After escaping mainland China in the bottom of a fishing boat at the age of 12, Jimmy Lai went on to become one of the most influential people in Hong Kong. But now the founder of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy newspaper is facing the possibility of life in prison under China’s repressive national security law. On this episode of Follow the Money, Sebastien Lai and Jennifer Robinson, legal counsel to Julian Assange, join Ebony Bennett to discuss the fight to free Mr Lai and the global threats to freedom of the press.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 2 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
When those changes were passed with almost no scrutiny or debate, the Australia Institute’s National Integrity Committee of retired judges said that the changes raised a real concern that integrity had been set back considerably in South Australia.
“The South Australian Government cannot carry on with a business-as-usual approach when integrity has been so clearly compromised in the state,” said Bill Browne, Director of the Australia Institute’s Democracy & Accountability Program.
“Commissioner Vanstone has been unequivocal in her defence of the role of the anti-corruption commission in South Australia.
“That these complex reforms were rushed through the Parliament with almost no scrutiny or debate raised serious concerns for transparency in South Australia. Now, with the resignation of the Commissioner, South Australia has an opportunity to revisit these drastic changes and investigate the troubling impacts with the scrutiny they deserve.”
Seen in this context, the growth in minor party and independent representation is just the latest example of power sharing.
The likelihood of shared power in the Commonwealth parliament has increased as the major party vote has declined significantly since the end of World War 2, and the 2022 election marked the lowest combined vote for the two largest parties since the Great Depression. It also yielded the largest House of Representatives crossbench ever.
Despite occasional fearmongering about ‘hung’ parliaments, minority government and “coalitions of chaos”, the reality is that power sharing governments are common in Australia. Governments often need to secure the support of other parliamentarians, whether through the formal, albeit secret, coalition agreements between the Liberal and National parties or various arrangements with independents and minor party MPs.
Independents and minor parties upend the old certainties of political life. Predictive tools like the Mackerras pendulum do not capture contests outside of the two major parties, and
what is a “safe” or “marginal” seat seems to be inverted for independents and crossbenchers.
This necessitates a more mature and nuanced analysis of both electoral outcomes and the contribution of crossbenchers and their roles, just as the electoral success of the Labor Party
in the 1890s and 1900s forced the political class to reckon with the political labour movement. Power sharing has always been a feature of parliamentary democracy, but the details are always changing.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis speaks to Allan Behm, Director of the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs program, about the US Supreme Court and his new book, The Odd Couple: the Australia-America relationship.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 5 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Guest: Allan Behm, Director, International & Security Affairs program, the Australia Institute // @Mirandaprorsus
Host: Emma Shortis, Senior Research for International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @EmmaShortis
Too often other Australian governments kowtow to the gas and coal industry. But, heading into a tough state election, Queensland Premier Steven Miles is bucking the trend.
The Queensland Government’s decision to boost coal royalties and stand up to the inevitable industry scare campaign has already paid off big time for Queenslanders.
In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent commodity prices soaring and the Queensland Labor government changed its royalty scheme so a greater portion of the windfall was paid to the community. The Australia Institute estimates that the revised policy raised $4.3 billion in revenue in 2022-23.
This money, that would otherwise have gone to multinational shareholders, is mainly being spent on better public services. All Queenslanders will receive a $1,000 rebate on their power bills (on top of the $300 rebate the Commonwealth is giving) and, for the next six months, everyone in South East Queensland will enjoy a reduction of public transport fares to just 50 cents.
It has also pledged to pour $1 billion over five years into a health strategy for women and girls aimed at achieving gender equality. This will include Australia’s first publicly funded endometriosis and pelvic pain clinic, expanded access to IVF, and free period products in all state schools.
We’re the 12th largest economy in the world. We’re the third largest exporter of fossil fuels. We’re a country that’s also a continent.
But too often, we act small.
Some might argue that there’s not a great deal Australia can do about issues beyond our borders. But Australia matters.
Here at the Australia Institute, we have a 30-year track record of bringing big ideas and big thinkers into Australia’s public policy debate to help Australia think big.
That’s why we’re delighted to be hosting Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz for his ‘Economics and the Good Society’ national speaking tour, as part of our 30th anniversary celebrations.
It’s also why I was so proud this week to launch The Odd Couple: the Australia-America relationship, a new book by our International & Security Affairs Director, Allan Behm.
America needs a friend, not a flunkey, and Australia may become its best ally.
Join International & Security Affairs Director Allan Behm on a tour for his book ‘The Odd Couple: The Australia-America Relationship’
Would the divestiture powers proposed by the Federal Opposition and supported by the Greens help keep inflation down? And what impact will the new and improved stage three tax cuts have in the economy? On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Australia Institute Senior Economist Matt Grudnoff talks about supermarket divestiture and the changes brought in with the new financial year.
Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @MattGrudnoff
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @ElinorJ_L
Theme music: Blue Dot Sessions
We’d love to hear your feedback on this series, so send in your questions, comments or suggestions for future episodes to podcasts@australiainstitute.org.au.
