I am anticipating this Tuesday’s budget particularly keenly, as the treasurer has flagged a “productivity package”, alongside tax and spending reforms, to improve the country’s long-term prosperity and budget position. It’s action that our economy sorely needs.
A lot of comparisons have been made with the 1979 oil price shock in recent weeks. The difference is that, in 1979, Australians had no choice but to absorb the shock. This time, many who can are quietly plotting their exit from petrol and diesel.
There is a view in the engine room of the federal government that the real leader of the opposition at the moment is not Angus Taylor but United States President Donald Trump. No one has done more to put Anthony Albanese’s government on tenterhooks than the mercurial incumbent at the White House.
My mother used to warn me that I was an easy target, and it turns out that extends well beyond my body. The people with the least power are always the easiest to question, the easiest to blame, and that is what ableism looks like when it is embedded into systems.
Another world oil crisis, another period of stagflation – the combination of sluggish economic growth and rising unemployment with accelerating inflation. The current crisis, the direct result of the divisive and controversial war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, is likely to be the worst yet.
As fate would have it, the Albanese government’s key measures offering fuel price relief to motorists and crucial heavy transport operators coincided with April Fool’s Day. This was no prank, however; it was an intervention born of desperation, turbocharged by uncertainty over how long the global energy crisis driven by the Iran war will last.
Many is the time, looking around the chamber, I ask myself the same question: When will we ever learn? This time, it is the government’s contemplation of removing incentives to encourage motorists to switch to electric vehicles…
The governor of the Reserve Bank, Michele Bullock, was a little too frank for the treasurer this week, when she mentioned the prospect of a recession after the RBA’s Monetary Policy Board raised interest rates for the second consecutive month.