Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Paying for the cowpat sandwich Morrison handed Albo

It never pays to be too sorry for politicians. They’re all volunteers, they’re well paid for what they do, and even the nicest of them have thrust themselves ahead of many others to get as far as they have.

But I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Anthony Albanese. He got himself elected by promising not to change much, but I doubt he expected to be handed quite such a cowpat sandwich from the smirking Scott Morrison.

As part of his efforts to prove he could keep taxes lower than Labor, Morrison avoided fixing anything much and allowed waiting lists to build up. Now everywhere Albo and his ministers look, they find problems.

These problems will be expensive to fix. This week it’s Education Minister Jason Clare’s turn in the spotlight. The final report on the Universities Accord, which was released on Sunday, reveals plenty that needs fixing.

For openers, the previous government’s job-ready graduates scheme has been a disaster. Under the guise of encouraging students to pick courses that left them job-ready, it cut fees for teaching and nursing, while more than doubling the fees for such courses as arts and humanities, including economics and law.

As the experts predicted, this had little effect on the courses chosen. But it did have its intended effect: saving the government money. One expert suggests that returning tuition fees to something more reasonable could cost the government about $1 billion a year.

The report recommends that the fees for particular courses be set according to the expected lifetime earnings of someone with that degree. Good idea.

I’ve always been happy to defend the HECS-HELP debt scheme as a way of getting people to contribute towards the cost of their education. With repayments geared to the size of their income, and an interest rate far below commercial levels, it should not deter youngsters from poor families from attempting to better themselves.

But unsympathetic governments have fiddled with the scheme incessantly, and with the (hopefully brief) return to high inflation, it’s not surprising Gen Z is so dissatisfied. But Clare seems disposed towards the tweaks the report proposes.

Annual indexation of the debt would occur after deducting the year’s repayments, rather than before. The debt would be indexed to the lower of the rise in consumer prices or the wage index. And the rates at which repayments were required would be applied to successive slices of your income, just as income tax is applied.

There are shortages of workers with various tertiary qualifications at the moment, and the report sees the demand continuing to grow. At present, about 60 per cent of workers have trade or degree qualifications, and we need to reach at least 80 per cent by 2050, the report says. This would involve more than doubling the number of Commonwealth-supported students each year to 1.8 million.

Clare worries that not enough disadvantaged young people are making it to – and through – uni. (Let me tell you, people have been worrying about this at least since Gough Whitlam’s day. And even making university free didn’t help much.)

At present, people from poor families – those of “low socio-economic status” in academic-speak – account for about 17 per cent of enrolments, compared with 25 per cent of the population. Other target groups are First Nations peoples, people with a disability and people living in regional and remote areas.

The report proposes that uni students’ places be funded on a needs basis, similar to Gonski’s scheme for schools. Unis would receive a base amount per student, plus further loadings according to the particular students’ disadvantage.

This would mean regional and outer-suburban unis got a lot more funding per student than the sandstone central-city Group of Eight. But the extra money would be used to reduce the chances of disadvantaged students failing to complete their course for monetary or other reasons.

There would be fee-free courses to prepare chosen students for the rigours of university learning, and financial support for students required to undertake presently unpaid work placements.

It all sounds a big improvement. Quite apart from fairness, it’s clear that the higher the proportion of young people the government wants with a uni degree, the more it will need to include people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

But note this: none of these good ideas has been costed, let alone accepted by the Albanese government. We don’t know whether those that are accepted will start in this year’s budget or in 10 years’ time.

As for Gonski-like arrangements, the real Gonski needs-based funding for schools has still not been fully implemented more than 12 years later.

Let me quote Clare back at himself: “We’re not going to tackle this problem if we think that we can solve all the problems at the door of the university when someone turns 18.”

Just so. With education, it’s best to start at the bottom and work up. But we won’t solve many of our multitude of problems until some pollie has the courage to say maybe we need taxes to be higher, not lower.

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Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Want better productivity? Start by ensuring our kids can read

The trouble with our economy is that there are so many things needing to be fixed, it’s hard to know where to start. And so many of them are urgent we don’t have time to fix things one at a time. But since the economy consists simply of all the workers and all the consumers – that is, all the people – one of my guiding principles is that governments should manage the economy for the many, not the few.

This may seem obvious but, during the decades of “neoliberalism” from which we’re still emerging, it became far from obvious. Neoliberalism is the doctrine that what’s good for BHP is good for Australia. We got used to listening with rapt attention when the top 100 or so chief executives told us what needed to be done to improve productivity.

It took us too long to realise that their idea of a well-functioning economy was one where their incomes grew considerably faster than ours. They’re still at it, not having realised that we’ve stopped listening.

They’re arguing again that the most important thing we need is major tax reform – which, when you inquire, turns out to mean they’d pay less tax while we paid more.

No. I’m far more persuaded by this week’s report from Dr Jordana Hunter and Anika Stobart of the Grattan Institute, arguing we should start at the bottom, not the top, and make sure all our kids become confident readers as early as possible in their time at school.

If you’re building a house, you start by laying a firm foundation, and education should work the same way. Hunter says that in no area of education is improvement more urgent than reading. “Reading proficiency is a foundational skill that unlocks the broader curriculum and empowers young people to grasp opportunities for themselves,” she says.

Stobart says, “When children do not read fluently and efficiently in early primary school, it can undermine their future learning across all subject areas, harm their self-esteem, and limit their life chances.”

Students who struggle with reading are more likely to fall behind their classmates, become disruptive, and drop out of school. They are more likely to end up unemployed, or in poorly paid jobs, we’re told.

Why are they telling us this? Because last year’s NAPLAN testing results show that one in three Australian primary and secondary students cannot read proficiently. For Victorians, the news is better, sort of: a mere one in four.

But for Indigenous students, students from disadvantaged families, and students in regional and rural areas, it’s more than half. (Which makes you wonder why Barnaby Joyce and his National Party mates don’t have a lot more to say on public school funding.)

This appalling deficiency hasn’t just happened, it’s been going on for years without anyone making a fuss about it. Why is it happening? Hunter says the reason most of those students can’t read well enough is that we aren’t teaching them well enough.

“A key cause,” the report says, “is decades of disagreement about how to teach reading. But the evidence is now clear. The ‘whole-language’ approach, which became popular in the 1970s, doesn’t work for all students [including someone in my family years ago]. Its remnants should be banished from Australia’s schools.

“Instead, all schools should use the ‘structured literacy’ approach right through school, which includes a focus on phonics in the early years. Students should learn to sound out the letters of each word.”

Now, let’s be clear. I like teachers – especially those who tell students they must read my columns. So this is no attack on our hard-pressed teachers.

“The real issue here,” Hunter says, “is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success? The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom.”

But a key improvement is regular classroom testing, to ensure kids who are struggling get identified early and given extra help to catch up.

That, of course, takes extra money. But federal Education Minister Jason Clare is renegotiating the school funding agreement with the premiers. “The reading wars are over. We know what works,” he’s said. “The new agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school.”

Economists often worry that the things you could do to make the economy fairer come at the expense of the economic efficiency that improves productivity. But ensuring our kids get off to a good start in life – including through early education, two years of pre-school and good literacy and numeracy – ticks both boxes.

It gives our kids better lives, it makes our workforce better skilled and more valuable, and it saves the budget a bundle in having fewer people who need special help.

Read more >>

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Identity politics is destroying our public schools

When one of the most privileged and oldest private schools in Australia, The King’s School – home to the scions of the squattocracy – has to be ordered by the NSW government not to spend public money on a plunge pool at its headmaster’s residence, that’s when you know there’s something very wrong with the way federal and state governments are dividing their funding between public and private schools.

It’s a system where the less government help a school needs, the more it’s given, and the more a school needs the more likely it won’t be given enough.

Although the famous Gonski report of 2011 recommended that government funding of schools be based on the assessed needs of their mix of students, more than a decade later that hasn’t happened.

Why not? Partly because, unlike most other English-speaking countries, Australia has allowed the mainstream Christian churches to play a big role in the provision of primary and secondary education.

They had schools before the government decided to introduce compulsory public schooling, and were allowed to keep running them. To this day, they’re allowed to provide religious instruction in public schools where – despite our growing lack of religiosity – the churches fight against ethics classes being offered as an alternative.

Led by the Catholics, the private schools fought to stop the Gonski reforms reducing their funding and control over how it was spent. Anachronistically, our politicians remain wary of getting off side with the church vote.

But the other reason for the backsliding on Gonski is the much earlier decision of the Howard government to make parents’ choice of school – not student need – the highest priority for government funding.

John Howard got the states to licence many new private schools, most of them with some religious affiliation. This has changed the nature of Australian schooling in a way few people have noticed.

Have you heard of “identity politics”? It’s the modern tendency for voters to think of themselves not just as Australians, or even Labor or Liberal, but as part of an ethnic, religious or gender-preference group.

There was a time when almost everyone was educated at the local public or parish school. At school, you learnt to get along with people from many different social classes and backgrounds. These days, only a small majority of students go to public schools, and it’s now common for Jewish kids to go to Jewish schools, Muslims to Muslim schools, evangelical Protestants to “Christian schools” and so forth.

