Latest news with #thinktanks
ABC News
9 hours ago
- Business
- ABC News
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says Albanese government ready to overhaul the tax system
After months of acting coy and playing down expectations of what it might do to shake things up, the Albanese government has officially opened the door to big, beautiful, and maybe even brave tax reform. Big? We don't quite know that yet. Beautiful? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the jury is out there. Brave? They will have to be brave because the backlash is coming, and it could get ugly. The word reform is so overused as to be meaningless, but if it is to be meaningful, it will have to involve some losers. That's where the ugliness lies. Treasurer Jim Chalmers declared last week that limiting the narrative to "ruling things in or ruling things out" has had a "corrosive impact" on policy debate. On that, he is dead right. Journalists (yes, I'm putting my hand up here) must also take responsibility for sometimes seeking to box in politicians and, as a consequence, short-change the country by limiting the scope of our debate. But the biggest perpetrators of boxing in are politicians themselves — so afraid of their shadows, they have shut down debates as soon as they start. You get the sense watching the treasurer that he has played his cards not only carefully, but expertly. For some time, he has let the temperature and pressure rise and the debate rage outside of the government, letting others build a case for structural change to the way we tax. By letting others do the heavy lifting — making the case for change — from think-tanks, to independent politicians, to millennials on a tear about boomers and their elaborate holidays — he has walked into a political climate that is open to change. It is no longer 2019, when in the wake of Bill Shorten's loss, Labor went into the fetal position. Labor's timidity may finally be evaporating. The demographic shifts among Australia's voting base also help Labor. With Gen Y and Z now the biggest voting blocs, the losers are outnumbered. The preconditions are there for change. This week, the treasurer was pressed on his one existing proposal that changes the tax treatment of superannuation. Chalmers refused to budge on his contentious plan to raise taxes on people with more than $3 million in superannuation, as he signalled he was open to cutting income taxes as part of wider tax reform. The reform has a chorus of critics — some making reasonable points about the design of the tax — but the treasurer is on steady and solid ground on the politics, and he knows it. New polling conducted by pollsters Talbot Mills Research — a polling company used by Labor in the last campaign — polled over a thousand people in early June with the following question: "The federal government plans to raise around $2 billion a year by reducing tax breaks for people with over $3 million in super. How strongly do you approve or disapprove of these proposed changes?" The results speak volumes about why Chalmers doesn't seem like he is in the mood to water down his proposal. Twenty-six per cent strongly approve, 37 per cent said they somewhat approve, 14 per cent somewhat disapprove, and only 11 per cent strongly disapprove. Twelve per cent were unsure. Chalmers is now saying Labor is willing to overhaul the tax system to reduce its growing reliance on income tax while ensuring the government can raise enough money to deal with the structural deficit. Independent MP Allegra Spender has been pushing for sweeping tax reform, calling for lower income and business taxes, fewer concessions for property investors, and a reduction in compliance costs. The member for Wentworth has used her parliamentary platform to argue that the tax system is a barrier to home ownership and is burdening young Australians, something that is getting harder because of bracket creep and an aging Australian population. She said it was a "really positive sign that the treasurer has recognised the importance of tax reform". But she said even achieving revenue neutrality right now was difficult within our tax system because things like fuel excise was dropping, tobacco excise was dropping, GST as a proportion of our tax system was dropping, and we have fewer working-aged people as a proportion of people in the system. Asked how to get voters to embrace a tax change that would slow intergenerational unfairness, Spender said: "When I talk to people in my community, people really worry their kids and grandkids are not going to be able to meet the same milestones as previous generations, and that is really motivating." But even with a whopping majority and a community pushing for change, landing the reforms will still be hard. One tweet from broadcaster Neil Mitchell tells that story. He warned: "Boomers beware. Jim Chalmers is taking [sic] about 'intergenerational justice' in tax. That means a tax on boomers, who actually did a bit to build this country." Subtle? Not so