Voting No? You may have this key assumption wrong

If you’re thinking of voting No in the Voice referendum because governments have been spending so much taxpayers’ money trying to “close the gap” without much sign of success, perhaps you need to reconsider. If the Voice to parliament of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is enshrined in the Constitution, obliging our politicians and bureaucrats to listen, chances are that money will be better spent.

But I can tell you now the message First Nations people will be trying to get across: we want the local spending on health and education and the rest to be administered by Indigenous-led local organisations.

Why? Because when you do it that way, the money’s spent by people with a much better understanding of what the problems are, and the best ways to go about fixing them. Because when the government’s being represented by Indigenous-run outfits, they get much more trust and co-operation.

I’ve realised this mainly by reading a report, Better Outcomes and Value for Money with a Seat at the Table, issued by the Lowitja Institute, a largely government-funded, Indigenous-controlled health research organisation, based in Melbourne.

Let’s start with some facts about government spending on Indigenous people.

According to the Productivity Commission’s most recent estimates, for the 2015-16 year, spending by all levels of government on Indigenous people totalled $33 billion, representing 6 per cent of those governments’ total spending of $556 billion.

Some mates of mine believe Aboriginal people get a lot of government money the rest of us don’t. Only $6 billion of that $33 billion was specifically targeted to Indigenous people. The remaining $27 billion was the share of ordinary spending on hospitals, education, aged care and, importantly, the justice system, used by Indigenous people.

Even so, that $33 billion represents average annual spending of $44,900 per Indigenous person, compared with $22,400 per non-Indigenous person.

Why are Indigenous people getting twice as much? Because they have more disadvantage than the rest of us, and so need more help. For instance, their burden of disease is 2.3 times that of non-Indigenous people, the report says.

Indigenous people “have survived centuries of systemic racism, economic and social exclusion, and intergenerational trauma. As a result, our peoples now die far earlier and experience a higher burden of disease, disability, poverty, and criminalisation than other Australians,” it says.

But here’s the upside. Because governments are spending so much, “slight improvements in the efficiency of the existing spend would generate substantial savings, both directly and through flow-on impacts to other policy areas,” we’re told. For a case study, read to the end.

The federal government first signed a statement of intent to work in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in 2008, to “achieve equality in health status and life expectancy … by 2030”.

This partnership was refreshed and strengthened in 2020 by a National Agreement on Closing the Gap, made between peak Indigenous community organisations and all federal, state, territory and local governments.

The agreement accepted four priority reforms: formal partnerships and shared decision-making, building and strengthening the community-controlled sector, transforming government mainstream organisations, and shared access to data and information at a regional level.

Are you getting the message? In practice, however, the report says, “these changes have been patchy and incremental despite increased investment from government”.

“An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice could support more effective public investment in our wellbeing because our communities know what they need and how to deliver outcomes with the right support,” we’re told.

The report argues that government-run, top-down programs to close the gap haven’t worked as well as community-controlled initiatives.

Research indicates that Indigenous-controlled community health organisations “attract and retain more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients than mainstream providers, are more effective at improving our health, and see more significant health benefits per dollar of expenditure,” the report says.

It was Indigenous community health organisations that had the knowledge and expertise to rapidly respond to the especially great threat presented to their people by COVID-19.

Throughout the first year of the pandemic, just 147 cases of the virus were reported among Indigenous people, out of 28,000 total cases in Australia. There were no Indigenous deaths and no identified cases in remote Aboriginal communities.

In the second year, Indigenous community health organisations worked tirelessly to ensure their communities were vaccinated.

Turning to education, the report says the federal government’s “remote school attendance strategy”, begun in 2013, with total spending of more than $200 million over eight years, had seen falling attendance rates.

By contrast, the report argues, in 2017, the community-led Maranguka justice reinvestment project in Bourke achieved a 31 per cent increase in year 12 retention, a 23 per cent reduction in recorded rates of family violence incidents, and a 42 per cent reduction in adult days spent incarcerated.

These improvements were calculated to have saved the NSW economy $3 million that year – five times the project’s operating costs.

I’ve drawn my own conclusions from all this. So close to the vote, I leave you to draw yours.

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Whatever our other problems, there’s much less crime to fear

When I went to Sunday school we used to sing “count your many blessings, name them one by one”. It’s good advice, enthusiastically endorsed in recent times by the practitioners of “positive psychology”. But it’s not something the media do much to help us with. So you may not have noticed that we see far fewer stories about the rising crime rate and shocking descriptions of particular crimes.

That’s because, after rising for about three decades, Australia’s crime rate has fallen sharply since 2001. When the dog doesn’t bark, the media rarely notice. But this is a blessing we should be more aware of. Not everything about the world is going to the dogs.

In a book published this week, The Vanishing Criminal, Dr Don Weatherburn and Sara Rahman seek to answer the obvious question: why something that just kept getting worse has now been getting better for a decade or two. Weatherburn, formerly director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, is now an adjunct professor at the University of NSW. Rahman is a researcher working in the NSW government.

First, the back story. The figures show that during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Australia faced rapidly rising rates of break-and-enter, motor vehicle theft, robbery, stealing, assault and fraud.

The international crime survey of 2000, covering 25 countries, showed us having the second-highest rate of car theft, the highest rate of burglary, the highest rate of contact crime – covering robbery, sexual assault and assault with force – and the highest overall level of crime victimisation, the authors say.

At that stage, one in 20 Australian households was falling victim to burglary every year, one in 60 was losing a car to theft, and one in 20 people over the age of 15 was being assaulted, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Although the rates of particular crimes varied widely between suburbs and towns, no state or territory escaped the rise. “The spread of lawbreaking into the suburbs led to rapidly rising public concern, fuelled by an insatiable media and political appetite for stories about rising crime,” the authors say.

At the time, the country was in the grip of a heroin epidemic, which many believed to be responsible for the rise in theft and robbery.

But then, for no obvious reason, crime rates turned from going up to going down. This, too, occurred across all states and territories.

The authors say national recorded rates of property crimes fell precipitously after 2001. By 2017, break-and-enter had fallen by 68 per cent, car theft by 70 per cent, robbery by 71 per cent and other theft by 43 per cent.

The rates for murder fell by 50 per cent, attempted murder by 70 per cent and the overall rate of homicide (including manslaughter) by 59 per cent.

Rates of assault and sexual assault continued to increase, but since 2008, the annual prevalence of actual assault fell by a third, and threatened assault by almost a quarter.