Sorry, this may be what many parents choose for their offspring, but I’m not sure if it will be good for national tolerance and social cohesion. Just as bad, it’s happening at the expense of public schools, left with too few resources to do justice to the more than 80 per cent of the nation's disadvantaged students – those of the lowest socio-economic status, Indigenous and the outback (not to mention misbehaving kids expelled from private schools).

Private schools can – and do – say no to kids with problems, but public schools can’t.

According to official figures collated by Trevor Cobbold, of Save our [public] Schools, combined annual federal and state funding grew by more than $2800 per independent school student over the nine years to 2020, after allowing for inflation. That compares with increases of almost $2500 per Catholic school student and just $830 a year per public school student.

Across Australia this year, combined government funding is estimated to have provided private schools (Catholic plus independent) with 106 per cent of the Gonski-inspired, officially calculated “schooling resource standard” needed to meet the particular needs of their students. Public schools will get just 87 per cent of what they need.

Add huge tuition fees, and you see why long-established independent schools have far more income than they need just to run the school. Many have never-ending construction programs moving round and round the cramped school campus, tearing things down and building new indoor swimming centres, music and drama centres, auditoriums and sporting facilities.

Casual observation suggests that independent schools get better academic results than Catholic schools and, particularly, public schools. But many studies show that, once you allow for the socio-economic status of the students’ parents, independent and Catholic schools do no better than public schools.

If governments keep over-funding private schools and underfunding public schools, however, a lot more parents will feel they need to pay up, so they can move their kids to private, leaving public schools with a much higher proportion of disadvantaged students that they’re inadequately resourced to help.

Doesn’t sound like a road we should want to travel.

After coming to office last year, the Albanese government postponed any changes to federal funding of schools for a year, so an expert panel could report on the National Schools Reform Agreement, the agreement between the feds and states on school funding.

The panel’s report is due this month. But even if it recommends big reforms, you wouldn’t be sure this bruised and battered government would be up for the fight with privileged schools and their parents.

Read more >>

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Voting No? You may have this key assumption wrong

If you’re thinking of voting No in the Voice referendum because governments have been spending so much taxpayers’ money trying to “close the gap” without much sign of success, perhaps you need to reconsider. If the Voice to parliament of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is enshrined in the Constitution, obliging our politicians and bureaucrats to listen, chances are that money will be better spent.

But I can tell you now the message First Nations people will be trying to get across: we want the local spending on health and education and the rest to be administered by Indigenous-led local organisations.

Why? Because when you do it that way, the money’s spent by people with a much better understanding of what the problems are, and the best ways to go about fixing them. Because when the government’s being represented by Indigenous-run outfits, they get much more trust and co-operation.

I’ve realised this mainly by reading a report, Better Outcomes and Value for Money with a Seat at the Table, issued by the Lowitja Institute, a largely government-funded, Indigenous-controlled health research organisation, based in Melbourne.

Let’s start with some facts about government spending on Indigenous people.

According to the Productivity Commission’s most recent estimates, for the 2015-16 year, spending by all levels of government on Indigenous people totalled $33 billion, representing 6 per cent of those governments’ total spending of $556 billion.

Some mates of mine believe Aboriginal people get a lot of government money the rest of us don’t. Only $6 billion of that $33 billion was specifically targeted to Indigenous people. The remaining $27 billion was the share of ordinary spending on hospitals, education, aged care and, importantly, the justice system, used by Indigenous people.

Even so, that $33 billion represents average annual spending of $44,900 per Indigenous person, compared with $22,400 per non-Indigenous person.

Why are Indigenous people getting twice as much? Because they have more disadvantage than the rest of us, and so need more help. For instance, their burden of disease is 2.3 times that of non-Indigenous people, the report says.

Indigenous people “have survived centuries of systemic racism, economic and social exclusion, and intergenerational trauma. As a result, our peoples now die far earlier and experience a higher burden of disease, disability, poverty, and criminalisation than other Australians,” it says.

But here’s the upside. Because governments are spending so much, “slight improvements in the efficiency of the existing spend would generate substantial savings, both directly and through flow-on impacts to other policy areas,” we’re told. For a case study, read to the end.

The federal government first signed a statement of intent to work in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in 2008, to “achieve equality in health status and life expectancy … by 2030”.

This partnership was refreshed and strengthened in 2020 by a National Agreement on Closing the Gap, made between peak Indigenous community organisations and all federal, state, territory and local governments.

The agreement accepted four priority reforms: formal partnerships and shared decision-making, building and strengthening the community-controlled sector, transforming government mainstream organisations, and shared access to data and information at a regional level.

Are you getting the message? In practice, however, the report says, “these changes have been patchy and incremental despite increased investment from government”.

“An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice could support more effective public investment in our wellbeing because our communities know what they need and how to deliver outcomes with the right support,” we’re told.

The report argues that government-run, top-down programs to close the gap haven’t worked as well as community-controlled initiatives.

Research indicates that Indigenous-controlled community health organisations “attract and retain more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients than mainstream providers, are more effective at improving our health, and see more significant health benefits per dollar of expenditure,” the report says.

It was Indigenous community health organisations that had the knowledge and expertise to rapidly respond to the especially great threat presented to their people by COVID-19.

Throughout the first year of the pandemic, just 147 cases of the virus were reported among Indigenous people, out of 28,000 total cases in Australia. There were no Indigenous deaths and no identified cases in remote Aboriginal communities.

In the second year, Indigenous community health organisations worked tirelessly to ensure their communities were vaccinated.

Turning to education, the report says the federal government’s “remote school attendance strategy”, begun in 2013, with total spending of more than $200 million over eight years, had seen falling attendance rates.

By contrast, the report argues, in 2017, the community-led Maranguka justice reinvestment project in Bourke achieved a 31 per cent increase in year 12 retention, a 23 per cent reduction in recorded rates of family violence incidents, and a 42 per cent reduction in adult days spent incarcerated.

These improvements were calculated to have saved the NSW economy $3 million that year – five times the project’s operating costs.

I’ve drawn my own conclusions from all this. So close to the vote, I leave you to draw yours.

Read more >>

Friday, September 29, 2023

Albanese wants to put full employment back on its throne

Something really important to the management of the economy happened this week: the Albanese government released its white paper on employment. If the government achieves the vision it has laid out, it could be a turning point in how our economy works, one that begins a lasting reduction in the rates of unemployment and underemployment.

This is Labor’s decision to put “full employment” back on its throne as a central objective of macroeconomic policy. Or, as the paper puts it, “placing full employment at the heart of our institutions and policy frameworks”.

For the first 30 years after World War II, the achievement of full employment was the overriding objective for the managers of the economy. This era began in 1945, with the Curtin Labor government issuing a white paper on full employment in Australia. Notice a pattern?

It worked well for 30 years, but fell apart with the arrival of high inflation in the mid-1970s. Since then, the primary concern of macroeconomic management has been to keep inflation low, with the goal of achieving full employment usually given not much more than lip service.

What’s changed has been the way the ups and downs of the pandemic have suddenly returned us to the lowest rate of unemployment in almost 50 years, about 3.5 per cent. But also the lowest rate of underemployment – part-timers who can’t get as many hours of work as they want – in several decades.

At present, we have about the highest proportion of the working-age population participating in the labour market – by having a job or actively seeking one.

This unexpected return to something close to full employment has prompted many people to think we should be trying at lot harder than we have been to keep employment high and unemployment low.

And that’s why the Albanese government has decided to put the goal of full employment back on its throne in the halls of macroeconomic management.

“Macro” means focusing on the economy as a whole. “Micro” means looking at particular bits of the economy, or at particular mechanisms within the economy.

Since World War II, governments have sought to use “fiscal policy” (the budget) and “monetary policy” (interest rates) to “manage” the macroeconomy by smoothing out the ups and downs in demand for (spending on) goods and services – and thus employers’ demand for workers.

If the goal of full employment is now back on centre stage, what does full employment actually mean?

The white paper defines it as where “everyone who wants a job is able to find one without having to search for too long”. But it adds a qualification: the jobs we create should be “decent jobs that are secure and fairly paid”, a requirement many employers won’t like the sound of.

The paper says it wants “sustained” full employment, which means “minimising volatility in economic cycles and keeping employment as close as possible to current maximum level consistent with low and stable inflation”.

So restoring the priority of full employment doesn’t mean ceasing to care about inflation, but does mean that getting serious about full employment will affect the day-to-day management of the macroeconomy.

The paper also says full employment must be “inclusive”: broadening the opportunities for people to take up paid work and lowering the barriers to work created by various forms of discrimination.

But how will the government go about achieving this more inclusive view full employment? Well, one way to answer this is to take the economists’ standard list of the types or causes of unemployment.

“Frictional” unemployment occurs because, at any time, there’ll always be some people moving between jobs or seeking their first job. So frictional employment is inevitable and nothing to worry about.

It occurs because it takes time for someone wanting a job to find someone wanting to give them one. You’d think that with so much advertising of job vacancies, and so much looking for jobs, occurring online, frictional unemployment ought to be lower than it used to be.

“Cyclical” unemployment is caused by downturns in the economy, which reduce employers’ demand for workers with little reduction in the people seeking work. As the paper says, it can be lessened through “effective macroeconomic policy settings”.

That is, to get the economy moving quickly out of a recession and, better, managing to stop it getting into recession in the first place. It’s when people lose their jobs during a prolonged recession – and education-leavers take months to find their first job – that you get a build-up in “long-term” unemployment.

