Category: Language

How ’stressed’ are households with mortgages?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

The Age this morning led with a story about record mortgage and rental ‘stress’:

THE number of Australians under financial stress from housing costs has soared to a historic high, with more than a million households now spending at least 30 per cent of their income on loan repayments or rent.

Adding fuel to a potentially explosive election issue, census figures show that the number of households officially declared under “mortgage stress” has almost doubled in five years — to 547,054. At the same time, the number of households above the “rental stress” threshold — spending more than 30 per cent of their income in rent — has climbed to 520,598. (emphasis added)

According to an ALP press release (seemingly the source of this story) that’s equivalent to 27% of households with mortgages.

It is of course unsuprising that high property prices are flowing through to people spending more of their income on housing. But ‘stress’ in this context is a subjective rather than objective indicator, so it is not clear that we can really say that spending 30% of income on mortgage or rent payments is an ‘official’ indicator of financial stress.

Other measures of financial stress, for example, come up with lower estimates of financial problems among households with mortgages. The 2006 General Social Survey found that 16.5% of households with mortgages had experienced a cash flow problem in the previous 12 months (defined as not being able to pay a bill on time), which was slightly lower than the national average.

So where does the 30% of income figure come from? Continue reading “How ’stressed’ are households with mortgages?” →

Are ‘left’ and ‘right’ useful political labels?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

As long-time readers would know, I think the labels left and right are not very useful nor descriptive as each covers such a huge range of ideas that it’s hardly useful.

That’s blogger Sacha Blumen in his comment on my post on left and right attitudes to status.

Sacha’s quite correct that the political labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ can cover a lot of territory.

According to Wikipedia, ‘left’ can cover:

social (as opposed to classical) liberalism, populism, social democracy, socialism, communism, syndicalism, communalism, communitarianism, some forms of green politics, some forms of progressivism, and some forms of anarchism.

While ‘right’ can cover:

conservatism, monarchism, fascism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, reactionism, some forms of populism, the religious right, nationalism, militarism, producerism, Nativism, realism or simply the opposite of left-wing politics.

Adding further to the complexity, political parties thought to be of the ‘left’ or ‘right’ don’t always act according to stereotypes. As Paul Keating has been reminding us this week, Labor led the way with market reforms of the Australian economy, while the ‘right-wing’ Howard government has increased spending on welfare more quickly than Keating did.

Though more precise ideological descriptions are often useful, that doesn’t mean that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have no value. Continue reading “Are ‘left’ and ‘right’ useful political labels?” →

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.
Continue reading “What is the difference between a voucher and a scholarship?” →

Libertarians for oppression?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

One for the beyond wrong file:

The libertarian logic is that, since personal freedom and the existence of free markets are inextricably intertwined, and since as [Robert H.] Bork puts it ‘vigorous’ economies are vulnerable to being ‘enfeebled’ by particular cultural practices, then the champions of personal freedom have a licence to police cultural practices – in the interests of freedom and economic vigour. Thus libertarians can reason that difference (for example multiculturalism, homosexuality) must be eliminated so that the economy can function better…

That’s from Christine Wallace’s ‘Libertarian nation by stealth’, in the latest Griffith Review. In the unlikely event that you want to read a dozen or so pages of ignorance and silliness, you can download it here. This is normally a reasonably good magazine, but Julianne Schultz must have been sleepediting when she approved this article for publication.

Quackonomics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

If you read this blog, you’ve known since November last year what Peter Costello told Parliament yesterday: that Kevin Rudd’s ‘Brutopia’ comes not from the late British conservative intellectual Michael Oakeshott, but from Donald Duck comics. In the Treasurer’s words:

When you ask where he [Rudd] draws his inspiration for his quack economic policy, you find that it comes from a Donald Duck magazine. …This is the evolutionary cycle of the Labor Party. We have moved from Mark Latham’s roosters to Kevin Rudd’s ducks.

The SMH took it one better, labelling Rudd’s views ‘quackonomics’ (in a play on Freakonomics), but they are still buying the Oakeshott line:

Labor’s spin doctors argued that the tactics showed the Government had failed to find any point of substance against Mr Rudd. Yet you can be sure this year he will resist the temptation to intellectualise his subject matter with clever terminology even if it was actually borrowed from British conservative Michael Oakeshott, rather than Donald Duck.

