Articles from Club Troppo
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Immigration cuts and housing prices: what research says (and media should report)
Most credible researchers believe immigration affects house prices. The questions are: how muchs, and at what cost?
Peter Dutton’s Opposition has promised to cut Australian immigration by a quarter “to tackle the housing crisis“.
Keep dental out of Medicare
Many people think that if Medicare works for getting sick, it must also work for dental and anxiety and ADHD and various other types of problems.That isn’t necessarily the case.One big problem for any sort of health intervention is the interested carer. They have an incentive to suggest you need treatment.In the case of classic sickness, overtreatment has been restrained through various mechanisms.
The First Home Guarantee expansion: bad for buyers, good for sellers, yet again
Advice for homebuyers and citizens: housing guarantee schemes deserve your derisive laughter, whoever backs them.
A young woman who I have known for many years messaged me yesterday to ask a question. She and her partner have been saving hard for a year or so, and were planning to save for a few years more. This a pattern that millions of Australians have followed over the past two hundred years, and it has generally worked well.
People get weird about trade: an Australian trade policy history for the Trump era
Donald Trump is trying to slash his nation’s trade deficit. Australians may recognise this task: we tackled it in the late 1980s, failed, and found that it mattered less than we thought.
Hello, US readers! You’ve just started an interesting economic experiment to see whether government policy can change a trade deficit into a trade surplus.
Cheap gas? Cheap nuclear? Yeh nah
This article deals with Federal Coalition Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s election promise to force gas producers to reduce the price of gas for Australian consumers to $10 per gigajoule.However, according to a debate on last night Q &A between Labor Climate Change Minister Ed Husic and his Coalition counterpart Ted Evans, Husic stated that the cost price of most Australian gas was around $7 per gigajoule with another $4 paid by the producers for transporting it to market.
The ABC (ombudsman) stopped talking to me
There was an ostensible “news” article on the ABC news site about Trump’s executive order (EO) titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” The capitalisation is not mine; it is in the executive order FFS! The Whitehouse is becoming an ALL_CAPS tweet factory.
12 lessons from the weird, unnoticed end of Australia’s bitter broadband war
What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That’s pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode.