Observations from Carlton's lone classical liberal
The move has not been successful; or at least, not very smooth.
The original plan was to fold andrewnorton.info into the parent installation, but two days of fighting like cats and dogs with WordPress has taken about a year off my life.
Anyway, I’ve put Andrew’s site on a standalone installation for the moment. At least it’s nice and quick and the URLs look nicer.
The Age tried hard to find negatives in the Mapping Social Cohesion report released today, but
…while [co-author] Professor Andrew Markus said the study had “highlighted some issues which can be taken up”, he said the overall picture was a “very positive one”.
Despite all the fuss about ‘dog whistles’ and ‘divisiveness’ during the Howard years, and from the other side about the supposedly dire consequences of ‘multiculturalism’ during the Hawke and Keating years, attitudinal research suggests that ‘social cohesion’ remains high. Australians overwhelmingly have a ‘sense of belonging’, whether born here (96.9%) or overseas (94.4%). Pride in the Australian way of life is high whether the respondent was born here (94.4%) or overseas (90.4%). Migrants are slightly more likely (81.4%) than those born here (79.6%) to think that Australia is a land of economic opportunity and that their life will be improved in three or four years (55.6%/46%).
This isn’t to say, of course, that things go smoothly all the time. A quarter of respondents had experienced discrimination at some time in their lives because of their ethnic or national background, and 8% on the basis of their religion. 6% say they experience discrimination on a regular basis of once a month or more. This is broadly consistent with previous research.
Continue reading “Social cohesion survives Howard, multiculturalism etc etc”
As Andrew’s longtime webhost I thought I should let you all know I’ll be moving this site to a new server in the coming week.
Andrew has been volunteered by yours truly to be the first guinea pig for a blogging service I am putting together aimed at Australian bloggers. This is not quite an official announcement as I am still ironing out various tedious kinks, but in the coming weeks and months I hope to bring some more ozbloggers on board before opening it up to the public.
You will almost certainly experience disruption as a consequence. Probably the biggest change you’ll see is that the /blog/ hanging off the URL will get dropped, as it’s vestigial. Existing links should continue to work as I will be putting a redirection script in place to handle the required black magic.
Another thing that will probably happen is that I will have to disable comments while dumping and reloading the database, to ensure nobody’s gems go missing in the transition.
That’s it for now. See you all on the other side.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been given a standing ovation by the 1002 delegates to the Australia 2020 Summit in Parliament House.
Make that 1001 delegates, at most. While I was in the room, needless to say I was not among those giving the PM a standing ovation. In the latest issue of Policy, I have reprinted an article by Owen Harries on intellectuals, in which he – following George Orwell – notes the propensity to power-worship among intellectuals. This was on embarrassing display yesterday afternoon. For nearly twelve years, this psychological need has gone unmet as the dreaded Howard occupied the Prime Ministerial suite. And now Australia’s progressive intelligentsia has someone as PM who, while carefully not signing up to immediate implementation of their ideas, takes them seriously and flatters their egos.
I was in the productivity stream. At that 100 person level – as opposed to the collective behaviour in the 1,000 person plenary sessions – there wasn’t a smothering consensus. But nor was there much debate. It was more a case of people trying to put their pet topics into the stream statement that was to be included in the summit initial report. By Sunday morning I was bored and disengaged.
What of the actual ideas? From my stream, the one that has received most attention was to let people reduce their HECS-HELP debt by doing community service. That one mysteriously appeared in our stream summary document on Sunday morning, despite never having been mentioned in the group the day before. Nobody I spoke to from other sub-streams within the major productivity stream had heard it before either (I was in the post-secondary sub-stream). Perhaps it came from community submissions.
Continue reading “My 2020 weekend”
Polling on federalism is pretty rare, but in a new ANU Poll they have replicated a 1979 question that asked:
Do you think the state governments should give some powers to the federal government, or do you think the federal government has enough powers already?
In the last 30 years, the proportion of people thinking that more powers should be given to the feds has more than doubled, from 17% to 40%. Unfortunately, respondents were not asked which powers should be handed over.
On the question of whether the federal government should provide more money to the states, the proportion opposing it increased from 30% to 38%, perhaps because respondents doubt it would be spent competently.
The second question highlights, however, what is wrong with Australian federalism – not so much the formal division of powers, but the states’ reliance on federal funding. Until that is fixed, the system will never work.
No matter how many times Bob Birrell updates his argument that we need more graduates, he gets lots of publicity. This morning was no exception. According to The Age
THE Federal Government should massively increase university places rather than offer 450,000 new training places if it wants to equip young Australians with the skills needed in future, a Monash University study has argued.
Similar stories appeared in the SMH and The Australian.
The basic argument goes like this: there is strong employment growth in managerial, professional and associate professional occupations. However, growth in university commencements has been much lower, and even fell in a few disciplines between 2002 and 2006. Employers have had to use migrants to fill vacancies. Therefore we need more graduates.
However, on closer examination of the evidence the argument falls apart. Of these three broad occupational groups, only professionals are truly dominated by graduates. As I noted in my paper on this issue last year (pdf), only about 20% of associate professionals have degrees. Indeed, the category has now been abolished by the ABS and the occupations that it used to cover distributed to other broad groups. Some of them have gone to ‘professionals’ and ‘managers’, but most went to occupations that do not normally require degrees.