I’ll email the journalist today and ask him to get Labor to provide the exact source of this claimed Oakeshottian term.

The invisible classical liberals

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

I’m no fan of identity politics, but it can get a little frustrating when people won’t recognise my political position. Even when a newspaper gives a generally uncritical summary of something I have written (my big government conservatism Policy article), they can open by saying:

IT’S a turn up for the books when a right-wing think-tank launches an attack on the Howard Government.

But as it turns out, hell hath no fury like a conservative scorned. (emphasis added)

So even in an article expressly criticising conservatism I still get classed as a ‘conservative’.

Bryan Palmer’s Australian Politics Quiz caused similar dissatisfaction this week among my fellow classical liberals, who were classed as ‘left’ on ‘traditional’ values (as I was when I took the test), though few of us would ever regard ourselves as ‘left’ in any way. At Club Troppo, Mark Bahnisch explained the situation this way:

The thing is though that libertarians traditionally are a very small current in what is a very statist political culture on both sides of the aisle in Australia.

Having said that, certainly social liberalism is more in evidence now and can be found in all political parties, as can social conservatism (at least in the majors).

I still think consistent economic/social liberals are pretty rare in Australian politics, and getting rarer. As I

The rise of ‘market fundamentalism’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

Back in 2001, I wrote an article for Quadrant titled ‘Naming the Right’ (pdf) which tracked the changing terminology used to describe the free-market right. It argued that ‘New Right’ had largely gone out of fashion, and that though ‘neoliberalism’ was on the rise, ‘economic rationalism’ was the still the most common label. Re-reading it now there is a striking omission: ‘market fundamentalism’, which has attracted recent attention from Kevin Rudd’s use of it in his Monthly article and his CIS lecture (pdf), along with critical commentary from Jason Soon in the blogosphere and Tony Abbott in the SMH.

Market opponents have long used religious allusions in describing market supporters, branding them ‘zealots’ believing in an ‘orthodoxy’ of ‘sacrosanct’ markets as a ‘path to salvation’, including using the phrase ‘economic fundamentalism’ (these are all from a paper on economic rationalism I wrote in the early 1990s). But I am pretty sure that in omitting ‘market fundamentalism’ in my 2001 article I was not making a lexicographical blunder. It just hadn’t caught on then.

These days put ‘market fundamentalism’ in www.google.com.au and you will still be going with new examples tens of Google’s pages later. I found only one use, from 1999, that pre-dated my Quadrant piece, though search engines are not ideal for research stretching back into the days before putting things on the web was standard practice. The 1999 link referred to zillionaire speculator and would-be public intellectual George Soros who is fond of using the term; it was also popularised by the poorer but academically far superior Joseph Stiglitz.

As others have pointed out, the term itself cannot withstand much scrutiny in the way Rudd uses it. What interests me here is the sharp shift in the connotations attached to the labels for free-marketeers. We have gone straight from a term that alludes to the anti-religious forces of reason, ‘economic rationalism’, to one that alludes to the irrational dogmatism of religion, ‘market fundamentalism’.
Continue reading “The rise of ‘market fundamentalism’” →

How many people read The Monthly?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

If you are still reading The Monthly, you’re part of a pretty exclusive group – just 42,000 people, or 0.2% of the population, according to the Roy Morgan Readership Survey. Admittedly, Morgan’s call centre would have to ring a lot of people before they found any readers of the magazine I edit, but then again Policy never set out to be an antipodean Atlantic Monthly.

Apart from lacking the Atlantic Monthly‘s circulation, this month’s Monthly was lacking The New Yorker’s famous fact checkers. Crikey had a go at them for publishing Mungo MacCullum’s claim that Robert Menzies had an affair with Elizabeth Fairfax, wife of media proprietor Warwick Fairfax. There is no evidence that such an affair ever took place.

