Electoral commentary hasn’t yet absorbed the magnitude of the disaster suffered by the anti-Labor parties in Queensland tonight. It’s true that Labor’s massive majority has been reduced a little relative to the outcome in 2001, but this was distorted by the presence of One Nation, which has now been almost completely eliminated. This was a ‘normal’ election, with no last-minute scare campaign or other disturbing factor, and the coalition has been crushed.

Let’s look first at the National Party. They are supposed to be the alternative government, but they got only about 17 per cent of the first preference vote and have been reduced to the status of a rural rump, as in NSW and Victoria, the only other states where they remain a significant force. The seats they have regained have been in areas that should have been safe and were lost because of the One Nation upsurge. . Outside their heartland, they actually lost more ground this time around, losing the seat of Keppel. In the Gold Coast, where they were once the dominant party, they have disappeared for good. In provincial cities like Cairns, Toowoomba and Townsville they have gone nowhere. Even in the heartland, their gains were partly dependent on the “agin the government” vote in sugar electorates – this will work against them when the Federal election comes around, unless the fabled FTA with the US includes access to sugar markets (and, since GWB has an election of his own coming on, that’s not very likely).

Then there’s the Liberals. They hold about half the Federal electorates in Queensland, but they remain completely marginal in State politics. It’s quite possible that they will hold only one Brisbane electorate in the new Parliament, as they did in the old one. As a resident of Indooroopilly, I only have to walk down the street to be stunned by the idea that this is a marginal Labor seat. admittedly the University of Queensland is a disturbing factor (it brought me here, after all) but the general ambience is that of Toorak or Double Bay. The same is true in spades of Clayfield, which Labor looks certain to retain. At least at the state level, urban electors want schools and hospitals and think Labor is more likely to deliver them than the Liberals.

Perhaps the best feature of the election from my viewpoint is that Labor’s massive win followed the introduction of a new tax (the ambulance levy) and there was no commitment not to raise existing taxes or introduce new ones. There were some justified tax cuts (for example, in stamp duty on house purchases) but the government is now in a position to meet its expenditure commitments without resorting to deficit finance.

State and Federal politics are very different, but the core vote from which the Coalition is working is about 35 per cent. Given a competent campaign, Federal Labor should pick up enough Queensland seats to make the next election a very close call.

The old Australian tradition ‘vote early and vote often’ is under official attack here in Queensland. The pamphlet distributed by the Electoral Office laid great stress on the fact that we should vote exactly once.* And a fair bit of publicity was given to the fact that polling booths are most crowded between 8am and 10am.

*For non-Australian readers, I should point out that not voting at all is not a legal option here. If you want to abstain, you have to do so actively, by turning up and casting a blank ballot.

In the middle of a generally reasonable Newsweek article about the failure to find WMDs, I came across the following para

But if Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t he come clean? After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private—even outside the country—and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn’t that the sensible option?

But, but …(lapses into stunned silence)

My posts regarding the third-hand junk science on DDT presented by Christopher Pearson have provoked an interesting debate, which leads me to want to clarify my position on the issue. You can find relevant references in my previous posts and the comments threads. Here are the conclusions I have drawn:

The ban on the agricultural use of DDT, beginning in the US in 1972, and much reviled by junk scientists, was fully justified, for several reasons.

• DDT has well-established adverse environmental effects, particularly on predatory birds
• DDT persists and accumulates in human body tissues, which is an undesirable property for any potential toxin. There is strong, but not conclusive evidence of health risks to humans  arising from this
• DDT has broad-spectrum effects, killing beneficial as well as harmful insects, and is highly persistent
• Indiscriminate agricultural use of DDT promotes the development of resistance, reducing or eliminating the usefulness of DDT in its most beneficial use, as an antimalarial

The early success of DDT as an antimalarial in countries such as India and Sri Lanka was not sustained, but this had little or nothing to do with the 1972 ban. The main problems were the development of resistance and the lack of sustained funding. Resistance problems also reduced the effectiveness of antimalarial drugs and there was little commercial interest in the development of new ones.

The use of DDT as an antimalarial, sprayed on house walls or insecticidal nets was not banned in 1972, and never has been. The majority of junk science diatribes, including Pearson, state or imply the contrary, either through ignorance (almost certainly the case for Pearson) or malice.

