Observations from Carlton's lone classical liberal
The Premier even thanked the media, saying he respected the role journalists play. Said state rounds ere among [the] most professional in country. (emphasis added)
But even the most professional reporters can include a typo and miss a word when breaking a big story, the surprise resignation of Victorian Premier Steve Bracks. From The Age online, 10.54am.
At the start of the month, I suggested that Guy Pearse, author of High and Dry, a critique of the Howard governmet’s climate change policies, use his wesbite’s ‘Clarifications and corrections’ page to correct the claim that Greg Lindsay had any responsibility for the government’s policies.
My argument was based on the facts that Lindsay has had nothing to say on the topic (which Pearse admits), and that the CIS had published only a handful of articles on climate change, and none for several years. It seemed to me to be a wildly implausible notion of ‘influence’, that all you have to do is print a few pieces and – hey presto! – the government adopts your policy. Strangely, given this theory of influence, my dozens of articles on higher education reform over more than seven years, not to mention my prior role as the actual Ministerial adviser on higher education, have failed to secure the desired outcome. Ditto many CIS policy suggestions on tax, welfare, and other subjects.
Now Pearse has responded to my post, and though he does, near the end, back-pedal a bit, it is mostly a flimsy exercise in guilt by association.
Continue reading “Guy Pearse’s high and dry argument”
The people who write Graduate Careers Australia’s starting salaries report must love their time series of graduate salaries as a percentage of average weekly earnings, because they keep highlighting it in their report and in their media release, even though they are coming close to admitting is is meaningless statistical junk.
I can see why they want to keep it – it goes back nearly 30 years, to 1977 (the data in the report released yesterday is for people employed in early 2006). On surprisingly few topics do we have consistent data going back that far. And for people considering the costs and benefits of university study, it is useful to know their likely earnings compared to the alternatives. But as the Graduate Salaries 2006 report says:
…it is important to note that average weekly earnings may be positively affected over time as more and more graduates enter the workforce. As their careers progress their salaries grow, overall average weekly earnings are pushed up.
The only thing wrong with that is the ‘may’. They have a table showing full-time workers with a diploma and above going from 19.7% in 1998 to 27.8% in 2006. Using only bachelor and above and all workers, ABS Education and Work shows an increase from 14.5% in 1994 to 23.9% in 2006. I’m not sure what proportion of workers had degrees in 1977, but we’ve gone from graduates having a small impact on male average weekly earnings to a large impact – nearly a quarter of all earners. As bachelor degree graduates typically earn half as much again as people with Year 12 qualifications only, the statistical effect is not trivial.
This isn’t the only problem. Continue reading “Are graduates earning less compared to other workers?”
Younger readers of this blog (Sukrit and Leon I know of, and maybe some lurkers?) might be interested in the CIS Liberty and Society programme, a weekend live-in seminar on classical liberal ideas. The next one is in Sydney over the weekend of 14-16 September, with 6 August the deadline for applications. It’s free, and the CIS will also pay most of your travel expenses if you live outside of Sydney.
For people who have been in the past (it’s been going since 1996) we are planning drinks in Melbourne on 23 August. I’ve emailed everyone we have records of living in Melbourne, but there were a few bouncebacks and there are probably some people who have moved here since they attended L&S. If you are interested in coming email me anorton AT cis.org.au
And for other people who have been in the past, there are a couple of Facebook groups:
This one set up by Jacques Chester, now in Perth.
And this one set up by Robert Wiblin, who is at the ANU.
The people at Catallaxy are understandably unimpressed with the reasoning in today’s Clive Hamilton op-ed. Hamilton’s argument (such as it is), using the jailing of tax-evading music promoter Glenn Wheatley as a news hook, is summarised in this passage:
Despite their crimes, some of the tax cheats may feel a sense of grievance — because for some years our public culture and our political leaders have provided justification for tax shirking.
While the Federal Government has said that it will crack down on tax cheats, for years it has actively undermined public confidence in the legitimacy of taxation. Each time the Treasurer or the Prime Minister says he wants to cut the “burden” of taxes to put money back in the pockets of those who have worked hard to earn it, he buttresses the widespread view that governments are out to rip off the poor old taxpayer.
Conservative ideologues go even further, reinforcing the idea that taxation is theft. The Centre for Independent Studies, an influential right-wing think tank favoured by the Government, ceaselessly promotes the view that government is inherently hostile to individual interests and set on exploiting the taxpayer for no good reason.
…If you take this view of the government as a hostile force why would you pay your taxes? If taxation is theft, tax evasion is not only defensible in itself but a blow against an oppressive force.
According to Clive:
These arguments form part of a sustained shift away from thinking of ourselves as citizens with responsibilities to the public interest and towards thinking of ourselves as individuals with responsibilities to no one but ourselves and our families.
Hamilton’s argument is, on a moment’s reflection, very weak Continue reading “Did Glenn Wheatley evade tax because he read a CIS discussion paper?”
According to Mark Davis’s essay in Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, the ‘decline of the literary paradigm’ – fewer works of literary fiction being published, and reduced public intellectual influence of literary authors –
can be understood in terms of broader social and governmental shifts related to globalisation, such as the decline of the postwar consensus (‘welfare state’) politics and their supplanting by a new consensus based around free-market notions of deregulation, privatisation and trade liberalisation, and the rise of the global information economy.
