Sunday Essay - deaths of cartoonists Murray Ball and Bill Leak, the WA election results

I was saddened to hear of the death of New Zealand cartoonist Murray Ball, the creator of Footrot Flats. I really enjoyed Footrot Flats. As a part Kiwi with New Zealand farm connections I knew enough to understand the local allusions, More importantly, the characters were just fun.

I spent Saturday night watching the West Australian election count. That made for a very late night given the three hour time difference. Since it seemed pretty clear that the Barnett Government would lose the election, the three things that I focused on were the likely scale of the defeat, the size of the One Nation vote and the fate of the WA National Party.

It quickly became clear that a swing, a big one, was on, so my focus shifted to the other two.

Much has been written about the decline in the One Nation vote. If you exclude the lower house seats where One Nation did not contest, the One Nation vote would appear to be around the number suggested by the polls, a bit over 8%, with a higher vote in regional areas, lower in Perth Metropolitan. So well down on the peak poll forecasts, but around the final average poll numbers.

The Liberal decision to preference One Nation in the Upper House in return for One Nation preferences in the lower house clearly backfired. The scale of the backfire is subject to debate, but when you have both Liberals and Ms Hanson herself saying that it was a mistake that cost votes, I'm inclined to go with the professionals.

In practical terms, it looks to have delivered One Nation 1-2 upper house seats, reducing the Nationals by one.to four seats.  In the lower house, it looks as though it may transfer the previously National held seat of Kalgoorlie to the Liberals, although results here are still uncertain.

The results in National Leader Brendon Grylls's seat of Pilbara are too close to call, although it looks as though he will lose the seat to Labor  Here a special factor was in play, Gryll's proposals to increase mining royalties on Rio Tinto and BHP.

In this Footrot Flat cartoon, Dog plays the role of Grylls while you need to dress the two farmers in high vis clothing.

BHP and Rio Tinto are reported to have spent more than $2 million in anti-National advertising, while BHP reportedly tried to encourage its staff in the Pilbara to vote against Grylls. From their viewpoint, it was a relatively small (and successful) investment to avoid a bigger impost.

Listening to election night commentary from both Liberal and Labor spokesmen, they were both men, on the royalty issue, both said that Gryll's proposal was essentially silly because all it would do is to reduce WA's share of the GST. If you think about it, and its correct, that's a dreadful commentary on current fiscal arrangements within the federation, something that Premier Barnett rightly campaigned on. What's the point on taking fiscal action at state level if all that happens is a consequent fiscal hit at another level?  

The sudden death of another cartoonist, Australian Bill Leak, bookends this short post.

Leak was always idiosyncratic, attracting controversy and invective.Towards the end of his life, this seems to have weighed  on him.

Even at the end, he was still campaigning against what he saw as the dead hand of political correctness.

Both Australia and New Zealand have been very lucky in their political cartoonists over a very long period. Often controversial, they have presented political and social issues back to us in ways that make us pause. The pictures they present are something like those distorting mirrors that used to be popular at sideshows and amusement arcades, but they encourage us to look in new ways and, sometimes, just to share the fun.

This Sunday post will also act as tomorrow's Monday Forum. As always, go in whatever direction you like.

Science, Innovation and all that jazz

This morning's reflections and Monday Forum is loosely linked to innovation, that presently popular topic. As always, feel free to go in whatever direction you like!

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal  (23 October 2015), The Myth of Basic Science, British peer Matt Ridley concludes:

 The perpetual-innovation machine that feeds economic growth and generates prosperity is not the result of deliberate policy at all, except in a negative sense. Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention; they can only make sure that they don’t hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change.

To get to this point, he argues that the old linear model dating back to Francis Bacon now encapsulated in the idea of pure research feeding into applied research into useful technology is misleading. In fact, in most cases, technology, innovation feeds into, drives, science. Technology has, he suggests, become a self-replicating, self-steering system that will give best results if left alone. Politicians should stop believing that innovation can be turned on and off like a tap. Governments should stop funding basic research, do away with patents and get out of the way. This drew a protest from (among others) Don Aitkin - Should the public funding of basic science stop? Don is clearly impressed by the view of Mr Ridley in a general sense, but this was a bridge too far.

Without research, I do not remember when systems approaches first emerged. I do do know that I was arguing in the 1970s that the now popular systems approaches could be fruitfully applied the archaeology and Australian prehistory to provide insights. This followed work that I had done attempting to use economic constructs to analyse Aboriginal economic life, work that seemed to yield fruitful results. However, what we might think of as modern "systems" approaches suffers from severe weaknesses.

With the exception of marxist and some socialist theorists who always wanted to make the evidence fit the model, system approaches were simply another way of analysing evidence. Considering a system as a series of interconnected parts, a systems approach led you to ask questions about possible parts and the relationships between them.  Today, the old normative approach adopted by some on the left has sadly become universal, with the dominant right imposing its own particular orthodoxies on the evidence. It's not just the right of course, for normative systems approaches have become deeply embedded in policy debate. Still, economic models have a lot to answer for in, among other things, keeping thesis and antithesis alive!

Mr Ridley is correct, of course, in arguing that the pure, applied, useful technology model is flawed. To use his own thinking, technology feeds into science, science feeds into technology. It's a system. However, and those involved with systems know this, systems involve multiple flows and interconnections. It seems to me that Mr Ridley wishes to impose his own conclusions on the system. using selective evidence to support his thesis. Damn, thesis and anti-thesis again! 

