At the risk of being political – and politics is important, it will determine how we are governed for the next three years – economic conditions could scarcely be better for a government seeking re-election.
The economic things that matter most to most people are, in my view:
jobs – if employment is climbing rather than falling, most people are not at much risk of losing their job
Ten years ago, in the lead-up to Australia’s short-lived carbon price or “carbon tax” (either description is valid), the deepest fear on the part of businesses was that they would lose out to untaxed firms overseas.
NSW is doing what Labor’s Bill Shorten could not – explaining why Australia’s capital gains tax concession is knocking first home buyers out of homes.
Few of us who have survived the last year aren’t grateful for technology.
Zoom, email, connected workplaces and solid internet connections at home have made it possible to work, shop, study and carry on our lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic hit, say, 20 years earlier.
But parts of big tech — the parts that track us and drive us to think dangerous and antisocial things just so we keep clicking — are doing us enormous damage.
Eight in ten of Australia’s leading economists back action to cut Australia’s carbon emissions to net-zero.
Never has an inquiry into the skyrocketing price of homes been more urgent.
Rarely has one been as insultingly ill-suited as the one under way right now.
Last year COVID-19 seemed simple. It was horrific, but the arguments about what to do were fairly straightforward.
On one side were people rightly horrified by its rapid spread who wanted us to stay at home and stay away from school and work and socialising in order to save lives.
After a misstep, it’s about to become illegal to import e-cigarettes without a prescription, which means that, for most Australians, it’ll become all but impossible to vape from October 1.
The misstep tells us a lot about how the Australian government works behind the scenes — most of it good.
Australia’s economy was performing exceptionally well in the lead-up to the Delta variant lockdowns, propped up by a barrage of government spending in the three months to June and impressive household spending.
Failure is only the beginning.
Thirteen of Australia’s 80 closely-regulated MySuper superannuation funds have failed the APRA performance test.
There’s a fair chance you are among the one million people in them.