Agriculture, the environment and Australia's future

During the week the World Wide Fund for Nature released a report suggesting that it took nearly eight hectares of land to maintain the lifestyle of each Australian, up from nearly seven hectares in 2006.

At the same time in Food Shortages In Australia Thanks To Anti-Farmer Free Trade and Environmental Policies, Steve Truman suggested that Australia might become a net food importer within forty years. We presently feed two people globally for every Australian. There is an error in Steve's maths re the rate of population increase, but it does not affect his argument.

In August, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released data showing that Gross Farm Product (the valued added in agriculture) in NSW in 2006-2007 had fallen to $3.8 billion, just 1.1 per cent of Gross State Product.

We lock increasing areas up in National Parks, then cannot find the money to manage them properly, creating significant problems. We impose wholesale restrictions on land use, restrictions that fail to take varying local conditions into account and that farmers have then to manage around.

Governments are presently buying back water licenses. This is equivalent to putting a bull-dozer through some local communities. Our population concentrates in metro centres and on the coastal strip, leaving country communities that have water and existing infrastructure drained of people.

Regional infrastructure built up over generations has declined to the point that services for many regional communities are worse than they were sixty years ago. This has created a vicious cycle. We have almost painstakingly created islands of poverty that stretch from some outer metro areas through parts of the coastal strip into the inland.

Our policies are developed at a macro level, driven on one side by concepts of efficiency and measurement, on the other by ad-hoc responses to particular crises and perceived need. We live in an issues driven society in which cause based groups have come increasingly to dominate the policy and political debate.

I know that this must sound like something of a diatribe. One of my key frustrations is that, at least as I see it, the information required to make informed judgements is either not there or hard to find. I also get cranky at what I perceive to be an anti-rural bias in current thinking.

Back in October 2006, I wrote:

Australia faces a serious drought, perhaps the worst on record. Whether this drought is simply a bad drought or a sign of global warming is an important issue. But in the conversation I am talking, about discussion went from drought to water to the need to phase out primary production dependent upon water, especially irrigation crops. Part of the argument was couched in terms of the need for the metro cities to have access to more water, part in terms of the need for the environment to have more water, part on the belief that farming and grazing was no longer viable in many parts of Australia.

This led me to re-check the trade statistics, something that I had not done for a while. These suggested that our export dependance on a small number of mining and agricultural products had in fact increased.

For a long time our mainly urban population has been buying more from overseas than we sell. The gap has been met through overseas private borrowing. This is not sustainable in the longer term.

We have to either increase our saving rate or, alternatively, find new things to sell internationally. If we lose our coal and agricultural exports, the position becomes much worse. Should Steve Truman's gloomy prognostication that Australia may become a net food importer prove correct, then we may find ourselves in diabolical trouble, as will those in other countries that we presently feed.

I am actually far more positive than Steve. However, I am worried about our tendency to assume that we can have our cake and eat it too, about our desire for simple solutions.

Take, as one example, the suggestion that we should reduce our population increase by cutting back on migration.

If we cut our migrant intake to zero, and I doubt that this is practical, the growing emigration of younger Australians could well offset the natural increase, leading to a stable or even declining population. However, in this event issues with population aging will bite very quickly.

My personal view in all this is that we need something of a paradigm shift in our thinking, that we need to ask new questions. If we keep on as we are, Australia is likely to find itself caught between a rock and a very hard place within twenty years.

Reflections on the call for bloggers to unite in support of refugees

Tikno drew my attention to the suggestion from Bloggers Unite that bloggers from around the world might combine on 10 November to draw attention to the plight of refugees, as well as to the work of Refugees United in helping re-unite separated families.

My problem in thinking about this was simply to find something useful that I might say. Sometimes the problems seem so great, the solutions so distant, that it all becomes just too difficult.

Natural calamities can force people to flee. More often, it is man's inhumanity to man. Refugees are a reflection of the dark side of the human spirit that still dogs us and may ultimately destroy us.

Yet despite all the problems, I think that humanity has actually made progress at two levels.

At the first level, we are simply better at handling natural calamities. This may sound hard to believe, but I think that it's clearly true. If you look back into the past, famines and other natural disasters went un-checked, even un-noticed.

At a second level, we may not be able to remove the dark side of the human spirit, but we have been slowly introducing mechanisms to at least exercise a measure of control over it. The evolution of the international structures created in the chaos that followed the end of the Second World may have been slow and imperfect, but there has been progress.

I make the point about progress because it counters our human tendency to give up in the face of what seem to be continuing insuperable difficulties.

From a purely Australian perspective, I also think it helpful to remember just how important refugees have been to the development of this country. While most Australians don't think of it in these terms, nearly every Australian has a refugee somewhere in their lineage, or at least knows a present or past refugee.

