Irfun Yusuf points out some problems with the sample citizenship test released by the Federal government. Here’s a real doozy

15. Australia’s values are based on the …

a. Teachings of the Koran

b. The Judaeo-Christian tradition

c. Catholicism

d. Secularism

The correct answer, apparently, is B, despite the clear statement in the Constitution that Australia should have no established religion. This, combined with the implicit requirement to repudiate Catholicism and Islam, violates the spirit of the Constitution and probably the letter of anti-discrimination law.

That’s by far the worst, but there’s plenty more. For example, to get full marks you have to say that Australia is not a monarchy (Q5) but that our head of state is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (regarded by most as a monarch) (9). Of course, the questions of who is our head of state, and whether or not our system is a monarchy have been the subject of sharp controversy in the recent past (for example, who should open the Olympics). I wasn’t even sure which answer was supposed to be right on the Head of State question.

All these questions should be scrapped. But if all that is left is a set of easily-memorized answers to Carmen Sandiego questions like “Australia’s national flower is …”, there seems to be little point in having a test at all.

(Via Catallaxy and Andrew Norton) Some corrections and clarifications made in response to comments

Update 21/5

As pointed at by Geoff Honnor at Troppo, Howard denies that the sample questions are genuine. Applying the careful parsing necessary with both the government and the Murdoch Press, I can come up with two possible interpretations:
(i) The Herald-Sun made the questions up, but ran a report with the natural reading that they were from a sample test made available by Kevin Andrews (‘given an exclusive insight’, ‘sample questions highly likely to be in the test’) and so on
(ii) The questions were from a sample test made available by Kevin Andrews, but since it wasn’t part of an official test, Howard feels free to disclaim them

As regards motives, (i) suggests a standard beatup, while (ii) suggests either a trial balloon or a dog-whistle exercise designed to stir up controversy (successfully, though maybe not with the reaction they hoped for). More at LP

Since opinion polls are undertaken as a basis for news stories, it’s probably inevitable that the results are given more significance than they deserve. Before we get too carried away with Labor’s good result in the latest Galaxy poll and Newspoll it’s worth recalling a couple of basic points

* Opinion polls are samples with a margin of error, and fluctuations of 2 per cent or so can be expected as the result of chance variation (if you believe in classical hypothesis testing, you can say that such a change is statistically insignificant). So the fact that Labor gained 2 per cent in the latest Newspoll means almost nothing, except as a pointed lesson to people like Greg Sheridan who tried (while covering himself in qualifications) to make a trend out of the 2 per cent drop in the previous poll

* Swinging voters are not close followers of the political scene with finely balanced preferences tipping from one side to the other as a result of careful analysis of the latest news. There’s no reason to expect a budget to have a big impact on votes, especially when it contains few surprises. The government is probably right to say that the impact of the Budget, which is essentially to remind people that economic conditions are good, will be felt gradually over the next couple of months.

That’s the good news for the government. The bad news is that the government’s cleverness in stealing the most attractive components of Labor’s policy is likely to prove either ineffective or counterproductive. As far as public expenditure and taxation is concerned, the big news is that Labor is once again the party of initiative. Most people are unimpressed by tax cuts, and would prefer an improvement in services, delivered without the ideological riders that the government insists on attaching to almost everything (university grants conditional on AWAs, micromanagement of state functions to ensure Commonwealth credit and so on). The same is true, in the absence of a dramatic shift in government policy, on climate change. It’s only on Industrial Relations that the government is acting and Labor reacting, and even here Rudd’s link of IR and family issues has to some extent turned the debate around.

The party of initiative doesn’t always win, particularly if people are worried about dangerous radicals lurking in the shadows. But with Rudd offering a safe pair of hands, this fear is unlikely to be as effective as it was in the past. Howard has shown himself capable of pulling rabbits out of the hat in the past, and it looks as if he will have to do so again.

Oddly enough, no one seems to have used this headline, but Howard’s announcement that the no-disadvantage test will be revived for workers earning less than $75 000 is a big concession, at least in symbolic terms, to the union campaign against WorkChoices.

We’ll have to wait for details to see whether the concession is as substantial as it appears. As regards the $75 000 limit, it’s fair enough to say that workers on incomes at this level are in a reasonable position to protect their own position in bargains with employers without government intervention. Administratively, though, a distinction like this sounds like it’s going to be something of a nightmare to manage.
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I meant to do a May Day post on Industrial Relations, and particularly Labor’s proposal requiring employers to grant new parents 12 months unpaid leave, in the absence of “reasonable business grounds” for refusal. It’s hard to analyse a policy like this in terms of labour market microeconomics. A standard equilibrium analysis would suggest that some firms might voluntarily offer family-friendly conditions, but the number of such firms would be smaller than the number of employees who would prefer them (since there is less cost and trouble for employers in being family-unfriendly) and this is what we see.

