Chapter 6 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Decentralisation: or the myth that it is good to get people to live where they don't want to



John Ray

OF ALL THE political lobbies, the decentralisation lobby is perhaps the most confused. Of all the trend-setting causes that represent a desire to have your cake and eat it too, decentralisation could well be the major. How can one have the benefits of the big city without having a big city? That is the question that decentralisation proponents have to answer.

Historically, the great advocates of decentralisation in Australia were the military men and the farmers. The farmers wanted decentralisation for the quite obvious reason that it would bring at least some of the benefits of the city closer to them. They could enjoy farm life while their wives enjoyed the variety of the city supermarkets and shopping centres and their children enjoyed the social opportunities of the city. For them it certainly was a fantasied way of having their cake and eating it too. Of course they were seldom so brash as to advance publicly such considerations as the reason for decentralisation. They would normally in fact appeal to the strategic considerations of the military men.

The strategic advantages expected of decentralisation were fairly obvious for a conventional war. An empty countryside can be advanced through by an invader much more easily than one infested with farmers-turned-guerilla. Having your population scattered also meant that a sudden onslaught on one place (such as any of the great seaboard metropolises) would not immobilise the defenders nearly as much. The loss of one city would not be nearly so tragic and the forces required for occupation of the country would be all that much larger.

Such considerations, however, do seem to have become rather outdated by the nature and probabilities of modern warfare. Australia's defence forces are so weak that any enemy who got as far as landing here would have a practically uninterrupted conquest. Australia being so vast and yet so little populated is practically indefensible by conventional military means. Australia's entire defence effort has been directed towards winning reliable friends in the region and in preventing any invader ever reaching these shores. The armed forces that are maintained have no realistic purpose other than assisting in brushfire wars in neighbouring friendly countries. For all intents and purposes the only significant military defence Australia has is the American Seventh fleet and the U.S. Air Force.

I have no wish to be understood as saying that I consider the level of military preparedness described above as adequate. What I would point out, however, is that there are many more urgent military steps to be taken before any investment in decentralisation for strategic purposes becomes worthwhile. If we were serious about defending the place, we would be better off training some more soldiers. It is no good making one's country defensible if we are not also going to provide it with some defenders. Contrast Australia's army of 34,000 with Taiwan's army of 600,000. The two countries have similar populations. Obviously, in the face of any real threat, neither decentralisation nor anything else will save Australia. An army division in Darwin, however, would be a more realistic defence move than subsidies to rural New South Wales or Victorian farming towns.

Recently, however, new forces have been added to the ranks of the decentralisation advocates. Instead of conservative farmers, we now have radical ecology cranks. An unholy alliance has been forged.

The ecology people see decentralisation as attractive in that it offers relief from what is generically called "urban blight" -- things such as traffic congestion, crime, polluted air and water, overcrowded recreational facilities etc. There are also certain economic attractions in smaller centres -- principally cheaper land.

No one can dispute that smaller cities and towns are superior to large cities in the respects listed. Does it follow however that we should encourage people to live in smaller cities? I think not. Australia has a great range of urban centres. You can live in a small town such as Innisfail (pop. 7,000 ), a small city such as Cairns (pop. 27,000 ), a larger city such as Townsville (pop. 69,000 ), a small metropolis such as Hobart (pop. 150,000 ), a large city such as Newcastle (pop. 340,000 ) , a metropolis such as Adelaide (pop. 820,000) or a very large metropolis such as Sydney (pop. 2,780,000 ).

In the above circumstances, with this range of size, if anyone is really honest about preferring smaller centres to the larger ones, why don't they go there? The smaller towns and the country generally need people. Country people are always bemoaning the drift to the cities. What is holding our trendies back from reversing the drift?

A great deal! While it may be true that the big cities have disadvantages, what is overlooked is that they do have positive attractions as well. Why is it that many country towns cannot get a resident doctor? Why is it that the Education Department has to resort to coercion to get teachers to go to country schools? Why is it that academics are so reluctant to apply for jobs at country institutes of technology that even a bachelor's degree will get you a lectureship there instead of the doctorate that would be required in the city? Why is it that the Australian public service has to offer accelerated promotion to get its officers to go and work in our beautiful decentralised national capital? Because small towns are dead. They lack the social variety and range of recreational opportunities of the big city. The jobs are there and the pay is in many cases better, but still people prefer the big city. And what basically is it that gives the big city its attraction? People! (see Part 1, Chapter 1, page 3 also.) To have social variety means to have more people. To support a variety of recreational and educational facilities there needs must be more people. To have a greater variety of jobs on offer means there must be more people to fill them all. To have a variety of restaurants available means there must be more people to eat in them. To find sufficient people to support minority interest groups means that there must be enough people for the minority still to amount to significant numbers in absolute terms. Most of our rewards ultimately or primarily come from people and people in abundance are what the big city offers. Urban growth is no accident. It is, in at least a large part, the result of people voting with their feet. If the balance of costs and gains was against the big city, the trend would be away from the cities. It is in fact the opposite. More people are moving to the cities than away from them.

Of course, in their foggy way, the trendies do know that big cities have advantages too. They are not moving out, after all. What they believe is that government action can still give the small centres comparable attractions to the larger ones. It is all a matter of subsidies! So simple! What they have to tell us is how subsidies can replace people. What they also overlook is that cities have immense economic advantages -- principally the advantage of minimizing transport costs. 'Transport costs'! some will say. 'How dull. Surely transport is only a minor and highly secondary economic factor!'

Far from it. Depending on what you include, up to half of our GNP goes on transport-related costs. Up to half the work done in the community goes into transport-related activities. Think of the motor vehicle industry, the oil industry, the railways, the airlines, the buses, trams and taxis. Think of our largest single employer, the Post Office. Think of transport substitutes such as the telephone service. Think of shipping firms, sailors, wharf labourers, ship builders, road builders, truck drivers, hauliers and delivery men. Go for a drive on city roads during the day and try to get some faint inkling of how many commercial vehicles there must be in use. Think of the mechanics and the petrol stations on every second corner. Think of the number of people who spend precious hours driving themselves to and from work every day. It may seem absurd, but one of the most characteristic and most frequent of human activities is motion -- transport of ourselves and of objects from place to place.

We all have some conception of the immense number of intermediary steps that have to be gone through before something such as a television set can be produced. Not one of us would be able to, unassisted, make a single component. Think, that for every step in that set's production the components have to be transported from one workman to another -- often to workmen in separate factories. If those factories were far apart imagine the huge extra costs that would be incurred. Concentration of factories, workers and customers in one large city minimizes these costs. Without large cities we would all be so much poorer and so much more lacking the luxuries that we regard as part of the good life. Whatever it is that people want to pay for, they would be able to afford less if it were not for big cities.

Therefore, industrial firms could seldom justify setting up outside major urban centres. Their transport costs would be too greatly increased. The land they build their factory on will be cheaper, but most of the materials they use to build it will be dearer. Hence they will have increased costs getting supplies for their factory and increased costs in distributing the finished product. There normally have to be great natural advantages for an industrial activity to be set up outside the major urban centres.

Big cities have, then, both social and economic advantages. On the social side they offer variety and on the economic side they offer economy of transport. They are one of man's oldest, most versatile and most successful inventions.

When, therefore, governments intervene in the natural settlement process in the name of decentralisation, what they find they have to do is to offer inducements both to the industrialist and to the people who will work for him. These "inducements" are usually of a monetary form -- such as the infamous 60:30:10 rule whereby the New South Wales government pays with the taxpayers' money ninety per cent of the establishment costs of factories built in rural centres. Nominally, of course, the money is lent -- but at such low interest rates and for such long terms as to be (particularly given the rate of inflation) essentially an outright gift. A poorly conceived enterprise that would never get backing elsewhere can always get government backing if it promises to set up in the country. If it has enough taxpayers' money spent on it (including subsidies and outright grants as well as loans) any enterprise will flourish.

To get people to move into the country the inducements are similar. Generally they are not so unsubtle as to pay obviously higher salaries -- though "loadings" of various sorts do from time to time appear. The qualifications needed for a job are watered down. This means that you get a higher classification than normally and with it goes of course a higher salary. Yet because of this little subterfuge, it can still be claimed that officers in the country and officers in the city are being paid equally for equal work. Canberra postings for Commonwealth Public Servants are the best known instance of this potent, but hard-to-prove practice.

What it all amounts to is that people who would not normally want to go to the country are being tempted to give up the attractions of the city by monetary bribery. People who do not want to go to the country are being forced to do so by their own monetary need. And for whose good? The people who go are not as happy as they would be in Sydney or Melbourne on a similar salary (though some do eventually learn to like their new environment) nor is the taxpayer as happy as he would be in spending the tax dollars that it costs on himself.

It would make better sense (though nothing in this connection seems to make good sense) to give the unwilling emigrants from the city the extra money anyhow and let them go on living in the city where they want to live: Then at least some people would feel greatly benefited by the outpouring of taxpayers' dollars.

At this point the whole exercise seems to look a little like the outcome of some moral conviction that decentralisation or country living is merely, in some mystical sense, "good", or to be admired. What makes it "good" no one seems to know. Perhaps it is something like "kindness" -- we just know it to be good. Being what people want to do is not cause enough to make it good -- for the excellent reason that it is not what they want to do. It being essential for our defence cannot be what makes it good because, in fact, if anything, it diverts money that otherwise might go to really necessary and effective defence spending -- such as training more soldiers. Its being necessary because only country life builds up the character and fortitude that a nation needs cannot be the reason or someone will have to explain where the city-bred people of London found the splendid fortitude and character they displayed in the Battle of Britain. Generations of city life with hardly a breath of country air does not seem to have turned them into moral marshmallows.

No, the only possible justification for decentralisation can be that it springs from a fascistic conviction that something is just good for people for some abstract or aesthetic reason and even if people cannot see it for themselves they should still be forced or induced to comply with its requirements. The Nazis thought that blue eyes and fair hair were a good thing for reasons that could never adequately be demonstrated (but which were probably mainly aesthetic) so they determined to fasten such a mould on the whole of humanity. Decentralisation mania seems to be a democratic and fortunately weaker strain of the same virus.

In summary, on the evidence of people's own choices, the balance of costs and gains is in favour of the big city. For people who sincerely disagree with this evident majority judgment, there is already a great variety of smaller centres they can go to.

