The mining industry in Australia, and in most other countries, pay special taxes for the use of community owned resources in additional to taxes levied on businesses in general. General taxes include the corporate income tax, payroll and transaction taxes, and labour pay personal income taxes....

In this paper, we consider an extension of the commonly used poverty gap measure that may be used to address he question of whether the elimination of poverty is a feasible objective, given sufficient political commitment. The resources potentially available to address poverty may be measured by...

On 2 June 2009, the Queensland government announced a program of asset sales projected to realise $15 billion. In this paper, the public case for privatisation put forward by the Queensland government is case is shown to be wrong and, in important respects, deliberately misleading. It is argued...

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Great Risk Shift’, that is, the process by which the burden of risk has been shifted away from governments and employers and on to workers and households. The...

The rise of New Media associated with the Internet has radically changed many aspects of daily life, and enabled us to do things that would have seemed unimaginable even a few decades ago. The speed and volume of communications has increased by a factor of a million or more since the Internet...

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. The fact that individuals and families are vulnerable to a wide range of social, economic and other risks, and that collective action is needed to help reduce and manage these risks, has long been important in social...

The aim of this paper is to restate the case for social democracy and to propose a policy agenda in response to the global financial crisis. The crisis is not a temporary aberration, to be followed by a return to the ‘normality’ of the late 20th century, dominated by the ideology of economic...