Catallaxy Files

Kevin Rudd went on Insiders this morning and did quite well I thought. The only time he looked in any trouble was when Barrie Cassidy asked him why he has misjudged how hard it would be to get things done. Rudd hadn’t expected that question. Clearly he had hoped to be able to make the otherwise sensible argument that things often take longer than you might first expect. Cassidy came back with the question was that naivity or inexperience that lead to that misjudgment? Good question; afterall Rudd had public service experience in the Goss government and should have had some idea about these sorts of practicalities.

There seems to be some confusion as to what Rudd promised on hospitals. In the interview he said he supports local control and he had only promised national funding. This is what he said at the ALP campaign launch in 2007.

On hospitals, we have put forward a national plan to end the buck-passing between Canberra and the States. I have a long-term plan to fix our nation’s hospitals. I will be responsible for implementing my plan, and I state this with absolute clarity: the buck will stop with me.
Mr Howard, by contrast, has put forward no new plan. He prefers to continue buck-passing to the States, instead of taking responsibility for fixing the system. Australians are fed up with this tired, old game. Australians want a long term solution for our hospitals. They are sick and tired of short term excuses for not fixing our hospitals.
• We will deliver 2,000 extra aged care beds to take the pressure off acute hospital beds.
• GP SuperClinics around Australia to take the pressure of accident and emergency departments.
• A national fund to eliminate elective surgery waiting lists beyond clinically acceptable times.
• A massive national investment in the war against cancer.
• And 10 years after Mr Howard abolished it, we will re-establish a Commonwealth Public Dental Program.

What he said today is consistent with the ALP campaign launch – but it is not consistent with this ALP sound bite.

If States don’t cooperate I’ll seek a mandate for the Commonwealth to take over delivery of health care services.

So the confusion might be understandable.
Update: The document I’m quoting seems to have been taken down, here is the google cache.

The idea underlying all interventionist policies is that the higher income and wealth of the more affluent part of the population is a fund which can be freely used for the improvement of the conditions of the less prosperous. The essence of the interventionist policy is to take from one group to give to another. It is confiscation and distribution. Every measure is ultimately justified by declaring that it is fair to curb the rich for the benefit of the poor. In the field of public finance progressive taxation of incomes and estates is the most characteristic manifestation of this doctrine. Tax the rich and spend the revenue for the improvement of the condition of the poor, is the principle of contemporary budgets. In the field of industrial relations shortening the hours of work, raising wages, and a thousand other measures are recommended under the assumption that they favor the employee and burden the employer. Every issue of government and community affairs is dealt with exclusively from the point of view of this principle.
…
The interventionist in advocating additional public expenditure is not aware of the fact that the funds available are limited. He does not realize that increasing expenditure in one department enjoins restricting it in other departments. In his opinion there is plenty of money available. The income and wealth of the rich can be freely tapped. In recommending a greater allowance for the schools he simply stresses the point that it would be a good thing to spend more for education. He does not venture to prove that to raise the budgetary allowance for schools is more expedient than to raise that of another department, e.g., that of health. It never occurs to him that grave arguments could be advanced in favor of restricting public spending and lowering the burden of taxation. The champions of cuts in the budget are in his eyes merely the defenders of the manifestly unfair class interests of the rich.

From Human Action pg. 855 – 857.

This is prompted by Andrew Bolt’s alarm about teaching dreamtime stories and cognate mythology before exposing students to the periodic table.

Ron Horner turned up at Launceston Grammar from Manchester in 1960. He was appointed as Senior Science Master and also the Head of the Junior School.

On the side he started a Classical Music Club, a Science Library and a wandering Sunday cricket team that played village green matches around the country. This gave a handful of  lucky boarders the chance to get some decent tucker one day a week.

He administered a test to find out roughly where we were at in Chemistry as we started year 10. He was gobsmacked to find how little we had leaned in the previous three years in the hands of “Screw” Hampton, an Anglo-Indian who was full of tales of the war and the role that his Ghurkas played in it. Incidentally I am in debt to “Screw” for converting me into the breakthrough bowler with some coaching provided while he umpired the first game that I played in the First XI. I am not sure if coaching by the umpire is in the spirit of the game, still, it only consisted of three words, hissed through closed teeth “Pitch it up!”, and it worked.

Getting back to Chemistry, with an exam for the School Certificate at the end of the year, Ron Horner went into catchup  mode, including some lunchtime classes and an early return from the holidays at hte end of second term. He was a truly inspired teacher and this came through in his teaching of the periodic table.

“Good afternoon boys. Today we are doing the periodic table of elements. But first I want to tell you about a little place in Paris where bored businessmen go at lunchtime to watch young ladies dancing and showing off their legs and their underwear.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Lynn on Keynesian solutions in the UK.

The U.K. has produced notable economists over the years, but John Maynard Keynes, the guru of government intervention, was one of truly global significance.

So it may be fitting that the U.K. will also become the deathbed of Keynesian economics.

Britain has been following the mainstream prescriptions of his followers more than any developed nation. It has cut interest rates, pumped up government spending, printed money like crazy, and nationalized almost half the banking industry.

Short of digging Karl Marx out of his London grave, and putting him in charge, it is hard to see how the state could get more involved in the economy.

The results will be dire. The economy is flat on its back, unemployment is rising, the pound is sinking, and the bond markets are bracketing the country with Greece and Portugal in the category marked “bankruptcy imminent.” At some point soon, even the most loyal disciples of Keynes will have to admit defeat, and accept that a radical change of direction is needed.

