The 80 page Senate Committee report into rude words on television is full of bizarre material. Take for instance Media Standards Australia, which believes that the problem with offensive material isn’t that it offends people, it is that it exists at all:

Sadly, however, the more concerned people do just switch off, the longer the unacceptable levels of offensive material continue unchecked, and uncommented upon. One cannot complain about something that one does not see.

But the Senate committee is not all laughs. One significant regulatory proposal in the report is dumped in at the end of a long discussion on parental responsility - a mandatory “parental lock-out” on all new digital televisions sold in Australia. This sounds similar to the American V-Chip which was made mandatory in new US televisions from 1999 onwards. Read the rest of this entry »

The July 2008 IPA Review will be on the newsstands and in mail boxes within the next week, but a number of articles are available on the new Institute of Public Affairs website. If you’re not a subscriber, please consider becoming one!

I have two major pieces in this edition: a longish piece on the moral emptiness of ‘Olympism’ and other justifications for hosting the games, ‘Politics, not sport, is the purpose of the Olympic Games‘, and a book review of a collection of essays on cult, sleaze and horror films called Sleaze Artists, ‘Have bad movies edged out good?‘ My editorial discusses the Fisher Award for best magazine.

But just as exciting is the availability on the new website of the entire back catalogue of IPA Reviews, reaching back to the first edition in 1947. Over the last sixty years, we have published specially commissioned original articles by Raymond Aron, Peter Drucker, three pieces by Friedrich Hayek, Keith Hancock, many pieces by Geoffrey Blainey, as well as seminal articles on the history wars, fair trade, and Islamic liberalism. There are a lot of gems buried in the history of the IPA Review, so its certainly worth digging around.

One point to note however is how a number of the policy positions of the IPA Review has changed over the years. While the magazine has remained a consistent advocate of liberalisation, its position on small number of policy areas has changed - most notably in the social policy arena.

The magazine now takes a consistent position in favour of both economic and social liberalism. But it has always been a reflection of philosophical trends in the Australian right. As I write in the editor’s note on the website, ‘as Australian society has changed, so has the IPA Review.’

It may well be that a third glass of wine dramatically increases the risk of accident and injury to the drinker. But what good are the federal government’s new healthy drinking guidelines if they deviate so far from the norm of usual social drinking practices?

Surely the purpose of official drinking guidelines are not to represent some unrealistic medical ideal, but to actually convince drinkers to moderate their consumption. Why then lower the definition of ‘binge drinking’ to a level which will be dismissed by most responsible drinkers as absurd? What little power the phrase ‘binge drinking’ had is dramatically reduced by this change.

From the 1951 film Home Town Story, now apparently only famous for a minor role by Marilyn Monroe. Link via Craig Newmark.

eBay announced yesterday that it going to fight the ACCC over its PayPal ruling.

I’m not big on internet auctions. But I use the secondhand book site Abebooks a lot. It is in many ways similar to eBay - rather than selling goods directly to consumers, Abebooks just acts as an intermediary between book buyers and secondhand book sellers. Like eBay, customers can contact sellers directly if they have questions or need to alter shipping details after the initial sale. And also like eBay, a rating system is used to build reputation, although, considering most sellers are established bookstores, the rating system isn’t as crucial to Abebooks as it is for eBay.

But unlike eBay, Abebooks has always had only one payment method. It has never opened its sales system to competing payment devices. It did mandate in 2006 that all credit card transations were to be processed by Abebooks itself, rather than passed onto the bookstores to process, but it has never offered customers the ability to directly transfer money from their bank account, or to send cheques to the seller.

But it is unlikely that the ACCC is going to pursue Abebooks anytime soon, even though the payment options the book seller offers are more limited than those now being implemented by eBay. (eBay will continue to allow cash payments upon pickup, and the PayPal system allows users to do bank transfers, rather than having to go through a credit card as an intermediary.)

eBay’s mistake was to allow third parties access to their sales system in the first place. The ACCC can only claim that it the auction site is in violation of the Trade Practices Act prohibition on exclusive dealing because eBay has already demonstrated that its sales system can technically be open to other payment devices. If eBay had only ever offered an internal payment device - as Abebooks does - then it would be unlikely that it would attract the regulator’s attention. PayPal is owned by eBay - to what extent should they be treated as seperate companies, rather than an entirely merged entity?