A very large number of Australians of Irish ancestry have one or more ancestors who were forced to leave Ireland by the potato famine when many Irish simply starved to death. Then, at the end of the Second World War as part of the mass migration program, we admitted hundreds of thousands of refugees, displaced persons they were called, from the chaos of Europe.

These are big examples, but over more than two centuries there has in fact been group after group of refugees, decade after decade, each contributing to the evolving texture of Australian life.

In saying this, I am not saying that Australia can simply admit all refugees regardless. We cannot. I am saying that we should remember our own past in forming our views about refugees.

Looking back over this post, I suppose that there are two key messages in it.

The first is the importance of continuing hope that we can and will do better as a species, no matter how hard the problem may appear. The second is the importance of compassion, the need for us as human beings to care for each other.           

Sunday Essay - New Zealand elections 2008

The photo (New Zealand Herald) shows  National Party leader and new New Zealand PM John Key celebrating his election win.

New New Zealand has been much in my mind recently, in part because youngest has been travelling there.

In my last Sunday Essay,  Sunday Essay - the strange case of Australia and New Zealand, I discussed the relationships between Australia and New Zealand.  

Last night I listened to the live election feed on NZ TV. Yes, I know that this makes me something of an election tragic, but I could not help myself.

Youngest rang. It's been very cold in NZ, with horticulturalists including wine growers battling to save their crops using a variety of techniques including mass helicopters - the downdrafts from the rotors were used to force warmer air towards the ground. Clare said that they had to erect their tents in the snow, a painful process because the tips of your fingers become so sensitive.

This was an election that combined new and old in interesting ways.

New Zealand Electoral System

To begin with, the NZ electoral system has its own unique features. There are 120 seats in the single house New Zealand Parliament broken into three groups:

• 62 general electorate seats
• 7   Māori electorate seats
• 51 general list seats     

The general electorate and Māori seats cover geographic areas with members elected on a first past the post voting system. The 51 general list seats are elected by a proportional representation system under which:

• Parties that do not gain any electorate seats receive a proportion of the 51 list seats based on their proportion of the vote so long as the vote exceeds 5 per cent or more of the national list or party vote.
• A party that gains even a single electorate seat does not have to reach the 5 per cent list threshold but instead receives a share of list seats proportional to its vote.

If I understand the system correctly, the dual threshold for list seats means that total seats allocated can exceed 120. In this event, the size of Parliament expands to the degree required to accommodate the overhang.

Each New Zealander has two votes, one electoral plus one party or list vote.

There are some complexities in the whole system that I do not fully understand and have been meaning to find out, but I think that the general description is okay. For example, I assume that the special Māori seats do not count as electoral seats for list purposes, and there are also some rounding issues.

Election Dynamics

This mixed system makes for some fascinating complexities, almost mandating that all New Zealand Governments will be coalition Governments built around the two big parties - National and Labour.

Further, while many Australians assume that New Zealanders are like Australians (at the last census 389,000 Australian residents were in fact born in New Zealand), the two countries are really very different in terms of history, ethnic mix and culture.

Like Australia, New Zealand has been going through a period of rapid change, a process I discussed in a previous post, Pacific Perspective - Pasifika and New Zealand's Future.

New Zealand has been losing people through migration, especially to Australia. At the last Australian census, 389,465 Australian residents were born in New Zealand. The number of Australian residents with one or more parents born in New Zealand is far higher.

The last Australian census also revealed that 93,000 Australian residents classified themselves as Mäori. Given that some  Mäori classified themselves as of New Zealand rather than Mäori ancestry, the actual number of Mäori could be as high as 110,000. After New Zealand, Australia is the world's largest  Mäori country.

New Zealand emigration has been offset by migration, increasingly from Asia and the Pacific Islands.

At the last census, 9.2 per cent of the population was Asian (6.6 per cent at the previous census). Mäori with 14.6 per cent of the population remained the second largest ethnic group, followed by Pacific Islanders at 6.9 per cent, up from 6.5 per cent at the previous census. While England still ranks number one as the birth place for overseas born, the People's Republic of China has now pushed Australia into third place followed by Samoa.

The geographic distribution of these various groups is very different, with migrants especially concentrated in Auckland. 

New Zealand Labour has traditionally drawn its support from industrial areas, from urban voters in the bigger urban centres and from Mäori voters.

The rise of the Mäori Party has eroded Labour's position in the Mäori seats, while the Greens have also eroded Labour's in some areas such as Auckland. While there may be a natural alliance between Labour and Greens in some senses, the presence of first past the post voting in electorate seats means that Labour is the big loser from the Green Presence.

