This week in Policy we bring you the first installment in a series of articles by Dr. Geoff Davies that outline, in plain English, how the real world deviates from the measures and predictions of orthodox economic theory. In ‘Counting Busyness, Missing Wellbeing’, Davies writes about the misuse of the GDP as a measure of progress, and looks at some of the alternative approaches to measuring wellbeing
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Monthly Archives:: June 2006
EXTRACT: What Price a Creative Economy?
If we stop seeing creativity as a burden on the public purse and begin to see it as leading innovation in post-industrial growth, writes Stuart Cunningham, then we could build a creative economy that is independent, self sustainable and profitably our own more
East Timor after Alkatiri: nation or protectorate?
Tim Anderson writes that a more ‘Australian friendly’ government could be bad news for poor people in East Timor – which means most of the population. If East Timor becomes a ‘neo-liberal protectorate’, Anderson argues, it will meet the fate of other small countries whose attempts to gain economic independence have been quashed by international institutions and powerful neighbours more
WARNING: A rising temperature can be a sign of illness
Stephen Leeder considers the implications of global warming for health policy, and calls for the effects on global health to form part of debates on energy production. He predicts increases in respiratory disorders as a result of global warming and calls for investigation into its likely impact on vector-borne diseases and those transmitted by mosquitoes
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Australia’s Ring of Fire
Cavan Hogue writes that Australia needs to remember that the countries we call 'failed states' are in fact artificial, colonial creations. He argues that we should not be surprised if these 'non-states' fail but only if they succeed, and that pushing them down the 'democratic nation-state' model may not be in their best interests – or our own more
Policy snapshots
Every fortnight the Centre for Policy Development Policy will link to five recently published items – reports, commentaries, discussion papers or submissions to parliamentary inquiries – that inject bright ideas into current policy debates.
This fortnight's pick:
Reclaiming the Australian Commons
Australian state and federal governments may still be in love with privatisation, writes James Arvanitakis, but for Australian communities the relationship is getting cold. In ‘Reclaiming the Australian Commons’, Arvanitakis charts the enclosure of Australia's common wealth and calls for governments to re-draw the 'line in the sand' between commons and commodities more
Technological Betrayal
Quentin Dempster urges the government to embrace the brave new world of digital free-to-air broadcasting. He calls for the government to subsidise the cost of digital set top boxes for every household and the sale of commercial licences to fund the role of public broadcasters in digital broadcasting. To do this the government will have to take on the medial moguls, a course of action, he laments, which they are unlikely to take
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Not Bad But Not Yet Good: Victoria’s New Charter of Rights and Responsibilities
The first hurdle towards the enactment of Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities was overcome last week when it was passed by the Legislative Assembly . While we wait for it to be considered by the Legislative Council, Spencer Zifcak provides a critique of the new law. He acknowledges that it is an important step towards the first State-based human rights Charter, but it is not without its compromises more