Assuuming there’s a general social consensus in favour of assisting families with children, an obvious question is whether business should be expected to carry some of the burden. As this graph of the profit share of GDP shows, there shouldn’t be a problem of affordability.

Of course, there will always be marginal firms, but if you can’t make it with profits at current levels, probably you shouldn’t be in business at all.

From the viewpoint of the average member of society, depending mainly on labour income, the case for accepting a substantial profit share rests on the assumption that incentives to seek profit will ultimately benefit everyone. It’s hard to make this case when conditions like parental leave haven’t improved substantially in decades and other conditions, such as rights to weekends and public holidays, are going backwards. The long term interests of business would be better served by a less aggressive pursuit of short-term goals.

Following Kevin Rudd’s launch of an IR policy including 12 months unpaid parental leave for each parent of a new baby, the Sunday Telegraph ran Glenn Milne’s story* under the headline “Rudd Caves: Unions win child-friendly industrial relations coup”. Given that Rudd has been pushing the family-friendly line hard since the day he was elected leader this seemed OTT even for the increasingly absurd Tele (still running global warming delusionism I note). Apparently someone else thought so – the online edition is running with “Rudd goes to bat for workers”

Update Monday 30 April Milne’s story in the Oz goes back to “Caves”. This is just silly. All these people seem to be living in the 70s when union-bashing was good politics (compare the vendetta against student unions, settling scores from the same era). Supposing that the Labor party structure had no union representation at all, I doubt that the policy would have been much different. It’s obviously necessary for Labor to fight the government on WorkChoices. Given this, it’s hard to see how the policy could have been much more moderate than it is without being open to attack as purely cosmetic.

* Note that standard practice, presumably followed here, would be for the headline to be written by a sub-editor without reference to Milne.

One of the few real debates at the (generally tightly controlled) conference concerned a proposal under which couples could register their relationship to protect property rights, pension entitlements and so on. This proposal is somewhat less than a civil union, since there is no associated ceremony, and is explicitly claimed not to represent gay marriage. A couple of states have already implemented the idea. A striking feature, mentioned in the debate but not in newspaper reports is that registration is available for people in a carer-dependent relationship rather than a partnership.

As this comment notes, the proposal is very conservative by international standards, but the only opposition within the conference came from the right, and it appeared from the debate that most gay and lesbian organisations have been willing to accept the proposal. In part, this is because it delivers most of the substantive benefits of civil unions, while neutralising most (not all) of the religious opposition. But it also reflects the more general view that anything is better than another term of the Howard government, which has pushed nasty wedge politics on this issue and on many others. Although Labor is way ahead in the opinion polls at present, similar leads have evaporated in the past, and no-one seems willing to risk upsetting the applecart and getting the blame for yet another loss.

I managed to miss the crucial moment, but Labor’s National Conference has just voted to scrap the three mines policy, which was adopted at the last Labor conference I attended (in 1982, IIRC). I can’t say I have any regrets about this. The policy was a grubby compromise when it was adopted, and it didn’t improve with age. The idea that restricting Australian exports of uranium could constrain nuclear proliferation might have made some sense back in the 1970s when nuclear power was expanding rapidly, but it has long since ceased to be relevant.

That said, the news on nuclear proliferation has nearly all been bad lately, after a period in the 1980s and 1990s when a number of countries (including Brazil and South Africa) turned away from seeking nuclear weapons. The insistence of declining powers like Britain and France on maintaining their nuclear power status, and the success of India and Pakistan in gaining acceptance of their nuclear weapons has set the scene for a disastrous expansion in the set of nuclear-armed states, which will, surely lead to nuclear weapons being used, either by a government or a terrorist group, sooner or later. The only hopeful sign is the possibility that North Korea will disarm, though the recent agreement gives the rest of the world nothing better than the position that had been reached back in 2001.

The related ‘news’ is Howard’s announcement of plans for an Australian nuclear power industry. It’s hard to see this as much more than a stunt, since it’s most unlikely that any plants will be operational before about 2030. Even that possibility is conditional on a whole range of necessary conditions, including a return to nuclear power in the US and Europe, the successful completion of research on a new generation of plants (Howard’s announcement includes a contribution to this project) and, most importantly, some permanent resolution of the debate over what to do with nuclear waste.

Given the absolute need to respond to the global warming problem, we shouldn’t rule out the nuclear option. But neither should we engage in the kind of winner-picking implicit in the statements we’ve heard lately from Howard and others.