These are the people who needed special, personalised help from the government because the longer they go unemployed, the less an employer wants to take them on. This role used to be played (not particularly well) by the Commonwealth Employment Service, which was replaced by what’s now called Workforce Australia, using often for-profit providers of “employment services” to people with problems.

If you’ve heard anything about robo-debt, it won’t surprise you that it’s become a travesty of what it was supposed to be, with providers gaming the system and gaining the impression the government wants them to punish people rather than help them.

The Albanese government has instituted an inquiry into the present system of government-funded employment services. How seriously it reforms this shemozzle will be a key test of how committed the government is to achieving sustained full employment.

The final type of unemployment is “structural”, caused by a mismatch between the skills a worker possesses and the skills employers are seeking. Sometimes the mismatch is geographic; often it’s caused by the ever-changing structure of industry, as some industries decline and others expand.

This is the hardest cause of unemployment to reduce. But it involves reforming every level of education and committing to retraining and lifelong learning. Again, this will be a key test of whether the government is committed to achieving sustained full employment, not just dreaming about it.

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Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Universities teach us much about government mismanagement

I’m starting to worry about Anthony Albanese and his government. As politicians go, they’re a good bunch. Well-intentioned, smart and hard-working. Only occasionally got at by their union mates.

They’re anxious to fix things, which is surely what we elect our politicians to do. Things the previous lot either neglected or worsened. But, like all pollies, their overriding objective is to stay in office.

And I fear they lack what John Howard called the “ticker” to make the tough decisions. To knock heads together when needed. To make the unpopular decisions their predecessors shied away from.

Above all, to say to voters what a tradie says to a home owner: “I can fix it, but it’s gonna cost ya.”

Everywhere you look in the federal space you find problems: aged care, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, government employees who’ve gone for years being underpaid, especially women in the “caring economy”, who’ve been exploited for decades. Medicare, with its overstretched hospitals and staff, overpaid specialists and underpaid GPs. The way the increasing frequency of extreme weather events is making insurance unaffordable.

Housing – whether it’s home ownership or renting. The decades of neglect of public housing. The rundown of the public service and its expertise and its replacement by untrustworthy management consultants charging exorbitantly for self-serving advice.

What many of these problems have in common is that they’re the consequence of both parties’ decades-long experiment with “smaller government” and lower taxes and the always-dubious notion that, because the private sector is inherently more efficient than the public sector, handing institutions over to private owners and the provision of various public services over to for-profit providers would leave us much better off.

No. Government is smaller only because so many of its bits have been sold off. The new private owners have rarely hesitated to whack up their charges, but our taxes don’t seem any lower. Put it together, and we’re paying more for services whose quality has declined.

Education Minister Jason Clare’s plans to fix universities are an extreme example of supposed “reform” gone wrong.

Last month, he issued an interim report promising five immediate actions to start fixing the sector’s many problems, ahead of the more comprehensive changes to be proposed in the accord panel’s final report in December.

These involve setting up 20 additional “study hubs” in regional areas plus up to 14 outer-suburban hubs, abolishing the Morrison government’s rule requiring students who fail to pass 50 per cent of their courses to be sent away, giving uni places to all First Nations students who meet the eligibility requirement for the course, guaranteeing uni funding for a further two years, and persuading state governments to appoint more people to uni councils who actually know something about universities.

That list is too modest to fault, but nor is it likely to do much good. When it comes to universities, everywhere you look you find problems. The academics tell you the government isn’t giving them enough money to do good research; the students tell you the teaching isn’t good enough, with too much of it palmed off onto casuals. Too many students drop out of their courses without anyone much caring. Young graduates seeking a career in academia get no job security and are treated badly.

The Morrison government’s crazy Job-ready Graduates scheme cut the tuition fees for degrees it approved of – teaching, nursing and agriculture – while doubling the fees for the humanities degrees it disapproved of. There’s been no decline in people doing arts degrees, just a lot more debt for those who do.

The HECS student loans started life in the late 1980s as carefully designed and fair, but governments’ attempts to get the money repaid faster have stuffed up the fairness.

The plain truth is that successive governments have brought about a sort of back-door privatisation of our universities with disastrous results. They’ve been trying for ages to get the unis off the federal budget. Their big let-out has been to allow the unis free rein in overcharging overseas students.

They’ve succeeded in giving unis the worst of both worlds. Unis have been filled with layers of high-paid managers, whose main role seems to be to annoy the academics. If businesses can fill up with casuals and keep accidentally underpaying people, we can too.

Vice-chancellors have become fund-raisers, always hunting for new sources of revenue. They spend much time finding ways to game the various international rankings of universities, which impresses the parents of overseas students and allows the big-city unis to charge higher fees.

One problem for Clare is that though the unis are agreed the system is bad and needs big change, they can never agree on what the changes should be.

But the biggest problem is that nothing can be fixed without costing the government a lot of money. This is where Clare risks raising expectations the government can’t meet. We’re stuck with smaller government in the sense that the pollies aren’t game to ask us to pay more for a better one.

Read more >>

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Most of us don't really want to be rich, for better or worse

When it comes to economics, the central question to ask yourself is this: do you sincerely want to be rich? Those with long memories – or Google – know this was the come-on used by the notorious American promoter of pyramid schemes, Bernie Cornfeld. But that doesn’t stop it being the right question.

It’s actually a trick question. Most of us would like to be rich if the riches were delivered to us on a plate. If we won the lottery, or were left a fortune by a rich ancestor we didn’t know we had.

But that’s not the question. It’s do you sincerely want to be rich. It ain’t easy to become rich by your own efforts, so are you prepared to pay the price it would take? Work night and day, ignore your family and friends, spend very little of what you earn, so it can be re-invested? Come unstuck a few times until you make it big? Put it that way and most of us don’t sincerely want to be rich. We’re not that self-disciplined and/or greedy.

The question arises because the Productivity Commission’s five-yearly report on our productivity performance has found that, as a nation, we haven’t got much richer over the past decade – where rich means our production and consumption of goods and services.

When business people, politicians and economists bang on about increasing the economy’s growth, they’re mainly talking about improving the productivity – productiveness – of our paid labour.

The economy – alias gross domestic product – grows because we’ve produced more goods and services than last year. Scientists think this happens because we’ve ripped more resources out of the ground and damaged the environment in the process.

There is some of that (and it has to stop), but what scientists can never get is that the main reason our production grows over the years is that we find ways to get more production from the average hour of work.

We do this by increasing the education and training of our workers, giving them better machines to work with, and improving the way our businesses organise their work.

But the commission finds that our rate of productivity improvement over the past decade has been the slowest in 60 years. It projects that, if it stays this far below our 60-year average, our future incomes will be 40 per cent below what they could have been, and the working week will be 5 per cent longer.

It provides 1000 pages of suggestions on how state and federal governments can make often-controversial changes that would lift our game and make our incomes grow more strongly.

So, this is the nation’s do-you-sincerely-want-to-be-rich moment. And my guess is our collective answer will be yeah, nah. Why? For good reasons and bad. Let’s start with the negative.

If you think of the nation’s income as a pie, there are two ways for an individual to get more to eat. One is to battle everyone else for a bigger slice. The other is to co-operate with everyone to effect changes that would make the pie – and each slice - bigger.

For the past 40 years of “neoliberalism”, which has focused on the individual and sanctified selfishness, we’ve preferred to battle rather than co-operate.

Our top executives have increased their own remuneration by keeping the lid on their fellow employees’ wages. Governments have set a bad example by imposing unreasonably low wage caps.

Then they wonder why their union won’t co-operate with their efforts to improve how the outfit’s run. Workers fear there’ll be nothing in it for them.

It’s the same with politics. Governments won’t make controversial changes because they know the opposition will take advantage and run a scare campaign.

But there are also good reasons why we’re unlikely to jump to action in response to the commission’s warning. The first is that economists focus on the material dimension of our lives: our ability to consume ever more goods and services.

We’re already rich – why do we need to be even richer? There’s more to life than money, and if we gave getting richer top priority, there’s a big risk those other dimensions would suffer.

Would a faster growing economy tempt us to spend less time enjoying our personal relationships? How would that leave us better off overall (to coin a phrase)?

How much do we know about whether the pace of economic life is adding to stress, anxiety and even worse mental troubles?

If we did go along with the changes the commission proposes, what guarantee is there that most of the increased income wouldn’t go to the bosses (and those terrible people with more than $3 million in superannuation)?

What we do know is that we should be giving top priority to reducing the damage economic activity is doing to the natural environment, including changing the climate. If that costs us a bit in income or productivity, it’s a price worth paying.

And there are various ways we could improve our lives even if our income stopped growing. Inquire into them.

Read more >>

Monday, March 20, 2023

Handle with care: Productivity Commission's advice on getting richer

If you accept the Productivity Commission’s assumption that getting richer – “advancing prosperity” – is pretty much the only thing that matters, then the five priority areas it nominates in its five-yearly review of our productivity performance make a lot of sense.

But when you examine the things it says we should do to fix those five areas, you find too much of its same old, same old, preference for neoclassical ideology over empirical evidence.

And you find no acknowledgement that part of our claimed failure to improve the productivity of the “government-funded non-market services sector” has occurred because, over recent decades, governments have acted on the commission’s advice to keep the public sector small and taxes low by outsourcing the provision of human services to profit-motivated businesses.

