With the rise in inflation as Australia’s economy struggles with re-opening and supply chain problems, each release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) generates headlines and political debate. But the CPI doesn’t necessarily provide a full reading of price pressures: depending on who you are, and what you buy. In this column published in the Guardian Australia, Greg Jericho (new policy director for the Centre for Future Work) dissects several measurement issues related to this most-watched economic statistic.

If he doesn’t provide support soon the economy will spiral but if he does he must admit the cost of living with the virus.

Australians are getting a stark reminder about how value is actually created in an economy, and how supply chains truly work.

The return of Summernats to Canberra reminds us the Prime Minister promised Australia would be going into 2022 ‘looking through the front windscreen, not the rear vision mirror’. In reality, National Cabinet seems to be doing the policy equivalent of a burnout (or a doughnut as I called them growing up), spinning its wheels furiously

The great resignation is apparently upon us — workers are walking away from bad jobs. But in Australia, the exodus of women from the workforce says more about structural barriers than worker empowerment.

The retiree group most affected by rising living costs.

Economist Matt Grudnoff outlines the ‘progress’ made since the royal commission.

The federal government’s handling of the pandemic has been the worst public policy screw-up in Australian history

If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, was the climate really saved? Sadly, such esoteric questions have become the main game in the topsy-turvy world of Australian climate policy, where rising emissions from the oil and gas industry are ‘offset’ by not chopping down trees. The polite term for the creation of dodgy carbon

To say the very least, the government’s decision to acquire the technology to build nuclear-powered submarines is problematic. For those Australians familiar with the role of submarines in Australia’s defence planning – and there are more people involved in that arcane world than you might think – there is a kind of inevitability in the

In an amazing feat, both leaders shift attention away from their past performances and on to future freedoms to be granted, based on decisions made by the public In the ultimate expression of neoliberal language, prime minister Scott Morrison and New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian are gradually shifting their messaging away from the dangers

In the middle of a pandemic, through the middle of a recession, Australia has undergone a secret wealth explosion. When the national accounts were released on Wednesday, there was a collective sigh of relief. Australia was not on the brink of a double dip recession. However, a much bigger story was missed. While everybody recognised

The same Prime Minister who spruiks ‘technology not taxes’ as a climate change strategy is now championing ‘pharmaceuticals not physical distancing’ in the battle against COVID-19. As always, his slogan is more spin than science, and the phoney distinction will be dangerous to our health, our wealth and our society. Just as virtually every economist agrees that

Things feel like they’ve taken a turn for the apocalyptic lately. Between the fall of Afghanistan, the IPCC report and the exponential growth of Covid cases in NSW, every time you turn on the news things are spinning out of control. Not because there’s no hope, but because of the hubris of some of our

Scott Morrison has an answer for everything and a solution for nothing. Like the neoliberalism of which his party was once so proud, he is all promise and no delivery. His press conferences have long been a masterclass in dictating the terms of debates, dodging accountability and delivering attacks on his rivals. But now that

Scott Morrison’s government loves financial incentives when they’re for CEOs and high-income earners As any parent or child knows, sometimes threats work, and sometimes bribes work. Despite the Morrison government planning to spend $180bn on tax cuts to those earning above $200,000 per year as more incentive to work hard, the Coalition are arguing that

Tax is good. The fact that such a statement will raise eyebrows signals just how feeble Australia’s political debate on revenue has become. Taxes create space in the economy for a thriving and robust public sector. They allow us to educate our children and have a world-class healthcare system. They make a dignified retirement possible

Like a struggling middle manager, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been playing the states against each other to distract from his own poor decisions. The interstate fight for vaccines, funding, and even praise from the Prime Minister, now dominates Australia’s response to COVID. But if COVID rarely breached our quarantine, if there was plenty of

Canberra resident and economist David Richardson has been attending the Budget ‘lock-up’ for the Australia Institute for 13 years. This year, he was banned. The lock-up is where journalists, the opposition and crossbenchers, business groups, non-government organisations and other experts are given access to the details of the Federal Budget ahead of time. However, they

Australia paid a big price for the over reliance on insecure jobs prior to the pandemic. But as our economy recovers, insecure jobs account for about two out of every three new positions. In this commentary, originally published on New Matilda, Economist Dan Nahum explains why that’s a very bad thing – especially in front-line, human services roles. In the context of COVID-19, the effects of insecure work in these sectors, in particular, reverberate across the whole community with dangerous and tragic consequences.

The more a company invests in safely handling waste the more jobs it will create, the less damage it will do to the natural environment and the less harm it will do to the tourism, agriculture and fisheries industries that are built on the image and the reality of Tasmania’s clean environment. While it is

I’m a fifth-generation farmer. My family have run properties alongside the Darling/Baaka River for almost a century. We have watched as the once mighty river system that runs through the heart of our nation has suffered due to government mismanagement and over-extraction upstream. I’ve always said the red dirt of home runs through my veins,

You can’t be a leader if you follow people down the wrong path, which is why, with a heavy heart, I am returning the alumni award for National Leadership the University of Newcastle bestowed on me in 2017. I cannot understand how the council of a university whose motto is “I look ahead” could appoint

The best way to keep premiums down is to prevent climate change and the disasters it causes No matter how much you pay for your home or car insurance, if your property is damaged by mouse plague, nuclear radiation, war or rising sea levels you are almost certainly on your own. If you’re lucky, your

Over time, insecure work has become more prevalent in the Australian economy. Key drivers of worsening job quality include: decades of economic policies which constructed unemployment “buffers”; insufficient paid work available for all who need it; reductions in the level of unemployment benefits to below-poverty levels, collapse in collective bargaining coverage, and failure to regulate insecure work.

The budget shows that the government is not interested in lifting women out of poverty

While most of the world offers incentives to people buying EVs, our government hands out subsidies for utes As a rule of thumb, it’s good economics and good politics to tax the things you want less of and subsidise the things you want more of. That is why the Australian government raises so much tax

The only viable long-term solution to our liquid fuel insecurity is to get off fossil fuels. Instead we are giving them taxpayer handouts When I was a kid, every year in early December we would go to the Geelong oil refinery in Corio. The refinery’s fire engine would cruise around, flash its lights and hand

There are ways to make housing cheaper for those locked out of the market, but little political will to let house prices fall Do you want house prices to be higher or lower? I think they should go down, but relax, few people agree with me. Especially people who already own a home or four,

There has never been a worse time to be a centre-right economist. From the IMF to the World Bank, Australia’s RBA, the US Treasury and now our very own Josh Frydenberg have all abandoned talk of budget and government restraint. For 40 years, the anti-debt and deficit rhetoric held much of centre-right economic orthodoxy together. Of course,