Category: Economy

The challenge for Treasury, the Productivity Commission and the rest is to be less doctrinal – less true to the one true economic rationalist faith – and more practical in giving advice that satisfies the pollies’ ever-present need to “do something” without the something they do causing a lot of harm, maybe even some good. (more…)

Nicholas Gruen’s piece in the Saturday Paper, Making the Reserve Bank a “people’s bank”, while gratifying in its support for my recent piece, lacks a particular historical perspective: we’ve been there before. (more…)

A recent episode of ABC television’s satire Utopia saw political spivs trying to convince the fictional Nation Building Authority to endorse anti-competitive conditions on a multi-billion-dollar port asset sale.   Head of that Authority Tony Woodford – played beautifully by Rob Sitch – resisted valiantly. Shortly thereafter, a newspaper review criticised Utopia thus: ‘…the writers of Utopia make their point by reducing pivotal players in the policy formation process to idiots. (They) are straw men, delivering obviously untenable arguments, which guide the viewer to think no one in government knows what they are talking about.  It’s a lazy critique, but the writers get away with it because the viewers are entirely sympathetic.  Lampooning “those clowns in Canberra” is hardly a controversial undertaking’. If only that sniffy assessment were accurate.  (more…)

I’m starting to suspect the federal government – of whatever colour – has lost its ability to control its own spending. (more…)

Some on the far right may see stagnant or falling wages as a welcome boost to profits and competitiveness, but in both structural and political ways low wage growth and consequent widening inequality is undermining capitalism. (more…)

Stark displays of inequality, such as the concentration of homeless people in Martin Place, challenge us to unite in solidarity with those who are oppressed by injustice – an injustice that is a deliberate aspect of our neoliberal economic system. (more…)

A belief, without foundation, that “the market” is the best way to deliver any product, has our politicians gibbering, when the provision of Public Goods (see my previous article) is properly to be determined by the principle of universal access, not some illusion of competition providing it. (more…)

Perhaps the time has come to consider a notion, at which most progressives’ immediate reaction is to recoil, that a compulsory non-military youth civic service program be introduced in Australia?   (more…)

There is systematic tendency in Australia compared to many countries in Asia for the mainstream media to place greater emphasis on the potential downsides of technological change rather than the upsides. (more…)

The idea that government economic policy should only be about making capitalist enterprise easier is just plain wrong. It should be trying to make it better for the nation. (more…)

 “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts”, the great American professor-turned-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to enjoy saying to opponents. (more…)

Shorten has brought tax reform to the political arena. Let’s hope the Labor Party doesn’t go to water between now and the next election, because we need more public revenue and a fairer and less distortionary tax system. (more…)