The announcement that controversial mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is to use new Enterprise Migration Agreements to employ 1715 foreign construction workers on her $9.5 billion Roy Hill iron ore project…
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British novelist E M Forster famously offered two cheers for democracy. We might say the same about the national Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Bill introduced into Parliament last week…
“A third of workers waste quarter of their day” - Herald Sun. “Wasted work time costs billions a year” - The Age. Judging from these headlines, you would think Australian workers are chronic time wasters…
Sitting between the two hot potatoes of immigration control and labour market regulation, work visas are an inherently controversial public policy issue. It is therefore of little surprise that Immigration…
Trade liberalisation has pulled many developing countries into emerging markets in the last decade. Jim O’Neil, an economist and chairman of Goldman Sachs, who forecast global economic domination by certain…
The way petrol is priced in Australia has been a perennially vexed issue. Earlier this month, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced it would launch an inquiry into price-sharing…
The special EU summit held in Brussels on Wednesday revamped the discussion on Eurobonds (i.e. the issuance of common government bonds to pool the Eurozone debt liability) as a possible option to address…
Australian foreign minister Bob Carr was interrogated about Australia’s alliance with the US in three separate meetings with Beijing’s leaders last week. “Make no mistake, the re-emergence of China, and…
The Australian dollar has dropped to a six month low on continuing fears over a Greek exit from the Eurozone, despite pleas from European Union leaders. Head of discipline, Economics and Winthrop Professor…
Equal pay was, and still is, one of the key demands of feminists. Basic to any idea of gender equity should be that paid work is fairly rewarded, whether it’s undertaken by a male or female. In early Australian…
“The object of [the Fair Work] Act is to provide a balanced framework for cooperative and productive workplace relations that promotes national economic prosperity and social inclusion for all Australians…
The election of Australia’s top corporate regulator Greg Medcraft to the chairmanship of the International Organisation of Securities Commissions has received nowhere near the prominence it deserves. Aside…
What do you get when you buy 900 million user experiences, mostly from smart devices? Facebook’s float has been dogged with controversy: on Monday, its shares plummeted 11% and dropped another 8.9% to…
The G8 leaders’ cautious embrace of “growth and jobs” on the weekend has momentarily buoyed international markets, but significantly, altered a 30-year focus on inflation. For more than three decades…
Qantas has announced it is splitting its loss-making international business from domestic operations, as part of a five year turn-around plan announced last August. The two companies will have separate…
The lingering commitment to austerity of leading Western politicians in the face of impending economic tragedy is beyond belief. The dismal science is a sobriquet often wrongly applied to economics, but…
The idea of a shared currency between Australia and New Zealand is not new and has engendered discussion over the past two decades. It has recently come to the forefront as a result of our Prime Ministers…
The Melbourne Institute’s recent “Intergen +10” workshop was a retrospective on Australia’s pioneering Intergenerational Reports, an outgrowth of the fiscal responsibility legislation put in place by the…
Each year the budget is like an annual health check on a patient with many complexities. In a black coat, not a white one, the august Treasurer reports the nation’s temperature, provides much-needed tonics…
The worldwide online activist group Avaaz, which claims over 14 million members and operations in 193 countries, has this week launched an Australian campaign against Lachlan Murdoch. The group has written…
The ACTU released the report Lives on hold: unlocking the potential of Australia’s workforce summing up the findings of its six month inquiry into insecure employment chaired by Brian Howe at its Congress…
In Perth last October, New York University’s Professor Nouriel Roubini issued a dire warning to the business forum of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting that Australia faced the threat of a “hard…
Last October surfboard company BASE abruptly closed its factory on the Gold Coast, with the direct loss of 30 jobs. Since then, nearby D’Arcy Surfboards has announced it is shedding workers and downsizing…
Are the tragedies of the 1920s repeating themselves in the twenty-first century? In the 1920s, an irrational attachment to the gold standard helped cause the Great Depression, as European fears of inflation…
“I don’t envisage, not even for one second, Greece leaving the euro area. This is nonsense; this is propaganda.” That’s Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, chairman of the Eurogroup, speaking…