Thanks to everyone who made suggestions, I’ve managed to put together a reasonably good set of further reading for my chapter on the Howard government’s economic policy. Further suggestions are still welcome of course.

The literature on Australian economic policy is still largely focused on the Hawke-Keating government and the issues arising from that government’s reform agenda. The scarcity of published work on the Howard government is, in part, a reflection of the lags involved in the process of making an assessment and distilling it in the form of a book or even a journal article. However, the absence of significant new economic policy ideas has also been a relevant factor.

Some comments on economic policy from a free-market viewpoint can be found at the Institute for Public Affairsand the Centre for Independent Studies , but little in the way of comprhehensive assessment of the Howard government is available from these sources. The most recent systematic presentation of the free-market viewpoint is Wolfgang Kasper’s short monograph, Building Prosperity:Australia’s Future as a Global Player (Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards, 2000).

Generally critical accounts of recent Australian economic policy are more common and include Fred Argy, Where to From Here? Australian egalitarianism under threat (Allen & Unwin, Syndey 2003). Michael Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003) and Christopher Sheil (ed) Globalisation: Australian Impacts, (University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2001).

The tax reform debate generated a few books, including Howard Pender, The Joy of Tax: Directions for Tax Reform in Australia (Australian Tax Research Foundation, Sydney,1988) and this writer’s Taxing Times: A Guide to the Tax Debate in Australia, (University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2001). The best sources on the privatisation debate are the CEDA publication  Privatisation: A Review of the Australian Experience (Growth 50, December 2002) and Bob Walker and Betty Con Walker, Privatisation: Sell Off or Sell Out? The Australian Experience, (ABC Books, Sydney 2000).

Some useful information on unemployment can be found in Debelle, G. and Borland, J. Eds.), “Unemployment and the Australian Labour Market: Proceedings of a conference held at the H.C. Coombs Centre for Financial Studies, Kirribilli,9-10 June, 1998“, (Reserve Bank of Australia, Sydney 1998).

A more sympathetic of the governments fiscal and macroeconomic assessment than that offered here can be found in the OECD Country Surveys (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/5/2496702.pdf) which largely reflect the views of the Australian Treasury. Also useful is Gruen, D. and Shrestha, S. (ed.), The Australian Economy in the 1990s: Proceedings of a conference held at the H.C. Coombs Centre for Financial Studies, Kirribilli, 24-25 July2000 (Reserve Bank of Australia, Sydney 2000). Discussion on a wide range of topics can be found at the website for Radio National’s Background Briefing and also at this writers’s website