The HindSite Blog

Free schooling and willingness to pay for education

2012-01-30T16:50:00.001-08:00

My views on private and public schooling are in flux. Broadly I think that private schools are useful in that they save the government money that can be used on more needy students. However I recognise that in practice they also cause there to be less parents with means who care about the state of public education. I was impressed in New Zealand by how good some of the public schools are. The fact that only about 1.5% of students attend private schools there must have something to do with this since it means lots of middle and upper-middle class parents have to care a lot about public schools.

But the New Zealand system isn't perfect either. They use zones to decide which kids can go to which schools. There are choice-based objections to this system. But what I find interesting is that evidence suggests that assigning people a local, free public school doesn't eliminate their willingness to pay for education.

There are two clear ways (although I'm sure there are lots of other ways) in which this manifests itself in New Zealand. First, rich parents support parties like National and ACT that want to undermine the zoning system in ways that will let them choose to send their kids to better school. Of course they have lots of other reasons to support those parties, but at the margin it must drive some donations of time and money to the party.

Secondly and more importantly, the zoning system causes large distortions in property prices. Homes in Auckland, for instance, that are in the zone for Auckland or Epsom Grammar Schools are worth much more than homes that are just outside of those zones. (Apologies that I can't find a good link for this, but I understand it to be a widely accepted fact).

That means the zoning policy re-allocates the parents' willingness to pay for education away from the education sector itself and to the incumbent owners of land in arbitrary zones. This is of course a perverse result. That money could be spent on improving education, even if it is improving the education of kids with existing privilege, it's clearly better than simply enriching people who happen to own land in the zone.
Now I think it is logical to assume that a policy like New Zealand's will reduce the willingness to pay for education over time. Having a good, free option available will reduce how much people value paid-for education, since a free substitute is available. But I don't think any sensible policy could eliminate that willingness to pay. Parents who want their children to succeed will always want to spend money to ensure that success, whether it's on extra books, tutoring or even trips overseas that open a child's mind.

That brings me to Australia's system. I think the selective schools in New South Wales (and outside of it where they exist) are a brilliant means of creating and ensuring social mobility. The fact that kids in Sydney can attend the best academic schools in the state for free catapults literally thousands of kids a year into a position from which they can join the middle classes.

But giving kids access to free, high quality schools that their parents had the willingness and means to pay for is basically middle class welfare. It means parents with poor incentives will spend money that could've helped educate their kids on something less helpful, and it means parents who want a good education will spend it on something other than the school system.

In New South Wales we've seen huge amounts spent on coaching children for the test required to get into selective schools, and huge amounts spent on coaching children at those schools outside of school hours. In other words, there are parents at these schools who have money they are spending on education, but that money isn't helping pay for the schooling their children actually achieve. Indeed there is reason to think excessive coaching cultures are hurting those schools. (Apologies for the lack of links - this was all over the papers around HSC season last year)

In light of that I think that, paradoxically, progressives shouldn't support free public schooling for all students. They should support the availability of free schooling, but that's a different thing. We should make sure that all students can attend great schools regardless of their parents' wealth. But we should find ways to make sure that families that want to spend large amounts of money on their children's' education are actually spending it on the schooling of their kids, not other groups whether they be land owners or coaching company owners.

Ultimately, supporting policies to achieve this should mean there is more money available to pay for schooling for everyone. That, coupled with the possibility of free schooling for those who need it, should mean better schooling is available for all kids.

Eddie Cowan is right - we need better stats in cricket. But which ones?

2011-12-01T17:03:00.001-08:00

Eddie Cowan, who is fast becoming the best cricket writer in the country, had a thought provoking piece on Cricinfo yesterday about statistics in cricket. He made the argument that our focus on averages is archaic and not terribly explanatory. It's well and truly worth a read.

I want to make at least a preliminary attempt at taking up the challenge. I've set out below a handful of statistics that I think would be extremely useful but that can be easily collected without the use of hawkeye or other elite technologies.

In putting these together I've considered the sorts of stats we already have, but also the traits that we are told make good players, or the outcomes we told that teams should aim to produce. The point of these stats is not necessary to define the 'best' players, but to offer a means of finding players with particular advantages over their peers.

I add the caveat that I think these would be most useful in test and first class cricket, but could be useful in any format.

I would welcome more suggestions in the comments!

Batting

1. Team runs per wicket at entry and exit

We hear a lot that great batsmen can 'turn a game around' and this metric should measure it. It's very easy to calculate: divide the team's runs by the wickets fallen when the batsman comes to the crease and subtract from that the team's runs by wickets fallen when they get out. It should provide a fairly good measure of whether the batsman turned the game around while they were at the crease.

One limitation is that if a batsman is at the other end while a team mate makes match-changing runs, they would get credit. But if you think about it that is worth crediting, and since a player would be unlikely to consistently do that without making runs themselves, it's not such an issue.

Another limitation is how to measure situations where a batsman is not out. Not 100% sure how to solve that one, but it's not a big deal.

2. Team runs per over at entry and exit

Same idea as above. This would be interesting in its ability to capture whether a batsman's coming to the crease corresponds with the team scoring more or less quickly. I think this stat is neutral (except in Twenty20) but highly explanatory.

Edit: This stat needs to be tweaked because it's harder to change the RPO later in the innings (i.e. 10 runs in an over in the second over impacts the RPO more than 10 runs in the 100th over). Perhaps measure RPO of runs at the crease against RPO before coming to the crease.

3. Maidens conceded

We hear that bowling maidens is crucial to building pressure for the bowling side. So it makes sense to try to find out which batsmen concede the most. Perhaps this is best expressed by taking balls faced divided by 6 (i.e. overs faced) and giving us maidens conceded as a percentage of that (i.e. what percentage of overs faced are maidens).

This is related to, but I think more useful thank a measure of dot balls as a percentage of balls faced.

4. Rest of team average while batsman at crease

It is often said that some batsmen bring out the best in their batting partners. Usman Khawaja said that batting with Ricky Ponting in Johannesburg was invaluable. It was said that Steve Waugh brought out the best in tail enders by refusing to farm the strike while he was batting with them.

These sorts of claims would be very easy to quantify by measuring the average of the other batsmen while that batsman was at the crease. Just take the runs scored by those at the other end and divide by the wickets that fall while the batsman is at the crease.

5. Scoring shot efficiency

We can broadly say that playing scoring shots in cricket involves more risk than blocking or leaving the ball. And further we can broadly say that a better batsman will find bigger gaps and hit them harder than a lesser batsman.

So we should measure how many runs a batsman scores on average from shots that they score from. In other words, if it's not a dot ball, what does the batsman score on average?

Bowling

1. Strike rate in team's next over

We often hear that some bowlers might not take wickets, but that they help the team take wickets by creating pressure or chances at the other end. This isn't too hard to measure. We currently measure the bowler's strike rate - how many balls on average they need to take a wicket. So if we want to see whether they let others cash in at the other end, we should just take the strike rate of the overs immediately after those bowled by the bowler.

For that matter we could take the average, economy rate etc of the overs immediately following as well.

2. Maidens percentage

If maidens are so important, we should see how many of a bowler's overs are maidens as a percentage. Too easy.

We can add to that the percentage of consecutive maidens and triple consecutive maidens (which John Buchanan found massively increase the chance of a wicket).

3. Scoring shot strike rate

The inverse of the scoring shot efficiency metric for batsmen. Look at how many runs a bowler concedes on balls from which runs are scored. In shorter forms, where economy rates are equal, you would probably prefer this number to be higher. That would mean batsmen are facing more dot balls and then hitting bigger shots - which broadly would mean taking bigger chances. In longer forms you'd probably prefer a lower number, meaning that there are fewer pressure-relieving boundaries.

4. Strike rate in first over of spells

Commentators are fond of saying of Graeme Swann that one of his strengths is his ability to take wickets in the first over of a spell. This is easy to measure. Just take the wickets in first overs of spells generate a strike rate from it. Again this could be done to give an average and economy rate in first overs of spells.

5. Innings result compared to projected innings result for individual bowler

The result of this metric would be similar to an average but would better capture situations where someone leads an attack even if it doesn't produce good career stats.

The way to measure this is to take the average runs per wicket for each innings a bowler bowls and subtract it from the runs per wicket for the whole innings. Then sum those differences for a player's career.

For instance, if someone takes 2/50 in an innings of 300 then their difference is 5 (300/10 = 30 minus 50/2 = 25). Compare that to someone who takes 2/50 in an innings of 200, where the difference is -5.

Edit: this needs to be weighted by wickets (for average) or overs (for economy rate and strike rate). It should be weighted by the percentage (i.e. 10 overs in 100 over innings is the difference by .1, 3 wickets in 9 wicket innings is difference *.33).

So what this would capture is whether bowlers consistently over perform or under perform their team mates. In particular it would help to correct for bowlers who play a lot of their cricket in conditions that are friendly or unfriendly to bowlers.

Again, this could be replicated for economy rate and strike rate.

Final thoughts

These stats are probably not going to be that useful in finding out which players are the greatest. But I think they would do a huge amount to split players with similar surface stats. In situations where selectors are tossing up between lots of similarly-credentialled players - as they were before the first test - a discussion of these stats should illuminate important differences.

Weekend reading!

2011-05-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry that all I'm doing at the moment is posting links, but absent the time to do anything more, I figure this is better than my usual total neglect of the blog!

Quora is a the latest and greatest social media tool. It lets people ask, give and rate answers to questions. I joined last year and found it very narrow. Most of the questions were about running a tech startup! But since then apparently it's broadened a lot. Hard to see it being a breakout, because it's pretty nerdy. Then again, so was early Twitter! Anyway, here's their attempt to figure out whether Jay Z's 'legal advice' in 99 Problems is useful. HT Kottke.
Kevin Drum advances the 'Unified Theory of Republican Flip-Flops' - taking their temporary adoption of policies they now oppose (like cap and trade) as tactics adopted only to fight off more liberal proposals. He rebuts Ezra Klein's argument that they're driven by animosity toward President Obama.
A moving account of Saddam Hussein's last minutes leaves him as the one with dignity and his executors as the monsters.
Ezra Klein christens the 'No-Brainer awards' for policy proposals that are... no-brainers. I'm not sure everyone would agree, but they probably are amongst his audience. The taxpayer receipt is a great policy I'd love to see implemented in Australia.
It turns out that Liberal MP Jamie Briggs has previously supported buying set top boxes for seniors, the policy last night dubbed by Tony Abbott 'Building the Entertainment Revolution'. His speech in favour makes limited sense and basically consists of saying people need this, therefore the government should provide it. It's unclear why that is a sufficient argument for any government spending, let alone something as stupid as this.

That's all for me folks. Have a great weekend.

Interesting things to read

2011-05-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

In lieu of a more substantive post, here are some things that caught my eye over the last couple of days.

Since the Chinese government runs the world's largest censorship regime, they of course have to publish directives to media about what they're not to publish. And of course, those directives are now regularly leaked... which kind of defeats the purpose. They make for fascinating reading. HT Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
What's the first thing the world's newest country, South Sudan, should do? Give everyone over 12 some cash and establish universal catastrophic health coverage, apparently.
Tim Carmody at Kottke.org tells us why we wanted to believe in fake Martin Luther King Jr quotes after OBL's assassination.
Matt Yglesias on the economic integration of schools. I think this is a fascinating policy proposal and a worthwhile goal for public school systems
An Australian cheerleader in the IPL has been sacked over her tell-all blog about players' behaviour behind the scenes.

Finally, here's Inception (one of the most overrated films in recent memory, in my opinion) explained via Mac OS X folders. Very clever.

INCEPTION_FOLDER from chris baker on Vimeo.

My favourite quote on all things Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged

2011-05-10T19:47:00.001-07:00

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I think this was discussed on the Slate Culturefest a couple of weeks ago. It's a great quote. I found it online here, but I can't find a reliable origin point.

Now the PM has got on the 2bn watched the royal wedding bandwagon

2011-05-09T21:24:00.001-07:00

As John Quiggin, and others, have pointed out it is extremely unlikely that 2bn people watched Kate and William Windsor's wedding.

The PM just repeated the number on indulgence in Question Time.

I mean... come ON!

Donald Trump is an idiot: The audience of Celebrity Apprentice is the most liberal on US TV edition

2011-05-09T20:09:00.000-07:00

Via The Atlantic, it seems that the audience of Celebrity Apprentice is the most liberal on TV. So of course his recent birth-laced tilt at the Republican presidential nomination hasn't been great for ratings.

Trump being a moron aside, this chart makes for some fascinating reading. It plots Democrat-Republican scale on the horizontal axis and turnout index (i.e. more or less likely than average to vote) on the vertical axis.

A few interesting points to take from it:

Family Guy has the least voting audience.
30 Rock has one of the most liberal audiences and one of the highest voting.
The Mentalist's audience votes the most, followed by the Office.
The two shows with the most Republican audience are NCAA Football and NFL Football.

Interesting things to read & some music

2011-05-08T16:38:00.001-07:00

I'm keen to keep up the frequency of posts here, even though I lack the time to write lots of new content. The solution, I've decided, is to return to my old practice of posting links to interesting things I've read on the web.

Here's some for today:

Matt Yglesias calls out false equivalence in media reporting on Medicare reform. It's not demagoguery to call New Gingrich in favour of letting Medicare 'wither on the vine' because that's exactly what he said he wanted to happen.
Matt again with a great take on the EU crisis. It doesn't make sense to laud the Germans as responsible savers and the PIGS as profligate spenders since the Germans were loaning their savings without thinking about whether the PIGS could afford the debt.
My favourite entry so far from a great new Tublr: Shit My Students Write.
The children living near Osama's compound understood incentives - 50 rupees for a new ball every time they kicked one over the fence.
It seems you can't tell the difference between expensive and cheap wine, but you can experience it differently if you know whether it was cheap or expensive. Start ripping off those price stickers!

Finally, if you haven't already you should grab an (electronic) copy of TV on the Radio's new album, Nine Types of Light. This is the first track, Second Song, and it's a belter.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/the-myth-of-the-responsible-saver/

Being articulate is not the same as having something to say - Paul Keating and Bob Ellis syndrome

2011-05-06T21:42:00.001-07:00

This week I've read contributions to the public debate by Paul Keating and Bob Ellis. Keating resigned his post as Chairperson of the Banangaroo design review panel after the Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, told him to shut up and stop denigrating people who disagree with him. Ellis wrote a relatively nonsensical piece about the death of Osama bin Laden.

I don't think anyone would deny that these two men know how to write a sentence. They're both incredibly articulate. Witness this passage from Ellis' article:

Clearly they feared the sight of his widow, wounded in the fire-fight, at the graveside of him and his dead son, and the sight of his grieving daughter and his other sons would humanise him in an inconvenient way. Clearly they feared his grave would become, like that of Karl Marx or St Thomas a Beckett, a pilgrim shrine for apostles yet unborn.

It's great prose. The unfortunate thing about both Ellis and Keating is that their contributions are well... shit.

Ellis' last two big articles on The Drum have been terrible. Offensive, disjointed, poorly thought out and clearly written in half an hour over a bottle of red. (I have no idea whether Ellis even drinks - you get my drift).

Keating, meanwhile, has been slagging off people who oppose his development vision for Banangaroo. Or I should say the development vision he bullied Kristina Keneally into accepting. Not with a substantive rebuttal of their arguments, but with pithy put downs.

Now of course the media will report on or print the comments of famous people with a reputation for causing a stir. That's fine. I imagine for The Drum publishing Ellis is a necessary evil to drive traffic and justify the continued existence of the site.

But I beg them to think about whether they should publish them. Jonathan Green, editor of The Drum, should've sent Ellis' article back to him and asked him to edit it. I mean it had a four paragraph P.S. at the end. And it was crap. I wonder whether the SMH should be putting Keating's shenanigans on the front page. Sure, he was once Prime Minister, but the happenings on the Banangaroo design review board don't strike me as front page news.

As these two men age, they are becoming less relevant to Australian public life. The fact they're still willing to mouth off about their opponents doesn't change that.

What's the political point of plain cigarette packaging?

2011-04-06T21:32:00.001-07:00

The government announced today that it will push ahead with plans to force all cigarettes sold in Australia to be packaged in the same olive packages. A friend commented to me that the new minimalist packaging, in the colour of the season to boot, was actually quite appealing to him, though I doubt hipsters are the target of this policy.

In all seriousness though, it is far from clear that this is a good idea. Smoking rates in Australia have fallen since the government banned various forms of cigarette advertising in the 80s. Smoking among those aged 14 and over has fallen from 30.5% of the population in 1988 to 16.6% of the population in 2007. That has obviously been a great result - letting adults choose behaviours and products that harm their health is probably a necessary incident of freedom, but letting companies manipulatively peddle addictive products to addicts probably isn't.

But it seems that the argument for plain packaging relies, at least in part, on thinking that standarising packaging - and therefore branding - is analogous to cutting advertising. Perhaps it is, but its effect will certainly be far more marginal. And as the cigarette lobby has pointed out, there's no actual evidence that plain packaging will work.

I think this policy is actually about politics, and the health benefits that may come will be a welcome bonus for the ALP. The first political benefit is that the government is seen to be doing something about a problem that most people want to see addressed. Indeed they can boast, as they have, that they're imposing the toughest laws in the world. I've little sympathy for this kind of political pandering - especially when it's based on stripping the rights of unpopular groups who are none the less law abiding. (Populism, even when directed against criminal groups is usually distasteful.)

However the bigger political benefit, as I see it, is that this issue wedges the Liberals in a quite spectacular fashion. On the one hand, there is definitely some milage for the Liberals in opposing this is big government overreach. But at the same time, the Liberals accept political donations from tobacco companies. This morning, when they equivocated on the policy, Nicola Roxon was straight at them, saying: "There is a clear question for Mr Abbott today: will you join with the Gillard government or will you continue to be in the pocket of big tobacco and accept their donations?"

That, I think, is what's really behind this policy. If the Liberals oppose it, they can be painted as stooges of big tobacco. If they support it, they may well have to kiss goodbye to some or all of their tobacco donations. Political donations are a bit like your dirty washing - they never look very good when the media explores every single item. Having the political debate focus for days or weeks on how much cash the Liberals take from big tobacco could be more than they can take.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think this government deserves to have its policies, and the timing of their announcement, scrutinised for political manoeuvres. And I'm a little too cynical to believe that this announcement, coming in a week where the government has been distracted by Kevin Rudd, is both pure coincidence and pure policy.

#lolstralian quotes jokes by Tina Fey as newsworthy admissions that mocking Sarah Palin hurt 30 Rock's ratings

2011-04-05T23:14:00.001-07:00

This is surreal. In a interview about her forthcoming book, Tiny Fey cracked some jokes about her impersonation of Sarah Palin. The Australian, Australia's most serious broadsheet, reported her jokes as admissions that she had erred.

It quotes an excerpt of the book from USA Today that reads "Some may argue that exploiting Governor Palin and her family helped bring attention to my low-rated TV show...I am proud to say you are wrong. My TV show still enjoys very low ratings." That presumably supports the article's headline: 'Sarah Palin impersonation may have hurt 30 Rock ratings, Tina Fey says'.

Um... no she didn't. Or, if we take that excerpt as representative of Fey's honest and serious feelings, I think the biggest headline is that she admits to exploiting Palin and her family.

The #lolstralian pushes on:

Fey said she believes "the Palin stuff" negatively affected comedy show 30 Rock.
"Let's face it, between (co-star) Alec Baldwin and me there is a certain fifty percent of the population who think we are pinko Commie monsters," she wrote.

Really? Does that quote really support the statement above it? Dear God, I'm changing my bookmarks to news.com.au...

Despite its relatively low ratings, 30 Rock earns rave reviews from critics and has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards. It was renewed by NBC for a sixth season.

I'll tell you one place that isn't overpopulated: Dick Smith's top paddock

2011-03-30T17:31:00.001-07:00

Yet more nonsense from population alarmist in chief Dick Smith: Australia should have a 'two child policy'. Given that Australia has a really easy lever to pull to change its population - namely its migrant intake - it's really unclear why this is up there on Smith's list of population control strategies, even if we accept the need to limit our population.

According to the ABS only about a third of Australian women by the age of 40-44 had given birth to three or more children. So we're talking about a vanishingly small impact on our population, at the cost of imposing a policy imported from the Peoples' Republic of China. And here I was thinking Dick Smith was against imports.

I do not understand what it is about having lots of money that makes the media, especially the ABC, give this idiot a platform.

Oh and I forgot the kicker here. Guess how many children Dick has? Three.

So I think we can conclude that one place that isn't overpopulated is Dick's top paddock. I think he's a few sheep short of a full flock.

Apple charges more in Australia because it can. So what?

2011-03-28T21:46:00.001-07:00

The new ALP MP for Chifley, Ed Husic, tweeted triumphantly this morning that the media had picked up his comments about price differences between Apple products in Australia and the US. Why, demanded Husic, could Apple charge a couple of hundred dollars more for the same product when it was sold in Australia?

For Ed's sake, I hope his outraged hand-wringing was the product of calculated populism because the alternative is that it was the result his ignorance about some pretty basic economic principles.*

Apple charges more for its products in Australia because it can. The Australian and US markets for Apple products are susceptible to price discrimination. You can't order products from the US Apple store to be delivered in Australia, and very few, if any, people are willing or able to buy products in the US, ship them to Australia and re-sell them at a profit. In fact that might breach Apple's terms of sale. As a result, since it faces segmented markets, Apple can charge the profit-maximising price in each market, which will mean that some markets face higher prices than others.

If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be pretty pissed if they did anything else. And as cool as Apple's products are, they're not like the monopoly providers of baby formula or HIV drugs or something. They're well within their rights to maximise the profits they make from selling gadgets to hipsters and fanbois like Husic.

So if Ed was actually asking why they do it, that's the answer. If on the other hand he was engaging in stupid populism he should take a long hard look in the mirror. Unless he'd be willing to act to solve the problem, he should shut up about it. Now acting could mean supporting a boycott of Apple products (Husic was the first MP ever to deliver their maiden speech from an iPad so that seems unlikely) or it could mean some more interventionist policy like forcing Apple to peg its Australian price to its US price. The first would make him look like a petulant hipster and the second would make Apple, at the margin, less willing to do business in Australia.

I guess I'd prefer the shut up option. Husic has a parliamentary platform to express ideas and advocate for causes. If he thinks it is a good idea to waste that on whinging about being charged an extra $100 for a MacBook Pro I suggest he chalk this up as a massive #firstworldproblem an get back to helping the people of Chifley, many of whom I'd be couldn't give a shit if he was overcharged for an iPad they can't afford in the first place.

* As in this is covered in intermediate micro courses at university (even the crap intermediate micro course I took). So yeah, if you don't have an uni degree in economics, maybe it's news to you. But if you're a federal MP and mouthing off about something, maybe you could just ask someone who knows what they're talking about first.

Who wins from the Greens' failures in Balmain and Marrickville?

2011-03-27T17:06:00.001-07:00

I was bitterly disappointed to see over the weekend that the Greens didn't win the seats of Balmain or Marrickville in the NSW election. If they couldn't win either seat in a year where the ALP's brand was at its lowest ebb, it's unclear if they ever can.

But I should be very clear here: I'm not disappointed that the Greens' candidates Jamie Parker and Fiona Byrne won't be in parliament instead of ALP members Verity Firth and Carmel Tebbutt. Indeed I have very little doubt that Firth and Tebbutt are more talented and capable members than Parker and Byrne. More about that in a second.

What disappoints me is that I worry this result will embolden those in the ALP who disregard progressive issues and voters, judging the Greens to be a minor threat. If the ALP learns from this that their most progressive members aren't going to lose to Greens our politics will be poorer. I wanted to see Firth and Tebbutt cast out to send the opposite messsage: the the ALP faces a credible threat on its left and that it needs to act to address it.

As much as Firth and Tebbutt themselves are probably not anti-gay marriage*, they are part of a party that still is. Maybe the national conference this year will change that. But when we're dealing with massive state-sponsored discrimination, I don't see why anyone should be content to wait. I refuse to support a party that lets progressive issues slide, and lets discrimination continue because it would rather win the votes of bigots than try to win them over.

