Australia’s 2015 Intergenerational Report assumed that labour productivity would grow at an average annual rate of 1.5 percent over the period 2015 to 2055. This is slightly lower than the growth in labour productivity over the last decade because multifactor productivity has stagnated.
In 2012, Australia’s Asian Century White Paper outlined fundamental policy and attitudinal changes that would be required if Australia was to make the most of the opportunities presented by the Asian century. Yet it has had no impact on policy in Australia.
House prices rose by an average of 64% in Sydney and Melbourne in the decade from 2004 to 2014. At the same time foreign investment proposals in developed real estate rose by almost tenfold. This correlation led to many anecdotal stories of Chinese buyers driving up prices and to a Parliamentary Inquiry.
Christmas has come early for advocates of tobacco control, with tobacco giant Philip Morris’s lawsuit against Australian plain packaging legislation ruled invalid. Australia will not have to pay any damages to Philip Morris. Indeed, it is likely that there will be an order for Philip Morris to reimburse the Australian government’s costs in defending this suit.
How can two words create so much confusion?
The government has released its options paper on Australia’s misuse of market power laws. However, all the options miss the key point.
The law is section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act. The Harper review recommended substantial change to this law. Some of the suggestions are sensible. For example, the law should protect competition, not individual competitors. However, it is currently ambiguous. Making the offence an act to “substantially lessen competition” can fix the ambiguity.
With the Turnbull government’s innovation package now out of the way, we will soon get the official update on the government’s budget position, the so-called Mid-year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO).
And it is unlikely to be pretty.
The budget numbers that then-Treasurer Joe Hockey laid down in May were, at that time, rather ugly. The estimated budget deficit for 2015-16 was to be $35.1 billion, or 2.0% of GDP.
The major big business lobby groups have largely welcomed this week’s innovation statement, getting behind its support for entrepreneurs. One wonder why they care since it primarily focuses on research institutes and startups, with which they hardly interact.
“Australia’s innovation challenge means we need to move from fat and happy, to lean and keen,” said Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Kate Carnell.
The federal government has hit a major roadblock in its plan to bring in new rules governing superannuation funds, with four independent senators refusing to support the related bill.
The proposed legislation was widely seen as targeting industry super funds, aimed at the part of the retirement-savings industry that is best performing and (compared to the for-profit sector) largely scandal-free.
When the public thinks of innovation, it’s usually in the realm of blue-sky thinking and new inventions. In the world of transport, innovation evokes images of 600 kilometre per hour trains in Japan, or two-person aerial transit pods in Israel, driverless – or maybe even flying – cars.
When he unveils his innovation statement, will Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull be seduced by these notions – or will his innovation statement focus on more pressing needs for innovation in the transport system?
The taxation of superannuation has been the cause of much consternation. Much of the difficulty is the result of the slow drift of superannuation from the moorings of its original purpose.
In introducing the superannuation guarantee in 1992, the Keating government was pursuing an ideal firmly centred on the ordinary person of ordinary means. The hope was to extend superannuation to the entire workforce as a means of ensuring working people were not wholly dependent on the state in funding their retirement.
