This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Public Square, a CNU journal. It is shared here with permission. All pictures were supplied by the writer.
Historian Dr Prudence Flowers joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the politics of reproductive rights in American politics, Project 2025 and the wave of support for Kamala Harris since Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 12 and Thursday 25 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
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Guest: Prudence Flowers, Senior Lecturer in US History, Flinders University // @FlowersPGF
Host: Emma Shortis, Senior Research for International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @EmmaShortis
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg Jericho discusses the economic impact of a second Trump presidency for Australia and the region – and why four more years of Trump could be a disaster for the climate.
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 // @GrogsGamut
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.
Dr Emma Shortis and Ebony Bennett, host of the Australia Institute’s Follow the Money podcast, reflect on Joe Biden’s legacy, his endorsement of Kamala Harris and what it could mean for the election campaign.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 22 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Host: Emma Shortis, Senior Research for International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @EmmaShortis
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebony_bennett
Theme music: Blue Dot Sessions
You can see Professor Joseph E Stiglitz speak live in several cities across Australia as part of the Australia Institute’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Tickets are available online.
The United Nations and the IEA have been clear that there can be no new coal, oil or gas projects if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. There is no ‘clean energy transition’ while governments keep approving highly polluting new fossil fuel projects
The projects are off the coast of Western Australia and Victoria.
Sea dumping (described by the gas industry as CCS) increases emission by enabling new fossil fuel projects. Just three Australian coal fired power stations emit more carbon pollution than the entire world’s current CCS capacity.
“This government was elected to take action on climate change and reduce emissions, but they are opening new fossil fuel projects instead,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.
“Expanding Australia’s gas production in the middle of a climate emergency is not just short-sighted: it treats our Pacific Island neighbours and future generations with contempt.
The deepfake, which is marked as “AI-generated content”, depicts Premier Miles dancing, to make fun of Miles for posting a video of himself making a sandwich.
Effective truth in political advertising laws already exist; they have operated in South Australia since the 1980s, were legislated in the ACT in 2020, and been proposed in other jurisdictions – including by Queensland Labor rank-and-file.
“Even when political ads are marked as AI-generated, political parties and candidates should be wary about running them. No one benefits from a race to the bottom where fake content is used to ridicule political rivals,” said Bill Browne, Director of the Australia Institute’s Democracy & Accountability Program.
“Queensland saw the use of one of the first political deepfakes in Australia, at the 2020 state election. It looks like the trend is continuing.
“While this deepfake was marked as AI-generated, it shows how easy it has become to create fake content – and there is no guarantee that other fake content in the Queensland election will be clearly identified. In Queensland, it is perfectly legal to lie in a political ad, and it shouldn’t be.
“Elections elsewhere around the world have seen deepfake images and videos used with the deliberate intent to deceive.
“Truth in political advertising laws in Queensland, along the lines of those already in place in South Australia and the ACT, would help ensure that voters are not misled.”
To do so, Australia will need to abandon its conciliatory deference to the U.S.A and instead begin advocating strongly in our own national interest.
Australia has power and agency in the US-Australia relationship. With a second Trump Presidency remaining a real possibility, Australia also has a significant stake in the survival of US democracy and global leadership.
“Biden had nowhere to go, and that’s where he went,” said Dr Emma Shortis, Senior Researcher for the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs Program.
“Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, which was the only logical choice. Harris is now an experienced Vice President, accustomed to the national stage and particularly strong on the issue of reproductive rights.
“While American politics has been preoccupied with recent events, this issue is one that motivates voters to turn out. It did in the 2022 mid-terms, and it likely will do again.
“There is a long way to go until November, but Trump currently remains ahead in the polls.
“What Australia does matters on the world stage, and we can no longer blindly rely on the United States to defend us.
“Instead of considering how Australia can accommodate America under Trump, we can instead focus on standing up for what matters to us and push hard for our interests and values. It’s time that we learned to work with America, not just for it.”
Even though the transport sector is the third largest source of Australian emissions and accounted for 21% of national emissions in 2023, the Australian Government continues to incentivise the sale of big utility vehicles (utes) relative to other car options. Over the last twenty years, the number of utes on our roads has grown much faster than the number of passenger vehicles.
