Passing the Bradman Test

As I sit down to write this, my family and I are exactly three weeks shy of the ceremony that will officially make us Australian citizens. That’s just time to get ourselves the obligatory criminal record, as the old joke goes, and we’ll have passed the final hurdle. I’m thinking maybe a bit of shoplifting will do the trick, or a driving trip down to New South Wales to get entangled in one of their blatant revenue-raising speed traps where the highway limit drops from 80 to 70 to 60, then back to up to 90 then down to 80 and all on the same-looking stretch of road with cameras everywhere—a scam if ever there was one, however much it might always be couched in the pieties of protecting lives by enforcing strict speed limits.

An earlier hurdle to citizenship was the test. My wife and I had to go down to the immigration office and sit a twenty-question multiple-choice test. The preponderance of questions were what you might think of as fact-based: “What’s the floral emblem of Australia?”— golden wattle, as I learned reading the book they hand out to would-be Australians. “In what year did Federation take place?” “Who was the first Prime Minister of Australia?” There was even a question on Donald Bradman.

There was nothing wrong that I could see with having to spend a bit of time to learn these basic facts. A few of the questions on Australia’s form of government and its constitution were a bit debatable—I knew what the expected answer was from reading the book but I didn’t necessarily agree it was the unambiguously correct answer. But all of us learn when to play the game, and this was one of those times.

On these fact-based questions you were allowed to get no more than three wrong. Any native English-speaker who had got through high school could overcome this hurdle after a couple of hours reading the book they hand out to you. So it’s not so much meant to block applicants as to ensure they stuff a few basic facts into their memories, even if it’s just their short-term memories.

And then there are a few questions on each test, three I think it was, which are not so much fact-based as what you might think of as value-laden. Each person taking the test had to get all three of these questions correct. I barely exaggerate or satirise or lampoon these questions—and assuredly I do not give a false sense of their flavour—when I say they ran something like this:

In Australia, a) men and women have the same rights; b) men have more rights than women; c) women have whatever rights their husbands allow them; or d) what do you mean women have rights?

Or, in Australia, a) men and women can vote; b) women can vote provided they do so the way their husbands direct; c) only in the non-convict State of South Australia can women vote; or d) are you serious that women can vote?

Personally, I’d put any person who got any of these sorts of questions wrong straight on the next plane out of here. Even if a test-sitter has no sympathy at all with the obvious—and I mean blatantly obvious—correct answer, it is well worth making it plain to him, her and all would-be Australians what the standards and expectations are here.

And I leave it for you readers to work out at whom these value-laden questions are aimed. I don’t think that will overly stretch your mental faculties.

At any rate, and having had to go through the hassle of sitting this sort of test, I think it’s a good idea to make would-be Australians do it. I think the benefits outweigh the costs, which is not something I regularly say when it comes to bureaucratic roadblocks. And for what it’s worth I might also note that all the immigration officials with whom my family and I came into contact in this process were friendly and helpful, on a couple of occasions to an extent above and beyond the call of duty. For someone who works in one of Australia’s massively bureaucratic and Soviet-like universities, this helpfulness and friendliness came as a bit of a shock.

One of the immediate benefits of getting citizenship (assuming, of course, that we manage to get a criminal record in the next three weeks) will be that we can then travel with an Australian passport. Up to now my family and I have had two citizenships and two passports. We’re Canadians and New Zealanders, having lived and worked in New Zealand for eleven years. So for the last four and half years we have travelled from, and entered, Australia with our Kiwi passports. Once we started the process of becoming Australians, we got a permanent resident’s visa in our New Zealand passports.

Boy was that a hassle. Most Kiwis, who can get off the plane and immediately start working, or going to schools, or getting health care here—just as Aussies can do the same in New Zealand—never bother to become Australians. So New Zealanders with a permanent resident’s visa in their passports are a comparative rarity. What that has meant is that for the last couple of years every time we leave this country, and every time we enter, we get pulled aside at customs and a supervisor gets called over. It’s as regular as a Swiss clock.

So it wasn’t because of that sort of extra special customs treatment that the Allans decided to become Australian citizens, when so many others holding New Zealand passports simply don’t bother. In fact I’ve had quite a few Kiwis ask why we’re bothering to take out citizenship here, given that there are so few ways in which it will make any practical difference to our lives.