Prior to the election, the opinion polls were showing a clear "it's time" factor after nine years of Labour rule, allowing the Nationals to widen their base.  Further, the polls also suggested that Winston' Peter's New Zealand First Party, a Labour ally, was in a deal of trouble.

Election Results   

The polls were right. The following table drawn from Elections New Zealand shows the preliminary results from election night.

Party	Party Votes	% Votes	Electorate Seats	List Seats	Total Seats
National Party	951,145	45.45	41	18	59
Labour Party	706,666	33.77	21	22	43
Green Party	134,622	6.43	0	8	8
ACT New Zealand	77,843	3.72	1	4	5
Mäori Party	46,894	2.24	5	0	5
Jim Anderton's Progressive	19,536	0.93	1	0	1
United Future	18,629	0.89	1	0	1
New Zealand First Party	88,072	4.21	0	0	0
Total Seats			70	52	122

The Nationals always bolt in front at the start of counting because of the strength of their vote in rural areas that finish counting first. Labour did begin to claw the lead back, but it soon became clear that this would not be enough. In the end, Auckland swung heavily to the Nationals, while the Nationals also won Christchurch for the first time since 1996.

As counting proceeded, it quickly became clear that Winston Peters'  New Zealand First Party was in trouble, unlikely to win an electorate seat, unlikely to get to the 5 per cent threshold required for list seats. And so it proved. This result ended the long career of Winston Peters who first entered the New Zealand Parliament in 1978.

Winston Peters has been one of the most colourful New Zealand politicians. Whatever one's views may be of the man, he has never been dull!

New Zealand First's failure to get to 5 per cent was indicative of a broader feature. Of all the minor parties, only the Greens passed the 5 per cent barrier.

After the Nationals, the big winner was the ACT Party, a right of centre party originally co-founded by Sir Roger Douglas. I dealt with Sir Roger's role as Finance Minister and in the then Labour Government in Changes in Public Administration - the New Zealand Model .

ACT significantly increased its share of the popular vote while retaining its electorate seat, presently giving it five seats. One side effect was the return to Parliament of the founder of  Rogernomics.

ACT's seats in combination with United Future's one, gives the new National Government a very powerful Parliamentary position.            

Saturday Morning Musings - joy of new things, 100,000 visitors, blogging

The photo is from Beijing and shows me trying - very badly, I might add - a tai chi exercise. Some of the locals could not help smiling at this somewhat stooped, tall and ungainly visitor.

I like trying new things, finding out about new things. When I arrive in a new place, the first thing I generally do is to buy a local newspaper. My family laughs at me some times because of the way I seem to localise. I can't help it. It's both a matter of personality and of training.

Once I have read the paper, it usually gives me something to talk about or ask questions about. This adds to my knowledge, so I can ask further questions.

I also try to watch the way people behave, interact. Sometimes people do laugh at me because I might look very silly when I try something, but you will be surprised at how often it leads people to open up.

Mind you, there are some things I cannot do. I cannot haggle properly, something that can be a very real weakness. I am too busy listening to the patter, watching the whole thing.

"You come with me to see warehouse" led down this fascinating Beijing back ally. Having done this, it becomes very hard to refuse to buy anything!

To the Chinese, bargaining is a very stylised sport, but one that I would have to consciously learn how to do. It's on my list!

Part of the reason for this introduction, beyond the indulgence of talking about myself, is to make the point that the on-line media can never replace the print version when it comes to getting a context.

It's partly a matter of content - on-line editions just have less content. But its more the paper as a whole including ads and story snippets. These may be small, simple details of local life, but can also be substantial.

It took me less that twenty four hours in Shanghai, for example, to realise that key elements of Australian economic reporting on China were incorrect, that the high prices being charged for our coal and iron-ore were unsustainable. The clue here were newspaper reports on the adverse flow-on effects of downstream price increases on demand for things like cars.

As it happened, the global financial crisis was just breaking, but even without that it was clear that there was a local economic problem.

Turning to other matters, visitor 100,000 to my blogs arrived sometime in the last twenty four hours. I do not know who she or he was, but welcome!

As Tikno pointed out to me in a comment, my first post was back in March 2006. That's a long time ago. It took me a while to get going in terms of regular posts, longer to sort out where my blogging niches might be. Even now my focus continues to shift in light not just of my own writing, but of the conversations between blogs and in comments.

I am actually very lucky in my commentators. Including my own responses, there have been around 164 comments over the last month, mainly on this blog. I also get a range of emails. While this is not large compared to some blogs, it's still a reasonable number.

Importantly, I find the comments very helpful in informing my own writing and thinking.

