So you think it’s the right time to dive in and buy a home.
I can’t tell you you’re wrong. I can tell you it would have been better to do it before prices began soaring, and that if they keep soaring it will get worse still.
In 2007 Malcolm Turnbull turned off an industry’s life support without blinking.
The industry made light bulbs, of the traditional kind; so energy-inefficient they lost most of it as heat.
We got an awful lot right during the COVID crisis — an awful lot that we couldn’t have got right just a few years earlier.
Which is another way of saying we were incredibly lucky.
Had COVID attacked during the 1980s there would have been no way to make a messenger RNA vaccine, not even for animals.
Never before has a budget spent so much to supercharge the economy after the worst of a recession has already
As surprising as it may seem, Australian budgets aren’t really about money — they’re about values.
What in America they call the State of the Union, in Australia we call the federal budget.
Australia’s top economists have overwhelmingly backed a decision by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to reset the budget strategy so that it prioritises achieving an unemployment rate of between 4% and 5% over reducing debt.
Australia hasn’t had an unemployment rate below 5% since 2011.
Not long ago it seemed as if the future was going to get better and better — not long ago at all.
For me the high point was around 2005, fifteen years ago.
I don’t know if you can remember how you felt at the time, but for me the surge in living standards, driven by an ever-building surge in output per working hour (“productivity”) suggested things were building on themselves: each new innovation was making use of the ones that had come before to the point where….
Of all the weak targets ever adopted by Australian governments, one of the weakest has to have been an unemployment rate “comfortably below six per cent” in last year’s budget.
At the time the budget was delivered on October 6, the published unemployment rate had already fallen to 6.8%.
It’s tempting to think home prices are soaring because there aren’t enough homes.
