One of the dominant ideas buzzing around the internet is that there’s little we can do to escape the prospect of more frequent and worse bushfires - ever.
That’s because there’s little we can do to slow or reverse the change in the climate.
Australians saved rather than spent most of the budget tax cuts, almost doubling the proportion of household income saved, leaving spending languishing.
Thirteen leading economists have declared their hands in the stand off between the government and the Governor of the Reserve Bank over the best way to boost the economy.
All 13 back Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe.
Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy – in the job for for just weeks after moving across from the department of infrastructure last month – has dismissed talk of spending big on infrastructure in order to escape an economic downturn.
Such calls “sound straightforward, but in practice are difficult to achieve”, he told a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
The government’s new retirement incomes review will need to work quickly.
On Friday Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he expected a final report by June, just seven months after the issues paper he wants it to deliver by November.
The budget is bouncing out of deficit and is set to stay in surplus for the decade to come.
The Australian economy is tepid, with consumer spending the weakest in ten years, business investment shrinking, and economic growth too weak to cover population growth.
Were it not for very strong growth in export income and the biggest surge in government spending in 15 years, the economy would have shrunk.
Australia has been in a current account deficit – paying more money out to the rest of the world than it took in – for 44 straight years, since September 1975.