The public debate about the state of the British economy was enlivened last week by a brawl between economists.

A series of letters have been published in the UK press. This is the first. The second and third letters were published in the Financial Times.

The House of Commons Science and Technology committee is having an inquiry into the ClimateGate affair. Hearings start on Monday (although if a general election is called over the weekend then they’re off). The submissions are here. I haven’t read them all, but here is a sampling of two that comment on Phil Jones.

Hans von Storch and Dr. Myles R. Allen

The fact that we disagree with Professors Jones, Mann and others on some matters, such as proxy-based reconstructions, has no bearing on our respect for Professor Jones’ analysis of the instrumental temperature record.

That is a huge endorsement.

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

3.1 I have no reason to believe that most of the scientists involved in the CRU affair (and this a group reaching beyond the UK) did anything but act in good faith, doing their duty to science, bureaucracy and the public as they saw it and as they were funded to do. It is important, however, for you check my observation, that most climate change since the late 1980s has been government- and grant- funded with the clearly stated objective that it must support a decarbonisation agenda for the energy sector.

3.2 Scientific research as advocacy for an agenda (a coalition of interests, not a conspiracy,) was presented to the public and governments as protection of the planet. This cause of environmental protection had from the start natural allies in the EU Commission, United Nation and World Bank. CRU, working for the UK government and hence the IPCC, was expected to support the hypothesis of man-made, dangerous warming caused by carbon dioxide, a hypothesis it had helped to formulate in the late 1980s and which became “true” in international law with the adoption of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.

She goes on.

It is at least arguable that the real culprit is the theme- and project-based research funding system put in place in the 1980s and subsequently strengthened and tightened in the name of “policy relevance”. This system, in making research funding conditional on demonstrating such relevance, has encouraged close ties with central Government bureaucracy. Some university research units have almost become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Government Departments. Their survival, and the livelihoods of their employees, depends on delivering what policy makers think they want. It becomes hazardous to speak truth to power.

This problem associated with government funding is often neglected. I think it is a real problem. To the extent that this has happened (we don’t know that yet) Phil Jones is as much a victim of circumstance simply responding to the incentives that were put in place than a villain – none of these individuals needed to defend Jones.

And we now see a department with a split personality.

One part of the department seeking to implement an emissions trading scheme with the aim to reduce carbon emissions

and

a second part of the department seeking to install insulation with the effect on increasing carbon emissions (see article by Hedley Thomas in the Australian of 26 February 2010 Woolly claims on insulation and that of Henry Ergas Energy Efficient, Benefit Deficient).

Only it seems that the insulation part of the department has been more successful in increasing emissions than the other part of the department has been in reducing emissions given the CPRS is dead.

Bizarre.

Canberra is now Constantinople under the Byzantine Empire.

Reflecting further on my previous post on the failed insulation program, perhaps we should consider the program from the perspective of putting the insulation industry permanently on the taxpayer life support?

Before the original insulation program, the industry existed nicely without government subsidies.

Then, on the pretext of insulating us from the global financial crisis (excuse the pun), the Government rolled out the insulation program in February 2009.

Now it is clear that even proponents of the stimulus program would find it difficult to justify further new stimulus measures.

We discover that the original insulation subsidy program is a failure for various reasons and the government rightly cancels it.

So why do we need a replacement? Has the Government turned the insulation industry from a subsidy-free industry into one – like the automotive industry – that has become addicted to subsidy?

I haven’t really followed this much. I did hear on the news that the Rudd government fears home-grown terrorism from individuals born in Australia – so that’s Jason and me off the hook. Greg Sheridan at The Australian has put in a good word for the report.
The point that he makes that shoud be shouted from the rooftops is this:

The best counter-radicalisation program is a good, open decent society.

He goes on

There are only two overt counter-radicalisation programs we should engage in. One is to provide intensive settlement assistance to people we take in under the refugee and humanitarian program. To bring someone from war and refugee camp-living in Somalia or Sudan, with no competence at living in our sort of society, and dump them in Footscray or Bankstown with a Centrelink leaflet is asking for trouble.

The other area we should work hard in is jails, where Islamist prisoners are recruiting people because they have much stronger beliefs than anyone around them.

Can’t fault that logic. I have quibbles with other aspects of the op-ed but I think those core issues are correct.

Howard Bamsey is the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Climate Change and Special Envoy on Climate Change. He gave a speech to a CEDA debate this week on the post-Copenhagen situation. He is reported as having said (free 21-day trial registration required)

I think the term sceptics is often used to describe those who oppose the straight reading of the science. I understand why they like to use that term about themselves. I personally do not use it. I don’t believe it fits them. I think that sceptics are people who are the heroes of science. Every scientist is a sceptic at heart. The sorts of people who are fostering some of the fundamental questioning of climate science are not sceptics at all. [They are people] who bring an effort of will to a reading of science, not an open mind and not a proper sceptical one.

Unluckily for him, he was debating my good friend Tim Wilson who pointed out, quite politely I’m told, that it wasn’t the place of public servants to be making those sorts of arguments.

The fact that the Government is now directing its departmental resources to attack people who are critical of the process … is actually quite mind-boggling.

It seems Bamsey conceded the point and that it wasn’t the role of the Department of Climate Change

to make political comment …, and if you heard me doing that then I apologise and withdraw it.

Our friends in Canberra have been getting ahead of themselves and its good to see that at least one of them recognised that he’d stepped over the line and apologised.