Latest Posts
Flood insurance
The recent horrendous floods in the Hunter Valley have reminded me (again) of another example of insurance market failure – flood insurance. It hasn’t hit the headlines yet, but it will. In the Australian insurance market, it is pretty close to impossible to buy insurance against flood. Wordings vary, butContinue Reading
Trade offs
The other morning, Hungry Boy was sick. For a change in our house, it was nothing serious, but someone had to stay home with him. He couldn’t go to preschool, as was the usual plan that day. Mr Penguin, who is the primary carer in our house, also does quiteContinue Reading
Older workers
As the baby boomer bulge works its way through the workforce, with fewer and few new entrants, (in 10 years time, there will be half the new entrants to the workforce each year that there were this year) it becomes more important for companies to figure out how to makeContinue Reading
School vouchers
There’s a great opinion piece (from Lenore Taylor) in the AFR this weekend about the school vouchers that were snuck into the budget this year. Briefly, $475 million has been budgeted to provide $700 tutoring vouchers to the parents of children who fail national reading and maths tests. The articleContinue Reading
Female earnings
There was the regularly quarterly article today, following the release of the latest labour force statistics, about how women earn less than men, with the gap narrowing very slightly in the last quarter. Varying reasons were given (Joe Hockey, for the government, drawing a long bow and claiming work choicesContinue Reading
Flexible hours
Corporate Woman in the AFR this week had a disappointed commentary on the Federal Budget. The column was calling for a bit more compulsion from the government around flexible working hours – pointing out that business needs to become more friendly towards women/carers who are working, rather than government using the taxContinue Reading
The Grey Hair Factor
I was sitting in a meeting today, when we were talking about the need for an impressive barrister to help us with a tricky regulatory issue. Our solicitor talked about one potential candidate, “he’s got the right amount of grey hair”. It reminded me of when I was consulting. PuttingContinue Reading
Research on work and family
In writing my last post, I also found a couple of fascinating bits of research that have been made possible by HILDA – the Household Income Labour and Dynamics longitudinal survey which has been collecting data since 2001. Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor? – this is a fascinating piece of researchContinue Reading
Work life research
There have been two major policy pieces about work and life in Australia recently. Each one recommending some change, but not especially effectively, judging by the results so far. It’s about Time – a project by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) examining the interactions between family responsibilitiesContinue Reading
Two tiers for health care
There was a fairly impassioned article in the SMH today about how the Australian health care system has very definitely become a two-tier health care system. “the wealthy and privately insured get timely health care and the rest, unless they are critically ill, can wait.” Except, as I blogged recently,Continue Reading