Archive for the 'Australia' Category

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On being a reporter for a News Corp paper …

Published on 12 October 2009 in Australia and Media. Tags: , , , , . 0 Comments

Anonymously faxed (!) to Crikey and from there replicated by Peter Martin, here is an internal memo from staff to management at The (Adelaide) Advertiser [Main Site, Wikipedia]:

[...]
There are many conflicting instructions, blanket bans on certain words and subjects, and a lack of trust in the reporter to choose what to focus on.
[...]
We need clearer communication about what management wants. We need early, clear direction that also incorporates flexibility when stories change throughout the day. We need to feel confident that when circumstances beyond our control change the direction of a story, we will not be verbally abused or blamed for that. Management often dictates an editorial line it wants reporters to take that is in conflict with what our contacts say. Much of a day can be wasted trying to find one person to say what management wants them to say. This is not reporting, it is fabricating news.
[...]

Here is the memo as a pdf. The document in scribd is below …

Advertiser Memo

(Brad DeLong, are you reading this?  This, if not already there, is coming to America …)

A description of Australia’s healthcare system

Published on 20 August 2009 in Australia, Health Care and USA. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment

John Hempton has gotten to it before I did and written it far better than I would have anyway.  Have a read.  Although I agree that Australia’s system is much, much better than America’s current system or any of their proposed frameworks, I would add three negative comments about Australia’s system:

  • Medicare payments to GPs for a consultation by a patient are determined centrally (at the federal level) and have not increased with inflation.  At first that meant that GPs shortened each consultation to fit more people in per day, but in the long run served, I believe, to reduce the supply of GPs and as a result pushed people with minor ailments to hospital emergency rooms.
  • I don’t know if it is better or worse than other countries, but the administrative overhead in the state government health departments is surprisingly large, even to me.  I am led to believe that adminstrators and middle-managers exceed more than 50% of the staff of Queensland Health (and that does not include admin staff on the wards).
  • The federal-state funding arrangement in Australia is a real problem.  I don’t know whether the best policy is to put all health care in federal hands or to grant the states more revenue-raising posibilities, but something does need to happen.

Whither baseload demand?

Published on 28 July 2009 in Australia, Economics and The Environment. Tags: , , . 1 Comment

John Quiggin has a post in which he argues that, if baseload demand exists in any meaningful sense, it is much lower than current offpeak demand.  I want to paraphrase and expand on what he said.

There is no such thing as a “natural” or baseload level of demand.  There is a demand curve that plots quantity demanded as a function of price (or if you’re trained as an economist, the other way around).  There is a 3rd dimension of “time of day” (or more strictly, time of week, if I can say that): the curve of quantity-versus-price shifts in and out over the day.  The entire thing then shifts out slowly over time as population and the economy increase.

At most, we might say that there is a region of the demand curve for the offpeak period that is highly inelastic with respect to price.  Quiggin is arguing that that region would only be for quite small amounts of power, distinctly less than we currently see in offpeak load figures.

The reason lies in the economics of our current electricity supply through coal-fired power stations. (Side note:  I’m not 100% certain of these points – if anyone can confirm or deny them, I’d be glad to hear from you):

  • There is some range in the thermal output of a single furnace (it’s not simply all or nothing), but real variation comes from switching entire furnaces off and on.
  • The cost of moving within the output range of a given furnace is essentially just the fuel cost; the concurrent manpower required and the maintenance needs accrued are unchanged.
  • There are economies of scale in concurrent manpower when increasing the number of furnaces.  Moving from one furnace to two does increase the staff requirement, but it does not double it.
  • There are significant one-time costs associated with starting (and possibly also with shutting down) a furnace, largely due to accruing future maintenance costs.  This means that once you start a furnace, you want to keep it running as long as possible so as to amortise that cost over the greatest amount of output.

The upshot of these points (and all of them point in the same direction) is that a cost-minimising coal-fired power station is one with many furnaces that are shut down as rarely as possible.  In other words, they ideally want to supply a large and constant amount of power to the grid.