much. The idea that boomers uniquely built this country is indeed a strange idea. All generations contribute during their working age. Tell that to the Gen Xers and Millennials currently slogging it to keep their heads above water. Chief executive of the Grattan Institute, Dr Aruna Sathanapally, who has been pushing for big reform, said the treasurer had now said the quiet bit out loud. And she's relieved. "Chalmers has said the important bit out loud — it's the government's job not just to deliver its election commitments but to lead us through the times we live in, including making the trade-offs that we need to preserve our living standards in the years ahead," she said. "It's great to see tax reform on the table. It has to be on the table: our tax system is simply not fit for our aging society, the global context, or tackling climate change." Sathanapally said she would like to see the government grapple with "the fact that paying for our existing expectations on healthcare, aged care, defence and pensions is going to cost more." "It is unfair to place that burden on today's children, rather than those who have benefited from a tremendous growth in asset prices," she said. "What I want to see is not just the government but each of Australia's sector leaders strive for a system that works for and not against younger Australians. "Intergenerational equity is not a zero-sum game: a system that supports education, innovation, paid work, and care for each other will support a better economy and quality of life overall". The way the Coalition plays this will be fascinating. The politics of opposing contentious changes are delicious and easy, but the demographic time bombs will hit future budgets too if they fail to get behind substantive change. The opposition is already mounting the case that this is Labor on a tax grab. But what they fail to grapple with is that the community's expectations around spending have grown. Unless they can win the argument with voters that substantial spending cuts are necessary, they will have to consider the changes outlined by Labor. Opposition finance spokesman James Paterson said this week that the Coalition was up for a conversation with the government. He said his party was open to working constructively with government to make the tax system more efficient, to collect revenues in less distortional ways, "but we are not going to give them a blank cheque to increase taxes on Australians at the worst possible time for our economy." But if the coalition is going to argue that defence spending should rise to 3 per cent of GDP, they will have to explain how they will pay for it. Endless demands for more spending on key areas of national significance are meaningless without an answer for where the money will come from. Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.
Washington Post
15-06-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
U.S. could lose more immigrants than it gains for first time in 50 years
For the first time in at least half a century, more people may leave the United States than arrive this year, an abrupt shift in immigration patterns with potentially significant implications for the U.S. economy. Economists at two Washington think tanks expect President Donald Trump's immigration policies to drive this reversal: from the near-total shutdown of the southern border to threats to international students and the loss of legal status for many new arrivals, according to a forthcoming paper. A rise in deportations — the aim of recent workplace raids that triggered protests in Los Angeles and other cities — also plays a role.
Telegraph
05-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
So now it's official. The ‘graduate premium' is a myth
Have you ever thought about the main reason why school leavers keep choosing to go to university and higher education (HE) participation rates continue rising? Of course there are many reasons; a chance for young adults to get away from their parents, ease of application and acceptance, it looks more fun than going to work, an interest in the subject… But what is the main driver that underpins society's messaging and ends up channelling 18-year-olds into university rather than the workforce? Well, it's the perception that there is a 'graduate premium'; and put simply, the narrative goes like this – 'Don't worry about the debt, you're going to get paid more to make up for it'. And the HE sector well knows the importance of maintaining the societal belief in the graduate premium to drive up their customer numbers. They are relentless in their efforts, issuing constant public comments, articles and self-commissioned reports, often via sympathetic think-tanks, claiming the limitless powers of HE to deliver a graduate premium to all who enrol. But this positive advertising is starting to contrast starkly with increasing evidence, now in plain sight, of graduates' difficulties getting jobs as well as the low pay on offer of not much above minimum wage. There is