Could WorkChoices affect the 2007 election?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

In the Newspoll on WorkChoices, more people think that it will be bad for the economy than think it will have bad effects on them personally. Which opinion is more important? In arguing the case for the electoral significance of this polling, Fred Argy and Robert Corr argue that (in Fred’s words):

people are not guided only or even principally by self-interest when they vote

It’s certainly possible to find evidence in issue polling that people are guided by the concerns of others. I made just such an argument in my analysis of pre-Workchoices industrial relations polling. But showing that such concerns have an influence on voting is much more difficult.
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Mobilising the base on industrial relations

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

Public opinion on WorkChoices is remarkably stable. Another Newspoll reported in The Australian this morning shows that despite a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign by the government, a huge scare campaign by the unions and Labor, and some objective labour market data, overall responses to Newspoll’s questions have changed only modestly since they were first asked in October 2005. The same situation is evident in the work of other polling organisations.

The biggest changes are to questions about the overall economy and about job creation. Since the first Newspoll, the proportion of people saying that the changes are bad for the economy has increased from 40% to 47%. This change was evident by the April 2006 survey and is essentially unaffected by anything that has happened since. Those saying WorkChoices is good for the economy are also up, but by a lesser margin – 31% to 34%. This peaked at 38% in December 2005. Some previously uncommitted people are now offering opinions.

On job creation, the proportion saying WorkChoices is bad has gone from 39% to 45%, and good from 30% to 33%. The answer that is most likely to be correct, ‘somewhat good’, is given by 21% of respondents.

The most stable response is on personal impact. While people tend to be over-pessimistic about their employment prospects, they are more realistic about their own situation than that of others. Since the first Newspoll, those saying they will be better off has increased from 11% to 14%, and those saying they will be worse off has increased from 32% to 33%. Those saying it won’t affect them has increased from 44% to 48%.

It’s only by digging deeper into the results that we can see a possible larger effect of the propaganda efforts on each side. For example, in Newspoll’s first survey 19% of Labor supporters thought that WorkChoices would be good for the economy. By the latest survey, that was down to 13%. Among Coalition supporters, the proportion thinking it would be good for the economy increased from 49% to 62%. At the aggregate level, partisan belief in WorkChoices being bad for the economy is up 3% on the Coalition side to 22%, and up 7% among Labor supporters to 69%. But among Labor supporters there is a change in opinion intensity, with those rating it as ‘very bad’ up from 38% to 50%. To a lesser extent, the same effect can be seen in the job creation question on the Labor side: a change in aggregate results (up 7%) and a larger change in strength of opinion, with ‘very bad’ up from 29% to 39%.
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Do we have too many science students?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 45 Comments

An article in this morning’s Australian reports complains that, at some universities, the cut-off score for a course in Chinese medicine is higher than for a traditional ‘Western’ science degree. This has Education Minister Julie Bishop suggesting that we need to encourage more students to study science ‘to ensure the future needs of the nation are met’ and International Organisation for Science and Technology Education chairman Dr Terry Lyons worrying that ‘low levels made science even less attractive to students’.

Demand for science courses does seemed to have declined over time, though it is hard to say by exactly how much, since IT courses were classified under science in applications data before 2001. But adding together science and IT, numbers were higher in the 1990s than now. As a share of total applications science itself been fairly steady since then, with 6.79% in 2001 and 6.53% in 2006. But Dr Lyons seems to be wrong about low cut-off scores deterring good students. As the AVCC’s analysis of applications data shows, science attracted 10.9% of students with ENTER scores of 90 or above. Students are driven more by their interests than the status obsessions that afflict academics.

Though applications are holding up, science is one of the few disciplines in which first-preference demand is consistently below supply. Given there are other disciplines in which supply is significantly short of demand and which lead to professions with labour market shortages it would seem sensible to move places from science into other disciplines. But would this threaten, as Bishop worries, the ‘future needs of the nation being met’?

