Catallaxy Files

Check out ABC “Late Night Live” this evening for Robert Manne’s reply to Keith Windschuttle’s claim that he should step down pending an inquiry into his reporting on the “stolen generation” issue.

Manne provided the best-known account of Commonwealth government policy on this topic. In his 2001 publication In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Manne said that in 1933, following a request from the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, Dr Cecil Cook, the Commonwealth endorsed a policy for breeding out the colour. Manne wrote:

The officials in Canberra and their Minister, J. A. Perkins, gave support to Cook’s proposal for an extension of the Territory policy to Australia as a whole. The Secretary in the Department of the Interior, J. A. Carrodus, composed a memorandum of his own. “The policy of mating half-castes with whites, for the purpose of breeding out the colour, is that adopted by the Commonwealth government on the recommendation of Dr Cook.”

Manne said this remained the government’s position for most of the remainder of the 1930s:

the policy of breeding out the colour received the full endorsement of the Commonwealth for at least another five years.

In an article in the Weekend Australian (January 30-31, 2010), I pointed out that Manne’s account is far from the truth. It even runs counter to evidence readily available in the archives Manne cited himself.

Contrary to my expectations the RBA did not raise interest rates this afternoon.

Peter Klein at Organisations and Markets has listed some nice pictures to demonstrate the absurdity of the claim that we have lived through some decades of deregualtion, the retreat of the State, neoliberalism, yadda yadda.

One of the established memes about the financial crisis is that it demonstrates the failure of unfettered capitalism, the dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire environment that prevailed in the West over the last few decades, all driven by the ideology of “free-market fundamentalism.” This seems to be a truism among most of the Commentariat. Of course, as pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the truth is virtually the opposite: there was never any “deregulation,” the Bush Administration spent public money like a drunken sailor, and government continued to expand as it always does. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so try these on for size. (US data; click charts for sources.)

The Guardian is reporting that leaked emails from the University of East Anglia show some sort of cover-up.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

This isn’t actually new news. All this information has been in the public domain for some time. What is news is the fact that the Guardian is now getting on the band-wagon.
(HT. CL)

Samuel J has already had a go at the Intergenerational Report – now the journos get stuck in too.

Peter Martin

I am not denying there will demographic changes – I am just saying we will easily deal with them, as we always have

Tim Colebatch

These numbers are rubbish. Like the My School website, it’s another example of our tendency to reduce every issue to some numerical indicator that we can measure or project. The issues are real, but to reduce them to numbers just trivialises them.

Terry McCrann

KEVIN Rudd is damned and damned utterly by his own Intergenerational Report. It loudly proclaims we have a prime minister who hasn’t got a clue.

Of course it does so completely unknowingly and self-evidently unintentionally. Most deliciously, in so capturing the report’s comprehensive inanity, with the illustration chosen for the cover.

All of which also tells us we have a Treasury department and a Treasury head in Ken Henry which/who are also utterly clueless.

Ross Gittins (even before it was published)

Sorry, but I’m not buying. Rudd’s analysis is alarmist and highly misleading.

Over at Core Economics Sam Wylie makes some very sensible comments.

What is the big deal about 35 million? That projection represents a considerable slowing of historical growth rates. There isn’t any natural resource constraint on having a larger population. At 35 million there would be 22 hectares of land per person in Australia, which seems like enough. Saying that Australia doesn’t have enough water for 35 million people is as sensible as saying that we don’t have enough electricity. Generating electricity and desalinating water are perfectly scalable industrial processes. There is plenty of water of in the ocean, we just need to get the salt out it, which gets cheaper every year. What else don’t we have enough of (apart from people)?

I have a letter in the AFR today responding to an op-ed John Quiggin wrote last week. The version below may differ slightly from the published letter. I have added the links.

John Quiggin does a magnificent job of destroying a straw man in his attack on Christopher Monckton (Tepid conspiracy theory, AFR 28 January 2010). Mind you he was unable to summon the courage to debate Monckton face-to-face when invited to do so by the prestigious Brisbane Institute.

Quiggin makes the claim that the CPRS will only raise about $10 billion a year and that no ‘credible economist suggests the economic impact will be more than marginal’. This merely invites us to imagine some incredible economists who have suggested otherwise.

Some of those economists, for example, may have contributed to the Treasury modelling that the Rudd government has taken to quoting with some approval. The Treasury modelling suggests by 2020 that the CPRS with a five percent cap will reduce GDP per capita by between 1.1 and 2.2 percent relative to a base case scenario. While real wages will decline by between 2.4 and 4.2 percent relative to the base case. That is just to 2020. It gets worse out to 2050.

Using Treasury forecasts and a range of discount factors Concept Economics was able to show that the present value of the costs for CPRS-5 was between 50 percent and 188 percent of current GDP. Using the Garnaut Report’s 1.4 percent discount rate the present value of cost is about 120 percent of GDP. At a regional level the Treasury show that Quiggin’s home state of Queensland would be the biggest loser from the CPRS.

This is hardly a marginal impact; and all for a measly $10 billion per year.
Update: John Quiggin has a letter in the AFR in response to this letter. It’s not up at his site but I’ll provide a link or copy when it comes up. His argument is that I have knowingly misrepresented the fact that he didn’t debate Monckton and this is further proof that no credible economists believe the CPRS will have more than a marginal impact.
Update II: Letter now posted.