It's not only the big comments. A short comment by Lexcen led to a total restructuring of my thinking on Australia's so-called culture wars. I had just written a carefully argued post looking at the differences between the US and Australia,a triggered by a post on another blog.

In writing this, I had accepted the premise that the culture wars were in some way linked to the importation of US ideas from the neo-conservatives and the religious right. Lexen's comments made me investigate the derivation of the Australian culture wars. I found that they were just that, Australian culture wars, uniquely local. It meant that I had to put a line through much that I had written.

In our discussions I sometimes get tired and no longer want to play. Poor Arthur copped this one recently in the discussion about the role of religion in Australia. Arthur has strong views that he expressed cogently but in a civilised fashion. It had been an interesting discussion that had teased out a number of issues.

I ended up putting a line under the discussion when I found that instead of discussing with Arthur I wanted to argue with him and that, as a consequence, my own position was becoming more rigid. As I said at the time, this was totally a matter of my own responses. I just thought it better to give myself a break, time to think further about the issues involved.

Looking back to March 2006, I find that my views are no longer the same. Of course there are continuities, but there are also substantial differences. I think that's a good thing.

In some cases I have simply worked through issues and, in the absence of reason to the contrary, no longer feel obliged to discuss them. In others, the issues have largely lost their relevance. In a very small number of cases, indigenous issues are the key example, I have simply withdrawn from discussion on current issues because I feel that I can no longer make a useful contribution.

This is an area where I have written perhaps 100 posts across several blogs with a special focus on history and public policy. The views I have developed are just too left field, too far outside the frameworks that dominate current discussion, to be relevant. I cannot see this changing. So in this case, I decided to limit future posts to a small number of areas where I feel that I can still make a useful contribution.

In all this, new issues and ideas keep emerging to stimulate and interest me.

Just at present, I am having a fair bit of fun dusting off my economics. Economics has always been part of my personal tool kit, but it is in fact some years since I worked as a full time professional economist.

At a personal level, the current global economic crisis has its nerve wracking aspects. I did not foresee global economic turmoil at the time I decided to change work directions! Still, I am really enjoying not just trying to understand developments, but also in trying to explain issues and challenges in a way that non-economists might understand.

Enough for this morning. I have some gardening to do.

More economics 101 - a non-economist's crib to Australia's economic outlook

One of the difficulties with all the economic data and commentary that constantly swamps us is that it can be quite difficult to fit it it all together, still more difficult to keep a longer term view.

To try to assist here, I have put up two posts on another blog looking at two recent economic statements, one a speech by the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, the second the recently released Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

I have tried to write from a non-economist's perspective. The posts are:

• A non-economist's crib to Australia's economic outlook - part one
• A non-economist's crib to Australia's economic outlook - part two

Australia's Murray-Darling Basin - historical climate perspective

For the geography and climate nuts among us, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has a lot of very useful data presented in maps and graphs.

The Murray-Darling River Basin in the south east of the country is Australia's largest river system and the source of much of the country's irrigated produce. It is also a river system much stressed recently by drought, leading to water wars, disputes over water usage.

The graph shows annual rainfall in the Basin since 1900. You can see the variability in rainfall very clearly. You can also see that the recent drought marked by two years of very low rainfall is not unusual. Total rainfall is now back to average, yet drought persists, as do debates about water usage. Why is this so?

The first reason is that it just takes time for moisture levels to rise in the soil, for dams to fill. Further, while rainfall as a whole is back to average, it is still patchy. The upper reaches of the smaller Darling River system in Northern NSW and Southern Queensland have had a fair bit or rain, including flood events. The bigger Murray River system in Victoria and Southern NSW has not.

Over the last fifty or so years there have been seven really major flood events. I have no doubt that there will be another one in due course. However, this is not the end of the story.

The system as a whole loses some 90 per cent of its water through evaporation and transpiration. Now here another variable comes in, heat. The hotter it is, the more water evaporates. During heavy rainfall periods, more water comes in, but less is lost as well because temperatures are lower.

The graph below shows annual mean temperatures across the basin set against the 1961-1990 average as a base. For some reason, the graph excludes the big drought period in the early 1900s, but that does not affect the immediate point I want to make. To accommodate this, simply add some red bars to the left of the chart.

If you look at the graph, you can see two things.

The first is the long cool period - cool is a relative term - from the early 1940s, This was broken by a big drought in the first half of the 1960s. Now the significance here is that this was the period when a lot of the big water storages including the Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme were built. It was also a period that included a number of major flood events.

The second thing you can see are the relatively higher temperatures of the immediate past period. This is not a post on global warming, so I do not want to get into a technical debate. I am making a much simpler point.

Part of the reason for the continuation of drought conditions lies in the combination of lower rainfall with higher temperatures. We may now be back to average rainfalls across the basin as a whole, but we are losing more water through evaporation.

