John Quiggin

From The Guardian Among many other challenges in dealing with the failure of urban policy in Australia, the Minns (NSW state) government is faced with the task of renegotiating, or repudiating, the disastrous set of contracts for toll roads in New South Wales made by its predecessors (Labor and Liberal) with the Transurban group. As a review by Allan Fels and David Cousins has found, the government is at risk of being held hostage by toll operators. According to Fels and Cousins,...

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old. First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

I’ve written another piece on the uneconomics of nuclear power in Australia The big unanswered question about nuclear power in Australia is how much it would cost. The handful of plants completed recently in the US and Europe have run way over time and over budget, but perhaps such failures can be avoided. On the other hand, the relatively successful Barakah project in the United Arab Emirates was undertaken in conditions that aren’t comparable to a democratic high-wage country like...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

What to do when we can’t trust our own eyes (or at least, the videos we are looking at. I spoke last weekend at a panel discussion on Navigating Lies, Deepfakes & Fake News, organised by McPherson Independent. This a group promoting the idea of an independent community candidate in the (LNP held) electorate of McPherson. It’s part of the broader disillusionment with the two-party system we are seeing in Australia and also in the recent UK election. It was a great discussion....

Another belated reprint, from The Conversation, 27 June Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants in Australia has attracted plenty of critical attention. But there’s a striking feature which has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear plants would be publicly owned and operated, similar to the National Broadband Network (NBN). On the contrary, it received enthusiastic endorsement from free-market advocates such as The...

The third in the famous trilogy of spurious Chinese curses that begins with “May you live in interesting times” is “May all your wishes come true”. I may have triggered this curse with a piece I wrote for The Conversation in March. headlined “Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal” which ended Talk about hypothetical future technologies is, at this point, nothing more than a distraction. If Dutton...

My latest in The Guardian henever I mention concepts such as gross domestic product (GDP), there’s a high probability that arguments about the merits of “growth” and “degrowth” will erupt. Almost invariably, these arguments are stuck in a conceptual framework that’s 50 years out of date, or even more. The national accounting system, of which GDP is a central part, was developed in the 1930s. It was designed to measure the working of the industrial economy that had emerged in the...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...