The big exception is recorded rates of (adult) sexual assault, which were higher in 2017 than in 2001, which were higher than in 1993. This is probably due to increased willingness to report offences to police.

Internet fraud has increased, of course. So has use of methamphetamine – “ice”. But unlike heroin, the authors say, ice has so far not made any measurable impression on rates of theft and robbery. It’s probably affecting violent behaviour, of course.

So why the marked decline in so many forms of crime?

The authors note that crime rates have fallen in the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and many European countries. But the decline has differed in its timing and degree in those countries, suggesting there is no single cause.

Rather, in explaining Australia’s decline, they see a coincidence of various factors. With homicide, they find that all the decline has been in gun deaths, rather than the more common knife attacks. So John Howard’s gun buy-back scheme may get some credit, but they think the best explanation is the steady improvement in emergency medical treatment.

Their best explanation for the fall in assaults is the decline in alcohol abuse among young people, in response to rising alcohol prices. Changes in some factors – such as the fall in heroin dependence – have had knock-on effects.

A reduction in the number of offenders relative to the number of police, and a decline in the size of the market for stolen goods, have allowed other factors – such as the risk of getting caught – to exert a greater influence.

Fortuitously, public pressure for the police to get better results reached its peak just as knowledge about what works in policing began to affect police strategy and deployment.

And all this occurred against a backdrop of low inflation, rising real wages and falling unemployment. Crime rates and unemployment do tend to rise together – something for Scott Morrison to remember as he contemplates putting out his Mission Accomplished banner.

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Why so many businesses are behaving badly

While we digest the royal commission’s evidence of shocking misconduct by the banks and insurance companies, there’s another unpalatable truth to swallow: they have no monopoly on bad behaviour.

It seems almost everywhere you look you see examples of companies behaving badly. In a major speech he gave a few months ago, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, offered a remarkable list of business household names the commission was taking proceedings against, as I noted at the time.


Commissioner Kenneth Hayne has given us a lawyer’s explanation of why the banks misbehave, but Sims’ speech offers an economist’s explanation.

It’s an important, though sensitive, question for economists since their simple “neo-classical” model of markets predicts firms won’t mistreat their customers because, if they did, they’d lose them to a competitor.

Sims offers seven reasons for this evident “market failure” – a term economists use to acknowledge when real world markets fail to deliver the benefits the textbook model promises.

First, he says, meeting customer needs may not be the main way companies succeed.

On the supply side, markets and economies are driven by the desire of firms to earn and grow profits. (On the demand side, markets are driven by the self-interest of consumers seeking the best deal they can get.)

Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it often means that those businesses best at meeting the needs of consumers over the longer term do best and survive longest.

“However”, Sims concedes, “being the best at meeting the needs of consumers is not the only, or even the dominant, way firms succeed. Staying ahead of rivals through continual improvement is a difficult task for most companies; eventually, someone [else] works out how to do things better and cheaper.”

“Commercial strategy therefore is largely about building defences against the forces of competition. To make it more difficult for other firms to develop a better product. Or, if they do, to limit their access to customers.” Much of this is perfectly legal.

Michael Porter, the doyen of corporate strategists, from Harvard Business School, demonstrated that firms can best attain commercial success by reducing the number of competitors, by erecting high barriers to new firms entering the market, by keeping suppliers dispersed and weak, by using brands or the bundling of products to create strong consumer loyalty, and by reducing the likelihood of other firms being able to offer your customers products those customers see as substitutable for your product (that is, by “product differentiation”).

Sims’ second reason customers may not get treated well is that executives are under considerable sharemarket pressure to increase short-term profits, so as to increase share prices. Executives’ bonuses are often geared to achieving this.

Many companies set a sales or profit target higher than the growth in nominal gross domestic product, meaning not all of them can achieve it. This can induce some executives to push the boundaries and ignore the risk of reputational damage over the longer term.

Third, in some markets poor firm behaviour goes unpunished by customers. This can be so because customers don’t see what’s been done to them – that they’re being misled, or that firms have formed an (illegal) cartel to keep prices high.

Or it can happen because customers don’t have viable alternative products to turn to. Or switching to another provider may be too difficult or costly. Firms may deliberately make it hard to compare their product with their competitors’.

Fourth, competition can become a race to the bottom rather than the top if firms gain a competitive edge through poor behaviour that goes undetected and unpunished. Stay pure and you lose business. A firm can know it’s bad practice, but not be game to be the first to stop doing it.

Fifth, companies may give their staff financial incentives without adequate safeguards to prevent mistreatment of customers.

Companies can establish poor business models, such as arrangements that leave franchisees little room to achieve a return on their investment while paying their workers award wages.

Sixth, customers can consider themselves badly treated when firms (including banks and power companies) engage in “price dispersion” – charging new customers a lower price than existing customers – which is a common practice and perfectly legal.

Economists have often judged this to be a good thing - “welfare enhancing”. But Sims notes that such behaviour imposes extra search costs (spending leisure time checking to see that companies you deal with aren’t taking advantage of you) which are a loss to society.

(He could have added than the economists’ simple model assumes away all search costs – an example of “model blindness”, by which economists mislead themselves.)

Finally, customers can suffer if executives’ loyalty to their company leads them to sail closer to the edge of what’s legal than they would in their private lives. If some lawyer tells you it’s not illegal, does that make it honest?

Not surprisingly, the economist’s explanation of why businesses behave badly is very different to the judge’s. But when it comes to what we can do about it, Sims and Hayne aren’t far apart.

Commissioner Hayne’s answer is not to pass new laws outlawing conduct that’s already illegal, but to increase penalties so as to make them a realistic deterrent to big businesses whose size means their misconduct in just one area can earn them huge sums, and then police the law with far more vigour and diligence that so far shown by the financial regulators, including Treasury.

Sims has several suggestions. Increase the "private cost" of bad behaviour by identifying and shining a light on bad behaviour, increasing penalties and continually looking for new ways to increase regulators’ ability to identify and pursue bad behaviour.

Markets will never be as competitive as the textbook model assumes, but Sims says governments should ensure they’re as competitive as possible.

And they should bolster competition on the consumer side by taking measures to lower customers’ search costs – the time and effort needed to find the best deal.

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Corporate crime is far too common

If we’re to believe what we see in the media, we’re being engulfed by a corporate crime wave. An outbreak of business lawlessness that engages in “wage theft”, mistreatment of franchisees, abuse of workers on temporary visas, and much else.