Network economics focuses on the way networks, systems operate, Network economics suggests that under certain defined conditions, networks will lead to monopolistic or oligopolistic outcomes.We have seen this in the higher technology areas so beloved by Prime Minister  Turnbull. A fair bit of economic and policy analysis has been concerned with overcoming this problem. Apart from recognising the way in which patents can be used to protect market power, Mr Ridley ignores this problem. He implicitly assumes that the technology system will give best results. He does not test this, nor recognise that it may lead to undesirable outcomes such as under investment in basic research. It may not, but the question has to be addressed.

I now turn to another topic, the present conflation between innovation and science and technology. It's deeply embedded, and it seems to affect all our thinking. Certainly it affects Mr Ridley's thinking, even though he is clearly influenced by Adam Smith, surely one of the great innovative thinkers of the 18th century measured by his continuing influence.

In a discussion in one of the comment threads, I suggested that innovation meant change. It's a little more than that, of course. Innovation means something new, something that is outside the current box. It is not the same as productivity improvement, nor of cost reduction, nor of improved efficiency and effectiveness. although all these things may be an outcome. It is also not the same as science or technology. Adam Smith was an innovator, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter was an innovator. Indeed, the phrase "creative destruction" that he coined has suddenly now become very popular jargon. 

The imposed linkage between innovation and science and technology is an example of the mental blindness created by definitional ambiguity, These ambiguities, the lack of  clarity or of questioning, act as blinkers: they force us to gallop down one track when we might be better on another. Our very obsession with innovation blinds us to the real possibilities of innovation. That is why I have doubts about Mr Turnbull's emphasis on innovation. He does not ask questions, he feeds us his pre-determined answers. 

Finishing by returning to the funding of basic research, during the 1980s I was an active proponent of the need for greater linkages between industry and universities, of the need to effectively commercialise research carried out in the university sector. By the early 2000s, I thought that the focus and process, however imperfectly carried out, had gone to far, far too far. I was particularly concerned with what I saw as the collapse of curiosity based research in all disciplines, not just science. How, I wondered, were new ideas to come through, how were existing structures to be challenged, how were issues to be clarified, when everything had to be justified by outcomes linked to pre-determined questions and measurable results, usually with a dollar sign attached?

Since then the position has got worse, especially but not only in Australia's "top" research institutions. The proliferating buildings and institutes based on special applied research areas are, to my mind, a sign of failure. Staff no longer have freedom to pursue questions just for curiosity. Adam Smith himself was able to think and write because of access to patronage. Very few people have that luxury today. 

Sunday Essay - the real insignificance of Australia's chattering zone

This morning's Sunday Essay is triggered by offerings from my fellow bloggers.

Over on Club Troppo, Gummo Trotsky's George H W Bush & The Broccoli Wars reminded me of a footnote in recent US politics. It appears that President Bush Snr's dislike of broccoli, a dislike shared by many, actually has a physiological base. However, one commenter managed to put his own very particular slant on the matter:

Supertasting is a pretty good analogy for what researchers like Jonathan Haidt have observed: people with conservative views have a strong sensitivity to fear and disgust, while progressive types don’t.

That’s why, where the Right sees a community of grotesque abominations and a dire threat to western civilisation, the Left just sees gay people and isolated acts of terrorism.

Over at his place, Don Aitkin's How important is this election? seeks to correct the view that this is the most significant election ever and in so doing has a shot at The Conversation. This drew a comment from Peter Kemmis:

For a university-supported site, I think "The Conversation" is quite disappointing. It reflects a narrowness from many contributors and feeds what may in many cases be a narrow readership. There is an opinion piece by Nick Cater in "The Australian" today, where he discusses the media and current politics. He defines the Chatter Zone as comprising 13 Australian electorates, where 9 seats are held by the Coalition, and the balance by Labor and the Greens. Within 5 of these electorates live 2,000 of Australia's 20,000 journalists. In the 19 electorates:

• 20% vote green (compared to 10% nationally)
• 2.85% of couples are in same-sex relationships (0.57% nationally)
• 20% of adults have a degree in arts or the humanities (6% nationally)
• 33% state 'no religion' (20% nationally)
• 40% of mixed couples are de facto (10% nationally).

Cater's telling point is: "The prejudices of the Chatter Zone set the agenda on ABC1's Q&A. Planetary warming? Check. Gay marriage? Check. The depravities of the Catholic Church? Check. Turnbull for Liberal leader? Check. It is an inner-city dinner where the only saving grace is the absence of couscous."

As it happens, I'm inclined to agree about the narrowness of The Conversation. It's on my reading list for I find some useful material there, but there does seem to be a perceptual bias among its writers. I would also agree that the inner city electorates that Cater is referring too lie on a particular edge of the Australian social and political spectrum. I, too, have complained about that, about the way that views from those areas are presented as a value norm.

However, it's not quite as clear cut as that. To begin with, journalists living in particular areas focusing on particular slices do tend to absorb the views of those that they write about. For example, and long may this continue, journalists writing on rural issues or living in country areas are far more likely to be interested in National Party or country political or life issues. No one accuses them of bias.

Now take the issues that Mr Cater lists.

It is true that climate change scepticism is greater in country areas, that certain sets of environmental views are most deeply entrenched in the electorates that Mr Cater talks about, However, the position is far more complicated than that. You only have to consider the environmental wars that have raged across New England, wars that have had a direct affect on NSW and national politics, to see that the changing coalitions of interests are far more complex, that the views of inner city Greens are largely peripheral to the New England debate. They just don't matter. Lock the Gates did not spring form Mr Cater's electorates.

Or consider the depravities of the Roman Catholic Church.

