Social justice, equality, democracy & human rights
I acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, I pay respect to elders past and present.I’m honoured to be here tonight with so many inspirational people. When I call you inspirational, I’m not trying to be nice for the sake of it. It’s because I’ve never...
After Piketty opens with a discussion by Arthur Goldhammer, the book’s translator, of the reasons for Capital in the Twenty-First Century's phenomenal success, followed by the published reviews of Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Robert Solow. The rest of the book is...
Thank you to David and Alison for inviting me to launch their provocative, combative and myth-busting Honest History Book. It’s a punchy collection of essays by some of our very best historians. This book busts myths and bursts bubbles. It is a history book for our...
Australia and the global eighties It is a mark of the limiting character of a purely national perspective that it has been so rarely noticed that two English-speaking democracies of the 1980s each had a former trade union official as its national leader. Bob...
Productivity Commission Amendment (Reducing Inequality) Bill 2017This bill places inequality firmly on the agenda of one of our country's most influential economic policy institutions. We consider the bill at a time when inequality in Australia is at a 75-year high,...
‘Define your terms,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘or we shall never understand one another.’ He was talking about miracles, but much the same might be said of ‘globalisation,’ a term used by both supporters and opponents to mean a great many different things.The Organisation for...
Following are brief notes and key charts about new data on: the share of Australian incomes accruing to the top 10% and top 1% (of individual adult income earners); the size and implications of tax evasion for inequality; and the distribution of income and wealth in...
Australia’s Fair Work Commission has recently decided to reduce penalty rates for work on Sundays and public holidays in the retail and hospitality sectors. Rates would fall by 25 to 50 percentage points of base wages, for most employees covered by the retail,...
The Guardian has kicked off a new project investigating inequality of all kinds, all over the world. The paper's 'Inequality Project' is supported by the giant NewYork-based liberal-orientated Ford Foundation. The paper report's that all the content is editorially...
In 2013, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said of Labor’s mining tax: ‘What an extraordinary exercise in ineptitude: the first tax in the history of the Commonwealth that actually does not raise any money.’ If the success of a tax is measured by the revenue it raises,...
AIME says the answer is equal education, and has produced a gorgeous animation to promote the idea of education mentoring worldwide.AIME stands for the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience, a charity that runs a mentorship program designed to give Aboriginal and...
American historian Daniel T. Rogers discuses the Age of Fracture with Christopher Sheil.
With affordable houses increasingly out of reach, wage growth slow and household debt high, Australians are certainly feeling poor. But how do they compare to their neighbours? New Census data confirms there’s a lot of variability in income. The Census breaks...
When people say share ownership is highly diversified, they think most large public corporations have lots of shareholders and often the largest shareholder has less than 15 per cent, sometimes less than 5 per cent, of the total shareholdings. But looking at it this...
The concept of ‘the Big Lie’—a brazen untruth pushed so relentlessly in mass media that it’s eventually mistaken for truth—is hardly novel. As is the case with so many other wretched stratagems of its ilk, capitalism got there first with the PR technique known as FUD:...
To understand the sensational outcome of the British election, one must ask a basic question. What happens when phony populism collides with the real thing?Last year’s triumph for Brexit has often been paired with the rise of Donald Trump as evidence of a populist...
With the release of the March quarter national accounts, there have been reports the Australian economy could break the Netherlands’ “world record” for continuous growth. But there are three problems with this assertion.It’s now been 103 quarters (25 years and 9...