Spare us
It is difficult to work out whether Brendan Nelson was paying attention during his decade in government.
And just as difficult to work out whether he was paying attention during Tuesday's night's budget.
Here are some howlers from his speech last night replying to the Budget:
“We do not support higher taxes and higher spending.”
Excuse me, but that's exactly what the Coalition did
Here are the big ones:
Ross Gittins: 'If Wayne Swan is Robin Hood, I'm the Sheriff of Nottingham.'
KEVIN RUDD has failed to grasp the nettle. In his effort to demonstrate Labor's credentials as a good economic manager he is off to a disappointing start.
The budget could have been worse - as it almost certainly would have had John Howard been re-elected - but it could have been much, much
Regardless of what Wayne Swan's tax inquiry finds.
The Treasurer has committed himself to extra tax cuts beyond those promised during the election, setting aside an additional $15.8 billion to fund further tax cuts from 2011-12.
From July this year no worker will pay tax until his or her income reaches $14,000 – up from $11,000 at present. No-one will pay the 30 per cent rate until their income
At 1.00pm I go into the prebudget lockup.
They won't let me out until 7.30pm, when the Treasurer begins his speech to Parliament.
Like I said, the budget speech will be here at 7.30pm eastern time, and instant analysis will be here.
Any last minute tips on things to look out for?
Any thoughts to carry into the lockup?
Any questions you want answered?
Anything you want me to ask the
Wondering where to shop?
The Treasurer has taken time out from preparing the Budget to offer advice.
ALDI has better prices than just about anywhere else (just as Coles has worse petrol prices, according to his Petrol Prices Commissioner).
Here’s Wayne Swan at a pre-Budget press conferences:
“I’ll tell you what, how many people here shop at Aldi?”
“I can tell you this, out there in my
Dave Bath, in comments, reckons we spend it on lipstick.
The New York Times and the Economist both suggest that that we spend more on lipstick when our finances tighten:
"Last month, Betsy Stein made a beeline for Bloomingdale’s to buy a shirt, but the top she found was $280. Ms. Stein told herself that in the current economic climate, she shouldn’t charge it.
“With the scare of the downturn,”
The pages of the Budget are being printed and glued together.
The hard work is over.
Saturday is usually the deadline for printing and binding the budget papers.
The printers say that if they don’t start by then, the glue won’t be dry by Tuesday night.
It’ll be a thicker book than usual. This one contains an extraordinary 649 spending decisions, nearly all of them spending cuts.
In contrast
It's where the action is, right?
On the eve of Western Australia's Thursday budget, Shane Wright, economics editor of the West Australian probes the mystery.
Go West! Life is peaceful there
Go West! There in the open air
Go West! Where the skies are blue
Go West! This is what we’re gonna do…
- The Village People
The Village People may not have known when it was time to give up disco, but the
Curious. Wayne Swan's tax cuts will present ordinary full-time earners with a higher effective marginal tax rate.
Here's my column:
So. You’re looking forward to a budget tax cut.
I’ve got some disappointing news.
The tax changes being talked as budget tax cuts are not actually budget measures. You won’t find them in next week’s budget bills.
(I am also the bearer of even less-pleasing news,
...as never before.
You wouldn't credit it.
As petrol prices, food prices and mortgage rates have soared we have been buying more jewelery than ever before.
According to the Bureau of Statistics our inflation-adjusted spending at jewelers shops soared an extraordinary 11 per cent in the first three months of this year.
At the same time our inflation-adjusted spending at meat, fruit and bread
TD Securities unpacks today's retail figures. They are not what they seem.
Recorded retail sales rose by 0.5% in March, ahead of expectations for a 0.3% increase. BUT, excluding food (which most likely rose from higher prices) retail sales actually fell by 0.3%.
All but one other category of expenditure fell in the month. In particular, department store sales fell by 0.7% to be only 0.2% up on
John Cargher has died one week after recording his final radio program.
