Author: Andrew Norton

Just in case you think your taxes are too low…

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Here’s a special opportunity for those Australians who think that, even though the federal government is already slugging them for $10 billion more than it needs to finance its spendthrift programmes, they would nevertheless like to give it some more money. It is the Higher Education Endowment Fund, in which part of the Budget surplus will be stashed, and legislation introduced yesterday will make public donations to it tax deductible.

Sadly, this looks like more evidence that my comrades in Canberra have lost the plot. I doubt even lefties think people should donate money to the state, or even if they do are not so delusional as to think that anyone would.

If you would like to give money to universities any of them will take your gift without spending needing to be first approved by the Minister. And you still get your tax deduction.

Biased poll respondents on biased journalists

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

There was more evidence in a Morgan poll earlier this week that ABC bias is perhaps the most lost of the lost conservative causes. In Morgan’s survey of media bias, just 2.5% of respondents could specify the ABC or one of its presenters as being biased to the left.

Overall, the survey suggests that perceptions of media bias are more the result of respondent bias than of specific grievances. While 24% of respondents thought that newspaper journalists were too left-leaning, only 3.5% could name a specific journalist or newspaper as being too left-wing. Similarly, of the 19% of respondents who thought that newspaper journalists were too right-leaning, only 3.5% could name a specific journalist or newspaper. Further, most of the journalists nominated as ‘biased’ to the left or right are columnists, and to say that a columnist is biased isn’t necessarily a criticism.

There is a similar phenomenon at work in attitudes towards politicians, in which politicians in general receive lower ratings for trust than the most well-known politicians (including the Prime Minister, even after years of people accusing him of being ‘tricky’ or a liar). Stereotypes are poor predictors of attitudes to specific members of the class of person being stereotyped.

Strained logic on full-fee university places

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

The Mercedes-Benz CLK 63 AMG is an impressive car, but at $200,000 it is rather out of my price range. But am I excluded from car ownership as a result? If you apply the logic of the National Union of Students, the answer to that question is yes. In response to the annual media kerfuffle over $100,000 and $200,000 university courses reported in each year’s Good Universities Guide, NUS issued a media release:

The National Union of Students called on the government to review its position on full fee paying places in order to provide opportunities to all students, regardless of whether they have wealthy families or are prepared to take up a $200,000 loan. National President, Mr Michael Nguyen said, “The prospect of going to university and graduating with a huge debt really makes it difficult for young people to be able to go to university unless they come from wealthy families.”

Of course, very few of the 663,000 Australians enrolled in Commonwealth-connnected higher education institutions last year were paying $200,000 or anything like it. Many of the most expensive courses are in fact double degrees which in practice cost less than the figure reported in the Good Universities Guide. When I have looked into this in the past the GUG assumes that people pay full-fees for both courses. However, as the full-fee ENTER for the more prestigious course is usually above the HECS ENTER for the less prestigious course, any students would pay full fees for one and HECS for the other. I haven’t had time to do more than quick check of this year’s GUG, but for Monash at least the same problem is there. Monash’s website states for Arts/Law:
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How much does the public know about interest rates?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

Much election-year political point-scoring assumes that public knowledge of economics is minimal. In 2004, the Coalition encouraged us to believe that the double-digit interest rates experienced during the last Labor government might return with a new Labor government. This year, Labor is suggesting, with all the fine-print qualifications the Coalition attached to interest rates last time, that it might be able to do something about grocery and petrol prices.

How easily fooled is the public on these things? On interest rates, answers to questions in the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes suggested a public without the level of policy understanding needed to evaluate the government’s claims. Respondents were asked how much knowledge they had of the role of the Reserve Bank. 6.5% said they had ‘a lot’ of knowledge, and another 31% said that they had ‘some’ knowledge. The rest admitted little or no knowledge.

Yet even these numbers may be overstating the public’s formal understanding. Another question asked how much knowledge the respondent had of how monetary policy is determined. Given that the Reserve Bank determines monetary policy all 37.5% with some or a lot of knowledge of its role ought to have also been knowledgeable about monetary policy. But instead 5% claimed ‘a lot’ of knowledge of how monetary policy is determined and 25% ‘some’ knowledge’. Some of those who think they know about the RBA need to visit its website.
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Menzies exhumed again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

When will poor old Robert Menzies be left to rest in peace? Time and time and time again this crusty old conservative is brought back to life as a more liberal Liberal than John Howard. Former Victorian Liberal politician Robert Dean gives the argument yet another run in (where else?) The Age this morning.

As with previous such accounts, there are some strange views of what happened in the past:

His passion for equality of opportunity was nowhere more evident than his belief in free education. He called for a 10-fold increase in university entrants.

While the Menzies government did provide scholarships to some university students, it did not introduce free university education, which came with Whitlam’s government in 1974. I’m not sure that he called for a 10-fold increase in university students, but it certainly didn’t happen during his term. Numbers actually fell in the early Menzies years, and eventually peaked at about 20% of current numbers.

And in criticising the government over Iraq, Dean says: Continue reading “Menzies exhumed again” →

The dog whistle that wasn’t

~ Andrew Norton ~ 28 Comments

The most interesting finding in the Newspoll reported in today’s Australian was the question on Kevin Andrews’ handling of the Haneef case. At least until he released part of the transcript of Haneef’s discussion with his brother about leaving Australia Andrews was being punished by the media like no other Minister in recent times.

