David Hicks - a final comment

Lexcen and I have been having a debate about David Hicks. Here Lexcen feels:

There is a lot of sympathy for David Hicks. I don't know why. I'm not sure if the sympathizers are more concerned with the rights of individuals or that justice must seen to be carried out or whether they see Hicks as innocent. Personally, I would just dump him back in Afghanistan and forbid him from returning to Australia.

I know Lexcen's views are shared by others, although the majority view is now clearly shifting. In this post I want to explain, very simply, why the Hicks' case so concerns me.

To cut to the nub of the matter, my core concern in the Hicks case (here, here), and the reasons for my linking Hicks and Dreyfus, have very little to do with questions of Hicks' guilt or innocence of whatever he may ultimately be charged with, everything to do with process.

If you look at English history you will see that one of the core themes has been the fight to establish the rights of the individual relative to the state. The rule of law and equality of people in front of the law are part of this.

This was not an easy fight. Kings who ruled by divine right did not take kindly to limitations on their power or actions that threatened their interests. Later Parliamentary Governments in fact also behaved in the same way when they saw their what they perceived as their or the nation's interest being threatened. Individual rights were established by blood and suffering.

The new Australian colonies had it pretty lucky. We inherited the gains that had been made. We were given responsible government and freedom early. So we took (and take) certain things for granted.

Even so, our Governments at all levels since 1788 have displayed the same tendency to believe in the divine right of Government, today expressed in terms of the national interest. Weapons used have included police enforcement, imprisonment, deportation, manipulation of public opinion, secret surveillance, removal from office, slander through Parliament.

Often, these actions were perceived as correct at the time, driven by overwhelming popular opinion and fears. Sometimes, those opinions and fears were correct. More often, history has shown them to be invalid or unbalanced. In all this, respect for the rule of law and of equality before the law has, however imperfectly, been a key thing protecting us as individuals.

The problem with the Hicks case, at least as I see it, is that the treatment of David Hicks has increasingly breached these principles. It is easy to uphold the principles of the rule of law and equality before the law when a matter is popular, much harder when the matter is unpopular. Yet it is how we handle the second that determines the longer term strength of the principles and of our freedom.

HSC, UAI and Education - a further note

My last post continued my musings on the rigidities, difficulties and pressures created in NSW by the Higher School Certificate/Universities Admission Index combination, by the need for schools, parents and kids to try to manage the process to get the best numeric outcome.

I have done a little more thinking and investigation since then talking to people and also working my way yet again through the UAC web site.

As all parents know, the UAI index is a device for competitive matching of demand by students for courses to available places in courses within NSW and ACT universities. At the end of each entry round there are always some vacancies in some subjects in some institutions. In this sense, the UAI is most important as a rationing device for the more popular courses and institutions.

Given all this, the final UAI required for entry to a particular course in a particular institution becomes a price proxy for demand and supply for that course. The result is a quite dramatic 40 spread between the lowest entry UAI that I could find (60 in 2006) and the 99 plus required for some courses in some institutions.

The UAI is not a perfect market clearing mechanism simply because students are not themselves perfectly mobile, while universities will drop UAIs only so far to attract students. This means that at the end of the process there are always some vacancies in some institutions one one side, some unplaced eligible students on the other.

Prior to the UAI system, students had to apply individually to their institution(s) of choice. In this sense, there is no doubt that the UAI system has made things easier for students. However, it has also introduced the distortions and pressures I discussed in my previous posts.

One specific issue that I mentioned in my last post was our surprise at the continued importance of the UAI for people who had already completed part of their degree and wished to switch courses and especially institutions. The specific trigger case was Sydney University with its 50/50 weighting between UAI and first year results. We have since learned that the University of NSW has a 75/25 weighting.

This came as a surprise to us because in the old pre-UAI world weight was placed upon successful completion of first year because it proved that you could in fact do tertiary studies, something that could not be assumed just from success in final school exams.

We should not have been surprised. Students wishing to switch compete against year 12 students, so there is an argument for ensuring at least some equivalence. However, the difficulty for students and parents is that it introduces yet a further degree of complexity into an already complicated process.

The process appears to work this way.

Students wishing to switch institutions apply to UAC as post year 12 students. Each university sets their own rules, hence the variation in weighting between UNSW and Sydney. UAC then somehow takes the student's university results and turns them into a UAI equivalent index, allowing the old UAI and the university results to be combined into a new UAI equivalent so that the transferring student can be compared with the year 12 cohort.

All this sounds fair and equitable. However, there are some very real problems.

To begin with, no one seems able to tell us - perhaps a reader can - just how the university study component is turned into an index number for ranking purposes across grades, courses and institutions. So we have another black box uncertainty.