'But Sydney is the only place I could get a job as good as the one I have now', someone will say. 'I would love to live in the country if only suitable work were provided'. Given the difficulty that employers have in getting people to take the lush jobs of Canberra, anybody who makes such a claim is probably in fact making a false claim. The big city is not the only home of good jobs. It may however be the only home of many specialised jobs and if for you the only good job is one of these then it may be true that you are forever condemned to city life. If, for instance you are a merchant banker you will under no government have congenial job prospects in Coffs Harbour. And the reason is an inevitable one -- because personal contact with the heads of large corporations and financial institutions is so important to your work or the work of your firm. Scattering the financial institutions and big corporations throughout the countryside would be scant help. It would simply render your work less effective, reduce the call on your services and cost you a lot more in trunk-line telephone charges.

The very essence of many specialised jobs is that they are made possible only by having within reach a large population to support them. If only 0.001 per cent of the population on average want your services, it is going to take a very large agglomeration of people to make your service into a full-time job. If you have chosen such a job while also having a liking for 'wide open spaces' then you are certainly in need of help -- but perhaps help of a psychiatric rather than of a monetary kind.

It is nonetheless surprising how few jobs, even ones which are apparently specialised, are limited to the big city. Even computer programmers, systems analysts and university lecturers can, if they try, get jobs in centres as small as Townsville (pop. 69,000). 'But who would want to live in Townsville?' To that there is only one answer possible -- the trite-sounding but ineluctable answer that one must give to all decentralisation advocates: 'You cannot have your cake and eat it too.'

Chapter 7 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Can We Afford Decentralisation?



By PETER SAMUEL

That big cities are bad, has been received wisdom for many Australians since the beginning of this century, when they showed their first shock symptoms after realising that they were the most urbanised nation in the world. Lately there has been added to it the new whizz idea that big cities are uneconomic. Mr Whitlam, more likely than anyone else who matters in Federal politics to hop on to whizz ideas, has had a ride or two on this one lately. Now there is sad news for both a conventional wisdom and a newly fashionable idea: big cities may be the most economic way of housing Australians. This news comes from a confidential Government document.

Why this particular document is confidential may be due partly to Australia's unique (among democracies) insistence on keeping practically everything secret. (See: 'Why can't we know what the public servants are doing,' The Bulletin, 6 March 1971.) But it may also come from the vested interests of the governing coalition parties in keeping their rural seats. Now that so many farmers are going broke it can seem to be good politics to theorise away about how there must be decentralisation of new industry away from the big metropolitan areas.

Not that anyone does anything about this question. There is plenty of blah, but Government machinery stays still. It is five years since a Commonwealth and State Decentralisation Committee was established. The Committee commissioned a series of studies on the costs and benefits of decentralisation. Now the findings of these studies remain secret. Mr Whitlam has asked for them to be made public but he has been refused. One reason why they remain secret may be that they deny politicians' blah.

The Bulletin has obtained a copy of one of the key reports. Under the forbidding title of 'A study of the comparative costs of providing public utilities and services in Melbourne and select Victorian centres,' prepared by Dr J. Paterson of the consulting firm Urban Systems Analysis, Melbourne, and circulated to Commonwealth and State Departments but otherwise kept secret, the report suggests that decentralisation may be uneconomic.

The sixty-page document fails to find any significant diseconomies in Melbourne's growth compared with eight smaller cities. Indeed, it finds that the cost of maintaining services in the smaller centres 'was at least fifty per cent higher on average than the cost of services in Melbourne.'

The main conclusion of the study is that the size of urban centres is probably relatively unimportant in urban costs --that in determining costs, geographical location, resources, management and planning are all much more important than size.

The Paterson Report is rather tentative in some of its conclusions because it is unable to allow for differences in the quality or range of services, so that it really measures expenditures rather than real costs. For this reason it is just possible that the results of the study would favour the big city against the small centres rather more strikingly if it had been possible to adjust for different levels of service.

Here are some of the report's main findings:

* In education and hospitals, at least, Melbourne's standards look higher than those of the small Victorian cities, and only in the case of roads, where the metropolitan centre suffers severe traffic congestion, does the big city provide clearly inferior levels of service to its citizens.

* Expenditure on police services in Melbourne and also in the larger Victorian provincial towns is lower than in the towns under 20,000-about $5.50 per person per year against an average $7.50. There was no significant difference in education spending as between the larger and smaller centres, despite the better facilities available in the larger centres-which suggests strongly that real education costs are less in the big city. Much the same appeared true for hospitals.

* Unit expenditure on running water supply and sewage services in Melbourne were significantly lower than in small centres-about $4.00 compared with $8.50 per citizen per year. Postal services were $3.95 against $6.79.

* The small centres do much better in only two areas-- garbage disposal and Local Government. The small centres spend $1.51 on garbage and sanitary work against the $2.46 of Melbourne, which clearly requires more sophisticated garbage incinerators and cannot rely so much on open rubbish dumps as the small towns. As for local government administration, this costs almost twice as much in Melbourne, at $5.60, as the $2.86 per citizen per year of the small centres.

* In total, current costs of urban services in Melbourne come to $71 a year per person against $117 average for eight country centres, which varied individually between $89 and $149. On the capital side the cost of providing overhead services for extra people was found to be much lower in Melbourne than in the smaller centres-$1192 per extra person compared with an average of $3582.

The opponents of decentralisation could use these figures to tremendous propaganda advantage. They could claim that to house an extra 100,000 people on the fringes of a big city would cost only $120 million in capital services compared with about $360 million in small centres.

One of the difficulties the report points up is to distinguish between economics of size and economics of fast growth. The mere fact that Melbourne grew the fastest in absolute terms may have been the reason why services could be put on at lower unit costnot that additions were being made to a big city system. Urban facilities are often what economists call 'lumpy' projects. They cannot be built in bits and pieces. That is to say, a new water main has to be built bigger than immediately needed and there are economies in rapidly taking up its full capacity.

Another defect in the Paterson report is its narrow scope. Urban centres in Victoria are not very big. Most of the more sensible advocates of new cities in Australia have been thinking of the advantages of cities of half a million or so. But the Paterson report certainly puts paid to any idea of just dispersing population round existing small-population centres. It may not put paid to the idea of building new cities of 250,000 or more. But that is not what most of the a flicionados of decentralisation mean when they use their favourite word.

It is a most valuable report-- an example of how rationality can deflate emotion and of the necessity to base policy on something stronger than unalloyed prejudice. For this reason, it makes one question the validity of the present vogue for opposing present immigration policy on mere hunches. For all we know --until the new studies the Government has ordered have come in-- it is just as likely that it would be more economic to increase our rate of immigration than to reduce it.



This article originally appeared in "The Bulletin", 27 March 1971, p. 21-22.

Chapter 8 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Pollution: The Cost of Clean Living



By: PETER SAMUEL

Economics used to be called the dismal science, but compared with the newly modish science of ecology it is almost utopian. The ecologists --or more strictly the collection of people jumping on the bandwagon of conservation and anti-pollution --are the new prophets of doom. There is now a very real danger that by misstating and grossly exaggerating the very important case for a greater concern with the environment, conservationists may be dismissed as cranks. If the case for conservation is stated only by biologists and natural scientists ignorant of politics and economics, then it is not going to get far. In fact, a reaction will set in against it.

Nevertheless, scientists do recognise the relevance of economics to the environment, even if they make fools of themselves when they enter an area they know so little about.

The first economic point that needs to be made to the conservationists is that some current economic trends are working very much in their direction. The growth areas of all advanced economies are information (computing, control systems, telecommunications), education, health, tourism, leisuretime activities and the like, and these are 'non-polluting'. Most manufacturing is growing much slower than these activities. And the economic sector which has had the most devastating effect on the environment --agriculture --is hardly growing at all.

Another point is that a great deal of the growth in productivity which conservationists tend to despise is actually on their side. Many of the great economic advances are associated with more efficient utilisation of natural resources. A ton of steel can now be manufactured using considerably less iron ore and coal and limestone than it could twenty years ago. A ton of steel now means less digging and messing around with the earth. Most of the increases in agricultural production have been achieved without using more land. Very often technological advance reduces pollution; for example, the switches to natural gas and electricity for heating, away from the use of coal, wood, and oil.

If scientific research is directed specifically toward the problems of pollution it should be possible to make considerable progress. But scientists seem to have lost faith in the possibility of progress. They talk all the time about the impossibility of finding a technological solution to every pollution problem. That no doubt is true. But surely it is also true --though the scientists in their pessimistic mood tend to overlook it --that technological advance can solve many pollution problems and reduce others to satisfactory dimensions.

The supporters of anti-pollution measures should also recognise that much of the concern about the environment and the demand for conservationist measures is elitist and inegalitarian. Cleaner air must be regarded as a luxury item in most conditions in Australia, for example. It is one thing for the professor of biology with his income of $16,000 a year to be keen on conservation. He probably is very well set up with housing and associated gadgetry, and he can take trips to conferences and elsewhere. His wife does not have to count housekeeping money. For him, the prettiness of the countryside and the freshness of the air are relatively very important, since his other needs are relatively satisfied.

But this man is part of a very small minority. The average man is on an income of about $5,000 a year and he is often battling to keep up the payments on his house, and he values his modest collection of household gadgets and his car quite highly for the freedom from drudgery, the entertainment and the mobility they give him. He will not be prepared to sacrifice much of these for cleaner air. And similarly he will value the preservation of the countryside less highly than the richer man.

For the higher-income man it is nothing that he, together with everyone else in Australia, has to pay an extra $50 for his car because of the cost of incorporating anti-pollution devices. But for the man who can only just afford a car, and who is paying hire-purchase interest rates, the anti-pollution regulations will be an unwelcome burden when he is already struggling to maintain a vehicle which will take him and his family into the countryside at weekends or during holidays. At present levels of income and under existing pollution conditions, the majority of Australians are probably not prepared to pay very much for cleaner air and other aspects of a better environment.

The fact that conservation is often an inegalitarian measure does not mean it is wrong. All sorts of things governments do are inegalitarian --like subsidising the arts. The country would be culturally very impoverished if egalitarianism were the only criterion by which policies of governments were judged.

