The collapse of ABC Learning has prompted widespread calls for greatly increased regulation of childcare services. According to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, child care needs to be a "highly managed market", not only with regulation of service standards but also with caps on the number of places. Equally, the organisation representing independent private childcare operators, Childcare Associations Australia, has called on the Government not to allow "another childcare monopoly" to take ABC Learning's place. Central planning is in the air. To view the article click read more.
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“What I'm determined to do with the cabinet colleagues is to say well, here are some performance benchmarks in terms of how this is implemented over the next three years. .. we do that and everyone's clear about what's expected of them.”
Kevin Rudd, interviewed on the ABC’s 7-30 Report, 27 November, 2007.
Time only flows one way, but many listeners to Kevin Rudd’s first post-election interview with the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien must have felt a sense of “déjà vu all over again”. Were they in Australia or in early Blairite Britain?
As an economist, it is my duty to talk about costs.
—J.B. Brigden
RISK IS INHERENT in life because life is inherently uncertain. As Peter Bernstein has put it, uncertainty simply means that more things can happen than will happen—and while some of those things are very good, others are bad and some are very bad indeed. How we deal with those bad outcomes is a crucial part of our lives as individuals and as societies. That governments have a role in helping to deal with bad outcomes is undoubted.
Henry Ergas on understanding the Howard legacy
Epochs, the German philosopher Georg Hegel said, become meaningful only as they come to an end. It is only ‘‘a shape of life grown old’’ that we can grasp and thus ‘‘paint its grey in grey’’, for it is when chapters of history come to their close that concepts and analysis can merge with practice and experience. ‘‘The owl of Minerva’’ (the Roman goddess of wisdom) therefore ‘‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’’, and as it takes flight, condemns the past to a world that ‘‘cannot be rejuvenated but only understood’’.
Risk is inherent in life because life is inherently uncertain. As Peter Bernstein has put it, uncertainty simply means that more things can happen than will happen – and while some of those things are very good, others are bad and some are very bad indeed. How we deal with those bad outcomes is a crucial part of our lives as individuals and as societies.
Few issues have been as controversial in recent years as telecommunications. The widely publicised dispute between Telstra and the previous government received almost daily coverage in the media; with the recent change of government, the future of Australia’s telecommunications policy is under close scrutiny.
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The paper describes a duality between the value of the real option to delay investment by one period and the expected economic depreciation over that period.
For much of the post-war period, Australia’s economy was relatively insulated from international trade. In part, insulation reflected the costs arising from distance. However, the high levels of assistance provided to import-competing manufacturing during, and after World War II, also played an important role.
The Results of a six Country Survey
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