Katy's InTray

• This inquiry is about finding ways to put the people who use human services at the heart of service provision. This matters because everyone will use human services in their lifetime and change is needed to enable people to have a stronger voice in shaping the services they receive, and who provides them.
• In the study report for this inquiry, the Commission identified six services for which the introduction of greater user choice, competition and contestability would improve outcomes for the people who receive them. These services are: end-of-life care services; social housing; family and community services; services in remote Indigenous communities; patient choice over referred health services; and public dental services. This final inquiry report sets out tailored reforms for those six services. There is no one-size-fits-all competition solution.
• Users should have choice over the human services they access and who provides them, unless there are sound reasons otherwise. Choice empowers users of human services to have greater control over their lives and generates incentives for providers to be more responsive to their needs.
  • Competition and contestability are means to this end and should only be pursued when they improve the effectiveness of service provision.
• A stronger focus on users, better service planning and improved coordination across services and levels of government is needed. Governments should focus on the capabilities and attributes of service providers when designing service arrangements and selecting providers — not simply the form of an organisation.
• Each year, tens of thousands of people who are approaching the end of life are cared for and die in a place that does not fully reflect their choices or meet their needs. Reforms are needed to significantly expand community-based palliative care services and to improve the standard of end-of-life care in residential aged care facilities.
• The social housing system is broken. A single system of financial assistance that is portable across rental markets for private and social housing should be established. This would provide people with more choice over the home they live in and improve equity. Tenancy support services should also be portable across private and social housing.
• Family and community services are not effective at meeting the needs of people experiencing hardship. Practical changes to system planning, provider selection, and contract management would sharpen focus on improving outcomes for people who use these services.
• Current approaches to commissioning human services in remote Indigenous communities are not working. Governments should improve commissioning arrangements and should be more responsive to local needs. This would make services more effective and would lay the foundation for more place-based approaches in the future.
• Patients should have greater choice over which healthcare provider they go to when given a referral or diagnostic request by their general practitioner. A simple legislative change would help. More patient choice would empower patients to choose options that better match their preferences. Public information is needed to support choice and encourage self-improvement by providers.
• Public dental patients have little choice in who provides their care and most services are focused on urgent needs. Long-term reform is needed to introduce a consumer-directed care scheme. This would enhance patient choice and promote a greater focus on preventive care.

• Greater competition, contestability and informed user choice could improve outcomes in many, but not all, human services.
• The Commission has prioritised six areas where outcomes could be improved both for people who use human services, and the community as a whole. Reform could offer the greatest improvements in outcomes for people who use:
  • social housing
  • public hospitals
  • end-of-life care services
  • public dental services
  • services in remote Indigenous communities
  • government-commissioned family and community services.
• Well-designed reform, underpinned by strong government stewardship, could improve the quality of services, increase access to services, and help people have a greater say over the services they use and who provides them.
• Introducing greater competition, contestability and informed user choice can improve the effectiveness of human services.
  • Informed user choice puts users at the heart of service delivery and recognises that, in general, the service user is best placed to make decisions about the services that meet their needs and preferences.
  • Competition between service providers can drive innovation and create incentives for providers to be more responsive to the needs and preferences of users. Creating contestable arrangements amongst providers can achieve many of the benefits of effective competition.
  • For some services, and in some settings, direct government provision of services will be the best way to improve the wellbeing of individuals and families. The introduction of greater competition, contestability and choice does not preclude government provision of services.
• Access to high-quality human services, such as health and housing, underpins economic and social participation.
  • The enhanced equity and social cohesion this delivers improves community welfare.
• Government stewardship — the range of functions governments undertake that help to ensure service provision is effective at meeting its objectives — is critical.
  • Stewardship includes ensuring human services meet standards of quality, suitability and accessibility, giving people the support they need to make choices, ensuring that appropriate consumer safeguards are in place, and encouraging and adopting ongoing improvements to service provision.
• High-quality data are central to improving the effectiveness of human services.
  • User-oriented information allows people to make choices about the services they want and for providers to tailor their service offering to better meet users' needs.
  • Transparent use of data drives improvements in the performance of the system for the provision of human services and increases accountability to those who fund the services.

Key findings

• The housing sub-function of the Federal Budget was $3.5 billion in 2021/22, but this did not include key housing support measures such as Commonwealth Rent Assistance and property tax concessions. With these included, actual 2021-2022 federal expenditure on housing is estimated at $27 billion.
• The share of federal housing spending going to the lowest 20% of income earners declined from 44% in 1993 to 23% in 2023, while the share going to the top 20% increased from 9% to 43%.
• In the last decade alone, the share going to the top 20% of earners has increased by over a third.
• The share of total federal housing expenditure going to property investors rose from 16.5% in 1993-94 to 61.4% in 2021-22.
• Investor tax concessions have grown from $1.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $17 billion in 2024, effectively operating as a shadow housing policy with a significant impact on the market.
• In 2023-2024, federal investor tax breaks will be worth almost five times the amount spent by the Federal Government on social housing and homelessness services through the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement and the $2billion Social Housing Accelerator Fund, announced in 2023.
• Strategic expenditure on social housing and homelessness services, which are negotiated between the Federal and State/Territory Governments, once made up well over half of total federal housing spending. Now just 7% of total federal housing expenditure goes toward these programs.