Several people (including me) have criticised Kevin Rudd’s article ‘Howard’s Brutopia: The Battle of Ideas in Australian Politics’. But none of us have yet challenged the claimed origins of the term ‘brutopia’:

Contemporary British conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott have starkly warned against a ‘brutopia’ of unchecked market forces.

It is some years since I have read Oakeshott in detail, but I doubt this is true. Oakeshott wrote little on economics, but what he did – such as ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’ in Rationalism in Politics – is generally sympathetic to markets, though in a non-ideological way. More to the point, it is hard to imagine an elegant writer like Oakeshott using an ugly neologism like ‘brutopia’. And he wasn’t really the type to quote from Donald Duck comics, where the term originated in the late 1950s, in a clear reference not to market dystopias but a dystopia lacking markets, the Soviet Union. Putting pop culture references into academic writing did not start until decades after Oakeshott did his main work.

If it wasn’t Oakeshott, who was it? The closest I can get via Google to a ‘British’ reference is a 2000 article by an academic in Belfast. Rudd clearly defines ‘contemporary’ rather broadly (Oakeshott died in 1990) so perhaps it was a print only usage. But like Mungo’s Menzies affair, Rudd’s conservatives warning of market brutopias sounds like something New Yorker-style fact checkers wouldn’t have allowed into print.

Footnote folly

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

One disadvantage of being an editor is the habit of reading pedantically. When most people come across misused words, grammatical mistakes or erratic punctuation they use their natural ability to infer meaning from the jumble (try reading the transcript of a conversation you understood perfectly well to see how good you are at finding order amidst chaos). But when editors come across the same problems they tend to fixate on the errors instead of what the author is actually saying.

This happened to me on Tuesday when I was reading the High Court’s industrial relations judgment. I was continually distracted by the wrong placement of footnotes. Take these two not untypical sentences:

The constitutional underpinning of the legislation was noted, but not questioned[8]. McHugh J said[9] that “[t]he corporations power provides a broader basis upon which s 170LI may operate”.

Which should have been written:

The constitutional underpinning of the legislation was noted, but not questioned.[8] McHugh J said that “[t]he corporations power provides a broader basis upon which s 170LI may operate”.[9]

With rare exceptions, such as with dashes or where ambiguity might otherwise be created, footnotes go after punctuation. Putting them in the wrong place is surprisingly common. Academics seem nearly as likely to think that footnotes go before punctuation as teenagers are to think that apostrophes are needed to create a plural (or apostrophe’s, for victims of the school system over the last decade or so). Most mistakes are made by people whose disciplines use the Harvard author-date system of referencing. In that system the author’s name and the date of publication go inside the punctuation (like this). But clearly even where footnoting is still widely used, such as in legal publications, some people still have the wrong idea.
Continue reading “Footnote folly” →

The War on ‘Democracy’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

Crikey reported during the week that Gerard Henderson was threatening to sue UWA Press over their triple-titled The War on Democracy/Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press/A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Conservative Dream. But it’s in the bookshops, and that’s where it should stay, so that it can sink under the weight of its own silliness.

The authors, Niall Lucy, author of A Derrida Dictionary, and Steve Mickler, begin with a Humpty-Dumptyish definition of ‘democracy’:

As an idea and an ideal, then democracy acknowledges that between the many different interests in a society there are unequal relations of power, and so it acts to give power to those interests which on their own are less equal than others.

That’s hardly how most people would define democracy, which is about giving people political power, not equalising power more generally (in practice a broader equalisation of power has been a consequence of democracy, but it is not ‘democracy’ in itself). What Lucy and Mickler mean is closer to social democracy, or social justice. I can’t see any intellectual value in conflating separate concepts; the authors are confused, or perhaps they are trying to use the term as a polemical device to disassociate conservatives from something everyone believes to be A Good Thing.

‘Democracy’ is not the only eccentric definition. The first ‘conservative’ to be attacked is Luke Slattery, who I think would probably put himself somewhere on the left, and certainly would not be seen by anyone on the right as a ‘conservative’. But he gets labelled a ‘conservative’ because he is against postmodernism.

Ironically, this is because Lucy and Mickler seem to follow the logic of their own criticism of how conservatives construct the left:
Continue reading “The War on ‘Democracy’” →