It is, I think, true that there are particular negative views about religious faith that are more common in the areas that Mr Cater talks about. But if you look at the real hot spot issues in this area, they are not in the inner city areas but in places like the Lower Hunter, in Armidale, or in regional Victoria. Further, the people they most affect are those who were devout, who trusted their institutions, and they are far removed from the sometimes brittle dinner party or restaurant chatter of a Marrickville or Balmain, to take Sydney examples. Broken Rites is hardly an inner city organisation, at least as I understand it.

Gay marriage and, more broadly gay rights, is a different case. Here, I think, we can say that certain inner city Sydney areas provided something of a haven for changes that spread across Australia. But that had little to do with the then chattering classes, more with the ability of people to organise.

Like Mr Cater, I get annoyed with the way that the chatter zone seems to dominate certain aspects of media coverage. But then, I remind myself that it doesn't actually matter. In the diversity that is Australia, it is the interaction between personal and area concerns that finally sets the agenda.                 

Introducing induction vs deduction: the fall of economic history at MIT

I fear my foreshadowed posts on MOOCs will have to wait!

A post on Professor Greg Mankiw's blog led me this June 2013 paper by Peter Temin, The Rise and Fall of Economic History at MIT. I was attracted by the title because it seemed to bear upon issues that I was exploring in my own amateurish way in Sunday Essay - economists and the decline of economics. Browsing, my eye was caught by this quote:

A more widely repeated comment was made by Paul Samuelson to Walt Rostow over lunch one day. After Rostow made a claim that Samuelson disliked, Samuelson said, “Walt, you may be an economist among historians, but you are historian when you are among economists.”

That resonated! I wonder why?

I found Professor Termin's piece interesting but depressing. Interesting because of the history, depressing because it was a similar pattern at another place at a similar time. I leave it to you to read the full paper, but I wanted to make a few comments.

Termin suggests that economics at MIT came to rest on three legs: theoretical economics, econometrics and economic history. The theoretical and econometric legs combined, ultimately squeezing out economic history. Underneath this result was an intellectual conflict that I am only just becoming aware of.

On Wednesday, Belshaw’s World – Barratt’s story: can the academic present measure up to its past? looked at some aspects of changing academic life through a prism set by Professor Barratt's history of the Psychology Department at the University of New England. By its nature, the book is partially a history of the changing face of psychology as a discipline seen through the eyes of one man at one place.

Underlying the changes, is a shift from inductive to deductive study within Psychology. Inductive reasoning is bottom up, a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates general propositions that are derived from specific examples. By contrast, in deductive reasoning specific examples are derived from general propositions.

Putting this another way, theoretical economist built models based on certain assumptions and then refined and extended them. As deductive reasoning gained sway, the economic journals filled with articles that were ever more detailed explanations of ever narrowing points. These explanations became hypothesis that were then subject to scientific test. This explains the natural fit between the theoreticians and the quantitative economists. However, you could only test those things for which certain types of data were available.

Something of the same process happened in psychology. Professor Barratt was a deductionist, although he used the term hypothetico-deductionist to combine the idea of hypothesis drawn from models followed by tests. Mind you, he never went to the same extreme as some of the economists, always recognising that you had to move between the particular and the general, that observation of human behaviour had a place in the creation of ideas.

I do not want this to be a long post. I am just setting a scene. In the meantime, do read Professor Temin's paper.    

Sunday Essay - economists and the decline of economics

Today's Sunday Essay was triggered by a loosely connected overlap in my current reading.

My train reading at present is focused on the stories of the various disciplines that occupied central places at the University of New England for much of its earlier history. I am interested because it bears upon the broader history that I am writing (On writing a history of New England), but I also find it interesting because those stories reflect broader changes in the disciplines themselves, in the academy, and in Australian life. The three pieces that have been my focus this week are John Pullen's story of the rise, fall and very partial recovery in the teaching of the history of economic thought; Agricultural Economics in Australia, a collection of essays published to mark the sliver jubilee (1958-1983) of the establishment of agricultural economics at UNE; and Paul Barratt Snr's history of the psychology department.

Coincidentally, there were a number of blog posts that fed into my thinking in different ways: one was Don Aitkin's Higher Education, Lower Morale, an essay looking at changes in the academy; the second Winton Bates'  Should the GFC be viewed as a 'balance sheet' recession of the kind Irving Fisher wrote about in the 1930s?; the third Steve Keen's series on the self destruction of economics (here one, here two, here three).

By way of further background, I know very few economists now whereas they dominated my immediate environment when I first started working. That's partly because of changes in work and my interests. It's more, I think,  because there aren't actually very many economists around outside some narrowly defined spheres. There are fewer still generalist economists of the type that I once was.

It's odd, really. I can't talk economics properly with the few specialist economists I know because I don't understand the models that they are talking about, nor can I talk economics in a day to day work sense with colleagues because the analytical tools I use are simply unknown. There are no economists at all!  I have to try to translate, to fit, my thinking into quite different modes of thinking.

To begin my analysis with a quote from Steve Keen:

Economics has declined from 40 per cent of any business-oriented degree to 4 per cent in 40 years. For a profession obsessed with linear regression, it has suffered a near-perfect linear regression of its own.

In his presentation to the conference held to mark Agricultural Economics Silver Jubilee at UNE in 1983, Geoff Miller wrote:

It would be a mistake to infer that the influence of economists is on the wane. It most definitely is not. What is happening, however, is that proportionately fewer and fewer applied economists are willing to identify themselves as economists. They masquerade under the titles such as business manager. market analyst, administrator, treasurer and even bureaucrat!