Platform decay is the phenomenon of major internet platforms, such as Google search, Facebook, and Amazon, systematically declining in quality in recent years. This decline in quality is attributed to the particular business model of these platforms and its harms are usually understood to be violations of principles of economic fairness and of inconveniencing users. In this article, we argue that the scope and nature of these harms are underappreciated. In particular, we establish that platform decay constitutes both a cognitive and moral harm to its users. We make this case by arguing that platforms function as cognitive scaffolds or extensions, as understood by the extended mind approach to cognition. It is then a straightforward implication that platform decay constitutes cognitive damage to a platform’s users. This cognitive damage is a harm on its own; however, it can also undermine cognitive capacities that virtue ethicists argue are necessary for developing a virtuous character. We will focus on this claim in regards to the capacity to pay attention, a capacity that platform decay targets specifically. Platform decay therefore also constitutes both cognitive and moral harm, which simultaneously affects billions of people.

This report provides data and insights about social housing need across Victoria and models social housing growth targets required to meet expressed demand and total demand. These growth targets are based on a set of housing scenarios, policy scenarios and distribution scenarios. The method is detailed in the body of this report.

All data, insights and analysis, and modelling in this report has been produced by SGS Economics and Planning for the Victorian Housing Peaks Alliance.

In this paper we provide an in-depth analysis of Pakistan’s macroeconomic situation.
We argue that although the stabilisation program signed with the IMF in November 2008 could
restore some "macroeconomic stability", it will depress the investment and unemployment
outlook, and it will not create the conditions that Pakistan needs for sustainable long-term
development. We put forward the foundations for a sustainable macroeconomic program for
Pakistan. This contains policy advice that differs markedly from that of the IMF. The essence of
the proposal is the consideration that a government that issues its own currency faces no financial
constraints or solvency risk. This implies that the usual “government budget constraint” has no
economic content. Based on this, we examine the potential role that the country’s fiscal and
monetary policies could play in promoting growth and in generating full employment and price
stability.

Drawing on more than a year of information gathering, this position paper presents a snapshot of the repression and criminalization of peaceful environmental protest and civil disobedience observed by the Special Rapporteur in European countries that are Parties to the Aarhus Convention. It explains why the Special Rapporteur considers this repression and criminalization to constitute a major threat to democracy, human rights, the civic space, and to the exercise of the rights guaranteed under the Aarhus Convention, and therefore why he has made this issue a priority topic under his mandate. It sets out why the Special Rapporteur considers a profound change in how States respond to environmental protest to be urgently required and features five calls for action to States on how to do so. It also urges the human rights community to coordinate their efforts to support this call for action.

The criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest is problematic for at least two main reasons. First, it focuses state policy on punishing dissent against inaction on climate and environmental change instead of taking adequate action on these issues. In criminalising and repressing climate and environmental activists, states depoliticise them. Second, they represent authoritarian moves that are not consistent with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.

[…]

Governments, legislatures, courts and police forces should operate with a general presumption against criminalising climate and environmental protests. Instead, climate and environmental protest should be regarded as a reasonable response to the urgent and existential nature of the climate crisis, and activists engaged as stakeholders in a process of just transition.

In the autumn of 1938, an internal memorandum was circulated among Reichsbank officials about the dire economic situation of Nazi Germany as a result of the frenzied rearmament policy through central bank monetary expansion. Warning against its inflationary effects, the memo suggested a “smooth landing” from a war to a peacetime economy. In the following months, seeing that instead of restraint there was a further acceleration of the armament race, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the banks’ directorate decided to issue an official memorandum, which Schacht delivered directly to Hitler’s hands. Emphasizing that the Fuhrer himself had always “rejected inflation as stupid and senseless”, the letter stressed that “Reichsbank gold and foreign exchange reserves were ‘no longer available’”, that the trade deficit was “rising sharply” and that “price and wage controls were no longer working effectively”. With the volume of notes in circulation accelerating, state finances were bluntly described as “close to collapse”.

The notion that negative gearing leads to an increased supply of rental dwellings is flawed: 92% of
investment is used to purchase existing dwellings, displacing previous owner-occupiers or tenants to
buy or rent elsewhere, respectively, resulting in little to no net increase in the rental stock. Negative
gearing is a poor investment strategy over the long term for investors pursuing capital gain rather
than rental income as housing prices have increased by an average of 2.4% annually from 1880 to
2011 in real terms (before 1996, housing had delivered a real return of only 0.7% annually). Negative
gearing for purposes of realizing capital gain, however, becomes a viable strategy during the boom
phase of a housing cycle as capital values are substantially appreciating. Contrary to claims that
quarantining negative gearing during 1985-87 caused a surge in rental prices, rents increased in only
some capital cities while stagnating or falling in others.

[…]

It is recommended that, at a minimum, negative gearing be quarantined to the purchase of newly-
constructed dwellings, or preferably, be abolished. The Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) scheme
is better targeted towards those who require help in the course of renting rather than subsidising
residential property market investors. Although the CRA could increase rents, it appears to be the
most straight-forward mechanism available to policymakers to aid tenants.