Just as Alistair Cooke died just weeks after recording his final radio program.
And Charles Schulz also died weeks after drawing his last Peanuts cartoon.
My Brother in Law would listen to Singers Of Renown in the bath religiously each Saturday afternoon.
Here's the news, just in from the ABC:
John Cargher, host of the
Secret Treasury documents released under the Freedom of Information Act undermine one of the Government’s key claims in support of its tax package to be delivered in Tuesday week’s Budget.
Both the Treasurer and the Prime Minister have claimed that the $31 billion package will boost employment and provide an “incentive” for existing workers to put in more hours.
But the Treasury documents,
CHOICE: "We are unaware of any evidence to suggest that sufficient savings are more difficult to achieve for higher income earners."
By all accounts Wayne Swan's first Budget, due in a fortnight, will be a shocker. And not only for people from the ACT.
But there will be generosity amidst its meanness - a surprising amount of it reserved for those of us who are already very well off.
Want
For years I and a number of other economic journalists have been saying that it doesn't - not really; not in a sustained way.
What we thought we knew was that as people got richer their happiness improved, but then fell back to about where it was before.
Japan was shockingly poor after the war and is now rich. But the surveys found its people little happier than they were before.
Increased
Really.
They'll be making an ad out of today's CPI press conference:
TREASURER: What we’re trying to do is to get Aldi to set up more quickly and they haven’t been able to get the land because their major competitors gobble it all up. This is a measure about making sure another competitor gets into the grocery market in more locations, more quickly to deliver better prices. I’ll tell you what,
The story so far:
Once it probably came from the other depositors in your bank.
Then our demand for mortgages outgrew depositors funds (which in any event had shrunk) and many of our mortgages became funded from overseas, including some of those sold by banks and all of those sold by organisations such as Aussie, RAMS, Members Equity etc.
The foreigners - in Europe, China, wherever - bought
Commenter Willowtree is unkind enough to observe:
"Australia will maximise its wealth, excellence and equity by driving up productivity growth to the leading edge of developed countries, by:
•Equipping all Australians through an education and training system that leads the world in excellence and inclusion
•Deploying Australia’s human capital efficiently and fairly including by overcoming the
Wondering what there’s too much of in your share portfolio?
It could be testosterone.
When the share market was climbing, testosterone was thought of as a good thing. A Cambridge University study just published has found that during the upswing the more testosterone in a (male) share trader’s saliva in the morning, the more money he had made by the end of the day.
The author, John Coates -
Jessica Irvine, in this morning's SMH:
"THE centrepiece of the Rudd Government's plan to increase national savings and make housing more affordable - its first-home saver account - is unfair, too complex and may not be available on time, according to a flood of submissions to a Treasury inquiry into the plan.
They say it is highly regressive, gives rich savers double the benefit of poor savers,
“We are hoping prices move back up.”
The Australian National University has lost $100 million from its investment portfolio as a result of the worldwide share market crash.
The ANU’s Vice Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb confirmed the figure to the Canberra Times yesterday after hinting at it during a vote of thanks to the Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens at a guest lecture on Tuesday.
In
The Governor's delivery during yesterdays ANU lecture and during questions afterwards was flat and understated. Not at all like the more adventurous man who appeared before the Parliamentary committee two weeks earlier.
The ridiculous newspaper coverage that followed that appearance (pictured) seems to have affected him.
The head of the Reserve Bank has expressed sympathy for the Australians
Michael West on the Australian Securities Exchange in this morning's Age and Sydney Morning Herald.
"The regulators have just become defendants.
Opes Prime had warned both the ASX and ASIC in February that it was in breach of its liquidity requirements. Both failed to act. Any client of Opes whose exposure to the collapsed Prime broker increased between that time - at the latest - and the
“Awesome, amazing, inspiring, empowering”.
"We have a strong and committed voice, and Australia’s new leadership has an unprecedented appetite to listen.”