Now the Greens have to take a big share of the blame here. They put forward to terrible candidates. Fiona Byrne, former Mayor of Marrickville council, voted for that council's boycot of Israel and Israeli products. That was a decision that placed her clearly out of the mainstream at a time when the Greens needed a candidate who could win the votes of disgruntled ALP voters and strategic-voting Liberals.

Jamie Parker, mayor of Leichhardt Council, was involved with a company that made false claims about the health benefits of herbal remedies it sold. In the run up to the election I received a mailer from him that said he opposed the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank and Telecom! Again, not a candidate who is going to attract many new voters to the Greens' cause.

I still would have preferred to see them both elected, my reasoning being that in Parliament they were more likely to campaign for marriage equality, action on climate change and other key Greens policies than divestments from Israel or the return of lumbering state utility monopolies. More importantly, I thought their presence would have given the ALP a real scare and sent it the message.

So who wins from the Greens' failure? Not the Greens, that's for sure. And not people who care about the mainstream causes that only they champion. The winner, of course, is the ALP. The question is whether it will prove a phyrric victory. If the ALP realise that the Greens' own ineptitude saved them, then they may be able to save themselves. Having Firth and Tebbutt make up about 10% of their lower house caucus may help. But if they conclude from this victory that they're untouchable and can continue to ignore their left flank, their day of reckoning will come sooner rather than later.

* I understand that issue is primarily federal, but that's no reason why state-level candidates can't campaign on it.

International Womens Day

2011-03-07T17:09:00.001-08:00

Happy International Womens Day everyone!

There has been a lot of discussion on the news today about the prospect of using quotas to address the chronic under representation of women on boards. I guess the first thing I would say about that is that it's a shame that this is the focus of our IWD discussion. I'd have thought the struggle for womens' rights internationally would be the focus of today. A discussion about how many women are captains of industry in Australia is an important one, but there are a lot more pressing womens' rights issues confronting us around the world. A day to reflect on how we can spread the rights that women' enjoy in this country to other countries would be a day well spent.

Secondly, I'm not sure the representation of women on boards in Australia is a first order issue. For starters, there is a lot of low hanging fruit yet to be picked. I'd like to see a concerted effort to make abortion legal for every woman in Australia. More broadly I'd like to see a focus on the wage differential in the sectors where most women work. Male or female, almost all Australians will never be on a company board. So addressing inequality in less symbolically important but more practically important sectors is more important to me.

So far as representation on boards goes, I think the undue prominence given to the issue is a good example of the way in which the experiences of elites shape our political agenda. Of course politicians and journalists know lots of board members - so to them it's an obvious and meaningful indictor.

On the merits of the proposal, I'm in favour. I consider affirmative action programs in areas where it addresses a problem the market has not solved to be a pro-free market policy option. It's best understood as changing the incentives firms face in order to correct a market failure or information asymmetry that has led to them making non rational decisions. Regardless, its also a good idea because diverse institutions, private and public, harness more ideas and make society more vibrant and inclusive.

The political dynamic of the debate over quotas is quite funny to watch. Last night on Q and A Joe Hockey was doing his best to be all things to all people, saying that he supported quotas. Kate Ellis, on the other hand, wanted to try to talk business around. I would guess both of them are naturally inclined to believe the opposite of what they said. However that the said it shows Hockey coseying up to small 'l' Liberals while Ellis reflects the paranoia that the ALP have about being seen to be anti-business or pro-regulation. Ellis' unwillingness to stand up for government action on this issue is particularly weak-wille and disappointing.

Perhaps, after all, government regulation to address these gender disparity goes on the 'only Nixon could go to China' list.

Sydneyification and restrictive trading laws

2011-03-06T15:23:00.001-08:00

I was talking the other day to a friend who was simultaneously raving about and bemoaning a trendy new dinner venue in Sydney. It was the Malaysia Kitchen Food Market, which was run for a short time in the lane behind the State Theatre, in the city. As Sydneysiders would expect, my friend was raving about the food and the venue and bemoaning the fact that by the second day, there was a line several hundred meters long to get a table. Resigned, she concluded it had become so 'Sydneyfied'.

Now 'Sydneyfication' is definitely a phenomenon. It occurs when a cool new bar or restaurant opens, only to soon be so full of other people that there's no point even trying to go. Think Pocket Bar on Burton St or a large group dinner at Spice I Am.

I think there is a tendency to blame Sydneysiders - especially hipsters - for the mass overcrowding caused by everyone latching on to the same fad at the same time. But in reality Sydneyfication is caused by terrible and restrictive trading laws.

If it is possible - and it must be since it was allowed to happen - to safely cook and sell Malaysian food in the laneway behind the State Theatre, why can't the operators continue to do that until the weather gets too cold for people to want to eat outside? If hundreds of people a night want to drink in a refurbished garage in an otherwise under-used inner-city building (as they do at Pocket), why can't more garages be refurbished? If people love the idea of sitting on stools on the footpath on Wentworth Avenue to eat amazing Thai food (as they do at Spice I Am) why aren't there more places like that popping up?

By and large the answer is that restrictive trading laws make it far too hard to open new bars and restaurants, especially those based around having far lower overheads than called for by the traditional business model. One reason this doesn't happen is that it upsets incumbent proprietors who have a huge number of ways of blocking progress by complaining about crowding, noise and even food smells - which by the way are delicious and should never be the subject of a complaint.

So next time you see your favourite bar packed to the rafters, don't blame the hipsters who got there first (as an aside, how do they get there so early!?) - blame restrictive and anti-competitive trading laws.

Dear cafes: it is not my problem if you don't accept cards

2011-03-03T16:59:00.001-08:00

I went this morning to Store Espresso, which is next to Camperdown Oval. My girlfriend and I had some good coffee and pretty good food. The cafe is really nicely decorated and has a great, laid-back vibe.

When we got to the counter, I asked if they accepted cards. They did not. Our bill was $31.50 and after we both scrounged through our bags we had $28 in cash on us. Given that there is no sign anywhere in the cafe to tell people they don't accept cards, I would've thought they would take our $28 and comp us the $3.50 we were short by.

But no. I asked the waiter where the nearest ATM was. He didn't know and asked the barista who said the nearest ATM was at the Mobil on Parramatta Rd - about half a kilometre away. Or, he said, the convenience store two blocks away would give cash out with a minimum purchase.

So off I went to the convenience store where I had to spend $10 (ten dollars!) in order to get cash out. To make matters worse, when I got back to the cafe to pay there was no apology, no thankyou, no nothing.

I just don't understand that attitude. I do not have a sixth sense of EFTPOS detection. I just don't understand how it is my fault that I assumed that a decade into the twenty-first century, in inner city Sydney, I could use a debit card to pay for breakfast in a cafe. Hell, even if I'm totally wrong about this, is it too much to expect an apology for having to schlep in get cash to pay for breakfast?

I am not going back to Store Espresso. Their decision not to comp us the price of a coffee we were short by has cost them a lot more than that.

See, I have no problem with businesses choosing to offer or not offer any payment method. But since it's 2011 I think EFTPOS is the norm and shops that choose not to offer it should make that clear. That's especially true when there are no ATMs within a cooee of your shop.

It costs a bit less than 1% of transactions to get EFTPOS. That is just not much. If businesses think it is going to kill them I'd suggest either charging a surcharge for cards or re-thinking the business strategy they have that means 1% in EFTPOS fees is going to make of break their business. I suspect the real gain that comes from not offering EFTPOS is that it makes it much harder for the Tax Office to check whether your activity statements and GST payments are correct.

Sorry for being (even more of) a Gen Y stereotype by venting rage at a cafe via blog. /rant.

Is Costa Rica really the most efficient country in the world at creating happiness? Is Egypt better at it than Australia?

2011-02-28T20:22:00.001-08:00

I was lucky enough this morning to have the Kindle I've just purchased delivered, two days ahead of schedule. In the spirit of embracing the brave new publishing world that the Kindle represents, I purchased Nic Marks' The Happiness Manifesto.

In it, Marks' makes some sensible points about the problems of GDP as a measure of national wellbeing. However, as Matt Yglesias noted a little while ago, the best articulation of the problem comes from a speech Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 and not from the present research.

I think though that Marks' jumps the sharp when he plumps for the Happy Planet Index, which his think tank created. The idea behind the index is good: to measure how well a country produces happy, long lives for its citizens (based on self-reported happiness, life expectancy, literacy etc) against the cost it imposes on the environment in doing so. The index of course captures the fact that the enormous material wealth and wellbeing of the citizens of the United States has come at a terrible cost to the earth's environment.

However the HPI seems to serially underestimate the value of a high standard of living. Perhaps the best evidence for that is the fact that it ranks Costa Rica as the most efficient and Vietnam as the fifth most efficient in the world. Actually, no, the best evidence is that in the 2009 index Egypt and Saudi Arabia were 12th and 13th! Given that the United States is ranked 114th, Australia 102nd and New Zealand 103rd, I'd say something has gone wrong.

Now this ranking doesn't claim Egypt is a better place than Australia. But it claims Egypt produces happiness for its citizens more efficiently than Australia does. That could only be true if the index massive under estimates the amount of happiness produced for the citizens of Australia.

I think the reason behind this is that it relies on in-country surveys of self-reported happiness. Given that there is evidence to suggest that most self-reported happiness is relative to a person's position in society, it's unclear how well it can be used in drawing inter-country comparisons.

For us to meaningfully compare the happiness of the citizens of many countries, we would to get them to use global society as their reference. If they did, it seems obvious to me that Australians would report themselves far happier and Egyptians far unhappier.

But we don't need to guess at these sorts of things. The revealed preference of the people of the world is available. We can look at the migration rates between country pairs as a way of measuring where the people of those countries would prefer to live. I don't have these to hand - but I would be surprised if I was wrong in saying that more people migrate to Australia from Egypt annually than visa versa.

In other words, while people may say one thing about their happiness when asked, it appears that given the choice, they value wealth and freedom more than these measures would suggest. As a final point, and to draw this into sharp relief, Costa Rica had the highest reported happiness in the data used to create the 2009 HPI. But given the chance to move to the United States, how many Costa Ricans would choose to? And how many Americans would choose Costa Rica?

Should Alan Jones 'respect the office' of the PM?

2011-02-24T16:21:00.001-08:00

Without trying to attack a straw man here, I got into an argument on Twitter this morning about the claim that Alan Jones should 'respect the office' of the PM and refrain from talking over or talking down to Julia Gillard (as he did on air this morning). I think the claim is total nonsense.

I think Gillard goes on shows like Jones' for three reasons: to reach out to his audience, knowing full well that they largely beyond reaching; to get into a stouch that energises her base (judging by Twitter and FB reactions, she succeeded) and to get media attention by engaging in the fight itself. At the same time, her media team would be grossly negligent and she suffering from amnesia if she expected anything other than the reception that she got from Jones. In other words, going on Alan Jones' show is a calculated media strategy from the PM's office.

Given that she choose to go on the show, knowing what Jones is like, I think he is under no obligation to treat her in any particular way. I personally wouldn't speak to a PM like that. And I understand that the 'treat the office with respect' crowd are talking in normative moral terms and not supporting a coercive legislative response, but I see no reason why Jones is under such a moral obligation.

Gillard is the head of a Parliamentary government, not the head of the state. She represents her party and our political government, not Australia as a sovereign entity. Part of the strength of our democracy is the robustness of its debate and I feel one of the things that sets Australians apart is our healthy disrespect for authority.

To say that journalists are under an obligation not treat the PM in a certain way is to ignore that this is a problem the market already solves, without the need for the imposition of moral imperatives. If Gillard wants to front Jones' show, then she should be willing to front Jones. If she feels he doesn't treat he with the respect she feels that she or her office deserves, then she should not go on the show. His listeners are in the same position - if they're offended by his style of interview they can stop listening. I personally think it's a good thing that journalists like Jones (if you can call him that) have a strong enough presence in the market that they don't need to handle politicians with kid gloves in order to get access to them.

One final point: how many of those calling on Jones to treat Gillard's office with more respect would not have and did not afford the same respect to John Howard?

Huntsman's timing was terrible

2011-02-01T02:40:00.000-08:00

The US Ambassador to China, John Huntsman, has resigned and the conventional wisdom is that he'll now seek the 2012 Republican nomination for President, to run against his current boss, Barack Obama.

It's obvious that Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah, will face some troubles in the Republican primaries. Obama joked two weeks ago that "I'm sure that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary."

I read an account a while ago, which was talking about a Huntsman challenge, (I can't find it now) that made the point that Huntsman could construct a plausible narrative to overcome having worked with Obama. He could argue that he took the post with high hopes for bi-partisanship, only to see Obama become a mindless partisan, wreck the budget, wreck the country etc.

And that might work. But when I read that post, before the mid terms, it made a lot of sense. Since then, Obama got the START treaty passed with seven Republican votes and passed his tax deal with GOP support in the Senate. In other words, he's taken the meat out of Huntsman's best answer to his Tea Party critics.

I think though, as others have said, that Huntsman is mindful that the GOP almost always nominate someone who's run for and lost the nomination before and so will run in 2012 with an eye to winning in 2016.

Either way, form his perspective, I'd say he's timed his run poorly.

How do we deal with the uninsured victims of natural disasters? Compulsory natural disaster insurance administered by the government

2011-02-01T01:55:00.001-08:00

Just as we mop up the last of the floodwaters across Queensland, the massive Tropic Cyclone Yasi is about to crash into the coast of Far North Queensland (or as the Daily Mail calls it, the state of Capricornia). There is little doubt that once again thousands of people will lose their homes who are either underinsured or not insured at all.

Luckily, we live in a society rich and compassionate enough to make sure that these people won't be left homeless. Either their friends and neighbours, charity groups or the government will help them rebuild and move on with their lives. The reality in Australia is that even those who don't purchase insurance are insured to some extent.

Recognising this, we need to think about whether it's fair that those who buy no or not enough insurance still receive it, in some form or another. I think it is not.

And quickly I want to dispose of the argument that insurance companies and not home owners are to blame. Some people do sign insurance policies that don't cover them for certain events, without realising that is the case. But absent fraud by the insurers that is the failure of the customer.

No, we don't all read the fine print on every contract we sign. But when the contract is about what happens when a giant flood destroys your house it's not the insurance company's fault if you can't be bothered to read it. We are talking here about the most valuable asset that most people own - their house.

However I don't think the fact that it's the homeowner's fault means they should denied help in the event of a natural disaster. There is simply no need in a country as wealthy as ours to leave people homeless to teach them a lesson. That's the principle behind unemployment benefits, government housing, etc.

It's worth noting is that the more likely your house is to be destroyed by a natural disaster, the more it will cost to insure against natural disasters. And it's also worth noting that disaster prone areas of Australia tender to be poorer than the rest of the country (think the Far North Queensland coast, the Northern Territory, remote norther WA, rural Victoria etc). And finally I think we should note that we actually need people to live in those areas, as primary producers, to lessen the population pressures in our capital cities and of course to give Australia a bit of geographical and cultural diversity!

Having laid out all of this, I think the answer is compulsory natural disaster insurance administered by the government.

I think it needs to be run by the government for three reasons. First, in the event of disasters the government has the ability to spend first and assess later, while insurance companies either delay and squabble over payments or require individuals to cover costs in the hope of being reimbursed later. That allows faster recovery.

Secondly, offering disaster insurance to people in some disaster zones just isn't that profitable. The government of course doesn't need to run its insurance business as a profit, and can indeed run at a loss if need be. That way people in disaster zones will always be offered insurance (as long of course as they can get local government approval to build in the first place).

Thirdly, given the pricing structure I'll suggest in a moment, I think the government subsidising people's purchase on the private market would be less efficient than the government providing the insurance itself. Especially because in order to achieve the coverage and price levels it desires, the government would end up regulating the companies so much it amy as well provide the insurance itself.

And the pricing structure I think we need is this: the more disaster prone your property, the more you pay. The more valuable your property, the more you should pay. However the less you earn, the less you should pay. By combining those variables, insurance could be offered in a price structure that reflects the risk to the property, its value and the earnings of the owners.

Of course there is no need for the government to offer full replacement value insurance to every person. But they should offer a basic level of coverage and rebuilding. People who want better or more insurance can purchase it on the private market.

The analogy to compulsory third party car insurance is a good one. Obviously that is provided by the private market, but as I explained above, I think this market is better served by the government. But the principle is the same: if something goes wrong, society cannot credibly commit to not help the victims (third party victims of car crashes, uninsured victims of cyclones) and so requires them to insure themselves to help cover the cost of that risk, since it is the result of their behaviour.

Finally, we should ask what the alternative to this scheme is. More government regulation of the insurance industry? Higher taxes on everyone (or the rich only) to cover the rebuilding costs of private houses? A continuation of the status quo in the face of increasing natural disasters as the climate changes? I don't think any are a superior alternative.

Watson's dismissal last night supports my point about him playing off the wrong foot

2011-01-12T19:52:00.001-08:00

I made the point last week that one of the ways in which Twenty20 and ODI cricket had made the Australians worse test players was that the tendency to push forward in shorter cricket led to players playing back foot shots with their weight on the front foot or to players playing balls off the front foot they should play off their back foot.

Shane Watson was bowled last night, playing a cut shot, by a ball from Yardy that skidded on a bit quicker than he expected it to. But as this photo shows, Watson was playing the cut shot with his weight almost entirely on the front foot, making him poorly balanced and stopping him from adjusting his shot to play the ball later as it skidded on.

One final note, about Steve Smith. Watching him slog at the end of the 5th test, and again last night, I think he's got it into his head that he's a slogger of the ball when he's actually a strokemaker. He looks his best when he's timing the ball, even if he's playing unconventional shots. When he tries to hit the cover off it he looks plain ugly and rarely succeeds. I can't help but feel that him thinking he needs to do this is can be blamed on Twenty20 cricket.

Response to Amir Iljazi of Menzies House on the Giffords shooting

2011-01-12T14:01:00.000-08:00

To his credit, Amir Iljazi has responded to my post, which criticised his post on the Giffords shooting.

Also his his credit, Iljazi admitted that he should have provided evidence to back up his claim that the left 'reprehensibly' were blaming the right for the shootings. I pointed out this his initial failure to provide evidence reflected poorly on his style of argument. I wasn't denying that some on the left had pointed the finger at the right.

Although as with his original post, I question whether the evidence proves what he claims it does.

"We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was"
: NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman, a comment made while Rep. Gifford's was still in surgery just after the event.

"Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin…
": Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas hours after the shooting

"There is a lot of fringe groups that were very upset with the health care law, felt that the federal government was overstepping its bounds, and that was in – within everyone's mind. It looks sadly like it's come to fruition today.
": MSNBC Reporter Luke Russert, near minutes after Krugman took to his blog

"If Glenn Beck who obsesses nearly as strangely as this Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt…"
: Keith Olbermann, from his "Special Comment" that aired that Saturday night

While the comments by Markos Moulitsas are clearly inflammatory and stupid, Krugman made a probabilistic statement ('the odds are that it was') about the shooter's motive. He then proceeded to provide evidence to support his supposition, including that Giffords had previously been the target of politically motivated violence. Russert makes the point that many were angry about the government and that the anger came to fruition in the shooting. Pointing out that anger can lead to violence is hardly an 'reprehensible' claim.

Olbermann was being glib but makes a fair point that Glenn Beck, like Loughner, is fanatical about debt and gold. In the same clip he calls on Sarah Palin to "repudiate her own part, however tangential, in amplifying violence and violent imagery". Hardly a 'reprehensible' call.

Iljazi asks:

Now, did Hind really think that left-leaning journos didn't come out in full force almost like a chain reaction after the shooting to stand up and shout to the rafters with this garbage? I can't answer that, all I can do is provide the proof; and Krugman, Olbermann, and Moulitsas are as influential as it gets when it comes to the left-wing in America today… indeed, even President Obama doesn't hold as much sawy with the left wing movement as these people.

I actually don't think that the left-wing media in the US did 'come out in full force' to 'stand up and shout to the rafters with this garbage'. I think three of the four examples Iljazi chose to cite were not nearly as bad as he made them out to be.

But that is beside the point. I pinged Iljazi for failing to bother to provide evidence of his big claim, that:

Liberals in the blogosphere, many at the nations leading newspapers (Paul Krugman perhaps being the most despicable of all), and a number of commentators on TV didn't even wait for victims to arrive at the hospital before using this incident to immediately profess to the masses that the reason Giffords was a target was because of A- Sarah Palin; B- The Tea Party; C- Talk Radio; D- Fox News; E- All of the Above.

It is an understatement to call what has been said on TV, published in op-eds, and written on the blogs, reprehensible. All have followed the same mantra of blaming the right, while having absolute disregard for the facts that have come out, (not to mention the facts that have yet to emerge).

He admitted his error and provided some evidence. I don't think it really proves his point. Readers can reach their own conclusions. Mine is that, Iljazi's argumentative style is to run his mouth and make claims the evidence he can muster can't actually prove. I'm sure he can find more questionably probative examples, but it shouldn't really take him three attempts.

Next he disagrees with my assessment that:

[Iljazi] then falls for one of the logical fallacies I find most annoying in political debate, the 'your side of politics did what you accused us of, ergo we are innocent and you are the villains'. Providing evidence that some on the left have used violent rhetoric does nothing to prove the right didn't do the same. Political writers need to constantly remind themselves that while electoral politics are zero sum, policy and political debates are not: sometimes both sides can be right, and sometimes both sides can be wrong. Even if you prove that your opponents are hypocrites, it does not exonerate your side.

He calls this 'flat wrong'. He explains that what he meant was:

What I was doing in this part of the blog post was refuting the despicable theory that was propagated with this mantra that the "right" was responsible for Saturday's shooting.
This theory I speak of is that Americans on the right in Radio, TV, and elsewhere have been responsible for the increase in incendiary rhetoric in America. I was not excusing any incendiary rhetoric, from EITHER SIDE[Editor's Note: Personally, I think Amir is being far too generous here. TVA]. My aim in that part of the post was to show that the notion of the "right" having the sole responsibility for the level of partisanship and rhetoric in American debate today is simply ridiculous, and my examples were such that I felt my point was made.

With that being said, here's a more detailed construction to illustrate my point. I'll be clear again (so that Hind doesn't misunderstand!): BOTH SIDES are responsible for 'incendiary rhetoric' dating back for many years. However, since the media only wants to talk about the "right", here is the "left" and how they have been a part of this cycle. (h/t to Menzies House Managing Editor Tim Andrews for sending me that link!)(Editors note: aww, shuck. Seriously though, do read the link…TVA)

If that's true, it's not what he originally said:

The fact that many in the media have been so forceful pushing the idea that the right wing has given way to outrageous rhetoric is an outright lie, period.

There are countless examples of fiery rhetoric on the left whether it be a"target list" complete with bulls eye symbols from the DCCC; a liberal talk radio host playing the sound of a gun shooting while playing a clip of President Bush speaking; or even a TV host imagining the death of a conservative talk radio host in a very gruesome circumstance. I'm not even going to get into the now INFAMOUS documentary-style film "Death of a President" and the kind of level of rhetoric that represents. The left has been engaging in vicious rhetoric for more than a decade, and that is just an absolute fact. Their hypocrisy on this issue exposes them for the political opportunists they are by using a near-dead member of Congress for not only the demonization of their political opponents, but also to advance their political agenda, all under some sense of moral superiority. To call this disgraceful is an understatement.

Even if we take the second version of his argument as his argument, and not as a walking back of his original outburst, I think he still commits the same fallacy. I just don't understand how showing (in my opinion not equivalent) examples of inflammatory left-wing rhetoric disproves the claim that the right has been responsible for the increase in incendiary rhetoric. That was my point: that it's a fallacy to argue that because you can show your opponents are guilty of what they accuse of of, you are thereby exonerated.