Geoff was then Deputy Secretary at the Department of Primary Industries in Canberra. He went on:

This audience will be well aware that just as proportionately fewer applied economists identify themselves as economists, so too is proportionately less applied economics being taught in faculties that identify themselves as economics faculties. We are well into the era of the business school.

To Geoff's mind, the most useful economist was one who had been taught as rigorously to apply theory as the theory itself. He continued:

Good theorists with little training in applications, usually burn up all their energy (and other people's patience) telling policy decision-makers  why the data cannot be usefully employed, why no inferences can be drawn from the results of the analysis, or (at the other extreme) advocating excessively simplistic solutions to complex problems.

Now I don't completely agree with Geoff here for reasons that I will explain in a moment. But it is true that the greatest value to me of economics lies in the way that it helps me to understand and analyse problems, to come to quick judgements. even though I may struggle to express them sometimes in comprehensible form to people who do not have knowledge of the same analytical tools. It is equally true, and this has been an enormous frustration sometimes, that I have struggled with colleagues who demand that I comply with their economic models or ideological frameworks even though I am trying to articulate a new position that might help us to solve an immediate problem.

Economics at UNE was first taught as part of Arts. There were three features to the course.

The focus was on teaching, something that comes through in all the early history disciplines at UNE. It is also something that Don Aitkin feels that has been lost with the current emphasis on research. There were applied elements to the course and especially to the research carried out by staff since this focused especially on problems of development. Finally, the course was solidly grounded in the humanities.

This is where John Pullen's paper is instructive. For those doing honours, the history of economic thought was effectively a compulsory unit. You cannot study the history of economic though without becoming aware of the way in which views on economics, the resulting models, are human constructs grounded in the cultures of the time. UNE also developed a strong economic history school, another declined discipline, for just that reason.

Agricultural economics was fought for and emerged as a practical applied course bridging the gap between economics and agriculture. Solidly based on what would a little later be called neoclassical economics, it developed a series of analytical techniques that could be applied at farm or industry level. As a non-mathematician, I stood in awe of strange concepts like linear programming or the monte carlo model. So UNE had three streams: a generalist economic course; an applied economics course in agricultural economics; and an economics history course. From my perspective, the wheels then came off.

As an entry point here, I want to take the famous dispute at Sydney University that Steve Keen referred to between Professors Hogan and Simkin and those who saw the teaching of economics and economics as a discipline in different ways. Here I quote from Professor Hogan's obituary:

He was nothing if not a fighter. He believed that ''quantitative rigour'' was the foundation for solving real world problems, rather than sociological and political factors. He wanted to produce economists who would help the corporate world and government. Statistics, spread sheets and mathematics featured prominently in his thinking. In the end, he was not able to resist the overwhelming demands for a change of focus and his economics department was split.

Steve Keen was on the other side of that divide. To my mind, both sides were wrong, but both encapsulated trends holding at the time that are still playing themselves out.

Professors Hogan and Simkin were trying to introduce a rigorous applied content, a quantitative rigour. In so dong, they reduced the generalist stream. Two other professors of economics at the time ( tartly remarked over lunch that Sydney was training bad mathematicians and worse economists. However, those on the other side with their emphasis on political economy were not, in fact, arguing for a generalist course, but a generalist course of a particular type. It became an ideological debate.

  The logical joining of the two positions was to have a core general course with opportunities for specialisation on the generalist, humanities or applied side. This was not possible at Sydney nor. as it turned out, at most other places. The decline of economics as a discipline continued.

I accept that what I have said is partial. I imagine that those of both sides of the Sydney divide would disagree with at least parts of my assessment. Accepting that, if we jump forward, we find the University of Western Sydney retrenching thirteen economics staff including Professor Keen. This passed almost without notice. I am not in a position to judge the eternal dynamics involved. However, I can express my sadness.

Staying in the present, I now want to turn to Winton Bates' post, Should the GFC be viewed as a 'balance sheet' recession of the kind Irving Fisher wrote about in the 1930s?. Winton and I did economics at the same time at UNE. I went on to focus on history, Winton was in the agricultural economics stream, Despite that, we remain friends! 

The first part of the post deals with Mr Rudd's record, the second with Irving Fisher's views of the great depression. I have not been able to check Winton's references in the first part, they are behind firewalls, but both Henry Ergas and John Stone are ideological warriors. That doesn't mean that they are wrong on particular points, but you have to understand where they are coming from. Certainly based on Winton's reporting, I think that they are wrong, imposing a view of what happened on judgements that had to be made at the time.

I will write a proper post on this one not to attack Winton (I have a great respect for his views), but because it is important. I was in Shanghai when the GFC broke. I came back to a traumatised Australia where reactions seemed to me to be at total variance to the economic facts as I knew them. This actually drew me back into writing on macroeconomics, I field that I had left and did not expect to return to. Essentially, I could not match the gloom and doom scenarios to the basics of the Australian economy, so I took a contrary view. However, this did not lead me to oppose the stimulus measures, far from it. My concern at the time was the direction and balance of those measures.

The second part of Winton's post focused on Irving Fisher's views is, if I interpret the argument correctly. very similar to views expressed by Professor Keen. Essentially, a key part of the problem was the combination of levels of private debt with income and price variations.

In finishing today's post, I want to look briefly at economics models. All models are abstractions. This applies to the IS-LM model, to the AD-AS model, to the DSGE model or to Agent Base Models. Models are useful thing, but in each model the critical issue is the specification of relationships that underpin the model's working. If those change, then the model will give invalid results.

