Category: Crime and punishment

The proposed law against commercial cheating and the Constitution

Andrew NortonLeave a comment

Successive Commonwealth governments have been creative in finding ways to by-pass the Constitution. That has been very necessary in education, which was originally intended to remain a State responsibility.  The Commonwealth has no direct power to legislate on an education topic other than in the territories. This creates legal issues for the Commonwealth’s attempts to ban commercial cheating. Draft legislation was released at the weekend.

The Commonwealth’s main vehicles for education policy have been section 96 tied grants to the States (no longer used for higher education, but still used for school and vocational education), the section 51(xx) power to legislate on foreign, trading and financial corporations (which relies on universities being trading corporations; this power could collapse if they went back to full public funding) and section 51 (xxiiiA), the ‘benefits to students’ power, which is the main legal basis of Youth Allowance, the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, and HELP.

Because the Commonwealth can fully legislate for the territories, the draft bill would be effective in the ACT and the Northern Territory. But in the states the legal situation is more difficult.

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Does higher education reduce crime?

Andrew Norton5 Comments

One argument made for higher education – at least when arguing for more funding – is that it helps reduce crime. A visiting OECD official recently made the reduced crime claim for higher education, citing Walter McMahon.

Graduates are likely to have quite low conviction rates – I have not been able to find precise statistics, but in 2009 only 14% of 25-34 year old prisoners had completed year 12, compared to 63% of the general population in 2006.

But it seems more plausible to me that graduates are people who were always at relatively low risk of offending, regardless of whether or not they pursued higher education. This low risk would be a function of better socialisation, and the ability to earn a reasonable income without breaking the law. Education is likely to have whatever preventive effects it is going to have well before higher education.

The broad historical trends would also seem to count against any straightforward link between higher education and crime. Australia’s crime statistics don’t lend themselves to easy long-term time series, but crime and education both escalated significantly from the 1970s. The figure below shows crime and higher education attainment increasing from the mid-1990s to around the turn of the century, before crime started trending down again (as also occurred in other countries).


Sources: Education and Work, Australian Institute of Criminology

My theory would be that a third factor at least partly explains both trends, though I think crime is a more multi-factor phenomenon than higher education. The collapsing labour market opportunities for men with little education over the last 30-40 years made both crime and higher education more profitable relative to the alternative of welfare/insecure jobs. So crime and higher education both increased.

But there is no direct relationship between crime and higher education, and increasing the latter will not decrease the former.