The second problem is the nature of the equivalence between the HSC/UAI ranking and the University results.

Leave aside issues about comparisons of UAIs between years, a student already at university may miss out if the university result pulls the UAI down. Take the case of a student who already has the required entry level UAI for the course but has been on a gap year. That student gets in. The same student who has been at university for a year, passed everything but gets an index number lower than the UAI may miss out.

Advice from the University of NSW is that students wishing to switch courses should obtain average distinction to ensure that they can switch. That's fine, but marks are affected by all sorts of things.

For example, it appears that in at least some universities in some courses the bell curve approach is applied. The effect of this, to one quote university lecturer involved, is to limit the number of higher results independent of the absolute quality of students and their results. Further, those wishing to switch often do so because they realise that they have made the wrong choice, something that may affect their results to some degree.

In all this, I can see only one class of student who might clearly benefit from the system. This is a student who know exactly what they want to do but who falls a little short in the UAI stakes. That student may accept another course then work like absolute blazes ignoring all else to get high enough marks at university to increase his/her average index.

Previous Posts in this Series

• Gripes about Australian Education - 1
• Gripes about Australian Education - 2

Gripes About Australian Education - 2

In my last post I looked at some of the rigidities, difficulties and pressures created in NSW by the HSC/UAI combination, by the need for schools, parents and kids to try to manage the process to get the best numeric outcome.

One of the difficulties here lies in the uncertainties associated with the process. In the words, of my eldest, how was I to know that English would be my best subject?

This was a subject that Helen struggled in to some degree, a subject where we arranged some external tutoring, a subject where her place in class was lower than in most other subjects. Then come the HSC her exam mark was far better than expected, miles in front of the raw school assessment, with the assessment itself being scaled up by a substantial margin.

Conversely, drama was one of Helen's favourite subjects and one she was good at. Unexpectedly, in drama the exam mark was lower than expected, with the no scaling up of school assessment.

I had attended all of the class and individual performances and did not understand this result. I still do not, even after hours spent analysing the official data.

The best I can work out is that the examiners must have marked the school very hard in the performance segment of the examination, bringing the overall exam mark down. Since, as seems to be the custom in many schools, the school itself had marked the assessment tasks hard, the combined effect was negative.

Whatever the reasons, the outcome affected Helen's UAI since she had chosen to do just ten subjects to allow her to also concentrate on other things including her role as prefect. Should we have discouraged her from pursuing the prefect position and then investing so much time in it? I don't think so, because she did blossom in the role. But I can understand why some parents do discourage their children's extra-curricular activities.

Under the NSW/ACT system students have to nominate their university/subject choices. In doing so, they are advised to make a number of prioritised choices. Universities then make offers based on student UAIs.

For most students, the process of selecting universities/subjects can be complex. In some cases, students know exactly what they want to do. However, in most cases they are not certain and go through something of a search process.

I watched all this with interest in the case of Helen and her friends, am now watching the same process with Clare and her friends, some of whom did the HSC this year.

The starting point is just which university you might get into and in which subjects, given your expected UAI.

Unlike the US where students consider universities across the country, Sydney students are almost entirely stay at home. This is partly a matter of culture, increasingly a matter of economics. As the costs of university education increase, the added costs of living away from home become a greater burden. So most Sydney students look first at local institutions. Here the combination of subject choice with expected UAI narrows the field.

Other factors then come into play. These include travel time, where friends are going and the prestige and culture of the institution itself.

Because Sydney University is still seen as a university, that institution attracts students who still see a university education in broader terms as compared to the narrower vocational focus. Conversely, UTS is less attractive to those seeking a broader university experience, while the University of New South Wales suffers because the large number of overseas students is seen as adversely affecting campus life. For Eastern Suburbs' kids, the group I know best, Macquarie and Western Sydney are just too far away, while Western Sydney also suffers from lack of prestige.

At the end of the day, it all depends upon just what offers you get. In Helen's case she wanted to do business studies as a first choice with Sydney and UTS as her preferred institutions. The business studies choice dictated the final outcome.

I actually do not understand quite why current students have such a strong preference for commerce or business studies, although that is a matter for another post. In any event, that preference means that UAI's for commerce/business studies can be quite high. In Helen's case, her UAI would have allowed her to do Arts at Sydney, but in terms of her preferred subject choice the only business studies option was UTS Kuring-gai.

Students make their institution and subject choices based on the best information available to them at the time. A considerable number, perhaps as many as a third based just on the sample I know, find their initial choices unsatisfactory.

