And she was how old when she had her baby?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

The Victorian police have laid charges over a fire that killed a man and destroyed 11 homes deliberately lit bushfire. But do the maths on the accused:

A teenage boy and his mother have been charged with arson after a fire in Gippsland, south-east of Melbourne.

The 29-year-old woman and her 15-year-old son also were charged with reckless conduct endangering life, allowing a fire to remain alight on a day of total fire ban and impeding an investigation.

There was something to be said for the old system in which such boys were put out for adoption, rather than following this all-too-predictable path to the criminal justice system, via educational failure.

Is the review of the Nelson reforms pointless?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Can a review that rules out the only possible solutions to the problems it identifies do any good? That’s the question we face with the first phase of a review of the Nelson reforms announced by the government yesterday.

This part of the review is of the ‘funding clusters’, the dozen discipline groupings that determine how much universities receive for each student place they provide. The total is a combination of the Commonwealth contribution and the student contribution.

Even within the inherent constraints of a centrally planned system this is a mess. The amounts for each cluster have their origins in the ‘relative funding model’ used in the early 1990s to equalise funding between the universities and the old Colleges of Advanced Education (now known as ‘Dawkins universities’) when the distinctions between them were abolished. This was not a costing exercise; it was an examination of historical expenditure. Each discipline was to receive a multiple of a base amount. For example, law places received the base amount, and medicine places 2.7 times that.
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The ANU spins its enrolment problems

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Andrew Leigh is blogging on the Australian National University’s decision to offer school leavers with UAIs (ENTERs for people in other areas) that won’t get them into the university a separate admissions test.

The ANU is selling this ‘as a way to provide greater access and equity’. But when it comes to anything that can affect university status, such as the quality of the student intake, the first assumption ought to be that every university statement is shameless spin.

In this case, a more interesting place to start than the university’s explanation might be the NSW/ACT university application statistics (pdf). Though overall the number of applicants is up, for the ANU first-preference applications are fractionally down. That spells trouble for the ANU, because this year the ANU was about 200 places under-enrolled (less than their quota, that is). Given part-time enrolments, that would translate into more than 200 persons. If that was caused mainly by weak commencing student numbers in 2006, they have double trouble: not only do they need to make up lost numbers, but they have a ‘pipeline’ problem in that their second year cohort will be slightly smaller than they had originally planned.
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The lack of critical thinking in higher ed policy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

They say that university education encourages ‘critical thinking’, but so rarely is that skill applied to university policy itself. At the weekend, Kevin Rudd returned to his anecdotes about higher education:

“We’ve got to look long and hard at how we make higher education affordable for kids from working families right across this country. I’m concerned we’re heading backwards on this, and it’s not good in terms of equity.

“We have young people and their families coming in to our electorate offices saying they don’t know if they can afford to have their kids go to university any more. This is a crying shame. The rest of the world’s investing more in education, skills and training, but public investment by the Howard Government is going backwards.”

Though demand for university places declined over the 2003-2006 period, at current prices it still exceeded aggregate supply (though some universities could not fill places, this was because the quota system of allocating places to universities does not take demand into account).

For 2007, preliminary applications centre data indicates that demand from school leavers is up by 3.8%. What is the point in trying to generate extra demand if there are too few places already? Especially if there are unlikely to be sufficient high-quality jobs at the other end.

In any case, there is no evidence – despite what people coming into Rudd’s electorate office might say – that low SES people are ‘under-represented’ at university once their ENTER scores are taken into account. The Cardak and Ryan research released this year showed that at the Year 12 to university transition point there is no evidence that anything other than ENTER score makes a difference. The problem is that low SES students get relatively weak ENTER scores.
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Talking to ourselves

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

According to a media survey, blogs are now registering as a source of news, with 2% of people turning first to blogs for news of events in Australia, after scoring a ‘*’ last year. But TV (42%) and radio (21%) still dominate, reflecting their superior news gathering and delivery capacities. Slightly more people – 3% – turn to blogs for ‘political background’. I thought blogs might have done better on this question; this is one area in which I think some blogs do quite well.

But blogs have found their niche in providing ‘views and opinions of people like me’, with 7% of people turning first to blogs to have their prejudices reinforced. Talkback radio and ‘newspapers/magazines’ (an annoying blurring of quite different forms of media) also do better on this count than on providing ‘political background’. That this is blogs’ strength is not suprising. With low set-up and running costs, blogs can target niche viewpoints (such as classical liberalism:)) more effectively than media that require large audiences to be economically viable. Overall, though, these figures remind us that blogs have very limited capacity to influence how the public sees the world. Our audience is mostly people who agree with us already.

