Author: Andrew Norton

What is the difference between a voucher and a scholarship?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

In an article published in this morning’s Australian about the university reform proposal (pdf) launched today by the Group of Eight, journalist Dorothy Illing wrote:

AUSTRALIA’S most powerful block of universities has thrown down the gauntlet to the major parties to introduce a radical new model for higher education underpinned by student vouchers and price deregulation. ….The centrepiece of the Group of Eight plan … is a system of portable government-funded scholarships that would shift control of demand for university places away from the commonwealth. (emphasis added)

Is there a difference between ‘vouchers’ and ‘scholarships’? Politically, they have different connotations. Vouchers have long been associated with plans to end central control of public education, and the very word triggers knee-jerk negative reactions from some leftists. Scholarships, by contrast, are generally associated with reducing the cost of education to people judged academically able or financially needy. Most people intuitively think that is a good thing. It is no surprise that the Group of Eight chose the term ‘scholarships’ over ‘vouchers’.

Conceptually, however, what the Group of Eight is proposing is closer to vouchers. Both vouchers and scholarships are subsidies aimed at individuals, as opposed to the block grants used to finance Australian universities before 2005. Scholarships are usually awarded to individuals to attend a particular school or university. The key idea behind vouchers, by contrast, is that the beneficiary of the subsidy also gets to choose where it is spent. The ‘scholarships’ suggested by the Group of Eight could be redeemed for any accredited higher education course in Australia. Just like vouchers, they are aimed at creating a publicly-subsidised market.
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Has public debate been corrupted?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

If book buyers have a limit on how many ‘Howard’s suppressing free speech’ books they’ll add to their shelves, it’s a pity Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison’s Silencing Dissent reached the bookshops before David Marr’s His Master’s Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard.

They cover similar ground (indeed, some of the same ground, with Marr citing the earlier book) and ultimately have similar problems, but Marr’s book is much the better of the two: whatever his faults, he writes well; and he retains a sense of perspective lacking in Hamilton and Maddison.

According to its editors, Silencing Dissent:

paint[s] a picture of Australian democracy in serious jeopardy….The longer term picture is even more worrying: authoritarianism can only flourish where democracy has been eroded.

But according to Marr:

For a decade now, public debate has been bullied and starved as if this was an ordinary function of government. It’s important not to exaggerate the result. Suppression is not systematic. … There are limits.

But, as with Silencing Dissent, it’s not clear that all the examples really tell us much about the state of public debate in Australia. Continue reading “Has public debate been corrupted?” →

Carlton’s best classical liberal blogger

~ Andrew Norton ~ 58 Comments

Some of my Liberal friends may feel envious that I can win a vote with just 13% support, to claim the title of ‘best solo libertarian blog in Australia’. As I do not use the label ‘libertarian’ I did not vote for myself. And as I only read a couple of the other fourteen contestants regularly enough to form an opinion on their relative merits, I did not vote for anyone else either.

But 161 readers of the Australian Libertarian Society blog did back me – though I do not know whether this is because they like my blog, or because at one point Graeme Bird was in front, and I was the most realistic chance of preventing him from winning (Graeme is the only person on moderation at this blog, but even if he wasn’t most of his comments would still be rejected for containing obscenities).

Whether I am Australia’s best solo libertarian blogger or not, I am confident that I am Carlton’s best classical liberal blogger….

Do employees work only for their own benefit?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 54 Comments

The latest ABS data on ‘working time arrangements’ received a tendentious report yesterday in the SMH:

ALMOST a third of Australian employees work unsocial hours – between 7pm and 7am – and even more complain they have no say about when they start or finish. ….Thirty per cent said their shifts regularly overlapped the hours between 7pm and 7am as part of their main job. Three in five said they had no say about when they started or finished.

As for weekends, 16 per cent said they were required to work on Saturdays, and 8.5 per cent on Sundays. One in four were not always allowed to choose when to take their holidays. (emphasis added)

Note the SMH interpretations I bolded. Working after 7pm isn’t necessarily ‘unsocial’ – a lot of people like their colleagues. The ABS report doesn’t anywhere suggest that people were complaining about having no say about when they start or finish; that simply goes with many jobs where predictable opening or operational times are necessary. The ABS doesn’t say that 16% of people are ‘required’ to work Saturdays; it just says that 16% do work Saturdays. As I noted earlier in the month, weekends and evenings are the only time some people with other commitments can work. And workers in particular industries can’t take holidays whenever they choose for good reasons, eg school teachers can’t take holidays during term.

What’s missing in this reporting is the sense that an employment arrangement is one of mutual advantage between employer and employee to provide goods and services from which other people benefit – rather than just something to benefit the employee, regardless of its effects on others.
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Can business students do their sums?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

This morning’s Higher Education Supplement in The Australian gave the lead story to various interest groups complaining about the Budget decision to reduce Commonwealth subsidies to commerce students by about $1,000, with universities being allowed to increase student contribution amounts by about $1,200.

“It is hard for us to see how this is going to attract more people into doing those courses. In fact, it might turn them away.”

… said Geoff Rankin, chief executive of CPA Australia, which represents 112,000 finance, accounting and business professionals. …

It is a great worry to us,” University of Western Sydney vice-chancellor Janice Reid said.

“It will be a significant disincentive for students who might have seen a bachelor of business or bachelor of commerce as a viable alternative to a bachelor of arts or a general degree in the humanities.

As usual, these arguments assume that prices have a big impact on which courses students choose. Yet a study (pdf) released a couple of years ago put the average income premium from a business undergraduate degree, compared to a Year 12 qualification, at $542,000. The maximum extra cost that could be imposed on a student would be 0.66% of that. Prospective business students who can’t work out that the course is still a good deal have no aptitude for financial reasoning and – as Janice Reid suggests – should perhaps do Arts instead.
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Liberalism and discrimination

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

The Peel is a Melbourne gay bar that, according to its owner Tom McFeely, isn’t gay enough. He applied for an exemption to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act, legislation that would otherwise forbid him from keeping out women and straight men. And yesterday in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal he was granted that exemption.

