The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), after taking a look at sales for the first half of 2008, has run crying poor to the Herald Sun. While they have not yet released these figures to the public, they presumably continue the trend evident in published figures for 2006 and 2007.
Australian Music Sales
Commenting on my petrol prices post, Mark Lauer suggested that excise on petrol should in fact be increased to deal with negative externalities:
Personally I think we should be increasing the excise. It represents the many negative externalities that car use in our society creates: carbon emissions, use of space for (larger) roads; materials, construction and maintenance of (larger) roads; particulate pollution; deaths and injuries from road accidents, and so on, all of which scale with mileage and hence fuel use. And our understanding of all these factors is moving in the direction of increased disutility. Hence the charges should be increased.
I’ve been thinking about petrol and carbon emissions a bit over the last few weeks, so this is as good a prompt as any to put down my thoughts here on the Mule. I should also point out that I have Mark to thank for the back of the envelope calculation that I’ll discuss here.
Soaring petrol prices have led to all sorts of calls for action to help reduce prices. The Opposition called for a 5 cents per litre reduction in the excise on petrol, which currently stands at 38.1 cents per litre. (See note below for an explanation of the strike-throughs). the abolition of the double taxation of petrol by eliminating Goods and Services Tax (GST) on petrol excise. Since the excise is currently 38.1 cents per litre, this would save 3.8 cents per litre. One Victorian Liberal MP, Chris Pearce, went further and called for a 10 cent reduction in petrol excise. The Rudd Government initially claimed that there was nothing more that they could do, but then buckled to the pressure and has proposed the introduction of a national FuelWatch scheme aimed at promoting price transparency at the bowser. The Minister for Competition Policy & Consumer Affairs, Chris Bowen, has indicated that this scheme is expected to save around 2 cents per litre. So, what is going on with petrol prices and what are the merits of these proposals?
Last Monday the public beta of OpenAustralia.org was launched. The site, closely modelled on the UK’s TheyWorkForYou.com, aims to make the workings of Australia’s democracy more transparent.
Transcripts of parliamentary proceedings (Hansard) have been available on line for some time, but OpenAustralia takes the same content and gives it a Web 2.0 work-over. Searching is far easier than on the parliamentary website. You can enter your postcode, find your local member and then search for particular words or phrases in her speech (in my case Tanya Plibersek) and you can even subscribe to an email alert which lets you know whenever she says something in parliament. You are also able to post comments on individual speeches. This feature provides a intriguing forum for community debate of political issues without the filter of media decisions as to what is or is not newsworthy. I will be very interested to see how these discussions evolve.
Yesterday the Sydney Morning Herald published an article on the latest retail sales numbers for New South Wales that contrasted the sales growth in take-away food and pubs and clubs with the decline in business for cafes, restaurants and fresh food retailers. This is put in the context of with rising mortgage rates and fuel prices, to suggest that consumer behaviour is starting to shift. The data is published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, so I decided to dig a little deeper. Prompted by a comment over on the Junk Charts blog, I’ve used a table enriched with spark-lines rather than the heatmap I used in the inflation post.
The Joint Economic Committee is a standing committee of the US Congress is charged with reporting on US economic conditions. Needless to say, the Committee is making a close study of the financial turmoil triggered by the collapse in US house prices and rising delinquency rates among “sub-prime” borrowers. Recently Alex J. Pollock gave testimony to the Committee entitled “Regulatory Implications of the Housing and Mortgage Bubble and Bust”. Continue reading
Until recently, I’d never given much thought to the fact that whenever I buy my lunch at the deli behind my office building, I always get the same sandwich (chicken, avocado, cheese, tomato and lettuce on multi-grain, in case you were wondering). Then I started reading Dan Ariely‘s book Predictably Irrational and realised that I’d been “self-herding”.
Inflation in Australia has been running well outside the 2-3% range targeted by the Reserve Bank of Australia—the most recent figure was 4.3% for the 12 months to March 2008—which is why interest rates have been on the rise for the last couple of years. So what has been driving prices up in Australia? One useful way to get a sense of what has been happening is to use a type of chart known as a treemap (sometimes called a “Map of the Market”). These charts tend to be pretty busy, but can be a great way to explore a rich set of data.