Rally for Research

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The Dis­cov­er­ies Need Dol­lars cam­paign to stop the rumoured cuts to research fund­ing will now have ral­lies in Syd­ney and Ade­laide as well as in Mel­bourne:

I’ll be attend­ing the Syd­ney Rally–though with­out a lab coat! Please attend one of the ral­lies, if you are able.

There is also now a Get­up cam­paign sug­ges­tion, and fit­ting­ly it’s joined the First Home Buy­ers Strike and Abol­ish Neg­a­tive Gear­ing cam­paigns at the head of the sug­ges­tion list.

It’s a trav­es­ty that the gov­ern­ment or its advis­ers can con­sid­er­ing reduc­ing fund­ing for worth­while activ­i­ties like research, with­out even con­tem­plat­ing end­ing harm­ful sacred cows like those two schemes to keep house prices ris­ing.

This is all being done in the name of return­ing the bud­get to surplus–an obses­sion that is being jus­ti­fied in the name of Keynes (see ” Swan’s back-to-black defence”) when this is a trav­es­ty of Key­nes’s views.

The rumoured cut of $400 over 3 years pales beside how much could be “saved” by lim­it­ing the First Home Buy­ers Grant to new hous­ing only. On a back of the enve­lope cal­cu­la­tion, this would save five times as much as the planned cuts to research would save.

There are rough­ly 110,000 recip­i­ents of this grant every year, less than ten per­cent of whom buy a new house. Lim­it­ing the grant to them alone would save $700 mil­lion per year, ver­sus the $133 mil­lion “sav­ing” from cut­ting research fund­ing.

This would also be a social­ly ben­e­fi­cial bud­get cut. Giv­ing the grant to buy exist­ing homes sim­ply adds more lev­ered mon­ey to the com­pe­ti­tion for exist­ing hous­es, dri­ving up their prices. Restrict­ing the grant to new hous­es only would help make hous­ing less unaf­ford­able, and boost demand for the ail­ing con­struc­tion sec­tor.