Home » regional economy
Category Archives: regional economy
The Cashless Debit Card: a review of the reviewers
Janet Hunt reviews the reviewers of the cashless card, and finds them wanting.
The concept of a ‘Healthy Welfare Card’, now renamed as
the Cashless Debit Card (CDC), was a recommendation
of the Forrest Review into Employment and Training
(Forrest 2014). It was seen as a development from
income management which has been occurring in parts
of Australia since the Northern Territory Emergency
Response, when it was first introduced for Aboriginal
communities there. In March 2017
the Department of Social Services released a ‘Wave 1’
evaluation undertaken by Orima Research of the CDC
trials in Ceduna and Kununurra.
One of the questions under review that has gained a lot of attention was “Have there been reductions in the consumption of alcohol, illegal drug use, or gambling?”
Some Survey participants said they though there had been “some” reduction in at least one of these. However 77% indicated no change. Results varied between Ceduna and Kununurra perhaps pointing to other factors being crucial. Concern about ICE use was heightened.
Police statistics indicated little or no change in crime and violence Ambulance call outs to public places did reduce, but seems to have been replaced by more call outs to private locations
Overall what is not highlighted by the official review is that there are many social problems that could be addressed by positive interventions in the areas of housing (including domestic violence safe houses), employment and public health provision (particularly mental health).
“If these trials are not helping people who live in
considerable poverty and a different program could, then
change is required. Positive programs and services to
address the problems, including housing and job creation
that could make many more people’s lives better (Klein
2017), may offer far greater value for public funds than the
CDC program and do more to improve Indigenous lives. “
Frank Stilwell on Turnbull’s Economic Plan
Tis wisely said, “you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink”. In the absence of growing demand for their products, there is no reason to expect that business will respond to a tax cut by investing in expanded productive capacity. Any additional after-tax profit is just as likely to be used for buying residential real estate – precisely what an already speculation-prone economy and society does not need!…
The government’s so-called ‘economic plan’ does not stand up to critical scrutiny. It looks particularly ill-suited to the economic conditions that the nation faces in the aftermath of the local mining boom and the continuing financial instability on a global scale. There is little ‘on the table’ that provides an affective antidote or alternative. Rather, we are being offered continuity in the form of ‘trickle-down economics’. This is the belief that giving wealthy people even more income will eventually benefit everyone. It is a self-serving elite ideology, rather than sound economics. It was deeply embedded in the policies of US President Ronald Reagan, for example, emphasising tax cuts for the wealthy as a means of creating more incentives for wealth-creating private enterprise. Reaganomics caused both economic inequality and the budget deficit to surge. Are we doomed to re-run this failed policy?
The Coalition’s oft-restated commitment to ‘jobs and growth’ is an Abbott-style three word slogan, hitched to a give-away to the big end of town in the form of business tax cuts and some assorted policies that intensify economic inequalities. When the promised surge in ‘jobs and growth’ fails to materialise, the government will have three options: (1) abandon any claims about its capacity to undertake ‘budget repair’, (2) engage in big cuts to social services, health and education in the attempt to get the government budget back into surplus, and/or (3) raise the rate of taxation on goods and services (GST).
No-one knows for sure what the future will bring, but it is hard to take the government’s ‘economic plan’ seriously without also mentioning the tooth fairy or the prospect that pigs might fly…
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
Restore full employment in Australia to shift the balance of power back toward working people
A Powerful article by Victor Quirk
Australian working people have been cruelly betrayed over the past forty years by those elements of the ALP and union leadership who have countenanced the use of unemployment and under-employment as a socio-economic weapon. These people have treacherously dishonoured the historic achievement of Curtin and Chifley who during and after WW2 showed Australians that the federal government can keep the unemployment rate under two per cent if it wishes. They proved that by adjusting public sector employment and expenditure in response to shifts in private sector activity they could keep aggregate demand at a sufficiently high level to ensure the nation’s productive resources were reasonably fully utilised, particularly its willing labour resources.
…
Alex Carey (1995) and Sharon Beder (2006) have documented the multi-million dollar corporate funded US ‘economic education’ campaign that began in Australia in 1976, establishing the mantra of ‘small government’, ‘deregulation’, ‘private sector good – public sector bad’ that corporate-funded politicians, think tanks and media commentators have been chanting ever since. It is what most people now understand to be ‘economics’, and is in fact the recipe for permanent chronic labour under-utilisation.
Proponents of the Job Guarantee point to key characteristics of modern monetary systems currently in place in countries like the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, Brazil – in fact nearly all developed countries apart from those who use the Euro – which mean they do not behave, nor impose the constraints on more socially progressive policies, as the prevailing voices of economic orthodoxy claim they do. The pertinent characteristics of the monetary systems of such countries are that their central governments are the sole sovereign issuers of the currencies used by their citizens, their currencies have floating exchange rates, and are not pegged in their value to a quantity of gold or similar precious metal. As a consequence of these characteristics these central governments (eg., the Australian Commonwealth Government) can never run out of money, unlike the households, firms, state governments, local governments, and all other economic actors who use their currencies.
Such central governments could buy everything in an economy before they could ever run out of money, though in outbidding other people that want those same things they would obviously generate a massive inflation. But when productive resources are left unutilised, with no other offers from other buyers, as in the case of the unutilised labour of unemployed people, a government with a modern monetary system can buy as much of it as they want, at the lowest legal price (eg. the federal minimum award), without exerting upward pressure on its price.
Reimagining NSW: how the care economy could help unclog our cities
The care economy can be at the core of reshaping our view of what a good economy and a decent society is. Ben Spies-Butcher sketches out a fresh way to view the rise of the care economy. Regions can be the biggest beneficiaries
unionsnswinfo 