HeyJaredJames Stekhoven
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 25, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for Independentaustralia
- Top 5M sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 15, 2026
Latest articles
Australia’s efficiency obsession has created a culture of distrust (opens the original)
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Australia’s obsession with metrics, audits and managerial efficiency has created a culture of distrust that undermines professional integrity and the public good, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven. THERE WAS A TIME, lost now in the mist-shrouded memory of pre-efficiency Australia, when doctors healed the sick, teachers educated the young and an academic’s job was to think thoughts slightly more profound than those required to fill out a quarterly risk-mitigation spreadsheet. Enter New Public
The billionaires are terrified of us (opens the original)
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The billionaire class is retreating behind bunkers, philanthropy and PR as the social order that created its obscene wealth begins to fracture, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven. FOR DECADES, the ultra-wealthy have confidently commanded that we believe in the comforting (for them) fairytale of meritocracy — the notion that a billionaire is simply someone who worked a million times harder than a nurse, a teacher, or a cleaner. Yet, if you spend even a casual afternoon reviewing the architectur
How neoliberalism created the populist backlash (opens the original)
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Decades of neoliberal managerialism hollowed out political leadership, creating the vacuum in which right-wing populism could thrive, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven. FOR DECADES, modern democracies have operated under a comforting illusion: that governance could be safely outsourced to spreadsheets, technocratic consensus and market-driven metrics. Public administration was treated as a frictionless optimisation problem, overseen by an elite class insulated from the messy friction of every
Billionaire BS and the great wealth lie (opens the original)
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The myth that billionaires earn their fortunes through hard work is a convenient fiction that justifies extreme inequality and blames the poor, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven. LET’S GET ONE THING straight: no one becomes a billionaire by working hard. They become a billionaire by being lucky, born a meter from the finish line and then telling everyone who took off from the starting line that they out-sprinted them. The “self-made” billionaire is the greatest fairy tale since the tooth fair
Market mysticism and the misinformation that dudded Australia (opens the original)
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Australia didn't just embrace market economics; it embraced the myth that efficiency alone could deliver fairness, prosperity and the common good, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven. IN THE SCHEME of modern public policy, “efficiency” has been elevated from a technical economic metric to a sacred moral virtue. We are conditioned to take it as a tenet of faith that if a market can do it, it should do it and that any mechanism slower, more deliberate, or more equitable than the the holy ghost… s
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