Which, if anything, has made matters worse rather than better. As witness: the mess we’ve made of aged care and vocational education and training, and the ever-growing cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The report is quick to explain that improving productivity does not mean getting people to work harder. Perfectly true. It’s supposed to mean making workers more productive by giving them better training and better machines to work with.

Except that when you see the commission recommending a move to “modern, fit-for-purpose labour market regulation” – including, no doubt, getting rid of weekend penalty pay rates – you realise the commission has learnt nothing from the failure of John Howard’s Work Choices, nor from the failure of the reduction in Sunday penalty payments to lead to any increase in weekend employment, as had been confidently predicted.

So, what the commission is really advocating is that the balance of power in wage bargaining be shifted further in favour of employers and away from workers and their unions. Which probably would lead to people working harder for little or no increase in pay.

What the commission should have said, but didn’t, is that workers would be more co-operative with bosses’ efforts to improve the productivity of their firms if they were more confident they’d get their fair share of the benefits.

At present, they have good reason to doubt that they would.

What’s conspicuously absent from all the bemoaning of the slowdown in our rate of productivity improvement, is any acknowledgement that there’s also been a huge fall in the rate of the flow-through to real wages of what improvement we are achieving.

Until that’s fixed – until the capitalist system goes back to keeping its promise that the workers will get their fair share of the benefits of capitalism – Australia’s households have no rational reason to give a stuff about what’s happening to productivity.

Back to the point. Productivity improves when you produce the same things with fewer inputs of labour or capital, or produce more – either more quantity or better quality – with the same inputs.

And the report is exactly right to say that steadily improving our productivity is the key to improving the nation’s material standard of living. The rich world has more than two centuries of proof of that truth.

The first of the report’s five priority areas is achieving a “highly skilled and adaptable workforce”. Dead right. This is economics 101. Economists have known for yonks that investing in “human capital” is the obvious way to increase productivity.

(And it’s the better-educated and trained workers who can most easily adapt to the changing demand for labour that the digital revolution and other technological advance will bring.)

But the commission long ago stopped pointing this out, while state and federal governments put their efforts into quite different objectives. The Howard government, for instance, spent hugely on expanding parents’ choice of private school.

“I’m a Callithumpian, and I’d like to send my kid to a Callithumpian school, where they won’t have to mix with sinners.” Next, we had the limited success of the Gonski-inspired push to fund schools based on student need rather than entrenched privilege and religion.

And then we wonder why school results have got worse and so many kids leave school with inadequate numeracy and literacy. How they’ll be advancing our prosperity in an ever-changing world I hate to think.

Which raises a recent “learning” by economists, that doesn’t seem to have reached the commission: if you ignore what your “reforms” are doing to the distribution of income between the top and the bottom, don’t be surprised if your productivity goes off.

For some inexplicable reason, growth in the number of the downtrodden makes the average look worse.

Meanwhile, with universities, the highest priority of successive federal governments – Labor and Liberal – over the past 30 years has just been to get them off the budget.

The feds have made them hugely dependent on attracting overseas students and charging them full freight. One way they’ve coped is by making university teaching by the younger staff part of the gig economy.

Apart from putting the public unis (but not the few private unis) on a starvation diet during the lockdowns, the Morrison government’s last effort to punish what it saw as a hotbed of socialism was a hare-brained scheme to encourage students to choose courses that made them “job-ready” by, among other things, doubling the tuition fees for a BA.

Fortunately, this failed to discourage the students, but did make the humanities a far more profitable product for the unis to push.

To be fair, another recent “learning” does seem to have got through to the commission. It’s third priority for attention is “creating a more dynamic and competitive economy”.

Research by Treasury has found strong empirical evidence that our economy has become less dynamic – less able to change and improve over time. Fewer new firms are being created, and fewer workers are being induced to change their jobs pursuing higher pay.

Our industries have become more oligopolised – allowed by our permissive takeover laws - and, not surprisingly, their profit margins (“markups,” in econospeak) have been creeping up.

No official will admit it, but it seems pretty clear that the reason the Reserve Bank has been raising interest rates so far and so fast – despite falling real wages – is the part that oligopolistic pricing power is playing in our high inflation rate.

And now further Treasury research has confirmed that our high degree of industry concentration (markets dominated by a few huge firms) has given employers greater power to limit the rise in wages.

All this makes it unsurprising that our rate of productivity improvement has weakened. It also helps explain why, over the past decade, virtually none of what improvement in the productivity of labour we have achieved has been passed on to real wages.

Read more >>

Monday, June 13, 2022

Maybe Left versus Right is turning into smart versus not-so

Here’s a funny thing to think about on a holiday Monday: what if all the well-educated people voted Labor and the lowly-educated voted Liberal or National? How would that change our politics? A preposterous notion? Not as much as you may think.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, the great political stereotype is that the Liberals are the party of the bosses, while Labor, with its link to the union movement, is the party of the workers. So the people who own and manage the country vote Liberal, whereas the people who do as they’re told vote Labor.

This is the basis for the Liberals' instinctive confidence that they’re the natural party of government. Such belief is reinforced by their having spent far more of the past 75 years in office than their opponent has.

The better-situated, better-off suburbs in any city tend to vote Liberal, while the inner and outer, less-desirable suburbs vote Labor. Most people living in country areas and voting for the Nationals tend to be on modest incomes, similar to the stereotypical Labor voter.

The owners and managers tend to be pretty happy with the world as it is, whereas those further down the pecking order, with less wealth and less income, can always think of things they’d like to see changed. The Liberals defend the status quo, while Labor is the party of “reform”.

This is the basis for the standard perception of politics as a conflict between the privileged Right and the discontented Left.

But what if this conventional setup was changing - being undermined – before our eyes? We all know that strange things happened in last month’s federal election. As usual, we’ve tried to understand these from the top down. How the parties’ share of the national vote changed, then looking by state and even at the 151 electorates.

But Luke Metcalfe, founder of the property and data analytics consultancy, Microburbs, (and, as it happens, a nephew of mine), has done a bottom-up, more “granular” analysis.

He’s taken the Australian Electoral Commission’s voting figures by polling booth and matched them with all the detailed demographic information for corresponding small statistical areas in the 2016 census. They’re not a perfect fit, but they’re a good guide.

Metcalfe finds that “we’re seeing a continuation of the trend in the [2019] federal election, where the Coalition’s support base is shifting towards poorer, less-skilled, less-educated people born in Australia”.

When Labor lost in 2019, many people noticed the swing against Labor in regional mining seats in the NSW Hunter Valley and Central Queensland. What few noticed was the swing to Labor in many safe Liberal seats.

This time, Metcalfe says, rich, educated professionals swung 11 to 12 per cent against the Coalition, while the country’s working poor - the fifth of polling booths paying the lowest rent, earning the lowest incomes and with the least skills - swung only 3 to 4 per cent against it.

As we know, much of this shift away from the Liberals came via the teal independents in Liberal heartland seats in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. The teal seats’ most dominant characteristic was their high levels of “educational attainment”.

Unsurprisingly, income and education are highly correlated. But Metcalfe says it’s education, not income, that’s doing the driving.

Many people think they’ve detected in recent election results a growing divide between city and country in Australia, but also in Britain and America. But maybe it’s more about the better-educated concentrating in the big cities – where the best-paying jobs are – leaving the less well-educated in outer suburbs or back in country towns, feeling the world has changed in ways they don’t like and thinking of voting One Nation.

Some political scientists think voters in the rich economies are dividing between the globalists and the nationalists. In the same vein, David Goodhart famously explained Brexit as a battle between those who could live and work “anywhere” and those who had to live “somewhere”.

But it still gets down to education and the way ever-rising levels of educational attainment - particularly among women – are remodelling the party-political landscape.

Take climate change. The better educated you are, the more likely you are to accept the science, believe we should be acting, and not be worried about either losing your job in the mine or paying a bit more for power.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the party of the workers became the party of the well-educated, while the party of the bosses became the party of the battlers?

I can’t see that happening, it’s too incongruous. There’s no way the Coalition could get enough seats without the Liberals’ leafy heartland. But it will need radical policy change to get the well-educated back into the fold, or into bed with the Neanderthal Nationals.

Read more >>

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Sense about improving education, before the political bulldust flies

In the looming election campaign we’ll be hearing a lot of silly, scary and self-serving stuff. Who’s better on the ukulele, ScoMo or Albo? Who’s the more “human”? Which side “won the week”?

We’ll see the content of carefully compiled “dirt files”. Each side accusing the other of hypocrisy. The other side’s policies have been/would be absolutely frightening.

Great. I can’t wait. But last week I ran across the thoughts of someone who’s had much experience in governance, but isn’t running for office. He was on about education – a topic of direct or indirect relevance to us all – but one that won’t be heard once all the shouting starts.

He’s Professor Peter Shergold, former head of the Prime Minister’s Department under John Howard, but these days chancellor of the University of Western Sydney and writer of government reports.

At every level of education – early childhood education and care, schools, universities and vocational education and training – the polite judgement on our performance is: could do better.

Shergold had many sensible things to say in a report to federal and state education ministers that lobbed only after the plague had begun.

He starts by putting education in a broader, more balanced context. “Education must prepare young people both for active citizenship in a democratic society and for purposeful engagement with the labour force,” he writes.

