Every life is valuable, so immensely valuable that to try and quantify an amount is offensive to our sensibilities. Yet governments use value-of-life calculations to guide policy decisions every day. While value-of-life calculations are imperfect, the fact that we endeavour to estimate the value of life is far from the worst scenario imaginable. Would anyone freely choose to live under a government that…

The departure of Joel Fitzgibbon from the Federal Parliament at the next election arguably marks the end of an era for the Labor Party as it continues its tectonic drift away from its working-class roots. Fitzgibbon represents the working-class, coalmining and energy produ­cing electorate of Hunter in New South Wales. The electorate’s first representative was Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, but has…

  A local banking system on the German model and a development bank would between them provide the financial infrastructure to revive Australia’s manufacturing sector at all levels of scale: small, medium and large.  On September 10, 2021, the submission period for the Inquiry of the Senate Standing Committee on Economics into the Australian Manufacturing Industry closed. The terms of reference had included…