And while the mass of present-day Australians might not be prepared to pay a great deal for a better environment and the conservation of the natural wildlife and vegetation, it is a safe bet that future generations of Australians will value these things much more highly. In a generation --twenty-five years' time --Australian per capita incomes should be more than twice what they are now and by then the average householder will have far less difficulty in financing his gadgetry and will be prepared to pay much more to have a good environment. So, to satisfy the needs of the next generation --not to speak of future generations --there is a case for conservation policies now which will preserve a satisfactory environment for them. An environment is not something, like a washing-machine or a house, which can be manufactured to meet immediate needs. It can only be moulded over a long period by positive conservation measures on the one hand and negative 'development' measures on the other. A balance between development and conservation which suits present-day Australians is probably stressing conservation inadequately (and over-emphasising development) for the needs of future generations.

But the first target of conservationists should be those so-called 'development projects' which are not really development at all, because they are likely to require subsidies to make them go. They should be concentrating their anger on schemes which make neither conservation sense nor economic sense. The elimination of these will both improve the environment and increase people's incomes. There are plenty of uneconomic developments which the conservationists could attack. They did this with great success in the Little Desert affair in Victoria recently. But almost every new rural water-storage project in Australia is uneconomic --because of the paucity of market for the produce of irrigated land. Each of these dams is impoverishing the country by consuming resources in the building which could be used productively elsewhere and by putting into business another collection of farmers who will have to be subsidised steadily over the years ahead. Each dam also impoverishes the environment by submerging vast bush valleys and disrupting the whole ecology of the river downstream. Many of Australia's water birds as well as smaller species of river life are threatened by the changes in river behaviour caused by dams.

Though it is hard to believe, there are governments in Australia still encouraging farmers to grow more. The worst offender is Victoria, which is still clearing bush for new dairy farms, though Western Australia must rank next in silliness with its continuation of land clearance for new wheat farms. The Commonwealth Government is an offender in a less direct manner. By giving extraordinarily generous tax deductions for capital expenditures, it encourages 'development' beyond the limit which is economically sound. And by subsidising fertilisers so heavily it encourages their excessive application. The deleterious effect of fertilisers outside the farm, once they are washed into creeks and rivers and then into the sea, probably means that even what makes economic sense for the individual farmer is an excessive use of fertiliser from the viewpoint of the nation as a whole. Fertilisers, insecticides and other chemicals which pollute the environment should be heavily taxed, not subsidised. (The farmers could get the money gained by the Government back in the form of a straight tax deduction.)

The current crisis in Australian agriculture gives conservationists a heaven-sent opportunity. Because of the world surplus of grains which has developed in the past three years, and seems likely to persist because countries like India are now self-sufficient, the Australian wheat industry must take half its twenty-five million acres out of use. That is equivalent to over half the area of Victoria. Wool prices are going down not because of any conspiracy of Japanese buyers -- if only it were as simple a problem as that! -- but because the market for wool is steadily weakening. Synthetics are being used more, heating in houses, workplaces and cars is making people all over the world dress more lightly. (Like many Canberra people, I do not own an overcoat.) Butter and tobacco are being used less because more people believe they are health hazards. For many items of Australia's agricultural production protective tariffs and import quotas in other countries make the future look grim. And possible British entry into the EEC makes the future of many rural industries look disastrous.

In this context, there is no economic logic in further land clearance for farming or for any more rural dams. There is a positive economic case for progressively taking marginal farms out of agricultural production. 'Let the bush grow back' is a sound slogan for Australia in the 1970s. And it opens new horizons for conservationists. Conservationists can demand an end to policies of agricultural expansion and the beginning of reconstruction, and they should be able to get every taxpayer on side. Every acre of land given back to bush will not only improve the national environment but it will save the nation the costs of surplus agricultural production.

But perhaps the most important advice the economist will give the conservationist is that he should harness the price system to his cause. In other words he should try to extend the economic system based on price incentives into the area of 'the environment' and use it to combat pollution. Use of the price system will generally be more effective and practical than use of direct controls or regulations. Take the example of exhaust emission from cars. Being advised by bureaucrats, governments are in the process of introducing a complicated series of bureaucratic controls. All new cars will have to be fitted, for example, with devices suppressing emission of pollutants below one per cent. This regulation may help somewhat in reducing car-exhaust pollution, but it is an extremely crude device. It means that old cars can go on polluting as before. There is no incentive to the car operator, once he has got his car out of the showroom, to maintain his car so that its pollutant emission is kept down. And there is no incentive to the car manufacturer or fuel supplier to get pollution further below the mandatory ceiling emission set in the regulation. Finally, it is an unfair and wasteful imposition on the country man, who lives in an area of low motor-vehicle density.

Most of the shortcomings of the bureaucratic regulation can be overcome with a 'pollution charge'. Each car owner should be charged an amount proportional to the estimated emission of pollutants from his car. This would be an easily implemented measure as most States now have the requirement that for safety reasons each car is inspected annually when re-registration comes up. Exhaust emission could be measured and related to the miles driven as indicated on the speedometer. The charge could be set at a level which equalled the estimated nuisance value of extra exhaust in the particular registration centre. In country areas there should be no pollution charge, and probably it would not be considered necessary in most smaller towns and cities. In the bigger metropolitan areas it might be substantial and raised steeply should the general problem be judged to be getting more acute.

The pollution charges would give manufacturers an incentive to spend money on research and development into cheaper and better emission-suppression devices, since 'save on emission charges' could become a selling point. In the same way, fuel makers would have an incentive to get the lead and sulphur and other pollutants out of their fuels. And motorists would have an incentive to maintain their cars after purchase in a condition in which their exhaust emission was controlled.

Such pollution charges could also be applied to other processes which vent private garbage into the public domain of the atmosphere: domestic heating systems, industrial plants, airliners.

And why not noise charges in cities, where this is practical? Life in suburbia would be much more pleasant if motor-mowers were taxed proportionately with the noise they make. Again there would be an incentive for the makers to progressively reduce noise levels by introducing new silencing systems and eventually produce new motors and power sources. The regulation that a mower shall not emit more than forty decibels is an inferior rule, because it is set at a level which is 'practical' with existing technology and therefore gives manufacturers no incentive to find improved technology, because it gives the purchaser no incentive to buy the marginally quieter model.

On the other side of the ledger there are private activities in cities which improve the environment of the city community generally as well as benefiting the individual. Tree planting is an example. Surveys in Sydney by the Urban Research Institute recently have shown just how highly suburbanites value the tree-ness of their environment, but each individual cannot do much. The institute thinks there is a clear case for subsidised trees for the suburbs.

The motor car is generally recognised as one of the main damagers and not only because of exhausts. The 'road toll' makes it a major health problem and it requires seemingly endless expenditures on roadways and parking facilities. One approach to the safety problem might be to try to adopt some set of 'danger charges' based on a safety rating of the vehicle. Some car safety features are so valuable that there could be severe fines for not using them. An American estimate puts the average cost of not wearing a seatbelt in terms of extra death, hospitalisation and time lost at about $2000 per $5 seatbelt. There should obviously be a very heavy fine for not wearing a seatbelt. But more general 'danger charges' would give car makers a reason for getting busy designing and introducing other safety features. We have heard for a long time about rapidly inflating air cushions for protecting the occupants of cars in case of collision, but very little real work is being done on this important innovation. Danger charges related to danger ratings (based, say, on survival probability in given collisions) would have the motor industry working like beavers to design and introduce new safety measures.

The non-economists' answer to the obvious overuse of cars in cities is to say let them congest: do not build the new roads and parking stations which seem justified by the existing traffic flows and congestion. The better answer is to start pricing the use of roadspace according to the cost that the motorist imposes by occupying that space. If he puts sufficient value on the mobility he gets out of using the roadspace at a particular time to pay the costs to the community of providing that roadspace, then equity and efficiency dictate that he should be able to get that roadspace to use. If motorists were charged the costs of the use of their roadspace, and if parking charges were everywhere related to the rentable value of the space taken up by parking, then the car would be brought under control. There would be an indicator of the social value of new roads, and a better use of existing roads, since charges in peak hours would encourage a de-peaking of traffic flows. Public transport would be able to compete on a more equal basis with the car.

These are only a few examples of an economic approach to pollution control and an improved environment. A whole range of other measures is obviously needed. Governments spend pitifully small amounts. The Commonwealth could well take more initiatives. Why not a program for the Commonwealth acquiring and running a number of large national parks? And running field-study centres in various places to study and report on changes in the environment as the Weather Bureau reports on the weather? There is obviously a great deal to be done in education, and the idea of 'biological centres' (higher-level zoos which display whole systems of plants and animals together in an ecological setting rather than just the animals in isolation) is most interesting. Finally, the Commonwealth's contribution of $50,000 to the Australian Conservation Foundation is pathetically small in a Federal Budget of $7,000,000,000.



EDITORIAL NOTE

Since the above was written, farming has become a better business than it once was and the overpopulation prophets have created the fear that chronic food shortage may be around the corner. A little history, however, will show that the present tight supply of rural commodities is at least in part merely one temporary phase of an often repeated cycle of boom and slump in agriculture. There is little doubt that the long-term situation in Western agriculture is one of oversupply. The 'dynamic cobweb' cycle in agriculture often described by economists has in recent times been distorted and extended in period by government 'propping up' operations but cyclic effects must still be expected. The present good market for agricultural products is also partly due to the once-in-a-lifetime coincidence of bad harvests throughout the world. Such coincidences cannot be relied on for long term planning. ( J.J.R. )



This chapter originally appeared in "The Bulletin", 30 May 1970, p. 39-41.

Chapter 9 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Concorde and the Destruction of Ozone



By S. T. BUTLER

Recent publications by two physicists from Columbia University, U.S.A., are of vital significance with regard to the question of pollution of the upper atmosphere by the exhaust gases of supersonic transports such as the Concorde.

The possible depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere by oxides of nitrogen in the exhaust gases of supersonic aircraft made headlines last year.

Ozone is a type of oxygen which resides in the atmosphere at high altitudes - primarily between 60,000 to 150,000 feet. The molecules of ozone consist of three oxygen atoms joined together, so that ozone is described by the symbol 03. Normal oxygen as we know it consists of two oxygen atoms combined - and has the symbol 02.

Ozone is formed in the first instance by ultraviolet rays in the solar radiation splitting the normal 02 molecules into their separate oxygen atoms. Each one of these, through a series of collisions, may become attached to normal (O2) molecules to produce the ozone (03) molecules.

Ozone molecules are in turn destroyed by being broken up by ultraviolet radiation, or by undergoing chemical reactions with other molecules which exist naturally in the atmosphere - the oxides of nitrogen providing one example.