This is really why economic forecasters are in so much trouble. This is why so many older theories are being dusted off. The economic world has changed, and we are struggling to understand the changes. We have to look back to the past to develop new ideas for the future.

This is where, I think, the old economics comes in. I actually have no idea how a DSGE or Agent Based Model really works, although I can understand the basic principles. But I don't think that this matters. The foundation economics that I have done in those now ancient days, as well as my past practical experience as a professional economist, gives me the capacity to ask basic questions. That, I think, is what is really important.     

Sunday snippets - defence self reliance, Ramana's stories, new Polish Australian blog & the death of Helen Hughes

This Sunday's blog round up begins with a piece by Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan , Defence policy: Self-reliant or self-deluded?. Essentially, Jim argues that the apparent Australian focus on self-reliance is misleading and indeed dangerous because of the way that words can be used to conceal realities. This is a variant of the point I was making earlier in regard to the dangers of the words public interest.

Reading the piece and the quote from David Uren, the Australian's economic editor, reminded me of the dangers of economics. Whether or not Australia could achieve defence self reliance is a technical question that depends on the definition of self reliance and then the force structures required to deliver self reliance as defined. Once these questions have been defined, then costs come into play, along with the most effective delivery options. Once costs have been defined, then we have to ask is Australia prepared to pay?

These are not economics questions as such, although the tools of economics may be useful. Yet economics sticks its bib in as an early stage. The technical analysis may say that Australia must maintain certain domestic industrial capabilities if self reliance is to be achieved and that, consequently, certain industrial activities must be subsidised. But says the economist, that's industry protection and industry protection is a bad thing. Discussion then becomes confused.

Over on his musings, Ramana's Stories poses this question:

This post is to ask my regular readers if I should start a series of real life stories on interesting people and situations that I have encountered over an eventful life. Feel free to be as frank as you want to be. I don’t have to take your advise!

Go for it, Ramana. You write well. The advantage of using fiction as a vehicle is that you are not bound by facts and therefore have a better opportunity to focus. I do something of the same thing when I generalise from my own experiences. In so doing, I can focus on broader questions unbound from the precise details that began the muse. 

A new blog on my blog list, its actually a new blog too, is My Observations. Its written by a Polish women who now lives in Australia but has returned to Gdansk on personal business. It records her reactions to the new Poland. It's well written with a very personal idiosyncratic style.

Over on Club Troppo,Ken ran a guest post by Rob Bray, economist and research fellow in the School of Business and Economics at the Australian National University, National Minimum Wage – role and rationales. I found it a quite helpful and significant post.

The original Australian wage structure, the basic wage, was based on the social structures of the time. What was the minimum wage required for a family with one male bread winner to live in moderate comfort? Those days are long gone. What, then, is the role of the minimum wage?  It's actually the wage required to allow a single individual to live in minimum comfort. That's a huge shift.

On Catallaxy Files, Julie Novak reports (Helen Hughes, Australia’s greatest female economist: 1928-2013)on the death of Helen Hughes. I didn't know until I saw this post. I join with Julie in expressing my regrets. I never met Helen, but I have known of her for a long time. Often I disagreed with her, but I always took what she said seriously.

I didn't know that Helen had been born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1928 and had migrated to Melbourne with family in 1939. I know that there is a story there. It reminds me too, that part of the richness of Australian life lies in the people who have come here from different parts of the world and brought their different perspectives. I hope that there is a full obituary on Helen. I would like to learn more.

I fear that I am out of time. I have things to do, including watching youngest play hockey later this morning. Still, we will chat again.

The New England populist tradition

I am about to bring up on the side bar a short notice explaining my political bias that I come from and am influenced by, the New England populist tradition. I feel the need to do this because of the way that my analysis often doesn't quite fit conventional modes. Sometimes it appears left, sometimes right, sometimes conservative, sometimes not.

Our views are influenced by our collective experiences. In my case, that includes quite a wide range of experiences in public and private sectors, as a policy adviser and consultant, as an economist and historian, plus the simple day to day things of life.

In all this, many of my political values and views were formed during my childhood and younger adulthood and then refined through experience. I grew up in a household that was, in retrospect, intensely political.

On one side, there was the Country Party and New England New State Movement. My grandfather, David Drummond, was a senior Country Party politician and a leader of the New England New State Movement. On the other side was an internationalist, academic and, in today's terms, left tradition whose roots lay in the industrial towns of Lancashire transmuted through New Zealand and the close-linked world of the Empire and Commonwealth universities.

These traditions may seem very different, but they actually coalesced around a series of common concerns and values. In some ways my father and grandfather were very different and certainly did not always agree. Yet there was a remarkably high degree of overlap in many of their core values and concerns, with one core unifying feature their concerns for social justice, for education and community development and for the development of Northern NSW.

I absorbed all this and was actively involved. Then I moved away. In the intensely fascinating world of Canberra, the very specific and apparently New England issues that had concerned me seemed less relevant.  

It is hard to escape one's past. I started writing a biography of my grandfather as a PhD topic. I had planned to focus on his public career and especially his role as NSW Education Minister. As I researched, I found that Northern NSW, the broader New England, moved to centre stage.

Drummond had a very troubled childhood, including a period as ward of the state. In his partial autobiographical manuscript he describes his early childhood and his first period as a ward in detail, and then there is a gap until his arrival in Armidale in 1907 as seventeen year old farm labourer.

It is from this point that the troubled child found success and, in a sense, redemption. In this process, the North (the broader New England) became central.