I have two answers. One is that my wife and I want to be able to vote. I’m a big adherent of democratic decision-making and I think Australia’s present constitutional arrangements are as good, and as democratic, as any I’ve encountered. But in Australia, unlike New Zealand, Canada or the United Kingdom, you have to be a citizen to vote, not just a resident. However statistically insignificant and unimportant my vote might (and no doubt will) be, I want to exercise it—and I say that even though at the time of writing this my choice is probably Malcolm Turnbull, a dispiriting fact if ever there was one.

So that was one reason for going through the time-consuming hassles, and the expense, of becoming Australians. The other was less noble. You see I’m not wholly convinced that in the long term the remarkably open borders between Australia and New Zealand, at least in terms of the free movement of people, will be able to withstand the very different current trajectories of the two countries’ economies. New Zealand, to put it bluntly, does not look all that competitive, especially after the last near-decade of Helen Clark rule.

At present New Zealand has Swedish levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Productivity is comparatively lousy. Living standards are falling further behind Australia’s. Far too many talented Kiwis are leaving to pursue careers overseas, and not returning. The World Economic Forum ranks New Zealand an awful fifty-first for the burden of government. It has too many people working in the public sector. Its global ranking in terms of GDP per head is down to twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh, twenty places down from half a century ago.

Now don’t get me wrong. My family and I loved living in the university town of Dunedin, near the bottom of the South Island. The people were friendlier than anywhere else we’d lived. The university, or at least the law school where I worked, was far better than any I’ve come across in Australia, and a few orders of magnitude less bureaucratic and committed to one-size-fits-all rules, policies and outcomes. And there was still this leftover Presbyterian ethos, pretty much unknown elsewhere in New Zealand, whereby people did not flaunt their wealth. We had lived five or six years in Dunedin before we discovered that the people driving the ten-year-old Volvo were multi-millionaires. Despite a strong attachment to small government and the free market, I very much liked that prevailing ethos.

There are a few other things I liked more about New Zealand than I do about Australia. Let me set them out before setting out where, and in what ways, Australia is better.

First off, Kiwis are not obsessed about health and safety. I’ve just been back to New Zealand with a boys’ bagpipe band touring the South Island. As you drive along highways you’ll see work being done on the side of the road. There might be a handful of orange cones letting drivers know. That’s it. In Australia there’d be five or six workmen stopping and directing traffic, temporary lights, and so many precautions you just know that no one, ever, has sat down to weigh up likely costs against purported benefits.

In fact the Australian obsession with safety, and with taking any and all steps that might conceivably have some preventive effect however fleeting or tangential, seems even to surpass the American one. I have no idea if this is driven by tort law here, and personal injury lawsuits that put some sympathetic and needy plaintiff on one side and an insurer on the other and ask the judge to choose between them, or whether it’s due to something else. But I do know that New Zealand is pretty much the only Western democracy with a no-fault personal injury regime. You cannot sue over there for personal injuries caused by accidents.

I remember thinking how bizarre that was when we first moved to New Zealand. Now I think it’s a very good system indeed. And let me be clear. There are all sorts of flaws and distortions in this Kiwi system under which everyone who is over there, citizen or tourist, is entitled to treatment and compensation for accidental injury, fault being irrelevant to getting this. It’s just that with all its warts it’s a better system than ours. Think of a big chart that lays out what you get for what you have and you’ll get the idea of a no-fault system. Provided it was caused by an accident, and not chronic, you’re in—though of course that’s not as neat a line, nor as easy to police, as I’m making out here.

Anyway, for 95 per cent of injuries, all the smaller ones, you’re significantly better off with this meat-chart approach. Sure, the bureaucracy that administers it is pretty awful. But if you had to design the least efficient way of compensating injured people you could never, ever come up with anything to beat the Australian/ American/British approach where you go to a lawyer when you’re hurt and you sue some wrongdoer.

Under our system in Australia the lawyers end up taking about 30 per cent of awarded moneys, probably more, right off the top. Then the system has to pay for the courts and judges. And of course almost everyone gets insurance in case of suffering an accident, and often lest he or she cause one. Those costs have to be factored in too. So the percentage of moneys spent that ends up making its way to injured people is astoundingly low. It’s an incredibly inefficient way to compensate people hurt in accidents. And that’s without even raising the fact that for small injuries it’s not worth suing, that the costs of suing can deter people who don’t have open-and-shut cases, and that wealthier litigants can afford better lawyers.

