The Coalition and research

Futile research or stealthy censorship?

Ian Musgrave puts the boot into the Coalition's populist stab at research funding yesterday:

Yes, that’s a good idea. We could set up a committee of experts to examine all grants in detail, and get them checked by external experts as well, before deciding on who to give money to.

Oh wait a second, we do that already, it’s called the Australian Research Council.

Now, I’ve been both an applicant and a reviewer of ARC grants, so I can tell you personally that the grant process is no cake run. The competition is fierce and the amount of grant money available is limited. The review process is exhaustive and more than a little harrowing. Only around 20% of all grants get funded, and you have to be exceptionally good for your grant to get up.

 But this part is most telling:

Great, now we have a bunch of auditors telling researchers what their priorities should be, that’s going to work out just fine. Not to mention the cost of having this team doing the re-prioritising. Anyone willing to bet that the amount of money saved by shuffling around grants with funny names that politicians don’t understand will be more than gobbled up by the Commission of Audit team?

Oh, and the funds clawed back from these “wasteful” projects to will be put into “new medical research programs for dementia, diabetes and tropical disease”. Yeah, except that isn’t the ARC’s role at all, that’s a completely different funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council or the NH&MRC.
I suppose it would be too much to expect that the Coalition would actually understand how research is funded in Australia.

This is hard to see as anything other a cynical attempt to defund topics the Coalition doesn’t like.

 It reminds me of the Howard government's poor judgement in stopping small funding for Australian contribution to dangerous asteroid hunting.

I am curious (yellow)

What scientists can see in your pee

Quite a lot, as it turns out, and it's all on line now: 

"Urine is an incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds going into our toilets," noted David Wishart, the senior scientist on the project.

Wishart's research team used state-of-the-art analytical chemistry techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to systematically identify and quantify hundreds of compounds from a wide range of human urine samples.

To help supplement their experimental results, they also used computer-based data mining techniques to scour more than 100 years of published scientific literature about human urine. This chemical inventory—which includes chemical names, synonyms, descriptions, structures, concentrations and disease associations for thousands of urinary metabolites—is housed in a freely available database called the Urine Metabolome Database, or UMDB. The UMDB is a worldwide reference resource to facilitate clinical, drug and environmental urinalysis. The UMDB is maintained by The Metabolomics Innovation Centre, Canada's national metabolomics core facility.

Looking back at the history of improving health

Life expectancy history: Public health and medical advances that lead to long lives. - Slate Magazine

It looks like this is the start of a series of posts about this fascinating topic.  Some of the things mentioned you would have heard before, but it's always interested to see snippets of information showing how the popular imagination about something is really quite inaccurate.  Like this:

One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!

Jericho as with Pascoe

Coalition costings: we finally get them and they're just political fluff | Business | theguardian.com

Greg Jericho makes a very similar assessment to Michael Pascoe's about the Coalition's costings:

Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.

But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?

Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.

Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.

Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!

As Jericho then points out, the ridiculous thing is that Abbott is also trying to straddle the fence of whether or not the "commission of audit" will mean further cuts.

It's all pretty ludicrous.

Update:  by the way, surely the re-assigning of rail money to road construction indicates a pretty ad hoc approach to working out which infrastructure project is most beneficial?  I have complained about this a few times recently - everyone's saying it's important to put money into the "right" form of infrastructure, but making a trip to work, say, 15 minutes faster would seem something pretty hard to assess for its economic consequences.  

Update 2:  John Quiggin sounds the warning about the "commission of audit".

Pretty accurate, Waleed

Abbott's adoptive strategy on policy

Waleed Aly goes through the remarkable list of Labor policies and initiatives which the Coalition has come to endorse.  He concludes:  

 All this is a testament to the brutal efficiency of Abbott's opposition. He's quite prepared to bludgeon the government with an argument he later rejects. It's shameless, but it works because he does it with confidence and a straight face.

As I have been saying, it is also very similar to what Rudd did in  2007.  He picked up on one or two things the public did want changed (Workchoices in particular, but also - and people forget this - closing the "Pacific Solution") but overall he just ran a populist campaign as the softer, kinder John Howard. 

