Seeing racism where it isn’t

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

Some people are just too anxious about race and racists. At The Stump, Sophie Black (Crikey‘s deputy editor) writes about last night’s Hey Hey It’s Saturday reunion Harry Connick Jr protest against a ‘Jackson Jive’ Red Faces sketch. Connick’s problem was that the performers had blacked-out faces, which has a cultural meaning in the US that it does not here. But Black sees more sinister potential:

Ray [Hadley] should ask Daryl [Somers] this question over lunch – do Channel 9 capitalise on this incredibly negative publicity by taking the Howard on Hanson approach? Don’t condone any racist undertones, but by all means, exploit the ignited base. Pit the PC snobs against the true blue battlers.

It’s the old assumption that racism is a big part of the Australian psyche, with any reaction to an issue with a racial or ethnic angle evidence for this nasty undercurrent in Australian society, one unscrupulous politicians and – it seems – TV entertainers are just waiting to exploit.

But in this case, if there hadn’t been a Red Faces judge from the old slave-holding, black-lynching American south it’s unlikely there would have been any ‘race’ controversy. Continue reading “Seeing racism where it isn’t” →

Social democratic consensus

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

In my Quadrant Online piece on the left sensibility, I argued that the Australian left sensibility had accommodated contradictory ideas over time, including:

protection and free trade, nationalisation and privatisation, empire and republicanism, White Australia Policy and anti-discrimination law.

But I should also have noted that if my political identity survey is a guide, current-day social democrats show a high degree of policy consensus. In the latest issue of Policy, I have an article that collates the survey responses of the three varieties of economic liberal (classical liberal, libertarian, and social conservative and economic liberal) and compares their views with those of social democrats: Continue reading “Social democratic consensus” →

Liberalism and the emotions

~ Andrew Norton ~ 36 Comments

In response to my left sensibility post, Dave Bath suggested that

Are most self-identifying rightards best characterized by a lack of sensibility, if not sense? Could they be described as suffering some kind of social autism?

People with autism or Asperger’s typically have difficulty in reading and appropriately responding to other people’s emotions. I know of no evidence that this is particularly common among right-of-centre people (though Tyler Cowen has a sympathetic chapter on the issue in his latest book, prompted by a suggestion that he might have Asperger’s). But liberalism does, I think, have a more constrained and sceptical view than other political philosophies on the role of the emotions in public life. Continue reading “Liberalism and the emotions” →

The Stump

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Crikey has started the most ideologically-eclectic blog to date, The Stump.

On the classical liberal side, it has Jason Soon, Charles Richardson and Chris Berg.

Also from somewhere right-of-centre is Counterpoint presenter Paul Comrie-Thomson.

On the left it has Guy Rundle, Phillip Adams and Andrew Bartlett.

The blogosphere (or at least my part of it) has been rather quiet the last few months, so perhaps putting this lot together will liven things up.

Defending GDP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Of all the statistics produced by the ABS, GDP stirs the strangest reactions. In Fairfax papers over the weekend, Don Edgar tells us that:

Gross domestic product has failed as an indicator of either national progress or individual happiness.

That’s quite probably because it is not a measure of national progress or individual happiness. It measures the value of goods and services produced over a particular time period. Pointing out, as Edgar does, that ‘GDP goes up with increased spending on crime, natural disasters’ is true but a silly criticism. We would be better off if crime and natural disasters did not occur, but spending on them usually leaves us better off than we would be if we did nothing (the ‘gross’ is intended to explain that no account is taken of capital depreciation, or destruction in the case of crime and natural disasters).

GDP clearly cannot be taken as equivalent to national progress or individual happiness. But one reason that it is a very useful statistic is, as Will Wilkinson points out, that it correlates with other statistics that get closer to progress, such as levels of health and education. Continue reading “Defending GDP” →

Is Christine Wallace’s review of the new Gillard biography an ‘absolute stink-to-high-heaven conflict of interest’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

In the latest issue of the Monthly, Christine Wallace reviews Jacqueline Kent’s new biography of Julia Gillard.

