The Australian Democrats, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Today the Democrat Senators gave their last speeches, bringing their party’s 31-year parliamentary history to an end. That makes me feel rather old, as I attended one of the first meetings that led to their creation after Don Chipp left the the Liberals in March 1977 (in the days when it was Malcolm Fraser being denounced for abandoning small-l liberalism).

The ‘Committee of Concerned Citizens’ organised a meeting on 9 May 1977 in the Melbourne Town Hall. There were 4,000 people there, including me and my Dad (I was 11), with many more turned away. According to John Warhurst’s book Keeping the Bastards Honest, at the end of the evening Chipp declared himself committed to a new party. I can’t quite remember what I thought of it all, though obviously I was not persuaded to take the micro-party route.

While they won seats up until the 2001 election, the Democrats never found a stable constituency among the ‘concerned’ middle class. The Australian Election Survey questions on which party respondents voted for at the most recent and at the previous election always showed a lot of churn among Democrat voters. People would vote for them, but vote for someone else next time. But until 2004, they always picked up enough of the stray disgruntled vote to win seats.

The 2007 AES suggests that the vast majority of defecting 2004 Democrat voters went to Labor and the Greens, confirming that the party that had been born centrist died leftist. With Labor and Liberal fighting over the middle ground, there was no electoral room for a centre party between them.

Despite their wacky policies on some issues (eg higher education) I’m sorry to see the Democrats go. Politics is less a choice between good and bad than between better and worse, and the Democrats are better than the Greens, Family First, or that no pokies guy from South Australia.

The Australian Democrats, RIP.

Where I was not the lone classical liberal

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

Apologies for the infrequent blogging of the past few weeks. I’ve been wandering North America – San Francisco, LA, Chicago (including a trip to the University of Chicago, where I certainly would not be the lone classical liberal), Toronto and Montreal – and decided to take a break from blogging, though I could not resist on a couple of occasions.

Of course I have come home to a mountain of work, leave from work being part holiday, part rescheduling. I will resume regular blogging shortly, but it will probably still be light for the next week or so.

Raffles College and ‘central management and control’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

In a blog post earlier this month, and in a subsequent Higher Education Supplement version of the post, I expressed doubt as to whether Raffles College of Design and Commerce, formerly known as KvB Institute of Technology, had current ‘central management and control’ in Australia. This was due to it now being owned by the Singapore-based Raffles Education Corporation. If it did not have this central management and control, amendments currently before the Parliament could lead to its students losing access to the FEE-HELP loan scheme.

The Higher Education Supplement and I have now received a letter from Professor Ron Newman, CEO and Chair of Raffles College of Design and Commerce, stating that it meets the requirements for FEE-HELP approval and therefore that they will be compliant with the new legal requirements.

Newman’s letter states that the members of the College’s Council all live in Australia, all but one of the eight members of the academic board live in Australia, three of the four company directors live in Australia, and it has a registered office in Sydney.

The issue here is what constitutes central management and control, but I agree that this sounds as close as is possible to central management and control being in Australia as is possible with 100% foreign ownership.

I’d note too that neither my post nor my article were intended to be criticisms of Raffles; only of the misguided policies of the former government that the current government was legislating to enforce.

Our ‘anomalous, inconsistent and irrational’ higher education system

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

The SMH report of the higher education review discussion paper picks out one of its very few quotable quotes, describing the funding system as:

at best complex and at worst anomalous, inconsistent and irrational.

This will come as no surprise to readers of this blog.

There are a few instances of this kind of frank analysis. The discussion paper summarises the research on what effects increases in student charges have had on low SES groups or particular disciplines (ie, none), so we now have a government document that effectively admits that the hundreds of millions of dollars the government is spending reducing charges for maths and science students is money wasted.

The government’s rhetoric about cuts to per student expenditure is also put into context. Labor has preferred out-of-date OECD data which ends in 2004, conveniently missing the surge in spending per student since then. Here is the key sentence (p.15):

From 2005, income per place has increased and in 2006 was $15,090, or 7.2% above the 1989 level (in real terms).

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My (possible, unintentional) contribution to university protectionism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

I fear I may be, unintentionally, partly responsible for a minor piece of protectionism currently on its way through federal parliament.

The story started last year when I was researching for a paper on private providers of higher education (like many of my research projects, it has fallen victim to the daily bombardment of urgent tasks). These providers have been assisted by the extension of the FEE-HELP loans scheme, which lets their Australian students borrow money on similar terms to HECS students in Commonwealth-subsidised places at public universities.

