Category: Families & relationships

Uni fees and the working class

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

The Age this morning reports the findings of 2006 census analysis I did wearing my University of Melbourne hat.

It looks at 18 and 19 year olds living at home (so we can see parental occupation and household income) to see how socieconomic background affects university and TAFE attendance rates. As there are similar census studies for 1991, 1996 and 2001, we can also observe trends over time.

For regular readers of this blog, the finding that the increased university attendance charges in 2005 had no negative impact on low SES attendance rates will come as no surprise. But the growth observed between 1991 and 2001 for all groups has stalled.

Unfortunately, the 1991 to 2001 census data does not disaggregate 18 and 19 year olds; which means it is hard for me to work out whether this is a real stalling, or a by-product of students starting university studies at a later age. For the 2006 census, there were significant increases in university attendance rates between age 18 and age 19 (21% of 18 year olds, 30% of 19 year olds).

The most striking finding, as it had been in earlier census-based studies, was that for the sons of blue collar families the normal pattern of university attendance increasing with household income is reversed. The more the family earns, the less likely it is that their sons will attend university, and the more likely it is that they will attend TAFE. For the daughters, the usual relationship is observed, but the attendance rate is only 3% higher in the wealthiest blue-collar families than it is in the poorest.
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Work and life in balance

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

The 2006 ABS time use survey results were issued today, giving us another chance to review the claims of left-familists that our time needs their regulation.

The ABS classifies time according to activities, but also into the categories of ‘necessary time’, such as sleeping, eating, and personal hygiene; ‘contracted time’, such as work or education which have specific time obligations; ‘committed time’, such as child care, domestic duties and voluntary work, and ‘free time’, what’s left.

All household types record a slight drop in ‘free time’, by 0.5% to 2.1% of the day, between 1997 and 2006. Most household types also saw slight drops in ‘necessary time’. For households with kids, the greatest gains were in ‘contracted time’, with increases ranging from 0.9% for couples with kids over 15 to 5% for lone parents with kids under 15. Except for the latter group, there were also gains in ‘committed time’.

So does that ‘contracted time’ figure mean people are working longer hours? In 2006, the average man who had a job spent 7 hours and 56 minutes at work and 58 minutes on associated travel. In 1997 he spent 8 hours and 3 minutes at work and 60 minutes travelling. In 1992 he spent 7 hours and 53 minutes at work and 54 minutes travelling. (I’m getting the comparison figures from How Australians Use Their Time 1997.) So there is really no trend here. Even the traffic problems constantly in the news are hard to see in these figures.
Continue reading “Work and life in balance” →

Are young voters attracted to social conservatism?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

Conservative and ‘progressive’ Liberals may disagree on much, but it seems they share at least one attribute – confusing their hopes with our reality. Last December Senator Judith Troeth called for a ‘progressive liberalism’ to restore the party’s electoral fortunes. As I pointed out at the time, the polling does not support Troeth’s conclusions.

And today NSW Young Liberal President Noel McCoy has an op-ed in The Australian arguing that John Howard’s social conservatism resonated with young people.

The evidence for this is rather thin, as McCoy effectively admits. That in 2004 the Australia Election Study found more young people voting Liberal than Labor ‘for the first time’. So the AES surveys in 1996, 1998 and 2001 (and no doubt 2007) are aberrations, and we should rely on the 2004 survey? McCoy is drawing on Clive Bean’s research, but Bean was relying on a sample of 121 persons aged 25 and under (see his chapter in Mortgage Nation). Ian Watson’s analysis of a much bigger sample of Newspoll respondents found the Coalition’s worst-ever result among the 18-24 year olds in 2004.
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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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A baby bonus boom?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

A story on The Age website this afternoon, referring to the release of the ABS birth statistics for 2006, is headlined ‘New figures reveal our baby boom’. It reports:

Australian Bureau of Statistics data released today showed that 265,900 births were registered in 2006, the second highest since the record 276,400 births recorded in 1971.

The baby bonus rate changed during the year, but on my estimates that would have cost taxpayers $950 million. So did nearly a billion dollars buy us an increase in the number of babies being born?

