Month: November 2005

At the Academy

John Quiggin10 Comments

I’m at the annual meeting of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. I’ll be talking in a symposium on Ideas and Influence on the topic “Economic liberalism: Fall, Revival and Resistance”. This evening there’s a public lecture from Paul Kelly on Rethinking Australian Government, at the Shine Dome (Academy of Science).

I had dinner last night with Max Corden, one of the great names in Australian economics, and we had a fascinating discussion about trade and current account deficits and the ways they might come back into balance smoothly (or not).

Then there was a colloquium on the topic of a Bill of Rights, at which Hilary Charlesworth and Larissa Behrendt spoke, which produced a couple of new (to me) developments. First, most people seem to have abandoned the idea of inserting a Bill of Rights into the Constitution, favouring a legislated Bill instead. Rather than being entrenched, this would require courts to interpret laws consistently with human rights as far as possible. If governments wanted to pass laws inconsistent with the Bill of Rights they could do so, but they would have to be explicit about it.

The second point is that the ACT has already passed such a Bill and that other states are considering it. This is part of a more general trend where the old assumption that the only way to achieve desirable progress is to centralise power in the federal government is being overturned.

Mine enemy’s enemy

John Quiggin29 Comments

I haven’t found enough information on the riots in France, to make any useful comment on what’s happening, except an obvious one, that the Chirac government has made an awful mess of things.

In this context, there’s an expectation about that leftists should defend Chirac and his government, and therefore be embarrassed by his failures. The first time this expectation arose was when (thanks to poor performance and co-ordination on the left) Chirac ended up in a run-off against Le Pen for the presidency in 2002. Hence it was necessary for the left to campaign for a strong vote against Le Pen and, necessarily, for Chirac. Then in 2003, Chirac’s government led the opposition to the Iraq war at the UN, by virtue of its permanent membership of the UNSC, rather than because of its great moral standing. Still, the war had to be opposed, and Chirac therefore had to be supported.

But the argument that ‘mine enemy’s enemy is my friend’ can only go so far. Much of the reason why French Gaullists annoy US Republicans is that they have so much in common. There’s little doubt that, if Chirac had the kind of global power that Bush does, he’d abuse it in exactly the same way. Australians and New Zealanders, who’ve seen Chirac and his predecessors throwing their weight around in the South Pacific (long used as the site for French nuclear tests), are well aware of this. The same kind of heavy-handedness is evident in domestic policy and seems to have contributed to the riots.

Have PPPs matured ?

John Quiggin8 Comments

I’ve been involved in the debate over private infrastructure and public-private partnerships for more than a decade, and have accumulated lots of evidence that the public sector generally loses from these deals. One response I get a lot is that the process has matured and that the failures of the 1990s are no longer relevant.

Sydney’s Cross-City tunnel fiasco makes it clear that this is not the case. This deal has all the features that I and others have been criticising for years – secret clauses, restrictions on future planning, closure of alternative routes, crippling penalties for changes and so on. But there’s more. The inclusion of an upfront payment to the RTA, effectively creating a slush fund outside the normal budget process, is an abuse that wasn’t even contemplated a decade ago.

It’s reported Treasury is furious over this and I’m not surprised. They’ve been trying to establish a coherent PPP process, but toll road projects seem to fall outside its scope. But the fundamental problems are, as far as I can see, inherent in the whole concept.

Other recent developments make it clear that we need a moratorium on PPP deals. How can the public interest possibly be protected when any politician or public servant involved in these processes can expect a multi-million dollar sinecure on retirement, provided they don’t upset the applecart? You only have to look at the payrolls of the major players in the industry to see what I mean. Tony Harris, the former Auditor-General who exposed the dodgy accounting behind many of the early schemes is one of the few people involved in the process who doesn’t have a cushy job or consultancy of some kind.

Sistani rules, again

John Quiggin29 Comments

I haven’t seen much discussion of this AP report that Ayatollah Sistani is likely to call for a withdrawal of US troops after the elections on December 15 (found via Juan Cole).

It’s unclear whether this is an accurate report of Sistani’s intentions, a trial balloon, or an attempt by some in his circle to create a fait accompli. But assuming the report is accurate, it seems clear, as Cole says, that any attempt to resist such a demand from Sistani would be futile, especially now that the Sadrists, still violently opposed to the occupation, are likely to play a large role in the new government. Nevertheless, the US, backed by current PM Jaafari is currently seeking a 12-month extension of the occupation mandate from the UN, instead of the 6-month extensions sought previously.
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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin41 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

Guest post from Rhonda Stone

John Quiggin26 Comments

By email, Rhonda Stone has sent in the following piece relating to earlier discussions here. Comments are welcome, but, remember that Rhonda is a guest, and please be particularly sure to stick to civilised discussion. Comments that abuse the poster or other commenters will be deleted.