But the demand curve at 3pm is a lot further out than at 3am.  The coal powered stations can handle this a little bit by scheduling all non-emergency maintenance overnight, but ultimately, they face a conundrum:  the demand simply doesn’t exist — at any price — to meet their cost-minimising supply in the dead of night.  So they compromise by shutting down some furnaces (which raises the average cost of the remaining power generated) and lowering the offpeak price by half (which lowers the average revenue they receive for that power) in order to raise the quantity demanded.

Quiggin is contesting that the increase in quantity demanded during offpeak is significant compared to the “true baseload” demand, the quantity that would be demanded at 3am at just about any price.

In contrast, solar power, in particular, would have supply shifting in and out over the day along with demand.

Howard and Costello

Published on 15 June 2009 in Australia and Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

With the news that Peter Costello will not be seeking reelection, Peter Martin gives us two stories of Costello’s way of dealing with people.  The first, with Saul Eslake, the chief economist of ANZ, is interesting enough, I guess.  The second one really caught my eye:

Richard Denniss is these days the chief of staff for the Greens’ leader Bob Brown. In 2002 he was the chief of staff to the then Democrats’ leader Natasha Stott Despoja. In Mr Costello’s budget speech that year he had announced that pensioners and other concession card holders would have to pay more for their medicines. Their co-payment would climb from $3.60 to $4.60 per prescription.

The Democrats said they would oppose the measure in the Senate. Some weeks later Senator Stott Despoja and Dr Denniss were summoned to the Peter Costello’s office.

Denniss says Costello took them through page after page of laminated graphs, talking at them for the best part of an hour. The Treasurer seemed surprised to discover that they hadn’t been won over.

“At one point Costello said: Natasha, you don’t appear to understand the numbers. To which she replied: I do understand the numbers Peter, you don’t have them in the Senate and you won’t be passing this bill”.

A few days later the two were summoned to the Prime Minister’s office. Denniss says he had expected Mr Howard to be even worse.

Instead they found Howard “effusive in apologising for being late, come in sit down, can I get you a cup of tea – lots of chit chat, lots of actual conversation”.

The Prime Minister said “I know you spoke to the Treasurer last week and I’m sure he showed you all his graphs” and I understand your position: “we are trying to drive up the price of medicine for sick people, of course the Democrats are going to oppose it”.

And then he said: “How about ten cents? That wouldn’t hurt anyone.” “It absolutely floored us.”

Howard said: “Natasha, you’re the leader, I’m the leader, can’t we just settle this right now?”

Denniss says he found the Prime Minister almost impossible to resist. “His genius was to make us feel powerful.”

Costello by contrast “wanted to wield the power that had been bestowed upon him.”

I find this entirely compelling.  Costello always struck me as a technocrat.  I may not have liked Howard much (and not at all for the latter half of his time as PM), but he knew better than most what any specific audience wanted to hear.

Westminster democracy and illiberalism

Published on 30 May 2009 in Australia, Justice/Law and Politics. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments

Cam Riley doesn’t like the new “Bikie Laws” in South Australia.  He quotes Gary Sauer-Thompson, who says:

My understanding is that under the legislation … the Attorney-General has right to call an organisation, which could be anything from an informal group of people who meet at the local pub for a weekly drink through to a football club or a business, a Declared Organisation. The Attorney-General can use secret and untested evidence in making that declaration, and his decision can’t be challenged in the courts.

… Severe penalties are then visited upon controlled members who continue some form of contact, even remote contact by post, fax, phone or e-mail – two years imprisonment for a first offence, five years for a second or subsequent offence.

I agree with Cam and Gary.  This is illiberal and unnecessary.  The law is ostensibly to combat criminality in gangs of bikies, but every element of that criminality is already illegal.  It’s already illegal to conspire to commit violence, or to trade drugs.  So the net effect of this legislation is simply to grant the Attorney-General the power to disallow any organisation that (s)he doesn’t like.  Cam points out that the “emergency” laws enacted in NSW following the Cronulla riots are still on the books.

My question is this:

Why do these laws get passed now when they (probably) wouldn’t have been passed following equivalent crises 100 years ago?

