After decades in public life some Australian corporate leaders are figuring out what first-year philosophy students grasp in their first lecture: it’s hard to define “ethical”. But as Transfield Services’ chairman Diane Smith-Gander has discovered, the stakes are a bit higher than undergrad debating prizes. Losing the debate over the ethics of running offshore detention centres

First published in the Australian Financial Review – here It’s bizarre that people blame Tony Abbott’s demise on his inability to communicate. He was a great communicator, and people knew exactly what he stood for. No politician was as relentlessly ‘on message’.  Abbott’s problem wasn’t the clarity of his message; it was the incoherence of

As opposition leader Tony Abbott told us that emissions trading was an expensive fraud. As Prime Minister he is proposing changes to his direct action policy based on the assumption that trading pollution permits is both cheap and reliable. As with so much of the modern policy debate the explanation for this remarkable turnaround has everything

Australia can’t have a grown-up debate about reform until we stop having juvenile debate about economic modelling. A government that thinks its most persuasive argument begins with “but economic modelling shows” should have as much chance of shifting the economic debate as Bronwyn Bishop had of shifting Australians’ attitudes to the role of helicopters in political

Politics Tony Abbott picks his fights, and loves, on the basis of the enemies he will enrage. This time he’s decided to love coal, but he has also enraged key sections of the National Party. First published in the Australian Financial Review – here. As the coal price continues to fall, the financial case for

First published in The Australian Financial Review, 30 June 2015 – Here The Business Council of Australia once defended free markets, but now it and others only support reforms that help its big business friends. If the Business Council of Australia (BCA) was serious about reducing government waste it would have slammed the recent announcement

While Norway’s decision to divest its $900 billion sovereign wealth fund from coal shares sent shock waves around the financial world, it was the way the Norwegian parliament made the decision that is truly radical. Norway has a conservative minority government, but the idea to sell out of coal started with an NGO, was taken

The mining industry is furious that if you make a donation to an environment group, your donation is tax deductible. You know the drill. You give someone in a koala suit anything over $2, they give you a receipt and go off to save an owl, hug a tree or, more likely, make a submission

While the public are rightly outraged at the callous tone of the Treasurers ‘get a good job’ remarks in response to housing affordability, economists should be equally disturbed about the bizarre logic behind the government’s approach to the issue. Joe Hockey seems to be increasingly confused about what housing affordability is. Hockey and Abbott believe

Tax policy Resources companies and lobby groups are lobbying a parliamentary inquiry to strip political climate groups of their charity status. But resources companies can deduct the money they pay to their industry groups from tax. Speech isn’t free in Australia. It isn’t even cheap. Corporate Australia spends billions telling the public, and our politicians,

A little bit of economic theory is a dangerous thing, and many of the people defending what BHP and Rio Tinto have done to the price of iron ore are demonstrating that they have very little economic knowledge indeed. Economists usually don’t like cartels, or other forms of producer protections, as they help producers and

Joe Hockey’s “do nothing” budget is better than his first “do harm” budget, but he still hasn’t tackled the big issues that face Australia in the wake of the mining boom, writes Australia Institute executive director and economist Richard Denniss. This article was produced for, and originally published by Crikey.com.au – Here. The economy described in

The apparent Coalition aim of cutting taxes does not match its public declarations about reducing the deficit. But tensions within the Coalition make any move on taxes difficult. Does Joe Hockey think removing the deficit levy will make the deficit go away? Announced in last year’s budget, the temporary 2 per cent increase in the

The Earth is flat, climate change is a conspiracy and the only way to collect more money for the states is to collect more money via the GST. How did the nonsensical belief that the GST is the one and only source of commonwealth revenue that can be transferred to the states come to be

The iron ore price is well above its long-term average. Indeed, at $US50 per tonne it is well above the $US36 price that Wayne Swan inherited in 2007. Blaming the iron ore price for Western Australia’s budgetary woes is like blaming the sinking of the Titanic on the iceberg. Yes, it’s a factor and yes,

