Which party do churchgoers support?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

People who regularly attend church (or synagogue, mosque etc) are likely to be more influenced by religion than those with only a nominal religious affiliation. On the theory that most religions tend towards cultural conservatism, I’d expect frequent churchgoers to be more likely to support the Coalition than Labor.

The figure below, which looks at people who say they attend a religious service once a week or more, confirms this hypothesis. The more interesting aspect of it is that there appears to be almost no trend in this over 40 years.

image001
Sources: 1967, 1979, Australian National Political Attitudes Survey; 1990-2007 Australian Election Survey.

If we put the 1967 Labor result down to the complexity of dealing with the DLP in that year (broken down results: 30% Labor, 9% DLP), and put the 1990 Coalition result down to some rogue factors, we have virtually flat lines over four decades.

Given all that’s been going on in changing religious observance, along with wider social and political changes, this aspect of religion and politics seems extraordinarily stable.

A better higher ed prediction

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Though my prediction on science applications wasn’t on target, my prediction on low SES enrolments is doing better.

The basic theory is that low SES applicants are disproportionately affected by movements in the number of places in the higher education system, so that when the number goes down they get a declining share of the total, and when it goes up they get an increasing share.

This is because low SES school students tend to get lower average Year 12 results, the currency for ‘buying’ admission to university. Other things being equal, a contraction in places causes admission requirements to rise and prices low SES applicants out, while an expansion causes admission requirements to fall and allows low SES students to buy more places.

The 2008 enrolment statistics released yesterday show that commencing domestic undergraduate numbers were up 1.5% on the previous year, allowing a modest increase in low SES* share from 16.95% to 17.01% (overall this series is very stable; most years rounding makes it flat).

Breaking the statistics down further, in the public universities 17.3% of commencing undergraduates are from low SES backgrounds, compared to 15.2% in non-public university providers- even though most of these students are paying full fees.

* This is using the postcode measure of low SES; permanent residence in a postcode in the lowest 25% according to the ABS Index of Education and Occupation.

Which party do Catholics support?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

Pollytics blog today reports on an Essential Research survey on religion and party affiliation. It finds that the religious divide in Australian politics, with Catholics tending to favour Labor, and Protestants tending to favour the Coalition, remains alive. According to this survey, 50% of Catholics support Labor and only 29% support the Coalition.

Other surveys, however, find that among Catholics the Coalition has been catching up on Labor. The chart below tracks 40 years of data using the party id (”think of yourself as Labor, Liberal…etc”) question rather than which party the respondent supports at the current time. Pollytics says that Essential’s question was which party the respondent felt “closest to”, but perhaps this is building in too much of the Rudd bubble.

image002
Sources: 1967*, 1979, Australian National Political Attitudes Survey; 1987-2007 Australian Election Survey. Continue reading “Which party do Catholics support?” →

Famous writer mistakenly impressed

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

As regular readers know, I think the literati are typically poor analysts of political and policy matters.

Though Nobel-prize winning author J.M. Coetzee’s style suggests to me a more analytical mindset than is usual among literary figures, comments in yesterday’s SMH on books and writers on Australia he has found interesting are not encouraging me to revise my theory:

Other writers I was impressed by included Mark Davis, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe, who try to place recent developments in Australia in a world context.

I gave up on Davis’s book, but I did finish and blog on Boucher and Sharpe’s book on ‘postmodern conservatism’ in Australia.

One of my criticisms was that is that it doesn’t place recent developments in Australia in a world context, but rather confuses recent developments in world politics with an Australian context.
Continue reading “Famous writer mistakenly impressed” →

Can public intellectuals be used to assess partisan media slant?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans have a new paper out on media ‘slant’ (which they prefer to ‘bias’, given that reporting can be negative or positive for reasons unrelated to prior partisan feelings).

One of their methodologies for assessing ‘slant’, getting five people to code article and editorial content, seems sensible – though it would be good to extend the analysis beyond the 2004 election campaign, given that it would be quite possible that leadership issues in that campaign made some papers appear more anti-Labor than they are on ideological grounds alone.

But another methodology using public intellectuals, as Sinclair Davidson has argued at Catallaxy, just isn’t going to work.

They’ve rated the partisan nature of various public intellectuals according to whether they are most mentioned by Coalition or Labor politicians in a positive or neutral way. As Sinc points out, this immediately starts to get some very counter-intuitive results:

Does anyone really believe that Philip Adams (26 mentions, 65% Coalition) is a right-winger? Other right-wingers include Eva Cox (9 mentions, 56% Coalition), Germaine Greer (4 mentions, 75% Coalition) and Hugh MacKay (18 mentions, 78% Coalition). Kevin Rudd’s best friend Glyn Davis (18 mentions, 56% Coalition) looks to be a tory too.

Continue reading “Can public intellectuals be used to assess partisan media slant?” →

Australia’s not so large education export industry

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Reporting of Julia Gillard’s India trip has regularly mentioned Australia’s ‘$15 billion’ international education industry.

