There’s an interesting piece in today’s Fin (subscription required) from John Roskam of the IPA. Looking at the possibility of big tax cuts from the current government, he bags Howard’s conversion to tax-and-spend social democracy before and during the 2004 campaign. He goes on to say

There is no overwhelming demand from the public to lessen taxes and, indeed, this is the nub of the problem confronting Liberal MPs and anyone else committed to tax reform

On the other hand, there is an overwhelming demand for better public services, and Howard has promised to meet that demand. Supporters of tax reform should seek to convince the public rather than taking advantage of an essentially accidental parliamentary majority to push through policies for which they have no mandate.

In the discussion of the relative treatment of communists and nazis in Australia, I recalled reading that Menzies had visited Berlin not long before the war, and made complimentary statements about Hitler. Googling revealed only one supporting source, from the memoirs of communist Stan Moran, who also claims to have bestowed the nickname “Pig Iron Bob”. Moran says

In 1937 Menzies went to Germany to see Hitler but Hitler was too busy to see minor politicians, and all he saw was Himmler. When he returned he said “If you and I lived in Berlin we would say that Hitler had done a great job for the German people.�

This matches the quote I recalled, but raises the possibility that it is a spurious one foisted on Menzies by his opponents. Does anyone have any info on this?

Assuming the quote is valid, it rather undermines the claim that any flirtation with Nazism or fascism is fatal to ones reputation, while similar sympathy for communism is not.

I see that Keith Windschuttle has turned his attention to the White Australia policy which, not surprisingly, he defends as a “rational and, in a number of ways, progressive, product of its times”. Although the story is somewhat garbled, it seems likely that WIndschuttle’s defence is that White Australia was not premised on racial superiority, but on the doctrine of “separate but equal” treatment used in the case of Plessy vs Ferguson to defend the Jim Crow laws of the American South and, in its Afrikaans form, as the theoretical basis for apartheid (separate development).

I feel sorry for anyone who defended Windschuttle’s earlier campaign defending the treatment of Tasmanian Aborigines on the assumption that he was an honest seeker after historical truth, rather than, as is now clear, a consistent apologist for racism, happy to use racist arguments in support of his cause. I’d welcome comments from anyone honest enough to retract their previous support for Windschuttle.

I’ll also be happy to publish comments from anyone seeking to use quibbles about the definition of “racism” to claim that a policy that openly defined itself in terms of skin colour was, in some sense, not racist. However, if you want to make such a claim, be aware that it has previously been made by the defenders of Jim Crow and apartheid, and don’t whinge when you get lumped in with them.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the idea of “teaching-only” universities. This discussion confuses two separate issues. The first is whether we should return to some variant of the binary system we had in the 1980s, with two kinds of universities. The research universities (the existing sandstones and some others) would carry on as before, while the teaching universities would drop research and PhD programs, and probably offer a somewhat different range of courses. In the Australian context, these would be low-status institutions, though the example of US “liberal arts” colleges shows that this need not be the case.

The other question is that of recently-arrived enterprises that don’t resemble universities in any sense except that they offer post-secondary education of some kind as part of their business. Examples are[1] Melbourne University Private also trading as Hawthorn English Language Centre and the various city centre “campuses” established by universities like CQU as well as potential commercial entrants from overseas, such as the “University” of Phoenix. In essence, these are trade schools offering business (and maybe computer) training along with English teaching to overseas students.
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I’ve been reading lots of stuff about the fundamental irrelevance of the Labor party and so on, and while this is inevitable in the aftermath of an election, it seems to be going on longer than usual. So let’s do a what-if. What if Labor had managed to get 3 per cent more votes than it actually did? The Liberals would have been out of government in every jurisdiction in Australia. Pundits would be falling all over themselves to point out the hopelessness of their cause, as witness the fact that they couldn’t win even with a strong economy and so on. This would be overstatement, but not as much as the corresponding claims with respect to Labor.

A related point is here at Crooked Timber

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I was thinking about the prospects for the US election and also about the probability of casting a decisive vote and it struck me that a situation like that of Florida in 2000 would have had a quite different outcome in Australia. In a situation where there were enough disputed votes to shift the outcome (and no satisfactory way of determining the status of those votes), the Court of Disputed Returns would probably order a fresh election. It seems to me that this is a better way of resolving problematic elections than attempts to determine a winner through court proceedings[1], though I’d be interested in arguments against this view.

In view of the long delay between election and inauguration, this solution would seem to be particularly appealing for the US. However, it seems clear from this page that the American constitutional tradition does not allow for such a possibility, preferring such devices as drawing the winner from a hat, if nothing better can be found. I wonder if there is a reason for this, or if it is just one of those things that doesn’t come up often enough for people to think about fixing it?

fn1. Obviously, once the situation arises, one side or the other will see an advantage in going through the courts, or allowing state officials to decide,and will oppose a fresh election. But ex ante, it seems as if agreeing to a fresh election in such cases would benefit both sides.

