In search of a scheme

RESERVE funds held by WorkCover, the NSW workers compensation scheme, fell dramatically from $520 million in May 1994 to $64 million in June of this year.  In an attempt to arrest this decline, the NSW Government is rushing through Parliament a series of measures designed to reduce the costs of the scheme.

Some of these measures are aimed at cutting administration costs.  Others are designed to reduce compensation payments.  Is this the right way to go?

Recent US research has shown that a genuine workers compensation scheme can play a crucial role in improving workplace safety and in reducing labour costs.

When premiums for workers compensation insurance are related to an employer's workplace accident record, then the employer has a financial incentive to improve workplace safety.  How strong are these incentives?

Research by Duke University economists Michael Moore and Kip Viscusi in their book Compensation Mechanisms for Job Risks (Princeton University Press, 1990) shows that workplace accidents in the US would be about 30 per cent higher in the absence of compulsory workers compensation insurance, whereas occupational health and safety regulations (OH&S) appear to have reduced workplace accidents only by 2 to 4 per cent, perhaps less.

In short, workers compensation in the US is about 10 times more effective than OH&S regulations in reducing workplace accidents.

There are good reasons for the effectiveness of workers compensation.  Where insurance premiums are related to workplace accident records, all employers have direct financial incentives to discover ways of making workplaces safer.  Moreover, an employer is in a much better position than a regulator to know the kinds of safety measures that are likely to be cost-effective in his particular workplace.

And with insurance premiums dependent on accident records, employers have incentives to listen to employees views on how to improve safety.  The advantage of the insurance or "carrot approach" is that it is essentially self-enforcing.

In contrast, compliance with OH&S standards is mandatory even when it is not cost-effective.  Moreover, enforcing regulations tends to be costly and ineffective.

Here in Australia, there is a danger that measures designed to artificially hold down workers compensation insurance premiums will weaken incentives for employers to improve workplace safety.  This is especially problematic where workers compensation premiums for high-risk industries are artifically reduced by cross-subsidies from low-risk industries.

There is also a danger that regulations will reduce incentives to control fraudulent compensation claims, thereby raising costs of workers compensation schemes.

Moreover, there are reasons for believing that holding down insurance premiums does not necessarily reduce overall employment costs.  Wages are generally higher for more hazardous occupations.

These wage premiums represent compensation in advance for risking injury or death.  Because workers compensation insurance provides compensation after an accident workers demand less in advance.  In other words, wages decline because risk premiums are reduced.

Wages also tend to be reduced because improvements in workplace safety reduce the wage premiums demanded by workers.  Indeed, Moore and Viscusi show that in the US, the net effect of compulsory workers compensation has been to reduce total employment costs in non-unionised industries.

The conclusion is that measures which artificially reduce premiums may both be detrimental to workplace safety and fail to reduce overall employment costs.

These issues are complicated in Australia by other factors, such as artificially determined award rates of pay which may prevent adjustments in wage premiums for risk in response to improvement in safety.

But, such complications are just one more reason for a comprehensive and systematic overhaul of our industrial relations systems and related regulatory paraphernalia.

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Trend figures show way

THE reporting of the November employment and unemployment figures on December 8 raises a question as to the capacity of the usual commentators to give the community an indication of the underlying picture.

Just about every analyst agreed that the monthly increase of 112,000 or 1.4 per cent in the seasonally adjusted figure for employment was "unbelievable" and that the December figure will almost certainly reverse most, if not all, of this increase.

Yet this "unbelievable" November increase was described as being "good news" for the Government and as making it most unlikely that the December quarter GDP figure will show a fall.  When the December quarter seasonally adjusted employment figures record a large fall, will this also be "good news" because the seasonally adjusted figures are "volatile" and "too much attention should not be paid to month-to-month variations"?

As far as I can see, not one commentator on the November figures even mentioned that the trend figure for unemployment increased to 8.6 per cent (from 8.5 per cent) or that the trend figure for employment increased by only 8,000 or 0.1 per cent.

