With the Brisbane G20 Leaders Summit only a matter of weeks away, Australia is increasingly succumbing to G20 fever. Rarely does a self-declared middle power such as Australia get to play host to such…
Although Australia’s tax-to-GDP ratio is low by international standards, no-one wants to discuss how we might pay for the improvements needed to public transport, and even less the need for taxation to…
Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series…
With major employers heading offshore and employment numbers decimated, what will emerge from the ashes of Australia’s manufacturing industry? And what role should manufacturing play in the federal government’s…
News emerging from Washington last week suggests climate change may amount to more than an FAQ in the appendices of this November’s G20 leaders’ summit agenda. President Obama’s deputy national security…
Our lives are surrounded by the ideas and creations of thousands of people. The magic of flight, or computers, or vaccines, inventions and innovations we take for granted, have advanced from one idea to…
On the surface, Joe Hockey’s analysis of the imposition by Chinese authorities of tariffs on coal imported from Australia as good old-fashioned protectionism seems straightforward. That at least is what…
Ireland has this week moved to change its tax law, closing the “double Irish” tax avoidance technique widely used by multinational enterprises including Google and Microsoft. In very broad terms, the current…
Australia’s manufacturing industry is in decline. Yet some businesses are managing to buck the trend. The question is what do these “outliers” do differently from their competitors? And what does each…
Just as women face challenges in participating in the work domain, so men face challenges participating in the home domain. Emma Watson in her much-discussed UN speech observed that inequalities faced…
The winner of this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Jean Tirole, is one of the most prolific, respected and admired economic theorists of the last 30 years and has had significant influence…
The Abbott government’s Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda is an economic policy statement likely to define its term in government. The Agenda has four planks in the government’s efforts to…
One of the key planks of the government’s new Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda is a desire to boost collaboration between business and industry, the scientific and research communities and…
Charis Palmer, The Conversation and Alexandra Hansen, The Conversation
The federal government has released its National Industry Investment and Competitiveness Agenda, committing around A$400 million towards “industry growth centres”, new tax incentives for employee share…
It is not often that we witness strategic design in action, for the benefit of national security and economic growth. The challenges of translating good ideas into meaningful acts can be too great and…
Despite valiant efforts by commentators such as Bernard Keane and Michael Pascoe to slay claims that Chinese buyers are making it harder for ordinary Australians to enter the housing market, the notion…
With major employers heading offshore and employment numbers decimated, what will emerge from the ashes of Australia’s manufacturing industry? And what role should manufacturing play in the federal government’s…
With major employers heading offshore and employment numbers decimated, what will emerge from the ashes of Australia’s manufacturing industry? And what role should manufacturing play in the federal government’s…
Chief executives who don’t care about the gender pay gap or believe that closing it will only increase costs, might want to consider some of the benefits of audits and strategies for identifying and closing…
With major employers heading offshore and employment numbers decimated, what will emerge from the ashes of Australia’s manufacturing industry? And what role should manufacturing play in the federal government’s…
Last week the IMF revised its 2014 global economic growth forecast down to 3.3% from the 3.7% expected six months ago, confirming that most economies around the world, Australia included, continue to underperform…
Smoking rates among 12- to 24-year old Australians fell from 15% to 11% in the two years following bans on displaying cigarettes at the point of sale. So does this mean that placing cigarettes out of sight…
The ABS faced considerable unwelcome attention this week after it announced substantial revisions to the seasonally adjusted labour force figures for July and August. Reacting to the announcement, Treasurer…
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has come under attack for the perceived lack of reliability of its labour force statistics, particularly the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is one of…
It is fairly common for media to report incidents of overt sexism and sexual harassment at work. Colleagues demanding sexual favours and verbal and physical abuse are examples of behaviour that have been…