The Will of the people

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

Will Wilkinson has a good libertarian analysis of the US election result.

Some parts I particularly liked:

I have always thought that the symbolic or cultural value of an Obama victory would be enormous. The dramatic reaction last night confirmed that. I understand why so many people are elated, and part of me is elated, too. I find it hard to see how you could not be. There is no denying that an election can be culturally transformative. It means something profound that a black man was elected to the most visible, high-status position our society offers. …

But, frankly, I hope never to see again streets thronging with people chanting the victorious leader’s name. …

romance in politics is dangerous, misplaced, and beneath intelligent people. Were we more fully civilized, we would tolerate the yearnings projected on our leaders. Our tribal nature is not so easily escaped, after all. But we would try to escape it. We would discourage and condemn as irresponsible a romantic politics that tells us that if we all come together and want it hard enough, we’ll get it. We would spot the dangerous fallacy in condemning as “cynicism” all serious attempts to critically evaluate the content of political hopes.

Who should decide how campus services are delivered?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

Over at Lavartus Prodeo, Paul (no relation) Norton offers an argument against the government’s position that student amenities fee money go to the universities. Instead, he wants to

restore the role of democratic student management of services and funds, but strictly subject to certain institutional safeguards and accountability mechanisms which have been largely missing from the governance structures of student organisations hitherto.

His argument for this is essentially anecdotal, that at a couple of Queensland universities of which he has direct experience a student run entity performed better than a university management controlled entity.

He may well be right about these examples, but his post is an instance of a general problem with this debate: almost every participant is trying to turn their personal idea of how student affairs ought to be organised into a model all universities must follow.

NUS wants to get their hands back in the till; Liberal students are adamant that NUS hands should be kept out of the till. Some want democratic student control of student services; others think that university management should be in charge of delivering those services.
Continue reading “Who should decide how campus services are delivered?” →

Engineering student, 19, only person making sense

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

There are plenty of VSU stories in the papers this morning – eg here, here, and here. But only when The Australian went and did a campus vox pop, instead of asking established players to recycle their arguments, did someone point out the obvious solution:

…engineering student Phuong Nguyen, 19, said that although she did not mind paying the extra money, she did not see why campus services should be paid for separately, because “they might as well put up the uni fees”.

Indeed, they might as well.

The return of the amenities fee

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

The VSU debate is back on. Youth Minister Kate Ellis has announced that from mid-2009 universities will again – subject to Senate approval – be able to charge students for non-academic amenities. There are, however several significant differences from the pre-VSU situation:

* the amenities fee will be price capped, at $250
* there will be a new income-contingent loan scheme, SA-HELP, to help students pay for it
* what universities provide students will be regulated for the first time, with ‘national benchmarks relating to the provision of student support services’ and ‘new representation and advocacy protocols’
* actual membership of student assocations will continue to be voluntary

The Coalition is already brawling over it, with the Liberal students running a Save VSU Facebook group, Barnaby Joyce threatening to again cross the floor on the issue, and Shadow Minister Chris Pyne opposing money going to political activities, but leaving open the possibility of supporting a proposal that funded amenities only.

The government’s position is no more coherent. Continue reading “The return of the amenities fee” →

Why neither right nor left support meritocracy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Charles says he believes in meritocracy, and Shem too thinks that admission to university should be based on merit. Polling the CIS did a few years back shows that most Australians also like the idea of meritocracy.

Meritocracy is a theory of desert; that if you have some characteristic – usually linked to ability – you deserve a position associated with that characteristic, most commonly places at educational institutions and particular jobs. Meritocracy’s Wikipedia entry states that this is in opposition to allocation by

wealth (plutocracy), family connections (nepotism), class privilege (oligarchy), cronyism, popularity (as in democracy) or other historical determinants of social position and political power.

But Wikipedia’s list is too short. Both liberals and social democrats support principles of distribution that are at least in tension with meritocracy.

Don Arthur likes pointing this out in the case of liberalism. Liberalism favours distribution by free exchange, and there is no guarantee that this will match distribution according to personal merit. The market is usually too impersonal to judge directly whether people are intelligent, hard-working, or have any other positive personal attribute. Consumers and producers often know little or nothing about each other. People can be stupid or lazy but lucky, and so reap market rewards. And people can be intelligent and hard-working but unlucky, and so go unrewarded in the market (as recent graduates are about to find out, at least temporarily).
Continue reading “Why neither right nor left support meritocracy” →

The hip pocket politics of climate change

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

The Treasury modelling of climate change abatement released this week put the likely cost at about $1 a day for the average household. An ANU poll (pdf) also released this week confirmed a general willingness to pay higher prices to protect the environment. But how does this dollar-a-day price to climate change abatement compare to more specific polling on the issue?