“This is vital at a time when trust in democratic governance and institutions is at a low level and cognitive technologies are transforming the future of work.”

School leavers don’t just need to be employable. They need to be adaptable, flexible and confident. Education must provide students with the essential attributes they require for lifelong learning in whatever fields of endeavour they may choose, he says.

The professional and applied skills they need will change significantly over their lives. The jobs they do will be transformed. Most will switch careers.

Academic achievement is important but not the sole reason for schooling. We need to focus more on preparing the whole person, no matter what career path they choose. Many senior secondary students enjoy school. Some, for a variety of reasons, just want to leave as soon as possible. Both groups need to be supported by more flexible learning.

Education will remain the foundation of a “fair go” Australia, Shergold says. Senior secondary students from disadvantaged backgrounds should be supported to ensure they can follow the same pathways available to others.

Literacy, numeracy and digital literacy should be recognised as essential skills for every student. At a time of technological transformation, when the future of work is uncertain, these attributes are more important than ever, he says.

Students must be supported to attain capabilities in these areas before they finish school. “Every young person who leaves school without them is having their economic and social future short-changed.”

All pathways through school should be delivered to the same high standard. While university will remain an aspiration for many young people, academic pathways should no longer enjoy more privileged access to school resources than apprenticeships, traineeships or other vocational education and training.

Shergold gets more specific in a report he wrote for the NSW Education Department with someone whose name seems familiar, a David Gonski. They find that vocational education and training – VET – is plagued by problems across the nation.

Skills development hasn’t received the level of government investment required, which has helped reinforce the public perception that VET is less valuable than university education. This misconception is too often instilled in students while they’re still at school.

When they move on from high school, they enter a world bifurcated between university and vocational education. Forced to choose, many opt for a uni degree, for which there are no upfront costs, rather than paying fees for certificate-level vocational education.

Partly because career advice is so poor, many parents and students believe the demand for vocationally qualified workers is in decline. This is utterly mistaken, Shergold and Gonski say.

Federal figures on skilled occupations show shortages in many trades, including mechanics, panel beaters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters and cabinet-makers. A rapid rise in demand is forecast for certificate-trained workers in child care, aged care and disability care.

Get this: a “significant proportion” of uni graduates then move to VET to enhance their employability. It’s clear to me that a lot of kids who struggle through uni (with many failing to make it) would have been better going to VET.

Little wonder Shergold and Gonski want to bring universities and VET into a single system. They want much better career advice, which should be available to people throughout their working lives, including those obliged to make mid-career changes.

They want senior secondary schooling to be less obsessed with having kids direct all their efforts to maximising a single number, the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. There are better ways for unis to select good recruits. And high schools could do more to get students started on a vocational “pathway”.

All this is worth debating in the coming weeks – but ain’t likely to be.

Read more >>

Friday, July 16, 2021

Reform not a dirty word when it benefits the many, not the few

The idea that the economy needs to be “reformed” has been hijacked by the business lobby groups. Their notion of reform involves making life better for their clients at the expense of someone else. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that could be changed to make the economy work better for most of us, not just the rich and powerful.

Trouble is, Scott Morrison shows little interest in any kind of reform, whether to advance business interests or anyone else’s. Reform involves persuading people to accept changes they don’t like the sound of, and increases the risk they’ll vote against you at the next election.

Morrison’s government is making heavy weather of our most urgent problem – getting all of us vaccinated against the virus ASAP – so maybe it’s not such a bad time for him to Keep it Simple, Stupid.

But we do have an election coming up, in which it’s customary to think about what improvements could be made over the next three years. And it’s not illegal for us to dream about what could be improved if sometime, somewhere we ever found leaders interested in doing a better job as well as staying in office.

Next to the pandemic, the most important problem we need to be working on is climate change. That’s stating the obvious, I know, but not to Morrison and his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, whose recent intergenerational report paid lip service to the issue but then proceeded to project what might happen to the economy and the federal budget over the next 40 years without taking climate change into account.

What’s surprising is that another Coalition government, Gladys Berejiklian’s in NSW, did take account of global warming in its state intergenerational report. It found that more severe natural disasters, sea level rises, heatwaves and declining agricultural production would reduce incomes in NSW by $8 billion a year in 2061 under a high-warming scenario compared to a lower warming one.

Clearly, climate change will be bad for everyone in the economy – some people more than others – while acting to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases will be a cost to our fossil fuel industries.

But the world’s demand for our coal and gas exports is likely to decline whatever we do. Our government doesn’t believe climate change needs to be taken seriously but, fortunately for more sensible Australians, the rest of the world does, and is in the process of forcing “reform” on our obdurate federal government.

In the meantime, however, our electricity industry is finding it hard to know what to do because the Morrison government won’t commit itself to a clear plan on how we’ll make the transition to all-renewable power.

Worse, our abundance of sun and wind relative to most other countries makes us well placed to become a world renewables superpower – exporting “clean” energy-intensive manufactures, maybe even energy itself - if we act quickly.

Right now, however, our need to choose between being a loser from the old world or a winner in the new world is sitting in the too-hard basket.

Moving to less strategic issues, Danielle Wood, chief executive of the Grattan Institute, gives a high priority to lowering barriers to workforce participation by women, by making childcare more affordable and improving paid parental leave.

We’ve long seen the benefits of free education in public schools. Making “early childhood education and care” free would not merely make life easier for young families, it would get more of our kids off to a better start in the education system and allow women to more fully exploit the material benefits of their extensive education, not just to their benefit but the benefit of all of us.

The benefits of getting an education greatly exceed getting a better-paid job – education broadens the mind, don’t you know – but it makes no sense for girls, their families and the taxpayer to put so much effort and money into gaining a better education, then make it so hard for them to do well in the workforce when they have kids.

One factor that’s widening the gap between rich and poor in the advanced economies is years of “skill-biased” technological change, which is increasing the wages of highly skilled workers while doing little to increase the wages of unskilled workers. Indeed, many routine jobs are being replaced by machines.

This says one way to ensure Australian workers prosper in the digital future of work is to ensure our workforce is well educated and highly trained. We must be willing to spend – to invest – however much it takes to have a workforce capable of providing the more analytical, caring and creative skills employers will be demanding.

We need to do more to help our teachers teach better so that fewer kids leave school early without having acquired sufficient education to survive in the world of work. Some teachers are better at it than others; they need to be used to train younger teachers on the job and rewarded accordingly.

Universities need to be better funded by the federal government, so they can afford to give students a higher quality education, vice-chancellors aren’t so eternally money hungry, unis stop exploiting younger staff with insecure employment and aren’t so dependent on making money out of overseas students and thus obsessed by finding ways to game the international university league tables.

How’s all this to be afforded? By all of us paying somewhat higher taxes, how else? By politicians giving up their election-time pretense that taxes can come down without that leading to worse quality government services rather than better.

Throwing money at problems doesn’t magically fix them, you must use the money effectively. But when mindless cost-cutting is the source of much of the problem, nor is it possible to fix problems without spending more.

If our politicians would speak to us more honestly along the lines of “you get what you pay for”, that itself would be a welcome reform.

Read more >>

Sunday, May 30, 2021

Top economists think much further ahead than Morrison & Co

If Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg are looking for ideas about what more they could be doing to secure our economic future – after all, they’ll be seeking re-election soon enough – they could do worse than study the views of the 56 leading economists asked by the Economic Society of Australia to comment on this month’s budget.

Two points stand out. First, almost all the economists were happy to support the budget’s strategy of applying more fiscal stimulus to get unemployment below 5 per cent. They were pleased to see the government abandon its preoccupation with surpluses and debt.

As Professor Fabrizio Carmignani, of Griffith University, said, “the good thing about this budget is that it was not about repairing the deficit and debt accumulated in 2020”. Professor Sue Richardson, of Flinders University, said: “the debt and deficit mantra was never justified”.

Second, with one notable exception, the economists were critical of the government’s choice of things to spend on. The exception was its big spending on the “care economy” – aged care, childcare, disability care and mental health care – which most respondents welcomed. Indeed, quite a few thought there should have been more of it.

After that, the economists had plenty of constructive criticism of the government’s priorities. For instance, quite a number were happy to see big spending on “infrastructure”, but critical of the government’s narrow conception of what constitutes infrastructure.

Carmignani said: “there is in this budget – as in the past – an almost blind confidence in the power of investment in physical infrastructure to drive future growth and development. In fact, the future prosperity of Australia depends on innovation that requires social rather than physical infrastructures”.

Professor Gigi Foster, of the University of NSW, said: “childcare should be viewed as the social infrastructure that it is, and invested in as such. Instead, when we heard ‘infrastructure’, it was mainly code for transportation”.

So even in the area of physical infrastructure, the budget shows a lack of imagination. Professor Michael Keane, also of the University of NSW, said very little of the infrastructure money was “allocated to such urgent needs as renewable energy, climate change adaptation, environmental sustainability, water resources, etcetera. This shows a real lack of ambition.”

Richardson agrees. “The future is one of zero net greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “The transformation of the energy, agricultural, transport and manufacturing systems that this requires is enormous, will require unprecedented levels of investment and needs to start now.“

Now that’s interesting. Historically, treasurers and their advisers have regarded the budget as the place for discussion on finances and economics, not the state of the natural environment nor the challenge of climate change.