But should we believe it? Regrettably, my years as a journalist have taught me not to believe everything I read in the paper (this august organ excepted, naturally).

News gathering is a process of what when I was an accountant I would have called “exception reporting”. That’s because people find the exceptions more interesting than the ordinary, everyday occurrences.

When the exceptions pile up, however, the risk is that they’re taken by readers to be representative of the wider reality.

So, in the case of businesses behaving badly, how exceptional are the exceptions? The answer from Rod Sims, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, in a speech he gave last Friday night, is not as exceptional as you’d hope.

To prove his point, Sims offered an extraordinary list of the commission’s enforcement activity, just in the month of April this year.

Ford was ordered to pay $10 million in penalties after it admitted that it had engaged in unconscionable conduct in the way it dealt with complaints about PowerShift transmission cars, sometimes telling customers that shuddering was the result of the customer’s driving style despite knowing the problems with these cars.

Telstra was ordered to pay penalties of $10 million in relation to its third-party billing service known as “premium direct billing” under which it exposed thousands of its own mobile phone customers to unauthorised charges.

Thermomix paid penalties of more than $4.5 million for making false or misleading representations to certain customers through its silence about a safety issue affecting one of its products which the company knew about from a point in time.

Flight Centre was ordered to pay $12.5 million in penalties for attempting to induce three international airlines to enter into price-fixing agreements.

K-Line, a Japanese shipping company, pleaded guilty to criminal cartel conduct concerning the international shipping of cars, trucks and busses to Australia.

Woolworths had proceedings instituted against it alleging that the environmental representations made about some of its Homebrand picnic products were false, misleading and deceptive.

Phew. Surely that was an exceptional month. But Sims has more cases to list.

Earlier this year, the Federal Court found that the food manufacturer Heinz had made misleading claims that its Little Kids Shredz products were beneficial for young children, when they contained about two-thirds sugar.

Who could forget the case of four Nurofen specific pain products? Their packaging claimed that each was specifically formulated to treat a particular type of pain when, in fact, each product contained the same active ingredient and was no more effective at treating that type of pain than any of the others. “The key difference was that the specific pain products were near double the price of the standard Nurofen product,” Sims says.

Hotel giant Meriton was caught taking deliberate steps to prevent guests it suspected would give an unfavourable review from receiving TripAdvisor’s “review express” prompt email, including by inserting additional letters into guests’ email addresses.

The court found this to be a deliberate strategy by Meriton to minimise the number of negative reviews its guests posted on TripAdvisor.

Optus Internet recently admitted to making misleading representations to about 14,000 customers about their transition to the national broadband network, including stating that their services would be disconnected if they didn’t move to the NBN, when under its contracts it could not force disconnection within the timeframe claimed.

Pental has admitted that it made misleading claims about its White King “flushable” cleaning wipes, saying they would disintegrate in the sewerage system when flushed, just like toilet paper, when our wastewater authorities are having big problems because the wipes can cause blockages in their systems.

Shocking. But, you may object, isn’t this just more anecdotes? How representative are they? Sims acknowledges that not all companies behave poorly.

He says that “poor behaviour usually occurs on a spectrum, with few companies behaving badly often, but rather many engaging in occasional significant instances of bad behaviour” – which, he insists, remains unacceptable.

So what can the commission and the government do to reduce the incidence of unacceptable behaviour?

Since businesses commit these excesses in their completely legitimate pursuit of higher profits, the key is to increase the cost to them of bad behaviour.

Many firms invest heavily in their brand reputation, which is a signal that they can be trusted. “The greater the likelihood that bad behaviour will be exposed and made public [see above], the more companies will do to guard against such behaviours.”

In their amoral, dollar-obsessed way, economists assess the attractions of law breaking by weighing the benefit to be gained against the cost of being caught multiplied by the probability of being caught.

Leaving aside the cost of reputational damage (just ask AMP if it knows about that), if you can’t do as much as you should to increase the chance of being caught, you should at least wack up the fines.

Sims says that “the penalties for misconduct, given the likelihood of detection, are comparatively weak”. He believes he’s had some success in persuading the Turnbull government to increase them.

“Just imagine if the penalties I mentioned [see above] were 10 to 20 times higher,” he concludes.

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One way to foster growth and jobs

Things may be gloomy in other countries, and even in parts of our own economy, but there's one aspect of Australian life where everything's on the up: we're enjoying a sustained prison boom.

Consider this. Over the 66 years to 1984, Australia's rate of imprisonment per head of population rose by a paltry 13 per cent. Over just the past 30 years, however, it's more than doubled.

How's that for progress? We now have more than 36,000 people behind bars, meaning our imprisonment rate exceeds that of Canada, Britain and most of Europe.

And I'm happy to acknowledge that the Aboriginal community has made a quite disproportionate contribution to this achievement. The Indigenous imprisonment rate is now more than 45 per cent higher than it was at the time of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

This exciting news is brought to us by Dr Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, in a conference paper to be delivered on Thursday.

Weatherburn calculates that if we can only maintain the rate of growth we've achieved in the past five years for another three, we'll be up to more than 43,000 prisoners nationwide.

Think of the contribution to "growth and jobs". A screws-led recovery. And think of the improvement in productivity as we stuff more prisoners into our existing jails.

But that's not the best of it. We've been able to keep prison numbers growing even as rates of crime have been falling. How's that for an achievement?

How's it been done? Easy. Over the past 30 years we've pursued policies that result in more people being refused bail, more people getting a prison sentence and more people staying in prison for longer.

Truly, the prison industry and its backers could teach the commercial world a thing or two about drumming up business.

To be fair, there was a long period when rates of crime got worse and worse. According to Weatherburn, it started in the 1960s when servicemen returning from Vietnam brought heroin with them. The rate of heroin use began to climb, and with it a lot of heroin-related crime.

Between 1973 and 2001, rates of theft and robbery soared. Property crime spread from working-class suburbs such as Redfern, Footscray and Fortitude Valley to middle-class suburbs as well. By 1983, nearly one in 10 Australian households had been victims of some form of household property crime in just the past 12 months.

The public got fed up. Led by the shock jocks, the media jumped on the bandwagon and state politicians competed with each other to prove they were tougher on crime than thou.

Australians became prison-happy. Got a problem? Whack some people in jail. Problem doesn't seem to be easing? Lengthen their sentences. Still not happy? Keep getting tougher, without ever checking to see if it's working.