While utes are necessary to a range of occupations, their proliferation, particularly of larger heavier models, damages the environment, damages roads, and incurs a range of other costs on society. A key example of this incentivisation is an exemption from Luxury Car Tax (LCT), which applies to essentially all utes.
Large vehicles impose considerable costs on society, from their higher carbon emissions and rates of road damage to serious safety concerns. The Australian Government should ensure that these costs are accounted for by properly taxing and regulating these vehicles, starting with removing the LCT exemption for utes. These policies would curb the growth in expensive and damaging vehicles in Australia and limit the use of utes to legitimate commercial purposes rather than personal luxuries.
A loophole in Australia’s tax law effectively subsidises large utes such as Ram and Chevrolet pick-up trucks by avoiding the Luxury Car Tax (LCT) that other imported vehicles pay, regardless of if the vehicles are used for work, recreation or just commuting.
The $250 million cost of this subsidy is more than ten times the Federal Government’s Active Transport Fund for the construction and upgrade of cycle paths every year.
Key Findings:
Luxury car tax is paid on the sale or importation of most cars valued above $81,000.
However, any vehicle that can carry twice the weight in payload that it can carry in people, is exempt regardless of what it is used for.
Non-luxury utes, used by most tradies, sit below this threshold and would be unaffected by the removal of the luxury ute loophole.
“The Australian public is subsidising big, dumb utes by hundreds of millions of dollars each year,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at the Australia Institute.
“These vehicles are damaging roads, reducing safety and increasing emissions, yet they are given a massive tax break.
“Removing the luxury car tax exemption will not affect most ute drivers, particularly tradies.
“Instead it targets those buying large luxury vehicles, worth sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, for personal use.
Prosper Australia is an economic research organisation founded in the Georgist tradition of political philosophy. Our work centres on the monopolistic nature of land and how it shapes our economy and society. We have a long history of research into property taxation and local government rating systems. We wish to raise five points in relation […]
Prosper Australia today declared its disappointment at the state budget inaction on housing and tax reform. “The Housing Statement declared a goal of 800,000 new homes over the next decade, yet this budget contains only minor announcements on an increased construction for public housing,” said spokesperson Rayna Fahey. “We need dollars for dwellings, not developers.” […]
Supply targets alone won’t solve the problem – we need redistribution and tax reform Prosper Australia today condemned the punitive approach taken by the Allan government to address housing supply, calling the strategy a complete miss of the mark. “Our research shows that Melbourne does not have a supply issue, rather an issue with distribution […]
3 million workers could benefit from tax shift Prosper Australia today released new research highlighting the economic benefits of shifting taxes off income and onto land. Report highlights: Low and middle income earners face effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) on extra income as high as 80%. High EMTRs are a disincentive to work. Reducing high […]
The Great Housing Hijack is the latest book by Dr Cameron Murray. Here at Prosper Australia we have been following Cameron’s work for quite some time. Some of our supporters will remember his entertaining Henry George Commemorative Address in 2018. The Great Housing Hijack is a compelling read and explains the history of land prices […]
Tweaking individual policies will not deliver the change Australia needs: we must capture the consensus and commit to reforming our tax system away from earned and onto unearned income.
Prosper’s Director of Research and Policy, Tim Helm, was interviewed by Cameron Murray for the Fresh Economic Thinking podcast on 9 November 2023. Their conversation covered the relationship between the prices of land and housing, how to define and measure landbanking, incentives for landbanking, the relationship between landbanking and housing supply, and methodological issues in […]
Presentation to the Planning Institute of Australia’s Victorian Conference, October 13, 2023 Today I want to take you on a rapid intellectual journey, a therapeutic crash-course, to convince you all to stop worrying about housing affordability – and instead, to learn to love high land values. Land takes the gains… Riddle me this: When planners […]
Prosper Australia today welcomed the announcement that the Vacant Residential Land Tax (VRLT) will be expanded to include suburban undeveloped and regional sites.
132nd Henry George Address by Professor Ross Garnaut Australia: Made for Free Trade and a Tax on Rent (Transcript of speech recorded at the Kelvin Club, Melbourne, 7 September 2023. Lightly edited for clarity and brevity.) Thanks, Tim, and very good to be here with this group of people. Very good to know that such […]
If we’re going to have to rethink our tax system, rent-seeking seems a good place to start. Perhaps if we taxed productive profit less than its unproductive counterpart, we’d have the seedlings of a system better designed to meet what the Intergenerational Report warns us is coming.
