Gay marriage delayed but not defeated

May 8, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

The Rudd government’s decision to block the ACT government’s civil union plans continued to attract criticism this morning, but also a religious defence.

The Australian Election Survey 2007, conducted after last November’s election, provides some further polling evidence on where the public stands on this issue. In a question about whether same-sex marriage should be recognised by law, the public is now evenly divided, with 43.6% in favour and 43.2% against. That’s less than the June 2007 figure of 57% in favour in a GetUp! Galaxy poll, but I thought at the time that this number was suspiciously high and probably due to it being asked directly after a question on various other forms of discrimination against gays. However the AES result is above the 35% in favour in the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes.

The three polls all had different question wording, but there are some consistent patterns of opinion. Men and women are mirror images on this issue; 34% of men are in favour of same-sex marriage and 53% against, while 52% of women are in favour and 35% against. I can’t immediately think of any other issue on which male and female opinion is so different.
Continue reading “Gay marriage delayed but not defeated” →

HECS for sportspeople

May 6, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 40 Comments

In one of the many possible budget savings that probably won’t be announced next Tuesday, Andrew Leigh suggests charging elite sportspeople for their Australian Institute of Sport education. This is a rare issue on which I broadly agree with The Australia Institute, which put out a paper (pdf) some years ago callling for income-contingent loans for AIS sportspeople, as Andrew L also proposes today.

Currently Australia’s elite sports education costs about $130 million a year, though I could not quickly see how much of that was directly spent on people enrolled at the AIS. Even if all of it was recovered it would not exactly be a major blow against big government, but worth doing.

Governments have, however, long been wary of this idea. I’m not sure whether this is because they think the negative publicity involved with popular sportspeople criticising them outweighs the relatively small financial benefits the scheme would bring to the government, or whether they were worried about triggering ‘HECS for TAFE’ (assuming that the AIS is a glorified TAFE) controversy. Perhaps a bit of both.

Still, if the punters can be conned into structural reductions in spending to supposedly deal with a cyclical inflation problem, we should take advantage of this political opportunity.

Banning political party donations

May 4, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

Since I last posted on political donations, the debate in NSW has escalated beyond disclosure to prohibition. The SMH was endorsing this route again yesterday. As usual, no serious consideration has been given to the likely consequences of such a move.

Arguably, in the Labor Party unelected party officials and conference delegates already have too much power over elected Labor MPs. They were trying again to exercise that influence at the NSW Labor conference yesterday. If ‘outsiders’ have less access to politicians, then the party insiders, in Labor’s case the unions, will have even greater relative influence. That is not to say that they will always get their way – politicians will usually be more concerned with the broader real-world and electoral implications of policy. But the insiders will proportionately get more of the decision-makers’ time.

But a ban on political donations won’t help political parties, even while it will help party power-brokers. Most of what parties do between elections is fundraising. Much of the social capital element of political parties would disappear without fundraisers. Already parties are suffering from not being able to give members enough to do, and this problem would worsen further if donations were banned. Parties would become quasi-state institutions, rather than being parts of civil society. Continue reading “Banning political party donations” →

Why taxi fares are high and taxi driver wages low

May 1, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

I don’t often agree with The Age‘s campaigning journalism, but I thought they picked the right cause – if not quite the right argument – in their advocacy this morning on behalf of taxi drivers. The paper led this morning with the heading:

Assault
Abuse
Fair evasion
12 hour shifts
Poor security
All this for $8 an hour

For the benefit of interstate readers, on Tuesday night a taxi driver, like many of them an Indian student, was stabbed by a passenger (who thanks to the cameras installed in cabs was arrested by police within 24 hours). At last report, the driver was still in a serious condition in hospital.

Drivers responded by blocking a major city intersection, eventually forcing the state government to agree to security screens and pre-paid fares late at night.

Though an analysis piece and an editorial did refer to the licence system in the industry, they did not draw the obvious conclusion that it is to blame for the miserable earnings of taxi drivers, despite the seemingly high fares paid by passengers.

The CIS has a long history – though one unfortunately without policy success – of criticising taxi regulation. One of its earliest publications, by Peter Swan in 1979, was a critique of regulation of the Canberra taxi industry. This was followed by articles by commenters on this blog, Jason Soon in 1999, and Christian Seibert in 2006.
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The decline of marijuana

April 29, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

The latest drug statistics from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that illicit drug use is becoming less common. In the last six years (the survey goes back to 1993, but only since 2001 have huge 20,000+ samples been used) the proportion of Australians using any illicit drug in the last twelve months has declined from 16.9% to 13.4%.

What’s particularly interesting is the way it is falling away in the teen group, aged 14-19. While this is still an age of experimentation (the overall statistics are helped a lot by all us sober 40 plus people), the proportion of young men using illicit drugs in the last 12 months is getting close to having halved in just six years, from 28.8% to 15.6%. Among young women it is down from 26.6% to 17.7% (making this the only age group in which females are more likely to use drugs than males).