The answer to that is almost certainly no. Except in low-paid professions like teaching, there is no evidence of shortages in scientifically qualified personnel. Unlike several other graduate occupations, they don’t appear in skills shortages lists and science graduates in some fields have more difficulty than other graduates in finding full-time work. And with over 8,000 people enrolled in science PhDs there are plenty of potential researchers working their way through the system.

Rather than worrying about hypothetical shortages of scientists in the future, we should be more worried about existing shortages in a wide range of health-related fields. If the normal pressures of supply and demand had been allowed to operate, the system would have re-balanced itself years ago – solving, along the way, the ‘problem’ of low ENTER scores for science courses. But as centrally controlled systems are prone to doing, we are producing too much of things people don’t want and too little of what they do want.

Contrasting takes on Lebanese migrant policy in 1976

~ 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.

Ends versus means on global warming

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

This month’s Newspoll on nuclear power plants, as reported in The Australian yesterday, again highlights the political complexity of the greenhouse issue. While several polls confirm that the public believes global warming to be a major issue, they do not accept the most feasible ways of reducing emissions. In this poll, 50% are against nuclear power plants, and only 35% are in favour – with most of the remaining 15% of unsure respondents likely to go for a negative response if pressed (if people are forced to choose they tend to go for status quo options; all the more so on an issue ripe for scare campaigns like this one).

Due to the particular history of this issue, with opposition to uranium mining an article of faith on the left, we have the situation of Labor voters being considerably more likely (80%/60%) than Coalition voters to think global warming is a serious issue but considerably less likely (29%/51%) than Coalition voters to support a way of significantly reducing emissions. It is another example of the reluctance of left-of-centre voters to see politics and policy in pragmatic terms.

Bob Brown’s vendetta against the Exclusive Brethren

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

The wacky Christian sect the Exclusive Brethren has been in the stocks this week. Some of the attacks, like today’s story in The Age about covering up child abuse, are fair criticism – even if offences by someone who has already been thrown out of the Brethren and convicted of his crimes are hardly front page lead story material.

But other stories reflect as badly on those generating the news as on the Brethren – if not more so. They document attempts by Greens Senator Bob Brown to use instruments of the state to get at a religion he does not like.

Brown started this off with (another) attempt to have a Senate inquiry into the Brethren. Their offence? They had written to the Attorney-General proposing changes to family law. These were not sensible suggestions and as The Age reported:

Mr Ruddock’s response to the Brethren’s approach gave them little joy. The Government’s changes would “emphasise the rights of the child and the right of the child to know both their parents,” he wrote.

Ministers receive lots of letters with crackpot ideas (I used to have to coordinate responses to some of them). But the remedy is not punishing their senders by hauling them before Senate inquiries. It is polite letters explaining why the government cannot take up their proposals. Every citizen has a right to put their views to government without harassment.
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Contrasting takes on how much the government contributes to uni costs

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

The data from Figure 4.1 reveal that there has been a radical change in the nature of funding, particularly from 1987 to 2000. … the increase in revenue coming from students, which went from just a couple of per cent to about 25 per cent.

Bruce Chapman, Government Managing Risk, Routledge, London & New York, 2006, p.55.

Bruce Chapman, who developed the original scheme for the Hawke-Keating government, yesterday disputed the Howard Government’s claims that students are paying only about 25 per cent of the cost of a degree. …
“Does it stop people going to university? The answer to that seems to be no. But the next question is how much should students pay compared to taxpayers. We’re now at a level of about 45 per cent of the recurrent cost. I think the case for making that higher is very weak.”

Bruce Chapman, The Australian, 29 December 2006.

Ok, he’s not being completely inconsistent. The book – in an annoying feature of academic publishing – uses old data and the same basis for assessing the student contribution as the government, looking at what percentage of the whole university enterprise students pay for and not just the teaching component.

On my calculations, Chapman as reported this morning is right on the student contribution to the nominal cost of their tuition (ie, ignoring the cross-subsidy from fee-paying students), though if we allowed for likely bad debt it goes down to 38%. But in a debate where no data or fudged data are the norm, Bruce shouldn’t be surprised if his own words are quoted back at him.