What does this matter? The comparison between Abebooks and eBay shows that the prohibition on exclusive dealing depends perhaps more on historical circumstances as it does on theories about economic efficiency. Forcibly opening up the industrial processes of integrated firms to competitors is a bit hard for the competition regulator. Blocking attempts at integration by firms that have in the past allowed a degree of open access is much easier. But surely both have similar merits - if the ACCC claims it knows the most efficient and competitive degree of any given firm’s integration, why wouldn’t it be going hard against Abebooks as well?

Kevin Rudd has gone to Tokyo and managed to bring the annoucement of Toyota’s green car production forward a few months, at the cost of $70 million.

But from the government’s perspective, what difference does it make if hybrid cars are built in Australia or in, for instance, China? If the Victorian and Commonwealth government wanted to encourage car manufacturers to build ‘green’ cars, why wouldn’t it just offer the firms their $70 billion and allow them to build the cars anywhere in the world? The resulting cars may eventually be cheaper, encouraging their adoption. And surely the aim is reduce global emissions, not only emissions originating from Australia. So what does it matter where those cars are finally purchased and used? (I might be mistaken - is there a reason that we might have to reduce emissions in certain areas around the globe more than other areas?)

Kevin Rudd and John Brumby’s green car announcement may be wrapped in the rhetoric of climate change and innovation, but it seems to be just traditional industry policy with a green twist.

(Sinclair Davidson and I asked the Labor Party 7 questions about their industry policy in early 2007. And earlier this year I penned a defence of the poor old automobile.)

This sort of makes a mockery of the idea that Melbourne’s new 2am lockout is an experiment, doesn’t it? Extra police are being allocated to the CDB this weekend to enforce the new laws. But those extra police will no doubt have an effect on the level of violence late at night. Says the Assistant Police Commissioner Gary Jamieson: “We’re very excited that we’ve got these new provisions in and we want to make it successful so that means police playing a very active role.”

So if late-night violence decreases, will the government attribute the change to the more numerous and very active police or the lockout?

On top of this, one quarter of the affected venues are exempt from the lockout trial. It is hard to see how this three month period will be a rigorous experiment in public policy.

I’ve been forwarded this list of venues exempt from the 2am lockout, so I can’t personally verify its accuracy. The list is obviously incomplete. There are nearly 100 venues exempt, but I’ve only got a list of the first couple of dozen. If I can find more names, I’ll try to update this list.
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I have a piece in this month’s Quadrant: “Regulation and the Regulatory Burden”, as part of their ‘How Good Was Howard’ series. (It is not, unfortunately, online yet.)

At the editor’s request, the piece is for the most part drawn from my monograph published earlier this year, The Growth of Australia’s Regulatory State: Ideology, Accountability, and the Mega-Regulators, but also tries to tackle the question at stake - to what degree should we consider the government, or the prime minister, responsible for the growth in regulation? My argument in the book and the Quadrant article is that there are a number of engines of regulatory growth within the structure of government (not least regulatory agencies themselves) that exert underappreciated power over the total corpus of regulation. Therefore the degree to which we can blame governments and individuals for regulatory growth is limited, although not negligible.

I’m no fan of the Howard government, but I’m not convinced they deserve all the blame for the dramatic growth in regulation over the last decade.

There’s a passage in the preface of Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky’s classic Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland which strikes me as particularly important:

Policies imply theories. Whether stated explicitly or not, policies point to a chain of causation between initial conditions and future consequences. If X, then Y.

Public policy requires more than just the simple identification of a problem that should be addressed through government action. Instead, good policy requires a firm understanding of the causal connection between specific policy measures and the desirable end goal. Without that connection, a policy cannot ever hope to achieve its aims - except perhaps by happy accident - and there is a good chance it will backfire.

This, anyway, is what comes to mind when reading some of the submissions to the Senate Inquiry on Ready-to-Drink Alcohol Beverages. Those submissions that are pro-regulation and pro-alcopop excise increase (certainly, not all are) do very well at identifying binge drinking as a problem that they would like government to address. They are also very good at coming up with some possible policies. But they fail Pressman and Wildavsky’s test - they fail to establish a causal connection between those specific policies and their goals. Read the rest of this entry »