Cutting petrol tax to bring down the cost of living used to be the political version of a joke. Failed US presidential candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton both tried it in 2008.
The West is arraying financial weapons never deployed before against a country of Russia’s size, forsaking some of the principles that have defined it.
We are about to find out whether we’ll lose a tax break worth up to $1,080 a year.
If you told someone a year ago unemployment was about to dive below 5%, to just above 4%, they wouldn’t have believed you.
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.
“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.
