Which slopes are slippery?

Andrew Norton12 Comments

Near the end of his anti-gay marriage article in today’s Age, Ted Lapkin does get to some substantive reasons why he thinks gay marriage is a bad idea. But much of the article is devoted to the slippery slope argument that once we have gay marriage we will slide into things we really don’t like, such as legal recognition of polygamy and decriminalising incest.

I don’t disagree with Lapkin that issues can develop their own logics, and that one change can make another change more likely. I think we are now nearing the base of a moderately slippery slope on gay issues. Once the state gave up on the idea of actively persecuting gay people for acting on their sexual desires, it became harder and harder to defend all the other ways in which the law disadvantaged them.

Lapkin himself says that everyone, gay or straight, is entitled to identical protections from the law – something that few conservative defenders of the family would have said until quite recently. Once you are sliding on the slippery slope, it can be hard to stop. The last conservative stand on gay issues at the Marriage Act is no more likely to succeed in the end than any of the other battles along the way.

The question then is not whether slippery slopes exist, but whether you can slide from one slope to another in any kind of deterministic fashion (“The floodgates will inevitably open to a further slide down the slippery slope of social disintegration”.) Read More »

The workforce supply of female graduates

Andrew Norton8 Comments

I’m writing a piece for The Age on the feminisation of Australia’s universities. In 2009, 59% of domestic commencing students were women. Overall the proportion of students who are female is a little lower, as there are strong male biases in education in some source countries for overseas students.

The gender shift in enrolments has big implications for the future labour supply of graduates. Though the 2006 census is getting a bit out of date, the figure below is striking. After their 20s, only a minority of female graduates work full-time except for age 50-54, when 51% are full-time workers. Obviously parenting responsibilities are a major factor in this, but even childless women are much less willing to work full-time than men.

I thought these numbers might offer some insight into the finances of the HELP loan scheme, but the ATO tax statistics don’t support this hypothesis.

Women owe 56.6% ofthe outstanding HELP debt, much what we would expect given their share of the student population. The average female balance of $12,361 in 2008-09 is lower than the average male balance of $13,914. I can think of a couple of possible reasons: the strong female majorities in cheap (to the student) courses such as education, nursing and arts; and a larger number of female than male graduates who have old unpaid debts, but at lower totals due to cheap HECS rates in the past.

If the gender age-work patterns persist, it does however raise questions about what happens if student contributions increase. Historically, the average repayment time for HECS/HELP debts is about 8 years. So on lower student contribution amounts, women who graduate in their early 20s could clear all or much of their debt by the time they leave full-time work to raise kids. But if initial debts are larger, that may not be the case.

Does the public support sending refugees to third countries?

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If asked whether asylum seekers arriving by boat should be turned away, most Australians have always said yes (Murray Goot and Ian Watson have a useful summary of the polling here, from p.28). But in another example of the hard to follow public opinion on the issue, if the choice is between processing asylum seekers in Australia and sending them to another country, their choice seems to be processing in Australia.

A Nielsen poll published in the Fairfax papers yesterday found a small majority in favour of processing here, and only 28% in favour of sending refugees to a third country.



Earlier polls found a similar pattern of opinion, if the costs of the Malaysia deal were explained.

I can’t recall any polling directly on the Howard government’s ‘Pacific solution’, but politically it was generally seen as a success. Or maybe questions about the means of stopping the boats don’t matter much. If the goal is achieved, discomfort at the means will be overlooked.

Pragmatism and ‘fundamentalism’ on the funding of the humanities

Andrew Norton3 Comments

While clearing out my office earlier this month I found lots of old media clippings. Compared to the early 2000s, the higher ed debate now seems less ideological. I’m not sure exactly why, though the NTEU‘s lower profile in policy debate is probably part of it, along with the arrival of a Labor government, which attracts less heated opposition than a Coalition government.

But sometimes the old style of debate re-appears, as it did in this swipe at me in today’s Age for being a ‘market fundamentalist’, written by University of Melbourne English professor Ken Gelder.

He was responding to this article, which was a pragmatic analysis of higher education funding politics, based on a presentation I gave to a seminar on the public funding of the humanities and social sciences.

My argument was that given Australia’s political and economic arrangements the chances of significant increases in public funding for the humanities and social science were low. Smaller university English classes aren’t likely to win out as a spending priority against the many other pressing political demands. Labor and Liberal governments have behaved in quite similar ways on higher education funding, because whatever their ideological differences they face the same political imperatives. Read More »