It seems obvious that the legislature has a political incentive to be seen doing something, as time in the media’s spotlight is currency to a politician.  It’s common to suggest, although not universally accepted, that the sharp end of the executive (i.e. those charged with enforcing the law) generally wish for more options in carrying out that enforcement.  In a Westminster system of the executive having a controlling influence in the legislature, that would imply inexorable movement towards illiberalism over time as exogenously-sourced crises occur.

So how has liberalism survived for so long in the Westminster tradition?  What, if you’ll excuse the pun, arrests the movement to a sort of democratic dictatorship?

More people have jobs AND the unemployment rate is higher

Published on 12 March 2009 in Australia, Economics, Teaching and Welfare. Tags: , , , , . 0 Comments

This is another one for my students in EC102.

Via the always-worth-reading Peter Martin, I notice that the Australian Bureau of Statistics February release of Labour Force figures contains something interesting:  The number of people with jobs increased, but the unemployment rate still went up.  Here’s the release from the ABS:

Employed Persons Unemployment Rate
Australia Feb 2009 Employment Australia Feb 2009 Unemployment Rate

FEBRUARY KEY POINTS

TREND ESTIMATES (MONTHLY CHANGE)

  • EMPLOYMENT increased to 10,811,700
  • UNEMPLOYMENT increased to 561,100
  • UNEMPLOYMENT RATE increased to 4.9%
  • PARTICIPATION RATE increased to 65.4%

SEASONALLY ADJUSTED ESTIMATES (MONTHLY CHANGE)

EMPLOYMENT

  • increased by 1,800 to 10,810,400. Full-time employment decreased by 53,800 to 7,664,200 and part-time employment increased by 55,600 to 3,146,200.

UNEMPLOYMENT

  • increased by 47,100 to 590,500. The number of persons looking for full-time work increased by 44,400 to 426,000 and the number of persons looking for part-time work increased by 2,600 to 164,500.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

  • increased by 0.4 percentage points to 5.2%. The male unemployment rate increased by 0.3 percentage points to 5.1%, and the female unemployment rate increased by 0.5 percentage points to 5.3%.

PARTICIPATION RATE

  • increased by 0.2 percentage points to 65.5%.

The proximate reason is that more people want a job now than did in January.  The unemployment rate isn’t calculated using the total population, but instead uses the Labour Force, which is everybody who has a job (Employed) plus everybody who wants a job and is looking for one (Unemployed).

$$!u=\frac{U}{E+U}$$

Employment increased by 1,800, but unemployment increased by 47,100, so the unemployment rate ($$u$$) still went up.

Peter Martin also offered a suggestion on why this happened:

We’ve lost a lot of wealth and we’re worried. So those of us who weren’t looking for work are piling in.

I generally agree, but my guess would go further. Notice two things:

  • Part-time jobs went up by 55,600 and full-time jobs fell by 53,800 (the difference is the 1,800 increase in total employment).
  • The number of people looking for part-time jobs went up by only 2,600 and the number of people looking for full-time jobs rose by 44,400 (yes, I realise that there’s 100 missing – I guess the ABS has a typo somewhere).

There are plenty of other explanations, but I think that by and large, the new entrants to the Labour Force only wanted part-time work and found it pretty-much straight away – these are households that were single-income, but have moved to two-incomes out of the concern that Peter highlights.  On the other hand, I suspect that the people that lost full-time jobs have generally remained in the unemployment pool (some will have given up entirely, perhaps calling it retirement).

The aggregate result is that the economy had a shift away from full-time and towards part-time work, although the people losing the full-time jobs are not the ones getting the new part-time work.

On the topic of US politics …

Published on 28 October 2008 in Australia, Politics, UK and USA. Tags: , , , , . 0 Comments

There’s a perennial question thrown around by Australian and British politics-watchers (and, no-doubt, by people in lots of other countries too, but I’ve only lived in Australia and Britain):  Why do American elections focus so much on the individual and so little on the proposed policies of the individual?  Why do the American people seem to choose a president on the basis of their leadership skills or their membership of some racial, sexual, social or economic group, while in other Western nations, although the parties are divided to varying degrees by class, the debate and the talking points picked up by the media are mostly matters of policy?

An easy response is to focus on the American executive/legislative divide, but that carries no water for me.  Americans seem to also pick their federal representatives and senators in the same way as they do their president.