The reasons for this vary. In some cases, they simply find that they prefer a different subject mix. In other cases, they find the teaching unsatisfactory. Bright students who have done advanced work at school may find initial subject content boringly elementary. A significant proportion are disappointed with campus life at the institution of choice.

Helen is probably a fairly typical case.

She found that she was interested in a broader range of subjects, the long travel times to Kuring-gai became a burden, while participation in campus life proved difficult at such distance. Given her interests and friends, she found herself working at one geographic point, studying at a second point, playing netball with a University of NSW team as a way of continuing sport with friends, organising a drama performance at Sydney University with a friend there.

In these circumstances students need to consider choosing new subjects or even new institutions. However, a new set of institutional rigidities now come in. Again, we can take Helen as a case study.

At school she was told not to worry too much, that there were fourteen different ways of achieving the same thing. Her parents repeated this message based on our own experience. Start now and you can always switch later. Unfortunately, this advice is at best only partially correct.

In Helen's case, she presently wants to maintain a business studies major, she would like to do honours although this has still to be defined, she would like to consider doing some new subjects in arts, politics and economics, and she would like to play a more active role in campus life in the same way that she did at school. So she needs to look at new course options, possibly a new university, recognising that this may add an extra year to the degree.

To this end, she looked again at Sydney University. This is just down the road, she had played water polo for a Sydney University team, she has friends there, she and a friend are mounting a SUDS sponsored drama performance in February. In all, she already knows the University pretty well. However, Sydney University is still just not on. The reasons are instructive.

1. She still cannot get into either commerce or economics because of the way they do the assessments. To shift at the end of first year, the University rules provide for a 50:50 weighting between the previous UAI and the first year university results. Her credit average UTS first year results cannot bridge the gap between her UAI and the commerce and economics entry UAI requirements. There is no provision to take other things into account.

2. As before, she can get into Arts. However, here she faces two distinct problems.

• The first is that, based on the advice from the University, it is highly unlikely that she will later be able to shift to either commerce or economics should she want to no matter how good her results. So if she goes to Sydney, she is stuck in Arts.
• This brings up the second problem, the rigidity in SU course structures. When my wife did her degree at Sydney, she and a friend did almost identical subjects, with one graduating with honours in Political Economy, the second honours in Arts. This type of flexibility is apparently no longer possible. Many of the subjects that Helen is interested in, economics and government relations are examples, are not in Arts. This creates real longer term problems when it comes to considering possible majors and honour's year.

So now it's all back to the drawing board while we reconsider options. Should she stay at UTS perhaps trying to shift to the city campus, accepting the perceived UTS limitations? Should she move to Sydney, accepting the severe limitations there? Should she consider other alternatives such as combined economics/arts at NSW, assuming that she can get in?

There are a number of lessons in this story from a parent's perspective.

The first is the continued importance of the broader university experience for at least some students. I see this when I look at Pippa doing medicine at Newcastle who has apparently been having a magnificent time or Rachel at Sydney with her involvement in student activities. Conversely, I also see it in Helen with her disappointment at UTS. There is more to life than the narrowly vocational.

The second is the extent to which students are disappointed by their initial institution/subject choices. This appears to be far higher than I had realised, so the need for flexibility has to be factored into planning.

This leads me to my third point, the importance of institutional rigidities, including the continuing dead hand of the UAI, in limiting student choice. Students and parents must factor this into initial choices. What is the full range of course options at any institution? How easy is it to switch courses? How easy is it to switch universities? Should we consider the non-Sydney option?

There is also a lesson in all this for the Sydney universities themselves and especially the University of Sydney.

You cannot assume that just because you are a member of the gang of eight, have a large immediate local marketplace and an apparently strong market position, that your market position is unassailable. If you cannot offer good teaching, a rich student experience and substantial student flexibility, then you become just another commodity supplier.

Gripes about Australian Education - 1

Note to readers: This is the first of two posts setting out some of my gripes with the current Australian education system. While I was writing the first part, one of youngest's friends and her mum called in. Like Clare, the friend will do the New South Wales Higher School Certificate this year. The friend's mum was not aware of some of the things I had found out re student choice. So it may be that this post will actually be helpful to some, not just a gripe.

Yesterday I talked among other things about our visit to the Sydney University Open Day.

Perhaps I am getting too old fashioned, but since then I have found my concerns about the way our education system is evolving niggling away at my mind like an annoying mental itch. I just feel so sad for many of our kids. I now feel the need to scratch that itch, looking especially at the NSW system since this is the one I know best.

I think that the core of my concern lies in the combination of two things.

The first is the growing confusion between training and education.

I have done a lot of training and I think that I am pretty good at it. Training is about competence, the capacity to do. When I train, my objective is to give people the knowledge and skills they need to do particular things as defined in the course objectives.

