Recent publications in Occasional Paper
Address to the Conference Competition & Regulation in the Energy Industry
Opening up electricity and gas markets to competition forces retailers to seek better ways of meeting the needs of customers more cheaply and ensures that cross subsidies are made known.
WWF Says 'Jump!', Governments Ask 'How High?'
WWF Says 'Jump!', Governments Ask 'How High?' A case study suggests that governments need to better scrutinize allegations of environmental harm and those who make them by Jennifer Marohasy and Gary Johns '[We] base our work on sound...
Impacts of Kyoto on Australian Power Costs
In 1973/4 when the first energy crisis was underway, there were many risks perceived to result from the quadrupling of oil prices that OPEC engineered. Originally delivered as an Address to APEC Conference 'Kyoto---The Impact on Australia',13...
Regulated and Unregulated Interconnects
Views on interconnects range from those who see little in the way of future developments other than entrepreneurial interconnects, to the ‘planophiles’.
Take Away Take-Away: The Self-Induced Destruction of the Australian Food Manufacturing Industry
The Australian food-manufacturing industry is in trouble. Despite its potential, food companies are disinvesting and shifting production facilities offshore. Exports are declining. Productivity is low. The sharemarket performance of most leading...
Why Has the Arse Fallen Out of the Clothing Manufacturing Industry?
The Australian Textiles Clothing and Footwear (TCF) industry is under the hammer. It has all the appearances of a dying industry, with media reports of redundancies, closures and collapses seeming to occur every week. It is an industry that has...
Clough Lecture 2001: The High Price of Reform Fatigue
We set up the economic conditions after 2010 today The 2001 Harold Clough Lecture The transcript of the lecture is available here.
Attack of the Mutant Watermelons: The Campaign against GMOs in the Phillipines
It has often been said that biotechnology will feed a hungry world. That may very well be the case in the future. But at the moment, biotechnology is only feeding hungry activists. As this paper shows, opposing biotechnology is not so much of a...
Submission: Review of the National Access Regime
This submission argues that the scope of application of the national access regime should be narrowed and that its form should be changed in order to make it more cognisant of private property rights and to reduce the extent of the disincentive it...
Clough Lecture 2000: Is National Sovereignty Out Of Date?
Many voices now tell us that sovereignty has become irrelevant or anachronistic in our age of globalization.