A rare defeat for the political cartel

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday almost everyone was condemning the South Australian government for requiring blog commenters to use their real names when offering their views on the South Australian election. Now the South Australian Attorney-General has backed down and says he will repeal the laws retrospectively.

I’m not convinced that the courts would have upheld any attempted blogger prosecutions as within the law. In what appears to be the relevant provision of the SA electoral legislation (s.116), the case would turn on the defintion of an internet ‘journal’. In the legislation, “journal means a newspaper, magazine or other periodical.” Is a blog a journal in that sense?

As with the similar kerfuffle over Stephen Conroy’s proposed internet filter, much of the criticism does not go far enough. In each case, the relevant ministers are trying to extend to the internet regulation that has long applied to other media. Is there something special about the internet that means different rules should apply? Continue reading “A rare defeat for the political cartel” →

Being made ‘accountable’ under political expenditure laws

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

This morning the major papers have their annual round-up of how much was donated to political parties and who the major donors were in 2008-09.

In my particular concern of political expenditure laws, as in previous years the papers were struggling to find any news other than how much money the unions spent, and this year so far as I can see only the SMH even bothered with that.

Of the $6.5 million in political expenditure declared in 2008-09 (down dramatically from the 2007-08 election year spending of $50.6 million) 94.6% was spent by unions, 3.6% by GetUp!, 1.5% by environmental groups, and the remaining $11,170 by the Aged Care Association (SA). Continue reading “Being made ‘accountable’ under political expenditure laws” →

Does the Intergenerational Report under-state future family costs?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

At the time of the second intergenerational report, I lamented the rapid increase in family payments. Fortunately the third intergenerational report shows that these have since stabilised.

Indeed, annual per person family payments (Family Tax Benefit, childcare, Baby Bonus/parental leave) are at $980 a year for 2009-10 only $10 higher than forecast for this financial year in 2007. FTB is slightly down (the means test on FTB B?) but childcare is up by 75%.

Rather optimistically, family payments are forecast to have slightly decreased by the end of this decade to $960 a year. I find this difficult to believe. For a start, there are already active plans to increase FTB handouts via overcompensation for the ETS. While the Coalition may be able to stall this for a while, their overall weak political position means that Senate obstruction has a use-by date. Continue reading “Does the Intergenerational Report under-state future family costs?” →

Private schools gain market share despite downturn

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

As the GFC took hold in late 2008, some people were predicting a trend back to government schools. ‘Parents abandon private schools as downturn bites’ said a SMH headline.

I was sceptical, predicting a moderation in the trend to private schools rather than a reversal of the trend. In my view, religious diversity, discipline issues, growing affluence, and increased long-term importance of education will all, other things being equal, continue to favour private schools for the foreseeable future. Cyclical events like recessions may temporarily affect the affluence factor, but will not change the basic trend.

The preliminary 2009 schools data, released today, supports my scepticism about a trend back to government schools. Despite a small economic downturn, Catholic schools grew at more than twice the rate of government schools, and independent schools grew at around 5 times the rate of government schools.

Overall, private schools gained .24% of market share. Consistent with my prediction of a moderation rather than a reversal this is below the long-term trend. The annual average private school market share gain was .39% during the Howard years.

The first Grattan Institute research paper

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

The Grattan Institute has released its first report, an analysis of student progress measures by Ben Jensen. It argues that ‘value-added’ measures – that is, how much students improve between NAPLAN tests – are a more useful way of assessing a school’s performance than simply looking at its absolute results.

The report meets Grattan’s claims to be ‘objective, evidence-driven and non-aligned’. It is well-researched, uses data, and presents ideas that could easily be adopted by either major political party. While the media played up its differences with the about-to-be-launched My School website, it’s hard to imagine that Julia Gillard would have any fundamental objection to the ideas presented. And that was pretty much how she handled it today:

From what I’ve seen of the reports of the Grattan Institute work, they are saying that this is a good start but they are wanting to see more. Of course we are going to keep building on this website year by year as we get more results from national testing, more results on Year 12 retention, more results on vocational education and training pathways and attendance at school.