The economy in one box, the environment in some other box. The natural environment has been seen as of such little relevance to topics such at the budget and the economy that it has barely rated a mention in the five-yearly supposed “intergenerational report”.

But that’s not how our leading economists see it. At least a dozen of them have criticised the budget’s failure to respond to the challenge of climate change. Professor Warwick McKibbin, of the Australian National University, warned that “the world is likely to be taking significant action on climate change which will substantially impact Australia’s fossil fuel exports and the future structure of the Australian economy”.

Another topic barely mentioned in the budget – one of the industries much damaged by the pandemic – was universities. Unsurprisingly, more than a dozen respondents noticed the omission. They’re self-interested, of course, but they make a good case.

Dr Leonora Risse, of RMIT University, said succinctly: “investment in the university sector [is a] generator of productivity-enhancing skills, knowledge and research”. Meanwhile, McKibbin added that “a key ingredient is an investment in human capital”.

But the academics’ concern is wider than their own patch. Risse has called for more attention to the long-running drivers of growth, such as “investment in the workforce capabilities, resourcing, wages and working conditions of high-need, high-growth sectors” such as the care economy.

Dr Michael Keating, a former top econocrat, said restoring past rates of economic growth won’t be possible without addressing the structural problems in the labour market. “This will involve much more investment in education, training and research” but “the extra money in this budget for apprentices and trainees only makes up for past cuts.”

Notice a theme emerging? Budgets should be about investment – spending money now, for payoffs to the economy later – but investment needs to be in people, not just in physical and traditional things such as roads and railways.

It’s easy to accuse academics of pontificating atop their ivory towers, but they seem able see much further into the economy’s future needs than our down-to-earth politicians.

Read more >>

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Morrison moves the deck chairs on the hulk of our universities

A new rule of politics seems to be that no matter how badly the pollies have stuffed up some area of government responsibility, they can always make it worse. Enter the hapless federal Education Minister Dan Tehan who, doubtless acting under instructions from the boss, has just announced another set of passive-aggressive changes to university funding.

If, like a good Quiet Australian, you haven't been paying close attention, you may have gained the impression that the government is acting to help our unis to take in more local students – helping fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of overseas students – and changing the structure of tuition fees to encourage students into more occupationally oriented courses, which will make them "job-ready graduates" going into fields where the need for graduates is expected to be greatest.

You probably haven't noticed that, according to Tehan, the package includes "an additional $400 million over four years" for regional unis, and "a further $900 million" for the National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund.

Except that the whole package is "budget neutral" – a bureaucrat's way of saying it will cost the government not an extra cent. Since the government's expecting extra demand for uni places over the next three years, this is tantamount to its first major cost-cutting exercise after taking fright at the blowout in the budget deficit caused by the lockdown of the economy. So the "extra" and "further" funding will be coming not from the government's pockets but those of the universities and their students.

The government will fund an extra 39,000 places by 2023 – an increase of about 6 per cent – as the recession prompts more school leavers to stay on in education (and avoid taking a gap year), but will compensate for this by cutting the amount of its funding per student.

According to calculations by Professor David Peetz, of Griffith University (whose former job as a senior federal bureaucrat helps him find where the bodies are buried), the government will cut its funding by an annual $1883 per student, with the average increase in tuition fees of $675 per student reducing the net loss to universities to $1208 per student. (The fee changes won't apply to existing students, however.)

That is, the unis are being asked to do more with less. It's a safe bet their main response will be to further increase their ratio of students to staff. Unis will become even more of a sausage factory – which will be really great for the nation's investment in "human capital".

My guess is that the changes to the structure of tuition fees – with a hodgepodge of big cuts, small cuts, small increases, big increases and no changes – are intended to give the appearance of doing something to increase employment, to gratify the parliamentary Liberal Party's antipathy towards the universities (hotbeds of leftie activists who think Black Lives Matter and have kids who wag school because the silly-billies are worried about climate change) and to divert attention from the way the unis have been short-changed.

With the fee for humanities degrees up by a mere 113 per cent, it's quite a diversion. I'll be diverted only to the extent of quoting from a speech by a Business Council official in 2016: business needed the skills of "critical thinking, synthesis, judgment and an understanding of ethical constructs". The humanities produced people who can "ask the right questions, think for themselves, explain what they think, and turn those ideas into actions".

Ah, maybe that's what the backbench doesn't fancy.

Professor Andrew Norton, of the Australian National University, a recognised expert, doubts that the fee changes will do much to change students' preferences away from courses they think they'd like. And Peetz points out that it's the unis, not the government, that will be bearing the cost of the fee reductions for those courses the government prefers.

Which brings us to Professor Ian Jacobs, boss of UNSW, who points to the perverse incentives the changes will create (assuming the Senate is mad enough to pass them). Unis will be tempted to offer most places in those courses with the widest gap between the high government-set tuition fee and the cost of running the course. They'll be pushing BAs harder than ever.

This, of course, is exactly the way you'd expect the vice-chancellors to behave when you've taken government-owned and regulated agencies, spent 30 years pursuing a bipartisan policy of cutting their federal funding (from 86 per cent to 28 per cent of total receipts, in the case of Sydney University) and pretending they've been privatised.

Then, after they've turned to getting about a quarter of their funding from overseas students, but the coronavirus obliges you to ban foreign travellers, you hang them out to dry, refusing them access to the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme because they should never have allowed themselves to become so dependent on a single source of revenue.

For a while I thought the crisis had got Scott Morrison governing for all Australians. It hasn't taken him long to revert to playing friends and enemies.
Read more >>

Monday, November 11, 2019

Confessions of a pet shop galah: much reform was stuffed up

As someone who, back in the day, did his share of being one of Paul Keating’s pet shop galahs – screeching "more micro reform!" every time they saw a pollie – I don’t cease to be embarrassed by the many supposed reforms that turned into stuff-ups.

My defence is that at least I’ve learnt from those mistakes. One thing I’ve learnt is that too many economists are heavily into confirmation bias – they memorise all the happenings that affirm the wisdom of their theory, but quickly cast from their minds the events that cast doubt on that wisdom.

Well, let me remind them of a few things they’d prefer to forget.

Of course, it’s not the case that everything done in the name of "micro-economic reform" was wrong-headed. The floating of the dollar was an unavoidable recognition that the era of fixed exchange rates was over. And the dollar’s ups and downs have almost always helped to stabilise the economy.

The old regulated banking system wasn’t working well and had to be junked. With the rise of China in a globalising world, persisting with a highly protected manufacturing sector would have been a recipe for getting poorer. Nor could we have persisted with a centralised wage-fixing system or a tax system that failed to tax capital gains, fringe benefits and services – to name just a few worthwhile reforms.

Many privatisations were justified – the government-owned banks, insurance companies and airlines – but the sale of geographic monopolies (ports and airports) and natural monopolies (electricity and telephone networks) was a step backwards, mainly because governments couldn’t resist the temptation to maximise the sale price by preserving the businesses’ pricing power at the expense of consumers.

The conversion of five state monopolies into the national electricity market proved a monumental stuff-up at all three levels: generation, transmission and retail. It quickly devolved into an oligopoly with three big vertically integrated firms happily overcharging consumers at every level, with collateral damage to the use of carbon pricing in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We’ve learnt that “markets” artificially created by governments and managed by bureaucrats are – you wouldn’t guess – hugely bureaucratic, with the managers susceptible to “capture” by market players. The gas market has also been an enormous stuff-up, threatening the survival of what remains of Australian manufacturing.

The ill-considered attempt to treat schools and TAFEs and universities as being in some kind of market, where fostering competition between them and paying teachers performance bonuses would spur them to lift their performance, proved an utter dud.

Had the harebrained plan to deregulate uni fees not been stopped, it would have made even worse the chronic disorientation of the nation’s vice chancellors on what universities are meant to do and why they’re doing it. Lesson: trying to turn non-market parts of society into markets, while blithely ignoring all the obvious reasons such "markets" would fail, is a fool’s errand.

Which brings us to the half-baked idea of trying improve the provision of taxpayer-funded services by making their delivery “contestable” by for-profit providers. It's been an expensive failure pretty much everywhere it’s been tried: childcare, employment services, vocational education and training, and aged care (see present royal commission), not to mention privately run prisons and offshore detention centres. How long will it be before we’re having a royal commission into the abuses of the largely outsourced national disability insurance scheme?

Why have so many reform programs ended so badly? Partly because of the naivety of econocrats and other proponents of "economic rationalism". They had no notion of how far the grossly oversimplified neo-classical model of markets they carry in their heads misrepresented the big bad real world.

And many of them, having spent their working lives solely in the public sector, had no idea of how wasteful or bureaucratic the supposedly rational private sector could be. Actually break the law if they thought they wouldn’t get caught because corporate law-breaking wasn’t being policed? Sure. Rip off the government because the bureaucrats wouldn’t notice? Love to.

But there’s another reason so many reforms blew up. Because naive econocrats failed to foresee the way reforms intended to leave consumers or taxpayers better off could be hijacked by Finance Department accountants looking to cut government spending and produce "smaller government" by whatever expediency possible (see uni fee deregulation) and politicians looking to win the approval of big business or to move money and influence from the public sector column (them) to the private sector column (us).

Lesson: if a venal politician can find a way to sabotage micro-economic reform to their own advantage, they will.
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Monday, August 26, 2019

Why government-controlled prices are soaring

As if Scott Morrison didn’t have enough problems on his plate, we learnt last week that government-administered prices are rising much faster than prices charged by the private sector.