Too few good jobs for graduates

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

Three lots of graduate employment data were released this week. For recent graduates, the good news in that unemployment has dropped to 5.5%, though another 12% are in part-time or casual jobs and looking for full-time work. But for graduates overall, the ABS finds that unemployment is only 2.4%. Today’s ABS job search data shows that half of unemployed graduates have been out of work for 8 weeks or less. Just 0.4% of graduates in the labour market have been unemployed for 6 months or more.

But does this mean that Bob Birrell is right that we have too few graduates? The latest ABS graduate employment data again shows that he is wrong. Many graduates are employed in jobs that do not require degrees, such as clerical or sales jobs. Counting them and unemployed graduates together, and we have a ‘reserve’ graduate workforce of more than 460,000 people. That’s equivalent to nearly three years of university completions.
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What is the likely effect of the citizenship test on public opinion?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The Australian political class is convinced that Australians are racists and John Howard uses that racism to political advantage. With the citizenship test announced yesterday, Malcolm Fraser pondered:

Why have a new citizenship test for migrants and a flurry of talk about values reared their heads at this point? Is it about creating fear in the minds of many Australians? Is this the politics of race? Is the government using code to say that Moslems are different and that they don???t fit in?

Richard Farmer referred to the ‘transparent nature of Howard’s appeal to prejudice’. Peter van Vliet of the Ethnic Affairs Council warned that:

Now, as the 2007 election approaches we have a new race card, this time focusing on the enemy within.

But perhaps this has things the wrong way around. Howard does know that the Australian community is uneasy about some migrant groups. Already back in the 1980s, Muslims did worst in a social distance survey. The long list of PR disasters since isn’t going to have improved Islam’s image. But Howard is also a strong believer in social cohesion and that most Australians are not racists. As my article in the previous link shows, while many Australians will admit to ‘prejudices’, public opinion research also suggests that most Australians are not closed to any particular group, provided that they try to ‘fit in’. On this logic, greater confidence that people are meeting ‘fitting in’ criteria could increase acceptance of migrant groups, and a citizenship test is one way to demonstrate that migrants have made a reasonable attempt to fit in.
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The hilarious reincarnation of the DLP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

The surprise election of two Democratic Labor Party candidates to the Victorian Legislative Council has bloggers appalled. ‘Proportionate my arse’ says Urban Creature. ‘For crying out loud, not again’ laments GrodsCorp. ‘Mr Lefty’ condemns the ‘unbelievable f***ing hypocrites in the ALP’, whose preference deals helped it happen.

But more than any of this, it is just hilarious. I burst out laughing when told the news last night. The Democrats should not give up! Kim Beazley should not give up! If the DLP can come back to political life, anyone can. And the irony of Labor preferences bringing back the people who kept them in Opposition for so long makes it all the more amusing.

People say that proportional representation is more democratic than single member electorates. But what it seems to do in Australia is elect candidates that have negligible primary vote support, but manage to stitch up preference deals with the major parties that the PR system was designed to balance.

The citizenship test for Hyperbolia

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

The government’s announcement of a citizenship test put today’s Crikey contributors into an intense competition as to who could come up with the highest level of hyperbole. Richard Farmer started off with an allusion to the White Australia Policy and its infamous dicatation test:

Just as his predecessor a century ago hid the real anti-Chinese reason behind the dictation test, there was no mention yesterday of the growing fear and resentment of Muslims in the Australian community. This Prime Minister is trying to get the political benefit of pandering to anti-Muslim feeling without having to say so.

I’m not sure what the controversy is here. After all, we already ask citizenship applicants questions in English, to which they must reply in English. Perhaps the test will be harder, though this is not clear from what has been released so far. It will be internet-based rather than interview-based, but that can cut both ways. Some people find reading and writing easier than conversation, but others do not. In any case, to most people an English requirement will seem like common sense. In the 2003 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 92% of people thought speaking English was important for being truly Australian. Views were much the same among respondents who did not speak English at home – 90% agreement on its importance. Seven of the eight Arabic speakers in the sample held the same view. Nor is a belief in the need to speak English a sudden response to a ‘Muslim’ problem; 86% of respondents felt this way in a 1995 survey.

If a Newspoll in September is any guide, support drops off a bit when questions about Australia’s way of life are added to the English requirement, but not by much: 77% support overall. But Irfan Yusuf sees something much more sinister:

It is for Australians to decide how their culture (or should that be cultures?) is defined. It isn???t for governments to legislate to create a class of new citizens bound to one version of this culture. I believe there is a place in the world for government-sponsored and legislated culture. It???s called North Korea.

I think Irfan and Farmer have just passed the citizenship test for the state of Hyperbolia; whether they have made a useful contribution to debate in Australia is much less clear.