Are freedom of speech, freedom of association and the freedom to protest left-wing or right-wing issues? While Senator George Brandis was thundering away this week about the importance of a free press, I’m not sure his liberalism stretches to supporting Julian Assange and the desire of WikiLeaks to ”let the information free”. Similarly, while the

Fred Gale’s article, Tasmanian Forests Agreement: deeply flawed, worth backing, provides interesting insights into the views of one segment of the Tasmanian community that supports the Tasmanian Forest Agreement. However, he fails to fully grasp many of the fundamental reasons for continuing opposition to the deal and its associated legislation. Most notably, there is no

Two weeks ago, I explained the consequences of the Australian Conservation Foundation, The Wilderness Society and Environment Tasmania support for the so-called ”forest peace deal” in Tasmania. The deal obliges them to cease all protests that might impede the ability of native forest loggers to sell their woodchips, take active steps to help silence other

Economists are often accused of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Consumers, on the other hand, are assumed to have good knowledge of both. Indeed free-market economics rests more heavily on the assumption that individuals know what’s best for them than on any other assumption. While it is relatively clear that

The Chicken Littles are at it again – scaring us about the level of government debt and the deficits that bring about debt. Gina Rinehart has claimed that the present level of government debt ‘is simply unsustainable’ and that ‘Australia had to take action to avoid following Europe into economic misery’. Ms Rinehart should know

Climate change and food security are among the biggest problems facing the world today, and the fact that an increase in the former means a lot less of the latter simply makes both problems even more urgent. While the overlap in the consequences of these two problems might be obvious, what is less clear is

Contrary to the speeches made by many politicians, national economies are not like households. Indeed, the household management analogies that politicians often use to explain their approach to budgetary policy are rarely useful or appropriate. The way the Coalition is using the analogy is simply bizarre; they seem to have confused micro-economics and macro-economics. While

Federal government budgets are always strange affairs. They are billed as fact-based, hardnosed economics, when in fact they are far more about political theatre and posturing. While the budget is supposed to reveal the economic credentials of a government, most economists are left shaking their heads. Take the debate around the surplus. Both the Government

Regardless of the result of the next election, the ALP will hold an inquiry into what went wrong. How on earth, they will ask, could a government presiding over low unemployment, low inflation, low levels of public debt and a triple A credit rating be seen as poor economic managers at a time when the

Confusion lies at the heart of Treasurer Wayne Swan’s sixth budget. Does he want to be a big spender or a low taxer? Is he a Keynesian who is relaxed about the budget deficit, or is he a fiscal conservative determined to rein in public spending? Who can say?

My fantasy budget would be one that attempted to match the government’s spending to the public’s priorities and one in which taxing and spending policies, otherwise known as fiscal policy, was based on a close reading of simple economic theory rather than a quick skim of what’s trending on Twitter. Australia has one of the

The Opposition has proposed a paid parental leave scheme that offers to replace a woman’s wage if she takes time off following the birth of her child. Tony Abbott expects to raise $3.5 billion with a 1.5 percentage point increase in the company tax rate. But the Australian taxation system is a complicated beast and

In 1987 Prime Minister Bob Hawke promised that by 1990 no child would live in poverty. While those words have haunted him ever since, a new analysis by The Australia Institute reveals that his government did more to tackle poverty than all subsequent governments. Under the Hawke government, poverty rates dropped when welfare benefits rose

Passage of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement Bill in the state’s lower house effectively ended three years of negotiations between the forestry industry and environment groups. The deal is being celebrated by many as a resolution to the 30-year conflict over native forests in Tasmania and a win for the environment and economy. Nothing could be

QUEENSLAND Premier Campbell Newman has stared down former federal treasurer Peter Costello and he deserves some credit for that. A stocktake of Australia’s electricity now, compared with two decades ago, confirms that the privatisation and corporatisation of the sector has been a massive failure. An analysis of the sector since Victoria privatised power in the

