Author: Andrew Norton

Should the Liberals adopt ‘progressive liberalism’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

A recurrent critique of the Liberal Party is that it is more a conservative party than a liberal party, and that it should become more liberal. This critique has a libertarian version (for example my article on ‘big government conservatism’), and also a ‘progressive’ version, which has found its way into book form twice since the early 1990s: Christopher Puplick’s Is the Party Over?: The Future of the Liberals (1994) and Greg Barns’ What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party? (2003), which I rather unkindly reviewed for Quadrant.

After the 24 November defeat, it was the ‘progressives’ who moved first to fill the ideological vacuum left by Howard’s departure. In The Age at the weekend, Victorian Liberal Senator Judith Troeth told us that:

the party has an opportunity to reinvent itself and recapture the inclusive and progressive liberalism that once made it electorally strong. (emphasis added)

While some aspects of ‘progressive liberalism’ are in my view worthy, as John Roskam rightly points out it is not an election-winning strategy for the Liberal Party. Can anyone name an election the Liberals won because they were more ‘progressive’ than Labor?
Continue reading “Should the Liberals adopt ‘progressive liberalism’?” →

Should public schools be privatised? Day 4

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

Day 4

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

From Andrew Leigh:

Dear A.N.,

Let’s be careful about what we claim for private schools. The fact that private school attendance is positively correlated with civic activity doesn’t tell us anything about the causal impact. It could be that private school kids have rich parents, don’t move house as often, or any of a dozen unobservables. Just as the positive correlation between AWAs and wages doesn’t provide any useful causal evidence, so too correlation doesn’t mean causation in the case of public and private schools. My guess is that if we take a given child, she would be no more civically active if she attended a private school than if she attended a public school.

While I don’t think private schools have a special gift for turning kids into what Robert Putnam would call “social capitalists”, neither do I think that the typical private schools does a worse job of teaching tolerance than the typical public school. That’s basically why I support private schools getting government dollars: the per-child government funding to private schools is only about 55% of the per-child funding to a public school, so the taxpayer saves 45%. It may be the case that private schools have some positive externality (Caroline Hoxby argues that competition from private schools has the potential to ‘lift all boats’), or negative externality (if private schools skim the cream, the peer effects in public schools may go down), but I basically think that the best thing about private schools is that every kid who goes there saves you and me about $5000 ($11,000-$6000).

As I understand it, you’d now like to fund private schools on the same basis as public schools. Continue reading “Should public schools be privatised? Day 4” →

Should public schools be privatised? Day 3

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

Day 3

[Introduction] [Day 1] [Day 2]

Dear A.L.,

Periodically, our politicians rediscover civics in schools. In 1994, the Keating-appointed Civics Expert Group released a report supporting civics and citizenship education. One of their reasons was that a survey, which they had commissioned, revealed widespread ignorance of our political institutions.

Two things are important about the report’s date. The first is that it was published about 120 years after education became free and compulsory, yet neither attribute had yielded much political knowledge. The second is that was published about 140 years after democratic institutions were established in Australia, and 90 years after universal suffrage. Australia is a long-term successful democracy despite the absence or failure of civics education in our public schools.

While understanding political institutions can do no harm and would probably do some good, you don’t need it to acquire democratic values. The citizens of stable democracies like the US and the UK show similar levels of ignorance to our own. Democracy is so deep in the culture as to not need teaching or defending in principle, even while we argue endlessly over the detail. Children much too young to participate in elections intuitively understand that voting is a fair way of deciding things.

There is no reason to believe that private schools would challenge this democratic ethos. Surveys show that current ex-private school students are more active in political affairs and more strongly in favour of democratic rights than those who went to government schools. (Though generally there are only minor opinion differences regardless of school background.) In my view, preserving public education to teach civics is a non-solution to a non-problem.
Continue reading “Should public schools be privatised? Day 3” →

Will we get a new opposition party?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 40 Comments

There is a now familiar aftermath to significant Liberal defeats. People say that the Liberal Party is finished, and needs replacing as the opposition party. BA Santamaria took this view in the mid-1980s (see his essay in Australia at the Crossroads). Norman Abjorensen is the most frequent advocate of this position today, in his rather feverish Crikey contributions and elsewhere. John Quiggin has joined in the funeral rites, and Steve Biddulph argued in the SMH last week that the Greens would replace the Liberals as the main opposition party to Labor.

