If the Greens and Labor really are concerned about cost of living, they should support the re-indexation of fuel excise in return for a say on how this revenue is spent, writes Richard Denniss for The Drum.

You’d never know it from their behaviour, but the Greens hold 10 seats in the current Senate compared to the Palmer United Party’s three. Their current strategy of voting against virtually everything the Abbott Government announces, including things they actually support, has made them largely irrelevant since the last election. It is hard to think

The Abbott government can’t decide if it wants to tell people how to live their lives or free them to make their own decisions. The Coalition’s education policy, for example, reveals the contradictions between the world views of libertarianism and conservatism that the Coalition claims to represent. For many years, the balancing act has worked.

Divestment By the shrill sound of things, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Australian National University (ANU) had sent its teaching staff on a paid trip to blockade the Pilliga. Jamie Briggs, Minister for Infrastructure, attacked ANU for “damaging” job creation. Christopher Pyne, Minister for Education, called the university “bizarre”. Joe Hockey made similar intonations,

Australia’s richest seven people have more wealth than the bottom 1.73 million households combined. Most people think that’s a problem. Amanda Vanstone, on the other hand, seems to think the bottom 1.73 million should be thankful. “The politics of envy”. This is Amanda Vanstone’s condescending dismissal of concerns over Australia’s rapidly growing gap between its richest and poorest

As the world coal price continues to fall, politicians are asking themselves what the Australian economy will look like by the time the downturn bottoms out.They needn’t look far.Tasmania offers a clear road map for what happens to an economy when the price of a significant export commodity falls.And, most recently, with news the Tasmanian

The Abbott government has proposed a “one stop shop” approach to environmental protection to reduce so-called “green tape” and speed planning. The Commonwealth will no longer have oversight for a wide range of developments and it will be left to state governments to consider the national benefit. No one complains about duplication when it comes

In a democracy, power is the ability to talk crap and get and away with it. And nobody talks more crap than coal companies.  The public think that mining employs far more people than it really does, pays far more tax than it really does, and that it kept Australia out of recession during the

Richard debated Stephen Galilee, the head of the NSW Minerals Council on 7.30 NSW regarding their recent attack on our research into mining subsidies. This material sheds light both on our approach to our research and the disingenuous approach taken by the NSW Minerals Council.

Facts are so last century. The secretary of the NSW Treasury thinks we have a shortage of electricity and we are in danger of an electricity price explosion. The Commonwealth Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane, on the other hand, believes we have an “oversupply” of electricity generation capacity, and that electricity prices are unsustainably low.

The austere measures contained in the proposed Commonwealth budget have been justified by fears that Australia’s public debt is expanding rapidly and dangerously, and must be arrested through a dramatic change in fiscal policy. These fears are misplaced. Australia does not face any present or imminent debt crisis. Australia’s deficit and accumulated debt are both

The Australian Institute says the Minerals Council members – the large, mostly foreign-owned, mining companies – should explain the attacks on The Australia Institute. The Minerals Council has claimed that The Australia Institute is being directed by a political party. This is untrue and defamatory. The Minerals Council should immediately desist from making such claims

For American presidents, the ‘State of the Union’ address provides a once in a year opportunity to set out a plan for the direction the country needs to take and the policies required to get it there. The closest Australian governments get is the annual budget speech, and that is provided by the treasurer, not

Many may have bemoaned the dominance of “economic rationalists”, but I’m beginning to miss them. Sure, they often used simplistic and narrow assumptions to justify a wide range of bad ideas but, compared to the economic irrationalists dominating today’s policy debates, at least they were willing to have a fight with vested interests. The economic

The hypocrisy of Joe Hockey’s call for big business to make the case for his economic reforms is breathtaking. His government’s signature economic ”reform” was to rip up a perfectly good carbon tax. The Prime Minister and Treasurer rightly bet that business groups would sit silently by while this populist policy destruction took place. But

Tony Abbott’s problems with the Senate are only just beginning. The black eye the Palmer United Party gave him on his carbon and mining tax repeal is nothing compared to the body blow he will receive when the major policy initiatives announced in the budget, initiatives that weren’t mentioned during the election campaign, hit the

The Liberals will tell you that they don’t like telling people how to live their lives. Indeed they regularly tell us that individuals, not governments, are best placed to make decisions about what is in their own best interest. But, like successive ALP and Coalition governments, Tony Abbott and his team are big fans for

Just as introducing the carbon tax didn’t really drive the cost of a leg of lamb to $100, removing it isn’t really going to have any noticeable impact on the cost of living. Supermarkets are adamant they didn’t increase prices when the carbon price came in, and they are just as adamant they won’t cut

It’s much easier to solve imaginary problems than real ones, which explains why the current Government is highly concerned about low levels of debt, and relaxed about high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1950 our national debt has fallen from 100 per cent to 14 per cent of GDP. Our greenhouse gas emissions have

Last week was another big week for The Australia Institute. You might have seen that we launched another major research report, Mining the Age of Entitlement, this time on the $17.6 billion worth of  taxpayer support that State governments have given the mining industry. You might have seen Ben Oquist’s name mentioned in relation to

The day after Clive Palmer announced he would oppose the Abbott government’s efforts to abolish the 20 per cent renewable energy target, the price of market-traded renewable energy certificates jumped 27 per cent. The same day shares in Infigen, a company with a big portfolio of renewable energy generation, jumped 16 per cent. The next day, as the

Age of entitlement lives on: Report exposes billions in government handouts to mining State governments are providing billions of dollars in subsidies to the minerals and fossil fuel industries, a new report by The Australia Institute (TAI) has revealed. The report exposes the massive scale of state government assistance, totalling $17.6 billion over a six-year

Charging sick people $7 to go to the doctor will hurt ordinary Australians far more than the carbon price ever did. While, admittedly, the ALP did a poor job of explaining it, the reality was that most Australians received more in compensation than they paid in higher electricity prices. Of course there is no compensation

If Joe Hockey was actually determined to broaden the base of the GST he wouldn’t start by including food, he would start by imposing it on private school fees and private health insurance. Not only would he collect billions in revenue, he would raise it primarily from high-income earners. While the poorest Australians spend a

If Paul Keating’s pet shop galahs are still alive I suspect they are talking about tax reform these days. And no doubt all right-thinking galahs know that tax reform and increasing the GST is one and the same thing. The Commonwealth government will collect $363 billion in taxes this year, with state and local governments

The Government says our education system, our health care, our pensions and our social safety net are unsustainable. The big question I have is why? Every prime minister since Whitlam has managed to maintain the principles of universal health care and education. They have managed to maintain help to our elderly and less fortunate. Why

To paraphrase Winston Churchill — never in the field of budget conflict has so much been extracted by so few at the expense of so many. While the rest of us face a horror budget where we are told to keep calm and carry on, the miners are walking away puffing a cigar and doing the

Treasurer Joe Hockey expects unemployment to rise and business investment to fall. He plans to shed 16,000 public sector jobs into a labour market that Treasury says is softening. Indeed, Treasury states that the proportion of people who are employed or looking for work will continue to fall, “reflecting the expectation that employment growth will

John Howard is the Ronald Reagan of Australian politics. While Reagan is deified by modern Republicans for his fiscal conservatism, in reality he oversaw big increases in government spending. But because he took from the poor to deliver to the rich they love him all the same. 

National Party constituents will be amongst the hardest hit if the federal government adopts recommendations by the Shepherd Commission of Audit, a new analysis by The Australia Institute has found. While the Commission of Audit suggests that people are visiting the doctor too often, it does not take account of regional circumstances. Despite evidence that