But now crime rates have been falling since 2000, the time when the heroin problem suddenly went away. The national robbery rate is down by two-thirds, as is the burglary rate. Motor vehicle theft is down by more than 70 per cent and all other forms of theft by more than 40 per cent.

Even the rate of assault seems at last to be coming down in NSW and Victoria.

You could, if you were of a mind to, argue that crime is down precisely because more baddies are locked up. But this ignores all the other factors that may have changed.

Careful analysis by criminologists finds that a higher rate of incarceration does reduce crime, but only to a small extent, too small to explain much of the extent of the fall.

Of course, the nigglers – economists and suchlike – would point out that all this imprisonment is costing taxpayers a lot. In the 12 years to 1994-95, national spending on corrective services almost doubled to $880 million a year.

By now it's almost trebled to $2.6 billion a year. And if it continues its present rate of growth it will be up to $3.5 billion in three years' time.

We're spending a fortune to keep people locked up for ages even though it's not a very effective – and thus a very expensive – way to reduce crime.

But what about what about all the "growth and jobs" we're generating? You won't hear this from politicians, but those niggling economists will tell you we don't need growth for growth's sake, nor even jobs for jobs sake.

The fact is that all spending – by households, businesses or governments – creates jobs, so it's not enough to say this project or that will create jobs. That's why, if we've got any sense, we'll ensure that what we spend on brings us the most of those things we most want.

To give you an idea, the $2.6 billion a year we're spending keeping so many people banged up is the same as the cost of employing about 2800 probation and parole officers for 10 years, or putting more than 100,000 students through university.

At a time when governments – federal and state – profess to have no money to spare for worthy causes, perhaps we should be looking for ways to punish offenders that are more effective in reducing crime and aren't so expensive.

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War on drugs succeeding from economists' perspective

How goes the war on drugs? On the face of it, not well. But in thinking about the drug problem it helps to know a bit of economics. When you do, you see things aren't as bad as they seem.

Most people agree that the use of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines such as speed and ice can become highly addictive and, when they do, a lot of harm is done to users and their families.

So most of us agree that governments should be working to limit the use of such harmful drugs. The arguments come over how best to do it. The conventional approach is to make the production, importation, distribution, sale and consumption of such drugs illegal. Problem solved.

But we've been pursuing this prohibition approach for years, spending a fortune on policing, the courts and the high proportion of drug offenders in our jails. With all this has come a fair bit of police corruption.

And yet illegal drug use remains widespread, with still too many drug overdoses and drug deaths. The seizures, arrests and prison sentences roll on, seemingly to little effect. People may be using less heroin, but its place has been taken by ice which, if anything, seems worse.

If prohibition so clearly isn't working, shouldn't we try a different approach?

Last week the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research published research that seems to provide powerful support for the contention that the conventional approach is broken.

We've all seen TV news reports of police proudly displaying the seemingly huge quantity of drugs they've just seized after an intricate detection operation. We're told the "street value" of the seized drugs, with the implication that this success will put a hole in drug consumption.

The take-away message is clear. See? The tide has turned and we're winning the war after all.

But the study took the figures for seizures and arrests of suppliers of illegal amphetamines, cocaine and heroin, and compared them with the figures for two indirect measures of drug use: hospital emergency department admissions for drug overdoses and arrests for drug use or possession. The figures were for the whole of Australia, over the 10 years to June 2011.

The study found no evidence that increases in drug seizures and arrests of drug suppliers reduced the number of emergency department admissions or the number of arrests for use or possession.

The study also analysed three specific NSW police operations - named Balmoral Athens, Tempest and Collage - identified by the NSW Crime Commission as being so successful they had the potential to affect the market for cocaine.

It found that the operations did have the effect of reducing arrests for use or possession of cocaine, but that effect was only temporary.

In fact, the study found that increases in drug seizures were often associated with increases in hospital admissions and arrests of users. Huh? The likely explanation is that at times when there is a lot more of the drugs available, the police will be able to increase the amount they seize.

What more proof do you need? Prohibition isn't working and we should try something else. Many medical people would like to see less emphasis on criminalisation and more on harm reduction. Just imagine if we could take all the money poured into catching and punishing people and use it to help people get off drugs and sort out their lives.

But Dr Don Weatherburn and the other authors of the study argue strongly against using its findings to conclude that drug law enforcement is a waste of money.

Why not? Because, when you look at the issue the way an economist would, you realise there's more to prohibition than just attempting to stamp out all illicit drug use.

The other thing it does is force up the price of drugs. Research suggests the black-market price of cocaine in the US is between 2 1/2 and five times what it would be in a legal market. For heroin it was between eight and 19 times higher.

Economists, as you know, are great believers in the power of prices, and in using prices to change people's behaviour. There's little reason to doubt that the high price of illegal drugs hugely reduces the number of users and the amount each user uses.

Before we write off prohibition we need to consider what economists call the "counterfactual": what would the world be like if these drugs weren't outlawed? Far more people would be using them and the amount of harm needing to be reduced would be infinitely greater.

But the law enforcers need to remember what it is that's keeping the price of drugs so high. It's obviously not their success in greatly limiting the supply of drugs relative to the demand.

No, it's the high incomes drug producers and traffickers need to earn to induce them to run the great risk of imprisonment that working in this industry entails. As an economist would think of it, it's the big "risk premium" suppliers add to the prices they charge that keeps prices so high.

This suggests that rather than trying to maximise the size of the seizures they can parade on telly to prove how successful they are, law enforcers should maximise the risks of traffickers getting caught, thereby inducing them to charge a higher risk premium.

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How we can do better on Aboriginal imprisonment

You don't need me to tell you that in a country such as America, with all its history of racial conflict, the rate of imprisonment for African-Americans is far higher than the rate for whites. Twelve times higher, in fact. But you may need me to tell you we make the Yanks look good. Our rate of indigenous imprisonment is 18 times that for the rest of us.

Aborigines make up 2.5 per cent of the Australian adult population, but account for 26 per cent of all adult Australian prisoners.

If you want me to give you some economic reasons we should care about this, it's not hard. On average it costs $275 a day to keep an adult in jail. So it's costing taxpayers about $800 million a year just to keep that many Aborigines in prison. And this takes no account of the cost of juvenile detention centres, police costs in responding to offending, the cost of investigating and prosecuting suspected offenders and the health costs in responding to and treating victims.

Obviously, for every Aborigine who was in a job and paying tax rather than in jail and costing money, there'd be a double benefit to taxpayers, as well as a gain to the economy.