Tony Abbott would not admit this, but he has, on the face of it, turned out to be running as the stable Labor Party.  (His one distinguishing populist, and more wildly wrong headed than Rudd on Workchoices, policy is on carbon pricing.)

In both cases, it's the shamelessness of the approach that leads me to not respect it.  If they are going to ultimately support a policy, do so during the term of Parliament, not at the last minute.

And with Abbott, with his completely opportunistic, uninterested and unprincipled  approach to climate change, I could never vote for him.

Kevin's turn

Kevin Rudd with Annabel Crabb tonight was clearly more relaxed and comfortable than "Hah.Hah.Hah" Abbott, especially in the first half of the show.   There's no doubt that, despite his terrible reputation for being a difficult boss, he is close to his family, and there is no reason to question his assessment that he considers them his closest friends.   His daughter seemed, quite frankly, smarter than the Abbott daughters. (For one thing, she doesn't dress like Sporty Spice all the time, like one of Tony's daughter does, where ever she is.*)  And he has a nice dog: seeing him interact with it was definitely a humanising touch.     

But in the "one on one" with Crabb, there were plenty of flashes of the old fakery and over calculation in answers, and there is every reason to suspect he would still be a boss capable of making people very, very nervous.  It strains credulity to believe that he is felt worse about losing his 1996 campaign to become an MP than he did about the 2010 loss of leadership.  (Then again, maybe he was spectacularly emotionally immature in 1996, and had improved in that regard by 2010.  Who knows - he's a very hard man to judge on his self-reportage of his emotional state.)

I think he is obviously significantly smarter than Abbott, and can judge better who to take advice from.  On the other hand, it would seem his problem has always been over confidence in his own abilities, and it is very difficult to know how much more carefully he would listen to advice before making decisions if he were to be PM again.  He certainly failed to give a good impression of change  in the way he came up with what appeared to be (even if they weren't) ad hoc ideas in the course of the campaign.   I really think it was the way he announced these, without any explanation of how they had been decided upon, which started his leakage in the polls. 

But tonight, overall, he came out better than I expected.  I particularly liked his daughter's story about there being a good chance he would be sitting up reading a book at 4 am she arrived home as a teenager: it confirmed his nerdiness, but also made him seem a bit more human.    I think he probably would be a better PM this time around (in the unlikely event he wins government) as a result of his time on the backbench.  Keeping in check the old urge to make decisions quickly on the assumption that he is the smartest person in the room may be his burden for the rest of his life, though.

*  Too bitchy?  :)

The Joke

A pretty devastating assessment by Michael Pascoe of "Hockeynomics":

Remember all the times shadow treasurer Joe Hockey furrowed his brow, shook his jowls and growled that Australia had a budget crisis? Turns out he was only joking.

Either that or his “costings” disclosure is a joke. Or both.

After all the huffing and puffing, Hockeynomics is only proposing a $6 billion improvement in the budget’s cash bottom line over four years. In light of the past four years of hyperbolic fiscal posturing, this is genuinely astounding.
 
Even if you take year three and four budget projections seriously (and you really can’t, as everyone should now know), that works out to be an average improvement of $1.5 billion a year on a $400 billion budget – all of 0.375 per cent. It’s not even a rounding error. A half-decent Queensland storm can blow that away in half an hour.

By way of comparison, Tony Abbott is blowing $1.8 billion on reviving the novated lease/FBT tax lurk enjoyed by a minority of new car buyers, let alone an even smaller minority of voters. Consider the massive percentage increase in the Coalition’s budget improvement goal that could be obtained by implementing just this one tax policy based on principle and equity instead of subsidising a few salary packaging firms. Hey Joe, do the math.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/hockey-closes-campaign-with-a-joke-20130905-2t7ab.html#ixzz2dzkZVqdk

Thanks for the "so late it's useless" fact checks, Peter

Is Tony Abbott's $350 carbon claim hot air?

