Author: Andrew Norton

The end of WorkChoices

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Today the Coalition’s Shadow Cabinet officially declared WorkChoices dead. With coincidental but good timing, my Policy article on the ugly WorkChoices polling went online this morning.

Polling published since I wrote the article confirms the findings I report. In the Weekend Australian last Saturday, George Megalogenis cited surveys by left-leaning pollster Essential Media Communications that anti-WorkChoices opinion was stable across 2006 and 2007. The huge sums of money spent by both sides on WorkChoices propaganda had little if any net effect on the basic yes/no question.

My reading is that the anti-WorkChoices campaign was able to tap into set public opinion that labour market institutions should protect low-paid and vulnerable workers, and so it all it had to do was convince people that WorkChoices was contrary to their beliefs. That was accomplished by the time polling started in mid-2005.

What we still can’t be entirely clear on is whether the Coalition’s backdown on AWAs and the introduction of a ‘fairness’ test – a major watering down of WorkChoices on a key aspect of public concern, rather than just an advertising campaign – made any difference to the basic yes/no question (Megalogenis’s article doesn’t say when in 2007 Essential Media polled).
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Over-educated graduates, again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The annual ABS Education and Work report is out today, and so another round in the Birrell vs Norton dispute as to whether we have too few, or too many, graduates for labour force needs.

This is the first Education and Work survey using the ABS’s new occupational classifications. This mucks up my time series, but by abolishing the ‘associate professional’ classification ends my indecision as to whether these occupations should be counted as ‘graduate’ or not. Some of the occupations formerly classified as ‘associate professional’ have been transferred to the ‘professional’ or ‘managerial’ classifications that graduates typically aspire to, while others are now in the new categories of ‘technicians and trade workers’, ‘clerical and administrative service workers’, and ‘community and personal service workers’. (It was the mixed nature of the ‘associate professional’ category that made be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the Birrell case, and count these as ‘graduate’ jobs.)

With this sharper definition of which jobs are graduate jobs, I arrive at a higher estimate of the proportion of employed graduates in ‘non-graduate’ occupations – up from 19.2% to 26.5%. That’s 644,000 persons. There are another 400,000 graduates who are not working, giving us more than a million graduates not using their qualifications. By contrast, there are about 1.8 million graduates who are using their qualifications.

This new data supports my argument earlier this year (pdf) that labour market shortages in graduate occupations are more due to a misallocation of places between disciplines than to a shortage of places overall.

Ad hoc arguments against civil unions

~ Andrew Norton ~ 39 Comments

My friend John Heard is always quick to jump on any suggestion of gay marriage or civil unions; so much so that two op-eds on the subject this year have had to be qualified by subsequent blog posts (here and here).

Labor is not, as John now concedes but claimed in his Australian op-ed this morning, about to introduce civil unions in breach of an election promise. What it is planning to do is move towards relationship registers and remove various forms of discrimination against gay couples, as set out in the ALP platform.

The problem with John’s anti-civil union/gay marriage stance is that though his position on this issue is essentially the Catholic one, that’s a hard argument to make in a minority Catholic country with a strong tradition of secular politics.

So he is forced to adopt various ad hoc arguments that provide no solid basis for an anti-civil union/gay marriage argument. The problems of ad hocery are well-summarised in this passage from today’s op-ed:
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Does FEE-HELP inflate fees?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

In this week’s Higher Education Supplement in The Australian, higher education commentator Gavin Moodie offers the Liberal Opposition some policy advice. Some of it, such as introducing vouchers, unsurprisingly I think is sound. However there is also this:

There would have to be a cap on fees because the whole point of an income-contingent loan is to insulate students from the immediate cost of student fees, thus removing any price discipline on tuition fees as the US has found much to its cost.

This was an issue discussed at a workshop on the FEE-HELP loan scheme in Canberra this week. The idea behind a student loans scheme is, of course, to help students pay more than they would if tuition fees had to be paid upfront. To the extent that there is historic underinvestment in education, we would expect price increases when a loans scheme is introduced.

In the not-for-profit private non-university higher education sector this is what seems to have happened, with substantial fee increases observed in most of the institutions for which I have data in the year they received access to FEE-HELP, or the following year. But is this removing ‘any price discipline’? I doubt this. Their fees are still below what a public university would receive for a Commonwealth-supported place in the same discipline.
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The real greenhouse denialists

~ Andrew Norton ~ 36 Comments

Greenpeace says that its Newspoll on greenhouse issues shows Kevin Rudd would make himself popular by taking radical steps to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions:

[Greenpeace head of campaigns Steve] Campbell said that this week Mr Rudd had the opportunity to show leadership at the Bali climate talks and help gain consensus on the 25-40% range of reductions.