Both sides can bear responsibility simultaneously, and Iljazi admits this on his second attempt. But on my reading of his original argument, he made no such admission. If his goal was to provide evidence of intemperate left-wing rhetoric to balance out the allegedly biased media, his nonsensical first paragraph in the excerpt immediately above should have made that clear. My reading of that sentence is that the media 'have been so forceful pushing the idea that the right wing' has engaged in 'outrageous rhetoric' and that this claim is an 'outright lie, period'. Maybe I totally misread it, but it doesn't seem to say that Iljazi feels the need to provide balance in what he sees unbalanced media coverage. Again, readers can decide for themselves.

Iljazi then does what he did earlier - make a better attempt at providing evidence for his original claims. He asks me to say 'how wrong' a series of comments featuring violent rhetoric by left-wing media figures are. I'd say they're all pretty wrong. But can he point to any Democrats of the stature of John Boehner or Sarah Palin saying or doing the things I pointed out in my post? Did Nancy Pelosi say anyone would be a 'dead man' for voting against the Affordable Care Act? Did John Edwards or Joe Lieberman tweet 'RELOAD' alongside a map with crosshairs on the districts of 20 congresspeople? Did either of them accuse the President of 'palling around with terrorists' or of supporting 'death panels'? No, of course they did not. After all, there are degrees of wrongness.

And just because the point about false equivalence hadn't quite sunk in yet, Iljazi claims there's a tension between my excusing Death of President as fictional (recall he called this mockumentary a 'documentary-style film', which isn't exactly the gold standard of intellectual honesty) and my pointing out that John Boehner had been warned that saying a fellow member of Congress was a 'dead man' who 'can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati' could be misinterpreted by the mentally unstable. I guess there is some tension. I mean sure, a mentally unstable person could confuse fiction and fact. But, since we're talking about degrees of wrongness, he'd be a lot less wrong if he confused a figurative death threat by the highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives for an actual death threat. That's my point.

Finally, Iljazi would like to talk about mental health care and gun control in the United States. So would I. But I think we'd disagree. Let's talk about it later.

America not as free as it seems: surprise Kinder Surprise facism

2011-01-11T17:35:00.001-08:00

It seems the US seized 25,000 Kinder Surprises at the Canadian boarder last year. Apparently they're a choking hazard, and are banned as contraband. I guess that's sensible, since countries should ban things that could kill young children. Like chocolates with small toys inside. Or guns. Oh. Wait...

Menzies House's solidarity with the American right extends to hackish articles about the Giffords shooting

2011-01-11T14:43:00.001-08:00

To be fair, there are really only two things wrong with this piece by Amir Iljazi, the US Editor of Menzies House: the argument made, and the evidence cited in support of it.

After several paragraphs of platitudes, Iljazi finally gets to the point:

Thus far, President Obama has handled this crisis extremely well, and I must give him a great deal of credit. Sadly, I cannot say the same for the majority of those in the media who have supported him ever since he took the political world by storm. Liberals in the blogosphere, many at the nations leading newspapers (Paul Krugman perhaps being the most despicable of all), and a number of commentators on TV didn't even wait for victims to arrive at the hospital before using this incident to immediately profess to the masses that the reason Giffords was a target was because of A- Sarah Palin; B- The Tea Party; C- Talk Radio; D- Fox News; E- All of the Above.

It is an understatement to call what has been said on TV, published in op-eds, and written on the blogs, reprehensible. All have followed the same mantra of blaming the right, while having absolute disregard for the facts that have come out, (not to mention the facts that have yet to emerge). Now I could sit here and write all night about the despicable notions that were propagated by many in the much of the media and liberal blogosphere complete with links, but that really doesn't do any good. Why should I give the guttersnipes at MSNBC any viewers? The fact that many in the media have been so forceful pushing the idea that the right wing has given way to outrageous rhetoric is an outright lie, period.

There are countless examples of fiery rhetoric on the left whether it be a"target list" complete with bulls eye symbols from the DCCC; a liberal talk radio host playing the sound of a gun shooting while playing a clip of President Bush speaking; or even a TV host imagining the death of a conservative talk radio host in a very gruesome circumstance. I'm not even going to get into the now INFAMOUS documentary-style film "Death of a President" and the kind of level of rhetoric that represents. The left has been engaging in vicious rhetoric for more than a decade, and that is just an absolute fact. Their hypocrisy on this issue exposes them for the political opportunists they are by using a near-dead member of Congress for not only the demonization of their political opponents, but also to advance their political agenda, all under some sense of moral superiority. To call this disgraceful is an understatement.

Even if we were to take the argument (that the left 'reprehensibly' blamed some on the right for Gifford's shooting) to be true, the evidence that Iljazi advances is slim to non-existent. Saying that you could 'sit here and write all night...complete with links, but that really doesn't do any good' does not count as substantiating your argument. That Iljazi thought it wouldn't do any good speaks volumes about his attention to detail and willingness to engage in honest debate.

He then falls for one of the logical fallacies I find most annoying in political debate, the 'your side of politics did what you accused us of, ergo we are innocent and you are the villains'. Providing evidence that some on the left have used violent rhetoric does nothing to prove the right didn't do the same. Political writers need to constantly remind themselves that while electoral politics are zero sum, policy and political debates are not: sometimes both sides can be right, and sometimes both sides can be wrong. Even if you prove that your opponents are hypocrites, it does not exonerate your side.

The other thing that political writers need to remember is that being 'right' or 'wrong' are not binary states. There are degrees of rightness and wrongness. Failure to recognise this leads you to create massively false equivalences, which leads you to look like a moron. For instance, I would agree with Iljazi that, in retrospect, the DCCC should not have used actual bullseye symbols in the 2004 map that he refers to. However that is not the same as using gunsight symbols on map which Sarah Palin tweeted alongside the message 'RELOAD'. Further, the DCCC map referred to nine states that Bush won by less than 10 points in 2000. The Palin map referred to 20 people (including Giffords) who voted for the Affordable Care Act who were from districts that McCain carried in 2008. I would submit that there is a massive difference between bullseyes on states and gunsights on people.

The other evidence that Iljazi cites is pretty laughable. The 'liberal talk radio host playing the sound of a gun shooting' was in 2005 and part of a satirical sketch which the radio host apologised for almost immediately. (I should add that the information I'm citing on these pieces of evidence is just from following the links Iljazi supplied - so it's possible to refute his argument just by reading the evidence he cites). 'Death of a President' is not really a 'documentary-style film'. It was a British mockumentary about the political consequences of a fictional assassination of George W Bush. I mean maybe, a mockumentary could be called a documentary-style film. But the reason it's not a documentary is that it is fiction. Just like how Forrest Gump is a biopic-style film except that it is fiction.

Since we're talking degrees of wrongness, I'd counter this evidence of a fictional film from the UK and a radio host with, for starters, a Sarah Palin's map, and this incident involving the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boenher:

Another Ohio Democrat, Steve Driehaus, clashed repeatedly with Boehner before losing his seat in the midterm elections. After Boehner suggested that by voting for Obamacare, Driehaus "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town," Driehaus began receiving death threats, and a right-wing website published directions to his house.
Driehaus says he approached Boehner on the floor and confronted him.
"I didn't think it was funny at all," Driehaus says. "I've got three little kids and a wife. I said to him, 'John, this is bullshit, and way out of bounds. For you to say something like that is wildly irresponsible.'"
Driehaus is quick to point out that he doesn't think Boehner meant to urge anyone to violence. "But it's not about what he intended — it's about how the least rational person in my district takes it. We run into some crazy people in this line of work."
Driehaus says Boehner was "taken aback" when confronted on the floor, but never actually said he was sorry: "He said something along the lines of, 'You know that's not what I meant.' But he didn't apologize."

The final point to make is that the risk of a mentally unstable person acting on violent rhetoric that targets individuals was not unheard of before the Giffords shooting. Driehaus above gives an example of politicians being aware, and made aware, that crazy people could interpret the language in crazy ways. Giffords herself had her office vandalised after she voted for the Affordable Care Act. In response to that she warned that things like Palin's target map 'have consequences'. Don't they ever.

Thoughts on the Ashes loss and how Australian cricket can move forward

2011-01-07T18:17:00.001-08:00

Regular readers will know it's somewhat pointless for me to apologise for the lack of recent posts or to promise to post more regularly in the future. But I'll do both anyway.

Obviously Australia's crushing loss in the Ashes is a devastating blow for Australian cricket and sport. We've never lost by an innings three times in a test series. We're now the 5th ranked test nation in the world, which is particularly humiliating since number 6, Pakistan, often try to lose.

I woke this morning to this article in The Australian. I was pleased to see Michael Clarke speak frankly, take responsibility and assign blame for the loss. And then I read Andrew Hildtich and James Sutherlands' comments and became enraged. These two muppets have not only presided over a crushing defeat, but seem totally unwilling to admit any mistakes or take any responsibility:

Elsewhere, responsibility was in short supply yesterday, with chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch avoiding any.

"I think we've done a very good job as a selection panel, but the reality is we were totally outplayed," Hilditch said.

Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland denied that Australia's Test and one-day series in India, followed by a short one-day series in Australia, played any part in the Ashes debacle.

"I'm not discounting the fact that we couldn't look at the way in which we prepare but I think to point the finger at preparation and suggest that is responsible for us losing this Ashes series 3-1 is rubbish," Sutherland said.

"We actually played more Test cricket than England did leading into this Ashes series. That's just not the reason. That's not to say we can't do it better.

"If you look at Mike Hussey, people say his preparation leading into India was ordinary. Michael Hussey was our best performed batsman for the first three Tests, so don't talk about preparation.

"There will be a whole lot of things that will be considered. I know we all want to point the finger at someone or some thing but there are lots of things that could have been done better and have to be done better for us to get ourselves back on top."

Sutherland refused to elaborate on what could be done better, claiming he had discussed them with coach Tim Nielsen and hoped to be part of the annual review which the CA board will set-up to assess the season.

I'd say on the back of those comments alone, both should be sacked. Sutherland's comments are not only cowardly, but also stupid and illogical. The 'Hussey's preparation was criticised but he scored the most runs ergo the preparation was fine' argument is incredibly weak. Surely if his preparation was better, he may have scored more runs. And more importantly, almost all of our other batsmen failed dismally. The fact Hussey would buck poor preparation proves nothing.

And then there is Hilditch. Hilditch was at best a mediocre test player but compared to his work as a selector, he was Bradman. How on earth can he seriously say "I think we've done a very good job as a selection panel"? Maybe it's an elaborate joke and he burst into laughter as soon as he was behind closed doors. If so, sign him up as the straight man in a Clark and Dawes-style comedy duo. At least that way he'll be an intentional laughing stock.

We picked two spinners, who collectively, in three tests took four wickets at 104.5. I simply do not believe that there is not another spinner in Australia who would have averaged less than 100. But it's not even a matter of conjecture. Nathan Haurtiz has a good record for a spin bowler in this generation. It's a couple of runs better than Paul Harris, South Africa's spinner. In fact since Hauritz came back into the test team in November 2008, you could argue he's been the second or third best spinner in world cricket, behind Graeme Swann and Harbhajan Singh. He has 58 wickets at 36.22, compared to 128 at 28.10 for Swann, 87 at 35.63 for Harbhajan, 65 at 37.10 for Daniel Vettori, 46 at 42.28 for Paul Harris, 35 at and 44 at 39.68 for Suliman Benn. Not also that Hauritz average in the period was close to Muralitharan's and better than Kaneria's, Oija's and Mendis'. It is totally unclear why he was sacked. That a massive selection error. Oh and in 2009 and 2010 he averaged 32.92 with the bat. And has scored two Sheffield Shield centuries this season. Muppets. (I took every ounce of self control I have not to use all caps there).

Of course we have to remember that Steve O'Keefe is also available, who has a first class bowling average for 23 and took 4/88 in the Australia A game - the best figures any spinner took against England on the entire tour.

And then of course we could talk about the selection of Marcus North, Ben Hilfenhaus and the other players who were selected despite terrible performances.

But what I want to talk about now is how we can move forward. Obviously I don't have the experience or time to give a complete overview, but I've some ideas that are worth airing.

First of all, if we think test cricket is the pinnacle of the game (as we should), we need to decouple the value of central contracts for the number of forms of the game played. The fact that players make the most money if they play for the Twenty20, One Day and Test teams gives them the incentive to overstretch themselves, prepare poorly for tests and develop techniques that suit the short forms of the game, but not tests. On the last point, obviously the huge money in the IPL does this too, but players who are serious about representing their country in tests shouldn't suffer financially if they choose to focus only on that form of the game.

I think it's no coincidence that Andrew Strauss and Alistair Cook don't play ODIs or Twenty20 for England. Both have a pronounced first movement back when batting, a rarity in the modern game where one day cricket has led most batsmen to prop forward as their first movement, which has resulted in lots of the Australian batsmen (Hughes, Smith, Clarke to name a couple) playing a lot of balls off the back foot with their weight still on their front foot, or worse, playing balls off their front foot that should be played from the back foot.

If we want our top order batsmen to have good technique in test cricket, especially against the new ball, I would suggest there is a strong argument for only allowing them to represent Australia in Tests, but without the financial penalty that would usually entail. So despite his obvious talents in the shorter forms of the game, if the selectors seriously think Steve Smith is a future great batsman for his country (I think he is) he should be omitted from the ODI and Twenty20 sides. Likewise Shane Watson.

The other obvious improvement we can make is to sack our muppet batting and bowling coaches. Troy Cooley has not taught the Australian bowlers to swing the ball. If anything, they swing it far less now than they did a couple of years ago. Justin Langer, despite being a legend of the game, has presided over a marked decline in the quality of technique and temperament of the Australian batsmen. Even if he hasn't caused it, he hasn't arrested it either, so it's unclear why he's still there. And the decline in our fielding should claim the job of the fielding coach.

The long and short of it is that we can't make excuses for under performance, keep its architects in their jobs and then periodically act surprised that things have got worse.

It appears Captain Obvious is freelancing for the New York Times

2010-12-09T00:28:00.001-08:00

It seems even the world's paper of record is not immune from the scourge that is crappy opinion pieces. This effort, from Sheryl Gay Stolenberg (aka Captain Obvious) bears a dazzlingly insightful headline: 'To win re-election, Obama needs political centre'. Um, ya think!? It doesn't get much better.

I'm not sure how pointing out that Obama needs to win votes from people who won't automatically vote for him, but might, is an insight worthy of the opinion page of the New York Times. I'm working on an op-ed for them at the moment titled 'Wikileaks raises difficult questions'. I reckon it's got to be a shot at getting published. Either that or the other one I've got in the pipeline: 'Obama needs to win more votes in 2012 than Republican challenger.'

Credit where it's due, at least Stolenberg substantiates her ambitious and counter-intuative claim:

Analysts across the political spectrum agree that if Mr. Obama is to win re-election in 2012, he must recapture the support of the independents who have abandoned him over the past two years. Polls show that even before the tax deal, he seemed to be making a start.
In October, roughly one-third of independents — 35 percent — approved of how Mr. Obama was handling his job, according to a survey by The New York Times and CBS News. But in the most recent CBS News poll, nearly half — 49 percent — approved. By forging compromise with Republicans and demonstrating a willingness to break with his own party, analysts suggest, Mr. Obama may begin to solidify that trend.

Now I tell you what, there is no evidence more compelling and probative in an op-ed than the 'analysts agree' evidence. Well maybe there is: 'analysts across the political spectrum agree' evidence.

And of course there's two opinion polls. They trend they show proves the author's point according to... you guessed it: analysts.

There's actually a bigger, more substantive problem with this argument. It's true that Obama needs independents to win in 2012. But the assumption that he will necessarily win them over by arbitrarily being more right wing by handing the Republicans more victories is, at the very least, questionable.

At least some of the independent voters who Obama needs to win back are confused:

Research by Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization, bears that out. The group recently surveyed 1,000 voters who supported Mr. Obama in 2008 but abandoned Democrats in 2010; 500 of them were "droppers," who simply stayed home, and 500 were "switchers," who cast their ballots for Republicans. The survey found that 76 percent of switchers and 56 percent of droppers said Mr. Obama "should compromise with Republicans" to pass legislation.

I would suggest that many voters who want Obama to compromise with Republicans will disapprove of the substantive policy outcomes of his doing so. For instance, Obama's tax accord/backdown/unsuccessful hostage negotiation will provide some mild and not terribly effective fiscal stimulus, but will also do nothing to reduce the deficit, a policy goal we are constantly told independents are focused on. So when Obama goes to the 2012 electorate with the unemployment rate still somewhere around 8% and the deficit will be huge and growing. Independents will not approve. And I doubt they'll be impressed by the argument that Obama compromised with Republicans in order to bring about that dire situation.

Here's something Wikileaks told us that we didn't already know: Mark Arbib was leaking to the US

2010-12-08T14:55:00.001-08:00

What a total scumbag. Arbib had risen in my estimation after he announced his support for gay marriage, but after this, as far as I'm concerned he can slink back under whatever rock in Sussex Street came from.

So it appears after all Wikileaks is telling us something we don't know.

As if to prove my point from yesterday, Fairfax breathlessly reports Wikileaks reveals Kevin Rudd is a control freak

2010-12-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

As said yesterday that I found it annoying that the media was reporting information in the Wikileaks cables as though the people involved didn't know until now. As if to outdo its efforts thus far, Fairfax papers today started reporting on cables it had obtained *exclusively*. Today's cables reveal:

THE US regards the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, as an abrasive, impulsive ''control freak'' who presided over a series of foreign policy blunders during his time as prime minister, according to a series of secret diplomatic cables.

[...]

''Rudd … undoubtedly believes that with his intellect, his six years as a diplomat in the 1980s and his five years as shadow foreign minister, he has the background and the ability to direct Australia's foreign policy. His performance so far, however, demonstrates that he does not have the staff or the experience to do the job properly,'' the embassy observed in November last year.

The cables show how initially favourable US impressions of Mr Rudd, described as ''a safe pair of hands'', were quickly replaced by criticism of his micro-management and mishandling of diplomacy as he focused on media opportunities.

Sorry, how is that news?

That sounds like a fair précis of not only what the informed actors knew, but of what most Australians thought of Kevin Rudd over the relevant period. Is it really newsworthy that the US Embassy reported information back to Washington that could literally have been pulled from the pages of The Australian?

Sydney's 'nightscapes'

2010-12-07T15:49:00.001-08:00

This article, about the life and death of New York club Superdive has been linked to a fair bit in the past week or two. It's largely a history of the bar itself and how it obtained a liqour license in potentially dodgy circumstances, but is also says something about the East Village party scene:

Academics have a word for what the neighborhood has become: a nightscape. Bars and restaurants were once peripheral to the main drag's primary economic drivers: supermarkets, coffeehouses, boutique shops, record stores. But in post-industrial cities, nightlife has grown into an industry in its own right. As in any industry, shop owners tend to cluster. A century ago, that meant the creation of a Garment District. Now it means the creation of a Party District.
[...]

Even after the police made the area safer for visiting revelers, the bars that began opening to accommodate them weren't automatically considered by the locals to be bad neighbors. It's not clear when that changed: One popular theory pins the blame on Mayor Bloomberg's 2003 smoking ban, which forced drinkers out of the bars and onto the streets. Around then was the first time Goodson [a neighbour] really noticed, "Oh, we have bars in our neighborhood," he said.
NIGHTLIFE IS AN INDUSTRY LIKE ANY OTHER. If coal-burning plants spew ash, bars and restaurants spew drunken hoots and hollers, vomit on doorsteps, loud fights and a gantlet of stumbling smokers to plow through on your way to your door.
But bars and restaurants also benefit the neighborhood by creating jobs, spurring crime-deterring street traffic, and giving residents a place to go when they're tired of hanging out in their tiny apartments.

When I was in New York in October, I was really struck by how well it as a city managed to handle these nightscapes. The article talks about drunks, noise, vomit and fights, but by Australian standards, I don't think New York party districts compare. I blogged at the time about why I think that's the case: in short because Australia's expensive liquor licenses encourage incumbent licensees to squeeze as much out of their licences as they can, which gives them perverse incentives to encourage or at least tolerate binge drinking.

The last graf (yes, anonymous commenter, I will keep using that term where it is appropriate) provides the key to nightscapes, as they emerge and grow in Sydney, not falling foul of local residents. They need to provide more than they take. Most residents of the Cross and surrounding areas, no doubt, would appreciate having a range of local bars and restaurants, and would appreciate the area having enough activity to keep the junkies at bay. But that area is a nuisance because the number and type of people it attracts to the number and type of establishments it has outweigh those benefits. Surry Hills is probably a good example of an area where the abundance of bars really does add something to the local neighbourhood.

Wikileaks: We're forgetting that most of this stuff was known, just not publicly known

2010-12-06T21:30:00.001-08:00

Following the increasingly hysterical discussion about the Wikileaks leaks as it relates to Australia, I'm a little amazed at the extent to which politicians and the media forget that most of the material leaked may have been revealed to the public and the media for the first time, but that does not necessarily mean it comes as news to those involved.

A great example is advice that Kevin Rudd was revealed to have given to Hillary Clinton about China. It is totally unclear to me how this is meaningful news. As the Lowy Institute's Michael Fullilove tweeted:

Beijing will be shocked - SHOCKED - to hear Australia engages in hedging behaviour and frank discussions with its allies.

In other words, it's very hard to see this being news to Beijing. You'd hope that any self-respecting would-be superpower would be able to get its hands on as many secret documents - if not more - than Julian Assange. The Australian even admitted the cable was hardly newsworthy in the final graf of today's story on it:

Paul Dibb, at the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said Mr Rudd's comment were "a statement of the bleeding obvious". Similar views on the growth of China's military power were in the defence white paper, he said.

I think it's fair to say this is true of much of the information revealed in the most recent Wikileaks release of documents. It seems that as many as three million US personnel have access to the cables that were leaked. Given that, I think any party with a serious interest in the contents of any of these cables would already have obtained them, or at least the gist of them. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's more likely than not that Bradley Manning (or whoever the leaker is) is not the only person in that three million willing to leak documents.

The issue then, is not that the information is now available to terrorists, our enemies or even our frenemies. Instead, the issue is how the information being available to the media affects parties' reactions to it. Maybe China already knew Kevin Rudd talked trash about them to Hillary Clinton. The effect of Wikileaks is that they now know that everyone knows, and this may induce them into a reaction they otherwise would not have made. Likewise the revelations I wrote about last week that China was wavering in its support for North Korea. The real story there is how that information going public will influence China's behaviour.

On a broader note, I think the Australian media's coverage of this has exemplified its cringeworthy tendency to overplay the Australian angle on international stories, in a manner that assumes Australians couldn't possibly be interested in major news stories unless Australia is somehow involved. Obviously there are Australian angles on the story that are highly newsworthy, like the government's failure to offer Julian Assange consular assistance. But reporting the 'bleeding obvious' about our relationship with China or the location of 'critical infrastructure' is parochial and insulting.

Why do we need to advertise junk food, alcohol and betting to pay for our favourite sporting fixtures?

2010-12-05T22:11:00.000-08:00

As Dom Knight hilariously pointed out today, it's an absolute disgrace that Cricket Australia has accepted so much advertising from KFC while also taking money from the government to run anti-obesity campaigns. He thinks the government should step in and ban junk food advertising during sport in the same way they did cigarette advertising.

I'm all for the condemnation of Cricket Australia, but am a bit more ambivalent about the proposal to ban the advertising. I think there's a real tension in the government banning the advertising of legal products. I don't think it's never justified, but whenever it happens it really begs the question why the government doesn't just ban the product in question if they think it's so harmful.

What's more interesting to me is what about the economics of sport in this country lead to the huge amount of advertising for booze, junk food and gambling that we see in and around major sporting fixtures. I wonder what it is about sport that attracts the advertising of peddlers of vice. I'm sure cigarettes would still feature prominently if their advertising was allowed. No doubt there'd be people lining up to advertise drugs and hookers too if they could.

To that end, it's funny that phone and insurance companies are the other big advertisers, given their capacity to screw their customers.

If I may attempt an explanation (and I'd welcome other explanations from anyone else who has an idea) it would be that sporting fixtures offer a large audience that is highly defined, making it attractive to advertisers. I mean defined in the sense that the demographic profile - young, male, high disposable income - is quite clear and might be clearer than other high-rating shows, like for instance the six o'clock news. Looking at it this way, the preponderance of certain types of advertising is driven by the demographic watching sport.