He does get a little more specific (an earlier version of his chapter can be downloaded here) pointing to allowing parallel importing – ie, letting booksellers import books that publishers fail to release promptly in the Australian market – and abolition of subsidies for printing Australian books, which he suggests disproportionately affected literary fiction, since most illustrated titles were already printed overseas.
But it seems very unlikely that policy changes have greatly affected the state of Australian literary fiction. Continue reading “The welcome demise of literary protectionism”
“employed by CIS, which does not accept government money”
Is it not the case that there is a special section of the Income Tax Assessment Act which makes donations specifically to the CIS tax deductible (along with donations to a particular left leaning think tank)?
That’s commenter Spiros on the issue of who pays my CIS salary.
The argument here is that because donations to the CIS (please make one:)) are tax deductible that is a loss to the government and therefore the CIS (and through it, me) is in receipt of government money. In broad terms, this is a widely accepted type of analysis with the Budget papers providing estimates of ‘tax expenditures’ and my fellow critic of big government Des Moore including them in his estimates (pdf) of the size of government.
I don’t dispute that tax expenditures are a significant aspect of government policy – like ordinary taxing and spending, and like much other regulation, tax exemptions, deductions and concessions are (desirably or not) distortionary in that they steer behaviour towards particular activities and (implicitly) away from other activities. Tax expenditures are criticised for receiving less scrutiny than direct expenditure. And as the government still has to raise a certain amount of money to meet its outlay commitments, it means that other tax rates have to be higher to bring in the required amount of revenue.
I am not, however, entirely convinced by the standard analysis. Continue reading “Don’t tax and spend?”
When Howard biographer Peter van Onselen interviewed Peter Costello last year, the Treasurer was doing more than just going over old issues like the 1994 leadership agreement or the 2001 Shane Stone memo leak reported in this morning’s papers. He also had an eye to how his term as Treasurer would be seen, in light of criticisms of the Howard government’s spending record:
Mr Costello, frustrated at being overruled by the free-spending Mr Howard in expenditure review committee meetings before the 2001 election, would throw his hands in the air and exclaim: “What is the point of these meetings?”
This is a theme he returned to at a speech to a Liberal student function a couple of weeks ago, when he wryly noted that very few Ministers ever bring proposals for exepnditure reductions to the Budget process. Ministers get blamed for results their Departments announce, and so the Treasurer has received flak for a lack of spending discipline by the Commonwealth government.
His sensitivity on this point was such that he replied to my Policy article on ‘big government conservatism’, with his article in the current issue of Policy arguing for the government’s record on spending as a proportion of GDP (see also my reply and Robert Carling’s response).
Though I disagree that the government’s spending record is good (though as with economic conditions generally, it is important to acknowledge that it could have been a lot worse), I haven’t been allocating blame to Costello personally. I avoided even mentioning him in my big government conservatism piece. It is very unlikely that he dreamt up many if any of the government’s big-spending programmes, and FTB in particular has the Prime Minister’s fingerprints all over it. Unfortunately for the Treasurer, though, he is the one who has to go out and impose taxes, and he is the one who may well be seen, at least in the right-of-centre version of history, as the man who did not, or could not, take advantage of very favourable economic conditions to reduce taxes futher.
As commenter Richard notes, Oznomics author Andrew Charlton has an op-ed in today’s SMH arguing that:
The most popular misconception in economics and politics is that if the economy is humming along, the government must be doing a good job – it must be a capable economic manager and its policies must be working. … The truth, however, is that politicians have much less control over the economy than they would have us believe.
But what does the public actually believe? Increasingly, it seems, they have become sceptical of claims that the government deserves credit for a strong economy. At each of the last six elections, the Australian Election Survey has asked:
[compared with 12 months ago], what effect do you think they [the government] have had on the general economic situation in Australia as a whole?
At each election, the proportion saying ‘not much difference’ has increased, starting at 39% in 1990 and reaching 57% in 2004. In the same time, Continue reading “Are people taking economic growth for granted?”
If publisher Random House’s poorly-maintained website is a guide, Andrew Charlton‘s book Oznomics: Inside the myth of Australia’s economic superheroes, was going to be more humorously titled Does My Boom Look Big In This?: The truth behind Oznomics. But with the precedent of the best-selling Freakonomics and the local Gittinomics Random House must have thought another nomics neologism was more likely to sell books.
Oznomics is a textbook-polemic hybrid. It’s part of a welcome trend of books trying to simplify and popularise economics, taking us through some fairly orthodox micro and macro-economic ideas in the Australian context. But it mixes this with more partisan goals and and a more aggressive tone than the other pop economics books of the last few years.
So along with explanations of why protectionism is bad, we get the protectionists continually referred to as ‘sandbaggers’, because when the ‘tidal wave’ of competition arrives, their first instinct is to ‘stack sandbags on the beach to protect their territory’. The metaphor doesn’t really work as it relies too much on us remembering his original tidal wave metaphor (and how often do Australians sandbag beaches?), and ends up looking like a shot that is a cheap as the Chinese goods that the protectionists are trying to keep out. I’m as against protectionism as Charlton, but the insult was irritating me, and I expect it would be more off-putting for others less used to free trade ideas than I am. People need to be taken gently through counter-intuitive ideas.
And anyone who has ever dreamt of voting Liberal – and there are plenty of protectionists among that group who need to hear Charlton’s message – Continue reading “Oznomics”
Andrew Norton 