Thank you for providing the base data, R0bert. It would have helped if the reference had been provided in the article.

An interesting report. Personally, I find the calculation methodology to be quite bizarre, but then, I'm not a professional statistician.

One set of numbers was particularly confusing.

In terms of "Disability Adjusted Life Years", upon which much of the calculation depends, Domestic Violence poses a risk to health roughly equivalent to a lack of fruit and vegetables, and a third of the risk posed by physical inactivity. (The Cost of Domestic Violence to the Australian Economy: Part I, p27)

The other missing piece for me, wading through the mass of QALYS and DALYs, was the manner in which the Australian economy would actually realise all the dollars that were being measured, should domestic violence against women disappear from the continent overnight.

After a while, it occurred to me that there is something intrinsically sick in the concept of a society that needs to go to such lengths and expense to explain in financial terms that men beating up women is bad.

Would the report encourage the perpetrator, as he raises his hand, to suddenly think "hang on, this is bad for the Australian economy", and consequently desist?

Or - even worse - does our government work along the lines of "we'd really like to discourage domestic violence, but it doesn't stack up in economic terms. As soon as someone can show us what it is costing the taxpayer, we'll act"

In the meantime of course, it provides "work" for a whole host of people - Access Economics, KPMG (how they must love this stuff), plus the various NGOs and government departments.

What an odd society we have become.

"For the avoidance of doubt", as lawyers are wont to say, can I ask whether it is the contention here that the one-child policy in China is caused by underlying gender hatred, and hence constitutes Violence Against Women?

Presumably that would require that the cost of abortion in Australia, including the associated QALYs and DALYs, be added to the Access Economics and KPMG reports.

Or am I splitting hairs?

Pericles,

I think you hit the nail on the head when you wrote: "...we'd really like to discourage domestic violence, but it doesn't stack up in economic terms..."

E.F. Schumacher made a similar observation of our system in "Small is Beautiful":

"...Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing...Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow and prosper."

GrahamY:"There is no such relationship between gender and ability to support, just a probability factor across the whole gender. "

We use such stochastic probabilities all the time. If you only have one bet, then you place it so as to maximise your odds. In radiation safety, for example, there is the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle when dealing with exposure to ionizing radiation which could cause health problems. Any individual working with ionizing radiation, from UV to gamma, should take the precautions necessary to minimise their exposure to the hazard. The reason is simple: if the radiation causes some form of problem, the outcome is very negative. Most people may have no problem and enjoy the suntan from the solarium, but do you want to be the one who gets melanoma?

People in China under the one child policy had one bet, so many of them placed it on sons.

The reasoning is simple and goes like this:

Any woman may be entirely the superior of any or all men, but if one wishes to maximise the family wealth then boys are the way to bet, given the option, especially in the context of a peasant farmer lifestyle.

The Government apparently recognizes this:

"The one-child policy (simplified Chinese: 计划生育政策; traditional Chinese: 計劃生育政策; pinyin: jìhuà shēngyù zhèngcè; literally "policy of birth planning") refers to the one-child limitation applying to a minority of families in the population control policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Chinese government refers to it under the official translation of family planning policy.[1] It officially restricts married, urban couples to having only one child, although it allows exemptions for several cases, including rural couples, ethnic minorities, and parents without any siblings themselves.[2]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

It's not sexist to want to make sure you and your family doesn't starve. That may no longer be a common experience within china as modernisation takes hold, but I'll bet there are lots of people in the backblocks who can remember when it was a regular feature of life.

Graham, I should have said that I accept your narrow point in regard to definitions, but I think that in this case the definition serves to obscure the issue rather than illuminate it.

Pericles:"After a while, it occurred to me that there is something intrinsically sick in the concept of a society that needs to go to such lengths and expense to explain in financial terms that men beating up women is bad."

Yes indeed. Of course, we don't live in such a society, no matter how much the discussion is skewed by the damaged and those who want to take advantage of them. We live in a society that has held for a very long time that violence is not to be encouraged in any context other than war and some forms of sport and that even there it must be highly regulated. There is no cultural norm in which beating up the missus is acceptable, but there is a strong effort on the part of the more rabidly misandric feminists to normalise the use of violence against men by simply pretending that it isn't worth discussing.

There's lots more lovely free taxpayer money in being a part of "The Women's Lobby"...

Yeah you win Graham, but I think we are talking slightly at cross purposes. I think I'm more interested in the proposed/assigned motivation for the sexism. The picture painted is it's just an innate evil in all men, or an irrational hatred of women that motivates the sexism. I think it's fair to say it comes about from much more pragmatic (if outdated) motivations as discussed.

Like I said, is it misandry that men die in war 'precisely because thay are men', and is that an ihnerant misandry in society? Never heard that argument made before that's for sure but it seems equivalent to me.