Author: cchua

01 Feb

Posted at 10:30h in Blog

Due to technical difficulties, we were a little late sending out our annual Progressive Summer Reading List, and even later getting it up on the website, but here it is. We've got some terrific suggestions to ease you back into the working year ahead. Our thanks to staff, Research Fellows, Research Committee Members and Board Members for these suggestions.​ Fiction The Last Man in Europe by Dennis Glover April, 1947. In a run-down farmhouse on a remote Scottish island, George Orwell begins his last and greatest work: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Forty-four years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that within three winters will take his life, Orwell comes to see the book as his legacy – the culmination of a career spent fighting to preserve the freedoms which the wars and upheavals of the twentieth century have threatened. Completing the book is an urgent challenge, a race against death. A terrific first novel by Per Capita Research Fellow Dennis Glover,...

26 Oct

Posted at 10:28h in Blog

Thank you to all those who entered the 2017 Per Capita Young Writers' Prize. We had a strong field of entries, from Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, writing essays on subjects as diverse as mental health and wellness, political education, taxation policy, energy and environment policy. In 2017, the judging panel decided that there were three equal first prize winners: Benjamin Maltby for his essay Power to Australia: "An Incremental Energy and Environment Policy for Australia"; Andrew Silk for his essay "Adding Positive Economic Incentives to Australia’s Health Policy Toolbox"; Michael Dello-Iacovo for his essay "Effects of Livestock Industry on Climate Change and the Environment". These essays were well written and put forward well-constructed arguments on their topics....

16 Dec

Posted at 10:27h in Blog

Thank you to all those who entered the 2016 Per Capita Young Writers' Prize. We had a strong field of entries, from every state in Australia, with our entrants tackling subjects as diverse as our ageing population, university funding, challenges to our democracy, rights and our Constitution, and environmental issues. The winner of the 2016 Per Capita Young Writers’ Prize is Hayley Pring, whose essay Australia’s Silver Economy was, it was agreed by all judges, a compelling and well-constructed argument for focusing on the benefits and opportunities to be found in the ageing population, and made a strong case for reframing our policy approach to ageing in Australia. The second-prize winner is Hugh Hutchison, who wrote An Imperfect Inheritance: The Double-Edged Sword of Australian Political Parentage. This was an original and thought-provoking assessment of Australia’s political structures and institutions, which contained interesting prescriptions to address issues facing our democracy. A special environmental award was made to Victoria McGlynn, whose...

19 Aug

Posted at 10:27h in Blog

Through our Social Democracy in Focus series, we try to go beyond the theory of public policy, and look at real life outcomes of government decisions. We want to take a closer look at the real world consequences when specific policies, concepts and ideas are implemented. It's been a while since our last edition, but given the debacle over #CensusFail last week, we thought it's a good time to have a look at a specific concept that we're hearing a lot "efficiency" and the influence this is having on democratic institutions. The "Efficiency Dividend" Governments invoking efficiency as an intrinsic good is nothing new. The Commonwealth "efficiency dividend" was introduced by the Hawke government in 1987, and was supposed to reap the benefits of technological advances. It is an annual reduction in funding for the running costs of an agency, and is not supposed to compromise output. The problem with this very blunt...

19 Jul

Posted at 10:25h in Blog

Malcolm Turnbull - a new kind of progressive politics for Australia? Our Social Democracy in Focus Series is designed to look closely at the policies of progressive governments, and see how they translate into practice to implement a progressive policy agenda. Given the change in federal leadership, we thought we'd take a moment to evaluate our new PM, now over a month into his leadership, given that he is so often described as having "progressive" views. The transition September 15th 2015: "There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian", proclaimed our new PM as he took over the reigns of government.  He declared that a "government formed under his leadership, is a government for the 21st Century". Not since "Kevin 07", has such optimism flooded over our polity, a welcome respite from the constant fear mongering, three-word slogans and divisive politics that defined Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership. After 30 consecutive negative Newspolls,...

30 Jan

Posted at 10:08h in Blog

  We've got some great progressive reading suggestions to keep you busy over summer. Our thanks to Research Fellows, staff, Research Committee Members and supporters for these suggestions.​   Time for a New Consensus Tom Bentley and Jonathan West (2016, Griffith Review 51) In an in-depth and insightful analysis of the Australian political and economic landscape, West and Per Capita Board Member Tom Bentley investigate the growing sense of stagnation in Australia’s approach to public policy and economic reform. They argue that the current sense of political inertia comes from the fact that the whole discussion is taking place within the parameters of a political consensus that was forged in the 1980s, and which has now passed its use-by date.DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK HERE   Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Svetlana Alexievich (2016, Random House) Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for this and other oral histories, which document the tragedy of modern Russia. In this book, her interviewees describe what...

23 Dec

Posted at 10:08h in Blog

We've got some great progressive reading suggestions to keep you busy over summer. Our thanks to Ideas at Per Capita subscribers and the Per Capita Circle for these suggestions. An Economy is not a Society Winners and losers in the new Australia, Dennis Glover (2015, Black Inc books) A wonderful and personal account of the "winners and losers" in the new Australian economy. Glover takes aim at our policymakers and political leaders who prize productivity above all else, while paying scant attention to what happens to communities.  Economic rationalists have reduced communities to nothing more than economic inputs. Through the story of the decline of his own community of Doveton, Glover calls for a broader conversation about the kind of society we want to be - what kind of lives, jobs and communities to we want to build. The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia, Frank Bongiorno (2015, Black Inc) It's a decade full of big characters and...

17 Dec

Posted at 10:08h in Blog

First Prize awarded to Euan Brown for his compelling essay: Dispelling Ageism's Myths. Population ageing presents significant challenges, but these should not be overstated and the economic opportunities this demographic shift offers should be equally emphasised. Governmental research has up until this point inadequately identified those opportunities instead preferring a doomand-gloom prognosis of Australia's future economic performance and standards of living. Crucially, the productive capacity of older workers is largely missing from the Government's prescriptions and as a result those prescriptions are unreliable....

31 Aug

Posted at 10:23h in Blog

31 August 2015 Social Democracy in Focus - The Future of Social Democracy Welcome to our 8th edition of Social Democracy in Focus. In this edition we're doing something a little different. We've received such great feedback on Dennis' book, An Economy is Not a Society, that we thought we'd recap some of the discussion and commentary around it.  And we're also highlighting a recent presentation by David Hetherington on whether social democracy is in crisis. Is Social Democracy Actually in Crisis? In July, David Hetherington joined Eva Cox and Mark Banisch at a Fabians event to discuss "Is Social Democracy Actually in Crisis?" Said David: "Social democracy is in crisis. The political centre of gravity in the traditional west has moved to the right in the last few decades, the entrenched hold neoliberal activism has taken on our political system, a lack of vision, and the lack of faith in institutions and political players,...