Yet even with the public seemingly willing to believe the worst about the Coalition, Newspoll finds more people in favour of the way Andrews handled the case than against, with 49% approving and 36% disapproving (with a fairly large 15% uncommitted).

I suspect this fits with a pattern of views on migration. The public supports migration when it is seen to be in the interests of Australia. The key change under the Howard government has been that the migration system meets this criterion. Even though migration has increased considerably opposition to it has halved since 1996. Murray Goot and Ian Watson report that between 1996 and 2003 the proportion of people thinking immigrants are good for the economy increased from 49% to 69%, the proportion thinking immigrants take jobs from people born in Australia has dropped from 40% to 25%, and the people thinking immigrants increase crime rates has dropped from 45% to 34%.
Continue reading “The dog whistle that wasn’t” →

Affluence grows, poverty shrinks

~ Andrew Norton ~ 34 Comments

The Age‘s take on yesterday’s ABS Household Income and Income Distribution 2005-06 was predictable: ‘Rich are richer, while the have-less struggle’ read its headline. Yet what was more interesting was how little impact on overall inequality the growing number of high-income households is having.

Since 1994-95 the number of households in Australia has increased by 21%. But the number of those households with gross household incomes exceeding $3,000 a week, after adjusting for inflation, is up by 172%. The proportion of households in this group has gone from 2.6% to 5.9% (though the earlier figure will be understated somewhat, as salary sacrifices are now included).

Yet the Gini coefficient is not changing much. It is a measure of inequality, where 0 would indicate every household has the same income and 1 would indicate a single household has all the income. Over the 1994-95 to 2005-06 time period the Gini coefficient has only gone from 0.302 to 0.307.

One reason is that the number of poor households, with weekly incomes below $400, is dropping. Continue reading “Affluence grows, poverty shrinks” →

Friendship and Facebook

~ Andrew Norton ~ 86 Comments

I’ve read a bit about the philosophy of friendship over the years, but none of it is much use when encountering Facebook for the first time. Thinking myself too middle-aged for what I thought to be a youth site I hadn’t even looked at it until last week, when Jacques Chester asked me to link to a Liberty and Society group and I decided (in my middle-aged caution) to check before I linked. But I had to join first, and every day since I have received emails from Facebook telling me that person X, Y or Z has added me as a ‘friend’ and wanting to confirm that we are in fact ‘friends’.

In most cases, it’s been pretty easy to ‘confirm’ these people as friends. But can I be a ‘friend’ of someone whose name and face I don’t recognise? (from the friends we have in common I presume we must have met, but I don’t remember it). Or someone whose name and face I do recognise but I haven’t seen them, been in touch with them, or even thought of them for years? On the other hand, not confirming someone as a ‘friend’ could be seen as rude. Just because I am not a friend doesn’t mean I want to make an enemy.
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What is ‘bullshitting’ in the Harry Frankfurt sense?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

David Rubie thinks I breached by own comments policy in saying:

Most critics of ‘neoliberalism’ are bullshitters in the Harry Frankfurt sense; ie not so much liars as people who just don’t care whether what they say is correct or not.

This was a reference to Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’, which became a surprise bestseller a couple of years ago when Princeton University Press put it between hardcovers.

The term ‘bullshit’ is, in most contexts, mildly vulgar, but I think Frankfurt was right to use it because it picks up a shade of meaning lacking in some of the similar words we could use to describe the statements of people saying or writing untrue things. The Wikipedia entry gives its origins as:

“Bull”, meaning nonsense, dates from the 17th century (Concise Oxford Dictionary), whereas the term “bullshit” is popularly considered to have been first used in 1915, in American slang, and to have come into popular usage only during World War II. The word “bull” itself may have derived from the Old French boul meaning “fraud, deceit” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term “bullshit” is a near synonym.

The ‘bull’ is more important than the ‘shit’, because ‘nonsense’ is the idea being picked up in using the word ‘bull’ and carried across to ‘bullshit’. When we say someone is ‘bullshitting’ we might mean that they are telling lies, but it is more likely that we are saying that they are talking nonsense, which doesn’t require them to be consciously telling untruths.
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Demo-familism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

First right-familism, then left-familism, and now demo-familism, with Victorian multi-millionaire father-of-three Labor MP Evan Thornley proposing that parents get votes they can exercise on behalf of their under-18 children.

Given Thornley’s narrow victory in the 2006 Victorian state election I can well understand why he might want an extra three votes. But what are the in-principle arguments for his proposal?:

Families are currently underrepresented in our democracy. They pay but don’t have a say. A family of five or six has no more say in our democracy than a couple of two — yet their needs and potential contribution are greater.

“Electorates with large numbers of families can have up to 30 per cent more people in them than ones that don’t. As a consequence, issues of long-term concern to families like early childhood development, education and the environment don’t get the priority they deserve in our democracy.”

The idea of plural voting has a long history. In the 19th century John Stuart Mill favoured it, on the grounds that intelligent people would cast better-informed votes: Continue reading “Demo-familism” →