In the five months since June, the trend rate of unemployment has risen from 8.3 per cent and trend employment has increased by only 33,000 or by 0.4 per cent.  At this rate, employment growth during 1995-96 will be less than 1 per cent and unemployment in the June quarter of 1996 will be around 9 per cent, compared with Government forecasts for 2.75 per cent employment growth and an unemployment rate of 8.0 per cent.  Some "good news"!

The ABS publication containing the employment and unemployment figures points out that seasonal adjustment does not remove irregular or non-seasonal influences which may occur in a month and that the seasonally adjusted figures "may not be reliable indicators of trend behaviour".  In fact, the ABS states that irregular factors unrelated to the trend, account for more than half the changes in employment and 70 per cent of the changes in the unemployment rate.

Surely, then, the trend figures deserve at least a mention?  Indeed, a mere glance at the ABS graphs comparing movements in the seasonally adjusted and trend figures suggests that the trend figures give the best underlying picture.

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Harvesting Memories

Heritage Farming in Australia
Produced by and available from Alexander and Ann Sloane
Box 77, Yarrawonga, Vic 3730

This video consists of original film and commentary by the late Ian Sloane.  It describes farming experiences in the southern Riverina in the 1930s.  My grandfather farmer who left school in 1929 and who now lives mainly in the past found it fascinating.

In the 1930s he had a lot to learn about farming, but even more about government guidance.  In 1930 his letters were cancelled with a "Grow More Wheat" stamp.  So he did, and the price of wheat fell steadily and disastrously between sowing the wheat crop and reaping it.  This warped his belief in the wisdom of governments.

The video starts off with still pictures;  then in the 1930s Sloane bought a movie camera and started taking moving pictures of the way people actually farmed in those days.  Later he added voice descriptions explaining what they were doing and why.

He shows a team of six horses ploughing with a three-furrow mouldboard plough and says how pleasantly quiet it all was -- only a bit of rattle from the harness.  He should have mentioned the skylarks, which were wonderful.  I used a 10-horse team to pull a six-furrow stumpjump mouldboard plough.  It used to chatter a bit.  My grandfather was in love about then so his horses used to hear some romantic poetry, but they never let on.  Once you had taught the furrow horse her proper place, it wasn't hard work.

ROUGH GOING:

My grandfather had a steel-wheeled Fordson tractor similar to the one Sloane's neighbour worked.  It was rough going if the ground was hard.  He used to stop every hour to give it a spell as he had been trained to do with horses.

Sloane gives a clear picture of reaping wheat in the 1930s.  Cripes, it was really hard work -- none of this business of swanning around in air-conditioned comfort!  Sewing the bags while being savaged by flies, you slogged away to finish 200 a day for a pound in real money.  My grandfather will never forget the great day when he could afford a portable radio.  He particularly liked listening if there was a test match on.

The best part of the video is Sloane's description of expert haystack building.  My grandfather would like to be able to brag about his stacks, but they were notorious.  People said that they always seemed to lean a bit to the left.  Sloane shows an immense haystack with its thatch neatly trimmed with sheep shears and with proper galvanised iron mouse guards.  It stood there for 10 years and then opened up splendidly during the drought when it was really needed.  And I bet the Sloanes didn't ask for government help either.

So, get the video if you can.  If you are an old bloke like my grandfather it will revive many poignant memories and it will give you the chance to tell your progeny how hard you used to work in those days.  I doubt if they will be properly impressed;  more likely they will say, "Yes, the poor old chaps certainly worked hard with their hands, but what about their heads?"

The best thing Sloane's family did with his film was to put it in the tin trunk to let it mature.  Videos are a bit like diaries:  they get better as they get older.  Perhaps even my diary will mature with age.

Obsolete Feminism

The New Victorians
by Rene Denfeld
Allen & Unwin

"Conservatives are not going to align themselves with me", says Rene Denfeld.  Despite this warning from the author, conservatives will indeed find much common ground with Denfeld's The New Victorians.

