Media payback

October 13, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Newspapers are never at their best in campaign mode. Today’s Age leads with a story headed ‘Judge savages Andrews’. The article begins:

A FEDERAL Court judge has launched an extraordinary attack on Kevin Andrews over the involuntary removal of a man to New Zealand, claiming the Immigration Minister’s behaviour had been “truly disgraceful”.

The Immigration Department yesterday removed Timothy John Borstrok from Australia, even though he had lodged an application to appeal to the Federal Court over a decision to cancel his visa on character grounds

Only a dozen paragraphs in, long after most people have stopped reading, are we informed:

But a spokeswoman for Mr Andrews said: “While the …removal was done by the authority of the Immigration Department, the minister had no knowledge of, or involvement with the court hearing or the removal.”

Continue reading “Media payback” →

Unpopular Muslims

September 23, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

In a very funny episode of Kath & Kim tonight (including a great cameo by Matt Lucas as Sharon’s half-sister) both racist opinions (Kim) and racial identity based on a distant Indigenous ancestor (Kath) were enjoyably satirised. It was all far easier to take than a sanctimonious report More than tolerance: Embracing cultural diversity for health released this week by VicHealth.

But even tiresome bureaucratic documents can contain interesting data, this time a Victoria-specific study of racism, prejudice and discrimination. 12% of respondents agreed that they were ‘prejudiced against other cultures’, and 10% agreed with a conventionally racist proposition ‘not all races of people are equal’. A similar question in a national survey in 1998 found 16% of the population were racist, and 12% in 2001 in a Queensland and NSW sample.

Most of the questions on actual experience of intolerance or discrimination suggest that a only a small proportion of NESB migrants regularly experience it. It is by far the most likely to occur at a sporting or other public event (15%), perhaps because such events stir tribal passions and the offender is unlikely to see the victim again, easing social pressure pressure for tolerance, or be subject to institutional penalties. The next most likely location is the workplace (7%), though whether from customers or other staff it does not say; followed by education (6%), shops and restaurants (4%), and in housing and policing (3%). The low figure for shops, restaurants and housing perhaps shows again how the profit motive driving out other human sentiments can be a good thing.

Also out this week was an Issues Deliberation Australia report Australia Deliberates: Muslims and Non-Muslims in Australia. Continue reading “Unpopular Muslims” →

When is it OK to make unsubstantiated assertions?

February 14, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

In today’s Higher Education Supplement Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton have a go at this article from a couple of weeks ago by Andrew Leigh for his ‘various platitudes about the advantages of diversity’. Frijters and Beatton say (recycling what Frijters said on Andrew’s blog):

one of the biggest dangers for a scientist is to get sucked into simply stating things that go along with what is commonly believed but are not really self-evident at all. It’s very easy to make statements that go with the grain without applying the same amount of thought given to statements that go against the grain.

I’m all for scepticism. One of my most useful lessons in social science came when, as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I set out to write a critique of a chapter on the ‘New Right’ in book by one of my teachers. I decided to fact check every statement made, and was very surprised to find that quite a few things were simply wrong and many claims were not supported by the evidence I could find. Academics as much as any of us are least sceptical when confirming their existing prejudices for or against an idea, and as a result most vulnerable to critics hoping to take down their arguments.

But it’s hard to see what Andrew has done wrong here. These were the ‘platitudes’ he offered, numbered by me with my commentary in italics:
Continue reading “When is it OK to make unsubstantiated assertions?” →

Does diversity affect what we think about the welfare state?

January 11, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

As part of his well-deserved early career award from the Academy of the Social Sciences, Andrew Leigh was asked to write a paper for their journal Dialogue. As he explains on his blog, he chose to write on something a ‘bit provocative’, the possible negative effects of ethnic and linguistic diversity. One of these possible negative (sic) effects is reduced support for the welfare state.

For this hypothesis, he draws on the work of Alberto Alesina and Ed Glaeser, who argue that one of the major reasons for the much smaller welfare state in the US compared to Europe is that the US is more racially diverse. Or to put it more bluntly, the wealthy white majority isn’t too keen on giving money to the poor black minority. Extrapolating from this, Andrew notes that Australia’s welfare state is small compared to Europe’s, and that our linguistic diversity is higher than either the US or Europe, and therefore ‘our high level of linguistic diversity helps explain Australia’s relatively small social welfare sector’.

I doubt it. Indeed, you only need to keep reading Andrew’s paper to find at least one reason for doubt. Using answers to a question in the Australian Election Survey about whether people agree or disagree with the proposition that ‘income and wealth should be redistributed’ he finds that only in Queensland is there are a statistical relationship between disagreeing with the proposition and levels of local ethnic diversity. This he puts down to the relative success of ‘racially-driven politics’ in that state, with One Nation its most public manifestation. But what about all the other states? They, after all, contain the vast majority of seats in the Australian Parliament.

