The Victorian Labor government has done some fantastic work, but principles have to count for something.
Just for the record, I canceled my membership to the Victorian Labor Party on the 13th May.
Those of you who know me well will know that this hasn’t been a decision I’ve taken lightly, however under the circumstances, it’s a decision that was easy to make.
You may find this hard to believe, but the 2016 federal election campaign was a full fortnight longer than this one. I remember journalists from the campaign bus complaining afterwards that Malcolm Turnbull was moribund and lazy, booking a single daily event.
The Reserve Bank is pushing up interest rates to take money out of our hands.
The first increase in the current round will add about A$65 a month to the cost of paying off a $500,000 mortgage.
One of the stranger things about the Reserve Bank’s announcement of why it’s lifting interest rates by 0.25 percentage points is that it suggests inflation will come down by itself.
“A further rise in inflation is expected in the near term,” the RBA says, “but as supply-side disruptions are resolved, inflation is expected to decline back towards the target range of 2-3%.
Yes hello long time blogger, first time in almost two years post. In late 2020 my life (and writing) became consumed by completing a doctorate, which was eventually conferred in September 2021. I even popped on a floppy hat in December last year.
One of the strangest, certainly one of the hardest to justify, measures in last week’s budget was called “supporting retirees”.
A better title would have been “supercharging the wealth of those retirees who already have more than enough to live on”.
Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND
Labor’s Senate leadership under attack from within as three leading Senator’s are smeared in the ugliest factional fight to date from a repeat offending sub-faction of the Victorian Right. So what’s it all about and who’s involved?
Another Labor factional shitfight. What’s new eh?
Overwhelmingly, Australia’s top economists would rather the budget funds measures to cut carbon emissions than cuts income tax or company tax.
They are also dead against rumoured cuts to petrol tax and the tax on beer.
The biggest question relating to the management of the economy right now has nothing to do with next week’s budget. It has everything to do with the Reserve Bank and the board meetings that will follow it.
Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND
If you told someone a year ago unemployment was about to dive below 5%, to just above 4%, they wouldn’t have believed you.
If that person was an expert, and you said it would happen despite a Delta outbreak and lockdowns in our two biggest states, they might have said you had little idea of how the economy worked.
Sometimes the best things you can do are invisible.
Such as fighting cholera by ensuring drinking water wasn’t contaminated by sewage, as happened in London in the 1840s.