The Australian native forest sector has been in decline for the past two decades and all but fallen off a cliff since the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008. The forestry lobby has tried to lay the lion’s share of the blame for its predicament at the feet of the environmental movement,

What is the corporate equivalent of a dole bludger? For all the talk about class warfare in Australia it is interesting that the conservatives have a pejorative name for individuals who need support from the state but progressives don’t even have a term for the foreign companies that make huge profits but still have their

In New Zealand, cabinet documents are routinely released soon after cabinet has made a decision. In fact, the New Zealand guide for accessing cabinet documents states explicitly that the need for public servants to provide “frank and fearless” advice is not a reason to keep cabinet submissions secret. Where many Australian public servants might react

Tony Abbott’s Direct Action Plan has been ridiculed by many as expensive and unworkable. One of the primary objections has been that the centrepiece of the policy, the Emissions Reduction Fund, is a baseline-and-credit scheme that will require counterfactual baselines to be set for every participating polluter. The baseline for a given polluter will be

Last week, CSR closed a Sydney factory and made 150 people redundant. This was not caused by the carbon price, the mining tax or our industrial relations laws. The simple fact is that the high exchange rate that accompanies our mining boom has made many manufacturers uncompetitive. How much income support should they receive? How

Over the past century thousands of generous Australians have died and left some or all of their estate in a “perpetual trust” to be used for philanthropic goals. But most of the “perpetual trustees” have not been as long-lived as the funds they were managing and many funds were bought up by larger financial institutions

The fact that Gina Rinehart inherited billions of dollars apparently means that people earning $150,000 a year are entitled to feel average. The average income for an employed person in Australia is $58,375.20 a year. The median is $50,076. $150,000 a year is a lot of money. It is not average, it is not middle,

The government’s obsession with speeding up the mining boom has delivered an exchange rate and a shortage of skilled labour that is devastating the manufacturing industry. Rather than take its foot off the mining boom accelerator or admit that the miners’ boom means a bust for manufacturers, the government is trying to buy itself some

The rapid expansion in the mining industry over the past decade has done more harm than good to Geelong’s economy. Mining has created virtually no jobs in Geelong and has induced a high exchange rate that is crippling Geelong’s manufacturing industry with more than 1 in 8 manufacturing jobs lost over the past six years.

It’s very difficult to determine what the right rate of population growth should be, but it’s very easy to determine the wrong one. If there are no spare seats on the trains, no spare beds in the hospitals and no room on the roads then we aren’t ready for the anticipated net migration of 1

‘Mums and dads’ seem to be replacing ‘working families’ as the focus of political concern in Australia. The biggest problem with last week’s hoax media release about Whitehaven Coal, many argued, was its impact on ”mum and dad investors”. The language of mum and dad investors is as widely used as it is meaningless. Gina

The native forest and forest product industries contribute a miniscule amount to the Australian economy (in the order of 0.15% to 0.20% of GDP). Despite this, it has dominated the minds and energies of many politicians and environmental policy makers for decades. Among other things, it helped spark the emergence of the environmental movement in

The Climate Change Authority’s final report on the renewable energy target, which was released yesterday, contains a number of controversial conclusions and recommendations. A standout amongst these is the recommendation that the federal government explore whether making native forest wood waste eligible to participate in the large-scale RET (LRET) would increase the rate of harvesting

Our two-speed economy has a two-tiered tax system, with capital-intensive mining companies paying among the lowest rates of corporate tax and the labour-intensive service sector paying among the highest. All companies face the same nominal 30 per cent tax on income but the existence of accelerated depreciation and other tax concessions deliver disproportionately for the

Economic growth is a very strange thing. In 1949 when our gross domestic product was about a tenth of what it is today, Australia set out to build 145 kilometres of tunnels, 16 major dams and nine power stations as part of the Snowy Hydro scheme. But 60 years later, when GDP is $1.3 trillion