As petrol prices rise, will carbon emissions come down?
Articles from Peter Martin
Primary tabs
This pointless $1,080 tax break should have ended years ago – but has become hard to stop
We are about to find out whether we’ll lose a tax break worth up to $1,080 a year.
Australia cut unemployment faster than predicted – why stop now?
If you told someone a year ago unemployment was about to dive below 5%, to just above 4%, they wouldn’t have believed you.
An investment in clean indoor air would do more than help us fight COVID – it would help us concentrate, with lasting benefits
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.
Unemployment below 3% is possible – if Australia budgets for it
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.
Top economists expect RBA to hold rates low as real wages fall
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 best graphs tell stories. Here are my 10 favourites from 2021
“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.
GDP went backwards, but look at what’s to come
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.
GDP is like a heart rate monitor: it tells us about life, but not our lives
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?