16 March 2018

The next federal election campaign got under way this week. It looks like debt, deficit, and taxation will dominate our lives for the next year or so. Not nearly as exciting as citizenship and sex scandals, but ultimately more important to the long-term prosperity of the nation. The differences are quite clear and stark. The coalition government is arguing, from

6 March 2018

It’s almost budget time. That means that every rent-seeker in the country is off to Canberra with their begging bowl: Please Mr Morrison can we have some more? To be fair to Morrison there are an infinite number of worthy causes calling out for increased expenditure. Take national security, for example. We live in a dangerous world where any number

1 December 2017

Economists explain the far-reaching implications of blockchain technology on society and on how we are governed. A blockchain is a digital, decentralised, distributed ledger. This year saw a meteoric rise in interest in cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technologies that power them. Even the government is now interested. There’s now a Commonwealth Parliamentary Friends of Blockchain group, and one blockchain energy

22 November 2017

Australians haven’t seen any serious tax reform since the 2007 general election. On the first day of that election campaign the then Howard government announced serious tax cuts; quickly matched by the Rudd opposition. Some of those tax cuts were “aspirational” and never implemented. Since then changes to the tax system have constituted fiddling at the edges. The Gillard government

12 October 2017

Economists have spent the last 240 years – ever since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations – trying to understand how decentralised economies work. In that time they have established that the price mechanism does a pretty good job of coordinating economic activity, and that profits provide excellent incentives to stimulate human action. In the course of understanding how economies operate,

1 October 2017

The debt debate is over with the political class, writes Professor Sinclair Davidson. Recently on The Bolt Report Michael Kroger—former IPA director and now Victorian Liberal Party president—made the point that it was a great pity that the argument on deficit and debt had been lost. The loss of the deficit and debt argument is a tragedy on many levels—not least

26 July 2017

Sigh. Yet another round of debate on “inequality”. Yesterday Richard Denniss was warning us that even those “lefties” at the IMF thought inequality could be a drag on growth. Indeed – they do. In developing countries extreme levels of inequality often lead to political and social unrest. We in Australia don’t have too much to worry about on that front.

7 July 2017

A new report released today by the Institute of Public Affairs, has found that the South Australian Bank Levy has already damaged the investment reputation of South Australia, despite not yet being put to Parliament. The Report The South Australia Major Bank Levy: Arbitrary, unjustified, and harmful for South Australia and the rest of the country, by Dr Chris Berg

7 July 2017

In the South Australian state budget 2017-18, South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis announced that the state government intended to introduce a South Australian Major Bank Levy, one of two revenue measures “to help us meet the cost of our significant support for driving economic growth and creating more jobs”.1 Treasurer Koutsantonis made clear that this levy was explicitly modelled on

28 June 2017

Policy elites take the view that former prime minister John Howard did a deal with Meg Lees and the Democrats to introduce the GST. In a trivial procedural sense that is accurate. More importantly, however, Howard did a deal with the Australian people that in return for repealing a huge bunch of nuisance taxes, the Commonwealth could levy a broad-based