As first a farm labourer and then share farmer, Drummond became involved in the Farmers and Settlers Association and the agitation that would lead to the formation of the country parties. He shared the ideal of country, of an oppressed country and oppressing city. He also shared some of the radical and populist views that marked the early country parties.

In New England, the exact expression of country ideals was affected by a parallel movement that arose at the same time, that seeking statehood for the North.

Both the Country Party and New State Movement drew from common perceptions and grievances, but they were not the same. Concerned to address specific regional grievances and to force change in constitutional structures, the New State Movement crossed party divides and drew support from town groups not necessarily aligned with the emerging farm movements. Further, it had a very specific focus on constitutional issues.

The Country Party proved best able to capture the new sentiments in political terms because it was not then bound to existing political structures, but the distinction remained.

What I call New England populism is an amalgam of the different threads in the political history of New England. In that amalgam, Drummond played an important role because he articulated the constitutional views that, with some arguments over time, formed a common base. New England populism is a populist movement, but one with its own very specific constitutional base linked to separatist arguments and the need to justify the separatist position.

As I researched my grandfather’s life, I found the past flooding back. The thesis became, in part, an exploration of my own history and views.

I was now looking at the evidence and arguments from my position as a reasonably senior SES level Commonwealth Public Servant, judging the arguments from my experience in politics and policy. I found them good, quite unexpectedly so! That set me in new directions for both better and worse.

Well, what is New England populism and why is it still relevant beyond my own beliefs?

In terms of what it is, you won’t find it in any history books. It’s actually not recognised as a formal form of political expression. It just doesn’t fit in with conventional frames. However, I have given some of my posts at the end of this post that will give you an idea.

Is it still relevant?

Well, try Tony Windsor. I don’t think that he would call himself a New England populist, that’s my term. Yet he fits squarely in the New England populist tradition.

There is great debate within New England about the role played by Messrs Windsor and Oakshott because they cut across local political divides. New England itself had diminished, absorbed into conventional frames.

Outside New England, the support that Mr Windsor has gathered across the conventional political and ideological divides, the reason why Mr Windsor seems so fresh, lies in the fact that he is not bound by conventional divides.

Past posts on New England populism

• 12 April 2007, Hicks, Kansas and New England
• 13 April 2007, Kansas, Thomas Frank, New England, Jim Belshaw
• 14 April 2007, On Populism
• 14 April 2007, Populism - the New England Tradition: Introduction
• 25 May 2008, Sunday Essay - The beliefs of a New England populist

On some of Drummond's constitutional views:

• 2 February 2007,  Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Introduction
• 3 February 2007, Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Three streams of constitutional thought
• 4 February 2007, Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Constitutional principles
• 7 February 2007, Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Power will be Exercised

Saturday Morning Musings - culture wars, multiculturalism and change

The post of mine on this blog that continues to draw the greatest traffic by far is a post from November 2008, Sunday Essay - the importance of quiet time in a crowded world. I think that it's a well written post, but it's not the writing that attracts, it's the title. The constant stream of visits shows that it strikes a chord.

The release of former Australian PM John Howard's autobiographical memoir, Lazarus Rising, has attracted considerable Australian media attention (here, here, here for example). While I will buy or borrow the book at some point, I have no desire to revisit some of the things that Mr Howard talks about in other than an historical context.

One of our problems as we grow older is a tendency to re-fight old wars. I am as prone to this as anyone else, yet I have no desire to revisit multiculturalism or indeed Australia's cultural wars in the context of current politics. There is a good book there one day for someone who can properly unpack it all.

I say this because I still remember my sense of mortification from some posts I wrote back in 2007. In December of that year, a post by John Quiggin led me to write Deconstructing the Culture Wars - a personal aide memoire. This was a fairly carefully written post trying to disentangle some of the issues from a personal perspective. Then a comment from Lexcen led me to write another post, Australia's Culture Wars - uniquely Australian? taking a different tack.

In writing the first post I had implicitly accepted what we might call the conventional view, that the Australian culture wars were Australian, but also part of a broader phenomenon that included the transmission to Australia of certain ideas coming from the US. I was trying to unpack this.

Lexcen's comment made me do a preliminary web search trying to investigate the history of the culture wars.  I found that the term "culture wars" seemed to be most prevalent in the US and Australia, but that the Australian culture wars themselves seemed to be a uniquely Australian phenomenon drawing from our own history. I summarised my overall conclusions this way:

1. While the term culture wars is used in several ways, the term "culture wars" in the way I was describing it appears to exist in only Australia and the US.
2. Measured by frequency of usage, the great bulk of references to "culture wars" are Australian. Fourteen in the first few Google pages as compared to just 4 from US sources.
3. There appears to be very little similarity between the "culture wars" in the two countries. As an example, the religious element that appears so important in the US is largely missing in Australia.
4. I am forced to the conclusion that the Australian "culture wars" are just that, Australian "culture wars". I also begin to suspect that the term was first introduced into and popularised in Australia as a handy pejorative device by one side of the debate.

But why was I mortified? Well, I felt that I had been trapped into a way of thinking, spending time and thought analysing an issue when I should have been asking more basis questions.

As I said, the culture wars will make a good book one day linked not just to politics, but also to the history of Australian thought. In the meantime, I don't want to paddle in Mr Howard's pool.

I suppose that my biggest personal problem is that I have come to reject both sides. The world is simply not composed of just two models, a multi-cultural society on one side as compared to a multi-racial Australia with common values on the other. It is far more complex than that.

It is interesting, but it was Mr Howard's own Government that made me reject the idea that Australia must be a society dominated by common values.