More storage, more on-farm use, more evaporation, less water going down-stream. You can see why debates over water have been so politically charged in recent times.

Australia's confusions over education vs training

Neil Whitfield had a rather good post pointing to some of the issues in Australia's current education system. He actually pre-empted something that I had been intending to write on the importance of the establishment of the public education system in the 19th century as one of the five best things that had happened in Australia.

There was, however, one thing in Neil's post that I disagreed with quite strongly. Neil wrote:

What we have so far managed to resist is confusing education with training.

Neil, I fear that this horse had already bolted to the detriment of us all.

I am in part a professional trainer. When working as a trainer, my core task is to give people the knowledge and skills they need to do specific things. My performance is or should be measured solely by my trainees' capacity to do.

Education is a different thing, for there the focus is on getting people to think. Yes, the acquisition of specific skills is part of the process, but education is much more. It involves the creation of the capacity to learn to do new things, to discover new things, to critically examine existing ways of thinking, to develop new ways of thinking. In a democracy, education is critically important to the citizen's role as a thinking member of the community.

These are difficult things to measure, in part because we can only ever do it in retrospect, and then sometimes only partially. However, even simple measures provide a simple reality check.

Why is it, for example, that the small isolated population of Canterbury in New Zealand in the first two decades of the twentieth century turned out relative to size more world class intellectuals than the entire Australian system in the last two decades? We spend more. More of our children go to school and university, they go for longer. Yet our relative performance is not as good.

The language of training pervades the entire education system.

We talk about objectives and learning outcomes set in the context of specific disciplines. This is training because we are focusing on and trying to measure specific results from past activities. We can see this even more clearly when we look at current and proposed national measures - these are all narrowly skill based.

Consider the current focus on process in education. We look at critical evaluation, we focus on problem solving, we try to teach children project management skills, we tell them about various hats. These are all skills.

Then consider the education system itself, the way it works. It is a crowded system, with complex rules mandating what must be studied, often how it should be studied. We use continuous assessment techniques that themselves take up time. What do they measure? Specific knowledge and skills.

In all this, time to think and imagine - the guts of education - gets crowded out.

There is a simple test here. Assume that we actually achieve all the things that the current Federal Government, and its predecessor before it, are talking about. Do we really believe that we will actually have a more creative population? Will our population be better able to participate in civic activities? I really doubt it.

Just at present, the concept of Australia as an innovative country is going through another fashion phase. I say another phase, because I have seen all this before.

Australians traditionally have been an innovative people capable of seeing new solutions to problems. Often, we have had to work out practical solutions taking limited resources into account. I think that this is under threat.

Even if we take the current focus on innovation at its face value, and it is a fairly narrow concept as often expressed, there is (I would argue) little in our current education system that encourages kids to think in new ways. At best, we teach them to do existing things in a more efficient and effective fashion.

There is, of course, a balance question in all this.

I am not saying that there are not good schools or inspiring teachers in the current system, nor do I see education and training as mutually exclusive.

In the early stages of the Dawkins revolution in Australia, I was actually a strong supporter of the introduction of standards based competency approaches within the education and training system. I saw it as a way of improving standards, of increasing diversity, of freeing up rigidities that had crept into the official system.

The Dawkins revolution - a true education revolution - was driven by the need to improve an industrial system that had become too rigid and sclerotic. For that reason, it focused on skills formation and on measurement based approaches. What I had not expected, but should have in hindsight, was the wholesale application of the new approaches in a rigid way independent of the need to be met.

Religion, values and democracy

Arthur made a thoughtful response in the now quite long comment stream on In defence of the Lord's Prayer in the Australian Parliament.

I wrote:

He (Arthur) supports public debate, including the right of religious people to organise. However, this is constrained by the second stream, the separation of church and state. I think, and I stand to be corrected, that Arthur would argue that should religious views succeed in imposing their positions on the state, that would be wrong in principle even if they were to be in the majority or to gain majority support. That is, Arthur has a dividing line in his position.

Arthur responded:

It's a dividing line inherent, unfortunately, in the very concept of liberal democracy--the problem of how to strike a balance between democracy and protecting the interests of individuals and minorities (even religious minorities--which is what, in Australia, each Christian denomination is) from the tyranny of the majority.

It's true that I don't believe religious doctrines qua religious doctrines should be enshrined in law. Nobody should be forced to observe religious laws. I oppose blasphemy laws on these grounds. I also oppose what in the United States they call "blue laws": laws designed to coerce people to observe religious moral codes. If for religious reasons you don't wish to buy or sell alcohol on a Sunday, then don't do it: the state has no business forcing you to observe the Sabbath.

