Lots of interesting stuff, so pay a visit and comment. Policies are the same as here, but with a stronger preference for academic discussion as opposed to polemical arguments about policy.
Natural Resources Conference 2006
The $500 million rule for the Murray-Darling Basin
Having seen the abilities of the team of crack fact(oid)checkers here, I can’t resist the temptation to ask for more help. I’m planning on writing something on higher education. My starting point is the belief that the squeeze on universities, driven in part by the desire to force them to rely more on full-fee paying domestic students, has resulted in very little growth in domestic undergraduate numbers over the decade since the government was elected. But I’m having trouble getting consistent time-series on this. This report called Selected Higher Education Research Expenditure Statistics: 2000 supports my view for the period up to 2000, but after that, looking at the DEST site, I can only find annual cross-sections that don’t seem to be collected on a consistent basis. Can anyone give me consistent time series on domestic undergraduate numbers, and commencements. Better still is there a breakdown giving the number of HECS places and the number of full-fee places supported by FEE-HELP, on a basis comparable to the statistics up to 2000?
Update I found what I was looking for on the National Union of Students website. It’s over the page and needs some formatting. Money quote:
The number of subsidised places in 2007 will be roughly the same as they were in 1997. In terms of student access to HECS places a decade of Howard Government education reforms has amounted to standing still.
This is consistent with the partial data I already had.
The most recent data on full-fee places I could find was for 2002, when there about 6000 full-fee undergraduate places. Presumably that’s increased, but it seems clear that, as far as expanding access to higher education goes, the last decade has been almost completely wasted while the government chased a range of (mutually inconsistent) ideological hobby horses.
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A couple of days ago, I pointed out that a claim by Janet Albrechtsen that New Zealand had far fewer public servants than Australia seemed dubious, and called for a factoid check Almost instantly, readers of this blog were able to get the correct figure, showing no significant difference. Thanks particularly to Katz, Tom Davies and Sir Humphrey on this.
Terje Petersen emailed Janet Albrechtsen to ask for a retraction, a course I thought likely to prove fruitless. Yesterday however, she emailed him to advise that the error would be corrected, and Today’s Australian includesn:
Correction
IN her column on Wednesday (�Big government addicts can’t afford tax cuts�, page 24), Janet Albrechtsen compared the size of the public services in Australia and New Zealand using figures put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Statistics New Zealand. The comparison was incorrect because the figures from SNZ did not include some public sector areas that were included in the ABS figures. As a result, the size of the public service in New Zealand is much larger than indicated in the column.
I also got an email from Tom Switzer, opinion editor at the Oz, thanking us for picking up the error. I worked with Tom while he was opinion editor at the Fin, and while our politics couldn’t be more different, he was always very professional.
Albrechtsen and Switzer have done the right thing and should be congratulated for this. And the whole story is a case study in how blogs can be effective in both challenging and improving the mainstream media.
Like a lot of people, I suspect, I’ve been putting off the task of working out my situation in relation to superannuation. The rules are so complex, and have been changed so often, that it seems easier to just keep making the automatic payments, pick a reasonable looking investment strategy from the four or five on offer and hope that something comes along to clarify the issues.
In one sense at least, that strategy has paid off. Costello’s Budget speech announced what are claimed to be the most radical reforms ever to superannuation policy. At the very least, they are big changes, and render most previous calculations obsolete, so I’m glad I didn’t make any. Moreover, Costello’s claim to have simplified the tax treatment of super appears to be correct, although we’ll have to wait for the devilish details of cliche to be sure. Given that complexity entails a wide range of social costs, simplification is good in itself.
The bad is that the simplification has been achieved by greatly reducing the tax paid by those with large amounts of super, while doing nothing much for the rest. The likely outcome, I suspect is an increase in import-intensive luxury consumption.
The cosmetic part of the story is the claim that this will encourage people to stay in the workforce longer. Like a lot of other commentators, I doubt this. The income effect (more money makes retirement more affordable) seems likely to outweigh any substitution effect from higher expected net returns.
During the discussion following the death of JK Galbraith, the issue of advertising came up. In the Affluent Society Galbraith dismissed the idea that advertising is informative, and argued instead that it was used to manufacture demand for goods and services people would otherwise not want. The NYT obit suggested that Gary Becker and George Stigler had disproved this, a proposition that attracted some attention, mainly focusing on the work of Becker and Murphy.
Although Becker and Murphy don’t present it this way, their model actually supports Galbraith in most respects.
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In her Budget column today, Janet Albrechtsen makes the following claim:
NSW has about 380,000 state and local public servants servicing a population of 6.7 million people. And that’s not counting more than 40,000 public servants working in government-owned businesses. With a population of about four million, that should mean that New Zealand should have about 225,000 public servants. Right?
Wrong. According to Statistics New Zealand, our cousins across the Tasman have fewer than 69,000 public servants. That’s one public servant for every 58 New Zealanders, compared with one NSW public servant for every 17.5 NSW residents. The comparison only gets worse when you realise the NZ figure includes almost 12,000 defence force personnel and other public servants who, in Australia, would be working for the federal Government.
I’m too busy to check myself, but this seems highly implausible to me. NZ seems to have much the same mix of public and private schools and hospitals as Australia, and presumably local councils perform much the same range of tasks (maybe with a bit more contracting out). Can anyone do a factoid check here?