I see education as very different. Here the core focus is or should be on teaching people to think, to learn, to analyse, to understand, to see new connections and to create new knowledge. Yes, education does involve the acquisition of both specific knowledge and skills, but this is only part of the process.

Today, this distinction between the two has become very confused. One effect at university level is that the training focus on the capacity to do has come to dominate the education focus on the capacity to think. This flows through into every aspect of university education.

This confusion links to the second element in my core concern, the way in which we have created institutional straight jackets that narrow what is acceptable and reduce options while also taking the fun out of education. In turn, these link to the current obsession with quantification and measurement, an obsession whose development I traced in previous posts (here and here).

The straight jacket starts with the University Admission Index.

While some universities do have alternative admission systems (half of the lucky 2006 HSC class at Barraba Central School had university admission in advance of the HSC), the UAI remains the main mechanism determining admission to particular universities and particular courses within those universities in NSW and the ACT. Given the importance of the UAI, ways of maximising the value of that index are an important concern for schools, students and parents from the start of year 11.

The UAI results are based on the Higher School Certificate results. In turn, these results are based on a 50:50 split between school based continuous assessment and exam results, with a scaling system applied to the assessment results to ensure uniform application across the state.

At student level, HSC subject selection for those wishing to go to university is a complex process designed to maximise UAI. Get it wrong, and you may not be able to enter the university or do the subjects of choice. Student interest in particular subjects is there, but it is a secondary issue to the main game.

The continuous assessment process itself introduces another complexity. Whatever the arguments about the old exam based system and the pressures it created, those pressures are nothing compared to continuous assessment pressures.

To ensure a good UAI, students must maintain the required level in the on-going assessment tasks. Get a few of the early tasks wrong and your target UAI may go out the window well in advance of the final exams themselves. There is a further problem. The assessment tasks themselves take time for both students and teachers, reducing the time available for teaching and learning.

In all these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that there should be so many students, my own daughters included, who feel the need for special tutoring outside school to build their strength in weaker subjects.

The HSC and UAI results themselves create new pressures.

I think that it is still generally accepted that education is more than narrowly defined academic results. I think, too, that there is a degree of acceptance that the HSC and following UAI outcomes are a far from perfect predictor of university results, even less so of longer term success. Yet the reality is that none of this matters.

At school level, the HSC results provide the base for the creation of league tables comparing school performance. Schools talk about broader education, but they boast about or put the best spin they can on HSC outcomes.

Parents are just as bad. We read the published HSC results avidly. When, as happened in my eldest's year, an apparently good class fails to get a single band six (the top band) with this outcome adversely affecting subsequent UAIs, the outcome becomes a matter of agitated debate.

At university level, the publication of UAI cut-offs - a simple measure of demand for individual courses at individual universities - creates another league table. Students and parents use these to guide their choices for the next year, with a bias towards higher UAI universities.

The fact that a University like New England gets consistently good student outcomes but has lower entry UAIs because of the smaller student pool available to it as compared to, say, Sydney University gets lost in the static.

In all this, the real problem lies at the student level. Now this is where life gets a bit complicated because I am expressing opinions. However, all my views can be refuted with evidence.

I will deal with this in my next post.

One of those nothing days

Today has been one of those nothing days. You know, a day where one begins with lots of plans, things to do, but then somehow come to day's end with most things undone.

The day began well enough.

As on most days I got up early. The early morning is usually my most productive time because things are quiet without external distractions.

As always, I checked the overnight blog stats to see what people had been looking at. I still find this interesting because it indicates topics that I might want to follow up. This is most important for my special purpose blogs such as managing the professional services firm where I am trying to target people's needs. By contrast, on this blog I just go with my personal interests.

I then checked my emails, responded to comments on the blogs, then did a quick blog tour. This was productive, leading to a story on professionals and management. I then started processing back emails.

So far so good. But then the wheels seemed to come off. Wednesday is usually a disrupted day anyway because the cleaners come in. Before they can clean I have to at least ensure that the house is tidy. I was doing that when eldest (school and university holidays are still on) told me that the cleaners were coming tomorrow. Now this may sound silly, but it actually disrupted things.

Back to emails and some urgent outstandings, get the girls lunch, then took Helen to the Sydney University open day because she was thinking of the possibility of moving to Sydney. This was a most unsatisfying visit. She can move, but she can only do a limited range of courses because, at least as I saw it, of a remarkably rigid school structure. So if she moves she will have to hope to find a way to work round this once there, a significant risk. Not a happy daughter or Dad.