Thus there is a continuous formation of ozone in the upper atmosphere and a continuous destruction of it. An analogy is that of water flowing into a tank but also running out through holes at the bottom. The water in the tank reaches a certain level, which stays constant when the rate of input is equal to the rate of output. The equilibrium 'level' of ozone in the upper reaches of the atmosphere is determined by the production rate of ozone being balanced by its destruction rate.

In terms of the atmosphere at ground level, the ozone is extremely small in quantity. If all the ozone were compressed to normal atmospheric pressure, it would form a spherical shell around the earth only about 0.3 centimetres thick (a little more than one-tenth of an inch).

Small as this effective thickness of ozone is, it is a highly efficient absorbent of ultraviolet radiation, and evolution on earth has evolved below this absorbing layer.

The ozone is responsible for strongly absorbing ultraviolet radiation of wavelengths which are highly 'biologically active'. These wavelengths are known to be most effective in producing skin cancer and skin inflammations (erythema), and can be damaging to the eyes. If the quantity of ozone were halved, the effects to human and plant life could be disastrous.

This is the crux of the concern about supersonic aircraft flying at high altitudes above about 50,000 feet. Their exhaust gases will inject additional oxides of nitrogen into the atmosphere which will, in effect, put another hole in the tank, so that the average level of ozone in the stratosphere may drop.

In 1971 Professor H. Johnston, of Berkeley Uuiversity, California, calculated that 500 supersonic aircraft, each flying about seven hours a day, might eventually produce a reduction in the quantity of ozone to one-half its present value. Such predictions could not be certain because of unknowns in the rates of the chemical amounts involved, and indeed the quantities of natural oxides of nitrogen which occur in the stratosphere anyway.

Committees were set up in several countries to report on the issue; these included one appointed by the Australian Academy of Science, which expressed the opinion that, on data presently available, it would not expect significant adverse effects to the ozone level from the flying of supersonic aircraft. However, uncertainties remained.

Professor Henry M. Foley, chairman of the Physics Department of the Columbia University, and Professor M. A. Ruderman, visiting Columbia University from the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, have now pointed out that man has already injected into the stratosphere more oxides of nitrogen than would result from the flying of 500 Concordes seven hours a day for nearly ten years. Thus mankind has, albeit unwillingly, already exposed himself to the ozone reduction risk.

Foley and Ruderman point out that oxides of nitrogen are not only products of jet engine exhausts but will automatically be produced at high temperatures as a result of combining of naturally occurring nitrogen and oxygen in the air. This occurs in the 'fireball' of a nuclear explosion, and most of the products of this explosion are injected upwards into the stratosphere.

During one peak period between October 1961 and December 1962, the United States and Russia jointly exploded 340 megatons of nuclear bombs.

Foley and Ruderman calculate that these tests alone injected more oxides of nitrogen into the stratosphere than the flying of 500 Concordes seven hours a day for some five years.

If drastic ozone reduction had occurred, the world would already have felt the consequences. Yet detailed measurements of ozone concentrations over the world-wide system of monitoring stations has shown that in the last ten years the concentration of ozone has in fact slightly increased -- in some latitudes by as much as ten per cent.

The analysis by Foley and Ruderman seems unambiguous and undeniable. Whatever other problems the Anglo-French aircraft may be meeting, it seems that it can be freed from the charge of destruction of the earth's ozone layer.



This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Sydney Morning Herald", 16 July 1973, p. 7.

Chapter 10 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

This article originally appeared in Nation Review, 8 June 1973, p. 1042.

RHODESIA: IN DEFENCE OF MR SMITH



By John Ray

To MOST AUSTRALIANS, the Smith regime in Rhodesia is indefensible. They practice blatant racial discrimination, censorship, and imprisonment without trial. A more complete recipe for unpopularity would be hard to imagine. There is, however, more to the picture than is popularly supposed.

Why was Rhodesia not peacefully decolonised like the rest of Britain's African possessions? To answer this we must firstly ask ourselves another and quite basic question: Could white Rhodesians reasonably be expected to subject themselves to another Belgian Congo? Obviously not if they could help it. And in Rhodesia they could help it. They had been self-governing with their own parliament since the 1920s.

All the African decolonisations have been followed by mass slaughters and dictatorships. Some of these we hear little of in Australia because it is only blacks slaughtering blacks, but in Rhodesia all these things are right next door and the Rhodesians are acutely aware of them. If you were in their position, what would you do? Leave. That is certainly what many whites in other parts of Africa did before decolonisation.

In Rhodesia, however, the white community was relatively large (over 200,000 ) , self-sufficient and of long standing. It was their country, where they had been born and where they wanted to stay.

They were not going to throw in the towel and give their country over to another Amin-type dictatorship. But what then, were they going to do with the Africans? ,

The solution proposed was really a rather trusting one. They were going to put all their black people's children in schools and give them the vote as they completed primary education. Basically, only blacks with at least some education would be allowed to have a say in running their country. To cynics among us it may seem a trifle naive, but white Rhodesians were actually prepared to trust the power of education to avoid another bloodbath.

The world said it was not enough. Decolonise now. Give the blacks rule even if the only education they have had is how to use a spear. To the starry eyed idealists of Harold Wilson's British Labour government the realities of Africa didn't seem to matter.

It didn't even seem to matter that the good faith of the white Rhodesians was obvious. They had already succeeded in getting a higher proportion of their black population into schools than any other country in Africa. They had even shown themselves to be flexible on the education rule as the basic qualification for a vote. If an African adult did not have an education, but had shown his adaptation to civilised life by acquiring a certain amount of property or income, then he was given the vote nevertheless.

Since then the Rhodesians have been at war. A trade war, a war of nerves and an outside-sponsored guerilla war. As in all states at war, civil liberties have suffered. Instead of allowing to be tried the one solution that might have allowed the two races to live together in harmony, the outside world has ensured that Rhodesia must undergo that very bloodbath they sought to avoid. The world's Leftists must be proud of themselves.

The only solution now may be for the white Rhodesians to leave their homes, jobs, property and everything else that makes up a comfortable existence and emigrate en masse to some other part of the world. Naturally, they are reluctant to come to this conclusion -and they may yet be right. Despite nit-picking by outsiders, the Rhodesian economy is booming and South Africa has shown that black dissent can be controlled.

The big danger is, however, that if they do have to resort to South African methods to control terrorism (note that as yet there is in Rhodesia nothing like the apartheid system that reigns in South Africa), they may so alienate the blacks that even education will not make it safe to give them the vote. Already this has started. The Rhodesian government has felt itself obliged to raise the educational level which will earn a vote from primary to two years secondary education.

If the governments of the world were sincere in their desire to avoid both a bloody revolution and a South African style system in Rhodesia, they would surely desist in their policy of pushing the whites into a corner. What the whites need is not attack -- there is enough fear in their future already -- but international guarantees for their safety and the security of their property. That way they might be able to afford to run the risk that the rest of the world seems determined to force upon them.

Chapter 11 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Reprinted from Nation Review, 6 April 1973, p. 753 and written under the pseudonym 'Libertas'.

THE RHODESIA INFORMATION CENTRE



John Ray

MR WHITLAM and his A.L.P. government have promised that they will restrict our freedom of information 'by legislation, if necessary'. I refer, of course, to one of his first acts on coming to office -- his attempt to have the Rhodesia Information Centre closed down. It is still open at the time of writing.

Legislation then would indeed appear to be necessary. I will predict, however, that it will not quickly be forthcoming. Sir Robert Menzies is on record in Hansard as referring to the Rhodesian prime minister as: 'My friend, Mr Smith' -- so you can imagine how likely the Liberals are to let any such legislation through the Senate.

If it was put up and the Senate did reject it, however, the defeat might be signal enough to require a double dissolution. Can you imagine Mr Whitlam going to the polls on an issue of restricting one of our most treasured freedoms, the freedom to speak? The Senate debate alone would be damaging enough to Labor without fighting an election on the issue, indeed it is some testimony to how disorganised the Liberals were after the last election that they did not take up the issue on these grounds when Whitlam raised it.

'But', you may say, 'what has the Rhodesia Information Centre got to do with free speech? Surely it is just a propaganda outlet?' The answer to that, of course, is that when you agree with it, it is information; when you disagree with it, it is propaganda. As they used to say: 'What's propaganda and what's proper goose?'

'But by propaganda is meant distorted information, and there is no reason to tolerate that!' someone might say. If that is so, why do we tolerate advertising?

Anyhow, who thinks that our press itself is free of bias and distortion? Bias will always be with us. The only safeguard is that everybody be allowed to present his own viewpoint. In comparing the same topic treated by people with opposing biases, we might have at least the chance of finding a golden mean that is somewhere near the truth.

It is a sad comparison that while the former government was in power we did not recognise Communist China. We even fought them (in Korea). And yet one could always go down to the appropriate Communist bookshop and cart away half a ton of pro-Chinese literature if that was one's inclination. Mr Whitlam doesn't want to allow the same freedom to supporters of a regime he does not recognise or approve of.

This just bears out the suggestion implicit in my own nom de plume -- that in our society it is the conservatives who are the guardians of liberty and the rights of the individual, not the socialists. This is in fact traditional. It was the conservatives who believed in free enterprise and thought the free world was worth fighting for.

Not of course that Labor leaders don't acknowledge their commitment to free speech in the abstract. It is when it comes down to actually allowing people to hear something that Labor does not like them to hear that we see how different words are from deeds. Mr Whitlam went to the polls with the promise of 'more open government' and specifically justified this policy with the assertion that we all have a 'right to know'. This policy, however, was formulated in the belief that it would help embarrass the former Liberal government. That it might embarrass Labor was not seriously foreseen.

Whitlam's policy then seems to boil down to 'freedom of speech for those who agree with me'. Not so different from Joe Stalin after all.

Chapter 12 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

The article originally appeared under the pseudonym 'Libertas' in "Nation Review", 19 April 1973, p. 816.

RACISM IN AUSTRALIA?



John Ray

When you dislike a man who is black, that does not make you a racist. You are a racist only if you dislike him because he is black. This is a simple truth and yet I will venture to assert that much of what small 'l' liberals today call 'racism' falls into the first rather than into the latter category.

Take this affair recently headlined as Racism in Redfern. Several hundred white residents petitioned the local council to bar the takeover of several terrace houses in their area for the purpose of setting up an 'Aboriginal community'. Does this mean American style colour prejudice has come to Australia? Sydney television showed that there were indeed violent emotions involved --- with an actual confrontation between a white protester and a black organiser being shown.