Cutting the voting age to 16, paying teachers based on their performance, getting public transport to within two kilometres of every urban Australian, and a scheme that would slash the price of life-saving drugs are among the top
Have you ever sent an email that you wish you hadn't?
And what on earth does that question have to do with global warming?
The connection is the idea of a “nudge”, which we discussed here last week.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein from the University of Chicago are promoting the idea of a “nudge” to get us to get us to relatively painlessly cut our greenhouse gas emissions.
In their book
That's what I am writing about next Monday, for Tuesday's column.
I have quite a few ideas, but then I thought maybe someone reading this blog has one, or more, as well.
I am looking for ideas that would fit in with the Government's stated objectives (many of which have to do with saving money) and which would be politically realistic.
One is to end the special Fringe Benefits Tax treatment
Only one in four agree that "now is good time to buy a major household item".
In Australia things keep getting worse. Elsewhere...
The International Monetary Fund says a recession in the United States is now inevitable and that there is a 25 per cent chance of a global recession.
The assessment, in the Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook released overnight in Washington comes as the latest
And mortage brokers are parrt of the problem, not the solution.
The potential losses from the US financial crisis may be approaching the entire GDP of Australia.
In its latest Global Financial Stability Report released this morning the International Monetary Fund said that the direct losses to financial institutions from bad mortgages in the United States may now amount to US$565 billion, and
The war isn't over. The fighting's just begun.
What if, while the attention of economists was focused on the Budget and the upcoming 2020 Summit, the really important economic decisions were being made elsewhere?
They are being made as we speak inside the new Department of Climate Change. Within weeks it will reveal the detail of the new emissions trading scheme that will be in force for
Those of us who aren't among the chosen 1,000 participants have until
this Wednesday
to get our submissions in.
500 words addressing one of the 10 subject areas:
* Productivity Agenda - education, skills, training, science and innovation
* Australian Economy - the future of the Australian economy
* Sustainability and Climate Change - population, sustainability, climate change and water
*
Suddenly carbon emissions matter.
It has started to get painfully cold in Canberra early.
Many times a day in our homes we need to make carbon-relevant decisions, such as whether to push our heaters up a notch, whether to delay turning them on, and whether to wear a jumper instead.
And whenever we make those decisions we are likely to err on the side of immediate comfort. We know we won’t be
The summit "starter questions" are here, at the end of each of the ten pdfs or powerpoints.
Below, myself and Canberra Times colleagues Danielle Cronin, Andrew Fraser, Emma Macdonald, David McLennan and Ross Peake summarise the background papers prepared for each of the ten working groups at the summit:
Who will the next generation of Australian farmers be? What are the responsibilities of
It'll no longer be possible to claim that the new government is all talk.
Why Steven Conroy pulled the plug:
In opposition the Communications Minister Senator Conroy called the $1 billion Optus-Elders rural broadband network a “dog of a product”.
In government, he had to put it down.
Steven Conroy has his own much bigger broadband vision.
He wants 98 per cent of us to have access to very
The best explanation.
From David Warsh at Economic Principals:
How did the subprime crisis become so serious?
The drop-dead shorthand explanation emerged today when Deborah Solomon of the Sunday New York Times Magazine asked former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill how some fast-and-loose mortgage lending at the margin could trigger “a financial crisis of global proportions.”
You remember O’
The St George Bank has leapfrogged the other big banks to push up its mortgage rate to a new high of 9.47 per cent – a full 0.10 percentage points above its next highest rivals – with no end in sight for the increases following an apparent go-ahead from the Governor of the Reserve Bank.
On Friday Westpac increased its rate by 0.10 percentage points to match St George at 9.37 per cent following
...and it need not.
For some people, buying a house or a car or a mobile phone plan is anything but pleasant.
They are worried they will make the wrong decision and then as soon as they have made it they are certain they did.
