Rate rise an even-money bet as inflation off the floor
At last, an end to the Reserve Bank’s two-year freeze on interest rates is in sight. But not this year, and not because of particularly high wage growth.
Articles from Peter Martin
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Scope poll. 'Wisdom of crowds' puts BusinessDay ahead of Treasury
Women are much better forecasters than men, and a weighted average of forecasts in Fairfax Media’s BusinessDay economic survey easily outperforms the Treasury, an analysis of 20 years of Australia’s longest-running economic survey has found.
“Answers to the BusinessDay survey, when weighted by past performance, provide the most accurate macroeconomic forecast in the country,” said researcher Warwick Smith. “Treasury would do well to set up a system like it.”
Never mind the tax, it's wages that are making us glum
Why do they keep going on and on about tax when they must know it’s not our real concern? Because the sudden dive in wage growth – the thing that is really worrying us – is beyond their control.
Work to barely pay for returning mothers, inquiry told
The third and final stage of the government's proposed income tax cuts would overwhelmingly benefit men, late evidence presented to the Senate inquiry shows.
The inquiry will report on Monday that calculations prepared by the Parliamentary Budget Office show 1.894 million men would benefit from the final flattening of the tax scales and only 767,000 women.
Pink vs blue tax: the case for taxing women lightly
If women were to be taxed differently to men, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Treasurer Scott Morrison says the idea is absurd.
“You don’t fill out pink forms and blue forms on your tax return. It doesn’t look at what your gender is any more than it looks at whether you are left-handed or right-handed,” he said last week.
He even said, wrongly, that Labor has been suggesting it.
But such a move has happened before.
The case for destroying default super in order to save it
So toxic has much of Australia’s superannuation industry become that some at the very top of the government think the Productivity Commission hasn’t gone far enough.
Portrait of a sick super system
We’re apathetic about super, until we’re not.
On Tuesday phone lines to Australia’s biggest bank-run super funds buckled under a deluge of calls from customers wanting to close multiple accounts. Traffic to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s website for consolidating your super jumped 500 per cent.
The appalling truth about our 'world-class' super system
Here’s how you can tell the Productivity Commission was spot-on in its assessment of the superannuation system.
Not a single part of the industry, not one, has explicitly endorsed its key recommendation.
That’s because it is intended to help us: users of superannuation who depend on the industry.
The PC's fix for our multibillion super 'mess'
The biggest shakeup in the history of Australia’s $2.6 trillion superannuation system would see new workers able to choose an approved high-performing fund for life, saving as much as $407,000 by avoiding underperforming funds and multiple accounts.
How Turnbull can back down on company tax, 'obviously'
How do you walk away from something to which you’ve committed your soul? You say things have changed, “obviously”.
It’s how marriages end in divorce, how deputies abandon their prime ministers and how Labor treasurer Wayne Swan quietly but spectacularly abandoned his absolute commitment to a budget surplus in late 2012.