The Australian Government’s public analysis of climate risk, our greatest threat, is dangerously misleading. The Intergenerational Report 2023 (IGR) is a prime example. By dumbing down the implications of climate change with simplified economic models, the IGR and similar reports are institutionalising the global failure to face climate reality. The US inquiry into the 9/11 Continue reading »
Economy
With the increase in the number of BRICS countries, this emerging international order dominated by the countries of the Global South will ultimately become the primary international order in the world, gradually replacing the fading international order dominated by the US and the West. The 15th meeting of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Continue reading »
The Actuaries Institute of Australia has just confirmed what many Australian households already know – home insurance is increasingly unaffordable. It found average premiums climbed 28% in the year to March, while premiums for higher-risk properties, such as those in flood-prone areas, climbed 50%. The institute also found 12% of Australian households – 1.24 million – are Continue reading »
The future is already upon us. The forty-year Intergenerational Report (IGR) is a divertissement. The population, participation, and productivity template of Treasury economists (3Ps framework) is inadequate and unsuited to the already changed world. As is the obsession with growth. How far out does it seem reasonable to project? In terms of climate, Australia is Continue reading »
Led on by crusading Reserve Bank governors, the nation’s economists are determined to protect us from the scourge of inflation, no matter the cost in jobs lost. But there’s a black hole in their thinking about the causes of inflation, only some of which must be stamped on. Others can be ignored. Meanwhile, here’s another Continue reading »
Australia’s leading financial media platform, the Australian Financial Review, raised the red flag about the future of Timor-Leste this month, with International Editor Professor James Curran’s article, Timor-Leste on brink of failure. Curran sensibly said that Chinese influence in Timor-Leste may be a concern in Canberra, but the big problem is that the small nation Continue reading »
There is a spectre haunting the world. It is the spectre of economic crisis. How the world responds will shape all of our futures. To borrow from Carl Clausewitz; war is the continuation of politics by other means. The famous military theorist might have added that economics is politics which is war by other means. Continue reading »
The accepted norm of Western dominance of the global order is now over. The difficult matter for those in the West to accept is that the mantle of leadership is not being passed from one Anglo-Western power to another of the same ilk, but rather one neither Anglo, nor Western, and dare I say it, Continue reading »
Australian governments are now amongst the biggest users of external consultants on the planet. Our country has seen the privatisation of core government tasks at an extraordinary level over the past decade along with an increase in spending on private service providers that is hard to believe. While decent public sector jobs have languished in Continue reading »
Richard Marles said the quiet bit out loud ahead of the ALP conference AUKUS debate while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems to have been, er, “economical with the truth”. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Defence Minister had been “urging colleagues to back the statement and prove to Australians that Labor is the better party Continue reading »