“How could I have been so stupid” and “the other one would have been better” are among the cries we hear from the perpetually regretful. Read more »
A rift has developed between the Treasurer and the Reserve Bank over interest rates with the Bank defending the banks the Treasurer has attacked for excessive rate rises.
Addressing the Euromoney Financial Markets Innovation Congress in Sydney the head of the Reserve Bank Glenn Stevens said yesterday he could understand why Australia's banks had increased their rates by more than the Bank had
Labor made one really, really stupid promise during the election campaign. Not to allow the tax take to increase as a proportion of GDP.
What if the economy booms? Will this mean it will have to cut tax, at exactly the time it should not? What if it needs to spend the income from its carbon tax (read: emissions trading scheme) on activities that assist in the adjustment to global warming?
Meet The Press on Channel Ten is a very fast affair. At a certain point (shortly before each commercial break) the presenter Paul Bongiorno raises his hand (in a way that can't be seen on the TV) and the questions have to stop.
My co-panelist Emily Rice had just asked this question of the Minister Nicola Roxon:
EMILY RICE: Minister, just on another issue - the baby bonus is set to rise to
It like it!
Faced with demands from business for a simple emissions trading system, Professor Ross Garnaut has come up with just about the most simple one possible.
And the key to its simplicity?
All Australian carbon emitters - every one - will have to pay for their permits.
As he told me, "the complications in most schemes are about free allocation of permits"... Read more »
Under attack for not doing enough to take pressure off interest rates the Treasurer Wayne Swan yesterday claimed that had he done more, Australia's economy could have “slammed into a wall”.
Speaking to the Canberra Times at the annual post-budget Press Club lunch Mr Swan agreed that Canberra residents were breathing more easily after after Tuesday's Budget.
“All those dire predictions didn’t
...from the Treasury.
They’re an optimistic lot in the Federal Treasury.
Inflation, forecast by the Reserve Bank to climb to 4.25 per cent by June and then to 4.5 per cent by December not falling back to below to below 3 per cent until the end of 2010, is seen by the Treasury as hitting only 4 per and falling fairly swiftly thereafter.
The Treasury believes there will be no problems after
Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd have squibbed on their first big economic promise.
They were going to take pressure off interest rates.
They said so, repeatedly, while in Opposition and in the lead-up to the Budget.
But last night in the Budget speech Wayne Swan made not a single claim about rates.
The nearest he came was saying that he was “working to put downward pressure on inflation”.
He hasn’
The documents themselves will be here, at 7.30pm eastern time.
This site will have a good summary at that time.
Below the fold is the reading guide prepared by Shane Wright of the West Australian.
And below that is mine.
SHANE WRIGHT:
Wayne Swan is about to sit the toughest test of his political career. And you, voters and taxpayers, will be marking his examination paper.
Tomorrow’s
The inquiry is overdue. It might fix up disasters, like this, and this.
The critics of the new tax inquiry are wrong.
It's being headed by the right person.
Within months of joining the Treasury in 1984 the present Treasury head Ken Henry started work on the Hawke-Keating Labor government's draft White Paper on Tax Reform – the one that recommended a Goods and Services Tax.
In 1985 the
A massive investment fund to ensure that the benefits of Australia’s resource boom are preserved for future generations will be the centerpiece of a budget expected to bring in a surplus of around $20 billion on Tuesday night.
The fund, modeled on Norway’s Petroleum Fund will accumulate all future budget surpluses and could be worth as much as $100 billion in five years.
Entitled the Building
It's good.
So Westpac is expecting a one US dollar Australian dollar.
In fact the bank expects the Aussie to climb even higher than the US dollar over the the next year eventually hitting around US$1.02 next March.
It is entirely possible that that will happen and it would be a good thing.
The last five years make clear why it is possible. Over each, on average the Aussie has climbed 12 per
And also in Victoria it seems. Both had their Budgets yesterday, as did the Northern Territory.
