What I said in the Sunday Age last week:

In his ”forgotten families” speech in May, the Opposition Leader made tougher anti-dumping laws a centrepiece of his economic policy. These laws purport to prevent foreign imports being ”dumped” so cheaply in domestic markets they threaten the existence of Australian companies. The theory suggests that the foreigners will jack up prices once local companies have gone out of business. But it’s a theory that everybody from the Productivity Commission to Nobel-winning anti-free market economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks is nonsense …

Anti-dumping laws are pure protectionism. They benefit a few companies at the expense of consumers.

What Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor said on the Sunday Age letters page yesterday (no link):

Berg wrote that anti-dumping measures depend on “a theory that . . . the Productivity Commission . . . thinks is nonsense”. This comes as a surprise to the government and probably to the Productivity Commission which, in its report, included a chapter entitled “Should Australia retain an anti-dumping system?” Its answer, in short, was “yes”. Read the rest of this entry »

ABC’s Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes is a surprisingly trusting man.

When I suggested in The Drum on Monday that some provisions of the commercial broadcasters’ Code of Practice were “practically defunct”, he responded that Macquarie and Fairfax radio assured him this was not the case – that they fully accepted and adhered to the code.

Well that settles it. If the radio networks say they’re fully compliant, then obviously the Code of Practice is not the toothless, near dead-letter regulation which Holmes claims it to be in practice. Read the rest of this entry »

A great blog post on regulatory expansion, viewed through the microcosm of research ethics regulation:

From an evolutionary perspective, a research regulator is a life form with three very interesting characteristics. First, its numbers explode in response to catastrophic events regardless of how rare that event is. Second, it has few natural predators, so its expansion goes unchecked. Third, regulators multiply like bacteria: they spawn more regulations which require more regulators, so there is a rapid increase in population over time. And these three characteristics derive, I submit, from a basic human tendency to focus on emotionally-engaging events while ignoring their probability.

This model applies as easily to economic and social regulation as much as academic research: from Gary Banks’ hypothetical skipping rope regulation to the 2007 solarium controversy in Victoria. Regulations inspired by often tragic, but low probability circumstances cascade until we end up in a situation like this:

(For a brief discussion of the implications of regulatory and legislative expansion, see this Drum column “Micromanagement in the regulatory state“, or, for a longer discussion, my 2008 book.)