The Age tried hard to find negatives in the Mapping Social Cohesion report released today, but
…while [co-author] Professor Andrew Markus said the study had “highlighted some issues which can be taken up”, he said the overall picture was a “very positive one”. Read more »
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been given a standing ovation by the 1002 delegates to the Australia 2020 Summit in Parliament House.
As reported The Age this morning, the Climate Institute has released another of its regular public opinion reports. Climate change continues to be another case study in the difference between repeating the conventional wisdom back to pollsters and taking responsibility for an issue that, if the conventional wisdom is right, has consequen Read more »
The ‘progressive’ think-tank Per Capita was launched a year ago today. It’s off to a fairly slow start. Many blogs which are mainly hobbies for their contributor(s), including this one, have produced far material in the last twelve months than has Per Capita. And most of what Per Capita has produced are newspaper opinion pieces, which take only slightly longer than a substantive blog post to write. Read more »
In January I was sceptical, based on studies of student work and academic results, that increasing Youth Allowance to reduce work hours would pay academic dividends. Read more »
Last month, British backpacker Michael Edgeley suffered chest pains on an Emirates Flight back from Australia. The plane diverted to Mumbai, but sadly Edgeley died in the ambulance at the airport.
Also on the flight was the partner of Chris Miller from Tyneside, along with their two children. Emirates told Miller that his kids had chicken pox. And in a terrible mix-up with Edgeley,
When the backpacker later died, Emirates contacted Mr Miller in error with undertaker details. Read more »
Part of what keeps a new progressive alliance from forming is that people mistake differences in ideas about how the world works for differences in moral principles. Left-leaning liberals look at the policies classical liberals support and assume that the motivation is to redistribute income from the poor to the rich. And classical liberals look at left liberals and assume that they are motivated by an envious desire to punish the rich even if it means making everyone worse off. Read more »
While Liberal students search out biased academics, it is good to see that Young Labor is joining NUS in pursuing one of the big problems in higher education, price control. Read more »
As other bloggers said last week, I survived the cull of middle-aged men living in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra to be selected for the 2020 talkfest. I’m in the stream called ‘productivity agenda - education, skills, training, science and innovation’. Read more »
I have long been pessimistic about demographic trends in Liberal support. Last May Ian Watson, using data from both the Australian Election Survey and Newspoll, clearly showed problems for the Liberals in that their support was concentrated in older cohorts. Read more »
The National Union of Students had a flop last week with a very poorly attended ‘national day of action’. Read more »
The Australian Workers’ Union commissioned Roy Morgan Research to conduct a poll on the idea that half Labor’s promised tax cuts should be diverted to superannuation. Read more »
As Andrew’s longtime webhost I thought I should let you all know I’ll be moving this site to a new server in the coming week.
Andrew has been volunteered by yours truly to be the first guinea pig for a blogging service I am putting together aimed at Australian bloggers. This is not quite an official announcement as I am still ironing out various tedious kinks, but in the coming weeks and months I hope to bring some more ozbloggers on board before opening it up to the public. Read more »
No matter how many times Bob Birrell updates his argument that we need more graduates, he gets lots of publicity. This morning was no exception. According to The Age Read more »
According to a story in today’s Sydney Sun-Herald, the National Union of Students is calling for an inquiry into the ‘economic impact of student debt’. Read more »
According to the latest Morgan Poll on the ethics and honesty of various professions, more people now rate federal MPs highly on those measures than at any time since they started asking the question in 1979. Admittedly, still only 23% rate federal MPs highly for ethics and honesty, but that is up 7% on the previous year. Read more »
For many commentators, the political right is just a blur. The various labels - conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative, New Right, economic rationalist - are thrown around according to fashion as much as meaning. Six years ago (pdf) I wrote an article on how ‘New Right’ was largely squeezed out by ‘economic rationalism’, which in turn was being challenged by ‘neoliberalism’, now the favourite. Read more »
It is common in public opinion research for people’s average assessment of their own circumstances to differ considerably from their assessment of the average for others. Usually, they think that their own situation is better than other people’s. One reason for this is that media reports more bad news than good, giving us an ubalanced impression of how well other people are doing. Read more »
In response to my implied criticism of Andrew Leigh for assuming that increases in inequality are bad and decreases good, but never specifying for what level of inequality would satisfy him, commenter Leopold responds: Read more »
Not sexist! Not racist! Don’t tell Lot’s Wife!
Back in the 1980s, it was left-wing students who used to complain about lecturers expressing inappropriate political views. Due to an attack on him in the Monash student newspaper Lot’s Wife, my criminal law lecturer, the late Kumar Amarasekara, had to preface his often hilarious jokes with the above disclaimer. Read more »
How does your demographic theory work with the “battlers” phenomenon? Was it merely transitory?
Sinclair Davidson’s suggestion that the most formidable opponents of small government are conservatives rather than social democrats is interesting. I wonder whether this could lead to a realignment of Australian politics. Read more »
Over Friday and Saturday, The Age (as commenter Brendan pointed out) ran its own version of the SMH’s ‘white flight’ from government schools story, adding in refugees in Victoria to the Lebanese and Aboriginal students in NSW allegedly causing an Anglo-Asian flight to private schools. Read more »
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