The whole thing left me wondering, again, just what we have done to our universities. If we had the money, and if Helen who is a home girl would agree, I would push her in the direction of New England where I know that she can do the things she wants to do while also enjoying university life. Still, that's not practical just at present.

Back home now completely disrupted with an urgent and still untouched to do list but feeling the need to complain. Hence this post. I now have to start fixing things for tea and then take Helen to baby sitting, part of the HB income earning program. Hopefully I can get back to things later.

Demography - Australian historical population data

For those of us interested in Australia's past, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a publication providing historical population data back to 1788.

Hicks and Dreyfus

Photos: David Hicks, left. The degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, right.

In my last post I compared the Hicks' case with that of Alfred Dreyfus. In response Lexcen wrote:

"Jim, I fail to see the similarity between Dreyfus and Hicks. If you are referring to "injustice" then you might as well compare Hicks to Billy Budd. Personally, I would like Hicks to be judged under Sharia Law, since he chose to fight with the Taliban."

I know that Lexcen's views are shared by many Australians. I thought therefore that I should provide more information, then leave it to people to make up their own minds. Before doing so, let me make the implied linkage as I see it between the two cases quite explicit.

As I see it, Alfred Dreyfus was charged on flimsy evidence. He was then condemned through a very rushed and flawed military justice process distorted by fixed positions using evidence and processes that would not have been acceptable in any civil court. With people so dug in, it took many years for the injustice to be corrected.

Now people have to make up their own minds on this issue. But I thought that it might be helpful if I provided links to some of the evidence.

1. David Hicks was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2001.

2. The Australian Government has consistently stated that David Hicks has not broken any Australian law as it existed at the time. While some have argued that our law would in fact allow him to be tried in Australia, I have little choice as a non-lawyer but to accept the Government position. Since Hicks has not committed any Australian crime, then if he is to be tried it must be under US law.

3. The US announced charges against Hicks in June 2004. The statement of charge can be found here. These charges were described at the time in an Age editorial as weak. On a point of detail, The Washington Post noted that at the time that Hicks was alleged to have spied on the US and British embassies in the Afghan capital neither operated an embassy in the Afghan capital. A spokesman for the military tribunals was quoted as saying that the reference was to buildings once used as embassies and still occupied, when Hicks allegedly spied on them, by employees of the United States and Britain.

4. I struggled with the charges. No evidence has been adduced by anyone that Hicks was involved in actions that directly threatened life or involved military action against the allies. The charges all relate to association. Further, there is no direct linking in the charges to any US laws.

5. The military commission process then collapsed in the face of legal challenges and has only just been reinstated. New charges will need to be laid.

6. The Australian Government has consistently attacked David Hicks in a way that would be unacceptable had Hicks been on trial in Australia. In December 2006 the Law Council of Australia said in part:

The Federal Government’s approach towards Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks has been characterised by complacency, inaction and neglect.

Law Council President Tim Bugg said, “We would have preferred to release a chronology of what the Government has done to assist one of its citizens who is being held without charge. However, that would have been a very short chronology indeed.”

“Instead we are left with a trail of comments which show that the Government was eager to brand Hicks guilty from the moment of his arrest; complacent in accepting unsupported assurances from the US authorities about his treatment and trial; deceptive in claiming Hicks was the cause of extensive delays in the military commission process; and wrong in its defence of and support for every version of a clearly flawed trial process.”

In making its statement, the Council also released a detailed collection of remarks by Government ministers over the last five years. This can be downloaded from the above link.

7. In the latest development, Brigadier McDade, the woman appointed the nation's first director of military prosecutions to the new Australian Military Court has described the treatment of David Hicks as "abominable." The report continues:

Asked about the treatment of Mr Hicks, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years and is not currently charged with any offences, she did not hesitate. "Abominable," she said. "Quite frankly, I think it's wrong. I don't care what he's done or alleged to have done. I think he's entitled to a trial and a fair one and he is entitled to be charged and dealt with as quickly as is possible. As is anybody."

8. Even Prime Minister, John Howard appears to be having doubts with his remark that "the acceptability of him being kept in custody diminishes by the day".

Now I accept that I may be wrong in all this, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that David Hicks has been the victim of a travesty of justice.

David Hicks, the Australian Dreyfus

Cartoon

Note to readers who have seen this post twice. In preparing I had to break and hit publish instead of save. This makes no difference to the core message, just a little to the length.

All right, Neil, I'll play too on this one!

When I was a kid I read the story of Alfred Dreyfus and cried. How could a society do this to someone?

I have watched David Hicks. When he was interned, I accepted the need, if with reluctance. As time passed, I have worried more and more. Now Hicks has become Australia's Dreyfus.

