John Quiggin

My Budget response from The Conversation This week’s budget was Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ third and – for practical purposes – final for the current parliamentary term. Even if the 2025 election is delayed long enough to give Labor another budget, that speech would represent more of an election manifesto than any deliverable legislation. We are therefore now in a position to assess the Albanese government’s record on public spending and taxation. Most strikingly, the...

For quite a while I’ve been meaning to write a piece appreciating Ross Gittins’ 50 year run as Australia’s leading economic journalist. He’s one of the few who is neither an ideologue nor a recycler of corporate talking points (no names, no pack drill, but most of my readers will be able to think of plenty of examples).This plan was pushed to the top of my agenda when Ross gave an exceptionally generous donation to support my Brissie to the Bay cycle ride in support of MS Queensland....

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...

It’s International Workers Day, still celebrated as the May Day public holiday here in Queensland, at least when the Labor party is in office. So, it’s a good day for me to set out some tentative thoughts on work and its future. Via Matt McManus, I found this quote from Marx ‘Fragment on Machines”. The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital -posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated Reading this, it struck...

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...

Anzac Day (the anniversary of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in 1915) is always a sad day, but even more so this year, with the horrors unfolding before us in Gaza. The carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French, of which the Gallipoli campaign was part is the direct cause of the current catastrophe. As well as grabbing colonial possessions for themselves, the Allies made promises to Jews (seeking a homeland) and Arabs (seeking independence from Turkey) which could...

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...

Robert Farley has replied to my recent post on the obsolescence of naval power. Unlike our previous exchange, a pile-on where I was (as he points out) in a minority of one, Robert’s tone is mostly civil this time, and I intend to reciprocate. Our disagreements have narrowed a fair way. On many points, it’s a matter of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. For example, Farley observes that despite Houthi attacks, 2 million tonnes of shipping per day is passing through the...

In all the discussion of Leif Wenar’s critique of Effective Altruism , I haven’t seen much mention of the central premise: that development aid is generally counterproductive (unless, perhaps, it’s delivered by wealthy surfers in their spare time). Wenar is quite clear that his argument applies just as much to official development aid and to the long-standing efforts of NGOs as to projects supported by EA. He quotes burned-out aid workers “hoping their projects were doing more good...

My latest in Crikey Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Diego Fedele)Peter Dutton can’t seem to take a trick on nuclear power. Any option he puts forward seems to vanish as soon as he makes a commitment. Since Dutton became opposition leader, he’s pushed the idea of small modular reactors (SMRs). At least in their original concept, these were reactors small enough (say 50-to-70MW capacity) to be built in a factory and shipped to sites where they could be installed in whatever number was...