Category: Families & relationships

What should liberals think about marriage?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 35 Comments

Andrew is right, classical liberalism does not immediately supply a compelling reason to reject ‘gay marriage’, … except in necessarily narrow and unconvincing terms. This is because it is a political theory, not a moral philosophy.

Thus, while classical liberals can gesture toward love, as Andrew does, they cannot speak to what most couples, certainly all religious couples, and most societies know about marriage: the biological, emotional and sacramental realities merely secular critiques too often ignore. Classical liberals say ‘marriage’ but they mean something else. What they really describe is more precisely a registry office event – one where the witnesses, and indeed the law, are blind to the genitals, hearts and (too often) children (including in potentia) of the parties involved.

John Heard in responding to my critique of his objections to gay marriage.

Indeed, from the liberal state’s perspective a church wedding is just a registry office with stained glass windows, and the priest just a celebrant wearing strange clothes. That’s how it has to be in a society in which religion has lost its hold over the population, with 60% of marriages now performed by celebrants – and with many of the people who do get married in a church making a rare appearance there to do so. Marriage can have ‘sacramental realities’, but like children and even sex these are optional extras. The law does not require any of them, even though children ‘in potentia’ (or these days, watching mum and dad get married) are used as a reason for distinguishing gay from straight relationships.

But why in a liberal society should the law have anything to do with this aspect of people’s private lives? Why isn’t ‘marriage’ just a particularly intense form of friendship, in which the parties get to make up their own rules without any outside interference or involvement? Or why, as David Boaz from Cato has suggested, shouldn’t marriage just be another private contract, enforceable by the state, but according to terms decided by the parties rather than by the template provided in the law of marriage and (more importantly, in practice) divorce?
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The utilitarian conservative case against gay marriage

~ Andrew Norton ~ 61 Comments

Earlier this month, The Australian published an article advocating more equal treatment of gay Australians. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that, as many such articles have been published over the years. This one attracted attention, however, because it was written by Tim Wilson, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

This has put the IPA in the unusual position of receiving praise from the left and criticism from the right, in the form of an op-ed in today’s Australian by my friend John Heard. He’s taking a more conciliatory line toward the IPA on his blog today, but in the article he wonders why a ‘conservative’ think-tank is promoting gay marriage.

As I have pointed out before, there is some confusion in the IPA between liberalism and conservatism, but I think like much of the right we could say that they are economically liberal but have more diverse views on social issues, ranging from libertarianism to conservatism. I don’t think the liberal tradition provides any intellectual resources for discrimination against gay people, but clearly the conservative tradition does, and that’s what John is appealing to in his article – though on the gay marriage issue, not on superannuation laws and other ‘minor injustices’, as he calls them.

As John’s blog post clarifies but the op-ed does not, Wilson did not actually support gay marriage in his article. But John’s arguments against are still worth considering. His most general statement of principle is:

A “homo-con” like me would likely look at how many people are being affected by the apparent injustice and which wider goals are served by the same.

If the net result is a gain for the common good, then the discrimination is, far from an injustice, rather a boon for families and an exercise in good government.

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Does marriage lead to happiness?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

I’m attending two weddings this weekend, from which I hope two long and happy marriages will result. Having no insights of my own to add to the topic of marriage and happiness, I took another look at the subjective well-being literature on the subject. As I noted in a Catallaxy post eighteen months ago, this area of research is surprisingly controversial, with one prominent happiness researcher denying that marriage brings most people any lasting additional happiness.

One point that is not in dispute is that, at any given time, married people are happier than single people. I had a look at the most recent Australian survey to ask about happiness, the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, which finds the same relativities persistently found across time and around the world.

78% of married people rate themselves as 7 or above on 0-10 scale, compared to 63% of the never married. People in de facto relationships were similar to married people in the proportion in the normal 7+ range, but married people were considerably more likely to be in the very happy 9-10 range, 32% compared to 21% among de facto couples (even though you would think that married people would have had longer to grow bored of each other). Separated people are the least happy – 53% at 7 or above, but they get over it, as divorced people are about as happy as the never-married singles.

