The Thursday experiment didn’t work, so it’s back to once a week for the moment. This is your chance to post your thoughts on any topic. If you want to continue discussion on one of the older posts (last week or earlier) you’ll probably get more attention here. I’m still keen for suggested improvements to the blog, but anything (civilised) goes!

Update We’re off to a flying start with an extensive discussion of merkins (look it up). I’ve never quite understood what would create a demand for such an item, but the recent upsurge of Brazilian chic must be driving some sort of boom.

Google has been a huge aid in research, but I haven’t found a good site with a chronological set of Australian state and federal election results. I’m trying to check my recollection that, in about 1995, we had the opposite situation to that of today with Labor in office nationally but nowhere else. I’m sure about everywhere except NSW and Queensland – I can’t remember whether Fahey outlasted Goss.

So if anyone can answer the specific question or point me to a good site, I’d be grateful.

My view, for what it’s worth, is that the 1995 situation was a fluke, and the current alignment reflects more fundamental developments with public opinion to the left of the major parties on domestic issues, but not on foreign policy.

Update Thanks to Tim Dymond for pointing me to this database. At the beginning of 1995, Labor was in office in the ACT and Queensland, as well as nationally. Labor lost the ACT in February and Queensland in July, but, in the meantime, they won NSW in March. Labor’s winning streak started in June 1998 – they’ve won every state and territory election since then. Assuming Carr wins again next March, and there are no early elections, the run will extend into 2004. I’ll have a piece on the meaning of all this in Thursday’s Fin.

Further updateThe Psephologist aids my failing memory by reminding me of the Mundingburra fiasco. Goss actually hung on by one seat, but the 16-vote win in Mundingburra was overturned by the Court of Disputed Returns. At the same time, the member for Mundingburra got into some financial trouble and was dumped by Labor, which, not surprisingly, lost the ensuing by-election. The dirty tricks associated with campaign, while par for the course in NQ (one of our local MPs later went to prison for bogus electoral enrolments), gave rise to a lengthy inquiry. Since I voted in Mundingburra both times, I have no excuse for forgetting all this.

I’ve been appointed to the academic advisory committee for the Prime Minister’s Home Ownership Task Force. Most of the work will be done by the executive eommittee, which has some high-powered Australian and international economists including Stephen King, Joshua Gans and Andrew Caplin as well as Christopher Joye, who’s been the leading promoter of the idea of equity partnerships as a method of home financing.
But the real international stars, including Robert Shiller and Richard Zeckhauser are on the advisory committee. I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting regularly for coffee, but it’s great honor to be in the same group as these guys.
Readers may be interested to know how I managed this, given that governments generally give jobs like this to their friends and that I am well-known to be ‘no friend of the government’. As with a lot of things it happened pretty much by chance. Commentators of all stripes were piling on to denounce the equity partnerships idea and I wrote a piece in the Finarguing that it had some promise and deserved closer investigation. Next thing you know I got my invitation.

With weapons inspectors now in Iraq and apparently well on the job, it seems like a good time to reassess things, although all the evidence is preliminary. First, as I understand the news, the inspectors have already made unannounced visits to some of the sites featured in the Blair satellite dossier and found nothing. Perhaps the Iraqis have demolished the relevant buildings and removed the equipment, but I imagine this would leave some traces. A more plausible view is, as Thomas Friedman says, that anything of significance is much more carefully hidden, ‘inside mosques or under cemeteries’. This degree of concealment would rule out, I would think, an active nuclear weapons program. In any case, it does not appear as if the Blair dossier provided the level of evidence supporting war that was claimed at the time.

The next big date is 8 December when the Iraqis have to make their declaration, listing all their relevant sites, data etc. They’ve already denied having any weapons program, but this is consequence-free ‘cheap talk’. I doubt that they’ll turn up with a blank sheet of paper, but they may well try to hide something, and if they do, they’ll probably get caught. So war remains a likely outcome, but not a certain one.

