Top economists back boosts to JobSeeker and social housing over tax cuts in pre-budget poll
Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-NDOverwhelmingly, Australia’s leading economists want the budget to boost social housing and the JobSeeker unemployment benefit rather than bring f...
Dental Plaque: Sticky and Colourless Deposit
Taking care of your teeth and ensuring they are healthy is part of ideal self-care. There are essential things you need to know about dental plaques that can save your teeth from pain ...
Frydenberg is setting his budget ambition dangerously low
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s announcement that he’ll prioritise reducing unemployment ahead of reducing government debt is welcome news.The government is required by the Charter o...
Google and Facebook shouldn't subsidise journalism, but the government could
Jeff Chiu/APYou might have missed it – what with the biggest recession since the 1930s and a pandemic going on – but there may be big, and bad, changes happening to a media lands...
Testamentary trusts are one of the last truly outrageous means of avoiding tax
Scott Graham/UpsplashIt’s one thing to bring forward tax cuts, as the government is thinking of doing in the October budget.It’s another to leave wide open an arrangement that al...
Keating is right. The Reserve Bank should do more. It needs to aim for more inflation
Ashwin/ShutterstockFormer prime minister Paul Keating isn’t alone in wanting the Reserve Bank to do much more to ensure economic recovery.In an opinion piece for major newspapers he ha...
New Zealand companies lag behind others in their reporting on climate change, and that's a risk to their reputation
Shutterstock/sdecoretNew Zealand’s top 30 corporations do a poor job reporting on climate change compared with similar Australian and Fortune Global 500 companies, according to our res...
It's not only Westpac. What's behind the biggest fine in Australian corporate history
Marlon Trottmann/ShutterstockWestpac is to pay A$1.3 billion, by far Australia’s biggest-ever corporate fine for breaches of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing A...
More neurotic, less agreeable, less conscientious: how job insecurity shapes your personality
ShutterstockWith unemployment at its highest rate in three decades, almost a million Australians are experiencing the anxiety of being out of work. Even more are underemployed, and more stil...
'If JobSeeker was cut, the unemployed would be picking fruit'? Why that's not true
F Armstrong Photography/ShutterstockI’m not sure which does the most harm: the cut of A$150 per week in JobSeeker payments due this Friday or the sudden and coincidental volley of medi...
Why do bankers behave so badly? They make too much money to ask questions
Rudy Balasko/ShutterstockOver the past 16 months journalists have been scouring through more than 2,000 Suspicious Activity Reports originally sent by banks to the United States Treasury, be...
The major parties' tax promises are more about ideology and psychology than equity or fairness for New Zealanders
www.shutterstock.comThe conservative tax policies proposed by Labour and National ahead of next mont…
Athlete activism or corporate woke washing? Getting it right in the age of Black Lives Matter is a tough game
Sacramento Kings players kneel in support of the Black Lives Matter movement before an NBA basketbal…
Yes government debt is cheap, but that doesn't mean it comes risk-free
Rost9/ShutterstockThe financial response of Western governments to the COVID-19 crisis has been garg…
Vital Signs: 50 years ago Milton Friedman told us greed was good. He was half right
Hoover InstitutionThe point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed – for lack of a better word …
Who suffers most from Melbourne’s extended lockdown? Hint: they are not necessarily particularly vocal
James Ross/AAPBusinesses are protesting vociferously about Victoria’s extended lockdown. It&rs…
Tasmania's tax system is broken: here are three ways to fix it
SevenMaps/ShutterstockFor two decades now, meaningful tax reform has proved elusive. At the federal …
Super funds are feeling the financial heat from climate change
The wild fires that have ravaged the US west coast, turning skies orange, are a lurid reminder that …
3 keys to meaningful work: an employer who cares about the environment, society and you
ShutterstockWe spend, on average, about 90,000 hours at work. Given this, most of us want work that…
In gold we trust: why bullion is still a safe haven in times of crisis
Shutterstock“Gold” said famed investor Warren Buffett in 1998, “gets dug out of th…
Are your devices spying on you? Australia's very small step to make the Internet of Things safer
ShutterstockFrom internet-connected televisions, toys, fridges, ovens, security cameras, door locks…
The sackings at Rio look like a victory for shareholders, but...
In the coming days thousands of (digital) column inches are going to be devoted to the idea that ins…
Corporate dysfunction on Indigenous affairs: Why heads rolled at Rio Tinto
Outraged investors have forced the board of Rio Tinto to sack its chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jac…
Winding back JobKeeper and JobSeeker will push 740,000 Australians into poverty
lakshmiprasada S/ShutterstockAustralian National University calculations suggest JobKeeper and the b…
Vital Signs: batch testing and contact tracing are the two keys to stop the lockdown yo-yo
Back in March and April I (and many other economists) argued for lockdowns to get COVID-19 infection…