The New Victorians is a response from within to that most introspective of movements, feminism.  Partly in answer to calls by "Old Guard" feminists for new young voices, 26-year-old Rene Denfeld attempts to explain feminism's lack of success in finding converts among younger women.  Like Helen Garner's controversial The First Stone, The New Victorians sends a message regarding the state of contemporary feminism that older feminists find disconcerting and disappointing.

Denfeld explores the apparent paradox that while having benefited from feminism, young women are reluctant to apply the term to themselves.  She rejects Susan Faludi's popular "backlash" theory as an explanation, laying the blame instead squarely at the feet of feminism itself.  Described by one New York reviewer as "brave", Denfeld's book predictably has drawn outraged protest from the established feminist clique.

The "New Victorians" of the title are those whom Denfeld believes represent the current status quo in American feminism.  On the evidence presented by Denfeld, the analogy is not as contradictory as it initially appears.  Nor is Denfeld anti-feminist.  While she proudly adopts the term, she is disappointed by some elements of contemporary feminism in the United States.

IRRELEVANT

Denfeld complains that "feminism has changed -- dramatically", to become on the whole a movement that is extremist and radical, and irrelevant to most young women.  Claiming that feminism has moved away from the fundamental issues of equality to embrace extreme moralising and exclusive academic theorising, Denfeld writes that "feminism has become as confining as what it pretends to combat".

This is not entirely convincing.  For while feminism, like most social movements, is an evolving being, it has always been radical and, at times, less than inclusive.  While Denfeld spends considerable time showing exactly how radical and exclusive feminism is today, there is little to back the argument that this is a relatively recent change, one unique to the 1990s.  The radical aspects of feminism that Denfeld uses to illustrate her point have largely been with the Movement since its inception, in one form or another.

One notable exception to this is the trend toward goddess worship, to which Denfeld devotes one chapter.  This is a new phenomenon, but it has little if any currency in Australia and shows little chance of gaining credibility in local, established feminist circles.

Despite these reservations, much of Denfeld's book appears to speak for the young -- and not so young -- women of my acquaintance who have expressed doubts about organised feminism's appeal and applicability to them.

But is this enough on which to base a book?  For while Denfeld makes extensive use of surveys and studies which show the rejection of feminism, her evidence of why this is occurring is much less firm.  In this regard, she relies too heavily on anecdotal evidence, with several references to the same named interviewees, and only a few brief words of thanks in the book's opening pages to "all the young women, too numerous to name here, who were willing to talk to me openly and honestly about their feelings regarding feminism" to let the reader know on what Denfeld based her conclusions.

Similarly, Denfeld's survey of contemporary feminism relies too heavily on feminism in universities.  "Young women are far more likely to encounter organised feminism by taking an introductory women's studies course, attending rallies on campuses, picking up the latest issue Ms magazine, reading newspaper accounts, and browsing in the feminist literature section of bookstores", she writes.

Unfortunately, Denfeld gives little emphasis to "reading newspaper accounts" or indeed to other aspects of popular culture's reaction to feminism, except when it proves a negative point.  Her attention to academia ignores the fact that most people, and most women, don't have a university education, and if they do, they are unlikely to have taken classes in women's studies or to have taken more than a passing interest in a "women's rally".  Perhaps Denfeld gives too much credibility to the impact of university feminists on the world beyond campus.

EXTREMISTS

Similarly, she highlights the views of extremists within feminism, such as Andrea Dworkin, claiming that Dworkin's radical offerings are commonplace on university reading lists, and are offered as mainstream feminism.  Again, Dworkin's views arguably have little currency beyond academic, philosophical or feminist circles.  While I have not surveyed women's studies courses in Australia, as Denfeld apparently has in the US, I can report that, according to the university calendar, Dworkin's work has not appeared on the Monash University women's studies reading lists in the last few years.

The crux of Denfeld's arguments is in Chapter Seven, "Repeating History:  The Feminist Descent into Victorian Morality".  In this highly detailed chapter, she draws parallels between the puritanical Victorians and their obsessive protection of women and the feminists of the 1990s.  "The movement that once stood for equality for all women", she writes, "has come to stand instead for extremist and often irrelevant academic theories and the patronising views held by an elitist group of largely privileged women".