But the far more important reason for caring about the high rate of indigenous imprisonment is moral. As the criminologist Dr Don Weatherburn argues in his new book Arresting Incarceration, the consequences of European settlement have been truly calamitous for Aboriginal Australians.

"The harm might not have always been deliberate and it may not have been inflicted by anyone alive today, but it is no less real for that," Weatherburn says. "An apology for past wrongs would be meaningless without a determined attempt to remedy the damage done."

The trouble is, particularly in the case of Aboriginal imprisonment, we've been making such an attempt, but getting nowhere. If not before, the problem was brought to our attention by the 1991 findings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

The commission found that Aborigines were no more likely to die in jail than other prisoners. The reason so many died was that they constituted such a high proportion of the prison population.

The Keating government accepted all but one of the commission's recommendations and allocated the present-day equivalent of almost $700 million to put them into effect. State and territory governments committed themselves to a comprehensive reform program.

But get this: rather than declining since then, the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment has got worse.
"It is hard to imagine a more spectacular policy failure," Weatherburn says.

It would be easy to blame the problem on racism in the justice system but, though there may be some truth in this, it's not the real reason. Similarly, Weatherburn argues it's not good enough to blame it on "indigenous disadvantage".

If that were the case, virtually all Aborigines would be actively involved in crime and they aren't. Most are never arrested or imprisoned.

The plain fact is that more Aborigines are in jail because more Aborigines commit crimes, particularly violent crimes. In NSW, for example, the indigenous rate of arrest for assault is 12 times higher than the non-indigenous rate. The rate of indigenous arrest for break and enter is 17 times higher.

Measures taken after the royal commission failed to reduce crime because they assumed this would be achieved if indigenous Australians were "empowered". Much of the money and effort was devoted to legal aid and land acquisition.

Weatherburn argues that if you want to understand indigenous offending, you need to look at the factors likely to get anyone involved in crime, regardless of race.

"The four most important of these are poor parenting (particularly child neglect and abuse), poor school performance, unemployment and substance abuse," he says. "Indigenous Australians experience far higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, child neglect and abuse, poor school performance and unemployment than their non-indigenous counterparts."

The first and most important thing we need to do, he says, is reduce the level of Aboriginal drug and alcohol abuse. This is key, not just because drug and alcohol abuse have direct effects on violence and crime, but also because they have such a corrosive effect on the quality of parenting children receive, which greatly increases the children's risk of involvement in crime.

Weatherburn's second priority is putting more resources into improving indigenous education and training. As the mining boom in the Pilbara has shown, it's much easier to find jobs for Aborigines when they have the degree of education and skill employers are looking for.

His third priority is investing in better offender rehabilitation programs. Efforts to divert serious and repeat offenders from prison have been a dismal failure. But small changes in the rate of indigenous return to jail have the potential to produce large and rapid effects on the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment.

Much existing spending on Aboriginal affairs is ineffective. Were it not for Tony Abbott's special affinity with Aborigines in the Top End, we could expect the coming federal budget to really put the knife through it.
But this would save money without reducing the problem.

It will be a great day when the advocates of smaller government abandon the false economy of not wasting money on the routine, rigorous and independent evaluation of the effectiveness of government spending programs. Then we might make some progress.

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How to cut crime and the cost of crime

Although many types of crime have been declining over the past decade, there's still far too much of it. It's costing us too much, not only in losses to life, limb and property but also in worry that we may become victims.

Then there's the cost of all the insurance we need to take out and the cost of making our homes burglar-proof. Finally, there's the rapidly growing cost to the taxpayer of policing ($9.5 billion a year across Australia), the criminal courts (getting on for $1 billion a year) and the prison system (more than $3 billion a year).

You get the feeling all our efforts aren't acting as much of a deterrent. The more police we employ, the more arrests we get, and the more we increase punishments, the more people we have in overcrowded prisons.

Is there a way we can improve the effectiveness of our efforts so we have less crime and could spend less on crime control? Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes there is. He will expound his views at a conference on applied research in crime and justice in Sydney next week but, in the meantime, I can give you a preview.

Kleiman says we should be aiming for the minimum amount of punishment necessary to achieve the desired amount of crime control. Why? Because punishment is a cost, not a benefit. The benefit we're seeking is reduced crime, whereas punishment is a cost of achieving that benefit. Punishment comes at the expense of innocent taxpayers.

Putting it another way, we should keep clear in our minds that the objective of punishment isn't retribution, it's deterrence.

So how can we make our punishment more effective in deterring crime? Kleiman's thesis is that increasing the severity of punishment isn't cost-effective but making it swift and certain is.

"Theory and evidence agree: swift and certain punishment, even if not severe, will control the vast bulk of offending behaviour," he says.

Severity is not only a poor substitute for swiftness and certainty, he says, but also their enemy. That's because the more severe a sanction is, the less frequently it can be administered (prison cells are scarce) and the less quickly it tends to arrive.

It shouldn't be hard for any parent to believe that threats of punishment are more effective if the child knows an offence will be punished and that the punishment will be immediate. The trouble with our crime control efforts is that many crimes go undetected and so unpunished - you have a pretty high chance of getting away with it - and, even when offences are punished, the punishment comes months or years later.

Kleiman reminds us of the goal we should aim for: "the perfect threat never needs to be carried out". Achieve that effective deterrence and you've got the benefit of reduced crime without the cost of punishment. We could never reach that ideal but the closer we come the better.

Kleiman's analysis, influenced by the insights of behavioural economics, is an advance on conventional economics, which assumes severity is an adequate substitute for the certainty of being caught and ignores the question of swiftness.

All very logical but how do you put it into practice? Clearly, it would be impossible to make punishment of all offences swift and certain. But Kleiman observes our resources are spread very thinly. Instead, we should concentrate them, starting somewhere with a geographic region, a set of offences or a set of offenders.

You borrow resources from elsewhere and raise the certainty and swiftness of punishment until you reach the tipping point where offenders get the message and the rate of violation tips from being high to low.

Because offending is subject to positive feedback - a violation rate that's high will tend to stay high, whereas one that's low will tend to stay low - you can then move the resources to the next priority area. The reduction in offences will have increased the resources available.

Kleiman recommends focusing on those offenders subject to supervision in the community: people given community service orders rather than being sent to prison and prisoners let out on parole before their sentence is complete.

"As things stand, the community corrections system reproduces the flaws of the larger criminal justice system, having more rules than can be reliably enforced and imposing sporadic but sometimes severe sanctions," he says.

