May Day

John Quiggin22 Comments

Here in Queensland, at least while the ALP is in office, we celebrate Labour Day as May Day, with a holiday long weekend on the first Monday in May. It’s a good time to think about how workers, in Australia and globally, can turn around the long decline in the reach and influence of trade unions and the resulting decline in the wage share of national income.
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The Business Council thinks the left has no plan? …

John Quiggin8 Comments

… That’s a bit rich

That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Guardian. Final paras

unlike the BCA, its opponents have been willing to specify the measures needed to pay for these desirable outcomes. Eschewing the small target strategy routinely recommended for opposition parties seeking office, Labor has announced a range of revenue measures that would finance a substantial expenditure program, combined with some tax relief for low and middle income households. These include scaling back negative gearing, crackdowns on tax evasion and avoidance, and a restoration of the 2% levy on top incomes.

The Business Council has long been a weak and ineffectual participant in Australian policy debate. If it is to be taken seriously, it needs more than astroturf front groups and websites. The Council needs to take on some of its members, both in relation to their corporate behavior and in their resistance to any tax reform that might cause them any pain. Until then, Jennifer Westacott should be more cautious in asserting that others lack a plan and believe in “fairies at the bottom of the garden

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The Coal Truth

John Quiggin5 Comments

If all the coal in the Galilee Basin were burned, it would make it just about impossible to stabilize the global climate. Most attention has been focused on the Adani Group’s proposal for an integrated mine-rail-port project to develop its proposed Carmichael mine. There are however a string of would-be followers, including GVK Hancock and Clive Palmer.

The good news is that Adani’s March deadline for financial close, itself a deferral of earlier promises, has passed with no sign of anyone willing to finance the proposal. Even the Abbot Point terminal, which has long-term take-or-pay contracts with existing coal mines, is struggling to refinance its debt.

But there’s no room for complacency.
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Chapters

John Quiggin9 Comments

At a certain point in an academic career, you start getting lots of invitations to write book chapters, which is a lot easier than going through the mill of submitting articles to journals, dealing with referee reports and so on. I’ve had three emails in the last few days, telling me that books to which I’ve contributed chapters have come out.

The one of most interest to readers here will be The Coal Truth: The fight to stop Adani, defeat the big polluters and reclaim our democracy by David Ritter, with contributors including Adrian Burragubba, Tara Moss and Berndt Sellheim, Lesley Hughes,Hilary Bambrick, Ruchira Talukdar, Geoffrey Cousins and me. The title is self-explanatory. Although Adani seems to have gone quiet for the moment, this will be an important resource if the Galilee Basin project is revived, or for future struggles.

In addition, there’s the Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism, where I have a chapter on Rise, Decline and Future Prospects, and Human Forces and Engineering, which came out of a final year course for Honours Engineering students, to which I contributed a chapter oh climate change,

Why were we at war with Turkey?

John Quiggin69 Comments

It’s now more than 100 years since Australian troops landed on a Turkish beach to take part in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, which ended with nearly 30 000 Australians dead or wounded, among a total of up to half a million on both sides. For many of those years, I’ve been observing Anzac Day and mourning those losses. But in all that time, it’s never occurred to me ask why we were at war with Turkey, or rather why Turkey had chosen to join the German side in the Great War.

The answer is that the Ottoman government wanted an alliance with Britain and France, but was turned down. Russia, also allied with Britain and France, offered terms that amounted to a protectorate (it was the desire to keep Russia in the alliance that motivated the French rejection).

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GMI + JG = paid work as a choice for all

John Quiggin21 Comments

I’ve been arguing for a while that a Guarantee Minimum Income (or Universal Basic Income) ought to be combined with a Jobs Guarantee to would make paid work a genuine choice for everyone. To spell this out, the GMI/UBI would make it possible to live decently without paid work, while a Jobs Guarantee would ensure that paid work was available to everyone. As a medium term policy, the best form of GMI would, I think, be the participation income advocated by the late Tony Atkinson. That is, a payment conditional on some form of social contribution, including voluntary work, study and childcare. Support for such a policy entails a direct confrontation with the punitive attitudes behind policies like Work for the Dole, while still maintaining the widely-held principle of reciprocity.

I was going to write more about this, but I just received an article by Felix FitzRoy and Jim Jin, in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice which presents the argument very well. So, I’ll just recommend that to anyone interested in the issue.