I am not suggesting that David and Alfred are exactly equivalent. After a certain point that ceases to matter. Now we have an Australian citizen who has no one at Australian official level to look after him, who seems destined to spend an indefinite time in jail regardless of trial.

I have heard the Australian PM and the Minister imply that this is Hick's own fault for appealing aspects of the process. This is a dangerous argument because it implies that an accused should accept process regardless of validity.

The Government, I think, still hopes in all this that the Hicks matter may proceed to successful trial now that Congress has passed new legislation. But the problem for the Government is that after a certain period justice delayed becomes so clearly justice denied that the actual trial results become almost irrelevant.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary (and vague references to security reports do not constitute evidence), I think that we have been at this point for some time.

Africa, Demography and Productivity Change - a miscellany

This is another of those aide memoire posts.

Africa along with South America are two continents that I have not visited. I do monitor African development, South America less so

I was reminded of this by a post on Demography Matters looking at the latest Nigerian census results. Why does this matter?

On 23 November I published a post looking at Australia in its region, pointing to linkages between changing GDP, populations and Australian trade policy. This post focused especially on Australia in an Asia-Pacific context.

The post on Demography Matters reminded me of the need to take Africa into account. The post notes in part that Nigeria's population has been growing at an annual rate of 3.2 percent and now stands at just over 140 million, a 63 percent increase in 15 years.

I have not properly checked the African population figures. However, one estimate suggests that the number living in sub-Saharan Africa will rise from the current level of around 752 million to 1.7 billion people by 2050, or from 12 to 20 per cent of the world's population. These are sub-Saharan numbers only - in 1998 a further 173 million lived in the North African countries.

To put these numbers in perspective, by 2050 India is projected to grow to 1.81 billion, China to 1.42 billion. So what happens in Africa is going to be important to Australia.

The Demography Matters Nigeria post raised another issue that had been in my mind.

The world's population is projected to grow from 6 528.1 million today to 9 404.3 million in 2050. In 2050 my daughters will be 61 and 63 respectively, so they will (God willing) be there.

Continued action is clearly needed to rein in population growth if we are to feed, cloth, educate, employ and house this population. Now here we have a conflict between the need at national level to increase birth rates in certain countries facing aging populations and actual population decline in some cases (this is already a significant public policy issue in those countries) and the broader need to control population growth.

Another issue raised by the Demography Matters post in question is the nature of the interface between population change and economic growth. Let me put this very crudely and without argument in an Australian context.

Productivity growth is a key requirement to income growth in those countries like Australia where existing resources (people, land, capital) are already reasonably fully utilised.

Australia had relatively low productivity growth during the fifties and sixties, so we slipped in the world per capita income rankings. Low productivity growth was attributed to structural inefficiencies within the economy and especially those associated with tariff protection.

Over the last thirty years we have experienced much higher productivity growth, leading to significant increases in average per capita incomes. Conventional wisdom attributes this to removal of structural impediments. While I have no doubt that removal of structural impediments was important, I am now beginning to wonder about the accuracy of the conventional wisdom.

In an earlier note I pointed to some of the problems with productivity measurements. In this context, to what extent is the increase in productivity simply a demographic dividend independent of the impacts of structural change?

I don't have time to try to argue this now. I am simply getting the point down.

New Year's Wishes

As we track into 2007, I just wanted to wish you all a happy new year and to thank you for your support or for just visiting.

Way back on 27 September in conversations, I reported on the pleasure that this blog had given me. This remains true 64 posts later, although there have been a couple of times I have felt very stale, where it has been a very real effort to post.

Sometimes with bloggers it all becomes just too much. Here I have noticed the expiry of BiblioBillaBong with a degree of sadness because it was a blog I visited.

When I wrote conversations back in September my focus was on my regular visitors, those blogs I visited regularly. Since then I have acquired some site stats. This showed me that I while I did have regular visitors, search engine traffic was far more important than I realised. To what extent, then, should I try to take this into account?

To some degree I have done this by trying to give links in stories, by running some shorter stories on particular topics that simply provide an entry point. But my main focus remains on that group of regular readers that form this blog's very small community.

I no longer have a problem in finding things to write about. Now my problem is the opposite. Too many topics.

When I look at the pattern of posts, the blog has evolved from a post every couple of days to one nearly every day, several on some days. Even then I have things I had meant to say but did not.

Over at Ninglun's (Neil's) blog, I see that he has been making his new year's blogging resolutions.

One of those is to write less. Now this is a resolution I am not sure about, nor am I absolutely sure about his comments on focus, limiting himself, although I do agree that with so many blogs it may not matter if one does not say something. I have watched the growth of Neil's blog this year with admiration. For better or worse, he has created a blog (a monster on his back he might sometimes feel) that people do check on a daily basis, some like me several times a day!