The main driver seems to be declining use of marijiuana/cannabis, which has more than halved among young men (26.6%/13.1%) and is significantly down among young women (22.6%/12.7%). The girls use party drugs more than the guys, accounting for their higher overall figure.

There is debate at Harry Clarke’s blog and Andrew Leigh’s blog about what might be causing these changes.
Continue reading “The decline of marijuana” →

Can business students do their sums?, #2

April 29, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Last year, after the federal government let universities increase annual student contribution amounts for commerce and economics students by $1,200, I predicted:

Applications for business degrees will not move outside the normal +/- <1% market share we see for most disciplines each year.

The basis of my prediction was that applications are primarily driven by interests, and that while financial factors can influence course choices within the range of a person’s interests, these financial factors will not just include course costs, but the anticipated long-term costs and benefits of a particular course choice. Business and economics students, even more than other students, are likely to be able to do their sums and realise that $3,600 in additional course costs is trivial compared to the long-term earnings gains they can reasonably expect.

Damien Eldridge wasn’t so keen on my analysis, pointing out (correctly) that what mattered here was the marginal economics and commerce student, and that a shift in relative prices could see some move to other disciplines that interest them. He suggested that they might go to geography or sociology.

The applications data for 2008 was released today, which shows that my prediction was correct but also reports numbers consistent with Damien’s analysis. Management and commerce did lose market share, by 0.31% of all applications. As usual, no discipline gained or lost by more than 1% market share, demonstrating the high year-to-year stability observed in this data, despite occasional shifts in relative prices. The broad discipline cluster that includes geography and sociology gained 0.43%. Engineering draws on similar quantitative skills to commerce, and many engineers end up as managers, so I think this would be another (and perhaps more likely) alternative course, and it gained 0.53% of market share. Continue reading “Can business students do their sums?, #2” →

Fellow-student funded overseas holidays: the latest anti-VSU argument

April 27, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

As we saw in the case of Joy Kyriacou a couple of weeks ago, there are people whose sense of entitlement to the earnings of others is completely shameless. Ms Kyriacou, as readers may recall, thinks that her fellow Australians shoud pay higher taxes so that she does not have to postpone her first overseas holiday while repaying her HECS debt.

This morning The Age brings us La Trobe University sports manager John Dumaresq, who in a criticism of voluntary student unionism that looks more like a defence to me, explains why it is harder than before VSU to get members of the women’s football team to go to interstate matches:

“Students think, well, I can spend a week on the Gold Coast or I can work and at the end of the year with $700 [the cost of the Gold Coast footy trip] I can go to Thailand or Vietnam for an overseas trip.

They have to weigh it up, but in the past they might have done both because it was subsidised,” Mr Dumaresq said.

So on Mr Dumaresq’s view, other students – who if we believe NUS are poverty-stricken – should pay higher charges so that women footballers can go to the Gold Coast and on an Asian holiday.

I do not support price control, and therefore I cannot support that aspect of the VSU legislation. But as I have always conceded, the previous system was riddled with inequities and inefficiencies. The forced unbundling was useful shock therapy in clearing these away.

When the system is deregulated, universities will presumably think carefully before including the cost of too many student junkets in their price structure.

A reborn Bulletin?

April 26, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

My Bulletin obituary may have been premature. Reports in several papers over the last few days – the most detailed was in the Weekend Australian – reveal that businessman Peter Hall is considering buying the masthead and turning it

into a weekly magazine of comment and analysis, like The Spectator or the New Yorker. “I believe Australia needs an intelligent weekly magazine of comment and analysis.”

But surely we have more than enough ‘comment and analysis’ already, at least of party politics. While The New Yorker comes out weekly, the articles that make it worth buying have nothing to do with the previous week. Often they are the results of months of research, and written and edited so well that they could not have been rushed to meet a weekly schedule. A magazine with a circulation of over a million can sustain the expenditure needed to reach such excellence. The Australian market cannot. Continue reading “A reborn Bulletin?” →

Vote for your favourite public intellectuals

April 25, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Back in 2005, the British magazine Prospect, in a joint project with Foreign Policy, asked its readers to vote on the top 100 public intellectuals. It set off a wave of local public intellectual lists. Now Prospect is seeing how our public intellectual tastes have changed with another vote. (At least one change the editors have decided on already – Naomi Klein who came 11th last time isn’t even on the 100 person short list.) Anyone can vote for up to five of their favourite intellectuals, plus offer a suggestion as to who the short list misses, with the poll closing on 15 May.

There were about 20 names on the short list I’d consider voting for, but for quite different reasons so it is hard to rank them. But here are my choices and why: Continue reading “Vote for your favourite public intellectuals” →