by Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director of The Australia Institute. [This article originally appeared in the Canberra Times 08.09.18] Watching Brazil’s National Museum burn this week was a tragic reminder that, if we don’t take care, we can snap the threads that bind us to our history forever. Over a matter of hours, tens of millions

by Ben Oquist, Executive Director of The Australia Institute. [This article originally appeared in the Australian Financial Review 28.08.18] Scott Morrison is set to make the same mistake as the Business Council of Australia on energy and climate policy. Equating emission reductions with higher prices gets the politics and economics wrong. Australia’s climate and energy debates

by Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director of The Australia Institute. [This article originally appeard in The Canberra Times 24.08.18] I really enjoy the blood sport of Australian federal politics but I consider it a benign vice on my part, to be discussed only among consenting adults, mostly fellow Canberrans and people on Twitter. I confess I

By Richard Denniss – Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.   [This article originally appeared in the Australian Financial Review on 24 September 2018] Wars are expensive and culture wars are no different. Indeed, the opportunity cost of Australia’s culture war is enormous as it comes at the expense of developing meaningful energy, broadband and tax

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute. [Read in The Australian Financial Reiew here] Confidence is silent and insecurities are loud. How else could you explain Sky TV commentator Rowan Dean’s need to credit “Western values” for the Thai junior soccer team’s successful rescue? In case you missed Dean’s comments – because, like most

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute [View article in the Canberra Times here] Confidence is silent and insecurities are loud. How else could you explain Sky TV commentator Rowan Dean’s need to credit ‘‘Western values’’ for the Thai junior soccer team’s successful rescue? In case you missed Dean’s comments – because, like

By Richie Merzian, Director of The Australia Institute’s Climate & Energy Program.  [Read article in the New Matilda Here] Private and public investment in a safe climate future is growing, despite the best and worst efforts of some of the world’s leading polluters, writes Richie Merzian. On a reclaimed swamp fringing the outskirts of the industrial

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute. [View this article in the Australian Financial Review] Having abandoned the principles of small government, the right of Australian politics are now urging Australia to embrace Donald Trump’s attack on international agreements. Is there any institution these so-called “conservatives” aren’t willing to wreck in pursuit of

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute [Read in the Sydney Morning Herald here] Economic rationalism and neoliberalism are dead in Australia. In an unexpected twist, the idea that markets are good and governments are bad was killed by the right wing of Australian politics, who simply couldn’t resist the desire to shovel

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute. [Read this article in the Syndey Morning Herald] One thing that unites the Australian Parliament is that subsidies are a great idea. Whether it’s the Liberals’ enthusiasm for subsidising weapons exports, the Nationals’ love of subsidising coal mines, Labor’s love of subsidising manufacturing or the Greens

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute [Read in the Australian Financial Review here] The budget emergency is over. Even though Commonwealth debt has risen from $317 billion to $561 billion. Since Tony Abbott was elected, declaring a fiscal emergency, the Coalition has now flicked the switch to optimism and proposing $200 billion

By Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute [This article orininally appeared in the AFR] If Malcolm Turnbull were serious about the cutting the company tax rate he would simply push for a carbon tax to fund it. If the Greens didn’t support him, Labor almost certainly would. In one fell swoop he’d deliver the tax

Most Australians know in their guts that it’s pretty hard to find a traditional permanent job these days.  And now the statistics confirm it: less than half of employed Australians have one of those “standard” jobs.  And more than half experience one or more dimensions of insecurity: including part-time, irregular, casual, contractor, and marginally self-employed jobs.

Based on the way they talk about the proposed income tax cuts, the average Turnbull government MP struggles with the definition of average. To be fair, averages can be a bit confusing. For example, the average Australian has less than two legs (as the number of people with one leg far exceeds the number of people

Bracket creep is as maligned as it is misunderstood. Indeed, it can even be a good thing. But while most people probably know that bracket creep refers to people getting tipped into higher marginal tax rates as their wages rise, few seem to realise that there is good bracket creep and bad bracket creep. But before I explain

Everyone is saying Tasmania is a becoming a clean energy powerhouse, so how do we make sure ordinary Tasmanians get a piece of the action?

