Both his music and his thoughts on the digital age.
I don’t require musicians I like to be rational, sane, compassionate, intelligent, thought provoking and in general good people. But it’s awfully nice when one of them turns out to be so. The superb singer/songwriter Richard Shindell has some thoughts here and more here on […]

On the one hand, the economy is like a finely-tuned Ferrari. Or at least that was Tip ‘go away I’m still sulking’ Costello’s metaphor; and needless to say he was the only one capable of driving it.
This is borne out by Tony Abbott’s belief that Wayne Swan can creat inflation just by talking about it.
On […]

Thanks to the people skills for which he is well known, Tony Abbott is the shadow minister for family and community services. But it appears he thinks he has a treasurer’s baton in his knapsack and keeps making public statements about things that are not quite within his portfolio.
For example:
Swan to blame for rates […]

A man should know his limitations, as Dirty Harry used to say, and I don’t profess to be an economist. Maybe that’s why I puzzle over stories like these:
1. Australia has just enjoyed 14 years of uninterrupted economic growth. Unemployment is lower than at any time since 1974. The nation is awash with money. Yet […]

It took me a while to get through Judith Ajani’s The Forest Wars (MUP), partly because of my habit of having four books on the go at any one time, and partly because it’s more of an economic history of an industry than a history of conflict. Far from being an exciting account of […]

Perhaps you, like me, have been wondering just how the Government should “apply pressure” and “do more” to the banks, as the Opposition has been arguing this past week in response to the various rate rises. As we’ve seen, the banks have been acting to protect their profits and shareholder interests by passing on increased […]

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Deregulation of the labour market has arguably made a substantial contribution to improving the efficiency and productivity of the Australian economy. This has created great benefits to the current generation of Australians, evidenced most obviously during the last 15 years or so during which the per capita production of wealth in Australia has risen steadily.
The […]

Why, J-Ho, of course! He and Peter Costello have been going on and on and … on about how interest rates are lower than they were under Paul Keating and even if interest rates are going up, well, they’re still lower than they would be in some, well, parallel universe where Labor is governing, […]

Thanks to EconoMan in comments for this wonderful story.
Yesterday smirking Tip was doing his usual bellowing bull act in parliament because Kevin Rudd made a mistake about the income threshold at which the top marginal rate applies.
Seems a pretty minor matter to me. I wouldn’t have had a clue what the figure was.
I […]