The Policy Post

  Stop worrying about productivity. We’re doing okay. Australia’s productivity ‘crisis’ is not what it seems. We’re just not measuring it properly.

  Quietly, Albanese springs a $20 billion budget cut on the states. The federal government is slashing its funding for national roads and railways – and shifting the cost to the cash-strapped states.

  Can liberal democracy survive? Yes, actually. The fear and angst in western democracies is palpable. The threat from populists of the right is serious. But the reasons driving all this aren’t the ones you’ve been told.

  Australia as an industrial superpower? Well, yes … The Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia project is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented policies of recent times. It may also be the most important.

  How not to run a government. There’s a reason Tasmania’s hospitals and essential services are the nation’s worst. It’s because the state government underspends its own infrastructure budget by 27%.

We need to talk about Gina and Andrew. Natural resources are owned by the people of Australia, but mining companies don’t like paying us for the resources they take out of the ground. And when they look like having to pay more, their response is swift and brutal .

  The huge cost of inequality. The two richest people have as much wealth as the bottom 5.5 million. The tax system is one of the world’s least progressive. Essential services are failing. This is Australia.

  Defusing the population bomb. Can global economies just keep growing forever? Or will we finally reach the ultimate limits of growth – with disastrous consequences for humanity?

The increasingly unacceptable faces of capitalism. The corporate world has seldom been held in more contempt than right now. It goes far beyond Qantas and PWC to strike at the heart of the way global business functions.

What’s the Intergenerational Report really for? Projecting 40 years ahead is nonsense. The Intergenerational Reports have quite a different purpose – to justify what the government has already decided to do.

  Labor has one last chance to save public hospitals. But will they? Only the federal government has the capacity to put the hospital system back together. And a disaster unfolding in one state reveals what is already beginning in all the others.

  Neoliberalism is dead, killed by the GFC. A new, fairer era has begun. As Australia swings dramatically away from trickle-down economics, the rich are getting a smaller slice of the pie. Those in the middle are doing better – but not, yet, those right at the bottom.

  It was the biggest health reform since Medicare. It didn’t work. In 2011, Julia Gillard introduced a new funding system to fix Australia’s troubled public hospitals. So why did it fail so badly?

  Artificial intelligence will upend our economy. We’re utterly unprepared.   The AI revolution promises a vastly more efficient economy. But who pays the price of massive job losses, soaring inequality and social dislocation?

  Which state has the worst housing crisis? The crisis is everywhere – and it’s the result of decades of deliberate neglect and failed ideology. This analysis reveals how each state rates, from the least-bad to the worst.

  That very silly stadium in Hobart. The saga of a billion-dollar football stadium encompasses tragedy and farce – and reveals familiar folly at the core of government policy-making.

  The debt-and-deficit scare is back, wearing Labor’s colours. It’s still a dangerous lie.   Despite what we’re told, government debt is actually benign. ‘Budget repair’ is not.

  Early childhood: the neglected frontier that impacts almost everything. Education for our youngest kids is the key to an optimal future – for them and for the country. So why does Australia do it so badly? And what is being lost?

  Quietly, Chalmers moves on WA’s dodgy GST deal. Nobody is going to be happy. A rather large time-bomb, bequeathed to Jim Chalmers by the previous government, is set to explode in just over three years from now.

  Is Labor serious about health? Doesn’t look like it. Mark Butler’s Medicare “Taskforce” isn’t action on health reform. It’s a substitute for action.