Continue reading “The first Grattan Institute research paper” →

Public transport social capital not dead

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

A couple of weeks ago Tim Watts got a lot of coverage (here’s the Club Troppo version) for criticising the lack of response – from himself, and from others – to an incident on a tram, where a beggar started threatening and racially abusing a group of young Asian people. Like everyone else on the tram, he felt intimidated. He said the ‘inadequacy of the police response has created a climate in which people are fearful of speaking out’.

While the incident I observed on the number 96 tram this morning didn’t have a racial element, it did show that not everyone responds passively to threatening incidents. After a brief spray of abuse, a young man struck an elderly man, knocking him to the tram’s floor. The offender was immediately challenged by the two men closest to him; he threatened at least one of them but briefly backed off, before becoming aggressive again. But he did not get to carry out his threats, as two other young men tackled him to the floor, and then got him off the tram, pinning him to the ground despite his struggles.

Meanwhile at least two people were on the phone to the police, who acted quickly. The first police car was there in less than 5 minutes, two more police cars arrived shortly afterwards. The thug was arrested and put in the back of a police van. Continue reading “Public transport social capital not dead” →

VC actions undermine VC rhetoric

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

Governments look at what vice-chancellors do, rather than listen to what vice-chancellors say. Last December I pointed out that the government is taking the willingness of universities to enrol additional Commonwealth-supported as evidence – contrary to the verbal claims of VCs – that it does not need to increase funding. I repeated the argument in the Higher Education Supplement this morning.

My article was written a couple of weeks ago, but the Higher Education Supplement’s lead story showed that not only will VCs take more students on the same rates as now, they will also take more students on lower rates. Three universities are reported in the story as planning to exceed their enrolment quota caps. When this happens, they get the student contribution amount but not the Commonwealth subsidy. For many disciplines, that is a third or less of the within-quota funding rate.

So these VCs say 100% of the usual funding rate is too little, but they behave as if one-third of the usual funding rate is enough. If you were a cash-strapped government, which would you believe? Continue reading “VC actions undermine VC rhetoric” →

The five stages of language change

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

When I am in doubt about a point of style or grammar, first I always see what Pam Peters has to say. Her Cambridge Guide to English Usage miraculously foresees almost every question I want answered, and offers sensible suggestions based on Australian usage.

But I am also a big fan of Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage, the third edition of which I received last week.

The most useful addition made in Modern American Usage‘s 3rd edition is its rating of evolving words and usage not as correct/incorrect but on a scale from new usage to universal acceptance:

Stage 1: A new form emerges as an innovation among a small minority of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage.

Stage 2: The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage. Continue reading “The five stages of language change” →

Income and tax illusions

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

The Per Capita think-tank today released a survey of attitudes on tax and spend. The number one point they extracted from the survey results was that ‘Australians want a more progressive tax system’:

95% of respondents believe that low income earners and middle income earners are taxed too much, while only 16% believe that high income earners pay too much tax. However, only 3% of those surveyed feel low and middle-income earners pay too little tax, whereas 53 per cent believe that high income earners do not pay enough.

But as Per Capita itself notes, almost nobody believes that they personally pay too much tax. One reason for this is that many higher-income earners have an erroneous view of how well off they are relative to the community as a whole. In a 2004 paper I reported survey research asking people to place themselves in income deciles. Only 2% of people thought they were in the top two deciles. Continue reading “Income and tax illusions” →

Is the PhD a problem?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

Louis Menand’s new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is mostly the ‘backstory’ of American higher education; it is lucid and erudite reporting as readers of his New Yorker articles would expect. He has not set out to be ‘prescriptivist’ (his word). But clearly he doesn’t like the American PhD.

To start with, it’s not clear that the PhD is fit for purpose. It can’t be a qualification for university teaching, since most PhD students are already teaching. Nor do PhDs clearly provide a contribution to scholarship, since many PhD theses are not of high quality (and probably even more are not read except by the student, his/her supervisor, and the examiners). Menand – a Professor of English at Harvard – suggests that ‘if every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.’

Then there are what Menand calls the ‘humanitarian’ considerations. PhDs take a huge amount of time – though in the US they are nominally 4 years, most people take much longer. Median time to completion is 7 years in the natural sciences, 10 years in the social sciences, and 11 years in the humanities (including time out). Continue reading “Is the PhD a problem?” →