In the ACT the government says it is "ready for the future" and it is preparing to spend most of its accumulated surpluses on infrastructure to prove it.
Yes, an ACT election is just around the corner.
No, that has nothing to do with its decision to abandon austerity. It says so.
But given that
Dave Bath, in comments, reckons we spend it on lipstick.
The New York Times and the Economist both suggest that that we spend more on lipstick when our finances tighten:
"Last month, Betsy Stein made a beeline for Bloomingdale’s to buy a shirt, but the top she found was $280. Ms. Stein told herself that in the current economic climate, she shouldn’t charge it.
“With the scare of the downturn,”
"The emailed answer from the Chief Minister's office suggests it would rather fly partly blind than have to cope with new information."
Canberra is odd sometimes.
A farce will be played out on the floor of the ACT's Parliament on Tuesday afternoon - one that has little to do with good government and everything to do with leaving the people of Canberra wondering.
As as is his tradition when
It's from YouTube.
But Kate Blanchett as Olivia Newton John?
Kevin Rudd as John Travolta?
In a note to the Canberra Times he says they will have an "unambiguously positive impact on participation".
"Unambiguously positive", yes. But big?
His note to the Canberra Times is below, and below that is what I wrote for this morning's paper:
The Treasurer, Wayne Swan 30 April 2008:
POSITIVE PARTICIPATION INCENTIVES OF GOVERNMENT'S TAX PACKAGE
Treasury analysis of the Government’s income
RBA ECONOMICS COMPETITION
The Reserve Bank of Australia is pleased to again support an essay competition for university students to be conducted by the UNSW Economics Society.
The essay topic for this year is Housing Costs and Affordability in Australia.
Housing is an important component of household expenditure and household balance sheets. Essays should discuss:
. how housing costs and
“There’s no silver bullet here"
The Prime Minister yesterday conceded he had lost control over mortgage rates as yet another bank lifted its rates independently of the Reserve Bank and in the face of opposition from the Treasurer.
Westpac declared late yesterday that it would lift its rate by 0.10 percentage points to 9.47 per cent, one working day after the National Australia Bank announced
Meet Annette, a delegate from Monash Young Labor.
Parts 1, 2 and 3 of her adventrues were here.
Now for Part four:
And part five:
And part six:
It looks as if there will be a part 7!
It is real enough, but it isn't a razor gang cut as initially reported.
The government's razor gang may or may not announce cuts of that order in the Budget on May 13, but the ABS is getting in early.
The Bureau has told a Canberra journalist that the $20 million cut is an "independent savings drive", and that the efficiency dividend would only see it lose about $6 million, but they're going
That's what the lunches were presented in.
Much expense was spared.
Joshua Gans is back in Melbourne and offers his initial thoughts.
An extract:
"In the end, for me I will get just what I expected, a bunch of new connections and hopefully friends who share a common interest in wanting to make things better. I think the Government will get some more ideas, but importantly, will be held to
The Initial Summit Report.
Pretty quick, hey.
“Speed dating” and red stickers were among the tools used by economists to hammer out agreement during the first day of the 2020 Summit.
The 100-odd participants in the economics group were asked to first form a pair with someone they hadn’t met before and then come up with an idea they were both passionate about. After that the pair had to meet another pair and do the same thing, and then meet
Welcome to Canberra, delegates.
We in the Australian Capital Territory have long prided ourselves on our support of progressive causes.
The only state of territory to vote for a republic at the referendum (and overwhelmingly so), more than 60 per cent of us regularly vote Labor after preferences are distributed.
We introduced Australia’s first Human Rights Act, we were the first to recognise
And then, last June, while walking from Canberra's Hyatt Hotel to Parliament House, he was hit by a car.
Danielle Cronin, the Canberra Times Health Reporter, takes up the story:
Former Treasurer Peter Costello’s top aide Phil Gaetjens, 53, is described as a “brilliant brain’’ with an “incredible mastery of details’’.