Imagine this. You’re a State Government minister. Your department and the most powerful industry it regulates are under fire for failing to comply with your government’s own guidelines. Courts, the media and community groups keep complaining that the industry breaks the guidelines and your department lets them get away with it. Even the consultants you

According to the International Monetary Fund, the Howard/Costello government was the most profligate in Australia for the last 50 years. Indeed, while the mining boom was gathering pace they cut taxes so far and so fast that they forced the Reserve Bank of Australia to rapidly increase interest rates. While countries like Norway took the benefits of resource price

Last year Hockey was talking about cutting welfare payments but now, finally, he’s taking about taking on the vested interests in the superannuation industry to bring concessions under control. This time last year Joe Hockey sat on a silk chair telling Spectator Magazine subscribers about the need to cut welfare payments for the poor. Last

Politicians get their fair share of blame for the parlous state of policy making in Australia but they are not the only culprits. The bigger problem is that policy doesn’t get made the way people think it does. It doesn’t get made the way the way academics think it does, it doesn’t get made the

First published in the Australian Financial Review, 24th March 2015 Politics The senate is often describe as obstructionist and causing chaos but it is there for good reasons and governments have to learn to deal with it. Imagine if there was no senate to block Gough Whitlam’s reform agenda. Malcolm Fraser would have had no

While it is not polite to admit it, the plan to reduce the tax paid by wealthy Australians is one of the main reasons that Treasury predicts we will have so much trouble paying for health and aged care in the future. This is all spelt out in the IGR, albeit in the appendices. Last

Originally Published in the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday 10th March.  Thanks to Peter Costello a retired superannuant drawing down $1 million per year, tax free, doesn’t even have to pay the 2 per cent Medicare levy. That is just one of the inequitable and unaffordable time bombs that the last Liberal treasurer planted for

The biggest fiscal problem Australia faces is that we are not borrowing enough to meet our short term circumstances or long term objectives. Australia’s population will nearly double by 2075. We are currently growing by around 400,000 people – the population of Canberra – every year. If we were are serious about quality of life,

A fundamental contradiction lies at the heart of the Abbott Government. Its assumptions about our national security and its assumptions about economic management are in stark contrast. Something has to give. Our foreign and defence policies are explicitly based on the assumption that the US will retain superpower status in the coming decades. But Joe

Governments serve their citizens best when they engage them through informed debate. Scare tactics are not an acceptable alternative. We need to talk about crises. Whipping up a good crisis has become the foundation on which every case for every reform is now built. Budget black hole! Budget emergency! We will wind up like Greece!

Whether Tony Abbott limps on as PM or Malcolm Turnbull swoops in to lead the coalition, it is clear that big changes in policy are on the cards, and the area that is ripe for the biggest change is climate policy. There’s no easier way for the coalition to both signal that they have learned

The Newman government was handing an Indian billionaire billions of dollars of taxpayer money for literally – literally – no reason. During the recent state election, both the LNP and Labor in Queensland broadly supported the Carmichael coal project by Indian mining giant Adani. The key difference was whether they were expecting the taxpayer to

Once upon a time if a project couldn’t make a profit without government support conservative politicians would have called it a bad investment. Not these days. Take, for example, the Queensland government’s plan to spend $2 billion on coal transport infrastructure trying to make marginal mines in the Galilee basin financially viable. Even after enormous

The demise of the Australian car industry does not mark the end of taxpayer assistance in Australia, it marks only the end of highly visible assistance. The free marketeers didn’t win, they only defeated the easy targets. The real rorters not only still grow fat on the public purse, they lead the cheer squad for

The Tasmanian Government is taxing electricity users to prop up the losses that keep bleeding from Forestry Tasmania. Indeed, the $30 million “woodchip levy” funded by Tasmanian business and households is significantly larger than the $22 million annual cost of the Renewable Energy Target that some Tasmanian businesses claim to be so disadvantaged by. Energy