Economy

With the Greens now so clearly focused on garnering all the votes they can on the issue, and inequality threatening to put home ownership and even affordable rent out of reach for a generation of young people, it’s hard to justify preserving billions of dollars of tax incentives.

Poor strategic planning is a disturbing feature of government in this country. It may be attributable in part to the short political cycle, which mandates a federal election within three years.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers faces particularly difficult decisions in the next budget, probably the last before an election in early 2025. How much more can he afford to do to prop up growth, with additional measures to assist with the cost of living, while not worsening the inflation outlook?

Is it too much to aspire to, that our elections might be decided by which party will deliver the better government? The benchmark against which voters assess parties and candidates should be their capacity to govern well, not short-term political pointscoring, or some politically clever remark or slogan, or the outcome of competing scare campaigns.

Zali Steggall is not the only independent in the House of Representatives to be frustrated by the fact Question Time has become a largely boring exercise in political pointscoring, something exacerbated by the looming byelection in the Victorian seat of Dunkley. Some of the independents have written to the speaker, Milton Dick, and the leader of the House, Tony Burke, asking for reforms in standing orders to restore the exercise to its original purpose of holding the government to account and eliciting responses that would serve the national interest.

The federal Labor government has reached a vital crossroad in its journey to success or failure at the next election. It has a real opportunity to win not only the next election but at least one more to meet the average term since 1975, about nine years. A government heading in the right direction is a good place to be. There are, however, still challenges.

Dutton says you can no longer believe anything Albanese or Chalmers say on their future tax intentions. It hasn’t dawned on him that he lacks the clout of incumbency. Governments are in charge; oppositions can only promise and decry.

Refusing to be defeated by the relentless racism, however, Indigenous entrepreneurs and community leaders running non-profit corporations have succeeded in establishing businesses with positive outcomes that far exceed those of the many failed bureaucratic experiments.

I am concerned we have lost sight of the real purpose of education, and specifically university education. It has been an increasing weakness that a university degree is mostly looked at as an alternative in the spectrum of vocational training. It is much more.