A Climate Institute poll of marginal seats last November found just 13% of its sample were prepared to pay $30 a month or more, the cost range according to Treasury. The annual Lowy Institute survey, which was carried out during July, found only 19% of its respondents were prepared to pay $21 a month or more.

Though there has been an advertising campaign for the government’s package since these two polls, it was only telling people what they already thought (something needs to be done), not selling them on a price, so I doubt the punters’ opinion on how much they are happy to spend will have softened. It is more likely that it has hardened, as voters focus on protecting their short term financial position during what will at best be a significant slowdown, if not a recession.

Though the dollar-a-day at least gives the government’s spin doctors something specific to work with, the polling shows that they are starting from a very low base of support.

Should politicians use ghost writers?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

I spent most of my weekends in January and February this year writing my chapter for Peter van Onselen’s edited collection Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead. As has recently been reported, not all the other contributors spent quite so much time writing their chapters.

We know this because recycled material has shown that neither Brendan Nelson nor Julie Bishop wrote the chapters that appeared under their names. The Bishop chapter partly plagiarises New Zealand Business Roundtable Executive Director Roger Kerr, and with her chief of staff Murray Hansen taking responsibility for the whole mess we know that he was the author of her contribution (or co-author, with Kerr). Tom Switzer has outed himself as the author of Brendan Nelson’s chapter by repeating some of it in the Australian edition of The Spectator.

Last month I defended Bishop in her previous plagiarism controversy, on the grounds that senior politicians aren’t using their time effectively if they write all their own material. But Louise Adler, the publisher of Liberals and Power, is is taking a much tougher stance in The Age this morning:

Continue reading “Should politicians use ghost writers?” →

Trying hard to find a redeeming feature in Labor’s full-fee place phase out

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

It is tempting to put the $249 million phasing out of full-fee domestic undergraduate places at public universities, some details of which were announced yesterday and reported this morning, in the same category as the $562 million wasted in a futile attempt to boost maths and science. Putting the two policies together, $811 million will be spent to add not one extra student place and to actually reduce the total funding universities receive. Even by the very low standards of Australian higher education policymaking, that is pretty spectacular.

The full-fee domestic undergraduate places were always a case of 2nd-best policymaking. The quotas and price controls (the 3rd best policy) crippling the Commonwealth-supported higher education system created artificial shortages of university places in high-demand courses. Allowing universities to offer additional places – or more accurately, allowing univerisites to offer those places to Australians rather than overseas students – alleviated these shortages.
Continue reading “Trying hard to find a redeeming feature in Labor’s full-fee place phase out” →

What’s missing in Working Lives

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Unlike last year, the release of the 2008 Australia at Work report was unaccompanied by claims that rude Ministerial words amounted to threats to accademic freedom. By contrast, the welcoming of the Working Lives report by Julia Gillard was part of the generally uncritical response that the authors must have been hoping for last year.

Though like last year there is some interesting material in the report, the mix of data and advocacy – and the bills being partly picked up by the union movement – inevitably raises suspicions, not about the veracity of what is there, but about what has been omitted.

In Clive Hamilton mode, the Working Lives authors are keen to send the regulators in to make us go home earlier from work. But ABS reports showing that average full-time working hours and the proportions of workers spending more than 50 hours at week have been declining since 2003 are brushed off:

Despite claims of a downward trend, since the ABS has been collecting usual hours data in 2001, average usual hours have remained between 44 and 45 hours per week.

Continue reading “What’s missing in Working Lives” →

Australia’s surprisingly secure workers, part 5

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

The ACTU made much of their claim that WorkChoices reduced job security, as part of their fight against weakened “unfair” dismissal laws. But it is surprisingly hard to find evidence that the legal arrangements surrounding employment security have any significant effect on either subjective job security (how highly people rate their chances of keeping their job) or objective job security (the actual rate of retrenchment).

The ABS labour mobility survey, released yesterday and covering the 12 months to February 2008 (ie, all under WorkChoices dismissal law), reinforces this point. Were there mass sackings as employers unfairly took advantage of additional rights to do so? To the contrary, the proportion of people who left their last job involuntarily through redundancy, dismissal or lack of work fell to 1.8% of all people who held a job in that 12 months, certainly the lowest since 1990, and quite probably the lowest ever recorded.* (I don’t have the 1980s surveys, but this is better than the 2.7% in 1972, at the tail end of the long post-war boom).
Continue reading “Australia’s surprisingly secure workers, part 5” →