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

The NSW Minerals Council is out spruiking the benefits of the mining industry in the Hunter region in a new economic study. Using the same old tricks to inflate their numbers and ignoring any economic downside they manage to spin the result into a rosy picture that reaches the epic proportions of claiming that the

The newly-inked Tasmanian Forest Agreement has been hailed by many as a historic breakthrough that provides Tasmania with an opportunity to end the divisive “forest wars” and remake the state’s ailing economy. In truth, it is a case study in how not to make policy. By handing over the responsibility for resolving the dispute to

Conservative politicians used to bemoan the way Australia’s youth mindlessly imported American culture, but you don’t hear so much of that these days. Maybe it’s because many conservative politicians have become so comfortable importing their political talking points from their US counterparts. Like Republicans in the US, many in the Coalition seem alarmed about debt,

Imagine if we could increase the number of car parking spots in the Canberra CBD by 20 per cent. Now imagine we could do so at no cost to government, business or individuals and with no disruption. Would you support it? I imagine you would. So, what’s the catch? The catch is that most street-side

According to Rene Hidding, Tasmania’s Liberal spokesman for forestry, it is “insulting” to Tasmanians to inform them about the tiny contribution the forestry and logging industries make to that state’s employment. Presumably he thinks it would be better to deceive the people? For all of the analysis about what the collapse of the state’s forest

Job ads and corporate websites are often littered with claims that particular companies are “employers of choice” or committed to the wellbeing of staff. But according to a recent survey by the Australia Institute, around one third of the workforce reports experiencing stress and anxiety as a result of their work. About 2.2 million workers

John Howard’s description of work/life balance as a ”barbecue stopper” was more accurate than he realised. Not only does it continue to stop conversation among the ”working families” of such interest to political strategists, but the length and unpredictability of working hours makes it increasingly difficult for friends and families to make plans and keep

Neoclassical economics has a clear definition of a competitive market, but it has been so debased by Australian politicians and business leaders that it now borders on meaningless. According to mainstream textbooks, a competitive market is one in which there are lots of buyers and sellers, none of whom have any market power. Buyers are

They’re not widely publicised, but co-operatives and mutuals give customers a different option to the major banks. You might not like the fact that the big banks dominate 90 per cent of the mortgage lending market or that the finance industry makes a fortune investing your compulsory super in other big companies that buy up

The faith of Australian policymakers and business leaders in communist China to keep delivering record growth is touching. Just as they assume the sun will rise tomorrow, so too do they believe those responsible for setting China’s exchange rate, making five-year plans and running their vast state-owned enterprises will keep doing a great job. When