Pitch Engine

With the trans-Tasman travel bubble about to open, how much should the tourism industry get its hopes up?

www.shutterstock.comBy this time next week flights between New Zealand and Australia will have been taking off and landing for roughly 48 hours. The quarantine-free trans-Tasman travel bubbl...

Home prices are climbing alright, but not for the reason you might think

It’s tempting to think home prices are soaring because there aren’t enough homes.But that can’t explain the sudden takeoff from about the year 2000, the sudden takeoff from...

Not wiped out. Even after the collapse of Greensill, there's time to save Whyalla

Tudoran Andrei/ShutterstockWiping off Whyalla has become something of a macabre sport.All manner of things have been said to be about to destroy the steelworks town, including (briefly) the ...

Resistance to raising the minimum wage reflects obsolete economic thinking

Fewer than 2% of Australian employees work for the minimum wage (now $19.84 an hour). But the federal Fair Work Commission’s annual decision on how much to increase the minimum wage al...

New Zealand’s new housing policy is really just a new tax package — and it’s a shambles

GettyImagesEconomists like to talk about “optimal policy instruments” — essentially, policies that achieve their objectives more effectively or efficiently than the alterna...

Housing affordability is a problem. Here's why super-for-housing isn’t a solution

The idea that young Australians should be able to dip into their super to help buy their first home keeps going round and round. The most recent iteration put forward by the Coalition’...

Vital signs: to fix Australia's housing affordability crisis, negative gearing must go

Dan Himbrechts/AAPHouse prices are back in the news, and out of control.In the past three months the median house price in Sydney has risen by more than A$100,000 to A$1.12 million. Sydney&r...

Company directors can't serve two masters: what went wrong at Australia Post

Shareholder primacy is often said to be the guiding principle of corporations. The idea is that they exist to benefit their shareholders by providing dividends and capital gains, the more th...

JobKeeper and JobMaker have left too many young people on the dole queue

Of the more than 870,000 Australians who lost their jobs in the first few months of the COVID-19 crisis, 332,200 – or 38% – were young Australians aged 15-24.By June 2020, as the...

The successor to JobKeeper can't do its job. There's an urgent need for JobMaker II

workskil/ShutterstockUntil the end of last month one million workers were paid by JobKeeper.This month there are none. Treasury thinks up to 150,000 will lose their jobs. Credible estimates ...

The paradox of going contactless is that we're more in love with cash than ever

Ann Kosolapova/ShutterstockCOVID has changed you, right? You use less cash, perhaps a lot less.In the first two months of the pandemic, cash withdrawals from automatic teller machines halved...

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