August was a big month on the technology timeline. At the start of the month Apple announced that it would be discontinuing production of its iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. Then, mid-month the last Blockbuster Video stores closed down in Sydney and Canberra. And the ABS released the latest edition of the Business Use of... Continue Reading →

The first successful kidney transplant occurred in 1954 at a hospital in Boston. It happened when Ronald Herrick donated a kidney to his twin brother Richard, who was dying of kidney failure. For a kidney transplant to be successful, donors and recipients have to “match”. Simply wanting to donate a kidney to a loved one... Continue Reading →

In Thailand, a worker on an auto assembly line makes about $12,500 a year. Doing the job in Australian would pay nearly six times this — about $69,000. Given this differential, it shouldn’t be surprising that Australians have imported nearly 2 million vehicles from Thailand since 2005, but have exported fewer than 200 (not a... Continue Reading →

Parking at Canberra Airport is a cinch. You drive up to the boom gate, roll down your window, take the ticket and park. To leave, it’s a matter of taking the ticket to the ticket machine, putting in your coins, driving back to the boom gate and inserting the ticket. Parking along the Kingston Foreshore... Continue Reading →

Australians are working fewer hours and are less likely to be employed than they were at the start of the decade. Growth in our productivity has slowed as has growth in our working aged population. It is perhaps no surprise then that real GDP growth is much slower than previous decades. Australia’s long run real... Continue Reading →

Apart from the family house, the biggest purchase people tend to make is their car. Before the car was invented however, it was most likely their piano. At the turn of the 20th Century, pianos were an essential part of life. They were the home entertainment system of the era, the only mechanism for bringing... Continue Reading →

Over the past five years, nearly 1.4 million firms have gone out of business. That’s roughly 275 thousand firms a year, or one every two minutes. Thankfully, for the third straight year, that number has increased. Think about all the reasons a firm goes belly-up. They’re no longer able to meet customer needs. They’re being... Continue Reading →

In 1968 a bunch of learned minds wrote a book about what technology would look like some 50 years hence. The book, Toward the year 2018, prophesised rapid improvements in the speed of transportation, the ability to control the weather, disintegrator guns, anti-gravity technology (flying cars), picture phones and a nine hour work week. Some... Continue Reading →

“America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA and 50,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization.” (D. Trump) Populism and protectionism are back in vogue. Anti-trade, economic-nationalist sentiments are shaping elections across the globe. And it’s easy to sympathise. Manufacturing employment in Australia has fallen by about 10 per cent... Continue Reading →

Australia is the world’s largest producer of spodumene. We produced about 500kT last year, about three times as much as we did a decade before. All of this was shipped to China where it was turned into lithium-carbonate, -hydroxide and -chloride, the principal ingredients for making lithium batteries. A bit of an outlier in the... Continue Reading →