The grounds for protest were informative, however. Aborigines were in fact already squatting in many of these terrace houses and the local residents had come to find them singularly unpleasant neighbours -- drunken shouting, fighting and bottle smashing at all hours of almost every night -- aboriginals urinating in the street and shouting obscenities at passing white housewives. Who would not want to see the last of neighbours such as that -- whether they were black, white or had purple polka dots?

It is in fact a most violent denial of civil rights if we stigmatise people who protest against such things as 'racists' just because the offensive group is identifiable in terms of colour. Black is not beautiful -- any more than white is.

The greatest obstacle to a reasoned discussion of white 'backlash' is an unstated assumption by many of Australia's suburbanites that Aborigines are just the same as they are except that they have a brown skin. It is this assumption that makes what anti-aboriginal protesters say seem so unintelligible and unreasonable. 'I wouldn't like someone to object to me just because I had a brown skin,' the suburbanite says.

Of course the anti-Aborigine protester is not just objecting to skin colour. He could scarcely be so puerile. He objects to what does factually go with skin colour -- habits, behaviour and practices that white society has long preached against and condemns. If it were just the colour of their skin that set Aborigines apart, there would be no backlash.

It is then this fact that Aborigines are characterised by behaviour that in a white we would find despicable that suburban small 'l' liberals find so hard to absorb. I know of several instances where such liberals, when actually meeting Aborigines for the first time, have suddenly become much more conservative in their views. It is well-known that it is in country towns and depressed urban areas that anti-Aborigine feeling runs high. What people from both types of areas have in common is that they have actually met and lived near Aborigines. They know what they're talking about.

Obviously, there is no necessary assumption that these differences between Aborigines and whites are inborn. All of them could be attributed to differences in upbringing. We come from a culture that values privacy, hygiene and industriousness. Aborigines do not. We see the virtue of competition and emotional reserve. Aborigines do not.

White backlash is then reasonable. Unless we expect whites to forget overnight the cultural values that they have learned and practised all their lives, they will find the proximity of Aborigines unpleasant.

There are three possible solutions to this problem: change the whites; change the Aborigines; or have the two groups live apart. The first two solutions seem totally presumptuous and paternalistic -- if not fascist. The last is the solution that has usually emerged. Blacks and whites, if left to themselves, normally do live in separate communities. It is only when governments and ideology-blinded white do-gooders interfere with the natural selection processes that problems arise.

Journal of Human Relations, 1972, 20, 71-75.

Also reprinted as Chapter 13 in: J.J. Ray (Ed.)"Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Note: The article below does of course offend against the common Leftist claim that there is no such thing as race. Anybody who takes that claim seriously should perhaps read this article as a preamble to what appears below.



ARE ALL RACES EQUALLY INTELLIGENT? -- OR: WHEN IS KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE?



John J. Ray

There has recently been an extensive controversy in the psychology literature on the possible genetic base of racial differences in intelligence. This has been so acrimonious as to inspire the thought that the controversy itself forms an interesting case-study in the sociology of knowledge. I refer to the articles by Jensen (1968 and 1969) and Garrett (1969). One outcome of these controversies is the apparently justified accusation by Jensen (1969b) that an important body of his colleagues (the members of the council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) indulged in "propaganda" and disregard for the facts of the issue. Garrett (1969) makes similar observations. As Van den Haag (1969) points out, the cause of equalitarianism seems to have induced some remarkable failures of reasoning even among normally eminent social scientists. How may these phenomena be explained?

Study of Intelligence as the Hereditary Given

Before one can understand what is really going on in this controversy, it is necessary briefly to recapitulate some basic findings.

There is no doubt that American Negroes obtain lower average scores on standard intelligence tests than do American whites (Tyler, 1965, p. 306; Garrett; 1969). In fact the differences found are often so large and so regular in their incidence that this might be held to be one of the most impressive uniformities in the whole of psychological measurement.

To use Hebb's (1949) terminology there are two types of intelligence -- A and B. Intelligence A is the inborn, hereditary "given" whereas intelligence B is intelligence as measured, i.e. intelligence A plus some variable overlay of learned problem-solving strategies. It is mean differences across races in intelligence A that is of concern here.

Substitution of Ideology for Science

The way to assess differences in intelligence A is to control or equalize the influences and opportunities affecting the B Component. When this is done, differences remaining are attributable to intelligence A variations. Tanser (1939), Bruce (1940), and McQueen and Browning (1960) have carried out such studies where environmental influences on white and Negro groups have been controlled. All reported significant superiority of the white groups. In spite of this, most psychologists (Tyler, 1965, 9, 300) continue to claim that there are no innate differences in intelligence between whites and Negroes. The usual reason advanced for adherence to this credo is that the tests used must in some way be unfair to non-members of the dominant white culture (even though the Negroes and whites of Tanser's study had attended the same schools since 1890!). If this claim is true, how does one explain the consistent finding (Pintner, 1931) that Chinese and Japanese school-children get average test scores equal to or above those of American whites? One is asked to believe that the tests are unfair to people who have sat in the same classrooms as whites but not unfair to Chinese and Japanese who have a totally different cultural background.

Why is it that psychologists, who are most in a position to observe racial differences in intelligence, resolutely refuse to believe the evidence before their eyes? The answer to this is, I believe, an instructive, if sad, incident in the sociology of knowledge. Often drawn to their profession by humane or humanitarian considerations, psychologists are so committed to the belief that whites and Negroes morally should be treated equally that they seem to conclude, albeit unconsciously, that the best way of securing this morally desirable end is to convince people that whites and Negroes in fact are ontologically equal. If the facts fell into line with this account, all would be well, but as it is, the present author would question whether any moral goal is ultimately well served by denying reality as it is. If there are native differences in intelligence, our strategy in pursuing humanitarian goals must presumably become more adaptive by a recognition of it.

This question of the ideology subscribed to by the scientist is also relevant to the question of what we accept as a criterion for evidence. There have been many attempts to construct "culture fair" tests but their application has not been successful in removing Negro-white differences. We must then at some point ask ourselves: "When do we stop?" When do we consider the case proved? When do we start to conclude that there might not after all be some real difference there that is not attributable to a measurement artifact? Given the impressive uniformity of the findings to date, it seems abundantly clear that the existence of a real difference between races would long ago have been considered to have been proven out of hand were it not for an ideological commitment to the opposite viewpoint.

When is Moral Moral?

Just how much ideology can cause even an outstanding psychologist to drift into self-deception is exemplified in the position taken by McElwain (1970). McElwain is head of the Department of Psychology at Australia's largest university (Queensland) and author of the definitive "Queensland Test" of Aboriginal intelligence. This test was normed and validated on Aboriginal groups themselves. It includes only those sub-tests which could be shown to discriminate within the Aboriginal population. Although he does not appear to have committed himself in print, he has repeated to the present author in writing, an assertion often made to his students -- that when the Queensland test is given also to whites, a negative relationship between the discriminating power of a subtest within the Aboriginal population and the size of the gap between white and Aboriginal mean scores appears, i.e., as the test gets better so Aborigines rose closer to whites in average test scores. From this McElwain appears to suggest that if we got a really discriminating test, the difference between whites and Aborigines would disappear altogether.

Here, then, McElwain appears to commit the same fallacy in reverse that is so frequently alleged against tests normed and validated for whites! A test is designed specifically for an Aboriginal culture and yet whites still get higher scores on it! The amazing thing is that whites do not get lower scores on it. Of course the discriminating power and the size of the cross-racial gap are related. As the test is more and more characteristically Aboriginal in specific background, so whites are more and more disadvantaged. A true comparison study of the question set by this paper using the Queensland's test would require that a group of whites be found who shared an environmental background similar to the Aborigine culture. In that case only, might mean scores on McElwain's test be reasonably compared across the two racial groups.

If racial differences exist how do we explain them? A possible explanation is the ecological one: different racial groups develop different areas of excellence according to the specific demands of their characteristic environment. In the harsh European climate, forethought (symbolic thought) has historically been essential to survival -- particularly through the long winters. In Africa these same mental qualities have not had the same relative importance. Because of the more beneficient climate the importance of certain physical and psychomotor abilities has risen in comparison. In time the process of natural selection has ensured that these differentia became racially fixed. With the different characteristic environments of the white and Negro races, it would in fact be highly surprising to find similar levels in all abilities. What one would expect and what one does, I believe, find is that whites would be higher on cognitive abilities and Negroes higher on certain physical abilities.

Using the concept of a morality hierarchy proposed by Hampden-Turner and Whitten (1971) it might be said in fact that the attempt to deny the empirical findings of racial differences in intelligence in order to secure the moral goal of having all races treated equally represents a very low level of moral maturity. The person at the highest stage of moral development would presumably not need to have his moral resolve to treat people equally bolstered by assertions that people are equal anyhow. He would be anxious to do justice to the empirical findings in the awareness that they are essentially irrelevant to the moral decision he has made.

For the future then, humanitarian aims might perhaps best be served by abandoning the unlikely enterprise of proving all men equal. Instead, perhaps, we might concentrate on the question of what the difference between groups are -- and how differences might be used in the betterment of all.

REFERENCES

Bruce, M. 1940. "Factors Affecting Intelligence Test Performance of Whites and Negroes in the Rural South." Archives of Psychology, No. 252.

Garrett, H. E. 1969. "Reply to Psychology Class 338 (Honours Section)." American Psychologist. 24:390-391.

Hampden-Turner, C. and Whitten, P. 1971. "Morals Left and Right." Psychology Today. 4:39-43, 74-76.

Haag, E, van den. 1969. "Addendum to Jensen." American Psychologist. 24:1042.

Hebb, D. O. 1949. The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley.

Jensen, A. R. 1968. "Social Class, Race and Genetics: Implications for Education." American Educational Research Journal, 5:1-42.

Jensen, A. R. 1969(a). "How Much Can We Boost LQ. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review. 39:1-123.

Jensen, A. R. t969(b). "Criticism or Propaganda?" American Psychologist. 24: 1040-1041

McQueen, R., and Browning, C. 1960. "The Intelligence and Educational Achievement of a Matched Sample of White and Negro Students." School and Society. 88:327-329.

McElwain, D. W. 1970. Personal communication.

Pintner, R. 1931. Intelligence Testing. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Chapter 20.

