The length of the working day and the challenges of work–life balance are pressing issues for many Australians, as well as lively matters of public controversy. While the winning of the eight-hour day is celebrated as a past industrial achievement, contemporary discussions of working hours often overlook its rich history.

Tracing 150 years of campaigns for rights and for the fair distribution of productivity gains, historian Sean Scalmer shows how these movements successfully reduced the length of the standard working week from 60 to 38 hours per week, and how economic, social and political shifts since the early 1980s have stalled this long-term progress. Today, industrial laws provide inadequate protection for excessive hours, and Australian women increasingly shoulder long hours of paid work with the bulk of unpaid domestic labour. This has produced a social crisis for all Australians, but is yet to inspire adequate political action.

As debate over our working lives intensifies amid ongoing political, economic and technological challenges, Scalmer’s labour of love on the history of work and play affords us a way to understand the past so we can win back our time—collectively.

When I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1980s, a Chinese restaurant in town had its walls covered with photos of Marines and always gave a discount to any Marine who walked through its doors. The story behind the restaurant is remarkable.

It was founded by an immigrant who, as an impoverished child in China at the end of World War II, had been befriended by a company of Marines. They essentially “adopted” him and gave him his own bunk in a barracks and a Marine uniform, taught him English and basic drills, and sent him to a Christian religious school in China, which they paid for. When the Marines left when the Communists took over, “Charlie Two Shoes” as the Marines called him (“two shoes” being their best approximation of Tsui, his last name) was persecuted by the Communist government due to his friendship with the Americans. The government imprisoned him for years and then sentenced him to house arrest upon his release.

After a series of challenges, Charlie was miraculously able to get in touch with his old Marine buddies. As China was opening up in 1983, they arranged for him to immigrate to America, where he settled in North Carolina, started a Chinese restaurant, and eventually became a U.S. citizen. His various children generally thrived in America. Some ran the restaurant while others became doctors and pharmacists. In 2013, Charlie became the 18th honorary United States Marine. That same year, he accompanied some of his old Marine buddies on a trip back to China, his first visit since leaving 30 years prior.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Senior Economist Matt Grudnoff joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the Government’s economic roundtable, why taxing wealth more effectively would make Australians better off, and why removing as-yet-unnamed ‘red tape’ isn’t going to fix productivity.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.

You can listen to Dollars & Sense each week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Guest: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

The latest source of outrage within the Pentagon establishment is the rightful end of Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims’s career, which has drawn loud protests from both active-duty and retired officers. Secretary Hegseth’s decision not to promote Sims to the rank of general has been portrayed as evidence of creeping politicization in the military. The argument advanced by critics, and repeated in opinion essays and New York Times leaks, is that because military officers swear an oath to the Constitution, they should be protected from any decision involving their status or rank that is political in nature.

Popularized by leaders such as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, this interpretation distorts the true meaning of the oath all commissioned officers take. While the oath binds officers to uphold the Constitution, it also carries a persistent obligation to obey lawful orders from civilian leadership. That principle, which is rooted in centuries of American civil-military tradition, is what ensures that the military remains under the control of elected officials rather than becoming a self-governing class.

Officers take the following oath when they are first commissioned, and at each successive promotion:

August 21, 1:00 pm UCT Live Streamed through Zoom


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South Feminist Futures’ Political Economy Teach-in 26 #: Debt as a form of government”

In the age of Trump, our nation lives under the banner of America First. In domestic policy, this means securing our border, deporting those who are in the country illegally, and reestablishing law and order in our cities, among other key goals. But what does America First mean for the world beyond America? To answer that question, we must look back centuries.

The onset of the American Revolution was not purely a local affair. The war eventually became a global conflagration, with battlefields stretching from the Caribbean to India. But the enduring contest was ideological, not geopolitical. Non-American lovers of liberty—Paine, Pulaski, Lafayette, Von Steuben, and Salomon for starters—from an array of nations arrived to fight for the American cause, and sometimes became Americans themselves. They understood that fighting for freedom here meant rekindling hope for their own countries.

Australia Institute research has found that a fund, paid for by big polluters responsible for climate change, would save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year.

The research found that a levy of $30 per tonne of carbon pollution caused by coal, oil and gas production would have raised $44 billion this year alone.

The South Australian and federal governments have, so far, pledged $28 million of taxpayers’ money in response to the algal bloom, which is being driven by rising sea temperatures due to climate change.

It’s having a devastating impact on sea life, tourism, fishing, and other marine industries.

