Editorial.
Aspiration & inequality
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Issue 2
The inequality crisis, industry bargaining and the future of the union movement
Look around this room and imagine it represents Australia. Ask yourself: Why is it that one in four people here – in this room – are being paid the barest legal minimum? In many cases that’s Australians earning a wage of less than $700 a week. That’s 700 bucks a week...
Is Australia a wealthy country?
We’re the second richest in history, suggests Christopher Sheil.
Gough Whitlam and the party of the fair go
In his first speech to Parliament, my late friend and mentor Tom Uren spoke about his experiences as a former prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. He recounted his experience in an anecdote that is as powerful today as when he first delivered it. Tom said: In...
The make-believe land of Turnbull, Morrison & co.
Frank Stilwell cuts the Budget.
OECD meets Piketty
An alternative economic narrative A picture can say more than a thousand words. This is certainly true for the set of graphs (see below) that the OECD published in its latest Economic Outlook, which show the rate of return on fixed assets—a proxy measure for the rate...
Mary Alice Evatt: Art for the People
I was extremely honoured to be invited to speak at the opening of this magnificent exhibition of the works and the collection of Mary Alice Evatt, or Mas as she was often known because she signed her own works that way, in the initials of her maiden name, Mary Alice...
What the fair go means
The Opposition Leader's speech in reply to the 2018 Budget My fellow Australians, as I listened to the government's fifth budget on Tuesday night, I knew immediately we can do better than this, the people of Australia deserve better than this and a Labor government...
Australia’s rich to get richer
The government is promoting inequality, argue Robert Tanton & Jinjing Li.
Where have we come from and where to next?
I’m going to start by breaking a rule of progressive politics devised for us by George Lakoff a decade and more ago, when he said 'Don’t think of an elephant'. You might remember, Lakoff’s argument was that progressives were like participants in a psychology...
The disappearance of art
The Evatts, the arts, the websWhen I was initially approached about this lecture my first reaction was disbelief. It wasn't just my natural false modesty, it was knowledge of a particular fact of life, that on the whole visual artists are no longer seen as significant...