Last week my colleague Shane Wright dug out figures from the bowels of the consumer price index showing that, over the almost six years since the election of the Abbott government in September 2013, the prices of all the goods and services in the CPI basket have risen by just 10.4 per cent, whereas the government-administered prices in the basket rose by 26 per cent.

Some of those "administered" prices actually fell and others rose by less than prices overall. But let’s do what everyone does and focus on the really big increases.

Behavioural economics tell us that people’s perceptions of the cost of living are exaggerated by a ubiquitous mental shortcut psychologists call "salience". We tend to remember the things that leapt out at us at the time and forget all the things that didn’t.

So, for instance, we vividly remember the shock we got when we opened our electricity bill and saw how huge it was and how much it had increased.

In round figures, the cost of secondary education rose by 30 per cent over the period, childcare by 27 per cent, postal costs by 27 per cent, hospital and medical services by 36 per cent, council rates by 21 per cent, cigarettes by 109 per cent, gas prices by 16 per cent and electricity by 12 per cent (most of the bigger increase came during the term of the previous Labor government).

Not hard to see that the government has a huge salience problem. Plenty of scope there for the punters to convince themselves the cost of living is soaring.

But what should Morrison do? At a glance, the problem's obvious: government prices rising much faster than market prices say governments are hopelessly wasteful and inefficient. So expose the government to competition and the waste will be competed away, to the benefit of all.

Sorry, the true story’s much more complicated. Indeed, part of the problem is the backfiring of governments’ earlier attempts to make the provision of government services "contestable".

Let’s look deeper. For a start, some of the increase in administered "prices" is actually increases in taxation. The doubling in cigarette prices is the result of the phased massive increase in tobacco excise begun by Malcolm Turnbull.

Local council rates work by applying a certain rate of tax to the unimproved land value of properties. State governments usually cap the extent to which the tax rate can be increased, but the base to which it’s applied soars every time there’s a housing boom.

Postal costs rise because we want to continue being able to post letters to anywhere in Australia at a uniform price, even though we're actually doing it less and less, thus sending economies of scale into reverse. Australia Post would have been privatised long ago if any business thought it could make a profit from the business without scrapping the letter service.

The doubling in the retail prices of the now largely privatised (but still heavily regulated) electricity industry over the past decade is the classic demonstration that attempts to introduce competition to monopoly industries are no simple matter and can easily backfire.

The cost of childcare has been rising over the years because governments have been raising quality standards – staff-child ratios, better educated and paid workers. Is that bad? This formerly community-owned sector has long been open to competition from for-profit providers without this showing any sign of helping to limit price increases.

Even so, childcare is heavily subsidised by the federal government. This government’s more generous subsidy scheme caused the net out-of-pocket cost to parents (which is what the CPI measures) to fall a little last financial year.

The modest suggested fees in government schools wouldn't have risen much over the past six years. If private school fees have risen strongly despite the heavy taxpayer subsidies going to Catholic and independent schools, it’s because the number of parents willing to pay them shows little sign of diminishing. Hardly the government’s problem.

Detailed figures show that the out-of-pocket costs for pharmaceuticals rose by less than 6 per cent (thanks to reforms in the pharmaceutical benefits scheme) and for therapeutic goods fell a few per cent, while for dental services they kept pace with the overall CPI, leaving the out-of-pocket costs of hospital and medical services up by a cool 36 per cent.

That tells you private health insurance is falling apart. Add the continuing problems with needs-based funding of schools, and electricity and gas prices, and the scope for further efficiency improvements in healthcare, and you see the Morrison government has plenty to be going on with.
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Wednesday, August 14, 2019

We need more helicopter pollies caring for our kids


Sometimes I think that if our politicians spent as much time trying to fix the country as they do playing political games – slagging each other off and finding ways to “wedge” their opponents – we’d be in much better shape.

The world becomes ever more complicated and right now our future is looking, as a pollie might say, “challenging”. Not least among our challenges is ensuring our children have better lives than ours.

So far, you wouldn’t be sure we were making much progress on that project. Leaving aside the way we’ve shifted the tax system in favour of the old at the expense of the young, there’s the less-than-wonderful state of our education and training.

Our schools aren’t winning many prizes on speech day, and though our universities have become much bigger, you wouldn’t be sure all the extra youngsters going in are emerging with valuable degrees. You get the feeling some of them would have been better off going to TAFE.

Speaking of TAFE – sorry, “vocational education and training” - why is it still being treated as the poor relation in the education system? Has it recovered from the disastrous attempt to save money by making vocational training “contestable”?

You may not have noticed but, with Parliament not sitting last week, Scott Morrison and his minister thought they’d better get on with some work in the “education space”.

It was, to be polite, a week of modest accomplishment.

After decades of squeezing the universities – and turning the vice-chancellors into funding-hungry ringmasters who’re no longer sure what the circus is meant to prove – Julia Gillard introduced “demand-driven” funding of undergraduate places.

Predictably, the universities – particularly regional unis - went crazy, cutting entry standards and signing up everyone they could.

Gillard’s view that a much higher proportion of young people should go on to further education was sound, but did that mean everyone was off to uni now?

Enter the Coalition government, which decided demand-driven funding was costing too much. Why not deregulate the setting of uni fees? When that was shot down, it took some years for the government to decide simply to freeze the number of funded places.

Last year it relented, promising to increase places in line with the growth in the working-age population – but on condition of improved performance. Ah yes, performance indicators. That’s what we need.

But which? A committee of five vice-chancellors was commissioned to ponder the question. Last week Education Minister Dan Tehan released their report and accepted their recommendations. From next year the unis will get an extra $80 million, provided they demonstrate success on graduate employment, dropout rates, student satisfaction, and adequate participation rates for Indigenous, low socio-economic status and regional-and-remote students.

I have great sympathy for the government’s desire to stop the vice-chancellors using students as cash cows and get back to their main job of giving our kids a high-quality education.

But I doubt KPIs are the way to do it. Monetary incentives are a poor way to encourage better behaviour, partly because they’re too easily gamed. And nobody knows more about gaming performance indicators than our vice-chancellors, who devote much time to thinking of easy ways to boost their uni’s rank on the various international league tables of universities (because this attracts more overseas students and you can charge ’em more).

Moving on to VET, last week saw the release of a “Vision for Vocational Education and Training” following a meeting of federal and state ministers as part of the Council of Australian Governments.

As a collection of motherhood statements, it’s first rate. A sample: “VET and higher education [unis] are equal and integral parts of a joined-up and accessible post-secondary education system with pathways between VET, higher education and the school system.”

This seems to be an assertion that we already have just the thing we don’t have, but desperately need. How are we to achieve it? Not to worry. The ministers are working on it. (They say that COAG is where good ideas go to die.)

Meanwhile, Andrew Norton, of the Grattan Institute, has used the long-running Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth to conclude that not too many of the less-academic students going to university – among the 40,000 students a year with ATARs (tertiary admission ranks) of 50 to 70 – would have done better for themselves in VET.

Low-ATAR uni students are more likely to fail subjects and get low marks, and when they graduate are less likely to find professional jobs or earn high salaries.

Less-academic men doing humanities or science degrees might have earned higher lifetime incomes had they done vocational diplomas in construction, engineering or commerce.

But less-academic women often do teaching and nursing degrees. These “deliver good employment outcomes to students across the ATAR range,” Norton says. “These students are unlikely to do better in a vocational education course.”

Hmm. Teaching may be good for less-academic students, but I’m not sure how good less-academic teachers are for teaching.

I think that if universities are willing to admit – and take big fees from – less-able students, they have an obligation to give them more help.

Norton says “a good tertiary education system steers prospective students towards courses that increase their opportunities and minimise their risks. Australia’s post-school system does not always achieve this goal”.
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Monday, May 6, 2019

Universities: both sides should clean up the mess they've made

Among the many issues needing early attention from the winner of the federal election is universities. Trouble is, neither side seems to have much idea of how to fix the mess both parties spent decades creating, before Julia Gillard brought things to a head with the brainwave of moving to “demand-driven” funding.

Her idea of shifting control over the size of annual federal-funded undergraduate admissions from budget-conscious bureaucrats in Canberra to individual universities ignored the decades of funding repression to which the unis had previously been subjected.

Governments of both persuasions had gone for years trying to get the universities off the budget books by a process of de facto privatisation. Unis were given the power to charge (government-set) tuition fees to local students – HECS – and unrestricted power to charge overseas students – but with commensurate cuts in government grants.

The result has been to make vice chancellors as money-obsessed as any company chief executive, but without the private sector’s simple profit-maximising objective. Universities have lost their way, no longer sure what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.

Meanwhile, when Gillard opened the unis’ access to the federal coffers the predictable happened: vice chancellors went crazy, slashing entry requirements and cramming in as many more under-qualified undergrads as they could.

This seems to have been particularly true of second-string and regional unis. Australian Catholic University, Swinburne and Sunshine Coast more than doubled their domestic undergrad enrolments between 2008 and 2017. Another six increased their enrolments by more than half.

Gillard’s move to demand-driven funding was linked to her policy of raising the proportion of school-leavers going on to higher education to 40 per cent. A worthy goal – except that everyone took “higher education” to mean going to uni.