The other element of the explanation is that companies in the industries in question (alcohol, phone, gambling etc) are in pretty fierce competition because the products of each company are highly substitutable for one another. KFC needs to sponsor the cricket because there's very little difference between a Zinger and McChicken, and so on.

Having said all of that, I'm somewhat surprised that there aren't other industries to which all of the above applies. That would suggest that company size is also important, in terms of being able to justify/afford advertising on that stage.

Anyway that's all very interesting, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it's sad this is how we fund sport, and that it's sadder that sports administrators don't show a bit more responsibility and refuse to funding their games by allowing others to prey on their fans.

A comprehensive review of public opinion on gay marriage shows it is uniformly popular. Your move, government...

2010-12-05T20:26:00.001-08:00

The ever diligent and relevant Pollytics today published a comprehensive review of recent polling on gay marriage. It's really worth a read. Unsurprisingly, there is widespread support. Surprisingly though, the support is universal (assuming that Pollytics' aggregation of the polling is accurate). The October 2010 Galaxy poll showed net approval of gay marriage from every demographic cross section except over 50s, who had net support of 0. That figure includes married people and those with children. In other words, there is no demographic group in Australia that has net disapproval of gay marriage. The range of public opinion is from extremely strongly in favour to mildly in favour.

Pollytics observed:

What we see is that those folks less educated, older, childless, male and on lower incomes either not working or working in blue collar occupations are more likely to oppose, while those with higher education, younger, female and on higher incomes working in white collar jobs are more likely to support same sex marriage.

And yet despite this overwhelming support, gay marriage remains the policy of only one party in federal politics.

How is it that on this question we have elected a group of parliamentarians so out of touch with ordinary Australians? Why is it that only the Greens support a policy that has the support of a clear majority - maybe even by a 62 to 33 margin - of the public?

I think these numbers take a lot of the force out of the argument that the ALP "can't" support gay marriage because if they did they would lose seats in outer suburban areas. Admittedly, this polling doesn't take into account intensity of opinion, so there may be mild support up against intense opposition, but regardless it's hard to say that there are large slices of the Australian population who oppose gay marriage.

Last week I described the ALP's stance on the issue as politically-motivated bigotry. These numbers suggest to me that the bigotry might be politically motivated, but that motivation may well be based on the ALP thinking the public are more bigoted than they actually are, and than the ALP are.

The Australian should stop whining about the Greens and Twitter. It is pathetic.

2010-12-03T18:53:00.001-08:00

The Australian editorialised this morning about Twitter and the Greens. The Greens, it said, makes a 'boorish contributor to the national debate' that enjoys a 'louder voice than its numbers suggest' because of its 'stranglehold' on new media like Twitter. And all of this after I jumped to the defence of The Oz earlier in the week. It seems, in defending them, I made the mistake of believing that the facts they reported about the situation were true. Of course that was not the case, and the paper has now admitted as much. All of that makes it quite funny that the editorial seems to imply the tweet in question was indeed defamatory, which isn't borne out by the recording or the lack of legal action taken.

It really makes me wondering why The Oz doesn't put as much effort into getting its facts straight as it does into attacking the Greens. And attack the Greens they do. Although they claim, in one of the more laughable passages of this editorial, that they are 'a newspaper devoted to broad debate that sees its role as a scrutiniser rather than a cheerleader', that could only possible true if you assume that by being the former it is impossible to be the latter. Clearly the paper cheerleads for the right by directly aggressive 'scrutiny' toward the Greens.

The second graf of the editorial describes the Greens as: "a movement driven by moral purpose, sustained by the presumption of superior knowledge and superior virtue. As an opposer rather than a proposer, it is a boorish contributor to the national debate." That could only pass as scrutiny if the word entails unsubstantiated, condescending and assertive characterisations of your political opponents.

Of course, they go on to explain, it is no surprise that the 'moral-political community' dislike The Oz. To them it's not only not their fault, but their unpopularity is driven by forces beyond their control:

Just as ideologically charged regimes throughout the ages have galvanised support by identifying malevolent forces, real or imagined, bent on their destruction, so the oppositional moral political community would have had to invent The Australian if Rupert Murdoch had not done so first.

So just to replay that little passage, the reasoning in this editorial is as follows: 1. The 'moral-political' community think they're better than everyone else 2. The Oz are fair-minded scrutinisers 3. Their 'scrutiny' has nothing to do with the treatment they receive from aforesaid ideologues, and 4. Criticism of them is inevitable and occurs purely because the moral-political community needs an enemy. Tripe. Enough said.

Then the paper gets to Twitter, a 'hothouse environment' that has 'become a breeding ground for falsehoods that quickly become received wisdom with repeated telling.' To be fail, Twitter can spread rumour very quickly. Just look at how news of the Qantas A380 incident spread. However what critics often overlook is that it spreads confirmed truths even more quickly, and that users of twitters aren't total morons, mainlining any 140 character package into their bank of 'received wisdom'. The great irony of that is the Twitter opens an enormous space for traditional media to quickly provide the credible information everyone craves. Of course The Oz has not rushed to fill that gap.

Reading between the lines, I think The Oz is hostile to Twitter because it is the platform used for sustained and very funny mockery of it. I can see how that would hurt feelings. But to cast it as potentially dangerous for democracy, as they do here, is to make a category error. Twitter is not a political force or a media outlet. It is a communication platform used sometimes by political or media figures, in a way that is often irreverent, glib, sarcastic and funny. That is not the fault of Twitter, or of anything. There's nothing about it that is inherently hostile to the right, unless for some reason they can't take a joke. Rather than fearing and deriding Twitter, The Oz should jump right into the conversation and get stuck in.

Either that or shut up and stop whining. This is, apparently, the nation's paper of record. To be engaged in a fight with a social networking site is pathetic.

Credit where credit's due: Penny Wong edition and the ALP's politically-motivated bigotry on gay marriage

2010-12-01T17:58:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning for a couple of days to blog about Penny Wong's support for gay marriage at the SA Labor conference this week. I was highly critical of Senator Wong earlier this year when she confirmed on Q&A that she did not support gay marriage. So, giving credit where it's due, it's good to see her standing up against the politically-motivated bigotry of some of those in the ALP.

Importantly, Wong's support was crucial to the SA conference deciding to support gay marriage at the ALP National Conference late next year. Apparently, the result in SA means that the left will push at the national conference for gay marriage as the ALP's policy, and accept a conscience vote as a compromise. That's a big step forward.

But let's keep this in perspective. It's not like Wong has taken on a burden of ongoing advocacy. She's spoken up at a moment that was important to the internal politics of the ALP. She still has more to do to satisfy me.

The other thing made clear in this SA snafu is that there are some in the ALP Right who oppose gay marriage for purely political reasons. They believe that supporting gay marriage is surrendering to the Greens and, to quote Don Farrell, the leader of the Right in SA, "If, for the next 12 months we have a knock-em-out, drag-em-out battle the Labor Party over this issue, there will be only one winner out of that and that will be Tony Abbott.''

Don, I think you're forgetting at least one group: gay people who want to get married. And their families and friends. And those in the community who believe that the bigotry of a small number of people doesn't justify denying basic rights to a section of the community. And that is even if we assume that he's right that Tony Abbott would benefit from leading the only major party in the country that opposes marriage equality. I think there's a fair chance that skeptics of gay marriage could be won over by their political leaders. Certainly support for gay marriage has been increasing, and there's no reason to think it's hit a ceiling.

What this attitude reveals is the obsession of parts of the ALP with politics over policy. It reveals an appalling disregard for the damage done by their various political cowardices - whether it be to the gay community or the environment. What a disgrace.

The SMH is a terrible newspaper: Assange 'arrest warrant' edition

2010-11-30T18:19:00.000-08:00

What a woeful publication. The headline of this article is 'Interpol issues arrest warrant for Julian Assange'. However the fourth graf reads: "The arrest warrant, called a 'Red Notice', is 'not an international arrest warrant' but means Mr Assange could be arrested and extradited to Sweden from any country if local authorities act on it."

Which is it, Glenda Kwek!?

Wikileaks unintended consequences: I feel a lot better about the conflict in Korea

2010-11-29T21:33:00.001-08:00

So I haven't blogged before about the Wikileaks releases. Most of that is because I don't really care, and the rest is because I don't have much to say on the topic that hasn't been said elsewhere.

However, the latest round of releases have done at least one thing: made me feel much better about the conflict that is simmering between the Koreas. It turns out that China is getting fed up with North Korea's antics. I'd always thought that the one thing that made the situation on the Korea peninsula a bit scary was the fact that China had the North's back, so to speak. If China won't necessarily put up with the DPRK's increasingly erratic antics any more, then it leaves the US with a lot more room to act against the North.

All of that makes me feel a lot safer. To me, the worry isn't that action against the North will lead to retaliation against the South - that much seems almost certain. My worry is that action against the North will spill over into a wider conflict between the US and China. Now that seems less likely.

Ergo, Julia Assange is awesome.

Hey, everyone getting upset about 'Confessions of a young anti-feminist' - we're just feeding the trolls!

2010-11-28T21:05:00.001-08:00

There's been lot of discussion today about this article on The Punch by 'anti-feminist' Joesphine Asher. It even has its own hash tag. Let's call a spade a spade: the article is fucking terrible. I can only imagine it was published to create controversy and generate page views for The Punch.

By getting upset about Asher's idiocy, we're just feeding the trolls, rewarding The Punch for publishing rubbish by making them the centre of discussion.

That said, I can't help myself. Consider this a takedown rather than a feeding of the troll. In other words, link to this, and not to Asher's piece. (/end shameless plug)

The article starts with a false dichotomy, that "Instead of harnessing the different qualities of men and women to energise us, we are striving to make men and women more equal." It is totally unclear to me why, if we wanted to, we couldn't do both as a society. We can recognise that different people have different skills, and yet still make sure that everyone has the same opportunity and receives the same rewards for the same work.

Asher then recites opinions and statistics from a list of sources, arranged (intentionally or not) by decreasing credibility and relevance. First we have 'renowned' neurosurgeon Charlie Teo, speaking about things outside of his area of expertise. Then David Deida who wrote a book called The Way of the Superior Man (hmmm). Then Top Gear host James May slagging off men who can't 'wire a plug' (what is wiring a plug!?). And then Asher's friend - Dave, whose wife patronises him (Dave, I hate to say it mate, but the problem is your marriage, not society at large...).

The article seems to be a series of characterisations of modern society ("Women are also suppressing traditional feminine characteristics like elegance and fragility to take on high power careers and step into male dominated roles") that carry an implied, but unsubstantiated, assertion that what's characterised is somehow bad. Another example: "men are sporting aprons, doing their own ironing and pushing trolleys down supermarket aisles - roles that don't exactly exude manliness". What exactly is wrong about that!?

And on top of that it's deeply logically flawed. The best example is right at the end:

It seems marriage is becoming less about being dependent on each other and more about living independent lives. But is it making couples happier?

Now, 40 percent of Australian marriages are predicted to end in divorce.

What a load of total nonsense. Asher her shows a correlation, between her assertion about marriage and divorce rates, and implies causation. I'd say a much more plausible explanation is that as women have gained a more equal position in the workplace and in society at large, they have, especially with the advent of no-fault divorce, become much more willing and able to leave unhappy marriages. You know, the kind of unhappy marriages where women are expected to give up their career, raise children, do the trolley-pushing and leave the plug wiring to their husbands...

Contrarianism alert: I have no problem with Chris Mitchell suing Julie Posetti for allegedly defaming him

2010-11-28T16:06:00.001-08:00

Update: There is now audio available of Asa Wahlquist making the comments that Posetti was tweeting about. It seems a defence of truth may be available to Posetti.

Twitter went a little spare last week when Chris Mitchell, Editor in Chief of The Australian announced he would sue academic Julie Posetti for defamation for comments she made on twitter. In the offending tweet, Posetti alleged that Mitchell pressured The Australian's former rural reporter Asa Wahlquist to alter articles she wrote about climate change. The only problem for Posetti is that both Mitchell and Wahlquist deny the allegations. Indeed the two have not spoken, according to Mitchell, in 'years'.

Twitter (at large) was not impressed. Of course, as if often the case, the Twitterverse expressed their disapproval partly through some pretty funny tweets using the #twitdef tag. As I understand it, there are basically two objections to Mitchell's proposed action. First, that people shouldn't be getting sued over things they say on twitter, and secondly that Mitchell's action amounts to an attempt to silence critics through the courts, which threatens free speech and shows him to be a jerk.

I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. First of all, I agree that it's not ideal for a powerful and political Editor in Chief of a national newspaper to attempt to crush critics with legal action. But I think that's only true if there's no merit to the legal action. There's nothing, I think, improper about using the legal system against critics who commit actionable wrongs against you, even if doing so also serves the purpose of crushing them. Being powerful should not deprive a person of the protection of the law.

I think it's important that those in public life are able to be criticised. But our law has decided that people have an interest in their reputation and a right to protect it. To that end, we say that free speech doesn't allow you to make false allegations against a person that harm the way other people see them. I think that's a fair balance of rights. Obviously Posetti has several defences available to her, including attempting to prove that the allegations she made were true.

I've been willing to criticise The Australian as much as the next person. But I feel that some in the left, when dealing with news about the paper, get outraged first and then backsolve for reasons to be outraged. Not everything The Oz does is evil, and that extends to their senior staff. They might be tories and not strictly adhere to journalistic ethics at times, but they're still people who have the same rights under the law as everyone else.

I think the NRL's salary cap is legally invalid and would be struck down by a court

2010-11-23T15:48:00.001-08:00

As some of you may know, I spent this semester working on a paper about the NRL's salary cap. I handed it in on Monday. In the end I argued that the salary cap is an unreasonable restraint of trade.

I've really enjoyed the discussions my previous posts about the salary cap have created. The normative debate about whether a salary cap is or is not desirable is endlessly fascinating to me. This paper doesn't seek to involve itself in that debate. Its focus is restraint of trade law, and whether the restraint imposed by the salary cap is unreasonable and therefore unvalid.

So, by all means debate the desirability of the salary cap in the comments, but this paper isn't directly about that. And hey, if you happen to know a lot about restraint of trade doctrine, please feel free to weigh in there.

I do think that some of the evidence used in the paper is relevant to the debate about the desirability of the cap. In particular there is surprisingly little evidence that evenness of competition is a important in generating TV audiences or crowds at games. That's definitely some food for thought.

Anyway, the paper (all 8,000 words of it) can be accessed here. Apologies for any lingering typos!

Sorry, but since when is bogus rent seeking front page news?

2010-11-23T06:01:00.001-08:00

This bogus article is up front on The Australian website at the moment. In it, Gerry Harvey (who runs the Harvey Norman chain of retailers) says that overseas retailers have an 'unfair advantage' over local retailers and the GST should be applied to purchasers from overseas retailers.

Sorry, but how exactly is that not a 10% tariff on all imports?

And sorry, but why is The Oz running this story as if Harvey's self-interested rent seeking is anything but self-interested rent seeking? I mean after all, if nothing else, isn't The Oz supposed to be conservative?

I apologise for all the questions. And, let's be honest, I'm being facetious. I'll have a crack at the answers: a. it is a 10% tariff on imports, b. because they're pro-business conservative populists not actual small 'l' liberal conservatives and see b.

Just in case Gerry Harvey is actually off his meds, here's why his idea is stupid:

1. The Australian Dollar won't always be high. When it's low Gerry will rake in more cash as consumers switch back to local retailers.

2. If it is 'unfair' to be disadvantaged by exchange rate movements, does Harvey support subsidies for foreign retailers when the dollar is low?

3. The whole point of our current high interest rates is to appreciate our currency, which makes imports more attractive by making them cheaper, which slows the economy and keeps inflation in check.

4. While Gerry might be suffering an 'unfair' disadvantage at the moment, consumers are benefiting. They're not buying products from overseas retailers because they hate Australia (although these comments from Gerry are loathsome). They're buying from overseas because overseas retailers are charging lower prices.

5. It's not like Gerry buys the TVs he sells from Geelong. He benefits from a strong Australian dollar by getting the products he sells cheaper. If he doesn't want consumers buying from retailers overseas, he can cut his margins.

Alternately he can shut up.

P.S. I say this a lot, but I am really sorry for the long layoff in posts. I just finished a marathon exam period and now have a long, relatively idle summer ahead of me. So please do check back regularly. Tell you friends. That stuff.

Is Australia blooding its cricketers too young?

2010-10-31T03:21:00.001-07:00

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Herald yesterday, argued that part of the reason behind Australia's slide from first to fifth in the Test rankings is the fact that grade and state cricket is now dominated by young players, meaning they can't learn the nuances of the game from old hands.

I think Roebuck has a bit of a point here, but I'm not sure he's right in saying this is simply a matter of age. After all, a young guy coming into first grade and facing a trundling veteran may not learn much as if he's facing a young firebrand. The issue actually whether we're selecting the best players, regardless of their age. I think what Roebuck is implying is that we're not.

To me then the problem is not age, but the promoting of young players at the expense of better older players. I agree that it's not ideal to have a lower standard of state cricket in order to give young guys a go. That's not to say there aren't some great young players running around. Indeed lots of the best players in state cricket at the moment are young: Phil Hughes, John Hastings, Mitchell Starc, Steve Smith, Shaun Marsh, Callum Ferguson and Usman Khawaja to name a few. But what's crept in a lot is the promotion of young guys before they've actually performed. Just look at Moises Henriques and Mitchell Marsh for instance.

I remember a couple of years ago speaking with a bloke who'd gone through a lot of under age teams with Phil Hughes. He was saying that these days at the Centre for Excellence players are subjected to lots of biomechanics and other tests designed to measure the things that go toward making someone a good bowler or batman - their reflexes, eye sight, coordination etc. Phil Hughes, he said, was second on the record books on almost all of the batting tests - to Ricky Ponting. No wonder then that he was fast tracked into the test team despite a questionable technique.

Of course Hughes also scored a bucket of runs before his promotion. But when you see players getting fast tracked into the Australian setup in the absence of any outstanding domestic performances (Michael Clarke, Mitchell Johnson, Moises Henriques, Dan Christian) it's highly likely that their elevation has a lot to do with how they performed on the Centre for Excellence tests. It's probably safe to assume that similar tests and thought processes are sneaking into state selection too.

I'd suggest then that part of our problem is relying too much on variables other than runs scored and wickets taken. Of course (Michael Clarke) sometimes these decisions pay off. But on aggregate they lead to lots of guys playing who don't just lack age or experience but lack the achievements and ability needed to ensure a high standard of cricket. Having promise, latent ability or talent is one thing, but actually getting the results is another.

The final thing to note is that Roebuck's argument makes a lot of sense but doesn't at all hold for the test team. Although we've blooded a few great young players in the last couple of years, our current team is too old to be performing as poorly as it is. So lets promote some of the young guys who've scored runs at state level for the Ashes. The worst thing that can happen is that we lose the series, which I would argue we're on track to do anyway right now.

META ALERT: Interesting article on procrastination

2010-10-29T21:59:00.001-07:00

While procrastinating this afternoon, I came across this article in the New Yorker about procrastination (meta!). Citing a study that showed the number of people saying they had problems with procrastination quadrupling between 1978 and 2002, the author says 'it's possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem'. It's hard to be sure that's true, especially when earlier in the same passage the author quoted a writer in the eighteenth century speaking about how procrastination affects every mind. Perhaps he means modern as in 'not of the Renaissance'. Anyway it's an interesting article so you should read it.

The new Question Time paradigm - not so new

2010-10-27T21:08:00.001-07:00

I spent an hour this afternoon procrastinating and watching Question Time. I've been quite keen since I returned from the US to watch Question Time to see whether the 'new paradigm' and new Standing Orders had succeeded in their attempts to make QT work better. I was sadly disappointed.

To give credit where credit is due, the time limits on answers are helpful and widely observed. Perhaps though this is an innovation aimed almost solely at Kevin Rudd, and lengthy answers may not have been a problem in this Parliament anyway. And to be sure, there are lots of points of order now that seek to have the person answer the question do so more directly. However this attempt to have answers be more directly relevant to the question seems to have largely failed.

At the crux of this is that when members do not directly respond to the question and a point of order is raised to point this out, the speaker simply reiterates that the member knows the need to respond directly to the question. Perhaps, if their answer is particularly irrelevant, he will admonish them. But he seems unwilling or unable to do this. The result, at least to me, is answers pretty similar in style and content to those given in the old Parliament.

Warren Truss this afternoon asked the Prime Minister a question which quoted Ross Garnaut about the way in which a carbon price would raise electricity prices before asking whether the Prime Minister agreed with Professor Garnaut. The question was well worded to the new rules: it sought a simple yes or no answer to a clear proposition. The Prime Minister did not give that answer and instead ranted at length about Coalition carbon policy and the need for a carbon price. Truss raised a point of order to seek a direct answer, the Speaker directed that one be given and such an answer was not given.
So even when questions are tailored to the new rules, there's no guarantee there will be an answer. On top of that, the rules are currently being exploited by a strict interpretation from the speaker of what a question is asking. A question from the opposition about electricity prices ended in asking the Prime Minister why she didn't care about ordinary Australians. The result of that rhetorical flourish was, according to the Speaker, that the Prime Minister could speak at length about failures of Coalition policy, and not about electricity prices. In other words, the first part of the question was considered, effectively, to be a prefatory statement to a separate question about compassion.

Clearly Question Time needs to improve. We should look to New Zealand, whose Question Time allows re-direct questions which work well to hold speakers to the question.

(I'm trying to find a video of NZ Question Time, and will post it once I find it.)

Update: Here is a great website which has videos of NZ Question Time, uploaded each day.

Update: Here's a video from NZ Question Time:

Links and Music - NY flavored edition

2010-10-10T17:54:00.000-07:00

It seems like every second blog post of mine starts like this, but sorry for the tardy posting! I've been busy (in the sense of doing things, not in the sense of having things to do) in NYC.

Let's kick off with some music. This is 'Angela Surf City' by the Walkmen, from the album they released in September. (Disclosure: I read about this band on Pitchfork, liked it and am now recommending it - I have derivative opinions about music). It's awesome:

And a few things worth reading:

Only one third of Democrats think the current 111th Congress has achieved more than past Congresses, which of course doesn't make sense given some of the huge legislative accomplishments of the last two years or so. My attempt at an explanation is that a lot of voters see questions from pollsters as reflecting either approval or disapproval of whatever is being polled, and answer accordingly, even when the answer they end up giving doesn't really make sense. If that's at least partially right, put it in the 'some voters are really stupid' box.
I stumbled today across a store for Freeman Sporting Club (a fashion label, not a sporting club) in the West Village. It had some of the best menswear I've seen in ages. I picked up a great screen-printed silk tie and a pocket square. I approve of their commitment to plaid and tweed.
Here's a blog, called Less Wrong, that I had recommended to me last night by one of the guys I'm staying with there in Manhattan. Ellezer Yudkowsky is dedicated to exploring human rationality, amongst other things. Some of the posts are really interesting. Here's the one that was recommended to me as a starting point.

Of course, while I've been in the states, things have still been a-happening in Australia, and I'll get to that shortly!

Replacing 'no means no' with 'yes, and only yes, means yes'

2010-10-06T20:43:00.001-07:00

Prominent member of the Australian blogistocracy, Ben Pobjie, has a post up today that (tongue in cheek) gives seven ways to avoid raping people. I assume Ben is inspired by the latest football-related sexual assault controversy. But I think, even accounting for his intentional humour, he thinks the matter is all too simple. What a lot of young men don't realise is that basically consensual sex requires positive consent at the time of the sex. I guess that Ben kind of hints at that, but it's worth noting that this point isn't made clear enough. In many ways, 'no means no' can be somewhat misleading because it leaves unsaid a myriad of other situations where no one says no but consent is nonetheless unclear.

