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.

On the face of it, a mandatory parental control seems like a good idea, if you’re into that sort of thing. V-Chips appear to ‘empower’ parents. And while implementing a parental lockout would impose a cost on consumers, it would probably not be very large. If other regulatory burdens placed upon electronic equipment are anything to go on, the price of adding a small microchip to new electronics will be fairly quickly be reduced to irrelevancy.

But in the United States, the V-Chip has not been a very successful program. Despite 70-80 per cent of parents claiming in surveys that they have “serious concerns” about inappropriate television programming, in 2004, only 15 per cent of those parents actually used the V-Chip.

This suggests that either parents are exaggerating their concern, or are monitoring their children’s viewing in some other way. Or perhaps they are not aware of the V-Chip’s existance - a possibility which has led some American policymakers and lobbyists to suggest that the parental controls should have their defaults set at the highest possible restriction at the factory.

It is hard not to wonder why parents too lazy to quickly check about the parental controls they already have embedded in their television - yet who still profess deep concern about their kids viewing habits - are the government’s responsiblity.

Why does the government need to impose a mandatory V-Chip on Australian televisions in the first place? The Senate report unconvincingly dismisses the traditional argument about ‘parental responsiblity’ by contending that ‘economic and societal’ pressures meant that often children are unattended around televisions, or that televisions are often situated in children’s rooms.

But in many of these cases the solutions are obvious.

For instance, the problem of a television in a child’s bedroom could perhaps be solved by removing the television from the child’s bedroom. And certainly, as the Senate report notes, many children get home from school before their parents get home from work, but the 3:30pm to 7pm period is hardly the rudest few hours on television - current classification guidelines already take care of that potential issue.

And there is no reason that the private sector cannot deal with the issue of childrens’ television consumption by itself. Many digital set top boxes already include parental controls - it should be fairly simple for parents to inquire at purchase time which ones have this feature.

Adam Thierer points out in his Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods that at no other time in history have there been more tools for parents to manage the consumption of their children’s media. As digital television seeps through the Australian marketplace, those options will only continue to expand.

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.’

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

The submission of the Australian Psychological Society is a good example of policy recommendations without proper regard to causality. Certainly, it is full of possible measures the government could implement as part of their anti-binge drinking campaign. Sporting sponsorship and general advertising by alcohol companies should immediately cease. Happy hours should be banned. Liquor licences should be regulated more heavily, further trading hours limitations imposed, and retail competition restricted.

But the actual submission of the APS is more concerned with simply trying to establish that binge drinking is a problem that the government should tackle. They outline the harm alcohol consumption can do to individuals, they discuss extensively the ’social cost’ of alcohol consumption and describe patterns of licit and illicit substance abuse in young people. But none of that establishes that the trading hours of bars and pubs should be limited - why, of all infinite array of policies that could have been recommended, did the APS recommend these ones?

The APS’s lack of rigour is particularly disappointing because psychologists could have some valuable insights into the efficacy of the policies they propose. For instance, what psychological impact does advertising have on individuals who are undecided about whether they should purchase alcohol? Is there a body of theoretical or empirical evidence that sheds light on the possible consequences of the policies they recommend? Rather, the APS prefers to adopt the simple Yes Minister adage: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done.”

Indeed, it is disturbing that Australian governments themselves have failed to articulate the justifications for most of their anti binge drinking policies.

The Victorian government has not explained just how locking individuals out of bars, clubs and pubs at 2am will decrease violence - the spectre of hundreds of drunk revellers being suddenly unable to enter any licenced venue and jostling for taxis doesn’t inspire much hope. But even if these objections to the lockout had been dealt with by the government, what exactly is the link between the hour of the evening with violent incidents? Certainly, late at night, people are likely to be drunk and possibly violent. But if the 2am lockout compresses the times in which alcohol is consumed, it may bring violent incidents forward to earlier in the night. The chain of causality between policy and aim is so loose for the 2am lockout that there are hundreds of ways the policy could go wrong. (I discussed this point in my Sunday Age column a few weeks ago.)

Similarly, if the alcopop excise increase is an honest attempt to tackle binge drinking (and considering its importance to the federal budget, that is by no means clear) then it is a woefully under thought-out policy. The submission from the Independent Distillers Australia is most powerful when it quotes a number of comments off a Facebook group discussing the easy substitution between types of alcohol beverages after the excise increase:

I work in a bottle shop and this is the best example I can find as to why this tax is a really dumb idea: 1 carton of JD cans = $119; A 4pack of JD = $22; 1 700mL bottle of JD = $33. This means you can almost buy 4 bottles for the price of 1 carton. I know which option I’ll choose.

So a 6 pack of Smirnoff double blacks is now $30, and a bottle of vodka is around $30… three times the amount of alcohol for the same price, I’m smashing myself on a bottle of vodka!

If the government is genuine in its enthusiasm for their policy, they have failed to consider its possible consequences. Here too the chain of causality is extraordinarily weak - the federal government appears to have assumed that faced with higher prices for alcopops, consumers will substitute onto other less harmful goods, or abandon drinking entirely. (The theory that alcopops are a ‘gateway’ drink into harder material is, to my mind, an even worse justification for the excise increase. Would it be better to have a relatively soft gateway drink available, or make jumping into spirits at a young age more attractive?)

Unsurprisingly, the early evidence suggests that consumers have quickly migrated onto potentially more harmful straight spirits. If moving people off canned Beam-&-Cokes to just Jim Beam was the policy aim, it could be considered a highly successful. But it wasn’t. As state and federal governments (and the many interest groups like the APS who have been advocating major new regulations) have failed to develop a theory of how their policies would achieve their goals, they leave themselves susceptible to counterproductive results like these.