One reason for some initial doubt that marriage has the widely-assumed happiness benefits is that average happiness has been stable over time. Though it has fluctuated a little between surveys over sixty years, it has fluctuated without trend. Clive Hamilton and many others have seized on this as evidence that greater income does not make you happy. But if marriage makes people happier, or conversely non-marital states make you less happy, shouldn’t the declining share of the adult population who are married have led to a declining average level of happiness?
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Are we really short of discretionary time?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Even after all the recent work-family balance hype, I still found this comment from Graham Bell in Mark Bahnisch’s good-bye-for-now-because-I-am-too-busy post jaw-droppingly preposterous:

You have here touched on two aspects of life in 2007’s Australia:

[i] The rapidly worsening lack of discretionary time for so many people now, even for pensioners/retirees and the unemployed.

Gosh, imagine how pressed they might be if they actually had to work for money 40-50 hours a week, plus do all the other things that disproportionately fall to those in paid work, such as raising kids and keeping voluntary organisations going. Even for those who genuinely do have a lot on, there is an important distinction made by Michael Bittman, Robert Goodin and others between discretionary time and free time (pdf).

Discretionary time is what we have left after we’ve done enough to earn money, perform household chores and engage in sufficient personal care (eg sleeping). Admittedly, some of the arguments as to what constitutes enough are contentious; but the overall point is a strong one: because many people choose to do more than the minimum necessary across a range of generally essential activities their free time, the time in which they have no commitments, is much less than their discretionary time. Using a 1992 Australian time use survey, they estimate that discretionary time is two to three times as long as free time.
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Is there a conservative case for gay adoption?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

The ACT Government’s Civil Partnerships Bill, which lets two persons of either sex form a legal relationship, has again been vetoed by the federal government. According to Attorney-General Philip Ruddock the government’s

first objection was that “it involves a formal ceremony”.

“What it’s doing is equating (gay partnerships) with marriage,” he said yesterday….

He said marriage was a “cultural institution” that provided a basis on which children might be conceived and brought up and provided with proper support.

We are so used to the idea of heterosexual marriage and parenting that the idea of gay marriage and parenting is counter-intuitive. But if you think the issue through from any secular set of assumptions, including conservative concerns with the family, the logic leads inexorably to supporting gay marriage.

As children are already growing up in gay households – with 4% of gay men and 16% of lesbians according to the Private Lives survey – prohibiting gay marriage (or civil partnerships) is not providing ‘proper support’ to those kids, it is lessening the chance that they will receive proper support from two adults by making it easier for one partner to walk out on his or her parenting responsibilities.

Objecting to a ceremony – which the legislation doesn’t require anyway, just one witness – is similarly counter-productive. The guests at a ceremony are there to help the couple celebrate the happy day, but also as witnesses to the commitment they are making and an added source of social pressure to keep to their vows.

Though the conservative case for gay marriage is strongest when children are involved, politically there is no denying that children are the most contentious part of this issue. A Roy Morgan Poll released today found that though only 33% of Australians think homosexuality is ‘immoral’, 57% oppose homosexual couples being able to adopt children. Surveys last year indicated that opposition to the ACT civil union legislation was under 40%. There is a sizeable group of people who support gay partnerships but do not support gay adoption. This is a common pattern overseas; for example the Eurobarometer found that on average around Europe 44% support gay marriage, but 32% support gay adoption.
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The rise of political familism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

As a single and childless male I know an election year won’t be good for me. On both right and left, the trend is toward political familism, with the interests of people with kids put above those without.

On the right, the main trend has been toward income transfers. This year the Howard government plans to spend a staggering $28 billion on financial assistance to families with children. It’s the second-largest item in the federal budget after the aged pension, and does not include indirect benefits such as schools and health care. This largesse has helped make the Howard years exceptionally good for people with kids. In the latest NATSEM study Ann Harding calculates that real disposable income has increased by 29% for couples with kids over the last decade, for single parent families by 26%, for couples without kids by 23%, and for single households by 15%. This of course isn’t just government benefits; rising real wages and increased labour force participation are important too. But family benefits payments have undoubtedly skewed the income distribution further away from the childless. Everyone pays unnecessarily high taxes, but only those with kids get money back.

On the left, the main trend is toward advocating further intervention in the labour market in the interests of families. Kevin Rudd has enthusiastically embraced this agenda. In his first speech to Parliament as Labor leader, he said: [restored from NLA website]

…families are such a basic social institution that they deserve special protections. When you instead have a set of laws which says that you can be told to work at any time of the day, at any place and for virtually whatever rate of pay, that it can include weekends or whatever and that you can have your shifts and rosters changed at a moment’s notice, just pause for a moment. Let us think through where that all goes in terms of the impact on working families.