I think the better slogan to promote is that yes, and only yes, means yes. That is, unless both parties give active and positive consent, consent hasn't been given. I think publicising this fact would clear up the uncertainty that abounds in certain circles about situations where consent is given at some point, and then becomes uncertain, or where a person 'seems keen' but is too drunk to give positive consent immediately prior to sex.

Now I don't mean to suggest that this basic legal requirement isn't well known. Of course it is. But there are enough people who don't know that there's no point in being precious about repeating ourselves. And more people are ignorant about the law than you think. This isn't just working class football players. I remember attending a compulsory briefing when I attended a residential college at university which told us about the consent requirements for sex. Thankfully, as a law student, it wasn't news to me. But it was news to enough of my well-educated, upper-middle class fellow college residents that it struck me that much more had to be done to spread the message.

So, by all means, poke fun at people who can't get their heads around the very simple rules that govern consent to sexual relations. But let's not let that stop us from being willing to neutrally and non-judgmentally explain those rules to any and everyone who isn't fully aware, regardless of their background or whether they should already know.

Restrictive liqour licencing doesn't stop anti-social behaviour

2010-09-30T05:56:00.001-07:00

After having my flight from JFK to Boston cancelled, I booked onto a 2.40 am train from Penn Station to Boston and spend the night in New York with two friends who happened to be there. We dropped into a little bar on St Mark's Place in the East Village at about 10.30 and stayed there until they closed just after 1 am. The drinks were pretty cheap for what I was drinking - very strongly mixed Old Fashioneds (I couldn't resist - I've been watching too much Mad Men). And yet I didn't glass anyone. I didn't get into a fight. I didn't do a runner from a taxi.

At no point did anyone ask to see my ID, even though I'm 22 and the legal age in New York is 21. There were no bouncers at the bar, just a couple of staff who seemed to work at as well as run the place. The whole experience served to highlight what I've thought for a while: that restrictive liqour licensing doesn't prevent the anti-social behaviour that we see associated with alcohol use and abuse. There is no better example of this than Australia, which is rapidly developing a global reputation as a country that is simultaneously alcohol soaked and anal-retentive about its consumption.

In Australia politicians and prognosticators (especially those of the 'won't somebody think of the children' variety) argue that irresponsible drinking and the violence and property damages that it causes is in turn caused by it being too easy to get alcohol from licensed establishments. On that basis, they reason, the government ought to impose ever more stringent restrictions on alcohol licences.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that they've got the causation around the wrong way. What I think happens is that ever more restrictive alcohol licences a. increase the monopoly rents extracted by the existing holders of liqour licences and b. prevent the entry into the market of new entrants that would encourage and help create a culture of more responsible consumption. There is also empirical evidence from NSW that a. goes toward achieving b. The Australian Hotels Association, a powerful lobby of existing liqour licence holders, were extremely vocal (and unintentionally funny) opponents of Sydney's small bar law that was introduced by Clover Moore.

With restrictions making liqour licenses valuable, and their holders powerful and well connected, existing holders want to milk as much from their venues as they can. As a result they constantly push up against the limits placed on them by cramming venues, serving drunks and trying to get by with a minimum of security. On top of that, because a licence is so expensive and hard to get, once a person has one, they are under enormous financial pressure to cash in. That means they build the biggest complex possible, with as many bars, eateries and poker machine rooms as the space can hold. The result is souless 'beer barns' that attract and create violence and dysfunction.

Less restrictive licensing goes some way toward alleviating these problems. Cheaper licences mean smaller, quirker and better bars. Owners don't need to recoup massive outlays or get large returns on their license because it didn't cost them nearly as much. That means they can create more intimate and off-beat venues, knowing they don't need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to survive. Smaller venues are easier to control. And by setting relatively high prices and having a more interactive and mature relationship with their punters, owners can keep drunkenness to a minimum and avoid anti-social behaviour. I think all of this makes logical sense, but it is also my experience of Melbourne's famous small bars, and of the new small bars that have been opening in Sydney.

So next time you see a campaign to crack down on the opening hours of bars or on the number of new liqour licences, fight back against the AHA's spin. This is a market that needs more and better competition to solve its ills, not less.

Update: I should add that I'm talking largely about the restrictive granting of liqour licences, but also restrictive conditions to some extent. I'm not trying to argue that closing earlier won't reduce the amount drunk or the number of fights - it's almost a truism to say that it will. My point is that making it so hard to get a license leads to these problems.

New York City Cops

2010-09-28T06:11:00.001-07:00

Unlike the Strokes I'll refrain from making a judgement about how smart they are. (Though, if I were to, I wouldn't wimp out like the Strokes did). But having spent a few hours wandering around NYC, especially Times Square, I will note that there are an enormous amount of police in New York. If you've not been there it's difficult to appreciate. Around Times Square there are police standing around every fifty meters with more and more heavily armed police waiting in and around cars on every block.

Now obviously I know there's a reason for this: Times Square is a huge terror target as well as being a place that could well be a centre for petty crime since it's teeming with tourists. However I'm very skeptical that having the sheer number of police that New York has is actually an efficient way of resolving the security and crime problems the police are addressed toward.

Testing whether I'm right in this hunch is quite hard. We need first to figure out what exactly police are 'producing'; what New York gains from its police. I'd suggest there are a few somewhat interrelated benefits:

Police can (to some degree) identify and apprehend offenders.
Because their presence signals their ability to do (1), they deter criminals from committing crimes within such an area as they think the police have those powers.
By achieving (1) and (2) they make people more likely to frequent the areas and to carry and spend money in doing so, since they consider it more likely that they won't be mugged or harassed. This benefit shouldn't be understated - it's amazing how safe New York feels to a first time visitor, because despite the presence of some obviously dodgy characters, there are so many police around that it seems incredibly unlikely anything would happen to people who stayed in busy streets.
Also by achieving (1) and (2) the police make local entrepreneurs more likely to open and conduct businesses in the area, since there will be customers and less chance of being the victim of crime.
They make the area a more difficult target for terrorists, which may discourage some. Although there's also the chance that a high concentration of police signals that an area is of high value and therefore more worthy as a terrorist target.
More eyes means a greater ability to monitor crowds for suspicious behaviour that may point to terrorism, and it means more points at which members of the public can report suspicious behaviour. Having heaps of police around seems to have prevented a bombing in Times Square last year [link]

I'm sure I've missed some here, or haven't stated them very well. And I'd be reluctant to make too many claims about the direction in which causation flows.

But if we're to test whether the amount of police deployed is efficient, we should consider whether there are any substitutes for police in achieving these benefits. I'd say there are. The UK, for instance, seems to have adopted a CCTV-reliant method of trying to achieve the same ends. Obviously CCTV cameras will be far less effective than police in some ways. It's equally obvious though that police and CCTV monitored by civilians or police are substitutes, and that CCTV costs far less than police (at least in the numbers they're used in NY). This isn't to say there isn't CCTV in NY - there is quite a bit of it.

I think huge police numbers would be efficient only if (3) and (4) are particularly valuable benefits. (1) and (2) can be achieved by a far smaller number of police with CCTV, and (5) and (6) are aimed at preventing unimportant but unlikely events (especially when you consider that many terror attacks are foiled by law enforcement infiltration, dumb luck, terrorist incompetence or some combination of those). Having large numbers of physical police officers provides a sense of security that CCTV cameras clearly don't - especially because they suggest a much greater ability to prevent crime. And while people don't seem to object too much to being casually observed by hundreds of police, they get really creeped out by CCTV.

Having said all of that, I won't venture a firm conclusion (obviously) on whether having that many cops is efficient. One of the big factors we'd need to resolve is what the multifarious costs of a terror attacks are. But my guy says it's not the most efficient outcome.

On a final note, I think these large police numbers pose two sets questions that are interesting to me:

Should libertarians object to large numbers of police on the grounds that they have a chilling effect on legal behaviour that people might not be sure is legal? Should they object to that number of police on the basis that societies should be more self regulating, and large numbers of police undermines that? Do they think the civil court system should deal with more property disputes (i.e. suing the person who stole your goods if you can find them), with the state stepping back from constant enforcement of private property rights?
If you are a small government conservative, should you object to Mayor Bloomberg hiring that many cops? It's a huge expense that no doubt creates lots of waste (especially if you believe all government spending is inherently prone to excessive waste).

Waylayed in LA - the US tour begins

2010-09-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I'll be in the US from today until the 23rd of October on a debating tour, which is kindly sponsored by the University of Sydney Union, the University of Sydney's US Studies Centre and several host universities in the US. You can read about the tour here.

I'm currently in LA, en route to Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University. However foul weather in New York has delayed by LA - NY flight, cancelled by JetBlue flight to Boston and thrown things into disarray. At this point, I can't find any flights to Boston (you get the train to Cambridge from there) or any trains to Boston that leave after my newly-delayed flight arrives.

Anyway, I'm planning on keeping up an at least semi-regular posting schedule while I'm away. This should give me a good excuse to blog a bit about US politics, a topic I read a lot about without writing about very much because I feel so removed from the action.

Two quick thoughts from LAX:

Security is heavy here - lots of checking and re-checking. That said, the queues haven't been too long or the security unduly oppressive.

There have been announcements all morning directed at US service personnel, giving them directions to the USO lounge and thanking them for their service. It's an interesting reminder that this country is very much at war, and that the military, and military service are a normal part of everyday life in a way that it isn't in Australia.

I hate Junior Masterchef

2010-09-22T16:44:00.001-07:00

I love Masterchef. Its most recent season was compulsory viewing for me. And not in the way that Mad Men is - catching episodes on my laptop at the end of the day. Compulsory in the way great TV was in the 90s. I sat down, almost every night, at 7.30 to watch the show as it aired.

I light of that, I eagerly sat down on Sunday night to watch the second episode of Junior Masterchef. And I hated it.

Perhaps the worst thing about the new format is the bizarre play acting of the hosts. The new presenter they've added is awful. (I don't know her name, and I don't care to look it up.) When she speaks she makes more weird and clunky hand gestures than even Julia Gillard, the queen of arbitrarily front-facing palms. And along with regulars George Calombaris and Matt Preston, she treats the children like... some group that should be condescended to even more than children. The trio's non-stop smiling and praise is sickening. I'm not saying they should try and make the kids cry. Not at all. But I think they seriously under estimate the kids they're dealing with. What's more, I don't think there's much point in being relentlessly positive and cheery if it's as obviously fake as it is here.

And then there's the kids. I have coached high school debaters of many ages for the last five years. So I've hung around with a lot of nerdy and sometimes outright weird kids in competitive environments. Rarely have I ever felt any malice towards the kids. They are kids after all. It's easy to forgive a bit of weirdness. But I hated at least a third of the kids on this show from the moment they opened their mouths.

Take the kid last episode with the British accent who cooked some kind of soup and referred to it exclusively by it's wanky French name. Seriously, what a wanker. It was a fish soup. I don't know who I hate more - the kids or their parents. At 12 I guess kids have a fair bit of agency over how much of a wanker they are. But it seems their parents have encouraged their kids to develop cooking skills at the expense of other skills. Like not being wankers.

I have a fair bit of sympathy for the kids who've clearly learned to cook from their parents. That seems the product of time spent constructively with family. But the really fat kids who've parents have put them on a cooking show? I guess that's hard to hold against the kids, but gee that is bad parenting. Those parents should be encouraging their kids to obsess less over food and go and play some sport.

I guess what bugs me about it all is that being really really good at cooking at age 12 is weird. The reason kids at that age usually aren't trying to make wanky french fish soup is that they're playing with their friends, riding bikes, building forts. I think instead that a lot of these kids represent the worrying trend toward a sedentary, professionalised childhood.

And finally, let's not forget how exploitative it is to put these kids on national prime-time TV. Most of the kids seem to be deeply nervous. They act as though the affirmative of Matt Preston will be the key determinant of their self esteem in their teen years. Either the producers have created that impression, which is bad because it makes these kids look weirder than their are, or the kids actually do think that, in which case they shouldn't be dealing with these feelings on national TV.

</rant>

Think The Australian sucks? Attack the Sydney Morning Herald

2010-09-20T17:09:00.001-07:00

John Quiggin waxed lyrical last week about the failings of The Australian. The paper, he said, was dishonest, blatantly partisan and responds poorly to criticism. I don't disagree with Quiggin's claims so far as they relate to the incidents he is talking about. I'm probably a little more sympathetic to The Oz in general. A big part of that is that, absent the Financial Review, which sits behind an online paywall, The Oz is the last serious-minded newspaper in Australia.

Now I know that's a big call. And I'll make one large caveat: I'm talking here only about the online editions of the major papers. I know that the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are a bit better in print than they are online. But if you're like me and read practically all of your news online, The Oz really is as good as it gets. Maybe people of Quiggin's persuasion would say that The Oz is so partisan (etc) that they're not serious minded. I'd argue that The Oz still comes out ahead for trying to report on actual news even if their decisions on what is actual news, and how to report on it is informed by their partisan preferences.

To illustrate my point, here are screenshots from the smh.com.au and theaustralian.com.au websites, taken this morning:

[Apologies - I'm struggling to make the screenshots work. I'll have them back up shortly.]

I think the difference here is pretty clear. The SMH is running 'front page' stories about Robbie Williams laughing at a naked Kylie Minogue. About a 16 year old 'Horrorcore' rapper who killed his girlfriend and her family in the US. About an off duty cop who saved a family from a house fire. About Paris Hilton avoiding jail. And about 'Touring Amsterdam's Red Light District'. The Oz runs stories about Rob Oakeshott (aside: what a wanker), power prices, foreign aid and the US recession.

So sure, The Oz has its problems. But its critics should save some of their vitriol for the once-great Fairfax papers, who've chased the lowest common denominator and ended up just above the gutter. I'd say that smh.com.au these days is much closer to news.com.au than The Oz. The Herald should be pressured to pick up its act and give The Oz a run for its money.

Finally, I think this argument also applies by analogy to critics of the ABC on the right, who accuse it of left-wing bias. If they don't like what the ABC is dishing up, they should pressure commercial networks to pick themselves up and try to report on actual, serious news. Watching Channel 9 advertise its Monday night bulletin with a story about children swallowing things (as it did on Sunday night) should be enough to drive serious consumers of news to the drink.

The broader, and more depressing point to be observed here is that providing quality news isn't very profitable if you put it on the internet or broadcast it for free. I think that's an argument for giivng newspapers charity status or subsiding them, or something. But that's a topic for another day.

No offence, but if someone offends you, shouldn't sue them

2010-09-19T22:31:00.001-07:00

The Age reported on Saturday that a group of Aborigines are suing Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt for two articles he wrote which questioned the aboriginality of fair-skinned Aborigines. Bolt, firing off at the proverbial mouth, as he is want to do, suggested that the activists in questions' "choice to be Aboriginal can seem almost arbitrary and intensely political." He suggested that this 'choice' was all the rage in academic, arts and activism circles.

Obviously that's offensive dross. Bolt's writings, as they usually do, say much more about his own ignorance and prejudices than they do about the people he targets. A fair minded person, I think, on reading the comments in question would think less of Bolt, and not of the people he writes about. But even if he succeeds in persuading people who aren't already racially intolerant, or even in just fueling the flames of that intolerance, I don't think suing him is the solution.

The remedy sought in this case is an order to remove the articles from the Herald Sun website, and an order restraining Bolt and the Herald Sun from publishing 'substantially similar' material in the future. The applicants aren't seeking financial damages. This strikes me as the worst and most illiberal remedy to seek. I think that if individuals can show that Bolt has lead right-thinking people to think less of them, they should be entitled to damages, because in so doing they will have demonstrated that Bolt has caused some harm to them. But instead they seek to gag a person with whom they disagree from speaking.

I firmly believe that the freedom to speak includes the freedom to offend. Free speech that trades only in niceties is not free speech at all. However this is not to say that the freedom is unlimited. As I said above, where you cause harm to a person, you should be liable to pay damages. If you incite another to violence, or promote the hatred that leads to violence, you should be subject to criminal sanctions. Yet to have the courts interfere when people merely cause offence is to rely on the powers of the state to police a realm where public debate is the more effective arbiter anyway. What's more, those kind of heavy-handed sanctions insult the intelligence of the reading public because they imply that without court orders they would be powerless to stop themselves being sucked into the supposedly-persuasive embrace of idiots like Bolt.

The prospective nature of the order sought is even more worrying. An order that restrains future speech is an order that seeks to police thoughts. Rather than erring on the side of freedom by allowing Bolt to say what he wants and bear the consequences if he breaks the law, such an order would require him and his employer to self censor and refrain from speaking at all.

All the while, these sorts of actions merely make Bolt a martyr among those who sympathise with what he said. Seeing Bolt dragged through the courts by his opponents won't do anything to win over these people. What's more, I think it makes them less open to reason because it promotes an 'us versus them' siege mentality.

By all means, everyone should point out that Andrew Bolt is an idiot who says stupid and ignorant things. At times even he might expose himself to liability by causing harm to others. But if instead he simply offends, as a mature society we should understand his idiocy as a necessary incident to the freedom of speech that is the bedrock of our public life. The best retaliation is to exercise free speech in opposing him, and leave the courts out of it.

Biggie Smalls v Thomas the Tank Engine

2010-09-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

This is awesome.

Links to interesting things

2010-09-15T19:30:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the (once again) tardy posting. Given how attractive blogging is as a procrastination tool I have to pretty much swear off it when I need to study. Unfortunately for me, this week I've been cramming for a Corporations Law exam.

Anyway, there's still lots of interesting stuff happening on the interwebs, and here are some links to that:

Muslims in the US are, on average, wealthier and better educated than Muslims are in Europe and the UK. I think it would be interested to explore how this has interacted with anti-Muslim sentiment in the US since the recession began.
A paper on high frequency trading seems to suggest that it reduces volatility and makes markets function more efficiently. I'd say the finding is both affirming of conventional wisdom and contrary to conventional-unconventional wisdom.
Turns out that, since 1880, you'd be much better off buying the S&P 50 high and selling low than the conventional buy low, sell high strategy.
There's a war on at the moment over ugg boots. The US company that owns the Ugg trademark has been trying to stamp the use of the word, including by local Australian producers. Those bastards!
Do you, like me, prefer diet Coke? Maybe it's because it has about a third more caffeine than Coke and Coke Zero.

And on the musical front, here's an early live version of the Arctic Monkeys' 'Red Light Indicates Doors are Secured' which has to be one of the all time best ever songs about a taxi ride.

What is the difference between intellectual honesty and honesty in pundits?

2010-09-12T00:59:00.001-07:00

Matt Yglesias yesterday held forth about the term 'intellectually honest' as it's used to describe pundits:

I feel like I've been somehow held back in my career by confusion about what this phrase means. Does it just mean "honest"? And if the phrase "intellectually honest" is synonymous with "honest" then why are so many professional writers using it?
The whole thing to me really seems like a kind of cop-out. How hard would it really be for an editor to put out a help wanted add saying "I want to pay you a bunch of money to write coherent English sentences without lying?" Talk about a low bar!

I don't necessarily agree that 'intellectually honest' and 'honest' are synonymous in this sphere. I'd say the distinction is this: honesty goes to the accuracy of the facts (etc) a writer relies on. A writer is honest if they at least make an effort to get their basic facts straight, especially when they're outlining their opponents' arguments. I think intellectual honesty goes instead to their manner of argument, such as whether they make baseless assertions, obscure details or brush over inconvenient examples. What's more It's very easy for pundits, especially those with strong partisan leanings, to be intellectually dishonest without even meaning to.

A classic example comes from one of the posts on the Lowy Interpreter blog by Andrew Shearer (a former foreign policy advisor to John Howard) on the Greens foreign policy, about which I wrote this post two weeks ago. Here's an excerpt:

the Greens will be undertaking a comprehensive policy review in 2011 which will include 'looking at' their 'current' international policies. Presumably that's meant to signal they aren't really serious after all about pursuing the various foreign and defence positions I outlined the other day.
[...]
There are two ways to interpret the evidence: either the Greens intend to use their newly-gained power to implement their policy agenda (which is pretty scary), or they don't (which is pretty cynical). I'm not sure which is worse.

I described Shearer's posts as hackish at the time, and I stand by that assessment. But that's not because he wasn't honest. The Greens are reviewing their foreign policy. And I've no doubt he does believe what he's written. But it's not intellectually honest.

Note the 'presumably' at the beginning of the second sentence that I've extracted. Shearer uses that to slip in the idea that the Greens aren't serious about their foreign policy positions. He then uses that asserted premise to set up the false dichotomy in the second paragraph I extracted. Again, he makes a bald assertion: that there are only two ways to interpret the move, and that those two ways are those he outlines. There's nothing to back up the argumentation itself. No reason why there are only two ways to interpret the news - I mean couldn't another just be that they think they would be more popular if they changed their views? Or that the feedback their received during the campaign led them to believe they should review their foreign policy? If you engage in speculative psychoanalysis like this your preconceptions will no doubt influence the conclusions you draw. And Shearer, by way of this slippery argumentation, manages to conclude that the Greens are either 'scary' or 'cynical'.

There's no dishonesty there. I'm sure he does think the Greens are either scary or cynical. But the intellectual dishonesty lies in the argumentation. A 'intellectually honest' writer would explain why there are only two ways to interpret the move, and why the interpretations he offers are the only reasonable ones to draw.

So I'll have to disagree with Matt here. Being intellectually honest is different to being honest. It's just harder to do.

Maybe Stephanie Rice is a homophobe, but I'll tell you who are: her sponsors.

2010-09-08T16:26:00.001-07:00

At about three in the morning, after a 55 meter penalty kick won an historic victory for the Wallabies in the highvelt, Olympic swimmer Stephanie Rice tweeted "suck on that faggots. Prob the best game I've ever seen. Well done boys." Openly gay gold medal-winning Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham was quick to point out that Rice's use of the word 'faggot' was offensive, but to his knowledge she was not a homophobe. Regardless, Jaguar have taken from Rice the car they had been giving her free use of. (News report on this here.)

Obviously we can debate the extent to which casually using 'faggot' makes someone a homophobe. I'd say it at least evinces a degree of homophobia. If we're to treat homophobe as a binary tag then it probably doesn't get Rice over the line. Regardless, it's not language a public figure should be using.

But let's look at where the real homophobia lies. Matthew Mitcham won a gold medal in diving at the Olympics - a rarity for an Australian. His winning dive was brilliant. He's an attractive, smart and well spoken 22 year old athlete. And he has received virtually no corporate sponsorship since his win. To his credit, Mitcham has refused to blame the sponsorship drought on his sexuality. That's obviously a smart thing for him to say, but I doubt he's right. To me, that is homophobia.

We gain very little from a public shaming of 22 year old Stephanie Rice for a poorly chosen word if we don't admit that the homophobia that actually causes problems is much more deep seated and much harder to attack. Rice can't defend herself from the onslaught. The corporations that systematically discriminate against Mitcham haven't even been asked to defend themselves.

To end, let me issue a challenge to Jaguar (making of course the arrogant assumption they'll hear this challenge): if you as a company are so serious about gay rights, and so offended by Stephanie Rice's outburst, give her car to Mitcham. I bet you won't.

Why don't innovative lecturers help students to develop skills, instead of playing mind games?

2010-09-06T19:09:00.001-07:00

I was reading this post by Dan Ariely, a Professor of Behavioural Economics at Duke University and got quite frustrated. To teach his class on consumer behaviour a lesson about planning and irrationality, Ariely asked them to submit three papers over the course of the semester, but asked each student to set the due dates for each. Of course a rational student would make all three due on the final day, but in doing so a normal 'irrational' student would run the risk of procrastinating and hand in a substandard product. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's excellent book Nudge is full of similar examples of the authors playing these kind of games with their students.

I get why these lecturers do this. It's a hands-on way of demonstrating the principles they're talking about. But what of their responsibility to, you know, actually impart skills on their students? I get frustrated by assessment schemes that encourage a kind of pedagogical arbitrage, where students have an incentive to game the system in order to get better grades. It's bad if for no other reason than some students just aren't even aware of these 'arbitrage' opportunities.