“This poll shows that such a move would be extremely popular with the people of Australia, who delivered Mr Rudd a firm mandate at the last election, and want him to take even stronger action by reducing Australia’s emissions within his first term,” he said.

Actually, the poll (which to Greenpeace’s credit they make available in full) again shows how tricky this issue is for any governmment.

There is the usual overwhelming endorsement of action to reduce greenhouse emissions. It’s when we get to how this is to be done that, also as usual, things start to get complicated.

One question asks:

Do you agree or disagree that government should begin phasing out existing coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy generation within the next three years?

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Australia’s surprisingly secure workers, part 4

~ Andrew Norton ~ 31 Comments

Another Roy Morgan job security survey is out today, and yet again they fail to find the job insecurity the unions would have us believe WorkChoices is causing.

According to the ACTU in March 2007:

Job security for Australian workers has been eroded – with 3,761,000 Australian workers employed in businesses with less than 100 staff having lost any protection from being unfairly dismissed.

That’s about 35% of all workers at increased risk of being ‘unfairly dismissed’. Yet by how much has the proportion of people feeling their jobs are safe gone down? One percentage point over the last year, and three percentage points since WorkChoices was introduced, to 80% of all workers believing that their present job is safe. Perhaps there is a very small WorkChoices effect there, but that 80% is higher than it was between 1999 and 2004.

Another question asks whether, if the respondent became unemployed, he or she could find another job fairly quickly. 72% of respondents thought they could find another job fairly quickly – the highest figure since Morgan started asking the question in 1975, when 57% of respondents thought that they could find a job fairly quickly. The lowest ever result was 38% in 1992.

The two questions highlight a difference between job security and employment security. All other things being equal, a highly-regulated labour market makes it less likely that someone will be dismissed from the particular job they have now. So it increases job security. But all other things being equal, a highly-regulated labour market will also make it less likely that employers will take on new staff. So this lessens employment security, the confidence workers have that they will have a job, even if not necessarily the job they have now.

But the job security statistics suggest that employment laws are not the major influence on either job or employment security. Commercial considerations are the biggest factor, and relationships within the workplace probably the next most important.

A bloggish debate briefly continues – against Peter Whiteford

~ Andrew Norton ~ 60 Comments

At the risk of adding day 7 to the bloggish debate, I want to respond to Peter Whiteford’s comments at Andrew L’s blog. Whiteford says:

My reaction to Andrew N’s first post may seem casual, but it is where is the evidence that Australian public schooling is the sort of disaster that you seem to imply that it is. Are Australian intellectual elites all drawn from private school backgrounds? Does everyone who went to a public school get an inferior education? Does everyone who went to a private school get a superior education? What is the variation in educational achievement by type of school attended, and what other factors apart from type of school have influenced these outcomes? Evidence please.

Actually, I barely mentioned these conventional public-private debates – and not at all in the first post. As a classical liberal, I think there are inherent political and social problems with monopoly education, regardless of how well public schools teach the 3Rs. I was trying to bring out the philosophical differences between Andrew L and myself, which in fact did happen.

He’s happy with state indoctrination (though eventually conceding that public education doesn’t make much if any difference to civics); I’m not. A preference for live-and-let-live in a pluralistic society, rather than trying to get everyone to believe the same things, is one of the oldest ideas in liberalism, and still one worth arguing for in my view.

Consistent with this, surveys of why parents prefer private schools show that values-type issues are high on the list. This is not to say that government schools don’t incuclate values of some sort, but these aren’t necessarily the values parents want taught. We could hardly expect a single system to reflect the diversity of Australia, and it doesn’t.
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Bloggish debate concludes, comments open

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

Andrew Leigh and I weren’t sure how our ‘bloggish debate’ on whether public schools should be privatised would go. Can you transport an old-media leisurely exchange of views to an instant feedback forum?

The posts, with comments off, did seem to lie dead on the page. They did not give me my blogging fix, or I suspect the fix of the regular commenters who didn’t want a week off from arguing among themselves – I had to write other things during the week (Andrew L restrained himself, but he has more of a life than I do).

