Australia is about to have a debate on the role of government in business. That debate is going to be spread over several issues – Qantas’ junk bond status, Holden’s Australian manufacturing decision…
- Professor of Institutional Economics, RMIT University
Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey has kicked off a debate about the foreign ownership of Qantas, flagging a review of the legislation that currently limits foreign holdings. He says the airline is bound by…
People have been shocked to read that a brawl broke out after the football on the weekend. Yet after 33 days of snarling at each other Australians lined up and cast their votes on Saturday with no reports…
Australia has elected a Coalition government. So what will this mean for key policy areas? Our experts take a closer look at what’s in store for business, the economy, the environment, the National Broadband…
Last night on the AFL 360 show Gerard Whateley and Mark Robinson summed up the election: “It’s been a crap election campaign”. I think that’s right - it has been very difficult to maintain interest in…
The Coalition has released the remainder of its costings, one-and-a-half days before the election, outlining a plan to fund an A$11.5 billion infrastructure package by cutting foreign aid growth by $4.5…
Media is a tough business. Everyday starts from scratch and, in the broadcast media every second of the day has to be filled with content. Consumers are fickle - if they don’t like what they hear or see…
Over at the 2013 election media panel Brian McNair asks a good question. “I wondered aloud, …, why the ALP had failed to take the credit for managing Australia through the GFC with relatively few adverse…
Tonight Kevin Rudd made an economic argument as to why he should be re-elected. He said that he saw his job as “doing everything I can do to protect your job”. He then went on to describe the stress and…
Treasurer Chris Bowen didn’t have much ammunition at the National Press Club’s Treasurers’ debate. He could talk about the NBN, Disability Care, education spend, and the like, but not really about the…
British MP and anti-Murdoch campaigner Tom Watson is visiting Australia. Apparently he was so incensed by the Murdoch press coverage of the election that he cleared his schedule, packed his bags, and came…
We’ve all seen it: A mum preparing lunch stares down the camera and asks, “What are you hiding Mr Abbott?”. It is an election advert - we see them every election. It turns out that the mum in the advert…
Who doesn’t remember, with some fondness, Joe Dolce’s song Shaddap You Face? We might cringe now, but that song went to number 1 on the charts all around the world. Last night Tony Abbott told the PM to…
You read it in The Australian first - two weeks ago I indicated a problem with the Coalition’s paid parental leave (PPL) scheme. “The final complication is how this levy will interact with dividend imputation…
Who isn’t happy to see a new-born? Well soon enough, if the polls and betting markets are to be believed, the taxpayer will wince every time a new baby comes into the world. An Abbott government will be…
At election time we’re swamped with polling information - it seems there is a new poll, or variation of a poll, every other day. But is this a poor reflection on our democracy? A lot of people are uncomfortable…
Adrian Beaumont draws our attention to the betting markets and to the controversy that surrounds those markets relating to election outcomes. He suggests the betting markets follow polls and conventional…
In the early noughties former Labor leader Kim Beazley suggested that he’d like to see the unemployment rate with a ‘5’ in front of it. At the time this was considered a huge faux pas. At the time he had…
The election is off the tabloid front pages. That is bad news for the incumbent - as I keep saying Kevin Rudd has to win the campaign to win the election. This view isn’t just anti-Rudd propaganda. To…
Last night Paul Murray made two interesting comments on Sky News. First he said the media were bored with the election. Then he said that Kevin Rudd was losing the election. These two observations are…
The Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook (PEFO) was published this morning. Zareh Ghazarian provided a very readable account of the background to this document. But rather than being an update of the…
Yesterday I published an article here at The Conversation on the GST - specifically on the notion of a 20 per cent GST with offsetting tax cuts elsewhere in the system. Reading through the comments the…
Maybe the leaders’ debate wasn’t so boring after all. It’s Tuesday and ‘Notegate’ is still raging. Troy Bramston has an op-ed in The Australian arguing that Kevin Rudd didn’t cheat. It’s hard to get too…
It looks like the GST will feature prominently in yet another election. The government is running a scare campaign on whether the Coalition will raise the GST after the election. In the meantime Tony Abbott…
The optics are important. Nobody really believes that the leaders’ debates are decisive in changing votes, but they do provide important visual cues to the eventual outcome. As I’ve written before, prime…
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