An example I see all the time in my course are non-compulsory, non-redeemable mid semester tests or assignments. If a student elects to do the assessment, the mark the receive is binding. But students that don't attempt the examination sit the same final exam, on the same content, for the same amount of time. In other words, taking the mid-semester assessment unambiguously increases the amount of work on assessment (time spent studying for and completing it) that the student does for that subject. A 'rational' student would only attempt the mid semester if the extra time spent on it is worth less than the amount they think their grade on the final exam will suffer purely by reason of the mental pressure of sitting a 100% rather than 70% exam. For that reason I question why it's worth offering the assessment at all - especially when the diligent but un-savvy student is probably disadvantaged for doing something that seems sensible to them.

Now obviously a university education is about developing skills independently. Time management and self discipline are undoubtedly included. But the need for students to develop these skills on their own isn't mutually exclusive with lecturers doing more to help them. Instead of playing these games, and offering these opportunities to game the system, why can't lecturers just tell us what assessment to do, and when to hand it in. And what's more, why can't a university education involve explicit teaching about time management. It might be 'too high school' but it would undoubtedly be useful for at least some students, to be talked through how they should plan their time for an assessment.

In theory, I guess, the rationale is that if we don't teach students time management skills, those with the best skills will succeed. That ignores that, at least to some extent, time management isn't innate, but learned. Those with the best time management probably learned it at high school. So by leaving students to organically develop (or not develop) these skills to some extent just entrenches advantages (or disadvantages) they bring with them from high school.

Meanwhile, I continue to live the life of the wishfully rational student. I try to game the assessment calendar and avoid the non compulsory mid-semester assignment. No doubt in Ariely's class I'd choose my due date as the last day of semester. And yet I still procrastinate, mismanage by time, and end up doing things in a rush shortly before they're due. Maybe more guidance from my teachers would help. Since they're experimenting, they could at least try.

Update: As if to prove my point about my own disorganisation, this point was riddled with spelling errors and typos (which gave the appearance of grammatical errors). I've fixed up those I could see just now, so hopefully it's a bit more readable.

The Lowy Interpreter publish (some of) my frustrations with their coverage of the debate on the Greens' foreign policy

2010-09-01T21:03:00.001-07:00

Read it here. They helpfully link to the whole debate, so you can decide for yourself. The whole snaffoo was kicked off by two hackish pieces by a Lowy Director (?) who is a former foreign policy to John Howard. Anne Reynolds, foreign policy advisor to Bob Brown, provided a great rebuttal, which was criticised by the blog's editor, to which my response was directed.

How Gillard/Abbott can get to the magic 76, and what that means for Australian politics

2010-09-01T05:10:00.000-07:00

Following on from my post the other day about New Zealand's experience with hung parliaments, I thought I might offer some thoughts on what our experience could teach Australians about the current situation. Here are some randomly collected thoughts.

1. It doesn't matter constitutionally which is the largest party in terms of seats....

The new government of whatever hue, must have a majority on votes of supply (money to run the government) and confidence votes. That requires 76 votes in a 150 seat House of Reps. The Coalition is obviously in a slightly stronger position to get to 76 seats, because they have 73 and only require 3 independents to get to a majority (leaving aside the Tony Crook issue). But it is perfectly constitutionally plausible that the ALP plus the Greens member plus 3 independents could form a bloc of 76 votes on confidence matters such that the Governor-General felt confident in appointing them government.

2. ...but it does matter politically

Politically of course, it does make a difference which is the largest party. This is certainly the New Zealand experience. The largest party in terms of seats, whilst never having an absolute majority in the House, has always been the core of a new government. There is certainly an expectation amongst the New Zealand public that the party with the most number of seats will form the government. That expectation has translated into statements of political support from politicians for that very idea (fearing a backlash if they didn't). For example, at the 2005 election the NZ First and United Future parties explicitly said that they would "look first" to support the party that won the most number of seats. That was narrowly the Labour Party at that election, and both parties did deals with Labour to enable them to form a government.

A variety of commentators have pointed out at various points in New Zealand that the largest party in terms of seats does not have a right to be the government; instead a different "bloc" of parties could form a majority. However, whilst certainly constitutionally correct, this runs contrary to what the general population thinks (there was a poll around the time of the 2008 election which backs this up, which I can't find online).

I would posit that in the Australian context, if Labor was to form a government whilst having only 72 seats to the coalition's 72, they would face an immediate credibility problem. I suspect Gillard knows this, hence her deal with the Greens today, which is designed to give the impression that they Labor and the Greens should be thought of as a "bloc" of 73.

I am only speculating, but I suspect the issue of whoever wins the two party preferred vote is also important. Ordinarily it isn't (nobody thinks Howard didn't win the 1998 election for example), but Gillard made it relevant with her comments a couple of weeks ago. Again, I think a Labor government that loses the popular vote AND has fewer seats than the Coalition will start with a credibility gap.

3. How do you build a majority?

New Zealanders have found there a variety of ways that large parties get smaller parties to support them to form a government. In this Australian situation, the job for the ALP and Coalition is much harder because they are not dealing with one or two parties of a few seats each (so the MPs at least have a consistent philosophy and policy position), but five separate individuals whose policies diverge rather radically (as their press conferences have made clear). I feel sorry for Gillard and Abbott.

a) Policy concessions/promises

In New Zealand, deals between large and small parties have all involved policy promises and concessions in favour of the small party. For example, in 2002 Labour agreed to United Future's request to establish a Families Commission, reflecting that party's strong focus on "family friendly policies". It still exists today. In 2005, Labour agreed with NZ First to establish a special government card for seniors which entitled them to discounts on various government-run services. This reflected NZ First's strong support from GreyPower and other seniors' groups. Occasionally the concessions are promises NOT to do particular things, such as Labour agreeing to take no moves to decriminalise marijuana during the 2002-5 Parliament at the behest of United Future.

One innovation which could be seen in Australia, depending on the ingenuity of the negotiators, is an agreement by the major party to vote for a particular legislative proposal at first reading (thus sending it to a committee for further investigation), but not guarantee support after that. This has been used in New Zealand a few times. It allows the minor party to claim a "win", in the sense that the policy will now receive more publicity and scrutiny, and allows them to rally support for the policy and to try and convince the major party to take the policy further. For example, the government has recently agreed to support a United Future-sponsored Bill which introduces income-splitting for tax purposes at its first reading only, and has reserved its position after that.

It is easy to conceive of a scenario where the Coalition or ALP agree to back particular Bills that interest one or more of the independents initially to encourage further debate and scrutiny, but ultimately do not support them becoming law.

b) Ministerial positions or positions of power

Few politicians are merely happy being a local MP, and the ability to hold a Ministerial warrant has been a real attraction for minor parties in New Zealand. In New Zealand, and I'm sure it's the same in Australia, being a Minister means more money, more power, more status, more staff, more of everything. It's a heady temptation, and at least one Ministerial post is usually the price of support for small parties in New Zealand - sometimes even after they have promised not to take them (e.g NZ First in 2005).

One innovation, which I detailed in my previous post, is the idea of minor party Ministers only being collectively responsible for the portfolios they are responsible for. In other words, they are bound to support the government in the area they administer, but can campaign or vote against the government in other areas. This gives both the minor party and the majority party the flexibility to differentiate themselves from each other, and is a good "pressure valve" for when tensions between the parties becomes great.

The five independents are in excellent positions to demand Ministerial posts or Parliamentary secretary roles. I wouldn't be surprised to see Oakeshott or Windsor end up with a junior posting responsible for some aspect of rural/agricultural policy, or some aspect of broadband roll-out to regional areas, or perhaps special responsibility for rural health? The negotiators could wind in the innovation I've outlined above, although they may not want to, because of point 4 below.

c) Pork barreling

We have actually seen very little pork-barreling in New Zealand, which is mainly because the Parliament is elected on a proportional party-vote basis rather than by electorates, so parties deal with each other on those terms.

Having said that, the independents in Australia are in a perfect position to demand money for their various electorates and regions, and they are already making such demands from the looks of it (Wilkie's demand about building a new hospital in Hobart, for example). Given the propensity of both the ALP and the Coalition to throw money around like confetti in marginal seats during the campaign, expect more of the same in the post-election aftermath. Lucky residents of Kennedy, Lyne and New England.

d) All the feel-good stuff that's easy to agree to

Within this category is all the stuff that's easy to agree to and which political staff will spend a lot of time on. That is, consultations over legislation and Budget bids, regular meetings with the Prime Minister and key staff, access to Cabinet papers on a range of issues, "heads-ups" over contentious government policy announcements, access to the public service, etc.

The independents are already requesting a lot of this stuff. Expect them to get pretty much all of what they want. This is the easy stuff.

4. Passing legislation through the House of Reps is going to be a lot more difficult

A hung parliament by definition means passing legislation is more difficult. Although the independents and the ALP or Coalition will no doubt agree in their discussions on a range of legislative proposals to be considered in the Parliamentary term, there will be Bills that arise which were not thought about in the discussions. There will be new events to respond to and new reports issued. The New Zealand experience is that governments need to constantly negotiate the passage of legislation with minor parties. This can often mean compromises on particular policies, the watering-down of policy or even strengthening, depending on the circumstances. This is obviously not a situation unusual for Australians, given this often happens in the Senate, but it will be a new experience to have it happen in the House of Reps as well, and will produce its own tensions.

In my next post: why the next government will be inherently unstable, why the independents won't be able to control if there is an early election, and who bears the blame for instability.

Some thoughts on the ALP-Greens deal

2010-08-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

The ALP and the Greens today announced a deal, by which the Greens would support a Labor government, if they do indeed come to govern. You can download the full text of the deal here.

Tony Abbott was quick to criticise the deal. In particular he took aim at the ALP for dumping their 'citizens assembly' on climate change. I'm not really sure that warrants criticism. As Abbott himself has said repeatedly, it was a shocker of a policy.

But anyway, I think it's a little fruitless for me to get into the pros and cons of an ALP-Green deal. I'll leave it to anyone who's interested to take it up in the comments, or in the new 'ShoutBox' which should be just to the right of this post on your screen.

Reading the agreement, there are a few good ideas that both parties have committed to, and a few seem a little odd. First, they've agreed to establish an independent Leaders' Debate Commission - an idea I'm a big fan of.

I think the proposal to reduce the threshold for donation disclosure to $1000 from $11,500 and to increase the frequency of donation disclosures is a good way of improving transparency without stopping people from donating at all. However I'm not sure that banning all foreign donations is a good idea. At the least there needs to be more information on it. I'm unsure we have a problem with foreign donations in Australia. If we do, I'm not sure what the nature of that problem would be.

The proposal I find most worrisome in the electoral reform section is the proposal to create a 'truth in advertising' offence in the Commonwealth Electoral Act. I'm not sure how this would work, but I assume they mean that it will be an offence to say things that aren't true in electoral ads. I know I advocated banning non-party ads last week (which certainly doesn't earn me the libertarian of the year award), but even I think that is going too far. My proposal was based on the logic that if people lied, they could be held accountable at the ballot box, meaning that if they weren't running in the election, the accountability wasn't there.

I shudder to think how a law like this could ever be enforced. Defining and adjudicating what does and doesn't constitute a lie, in the context of political speech, would be incredibly subjective and political at the margins. What's more, we already have a mechanism to police that - free political speech and elections. To rely on a law like this would unacceptably politicise the courts and encourage litigation, not debate, as a means of solving political disputes.

Update: I just remembered another reason why this is a bad idea - the market can solve this problem, if it exists. In the US there are two great organisations, PolitiFact and FactCheck.Org, which specialise in analyising the truthfulness of comments by politicians. In fact PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for their work.

The rest of the proposed reforms, about investigating fixed term parliaments (a terrible idea if you ask anyone in NSW), setting up a parliamentary committee on climate change, recognising indigenous Australians in the Constitution, reforming Question Time and debating above-the-line voting and our commitment in Afghanistan range from sensible to amorphous. I'll leave it to others to comment on them.

What US politics tells us about 'moving past the 75+1' paradigm

2010-08-30T23:16:00.001-07:00

Julia Gillard told the National Press Club today that 'if the new government is to be effective and make progress on the big challenges our nation is facing then I believe we will need to go beyond the politics of 75 votes plus one'. She told us the new government could simply 'attempt to horse-trade or arm-twist with each Bill to get a majority vote', or they could embrace a new political paradigm. The details Gillard offered to that end were relatively amorphous and platitudinous.

But I don't think that the horse-trade versus new paradigm choice is a real one. Rather, I think when we have minority government or weak party discipline (which for the purpose of whipping votes for a Bill are points on the same continuum) both can occur at once. What's more, I'd argue that the former will definitely happen and the latter is unlikely. The experience of the US tells us that. Let me address those in turn.

Horse trading seems to be the natural equilibrium when reliable party votes aren't there to get Bills through Parliament, because it's the most efficient way of getting the votes. If a member is challenged for voting in favour of a certain bill, they can point to something tangible they got for their voters in return. Certainly we've seen it before in Australia - Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine was a master of the art. And in the US it's pretty common practice for (especially Senators) to demand pork for their districts and states in return for their votes on important pieces of legislation, even if it doesn't always work. At the moment the rural independents might look like they'll accept political reform instead of pork. But when they have to go back to their seats and try to win re-election, they could well struggle to convince their constituents that political or parliamentary reform was worth installing an ALP (or Coalition) government. That being the case, I'll be surprised if they don't end up bringing in a fair bit of dosh.

What I really want to look at though is whether the government routinely having to look around for enough votes in both the House of Reps and the Senate to pass its legislative priorities is actually conducive to more open, clean and accountable government. I'd say it isn't. For one, if I'm right that there will be more pork barreling, we can count that against open, clean and accountable government.

More importantly, the scramble for votes gives individual members more scope to exercise influence for special interests. If there are, say, 73 votes reliably in favour of the mining tax, the three, or four or five members who may or may not vote in favour will become the targets of massive lobbying on both sides. This is distinct to, but not mutually exclusive with, pork barreling. Where pork is all about bringing home the bacon for your seat (pardon the pun), this kind of lobbying is all about the opposing sides offering members personal benefits - principally money and power. These offers can be both overt and covert - donations to a member's party or personal election funds, job offers upon retirement, committee chairmanships or even places in Cabinet or the ministry. All of these sorts of corrupting influences are hard to identify and hard to police because it's difficult to prove causation - if a member votes against the mining tax and then retires and joins the board of a mining company, how can we prove he obtained the board position in return for the vote, as opposed to because of it? These sorts of shenanigans are bad for democracy, and are again common place in the US.

Finally, shifting coalitions in favour of various legislative proposals cause enormous collective action problems. A collective action problem occurs where coordinated action by the group will benefit all members, but those who buck the group can also get additional benefits, creating a situation where individuals try to protect their own hides and in doing so harm the group. Take the passage of the Democrat's healthcare reform package, the Affordable Care Act, through the US House of Representatives this year. Against a background of falling popularity for the package itself, President Obama and the Democrats at large, the individual Democrats who voted against the ACA could go to the mid-term electorate in November and say they bucked their party and voted against the bill. In their minds at least this would help them be re-elected - showing an independent bent that was willing to kill a bad policy, even if it angered their party. However if too many Democrats did this, the package would fail to pass, bringing even worse scorn on the party for failing to achieve their number one legislative priority.

In particular then, these collective action problems afflict the passage of the most important types of legislation - that which is unpopular or even just hard to explain to the electorate. In this manner, the ability of individuals to easily break off from their usual voting bloc can make it harder - not easier - to implement tough reforms. Imagine again the example of government trying to pass the mining tax through the House. In a climate of advertising-fueled demagoguery, in which the public is mislead about the legislation and dislikes it, the independents that Gillard would rely on to form government would have an excellent and popular opportunity to show just how independent they are by voting against the bill. The loss to the group is twofold - obviously a good piece of policy is not implemented. But even the independents suffer in the long run because the stability and efficacy of the government they support is undermined when it cannot pass legislation that is important to it.

Julia Gillard is preaching to the choir when I hear her talking about reforming politics and Parliament. It's a no-brainer. Of course should do it. I'm just very skeptical that she's right to say that minority government gives us the best opportunity to do it.

* Obviously there lots of unsubstantiated assertions here about what 'happens in the US'. I apologise but simply don't have the time to look up links. If you think I'm wrong, have a bit of a Google and then come and take me to task for it in the comments.

Hung Parliaments: The New Zealand Experience

2010-08-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

The recent Australian election, and its aftermath, has been fascinating. As a New Zealander well used to hung parliaments, it's been interesting to see Australians work out what a hung parliament means and how a stable government could and should be formed. Steve's asked me to detail the New Zealand experience with hung parliaments, so here goes.

Our electoral system

First, some background. New Zealand uses an electoral system called MMP, which stands for "Mixed Member Proportional". Ordinarily in the Parliament there are 120 seats (although there are 122 in the current Parliament for reasons too complex to explain here), of which 70 are "electorate seats", represented by a local member (as in Australia), and 50 are "list seats", represented by MPs drawn from party lists.

Each voter has two votes. The "party vote" determines the proportion of seats each party in Parliament gets. The "electorate vote" is a vote for a particular candidate to represent the electorate that the voter lives in. Obviously, the "party vote" is the most important vote, as it determines the overall number of seats each party gets in Parliament. People can, and often do (around 40% at the last election from memory), split their vote: e.g vote for one party with their party vote, but a candidate from another party for their electorate vote.

Allocating seats is done by a complicated formula, but basically, a party's proportion of the total number of party votes determines their seats in Parliament. E.g if the National Party gets 50% of all party votes, they get 50% of seats in Parliament (ordinarily, 60 seats). When a party is entitled to more seats than they won electorates, then MPs are drawn from the party list. E.g if National won 50% (60 seats) of the party vote, but only 42 electorate seats, then the top 18 people on the party list (not already elected) would also enter Parliament. A party needs 5% of party votes to be entitled to seats in Parliament ("the threshold"), unless they win an electorate seat, in which case the threshold is waived (a curious and controversial rule which is the subject of much debate - as can be seen below, the rule has meant a lot of parties with one to five seats at various times since 1996).

The system produces hung parliaments

The upshot of this highly proportional system is that no party has won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives in the five elections since the system was adopted in 1996. Every Parliament has been "hung". However, a government has been formed after every election, and life has continued. The New Zealand polity has become increasingly sophisticated at dealing with these situations, and a wide variety of governing arrangements have been used in order to produce a stable government that has the "confidence of the House" - a majority of votes on supply (money) and confidence issues. Below I go through each New Zealand election and its aftermath, and trace the development of new constitutional conventions and rules that have been developed.

1996 - 1999: National/NZ First Majority Coalition Government followed by National minority government

At the 1996 election, the incumbent National Party won 44 seats, the main opposition party (Labour) won 37, the NZ First Party won 17 seats, the Alliance won 13, the ACT Party won 8, and the United Party (by virtue of winning one electorate) won 1 seat.

With 61 seats required for a majority, this clearly placed the NZ First Party in a powerful position - a combination of National and NZ First (61 seats) or Labour, the Alliance and NZ First (67 seats) could form a government.

Negotiations took place between the parties for six weeks, with the National government operating as a caretaker government during this time (like the Labor government is now). This was a highly unnerving experience for New Zealanders, accustomed to going to bed on election night knowing who would form a government in the coming few days. Making things more difficult, the negotiations between the parties took place almost entirely in secret and it was only when the NZ First Party leader announced which party he would coalesce with that the actual parties found out the result themselves!

National and NZ First eventually signed a substantial and comprehensive coalition agreement that ran to many pages with many detailed provisions. It provided for a number of NZ First MPs to be Ministers (inside and ouside Cabinet) and the Leader of NZ First to be Deputy Prime Minister and the Treasurer. Budget parameters for the next three years were agreed with a series of spending commitments negotiated (for example planned tax cuts were deferred and social spending increased). National and NZ First agreed to vote for all Government bills in the House of Representatives and a fairly detailed legislative programme was worked out. Because of this comprehensive agreement the government that was established is generally recognised as a "majority coalition government".

The agreement broke down in mid-1998 over the sale of government shares in Wellington airport. Amid high drama, the Leader of NZ First was removed from Cabinet by the Prime Minister and lost his Ministerial warrants. The National Government then limped onto the 1999 election supported by a motley band of ex-NZ First MPs (now members of newly formed parties), independents, the ACT Party (which pledged support on supply and confidence), and even a disaffected Maori nationalist (who had left the left-wing Alliance Party).

1999 - 2002: Labour/Alliance Minority coalition government followed by Labour minority government

At the 1999 election, the National government was thrown out (after nine years in power). Labour won 49 seats, National 39, the Alliance 10, the ACT Party 9, the Greens 7, and NZ First 5. United again won 1 seat.

Labour and the Alliance had 59 seats between them, two short of a parliamentary majority. The two parties had fought the election campaign on the basis that they would govern as a coalition after the election, and duly signed a coalition agreement. However, the dangers of the highly prescriptive National/NZ First arrangement from the previous Parliament were recognised, so the the agreement was much shorter and spelled out only joint aspirations and some important joint policies, as well as providing for some Alliance Ministers. Perhaps the most interesting constitutional innovation was an "agree to disagree clause", which allowed either party to vote against government legislation in the House if it was a matter of particular importance to that party and was signalled in advance. The Alliance used this clause to vote against a government Bill setting up a free trade agreement with Singapore (although it was passed with National support).

To obtain a parliamentary majority, the Labour/Alliance coalition signed a "confidence and supply" agreement with the Green Party. The Greens guaranteed to vote for the passage of money bills and on confidence motions in the House, thus allowing the government to operate, and in return were able to negoatiate some Green initiatives as part of each Budget. The Greens did not get any Ministerial posts.

The crucial point about the above is that while the government obviously had a majority on confidence votes, for all other pieces of legislation, the government needed to secure a majority on a case-by-case basis. MMP has broken the "iron lock" of a government automatically having "the numbers" for all legislation it brings before the House. Labour and the Alliance had to reach out and secure agreement from the Greens or other parties in order to pass Government bills.

The Labour/Alliance agreement broke down in mid-2002 over the issue of the war in Afghanistan, which the government had supported. As a party to the left of Labour, this seriously annoyed some MPs in the Alliance, who took control of the extra-Parliamentary wing of the party and then left the coalition (whilst not bringing the government down by voting against it). The Alliance's leader (along with other loyalists), still insisting they were the "Parliamentary Alliance" stayed inside the government. Such a farcical situation could not continue, and so Prime Minister Helen Clark called an early election for July 2002, citing the "instability" of the Alliance as her reason for going to the polls early. The disaffected Alliance MPs (who had left the coalition) fought the election as the Alliance Party, and the former leader of the Alliance (Jim Anderton) formed a new party and fought the election as part of Jim Anderton's Progressive Coalition ("the Progressives").

2002 - 2005: Labour/Progressive coalition minority government

At the 2002 election, Labour won 52 seats, National just 27, NZ First won 13, the ACT Party won 9, the Greens won 9, and the United Future party won 8. The Progressive Party (led by the ex-leader of the Alliance) won 2.

Labour and the Progressives therefore had 54 seats between them, but needed 8 more to secure a Parliamentary majority. They had three choices: NZ First, the Greens, or United Future. The Greens had refused during the campaign to support a government that allowed genetic engineering, so Labour formed a "confidence and supply" deal with the United Future party - perhaps unlikely bedfellows, as it comprised a number of Christian fundamentalists (though was led by a moderate ex-Labour MP).

Labour quickly signed a "confidence and supply" deal with United Future, in which United Future agreed to vote for supply and confidence motions, in exchange for a series of policy wins (the creation of a Families Commission being the most notable), as well as policy nullifications (such as no moves to legalise marijuana). The Party did not receive any ministerial posts.

As between 1999 and 2002, the Government had a majority for confidence motions, but all other pieces of legislation required the government to reach to other parties to get a majority.

This government proved to be quite stable, and went the full term until the 2005 election.

2005 - 2008: Labour/Progressive coalition minority government

At the 2005 election, National was resurgent, winning 48 seats to Labour's 50. NZ First won 7, the Greens 6, the newly formed Maori Party won 4, United Future won 3, the ACT Party 2, and the Progressives were reduced to a single seat.