But Gaetjens draws a blank when he tries to remember the accident that almost
All of the public submissions to the 2020 summit are now up on line, all 8,637 of them.
"Sustainability" is the most popular topic, getting 1,322 submissions.
"Creative Nation" is the least popular, getting 455 submissions. Easy reading.
Plus, each of the 1,000 delegates has made a submission, but as far as I can tell they are not on the Australia2020 website yet.
The Rudd government is either a good one or merely good-looking.
We will know when its first Budget is handed down four weeks from tonight.
We don’t know yet partly because much of what it has announced to date are inquiries (or summits). It is easy to have good intentions while looking into things.
It is harder to make decisions that actually take things away from people. Until now the Rudd
Michael West on the Australian Securities Exchange in this morning's Age and Sydney Morning Herald.
"The regulators have just become defendants.
Opes Prime had warned both the ASX and ASIC in February that it was in breach of its liquidity requirements. Both failed to act. Any client of Opes whose exposure to the collapsed Prime broker increased between that time - at the latest - and the
The Queen has done it actually. Kevin Rudd and her stitched it up in talks in London. The new GG, Quentin Bryce, will take over in September.
She is the current Governor of Queensland, and has been much more besides. In her words:
“It’s a great honour and a great responsibility, and it’s a great day for Australian woman.
I grew up in a little bush town in Queensland of 200 people and what this
The 2020 Youth Summit - with 100 of our best and brightest - is on right now, on Saturday and Sunday at Parliament House in Canberra.
I'll have the thrill of reporting it tomorrow for our paper. Ten of the participants will take part in the Summit itself next week.
Here's an extract from the excellent opening speech delivered this morning by the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard:
"Recently,
The only region that had it, has lost it.
Full-employment has deserted the Australian Capital Territory.
Figures released by the Bureau of Statistics yesterday show that the number of unemployed Canberra residents climbed back up above the number of vacant jobs in March for the first time since last May.
An extra 598 Canberra residents joined the unemployment queue in March taking Canberra's
5:00pm eastern time, Wednesday 9 April 2008
Here.
It is, actually. And it needs to be.
Bernard Keane, in today's Crikey:
"They stare out from job ads, attractive, elegantly-attired, like no public servant you’ve ever met, inviting you to come and join them in the exciting world of ... auditing. Taxation. Agriculture. Defence procurement. The national papers are full of job ads for public servants, all trying to make their agency sound
“I can hear it slowing”.
The ANZ Bank has dramatically widened its provision for bad debts as a major investment bank has warned of “cracks appearing” in the Australian economy.
The ANZ yesterday told analysts it would aside $975 million to cover bad debts in the first half of this year, more than four times the value of bad debts it had booked in the same period a year before.
The bank's
And not a very inspiring one, I am afraid.
Andrew Leigh took part in Saturday's prequel, the ACT's 2020 Summit.
He has printed out a list of the ideas that his group (education) came up with and then drew the following depressingly apparent conclusions:
"One of the things that you can tell from the above list is what happens if you put people with a single expenditure priority in a room and
...confirmation to that his next move in interest rates will most likely be down.
And much much more. The whole transcript of Friday's parliamentary hearing is worth reading.
Some highlights:
ON RATES:
“The current level of rates, as we have made quite clear, is on the high side. When they’ve done the job, they can come down.”
ON UNEMPLOYMENT:
“In principle it could hardly rise at all. But
Both from Dr David Gruen of the Treasury who gave this excellent speech to Australian Business Economists in Sydney yesterday:
The private banks on the other hand...
Australia’s Reserve Bank believes it may have fired its final shot in the war against inflation and has declared it has no plans to increase interest rates further.
The declaration, released yesterday after a board meeting that decided not to lift rates was embraced by the Treasurer Wayne Swan as a “welcome reprieve for working families”.
The Bank’s