The best that I can come up with is to look at differences in political engagement brought about by differences in scale and political integration.  The USA is much bigger (by population) and much less centralised than Australia or Britain.  As a result, the average US citizen is more removed from Washington D.C. than the average Briton is from Whitehall or the average Australian from Canberra.  The greater population hurts engagement by making the individual that much less significant on the national stage – a scaled-up equivalent of Dunbar’s number, if you will.  The decentralisation (greater federalism) serves to focus attention more on the lower levels of government.  The two effects, I believe, reinforce each other.

Americans are great lovers of democracy at levels that we in Australia and Britain might consider ludicrously minuscule and at that level there is real fire in the debates over specific policies.  Individual counties vote on whether to raise local sales tax by 1% in order to increase funding to local public schools.  Elections to school boards decide what gets taught in those schools.

That decentralisation is a deliberate feature of the US political system, explicitly enshrined in the tenth amendment to their constitution.  But when so many matters of policy are decided at the county or state level, all that is left at the federal level are matters of foreign policy and national identity.  It seems no surprise, then, that Americans see the ideal qualities of a president being strength and an ability to “unite the country.”

Bryan has returned …

Published on 21 October 2008 in Australia and Politics. Tags: . 0 Comments

It’s old news by now, but in case anybody missed it, the excellent Bryan Palmer has resumed blogging at ozpolitics.  This is a Good Thing ™.

Needing a visa to visit America

Published on 3 June 2008 in Australia, Justice/Law and USA. Tags: , , , , . 0 Comments

Australia, like most of Western Europe and a few other countries, is on America’s “visa waiver” programme, which lets people travel to the USA for up to 90 days at a time without first applying for a visa, although the US can still deny entry to anybody that doesn’t answer the immigration official’s questions to their satisfaction.

By comparison, Australia requires that all visitors from everywhere except New Zealand have a visa. It’s a staggeringly simple and not overly expensive process that can happen online, but it’s a visa-requirement nonetheless.

It looks like the US is moving to an Australian-style system. They’re still calling it a “visa waiver,” but the requirement that I register before entering the US and that they reserve the right to deny my registration seems a lot like a visa to me. From the article:

Passengers travelling to the United States from countries whose citizens do not need visas must register online with the US government at least 72 hours before departure [from January 2009]

…

Although the new rule requires 72 hours advance registration, it will be valid for multiple entries over a two-year period. The rule will only apply to citizens of the 27 visa waiver programme countries

…

A Homeland Security official said the new measure would require the same information that passengers now have to include on the I-94 immigration form they must fill out before entering the US. He said Australia has been using a similar system for several years.

Presumably this means that the US will be more likely to start adding the newer members of the EU to the “visa waiver” programme.

Oh please, oh please, oh please

Published on 13 February 2008 in Australia and Politics. Tags: , , , . 4 Comments

Mr. Rudd, call Andrew Leigh.  Call him now.  Speaking on Indigenous policy, he writes:

  1. School attendance rates are appalling, and as Woody Allen says “90% of life is just showing up”. So pay Indigenous children to attend school.
  2. Literacy and numeracy gaps are large, and part of the difference may be teacher quality. So the federal government should promise bonuses of up to $50,000 to teachers who can get large improvements in performance in Indigenous schools. Teaching disadvantaged kids is the most important job in Australia – so why does no-one doing it earn a six-figure salary?
  3. Indigenous people are overrepresented in Australia’s jails, which do little more than warehousing. Since many are now private, why not rewrite the contracts, making payment conditional on post-release recidivism and earnings? Let’s create incentives for those who run jails to do more education, and less clock-watching.
  4. A major impediment to children attending school is drunkenness in communities. But a ban is a drastic measure. Let’s allow communities to set their own tax rates on alcohol, and keep the revenue (remember, a ban is effectively a tax rate equivalent to the cost of petrol to the nearest no-ban town).
  5. As many Indigenous policies as possible (including those above) should be subjected to rigorous randomised trials. Those that fail should be discarded without sentiment, and those that succeed should be expanded. We know from the headline indicators that many Indigenous policies haven’t worked; it’s time to start sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Amen.