You’d never know it from their behaviour, but the Greens hold 10 seats in the current Senate compared to the Palmer United Party’s three. Their current strategy of voting against virtually everything the Abbott Government announces, including things they actually support, has made them largely irrelevant since the last election. It is hard to think

The Abbott government can’t decide if it wants to tell people how to live their lives or free them to make their own decisions. The Coalition’s education policy, for example, reveals the contradictions between the world views of libertarianism and conservatism that the Coalition claims to represent. For many years, the balancing act has worked.

Divestment By the shrill sound of things, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Australian National University (ANU) had sent its teaching staff on a paid trip to blockade the Pilliga. Jamie Briggs, Minister for Infrastructure, attacked ANU for “damaging” job creation. Christopher Pyne, Minister for Education, called the university “bizarre”. Joe Hockey made similar intonations,

Australia’s richest seven people have more wealth than the bottom 1.73 million households combined. Most people think that’s a problem. Amanda Vanstone, on the other hand, seems to think the bottom 1.73 million should be thankful. “The politics of envy”. This is Amanda Vanstone’s condescending dismissal of concerns over Australia’s rapidly growing gap between its richest and poorest

As the world coal price continues to fall, politicians are asking themselves what the Australian economy will look like by the time the downturn bottoms out.They needn’t look far.Tasmania offers a clear road map for what happens to an economy when the price of a significant export commodity falls.And, most recently, with news the Tasmanian

The Abbott government has proposed a “one stop shop” approach to environmental protection to reduce so-called “green tape” and speed planning. The Commonwealth will no longer have oversight for a wide range of developments and it will be left to state governments to consider the national benefit. No one complains about duplication when it comes

In a democracy, power is the ability to talk crap and get and away with it. And nobody talks more crap than coal companies.  The public think that mining employs far more people than it really does, pays far more tax than it really does, and that it kept Australia out of recession during the

Facts are so last century. The secretary of the NSW Treasury thinks we have a shortage of electricity and we are in danger of an electricity price explosion. The Commonwealth Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane, on the other hand, believes we have an “oversupply” of electricity generation capacity, and that electricity prices are unsustainably low.

For American presidents, the ‘State of the Union’ address provides a once in a year opportunity to set out a plan for the direction the country needs to take and the policies required to get it there. The closest Australian governments get is the annual budget speech, and that is provided by the treasurer, not

Many may have bemoaned the dominance of “economic rationalists”, but I’m beginning to miss them. Sure, they often used simplistic and narrow assumptions to justify a wide range of bad ideas but, compared to the economic irrationalists dominating today’s policy debates, at least they were willing to have a fight with vested interests. The economic

The hypocrisy of Joe Hockey’s call for big business to make the case for his economic reforms is breathtaking. His government’s signature economic ”reform” was to rip up a perfectly good carbon tax. The Prime Minister and Treasurer rightly bet that business groups would sit silently by while this populist policy destruction took place. But

Tony Abbott’s problems with the Senate are only just beginning. The black eye the Palmer United Party gave him on his carbon and mining tax repeal is nothing compared to the body blow he will receive when the major policy initiatives announced in the budget, initiatives that weren’t mentioned during the election campaign, hit the

The Liberals will tell you that they don’t like telling people how to live their lives. Indeed they regularly tell us that individuals, not governments, are best placed to make decisions about what is in their own best interest. But, like successive ALP and Coalition governments, Tony Abbott and his team are big fans for

Just as introducing the carbon tax didn’t really drive the cost of a leg of lamb to $100, removing it isn’t really going to have any noticeable impact on the cost of living. Supermarkets are adamant they didn’t increase prices when the carbon price came in, and they are just as adamant they won’t cut

It’s much easier to solve imaginary problems than real ones, which explains why the current Government is highly concerned about low levels of debt, and relaxed about high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1950 our national debt has fallen from 100 per cent to 14 per cent of GDP. Our greenhouse gas emissions have

The day after Clive Palmer announced he would oppose the Abbott government’s efforts to abolish the 20 per cent renewable energy target, the price of market-traded renewable energy certificates jumped 27 per cent. The same day shares in Infigen, a company with a big portfolio of renewable energy generation, jumped 16 per cent. The next day, as the

Charging sick people $7 to go to the doctor will hurt ordinary Australians far more than the carbon price ever did. While, admittedly, the ALP did a poor job of explaining it, the reality was that most Australians received more in compensation than they paid in higher electricity prices. Of course there is no compensation

If Joe Hockey was actually determined to broaden the base of the GST he wouldn’t start by including food, he would start by imposing it on private school fees and private health insurance. Not only would he collect billions in revenue, he would raise it primarily from high-income earners. While the poorest Australians spend a

If Paul Keating’s pet shop galahs are still alive I suspect they are talking about tax reform these days. And no doubt all right-thinking galahs know that tax reform and increasing the GST is one and the same thing. The Commonwealth government will collect $363 billion in taxes this year, with state and local governments

The Government says our education system, our health care, our pensions and our social safety net are unsustainable. The big question I have is why? Every prime minister since Whitlam has managed to maintain the principles of universal health care and education. They have managed to maintain help to our elderly and less fortunate. Why

To paraphrase Winston Churchill — never in the field of budget conflict has so much been extracted by so few at the expense of so many. While the rest of us face a horror budget where we are told to keep calm and carry on, the miners are walking away puffing a cigar and doing the

Treasurer Joe Hockey expects unemployment to rise and business investment to fall. He plans to shed 16,000 public sector jobs into a labour market that Treasury says is softening. Indeed, Treasury states that the proportion of people who are employed or looking for work will continue to fall, “reflecting the expectation that employment growth will

John Howard is the Ronald Reagan of Australian politics. While Reagan is deified by modern Republicans for his fiscal conservatism, in reality he oversaw big increases in government spending. But because he took from the poor to deliver to the rich they love him all the same. 

Economics textbooks have a pretty depressing story to tell aspiring business owners. It can be summarised as, “Don’t bother. You will never make any money and even if you do, your success will attract new competitors who will push your price and profits down.” But don’t worry, no one pays economists for the accuracy of

Despite the skill of individual musicians, orchestras still need a conductor to bring the whole performance together. It is one thing to know how to play the horn, but someone needs to decide when the best time to honk it is. This week the Abbott government sounded like an orchestra without a conductor – there

You only get one chance to make a first impression and, if you are treasurer, you only get one chance to deliver your first budget. Joe Hockey has been talking up his determination to make savage cuts and “end the age of entitlement” for months but, with public support for the Abbott government continuing to

Like buying a house, it’s easy to get a free trade agreement if you don’t care what you get or how much you pay. Since coming to office, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has closed a number of free trade agreements in record time, and it shows.  The so-called free trade agreement with Japan ensures Australia

Productivity is easy to define, hard to measure and impossible to predict. But there is a big difference between how much we talk about something and how much we understand about it. For economists, productivity refers to the amount of output that can be produced per unit of input. Profit, on the other hand, fluctuates

Like his decision to spend $5 billion a year on a new paid parental leave scheme, Tony Abbott didn’t seek cabinet approval to restore knights and dames to Australian society. While Joe Hockey might want to end “the age of entitlement”, the Prime Minister certainly seems to feel pretty entitled to do as he pleases.

Like Qantas, the problem with the Commonwealth’s budget is a lack of revenue. If Qantas were to increase fares by about 3 per cent they would be back in the black, but for the time being at least, Alan Joyce has his eyes set on maintaining market share rather than maximising profits. Similarly, the Commonwealth budget