By Jeremy Simon. In the United States we treat education like it is a sport. And thanks to the PISA, an international test administered to 15 year olds around the world which produces a ranking of countries’ achievement in math, science, and reading every three years, we know who is winning. But winning isn’t all that is important in education. For that we need to consider how education is more like running a marathon and less like the Super Bowl. More...

By Elisa Lanzi. You may have seen recent Back to the Future festivities marking 21 October 2015 as the date Marty and Doc travel to the future in the famous second film with Michael J. Fox. If only we had a similar time machine allowing us to travel to 2045 to see what the climate has in store to better decide what policies to adopt today. Alas, no time machine has been invented yet but, in the absence of such a cool device, we can rely on climate and economic models that attempt to shed light on how climate change may affect the future of our societies. The new OECD report The Economic Consequences of Climate Change, does this using a global multi-sector, multi-region modelling approach. More...

By Roel Nieuwenkamp. A recent study involving a survey of over 1000 CEOs found that 93% of them believe that sustainability will be important for the future success of their business. These views may be based on strong evidence from studies that have contributed to strengthening the link between company performance and “doing the right thing”. More...

By Patrick Love. The OECD has just published How’s Life? 2015: Measuring Well-being. It includes statistics on material well-being (such as income, jobs and housing) and the broader quality of people’s lives (such as their health, education, work-life balance, environment, social connections, civic engagement, subjective well-being and safety), with a special focus on child well-being, and also has a chapter on how volunteering affects well-being. More...

By Jen T. Kwok. At a Geelong product launch on 7 October, Christopher Pyne professed that the new Prime Minister had asked him to release his ‘inner-revolutionary’. Turnbull had said, ‘Let me worry about the money, you get on with the ideas.’ This insight signals that the new PM wants a shift on national innovation policy, something Labor has sought to own since Bill Shorten’s Budget reply speech in May. More...

By Grahame McCulloch. The new Prime Minister and his ministry are economically dry and have much more socially liberal views than those of the paleo-Liberals associated with the former Prime Minister.  Many have backgrounds with merchant banks and traders, resource and energy companies and international corporate, legal and accounting services.  By and large they are a well- educated, cosmopolitan and cultured group.  They are independently wealthy and some are a little detached from reality. More...

By Paul Kniest. The ability of deregulated markets to efficiently and equitably allocate vocational education and training (VET) places in Australia has been on trial since the Brumby Labor Government in Victoria introduced its Securing Jobs for the Future policy in 2008. The policy entitled most students to government support (entitlement or demand driven system) and made all registered VET providers (public and private) eligible for government subsidies (fully contestable funding model). More...

By Paul Kniest. It was 3.30pm on Monday 14 September 2015 when Jeannie Rea, Rachael Bahl and Paul Kniest, representing NTEU, sat down for a meeting with Senator Glenn Lazarus in his Parliament office to discuss higher education policy. Reflecting on what were generally considered little more than rumours we jokingly asked whether Tony Abbott was still Prime Minister and were assured by a jocular response that nothing was likely to happen on that front anytime soon. More...