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.
What’s the boldest thing the Morrison government could do in next month’s budget?
It would be to forecast an unemployment rate below 4% (a rate of three-point-something), then to pledge to go further, to two-point-something.
Australia’s leading forecasters expect the Reserve Bank to resist pressure to lift interest rates all year, despite rising interest rates overseas, much higher inflation, plunging unemployment, and financial market traders pricing in two hikes in the next six months.
The 24-person forecasting panel assembled by The Conversation also predicts:
“One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is why should there be songs.”
The person speaking is Stephen Sondheim, the writer of some of the best songs for musicals in the 20th century, who died in November aged 91.
You can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it’s unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very good.
It is time for the digital awards of 2021! This is a review of the year in digital technology, told with a bit of sass and snark. In keeping with the times, this year-in-review award ceremony will be a virtual experience.
And what a year in digital it was. Digital played a role in helping the world enjoy Mars, and it helped propel rumors that led to an insurrection on January 6. Somewhere in between it played a marvelous role in helping society slouch towards an apocalyptical future. Let’s make fun of it all!
The most revealing graph presented in Wednesday’s September quarter national accounts is one showing what has happened just beyond the end of the September quarter, in the one we are in now.
Melbourne’s lockdown ended on October 27.
How much cash would you need to be paid to agree to live without a smartphone for a year?
If you are like the typical American, the answer is US$10,000 – which is far, far more than what we are actually charged for having and using smartphones.
How much would you need to be paid to live without a computer?
According to the same research, just published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a typical American would want US$25,000 to live computer-free for a year.
Like many journalists who’ve honed their careers at the ABC, economics writer Peter Martin began in a small local newsroom and moved through the ranks to become a specialist reporter and a foreign correspondent. Having subsequently worked in commercial media, he has a renewed appreciation of the ABC, both professionally and personally. Here he reflects on his strong lifetime attachment to the ABC, and the lessons he’s learnt about both the skills of the profession and the responsibilities of being a public broadcaster.
The good news is supposed to be that when the government gets out of the way “can-do capitalism” will have us roaring back to where we were before.
That’s the prime minister’s newest slogan, and we had better hope for more.
The unpleasant truth is that before the pandemic Australia’s economy was disturbingly and unusually weak. Can-do capitalism wasn’t doing what it should.
The events over the next week in NSW could have massive ramifications for the whole country.
There is a lot going on the NSW at the moment, however, I fear worse may be yet to come.
Now that ‘Back In Black’ has transformed into ‘I See Red’ Australia is waking up to the fact that after years of Coalition mismanagement ‘The Honeymoon Is Over’.
Although many of us would like to think so, elections are not won from the left or the right, they are won from the centre. At the end of election day, it is the swinging voters that will decide the immediate future direction of the country.
And so it went in 2013 when as a nation we were afflicted with this Coalition government.