Don't ask what is an Australian, but more importantly, who is an Australian.
If society is a problem to the system, then society can be changed by replacing the people in that society with others more compliment to the existing system...read Multiculturalism!

The chances of the waning of capitalist Neo-liberalism in Australia are zero. The chances of redirecting the society towards a humane and traditional social construct, are also zero under this system!

All tools in the Neo liberal tool chest are designed to reduce or destroy traditionalism!

This guy is a scholar at QUT? He's paid to write this stuff? It's just a rant of little analytic value. Basically the author hates any attack on benefits or union power.. the question of what the community will accept in terms of the trade off between tax taken and benefits paid is not considered worthy of note..

Curmugeon:
To quote no less a luminary than the redoubtable Forrest Gump; "stupid is what stupid does"!

Now I'll leave you with the rest of the day to work out if that applies to you and your ilk or the Author?
Rhrosty.

You posters so far are sticklers for punishment. You saw the author's name, and you actually read the stuff!

The author clearly understands neither economics not the origins of the term “neo-liberal” and its predecessors. “Economic Rationalism”, for example, was hardly every used until Michael Pusey published “Economic Rationalism in Canberra”. This set the tone for later uses of the phrase – almost always as a term of abuse, vaguely defined, bearing little resemblance to what actual economists and policymakers thought. A few on the drier end of the economic spectrum took it up for a while and tried to adopt it as a label for their own beliefs, but most gave up as it became almost exclusively an insult.

The “natural rate” of unemployment is not some God-given standard. Its more formal name is the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), and it largely supplanted the neo-Keynsian idea of the Phillips curve after the supposed trade-off between inflation and unemployment broke down with stagflation in the 1970s. The Phillips curve was abandoned because it didn't fit the facts, not for ideological reasons. the NAIRU theory doesn’t propose that governments can do nothing about unemployment; only that demand stimulus alone cannot sustainably drive unemployment below a certain point. Beyond that point, it is likely to result in accelerating inflation. If governments want to reduce unemployment below that rate, they need to use other policy tools.

No actual policy maker or mainstream economist believes “governments should not interfere in anyway with the invisible hands of the market.” None advocates “trickle down”. None wants to dismantle the welfare state. No-one outside of the movies proclaims “greed is good”.

The problem with this article and is that it absolutizes and caricatures policy positions that are never expressed in those terms except, occasionally, on the extreme fringes.

It’s so much easier to vent one’s righteous rage at a straw man, I suppose.

ttbn, what's the problem with the author's name?

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Rhian, there are two problems with the NAIRU:
Firstly there's a lack of imperial evidence for it, with inflation remaining low when employment fell far below what the NAIRU was previously thought to be.

Secondly it's theoretical basis is flawed. Most of the people not employed are not counted as unemployed, and there are also many more who are underemployed. Also the NAIRU figure takes no account of regional variations in employment and unemployment.