A small set of rules, each clearly linked to the goal of reducing re-offending, adequate capacity to monitor whether those rules are being observed and a system of swift, reliable and proportionate penalties to back up those rules would perform much better.

"If we can make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration - in other words, if we can learn how to punish people and control their behaviour when not paying for their room and board - we can have less crime and less incarceration, to the benefit of victims and offenders alike," Kleiman says.

For property and violence offenders who use drugs (a mighty lot of them), drug testing with swift and certain punishment can reduce their drug use, their reoffending and their time behind bars far more effectively and more cheaply than any drug treatment program or rehabilitation program, Kleiman argues.

The bad news is that present policies leave us with unnecessarily high levels of crime and incarceration, he says.

The good news is that just by making effective use of things we already know how to do, we could reasonably expect to have half as much crime and half as many people behind bars 10 years from now.

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Don't let on, but property crime is down

Wow. Did you see the latest figures for the falling crime rate? Pretty good, eh? What's that, you didn't see the figures? No one told you, eh.

It's true. Despite the best efforts of the federal Minister for Justice, Jason Clare, on Sunday, the Australian Institute of Criminology's latest compilation of statistics got remarkably little attention.

Why? One reason could be that it's old news. Levels of property crime have been falling for a decade. You've long known that, right? If you have, congratulations: you're much better informed than most.

A survey conducted in NSW in 2007 found that more than 80 per cent of respondents believed property crime had been increasing or had remained stable over the past five years. Only 11 per cent said it had been falling.

So why were the media so uninterested? Because they didn't think you'd be interested. They presumed you'd prefer to have your existing beliefs reinforced rather than up-ended. But I prefer to write for the minority who want to be informed rather than humoured.

The figures show falls in all the main categories of recorded property crime - burglary, motor vehicle theft and "other theft" (pickpocketing, bag snatching and shoplifting) - across Australia in 2010.

They also show falls in all the main categories of recorded violent crime - homicide, assault, sexual assault and robbery - other than kidnapping/abduction in 2010. For the latter, the number of cases rose by 39 to 603.

But levels of crime can rise or fall from one year to the next without that proving much. What really matters is whether the longer-run trend is up or down.

The clearest evidence is of a long-run decline in recorded property crime. The number of burglaries reached a national peak of almost 440,000 in 2000, and has since halved to fewer than 220,000 a year.

The number of motor vehicle thefts reached a peak of 140,000 a year in 2001, and has now fallen by 61 per cent to below 55,000 a year. Other thefts peaked at 700,000 a year in 2001, but are now down by a third to almost 460,000 a year.

If you allow for our rising population - up by a per cent or so a year - the decline in the rate of property crime is even greater.

So, as I say, it's clear property crime has been declining for a decade. For violent crime the trend isn't as clear - except for robbery, the property crime with violence. Robberies reached a peak of almost 27,000 in 2001, but have since fallen by 44 per cent to below 15,000 a year.

It's hard to detect any trend in the level of kidnapping and abduction, though the rate is very low: 2.7 incidents per 100,000 population. You wouldn't expect to see a trend in homicide, the rate of which is also very low: 1.2 incidents per 100,000 population. But after being well above 300 a year until 2006, it's been below 300 a year since then.

No trend in the number of assaults is visible to the naked eye, but the rate of assault seemed to peak in 2007 at 840 victims per 100,000, and is now down to 770 per 100,000. If this trend is confirmed, it will be because police have begun targeting the worst-offending licensed premises.

It's estimated only about half of all sexual assaults are reported to police. The number of recorded sexual assaults rose markedly between 1996 and 2008 to 20,000 victims a year - perhaps because of growing willingness to report offences - but though the arithmetic says the rate of sexual assault has been falling modestly since 2006, I'm not sure I believe it.

So why has property crime been falling? When the decline was first observed in the early noughties, much of it was attributed to a shortage of heroin, which led to a decline in its use and, hence, a fall in thefts by heroin addicts.

That seems true enough, but though heroin prices and purity stabilised in about 2004, the fall in property crime continued. Obviously, there must be more to it.

Most criminologists believe the amount of property crime is linked to the state of the economy. Unemployment has fallen and average weekly earnings have risen in real terms since the start of the noughties, so this may well help explain why people have been less inclined to take stuff that doesn't belong to them.

Another part of the explanation for which there's solid evidence is an increase in the proportion of property offenders who are imprisoned. The story here is not so much that tougher sentences are a greater deterrent, but that the more time you spend behind bars, the less time you're able to practise your nefarious profession.

And there are other possible explanations which, though untested by researchers, seem plausible. One is increased police effectiveness. They've been pushing hard on repeat offenders and also shifting their resources to crime hot spots at "hot" times of the day or night. Their crackdown on pubs and clubs with the worst records of assaults is a case in point.

A further possibility is that success breeds success. The more the incidence of crime falls while the number of coppers remains stable or rises, the easier it ought to be to catch offenders. As for motor vehicle theft, it's likely improvements have made cars harder to pinch than they used to be.

I finish with an appeal: you may prefer to know the truth, but keep it to yourself. Please don't spoil the fun of those who like to imagine they could be swept away at any moment by the rising tide of crime.

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Crime has become a mind game

The older I get, the more I realise how complicated - even mysterious - the world is. When I was young I tried to keep everything straightforward, concrete and logical. Then I realised the direct effects of some action can sometimes be overshadowed by its indirect effects.

Accountants and economists, as you've no doubt realised, tend to evaluate things in monetary terms. And there's no denying money is important - even to those who profess to have a soul above it.

But when you boil it down, money is important because of its power to affect how we feel. And not everything we feel can be converted to monetary terms. Unfortunately, our tendency to focus on the concrete and easily measured means we often neglect things that, while intangible, are important to our well-being.

Fortunately, economists are coming to realise this. Take crime. Why do we worry so much about it? Well, it does lead to monetary loss, including all the expense we run to as individuals and a community to protect ourselves from loss. And crime can lead to physical injury too, of course.

As a community, we - and our media - devote a lot more attention to crime than we used to. As part of this there's a lot more concern for the welfare of the victims of crime. We're more inclined to agree they should be compensated and we listen sympathetically as they take to the airwaves demanding vengeance against the perpetrators.

But has it occurred to you that the suffering of the wider community may exceed that of the victims? Or that crime's greatest cost may be to our mental well-being rather than our physical health or our pocketbooks?

