14th Annual Warren Hogan Memorial Lecture
Wednesday 15 October from 5:15pm to 8pm
Registrations close 10 October
The School of Economics warmly invites you to the 14th Annual Warren Hogan Memorial Lecture, featuring keynote speaker Chris Richardson, one of Australia’s most respected and engaging economists.
About the talk
The federal budget is Australia’s national social compact: workers and businesses are taxed, and spend those funds on the young, the old, the sick, the vulnerable, and on our defence force. That's a quarter of the national income, or closer to a third if you include the state’s expenditure to the federal's budget.
As the noted economist Cyndi Lauper once said, Money changes everything. Get the budget right and it’s a marvel. Get it wrong, and the consequences are dire.
The good news: the Lucky Country has been fortunate indeed – a combination of events (war, inflation and migration) have sticky-taped over some long-term cracks in the federal budget.
The bad news: luck won’t be enough to carry us forward. The pressures on our national social compact are growing, yet our responses have been too cautious.
Join us as Chris explores what this means for Australia’s future and why the budget is about much more than just the headline numbers.