Fresh Economic Thinking

The debate about super is heating up again.

Pauline Hanson announced in September that One Nation’s policy is to allow renters or mortgage holders to keep 3% of their salary out of superannuation to spend now, making them put away 9% instead of 12% in their retirement account.

With regular co-host Jonathan Gadir, we discuss all the arguments put forward by the panicking media mob about why letting people spend their money when they earn it is bad.

For a longer deep dive into the economic arguments against superannuation, try this FET article.

I referenced a Super Members Council (SMC) report in the podcast which, despite being a lobby group report in favour of super, notes that the system costs the federal budget becase the tax breaks are higher than the age pension savings. There is a copy below to download.

I also recently asked Grok AI about whether there are any organised interest groups looking out for the workers who actually want to spend their money when they earn it to take all their wages as income rather than park 12% in superannuation.

Its answer was shocking.

The honest answer is that almost nobody with deep pockets wants the whole compulsory system abolished.The $4.4–4.5 trillion pool and ~$30 billion a year in fees create one of the most organised and well-resourced interest groups in the country. Industry funds, retail funds, the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, unions, and a large slice of the financial advice industry all have strong reasons to keep the architecture intact and just tinker at the edges.

We have dug an enormous financial and political hole with the superannuation system.

It is technically easy to unwind superannuation—just require all income to be paid into a worker’s bank account, adjust tax settings slightly so that it all doesn’t get taxed at full marginal rates, and allow people to spend a small amount out of their super balance for an adjustment period of about five years (say $10,000 per year), and then any remaining funds will roll into non-tax advantaged investment funds.

But to do that needs an organised group standing up for workers.

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Why a paid subscription matters

A paid subscriber to FET wants intellectual challenge. They don’t want someone to write what they already think. They want insights that are hard to get elsewhere and a public debate that is intellectually honest, not tribal.

Subscribing is a vote for independence — you're saying I want Cameron Murray to have the financial freedom to investigate things that other economists won’t.

If that sounds like you, and you get value from the research and analysis published here, I’d appreciate your financial support.

A fresh economic consultancy

Most economic consultancies begin with the conclusion a client wants. They sell institutional credibility and a report. I sell economic thinking.

If your organisation has a difficult economic question, a policy argument that needs testing, or a problem where you want to get beyond the usual consultant consensus, I’d like to hear from you.

FET also provides custom economics training, presentations and workshops for organisations that want their people to understand the economics behind the issues they work on.

If there are economic concepts, debates, or blind spots your team needs a genuine handle on, then please reach out.

Ground Rules: Land and Housing Economics for Professionals

Put that professional development budget to work with an upcoming FET Land and Housing Economics workshop in Sydney or Melbourne.

This two-day workshop is crafted for smart researchers, policy analysts, economists and planners who want to truly understand how land and housing markets work.

This course may be eligible for CPD points from your professional Institute. Please check directly with them.

Sydney tickets here.

Melbourne tickets here

More details here.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

In the past few weeks, some of the world’s leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts have spoken up about the risks of letting AI models loose. Whether that is hijacking our heavily connected communications and infrastructure systems or triggering further geopolitical conflict, handing over decision-making to a tool that lacks human reasoning poses risks that are hard for us to even contemplate.

A group of experts has started pushing for a treaty to limit such risks with their AI 2040 Plan.

Here’s a recent NYT podcast on the topic, and another informative interview is here.

I asked Jonathan about the infamous “Hugging Face” attack by a group of AI agents and how that signals the unpredictability of AI choice when not constrained by the unwritten and internal rules of human cooperation.

One thing I didn’t get to discuss more with Jonathan was the type of basic economic sense check I usually make. For example, the AI 2040 Plan lists as its fourth risk that AI takes everyone’s jobs. But economists know that technology that replaces work will itself create new work opportunities. And we weren’t able to discuss the upside either—what if the most powerful AI agents realise that if humans stop fighting wars amongst their tribes and learn to cooperate better, we will build them more data centres?

I’m always the optimist!

The Future of Affordable Housing - online webinar

Housing affordability and construction productivity are two of the most debated topics in our industry today. But are we missing some fundamentals?

I will be speaking at this event about fundamental economic issues in our understanding of construction productivity and its apparent decline.

Book here. Use code LAW15 for a 15% FET supporter discount.

Dates: Friday, October 2, 2026 & Friday, October 9, 2026

Times: 4.00PM - 6.30PM

CPD hours: 5 (5 formal points)

Speakers: Cameron Murray, Fresh Economic Thinking; Noura Thaha, Associate Principal, Group GSA; Stephen White, Director Planning Urbis; Lindsay Clare, Clare Design; Kim Houghton, Economic Solutions (Regional Housing Issues in Australia); Geoff Hanmer, Architect & Lecturer at UTS; John Baker, Founding Director, BKA Architecture

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Henry Williams is the Director of Policy at a new Melbourne-based think tank called Policy Institute Australia. They have done detailed analysis of how to tweak Australia’s welfare system to provide for those in need, rather than giving away billions to high-wealth households.