By the standards of developed countries, crime rates in Australia are high. In a survey conducted in 2000, a higher share of Australians reported being the victim of a crime in the previous year than in any of the other 16 countries, including the US. By the same token, the level of crime in Australia, particularly property crime, fell quite considerably during the first half of the noughties - a fact that hasn't received as much publicity as our concern about crime would lead you to expect.

Francesca Cornaglia, of the centre for economic performance at the London School of Economics, and Andrew Leigh, formerly a professor of economics at the Australian National University and now a Labor member of federal parliament, have used local data to examine the link between crime and mental well-being in Australia.

They find that victims of property crime (burglary and theft) tend to be slightly better educated, whereas victims of violent crimes (homicide, assault, sexual assault, abduction and robbery) are less well educated.

Being a victim of crime, particularly violent crime, is "strongly and significantly related" to experiencing a deterioration in mental well-being. Victims' social functioning is harmed as emotional problems interfere with normal social activities. And they have difficulties with daily personal activities because of emotional problems.

Victims who are already suffering from mental distress are likely to react more strongly to crime than other people do. And victims are more likely to live in areas with higher crime rates. Victims of violence are particularly likely to experience post traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic and substance abuse. But Cornaglia and Leigh find that the rest of us also suffer a decrease in our mental well-being as a result of an increase in violent crime. The effect on our social functioning is nearly half the effect experienced by the actual victims.

Among all the violent crimes, it's assault, sexual assault and robbery that affect most categories of mental well-being. Although sexual assaults constitute a fairly small proportion of all crime, they have a "sizeable and significant effect" on three of the five components of mental well-being.

So the study finds strong evidence that the costs of crime are mental as well as physical and monetary. It also finds that the cost of violent crime in reducing our mental well-being extends well beyond the victims to the whole of the community.

But when you turn from the victims to the rest of us you turn from the reality to the perception, from the actual experience of crime to the fear of experiencing it. The degree of fear we feel about being a victim of crime can be out of proportion to the statistical risk of us actually becoming a victim.

This means that if media coverage of crime heightens our fear of being a victim beyond the actual risk of it, the media is adding unnecessarily to the decline in our mental well-being. Cornaglia and Leigh find the intensity of media reporting does increase the negative effect on mental well-being.

The media have "turned to crime" in recent decades in their pursuit of commercial advantage and in the no-doubt-correct belief that crime reporting is something their audience wants more of.

But the tabloid press in Britain is discovering the same people who lap up intimate details of the private lives of celebrities, politicians and even crime victims can turn on you when faced with the knowledge of the lengths to which you went to bring them those details.

If feeding the public's fascination with crime - and, in the process, leaving it with an exaggerated perception of the chances of becoming a victim - reduces the public's mental well-being, a day may come when "but that's what you wanted" won't be judged a sufficient excuse.

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USES AND ABUSES OF CRIME STATISTICS

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research annual symposium
February 18, 2009

When I was at university many years ago I read a fascinating little Pelican by Darrell Huff called, How to Lie with Statistics. It’s proved invaluable in my career as a journalist. In talking about the uses and abuses of crime statistics I could focus on the misdemeanours of the politicians, but instead I’m going to concentrate on something I know a little about, the failings of journalists.

In June last year the bureau put out a report showing no link between the heroin shortage and the rise in the use of amphetamines such as ice. The study was reported on the front page of the MX newspaper with the banner headline ‘Users switch to ice - heroin blitz forces drug change’. MX is Murdoch’s afternoon giveaway paper - I guess you get what you pay for.

On another occasion the bureau gave a newspaper figures showing that the number of eight and nine-year olds coming to the attention of police had fallen from 130 a month to 94 a month over the two years to 2007. The bureau also told the journalist that less than 1 per cent of the population aged eight or nine had some contact with the police. The headline on the journo’s story was ‘Kid Crime Rampage’.

On a third occasion the bureau gave the media figures showing there was no upward or downward trend in knife attacks in Sydney or the rest of NSW. One newspaper’s report of this study attracted headline ‘Stabbings skyrocket as knives plague city’.

A fourth example involves a paper called the Herald. The bureau put out a report showing that the percentage of convicted offenders receiving prison sentences had risen substantially since 1993. The study also showed that prison terms for most offences had increased, as had the proportion of defendants refused bail. The headline on the Herald’s report of the study said, ‘Prison population rises despite lower jailing rates’.

I could quote more examples, but that’s enough. What I want to focus on is how this misuse of crime statistics is brought about and then why it occurs. We’ll start with the how.

I quoted headlines to you and the truth is that the headline on a story heavily influences a reader’s perception of what the story is saying. But headlines are written by sub-editors, not reporters, and sometimes there’s a gap between what the story actually says and what the headline says it says. If there is, most readers won’t notice it. Such gaps can occur for three reasons: because the hard-pressed sub doesn’t accurately comprehend what the story’s actually saying, because the reporter has left some ambiguity in his copy and the sub, who generally knows far less about the topic than the reporter, has jumped the wrong way, or because the sub knowingly writes a headline that makes the story sound more exciting than it actually is. The first two explanations - misunderstandings - are more likely to be the case on broadsheet newspapers; the third - misrepresentation - is more likely to be found in tabloid newspapers. In the case of the Herald story I quoted, the reporter focused on all those offences where the rate of imprisonment had fallen. Since he noted but didn’t highlight that, overall, rates of imprisonment had risen, this left the opportunity for the sub-editor who didn’t read the story as carefully as he should have to conclude from the early paragraphs that the overall rate of imprisonment had fallen.

The interesting question is why the reporter wrote his story in a way that encouraged that error to be made - why he’d focus on the unrepresentative falls rather than the representative rises. I’ll try to answer that when we get to the question of motive - why the media behave the way they do. Perhaps here I should remind you that journalists have to draw the essence from sometimes long and complex reports or events in just an hour or two - under pressure from bosses to make it quick and make it sexy - so it’s not surprising errors and misinterpretations occur.