a growing realisation that we are burdening too many of our young adults with morale-sapping student debt for their whole working life, with little or no corresponding improvement in their career prospects. There are also concerns that we are building up a dangerous stockpile of student loans that won't be repaid, only for the taxpayer to pick up the tab. Meanwhile, money is flowing freely into the bloated HE sector via unwitting students being used as pawns. The Government has announced a White Paper due out this summer regarding Post-16 Education. So given the importance of the notion of a graduate premium, you would assume that the Government has ensured there is robust informative data to inform policy-making. Well, sadly not. There is only one Government report, the annual Graduate Labour Market Statistics, which attempts to quantify the graduate premium; and my research shows that it is fundamentally flawed. Some will say that the IFS Graduate Lifetime Earnings report from 2020 also 'proves' a graduate premium, but my research argues that it is just as flawed. My findings are already supported by the Royal Statistical Society, and the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has also found a case in my favour and agreed that there is a problem with graduate premium data. The OSR has intervened and forced the hand of the Department for Education (DfE), who admitted in their release today that their figures are misleading – and to such an extent that even though this has been a mainstay of graduate outcome reporting since 2007, they have decided to cease publication. The DfE have agreed that a report demonstrating the difference between the career pay outcomes of those with equivalent A-level results is necessary, and they intend to produce it as part of their LEO data e.g. comparing school leavers with three Cs who attended university and those that did not. But the inadequacy of the data doesn't stop there. Using mathematical modelling, I've found that since we surpassed 30 per cent HE participation as long as 20 years ago, the marginal graduates added – increasingly being drawn from school leavers with relatively lower prior academic attainment – haven't earnt any graduate premium at all on average. Yet this phenomenon isn't explored in official Government statistics. When graduates do earn a premium, there is still the age-old statistical issue that correlation does not prove causation. For the majority of graduates, the job they end up doing will have no meaningful connection to the degree subject itself. So you must question why the official Government statistics keep churning out data that implies that studying for a degree was the main causation reason for the higher earnings, whereas in fact it is more likely their pre-existing attributes such as academic ability and ambition. Furthermore, when there is a link between the degree subject and the graduate's career, did they genuinely need to study academically for three whole years at great cost to themselves beforehand? Couldn't the course have been far shorter? And to what extent could it have been cheaper and more effective for them to start work at 18 and learn from colleagues, undergoing job-based formal and informal training in order to progress? You can often learn far more in three weeks of doing the job than you can in three years of theoretical study. The existing statistics don't explore this at all and by implication see their main role as demonstrating what degree is better than another. They act on the assumption that for non-manual work, everybody should get a 3-year degree before entering the workplace, rather than whether a degree is necessary at all. Until now, these inadequate statistics have allowed the sector to hijack the official figures and mislead the public and Government regarding the benefits of higher education, claiming that 'everybody' will be able to benefit from the supposed average premium. What is needed is root and branch reform of graduate statistics. I believe it would provide compelling evidence that surpassing around 25-30 per cent HE participation was a monumental mistake, and we certainly should never have let it reach the existing 50 per cent. The vicious spiral of never-ending increasing participation is condemning ever more of our young adults to pay huge amounts for unnecessary degrees. The Government's ideologically driven policies are led by a misguided false notion of 'opportunity for all'; but in the hands of a commercially-driven sector it has become a gross exercise in mass exploitation. The only way for this to end is for the Government to introduce a sensible, pragmatic cap on student numbers, calculated based on useful data – not the misleading data currently being produced. Paul Wiltshire is a parent campaigner against Mass HE and is the author of 'Why is the average Graduate Premium falling'
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Does Donald Trump want to carve up the world — or keep it all for himself?
