Category: Economy

Has there ever been a more demoralising time to be Prime Minister?  There’s been the expected sniping from the sidelines and the continued calls for the Coalition to shore up its base and prevent leakage to parties like One Nation. 

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s recent warnings that house prices would fall steeply under a Labor government confirm the underlying politics of housing policy in Australia. The default position for politicians is to sound concerned about housing affordability, but do nothing.   (more…)

We see their spokespeople quoted in the papers and their ads on TV, but beyond that we know very little about how Australia’s lobby groups get what they want. 

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The failure of the market to provide housing for all who need it is compounded by several political failures.   (more…)

The most pressing question: Is the global system there to serve people, or are people there to serve the global system? They also never address a central contradiction of globalisation: that capital is free to move, but for the most part people are not, unless they belong to the elite ranks. The inevitable backlash has begun.  (more…)

The South Australian government  will introduce from July a “point-of-consumption tax” to claw back some of the gambling tax revenue it is seeing disappear over the border. The new tax is a reasonable response to a growing problem, and probably won’t send bookmakers to the wall. But it does highlight the current regulatory mess surrounding how we tax internet wagering in Australia.   (more…)

So long as government vacates the field, the balance between rich and poor lurches further towards the rich. 8 individuals control half of the world’s wealth. Is that Balance or proportionate ?  (more…)

Here lies the exquisite dilemma for the Packer lobbyists: help push the Chinese side to get a better deal, perhaps an exchange program for their incarcerated staff, or strike another deal, leaving all those ill-gotten gains sloshing around Sydney and Melbourne and finding their way to the Packer gaming tables.   (more…)

After Easter, Pearls and Irritations plans to publish a series ‘Making Housing Affordable‘ addressing key aspects of the housing crisis and recommending solutions, with contributions from a range of experts and other key stakeholders, including economists, planners, demographers, housing providers and policy makers.   (more…)

Vancouver’s response to the housing affordability crisis,  now includes a new Empty Homes Tax at 1% per annum of the value of each empty home covered. Australian reports suggest that there may be 90,000 empty dwellings in Sydney and 83,000 in Melbourne.  (more…)

Moral panic over recent increases in visibly homeless people in central Melbourne has brought to the fore the critical shortage of affordable housing across the metropolitan areas of Australia’s wealthiest cities. But living on the street is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more households are living in insecure and/or overpriced accommodation. Their plight is due to an undersupply of appropriately priced, sized and situated rental housing.   (more…)

If politicians were serious about the affordability crisis, they would be trying to support the important but underfunded affordable housing sector. Better targeting tax breaks towards new and affordable rental housing, rather than fuelling demand for existing homes, would also help. But until our politicians can see past supply slogans we can expect very little policy change.   (more…)

That CEOs are overpaid is something, as Leonard Cohen would say, “everybody knows”; including the directors and shareholders who ultimately decide their pay. Yet firms are unwilling to do anything about it, because to do so would damage internal relations, undermine status and run against the norms of the system.  (This is a repost from an article first posted on October 24, 2015.) (more…)

Donald J Trump is called the ‘businessman’ President. The ethics and practices of ‘private’ business, and the nature and ‘business models’ of activities undertaken, are arguably, neither consistent with the established accountabilities of ‘corporate governance’ nor with the innovative future of the’ digital economy’.’    (more…)

This a review of Wolfgang Streeck’s book ‘How will capitalism end?’.

Communists of the world, relax! Don’t spend your efforts trying to bring down capitalism, because it’s going to bring itself down.   (more…)