My CIS colleague Peter Saunders has argued that this analysis of the comparative welfare states misses important cultural differences between the ‘Anglo’ countries and Europe. The Anglosphere countries have much older and more powerful traditions of individualism than Europe. Alan Macfarlane wrote a well-known book on this, The Origins of English Individualism, tracing it back many hundreds of years. In particular, the Anglo countries have a much greater belief in self-reliance. Continue reading “Does diversity affect what we think about the welfare state?” →

Contrasting takes on Lebanese migrant policy in 1976

January 1, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Crackdown as Lebanese refugee program gets out of hand

THE Fraser cabinet decided to crack down on Lebanese immigration after being advised by officials based in Cyprus that it had become difficult to check the refugee claims and there was a possibility that terrorists and criminals were using the civil war as a cover to enter Australia.

Documents presented to cabinet by immigration minister Michael MacKellar said the Lebanese refugee program had “got out of hand and the department was scraping the bottom of the barrel with regard to quality”.

Notes prepared by the head of the community affairs branch and attached to cabinet submission “860” said: “There are regular reports of deliberate dishonesty and misrepresentation by applicants and their agents.” …

At the time immigration authorities had more than 10,000 applications for residency from Lebanese. With the number of arrivals jumping at the rate of 150 a week, cabinet decided to tighten the conditions for entry, which had been relaxed by the Whitlam government and extended by the Fraser government.

The Age, 1 January 2007.

Fraser was warned on Lebanese migrants

IMMIGRATION authorities warned the Fraser government in 1976 it was accepting too many Lebanese Muslim refugees without “the required qualities” for successful integration.The Fraser cabinet was also told many of the refugees were unskilled, illiterate and had questionable character and standards of personal hygiene.

Cabinet documents released today by the National Archives under the 30-year rule reveal how Australia’s decision to accept thousands of Lebanese Muslims fleeing Lebanon’s 1976 civil war led to a temporary collapse of normal eligibility standards.

The emergence of the documents raises the question of whether the temporary relaxation might have contributed to contemporary racial tensions in Sydney’s southwest, which exploded a year ago into race-based riots in Cronulla.
….

In September 1976, as a humanitarian response to the civil war raging at the time between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, cabinet agreed to relax rules requiring immigrants to be healthy, of good character and to have a work qualification.

and at paragraph 27, on a different page of the paper:

Cabinet agreed with Mr MacKellar and authorised him to issue a press release attributing the decision on curbing the intake to concerns about a lack of work opportunities for the migrants.

The Australian, 1 January 2007.

This morning’s papers provide a good example of how differing political agendas between newspapers can lead to very different interpretations of the same story – in this case, the release of the 1976 Cabinet documents. The Australian seems most guilty of spin here – unless you read right to the end of their lead story you would not realise that the Fraser government had realised there was a problem with refugees from Lebanon, and tightened eligibility criteria after an earlier relaxation. Indeed, I did not pick up on this important element of the story until I subsequently read The Age‘s very different take on the Cabinet papers. But The Australian wanted to draw a link with contemporary problems among the Lebanese, and probably have another go at Fraser, and so let the initial relaxtion of migration rules dominate the story. I’m not usually a fan of The Age, but here they have shown the value of media diversity.

Has Howard delivered on Hanson’s maiden speech goals?

December 11, 2006 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 37 Comments

So Pauline Hanson is planning another go at politics. This time the problem isn’t Aborigines or Asians, it’s Africans and Muslims:

“We’re bringing in people from South Africa at the moment, there’s a huge amount coming into Australia, who have diseases, they’ve got AIDS,” Ms Hanson told AAP…..

But Ms Hanson said politicians had gone too far in affording rights to minority groups and she was angered at the loss of Australian traditions because of Muslims. “Our governments have bent over backwards to look after them (Muslims) and their needs, and regardless of what the Australian people think,” she said.

“You can’t have schools not sing Christmas carols because it upsets others, you can’t close swimming baths because Muslim women want to swim in private, that’s not Australian.”

Ms Hanson is not the only person dipping into their bag of prejudices. Christopher Scanlon, a co-editor of the radical left Arena Magazine, is taking the argument that Howard is the respectable face of Hansonism for another trip around the Fitzroy block.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, just note that the party that disowned her has now delivered on every single one of the substantive policies proposed in Hanson’s maiden speech.

Unfortnately for Scanlon’s argument this is an exaggeration, and a big one, as anyone who bothered to check Hanson’s maiden speech would realise. If Hanson stood for anything, it was reducing Asian immigration:
Continue reading “Has Howard delivered on Hanson’s maiden speech goals?” →