Unsurprisingly, the RBA’s call to keep rates unchanged was met by some in the media and conservative commentariat as a failure to be tough. Some would prefer the RBA to be less concerned about the risk of a recession or rising unemployment than getting inflation from 3.6% to below 3%.
Such views are much easier to make when your own job is safe and your income is very comfortable.
It is worth remembering that in the past two years the share of household income spent on mortgage repayments has risen by the amount it did in five years during the mining boom, and by more than occurred in the run-up to the 1990s recession:
Oil and gas extraction in South Australia employs just 833 people, 0.1% of SA jobs. Petroleum royalties make up 0.4% of the state budget. On oil and gas production worth $1.7 billion in 2021-22, the industry paid at most $99 million in federal tax, of which Santos paid zero.
Despite this, the industry has significant influence in the state.
Will the government’s political finance reforms keep vested interests out of politics or ensure the major parties dominate Australia’s political landscape? Could South Australia’s proposed political donations ban become a model for the rest of the country? And what home-grown innovations have insulated Australia from some of the democratic backsliding seen in the United States? On this episode of Follow the Money, the Australia Institute’s Democracy & Accountability Director Bill Browne joins Ebony Bennett to discuss political finance reform.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 2 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Guest: Bill Browne, Director, Democracy & Accountability program, the Australia Institute // @Browne90
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebony_bennett
The Coalition’s proposed divestiture powers to break up major hardware and grocery retailers could help keep inflation down and assist with cost-of-living pressures.
“The introduction of divestiture laws is a sensible tool to stop large companies like Woolworths and Coles misusing their market power. It would be good for prices at the checkout and help keep inflation down,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at the Australia Institute.
“The Australian economy has become less competitive over the last few decades and these laws would go some way to addressing that structural imbalance.
“Our current competition laws have few ways of making an already uncompetitive industry more competitive.
“Divestiture powers will enable the government to break up large businesses abusing their market power and force them to compete, leading to lower prices and better service for consumers.
“In other economies, including the UK and the US, broad ranging divestiture powers are already in place. If adopted in Australia, these new powers would just bring us into line with other OECD countries.”
What does the release of Julian Assange reveal about the Australia-US relationship? And is Trump’s authoritarian behaviour really an outlier in American political history?
On the first episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis reflects on the first presidential debate performance and the release of Julian Assange, before former BBC United States correspondent Nick Bryant joins the show to discuss the country’s long history of authoritarianism.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 25 June and Monday 1 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
An interconnected economic reality Part 1: Rethinking the economics curriculum Dennis Venter This is the first part of an article by Dennis Venter describing an…
Advantages and applications of sodium-ion batteries Editor The following item has been extracted from a Wikipedia entry entitled Sodium-ion battery. The Na-ion batteries possess some…
The changes coming into effect from today – under the federal government’s Closing Loopholes Act – guarantee the rights of volunteer union delegates to represent workers and paid training leave.
The Centre for Future Work’s Carmichael Centre analysis found employees wanted their union to cooperate with employers and vice versa, and that giving workplace delegates a greater voice made this more likely.
“Those who claim that guaranteeing the rights of union delegates must lead to greater conflict are dead wrong,” said Professor David Peetz, research fellow and author of Employee voice and new rights for workplace union delegates.
“Workers expect their union and employer to cooperate effectively to solve problems, and reach agreements over pay and conditions, in both parties’ mutual interests.
“Well trained delegates are best-placed to represent workers. They don’t acquiesce but they do cooperate. After all, they know it’s in workers’ interests for workplace productivity to rise.”
The paper found this could help boost productivity, which on average was at least as high in unionised as in non-union workplaces. Strong representation and consultation made workers less resistant to productivity-boosting technology including artificial intelligence.
In the past, many volunteer union delegates have been obstructed from properly doing their job to allow employees’ voices to be heard in the workplace. Now, their rights will be guaranteed.
Labour productivity and real wages: an update Wayne McMillan Australian workers have experienced a considerable decline in real wages and overall productivity, due to a…
Some employers have actively placed barriers in the way of volunteer union delegates and paid officials. One study in the early 2000s found that 23% of delegates found management
hostile, while 22% of delegates reported that management opposition to their role as a delegate had become more intense over the previous two years. Examples from various case studies, including court and industrial cases, illustrate some of the ways in which that minority of employers from workplaces with delegates expressed their hostility towards unionism and their opposition to delegates, including by placing barriers in the way of workplace union activists and delegates.
The new regime of workplace delegates’ rights is very likely, overall, to increase the voice of employees, and thereby have positive consequences, over the long run, for pay and conditions, union membership, workplace cooperation, grievance resolution and productivity. However, the effects of new rights for paid union training leave depend very much on union responses, in particular on their subsequent reliance on classroom versus informal training and the ‘follow up’ of classroom education.