Faced with such electoral math, either National or Labour were in a position to form a government, although Labour had the upperhand by virtue of having two more seats. Feverish negotiation over a two week period ensued, with Labour and the sole Progressive MP eventually forming a minority government, reliant on support from NZ First and United Future - giving it a bare 61 seats in a 121 seat Parliament.

The nature of the confidence and supply agreements with United Future and NZ First was innovative. A series of policy "wins" (now standard in such agreements) were negotiated (with more for NZ First, recognising their four additional seats). The leaders of both parties also became Ministers outside Cabinet. In the case of Winston Peters, the NZ First Leader, he obtained the coveted role of Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Leader of United Future, Peter Dunne, became Minister of Revenue.

The interesting thing about the agreements was that both Ministers were described as being "outside the government", despite their leaders holding Ministerial warrants, a bizzare piece of sophistry that convinced no one. Further, both Ministers were described as being collectively responsible ONLY within their ministerial portfolios. In other words, on foreign affairs and revenue matters they were bound to support the government, but could campaign (and vote against it) on any other matter. This led to the curious (some would say ridiculous) situation of the NZ First Party (whose leader was Foreign Minister) campaigning actively against a free-trade deal with China (as it was a "trade" not a "foreign affairs" matter).

There were more constitituional innovations. Labour signed a "co-operation agreement" with the Green Party. The Greens agreed to abstain on confidence votes (thus giving Labour an additional buffer on confidence votes in the House) in exchange for a series of policy wins (mainly Green initiatives on energy efficiency) as well as "Government Spokespeople" on some policy matters ("Buy Kiwi Made" and "Energy Efficiency"). These MPs were not Ministers and were not responsible to the House (which raised some constitutional concerns) but MPs who were described as having authority to speak for the government on a limited range of matters and who could negotiate with the responsible Minister for funding for particular projects.

Like in the last two Parliaments, the government was required to look to other parties in the House to pass its legislation. This proved more difficult than in the past, with both NZ First and United Future being conservative parties. Labour was therefore required to "look right" to two different parties to secure a majority for bills, as opposed to in the past where they were able to "look left" to the Greens.

2008: National minority government

At the 2008 election, National swept back to power, winning 58 seats in its own right, the most for any party under MMP thus far. Labour won 43 seats, the Greens won 9, ACT won 5, the Maori Party won 5, the Progressives won 1, and United Future won 1.

Government formation was relatively easy, with National needing only the support of ACT (to the right of National) to have 63 seats in the House. A confidence and supply arrangement was duly signed, with policy wins for ACT negotiated. The ACT Leader and Deputy Leader became Ministers outside Cabinet (responsible for Local Government and Consumer Affairs respectively), but, following the precedent set under the previous government, they were only collectively responsible for those portfolios. Thankfully they were not described as being "outside the government". An agreement was also signed with the United Future Party (now reduced to one MP) with the leader, Peter Dunne, keeping his Revenue portfolio.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the 2008-2011 governing arrangements is that National also signed a confidence and supply agreement with the Maori Party, despite not needing their votes to govern. The Prime Minister declared that he wanted his government to be a broad-based one, taking in people of many talents and with diverse points of view. The two Maori Party co-leaders picked up the Maori Affairs and Community and Voluntary Sector portfolios, outside Cabinet, on the same basis that the ACT leaders did.

Like past Parliaments, the current government must look to other parties for support on all non-confidence matters. With relationships with both ACT (to National's right) and the Maori Party (to the left), and needing only the support of one party for a majority, the government is in a good position to do this.

Get Pakistan out of World Cricket - Now!

2010-08-29T02:35:00.001-07:00

With almost incontrovertible evidence that at least two Pakistani players engaged in 'spot fixing' during England's first innings in the ongoing fourth test between the countries, and new evidence that Pakistan's second test with Australia in Sydney earlier this year was fixed, it is now clear that Pakistan should be banned from international cricket until it can get its house in order.

Until we can be sure that Pakistani players aren't engaging in match-fixing we cannot allow them on to the field. The integrity of the game has been trashed by their behaviour. While the ongoing security problems in Pakistan are not the fault of the cricketing association, this is. The net result is that international cricket cannot be safely played in Pakistan, and the integrity of matches involving Pakistan abroad cannot be trusted. That makes it clear to me that they are currently adding nothing and taking plenty from the game.

If we cannot scrub out the whole team, then we should at least start with Mohammad Asif. While he is an undoubtedly talented and successful bowler, he has tested positive for steroids twice and been arrested with drugs in Dubai on another occasion. And now he's been caught in this match fixing scandal. Even a life ban wouldn't do this man justice.

Miranda Devine cracks it over the Ben Cousins doco, makes baseless and unhelpful assertions

2010-08-28T22:03:00.001-07:00

Miranda Devine had a column in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald in which she ripped into Channel 7 for glorifying drug use in their two-party documentary on the drug-addicted life of AFL player Ben Cousins. I haven't seen the doco yet - although I plan to (it sounds really funny) - so I can't really comment on the content of Devine's objection to the film. However the last couple of paragraphs struck me as odd:

Bryan [Cousins' faither] implies the family had been advised that Ben could use drugs in moderation. "He had drugs here … he was using … At the time we were following advice that he was trying to control his use."
Typical bad advice from the harm minimisation crowd who have captured the drug conversation. Moderation is meaningless to an obsessive, addictive person. Moderation and the drug-bingeing personality are mutually exclusive.
[...]
No more excuses for Cousins and others like him. It's not complicated. They are not afflicted by a "disease''. They are selfish narcissists who take drugs because it makes them feel good. They should forfeit any place of esteem in society.

Flickr user Wai Kin Wong, used under
Creative Commons Licence

As a start I'm unconvinced that 'the harm minimisation crowd... have captured the drug conversation'. Rather than provide any evidence of this, which would have allowed the column to speak more broadly about drug policy, Devine settles for the casual assertion, which pretty accurately captures the sloppiness she's known for.

However there are two bigger problems. First I don't understand exactly why the inability of an 'obsessive, addictive person' to use a substance or engage in an activity in moderation is necessarily an argument for banning that substance or activity. Obsessive, addictive people have a lot of trouble with tobacco, gambling and alcohol without that being a basis to deny anyone else the ability to use those things as safely and legally as possible.

Secondly, where did Devine get the qualifications necessary to pronounce that Cousins suffered from no disease? Being a selfish narcissist, as she asserts Cousins is, is not at all mutually exclusive with having any disease. Indeed it seems like mental health problems could well explain that behaviour. LIkewise it seems perfectly possible that his drug use was at least in part driven by mental health issues. Of course maybe he is just a jerk. What would I know. The question is how on earth does Miranda Devine knows any better.

What's more, this kind of demonisation of drug use is very unhelpful. If we decide that people who develop massive drug addictions (like Cousins) just do it because they're narcissists, how are we to structure drug policy to help the huge numbers of drug addicts who have serious mental health problems? It makes much more sense in drug policy to treat addiction as a medical problem, and make exceptions when it turns out some people are just dicks.

Cee-lo Green - 'Fuck you'

2010-08-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

Via Ivan ah Sam here is 'Fuck You' by Cee-lo Green which Ivan observed on Twitter might be the best new song since Arcade Fire's 'Sprawl II'.

I tend to agree. And the animation/film clip is great too. Witness:

Bob Katter is insane: Today Show August 2008 edition

2010-08-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

To wit:

Yikes.

Turnbull is right - we need to ban election ads by business and unions

2010-08-23T21:46:00.001-07:00

Last night on Q and A Malcolm Turnbull suggested massive forms to Australia's federal campaign finance laws. Turnbull's proposal (search the transcript for 'campaign finance') was for for a ban on all donations from those not on the electoral roll and to cap donations by those on the roll, to get rid of advertising by corporations and unions and to increase public funding to make up the gap.

NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell was quick to note on Twitter that the NSW Coalition were proposing similar changes if elected next year, including caps on donations and limits on how much non political party groups like unions and businesses can spend trying to influence elections.

Any and all of these changes would be enormously useful. The 'donations for decisions' culture in NSW that O'Farrell speaks about is despicable and should be done away with. I think proposals to ban all outside funding and instead publicly fund elections may be going too far, especially when caps on donations can achieve many of the same things. It would be too much to prevent individuals from contributing to candidates or parties they particularly support. Political donations allow individuals to express their degree of support for a cause. This is different, and importantly so, from expressing support by simply voting for or against a party. Indeed allowing individuals to donate is, to me, the necessary corollary of allowing individuals to volunteer for parties since time and money are in many ways substitutes for each other.

But I want to focus in this post on proposals to ban election advertising by non political parties. I am a big supporter of these proposals. I think the impact of non-party ads (third party ads is the natural term to use here, but I'll avoid it since it's somewhat misleading) on our democracy is almost uniformly negative.

I'm happy to accept that these ads are an important form of political speech. However I think that access to this form of speech should be restricted to candidates. The most important reason is because access among non-candidates is not at all even (Fn 1). Almost all of these ads are by union or business groups. It's not as though allowing non candidates to purchase election ads is an important means of civic engagement for ordinary voters.

What's more the ads are almost all overtly partisan, even when they are focused on particular issues. This allows them to serve as complements or extensions to the existing advertising campaigns of the parties. Just look at the Mineral Council of Australia's anti mining-tax ads this year, or the ACTU's Your Rights at Work campaign in 2007. The effect is that non parties can assist their political allies, meaning that political parties that court (or lose) the support of powerful interests can gain a massive advantage (or suffer a massive disadvantage). There is little doubt that the ALP benefited massively from the Your Rights at Work campaign in 2007, or that the Liberals benefited from the MCA's ads about the mining tax this year. In other words, how rich and vocal a party's friends are has a big effect on their political fortunes. To me that is a problem.

However my biggest objection to non party advertising is that it involves a serious deficit of accountability. The reason that the High Court has developed our law to allow free political speech is that free political speech assists and is necessary for a healthy democracy. The law denies politicians the right to succeed, where they otherwise would, in an action for defamation where the alleged defamation is in relation to their pursuit of political office. At least part of the justification for this is not that politicians have no right to expect the law to protect their reputation, but rather that the ballot box can vindicate them and punish their opponents when they are the subject of unjustified attacks, slurs and lies.

In other words, free political speech works because voters can hold political figures accountable at the ballot box for how they use their right to free speech. In the case of non parties advertising, no such accountability exists. The ACTU can spread mistruths about WorkChoices without voters being able repudiate it at an election. The MCA can peddle lies about the mining tax without voters being able to express their disapproval. (Fn 2) Given this lack of accountability, non parties have a much greater incentive to lie or 'go negative' than parties do. Indeed it may be a smart strategy for the non parties within a movement to do most of the negative or misleading advertising while the party within the movement stays positive. Something quite similar to this happened within the labour movement (the ALP and ACTU) in 2007, with the ACTU relentlessly attacking the government over WorkChoices while the ALP focused on more positive messages and plans. In the United States, Political Action Committees (or PACs) are routinely used by those supporting a candidate to attack the candidate's opponent. In 2004 the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, a Republican-aligned PAC, subjected Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry to savage and untruthful attacks which seriously undermined his image as a war hero.

Of course voters can almost always tell which side a non party is supporting. But making this identification does not mean that they will hold the party responsible for the actions of the non-party. Indeed the whole point of non parties is that they (at least outwardly) act independently of the parties, making it easy for the parties to refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, or indeed to easily distance themselves if the non parties good too far. And besides, as the saying goes, mud tends to stick. Just ask Barack Obama, who 18% of Americans believe is a Muslim.

The overwhelmingly negative nature of these non parties contribution to political debate is yet another reason for them to be shut out. Since they're not candidates for office they are able to offer a message that is extremely negative and narrow. This can have the effect of both poisoning debate via demagoguery and elevating relatively minor issues to centre stage in the media and voters' minds. I'm not necessarily against demagoguery or the elevation of irrelevant issues, on free speech grounds, but I'm against it when voters cannot hold the culprits responsible at an election.

I don't think what non party advertising adds to our political debate overwhelms what they subtract from our democracy.

Fn 1: I'm aware the access to advertising among candidates is also not even. The distinction in my opinion is that all candidates do engage in some form of advertising, and can do so, at least to some extend. On the other hand the vast majority of voters do not and could not afford to engage in any advertising. What's more as a point of principle I think we should do less to equalise the status of candidates than ordinary people, since candidates have themselves volunteered to be part of the electoral process.

Fn 2: I'm willing to admit there are plenty of other ways in which people can hold them accountable: by resigning their membership, stopping an financial support, writing to them or the media about the actions, etc. However none of these are as direct or as democratic as casting a vote. More importantly, many of those in a position to make a meaningful protest (such as by resigning their membership) are probably inclined to allow them to get away with lies in the further of a cause their believe in (or else why would be they members?).

Un-hanging the Parliament: The ALP should form government

2010-08-23T03:58:00.001-07:00

This was a close election, but with the results becoming more clear I think it has become obvious that the ALP should form government. I don't intend to endorse the Gillard government on policy grounds here, nor to argue that her government would necessarily be better than one led by Tony Abbott.

The point I want to make is this: as between them and the Coalition, the ALP won this election. The ALP has won the two party preferred vote 50.6% to 49.4% (at the time of writing). Indeed 49.5% of Australians voted for centre-left parties in the House of Representatives, compared to 44% who voted for the centre-right Coalition. That alone should should mean something very significant. If, as was the case in 1998, a party loses the popular vote but wins the majority of seats, then of course that party should form government. But where the number of seats won does not disclose the result, the two party preferred vote should hold a lot of sway in our decision about who should form government. We have a system in which people can indicate, between the two major parties, who they would prefer to form government. On that question, the people have spoken.

But the proceeding paragraph relies on the assumption that neither party has won a decisive number of seats. I would argue that is not the case. The ALP has actually won a significant number more seats than the Coalition. I don't use 'significant' here to mean large. I use it to mean exactly what it says: significant. It seems (again, at the time of writing) that the ALP have won the Tasmanian seat of Denison. That gives them 73 seats (76 are required to form government). The Greens' Adam Bandt, newly elected in the Victorian seat of Melbourne, seems almost certain to support a Labor government, giving them 74 reliable votes. This means they need only two of Independent MPs Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott to agree to support them for confidence and supply in order to form government. Although it seems unlikely, there is also the prospect of Gillard winning over 'independent-minded' Nationals MP Tony Crook, who defeated the Liberals' Wilson Tuckey in the Western Australian seat of O'Connor.

This is in contrast to the Coalition who in reality have only 72 reliable votes, relying on Crook for the 73rd. We should note as well that 73 represents the absolute highest possible total for the Coalition. The three seats that remain in doubt, Boothby, Brisbane and Hasluck, are all seats in which the Liberals lead. If they end up losing any of those seats they will of course add to Labor's total. It is even possible, but unlikely, that Labor will win 76 seats in their own right. Assuming that Crook will support the Coalition, they would need the support for all three of the independents mentioned earlier.

In other words, the chances of the ALP being able to gain the 76 seats required to form government are much higher than the Coalitions'.

There is one final factor that should be considered - the Senate. From July next year the Greens will have the balance of power in the Senate. That means any government will require the Greens' support in order to pass legislation. I think it is a bit of a no-brainer to say that, this being the case, the ALP will have a much better chance of navigating its bills through the Senate than the Coalition.

So aside from the fact that the ALP on this election by the metric that we often use to assess these things, I think it's clear that they have a better chance of securing more seats, and a much better chance of successfully enacting a legislative agenda. I think that, if you agree with my assumptions about the way seats will fall, this conclusion should flow no matter which side of politics you support. Democracy necessarily demands that we accept when one side has won, even when we disagree with what they may do with power.

Update: In response to some comments, I just want to make clear that I'm obviously aware that independents Katter, Oakeshott and Windsor are former members of the Nationals. I didn't omit mentioning this in order to bolster my argument. In fact I took it as given that readers would know that. That is obviously a bit sloppy. However the fact they were Nationals members doesn't mean much - and certainly if you saw them on the 7.30 Report last night, they all harbour serious animus toward the Nationals.

My predictions for election day

2010-08-20T17:55:00.001-07:00

I am a proud and unashamed subscribed to the 'a plague on both your houses' view of this election. I think both major parties have serious policy and personality flaws. I'm happy to say that in this election, I'll be voting for the Greens in the House and Senate.

But I don't intend to get into a long explanation of that decision. John Quiggin did a reasonably good job of making the case at his blog.

I want instead to go on record making some predictions, both big and small.

House of Reps

I think that the government will be narrowly re-elected today. The polling so far this campaign has been very similar to 2004 where the Liberals looked to be in serious trouble before the electorate retreated to the government's known quantity on election day. I think it would remarkable for a first term government to lose office without being behind in any of the late minute polls.

I'm not overly committed to this prediction but I think that the ALP will win 77 or 78 seats, and I'll try to explain how. I think their losses (including Liberal held, notionally-ALP seats) will be:

Qld: Dawson, Flynn, Herbet & Dickson (both notionally ALP). They should, with a uniform swing win Longman. However the LNP's candidate Wyatt Roy is 20 years old and I seriously doubt people will be willing to elect a 20 year old, notwithstanding ALP MP Jon Sullivan's recent gaffe. That's the reason for my call of 77 or 78: 78 if Roy doesn't win, 77 if he does.
NSW: Page (to the Nationals), Eden-Monaro, Bennelong, Macarthur (notionally ALP), Robertson, Gilmore (notionally ALP) and Macquarie.
WA: Hasluck & Swan (notionally ALP)

That's a total loss of 13 seats (14 with Longman). Within this prediction I'm predicting that the Coalition won't win any additional seats in Tasmania or the NT, and I think the ALP will make gains in Victoria and South Australia. I think they will win:

SA: Boothby & Sturt
Vic: La Trobe and McEwen

Finally, I think that the ALP will lose the Victorian seat of Melbourne to the Greens, meaning a net total loss of 10 seats for the government.

So, by that prediction, the allocation of seats in the new Parliament will be:

ALP: 77 seats
Coalition: 69
Independents: 3
Greens: 1

Senate

I'm less sure about my Senate predictions, but I think the composition of the 38 senators will be:

NSW: Two Liberals, two ALP, one Greens, one Nationals
Vic: Two Liberals, two ALP, one Greens, one Nationals
Qld: Three LNP, two ALP, one Greens
WA: Three Liberals, two ALP, one Greens
SA: Three Liberals, two ALP, one Greens
Tas: Two Liberals, three ALP, one Greens
ACT: One Liberals, one ALP
NT: One Country Liberals, one ALP

Which gives a final Senate composition of:

19 Coalition (16 Liberals, one Country Liberals, two Nationals)
15 ALP
Six Greens

Conclusion

I might be wrong. We'll see...

Update: I was probably wrong to call Eden-Monaro as going to the Liberals. My prediction that the ALP will retain Leichhardt, Petrie and Bonner in Qld and Lindsay in NSW has also been questioned and I'm willing to stand by it - if they fall so would the government (pretty much).

Update: Appears I got that wrong...

I'm on the Election Blackout Gabfest (again)

2010-08-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

This Election Blackout Gabfest features myself, Pete Black and Ivan ah Sam.

We talk about the Rooty Hill and Broncos Leagues Club fora, impressions from the last week of the campaign, costings and economic policy and make some predictions for the election.

Check it out.

A good NY Times piece on the election, and a not so good piece in Foreign Policy... by an Australian!

2010-08-19T22:05:00.001-07:00

In this last week before the election media outlets from the US have decided to run their perfunctory 'Australia is having an election' article. It's always fun to have a read of these pieces - the ability of overseas media outlets to get the basic facts right is a mark of their quality and attention to detail.

To that end, here is The New York Times' attempt. It's a pretty solid article, and I think even for an Australian audience it provides a pretty clear, accurate and concise recap of the campaign. I also found the final paragraph very funny:

Foreign policy matters — like Australia's engagement in Afghanistan, the strategic alliance with the United States and a growing relationship with China — have barely been mentioned. Instead, the candidates have spent much of the last two weeks arguing over whether to hold a second televised debate, and quibbling about whether their policy cost estimates were legitimate.

Those two sentences must have been written tongue-in-cheek. It's a totally fair criticism of the banality of the campaign.

But to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, we have this piece in Foreign Policy by Australian ex-pat and feminist blogger Chloe Angyal. Preliminarily, I should say that Angyal's writing on all things feminist is excellent and insightful, and that she's a friend of my housemate (though we've never met). But as an election analyst she leaves a bit to be desired.

The article itself isn't, I don't think, bad (bad implies it's...evil). It's just that an article in Foreign Policy, by an Australian, shouldn't contain the kind of casual factual errors present in Angyal's piece.

Compare her coverage of the impact of the ETS on Kevin Rudd:

But it wasn't enough for voters or his party, especially after his attempts to implement a carbon-trading scheme were scuttled in Parliament.

With the NY Times:

Many traditional Labor voters are irritated by the government's decision to shelve its cap-and-trade energy plan until 2013, citing poor international economic conditions and a lack of certainty in global talks on climate change.

I think it is at least sloppy to describe the ETS, which the ALP decided not to continue with, as being 'scuttled in Parliament'. Certainly there was scuttling but that wasn't what precipitated the plunge in polling support for Rudd - it was the decision to shelve the scheme.

The most egregious error is in the article is in Angyal's description of Tony Abbott:

For a start, her opponent Tony Abbott, the head of the Liberal Party (Australia's conservatives), is her polar opposite: a conservative Catholic who once trained for the priesthood and whose views on social issues are not unlike those of the average U.S. Republican Party senate candidate. A proponent (though famously not a practitioner) of pre-marital abstinence, against gay marriage (he has said that he feels "threatened" by homosexuality) and staunchly pro-life, Abbott is far more socially conservative than the Liberal Party leaders who preceded him.

It is ridiculous to say that Abbot's views on social issues are 'not unlike the average U.S. Republican Party senate candidate'. First of all it's difficult to tell what this means. An average Republican senate candidate in which state? What does 'average' mean there. Since there's more data available on sitting Republican senators, let's assume 'average' here means median, so we can compare Abbott and the 20th most conservative Republican senator. According to the most recent (2009) National Journal senate rankings, 20th and 21st most socially conservative Republicans (i.e. at the middle of their 41-member caucus) were Mississippi's Thad Cochran and Alabama's Jeff Sessions. (You can use a different method to figure out what 'average Republican senate candidate means' but you'll find very few with the same views as Abbott.)

Both oppose legalised abortion, don't oppose torture (such as waterboarding) as Guantanamo Bay, support a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage from being legalised. They oppose government-run healthcare (except for US Medicare!) and voted against the Affordable Care Act, The Democrats' healthcare reform bill. In short, Tony Abbott they ain't. Abbott is on the record as thinking abortion is bad, but does not oppose it being legal or available. He doesn't oppose government run healthcare - he is a former Health Minister! Sessions and Cochran would call Abbott a socialist for that. He opposes gay marriage (as does Julia Gillard) but speaks in positive terms about gay couples and gay relationships.

It is also extremely misleading to tell a US audience that Abbott is 'staunchly pro-life' since in the US that means publically opposing legal access to abortion, or at least believing states should be able to decide on a woman's access to it.

Finally, to give credit where it's due, I think Angyal's discussion of the media coverage of Gillard as a woman is very good. But I do object to her casual attempt to sum up Australian history and culture in a sentence:

Australian culture grew out of the rugged frontier mentality of its settlers' past, making their way in a new land. Women fit into that story largely by standing on the sidelines.

Really? I agree that women were sidelined for most of Australia's history. But the 'rugged frontier mentality of its settlers' past? That is too trite and stereotypical even for US audiences. And what's more, if that characterisation is true, then it is equally or more true of the US which had a much bigger and much more rugged frontier for much longer.

Anyway, I'm aware that I'm nit picking. It just annoys me to see substandard coverage of Australian politics in the US media. And it annoys me more when the culprit is an Australian!

Tony Abbott's final pitch to voters: I can work for two days without sleeping (!?)

2010-08-18T17:14:00.001-07:00

Tony Abbott announced last night at the 'people's forum' at the Broncos Leagues Club that he would campaign non stop from today until the election on Saturday. It seems he literally plans not to sleep until Saturday - even campaigning on graveyard shift radio between midnight at three AM.