Given that Labor obviously has to do something more than wait for the housing bubble to burst, one simple (but not easy!) organisational step would be to abolish factions. That is, membership of any organised factional grouping ought to be treated like membership of a rival political party, as grounds for automatic expulsion. Of course, it would be impossible to prevent informal or secret factions from operating, as they do in all parties. But, to my knowledge, the only major political party anywhere in the world with a faction system comparable to Labor’s is the notoriously corrupt Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, and even here PM Koizumi is largely independent of the factions.

There was a time (from the 1950s split to sometime in the 1980s) when the factional groupings corresponded to ideological divisions. But that has long since ceased to be true. It’s probably true that the average member of the Left faction is a little more likely to favor a ‘progressive’ line on social issues than the average member of the Right and Centre, but that’s about the strength of it. Each of the major factions is subdivided into smaller groups, often little more than extended families, with their retainers and servants.

Nowadays, the factions exist because they exist. No-one is willing to bell the cat. However, this is the kind of thing Latham could take on, and perhaps even win. It would certainly be more in his line than Simon Crean’s lame achievement of changing the union voting ratio from 60 to 50 per cent[1].

fn1. While I’m dreaming, I’d like an end to the formal link between the unions and the ALP. And a pony.

Quite a few people have pointed me to this piece by Barry Cohen which produces the unsurprising conclusion that Labor’s MPs are drawn from a very narrow range of occupations: union officials, 29; teachers, 18; state MPs and ministerial staff, 16; public servants, 14; party officials, 8; lawyers, 8. Before discussion what’s wrong with this, it’s worth pointing out that the situation is not that different on the other side of the aisle. Replace union officials with employer group officials, teachers with farmers and public servants with doctors, and you’d account for the great majority of Coalition MPs and ministers.

Whereas people once went into politics after spending a fair bit of time doing a variety of different things, political office is now part of a small set of fairly well-defined career paths. What’s mroe disturbing to me is that, at least for people who reached the heights of ministerial office, politics was almost always the last stage in a career. Now aspirants to the ministry are setting themselves up with contacts, and obligation networks for the time when they can really make big money, as consultants, lobbyists, chairmen of boards and so on. We don’t have to imagine the effect on public policy – there are already some egregious examples out there.

The only way to fix this, in my view, would be to greatly expand membership of political parties, and the only way to do that would be to give the members a real say in determining policy. Since that’s not going to happen, I don’t see a solution for this problem.

One of the features of the post-election that has struck me is its similarity to themes that emerged in the Thatcher years in the UK. For example, Miranda Devine’s claims about youthful support for the Liberals, taken down here by Don Arthur, reminded me of talk about the young fogeys who were redefining cool in the Tory mould. These people would have been in their twenties then, and in their early forties now, but, while some of the individuals who set the tone are still around, the generation they were supposed to symbolise is lost to the Tories. According to Wikipedia, the average age of Tory party members is 65.

This post by Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber makes the point that the Tory attempt to remake Britain in a free-market mould was a catastrophic failure, at least in party political terms.

. By crushing unions, privatizing state industry, trying to shift the North England economy from manufacturing to retail commerce, introducing market reforms to the welfare state, and flogging off public housing, the British Conservatives systematically tried to create a new class of Tory voters that would permanently marginalize Labour. The result was the transformation of the Conservatives into a near-permanent minority – thirteen years later, British voters still don’t trust the Conservative party anywhere near the public services.

Those engaging in triumphalism on the conservative side of Australian politics ought to learn from this lesson

Today’s Fin (subscription required) has the first in a series of articles on Australian manufacturing, by Peter Roberts. There’s an odd disconnect between the front page (and the editorial referring to it) and the body of the article. The opening includes the optimistic declaration

The Australian manufacturing sector is now made up, not of survivors, but successful competitors in home and export markets

But the main body of the article is rather less positive. It’s not surprising to learn that manufacturing has shrunk from about 20 per cent of GDP and employment in 1975 to 12 per cent today. But those who haven’t been following the news may be surprised to learn that manufactured exports are declining in nominal terms, and that as the article notes

there has been a seemingly inexorable rise in the manufacturing trade deficit … concentrated in areas such as chemicals, IT and telecommunications … From a high of $37.6 billion in 2000-01, manufacturing exports slumped to $32.9 billion in 2003-04

That’s a decline of about 15 per cent in nominal terms, more than 20 per cent in real terms and more than 30 per cent relative to GDP. Meanwhile imports have risen above $100 billion. I’ve previously looked at the stagnant export performance of the “elaborately transformed manufactures” sector, much-touted under Hawke and Keating, but this is worse than I had realised.

An economic rationalist might respond by saying that if manufacturing is declining, that must be a reflection of market forces and comparative advantage and therefore desirable. This at least a consistent position, though one with which I have some significant disagreements. But it seems silly to me to pretend that things are going well in manufacturing when the numbers clearly point to a rapid decline in all sectors exposed to competition.