Similarly, ABS Education and Work 2007 shows that less than a third of managers have degrees. Presumably many of them are in small businesses. Perhaps they would be better managers if they had degrees. But we cannot assume that a growth in managerial positions will require an equivalent number of graduates. Even among professionals, 30% don’t have degrees.
Continue reading “Do we have too few graduates?”
As reported The Age this morning, the Climate Institute has released another of its regular public opinion reports. Climate change continues to be another case study in the difference between repeating the conventional wisdom back to pollsters and taking responsibility for an issue that, if the conventional wisdom is right, has consequences for the lifestyles of us all.
As in earlier research, the level of concern about climate change is very high, at around 90%. 80% want the government to give the issue a high priority.
It’s when we get to the solutions that, as usual, things start to unravel. Three-quarters support laws to ensure all new electricity comes from clean energy sources. 87% support 25% of electricity coming from wind and solar sources by 2020. As wind electricity currently costs twice as much as coal-generated electricity, that is going to add significantly to power bills – especially as a hefty carbon charge on coal is going to be needed to make wind power financially feasible.
But how much extra are people prepared to pay for electricity? Even with their previous answers creating pressure for personal responsibility, and no real cost involved, 28% of respondents said that they were not prepared to pay anything more for clean energy. Another 32% said they were only prepared to pay another $10 a month (or about 10% more if the last ABS expenditure survey is a guide). Only 7% were in the more realistic range of $40 or $50 a month (if we can assume some technological advance and economising in response to higher prices).
Back in the real world of politics, Kevin Rudd was today announcing a scheme to reduce rather than increase energy prices.
As I said last year:
This is the greenhouse ‘denialist’ problem – not a few conservatives arguing that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, but a public that accepts the theory but rejects the consequences of their beliefs.
According to a story in today’s Sydney Sun-Herald, the National Union of Students is calling for an inquiry into the ‘economic impact of student debt’. Unfortunately for them, the human interest aspect of the story – one Joy Kyriacou (who by I am sure by complete coincidence has the same surname as former NUS President Daniel Kyriacou) – could not get her lines straight and revealed NUS’s campaign as the shameless rent-seeking that it is:
Ms Kyriacou, who graduated with a Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts from the University of NSW in 2006, said the $16,000 student debt burden was stopping her from saving for other things, like her first overseas trip or a house deposit. (italics added)
Of course it was bad enough that we were being asked to to finance a special first home buyers grant for graduates. But now we are being asked to fund their overseas holidays as well. Even by the very low standards of arguments against HECS, this one is a shocker. Continue reading “Taxpayer-funded overseas holidays for graduates: the latest NUS anti-HECS argument”
The ‘progressive’ think-tank Per Capita was launched a year ago today. It’s off to a fairly slow start. Many blogs which are mainly hobbies for their contributor(s), including this one, have produced far material in the last twelve months than has Per Capita. And most of what Per Capita has produced are newspaper opinion pieces, which take only slightly longer than a substantive blog post to write.
Unusually for a think-tank, they don’t seem to have any published research. The closest thing I could find was a ‘Dear Prime Minister’ (lefties love open letters) publication called ‘Memo to a Progressive Prime Minister’, but this is more of a manifesto with endnotes than a traditional think-tank research paper.
Presumably the research is still coming – there is a page on their website promising it – but so far they are lacking what gives think-tanks credibility and profile. With most of the social democratic talent either with secure university jobs or in one of the hundreds of government staffer jobs currently available to them, perhaps Per Capita is struggling to find people to do their research.
If they can lift their output, the manifesto provides some support for commenter John of Newtown’s suggestion last week that Per Capita was a ‘progressive fusionist’ institution. There are market-based policy suggestions in the manifesto, including a national water market and even a proposal for students to sell shares in their future income stream (the CIS was there first on that one, of course). At the same time, there are calls for ‘public investment’, but investment based on proper analysis of costs and benefits.
All that is a significant improvement on much other ‘progressive’ thinking, and from a liberal ‘fusionist’ perspective on really-existing conservatism, which too easily ends up as National Party agragrian socialism, particularly on issues like water. I hope Per Capita succeeds. But for the moment it looks like they are finding out how hard it is to run a think-tank.
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According to the latest Morgan Poll on the ethics and honesty of various professions, more people now rate federal MPs highly on those measures than at any time since they started asking the question in 1979. Admittedly, only 23% rate federal MPs highly for ethics and honesty, but that is up 7% on the previous year.
Looking back at the history of this question, there are upward spikes after governments change, and downward spikes when election promises are broken (Keating’s L-A-W tax cuts in the 1994 and 1995 surveys, and the ‘non-core’ promises in the 1997 and 1998 surveys). With Ruddmania, the spike this year was bigger than the 4% after the 1983 and 1996 changes of government. It is unlikely that the average ethics and honesty levels of politicians have changed much, but with the passing of Howard and arrival of Rudd some Australians are prepared to upgrade their ratings.
Though there is evidence that the numbers respond to real-world changes, this series is a very poor predictor of how voters will feel about individual politicians. Continue reading “Have politicians become more ethical and honest?”
Andrew Norton 