John Menadue

No joy from Budget 2018.  Governments do have the resources to tackle affordable housing shortfalls.  They just don’t have the will to accord it the requisite priority.  In so failing, they ignore not only the deep and lasting social costs of such neglect, but also the strong economic case for addressing housing affordability. (more…)

The housing affordability report card for the last 12 months is a mixed one.  A welcome reduction in price and rental pressures in some capital cities is offset by rising homelessness and ongoing housing stress for those on lower incomes, for whom more direct help is needed.  Policy debate is often still very confused, even amongst some of our most revered institutions, including the RBA. (more…)

Governments at both Federal and State level are still avoiding the politically difficult changes that would make a real difference to housing affordability. But we won’t make progress unless our leaders eschew the popular but ineffective options in favour of planning and tax reforms that could actually improve affordability. (more…)

Budget 2018 fails the 1.5 million Australian households living in unaffordable rental housing or officially homeless, despite the urgent need for Commonwealth leadership on affordable housing policy. (more…)

Property prices have moderated in our largest cities over the past year, thanks in part to tightening of lending by APRA, and on inflows of foreign capital.  There is some respite for first-time buyers, but the picture for renters is mixed.  This year’s Budget had nothing significant for housing and those on lower incomes have little to celebrate in terms of housing reform. (more…)

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven” — that’s how many older Australians, with the distorted hindsight of nostalgia, look back on the turmoil of 1968. ABC Radio National has devoted a series of its regular programs to the events around 1968.  The most concise is a short discussion May 1968 revisited on Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra.  Understandably most are retrospective, but there is also a program about lessons for today for those who seek social change  – the Gohn Day Memorial Lecture by Mary Frances Berry Lessons from past resistance movements.

Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980 is the title of an article in the New York Times. Why, in spite of the huge and growing  amount of money Americans spend on health care, has America;s life expectancy not been rising as fast as in comparable nations?  The lack of universal coverage provides one explanation, as do the burden of private health insurance and the influence of Big Pharma. Also, the article’s author, Austin Frank of Boston University, attributes much to general worsening conditions for the poor. The same theme is taken up in Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra last weekend where Sir Michael Marmot explains the influence of  “deaths of despair” from alcohol, other drugs and suicide, as well as inequality as contributing to lower life expectancy in parts of the USA.

People are continuing to drop private health insurance. Figures from APRA show that in the year to March 37,000 people dropped PHI. This was a net figure after 98,000 people under 55 dropped PHI, while insurers gained 61,000 members over 55.  (Fifty-five is the age below which members are net contributors, and above which members are net drawers.) The insurance trade journal Insurance Business, citing a survey by Roy Morgan, attributes the fall to price, coverage gaps and satisfaction with Medicare. If the Coalition had been true to established form we might have expected some rescue effort in the budget, but there has been no specific mention of PHI in the budget.

Abe walks a tightrope on Japan’s foreign worker policy (Japan Times, April 29 2018)

The Iran deal scuppered – aspistragetist

Alexander Downer’s secret meeting with FBI led to Trump-Russia inquiry – the Guardian.

Nissan drives into home solar and battery storage market – RenewEconomy

A 1960s British student leftist did not expect to find himself on a tour inside the Pentagon, or briefed by a US Army Colonel on his role there, tracking US radicals, with a distorted Cold War model of who they were – but, well, it happened. (more…)

Australians have a flaw in their character that shows up in their acceptance of a defective political system no decent reform can come close to changing. When their democratic system is attacked by minority anti-democratic forces, they’ll back the attackers, not their system. And, having done so, they choose to believe their system is still democratic. There’s no helping a fickle electorate.  (more…)

The return of the concept of ‘class’ to mainstream public debate is an unanticipated feature of the second decade of the new century. Whether defined by people’s relationship to production or distribution, or as a hybrid of economic and cultural identities, a consciousness of class is crystallising once again within democratic countries, and notably in the United States. Some reasons are obvious. (more…)

There is an old saw that cautions politicians never to establish an enquiry unless they know the outcome beforehand. The Prime Minister appears to have learnt that lesson from the ‘can of worms’ exposed in his Royal Commission on Banking.

Turnbull has announced an ‘independent inquiry’ into the future of the Australian Public Service (APS). An independent inquiry is not a Royal Commission and its terms of reference and membership are presumably designed to keep it focused on his own political agenda.  (more…)

Infrastructure Australia’s latest infrastructure priority list has been criticised for being “too Sydney-centric” and for giving Melbourne’s East West Link, cancelled in 2014, “high priority” status. The cancelled Roe 8project in Perth was removed from the list.

So how does a project get onto Infrastructure Australia’s list? This requires submission of a full business case, which then needs to be “positively assessed” to be given priority status. (more…)