Yes folks, the Crikey subscription is back at the top of Troppo for ONE WEEK ONLY as we’ve just been issued with the link – which will enable you to sign up. It’s here!.
As aficionados will be aware, Troppo funds its entire garage of imaginary vehicles (including the latest acquisition – Bronnie the chopper) from its annual group subscription to Crikey. Continue reading
I don’t stay on top of many of the latest issues. After all, they’re complicated, time is limited, so I’ll just satisfy myself with starting, largely ideological reactions (and of course not opine too strongly given my state of ignorance) about any number of public issues. Is climate change real? Buggered if I know but it would take a long time to come to a better view than I have now which is that it may be a disciplinary bubble of self-righteousness. It’s happened before. But given the preponderance of apparently reasonable people who know vastly more than me, it probably isn’t and given even a small chance that they’re right, we should do something. There! Job done. I can get on with something else.
Anyway, I always approved of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) on similar grounds. Since the ‘marginalist revolution’ from 1870s on, ours has been a discipline based on the metaphysical notion that it’s good to satisfy human wants and that urgent, deeply felt wants are more important than whether I drive a Holden or a Ferrari. And apart from the technocratic notion of the diminishing marginal utility of money, there is our Christian heritage. I was hungry and you fed me – that kind of thing. There. Job done. Slam dunk really. The NDIS is a Good Thing. And if it’s not fully funded, and if its costs blow out and if it has its share of snafus (all of which I expect are more likely than not), we’ll cope with them, like we cope with falling iron ore prices and with farcically designed VET Fee HELP schemes and the like.
Anyway, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation has been getting involved in some work for the National Disability Insurance Agency. So I spent last weekend reading the Productivity Commission’s report that gave rise to the scheme. And it’s a marvellous document. It seems like a well thought out scheme though as I’ve said above, it will have its share of snafus – these schemes usually do. We’re trying to set something up which by rights would take ten years, in about three. But it’s a great national crusade to make the world a better place. And it’s the old story. With economists being probably the most important profession in tackling slavery, so here it’s economists who managed to snaffle for themselves the prestige to propose something as audacious as this – and everyone went along with it. Equity and efficiency together – what’s there not to like? Continue reading
National policies take varied approaches to encouraging
university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural
experiment: the end of the “professor’s privilege” in Norway, where
university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their
innovations. Upon the reform, Norway moved toward the typical U.S.
model, where the university holds majority rights. Using
comprehensive data on Norwegian workers, firms, and patents, we find
a 50% decline in both entrepreneurship and patenting rates by
university researchers after the reform. Quality measures for
university start-ups and patents also decline.
by Hans K. Hvide, Benjamin F. Jones – #22057 (PR)
Rosalie Blum (Opening Night)
This week’s announcement by Pangaea Resources that it is suspending its NT onshore gas exploration drilling program and laying off 140 workers, following the Labor Opposition’s indication that it will impose an indefinite moratorium on fracking, has provoked predictable responses from the Giles government and some mining industry types.
However you don’t need to be a one-eyed greenie to doubt the extent to which Pangaea’s announcement was actually caused by Michael Gunner’s fracking moratorium announcement. Only 6 out of a planned 25 onshore exploration wells were drilled throughout the Northern Territory during 2015, and oil and gas prices have fallen further since then. Only a very naive person would fail to realise that rock bottom oil and gas prices are the dominant factor in Pangaea’s decision. Nevertheless, Labor’s announcement may have been a subsidiary factor, if only in the timing of the announcement. After all, Labor currently looks odds on to win government in the Territory come August’s election, so if you’re a resource company now is the time to exert political pressure.
Whether Labor should take any notice is another question.
This is a note to myself. It’s from the report of the NDIS Citizen’s Jury Scorecard. However, in a way that speaks for itself, it may be of interest to Troppodillians. It’s an illustration of professional obfuscation and indifference to those in their care. (Of course lots of those in these organisations are not like this. But lots are, and that’s despite their genuine intention to do the right thing – surely something to ponder). The closure of the offending institution seems to have been announced to the objections of various stakeholders.
Way back in the 1980s and 90s when I was a Labor “apparatchik” and then for a short time a local politician in the Northern Territory, the Opposition of which I was a part was for a time led by Brian Ede. He married Anne Walsh a daughter of arch neoliberal Federal Labor Minister for Finance Senator Peter Walsh. Current federal Labor frontbencher Gary Gray, who was a NT Labor staffer in the 80s, ended up marrying another Walsh daughter Deborah.
In part as a result of those c0nnections, the NT Labor Parliamentary wing was a hotbed of purist (some would say extreme) neoliberal economic dogma. Low taxes, balanced budgets, no industry assistance, no “picking winners” and so forth. At least it was a useful antidote to the Country Liberal government’s approach at the time, which could most kindly be described as crooked crony mercantilism. It’s an approach to which some would say the current Giles government has returned.
What strange times we live in! The Red Star Line’s passenger cruise freighter SS Labor, despite a seemingly lacklustre captain with a mutinous history, is sailing full steam ahead for port carrying an impressive cargo of solid policies and fiscal measures to fund them.
Meanwhile, the Blue Star Line’s SS Coalition, despite a patrician skipper imagined by many to be a master mariner, remains becalmed with an almost complete absence of policy cargo, holed beneath the waterline by a “friendly fire” GST torpedo and threatened by a potentially mutinous faction of his own crew led by the bloodthirsty brigand and erstwhile skipper Fletcher Abbott.
How did this happen?
Andrew Elder John Quiggin Crooked Timber OpenDemocracy Harry Clarke CoreEcon Bill Mitchell Skepticlawyer Kyle McDonald Constitutional Critique (Anne Twomey) The Conversation (G8 unis)