Indeed the whole tort system only survives because it purports not just to compensate the hurt—even the most inefficient bureaucracy is unlikely to cream more than a quarter off the top to administer the system, a percentage far, far less than the lawyers, insurers and others take off—but also because it purports to deter future tortfeasors. But does it do that? Does the threat of a future lawsuit make careless behaviour less likely? I mean that question seriously.

One possibility is that tort law often fails to deter, not least since so many people take out insurance to cover themselves anyway, and since all of us humans tend to think it will happen to the other guy, not to us. The other possibility is that it over-deters, making people so risk-averse that school playgrounds close down and doctors fear going into obstetrics. Both over- and under-deterrence are possible in different areas of human activity.

The balance struck in New Zealand as regards activities that have a modicum of risk attached to them—and that is virtually all human activities—seems to me to be at least as good as the balance struck here, and in most areas better. In terms of the costs of administering the system, as bad as bureaucrats are, lawyers are worse. They take a bigger cut, though lawyers would tend to articulate it in terms of upholding injured people’s rights to compensation (more or less painting out of the picture the compensation they themselves demand and receive).

I also preferred the universities in New Zealand. Yes, they are poorer in absolute terms, noticeably so in fact. But they have thus far shunned the worst aspects of the managerial culture that has so obviously, and so deleteriously, infected Australian universities—or at least the one where I work. (Whenever I give a talk or lecture overseas I now make a point of saying no university there should hire Australians in any administrative role, as they would be just too infected by the managerialist culture here.)

On my first day of work in Australia I was sent to an induction and told that decision-making was not collegial. And then over time I was slowly presented with a barrage of one-size-fits-all rules: on how to mark, when to mark, how many times to mark, the needed credentials of future academic applicants, what sort of marking guides to produce, the need for massively detailed course profiles, long and multiple forms to fill out each year for having my performance assessed, forms for students to fill out appraising every course every year, and the list goes on and on. The basic idea is that all teaching is aimed at the bottom 10 per cent of performers. The goal is to treat them like primary school students who are spoonfed things to regurgitate, preferably in some continuous-assessment sort of way. Meaningless jargon about teaching and other matters proliferates, divorced from reality and from how good people actually perform in front of a class. People who pretend to go along with this crap float to the top. The best analogy is to imagine what it must have been like to work in the Soviet Union before that bureaucracy collapsed. Or maybe General Motors in the 1950s, when everything was top-down, one-size-fits-all, sycophancy galore.

The most telling way to sum up Australian universities is to say that I would urge my own kids to go to university in New Zealand or Canada before I subjected them to an Australian university—though I suppose if you don’t know any better it’s tolerable here.

At any rate, and not to dwell on the down sides because despite those paragraphs of pessimism I think Australia is a terrific place to live, here are some of the up sides or advantages of living here.

First, political correctness—and by that I mean the culture that takes certain important public issues off the table, by pretending that only one point of view is acceptable and allowed to be articulated in public, generally with a blanket ban on anything that resembles humour or laughing at anything to do with these issues—is so much less evident in Australia than it is in New Zealand. And as for Canada, my native country, it’s almost impossible to convey the hold that political correctness has taken there. You simply cannot exaggerate how much freer of that cant we are here than they are there. And that’s a wonderful thing, not just because political correctness enervates freedom and liberty and encourages a soft sort of totalitarianism—a word I do not use lightly—but because it undercuts humour.

Let me give an example that I think is magnificent but that would shock (at least in public if they didn’t know you) most people in Canada. I was picking my son up from school last year, an independent school. I asked him how his school day had been. He turned to me and asked me if I knew what a stereotype was. I said I thought I did, but why was he asking. After a brief pause he asked, “Dad, how do you know it’s an Asian that has broken into your house?” Another pause ensued. “Well, Dad, when you get home you find your homework done, the dog missing, and the thief still trying to back out of your driveway.”

That was the teacher’s way to lead into a discussion on stereotypes, their harm and how they grow up. And I’m pretty sure my son will take more from that discussion than from any self-censored, platitudinous and jargon-filled lecture that you’d get in New Zealand or Canada. The point was a very serious one, but it was approached in a way that used humour. And it looked at why people thought it was funny and whether generalisations could, or could not, have negative effects. I thought it was a splendid use of humour to make an important point. And I know it would never, ever, happen in Canada or New Zealand. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen in the USA either.