While I can see the theoretical argument as to why existing political alignments don’t neatly match the Australian population or contemporary issues, in practice the major parties are deeply entrenched. In the last 60 years, only three minor parties have had a lasting parliamentary presence outside of a Coalition with the Liberals, and of these only the Greens have a secure future.

While the Green sociological base is large enough to give them a base vote larger than the Democrats, it is not yet clear that the Greens can genuinely make the transition from an issue movement to a mass political party, with all the compromises and deals that would inevitably require. The consternation caused by the very idea of a preference deal with the Liberals in the 2006 Victorian state election, even though the Greens are unlikely to win lower-house seats without Liberal preferences, highlights the problem. Identity politics and democratic politics sit uneasily together.

The 7.5% Green House of Representatives vote in 2007 over-states their reliable support. Continue reading “Will we get a new opposition party?” →

Should public schools be privatised? Day 2

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

[Introduction] [Day 1]

From Andrew Leigh:

Dear A.N,

I’ve enjoyed your writings on education for some time, so am chuffed to be discussing perhaps the biggest issue in education policy: should we have public schools at all? I’m also pleased for another reason – after a year of getting beaten up by the AEU and ACER for my work on teacher quality, I’m finally lining up with the comrades on an education policy issue.

Our question concerns one of the great puzzles of public finance. Across the globe, there is huge variation in whether governments play an active role in banking, airlines, pensions, and even health. But so far as I am aware, every government in the world runs a large share of the schools in that country. As Julius Sumner Miller (a privately-paid educator, you’ll point out) used to say on Australian television, ‘Why is it so?’

You suggest one answer: governments use public education as a means of indoctrinating their citizenry. I don’t deny that this can be important. My mother – an educational anthropologist – wrote her PhD thesis on the way in which the Indonesian government used schools in Aceh to indoctrinate young Acehnese minds into the belief that their identity was as Indonesians first, and Acehnese second.

Still, indoctrination isn’t all bad. I’d like to live in an Australia where children shared a basic understanding of democratic values, and understood our geography and our history. I’m more confident that public schools will achieve this than I am about private schools. Sure, lots of people have been fighting over what should be in the school curriculum, but we’ve also been hotly arguing about refugee policy and water policy. Sometimes conflict is a sign that an issue matters.
Continue reading “Should public schools be privatised? Day 2” →

Should public schools be privatised? Day 1

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

[Introduction]
Day 1

Hi A.L,

According to Australian Education Union election advertising, we need a federal government that will put public education first. But do we need public education at all? Would there be anyone calling for it, if we did not have it already?

People are used to the idea of state schools, so they don’t think about how uneasily government-controlled education fits with liberal democracy. If someone said that Australia’s media should be owned by the state, with journalists told by the state what they should say, with media audiences examined to make sure they had absorbed the official line, there would be predictable and justifiable outrage.

Yet public education means essentially that for Australia’s young people. The government owns most schools, employs most teachers, tells them what to teach through state-set curricula, and examines students to make sure they have it right—even kids escaping to private schools can’t avoid these last two aspects of state-run education. And unlike state-owned media, there are severe consequences for ignoring state education.

Across the political spectrum, activists want to use public education to influence young minds. In his book Dumbing Down, Kevin Donnelly documents how left-wing academics and teachers shape curricula to fit their political agenda. In government, the Liberal Party proposed a national history curriculum, which was widely seen as another front in the so-called ‘culture wars’.

Rather than fostering social unity, as some of its supporters claim, state-controlled education is a source of division and nastiness. Instead of allowing different groups to devise their own curriculum, and letting parents choose between them, we fight over a common curriculum. The public education lobby stirs class and sectarian resentment in its attempts to take funding from private schools.

