Title: Don't confuse excess with success
Summary:

THIS week's good news is that the economy is not technically in recession. The bad news, which is far more serious, is the lasting harm the good news could cause. Central to that harm are the lessons being drawn from the gross domestic product numbers. As the Government grasps paternity of the unexpected outcome, strong claims are being made about the efficacy of the present economic policy, with little or no basis in supporting evidence. And in the euphoria of the moment, the mounting problems associated with that policy are being ignored. Read more here:

Location: The Australian, p. 14.
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Fri, Jun 5th, 2009

Title: The National Broadband Network: Some FAQs Answered
Summary:

The National Broadband Network: Some FAQs Answered. Read more here:

Location: Concept Economics
Author: Concept Economics
Date: Wed, Apr 22nd, 2009

Title: New National Broadband Network
Summary:

The Federal Government has announced its intention to construct a $43 billion fibre optic network reaching almost every home and business in Australia. This will essentially involve taxpayers making a heavily-leveraged investment in the centre of a fast-evolving technological and commercial environment for benefits that are unclear at best. The key concerns regarding the Government's announcement are a lack of detail in the announcement around the budgetary and broader economic costs and benefits of the proposed project, regulatory uncertainty surrounding the project, and the failure to recognise and account for the inevitable economic costs and conflicts that arise when governments act as both owners and regulators. Read more here.

Location: Concept Economics Briefing Note
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Tue, Apr 7th, 2009

Title: Rudd on the road to disaster
Summary:

DURING the 1979 oil shock, the great French political scientist Raymond Aron noted that in crises, governments usually had little to fear from Oppositions but everything to fear from themselves. Only rarely did governments display the intellectual rigour to adapt to the new circumstances. Their tendency, catastrophically evident in the presidency of Valery Giscard d'Estaing, was to retain commitments that were even more economically costly than when first made. Emerging difficulties then led to half-baked populism, with all its long-term costs.

Kevin Rudd could teach Giscard d'Estaing a thing or two. Read more here

Location: The Australian
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Mon, Mar 30th, 2009

Title: Capital use of principle
Summary:

WHAT do we owe a prime minister? At the very least, to take what he says seriously. Kevin Rudd's recent essay on the global financial crisis does not make that easy. He caricatures opponents, assaults straw men, ignores contrary evidence and fails to explain his philosophy with any clarity. Yet the claims he makes are important. They deserve to be treated as if the best case had been put in their favour.

Those claims boil down to this: that neo-liberalism got us into this mess; that social democracy will get us out of it; and that we are at the cusp between neo-liberalism's false prophecy and the hard work of social democratic redemption. Read more here

Location: Weekend Australian
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Sat, Feb 28th, 2009

Title: Five reasons why a Rudd fiscal stimulus may not work
Summary:

In this article Henry writes about the Federal government's plan for a $42bn economic rescue package. You can read it here.

Location: The Australian
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Mon, Feb 9th, 2009

Title: Are economic consultants worth feeding
Summary:

This article appeared in The Review (supplement to the AFR) on the 30th of January 2009, page 3, titled "Economic certainty". The article is a speech Henry presented at the Economic Society of Australia, Canberra branch, in November 2008. Click here to read the speech.

Location: The Review (supplement to the AFR)
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Fri, Jan 30th, 2009

Title: Labor's plan is having a lend of us all
Summary:

In this article Henry comments regarding the Rudd government's $4 billion dollar commercial property liquidity fund. Read it here:

Location: The Australian
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Tue, Jan 27th, 2009

Title: Whitlam redux but more soap than opera
Summary:

ANOTHER day, another stimulus package. Who cares if the package du jour's main course, the nation-building projects, are merely commitments made by the previous government, frozen by this Government, and now hastily defrosted for the occasion? As Bob Geldof said about world poverty, "Something must be done, anything ... whether it works or not."

Shades of Gough? Perhaps. But if the Whitlam government was opera, this is soap opera: grandeur gone, soaring rhetoric replaced by a thicket of half-baked cliches and bureaucratic prose, all the character development of a high school musical.

The Whitlamesque ambition, however, remains intact. Read more here:

Location: The Australian, p. 10.
Author: Henry Ergas
Date: Thu, Dec 18th, 2008


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