Hear Hear.
Sadly, the words "Conservative Leader" is an oxymoron, since Conservatives don't want to go anywhere -except perhaps backwards.
Australian Liberals still believe in the "trickle down" effect; by paying themselves enough to be able to afford to pay a shoe shine boy (a pittance), we all benefit.

What total rubbish to assert that more equality would improve things for everyone. One good way to show this is to imagine what would happen if Bill Gates decided to move to Australia. Government revenue would increase greatly, due to taxation of his earnings, enabling the government to increase welfare, but the gap between rich and poor would also increase significantly.

The problem is that there are a small number of people who would work for nothing, and that is OK. The trouble is that the overwhelming majority will only work for a reward, and if everyone is to be the same, there is no reason to work. That is why every attempt at socialism or communism has failed lamentably, as the whole premise of socialism is equal misery for all.

Agree with most of this.
Clearly Conservative thinkers/rationalists, are mired in their own ideological mess, or very limited circle of very old and or repeatedly failed ideas?
Which to date have only served to widen the gap between the haves and have nots, or indeed, keep the basic wage in the land of the dollar bill, mired in real terms, for around thirty years!
Or produce outcomes, which include an ordinary worker paying twice as much tax, in percentage terms, as their wealthy employer.
I mean, a brand new or original idea, would likely be greeted by the smell of burning emanating from previously unused cerebral circuits, from both sides of the aisle?
Basically all these failed ideas have managed to achieve, is a nation that has gone backwards, from the third wealthiest, and a creditor one at that, to one who up until the GFC, had slipped backwards to around number thirty, with around 95% of our corporations off-shored!
Plus, huge record mounting debt burdens, and politicians too timid to try something new or different, or not included in the usual, formula for failure, that is the, I believe, current public service advice?
Nor can we recover our forgone economic sovereignty, by selling even more of it! What happens when there's nothing left to sell?
Doing what you've always done, gets you what you've always got!
Those things that made us wealthy, and indeed shared the benefits of work, and a fair go, must be reconstituted, starting with deliberately promoting co-ops; and investing in our own people and their better ideas.
Fist cab off the rank, must be huge tax reform and massive simplification, if only to remove often onerous compliance costs, which in some cases costs the bottom line more, than simply paying a very reformed and much lower, vastly simplified, single, stand alone tax!
And if it's not expected to carry all the current non productive parasites, which simply has to include all those with skin in the current complexity, more of it can be directed to the coal face, where it is needed!
Rhrosty.

It's okay for some to do unpaid work!?
What?
Just as long it is not those who are privileged to benefit from this effort. And who probably would never ever be able to match the work effort or work ethic, of those who provide said unpaid work!
And then we wonder why we are still going backwards, with huge growing foreign debt burdens, and an ever widening gap between the haves and have nots! Because blatant balderdash is okay!?
A new but much more severe GFC waiting in the wings, for another turn at decimating the economies, of those, who like the Czechoslovakian story, (Insane,) have placed the lunatics, along with their mountains of worthless paper, in charge of the asylum?
Yes, it is very nice for some CEO's to sleep outdoors, albeit, in very warm and comfy sleeping bags, to try to underline the plight of the homeless, while that demographic just keeps on growing, courtesy of our pollies and the privileged, massively distorting the housing market, which in turn, winds/claws back the discretionary spend our economy needs to grow!
And we continue to import foreign oil, at the cost to us of 26 billion per and growing, even as that which is beneath our very feet, remains there, due to the very inflexibility of the ideologues, who now run things; and who duck shove their responsibilities, by endlessly claiming, that the government has no business in business! The gold plated price of energy also must be paid for, by a smaller and eternally lessening discretionary spend!
Tell pragmatists like Lee Kwan Yu, who almost single-handedly, dragged a war torn and bankrupt, resource poor Singapore, into the twenty first century, and as an extremely successful tiger economy, that the government has no business in business!
Rhrosty.

This bloke can't be an Ozzie, & think this way. If he is, he's a perfect example of academic brain washing. How can someone, after all that study understand so little.