It is all in their report called “Home truths: The case for rebalancing toward better means testing”.

Here’s a revealing example from the report that illustrates some of the concerning realities of how Australia’s welfare system operates:

…a retired couple with a $5 million home in Sydney can qualify for the full Age Pension worth almost $50,000 a year, and up to $150,000 for one spouse in Aged Care. Their neighbours who rent a modest home and hold $1.5 million in super receive no pension at all and roughly half the Aged Care support.

This seems unfair—at least according to my internal moral compass.

Here is another example from the report

…[a] family with two kids earning $400,000 a year qualifying for up to $20,583 in Child Care Subsidy support and about $20,000 in Parental Leave Pay…

I think some listeners would be surprised by these welfare settings. In my imagination, these subsidies and welfare payments go to those in need, not wealthy and high-income households.

In the interview, we get quite nerdy discussing how relatively minor tweaks to just four parts of the welfare system—the Age Pension, Aged Care, the Child Care Subsidy, and Parental Leave Pay—which now cost over $126 billion per year, could save $21 billion per year.

And it would all be achieved in what I perceive as a very fair way, by targeting what amounts to upper-class welfare.

Here’s Policy Institute Australia’s website, and here’s the report.

*Note that we didn’t cover the more radical policy shift of making cash payments universal and letting the tax system do the means testing.

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction4:01 A family with a $400,000 annual income gets $20,000 of benefits5:58 What does some of the jargon mean12:07 The scale of the payments15:30 Age pension reforms28:00 Age care payments39:08 What about welfare for younger people and families44:59 Is it good to pay people for babies56:04 How big are the budgetary savings

Put Fresh Economic Thinking to work

Why a paid subscription matters

A paid subscriber to FET wants intellectual challenge. They don’t want someone to write what they already think. They want insights that are hard to get elsewhere and a public debate that is intellectually honest, not tribal.

Subscribing is a vote for independence — you're saying I want Cameron Murray to have the financial freedom to investigate things that other economists won’t investigate.

If that sounds like you, and you get value from the research and analysis published here, I’d appreciate your financial support.

A fresh economic consultancy

Most economic consultancies begin with the conclusion a client wants. They sell institutional credibility and a report. I sell economic thinking.

If your organisation has a difficult economic question, a policy argument that needs testing, or a problem where you want to get beyond the usual consultant consensus, I’d like to hear from you.

FET also provides custom economics training, presentations and workshops for organisations that want their people to understand the economics behind the issues they work on.

If there are economic concepts, debates, or blind spots your team needs a genuine handle on, then please reach out.

Ground Rules: Land and Housing Economics for Professionals

Put that professional development budget to work with an upcoming FET Land and Housing Economics workshop in Sydney or Melbourne.

This two-day workshop is crafted for smart researchers, policy analysts, economists and planners who want to truly understand how land and housing markets work.

Sydney tickets here.

Melbourne tickets here

More details here.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

I sat down last week for a long conversation with Aziz Sunderji, data wizard and author of the Home Economics Substack.

Subscribe to Aziz now. You won’t regret it.

With a background in banking and finance, Aziz comes to the question of housing with a focus on asset pricing and investment incentives. This means he diverges from much of the public policy conversation that merely assumes home prices should always be lower, but planning regulations and zoning are in the way.

But he also comes with a lot of technical and design know-how.

He has built a website summarising the Great Debate on housing supply and price, and a mapping tool called ProMap. Aziz was able to show me live on screen how ProMap can reveal patterns in the data that are usually hard to see, such as the migration to the suburbs and the price gains in suburbs relative to city centres since COVID.

You could say that his ProMap tool has made housing analysis Great Again.

It would be a dream to have a tool like that for Australian property data.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Table of contents

0:00 Intro

2:51 Backgrounds in finance and property

12:43 Writing books about housing

20:54 The Great Debate compendium

31:56 Where AI helps and where it fails

36:15 The ProMap housing data tool

43:36 Urban cores versus suburbs

58:00 Doubting the zoning explanation

1:02:47 Housing as an asset with a yield

1:11:38 Monopoly, land, and patient owners

1:15:49 An elevator pitch for the housing crisis

1:19:57 What the housing crisis really is

1:33:44 Austin, Tokyo, and closing thoughts

References:

Aziz’s Substack, Home Economics

Aziz’s mapping tool, thepromap.com

Aziz’s microsite, The Great Debate

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir encounters a heated debate on the AusFinance subreddit about the merits of Australia’s superannuation system, something Cameron often raises.