Tanser, H. A. 1939. The Settlement of Negroes in Kent County, Ontario. Chatham, Ontario: Shephard Publishing Co.

Tyler, L. E. 1965. The Psychology of Human Differences. New York: Appleton, Century Crofts. Chapter 12,

(Chapter 11 in: F.S. Stevens (Ed.) "Racism: The Australian Experience, volume 3". Sydney: ANZ Book Co., 1972)

Also reprinted as Chapter 14 in: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974



IN DEFENCE OF AUSTRALIA'S POLICY TOWARDS NON-WHITE IMMIGRATION



John Ray

Among academics there is widespread criticism of Australia's immigration policies. 'White Australia' is definitely a dirty word among much of Australia's intelligentsia. The defences that one normally hears of Australia's policy generally come from politicians rather than from academics in the social sciences (see, for instance 'The evolution of a policy' by the Hon. Phillip Lynch, M.P.-- former Minister for Immigration). In this paper I wish, as both a social scientist and as a conservative, to rebut the usual criticisms made by academics and positively to argue for Australia's present policy.

Some of the criticism one reads, even in reputable academic journals, is so incoherent on the rational level as to be very difficult to answer at all. The article by the anthropologist, Ian Bedford, for instance, (in Politics of 1970, pp. 224-227) contains the bald assertion that: "If the Australian is not to make war on the Asian in Asia, he must live with him on his own soil" -- and a whole series of similar statements whose only support seems to be the moral rectitude of their writer. This writer indeed seems to be characterized by that very 'intolerance of ambiguity' for which the racially prejudiced person has long been slated (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950; Rokeach, 1960). He argues that Australia should allow much more Asian migration just so we will have another Rhodesia here. For the sake of showing white Australians clearly to belong in the 'Baddie' camp of Bedford's conceptual world, he is prepared to encourage all the suffering among, and injustice toward non-white races that he believes to have arisen in Rhodesia. He expects Australia to erupt in bloodshed and riot without the White Australia policy. And it is this that he advocates. It is this that he sees as desirable. For what gain? To show us up as what he believes we really are. This, then, is surely an example of, and a testimony to, the way in which moralism can distort our thinking into working against not only our own self-interest but also against moral ideals themselves.

Among the saner advocates of increased non-white immigration, however, different arguments are generally advanced. As far as I am able to summarize them, they seem to go as follows: 1. Australia is too culturally isolated and inward-looking; 2. Our policy angers other (Asian) nations; 3. We have a moral obligation to help the suffering humanity of Asia in every way we can; 4. Any form of discrimination on racial grounds is, in principle, morally offensive; 5. The gain to Australia would be greater than the loss even in purely material terms. 6. Racism is evil and we should force everybody to become non-racists. I will consider these arguments one by one.

The first is certainly the most superficial and easily refutable point. It is abundantly clear that, on the world scene, Australia has more cultural diversity than most. With several million migrants from all parts of Europe in its population, Australia has a wealth of cultural diversity that few societies in the world could equal. Roughly one fifth of Australia's population was not born in Australia. Is this true of India, of China, of the U.S.A. or of most countries Australia might be compared with? The great European cultures that have made the world in their image are all represented here in strength. Asia and Africa are falling over themselves to emulate the Coca-cola culture and successful materialism of the European world. Are we to weep that we are not being exposed to what Asia itself is rejecting? Being electronically open to and in communication with all the world, Australia is right in the main stream of the world's cultural and intellectual developments. The music of a new composer or the new social theories of a great thinker might reach Australia a few months after they have reached the U.S.A. but is this cause for self-castigation or derogatory comparison with someone such as the Asian peasant who is cut off entirely from the world's intellectual community? If Australia is indeed culturally isolated and inward-looking, then, on the same criteria, all but a tiny percentage of the world's population must be similarly condemned. Sydney and Melbourne are infinitely closer to the New Yorks and Londons of the world (or whatever other great cultural centres one has in mind) than are the Rangoons or Timbuctoos. When I go to the theatre in Sydney, I have a choice of plays that would not, in terms of number and variety, invite derogatory comparison with many other cities in the world. I can go to any number of Greek restaurants in Sydney (or for that matter Chinese, Indian, Italian, Lebanese or Yugoslav restaurants) and drink Greek wine while a roomful of Greeks around me drink Australian beer. In terms of cultural variety the comparison we need fear would be hard to draw. Paris? Perhaps. Peking? No. Even Tokyo, for all its commercialized (and Western) variety, hears fewer foreign accents than we. One may, of course, advocate that we be exposed to a different sort of variety, but variety per se we do have --- par excellence. I myself feel that I have more to learn from a refugee Romanian Jew than I have to learn from an Asian peasant whose one aspiration in life is to own a bicycle. So then, by any standard of objective comparison, I would like to claim that Australia is an intensely cosmopolitan and urban society centred around its two great metropolises -- highly advanced, taking the best that the world has to offer and itself contributing at least its fair share to the dominant world culture of which it forms a part. Personally, I might welcome greater immigration to Australia of educated Indians and Africans because of the refreshing skepticism and joie de vivre that these groups might respectively contribute to our culture, but so to say is to imply a consciousness that any society -- even the very best -- can be improved. It is not to say that the society we presently have is at all a bad one in the respect under discussion.

The second criticism listed above is that our policy angers Asian nations. This is an assertion about which it is hard for either side to be factual. Most nations of the world do have restrictive immigration policies and ours in fact would rate among the more liberal. Nearly all the Asian nations themselves forbid people other than those of their own race from settling and acquiring citizenship. Indeed, others of their own race might not even be welcome. The one country that has made public protest about our policy in recent times is Japan -- a country which itself is almost fanatically ethnocentric and oppressive towards its own small Korean minority. Their protest against our policy is, in fact, the protest of a country which forbids permanent immigration of foreigners against a country which will accept any number of Japanese applicants of sufficient educational standards. Unlike the U.S.A., there are no quota restrictions on Asian settlement in Australia. The only restrictions are educational. Our Immigration Department statistics regularly reveal, in fact, that of those Asians whose application to settle here is approved, not much more than half actually come. From 1966 to 1971 (inclusive), 7,000 applications to immigrate made by Asians were approved but only 3,200 actually arrived. Many Asian countries are in fact themselves most unwilling to allow their people to leave (Taiwan being perhaps the most extreme example), so our policy, in fact, ought to accord well with what they themselves want. In summary then, the only evidence we have for Asian irritation with our policies is the case of Japan. Given Japan's own policy, however, we cannot see this criticism as very deep-seated or defensible. A situation that would, of course, draw criticism from Asian nations would be if we did have here a substantial minority of their people and ill-treated them. Witness the criticisms of Britain by the Afro-Asian nations or of South Africa by the black African nations. Since it is most implausible to believe that Australians would he more tolerant than Britons, our present policy can be seen as one that ensures that we do not anger Asian nations.

The third criticism listed above is that we have a moral obligation to help the suffering humanity of Asia in every way we can. In answer to this I could well make here the usual observations about the relative efficacy of foreign aid versus immigrant intake and I am sure that an impressive case could be made for the claim that the best place to help Asians is in Asia. One could even argue that importing a tiny minority of the Asian population into our midst (into what is, for them, an alien society) would be counter-productive to the welfare of both the individuals concerned and of the countries concerned. What I want to do instead of this however, is to challenge the basic premise that we are under a moral obligation. I would contend that the entire conception of Right and Wrong here involved is faulty. The existence of a discoverable right and wrong is implied in the criticism. Against this we must put the commonplace among many educated people today that there is no such thing as an absolute Right and Wrong. At least since Nietzsche (1906) and Sorel (1915) the existence of moral properties has also been widely questioned among philosophers and social scientists. It is true that the two statements 'X is pink' and 'X is right' have the same grammatical form. While 'pink' does indeed describe a property of the object, 'right' would seem rather to describe our reaction to the object or action. The rightness of some action exists in our opinion of it -- not in the action itself. 'Rightness' attributed to some action is therefore a fraudulent attribution -- designed to provoke argument, discussion or consensus in a pseudo-objective form. It is a polite (but misleading) way of saying 'I favour X' -- or, at best, 'all men would favour X if they had proper consideration for their own long-term self-interest'. If the moralist claims that something other than self-interest is involved, he must at least show where his moral basis emanates from. How does he know whether a thing is an instance of the category 'a right action' ( or 'an action which we are morally obliged to perform')? If God is the source of our moral information one has to be a metaphysician to be a moralist. Since I am not a metaphysician I am not impressed. Even if I was a metaphysician how could I be sure that I was getting the correct account of what God's will is? Given the divisions among religious people on moral questions, it would seem that moral information is not only metaphysical information but metaphysical information of a particularly uncertain sort. The only possible non-metaphysical answer that a moralist can give for the source of his moral information is to say that what is morally right is what he likes, or what all men would like in some optimum situation. The moral information is not to be gained from the action itself. A moralist will see taking up sword (or whatever example of an action one has in mind) as right on one occasion but wrong on another. The action has not changed --only our response to it (a response that is, of course, dictated by circumstances). Applying this to the question in hand, we must translate the contention here at issue as: 'I would approve of us helping the starving millions of Asia in any way we can'. This, of course, deprives the original assertion of its original imperative force. The utterer wished not only to report his own feelings but also to influence us to act in accordance with those inclinations of his. He could have said, 'Thou shalt help ... etc.' but this would not have succeeded in influencing us unless he had direct power over us. He therefore resorted to the subterfuge of moralism and endeavoured to convince us that we were under an obligation similar to a contractual obligation. Once this subterfuge is perceived however we must immediately be interested to ask, 'What is the origin of this obligation? Contractual obligations arise when we exchange one service for another but no such exchange has been undertaken on the present occasion'. In answer to this, the moralist can only resort to the Deity or some other mystical or hypothetical source of obligation. Alternatively he can abandon morality altogether and argue that it would be in our best long term self-interest to act in the manner he advocates. If he does this, the burden of proving his new empirical assertion is thrown upon him. He must advance arguments such as the two considered first above in order to show us that it is, in fact, the case that acting as he advocates would further our long-term self-interest. He may, of course, resort to arguments of a more general sort than the ones considered above. He may say something like: 'It is always wise to be benevolent'. This however is a contentious statement and requires proof. If 'benevolent' is defined in some non-circular way, it can surely be shown that some benevolent acts might not lead to the long-term advantage of any party. One has in mind such adages as 'Sometimes you've got to be cruel to be kind'. Surely the European nations were being benevolent in allowing Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland in the mid-1930s but it would be a brave spirit who would argue that this action was to our long-term self-advantage. Whether benevolence is wise also depends on what our goals are. If we enjoy aggression or the humiliation and suffering of others, then benevolence will obviously be less often wise than if we are otherwise motivated. Obviously then, general rules such as 'It is always wise to be benevolent' just will not work as such. At best they are guides to consider accepting when we have no other information as to the consequences of our actions or when such information as we do have leads to irresolvably conflicting conclusions. In all situations, our first preference must be to argue each case on its individual merits. It is this, then, that the advocate of change in our immigration policies has to do. He has to show that a change is to our advantage in this particular case. His primary reason for so arguing may not, of course, be that he believes a change would be to our advantage. While some advocates may be in this category, I believe that the greatest number would be people who have been conditioned in their upbringing to accepting as true, parental assertions that some acts are good or bad of themselves.