The latest inflation figures that saw annual inflation rise from 3.6% to 4.0% in May have caused some economists and commentators to argue the Reserve Bank needs to raise interest rates. However new data from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on enterprise agreements shows yet again that wage growth and increased income are not fueling inflation and thus an interest rate rise would do more harm than good.
In the first three months of this year, 1,022 enterprise agreements were approved by the Fair Work Commissions covering some 365,000 employees. Across all these employees the average annual wage growth of the agreements was 3.9%, down from 4.4% in the last three months of 2023.
Among private sector workers, the average agreed annual wage rise fell from 3.9% to 3.6% – a rate in line with the 3.6% annual inflation in the first three months of 2024.
The figures demonstrate yet again that wage growth has not driven inflation. Indeed a rate of 3.6% would see workers’ real wage fall after taxation and interaction with entitlements.
The Federal Government has no official definition or measure for tracking and reporting on national poverty levels.
Key findings:
Four in five Australians (83%) want the Federal Government to regularly measure and report on poverty rates in Australia.
An overwhelming majority of Australians (81%) agree that income support payments should be set at a rate that does not cause any child to live in poverty.
Australians are highly concerned that Australia has a high child poverty rate compared to other developed countries (69%), and about the effects of this on health and lifespan (83%) as well as education and employment (85%).
One in six Australian children (about 761,000 children) live in poverty according to research from ACOSS and UNSW.
The OECD finds that Australia’s youth poverty rate is the 13th-highest among member nations, surpassing the UK, Germany and Canada.
“There is no excuse for a country as rich as Australia to have one in six children growing up in poverty,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at the Australia Institute.
“Adopting an official definition of poverty in line with the OECD or European Union – either half or 60 per cent of median income – would provide important information to inform government policy and would allow public oversight to keep elected representatives accountable.
Poverty has long-lasting and insidious impacts on a child’s health and well-being and can affect their schooling and employment opportunities throughout their entire lifetime. Given that the low rate of income support payments keeps many families in poverty, reducing child poverty is not inherently complicated. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian Government managed to lift 650,000 Australians, including children, out of poverty overnight by supplementing existing income support payments.
The Australia Institute recently conducted polling to determine community attitudes towards child poverty in Australia. This polling found that respondents were overwhelmingly supportive of government measures to reduce child poverty, including:
With emissions reduction efforts stalled and energy bills spiking, why is Australia’s political class talking about nuclear plants that wouldn’t be ready for decades? On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg Jericho addresses the Coalition’s nuclear ‘nothingburger’ and what’s happening in Australia’s decarbonisation process.
Greg Jericho is Chief Economist at the Australia Institute and the Centre for Future Work and popular columnist of Grogonomics with Guardian Australia. Each week on Dollars & Sense, Greg dives into the latest economic figures to explain what they can tell us about what’s happening in the economy, how it will impact you and where things are headed.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @GrogsGamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @ElinorJ_L
Viral V. Acharya, Nicola Cetorelli, and Bruce Tuckman
Traditional approaches to financial sector regulation view banks and nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) as substitutes, one inside and the other outside the perimeter of prudential regulation, with the growth of one implying the shrinking of the other. In this post, we argue instead that banks and NBFIs are better described as intimately interconnected, with NBFIs being especially dependent on banks both for term loans and lines of credit.
One of the core responsibilities of central banks is to act as “lender of last resort” to the financial system. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has been operating as a lender of last resort through its “discount window” (DW) for more than a century. Historically, however, the DW has been plagued by stigma—banks’ reluctance to use the DW, even for benign reasons, out of concerns that it could be interpreted as a sign of financial weakness. In this post, we report on new research showing that once a DW facility is stigmatized, removing that stigma is difficult.
Patrick Douglass, Linda S. Goldberg, and Oliver Z. Hannaoui
Editor’s note: Since this post was first published, the note on the final chart has been corrected to reflect that, as depicted, gold shares are calculated based on national valuation (June 3, 2024, 9:00 am), and the text has been edited to clarify where the analysis refers to the authors’ sample (June 12, 2024, 1:29 pm).
Firms’ access to credit is a crucial determinant of their investment, employment, and overall growth decisions. While we usually think of their ability to borrow as determined by aggregate credit conditions, in reality firms have a number of markets where they can borrow, and conditions can vary across those markets. In this post, we investigate how the composition of debt instruments on U.S. firms’ balance sheets has evolved over the last twenty years.
Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Joelle Scally, Wilbert van der Klaauw, and Crystal Wang
Editor’s note: Since this post was first published, the aggregate credit card utilization rate cited in the second paragraph has been corrected. (May 14, 12:05pm). The percentage of Gen Z credit card users who are “maxed-out” has been corrected in the text and now matches the table. (May 15, 2024, 4:00 pm)
A recent Liberty Street Economicspost discussed who is borrowing and lending in the federal funds (fed funds) market. This post explores activity in two other markets for short-term bank liabilities that are often perceived as close substitutes for fed funds—the markets for Eurodollars and “selected deposits.”