Given the way the UN has coalesced behind the inspections and the vigour with which they are proceeding, I think the likelihood of the favored warblogger scenario, a unilateral US invasion, has dwindled nearly to zero. By contrast, even after Iraq accepted the UN resolution,Steven Den Beste predicted ‘We’re still right on track for hostilities to begin in December, unless there’s a coup in Iraq before then.’ The point about a coup, reflected Den Beste’s belief, now refuted by events, that if Saddam accepted unfettered inspections, he would be overthrown. (Of course, in a regime like Iraq’s such a coup could happen without any warning to outsiders and would be a highly desirable event. ) But the warbloggers, arguing on the basis of wishful thinking, have been consistently wrong ever since Bush’s address to the UN, and I think will be proved wrong yet again.

One of the sillier pieces of conventional wisdom about Victoria is that Melbourne now has a ‘buzz’ thanks to Jeff Kennett, and that Bracks is the beneficiary of this and of Kennett’s policies in general. The same ‘buzz’ was there at the time of the last election and the same commentators were surprised at the outcome and the lack of any apparent nostalgia for Kennett on the part of Victorian electors. In fact, the ‘buzz’ was the reason Kennett lost.

The basic reason is that ‘Melbourne’ in this story means the Melbourne CBD and inner suburbs where most most of these commentators live and work. Kennett’s spending priorities involved cutting basic services for the suburbs and the bush while dispensing bread and circuses in the CBD. His spending cuts were unsustainable and his privatisation program did nothing for the net worth of the public sector, so his only big contribution to the budget surplus was gambling taxes.

It’s true that the Victorian economy has recovered since the 1990s. But the depth of the Victorian recession had very little to do with Cain and Kirner, and a lot to do with Victoria’s reliance on manufacturing. Similarly the recovery has more to do with the cyclical nature of macroeconomic shocks than with any brilliance on Kennett’s part.
Update Shaun Carney agrees, saying

The Liberals refused to accept the ’99 result, and fought that campaign again

and

To people in the suburbs and outlying areas, the biggest project in their lives is to make sure their children are properly educated and that their families will be looked after if they get sick.

Getting schools and hospitals right – these are the major projects of contemporary Victorian politics.

And when it comes to the “inheritance” being spent, that’s what voters chose in 1999 and again on Saturday. They want cautious, steady financial management but they also want services. In good economic times they want their own money back, not politicians’ boasts about massive surpluses or never-never promises of a social dividend.

Don Arthur has more on wealth and inequality, a topic that’s been debated at length in recent posts and the ensuing comments threads. Don links to more from Tim Dunlop and a debate that has embroiled, among others, Clive Hamilton, Adele Horin, Mark Latham and Peter ‘the bad’ Saunders of the CIS (so named to distinguish him from Peter ‘the good’ Saunders of the Social Policy Research Centre). I don’t have time for a full statement of my views, but on this issue, I agree more with Arthur, Horin and Latham than with Hamilton and Saunders – not entirely a predictable alignment for me, but variety is the spice of life.

Although it’s obvious, I should clarify that none of the people of mentioned agrees exactly with any of the others, and that overall I agree with Clive on most things.

The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker, which I’ll probably review for the AFR. It’s very well written and generally well-argued but, as in most books on the perennial nature-nurture debate, caricatures the other side and promises more than it delivers. Here’s an extract from my draft review.

Pinker is a linguist and takes the acquisition of language, more precisely, the acquisition by children of their native language, as the paradigm example of learning. It’s hard to disagree with the conclusion that children’s brains are hardwired for the learning of language, based on the simple observation that two-year olds perform with ease a feat which most adults find exceptionally difficult.
But the exceptional nature of this feat should alert us to the dangers in using it as a paradigm. Langugage is the only characteristically human cognitive feat for which we are obviously hardwired (like most other complex animals, we are also hardwired for vision and other senses). For nearly everything else, the Blank Slate metaphor seems appropriate. Thanks to the environment in which I grew up, I can solve functional equations, swim the Australian crawl and perform many other tasks unknown to my hunter-gatherer ancestors. On the other hand, I can’t make or throw a spear or distinguish edible from deadly forms of bush tucker.
A striking instance of the absence of hard-wired functionality relates to kinship systems. Pinker stresses the cultural universality of kinship. Yet even a relatively simple kinship system such as that prevailing in modern Western societies presents a formidable learning task for most children, and puzzles of the form ‘brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son’ baffle many adults. There is little to suggest that the capacity to learn kinship systems is any more hardwired than the capacity to learn trigonometry.

Comments much appreciated