There is a balance issue here. No society can really survive without  common core values. Yet I found myself constantly objecting to the Howard Government expression of this, from its citizenship test through its emphasis on Australia's military history as a unifying device, to its belief that all Australian students must study Australian history and civics as defined whether they liked it or not. This is far too simple for a society that, by its nature, must be pluralist.

On the other side, beyond its historical Fraser context in assisting Australia to adjust to a more complex culturally and racially mixed society, multiculturalism as an ism has limited intellectual content. At its extreme, it appears to deny that a society needs a degree of shared values and history, something that strikes me as plain silly. More moderately, if it simply means that Australia should recognise and tolerate different cultures within a frame set by core values, then it is not especially profound, just common sense.

This has become a bit of a lecture. I apologise for that. Still staying in lecturer mode, I wanted to finish with a brief comment on Angela Merkel since her views have been linked to Mr Howard's comments. Here I quote from the Australian:

His (Mr Howard's) stance gains contemporary relevance from Chancellor Angela Merkel comments last Sunday that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had "utterly failed."

The German position has little contemporary relevance to Australia. Leaving aside the issue of just what Ms Merkel means when she uses the word multicultural, the two societies are very different.

At the end of the Second World War, over 90% of Australians were locally born. We were, in very broad terms, a culturally homogeneous society. For better or worse and for our own reasons, Australians then decided to support mass migration. Yes, there was a racial basis in the initial immigration selection process, but so large was the migration process that the practical effect was that, by 1975, Australia had moved from a culturally homogeneous society to a multicultural one. The progressive abolition of the White Australia Policy changed the ethic mix of immigrants, the appearance if you like, but did not affect the overall pattern. The adoption of the term multicultural by the Fraser Government was of itself a recognition of this change.

I am not sure when the term multicultural first emerged in a global context. The earliest reference I have found is 1941. I think that the first official expression was in Canada in 1971, then especially influenced by the need to harmonise French and English. However, I stand to be corrected here, the first full expression of multicultural in official policy terms was in Australia during the second half of the 1970s.

There is an enormous difference between Germany today and Canada or Australia of the 1970s. Both Canada and Australia are countries who chose for their own reasons to change. In a sense, we have been there and done that. Like it or not, we have been multicultural for many years.

The position in Europe is different, far more complicated, because of history. There is simply not the same linkage in Australia between ethnicity, culture and the sense of national identity. The idea of Germans = German ethnicity = German language and culture =  defined area = German nationalism is alien to Australia.

The very language that was earlier used in Australia including official documents - Australian people, Australian race -  that now makes modern Australians cringe was, of itself, a sign of the difference. We cringe because we see the idea of building a new but different British race on far shores as racist. Indeed it was, because it was set in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas of race and ethnicity that would later give rise (among other things) to the holocaust. Yet we forget the idea of newness, of change, of identity.

Today, Germany is, to a degree at least, stuck in the idea of being German. The idea of Australian is far more flexible. It is far easier to delete the concept of being British from the idea of a new Australian people than it is to delete German from the idea of the German people. 

I, for one, may be unhappy at our rejection of the British component of our past. However, I do accept that it is just so much easier to redefine a concept centred on the new than one centred on the old.    

Sunday Essay - the strange case of Australia and New Zealand

Photo: Daily Telegraph, New Zealand on attack, Bledisloe Cup, Hong Kong.

Last night Australia and New Zealand played one of their Rugby Union stoushes in Hong Kong in front of a mixed crowd of Kiwis and Aussies as well as probably somewhat bemused locals.

Baa baa black sheep
have you got the ball?
No sir, no sir
the Aussies have it all
Clare SMS

The Hong Kong game began well for Australia with a quick trie. Clare, watching from Picton in New Zealand sent a triumphant SMS. In fact, she rarely watches Rugby, but travelling in New Zealand she had no choice for there the game is a national passion.

With the assistance of some very dubious decisions by the referee, the game was being played under "experimental" rules, New Zealand kept in touch.

I won't even attempt to explain the Rugby Union approach to experimental rules, I don't properly understand it myself, except to note that it is both very British and very modern. Very British because it appears to involve a degree of eccentricity. Very modern because in the now commercial game, they bring in experimental rules to fix something, then test them in practice like a modern management pilot.

For someone like me who played the game all those years ago, it is in fact very confusing. There is a fascinating dynamic here. These are generally big men who can also run very fast, getting bigger and faster through a sort of process of Darwinian self-selection. Each time they change the rules, players and coaches respond by changing play to get best results under the new rules. In turn, this leads to more rule changes.

In this case, it appears that NZ had the rules down pat, Australia did not. With penalties running strongly in their favour, New Zealand kept in the game, finally winning 19-14.

As Union players from the two countries headed north for their European tours, several thousand miles further south in another variant of the Rugby Game, the Rugby League World cup, a relieved New Zealand broke their duck by defeating Papua New Guinea 48-6 in front of a pro-PNG crowd on Australia's Gold Coast. (Photo Daily Telegraph.)

This victory was very important to the Kiwis. Rugby League is a PNG national game, and the PNG side had already given England a bad scare. New Zealand had to win to keep alive their chances of meeting Australia in the finals.

The differences between the two Rugby codes are also difficult to explain simply to outsiders, in part because they date back to the industrial age and the differences built into the English class system. In a very class-laden comment, someone once described Rugby Union as a thugs game played by gentlemen, League as a gentleman's game played by thugs. Both games are now fully professional sports, both are played at a very high level, but it remains true in Australia that Union still draws heavily from private schools (here for example), League from the public school system.