Between about 1995 and 2000, debate over DDT was intensified because environmental groups wanted a complete phaseout of DDT as part of the UN convention on persistent organochlorine pollution (POP). Environmental groups argued that there were safer, and equally effective alternatives, such as pyrethroids and pressed developing countries to adopt these methods. In some cases, for example in South-East Asia, this worked fairly well. In other cases, such as South Africa, the alternative methods failed or funding was inadequate and it was necessary to return to DDT. During the debate leading up to the POP convention, rhetoric on both sides was heightened, tending to obscure agreement on the basic points that the only legitimate use of DDT was antimalarial and that replacement of DDT was contingent on the provision of affordable and effective alternatives, funded by rich countires. Quoted out of context, some of the arguments on the pro-DDT side have been used by junk science writers to back up their attacks on the 1972 ban. There are some instances in which environmental pressure led to ill-advised decisions to abandon DDT. But far more damage to the viability of DDT as an antimalarial was done by its use as a broad-spectrum agricultural insecticide – the very policy defended by junk science writers.

The current position is that, in at least some poor countries (particularly those where there has been no history of extensive spraying and therefore no buildup of resistance) there is no affordable and effective alternative to using DDT spray on house walls. As long as this remains the case, DDT use should be continued. Where there is a more expensive, but equally effective, alternative, the cost should be borne by rich countries, since the benefits of reduced DDT in the environment are global.

As the boom in Australian property prices comes to add hundreds of thousands to the value of any block of land from which the sea is visible, trees that get in the way of those views have been disappearing rapidly. In most places, this has reached the point where further clearing has been tightly restricted by law, but this has merely produced an epidemic of midnight tree-fellings and mysterious poisonings.

I was told today (but haven’t been able to check it) that Noosa Council has adopted what seems likely to be an effective deterrent. In the event of a suspicious tree death, a new tree will be replanted. While it is growing it will be supplemented by an artificial visibility barrier equal in height and width to the old tree. Perhaps the tree-fellers can find a countermeasure, but it’s not obvious how.

And on this kind of thing, as Noosa goes, so goes the nation.

Kieran’s piece on kids being driven to school reminded me of a post I’ve been planning for a while. One of the issues debated at length on my blog is that of speeding and law-enforcement measures such as speed cameras. I’ve argued against speeding and in favor of rigorous law-enforcement. Not surprisingly, and perhaps reflecting the fact that more than 80 per cent of drivers regard themselves as above-average, this has been very controversial. You can read some instalments in the debate here and here or use the search facility for “speeding”. Unfortunately most of the extensive and interesting comments were lost in a database failure.

In the course of this debate I discovered the fact, surprising to me, that, although the rate of road deaths per person in the United States is nearly twice that in Australia and the United Kingdom, much of this difference can be accounted for by the fact that distances travelled in the United States are a lot higher and are rising (there are problems with the numbers and biases in the measure, but I’ll leave that to one side for now). The differences between US and UK are plausible given differences in population density and well-developed public transport in London at least, but the differences between the US and Australia certainly surprised me. Australia is every bit as car-dependent as the US and has much lower population density.

All of this is a prelude to the fact that, in economic terms, time spent travelling is a really big deal. In their book Time for Life, based on the 1985 US Time Use Study, Robinson and Godbey estimate that the average adult American spends 30 hours a week in paid employment and 10 hours a week travelling (they also, controversially, argue that working time has been falling, not rising). It’s pretty clear that distances and times spent travelling have increased since 1985 in the US (in both the US and Australia, driving is by far the dominant mode of travel).

If, as I’ll argue below, most travel should be regarded as being in the same economic category as working and if, as the stats linked above imply, Americans spend about twice as much time travelling as Australians, then reducing travel times to the Australian level would be equivalent to a productivity improvement of between 12 and 15 per cent. As it happens, combined with the relatively small difference in hours of paid work, adjusting for hours of work and travel would just about eliminate the gap between Australian and US GDP per capita (about 20 per cent on standard PPP estimates).
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Via Lawrence Solum, I found this interesting post from Professor Bainbridge arguing that corporations should not be compelled to pay reparations for past wrongdoing (in this case, complicity in slavery). He says

Punish the wrongdoers, you say? Sorry, but the corporation’s legal personhood is a mere legal fiction. A corporation is not a moral actor. Edward, First Baron Thurlow, put it best: “Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?” The corporation is simply a nexus of contracts between factors of production. As such, there is no moral basis for applying retributive justice to a corporation – there is nothing there to be punished.

So who do we punish when we force the corporation to pay reparations? Since the payment comes out of the corporation’s treasury, it reduces the value of the residual claim on the corporation’s assets and earnings. In other words, the shareholders pay. Not the directors and officers who actually committed the alleged wrongdoing (who in most of these cases are long dead anyway), but modern shareholders who did nothing wrong.