This is manifest in the efforts of contemporary feminists to convince women that sexuality is "abnormal if not physically dangerous", and that females are "above" the "masculine" characteristics of competition, aggression, lust and strength.  Above all, the new Victorians have embraced the "Victorian declaration of difference", meaning that women, unlike men, are sensitive, nurturing, magical beings.  Denfeld identifies this as being most obvious through the rise of goddess worship, the blaming of patriarchy for all ills and the categorisation of women as victims ("the passive voice").  She labels these new directions a waste of time, damaging to feminism and irrelevant to the real issues that matter to most women.

Denfeld spends less time theorising about how exactly feminism has reached this predicament, concluding that, in essence, the potential to go off the rails was always there due to feminism's fragmentation.  The failure in the 1980s of the US Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to pass marked another blow, which left a directional void within the movement.  New leaders and new causes sprang up to occupy this void, but they were out of touch with real women.

Denfeld also targets the conservatism of the Reagan and Bush administrations, a lack of tolerance of different views within feminism, and a reluctance among older feminists to admit that feminism has changed from the 1970s.  Above all, she claims, older feminists will not admit that being feminist is about living what you believe -- and if this is the case, then most young women are feminists whether they say it or not.

This rationale for the decline of organised feminism does not neatly transfer to the Australian context.  Most glaringly, we did not have a conservative government during most of the 1980s, nor did Australian feminists suffer the legislative setbacks that the ERA failure represented to their American counterparts.

The New Victorians is a largely retrospective book with little attention given to the ongoing issues of feminism.  These are tackled only in the book's closing pages:  childcare, birth control, abortion rights, "political parity" and sexual violence.  "Political parity", or the need for more women in government, is given a scant seventeen-and-a-half lines.  In closing, Denfeld urges us to oppose censorship and "dump women's studies programs".

The New Victorians provides a selective and, in large part, anecdotal account of the contemporary American feminist scene.  Despite a foreword by Beatrice Faust, much of it lacks direct applicability to Australia (other than in the ways I have identified in this review).  The book is largely retrospective and thus short on prescriptian or future directions.  Despite these reservations, Denfeld's words will undoubtedly strike a chord with those who are fed up with organised feminism's apparently all-consuming navel-gazing, and its lack of relevance to young women.

Timely Critique

The Killing of History
by Keith Windschuttle
Macleay Press, Sydney

Who would have thought that this book would have been written by old Windy?  Keith Windschuttle has delivered a handsomely produced hardback decrying the influence of the fashionable literary critics and social theorists on the way the discipline of history is treated in the academy.  Explicit in this critique is the finding that the mindset of a culture is at stake.  A generation will be influenced in its ability to think clearly and accurately if the rot continues, he argues.  He is amazed how history, once so intellectually respectable, is now a prey to fashionable and bizarre theories.

The appearance of this book comes as a surprise to many others besides the current reviewer.  Ten years ago, Keith Windschuttle was rather a favourite of the academic left.  His best-seller The Media, a Penguin paperback, was a staple for introductory courses at many universities, and, while, as the author cheerfully admits, it is now out of date, it is still being adopted as a text.  Windschuttle actually gave, and this is no mean feat, a clear comprehensible explication of French structuralist Marxism in his treatment of Australian media.  The media, he wrote in the preface, "should be seen as arenas of conflict between the social classes".  While one must suppose that a socialistic bent was a basic requirement, given the views of the teachers who would adopt the text, that phrase sounds like so much ritual cant today.  But times change, and a new vision is required.

Enter, in 1994, The Killing of History.  The book is interesting in the same way that this blog is interesting.  Within the academy, at least within the humanities faculties, it is rather naughty, beyond the pale.  It tends to say things which are perceived to be against the interests of those in administrative control and of those academics who see opportunities in the fashionable changes brought in by the "cultural studies" movement.  The conventional wisdom is, of course, predominantly socialistic, "liberal" in the American sense, and, while claiming to be very "Australian", slavishly copies American trends.  The current establishment, while building on the premise of finding the former verities wanting, will brook no questioning of their own key assumptions.