If all this is not enough, in the last week New Zealand defeated Australia in the netball 38-31.

Netball is the biggest women's sport in the two countries, and (as the photograph of an earlier test shows) the rivalry is intense. Netball, by the way, is meant to be a non-contact sport!

It will be clear from these three examples that both Australia and New Zealand are somewhat sports mad, and also quite obsessive about beating each other.

I am a little odd here, because with a father born in New Zealand and with New Zealand family, I retain the right to cheer for whichever country I choose at the time. In SMSing us from Picton, youngest was in fact having a go at her father, thinking I might be cheering for the All-Blacks. In fact, I always cheer for the Wallabies in the Union, but for New Zealand in the League.

To further complicate matters, eldest and I support Canberra in the Super-14 (the Southern Hemisphere tri-nation club competition), but then go for Christchurch where Dad was born. This is a good stir (to use an Australian phrase) because Sydneysiders get upset because we don't support the Tahs, the Sydney team.

The complexities in sport and sporting rivalries are only one dimension of the complicated dynamic between the two countries.

A number of years ago, the Australian Government chose to dismantle a variety of arrangements that had effectively given residents of other dominions in the Commonwealth a degree of preference in Australia. This was done partly on nationalistic grounds, partly on the grounds of non-discrimination between national groups. The effects were quite profound, because (among other things) they affected the status of more than a million people living in Australia.

The changes were deeply resented by many Australians, but accepted up to the point that the Government proposed alterations to the status of New Zealanders, replacing the previous free-entry for New Zealanders into Australia with proposed passport and entry controls.

This was a step too far and the Government was forced to back-off. Regardless of the arguments for non-discrimination, New Zealand was different and was to be treated so. This remains true today.

Australia and New Zealand are very different and in so many ways.

The physical landscape is one dynamic. Those who have seen Lord of the Rings will know that New Zealand is one of the most physically beautiful countries in the world.

Unlike the sometimes rugged but rounded and ancient Australian red and olive-gray landscape, New Zealand as part of the Asian rim of fire is a place where the sharp edges of high young fold mountains with their white and gray contrast with the brown of tussock grass and the green of the beech forests or the the North Island farm lands.

New Zealanders still have a closeness to their land that modern urban Australians have largely lost. In Australia, bush walking is very much a minority activity. In New Zealand, tramping is still a national past time. The average New Zealander has more, and a more intense, interaction with country than most Australian will ever know.

New Zealand has turned this to real advantage. To many young Australians, Clare is a current example, New Zealand is the land of adventure sports.

Constrained at home in a world of growing regulations, controls and social restrictions, young Australians flock to New Zealand to experience adventure in what is, in fact, a very safe environment. There are dangers in the New Zealand bush and mountains, a number of Australians do die each year, but these are known dangers that can be managed.

A second difference lies in population.

Australia is five times New Zealand's size in population and the economy. This gives rise to a dynamic that would be familiar to Canadians, a sometimes resentment of a bigger neighbour that ignores or condescends to them, that attracts New Zealand migrants to the detriment of the home country.

This effect should not be understated. On my visits to New Zealand I found a marked change in attitudes during the 1970s, the development of a hard edged resentment driven by Australia's greater opportunities, by the way that Australians and the Australian Government appeared to be trampling on New Zealand. I think that this has died down somewhat, but it is still there.

There are also differences in language and politics.

The rise of the distinctive New Zealand English dialect with its thuck vowels is quite recent. It was not really there when I went to New Zealand as a child or young adult. Then, suddenly, over a few trips spanning perhaps ten years, it became obvious, replacing the previous more English pronunciation.

In political terms, New Zealand is both more conservative and more left wing than Australia. In particular, and notwithstanding the revolution in public administration associated with the development of the New Zealand model, New Zealand retains, I think, a more collectivist ethos than Australia.

Despite differences such as these, and these are only a few of the differences, New Zealand and Australia, New Zealanders and Australians, remain inextricably entwined.

I doubt that the provision in the Australian constitution that allows New Zealand to join the Federation will ever be exercised nor in fact, wearing my Kiwi hat, would I want to see it exercised. Yet shared history and shared people - the constant exchange of people between the two countries - create enduring bonds.

In simple terms, while sometimes fighting like Kilkenny cats, Australians and New Zealanders understand each other. Put them together in another country, and they tend to gravitate to each other because of common understandings, a shared sense of humour.

I cannot see this breaking down. The only risk that I see lies on the Australian side, in the sometimes arrogance that comes both from size and the Australian tendency to see itself as necessarily right. Sometimes a little humility and self-awareness is a good thing.

In the meantime, may the sporting sibling rivalry continue to the mutual enjoyment of both sides.

History of Australian and New Zealand Thought

Back in August I said that in a fit of absent mindedness I had created a new blog called History of Australian (or and New Zealand) Thought. My thinking was that it was important, but could not proceed without multiple contributors.

Then Rafe Champion volunteered. Neil will be interested to know that he is a son-in-law of Ruth Park and D'Arcy Niland. Rafe's friend and partner is a successful Australian artist. Her web site is well worth a visit.

Now that Rafe has joined, I have put up a first substantive post. I would still like more people to join us. As an example, I think that Geoff Robinson - Geoff is just an example -would be superb.

We would really like this to be an open, pluralist, blog expressing many different viewpoints. We are trying to fill a gap. The only requirements are civilised conversation, a focus on explaining or discussing the way we think as we do.

So if you would like to contribute, please let me know.