However, I wouldn't describe a law that happens to be consonant with a religious doctrine, but can also be justified on rational and secular grounds, as wrong in principle.

I have brought this particular exchange up as a main post because they provide a further opportunity to explore some of the tensions inherent in a democratic system.

Like Arthur, I do not believe that religious principles as religious principles should be enshrined in law. I formed this view a long time ago in part through personal experience, in part through my study of history.

I grew up in what was, by today's standards, a secular but also religious world. I developed quite strong religious views, strong enough to make me register as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

This forced me to address the question of the conflicts that could arise when duties as citizen conflicted with religious beliefs. When was it right to break the law if the law conflicted with one's beliefs? What price was one prepared to pay?

I grew up in the Protestant tradition. One grandfather was a Primitive Methodist home missionary in New Zealand, the second a Presbyterian and Methodist lay preacher. I went to Methodist Church and Sunday School. But then my parents sent me to an Anglican boys school, with its daily chapel services.

This is not a biographical post. My point is that religion was present, but so were the differences in religion. There is actually a very substantial difference between the Protestant and Anglican traditions. Further, I found some elements conflicted with my own perceptions and my immediate family experience.

At secondary school under the old curriculum, I did far more history than is possible in today's crowded curriculum. Five full year units of modern, two of ancient in the then five years' secondary course. Then three further history units when for age reasons my parents insisted I repeat the final years.

Much of the history I did had a European focus. It is impossible to study European history without becoming aware of religious conflicts. That is the reason why I strongly support the separation of Church and State, why I believe that religious principles should not be enshrined in law. Theocratic states, whether Calvin's Geneva or today's Iran, can be very uncomfortable places.

At the same time, I also learned about the way in which those in power would use force to protect their position. This held for states and for majority groups. In all cases, a range of arguments were marshaled to provide legitimacy, of which religion was just one.

For personal reasons linked to my immediate life, I tended to take the side of minority groups.

My positions were not always consistent. I have argued that Cromwell was critical in the establishment of the supreme power of Parliament, something that I regard as critical in the development of the Westminster system. At the same time, at an emotional level I have always felt like supporting the cavaliers against the round heads. They are just so much more interesting.

Out of all this has come a second constitutional principle that I hold strongly, the need in a democratic system to avoid or at least minimise the oppression of the minority by the majority, to protect minority rights.

In an earlier discussion on this issue, Bob Q challenged me. He argued that it was up to the minority to argue their position.

At one level, that's true. Yet history shows that oppression by the majority is a normal feature, that groups and institutions will use their power to enforce their position in the face of challenge, that they will only move in the face of countervailing power.

These things are never clear cut.

In the discussion on the Lord's Prayer, Ramana pointed to the way (as he saw it) the need to accommodate Indian minorities had in fact oppressed the majority Hindu community.

I have some sympathy for this as a general point, although I cannot comment on the Indian position. After all, and notwithstanding Arthur's careful subdivision of the Christian faith in Australia into its various denominational sub-divisions, Australia's majority Christian community has been forced to suffer erosion of its previous position in the name of multiculturalism and of neutrality between religions.

Yet there is also an argument on the other side. If Australia is to survive as a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, surely we need equality of treatment even if that means disadvantaging the previous majority group?

Here we actually get into some very slippery territory indeed.

If you look at modern Australia, you will see that much of the current political debate is in fact about values and morals. We just disguise it in modern jargon. Arthur's words "rational and secular" are an example.

"Rational" simply means based on logic, on objective thought. However, while values and beliefs can be subject to and indeed supported by rational arguments, they are not themselves rational. They are what we feel and believe. The concepts "feel" and "believe" refer to emotions.

In similar vein, the word secular simply means not religious. In suggesting that discussion or policy should be based on "secular" grounds, Arthur appears to be arguing that religious views should not be taken into account. Yet this does not remove values or morals from the discussion. It simply removes a group of values, those based on religion.

This post has taken a fair bit of time, and I am running out of thought space with arguments only partially developed. To try to draw things together, I suppose that the key point that I want to make is that we need to be very careful to identify key principles in the things that we talk about.

I valued Arthur's thoughtful comment greatly because in providing a clear articulation of his position he provided a clear base on which I could respond.

Monday Meanderings - cricket, impact of the economic downturn on education, new Whitlam biography

In a comment on Sunday Essay - the strange case of Australia and New Zealand, Ramana suggested that I should have mentioned cricket as another example of a sporting rivalry between the two countries.

Now this is actually an odd one, because the rivalry between the two countries in cricket has been much more muted. The rivalries that dominate Australian commentary on cricket are with England (the Ashes), for a period the West Indies and now Ramana's home country, India.

