photo credit: Nicholas Erwin At the moment, Victoria’s Metropolitan Fire Brigade and Country Fire Authority are funded by the Fire Services Levy, a charge added to fire insurance. But the FSL gives a free ride to uninsured property owners – they don’t pay for the level of fire cover provided. Free riders increase the cost [...]
Prof. Ross Garnaut gave the Hamer Oration at Melbourne University on Thursday. He pointed out that Australia has not experienced a recession for 17 years, a record for The Lucky Country. Such a period of unbroken growth is not just an Australian record, it is a world record. But one-way tickets have built-in risks for [...]
photo credit: Powerhouse Museum Collection Hon. Clyde R. Cameron A.O. Australian Minister for Labour (1972 – 1975) H/T – Liberty Australia Keynote address by Clyde Cameron to the Victorian Country Conference of the recently amalgamated Association made up of the former Australian Telecom Employees’ Association and Australian Telephone & Phonogram Officers’ Association held at the [...]
Michael Hudson As first published in The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, eds., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010):8-39. Also on Michael’s website. A century ago economists could only speculate as to the origins of enterprise. It seemed logical to assume that [...]
photo credit: Urban~Spaceman Miners finally agree to tax reform. What are the changes? The attempt to harness economic rents for the public good has been renamed from the Resource Super Profits tax to the Mineral Resource Rent Tax. The MRRT kicks in at the corporate bond rate plus 7%. That is 12%, rather than the [...]
Michael Hudson The Counter-Enlightenment, its Economic Program – and the Classical Alternative Based on a talk given to Prosper Australia on Friday October 16th, 2009. First published in Progress Magazine – Autumn 2010. Download Progress #1096 here. The last few years have seen Social Democratic and Labour parties fall into disarray throughout the world. Retreating [...]
photo credit: Adam_T4 Michael Hudson and Shann Turnbull* Confronted by the global financial crisis that is burying foreign economies deeper in debt deflation each month, Australia needs to protect itself – indeed, to liberate itself from as many costs and risks as it can. Fortunately, many of its costs and risks are unnecessary, merely [...]
photo credit: robertivanc The great property speculation game is over in America and Europe. The music has stopped. Forty years of steadily increasing pressure has been released. Houses are worth a fraction of what people paid in better times, while the giant mortgages they took on remain. Meanwhile, Australia parties on. We play the [...]
photo credit: earthsharing australia Thomas Kokkinos-Kennedy Semester 1, 2009, Assessment Two Research Essay Are the concepts and ideas proposed by Henry George in 1879 still relevant in understanding socio-economic aspects of the property market in contemporary Melbourne? This essay will begin with some background to Henry George the man and his historical context, followed by [...]
photo credit: marfis75 That’s essentially the message from the February Housing Finance figures. With the property market bubbling at extortionate levels, housing investors have decided to go to sleep at just the time they are most needed. In seasonal terms, housing investment fell in total by 3.4%. Housing investment crept upwards by just 0.4% in [...]