That. Is. Totally. Insane.

Abbott says that voters have 'a right' to see him work hard for the top job. Well maybe we do. But jeez it couldn't be a very important right. I'd argue an important right is to see an Opposition Leader campaign who isn't completely fried from lack of sleep.

Can we please identify now, before the election, the person who thought this was a good idea? It seems like a decision that could itself have only come about from a severe lack of sleep. It seems David Cameron ran the last 24 hours of his campaign this year non-stop which a. doesn't make it a good idea and b. doesn't mean doing it for even longer is even better. I would be surprised if any significant group of people are at all impressed by this, or if he could possibly meet and convince enough people between say midnight and five AM to make the severe sleep deprivation worth it.

I will be fascinated to see whether a sleep-deprived Abbott finally makes the campaign-ending gaffe I've been predicting on the Election Blackout Gabfest for the last three weeks.

Political science says campaigns don't really matter - why don't we listen?

2010-08-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

One of the schools of thought in election analysis that I'm a big fan of is the 'political science' school (if I can call it that). The thinking there goes that election campaigns and policy positions don't make a huge difference to the outcome of elections, with most undecided voters simply judging the incumbent against their perception of how well they and the country are going. Ezra Klein has a nice roundup of some of these views:

First, campaigns don't matter as much as we think. I take that as a good thing: Democracy shouldn't be overly reliant on whose political consultants are better at spinning the truth into advertisements and attack mailers.
Second, "elections writ large depend more on performance than on policy -- that is, they depend more on how things are going (for which the incumbent party is on the hook) than on specific policies, bills, legislation, etc." That's a bit unfair to incumbents, who aren't totally responsible for conditions, but it's nevertheless a fairly decent way for voters to make decisions.
Third is that voters don't approach elections with strong views on policy issues. Instead, they look to the political leaders they already trust to tell them what their views should be. If President Romney had proposed ObamaCare before a mostly Republican Congress, it would've gotten an easy majority of Republicans -- both in Congress and in the country -- and almost zero Democrats. Party affiliation drives policy opinions, and not the other way around.

Klein goes on argue that this isn't a nihilistic view, but is instead a good thing because it means the party with the best attack ads (etc) doesn't necessarily win. I tend to agree, but want to make the point that it's a shame more of this analysis isn't used by the mainstream media. Whether or not you agree with it, it is definitely a totally different way of looking at an analysing elections that's worth a shout out in election coverage.

When you think about it, it's not surprising that the media and punditocracy tend to ignore political science. After all, its most basic conclusion is that their entire profession - slicing and dicing policies, pressers and gaffes - is basically pointless because they things they focus on don't actually decide elections. Life would be a lot less interesting if we just looked at the unemployment rate and tried to figure out how many votes it will win or cost the incumbent.

Of course I'm over simplifiying what political scientists do. They don't just look at the unemployment rate. There is a lot of statistical analysis out there to do: in what direction have mortgage payments gone for voters in marginal seats? How have average wages changed in Queensland in the last three years? Is the cost of living in Western Sydney rising too quickly for its voters? The reason that we don't see it from the media is that it requires totally different skills, and therefore totally different people, to those used in election cover age at the moment. That of course gives the sitting establishment a very good reason to resist incorporating more political science into their coverage.

One final point. Perhaps the strongest argument against the value of political science is that big policy questions do seem to resonate, at least in Australian elections. Think WorkChoices in 2007, Asylum seekers in 2001, the GST in 1998 and the mining tax this year. In considering this argument we should remember two things. First, we should question the causation. Do these policy questions resonate because the electorate cares about them, or because the media trumpet them? I think the latter seems more plausible. Secondly, recall the third point that Ezra makes above: voters tend to start with a partisan lean or affiliation and back-fill the reasons for that based on the positions their chosen party takes. I made a similar point earlier this week when talking about whether Q and A audiences are biased.

Impressions from the Broncos Leagues Club: 'undecided voters' are greedy and selfish

2010-08-18T02:30:00.000-07:00

I just watched Tony Abbott take an hour of questions from 'undecided voters' at the Broncos Leagues Club in Brisbane. It was depressing. It's not that the questioners were ignorant, or stupid or bigoted. To the contrary, they were much better informed than I expected. But what worried me is how they used the opportunity to ask, almost exclusively, for handouts.

What would Abbott do for pensioners? For disabled veterans? For hospitals? How would he get a uni student a job? What about an apprentice plumber? He was even asked what he would do for the rich and childless. The questioners were an almost endless procession of people representing narrow interest groups who wanted more money from the government.

Is their economic self interest the main thing swinging voters care about? Are elections being decided by people who only ask what their country can do for them? Tonight's forum seemed to suggest so, and it's a worry. The whole episode made me wonder whether these voters even care about the deficit. I'm unsure whether they would prefer handouts to reductions in the deficit or whether they simply don't see how each is related to the other. I'm not sure which is worse.

I don't know what we can do about this, but I'm worried.

Bogus psephology watch: The Australian on Donkey Votes

2010-08-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I didn't think of doing this earlier, but I thought it might be fun to keep track of some of the more bogus psephology (statistical analysis of elections) floating around in the lead up to Saturday's election.

For my inaugural edition we have this article by Christian Kerr in The Australian about the Coalition being placed to pick up more donkey votes than the ALP in marginal seats.

The article mentions 10 marginal seats where the Liberals have drawn higher ballot positions than the ALP, meaning that they will benefit from any donkey votes cast in those seats. (A donkey vote is one where the voter numbers the candidates sequentially down the ballot paper, thus casting a valid vote, but not a properly considered vote. Preferential voting means that, as minor candidates are eliminated, the preferences will flow to whichever major party is higher on the ballot, and therefore high in the donkey voter's preferences).

There are at least a few problems with the article. First, mid-way through the article Kerr lists the marginal seats where the ALP has drawn higher than the Liberals. Recall the Liberals have 10. How many do you think the ALP got, if the article is about the Coalition's advantage? One? Two? Maybe five? No. The article itself identifies 10 - that's right, 10 - marginals where the ALP is higher than the Liberals. So if we take Kerr's logic that being higher on the ballot means something, then the net effect should be zero.

Secondly, and perhaps even more egregiously, Kerr does not - even once - attempt to quantify the value of the donkey vote. So in an article about how the donkey vote could help win seats, Kerr didn't even try to say how much help the vote actually is. Perhaps he didn't bother because, according to the ABC, the donkey vote is probably worth less than 1% of the vote these days. It's not nothing, but it isn't much.

That's all for now. If you spot any other bogus psephology, link me to it on twitter.

End the debate debate farce: it's time for an independent commission on Prime Ministerial debates

2010-08-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

The ongoing debate about whether or not Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott will have another debate has this week descended into farce, with the metaphorically faceless Karl Bitar and Brian Loughlane trading inane letters via the media and the candidates ducking, weaving and as Bubbles would say 'equivocating like a motherfucker'.

The whole ordeal is a stark reminder that we need an independent commission to organise our Prime Ministerial debates. Chris Croke and I wrote about this in The Age last month:

"Australia would be well advised to institute an independent commission with responsibility for convening and co-ordinating the debates.

Before the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd outlined that he wished to establish a prime ministerial debates commission modelled on the American commission on presidential debates. Britain has a less formal panel of political parties and broadcasters who jointly and equally decide the format of the debates.

Rudd's proposal for a commission was well received at the time and remains a good idea. The debate over the debates is one of the tired constants of any Australian election campaign and produces the poor outcomes we're currently stuck with.

An independent commission is a useful way of ensuring that the debates take place in a competitive and fair fashion. The debates should be scheduled far in advance, with candidates given sufficient time to prepare.

An independent commission also serves as a safeguard to ensure that where sufficient public support exists, a third party candidate can be allowed to participate. In the 1992 US presidential election, that was Ross Perot. In 2010, the real story of the British election debates was the elevation of the Liberal Democrat leader, whose call to break the "old" two-party duopoly on power resonated among the British electorate."

The unedifying spectacle that we've seen this week makes a powerful case for getting this done straight away. Of course it's unlikely to happen. As we've seen in this campaign, both sides are equally unprincipled and opportunistic in the way they approach debate negotiations. They see debates (or the avoidance of them) as a means of pressing a political advantage. Abbott first wanted three debates, and after this success at the Rooty Hill RSL forum will now only agree to a short one provided there's a 'town hall' meeting afterward. Gillard refused to have more debates, then called for another, and is now avoiding town halls after her performance at Rooty Hill. It's transparently opportunistic.

But this maneuvering is not just ugly, it's bad for our democracy. The reason we need an independent commission is that debates can be genuinely useful for voters. To see them turned into fodder for point scoring between Karl Bitar and Brian Loughlane is to see the contempt that political operatives have for genuine democratic engagement.

Maybe Q and A audiences aren't biased, they're just copy cats

2010-08-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

After Tony Abbott's solo appearance on Q and A last night there was a lot of bleeting on Twitter about the supposedly biased nature of the audience and questions. The odd thing though was that I saw both Labor and Liberal supporters saying that the audience was biased toward and against Abbott respectively. A few people went as far as to allege that some of the questioners were partisan 'plants' (I said as much in jest a couple of times).

I think that partisan viewers of these programs are getting the causation wrong when they allege bias. It's not, I don't think, a case of audience members being selected because they've chosen to spout partisan talking points in their questions. Instead 'ordinary voters' or less sophisticated followers of politics with a partisan lean one way or the other probably tend to express their views in the terms that their chosen political parties do.

This makes sense to me, since a person with stronger political views than political knowledge will have to rely on someone to provide the reasons why they hold those views. Given people's appetite for information that confirms their existing views this seems a reasonable conclusion to draw. I have no idea whether there is any study-based evidence to back this up, but it seems intuitively true.

Importantly it seems much more plausible than the producers of Q and A having a simultaneous pro and anti Liberal bias. Of course a good deal of a viewer's perception of bias will come from their own bias toward or against a candidate. Since I disengaged from the major parties after the 2007 election (and especially after Malcolm Turnbull was rolled) I've found myself noticeably less likely to assume or allege bias in the media.

Re litigating the salary cap debate: Won't somebody think of the players!?

2010-08-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

I've posted a few times about the NRL's salary cap, and each time have sparked some thought-provoking responses from readers. (You can see the posts here, here and here).

This semester I'm taking an elective in law school about sports law, for which I'm writing an 8000 word paper on player market regulations in the NRL. I'll be focusing mainly on the salary cap, and a little on other measures like player drafts. It being law and all I'm interested in the legality of the system and principally whether it contravenes the common law doctrine of restraint of trade. As I read more and my thoughts mature over the course of the semester I'll be posting again on these issues.

But for now, I want to raise something that I think was lost the last time the salary cap was debated: the rights of the players to earn what they're worth.

As a starting point, I'm happy to acknowledge that players can move to other countries or sports if they're unhappy with their pay. That is of course true. Indeed they can move to other industries if they think they'll be better paid.

I think though that we should reject this as a justification for players being denied a fair market wage. First of all, I don't think it's fair to say 'go somewhere else if you don't like it here' when the reason a person may have to leave is an anticompetitive collusion of potential or current employers.

The reason for that, to me, is that we should have little sympathy for a person who doesn't follow their dreams for their own reasons, but significantly more for a person whose dreams are denied to them (or at least made harder to follow) by others.

Let's face it, if the treatment dished out to rugby league players were visited on any of us, we'd be fuming. If I were told that all of the big law firms in the country had decided they could only offer me a salary below the market rate, and that my only options were to work overseas or in another industry I would be pretty irate. And the analogy isn't perfect: overseas legal markets are bigger and better than Australias - overseas rugby league and union competitions aren't better than the NRL. Even in my case I'd be annoyed by the manner in which the choice was denied - the point I made earlier.

I know that super rich, sometimes antisocial and almost always lower socio-economic background professional footballers aren't the world's most sympathetic group. But if we think that economic and employment freedoms are important, they're important for all of us.

I don't think this resolves the salary cap debate one way of the other. To some extent, the issue is irreducibly complex, and I can already think of arguments to counter those I've made here. I just wanted to make the point that we shouldn't forget the price players pay under a salary cap system.

Apologies for the tardy posting, and some compensatory links

2010-08-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

Apologies again for my tardy posting in the last couple of weeks. My (non blogging life) has been pretty busy, but I intend to get back into the swing of things now.

One thing that has slowed me down a bit is that I've been struggling for inspiration lately, ironically in the middle of an election campaign. But those two things aren't unrelated. I've found this campaign so dire and bogged down in banality that it's been hard to find things to write that haven't already been hashed and rehashed to death all over the media.

But anyway, here are some links!

First up, my musical endorsement. Here is a live performance of the Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) from the Arcade Fire's new album, Suburbs.

And some reading:

This comment nails why I hate phone calls.
Test your micro-punditry against the market: there are now betting markets online for individual seats. Lots of interesting data if nothing else.
Ezra Klein has some interesting thoughts on 'The Game' and other related pickup self-help books.

Back with a post soon!

Adventures in cookery - Baked Coral Trout

2010-07-27T05:15:00.001-07:00

I last night to have a crack at baking a whole fish. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, inspired largely by a delicious seafood meal I ate on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand in early 2007 (left).

So I went for a Coral Trout, it being my favourite fish. It turns out that, given the flavours I wanted to use I would have been better off with

Snapper or Barramundi, but that's a lesson learned for next time.

After a quick squiz on the net for advice, I scored the skin to the bone in three places and stuffed the cavities with ginger, lemongrass, lemon, lime, garlic and chilli. I drizzled some soy sauce and olive oil on top. I then wrapped the fish loosely in alfoil and baked it for 50 minutes at 200 degrees. The results, both before and after the oven, are below.

After all of that it tasted... okay. I mean it was Coral Trout, so it was great. But it wasn't nearly as juicy as I had hoped, and the flesh hadn't taken on as much flavour.

I think I needed to put the fish directly in the baking tray so that the juices didn't run off between the grates (as you can see from the photo, the fish is elevated on the grill above the pan).

I also get the feeling that I should have wrapped it more (or less?) tightly to keep more of the juices in. And maybe I should have cooked it for a little less time (or at a slightly lower temperature)?

These are indeed questions.

As a lesbian, does Penny Wong have to support marriage equality? No. But does she as a gay politician?

2010-07-27T05:11:00.001-07:00

Pete wrote very thoughtfully and intelligently earlier this week about Climate Change Minster Penny Wong's statements to the press that she personally did not support marriage equality. He asked whether all gay and lesbian people had to support gay marriage. I think, on reflection that they don't have to. Not because I think there is a justifiable case against marriage equality, but because I think people have a right to be wrong, and that is true regardless of any element of their identity.

So I definitely do think less of Penny Wong for failing to come out in favour of marriage equality. I understand she is bound by Cabinet confidentiality. But she could have kept with Cabinet ("I support the Cabinet's policy") without expressing her own personal lack of support. So, as I did when Julia Gillard came out against marriage equality, I now think less of Wong.

But to focus on Wong's status as a gay politician. I think we can all agree that politicians can disagree with policies that benefit a group of which they are a part, without being seen as treacherous, antiquated or self-hating. Plenty of women and black politicians have come out against affirmative action policies. People might think they're wrong, but most would respect their position. In many ways, as a part of the minority in question, they're better placed than most to assess whether or not the policy is a good idea.

Here's my problem though: Wong doesn't fit into that category. I'd say instead she fits into the category of minority politicians who are remembered as dinosaurs: those who oppose policies designed to redress inequality suffered by their group, not confer a substantive and additional benefit (whether or not it intends itself to redress inequality). That is to say I think Wong is in the ranks of female politicians who oppose equal pay laws, or black politicians who oppose anti-discrimination legislation (if either of those groups even exist).

It's one thing to oppose special treatment for your group. It's another to oppose equal treatment. As a result I think Wong will be remembered as a dinosaur, when as the first gay Cabinet minister in Australia's history, she could have been remembered as a real trailblazer.

Wong isn't herself being asked to marry. She's simply being asked to support the right of other gay and lesbian people to enjoy the same marital rights as every other citizen. You need not have faced discrimination in order to want to prevent others being its victim. To instead hide behind listing off what the ALP has done for gay couples is to make more obvious what they haven't done. Indeed hearing Wong on Q&A last night rattle off all the ways in which the status of gay couples has been equalised just begged the question why marriage couldn't also be allowed.

Against that background, by supporting her own continuing oppression and discrimination, Wong has marked herself out as a politician of the past.

This post also appears at Election Blackout.

I'm on the Election Blackout Gabfest

2010-07-23T23:43:00.001-07:00

I recorded this morning, with Peter Black, the first episode of the Election Blackout Gabfest. You can download the podcast from iTunes (search for 'Election Blackout') or you can listen to it at the Election Blackout website.

On the gabfest Pete and I discuss the campaign so far, the Greens' prospects in the election, GetUp!'s court actions against the Australian Electoral Commission and the major parties' climate change policies (or lack thereof).

Check it out.

Is there any way we can make Sunday's debate worth watching?

2010-07-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

An op ed I co-authored about how to improve Australia's election debates appears in the Age today. In it, we argue that we should take our cue from the debates held in Britain this year and do three things:

First, Australia would be well advised to institute an independent commission with responsibility for convening and co-ordinating the debates.
...
Second, Australia should rethink the press gallery's hold over asking the questions. The British debates featured only questions from a selected audience of undecided voters or from questions submitted by the public online.
...
Third, the success of the British debates has partly been due to the adoption of a single moderator.

The rest of the article puts a bit more flesh on those bones. The point I wanted to make in blog form though is that I'm not sure even these changes could really help us. I think the single moderator gives us the best shot - think how effectively Tony Jones can police the conversation and try to make people answer questions on Q&A. But at the end of the day, if the politicians are determined to spout focus-grouped platitudes I'm not entirely sure that we can do anything to stop them.

That depresses me a bit. We live in a country where, in contrast to the United States, our political debates are quite clear and level headed. Politicians defer to policy experts a fair amount, and the distance between the parties is small because there is broad elite consensus about how to approach most policy issues. But it seems the price we pay for sensible, safe politics is that we have such dull clashes between the parties.

We're unlikely to see a big personal or political clash between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott on Sunday night because they're remarkably similar people, with remarkably similar views. Both have succeeded because of a gift for 'talking straight' that has recently given way to a need to spout professionally tested slogans. Both have undergone significant ideological transformations in order to lead their parties, to the point where I think both now believe in whatever will get them power - hence the opportunism and lack of ideological consistency from them both.

Against that background, I worry that no matter what we do to change the format of the debates, we won't be able to do much more than tweak the outcome. I hope I'm wrong though

This post also appears at Election Blackout, where I'm contributing posts during the election campaign.

My mouth is watering at the Broncos 2011 lineup if they sign Greg Inglis

2010-07-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

The Broncos were the best team of the 2000s. When Melbourne won again last year it seemed that they had snatched the title. But obviously the relevation that they massively rorted the salary cap obliterates their legacy, leaving Brisbane as the obvious winners: two premierships (2000 and 2006), ten finals appearances... the list goes. They were also probably the best teams of the 1990s, winning premierships in 1992, 1993, 1997 and 1998.

In that 20 year period they fielded some amazing sides. But I think if they manage to sign Greg Inglis for 2011, which they appear poised to do, their side will be one of the Broncos best - ever.

I make this claim about 2011 knowing that the team will still be exceptionally young. If they can hold the group of players together, it should be even better in 2012 and beyond.

Let's have a look at their (probably) starting lineup for round one, 2011:

Fullback: Josh Hoffman has established himself as a real star of the future. Starting the season behind Corey Norman in the pecking order, Hoffman has overtaken him and is getting better with each game.

Wings: Antonio Winterstein and Jharal Yow Yeh are also highly rated young guns. Yow Yeh served as 18th man for the Queensland State of Origin team this year and Winterstein scored a heap of tries in 2009, his debut season.

Centres: Greg Inglis and Justin Hodges will be the best centre pairing in the NRL - by a country mile. Assuming that Hodges makes a full return from injury, the Broncos may well be fielding the two best centres in the world.

Five eight: Darren Lockyer is obviously past his prime, but is still a quality player and a strong leader. 2011 will probably be his last season, and there's every chance he'll go out on a high.

Halfback: Peter Wallace is a quality player and brings a strong kicking game. NSW seem to have decided that Mitchell Pearce is their future at halfback, but Wallace will always be waiting in the wings.

Lock: Corey Parker has had an amazing season so far in 2011, marked by great goal kicking, a creative use of the ball and an exceptionally high workload in both attack and defence.

Second Rows: Ben Te'o/Alex Glenn/Matt Gillett and Sam Thaiday will provide a strong attacking platform. Thaiday is the best forward in the game at the moment and all of Qld 18th man Te'o, NZ international Glenn and Gillett are extremely talented players with strong playmaking ability on top of their ball running. Any of the three can fill in at lock or in the centres, which provides good depth and some strong options off the bench.

Props: Shane Tronc/Nick Kenny/Mitchell Dodds are all solid if unspectacular players. If the Broncs want to play a more mobile pack they can always play Thaiday in the front row, which would strengthen it significantly.

Hooker: Andrew McCullough is a good young player, and is probably next in line after Matt Ballin for the Queensland jersey.

Given that Melbourne's team has been decimated, I just can't think of many team that will boast a better lineup. Can you?

Update: I was reminded on Twitter that Winterstein has actually signed with the Cowboys for next season.

Update 2: I've also been reminded in the comments by Chris that Ben Hannant has signed to return to the Cowboys next year, meaning their Tronc/Hannant front row will actually be one of the better ones in the NRL.

I guess that means I fired off a little too quickly - I got a little taken with the prospect of Inglis!

Update 3: Now that I think of it, I should have pointed out that Inglis is a long-term option to replace Lockyer at five eight, or even to play lock.

Hey Hey It's... another Tony Abbott gaffe

2010-07-21T05:51:00.001-07:00

This post also appears at Election Blackout, where I'm blogging as a guest contributor during the election campaign.

I'm starting to think that Julia should put poor Tony out of his misery and re-schedule election for Saturday. I mean how much worse can it get for him? He is, at his core, too ill-disciplined to lead a campaign without constantly straying off message (the Workchoices pledge debacle) or putting his foot in his mouth (Bernie Bantam, "that's bullshit" - the list goes on). Sure, part of the reason that's true is that he's an honest and frank guy. But gee, this is just embarrassing.
The latest monumental screw up was his appearance on Hey Hey tonight. The scenario looked like it was ripped from the state-run TV broadcast of some ex-Soviet emerging democracy: gawdy sets, a live band, nonsense interjections, a fading pop star and a national politician. Amongst all that, Abbott guffawed and squirmed his way through possibly the worst hour of prime time television of the year. People might want their PM to be able to relate to them. But that doesn't mean they want their PM to do it by judging Red Faces. It's not like people look at Red Symonds and think, "Hey, if he can gong a band of dancing midgets that well, I bet he would be even better at running the country!"
It says something very bad about Abbott that he agreed to do it. It says something even worse about his minders and advisers. People like Bernard Keane and Latika Bourke have been tweeting incessantly about the Liberal's shambolic campaign HQ, and this is further evidence that something is seriously wrong. Hey Hey isn't even a good show to go on if you want to connect with 'ordinary Australians' (if we're to credit that kind of idiotic reductivism with any meaning at all). Abbott was a bit player on the show, literally reduced to the same stature as Kylie and Lloyd from Entourage (who zinged Abbott pretty good at one point - another low point in Tony's appearance). Kevin Rudd going on Rove at least offered him the chance to dominate the audience's attention, tell a story and substantively demonstrate a different aspect of his persona. Tony just sat on the edge of the judges panel and looked lost.
I've been saying for a little while that I think the ALP will be re-elected with a higher share of the national two party preferred vote than they received in 2007, simply because Tony Abbott is such a bad campaigner that I'm sure he will seriously undermine himself by the time we get to election day. Chalk this down as the biggest screw up so far. I've got some respect for Tony, but I think by election day he'll leave Mark Latham looking like Bob Hawke.