Australia’s unfinished economic reform goal should be to make Australian capitalism work better by directing capital towards productive enterprise and away from dependence on asset inflation. (more…)
Category: Policy
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From compliance to opportunity in AI: the key is capability
The Australian conversation about AI has settled around risk and regulation. Its economic promise will turn less on the rules Australia writes than on the capability built around the technology. (more…)
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Future pharmacy should put patients and taxpayers first
A new report from The Grattan Institute recommends that responsibility for setting pharmacy remuneration be shifted to the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, in order to ensure Australians can safely and easily access essential medicines. (more…)
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Thirty years after Dolly, cloning is not what we expected
Thirty years after Dolly the sheep, cloning has not delivered armies of identical animals or resurrected mammoths – but it has transformed disease research, conservation and our understanding of cells.
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The unfairness we’ve learned to walk past
Allowing homelessness to continue is a choice. Ending it must become one too. (more…)
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Entitled schools are taking on entitled parents: what about the students?
Governments have fostered a sense of entitlement in private schools. They should be enforcing the principle of putting students first. (more…)
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Defence policy deserves more than slogans and selective history
Pat Conroy’s speech at the National Press Club was not a convincing presentation of the ALP’s record on defence. (more…)
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Government is contorting itself on overseas students
High student visa refusal rates and extreme fee increases are blunt, haphazard tools for cutting net migration. Australia needs a long-term migration plan it can explain and defend. (more…)
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Aged care assessments need experts not algorithms
Older people, their families and taxpayers are the losers in aged care system that trusts an algorithm over expert clinical assessors. (more…)
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The NDIS transformed lives – fixing it will take more than cost cutting
The NDIS needs reform, but tightening eligibility before alternative supports are ready risks abandoning people with disability and retreating from the citizenship principles on which the scheme was built. (more…)
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Thanks Mr Fox; please keep digging
Parkinson’s disease is the fastest growing neurological condition in the world, and still without a cure. (more…)
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Labor must remember what it stands for
In the first of a two-part series, John Menadue argues the upcoming ALP National Conference must do more than produce careful resolutions – it must confront Labor’s loss of values, membership and purpose. (more…)
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Does stopping native forest logging in Australia really kill orangutans?
The trope that ending native forest logging in Australia would be ‘a very bad day for orangutans’ does not stack up. (more…)
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How to pay for using our roads
A road user charge should not be used to punish electric vehicle drivers, but to fairly price all motoring by distance, vehicle mass and pollution – with fossil-fuel vehicles still paying for the harm they cause.
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New supply won’t fix housing while investors keep winning
To fix the housing crisis, further reform is needed that shifts taxation away from earnings onto passive assets. (more…)
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Australia must have an ambitious research policy to underpin economic transformation
In a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), Kim Carr warns that Australia cannot build future prosperity on population growth, property and resource extraction alone – it must invest seriously in the scientific capability that drives innovation. (more…)
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Enough is never enough
The pressing issues in Australian politics are not the lack of shared values but low productivity and greed. This is where reform efforts should be focused. (more…)
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Subsidised but unaccountable: the religious charity gap
The Government must address a gap in the charity framework, namely the exemption for religious charities having to be transparent about the benefits they receive. (more…)
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Hanson’s politics of subtraction offers her own voters less
Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech exposed the weakness in the old right-wing politics of subtraction: in an age of scarcity, promising to take things away no longer lands on someone else, but on the voters she needs. (more…)
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Dysfunctional disability policy
Assessing functional capacity instead of basing disability assistance on diagnosis has been tried before. To be fair, the test will need a strong qualitative element. (more…)
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Gambling reform was quietly taken out with the trash
Labor’s response to calls for a ban on gambling advertising was announced quietly and falls well short of the Murphy report’s recommendations, leaving children, young men and problem gamblers exposed to ongoing harm.
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Specialist fees are out of control. Medicare needs reform
Medical specialist fees have been rising far beyond Medicare support, leaving patients with heavy out-of-pocket costs, long public waiting lists and a health system that needs stronger public controls. (more…)
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Housing policy should build homes, not wealth
Housing policy should reflect the kind of society Australia wants to be: one that treats homes as a human right, builds neighbourhoods and social mixing, and stops privileging wealth accumulation over shelter. (more…)
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Pauline’s poisonous politics – Message from the Editor
A little while after Pauline Hanson graduated from Ipswich City Council politics to take the Queensland seat of Oxley, I ran into her in a Canberra pub. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. Journalists and politicians often drink together, or at least in close proximity to each other, and in the late 1990s Canberra had so few drinking holes that collisions were inevitable.
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The man who did everything right
The story of a voter who did everything Australia once told working people to do: work hard, buy a home, raise a family and keep faith. Now, after years of lost jobs, debt and broken promises, his look towards One Nation is not loyalty but a warning.
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The tragedy of AUKUS
In his submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry, Joe Camilleri argues revoking AUKUS must be part of wider reassessment of Australia’s place in the world. (more…)
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China fear is weakening Australian research
Australia needs to manage research security risks, but exaggerating the threat of collaboration with China could weaken national security by cutting Australian science off from leading researchers, global expertise and crucial STEM talent. (more…)
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Gotcha, or getting tax right?
As the government’s hearing on its tax changes enters its second day, tax reform will be harder to defend if capital tax changes are left standing alone, and Labor should link them directly to bigger income tax cuts for wage and salary earners struggling with the cost of living.
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Australian smelting needs an urgent clean energy fix to stop the bailouts
Australia’s smelters will keep needing taxpayer bailouts unless governments create a publicly backed clean energy model that can deliver reliable, affordable power for heavy industry. (more…)
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Should we bring back native forest logging? The answer is a clear no
Native forest logging is economically costly, environmentally damaging and socially divisive, and should not be revived in Victoria or Western Australia or maintained in Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland. (more…)