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Ian McAuley

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Bio

Ian McAuley lectures in Public Sector Finance at the University of Canberra and is a Centre for Policy Development Fellow. His passion is to ensure social reformers and progressive thinkers are engaged in the nation's economic debates.

Ian McAuley's contributions:

You can see a lot by just looking: Understanding human judgement in financial decision-making

In this paper CPD fellow Ian McAuley outlines the main implications of behavioural economics for financial decision-making, breaking down the myth that market participants are always rational decision-makers who act to maximise their own best interests.


More than one health insurer is too many: the case for a single insurer

In this paper, CPD fellow Ian McAuley explores the intrinsic limitations of Australia's current private health insurance system and explains how a single national health insurer can overcome them. McAuley argues that a single national insurer is more likely to be able to contain moral hazard, deliver public goods, and control price and utilisation to deliver equitable health care at lower costs.


Competition: Too Much of a Good Thing?

In the second of two articles on consumer policy and competition, CPD fellow Ian McAuley examines the limits of competition in the Australian policy marketplace.


Broadening Financial Understanding Summit

CPD fellow Ian McAuley will talk about financial decision-making at the Australian Bankers' Association summit on Broadening Financial Understanding in Sydney on July 2.


Ian McAuley examines the Australian economy for the Australian Collaboration

CDP fellow Ian McAuley surveys Australia's economic structure, including an outline of some long-term and medium-term challenges for Australian economic policy in his Australian Economic Fact Sheet for the

Choice – too much of a good thing?

In the first of a series of two articles on consumer choice and competition policy, CPD Fellow Ian McAuley examines assumptions about the value of choice in the policy marketplace.


Health & hospital reform: advice to the commissioners

Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley, and Denis King offer a few words of advice to the new members of the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission.


Enter left: let’s hope Rudd isn’t a 'Strong Leader'

Ian McAuley asks how Kevin Rudd can exercise true leadership and avoid the 'Strong Leader' style which helped bring about the Howard government's demise.


How the bean-counters took over the campaign

Debate in this election campaign has confused the basic task of balancing the national chequebook with the far more important and complex challenge of sound economic management, argues Ian McAuley.


Taking Mersey more complicated than it seems

CPD fellow Ian McAuley analysed Tony Abbott's troubled takeover of Mersey hospital for online news site Crikey.


The housing story: the reality of interest rates

Borrower blindness and confusion over the difference between real and nominal interest rates have contributed to Australia's heavy debt burden, writes Ian McAuley. But education alone won't be enough to change consumer behaviour - changes on the supply side of the credit market are needed.


Funding health care – a principled approach

Ian McAuley explains how to give some direction to Australia's muddle-headed health finance system.


Productivity – a dead end?

Ian McAuley argues that WorkChoices is likely to have a negative impact on productivity: "If labour is cheaper to employ there will be less incentive for firms to ensure workers are employed productively."


Bedtime economics

Ian McAuley reviews 'Gittinomics' by Ross Gittins, a book that demystifies economic theory and Australian policy, yet still manages to keep its place on the bedside table.


Australia's economy: lucky country, unlucky leadership

The Coalition can't claim credit for our current economic prosperity, argues Ian McAuley. In fact its unwillingness to deal with long-term structural issues is putting our economy on very shaky ground.


Paying for health care

Are taxpayers getting value for money out of Private Health Insurance susbsidies? Ian McAuley looks at the latest OECD data to determine what works in health care financing.


Austrians and Australian public ideas

Ian McAuley detects the influence of Polanyi - the other Austrian economist – in Kevin Rudd’s recent speech to the CIS.


What health care system?

In Ian McAuley'’s address at the launch of 'Reclaiming Universal Health Care' he argued that our current health policies are ‘an extraordinary combination of East German bureaucratic intervention and Chicago-style radical libertarian economics’.


How to run a country - into debt

Our debt-shy federal government is keeping the national budget in the black, private utilities in the pink, and the rest of us in the red, writes Ian McAuley


Citizenship and the common wealth

Australian citizenship is a 'work in progress', says Ian McAuley, and there’s a lot more work to be done


Superannuation — clever politics, poor policy

A super policy that encourages people to save now and spend later might seem like a good idea, but Ian McAuley explains that removing the tax on superannuation drawings will increase inequities, weaken the government’s revenue base, distort incentives and increase people’s dependence on the financial sector.


A Budget for the Lucky Country

Our Treasurer, writes Ian McAuley, is like Oscar Wilde’s cynic “who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. A run of good luck has masked serious weaknesses in the Australian economy. Sound financial management is not enough to compensate for years of underinvestment – we need economic policies to build the infrastructure, skills and resilience we need to ensure our future prosperity


Behind the smokescreen — here comes the nanny corporation to manage our bodies

The sale of Medibank Private, writes Ian McAuley, is obscuring the real agenda – the expansion of private health insurance. McAuley argues that any expansion of private insurance would result in waste, inequities and rising costs. If the government wants to invest in disease prevention it could do so far more efficiently and effectively through public health measures or direct subsidies


Paying for health care

Ian McAuley explores the complex and inconsistent approaches to paying for different health services in Australia. He explains how some services are provided at no charge, while others incur a full or part user contribution, and that the result is a system in which many people miss out on subsidies to which they are entitled. The solution that he proposes is for the government to undertake a re-design of the entire system, informed by basic policy principles embraced by the community.


Medical savings accounts

Jeff Richardson and Ian McAuley explore the idea of private Medical Savings Accounts.


A Civilized Tax Debate

Ian McAuley writes, 'Turnbull's case would have been stronger if he had suggested closing off the mechanisms for people with high incomes to avoid tax - such as using trusts and private companies which exist for the sole purpose of tax reduction.'


Values, not markets

Ian McAuley writes, 'When politicians in the major parties do attend to the citizens, it is in the way of the marketing executive, determined to sustain or gain market share. The marketing executive offers trinkets such as cash-back vouchers and extended credit terms, supported by glitzy advertising.'


Not such a super idea

Ian McAuley writes, 'we need to re-frame our public policy attention, away from the simple notion of more or less superannuation, and towards asking what policies may help us in matching income at our life stages with our needs at those stages'


Don't mention the economy

'Labor needs to integrate its policies in a clear vision and set of values - social values - rather than categorising its policies into 'economic', 'social' and 'environmental' headings with their implications of compromise, trade-off, and contradictions', writes Ian McAuley.


Updating the Australian Settlement

Ian McAuley writes, 'This policy forum demands a nation which invests in its physical, human, institutional and social capital so as to reduce the need for welfare dependence.'


Why health insurance is unsustainable

Stephen Leeder and Ian McAuley write, 'The more private health insurance there is, the less control there is over health care costs'


Aspiring to opt out

Ian McAuley states 'When governments encourage or force the better-off to opt out they talk about choice, but, far from extending our choice, we are denied choice - in this case the choice of using a public school. The same extends to health care and beyond.'


Ideas for a health policy

Ian McAuley looks at how a value-based system can resolve public and private divisions in Australia's health system. He describes the confusion and the grab bag of health proposals that we saw at the last election and outlines the importance of consistent principles in deciding how we spend public money in a field where public demands are practically unlimited.



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