Now let me give you some relevant background information. Much of the news the media publish comes to them in the form of press releases. All of the bureau’s reports, for instance, are accompanied by a summarising press release. It’s often alleged that the media are so lazy they largely publish uncritically the press releases sent to them by powerful government, business and other interests. In my experience that’s usually not the case; quite the reverse. These days most interest groups seek to use the media to advance their own interests. They employ PR people to put their own spin on the information they release to the media. Most journalists aren’t lazy and they see it as their job to get past the spin, finding the news their audience would like to know about but which the powerful interest would like to conceal. When they receive a report or a press release they think: there’s probably an interesting story in here somewhere, but I’ll have to dig for it; certainly, it won’t be the one the people who put out the press release put at the top of the release. There’s so much spin in the world that many journalists come to the conclusion that everyone’s trying to pull the wool over their eyes. You may regard the bureau as a beacon of independent truth-seeking, but I guess many journalists would suspect it’s just another government agency pumping out bromide about the receding crime wave at the behest of its political masters. There’s a saying in journalism that news is anything somebody somewhere doesn’t want you to know. My guess is that the Herald journalist in question waded through the bureau’s report until he found the bit he thought the NSW Government wouldn’t want people to know: that in the case of five significant offences, rates of imprisonment are going down not up.

Much of the misrepresentation of crime stats arises from statistical misinterpretation. You can misrepresent a time series in a host of obvious ways: by choosing a convenient time period for your comparison, by ignoring random variation (ie failing to ignore outliers), by ignoring seasonal variation (eg the number of assaults peaks in January each year and troughs in May or June), by ignoring base effects (eg saying some crime rate has doubled when it’s gone from 2 a year to 4 a year) and by ignoring the effect of police activity. For instance, when the number of arrests goes up because we’ve got more police on the job arresting people, you call it a crime wave; when the number of arrests goes down you say police aren’t out there on the job countering the crime wave.

The question is whether the journos who commit these statistical crimes are knaves or fools. I couldn’t deny there’s a lot of knavery - journos who know they’re distorting the statistics’ message, but don’t care - but there are more fools than you may imagine. Most journalists are arts-degree types with a very weak grasp on maths and little clue about how to interpret statistical information. If they did understand those things they’d be an economics editor by now. But the question goes deeper: many journalists wouldn’t be sure the diligent performance of their job required them to take account of those statistical niceties. The rules of statistical interpretation aim to ensure the user draws from the stats an accurate or representative picture of the aspect of the world the stats relate to. But that’s simply not the objective of journalism. Journalism pays no heed to the scientific method.

So let’s turn to the question of why the media misuse crime statistics and misrepresent the extent of crime. As the coppers would say, let’s look at motive. Much of the criticism of the media rests on the unspoken assumption that the media’s role is to give us an accurate picture of the world around us. We don’t have first hand experience of much of what’s happening around us and we need the media to inform us.

If that’s the role you think the media play - or should play - I have shocking news. The news media are on about news. What is news worthy? Anything happening out there that our audience will find interesting or important, although the interesting will always trump the important. Paris Hilton is interesting but of no importance; the latest change in the superannuation rules is important but deadly dull - guess which one gets more media overage?

Maybe 99 per cent of what happens in the world is of little interest: 99 per cent of the motorists who crossed the Bridge today made it without incident; someone you’ve never heard of went to work as usual and sold a new ring to someone you don’t know; Australia didn’t declare war on New Zealand . . . the list of uninteresting things that happen is endless. Journalists sort through all the things that happen looking for things they believe their audience will find interesting: the 10-car pile-up on the Bridge, Brad Pitt bought a ring for Angelina Jolie to make up after a fight, the Dutch withdrew their troops from Afghanistan.

When social scientists take a random sample they may examine the sample and discard any outliers that could distort their survey, throwing them on the floor. A journalist is someone who comes along, finds them on the floor and says, ‘these would make a great story’. I happened to be in the Herald’s daily news conference a fortnight ago on the day Kevin Rudd’s $42 billion stimulus package was announced, with all its (then) $950 cash handouts. We discussed searching for a farmer who’d get $950 because he was in exceptional circumstances, $950 because he paid tax last year, $950 because his wife also works, $4750 because he has five school-age kids, and maybe another $950 because one of the kids is doing a training course. And, of course, he’d have a big mortgage, meaning he’d also save $250 a month because of the 1 per cent cut in interest rates announced the same day. Had we found such a person and taken a good photo of him he’d have been all over our front page. The point is that we were search for the most unrepresentative person we could find. Why? Because our readers would have been fascinated to read about him. It’s reasonable to expect the media to be accurate in the facts they report but, even if they are, it’s idle to expect them to give us a representative picture of the world. And that takes me to an even more shocking thought: if the media aren’t on about giving us a representative picture of the world around us, why would journalists bother adhering to the rules of statistical interpretation? Why not highlight a quite unrepresentative statistical comparison if it happens to be the most interesting comparison?

It’s often claimed that the media focus heavily on bad news, often ignoring good news. Guilty as charged. But we do so for a simple reason: we know our audience finds bad news a lot more interesting than good news. So I’m not particularly apologetic for this state of affairs: our failings are the failings of our audience, which are the failings of human nature. Why do people find bad news more interesting than good news? As I’ve written elsewhere (SMH 12.4.2006), I believe the explanation can be found in our evolutionary history. Our brains are hardwired to perpetually scan our environment for threats, and now the chances of our being eaten by a lion have diminished we’re left with a strong appetite for bad news about, for instance, the threat of crime.

Communications research tells us we read much more for reinforcement than enlightenment. While there’s a niche market for columns that challenge the conventional wisdom, and news about some new and unexpected twist in a standard story will be found interesting, journalists know the news that goes down best is the news that confirms people prejudices. Perhaps thanks to the efforts of the media themselves, most people know as a self-evident truth that crime is increasing. Most stories about crime are intended to reinforce that belief.

Let me conclude. The media’s defence against criticism is that their failings are those of their audience; they do what they do because their audience demands it of them. But shouldn’t we hold the media to a higher standard than we hold ourselves? Yes we should. We can expect less crass commercialism and more professionalism. Doctors, for instance, don’t ask patients what disease they want to be told they have and don’t let patients pick the medicine they want prescribed.

And there’s a limit of inaccuracy and sensationalism below which market punishment sets in. Mediums that play too lightly with the truth eventually lose their credibility and their audience’s respect. This means there are checks and balances. Mediums that value their credibility - in commercial as well as ethical terms - often employ commentators who set a high store on making sure their audience isn’t misled, even when those commentators spend a fair bit of time highlighting the media’s own failings and trying to beat down some of the things that get beaten up on the front page. My guess is that, as information overload and infotainment continue to grow, at least the better-educated audience will gravitate to those journalists and journals they perceive to be committed to the search for truth. What’s more, it is possible to be truthful and interesting at the same time. So don’t slit you throat yet.

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