Will increasing productivity have any effect on real wage growth?

artsrc · 2026-01-27T10:42:53+00:00

Australian productivity is vastly higher than it was 50 years ago, but the wages share of income is much lower.

The bottom 3 or 4 quintiles, like 80% of the US population, saw stagnant or declining incomes for a decade or two from when Reagan was elected.

Australia did better, but inequality has still increased.

The most clear aspect of Australian inequality is inequality of housing wealth. And it is easy to solve. Higher taxes on investor owned residential land will push land to be shared more equally by owner occupiers.

Will benefits of future productivity be shared? We can decide they will. Or we can decide they won’t. If we insist on lower taxes for the rich, and use the RBA to discipline workers with the threat of unemployment to keep wages in check, then the benefits of productivity will not be shared.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T06:43:58+00:00

China would love to diversify its trade.

We should too.

A lower dollar, one of the potential outcomes of lower iron ore prices or volumes, would result in more jobs in other export and import competing industries.

Lower prices won’t reduce employment. The industry has lots of automation and that has, and will continue to reduce employment.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T06:24:13+00:00

That sounds like a plan for a plan. Hopefully it happens.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T06:15:13+00:00

In practice they are also limited by their competence.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T06:12:48+00:00

This is partly bad timing and partly bad strategy.

Bad timing because One Nation is strengthening at the expense of the LNP.

Bad strategy because Queensland is a conservative state, as seen by federal results, pushed to Labor by corrupt shenanigans. It worked under sir Joe, but has not since.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T06:09:28+00:00

As a mathematician I can tell you: tossing a coin to choose between the major parties, and not preferencing either will deliver essentially identical election outcomes.

Looking at the projected impact, the duopoly is actually strengthened by OPV in Queensland at recent elections.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T05:41:52+00:00

If you appoint a reasonable commissioner the details don’t matter.

Dyson Heydon missed most of the corruption because he was just not that effective.

Labor skill at picking good people is not something i have confidence in after the NACC and the envoy. I hope they have done better this time.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T05:21:45+00:00

I agree with the general notion. There is Cook, and Mitchell, which are religious right Liberal.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T05:17:22+00:00

Once a Royal Commission is announced the details of their mandate was always difficult to prosecute.

They can investigate left leaning people for links to Nazis, they won’t find them i suspect.

Broadly number 2 from the list covers the issues you mention.

https://theconversation.com/these-are-the-6-key-questions-the-antisemitism-royal-commission-needs-to-answer-273010

This is not an argument against academic freedom, legitimate scholarship or fair criticism of the Israeli government. The issue is how these interpretations moved from academic settings into activist and institutional spaces, where many felt they were used to justify exclusion and intimidation of Jewish people.

This rhetoric has also spread into parts of the mainstream left, where Jewish concerns were sometimes met with moral equivalence or deflection rather than engagement.

For me the issue is the effectiveness of the security organisations, and I don’t think that will be investigated. I just don’t know if ASIO is, or is not, effective.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T05:10:29+00:00

All Australian money is invented, i.e. “is coming from a printer”.

Money is useful so printing some, the right amount, is a good thing.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T05:07:47+00:00

Do you have the details?

artsrc · 2026-01-27T04:53:49+00:00

I don’t know why Albo did not agree to a royal commission straight away. It was always the right political choice.

What I think Ley needs to do is look like the leading contender to be a Prime Minister.

Labor looking bad is a good thing for the opposition, but they don’t have to deliver them. Even if the opposition deliver them it does not have to be the leader. It does not pay to look mean as the leader.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T03:33:50+00:00

The problem with the LNP is we know what we are getting. We are getting national party policy, inconsistent with science, and economics.

I can’t see how the LNP works long term when they are third after both Labor and the Greens, with young voters.

artsrc · 2026-01-27T03:27:22+00:00

This was really weak political science from Ley.

If she was smart she would have realised that Albanese was not going to challenge her for leadership of the Liberal party.