Prosper Australia welcomes Inquiry attention to Stamp Duty to Land Tax transition Prosper Australia today commended the Victorian Legislative Council’s Inquiry into Land transfer duty fees for their careful attention to the difficult issues involved in transitioning from stamp duty to a land tax. Prosper Australia Director of Research and Policy, Tim Helm, says: “We […]
Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee 7 July 2023 Thank you for the opportunity to submit to the Legal and Social Issues Committee’s inquiry into rental and housing affordability. Prosper Australia is an independent research institute formed over 100 years ago to further public knowledge of the teachings and principles of economist and land […]
Planning deregulation, especially rezoning, has been repeatedly touted as a key policy solution to Australia’s eye watering house prices. The story goes that prices remain high because the supply of new dwellings in accessible, desirable locations has not kept pace with demand due to zoning restrictions. Rezoning for higher uses will increase supply and make […]
My belief is that Community Land Trusts (CLTs) can demonstrate the benefits of recycling land rents for the common good. This will support the larger Georgist agenda with a micro version of the macro vision. It’s been 12 months since we started Grounded Community Land Trust advocacy. Our job is to support the CLT movement […]
by Jehan Azad & Uri Bram Wired Magazine (published May 4, 2023). Reprinted with permission. “There’s no such thing as a good landlord” is a rallying cry of angry renters. In the future, it might be conventional morality that it’s simply wrong to own land. In our times, owning land seems as natural as owning […]
Watching the bin fire that is the American presidential race, Australian democracy is looking pretty good.
There are without doubt some key things to be grateful for.
Our system of compulsory preferential voting, for example, which ensures no vote is wasted – unlike in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The Australia Electoral Commission, which ensures our elections are transparent and fair; free of the blatant gerrymandering we see in the States.
Even the secret ballot, an essential component of democracy worldwide, is an Australian invention.
But we cannot take our democracy for granted.
We need truth in political advertising laws that make it illegal to lie in political ads so public trust in our system doesn’t erode irreparably.
We need political finance reform exposes the undue influence of fossil fuel companies and others – and that doesn’t rig the system against independents and minor parties.
We also need to have a serious conversation about inequality, which undermines faith in democracy.
Look around and it is impossible to ignore the fact that our world is torn apart by brutal inequality. Some countries enjoy unimaginable material affluence while others suffer mass deprivation, with billions lacking basic necessities like nutritious food and clean water. The injustice stares every sane observer in the face. But where does it come from? This book shows that global inequality is not a natural phenomenon. It is not the inevitable feature of a normal economy. It is the result of the particular kind of economy that dominates our world. Capitalism.
The word capitalism tends to cause immediate confusion. For most people it calls to mind things like businesses, markets and trade: the ability of people to produce and sell things to one another. Who could possibly be against this? But in fact businesses, markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is a relatively recent system, having emerged in Western Europe only about 500 years ago. If one was to point to the single most important defining feature of this particular economic system, it would be that it is fundamentally anti-democratic.
The Divide was first published in 2017. In the years since, many people have written to me, or approached me during public events, to share the impact it had on them. I am always grateful for this. And yet as a researcher, I look back on the text now and wish that it could include all that I have learned over the past seven years. Knowledge moves quickly, and I want to make it available to readers. My goal with The Divide was to serve as an accessible introduction. I hope it continues to do that for readers. But - until Penguin is ready to produce a new edition - here are some resources that I encourage people to explore for more information and new knowledge.
1. On the rise of capitalism in Europe
The Divide briefly describes the violent processes of enclosure and dispossession that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe during the long 16th century. This description is improved with new information and references in the opening chapters of Less is More. It describes how worker revolutions brought down feudalism and improved human welfare, before elites responded with enclosure and other interventions to push wages back down and restore working-class subordination.
2. On the human toll of colonialism and capitalist integration
The government is currently legislating to reduce the tax concessions available on superannuation balances of more than $3m. While this measure would affect only around 80,000 people out of the 17m holders of superannuation conservatives and lobbyists of the wealthiest are arguing this will hurt those who have saved for their own retirement.