Foreign policy experts have struggled to make sense of the second Trump administration's incoherent and contradictory approach to world affairs — which in itself ought to serve as a clue. First of all, it suggests that the Trump team is operating without a recognizable or familiar playbook, driven partly by the Great Leader's famous whims and fancies and partly by competing streams of ideology. Secondly, it illustrates that the generations of think-tankers churned out by the graduate programs of elite Anglo-American institutions are completely at sea in this bizarre historical moment, whether in foreign policy or any other supposed discipline of governance. We've already worked through the theory that Donald Trump is reviving the expansionist foreign policy of Gilded Age America and William McKinley, who isn't just a deeply inappropriate presidential role model for the 2020s but also an inexplicably strange one. (What schoolbook or outdated world map or old-school history teacher of Trump's 1950s childhood is responsible for his McKinley love affair?) That seems partly true, or at least serves to explain Trump's self-destructive fascination with tariffs, along with his obsessive interest in retaking the Panama Canal, purchasing or seizing Greenland and, um, 'annexing' Canada (or something like that). We have to assume that someone or other, quite likely Stephen Miller — whose title is deputy chief of staff, but by some accounts is making all the policy decisions normally associated with, you know, being president — has gently informed Trump that the Panama and Greenland things would be major international incidents that might derail his otherwise glorious reign, while the Canada thing simply isn't happening at all. So these topics have gradually receded toward the back burner, along with his genuinely horrifying brainstorm about turning Gaza into a beach resort, without disappearing entirely. It's important to recognize that in world affairs, as in the pettiest of personal concerns, none of Trump's idées fixes ever completely go away. He forced Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to sit through a jovial, not-quite-joking discussion of the Great White North as the 51st state. (Which, I'm sorry, not to be that guy, but that isn't even right. Canada has 10 provinces and three federal territories; aren't we talking about the 51st through 60th states, plus or minus?) He still wants someone to prove that a deceased Venezuelan president, Italian satellites and the deep-state libs of the FBI stole the 2020 election. (I may not up on the latest theories; my apologies.) He, or more plausibly some eager-to-please groveling toady, actually wants school children to study the so-called evidence of that enormous history-shaping crime, which may involve the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. I guarantee he's still mad about the Sharpie-hurricane incident. So let's not pretend that McKinleyist neo-imperialism is gone forever, but for a while there it seemed superseded by an overtly ideological program of right-wing global conquest, which to this point has gone remarkably poorly. This feels more like Elon Musk and JD Vance's collective genius at work than Trump's. Sure, he's flattered by obvious right-wing analogues and imitators like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Javier Milei in Argentina, but he thinks of his relationships with other leaders almost entirely in individual and transactional terms. Ideology, for Trump, is nothing more than the sales pitch, or the decoration on top of the cake; it's not the 'deal,' by which he means a bunch of pomp and circumstance, ending with someone else's obsequious surrender and shameless flattery. He was over the moon about meeting Kim Jong-un during his first term, and no doubt still thinks that went well. He transparently believes he'd have gotten along smashingly with Hitler and Stalin, and it's a shame he wasn't around to help defuse World War II and the Cold War. Of course Trump would have happily taken credit for supporting the far-right AfD in Germany or the right-wing parties and candidates in Canada, Australia, Romania and Poland — if any of them had won. (To be clear, Poland's presidential election still hangs in the balance, with the final round of voting this weekend.) But at least so far, exported Trumpism has encountered high electoral tariffs across the liberal-democratic zone, delivering an unexpected and arguably unmerited booster shot to mainstream 'centrist' parties — with the solitary and instructive exception (as I recently observed) of Britain, where the political climate has gone from pretty bad to a whole lot worse. Electoral democracy isn't really Trump's bag anyway, given the unacceptably high risk of losing. (I recognize the potentially terrifying subtext of that sentence.) He leaves that stuff to the nerds, which brings us to his recent tour through plutocratic oil states of the Middle East and his well-attested preference for leaders who don't need to worry about that nonsense. In Saudi Arabia, now run by the youthful modernizer (and journalist-dismemberer) Mohammad bin Salman, Trump delivered a speech proclaiming that under his aegis the U.S. was no longer interested in looking 'into the souls of foreign leaders' and dispensing justice based on their perceived morality. That Teleprompter-ready rhetoric doesn't remotely resemble anything our president would say in a more natural context, but never mind. The point was taken: We're done pretending to care about human rights and democracy and all that airy-fairy woke stuff from the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution! We're here to do some blatantly underhanded business deals and take an outdated gas-guzzling 747 off your hands. With this, we