But the idea of a bloggish debate seemed novel enough that we received far more links from other blogs than was otherwise likely, if we had we each written what we wrote separately. We even hit one of the big American blogs, Marginal Revolution, which for the first time knocked off Google to become the largest single source of referrals to my blog. My daily traffic this week has been about 40% higher than my long-term average, despite the closed comments, so overall the experiment has to be classed a success.

I’m not sure that I would make a habit of it though. I found writing it harder than writing a normal blog post, because it is more difficult to make the structure work: the challenge was to make a coherent case of my own while still responding to what Andrew was saying. It was easier in this case than my gay bar door policy debate, where the exchange went off on a tangent immediately and I had to simply ignore what Alan Soble was saying to get it back to what I wanted to argue. But the two Andrews debate still required more thinking about structure than normal for a short piece of work. It would have been impossible with comments open and many more threads to deal with.

If it worked for readers, it was perhaps because he and I were capable of having a discussion. With Soble, I was on such a different intellectual wavelength that there was little common ground on which to engage. What do you do with someone who thinks that he, sitting in Philadelphia, is better able to judge how lesbians in The Peel behave than The Peel’s owner? With Andrew, I have some ideological disagreements, but we have common views about what counts as evidence.

Anyway, I’m interested in people’s thoughts on both the format and the substantive issues. Comments are open on all the ‘bloggish debate’ posts.

Should public schools be privatised? Day 6

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Day 6

[Introduction] [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3] [Day 4] [Day 5]

Andrew Leigh:

Dear A.N.,

What a brutal final paragraph! So if I don’t support your plan, I guess that makes me a conservative who doesn’t care about teacher quality. Few arrows could have better found their target.

I’m pleased that you and I have found common ground on civics, at least. I began by claiming that public schools provided a common crucible. You said that public school civics was in crisis. But since neither of us could provide empirical evidence, we weren’t willing to stand fiercely by our claims (incidentally, I think this is why people like John Quiggin and I enjoy arguing with you so much more than we enjoy arguing with many people on the right of the political spectrum). Perhaps one day, policymakers will have some believable causal estimates of the impact of school type on some set of ‘good’ civic indicators. In the absence of that, only the firebrands will be able to stay passionate about that one.

So now we’re left with the more traditional economic arguments. You take the view that privatised public schools will be more efficient and more equitable. I think the opposite is true on both counts. Whether it’s for political or economic reasons, companies like Edison Schools that have set up to run large numbers of schools have done very badly. According to their Wikipedia entry, their costs are higher than the public system, and they have still failed to make a profit in all except one quarter of their existence. A result like this makes me concerned about the viability of such a model in Australia. If private schools have one-third of the market when they get 55% of the government funding, can we really be confident that they could make a viable go of it in the rest of the market with 100% of the government funding? Shocking as it may sound coming from an economist, I think there may be some things that governments do better than markets, and one of them is running schools.
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Should public schools be privatised? Day 5

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Day 5

[Introduction] [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3] [Day 4]

Dear A.L,

As you suggest, former private school students might show more civic attitudes and behaviour than former government school students, but that doesn’t show that the school is the cause. Identifying causes requires much more research than I have done. I mentioned this finding not as an argument for private schools (it may or may not be that), but because you suggested that public schools provide a shared ‘basic understanding of democratic values’. I say, consistent with the evidence I think, that we will get that either way. Civics is a neutral factor in this debate.

If you are overstating the importance of civics in choosing a school system, I think you are understating how radical my proposal is. I don’t want to fund private schools on the same basis as public schools; quite the reverse I want to fund what are currently public schools on the same in-principle basis as private schools are now, according to their students’ socio-economic background.

I’m open to argument on the best measure of socioeconomic background. The current system uses proxies based on where the student lives, you favour more accurate ATO income statistics to create—if I read you correctly—personalised, income-tested vouchers.

The ATO may be the best original data source, but I prefer funding schools on an average basis, rather than via vouchers. I have the usual concerns about the work disincentives linked to means testing, but from an educational perspective individualised funding would encourage parents who must pay high fees anyway to send their kids to a high-fee school in an affluent area. That would replicate the lost peer effect problem that you mention.

Unlike the public school lobby, I don’t think kids should be conscripted into providing peer effects for their classmates. But if they voluntarily attend a school with a lower average SES rating their own family’s, everyone may end up better off. Each group takes advantage of the other group’s socioeconomic status.
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