“As it stands, South Australian communities, families and business owners are being left to foot the bill for this crisis, and that simply isn’t good enough,” said Noah Schultz-Byard, a South Australia-based Director at The Australia Institute.

“State and federal governments have been caught flat-footed in their response to this algal bloom tragedy.

“If the government had a National Climate Disaster Fund at the ready, so that they could quickly roll out the level of support that is actually needed in these communities, it would be a very different story.

“Currently, regular Australians are paying for climate-related disasters through higher taxes, increased insurance premiums, and lost income.

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis joins Angus Blackman to discuss the fallout from Trump’s meeting with Putin, the Australian government’s commitment to recognising Palestinian statehood, and the not-super-encouraging prospects for American democracy as Trump sics the National Guard on Washington, D.C.

This episode was recorded on Monday 18 August.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @angusrb

Show notes: 

Last month, Marco Rubio’s State Department executed a sweeping restructuring plan to implement an America First foreign policy. Although many offices were eliminated or combined, a few new ones were created. Among them is the Office of Natural Rights.

Its name has provoked predictable harrumphing from establishment commentators who feel “human rights” is the only acceptable term of art for diplomacy. While they are right that the terminology is significant, they are blind to the vital reality the State Department has recognized: without human nature there are no human rights. If our rights are not grounded in a shared nature, they are founded simply on the will of the government. If the government grants us more rights at one moment, it may arbitrarily retract them at the next.

The Trump Administration has observed this phenomenon with great alarm. JD Vance argued that this is Europe’s greatest threat in his now-famous Munich speech, and the State Department weighed in with an official article shortly thereafter. U.S. officials are rightly concerned about natural rights abroad, not because they are Republicans, but because they are Americans. The recognition of natural rights is the foundation of our own government.

But will the Albanese government spend the next three years using its thumping majority to lead bold reforms or deliver damp squib solutions?

Next week’s productivity roundtable will reveal which path the Prime Minister intends to tread, and so far, it looks like all it’s set to do is weaken environment laws and delay big tax reforms until after the next election.

Between the Treasury advice leaked to the ABC and the Prime Minister ruling out any major tax reforms before the next election, the government poured a bucket of cold water on any real excitement building for the productivity roundtable.

And the productivity roundtable has a big job ahead of it. Australia doesn’t just have a productivity problem, it has a revenue problem.

Australia is one of the lowest-taxing countries in the developed world. In fact, if Australia collected the OECD average in tax – not the highest amount, just the average – the Commonwealth would have had an extra $140 billion in revenue in 2023-24.

The elephant in the room is that it is business that has the biggest influence on productivity. Certainly, it has a much bigger impact than workers, who typically get the blame when things go wrong.

The factor that most shapes how productive workers are, we must remember, is the technology they work with. It is management that is responsible for the decisions about what technology a business introduces, and how. Workers often do not have much of a say.

It is not workers who make the decisions about how much money is available for investment. It is not workers who make the decision about which particular technologies to buy, install and use. It is not workers who decide how much money should be allocated to the training of workers to use the new technology, or how those workers should be deployed. It is management.

Sure, there is lots of evidence that, when workers have a say at work, productivity is higher. But managers often don’t give them a chance to have more than a token say, if they have any say at all. Any attempts by governments to legislate that workers decide or influence decisions on those matters are opposed by business bodies in Australia.

Previous Australia Institute analysis shows the gas policy mess created by Australian governments allowing virtually unlimited exports of gas from eastern Australia has led to a tripling of gas prices and doubling of wholesale electricity prices.

The analysis shows that incremental and technocratic attempts to fix the problems have failed, and that the ACTU proposal would solve these problems. It would:

• Increase domestic gas supply by providing a strong incentive for gas companies to supply uncontracted gas to Australian customers rather than selling it on the global spot market.
• Reduce domestic gas prices by significantly increasing the supply of gas to the domestic market.

Importantly, unlike the other technocratic policies, the ACTU proposal could not easily be gamed by the gas industry, which has run rings around the government for decades.

Billions of dollars in tax breaks that push up house prices and lock people out of a home must be wound back to tackle the housing crisis and productivity, a group of housing sector advocates, economists, and union leaders have urged the government.

In a letter to the Prime Minister and Treasurer, the group has called for negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount to be on the table at this week’s economic reform roundtable, with savings to be invested in building public and community housing.

The letter has been signed by Everybody’s Home national spokesperson Maiy Azize, ACOSS CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie AO, The Australia Institute Chief Economist Dr Greg Jericho, and ACTU Secretary Sally McManus.

Negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are locking Australians out of secure, affordable homes. Reforming these would:

• Reduce inequality and rebalance the housing market
• Redirect billions into building new public and community housing
• Improve productivity by diverting capital to more productive uses.

Everybody’s Home national spokesperson Maiy Azize said: “Every year, billions of taxpayer dollars are handed to property investors through negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, with everyday Australians paying the price.

World-renowned climate analyst and Senior Research Fellow at The Australia Institute, Ketan Joshi, has crunched the numbers and found that, despite claims of a shortage or crisis, Victoria is, in fact, a net exporter of gas.

Data from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water clearly shows that gas consumption has been declining in Victoria for years, which has led to an oversupply. It’s being driven by soaring gas prices (caused by exports) and legislation forcing Victorians to electrify their homes at a faster rate than any other state.

“Victoria exports way more gas than it consumes,” said Ketan Joshi, Senior Research Fellow at The Australia Institute.

“The Australia Institute recently produced a video of a massive gas drilling rig near the iconic 12 Apostles. Projects like this simply don’t make sense. They are unnecessary.

“Despite all the breathless claims of a gas shortage in Victoria, federal government data shows the true picture, that there is an oversupply.

“To top it off, demand for gas in Victoria is at its lowest level in a generation – and falling – as high prices and regulations force people to electrify their homes.

“The last time gas use was this low in Victoria, Dirty Dancing was in the cinema and Rick Astley cassette tapes were selling like hot cakes.”

Canberra is in the grip of Abundance fever, a virus that threatens to overwhelm public policy with a diagnosis of overregulation.

For those afflicted, the treatment is to maintain the status quo, but with the sheen of progressivism.

The Abundance agenda is being presented as a panacea for all of America’s problems, and therefore also Australia’s problems. It’s shaping next week’s productivity summit, as policy wonks, institutional heads, journalists and most government MPs hold up the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book as the new bible.

In America, the authors have been invited to speak at Democratic retreats as the answer to their woes, even as polling, the New York mayoral primary and the exasperated hair-pulling of millions of Americans say they’d much prefer Bernie Sanders’ socialism. But why change when you can do more of the same and call it abundance?

There are some thoughtful arguments in the book, but the crux of it boils down to “everything would be just fantastic and problem-free if we just cut the red tape that was holding back all that abundance we could be throwing around”.

The report – Three Ways Australia Can Tax Wealth Better –  comes on the eve of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Economic Reform Roundtable, which recognises the growing need to raise more tax revenue to pay for things like health services, schools, housing, the NDIS, defence, and many, many more essential public services.

Key findings:

• A 2% wealth tax on people worth more than $5 million (excluding the family home and superannuation) would raise $41 billion per year.
• The reintroduction of an inheritance tax (which operated in various forms at a state and federal level in the 1960s and 70s) would not only reduce intergenerational inequality, it would raise $10 billion per year.
• And the government would raise an extra $19 billion a year if it scrapped the capital gains tax discount, which would have the double benefit of making property more affordable for those currently locked out of the market.

“Australia is a low-tax country that does not do a good job of taxing wealth. It is one of the few developed economies in the world which has neither a wealth tax nor an inheritance tax,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.

“Correcting this would raise huge amounts of extra revenue for essential services and ease growing inequality in Australia.

Recently, we published a video showing a huge new gas drilling rig in Victoria, within sight of the 12 Apostles – a globally recognised tourist hotspot. As Dr Emma Shortis says in the video:

“We are putting our coastlines at risk to extract gas we don’t even need. Australia already produces way more gas than we use….Australia doesn’t have a gas shortage. We have a gas export problem”

Despite the undeniable numbers here, a ‘gas shortage’ is still put forward as one of the most common rationalisations for building massive new gas exploration and extraction sites, like the monster off Victoria’s coast.

A little-known data set buried in Australia’s government energy accounts lays it out quite nicely, and quite dramatically.

You may have seen something like this before in our charts, like here. But we’ve discovered recently that you can also zoom down into the state level, and see which regions of Australia have the most significant oversupply problem for fossil gas.

On Saturday afternoon, I began asking the Mastodon community to support Free DC Project, the organization spearheading the fight for DC’s rights to govern itself and to be free from Trump’s authoritarian martial occupation. As of this writing, we have already raised over $2000. Join the campaign here.

The fight to gain and protect Home Rule in the District of Columbia, and for the District's statehood, has a long history. But the fight for DC’s political autonomy connects to a bigger role the nation's capital has played for centuries in the great American struggle to realize the promise of the Declaration of Independence.