However, the Higher Education Support Act 2003 requires that in order to be eligible these providers must (among other things) have their ‘central management and control in Australia’. This was always a strange provision, since there could be many benefits from having foreign higher education providers set up in Australia.

Indeed, not very long after the Act came into force the government itself came to the same conclusion, but instead of changing the law passed a special amendment permitting the students of the Adelaide campus of the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University to get FEE-HELP. In the process, it added another strange ideological qualification, with the provision reading:

Carnegie Mellon University, a non-profit organisation established under Pennsylvania law. (emphasis added)

But I digress. In the course of researching the ownership of private providers, I came across two that had, since becoming eligible for FEE-HELP, been taken over by foreign companies. In the case of one of them, the government’s own higher education institution website is advertising this as a positive:
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What we did not agree to at 2020

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

As Joshua Gans notes, the final report of the 2020 Summit is out.

The authors of the productivity stream report certainly have an interesting definition of the word ‘agree’, as in ‘the stream agreed to the following’. What this means is that the ideas that follow were not, in the limited time available, subject to sufficiently vigorous dissent to knock them out of consideration. But given those time constraints, most people were more concerned with getting their own pet ideas in than keeping other people’s pet ideas out.

Given the lack of a proper decision making procedure, the productivity stream as a whole agreed to none of the ideas presented.

There are many bad ideas in this document, but two in particular amused me:

* [ensure] that policies and programs are informed by evidence and rigorous evaluation

This from a group that rarely gave policy suggestions more than a few minutes of explanation or discussion.

* develop measures to improve work-life balance

From a group sacrificing its weekend, led by a man who shows less regard for work-life balance than just about any other major employer.

Why is opinion on migration changing?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

The Age yesterday reported claims that comments former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews made last year about the reasons for slowing the African refugee intake led to more hostility towards Africans:

…
following Mr Andrews’ comments the NSW Immigration Department [sic] received reports of racial harassment directed at the African community.

“On 14 November 2007, the (deleted) reported that anecdotal evidence suggested an increase in racial harassment directed at Africans in the Parramatta area,” the department-in-confidence community update says.

As is usually the case with these claims, there is no real evidence here of either cause or effect. My own view is that politicians have little influence on subjects people can make up their own minds about. But what politicians say, and reactions to their comments (usually very heated where ethnicity is concerned), do alter the salience of particular issues. It is possible, though not very likely, that greater public discussion of the problems of African migrants had negative consequences for them.

But we can say that there is little sign in survey evidence that particular issues to do with African migrants, relating to gangs and crime, have had any influence on overall public opinion.
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The latest defender of public education

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

The defenders of public education often portray themselves as high-minded supporters of social cohesion, against ‘divisive’ people like Christians who actually believe in God.

Except for their notion of who counts as ‘divisive’, this is a conservative argument – that social unity is more important that freedom for minority cultures. This is why I have argued that ‘social cohesion’ is often a euphemism for intolerance.

This point was highlighted by the week’s events in Camden, with a proposed Islamic school that had been the subject of heated opposition for locals being rejected by the council on planning grounds (or at least so they said).

Much of the publicity has gone to Camden resident Kate McCulloch, who appeared at the Council meeting in a fashion-statement Australian flag hat (video here). And here is her case for public education:

“I want Muslims in Australia to attend our schools so their children can grow up with our values and, more importantly, so that their mothers can meet Australian mums and see how they don’t have to put up with the sort of treatment they sometimes endure.”

Sometimes you just can’t choose your allies.

Does religion make you happy?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

I recently read Arthur Brooks’ new book, Gross National Happiness. It’s a liberal-conservative version of Richard Layard’s social democratic Happiness: Lessons from a New Science a few years back. Two economists reading the happiness literature and finding it (mostly) supports what they already thought about the world.

One of Brooks’ arguments is that religion is good for happiness (he calls this chapter ‘Happiness is a gift from above’). Certainly the reported statistics are striking, with 43% of those who attend church regularly describing themselves as ‘very happy’, compared to 23% of those who attend church never or rarely.

I had a look at a similar question in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005, and there is a smaller but still large gap between the proportion of people who go to church one a week or more who are ‘very happy’ (defined as 9-10 on a 0 to 10 happiness scale) and those who never go, 33% to 23%.

Will Wilkinson is, however, critical of Brooks’ attempts to generalise this beyond the US experience. He points out that very secular European countries have very high happiness scores, and unlike the US they have been getting happier as they secularised.
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