In reality, the use of superannuation tax concessions has been completely abused. The purpose of superannuation is to reduce the burden on the pension system, but now we see in articles such as in the Financial Review today, people arguing that they are using superannuation to build up their inheritance for their children and grandchildren and that these measures to reduce tax concessions on super balances of over $3m are “stealing my children’s inheritance”.
Superannuation tax concessions for the wealthiest only serve to entrench inequality in our society, but worse, because the concessions allow the wealthy to reduce the tax they pay on their income before retirement, it means Australian taxpayers are in effect funding the retirement of the very wealthiest in the country.
The cost of these taxation concessions puts lie to the line that they are “self-funded” retirees.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg Jericho discusses the latest International Monetary Fund Update on the global economy, the possible impact of American tariff hikes on global efforts to tackle inflation, and the real story behind Australia’s seemingly rosy unemployment data.
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 // @GrogsGamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @ElinorJ_L
It’s said that ‘disunity is death’ in Australian politics, but – as several major party politicians found out in the 2022 election – falling in behind an unpopular policy agenda can be pretty dangerous for your career as well. On this episode of Follow the Money, Australia Institute Executive Director Richard Denniss joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the big changes taking place in Australian politics and how they might influence the next election.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 16 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Guest: Richard Denniss, Executive Director, the Australia Institute // @RDNS_TAI
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebony_bennett
Theme music: Pulse and Thrum; additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
You can see Professor Joseph E Stiglitz speak live in several cities across Australia as part of the Australia Institute’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Tickets are available via our website.
The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called for a global fossil fuel advertising ban. This is a policy idea that has been previously proposed by advocates in Australia, and that was quickly backed by the Greens and nine Independent MPs after the UNSG’s endorsement.
Fossil Ad Ban has been leading the charge in Australia to “stop fossil fuel companies and high greenhouse gas polluters using marketing and sponsorships to delay the inevitable and urgently required social transition to clean energy.”
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis speaks to Professor the Hon Bob Carr about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and what it could mean for the campaign, the emergence of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, and the trajectory of American foreign policy.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 16 July 2024 and things may have changed since recording.
Guest: Professor the Hon Bob Carr, former Australian Foreign Minister and former Premier of New South Wales // @bobjcarr
Host: Dr Emma Shortis, Senior Research for International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @EmmaShortis
Theme music: Blue Dot Sessions
You can see Professor Joseph E Stiglitz speak live in several cities across Australia as part of the Australia Institute’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Tickets are available via our website.
The Australian Government claims that green hydrogen is part of its vision for becoming a renewable energy ‘superpower’, but budget documents show this is not the case. Current industrial hydrogen use in Australia is 500,000 tonnes per year. The Commonwealth Government is budgeting for green hydrogen production of around 500,000 tonnes per year into the 2040s. Given the first users of green hydrogen will be existing industrial users of fossil hydrogen, this leaves no hydrogen for export from Australia.
This briefing note formed part of The Australia Institute’s submission to consultation on the Commonwealth Government’s Hydrogen Production Tax Incentive.
Former senator and transparency advocate Rex Patrick has lost his appeal to the Full Federal Court challenging the Australian Information Commissioner’s multi-year delays in handling FOI reviews. Some of Patrick’s outstanding FOI reviews have been awaiting decision for almost four years.
In a longstanding legal battle, Patrick sought to draw a line in the sand on lengthy FOI delays plaguing the dysfunctional regime and inhibiting timely public access to government information. He argued that the FOI Act requires information to be made accessible in a prompt or timely manner, and that the delays he experienced in his FOI reviews were objectively unreasonable.
Late yesterday, the Court recognised that the delay in processing Patrick’s FOI application was “very lengthy” and “unfortunate”. But it ultimately determined that resourcing is relevant in whether a delay is unreasonable. This effectively gives governments a license to underfund the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and frustrate the FOI system without consequences.
The Court also noted that there was no ‘one size fits all’ time limit for Information Commissioner review decisions. This leaves little recourse for people waiting multiple years for FOI reviews to be finalised, often rendering information sought irrelevant and limiting scrutiny of government decision-making.
How did Australia get itself into such a mess with housing? What impact is the crisis having on renters? And why does everyone seem to think investing in the property market is a good idea except the government? On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Australia Institute Senior Economist Matt Grudnoff talks about what caused Australia’s housing crisis and what government can do to fix it.
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.
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.