So, at a time when federal and state governments were engaged in their disastrous experiment with using “contestability” to get TAFE off their budgets, it suited both status-conscious parents and money-strapped lesser universities for the unis to cut their entry standards and poach kids who would have been better served getting a technical education.

Returning to the feds’ budget preoccupation, after the unis’ inevitable demand-driven raid on the federal purse came the Finance Department’s inevitable cry of pain: we can’t possibly afford this hugely increased cost.

The accountants’ solution – one that couldn’t have made sense to anyone who understood how un-market-like universities are – came in the Abbott government’s first budget: match the deregulation of uni places with the deregulation of uni fees (and cut uni grants by 20 per cent while you’re at it).

Fortunately, the Senate firmly rejected this bizonomics stupidity. But this left Abbott’s successors bereft of ideas to limit the unis’ cost to the budget. They ended up doing what they could do without parliamentary approval: canning the demand-driven system.

Which brings us to the election campaign. Labor is promising to restore demand-driven funding – but also to instigate an inquiry to find a more sensible division of roles between the two parts of higher education. Hopefully, the latter would undo the damage done by the former.

The Coalition is persisting with its spending cuts. But, because regional universities are claiming to be hard hit by those cuts, it promises special spending to help them (think National Party rent seeking).

But none of this would fix the real problem with the way universities have allowed their funding problems to undermine their commitment to high-quality undergraduate teaching and even high-quality research.

They’ve gone too close to turning undergrad teaching into a money-making sausage machine, where you have to be really dumb not to pass, where you don’t need to attend lectures because it’s all online, where lecturers – who will perish if they don’t get their publications up – limit their students’ access time, and where the lecturer is a casual because the person who should be doing it has brought in a big research grant and been rewarded by being allowed to “buy out” their teaching load.

Universities treat their junior academic staff badly (we get flexibility, you get insecurity) and have become bamboozled by KPIs and other faddish “metrics”. Their worryingly high dependence on fees from overseas students means the sandstone “Group of Eight” unis have become obsessed by lifting their place on the various international rankings of universities.

Why? So they can attract more overseas students and charge them higher fees. While their academics find ways to game their KPIs, their many “pro-vice chancellor (something in brackets)” search for ways to use their academic appointments and research direction to game the international rankings.

I think a much more comprehensive inquiry is needed.
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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Endless fights over money don’t improve education results

One of the few things both sides agree on in this election campaign is that we must get education right. A highly educated and well-trained workforce is our best insurance that all the benefits that digital disruption brings don’t come at the cost of many people unable to find decent jobs.

As a rich nation, our workers are highly paid. That’s not bad, it’s good. But it does mean we have to ensure our workers continue being equipped with the knowledge and skills that make their labour valuable - to local employers and to the purchasers of the goods and services we export.

One thing it doesn’t mean is that all our youngsters should go to university. There will be plenty of well-paid, safe, interesting jobs for the less academically inclined, provided they’re equipped with the valuable technical and caring skills provided by a healthy vocational education and training sector.

A top-notch technical education system will also be key to achieving something we’ve long just rabbited on about: lifelong learning. Being able to update your skills for your occupation’s latest digital whiz-bangery, or quickly acquire different skills for a job in a new industry with better prospects than the one that just ejected you.

But while we’re emphasising education’s instrumental importance to maintaining our material standard of living, we should never lose sight of its intrinsic value to our spiritual living standard. Education for its own sake. Because it satisfies humans’ insatiable curiosity about the world – even the universe – we live in.

We need to get education and training right at every level, from childcare (these days renamed ECEC - “early childhood education and care”), preschool, primary and secondary school, vocational education and training, and university.

To me, our greater understanding of the way tiny brains develop combines with common sense to say that, in our efforts to get every level of education up to scratch, we should start at the bottom and work up.

The better-equipped kids are when they progress from one stage to the next, the easier it is for that next stage to ensure they thrive rather than fall behind.

On childcare, the Coalition did a good job of rationalising the feds’ two conflicting childcare subsidies, but Labor is promising a lot more money for childcare, including phasing in much better pay for (mainly female) better-educated childcare workers.

The Coalition has achieved universal preschool for four-year-olds and, in the budget, extended that funding for a further two years. Labor has topped that, promising permanent funding arrangements and extension of the scheme to three-year-olds, as most other rich countries do.

Let’s be frank: because Labor plans to increase, rather than cut, the tax on high income-earners, it has a lot more money to spend on all levels of education (plus a lot of other areas).

It’s certainly promising to spend more on schools. The Coalition’s great achievement has been to introduce its own, better and somewhat cheaper version of businessman David Gonski’s needs-based funding of schools – which it immediately marred by doing a special deal with Catholic schools.

Labor’s promising to return to its earlier Gonski funding levels (but, hopefully, not to its earlier commitment that no rich school would lose a dollar).

It’s often claimed we spend a lot on schools relative to other countries, but the Grattan Institute’s schools expert, Dr Peter Goss, says that, when you allow for our younger population, only the Netherlands and the United States spend less than we do among nine other comparable rich countries.

International testing shows our 15-year-olds’ scores for maths, science and reading are each below the average for those countries. On maths, our score of 524 in 2003 had dropped to 494 by 2015.

For science, our gap between the top and bottom students – a measure of fairness - is wider than for the others, bar Canada, South Korea, Japan and even Britain.

Which demolishes the claim that we’re pouring more money into schools but getting worse results. What’s true is that our spending is below average and our results are also below average – and getting worse.

So, do we need to spend a lot more? No, not a lot more now we’ve gone a long way towards redistributing funding favour of needy (mainly public) schools full of kids with low income, low educated parents.

The feds and, more particularly, the states have more to do to re-align funding between advantaged non-government schools and their own disadvantaged public schools.

Once disadvantaged schools are getting their full whack of needs-based funding, however, we can end the eternal shootfight over money and move to the more important issue of ensuring the money's better spent.

Much can be done to help teachers move to more effective ways of teaching, making schools less like a production line and giving more attention to individuals, many of whom have trouble keeping up, while some are insufficiently challenged.

But, Goss says, this is mainly a job for the state governments, and the feds should avoid trying to backseat drive. The feds would help more by obliging the universities to do a much better job of selecting and preparing future teachers.
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Monday, December 31, 2018

Find parenting tough? Be glad you're not American

I have a news flash: being a grandad beats being a parent. Parenting is now a much tougher gig, whereas grandparenting is all care and no responsibility. And it’s a lot cheaper.

These thoughts are prompted by an article in the New York Times, in which Claire Cain Miller writes that parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

“Over just a couple of generations,” she writes, “parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.”

(How does she know how much time mothers spend on their kids? Because the US government conducts regular surveys of how people use their time. We used to do so too, but have since decided we can’t afford to keep it up. Great decision, guys.)

“The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s,” she writes.

The most momentous social change in my lifetime came sometime in the 1960s when Australia’s parents decided (as did parents in most advanced economies) that their daughters were just as entitled to a good education as their sons.

That simple attitudinal change has had huge economic and social ramifications, to which we and our governments are yet to fully adjust.

These days, most kids go to year 12, and most of those go on to uni. But girls outnumber boys in year 12 and at uni. When girls (and their parents and the taxpayer) have invested so much time and money in attaining a good education, it’s hardly surprising most of them want to put that education to work, so to speak, to gain the monetary reward but also to gain more intellectual (and social) stimulation than they would staying at home.

This “economic emancipation of women” has greatly increased the rate at which women participate in the (paid) labour force, making Australians a lot more prosperous, including by creating a lot of jobs for women performing services most women formerly performed for themselves at home, such as childcare.

The rise of the two-income family is one factor contributing to higher house prices. Governments have had to do a lot of work (and spend a lot of money) renovating the institutions of the labour market which, over the centuries, were designed exclusively to meet the needs of male breadwinners.

They’ve had to spend a lot more on high school and university education, legislate to ensure women (and later men) keep their places when they go on parental leave, receive at least some payment while on that leave, and receive big subsidies for a greatly expanded and heavily regulated system of childcare – in which childcare workers are better trained and much better paid.

Now there are strengthening efforts to ensure women get a much bigger share of the top jobs (with pay equal to the top men) – including in parliament.

Meanwhile, however, the nature of parenting has changed. Two-income families have more money to spend on fewer kids, and spend it they do – partly, I suspect, because mothers feel guilty about the time they don’t spend with their kids (I’m not saying they should, just that many do).

Parents, mainly mothers, put much time and money into taking their kids to after-school sporting and cultural training and (particularly in NSW) exam coaching. Many imagine sending their kids to expensive private schools will buy them a better education.

We’ve entered the era of “intensive parenting”, which brings us to Miller’s point that modern American mothers spend just as much time parenting as their stay-at-home mothers or grandmothers did. They just do different things.

As yet, however, it’s not nearly as bad in Oz as it is in the US. The gap between rich and poor has widened so much in America (with a bigger cost and status gap between government-funded universities and private Ivy-League colleges), that parents worry their kids won’t be able to live as well their parents did. In the States, parenting has become a lot more competitive.

Nor is it nearly as true here that children are most expensive before they get to school and after they leave it and head to uni. Our childcare is much more heavily subsidised than America’s. And our HECS-HELP “income-contingent loans” for uni tuition fees are much more concessional than what the Yanks do.

We have no need to worry about our kids being loaded up with HECS debt.
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