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...

For much of the 20th century, the expansion of irrigated agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin, was treated as a self-evidently desirable objective, to be pursued without excessive regard to questions of economic costs and benefits. Irrigation seemed to offer a ‘droughtproofing’ solution...

For most of the last decade, water policy in Australia has been dominated by emergency responses to what was, on most measures, the worst drought in our history. Irrigators have received only small fractions of their normal allocations of water, while urban water users have been subject to...

One of the most striking developments of the late 20th century was the explosion in the volume, speed and complexity of international financial transactions, and the resulting breakdown of effective regulatory control over the global financial system. The speed with which this process has gone...