When it comes to voting for the best NSW blog, I know where I am voting! Maybe a few shorter posts, a little limitation, just to ease the load.

For my part, I have made three but only three new year's blogging resolutions:

1. Contribute more to other people's blogs. I did this a lot to begin with, then it dropped off because I was too busy writing myself. Conversation is conversation, not parallel but completely separate streams. Here I note that Lexcen has begun putting up some rather nice posts on Australian heroes.
2. More short posts just to balance my longer posts while also making things a little easier for me.
3. Focus a proportion of my posts on previous posts to ensure follow up and help build depth.

I have made no resolution in regard to actions to increase readership. Increased readership might be nice, but that's not my primary aim on this blog.

End 2006 Personal Indulgence

This end year post is pure personal indulgence. If I can make it work within the blogger format, I wanted to share a few photos with you from recent years in no particular order.

Photo: Helen holds the floor. Year 11 camp 2004. Note the sunglasses as hair band. One of the problems today in a more complex and risk averse society is to give young people the type of experiences that their parents took for granted. School camps have become one way of doing this. I write a lot on this blog about the nature and process of change. When I look at Helen's friends from school, a remarkably powerful group of young women, I have no fear for the future.

Photo: Sis indulging. Harry's Bar, Venice January 2005. This is one of Venice's most famous expatriate bars. The girls loved Europe. Australia's European heritage remains strong as one national thread.

Photo: Clare's birthday 2006, four friends, six ethnic ancestries, one country. Clare's friends span all cultures and ethnic groups, and that's important as we track into Australia's future. While very different from Helen's friends, they are also a remarkable group of young women.




Photo: i luv this picasso. Paris, December 2004. Both girls, but especially Clare who loves art, thought that Picasso Museum was the one of the Paris highlights.



Colwell Bush birthday party 2005. Opening the gate. The impact of the drought can be seen. Australia will change, but it is very important to me inthe midst of change that my daughters retain some links to their country heritage. We -Belshaws and Colwells - were astonished to discover at a school function that there was a strong family connection between the two families.

Colwell Bush birthday party 2005. Raging on. I loved the country social functions in and around Armidale - Picnic races, woolshed dances, B&S's, Recovery Parties etc. It's interesting how things replicate themselves. One of Clare's friends, a lassie who originally came from from Cambodia, is presently going out with a country boy who is a boarder at my old school in Armidale.



Denise and I ready to go out to dinner in Rome January 2005. Dee is wearing her new leather jacket, I my new Italian shirt and tie. The Italians really do make good clothes! I come from the generation that first discovered Asia. I was 34 before visiting the UK and Europe for the first time, and then was surprised at the degree of resonance. Australia is an incredibly lucky country because of the way we link and can access so many different traditions.

Science and Political Correctness

One of the reasons why I read blogs such John Quiggin's on one side, Tim Blair's on the other, is that they give me very different perspectives on similar topics.

There has been a lot of debate about the Stern Report on climate change. Initially the report swept all before it, then doubts were raised about the assumptions built into the report. Here John Quiggin who is generally sympathetic but not uncritical of Stern's arguments makes the point that the single most critical assumption in the report is the discount rate used.

Just to explain.

With something like climate change, we are dealing with future affects. If we are to reduce these, we need to spend money now. In doing so, we trade off future reduced costs associated with climate change (the benefits) for costs now (the spend required to reduce future costs). So we have a stream of costs and benefits (reduced costs) spread over time.

Now a dollar in hand today is worth more than a dollar in the future. You can test this quite simply. If I give you a choice between getting, say, $800 now and $1,000 in fifteen year's time you may well opt for the $800 now. The discount rate is the rate required to bring the future and present amount into balance so that you are neutral between the two.

Now what all this means in the case of Stern is that he used a low discount rate, essentially arguing that present generations need to take the needs of future generations into account. As you increase the discount rate, the economic benefits of present actions fall away until ultimately the equation becomes negative. So those who attack Stern focus on the discount rate.

My point in all this is that before you can either attack or defend Stern's report, you have to look at the assumptions used.

On the other side of the ledger, Tim Blair is a climate change sceptic. This means that he will dig up material to support his position. But just because he is a sceptic does not of itself invalidate the material he presents.

Now here Tim presents a story on the concerns of oceanographer and climatologist Kevin Vranes on aspects of the climate change debate. Tim puts his own slant on the Vrane's views, but also provides a link to Vrane's post on a science blog.

The post is worth reading. For the moment I simply note that one of Vrane's concerns is, in my words, the way in which climate change has become so entrenched as a dominant popular view that scientists who want to express or discuss alternative views on issues such as the speed of the process fear to do so.

