The monument needs more to be spent to finish it than has already been spent. The one piece of good news is that policymakers can resist the sunk-cost fallacy.
Before expanding the GST, Australia should confront the deeper flaws in Commonwealth–state financial relations and the consequential fiscal mismanagement.
A red tape reduction program is only of benefit if the government has not spent the previous four years adding red tape.
The tailwind that powered the boom of the 2000s is now a headwind. A shrinking workforce may not be productive enough to finance Australia’s expanding welfare state.
Many regard the GST as one of the Howard government’s crowning achievements. It was not, and inflicted a productivity-asphyxiating knot on the federation.
We deserve a genuine alternative, but what the opposition leader is serving up is simply a promise to manage the Leviathan a little more politely.
The government assumes investors will calmly migrate from established housing into off-the-plan developments. But investors are not pieces on a Treasury chessboard.
If the governance establishment is serious about value creation rather than governance box-ticking, it should follow the evidence rather than the orthodoxy.
The young are not falling behind because the old have too much, but because the systems designed to protect them have made it difficult to create new wealth.
The anniversary of The Wealth of Nations falls this week. Two hundred and 50 years later, in Canberra, the book might as well have never been written.
Ultra-low interest rates and liquidity largesse are “treatments” that induce the very symptoms they claim to be managing.
The exchange operator’s fall from global leader to regional laggard was driven by a shift to stakeholder-centric values by its now-defunct Corporate Governance Council.
Competence and skin in the game should be a requirement for a board seat at a big business. A fetish for independence isn’t enough to ensure good governance.
This budget will evidence the sobering truth that Australia’s current policy direction leads to even more economic and social hardship.
On this trajectory, the NBN may be ultimately regarded as one of the worst investments in Australia’s history.
Something is rotten at the bourse’s headquarters with senior leadership in distraction and denial.
The cost and regulatory burden of a public listing is driving companies and investors into the arms of private capital. The ASX needs to fix itself.
Failing to learn from past policy mistakes is far, far worse than making them in the first place.
While the downward trajectory of listed company numbers is a global phenomenon, changes to governance principles have exacerbated this decline here.
It would reduce risk to taxpayers in a higher inflation world and remove the “pea and thimble” public finance distortions and opportunities cost of the wealth manager.