Wallace has her own Gillard biography coming out next year, a fact she discloses in the Monthly review. This is the usual let-the-readers-decide solution to apparent conflicts of interest.

Kent doesn’t accept that disclosure is enough, and Kent’s publisher doesn’t buy the disclosure defence either:

While [Monthly editor Ben] Naparstek said Wallace had clearly identified herself as the author of a rival biography, Mr Ball [the Penguin publisher] said that was “like a mugger declaring his profession when you first meet”.

“It doesn’t explain away the absolute stink-to-high-heaven conflict of interest in getting one biographer to review another. What kind of intellectual contortion must he have gone through to come up with that?”

Continue reading “Is Christine Wallace’s review of the new Gillard biography an ‘absolute stink-to-high-heaven conflict of interest’?” →

The real causes of academic staff problems

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

According to a report in this morning’s Australian,

AUSTRALIA’S academics are disillusioned by corporate management cultures at universities, threatening to drive many away from the profession and worsen a looming staff shortage as thousands of them approach retirement.

According to the survey on which the story is based (which I presume will appear here) 28% of Australian academics have taken concrete action to change jobs to an industry other than higher education.

What we don’t know is how many succeed. My calculations based on the ABS labour mobility survey suggest that education (which includes schools and vocational education) in 2007-08 had the lowest annual rate of labour loss of any Australian industry, coming fractionally below health on 3.5%.

While I doubt that corporate (sic) management culture has much to do with exit – since for all their complaints academics have less management direction than any industry I can think of – higher education is poorly placed to deal with its personnel issues. Continue reading “The real causes of academic staff problems” →

A leaking student pool

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Skills Australia chair Phil Bullock wasn’t happy, in a friendly sort of way, when I suggested that his organisation was a central planning agency (this was at a seminar to discuss the papers that ended up in this publication).

In their recent paper on ‘market design’, they deny that they favour central planning:

It is important to emphasise that Skills Australia does not advocate a ‘central planning agency’ approach based on detailed forecasting of skills.

It’s true that they don’t advocate the kind of micro-level central student place allocations we’ve sometimes seen in higher education. But Skills Australia does want what they call a ‘managed market’, in which governments purchase student places to align them with ‘community and industry needs’.

But I’m not sure that they have really thought enough about how this works in practice. With the central planner’s mindset, they want to shape student behaviour largely by restricting options: Continue reading “A leaking student pool” →

William Safire, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

It’s turning into a bad month for conservative pundits -with first Irving Kristol and now William Safire moving from the opinion page to the obituary page.

In Safire’s case, however, he will be remembered more for his interest in other people’s words than his own words of political commentary. As the NYT obituary says

from 1979 until earlier this month, he wrote “On Language,” a New York Times Magazine column that explored written and oral trends, plumbed the origins and meanings of words and phrases, and drew a devoted following, including a stable of correspondents he called his Lexicographic Irregulars.

One of my (rather too many) nerdish interests is in the origins of phrases and sayings, and his Safire’s Political Dictionary is invaluable for the history of political terminology. Continue reading “William Safire, RIP” →

The right on the left

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

Quadrant Online is running a forum on The Australian‘s ‘What’s left?’ series.

From the classical liberal side there is Jason Soon on social justice and me re-working my left sensibility material from last week.

Angela Shanahan and Bill Muehlenberg represent family-values conservatism.

John Dawson argues with Dennis Glover about equality.

And Mervyn Bendle provides the Quadrant grumpy old man perspective: ‘the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia is a shallow, condescending narcissist.. a labored, cliché-ridden, self-serving piece of propaganda, without even a hint of an interesting idea or original vision … the Left is about are simplistic ideas and slogans, jealousy, resentment, opportunism, and a lust for power and personal advancement. ‘