The answer to the meaning of life is, as we know thanks to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “42”. What is less well known is that the answer to what Australia’s tax policy should be is also a single, specific and essentially arbitrary numerical figure. [This article was first published in the Australian Financial Review –

Peter Dutton’s best argument for Australia to lower its annual immigration intake is one word: Sydney. Australia’s largest city has been made crowded, slow, expensive and unproductive by decades of unplanned immigration. [This article was first published in the Australian Financial Review – here] Anyone planning an event knows that it makes a lot more

First published in The Examiner, 15 April 2018 By 2050, everyone everywhere will have the right to thrive. (Yep, utopia). All communities are changing all the time.  The future of our Tasmanian community is not like a book that has already been written, each chapter is emergent & authorship is our collective responsibility. The narrative

Mainstream economists and conservative political leaders profess “surprise” at the historically slow pace of wage growth in Australia’s labour market. They claim that wages will start growing faster soon, in response to the normal “laws of supply and demand.”  This view ignores the importance of institutional and regulatory factors in determining wages and income distribution.  In fact, given the systematic efforts in recent decades to weaken wage-setting institutions (including minimum wages, the awards system, and collective bargaining), it is no surprise at all that wages have slowed to a crawl.  And the solutions to the problem are equally obvious: rebuild the power of those institutions, to support workers in winning a better share of the economic pie they produce.

In its desperation to cut the company tax rate the Turnbull government is willing to burden future generations with the kind of record budget deficits it has previously sought to pin on the ALP. As an economic strategy it makes little sense but as a political strategy it makes no sense. Indeed the PM seems so keen

U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent trade policies (including tariffs on steel and aluminium that could affect Australian exports) have raised fears of a worldwide slide into protectionism and trade conflict.  Trump’s approach has been widely and legitimately criticised.  But his argument that many U.S. workers have been hurt by the operation of current free trade

First published in The Examiner, 28 March 2018 On Tuesday, The Australia Institute Tasmania launched a new initiative cheekily titled #WTF2050 – What’s Tasmania’s Future?  The project brings together some of the state’s best thinkers to answer the question –  where do you want Tasmania to be in 2050? What’s your big hairy goal and

All poor people have low taxable incomes, but many people with low taxable incomes are a long way from being poor. [First published in the Australian Financial Review – here] And while the debate about the fairness of abolishing cash refunds for “spare” tax credits has conflated poor people and those with good accountants, the two groups

The tax treatment of earnings generated from owning shares is complicated. Because it is complicated most people think it is boring. Because it’s boring we don’t discuss it much. However Australia’s dividend imputation system is important, unique to the world and comes with approximately a $30 billion dollar a year price tag. So whatever you

On Friday 16 February the Australian Financial Review published an opinion piece on company tax and argued that The Australia Institute ‘undermined a policy that woud have created jobs, profits and a bigger economy’. Generally this is a good article which sets out how The Australia Institute undermined the Government’s plan to cut company taxes,

I’m proud that The Australian Financial Review thinks that my colleague Ben Oquist and I ran a “well-orchestrated thought campaign” against the BCA’s call for a $65 billion tax cut, but, to be honest, defeating it in that debate wasn’t difficult. [First published by the Australian Financial Review – here] Indeed, while Aaron Patrick’s piece titled “How company tax

The word “ideology” has a bad name these days but, as we are beginning to see, it is surprisingly hard to govern a country without one. Take, for example, the ideology of small government often associated with conservative governments like that of Mr Turnbull’s. [First published by the Australian Financial Review – here] Last week

With a seemingly never-ending string of negative narratives about how poorly our politics is performing, we are now overdue for some more structured thinking about what needs to be done. The “anti-politics” sentiment now risks hardening into something more dramatic as the electorate turns away, not just from the current crop of politicians – but potentially from

Just as many politicians choose to ignore the evidence of criminologists when designing crime prevention policy, the majority of Australian politicians choose to ignore economic evidence in the design of Australian energy policy. That’s OK. There’s no mention of role of evidence in the Australian Constitution and there’s no obligation on parliamentarians to base policy