Also, we comment on the emergence of culture within subreddits and respond to some of the comments on Reddit about Cameron’s work. The rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation becomes somehow relevant to the whole conversation too!

Enjoy this chat and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Starting next week at FET is a four-part analysis that I hope will become a reference point for understanding key concepts related to housing production.

* Why a feasible change of use is different from commercial feasibility

* How prices determine the cost of building new homes via choices of density and quality

* Housing supply is not new housing production

* Why landbanking is a normal market outcome of balancing present and future housing

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Friend of the show Mike Fellman joins me to chat about all things macroeconomic. We pick up on a previous conversation I had with Moses Sternstein about the interest burden from public debt.

Mike has a deep understanding of bond markets, macro policy, and money. It was a good chance to ask him about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which is a school of thought in economics that focuses on monetary operations and both sides of the monetary balance, which includes the debt (the liability to the government) and the asset (the Treasury bond held by the public or other organisation).

Is the MMT view really that different from the standard macro view? And where does a lot of the fear about public debt come from? Who really bears the cost of interest on public debt?

We dig into these questions. Enjoy the conversation.

Follow Mike’s terrific Housing Hell Substack here.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Moses Sterstein runs the terrific Random Walk substack. I stumbled across his creative insights a couple of years ago when someone sent me an article he wrote about the mythical housing shortage.

Since then, I have kept track of his views on evolving macro-economic and demographic trends.

This conversation was a chance for me to see how his independent analysis had led him to some similar views to mine on housing markets, but also test where we differ on the likely social, economic and political effects of long-term demographic trends.

It was a surprise to hear that we have both arrived at a similar view on the application of monetary policy being too broad for many of the industry-specific inflation concerns we have today.

Enjoy this conversation and find Moses on Twitter here and at his Random Walk Substack below.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

This week, regular co-host Jonathan Gadir is back to discuss inheritance taxes.

Are they the fairest tax that helps everyone start life on a more even footing? Or are they a nightmare of rules that require intrusive monitoring of gifts and that destroy family businesses?

We take some initial steps towards understanding how much tax revenue is possible, the problems involved, and the intergenerational issues at play.

An article of mine from 2014 on inheritance taxes is here.

And a link to The Australia Institute report we mentioned on inheritance taxes and gift duties is here.

Don’t forget that I am hosting a Land and Housing Economics workshop in Brisbane on 9-10th June 2026. Find out more here and come along to get into the weeds on property economics.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more?

Custom workshops are also available to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Economics can be thought of as the study of human conflict. Prices are one way to settle conflicts over who gets what.

So how does an economist think about war, and emergent cultural and political forces that create conflicts amongst groups?

Paul Frijters runs Academia Libera Mentis, a new education institution for minds that dare. He documents this grand education experiment here at his Subtack.

Paul and I go way back. Paul was my PhD supervisor, and we co-wrote Rigged, a book that dives deep into the way political favouritism operates in Australia. He has studied the way human societies function, particularly how the underlying emotional drivers of greed and love generate loyal groups as well as fierce competition.

He even has a book with Gigi Foster about that called An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks.

This underlying understanding of humanity should be extremely helpful for assessing potential scenarios in major global events, like the war in Iran. Although I am very much on board with the economic thinking about greed, love and groups, I am very much in the dark about the history and current tensions driving this new conflict in the Middle East.

Paul has recently lived in Saudi Arabia and has been studying the region in detail. So enjoy this chat and keep in mind how things have unfolded between when we recorded, on 16th March, and what is happening when you listen to it.

You can find Paul’s academy website with details of upcoming open days and events here.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

One of the most requested guests on FET has been Professor Steve Keen. Steve has been a student of economics since the 1970s, and a critic of the oversimplifications of the neoclassical economic school. He was an academic at the University of Western Sydney for many years, and Head of School at Kingston University in the mid-2010s.

One thing Steve taught me is to really think about the hidden assumptions in our economic models, which has been extremely valuable to me during my economic journey.

Our conversation starts with Steve’s concerns about the Vietnam War draft, and moves on to his epiphanies about what was missing from economics education. We discuss his attempts to model the key insights of Hyman Minsky about the economic behaviour that generates macroeconomic cycles, and the state of the economic debate.

Oh, and we talk about the very controversial issue of money creation by banks and the public Treasury!

Find Steve’s YouTube channel here.

Steve’s Debunking Economics podcast is here.

And of course, Steve writes on Substack at Building a New Economics, which is where you can find his latest writings and conversations.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0