If the brain reads sentences through a process of decoding or otherwise identifying individual words, how is it possible to read this:

B4UASsM2MCH ABT RDNG, cnsdr tht th BRNISWNDRFLY KreaTV& efcnt.
(copyright, 2005, Dee Tadlock, Ph.D., Read Right Systems, Inc.)

I would love to know if it has occurred to many of your readers that neither the phonics and decoding view of reading and development nor whole language philosophy accurately reflect what it is that the brain does when it reads sentences? What if individual word identification and sentence reading are completely seperate cognitive acts? What would that mean to our understanding of what must be done to prevent and correct reading problems?
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For daylight saving

John Quiggin78 Comments

Mark Bahnisch comes out against daylight saving, arguing that, in Brisbane’s summer weather it’s better to finish work after sunset.

I’m generally in favour as I tend to wake up with the sun. Because Brisbane is so far east (we’re not far from Byron Bay), sunrise in summer is very early – it’s light before 5am. In some ways, that’s good (it’s a great time to get work done), but not if you want to stay up past about 9pm. It gets dark pretty early, around 6:30.

I suspect that daylight saving here does little more than restore the time in Brisbane to what it would be under “God’s time”, without time zones or other fiddles.

The problem is, of course, that the state is big in both directions. The tropics have very little seasonal variation in the length of the day, which makes daylight saving in summer nonsensical while the west has the opposite problem to Brisbane. But given that we have to have one time zone for the whole state (an internal border would be ludicrous), we should pick it to suit the majority, who live in the Southeast corner.

Of course, anyone who really doesn’t like daylight saving could leave their watch unchanged, stick to their old schedules as far as possible, and just bear in mind that everyone else is using a different time. The reverse is true in the present situation if you really like daylight saving.

IR reform and inequality

John Quiggin145 Comments

It looks as if the IR legislation will be passed through the Parliament while we are all changing the channel to get away from the barrage of ads supporting it, so I suppose I’d better comment now, before taking the time to wade through the 600 pages of simplification the government is giving us. I’m mainly concerned with the likely impact on inequality

Taking the central elements of the legislation separately, it’s possible to make a case in regard to any one of them that the effect on inequality will be modest, or even favourable. It can be pointed out, for example, that many minimum wage earners are in high-income households, so a lower minimum wage won’t be so bad. And making it easier to sack people ought to promote more hiring as well as more firing, which should be good for those who are now unemployed.

These arguments are plausible, but not clear-cut. On the other hand, when we look at the macro evidence, we get very clear evidence pointing the other way. Wherever reforms like this have been introduced, notably the UK and NZ, inequality has increased drastically on almost all dimensions (capital vs labour, variance in wages, wage premiums of all kind, unequal allocation of work). In the US, where these institutions have been entrenched for a long time, inequality is higher than in any other developed country and getting rapidly worse.

It may not be clear which piece of the reform package is doing the work, but the aggregate outcome can be predicted with safety.

Make them pay, part 2

John Quiggin67 Comments

In response to my last post about taxpayer-funded IR propaganda, Things I’ve Seen comes up with a neat suggestion.

At the end of every advert, where we currently have “Authorised by”, add “This advert was paid for by the Australian taxpayer”. Then let democracy take its course.

The neat thing is that if ads were genuinely helpful and informative, tazpayer-viewers wouldn’t mind.

A requirement of this kind could be inserted by legislation, and it would be a brave government that subsequently removed it. Of course, it would only happen if it could be done in the first few days after a change of government, when the habits of power had not yet grown familiar.

League tables

John Quiggin2 Comments

Everybody loves league tables, especially when they do well. A couple of people (Graeme Halford and Jack Strocchi) pointed me to the Times Higher Education Supplement university league tables. Unfortunately the tables themselves are behind a paywall, but those ranked highly have not been quiet about it. The University of Queensland is ranked in the top 50 in the world and, for the social sciences, comes in at number 25. (It’s a bit annoying, by the way that the UQ press release runs first on the #29 ranking in biomedical science, and lists social sciences as an also-ran)

This is a pretty impressive ranking, though I’d be interested to see the criteria that put 17 Australian universities in the world’s top 200, compared to 54 in the US and 24 in Britain. It seems to overstate our relative importance, and to suggest that we are punching way above our weight. Still, the THES doesn’t seem likely to suffer from pro-Australian bias.