Closing Opportunities, Not Loopholes
A review of the proposed new ‘Closing Loopholes’ bill and its laws regarding labour hire, casual employment, and the gig …
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Bungles, Blowouts and Boondoggles: why Australia’s infrastructure projects cost more than they should
Introduction A large amount of taxpayers’ money, state and federal, is expended on large scale infrastructure that is intended to …
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Bracket creep hits young Australians hardest
Bracket creep chips away at living standards, especially those of younger generations, a new Issue Analysis by Centre for Independent …
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Debunking Degrowth
Introduction Increasingly there are calls for degrowth, not just to abandon the pursuit of economic growth, but to shrink economies. …
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The Rental Crisis. Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Committee
Rents are too high. This leads to homelessness, rental stress, long commutes, overcrowding, and a host of other social problems. …
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A Future Without Future Funds
In 1984, Milton Friedman reminded us that “there is nothing so permanent as a temporary Government program”. And so it …
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Rental and Housing Affordability. Submission to the Victorian Legislative Council’s Legal and Social Issues Committee
We need to relax zoning restrictions to allow more housing. At a society level, this requires more acceptance of higher …
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Superannuation tax: Why the total balance threshold should be shelved
Introduction This paper is a further developed version of the author’s submission to the Treasury consultation on the federal government’s …
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Cohort of losers: generational burden of government Covid response
Executive Summary Australia’s young people deserve to have their interests considered in Australian policymaking. In the Covid era, many policies …
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A new pathway to prosperity
Tom Switzer’s chapter contribution, “A new pathway to prosperity,” in Harry Stutchbury’s (edited) Markets & Prosperity (Connor Court publishing, 2023), …
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Superannuation is pointless if it isn’t boosting living standards
The government seems to be moving closer to a policy of using superannuation savings to partially pay for the forthcoming …
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Loudest ‘voice’ in all interest groups is for more government spending
Regardless of whether you think the Voice has any merit, there is surely some merit in the idea that government …
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Why we should welcome migrant workers
For a nation with such a high percentage of migrants, Australia’s relationship with migration remains very fraught. Of course, we …
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First big policy test for NSW Labor is budget repair
The NSW budget on September 19 will be the first big policy test of the state’s new Labor government. The …
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How Australia learnt the wrong lessons from the GFC
It came as a nasty surprise to almost everyone 15 years ago this Friday, when Lehman Brothers failed and the …
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Degrowth proponents wrong to claim capitalism causes climate change
Degrowth push to abandon capitalism, growth and innovation in the name of ecological purity would condemn us all to poverty. …
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Opportunity abounds in IGR. Can Chalmers and political class grasp it?
In a political world obsessed with the ultra-short term, the 2023 Intergenerational Report (IGR) launched this week is a somewhat …
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‘Greedflation’ myth hides real causes of inflation
With much fanfare this week, the ACTU initiated an “Inquiry into price gouging and unfair pricing practices” to be chaired …
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Labor shows hypocrisy in partisan political appointments
Many would be surprised at the coverage — and controversy — provoked by the appointment of a former Labor Chief …
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The Coalition can create generational voting change by tackling housing affordability
Australia’s centre-right political movement is in trouble. This may have seemed obvious from the fact that the Coalition lost elections …
Frequently Asked Questions
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) structure makes mistakes likely. It concentrates responsibility on one fallible individual, the Governor, answerable to a Board of non-experts, with little requirement to explain or defend decisions in detail. Arguments are subject to little scrutiny, either internally or externally. More fundamentally, the RBA has a culture that places a low priority on getting the answers right. As a result, mistakes are frequent, persistent and costly. Among several examples, the RBA recently placed higher priority on stabilising household debt than on its conventional goals of unemployment and inflation. Previously, it targeted the current account deficit. Read more ...
Inflation is rising around the world, the sting in the tail of the pandemic economic stimulus packages unleashed by governments in 2020. The narrative thus far is that this inflation spike is transitory, even if a little more persistent than first thought. It is expected to moderate as consumer price pressures ease and markets rebalance after the large positive demand shock and surge in consumer spending of the past 18 months. Read more ...