This photo from the Sydney Morning Herald shows Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar, right, taking position to play a square cut in the just completed second test, a draw. Like Rugby, cricket is one of those sometimes strange and mysterious games largely but not exclusively played between Commonwealth countries. An artifact of our shared past.

The very language of cricket creates a barrier to understanding. You try explaining that a silly mid-on is not in fact silly, while cricket fields do not really have gullies. And why do so many men stand around in slips, more usually a piece of female clothing?

This US presidential election has really attracted quite remarkable interest, in part because it has been such a history making event. I have not commented to this point, there has really been an awful lot of coverage, so I leave comments to people like Thomas in our immediate blogging environment.

As an aside, Thomas has not been blogging much recently because of other pressures. However, I was pleased to note that he does plan to continue our conversation on the state of the blogosphere.

While I have not commented, I have been watching quite closely. There is great support in Australia for Mr Obama. In fact, It is hard to find anyone supporting Mr McCain. I can understand this. Mr Obama has an almost mesmeric style and his call for change resonates.

In all this, I think that it is important to be realistic. From my viewpoint, the critical issue lies not so much in domestic US issues (that is a matter for the US), but in the implications for the rest of the world. And here I simply do not know.

The new US President will inherit both the US Government system with its divided powers and all the difficult issues - domestic and international - that the US is struggling with. There are no simple answers, so we need to be realistic about what can be achieved. It would take an omnipotent and omniscient being to deliver on some of the expectations that I have heard.

There have been a number of education related issues in the news recently.

One is the impact of the recession on private school numbers.

Recent years have seen something of a flight from public to private education. The reasons for this are quite complex, including the desire of some parents to see their children receive an education more closely aligned to their religion and values.

The funding model introduced by the Howard Government made this flight easier because it introduced a bias in favour of private education. Many schools responded by combining this Government funding with continuing fee increases well in advance of increases in the consumer price index.

This placed increasing strain on parents. In our case, we would never have sent our girls to the school we did if we had known how much fees would increase. Once there, we more or less coped with increasing fees by reducing spend on other things because we did not want to change educational arrangements in the later stages of the girls' education. However, it was a real battle.

There are early signs that the economic downturn may lead to something of a flight back to public education. This puts the advantages of the previous funding model into reverse. Non-government schools are being forced to review fees and cost structures in order to try to hold students.

Public education is meant to be open and accessible to all. That's fine, but the system simply does not have the capacity to cope with a large shift should it occur.

Roughly speaking, a 10 per cent decline in numbers attending non-Government schools would translate to a 4.5 per cent increase in numbers attending state schools. This may be very difficult to accommodate, with some state high schools already putting up the house-full signs.

Poor NSW cannot take a trick.

In response to Mr Rudd's call for the state to pick up its game, Premier Reese has promised to do so. However, now we have a potential blow-out in education costs coming on top of the previous blow-out in health costs, and this at a time when revenue has dropped.

One issue that the state is considering is the abolition of the now very expensive free public transport for school students.

There is a case for reform here. It is not clear to me why parents should receive a subsidy to send their child to school independent of location. If parents want to send their child to a more distant school instead of the most convenient one in geographic terms, then one can argue that they should pay the difference. However, complete abolition would add greatly to the cost involved for all parents.

Still on education matters, I have mused on the impact of global recession on overseas full fee paying university students, suggesting that this could have a major impact on Australian universities now dependant on those fees.

Chatting at a function a day or so ago with a senior academic from one of Sydney's universities, I asked about the impact so far on student numbers. The view was that the fall in overseas currency costs because of the depreciation of the Australian dollar provided a very real buffer. However, what I had failed to realise was just how important mainland Chinese students were in the mix, yet another link between Australia and the Chinese economy.

Finally, the first volume of a new biography on former Australian Labor Party PM Gough Whitlam has just been released. I will write a proper commentary later, but I just wanted to note a link with some of the things that I often talk about.

I knew that my grandfather David Drummond and Gough were friends. Whenever Gough came to Armidale he used to contact my parents. When my grandfather died in 1965, Mr Whitlam came to Armidale for the funeral. This may not seem unusual, but my grandfather was a Country Party member first of the NSW and then of the Federal Parliament.

For the benefit of international readers, the Country (now National) Party represents Australia's rural and regional areas and has traditionally been in coalition with the Liberal Party or its predecessors. So there is a political divide. Further, my grandfather was so much older than Mr Whitlam.

While I do not know at this point if the new biography refers to my grandfather or to the relations with Mr Whitlam, it does provide an important insight into the reasons why the two men were friends. In particular, it points to the importance of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Review in helping form Mr Whitlam's views, in energising his belief that change was possible. This is where the link comes in.