A closer examination of the statistics suggests not. Continue reading “A baby bonus boom?” →

Is the education rebate the FTB of the future?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

Labor’s education rebate, under which recipients of Family Tax Benefit A can receive

* A 50 per cent refund every year for up to $750 of education expenses for each child attending primary school (maximum $375 per child, per year)
* A 50 per cent refund every year for up to $1,500 of education expenses for each child attending secondary school (maximum $750 per child, per year)

will no doubt go down well in the electorate. I’m much less keen. It is another example of the government taxing us more than necessary and then giving the money back with strings attached, in this case a requirement that money be first spent on ‘laptops, home computers, printers, home internet connection, education software and school text books.’

Most families will spend this much and more on items on the list anyway, so the distorting effect is likely to be small in this case – it’s effectively just another cash handout for families in exchange for yet more government paperwork (Labor says it will reduce the ‘digital divide’, but this seems unlikely since families still have to find the cash to cover the full cost since they only get the rebate with their tax return, more than twelve months later if they purchase at the beginning of a financial year).

But how long before more of the FTB-linked money starts coming with strings attached, so parents spend the money as approved by Nanny – no fattening foods, no cigarettes or alcohol, no plasma TVs, no clothes made in sweatshops, no coal-generated electricity etc etc.? The current government is bad enough on these things, but Labor is full of busybodies who think they know how the rest of us should live.

Good times for ‘working families’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

During the week, the relentlessly on-message Kevin Rudd repeated his lines about ‘working families’:

The other big challenge is offering help to working families under financial pressure. Mr Howard just said he understood that, well that’s the same Mr Howard who said that working families had never been better off.

And the ACNielsen poll at the end of the week suggests that the public believes him, with 59% agreeing with the proposition that ‘John Howard has lost touch with working families’.

It’s not often that I agree with Clive Hamilton, or he with John Howard, but the Australia Institute has published some interesting ABS and HILDA-based research on just how well ‘working families’ are doing (as usual with Hamilton’s work, it gets a good report in Fairfax papers).

On average, the real disposable income of couples with kids went up 40% in real terms between 1994-95 and 2005-06, considerably more than the 28% increase recorded across the whole population. There were above-average increases across all the income quintiles for couples with kids, with the lowest gain of 35% in the second-highest quintile. General prosperity and very generous family benefits from the ‘out of touch’ Howard mean that, financially at least, families never have had it so good.

The working families doing-it-tough message is, I think, the key mistake of the Labor campaign. Not that it will harm the ALP’s immediate electoral prospects – to the contrary, it will probably add seats to their likely victory – but it is creating expectations that cannot be met, not even with the me-too tax cuts. Though ‘working families’ will almost certainly on average be even more affluent in three years than they are now, Rudd is fanning such an inflated sense of entitlement that ‘working families’ will be disappointed with their gains.

Divorce politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

Yesterday’s ABS divorce statistics for 2006 provide more evidence for our discussion of familist politics.

On the one hand, there is again no evidence that industrial relations changes are anti-family. The absolute number of divorces fell for the fifth year in a row. The ABS’s ‘crude divorce rate’, the number of divorces per 1,000 persons, as it mathematically must with a rising population, also fell. This is not a very good indicator of the stability of marriage as an institution, since it could reflect fewer people getting married as much as fewer people getting divorced. But comparing the absolute number of divorces with the absolute number of married persons recorded in the census shows the same trend. 1.45% of marriages were dissolved in 2001, compared to 1.3% in 2006 (though there had been an upward spike in 2001; the rate was 1.4% in 1996).

On the other hand, could perhaps a declining divorce rate mean that the massive family handouts of the Howard government are having a positive effect? Though the proportion of divorces involving children has been stable since 2002 on 50%, it is down from 54% in 1996, and the overall drop in divorces means fewer kids are having their lives turned upside down by divorce. There were 5,000 fewer kids whose parents divorced in 2006 compared to 2001. It is of course very hard to isolate the effects of family payments, but there is no new evidence against family spending in these numbers.

Or perhaps, as is suggested in the SMH, these improving numbers are just a ‘blip’. The average duration of marriage before divorce is rising, but that may not affect the proportion of marriages which eventually break up. Closer examination of the divorce statistics shows that divorce rates are dropping for those aged 44 and below, while rising for those aged 44 and above. But at least this means fewer couples with children still in the home are ending their marriages.

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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