According to The Age, the decision was not met with universal support:

WHEN Collingwood hotelier Tom McFeely decided to fight for the right to refuse entry to heterosexuals, he braced himself for a backlash. And a barrage of angry talkback callers proved him right yesterday.

But should McFeely even have had to apply for such an exemption? Anti-discrimination law is an issue that has divided liberals. There is a version of liberalism which holds that the way the state should treat its citizens – as impartially as possible – is a model for all institutions in civil society as well. Liberal states create space for people to live according to their own assessment of what makes for a good life, whether or not other people approve of it. But in a liberal society, the state may be the most powerful single institution, but private power has a large impact as well. To create space for the liberal individual, private as well as public power needs to be regulated. In alliance with egalitarian philosophies, this liberal idea helps explain why we have legislation prohibiting discrimination based on a wide variety of attributes.

Another version of liberalism holds that anti-discrimination law undermines freedom of association, the right to choose who we associate with and on what terms. Continue reading “Liberalism and discrimination” →

The 1967 Constitutional referendum

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the biggest ever yes vote in an Australian Constitutional referendum. But what exactly were people voting for? One interesting argument of two recent books, a revised edition of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, and Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public by Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, is that confusion was as common then as it is now.

In the 1960s, many people argued that Constitutional change was necessary to give Aboriginal Australians citizenship, and that’s the interpretation still being put on it today. On ABC TV’s Insiders this morning we were told:

As hard as it is to believe in retrospect, just four decades ago, Aborigines were not counted as citizens.

Hard to believe, indeed, as all Aborigines had been citizens since 1948, and many (the ‘half-castes’) much earlier. Yet the citizenship claim was also made in the opening few minutes of tonight’s SBS documentary Vote Yes for Aborigines (though contradicted later in the programme). The common belief that Aborigines were given the vote in the referendum isn’t right either, and even the idea that they weren’t counted in the census isn’t strictly correct – the Bureau of Statistics did count them, but the number was ignored for certain purposes.
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Political shopping

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, the ACCC action Sinclair Davidson and Tim Wilson are taking against Fairtrade coffee sparked the lengthiest-ever debate at this blog. But how many people might be interested in getting some social justice with their coffee?

The ABS General Social Survey 2006, the first results from which were released this week, provides some answers. It found that, over the last twelve months, a quarter of those surveyed had ‘boycotted or deliberately bought products for political, ethical or environmental reasons’. The fashion-prone young were not the most likely to buy or not buy for these reasons; on all measures of activism including this one they were below average. It was the middle-aged 45-54 year olds who were the most socially aware consumers, with 30% taking political, ethical or environmental considerations into account.

The 2005 Australia Survey of Social Attitudes asked a very similar question, except that their time period was 2 years rather than 12 months. Doubling the time period also doubled the proportion taking these factors into account, suggesting that for some consumers political purchasing is a very occasional event, rather than an everyday one like coffee (or perhaps the Fairtrade coffee is so bad that once is enough).
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Do more people feel better off now than when Howard was elected?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 53 Comments

According to an article in this week’s Bulletin, more people (36.5%) feel that they are not better off than before John Howard was elected PM than feel that they are better off (32.6%). The question seems to have been badly worded, with the apparent options being ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘the same’ – the magazine interpreted ‘no’ as ‘worse off’, but without spelling this out clearly some people who think things haven’t changed much could have answered ‘no’.

Even so, only a third thinking they are better off seems low. Income distribution analysis suggests that the benefits of prosperity have been spread through all socio-economic groups. And it’s been a good eleven years for technology-driven improvements: the internet and mobile phones particularly, but also home entertainment. Unemployment is at a 30-year low, and workforce participation at an all-time high.

There are theories that explain why perceptions lag objective statistics on issues like this, particularly when the question asks the respondent whether he or she feels better off. The happiness research has made much of the process of adaptation. When our objective standard of living improves we feel better for a while, but after a while we get used to it. Psychologists such as Danny Gilbert argue that we are not very good at recalling past emotional states. But Gilbert’s theory also suggests that because we can’t remember how we felt, we use theories of how we would have felt instead. Do people’s ‘theories’ of 1996 suggest that things were better then than now?
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Do government school kids learn tolerance and community?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

In my joint paper with Jennifer Buckingham comparing people who went to government schools with people who went to non-government schools, she draw the research short straw – collecting what the public school lobby has had to say on the subject. The op-ed by Catherine Deveny in today’s Age – an evidence-free rant – is the kind of stuff she has to trawl through.

Take this passage:

The lessons kids learn in government schools — resilience, motivation, community and tolerance — hold them in much better stead than hand-holding, spoon-feeding, mollycoddling and segregation.

I’m not sure that any of the surveys I plan to use can tell me much about resilience or motivation – though clearly private school students have enough of each to do much better educationally on average than those who went to government schools – but there are questions that help us understand any differences on community and tolerance.

The 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes asked about voluntary association involvement. 22% of those who went to government schools were actively involved in a voluntary assocation, compared to 25% of those who went to Catholic schools and 31% who went to other private schools. Another question asked about, in the last 2 years, working together with others who shared the same concerns to express views or represent interests. 43% of those who had been to government schools had done so, 48% of people who went to Catholic schools, and 52% of those who went to other non-government schools. On the question of trust, 53% of those who had been to government schools thought that other people could always or usually be trusted, compared to 59% of those who went to Catholic schools and 63% of those who went to other non-government schools.
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