For what it's worth, my own view on climate change is that the growth in "green house" gases in the atmosphere is causing longer term climatic change and that's a problem that worries me. However, I also feel that the exact scale and direction of the process is still uncertain, that individual events such as the current drought in South East Australia probably have little to do with climate change.

I make this point only so that you know my own opinion on the climate change issue. My interest in this post is broader, the way in which dominant paradigms become so politically correct that they distort discussion.

Many years ago I read Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolution.

Kuhn, who brought the word paradigm itself into prominence, argued that major scientific change occurred via a stepped process. Looking at the history of science, he suggested that the dominant scientific view - the dominant paradigm - held the high ground, squeezing alternative views out.

Over time, evidence accumulated that could not be explained by the dominant paradigm. Initially, this was rejected, excluded because it did not fit with the prevailing view. Then at a critical shift point the excluded evidence suddenly reached critical mass. The old paradigm was suddenly swept away, replaced by a new dominant view.

I found Kuhn's arguments persuasive, and indeed if you look at my writing on my blogs you will see his influence in things like my discussion of the 1970s as a critical shift decade, my use of the words a 'a far country' to describe the pre 1970s world, my attempt to trace the fall of previously dominant Australian social, cultural and historical paradigms, my very use of the word paradigm itself.

The problem with revolutions is that in sweeping away the past, they sweep away good with bad, stopping discussion on alternative views. Now here in science today there is a particular problem, one that makes me very cautious sometimes about accepting so called scientific evidence. That problem lies in the nature of the interface between science, industry and government.

Kuhn wrote in and of a world in which science was a unique domain. Even when science itself was emerging from natural philosophy, it was an activity that could be thought of as the domain of those with a particular interest in the subject matter.

There have always been interfaces between science and the broader human world. That world with its changing interests and views has always affected scientific study. Nevertheless, when Kuhn spoke of scientific revolutions his focus was on science and scientists, on the way that the dominant paradigm and its supporters attempted to maintain their position until finally swept away.

Today, the position is a little different.

Technology has risen to rival science. Within science, the focus is on applied science. Modern science requires money, and that comes from government and industry. Patents are replacing papers as a publish or perish measure, itself a new concept. Science is seen as a tool providing results for use by government or industry. All this affects scientific thought.

Take climate change as an example. Whole scientific areas such as climatology or oceanography now depend significantly on climate change related funding. The results from that research are built into public policy and popular debate. Popular opinion, Government policy, the views and interests of individual scientists have come together to establish climate change as a new dominant paradigm.

This is not necessarily wrong, but it becomes very dangerous if, as Vrane suggests, it is squeezing out alternative views and discussions within the scientific community itself.

This problem is not in fact new, but is a feature of the late 19th and twentieth century, the period when government and industry throughout the world became actively involved in science.

We can see the process clearly in Nazi Germany. There the Nazi's conscripted science to the services of State and Party to the detriment of science and scientists.

We can see the same process in Australia, if in a more benign fashion.

I grew up in the 1950s. Dairy products were seen as good for you. Then, suddenly, we were told that dairy products were bad for you in a sustained campaign that ran for years. This campaign and to a degree the associated scientific research were organised by the margarine industry trying to break quota limitations on margarine production protecting the dairy industry. Elements of the campaign were picked up be Governments, doctors and health experts. Finally, sales of diary products went into sharp decline.

The problem with all this is that the case as presented and as finally accepted was flawed. We now know that the margarine produced at the time and sold as a health product had its own health problems. The decline in calcium intake flowing from the decline in the consumption of dairy products created bone problems. Today, dairy is back.

Something similar happened with red meat.

Even where the science as presented may have been right, there were sometimes unexpected side effects.

Goitre, the swelling of the thyroid gland, was a major Australian problem because of iodine deficiency. This was solved through iodised salt. The campaign to reduce salt in the diet was successful but, in combination with fashion changes towards the type of salt used, reduced iodine intake. Goitre, previously the domain of poor countries, is back.

Now, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, the basic diet of the 1950s as promoted by nutritionists since at least the 1930s is itself back. This provided for three meals a day, small portions, a balance between food groups, limited snacks between meals, a piece of fruit a day and so on.

I stand to be corrected, but it seems to me that a family that ignored all the health and diet discussions over the last fifty years and just on kept on eating the diet as recommended in the 1950s would have been better off in health terms.

So what is the ordinary person to do in all this?

To some degree, we all have to accept the advice of specialists. The only thing that I can suggest is to exercise a degree of caution in accepting things presented by technology, science, and especially Government and industry as infallible truths. Far too often they are not.