As yet, it is unclear exactly how this might translate into policy. Late last week, Julia Gillard floated the idea of pressuring employers of people with kids under six years of age to permit part-time work without the disadvantages often associated with it, such as less training. Barbara Pocock’s book The Labour Market Ate My Babies, cited by Rudd in his CIS speech, proposes that:

…Australian labour law should be amended to increase the time autonomy of workers, especially those with care responsibilities. …within a framework that restricts long working hours … [including] new capacities for changes in working hours that are initiated by employees…all parents [to have] an opportunity to take up to two years out of paid work with income support on the birth of a child.

Obviously making half a million people a year eligible for income support (250,000 births times two parents) has fiscal implications, and means higher taxes for others or less spending on other things. But this kind of labour market intervention also has significant implications for other workers, who must fill the gaps left by people who decide, without reference to others, to vary their hours of work. Inevitably, the childless or empty nesters will pick up most of the slack, lacking the ‘childcare centre shuts at 5.30pm’ and other excuses of workers with kids.

The basic concerns behind political familism have been widely accepted, even if the major political parties do not have the same policy responses. But these concerns do not seem to me to be compelling enough to warrant the redistributions of time and money occurring or being proposed.

As the NATSEM research shows, families with kids have higher incomes than other kinds of households, receiving about $250 a week more on average than the next most affluent household type, couples without kids. In my article on ‘big government conservatism’ I report research from the mid-1990s showing that at that time people with kids had above average satisfaction with their financial situation. Yet for all the spending, it is hard to see any significant trends in the basic family statistics except for increased use of formal childcare.

Obviously parents need time to look after their kids, and many surveys have shown at least a large minority of people perceive some conflict between work and family. But this in itself is not a policy, as opposed to personal, problem. For most people, there are more things they could do with their time than there are hours in the day or days in the year. Inevitably, trade-offs need to be made between competing uses of time. But the ‘right’ trade-offs cannot be set in Canberra or by academics. They depend on a wide range of personal, family, and work circumstances, which will vary greatly from household to household and within households over time.

For example, in the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes about a third of respondents said they would like to spend less time in their paid job and 70% said they would like to spend more time with their families (implying some other activity ought to be reduced). But only 10% agreed that they would rather ‘work fewer hours and earn less money’, with twice as many saying they would rather ‘work longer hours and earn more money’. So while in a constraint-free world we would have more of everything, in the real world of trade-offs work is more preferred than it might appear if we just looked at questions about work and family. In the kids interviewed for Pocock’s book about their parents’ work hours the same pragmatism is on display. Many would like to spend more time with their parents (particularly boys with their fathers), but they also accept that their parents need to work, often for money but also because they enjoy it.

People also adjust without intervention from above. In an analysis based on HILDA data, between Wave 1 and Wave 2 (about a year) about 30% of those described as ‘conscripts’ to long hours (50 hours a week or more) went to shorter hours, along with about a quarter of those described as long hours ‘volunteers’. There are several ways this can occur: the long hours were just a spike in work which went away, employers take on more people to reduce hours (when demand increases, employers often work existing staff harder and take on more workers only when they are confident the higher demand will last), or workers change jobs. There is also considerable movement (about a fifth of each group) moving between ‘volunteer’ and ‘conscript’, showing changing preferences for hours worked but not the fact of long hours.

It’s far from clear to me that blunt rules imposed by policymakers can improve on this dynamic process of trade-off and adjustment. Prohibiting long hours might help ‘conscripts’ to reduce work. But it would be bad for those who enjoy their work, or need the money, or both. There would also be flow-on effects for those who rely on the work done by long-hours employees. These will be worst in occupations where there are existing labour market shortages, and no spare workers to make up for the hours not worked. With such shortages widespread in health professions, much longer waits to see medical professionals may not seem so ‘family friendly’.

Political familism doesn’t just disadvantage single people to provide added assistance to families who do not necessarily have greater needs. It is an attempt to replace individual judgments made by people in and out of families with collective judgments made by social critics and politicians. Liberals – small ‘l’ and large, welfare and classical – should resist these intrusions into the private sphere.

Why is attractiveness more important in male candidates?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

In Andrew Leigh and Amy King’s paper on politicians’ beauty (pdf) they found that looks matter more for male candidates than female candidates.

