policy

Neoliberalism changed many things in Australia. Unions are weaker. Inequality is higher. But exactly what changed is often surprising. The state did not shrink. Social spending did not decrease, nor did it become less redistributive. Household wealth has increased rapidly, but largely due to changes in social policy rather than rising productivity.

The relationship between liberalisation and the welfare state is both more central and more complicated than we often imagine. In Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation I sought to move beyond a lament for declining egalitarianism, and to instead learn from the political strategies that have mitigated and even reduced inequality in hard times.

The book examines case studies from three forms of liberalisation – targeting benefits, marketizing services and financialising the life course. Through each I highlight different models of reform that are broadly consistent with liberalisation (means-testing benefits, facilitating private service providers or using asset-debt relations), yet have different political and distributional consequences.

by Ben Clift* Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method […]

COVID-19 temporarily re-made fiscal politics. States responded to the health threat by enacting a sudden and far-reaching contraction of the private sector, partly compensated by an unprecedented expansion of the public sector. The moves proved temporary, with a swift return to fiscal and monetary constraint. However, the COVID response potentially provides lessons for understanding broader changes in capitalism.

In part I of our post, we used Schumpeter’s theory of the tax state to trace how changes in the organisation of capitalism had their ‘fiscal reflection’ in changing fiscal accounting practices. In this part II of our discussion of the tax state, based on a journal article recently published in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, we identify a new set of ‘hybrid’ fiscal tools, built prior to, but used during COVID, that could point to a more enduring shift in fiscal politics beyond neoliberalism [...]

Milton Friedman – one of the scholastic protagonists and machinists of Neoliberalism – wrote in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom, tutoring his disciples: “There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces […]

Kendall’s attack on Tory killing of over 40,000 care home residents in the pandemic doesn’t go far enough – and it ignores Labour’s cheerleader role as Johnson-Hancock policies caused even more deaths Right-wing Labour MP Liz Kendall has tweeted a video of herself pointing out the Tories’ lie about throwing a ‘protect ring’ around care […]

Extra resources put in to cope halved waits, showing again that NHS crisis is Tory-created Statistics gathered during strike action by paramedics have made a mockery of the Tories’ transparently ideological attack on workers’ right to strike. While Rishi Sunak and his partners in crime claim their plan to force unions to maintain services during […]

A version of this post was originally published on Redecentralized and VSquare.

After the violent events at the US Capitol social media monopolists are finally waking up to the reality that centralisation is dangerous; with power over daily communication of hundreds of millions of users comes responsibility perhaps too big even for Big Tech.

by Julien Etienne* It is startling to see that regulation scholarship continues projecting a business-as-usual picture, when current trends and scientific insights into the foreseeable future all point to radical change. Indeed, scientists have been documenting the extremely rapid decline in biodiversity and acceleration of climate change. They project that these trends will continue to […]

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Crikey on 3 June 2022. As I see it, the four most pressing challenges for the new Minister for health and ageing concern: 1. promoting health (not just … Continue reading →