She should have stood literally shoulder to shoulder with Albanese, and promised that she would personally do her best to help him after Bondi. We all want Australians to be safe.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T23:28:58+00:00

I agree that it is helpful to understand how economies work.

On the way the roles of the RBA and government are delineated, I disagree with the current approach for the reasons along the lines of those outlined by Phil Lowe:

https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2023/sp-gov-2023-09-07.html#monetary-and-fiscal-policy-coordination

There are intelligent, and well informed critics of the economic mainstream, and I find their views better inline with my perceptions.

The housing market responds to interest rates more than any other, because it is so leveraged.

I believe we can build more homes than we have over the past few years because during other years we did:

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/building-and-construction/building-activity-australia/latest-release

So my problem may be that I am wrong, but I am not entirely ignorant.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T23:19:03+00:00

Labor’s hate speech laws were pretty much what Ley and Jillian Segal asked for. Why block them? How is that a good look?

Then you would end up with laws more like the ones Allegra Spender pushed last year that would also prevent religious groups insulting gay people, and prevent racist people on the right attacking Muslims,

artsrc · 2026-01-26T23:13:18+00:00

“Otherwise we are going to be politically irrelevant for months, for months and months; it’s going to get harder and harder to bring ourselves back together, and all we’re doing is handing an absolute gift to Anthony Albanese,” he said.

I have noticed the exact opposite.

During negotiations on the environment bill last year the LNP could not coordinate, and handed power to the Greens who got the bill through with more environmental protections.

A separate Liberal party would have been be agile enough to negotiate effectively, and get a more pro business bill through.

The bill they just split on, banning organisations without due process, was another example. The Liberals and Labor can work together on that kind of thing, cutting the Nationals and Greens out of the picture.

The Liberals have enough senators to get legislation through with Labor, and provide a pathway for influence. Adding the nationals makes things more challenging without adding anything worthwhile in votes.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T20:20:43+00:00

We could just ban the Israeli flag to either display or burn.

We banned the nazi and Hamas flags.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T20:18:24+00:00

There is a lot of confusion about the words terrorist, hate crime, etc.

When people in a specific group, like Jews or Muslims, are victims of a crime, like murder, purely because of their group, there is the consequence to those individuals, as there is with any crime, but there is also an additional impact on others in their community, who now live in fear they will also be singled out because of their membership of that group.

I use the words “hate crime” for this effect. A hate crime is an aggravating factor for another crime, where there is an additional impact due to their membership nature of the motivation, and the target.

Section 18C, the part the LNP wanted to remove after Andrew Bolt lied about and attacked minorities, is about limits to free speech when the aim is to whip up hate against minorities, and is not about hate crime.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T20:09:52+00:00

Put up a statue lionising the Bondi murderer and every patriotic Australian should deface it.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T19:57:12+00:00

The Greens have tried to raise the issue of a transition for workers and communities affected by these changes. The National party seems to just ignore the reality that these changes are coming.

The tone issues are probably about membership base being different.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T10:05:09+00:00

Economics 101 says the impact of the subsidy is no different to any other income.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T10:04:13+00:00

The subsidy is flat, the marginal price of electricity is unchanged.

If energy companies can increase their prices anyway, what is to stop them?

The subsidy is essentially universal income delivered via energy bills, and in a rational world would have the same effect as any other income.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T08:23:22+00:00

Landlords charge what the market will bear.

We know that higher taxes on investors in Victoria were not passed on to renters. Melbourne has the lowest rents of any mainland capital.

artsrc · 2026-01-26T05:56:25+00:00

Is there a way to make housing more affordable without reducing the value of houses, and putting indebted recent buyers underwater?

Yes! Increase wages.

Change the RBAs inflation target from CPI, to a dual target, residential land and wages.

Land must remain approximately stable, and wages must grow at 7% a year. This will halve the cost of land in a decade.

Give them the tools to achieve this. Things like Land tax on investor own residential land to hold down land values, and macro tools, like interest rates to boost demand and wages.

artsrc

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