And what is it, can you remind me, that makes public education worth preserving?

Regards

A.N

A bloggish debate

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

As Andrew Leigh explains, this week we are trying something a little different, what he calls a ‘bloggish debate’. He mentions Slate‘s Breakfast Table as a model, but the exchange of letters has long been used by print publications in the same or subsequent issues to debate issues. Prospect runs debates , as does Philosophers’ Magazine, where my debate with Alan Soble on whether gay bars should be able to keep out women and straights is to appear.

Andrew and I will discuss a rather more important issue than a gay bar’s door policy, whether public schools should be privatised. The same material will appear on both blogs. I’m going to turn comments off as we post on alternate days, and then open them when we are finished.

Troeth faction splits

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Senator Troeth, a former party vice-president who has been in Parliament for 14 years, told The Age the Costello-dominated committee’s decision to override Mr Baillieu’s bid to run a candidate in last month’s byelection for the state seat of Albert Park was “simply disgraceful”.

– Victorian Liberal Senator Judith Troeth, reported on page 1 of today’s Age.

Despite John Howard accepting responsibility for last weekend’s result, it cannot all be laid at his feet. Many of the problems the party faced were caused by a weak and subservient organisational wing that lacked the courage to stand up to the parliamentary wing.

– Victorian Liberal Senator Judith Troeth, in her opinion piece published in today’s Age.

Election 2007 celebrity politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

One upside of the 2007 election was the failure of celebrity politics. Big names and big dollars were after Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth, yet there was a swing to him of 1.19%, against a NSW swing away from the government of 5.65%.

Across the harbour in Bennelong, Labor’s celebrity candidate Maxine McKew, though clearly with qualifications for the job beyond a long TV career, won with a swing of 5.38%, slightly below the NSW average. Perhaps a less-well-known Labor candidate wouldn’t have been able to get Labor over the line in Bennelong against a Prime Minister, but the celebrity factor isn’t obvious in the numbers.

Nor was a celebrity factor clearly showing for former TV weatherman Mike Bailey, running against Joe Hockey in North Sydney. His swing of 4.8% was also below the NSW state average.

In the South Australian seat of Boothby, Nicole Cornes probably did get a celebrity effect – far more publicity for her blunders than she might have received had she been more obscure. She did get a swing to Labor of 2.33%, but that was only just over a third of the overall South Australian swing.

Many voters probably do make their election decision for superficial reasons, but in 2007 their interest in celebrities did not seem to be among them.

The literacy challenge for our part-time education minister

~ Andrew Norton ~ 60 Comments

I didn’t think Stephen Smith’s performance as Shadow Education Minister warranted his appointment as Minister, but creating a part-time Education Minister – Julia Gillard will have to combine it with being Deputy Prime Minister, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister and Minister for Social Inclusion – is bordering on bizarre. It has unfortunate echoes of the two Ministers for everything in the early days of the Whitlam government.

While the media was preoccupied yesterday with ministries and Opposition leaders (another eyebrow raising decision), the ABS issued a report showing just why we need a full-time education minister. It was their second adult literacy survey.

It shows a slight prose literacy improvement on 1996, but still nearly half of all Australians are below the level 3 skills regarded as the ‘minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy’. The same is true of document literacy. (Prose literacy is understanding narrative texts; document literacy is the ability to locate and use information in various formats, including schedules, maps, tables and charts).

On the numeracy scale, more than half of all Australians were below skill level 3, and for a problem-solving scale, only 30% were at levels 3, 4 or 5.

There is also a further clue as to why 20% of graduates don’t have jobs suitable for graduates (pdf). By interesting coincidence, about 20% of bachelor-degree holders have only level 1 or 2 prose and document literacy. They are slightly worse on the numeracy scale, and much worse on the problem-solving scale. Further information is needed on whether these graduates are migrants, and their disciplinary backgrounds.

Regardless of the situation with graduates, there is clearly much work to be done to improve literacy. But will Gillard have any time to do it?