FASHIONABLE AND CHEAP

There is currently, in the academy, an unholy alliance of administrators and trendy academics.  The administrators are foisting "cultural studies" on the curriculum because they are fashionable and cheap, and are not dominated by fuddy-duddy professors who waste time talking about "standards".  As Windschuttle demonstrates, the cultural studies devotees appreciate the philosophical position that the traditional disciplines (in the physical sciences and the social sciences) cannot produce knowledge.  This doubtful epistemological theory is not only adopted as such, but also as a manual for action.  (Old timers will recognise agitprop when they see it).  If there is no "truth", but rather merely a cultural agreement, then why not organise some like-minded colleagues, stack the committee and change the curriculum?  Windschuttle sees them as following Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions):

"... a bevy of sociologists have entered the field to take up what they see as one of the most enticing consequences of his position:  the idea that what is believed in science is determined by the customs and power relations prevailing within a particular scientific community".

The author says that he chose the word "killing" in the title of his book because "there was a lethal process well under way".  He chose history as he considered it "the queen of the humanities", but his argument applies equally to many disciplines, especially to sociology, anthropology, or English literature.  He finds it surprising that the post-structuralist theory of Michel Foucault is now "taken seriously enough" to be taught to graduate students in accounting at the University of New South Wales.  So surprised is he that he puts in the sentence:  "No, I am not joking".

The case studies which the author chooses to describe are international in interest, and some of them have been covered in the popular as well as the scholarly media.  For example, the European discovery of America and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, while quite apposite for Windschuttle's case, have been the topic for revisionist historians, scholars, journalists and political activists for well over a decade.  The fuss culminated in a media blitz with Columbus's 500th anniversary, and may be a little stale now.

Of more direct interest to Australians may be the coverage of the exploration of the Pacific and the mutiny on the Bounty.  The various motion pictures about the Bounty are described in a classic "media studies" or "cultural studies" (small letters) style.  "This tale of class conflict, of tyranny versus just cause, remained the basis of the 1935 Hollywood clash between Charles Laughton's Bligh and Clark Gable's Christian.  By 1962, the movie reflected a reassessment by historians that it was Christian who was both better bred and better mannered and that Bligh was an uncouth, opportunistic upstart from the lower orders".  This film (with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard) had a sub-text of humane and liberal values against the dictates of profit.  By 1984, Anthony Hopkins's Bligh to Mel Gibson's Christian had homosexual attraction as that sub-text.  But we could never know presumably, as, if we disown the empirical or realist account of history, then each accounting is as valid as any other because all are merely cultural projections of their times.

Perhaps the most interesting case study for Australian readers is the recounting of the European settlement in Australia, including British exploration, the convict system and relations with Aborigines.  This is important for so many of our current national decisions depend on the acceptance of dominant myths for legislation and practice.  There is not much point in defending one's stake in a nation if one believes it is founded on a fraud.

The history of mental asylums and the penal policy in Europe will hold no surprises for those familiar with the theories of Michel Foucault, but will enlighten every other reader.  The other topics seem to cover the ground of a doctoral seminar on modern theories of philosophy, politics and communication, and include one current example:  the fall of Communism in 1989.

The book was published by Macleay Press in Sydney, was printed in Australia and is well presented.  One can expect some attention from overseas.  Perhaps one of the clubs may pick it up, as its topic is international.  Whether or not it finds a market here will probably be determined by the author's reading of the temper of the times.  The conservative conquest of Congress, the Gingrich phenomenon, may have some ripple effect in Australia.  In the meantime, we are on the cultural periphery, and cultural events occur in a time lag.  Right now, the book will be appreciated as confirmation of what you suspected but hadn't the time or the energy to find out.  Windschuttle has done his homework.  You will enjoy the book.  You may be appalled at what you read.  But ignorance isn't really bliss.  It is better to be knowledgeable.  That is, unless you think that truth is not an absolute concept, that knowledge can never produce certainty.  Then you had better rely on the authority of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Deleuze, et al and you will be welcome in the academy.