Budget-cutting political leaders regularly target the jobs and incomes of public sector workers as the first and most politically convenient target of their austerity measures. But their crusade to balance the books by downsizing headcounts, intensifying work, and freezing the pay of the workers who deliver essential public services can backfire. In this new report,

The state government of New South Wales recently awarded a contract for the purchase of 512 new intercity passenger rail cars to a consortium that will manufacture the equipment in South Korea.  The contract is worth $2.3 billion, including an unspecified sum to cover maintenance of the double-decker cars over an initial 15-year period.  The

The provision of infrastructure by government, financed by the issue of debt, is likely to be far superior to other options. Where private interests are in a position to offer a similar service, it’s likely that their costs will be much higher and that society will pay a higher price either through taxation or user

Most politicians claim that creating jobs is top of the agenda – but public sector jobs are a different matter. The Coalition has promised to cut at least 12,000 jobs in the public sector if it wins government, hoping to portray these jobs as superfluous and implying that getting rid of them will make everyone

Electricity prices are a major contributor to cost of living pressures and a major cause of concern for Australian consumers. While the carbon tax has recently been depicted as the main culprit in electricity price increases, electricity prices have been increasing rapidly for the past two decades. The cost of electricity increased by 170 per

The Coalition has proposed to cut the size of the Commonwealth public service workforce by 12,000 over the next two years. There has been considerable debate in Canberra, which employs more Commonwealth public servants than any other city, about the likely impact of such a contraction on the local economy. In addition to the direct

The emission trading scheme will provide compensation for the price rise for final users. However such policies do not apply to state governments, local governments, the community sector, and the federal government. In total the ETS would cost these public sectors $3.5b annually. 

The Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) was sold in 1994 by the Commonwealth and became a privately owned company, tasked with the processing of blood. Since its privatisation it has been accused of allowing hepatitis-C and CJD to infect the blood. This document focuses on the $400 million given to CSL by the Commonwealth between 1994

This report evaluates the impact of the privatisation of ACTEW on the financial position of the ACT public sector. In so doing, it examines the structure of ACTEW and the impact of the competitive electricity market on ACTEW’s profitability. It also assesses the options for dealing with the government’s unfunded superannuation liability. It concludes that

This paper collects together some of the papers from the Australia Institute’s conference entitled Citizens in the Marketplace: The implications of competition policy for citizenship. The conference was motivated by the desire to bring together various strands of thought which are being knit into an alternative to economic rationalism. The notion of citizenship, and the

This paper is designed for Landcare participants and policy-makers and outlines some economic approaches to land-use decision-making that could be used to evaluate Landcare.

This paper analyses the fiscal impact on the Commonwealth of the sale of Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) and relates this impact to the market environment in which CSL operates. It raises serious concerns about the returns to tax-payers from the sale.

This article shows that the public debt interest savings associated with privatisation are, on average, less than the profits foregone, implying that privatisation reduces public sector net worth. A copy is available on John Quiggin’s website.