John Quiggin

That’s the title of my latest column in Independent Australia, which came out on Thursday. The news has just come in that Morrison is to curtail his trip and return home. Strikingly, it was the lead headline on news outlets, including the ABC, Guardian, and Fairfax/Nine that failed to report Morrison’s absence for days, then buried the news in stories leading with other topics. All of that led me to some ill-tempered Twitter exchanges (the usual kind of Twitter exchange, I guess)...

The country is on fire. And: The PM disappears overseas. His supporters spin the fact that it’s only his second overseas holiday this year (not second holiday, or second largely recreational OS trip)The media are ordered not to report the fact, or even that we have an acting PM. Compliance is near-total until Twitter outrage puts the issue into the international pressTory-fighter Albanese gives Morrison a free pass. Still hasn’t pushed the government on link to climate change. Would...

Among other activities, I write or sign on to, lots of emails to business leaders and others, protesting against environmental failures, abuses of workers rights and so on. Occasionally that contributes to a win, but hardly ever do I get reply. I recently wrote to the CEO of Siemens, , protesting against the decision of the Australian branch of the business to work with Adani on rail signalling systems for the rail line to the destructive Carmichael mine. I was quite surprise to...

As I’ve said previously, explaining election losses after the fact is too easy, since changing any factor that caused a loss of significant numbers of votes would (other things equal) turn the loss to a win. Still, one thing that’s struck me about several recent elections lost by the left is that they combined a generally coherent platform with a fudge on a central issue. Examples are Corbyn on Brexit, Shorten on Adani and Clinton on the TPPA. I don’t want to make too much of...

A while ago, I made a submission to a Parliamentary inquiry into nuclear power and, in particular, the removal of the 1998 legislative ban on nuclear power. The inquiry was pretty obviously a stunt aimed at placating Barnaby Joyce and the nuclear lobby[1], but I decided to take it seriously and ask what would be needed to give nuclear power any chance, economically and in terms of social acceptance, in Australia. I proposed what’s been called a grand bargain , lifting the ban in...

That’s a term coined to describe the fate of the Greek social democratic (and nominally socialist) party PASOK, which implemented austerity measures in the wake of the global financial crisis, and was subsequently wiped out, with most of its voters going switching their support to the newly created left party Syriza. In France, Germany and the Netherlands, much the same has happened with the Greens gaining many of the votes lost by social democrats. Broadly speaking, the more a...

There have always been lots of people who saw nothing in politics except a bunch of windbags scoring points off each other. And a year or two back, there was a thing called anti-politics which attempted to give some kind of intellectual basis for this sentiment. Although I’ve known lots of anti-political/apolitical people and paid attention to the discussion of anti-politics, it’s always been something I’ve viewed from the outside, and as a problem to be remedied by doing a better...

Here are four propositions about voting behavior which, as far as I can tell, have been true in nearly all democratic countries for at least the past 50 years. Other things equal, people are more likely to vote for conservative parties if: They have higher incomesThey have lower educationThey live in rural areas or small townsThey are members of a dominant racial/religious groupBy contrast, lot of commentary on recent electoral losses for the left seems to start from the presumption...

As I write this, the haze of smoke from the now-continuous bushfires is hanging over Brisbane, as it is over Sydney and other cities. It’s scarcely surprising that the Morrison government is doing its best to ignore the problem, but you might think the official Opposition would be making some noise about it. Not likely! On Nov 12, Penny Wong said the immediate focus should be on firefighters battling the blazes, people at risk and those grieving lost loved ones. “When we get...

The Centre for Independent Studies has just issued a report about Australian public attitudes to religious freedom. I’m happy to say that the majority (64 per cent) attitude coincides almost exactly with the one I’ve expressed here, namely that within very broad limits, what we do and say in our own time is no business of the boss. That cuts both ways: both offering protection to people whose religious expression offends the boss, and preventing religious organizations from...