Little Johnny is told that it is bad to act in a certain way -- not that such an act is disliked by the parent (for whatever reason). Although it will not stand up to rational scrutiny, such children may often accept the inculcated belief that the act itself has this imputed property of 'badness' in some way intrinsic to it. The acceptance that certain acts have a property of 'badness' is also associated with (conditioned) negative affect towards such acts. Therefore, any acts that seem similar to acts that the child has accepted to have this property of 'badness' will suffer from generalization of negative affect. The adult feels (not necessarily consciously) that prohibiting unlimited Asian immigration is similar to acts that he was conditioned to avoid as a child. His advocacy of freer migration may therefore be dictated, not by rational considerations, but by generalized conditioned negative affect. Presumably, however, most of us would want to give more thought to our own long-term advantage in this particular situation than following our immediate emotional impulses. That the moralist's conditioned affect is a poor basis for action can also be appreciated if we reflect that others may not share that affect or even have conditioned affect of opposite effect. Where different people have opposite affective responses to the same actions, we cannot expect argument to alter the affect in any way but we might, if we are optimistic, hope that the policy actually adopted by the parties concerned would be decided on rational considerations of long-term self-interest. If this is to happen, debate on the likely outcomes of the alternative policies is essential before our estimation of the relative advantages to us can be made. Moralistic utterances cannot contribute to such a debate. This dismissal of moralistic utterances as nonsensical does then dispose of not only argument 3 above, but also of arguments 4 and 6. Argument 6, however, could be recast as: 'It would be in our interest to force people to become non-racists'. It is in this form that it will be considered below.

Before that, however, we will move on to argument 5 -- that the gain to Australia of freer Asian migration would be greater than the loss even in purely material terms. Such arguments generally turn on the economic advantages of immigration per se -- such as the elimination of upbringing expenses and the greater entrepreneurial motivation and rate of capital accumulation among migrants. It is proposed that the latter might be higher among Asian migrants and that we could be more selective of educational level etc. if we gave ourselves Asia to pick and choose from as well as Europe. Also falling under this general rubric, is the argument that we could correct the imbalance of the sexes in Australia by importing large numbers of Asian women.

Since Australia's per capita rate of capital accumulation is second only to Japan's and since the migrants we already get do have an average level of education higher than that of native Australians, it is evident that, even though it might in theory be possible to do better, we are certainly not doing at all badly already. Even if we were to make a concerted effort to get the cream of Asian society here, this would be at great cost to those societies and would certainly not be permitted by them. Because average educational levels are so much higher in Europe than in Asia, anxiety not to offend other nations by attempting to drain off their best talent would alone constitute sufficient reason to concentrate our immigrant-seeking activities on Europe. The loss of one professional man is an immeasurably greater loss to Asia than it is to Europe. The third proposal to correct the abnormal preponderance of men in Australia by importing Asian women is probably a rather facetious one. It has obvious difficulties associated with the acceptability of women from a vastly different culture to unwed Australian men and is also a policy unlikely to gain acceptance from the Asian nations concerned.

The sixth point listed above is not readily disputable in its revised form -- but it also has lost most of its impact in the revision. Obviously if all people were not racists this would solve a lot of problems. The point is, however, that bringing Asian migrants here is certainly not the way to achieve this. Britain's experience suggests in fact that this would lead to the emergence of racism. If we want people to become non-racists the only way is the slow sure way of more education.

Having now seen that the reasons why we should have more Asian migration do not stand up well to fuller consideration, we may ask: 'Are there any reasons why we should not have more Asian migration? The answers I want to suggest to this are, in general, so well known as to appear passe but the only answer the Left can generally produce to them takes the form of misapplying a psychiatric but clearly pejorative label such as 'paranoid'.

Let us face the fact that large numbers of even educated Australians do not like Jews or 'Wogs'. This is not concentration camp mentality. It is simply the perceptual discrimination of identifiably different characteristics in these people and the personal preference of not liking such characteristics. The concept of national characteristics stands in somewhat of a bad odour today but for all that it remains true that people who travel overseas have no difficulty in naming what those characteristics are (Cf. Madariaga, 1970). To say that Italians are more emotional is not at all to deny that some Italians are not emotional. It is simply to say that emotionality is more common among Italians than it is among us. We all have personal preferences about what we like in other people. If Italians are more emotional and we don't approve of emotionality -- (for us a cultural value), it makes perfect sense not to like Italians or any other group that is similarly characterized. Disliking Italians in this way is not even inconsistent with liking some individual Italians. I personally don't like marmalade jams but I have occasionally tasted a marmalade jam that I did like. In spite of the exceptions, when I go to the supermarket, I don't buy marmalade. Similarly I once knew even an ardent neo-Nazi who regarded the white race as the only one with a right to exist. One of his best friends and most constant associates was a Pakistani who was nearly as black as the proverbial ace of spades. Some exceptions don't necessarily disturb a rule. Following this line of reasoning through, if Australians like English migrants most and Asian migrants least, it is English migrants we should choose. This may be ethnocentric but it is not racist. The ethnocentric places a high value on those characteristics that are prominent in his own group. The racist actively persecutes members of other groups. Many superbly functioning and well-adjusted Australians I know will justly deny being racists and honestly deplore and condemn Hitler's concentration camps. Yet these same people will, among friends, exchange mocking misnomers for suburbs in which Jews have settled: Bellevue Hill becomes 'BelleJew Hill' and Rose Bay becomes 'Nose Bay'; Dover Heights becomes 'Jehovah Heights'. On the issue of admitting Jews to their exclusive schools and clubs, these WASPs will say: 'We let a few of them in-just to show we're not prejudiced'. If this feeling exists towards a group demonstrably not of inferior educational or cultural standards and which is not easily distinguished by something as salient as skin colour, how much more feeling must be expected against Asians? As happened with Great Britain, ethnocentrism could erupt into racism. Large numbers of Asians are readily accepted in our University communities but outside the sheltered world of academe things are different. We do have in Australia our own long-established Asian communities and we do have a continuing flow of Asian migrants. Pragmatic management has so far kept the proportion of Asians to a level where racism has not evolved. Let not moralists stampede us from this policy into something that can advantage no-one. The misguided compulsions of moralism offer us the prospect of transforming Sydney into another New York. Against this, I advocate enlightened self interest and an Australia not torn by racial tensions. At present I can walk alone at night through the streets of Sydney without fear. I would like to keep it that way.

REFERENCES

ADORNO, T. W., FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, ELSE, LEVINSON, D. J., & SANFORD, R. N. The authoritarian personality: Harper, N.Y., 1950.

BEDFORD, I. White Australia, the Fear of Others, Politics, 1970, 5, 224-227.

DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION Australia's Immigration policy: Government Printer, Canberra, 1910.

LYNCH, P. The evolution of a policy: Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1971.

MADARIAGA, S. De. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards: An essay in comparative psychology 2nd. ed.: Pitman, London, 1970.

NIETZSCHE, F. Beyond good and evil (vol. 12 of The complete works. Ed.: O. LEVY) Foulis, Edinburgh, 1911.

ROKEACH, M. The open and closed mind: Basic Books, N.Y., 1960.

SOREL, G. Reflections on violence" (Trans. T. E. Hulme ) : Allen & Unwin, London, 1915.



POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDA

1). I reproduce below a blog post I put up on Sept 30, 2004:

I WAS WRONG

"I note that Keith Burgess-Jackson has a post up explaining why he has reversed his view of President Bush and why he no longer advocates liberalism in general. Heaps of conservative thinkers have at one time been Left-leaning (including Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill) so all of them must have had to do a lot of explaining at some stage. I am pleased that I have never had to do that but I am also pleased to say that I have been wrong in the past on some matters nonetheless. I am pleased to find that I was wrong because it shows that I have learned something.

The mistake I made which I most regret was to underestimate the good nature and tolerance of my fellow Australians. In an article I wrote in 1972, I expressed the view that admitting large numbers of ethnic Chinese immigrants to Australia could well cause racial strife—as indeed it actually did in the Australia of 100 years ago or more. In the last 30 years, however, Australia has admitted large numbers of ethnic Chinese immigrants so that they are now probably around 10% of the population—but there seems to have been no friction between them and other Australians whatever. Note however that it was my fellow Anglo-Australians that I doubted. I have never doubted the civilized qualities of the Chinese".



2). In the last half a dozen sentences of the article above, I was (as I said) envisaging what moralism could eventually lead to: No restrictions on immigration at all -- with its attendant problems.



3). My pessimism was shared by a much more eminent Australian than I and for much the same reasons:

As Opposition Leader in 1988, Mr Howard attacked Asian immigration.... His comment in August 1988 was: "I wouldn't like to see it (the rate of Asian immigration) greater. I'm not in favour of going back to a White Australia policy. I do believe that if it is in the eyes of some in the community that it's too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater."

Like me, Prime Minister Howard was delighted when he found that his fears had not been realized.



Click here for a list of all John Ray's comments on moral philosophy

Chapter 15 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Economic Growth-Blessing or Curse?



By J.W. NEVILE

TEN OR TWELVE years ago economic growth seemed to be universally considered one of the fundamental values that no one questioned, like Motherhood and God. John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in the Presidential race in the United States partly because he pointed to the low rate of growth of the American economy under Eisenhower and promised that the economy would grow more rapidly when he was president. In the United Kingdom Wilson won an election with the slogan 'Get Britain moving again'. In Australia newspapers had economic supplements with titles such as 'Australia Unlimited'. Economic growth was the thing and its high priests, the economists, seemed to attribute to it all virtues - even mystical ones. The first great modern economist, Adam Smith, was often quoted to the effect that:

Growth endows the community with a sense of vigour and social purpose. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and hearty state to all different orders of the society. The stationary (state) is dull, the declining (state is) melancholy.