"Firstly as Australians we value equality or more commonly a fair go. We place much emphasis on being the land of the fair go, where everybody should have the opportunity to live their lives with dignity", writes Raffaele. However if he actually understood the Oz ethos, after opportunity he would have added "to earn the right" to live their lives etc.

By missing that little qualification he shows us he has no connection with real Ozzies. I think the rest of the piece shows he has no desire to understand or empathies with real Ozzies at all.

He fails totally to acknowledge the Ozzie disgust at the bludger, & our expectation that everyone will actually earn their own daily bread. That we are fed up to the eye teeth with people who expect their lifestyle to be paid for by anyone but themselves, but this fact is most carefully avoided.

All we actually have is a bit of fluff promoting socialism, & trying to use Ozzie fair mindedness against them to do so.

The worst of it is, that when he completes his studies he will become an academic, a policy adviser to a lefty government, or a politician him self. The majority will then suffer at his hands, & already failed ideology, because with all those letters after his mane, he must be right. What a bad joke these people are.

'morning Raffaele,

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but somewhere in your education you missed something very significant.

Economics is about “sums”, you know 2 + 2 = 4.

It may be a surprise to you to learn that “equity”, “social justice” and “wealth distribution” are nothing to do with sums or economics. I say this with some confidence in the certain knowledge that if wealth is not created by sums, there in nothing for the “humanities’ side of education to redistribute.

By trying to inject moral/value propositions into such debates is called “socialization”.

For many trained in the humanities; the standards of discussion routine in sums are alien, to them, sums seem so remote that ignorance hardly seems ignorance at all.

For good or ill, the major intellectual and social events of recent centuries, has been the progress of “sums” in the transformation of the world. This progress never has, and never will include humanities.

Your education in Law and International Studies and this article in particular, take you further away from the real world of those contributing to the creation of wealth, and deeper into illusion that humanities make any contribution to our society.

You need to be reminded of the importance of the unattainably different level of rigor and sophistication prevailing in subjects you clearly do not understand

Ah yes Hasbeen, but who are the real bludgers?
http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/the-myth-of-ceo-pay-packets/story-fn5tas5k-1226874315516

I suspect the majority of those on welfare are just unlucky, and most would rather not be in that situation. CEO's on the other hand are happy to take as much as they can, while trying very hard to evade -or 'socialise'- the very responsibilities they are paid for.
Ditto for our politicians.

Hi Grim,

On the other hand you could aspire to be a CEO yourself? All that is required is a good education, a good work ethic, determination, hard work, persistence, self motivation and the capacity to achieve.

Or you could always opt for the losers easy option and bitch at the world from the side lines?

So in Spindoc's world, anyone who doesn't aspire to be a CEO is a loser?
Doctors who genuinely want to heal the sick, nurses who want to tend to the wounded, teachers and child carers fond of children, the self employed and small business people who enjoy practising their craft and wish merely to raise their families... All losers?
It appears Spindoc believes that even on a site called “Online Opinion”, we peasants should not be so impudent as to criticise our 'betters'.
What a good little slave.

Will they never learn ?
The era of growth is OVER !
The economists are still pondering about the failure of austerity or
money printing to stimulate the economy into growth.
Very few economists have woken up to the realisation that growth needs
a surplus of energy.
They are still tied to the idea that money is the source of everything.
Some countries still have some growth but most are struggling on very
low growth rates. The US has saved themselves and helped out the rest
of us by their flash in the pan burst of extra oil production.
However that will end in a very few years and the fan & you know what
interface will draw a picture that no economist or politician can ignore.
In an era of zero growth, expansion or even the maintenance of pensions,
will be extremely difficult.
Maintenance of the existing infrastructure will require massive
effort and the sacrifice of many entitlements just to keep the nation ticking over.
There are a number of infrastructure projects that will become half
finished white elephants that will bankrupt any company silly enough to get involved.
The writing is already on the wall with four motorway projects total economic failures.
Bankruptcy, like those four, faces any new major project, they will
just not produce the projected income.
They will fail because they expect the old business as usual rules to apply in a zero growth economy.