schools.

And few religious beliefs get people more upset than creationism or intelligent design. Gawenda comments that:

Given that some faith-based schools in Australia — unlike schools in the US — teach creationism and the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design as legitimate alternatives to evolutionary theory, how many will mark the Darwin anniversaries [of Charles Darwin’s birth and publication of his evolutionary theory], let alone celebrate them?

In all probability, a significant number won’t. For that John Howard can take some credit. What an irony, given that this was a PM determined to roll back multiculturalism.

But how much does it really matter what ordinary people think about where humans came from? Even most of us who would say we subscribe to Darwin’s theories would not be able to correctly answer even quite basic questions about the evolutionary sequence and how many years ago the the various stages of evolution occurred. I wandered through an exhibition on Darwin only a few weeks ago in Toronto, but I have forgotten already most of what I learnt there.
Continue reading “John Howard vs Charles Darwin?” →

The Australian Democrats, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Today the Democrat Senators gave their last speeches, bringing their party’s 31-year parliamentary history to an end. That makes me feel rather old, as I attended one of the first meetings that led to their creation after Don Chipp left the the Liberals in March 1977 (in the days when it was Malcolm Fraser being denounced for abandoning small-l liberalism).

The ‘Committee of Concerned Citizens’ organised a meeting on 9 May 1977 in the Melbourne Town Hall. There were 4,000 people there, including me and my Dad (I was 11), with many more turned away. According to John Warhurst’s book Keeping the Bastards Honest, at the end of the evening Chipp declared himself committed to a new party. I can’t quite remember what I thought of it all, though obviously I was not persuaded to take the micro-party route.

While they won seats up until the 2001 election, the Democrats never found a stable constituency among the ‘concerned’ middle class. The Australian Election Survey questions on which party respondents voted for at the most recent and at the previous election always showed a lot of churn among Democrat voters. People would vote for them, but vote for someone else next time. But until 2004, they always picked up enough of the stray disgruntled vote to win seats.

The 2007 AES suggests that the vast majority of defecting 2004 Democrat voters went to Labor and the Greens, confirming that the party that had been born centrist died leftist. With Labor and Liberal fighting over the middle ground, there was no electoral room for a centre party between them.

Despite their wacky policies on some issues (eg higher education) I’m sorry to see the Democrats go. Politics is less a choice between good and bad than between better and worse, and the Democrats are better than the Greens, Family First, or that no pokies guy from South Australia.

The Australian Democrats, RIP.