Now, scarcely ten years later, economic growth has become a dirty word in some quarters. The zero-population growth movement has already grown into the zero-production growth movement. Even economists are writing books entitled The Costs of Growth and wondering aloud whether or not their former idol perhaps after all has feet of clay.

Is economic growth then a wonderful blessing that no nation can afford to be without? Is it an unmitigated curse that if not countered will lead us inevitably to global disaster? If the truth lies somewhere between these extremes -- as certainly it does -- is economic growth more of a blessing or more of a curse?

I am a growth man myself, and most of us are only too aware of deficiencies in our society -- both considered nationally and globally -- that can only be overcome by the increase in material resources, which are part of the fruits of economic growth. Most of us are painfully aware of the needs right here in Australia for better social services to eliminate poverty, better hospitals, better schools, not to mention universal sewerage to go with our universal suffrage. Many of us are also aware of the needs of people in the less rich countries we euphemistically call underdeveloped. These needs can only be satisfied through economic growth. The belief that economic growth is a good thing seems little more than common sense.

I want therefore to answer the question 'Is economic growth a blessing or a curse?' by examining the arguments of those who oppose economic growth, and showing that they have no substance. There are three main lines of attack on economic growth.

The first is the anti-materialism of some of the young people in developed countries as exemplified by hippies, and also by some others who would consider themselves radical reformers of the new left rather than drop outs. This rejection of affluence and of materialistic values is mainly confined to the children of affluent families who have always had material comfort and who have become bored with it. It is most evident in the U.S.A., the richest country in the world, and even there is most prevalent among children of the families who are better off economically. Such people have, of course, every right to reject materialism and material comforts for themselves. But surely it is arrogant in the extreme for them to reject it for others, many of whom have never known respectable comfort let alone affluence.

The second group attacking economic growth are a small number of economists led by Professor E. J. Mishan whose views have been very trenchantly set out in his book The Costs o f Economic Growth. Mishan's arguments against growth can be summed up in three statements: (1) Western societies already have enough material things, (2) growth leads to large scale external diseconomies (I'll explain that piece of jargon shortly) and (3) growth leads to rapid obsolescence of knowledge as well as machinery and equipment, and the change accompanying it leads to the collapse of traditional values and growth of dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Mishan's first point might have some validity if the world only contained the rich industrialised nations. Even in these nations there are still numbers of people living in poverty, but Mishan would argue that this should be cured by taking wealth and income from the rich and giving it to the poor. However it is much easier for the better off to give up part of their growth in income to help those not so well off, than it is for them to accept an absolute cut in the living standards to which they have become accustomed. This argument for continued growth has even more force when one remembers that Western nations share this planet with under-developed countries. It can be hoped that the Western nations will give more and more of their resources to help development in underdeveloped countries. They are more likely to do this if they are giving a part of the increase in their income, than if increasing aid to underdeveloped countries requires a cut in their own standard of living.

Mishan's second point has some validity. To explain this it is necessary to explain what economists mean by external diseconomies. The essence of the idea is simple: if something I do causes a cost to others over and above the cost to me that is an external diseconomy. The pollution and congestion caused by cars are good examples of external diseconomies. Mishan especially hates the motor car -- He calls 'the invention of the private automobile . . . one of the great disasters to have befallen the human race'. It is true that in the past, economic growth has often been accompanied by disregard of the costs imposed on others by a whole host of things -- from smokey factory chimneys to the noise of jet aircraft. This is not an argument against economic growth, though it may be an argument in favour of discouraging certain forms of production or consumption. It is an argument in favour of making those who cause external diseconomies bear the cost of them, for example making all potential polluters bear the cost of preventing pollution or keeping it down to an acceptable level.

Mishan's third point, that growth leads to a disrespect for traditional values, has a lot of truth in it. In most societies the fairly rapid change that often accompanies economic growth does lead to a questioning of traditional values and the status quo. How much you are disturbed by measures which increase dissatisfaction with the status quo depends on how much you love the status quo.

Overall, I cannot help but be left with the unfortunate impression that a lot of Mishan's arguments amount to little more than saying that, with economic growth, many people can enjoy things previously only enjoyed by a select few, and that this greatly diminishes the welfare of those who were the select few previously enjoying these things. For example, his tirade against the tourist industry concludes with the words 'the annual invasion of tourists has transformed once-famous resorts ... into so many vulgar, Coney Islands'.

The third type of attack on economic growth has come from the ecologists and conservationists. The most famous example is the study entitled Limits to Growth undertaken by Meadows and others for the Club of Rome. There are two separate issues in what the conservationists are saying. One is the pollution problem and the other the conservation of non-renewable natural resources. I've already said that the proper response to pollution is to make the polluters pay the full costs of removing or preventing the pollution. One must add to this the further point that there may well be some activities that should be banned altogether -- e.g. the discharge of mercury wastes into the sea.

The other barrel of the ecologists' shotgun is that even if we stop polluting, we must still stop growing because otherwise we will exhaust the non-renewable natural resources of this world, perhaps in fifty years, perhaps in a hundred years but certainly sometime. This argument has two parts. One is that if population continues to grow at its present rate the population of the world will double every thirty years and soon there will be standing room only on space ship earth. The mathematics of these projections are unimpeachable, but population is unlikely to continue to grow at its present rate, particularly if we have economic growth. World population growth is dominated by the growth in the population of a small number of large underdeveloped countries, where population is growing very rapidly because the deathrate has fallen much more rapidly than the birthrate. The surest way of reducing the birthrate in these countries is by economic growth. To argue, as some ecologists have, that aid to underdeveloped countries will only give them a higher rate of population growth and make matters worse, is to fly in the face of this fact.

On the other hand it is true that in many underdeveloped countries, reducing the rate of population growth is very important if efforts to improve the standard of living are to have much chance of success. For the world as a whole it is true that the sooner the rate of population growth is drastically reduced the greater the chance of eliminating much of the poverty throughout the world.

The second part of the argument, by some ecologists, that achieving zero population growth will be fruitless, because it will merely postpone the doomsday when we run out of natural resources, is pessimism gone mad. If we can achieve zero population growth in the next seventy-five years and greatly reduce the rate of population growth almost immediately (as the largest country in the world, China, already appears to have done) the doomsday when we deplete this earth's resources will be pushed further into the future, giving us more time to change and adapt our patterns of production and consumption. Consumption patterns will change in any case with economic growth -- as communities become richer they spend more and more on services rather than goods. Productive patterns will also change automatically since if certain resources appear to be likely to be scarce in the foreseeable future their prices will rise -- encouraging both economy in their use and a search for substitutes. Consumption patterns and technology will both have to change greatly over the next 150 years. It seems hysterical to denounce economic growth because of a fear or assumption that change will not take place.

In conclusion I think that all the arguments against economic growth in the sense of growth in output and income per head, are mistaken. They are also extremely dangerous. In as much as they lead more countries to adopt measures to deal with external diseconomies they will do some good, but the danger is that they will distract the nations of the world from doing anything about the real world crisis in our midst -- the disparity in living standards between the developed and undeveloped nations -- between Australia and Indonesia to give but one example. The arguments of the doomsday men are particularly dangerous as they may lead to a fatalistic feeling that if everything is going to end in disaster it is not worth trying to improve living standards in underdeveloped countries or among the under privileged in rich countries. The world does face a crisis lying in the difference in living standards between rich and poor nations. Economic growth, as properly understood, holds the only solution.



Postscript

Because the above was constrained by the absolute limits imposed by a thirteen and a half minute radio talk many points were omitted or touched on only very briefly. Letters that I received after the broadcast showed that this led to some misunderstanding of my general position. Let me therefore add the following five points by way of a postscript.

(1) I do not advocate maximum economic growth as a goal of national policy. Like all economic goods economic growth has costs about which I said very little in my talk. One not insignificant cost is the consumption which must be foregone now to make possible the capital accumulation that is part of economic growth. I am not arguing that we should maximise economic growth. I am arguing that the benefits of economic growth at an appropriate rate far outweigh the costs. I have not considered at all the thorny question of what is the optimum rate of economic growth, except to assert, very strongly, that it is significantly greater than zero.

(2) I am well aware that growth in gross national product, as conventionally measured, is a faulty indicator of economic growth. Not only are various goods, such as the services of housewives not measured in gross national product, but many costs, e.g. many pollution costs, which should be subtracted from gross output to get net production also escape measurement. It is of course genuine economic growth, not growth in the imperfect statistical indicator called gross national product, with which I am concerned.

(3) My talk was concerned with per capita economic growth in total and not with the composition of output. I too would like to see more emphasis on many of the types of goods and services desired by many 'no growth' advocates; for example, I would like to see more of our growth in output devoted to preserving bushland in national parks, to better health services and to better education at all levels, and none to increasing the number of cars per head of population or introducing colour television. This point can be enlarged and strengthened. I indicated in the talk that there will have to be big changes in production and consumption patterns over the next fifty years. To some extent these will happen without any extra market pressures, as certain goods become more expensive due to increases in the relative scarcity of some resources. I see no reason why changes in consumption patterns should not be speeded up; not by government fiat but by forbidding things such as advertising campaigns which at present bias consumers' desires in the direction of more, bigger, and perhaps better material possessions.

(4) The distribution of gross national product is at least equally important, in terms of human welfare, as its total. If economic growth occurs only by the rich getting richer, with no improvement in the lot of the poor I would not consider it worthwhile. This maxim can be applied to the distribution of gross national product between countries as well as to its distribution between people in one country.

(5) Finally I am not one of those "madmen or economists" who think that exponential growth can go on for ever. However, I do believe that if zero population growth is achieved relatively quickly, growth in output per head for the world as a whole can continue at the present rate, or even slightly higher rates, for another 150 or 200 years. There will be immense problems in changing to a no growth world. It does not seem unreasonable to postpone consideration of these until a no growth world is only 100 years ahead, and to concentrate now on the equally immense and equally important problems facing the world in this century.



This paper was originally delivered as a 'Guest of Honour' broadcast on A.B.C. Radio