Recent publications
Building the Australian Nanny State
Free bibs Victorian Deputy Premier Rob Hulls has announced an additional $35,000 of funding for Auskick programs to provide bibs and waist bags to identify volunteers who had met working with children checks. V-chip for Australia The Senate...
Submission to the Green Paper on Australia's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
Emissions Trading: Towards the biggest economic change in Australian history
‘Placing a limit and a price on emissions will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy', states the Federal Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper, which compares the economic impact...
So now you have bought an emissions trading scheme
What is it? The emissions trading scheme, or ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme', is a ‘cap and trade' system. This requires firms to obtain a government ‘permit' if they emit greenhouse gases. The government caps the level of...
Federal Government's ETS Green Paper is a Recipe for Radical Transformation of Economy
If implemented, the measures to curb Australia's carbon emissions foreshadowed in the federal government's Green Paper will bring about a radical transformation of the economy, according to the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia's leading free...
Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the National FuelWatch (Empowering Consumers) Bill
The rise of pop economics
The classical economists of the nineteenth century were largely concerned with wealth creation. David Ricardo developed theories of wages, rent and profit. Thomas Malthus wrote the consequences of population growth. Karl Marx looked at the moral...
How humanity outflanked starvation
Sinclair Davidson reviews A Farewell to Alms: A brief history of the world by Gregory Clark Sometime in the last 200 years there was a fundamental shift in the human condition. Our lives changed from being somewhat ‘nasty, brutish and short'...
A critique of the ACCC analysis of the FuelWatch scheme
Much has been made of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission analysis of the Western Australian FuelWatch scheme. This paper investigates the ACCC analysis published last December and comments briefly on the additional analysis the...
How many football teams should there be?
Competition is good for consumers-it leads to lower prices and better quality, with less efficient firms exiting the industry. Sports, apparently, are an exception to that rule. Consumers are better off when teams compete on the playing field, but...