It's worth reading anyway.  (And watching the video on "can the GST be increased without the States consent".  Short answer:  yes.)

Trying to cheer myself up

Local intelligence

I cannot explain how, but entirely by accident, in the course of work this morning, I learnt which street, and pretty much which house, in Brisbane barking mad billionaire wannabe politician Clive Palmer lives, and it's only a suburb or so away from me.

Should I drive by his house on election night?  Is he having a party I can gatecrash?  Does he have a child easily kidnapped?  (A joke, a joke, Federal Police!  Mind you, he does remind me a bit of the mad furniture shop owner in Raising Arizona, who was willing to forgive on the return of the babies.  [Still a joke!  Seriously!])

Quite a surprise anyway.

Update:  I see by Googling that the street he lives in has been noted in the Courier Mail more than once.  My intelligence was less of a coup than I realised.  

Jericho on costings

Policy costings about more than the final figures - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A good explanation from Greg Jericho here of the games being played with "costings".

We need to know the final number, and it's great to know that it is accurate, but we still need to know how they arrived at that number.

The problem is many editors and news directors have focussed on the number and not the assumptions and parameters that determined the result. The ALP also fell for this old way of thinking when last week they announced that the Liberal Party had a $10 billion black hole.

In reality what the ALP had demonstrated was not that there was a black hole, but that if you used the assumptions and parameters previously announced by the Liberal Party the savings amounted to only $21 billion as opposed to the Liberals' announced $31 billion.

Both numbers are right. But we have no idea why they are different, because we have no idea how the Liberal Party arrived at its final number.

To use the running analogy, at best we know the vague distance they ran, but little else.

The ALP over-egged their case, but when the Treasury and the PBO released statements pointing out that the costings released by the ALP were not the actual costings of the Liberal Party policies, the media for the most part took that as meaning the ALP's $21 billion figure was wrong.

The Treasury and PBO had said no such thing. They had merely announced that the costings depend on assumptions and parameters. Do we know the assumptions or parameters of the Liberal Party's policies?

Nope.

His explanation of the difference the Parliamentary Budget Office has made is important too, but I won't reproduce that here.

The quiet economists

I have been rather annoyed with the general silence of economists on the issue of the Coalition approach to climate change in the lead up to the election.

As far as I can tell, there is virtually no economist who thinks "direct action" is a better longer term plan for achieving its stated goal than pricing carbon. The evidence is strongly suggestive that the carbon pricing is having an effect already on reducing electricity consumption.   The Coalition's Greg Hunt used to champion carbon pricing, until he was told he had to come up and sell with an alternative simply so that Abbott could have a different from policy from Labor.  Government seeded clean energy financing has been underway in other countries - I have not heard any economist talk about whether that has been considered successful or not.

As I have argued recently, there is plenty of room to be skeptical of long term economic modelling of the effects of climate change; but shorter scale economics modelling of how to be push society in a cleaner energy direction can be expected to make sense.

So why are the great majority of  economists who support carbon pricing sitting on their hands on the topic during the election? 

Still don't like him

Tony Abbott, and his daughters, were on Kitchen Confidential tonight. 

I'm thoroughly sick of the PR use of his daughters throughout this campaign.  Transparent as a tactic, I hope this is the last we see of such persistent manipulative use of children in politics.

As for Abbott himself:   sad to say, but his psychological make up only came out of the interview as being shallower than expected.  He's quite open about not being able to be open any more, confirming my oft stated assessment that he was more likeable as a somewhat contrarian Minister, than as the  the um-ing and ah-ing,  self censoring, constipated looking Leader that he is now.  [And that awkward "hah.hah.hah' laugh - maybe it's natural, but sounds very self aware to me.]

Left the seminary because a mate of his from Uni was getting to travel overseas and sign up really big contracts?   I thought souls were meant to be more important than money, but there you go.  (Actually, isn't it said that he did not fit into what he considered virtually a "gay" seminary culture, but I suppose it is too much to expect him to be too open about that on national TV.)  He made  mention of feeling his education (making a specific mention of his Rhodes scholarship) was being wasted.  Actually, he has had a career in which his economics qualifications have made little contribution, and his colleagues have said he has no natural interest in the topic.  Turns out it was wasted after all... 