In the paper, and in The Age’s report, they suggest that ‘dumb blonde’ stereotypes might lead voters to judge attractive women negatively:

“This may be because female beauty carries negative connotations in the minds of some voters,” said Dr Leigh.

Perhaps. But I think there is an explanation that fits better with what they have found makes a difference – that candidate attractiveness has most effect where the candidate is a challenger and where voters are older, poorer, and have low levels of education. What all this suggests is that attractiveness is used to choose between candidates when voters don’t have other more reliable sources of information to hand, because the challenger is previously unknown to them and/or they don’t know much about politics.

The Australian Election Survey suggests that women are less likely than men to have the political information they need to choose between candidates. In the 2004 Australian Election Survey, 24.2% of women rated their interest in politics as ‘not much’ or ‘none’, compared to 17.5% of men. Interest in the campaign itself was even lower, with 27.4% of women and 24% of men presumably going to the polling booth having absorbed very little information about any of the candidates.

Presuming that most people react more strongly to opposite-sex beauty than same-sex beauty, this means that there is a larger pool of people predisposed to using male beauty as a proxy than female beauty. It would explain why attractive men seem to influence the vote more than attractive women.

Beauty in politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

According to a paper released today (pdf) by Andrew Leigh and Amy King, better-looking election candidates receive slightly more votes than unattractive election candidates.

Being good-looking is not, however, always a benefit in politics. In the beauty ratings, Ross Cameron did considerably better than most other male politicians. Unfortunately, perhaps, this also made him attractive to women other than his wife, eventually leading Genevieve Cameron to chuck him out of the house during the 2004 election campaign. Julie Owens, rated as OK by the beauty panel, took his place in Parliament.

It’s hard to imagine too many women throwing themselves at Australia’s least-attractive MP, Labor’s Dick Adams, which should save him from at least one type of political scandal.

University students in Australia over 40 years

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

For the last few weeks I’ve been helping to prepare a speech on Australian higher education policy over the last 40 years (for Adelaide readers, you can hear Glyn Davis give it on Thursday, for others the final version will be published in Australian Book Review). As my memories of the 1960s consist largely of Humphrey B Bear and the milk bottles with yucky cream under the lid they made us drink in kindergarten, I had to do some historical reading.

I knew the broad outline, but the detail can still surprise. Even in 1970, an author writing on ‘access to higher education’ could start a sentence with ‘In an ethnically homogenous society like Australia…’. No essay written on Australian universities today could contain the phrase ‘ethnically homogenous’.

As the student statistics released last week record, 239,495 of the 957,176 people enrolled at Australian universities are overseas students. To these can be added 163,820 domestic students who were born overseas. Between them, they make up 42% of all students at Australian universities.

Previous, though now rather dated, research found that the Australian-born children of migrants were more likely to attend university than 3rd or more generation Australians. We’ll have to wait for the 2006 census results to confirm that this is still true, but given the selection effect (ie, the people who are ambitious for their offspring are more likely to migrate) I’d be very surprised if it was not.

Given that, and a large migration programme favouring people with higher education qualifications (who are likely to pass that preference to their kids), it won’t be long, if it hasn’t happened already, before 3rd or more generation Australians make up a minority of university enrolments.
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What are community standards on erotic films?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

If you want to see the film Viva Erotica be grateful for federalism. The Sydney Morning Herald puts the situation this way:

AS SEX films go, Viva Erotica is tame: 28 minutes of sex and no violence. But because the sex is real, it is classified X18+, a rating that means it is banned from sale in all states.

All states, yes. But not all territories. Our-not-quite-so-conservative-as-it-seems federal government has declined to use its power to over-ride territory laws permitting the sale of X-rated videos or to instruct its wholly-owned corporation Australia Post not to deliver them around the country. But porn peddler Adultshop is seeking to overturn the X classification of Viva Erotica on the grounds that it does not offend ‘community standards’. After all, R-rated real sex is currently showing at your local art house cinema in Shortbus. But under the Office of Film and Literature Classification guidelines (pdf) Shortbus‘s real sex is not the same as Viva Erotica‘s real sex because the former has bothered with a plot and the latter has not.

To help its case, Adultshop had ACNielsen conduct a survey.

Explicit erotic films: Films and videos primarily involving various forms of actual sex, including close-ups, involving consenting adults, with no coercion or violence. In the ACNielsen survey, Australian Adults were asked: Do you personally find this content offensive (ie does it cause feelings of outrage and/or disgust)?

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