Along with children’s welfare, mental health seems to be the chronic disaster area of our social services. It’s not hard to see why – the problems aren’t amenable to simple one-size-fits-all bureaucratic solutions (let alone the market solutions beloved of so many policymakers), and those most directly affected rarely get heard. Still, it’s one of the tests of a civilised society how well we respond to the needs of those who can’t voice their own demands, and it’s not a test we’re passing at present. Regular reader Graeme Bond has written the story of his own family’s tragedy and the policy failures that contributed to it. Well worth reading and thinking about.

I was a bit distracted from the news yesterday by my own concerns, as a result of being verballed by Tim Blair and his goon squad. So I missed the more important fact that much the same thing was being done to AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty, who was accused by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer of “expressing a view which reflects a lot of the propaganda we’re getting from al-Qaeda”.[1] Under this attack, and more pressure from Howard, Keelty buckled and said his remarks had been taken out of context. Meanwhile, Downer put in a truly pathetic performance on Lateline trying to back away from his smear of Keelty (link via Chris Sheil).

A point of minor interest is that the Oz buries the entire story deep in a feel-good piece headed “Terror war gets $400m budget lift”. Clearly, Murdoch is in full campaign mode.

UpdateThis is truly pathetic

fn1. As readers should be aware by now, I don’t in fact agree with the view, imputed to Keelty, that our participation in the war in Iraq raised the risk of a terrorist attack because it offended Osama bin Laden. But Howard, Bush and Blair have increased the risk of a terrorist attack in Australia. They have done this by failing to fight terrorism effectively, preferring instead to go after Saddam Hussein, alienating much of the Islamic world in the process. It is they, and not Keelty who have assisted Al Qaeda’s propaganda machine. (I have scanned the preceding as carefully as possible for any source of ambiguity that might leave me open to (Tim) Blairing. I can’t find it, but no doubt Blair will).

One of the oddities of the past week is the belief, apparently near-universal among the Press Gallery, that Peter Costello scored a win over Labor last week as regards tax policy. In the boxing-match view of politics favored by the Gallery, Costello did indeed win several rounds – Labor shadow ministers contradicted themselves, appeared confused, and so on. But by Wednesday, thanks to Bob McMullan, Labor had a clear line, refusing to rule out new taxes and charges but promising not to increase the ratio of tax revenue to GDP. Three days of sneers and innuendo from Costello haven’t dented this line or produced any sign of a backdown from Labor. There’s no reason to suppose Labor can’t carry this line to the election. As McMullan points out, the endless sequence of special purpose levies introduced under this government, not to mention the GST, make any commitment of the form “no new taxes or increases in existing taxes” (literally) incredible. A commitment to a constant ratio of revenue to GDP leaves plenty of room for financing new spending initiatives simply by holding some existing programs constant in real terms.

Labor was always going to have trouble coming to a defensible form of words on tax and expenditure, and they had an uncomfortable couple of days. But the period of greatest danger in these things is the first few days after the position is taken, and this period has now passed. The effect of Costello’s attacks has been to solve Labor’s biggest problem six months before the real campaign.

Federal Labor’s recent resurgence in the polls doesn’t surprise me. Even when Labor was at its lowest ebb last year, I pointed out the baselessness of the idea that Howard had captured the hearts of the electorate and argued that Labor has become, in the absence of foreign policy crises or spectacular incompetence, the natural party of government in Australia. I think we are seeing in part the same phenomenon as in 1996. Having won an election against the better judgement of the voters, the government now has six years of sins to atone for instead of just three. But over and above this is the fact that, on tax and expenditure issues, the electorate is well to the left of both major parties.

What’s more striking than the Federal results in many respects is this Newspoll on the Carr government, which, I think it’s fair to say, has displayed some pretty spectacular incompetence over the last couple of months, what with the rail and hospital crises and the botched attempt to railroad the (spectacularly incompetent) former Communications Minister Michael Lee into office as Lord Mayor of Sydney. Carr’s personal popularity has taken a beating as a result of all this. But

On the two-party-preferred vote, however, Labor still remains in a much stronger position than the Coalition. Labor has 54 per cent support, slightly down from 56 per cent at the state election, while the Coalition is at 46 per cent, slightly up from 43.8 per cent.

This suggests to me that it will take a truly catastrophic display of incompetence by Labor for the Liberals to win a state election in Australia, as long as they remain the party of small government, privatisation and tax cuts.

Well, I forgot to listen to myself on the radio, talking about older workers and superannuation. However, the ABC has the whole thing on its website in both text and audio versions.

The comments thread on the Crooked Timber edition of my last post led me to this site (hat-tip: novalis), advocating Condorcet voting and presenting a critique of the instant runoff/single transferable vote , the core of which is

IRV has serious problems. It allows a sufficiently small minority of voters to safely register “protest” votes for minor-party candidates–but only as long as their candidate is sure to lose. As soon as their candidate threatens to actually win, they risk hurting their own cause by ranking their favorite first, just as they do under our current plurality system. IRV is therefore unlikely to be any more successful than plurality at solving the classic “lesser of two evils” problem.

It’s straightforward to show, however, that this problem can only arise if your preferred candidate would be the loser in a Condorcet system. Hence, voting strategically yields the preferred Condorcet outcome.
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Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta are smart guys, and it’s hard to believe they are totally ignorant of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. So how can they justify writing a piece promoting a system of “rank-order voting” as superior to the existing American (plurality) and French (top-two runoff) systems, without mentioning that Australia has had this system (in a range of variants) for many decades[1].

A minor side point is that, in addition to having the world’s most complicated voting systems, Australia also has compulsory voting[2]. Typically more than 95 per cent of votes are formal, that is, list all candidates in order of preference, with no missing numbers or repetitions. In Dennis Mueller’s generally excellent book on Public Choice, he discusses the single transferable vote and suggests that, while attractive in theory, it’s too complicated to work in practice. Either Australians are a lot smarter than everybody else, or public choice theorists aren’t as smart as they think they are.

fn1. To be precise, Maskin and Dasgupta advocate the Borda weighted vote, whereas Australia has the single transferable vote (called preferential voting in Australia), but nothing in their argument distingushes the two.

fn2. More precisely, compulsory registration and attendance at the polling station – there’s nothing to stop you casting a blank ballot.

While I’m dubious about the validity of the Dawkins analogy between memes and genes, there’s no doubt that we need some sort of word for a minimal unit of argument that is subject to reproduction and selection, and meme seems to have become that word.

One I’ve noticed in particular among supporters of the Howard government is exemplified by Michael Baume in today’s Fin (subscription required). He writes that the Howard government has halved youth unemployment, then immediately follows up with the small print “since the Keating era peak in 1992”. If seen similar comparisons regarding interest rates and, I think even occasionally on inflation. In all these cases, the majority of the improvements occurred before Labor lost office.

In political terms, this is a straightforward case of claiming your opponents’ accomplishments as your own. Underlying this is the fact, which I’ve pointed out that, in economic terms, the Howard government is essentially a continuation of those of Hawke and Keating, with a gradual (and not continuous) slowdown in the pace of microeconomic reform.

As it’s normally used, this argument is clearly dishonest. There might be circumstances in which it could be used honestly, particularly in relation to policy instruments under direct government control. For example, if the government controlled interest rates, it might say that “we have kept interest rates low, and will always do so. By contrast, Labor allowed them to rise to 17 per cent”. But in terms of targets like unemployment, the natural base point for comparisons is 1996, not 1992, and the government’s performance looks most unimpressive.