In various posts I have discussed Drummond's constitutional views, about the linkages between those views and New England politics and especially the New State Movement, the Movement seeking self government for New England. I have also suggested that the Movement and its sister movements were key drivers in Australian discussions on constitutional matters because they needed constitutional change to facilitate the sub-division of Australia into new entities.

David Drummond entered the Federal Parliament from the state arena in 1949. He was then 59. Gough Whitlam entered the Federal Parliament in 1953. He was 36.

Three years later, in 1956, following constant pressure from Drummond, the Constitutional Review Committee was established. Drummond and Whitlam were members. Unusually, the Committee's recommendations were unanimous across party lines. There were recommended changes to make the creation of new states easier, but the recommendations went well beyond this. Despite the political divides, strong personal links were forged between the older Drummond and the much younger Whitlam.

As so often happens with difficult issues, the Committee's recommendations were largely ignored at the time. However, listening to the radio discussion on the new biography it appears that the impact on Mr Whitlam was far greater than I had realised, extending beyond the personal into the political.

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.

The Lord's Prayer and the Australian Parliament

Short note to say that in The Lord's Prayer and the Australian Parliament - hints about the changing ways Australians think I discussed some of the historical issue raised by our discussion.

While my own biases are not concealed, my focus is on the history, the evolution, of different forms of thinking.

Blog Performance - October 2008

Hasty correction: I showed this post to Helen who pointed out two errors. The team is the women's team, not the mixed one (ouch!). It follows that the girl with the ball is not Helen (double ouch, damn!), although she does play centre from time to time. I have let the photo and story stand with corrections despite my blushes because I still think it illustrates my points.

The Post

This photo is from the recent university games in Melbourne, eldest (incorrect) with the ball. As centre in this case, Helen's (the centre's) task is to get the ball clear to one of her players so that they can shoot. Centres are not allowed into the forward part of the court.

It's quite cerebral, something that Helen enjoys. The rival centre has already jumped to try to block a shot. You can see Helen (the centre) swivelling to to try and find a clear path. The UNSW player in the centre left is moving to the left followed by the rival wing defence. Helen may shoot to the left, or straight forward since the wing defence's left move is opening up a path to the UNSW player at the back.

Netball is Australia's largest women's sport.In this case, although no boys are in the photo, the team is mixed sex, adding to the enjoyment. These were Helen's first university games and she had a fantastic time.

This post is in fact about the usual end month navel gazing. However, I thought that I would throw something in for variety.

The Statistics

Total visitor numbers on my various blogs to end October follow. I came closer than expected to cracking the 100,000 mark and will certainly do so in the next two weeks.

Blog	End September	End October	October Visitors
Personal Reflections	38,654	41,280	2,626
Managing the Professional Services Firm	17,942	18,585	643
New England, Australia	16,115	16,967	852
Regional Living Australia	10,519	10,994	475
Management Perspectives	6,063	6,606	543
New England's History	2,487	2,765	278
History of Australian and New Zealand Thought (joint)	1,236	1,307	61
Belshaw sans words	279	343	64
Total	93,295	98,847	5,552

Looking at patterns, the table below sets out total visitor numbers by month. October was a record month. I have clearly reversed the mid year slump associated with low posting.

Month	Visitor Numbers
October	5,552
September	4,857
August	3,991
July (average June/July)	3,962
June (average June/July)	3,962
May	4,296
April	4,536
March	4,294
February	3,710
January	3,656
December 2007	2,844
November	3,612

Total page views follow. These are not directly comparable with visitor numbers because they come from a different system. However, they do indicate trends.

Total page views in October (provisional) were 13,953 as compared to 12,160 in September, 9,859 in August, 9,292 in July, 10,635 June, 10,846 May, 11,058 in April, 10,969 in March, 9,456 in February, 9,485 in January, 7,447 in December, November 9,239.

Comment

This was another heavy posting month during which I made further progress in reducing the posting backlog. However, the plans I set at the end of the last month for the development of my Cinderella blogs were swept away by the global financial crisis.

Still, I shouldn't complain too much. It is a long while since I have written so many economics posts, and it's certainly refreshed my economics! It's also had the side effect of energising the Management Perspectives blog, previously something of a Cinderella in its own right.

Yes, I know that I have too many blogs. My continuing rationalisation is that each serves a different purpose, forcing me to write across my areas of interest.

There is obviously a quality/quantity issue in writing as many posts as I do, as well as a time issue. What I do find, however, is that the blogs have become my main store of my own intellectual capital, replacing material that I used to write but then store on the hard drive.

Given my somewhat peculiar interests, I find this interesting in its own right. With cloud computing much in discussion just at present, I seem to have morphed into a cloud computing person. Good to know that am still up with the trends!