He re-confirmed his upset at Gillard's misogyny speech, yet once again, he gives not the slightest indication that he recognizes his own provocative echoing of "died of shame", or years of not-so-subtle references to Gillard's childless status.   He accepts that he sees more "shades of grey" now than when he was a university conservative hard man.  Yet his political message over the last three years has been built around exaggeration and confrontation.

The funny thing about him is that he appears to be an introspective man, yet the explanations that he come up with about himself seem to fall well short of reality.

I hope he loses the election due to his policies, and the interview confirms that there is no particular  character reason for the public to regret such loss.

Who's that successful and visionary business leader again?

I had to remind myself about Roger Corbett, who is getting a lot of attention for having criticised Rudd and Labor (and praising Tony Abbott) on Lateline last night.

Oh that's right: he would be the Chairman of Fairfax who in 2004, as Eric Beecher told us last year, was confident the company would be the media "envy of the world":

After listening to my prognosis that the company faced a potential collapse of its traditional business model — I sketched out what I described as a “catastrophe scenario” under which The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age would lose much of their classified advertising in coming years — the Fairfax board studiously ignored my plea to implement overlapping strategies as “insurance” against that possibility.

One director, in particular, became quite agitated about what I was saying. “I don’t ever want anyone coming into this boardroom again,” he told his colleagues as he held up a copy of one of Fairfax’s hefty Saturday papers, “and telling us that people will buy houses or cars, or look for jobs, without this”. He then dropped the lump of newsprint onto the boardroom table with a thud.

That board member was Roger Corbett, now the chairman of Fairfax. He spent 40 years as a retailer, never worked in media or journalism, holds a handful of shares in Fairfax, and was paid $412,000 last year by the company. On the day he was appointed Fairfax chairman in 2009, Corbett presented a glowing picture of the way his company was handling its task. “The decisions taken in the last few years by management and the board have, I believe, put Fairfax in a position which is envied by media companies around the world,” he said.

 Gina Rinehart.doesn't like him either.  How easily I forget these things.  I wonder how she feels about him today after last night's performance?

Update:  the fact that Corbett worries about the ABC "crowds out" Fairfax, and thinks Workplace laws are holding up the economy, does make him more likely a Coalition sympathiser.  At least he does acknowledge a need for greater tax revenue, though.   But my real annoyance with him is the inappropriateness of expressing his highly partisan views as member of the Reserve Bank Board in a crucial part of the election campaign cycle.

Update 2:  so, he's actually a member of the Liberal Party, but it wasn't mentioned last night?  And the story ran this morning without that being mentioned?  Great job, media.

Update 3:  Actually, it occurs to me that it was also an obvious failing on Kevin Rudd's (or his team's) part too.  When asked about it yesterday morning, the first thing Rudd should have said "well he's a member of the Liberal Party, what do you expect him to say about me?"
 

Hopping to church in Luxembourg

Here's a charming story from the BBC about a centuries old hopping parade in Luxembourg.  Watch the video too.

Speculative physics in Nature

Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time : Nature News

Haven't had time to read this yet, but looks interesting...

A fair summary from John Quiggin

John Quiggin's take on the Coalition and Tony Abbott in this election campaign is pretty accurate, I think:

The case put forward by the LNP is based entirely on lies and myths. These include the claims that
* Labor has mismanaged the economy and piled up unnecessary debt and deficits
* Australian families are ‘doing it tough’ because of a soaring cost of living
* The carbon tax/price is a ‘wrecking ball’, destroying economic activity
* The arrival of refugees represents a ‘national emergency’
None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny. 