saw the launch of a new theory-balloon within the foreign-policy establishment: Trump is bringing back 'spheres of influence' as a guiding principle in world affairs, and those who bend the knee to America — or to him, which is the same thing — get to run their own s**thole countries however they like. As with the McKinley business, my verdict is: Sure, sort of. It's certainly conceivable that Trump has encountered some nostalgic-heroic retelling of the 'Great Game' of the 19th century, when the British and French empires sought to carve up the underdeveloped nations between them, and then Germany, Belgium, Italy, Russia and Austria-Hungary got into the act. (McKinley's clumsy territorial grabs can be understood as America getting into the poker game a few sessions late.) He clearly would neither know nor care that, considered as a whole, that diabolical contest probably produced the greatest set of crimes in human history, or that the migrant 'crisis' now afflicting every major Western-style democracy amounts to its long-tail karmic has a distinct fondness for exotic and fanciful narratives, and God knows the colonial-imperial period offered plenty of those. No doubt he'd find a hypothetical Second Great Game thrilling, on the level of pure fantasy: He may imagine Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and himself meeting over brandy and cigars at (let's say) the Schönbrunn Palace and congratulating each other for being great men of history who get to make great-man decisions about who owns what. Except that Trump doesn't take brandy or cigars — which ruins the whole fantasy, honestly — and Putin and Xi know better, at this point, than to take Trump seriously. There are a number of potentially fatal problems with this dusted-off 19th-century throwback, as studiously laid out by Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute in a lengthy essay for Foreign Policy. I would summarize them this way: LOL this is Trump we're talking about; never in a million years. Yet it's also true that the 'spheres of influence' model has a perverse appeal that goes well beyond aspiring dictators into various quarters on the left: It recognizes that we live in a multipolar world, and strikes many international observers as less hypocritical than the 'rules-based order' so piously advocated by former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, which amounted to old-school U.S. hegemony dressed up in contemporary drag. Although the Biden administration 'occasionally gave a rhetorical nod to multipolarity,' Shidore writes, its policies on the ground were to maintain U.S. domination globally and in all dimensions of power: military, economic, and institutional. The new administration's clearer acknowledgement of multipolarity is a promising beginning to reforming U.S. foreign policy. In the first weeks of Trump's second term, you could see the vague outlines of a 'spheres of influence' policy shaping up: He'd let Russia keep as much Ukrainian territory as it could conquer, and was manifestly unbothered by the prospect of China invading Taiwan. All he wanted in return was Canada! One can almost imagine a more clear-headed and ruthless version of Trump who sticks to that kind of hardcore realpolitik and gets away with it. I said 'almost.' Trump's iron grip on the Republican Party is a function of his irrationality, his limitless egotism and his mercurial whims. Those same ingredients make him utterly ineffectual as a world leader. His efforts to extort some kind of 'peace deal' from Putin — which Trump repeatedly claimed he could accomplish in 24 hours — have descended to online pouting and whining. ("Vladimir, STOP!" is not exactly Great Game material.) His exhausting trade war with China has accomplished nothing, except to convince Xi's unappetizing but highly rational regime that negotiating with this dude is pointless. For the moment, Trump has been shoved halfway back into the arms of Republican chickenhawks, the enfeebled tools of the military-industrial complex who no doubt suspected this would happen all along. I honestly can't tell you whether that's better or worse: Pick your poison. Thing is, if you want to carve up the world into competing zones controlled by 'great powers,' you need other great powers who want to carve it up with you, and you need a world full of smaller countries who are willing to go along or too weak to resist. Those things do not exist in 2025, and thank Christ for small mercies. Oh, and by the way: You also need to be a great power. I suppose the U.S. still technically qualifies, but not for much longer.
South China Morning Post
18-05-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
How the Indo-Pacific got its name – and what China has to do with it
Open a book of maps and look for the ' Indo-Pacific ' region – it likely won't be there. Yet the Indo-Pacific is now central to how many countries think about strategy and security. It describes a region spanning two oceans and dozens of countries, encompassing much of the world's trade routes. The Indo-Pacific did not emerge from the patterns of ancient trade, nor from long-standing cultural or civilisational ties. Instead, the concept comes from the realms of political science and international relations. The term can be traced back to the work of German political scientist and geographer Karl Haushofer – who was notably favoured by Adolf Hitler – in the 1920s. But it only truly gained traction in think tanks and foreign policy-setting departments in Washington and other Western capitals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It coincided with a shift in the global balance of power from a unipolar world – dominated by one superpower – to a multipolar one over the past decade or so. 'Confluence of the two seas'