This seems plausible. On the other hand, the obvious implication (one that was clearly implicit in Thurlow’s original point) is that the principle of limited liability is untenable, at least in relation to civil and criminal penalties for corporate wrongdoing. The wrongdoers are, as Bainbridge says, the officers and shareholders at the time the wrong is committed, and they should be held personally liable. The law has moved a bit in this direction in recent years, but Bainbridge’s argument implies that it should go a long way further, restricting the principle of limited liability to the case of voluntarily contracted debts.
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I enjoyed the series of stories Drunken Banker Week presented by Gummo Trotsky. Start here and work back.

The ‘Gray Lady’ nickname of the NYT implies the kind of conservatism and caution that’s appropriate to a journal of record. But in what is, as far as I know, a newspaper first, today’s NYT brings the astrology column onto the Op-Ed page, providing horoscopes for the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.

I’m bemused by this. If the implied view is that astrology is so patently silly that no-one would take it seriously, isn’t this rather a juvenile trick to play on Erin Sullivan, noted as the author of Saturn in Transit and the forthcoming Astrology and Psychology of Midlife and Aging., who appears to have contributed her column in all seriousness? If the implied view is anything other than that astrology is too silly to be taken seriously, isn’t this rather insulting to every reader of the NYT who has even a high school level of scientific literacy? No doubt there is some ironic postmodern stance that is appropriate here, but I can’t quite locate it.

In today’s SMH, Gerard Henderson repeats all the standard claims about swinging voters, for example

Elections in Australia are invariably decided by people who in most other democracies would not vote, or who, if they choose to back a minor party or independent, would not express a preference for either of the major parties. This is due to the unique federal electoral system, which comprises compulsory and preferential voting – introduced in 1924 and 1918 respectively.

In other words, it is the essentially uncommitted and/or uninterested – living in marginal seats – who decide election outcomes in Australia … Since the end of the Pacific War, the Government has changed hands only five times – 1949 (Menzies), 1972 (Gough Whitlam), 1975 (Fraser), 1983 (Hawke) and 1996 (Howard). The outcome in each case was determined by the change in allegiance of essentially non-political voters, along with a proportion of newly enrolled electors.

There’s a trivial sense in which all of this true, just as the outcome of a cricket match [at least if it isn’t drawn] is always decided by the last ball. And in a constituency-based system with only two parties capable of winning seats, it’s broadly speaking correct that only marginal seats count – however, swings are more variable these days so more seats are marginal.

Apart from that, however, Henderson’s analysis is (to the extent that it was ever valid), totally out of date. The implied picture is one in which most voters, and all who take a serious interest in politics, are committed supporters of one major party or the other, in roughly equal numbers. Hence, the remainder, the ‘swingers’ determine the outcome.

This was always a problematic viewpoint. As Henderson’s own family experience during the Split (he has an interesting piece on this in the latest Sydney Institute newsletter) people can and do make permanent changes in their political allegiance. A conversion of this kind is far more valuable to the gaining party than winning a swinging voter for a single election.

More importantly, the number of “rusted-on” major party voters has declined drastically. Both sides have recorded votes of 35 per cent or below in their worst recent outings, which puts an absolute upper bound of 70 per cent voters committed to one party or the other. But even within this group, there are almost certainly some who changed over time, or voted on a specific issues. For example, Keating lost lots of hardcore Labor voters in the 1996 election, but he undoubtedly gained some “cafe latte” votes with his cultural agenda – many of these will not be so attracted to Latham, while the former hardcore may return.

Henderson is particularly unsatisfactory when it comes to the minor parties. He notes that most Green preferences go to Labor, but there’s a big difference between getting a primary vote and getting 70 per cent of second preferences. To be precise, on these numbers the average Green vote is worth 0.4 first preferences votes to Labor.

More importantly, since minor party preferences are now crucial, what basis does Henderson have for equating minor party voters with “the uncommitted or uninterested”? The decision to vote for a minor party means that the voter has rejected both of the obvious choices, which normally implies some degree of interest in the process. It’s hard to argue that Democrat and Green voters as a group are less interested in politics than major party voters, whatever you might think of the results of their interest. Even One Nation voters, who are on average closer to Henderson’s idea of the apolitical swinger, were expressing a (negative) interest in political ‘business as usual’ when they abandoned their traditional allegiances to vote for Pauline.