Economy

For a prime minister on leave, Anthony Albanese had a busy week. It’s a sure sign of knowing you can take nothing for granted in politics, especially when everyone keeps telling you to lift your game.

The cost of living is still running too high and the opposition is weaponising every issue it can. As Treasurer Jim Chalmers prepares to deliver the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook statement, he faces a very big question. How he will balance the desire to maintain the long-awaited surplus Labor touted this year as evidence of its sound economic management with the need to help households still struggling with inflation and the highest interest rates in 12 years.

Australia is engaged in the most significant economic, industrial and social transformation – the transition to renewable energy. Unfortunately, the opposition, backed by its loyal media comrades, is doing its level best to complicate and undermine this effort with baseless assertions and misrepresentations.

The cage fight that passes for political debate in the Australian parliament is drawing to an unedifying close for the year. The Dutton-led opposition has rushed to exploit every fear and panic, and heads to the summer break convinced it has the Albanese government ready to yield.

Anthony Albanese could end up being a one-term prime minister if he can’t keep the faith with the young people who helped him to last year’s decisive election victory. Recent surveys suggest a cocktail of pandemic-related stresses is forging a generation of financially aware, politically engaged and resilient young people.

I still get social media pile-ons over my failure, in the lead-up to the 1993 election, to explain the likely price effects of the then proposed GST on a birthday cake … I fell into the ‘No’ case strategy – ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it.’

The employment white paper released by the Albanese government this week is a vast improvement in professionalism and substance on the previous government’s three-word slogan – ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ – which offered precious little detail about which jobs and how they would be delivered.

Among the various pressures pushing up our cost of living, one that is often overlooked is the exchange rate, or the value of Australia’s dollar relative to other currencies. Our currency is usually quoted against either the United States dollar, or a basket of our major trading partners’ currencies, known as the trade-weighted index.

Going into the last sitting week before the referendum on a Voice to Parliament, Anthony Albanese was desperate to have something positive to talk about, to assure Australians he was paying attention to their immediate concerns.

The current debate on rent controls in Australia, such as it is, is stuck in the tired old narrative of the beneficiaries of property price increases.