My Op-Ed piece in today’s Financial Review (subscription required) is on unemployment. A short grab:

At no time since the election of the current government has unemployment been an issue of real concern. Second-order trivia like the GST and waterfront reform have had far more attention. And, sadly, the Australian public has become inured to chronic mass unemployment. In the absence of a severe economic downturn, the government will pay no real political price for its worst policy failure.

Also, today the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia released a review of Australian experience with privatisation. You can download the <a Introduction here (PDF). Most of the contributors are broadly sympathetic to privatisation, though less so in the case of regulated monopolies. I argue, as I have done for some time, that we should be looking at renationalisation in many cases.

Most interesting to me was a study by Jonathan Kelly and Joanna Sikora showing that public opinion against privatisation has hardened steadily over time. In 1986, views on the privatisation of Telstra were about evenly divided. By 2002, 70 per cent were opposed and only 16 per cent in favour. Similar views apply even to firms like the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas that have been privatised for years, and opposition is even stronger in the case of Australia Post, the only business in the study still in full public ownership.

It’s difficult to attribute this to emotional attachments to Aussie icons, in view of the fact that people were quite willing to contemplate privatisation in the 1980s. Advocates of privatisation hoped that experience would lead people to accept it. In fact, the reverse has been the case, here as in Britain and New Zealand. People have experienced privatisation and they don’t like it.

In view of the rhetoric about elites we’ve heard so much about lately, it’s worth pointing out that the divide between elite and popular opinion is far sharper here than in the case of asylum-seekers.