Are human rights based on love?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

According to The Australian, the new girlfriend of David Hicks, Aloysia Brooks, ‘writes poetry on human rights issues’. Thankfully the paper spared us any quotations from it. But we were not so lucky in escaping ex-Justice Michael Kirby’s imaginative musings on ‘human rights’:

In an article published in The Age last week he told us that:

The essential underpinning of fundamental human rights is love. Love for one another. Empathy for fellow human beings. Feeling pain for the refugee; for the victim of war; for the prisoner deprived of the vote; for the child dying of cholera in Zimbabwe. We can imagine what it must be like to be a victim because, as human beings, we too feel, and yearn for, life, freedom and justice.

That’s quite a segue from ‘love’ to the pity we feel for a kid we’ve never met and never will meet dying of cholera. Putting ‘love’ as the underpinning of human rights seems to me to have things the wrong way around. It is because we don’t love each other, because positive emotions of any kind are in finite supply, that we need social norms and legal and political institutions that seek to protect us from others and to manage conflict in a peaceful way.

Judith Shklar, a fine Harvard political theorist and escapee from the Nazis as a girl, had it right in her famous essay on the ‘liberalism of fear’: that liberalism – which provides much of the ideological basis of ‘human rights’ – begins with the evil of cruelty, and the desire we have to live free of fear.

Whether legally-entrenched ‘human rights’ are the best way to put limits on cruelty is a debate that we will again be having over the next six months. But it we had unlimited love no such legal rights, and no such debate, would be necessary.

Bradley’s social justice mindset

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

The term ‘social justice’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bradley report on higher education policy, but the idea is everywhere in the section on ‘access’. Advocates of ‘social justice’ believe that they can describe in advance what a just society would look like; the actual interests and preferences of the individuals involved typically do not count for much.

The social justice mindset is behind the targets for ‘under-represented’ groups set out by the Bradley committee. They believe that by 2020 the proportion of students from the lowest 25% of socieconomic postcodes should be 20% of the university population. It’s currently in the 15-16% range. They don’t even attempt to defend this figure; like many other numbers in this intellectually weak report it seems to have been taken out of the air as sounding about right.
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Conor Cruise O’Brien, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien, who died last week aged 91, had a very varied career, straddling as his Times obituary says ‘diplomacy, politics, historical scholarship, literature and journalism’.

It was the last three that attracted me, though the first two informed them. I probably first came across him via his introduction to the Penguin edition of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, though I can remember also liking his mid-1980s book on Israel, The Seige, after which in some circles he was known as Conor Cruise O’Zion. From the Times obituary, he wrote it for much the same reason I read it, the influence of Jewish friends. Political views are usually part biography.

In 1994 I interviewed him for Policy, during my first stint as editor. We mostly talked about nationalism, which nearly 15 years on I fear may have annoyed him; presumably he was hoping to publicise his book The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, which had recently come out in paperback. Re-reading the interview, he knew a surprising amount about Australia, commenting on the history of Catholic-Protestant relations here and praising Noel Pearson.

It’s probably nearly as long ago as that interview since I read O’Brien, and I felt embarrassed as I read the obituaries that I could not recall a single idea, insight or piece of information that I could attribute to his writings. Perhaps they are there in my memory, unattributed. But on dipping into The Great Melody, it’s clear that he was one of those writers with the talent to make reading its own reward.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, RIP.

Youth Allowance reform

~ Andrew Norton ~ 29 Comments

Though the Bradley report fails on the key funding issue, not all of it is bad.

Earlier in the year, we debated the ‘independence’ test for Youth Allowance. I thought it should be tightened to exclude those satisfying a soft work test, but really still living at home dependent on their affluent parents.

The report provides new information on this issue. It shows (p.52) that ‘independent at home’ has been the only growing class of YA recipients over the last few years, though there was a small lift in other categories over 2006-07. Work Bruce Chapman carried out for the review using HILDA data found that 36% of Youth Allowance recipients were in households earning more than $100,000 a year. By contrast, only 32% of recipients were in households earning less than $50,000 a year. It’s quite a small sample (136 students), but supports other evidence that YA has turned into middle-class welfare rather than a program that assists genuinely needy people to attend university.

Sensibly, the Bradley report recommends abolishing these ‘independence’ categories, but lowering the age of automatic independence from 25 to 22. Money would be diverted to increasing how much parents can earn from $31,400 to $42,500, increasing the amount students can earn, and increasing benefits by an unspecified amount. Existing rorters of YA can, however, rest easy – current recipients will be ‘grandfathered’ out.

How high is Australia’s uni drop-out rate?

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

The report of the Bradley review of higher education policy says that Australia’s university completion rate was 72% in 2005. For this they rely on the OECD’s Education at a Glance publication.