Then there’s Abbott himself. After 20 years in politics, I can’t point to any substantial accomplishments on his part, or even any coherent political philosophy. For example, I’m not as critical of his parental leave scheme as some, but it’s totally inconsistent with his general political line, a fact that his supporters in business have been keen to point out. On climate change, he’s held every position possible and is now promising, in effect, to do nothing. His refusal to reveal policy costings until the second-last day of the campaign debases an already appalling process. He treated budget surplus as a holy grail until it became inconvenient, and has now become carefully vague on the topic.

Economic failure and climate change

As an antidote to Tony Abbott talking about claimed long term economic benefits of removing carbon pricing to justify its removal, I would suggest people read this post by Michael Tobis and the comments that follow, particularly as to how they relate to economic modelling and climate change.

Tobis has been banging on about this for some time, but it seems to me that not many people pay attention.

I find him quite convincing.   Just as I would not expect an economist working in 1913 to have a good set of predictions about the global economy in 2000, even if there was no great intervening issue like climate change, I just do not see how it is plausible to trust modelling that is trying to anticipate economic costs of a 100 year change to climate that will have greatly varying local effects around the globe.

Now, its true:  environmentalists use modelling to justify carbon pricing.   So how fair is it to criticise the likes of Abbott when he uses economic arguments against carbon pricing?

It is fair, for a couple of reasons:   climate change will have much longer term effects than a mere century.  Some of those effects that are very plausible/ likely in the longer term are simply obviously disastrous - work out what 2 or 3 m of sea level rise around your favourite global cities is going to do to them, for a start.  But on the shorter scale as well, changes to the hydrological cycle are likely to have some very serious effects, and soon, and common sense suggests that they are not readily capable of effective adaptation.  The effect will also hit the poorer countries hardest.  Have you noticed the flooding in India and China this year?  You can only build so many useful dams in a country, even if it is rich.   Is there anywhere in Western Queensland you can build a decent drought fighting dam that won't evaporate at a furious rate?

[And even if the unlikely assumption that climate sensitivity is only 1.5 degree for a doubling of CO2, you still have the concern about what ocean acidification is going to do to the food chain in the oceans, with recent work indicating that krill in Antarctica may collapse, and a very uncertain future for pteropods as well.  There is no good way to really guess the knock on consequences of the failure of very large elements of ocean food chain like that, I reckon, although scientists are trying.]

Criticisms of economic modelling to show that other economic modelling is flawed therefore misses this whole point. It misses the common sense of the situation.

So ridiculous exercises by small government/libertarian poster boy Topher, for example, are not just a waste of time; they are a dangerous waste of time.   At least Greenies who use economics poorly to get to the right political response anyway can't be accused of that.

The future of taxes

Why taxes would rise under Abbott

Ross Gittens does some useful number crunching about why the tax take has to increase somewhat if either side wins the election.

Should Labor or the Coalition wear the most blame for not being up front about this?   This gets confusing.  Labor has run a scare campaign on Abbott and the GST.  Abbott & Hockey deny emphatically that it is at risk.  But then, Abbott and Hockey have run, of course, a 5 year scare campaign on the deficit and their ability to get back to surplus faster than Labor.  Yet they do not face up to the fundamentals.

I think the best outcome may be that either Abbott or Rudd gets replaced in the next term, and the new leader gets realistic on this.

Folks are dumb where I come from....

Rudd fails to rally voters in his home state

Well, how harsh should I be?  It's not as if I supported a return of Kevin Rudd, and I have puzzled many, many times over why he was ever popular in Queensland.   The State is not exactly renowned for supporting urban quasi-intellectuals.   Did they think his "folkiness" was genuine?

Anyhow, after first encouraging Labor's party machine that Kevin was going to do well in Queensland, people polled here have decided they don't like him much after all.

What's more, they are apparently looking at voting in fairly significant numbers for Clive Palmer's nutty rich man act, and he seems to have taken over the "Eccentric Politician We'll Vote For Because We Don't Like Politicians" role from Bob Katter.

If they collectively have 15% of the vote, their preferences are going to be pretty important, and the article claims that more of those voters claim they will preference Labor.  Especially those voting for Clive Palmer.

This is all very peculiar.  But the State that continued voting for Joh endlessly has always been a bit of a political mystery.