So I think the lack of that sort of political correctness, or self-imposed hypocrisy, or fear of discussing and thinking about which sorts of generalisations are harmful and which sorts are not, is a wonderful thing about Australia. I’m not at all confident that Australia won’t eventually end up where the Kiwis and Canadians are now. But we’re not anywhere near there yet and there’s at least a hope we won’t end up there.

That leads on to the next great thing about Australia, the secondary schools. Our kids are in schools that would cost so much more in Canada or the UK or the USA that no one in our middle-class position could afford them. Here they’re affordable, not least because the federal government in effect sends an amount that’s a bit less than is spent on kids in state schools with them to the independent school. This creates competition; it leads to near on 40 per cent of secondary school students in Australia attending independent schools of one sort or another; it forces state schools to improve—one of the Brisbane state schools being as good a school as any going.

The health system here is also better than the ones we’ve experienced in Canada or New Zealand. I dare say that for many people it’s a better one than what they’d have in the United States. We returned to Canada for half a year in 2004 and could not get a GP. It was incredible. By contrast the system here seems to me to work well, at least when compared to any other system with which I’ve come into contact.

On a less day-to-day level, Australia has the best constitutional arrangements of any country of which I’m aware. The voting systems are good; there’s a genuine upper house of review that’s elected; there’s federalism; the judges (at least most of them) do not see themselves as philosopher kings whose job it is to lay down rights-based diktats for the rest of us, this no doubt having to do with the absence here at the federal level of any sort of bill of rights, a very good thing indeed; the amending formula does not by-pass the people and rest solely in the hands of the elite; and more.

Of course the set-up here is far from perfect. Federalism has been undermined, not least by the High Court judges. States cannot trigger a section 128 referendum to try to roll this back, so it looks set to be permanent. A good many closet aristocrats—people who really don’t trust their fellow citizens’ moral and political line-drawing preferences and would much prefer committees of ex-lawyers on the top courts to be drawing these lines—are presently pushing for some, indeed any, sort of bill of rights. They may succeed, given the way they’ve stacked the deck.

But at present Australia is probably the most democratic Western country I know of, with the possible exception of Switzerland. By democratic I mean the term in its orthodox sense of decisions being made by those accountable to the voters in elections, and on a majoritarian basis. I do not mean it in the sort of postmodern sense many of today’s closet aristocrats (where one’s privileged position flows from a law degree rather than the vagaries of birth) use it, as more or less equivalent to “leading to outcomes that are in keeping with those dictated by the interpreters of various rights-based documents overseas or in international bodies”. That some outcome meshes with your, my or anyone else’s sense of what is morally best does not make that outcome a democratic one. Democracy is a procedural virtue—it has to do with how decisions are made. It is not a substantive virtue—it is not tied to what was actually decided. So when I say Australia is the most democratic country going, I mean it in that “letting the numbers count” sense, though I recognise that others use it as a proxy for “good outcomes” or “outcomes we approve of”, a sort of Orwellian ploy that is becoming ever more common.

Yet another very good thing about living here is that thinking conservatives exist, have outlets for expressing their views, and are not seen as bizarre creatures to be avoided if at all possible. Conservatism is intellectually alive and well, in other words. Sure, we’d all be surprised if even 10 per cent of those working at the ABC voted for the Coalition. And the Fairfax press, especially the Age, is much the same. But against that there’s this journal, and the Australian (which, in my view, runs more “other point of view” opinion pieces than any of the Fairfax papers, save possibly the Financial Review). And there’s the Centre for Independent Studies, and Institute of Public Affairs, and the Menzies Centre. Nothing like that range or scope of right-of-centre output exists, certainly not in any per capita sense, outside the United States.

Lastly I like the Hobbesian worldview that so many Australians share. The world is not a danger-free zone or a place where the United Nations or one of its offshoots can be relied upon to keep us safe. It is a place where in the final analysis one needs to be prepared to protect oneself. And that means support for the armed forces. Australia gives that support. New Zealand patently does not, relying on its isolation, a naive internationalism, and an implicit free-riding reliance on Australia and the United States should push ever come to shove.

Australia knows its only real protection in the long term lies with the United States, and with strong support for its armed forces. That strikes me as an accurate reading of how the world actually happens to be, as opposed to how one might like it to be.

At any rate those are a few of the reasons I very much enjoy living in Australia. It’s why I’m delighted I managed to get the Bradman question correct on the immigration test and will be an Australian citizen by the time you read this.

After that I’ll just have to convince my wife she has to vote the way I want her to.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.