Update 2:31 pm An amazing team of unpaid factoid checkers has solved the puzzle almost immediately and the answer is “The number you first thought of”. According to the NZ government,
The public service makes up a small proportion of total state sector employment, as measured by Statistics NZ. In 2004 the Public Service made up only 14 per cent of the 275,000 state sector jobs
suggesting that, after netting out people doing federal government jobs, the NZ and NSW public sectors are almost identical in size, relative to the population. Albrechtsen’s entire piece is based on a difference in statistical classifications. Thanks to everyone who helped dig out the facts.
The obvious question is, if readers of this blog can find this kind of thing out for free, and in a matter of minutes, why is Albrechtsen getting paid for not bothering to make such obvious checks?
A couple of commenters have suggested emailing and asking for a retraction, and anyone who wants to do so is welcome to. My past experience with such things is that any correction is so grudging and qualified as to be worthless, but maybe Albrechtsen will surprise us.
While everyone was focused on the Beaconsfield miners, three Torres Strait fisherman, lost at sea for three weeks, were living on rainwater and raw squid. They saved their mobile phone batteries until they were back in range, then sent a text message and were rescued yesterday. The search for them had been abandoned after five days. I didn’t even notice the story, which barely registered with the national news, but my wife, who follows Queensland regional news pretty closely, picked it up, and pointed out the obvious contrasts.
It will be interesting to see whether the current affairs shows rush up to Torres Strait with open chequebooks to get the exclusive on this one.
Every time the budget comes out, we get little spreadsheets showing how much different kinds of households get in tax cuts. Something that struck me about last night’s budget was the fact that people on $30 000 got a smaller cut than people on $25 000. As far as I can see, no one has commented on this (feel free to point out exceptions) but on the face of it, there’s a puzzle here. As Costello said last night, if you cut the marginal rate on low incomes, (or raise the threshold), everybody gets the cut. So unless a rate is raised somewhere, people on higher incomes always get at least as big a cut as those on lower incomes.
The answer turns out to be something called the low income tax offset, which has been around for a while, as this factsheet from 2003 shows. As the name implies, low income earners* get an offset against their tax, but this is phased out as incomes rise from $20 000 a year to $30 000 (with this budget the phaseout starts at $25000 and runs to $40000).
Effectively, this is much the same as raising the threshold at which tax is paid (to around $9000, compared to the officially published $6000) and increasing the marginal rate on incomes between $25 000 and $40 000. I haven’t checked out how much, but I estimate it’s equivalent to around 2.5 percentage points, raising the effective marginal tax rate from 30 per cent to 32.5 per cent.
So, where the official tax scale suggest that low and middle income earners face the same threshold and lower marginal rates, the truth appears to be pretty much the opposite. It’s an open question as to which is better, but it would certainly be good for the tax scales to reflect reality instead of obscuring it.
*Another group of beneficiaries, far from low-income, are the children of those (probably including quite a few Cabinet ministers) who dodge tax through family trusts. The offset raises the threshold at which the income nominally assigned to them becomes taxable.
Budgets used to be big news once, both in the leadup and in the aftermath. Now, they’re front page news for a day, and even that’s not secure. If the Beaconsfield mine rescue had been a day later, I suspect at least some editors would have pushed the Budget to the inside pages. Why the decline in interest?
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One of my very first posts back in 2002 looked at whether blogging was a fad like CB radio and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t[1]. Four years and tens of millions of blogs later, Guy Rundle at Crikey asks the same question and reaches the opposite answer (reprinted at Mark Bahnisch). The main evidence he offers is the proliferation of dead and still-born blogs. Rundle draws an analogy with 17th century pamphlets, which he presents as a transitional technology, paving the way for newspapers.
A much better analogy, and one that’s obviously in Rundle’s mind as an editor of Arena is the “little magazine”. If you go through the stacks of any good library, you’ll find huge numbers of dead magazines, with lifespans running from decades to a single optimistic issue. There are almost certainly far more dead magazines than live ones. But the little magazine form has persisted up to the present, and is now migrating to the Internet.
Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Rundle hopes and expects that the future of online publishing will belong to magazine-style publications “well-edited moderate circulation outlets [that] can charge and get subscriptions” rather than to blogs. There are a few examples, including Crikey itself, New Matilda and Gawker and Salon in the US (also Opinion Online, but that’s free). Still, there’s very little evidence that such publications are displacing blogs, and serious doubts about whether the model as a whole is viable. The biggest attempt to organise a bunch of blogs into a media empire has been, as far as anyone can see, an expensive disaster.
It would be a pity for the little magazine format to disappear, but it seems likely that some fairly radical changes are needed if it is to survive the shift to the Internet, which renders many of the traditional gatekeeping functions of editors obsolete. Rather than bagging blogs, Guy Rundle would be better off thinking about questions like this.
Update While I was thinking about this, I looked about for a bit of evidence and found this survey on people’s familiarity with Internet terms. Unfortunately blogs weren’t included, but 9 per cent of respondents claimed to have a good idea what an RSS feed is (compared to 13 per cent for podcasting, which is new, but also much more directly accessible to anyone with an iPod). Blog reading isn’t the only use for an RSS feed, but it was the first big one, and still probably the most important, and using an RSS feed is still a sign of a hardcore reader. Of course, some people may have answered incorrectly, but I was still favorably surprised by this.
fn1. Mind you, I thought, and still think SMS is like CB radio, so all opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