The reason the review report doesn’t use an Australian source is that we actually don’t know what our completion rates are. The attrition rates occasionally published by DEST/DEEWR on a year-to-year basis count someone taking a year off or changing institutions as a ‘drop out’, but someone dropping a course but staying at the same institution in another course as a retention.

The OECD calculates its drop out rate by taking completions as a % of commencements n years earlier. But this is far from straightforward in the Australian statistics, since some people will be counted as ‘commencing’ more than once if they change courses. There used to be a ‘new to higher education’ commencing figure, but unfortunately it no longer seems to be published. But if I remove from the 2005 commencers those admitted on the basis of previous higher education and age the cohort three years I get a completion rate of 87%. Of course this is also highly problematic because some courses are longer than 3 years, and many people take more than 3 years to complete a 3-year course (and many of the people who completed a course will not have enrolled in that particular course originally). But it highlights how statistical factors influence results.
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The price is wrong

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

As I feared, the Bradley higher education report undermines its voucher proposal by failing to fix the price signals.

Indeed, it is worse than not deregulating fees, bad as that is. The Bradley committee haven’t even given any serious attention to how public funding could help make a voucher system work. Universities aren’t going to rush to enrol additional students under a voucher scheme if the price isn’t right. Indeed, if the price is wrong their response might be the opposite one: to use the lifting of regulation to shed uneconomic students.

The one study we have on university expenses relative to income for Commonwealth-supported places suggests that in half the disciplines they looked at universities lost money. This study has (acknowledged) data problems, but that finding is consistent with the observed behaviour of universities in trying to cut costs and recruit profitable fee-paying students. And a few of the disciplines in question did get some extra funding in the 2007-08 Budget. However, it suggests that an economically rational university would not be rushing to take extra students across a wide range of fields of study.
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Did Nelson support vouchers?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Much more on the Bradley review of higher education policy to follow, but first a postscript to the story of Brendan Nelson’s seemingly endless capacity to believe contradictory things. According to a report in The Australian,

THE former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson was on the line last week when The Australian broke details of the Bradley review…. [He] liked what he’d read in the morning’s paper.

In fact he was gobsmacked by Denise Bradley’s embrace of a voucher-style demand-driven funding system, which was something both he and a fellow former education minister David Kemp had favoured, and thought the consolidation and merger of regional universities was inevitable.

But if he favoured a voucher scheme, why did he do the exact opposite and introduce unprecedented government control over the distribution of university places? In the case of new places, this was often down to the detail of precise numbers of students in specific courses at designated campuses.

Did Cabinet reject a voucher scheme for a second time??? Or (as I have long suspected) did Nelson just not understand the bureaucratic monster of a reform package that his department created for him?

The daily disaster – climate change in the media

~ Andrew Norton ~ 36 Comments

Harry Clarke isn’t happy that Quadrant rejected his article criticising the ‘denialist’ perspectives that have been getting plenty of space in its pages. Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle’s reasoning goes like this:

We find that the pro-IPCC position is very well represented in almost every media outlet in the country, including academic journals and websites, but it is very difficult for sceptics to find any outlet for their voices to be heard. Hence, in the interests of balance, we believe the sceptics deserve a fair go in a little journal like ours.

My month of media monitoring shows that the alarmists do indeed get a lot of coverage. I counted 47 alarmist stories in the media over the last month, so an average of about 1.6 different predictions of disaster per day. This underestimates the saturation coverage this issue receives – I did not count multiple versions of the same story in different media outlets, and decided against including most borderline cases, where pessimistic projections were reported in a neutral way without accompanying calls to action. Maybe the prophets of doom were working extra hard in the lead up to the Poznan conference, but overall it confirms my impression that the alarmists are relentlessly on-message.

The NIMBYists were, however, closely pursuing the alarmists for numbers of stories in the media until late last month, but it seems we ran out of industries that were going to be devastated by an ETS. The NIMBYists finished well behind the alarmists on 31 stories. This might also have been higher than usual, in the lead up to announcing the detail of the ETS.
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Booking a date

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Book reading may be in decline, but being ‘well read’ still has cultural status. A 2005 survey found that a third of people in London and southeast England had bought a book ‘solely to look intelligent’. Now another British survey finds that nearly 40% of respondents admitted to being less than entirely honest about their actual reading habits in order to impress friends and potential partners.

Men are more dishonest than women about their reading (and no doubt much else…), but after seeing the things which would impress women we can have some symapthy for men:

Top ten reads to impress a woman:

1. Nelson Mandela autobiography [Long Walk to Freedom]
2. Shakespeare
3. Cookery books
4. Poetry
5. Song lyrics
6. Current affairs websites
7. Text messages
8. Emails
9. Financial Times
10. Facebook

In between telling lies, this reading list, and celibacy, I can see why some guys choose telling lies.

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).