Eighteen months ago I claimed that these figures were inflated, and while I was away last month Bob Birrell offered the most detailed substantiation yet of this argument.

In addition to the point I made about the need to deduct earnings by overseas students while in Australia, he adds that estimates of their spending while here are too high. I think he’s right, though a new survey of international students is needed to arrive at a more defensible number.

Universities Australia boss Glenn Withers wrote an article for the Higher Education Supplement defending the $15 billion figure, but though making a couple of good points it is unconvincing overall.
Continue reading “Australia’s not so large education export industry” →

More political donations innuendo

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

An AFR op-ed last Friday cited an anonymous corporate affairs head giving as one reason for ceasing political donations ‘some fear around our reputation’.

And little wonder, given the flimsy grounds on which businesspeople are subject to political donations innuendo.

A page one story in The Weekend Australian did at least – unlike other political donations investigations – start with something that looked a bit suspicious, a favourable deal for Credit Suisse in the now-infamous OzCar scheme.

But from there we head off on a particularly tenuous drawing of links:

The Weekend Australian can reveal that John O’Sullivan, the chairman of investment banking for Credit Suisse, donated more than $20,000 to the Wentworth Forum, the Opposition Leader’s political fighting fund.

But why is this relevant? The Opposition was working to discredit a Labor scheme that benefited Credit Suisse, a funny kind of buying influence for a Credit Suisse executive.
Continue reading “More political donations innuendo” →

How ‘brain-sex’ with Robert Doyle led to the Quadrant hoax

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

Yesterday I went along to a Melbourne Writers Festival session on Australian hoaxes, from Ern Malley to Quadrant (one of the panel was my friend Simon Caterson, whose book on hoaxes is out later this year).

Session chair and Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham began by quoting from an article she had published by Quadrant hoaxer Katherine Wilson, an article I had missed (perhaps because I miss everything that is published in Meanjin).

Wilson briefly rejects a point I made at the time, that this wasn’t a good hoax because it didn’t attack a position associated with Quadrant. In her article as ‘Sharon Gould’, Wilson used her own obsession with GM foods, rather than Quadrant‘s obsession with climate change scepticism.

But another point I made is supported by Wilson’s Meanjin piece. I said that

she wants to discredit Quadrant and Windschuttle in particular not by directly taking issue with what they publish, but by making them look foolish by publishing an article she had booby-trapped with errors and false statements

The real surprise in Wilson’s article is the bizarre source for her political strategy – the English classes of former schoolteacher and Victorian Opposition leader and current Lord Mayor Robert Doyle.
Continue reading “How ‘brain-sex’ with Robert Doyle led to the Quadrant hoax” →

What’s going on with science applications #2?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Earlier in the year, I reported evidence that contrary to my earlier expectations demand for science courses, for which the student contribution rate has been cut by by more than $3,000 a year, was going up significantly.

The national final applications data shows that science did indeed observe a surge in applications, up 17% in a market that was up 5% overall. The market share gain was 0.72%, within the historical pattern of annual movements of more than +/- 1% market share being rare, but still a big change (some previous U of M professional courses now requiring a science course first explains some, but not all, the increase).

So did the price decrease cause this market share shift? There is some other evidence in the applications data consistent with this interpretation. Past research suggests that people have clusters of aptitudes, skills and interests. On this theory we would expect declining market share in disciplines that draw on similar clusters to science. This is apparent in agriculture (-.49%) and health (-.34%). It is not apparent in engineering (+.32%) or IT (+.11%).

There is however one particularly curious aspect to the applications data. Continue reading “What’s going on with science applications #2?” →

A chance to get student amenities financing right

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

The government’s student amenities fee legislation has been rejected by the Senate.

While I did not support the original VSU bill, and am unpersuaded by the reasons given for rejecting the government’s legislation, I am pleased that it has been defeated.

Even by the low standards of Australian higher education policymaking, Kate Ellis’s student amenities financing plan was a shocker.

As I noted when it was introduced, it sought to impose new unfunded service obligations on universities – and this despite Labor cutting recurrent university funding in real terms in every year of its first term. While they have thrown money at capital projects, their policies on recurrent funding have been worse than the Coalition’s.

The bill would have required universities to make complex distinctions between similar services funded from their Commonwealth subsidies and from the new amenities fee.

The bill would have required universities to create an entirely new and completely unnecessary new student loan scheme, SA-HELP. Anyone who needs to borrow $250 for amenities will also need to borrow for tuition under HECS-HELP or FEE-HELP, and so these should be used for all loans. The SA-HELP alternative would have imposed bureaucratic costs on universities and created confusion for students.

In short, it is a relief that this bureaucratic monster has been strangled at birth.

While the government will probaby reintroduce the bill and hope that an Opposition terrified of an early election will pass it, the more sensible thing from them to do would be to refer it to the review they have promised on base funding levels for universities. Amenities fees are just one component of a much larger funding and pricing issue, and it would be sensible to deal with it all in a coherent fashion.
Continue reading “A chance to get student amenities financing right” →