Contrasting takes on the lady in the wheelie bin

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

KATHERINE SCHWEITZER lived a remarkable life: Holocaust survivor, refugee, wife, a generous benefactor to good causes in Sydney.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 2006.

A woman who was a member of a social group of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, which included Ms Schweitzer, put forward a premise that she may have argued with a taxi driver. “She was a terrible racist,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “She didn’t like Aborigines, or any other race.

“She didn’t like any advantages they were gaining.”

The Australian, 29 December 2006.

Another reminder of the complexities of ‘racism’ – that even those who have been its victims do now always draw the conclusions we might expect.

Supply does not equal demand in higher ed

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

According to an article in The Australian this morning on increased first year university enrolments:

AUSTRALIANS are turning to university in an effort to improve their career prospects, reversing a trend of school-leavers taking advantage of record low unemployment and the resources boom to land full-time jobs.
The latest commonwealth figures reveal a 6 per cent jump in first-year enrolments for Australian undergraduates last year,…
Part of the boost can be attributed to extra places being created as a result of measures by the Howard Government. …

Chief executive of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee John Mullarvey said the latest enrolment figures were “very positive”.

“It shows that demand (for university) is still high despite the economy booming,” he said.

Note the wobble between demand-based explanations (Mullarvey/journalist Dorothy Illing’s analysis) and supply-based explanations (extra places available). In market-based industries, this distinction may not be that important, since suppliers generally work to keep supply as closely aligned to demand as possible. But in higher education, where though trending downward most students are still enrolled under a centrally allocated system, the distinction between supply and demand is crucial.

Without proper price signals, in higher education overall demand always exceeds overall supply (because the low price encourages demand and discourages supply). So the increase in places noted in the article, plus the new private higher education providers taking extra students thanks to FEE-HELP loans, reduced excess demand.

But we can’t infer from this that there has been any reversal of a trend toward school leavers preferring to do something else, at least for a while. Between 2005 and 2006, demand as recorded by the centralised admissions agencies actually went down. Since these agencies are the main route into university for school leavers, the demand figures are consistent with school leavers continuing to prefer doing something other than study in the short term (though the initial demand figures for 2007 suggest that this trend might reverse itself slightly next year).
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Matt Wade impersonates Ross Gittins

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

“Ross Gittins is on leave” the SMH‘s opinion page noted this morning, but we have not been spared a Wednesday Ross Gittins column. If anything, stand-in columnist Matt Wade’s effort this morning is lamer even than Ross’s standard debunking of economic growth.

Commenting on the fact that though the US has a per capita GDP it ranks well down the global list for life expectancy (29th, compared to 7th for Australia, according to Wikipedia), Wade says:

The figures suggest Americans have, on average, traded longevity for higher incomes over the past 50 years.

Huh? Life expectancy figures aren’t like happiness statistics, where there is an apparent paradox of stable self-reported happiness while GDP per capita has grown significantly. Life expectancy has gone up almost continually just as GDP in Western countries has increased almost continuously in the post-war period. That’s true of the US and it is true of Australia.

As Wade says, there are various idiosyncracies of the US that help explain why despite on-going improvement it ranks below other developed countries. These contribute to the stark differences between white and black life expectancy, apparent too in Australia on an even greater scale, but our Indigenous population is too small for it to have the same impact on average life expectancy.

But none of Wade’s explanations, with the possible exception of disputed theories about social structures and work conditions, suggest a trade-off between GDP and life expectancy. And to the extent that there is a trade-off, it works in life expectancy’s favour. As annual income grows so too does public and private expenditure on health. The long period of prosperity in Australia over the last decade has seen per capita federal spending on health increase by more than 35% in real terms. This has almost certainly contributed to increased life expectancy over that time.

While nobody thinks that GDP growth alone improves health (as opposed to providing some of the means for doing so), the reasonable inference from Wade’s article that we should not be so concerned about economic growth is wrong. Not only would it deprive us of resources needed to finance improved health care, it would add to the life stresses he suggests are harmful, as unemployment went up again and employed people’s jobs became less secure.