Today in The Australian

As the global economy sputters and stockmarkets sag, a mere $140,000 will buy the pick-me-up to which every family aspires: the full kit of the Twelve Days of Christmas, from the first partridge to the last drummer, with all the doves, hens, geese, swans, maids, ladies, lords and pipers in between.

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Today in The Australian

In a year best characterised as “plot by Dostoevsky, script by Groucho Marx”, it was perhaps fitting that the Senate celebrated Christmas by considering legislation that would have prevented Christian schools from teaching the doctrines of Jesus Christ.

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Today in The Australian

Watching Malcolm Turnbull’s recent conduct, it was hard not to think of Enoch Powell’s famous conclusion to his biography of ­Joseph Chamberlain. “All political lives,” Powell wrote, “unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs.”

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Today in The Australian

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” France’s President Emmanuel Macron declared on Armistice Day, before adding, in a thinly disguised swipe at US President Donald Trump, “those who say ‘my interests first, regardless of others!’ rob a country of what gives it greatness: its moral value”.

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Today in The Australian

The American people spoke on Tuesday, but quite what they said will remain contentious for years to come. What is certain, however, is that American politics will be as tumultuous in its next phase as it was in the last.

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Today in The Australian

As Bill Shorten noted in his address to the Lowy Institute on Monday, China is likely to remain Australia’s largest trading partner “for the foreseeable future”. However, that doesn’t mean our interests are necessarily aligned.

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Today in The Australian
It’s time liberals put away childish things

One of the beauties of democracy is that when things don’t work out, there is plenty of blame to spread around. What happened in Wentworth is no exception.

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Today in The Australian

Greed is a deadly sin perhaps, but it helps drive our economy

Anyone who has followed the evidence being given in the financial services royal commission will not be surprised that Kenneth Hayne refers to “greed” more than 50 times in the interim report.

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Today in The Australian

It is hard not to feel uneasy about the treatment being meted out to Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee for the US ­Supreme Court.

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Today in The Australian

Perhaps the royal commission is the new form of the Last Judgment. As the wicked are exposed and the innocent — should there be any — exonerated, the commissioner, observing the proceedings from an elevated podium, impassably records their fate.

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Today in The Australian

After repeated rampages in Melbourne by African gangs, Australians are hardly likely to find the election results in Sweden surprising. With a sharp rise in violent crime, including a wave of attacks using hand grenades, since the country received an influx of refugees, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats emerged this week as the kingmakers in what is certain to be a hung parliament.

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Today in The Australian

With Australians scratching their heads and wondering what that was all about, Shakespeare’s dictum, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” has received a solid workout in the public debate. 

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Today in The Australian

Exactly 50 years ago, I spent my birthday protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. At a co-ordinated time, I believe it was Prague’s midnight, a minute of silence was observed in places that circled the globe.

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Today in The Australian

Like a python that has swallowed a pig, we are struggling to digest the population bulge the resources boom left behind. Unless immigration levels are reduced, the costs of that adjustment will only continue to mount, undermining public support for the migration program and jeopardising our ability to continue reaping the large gains migration brings.

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Today in The Australian

Fuel-efficiency regulation impact draft is a fantasy

Just two good things can be said for the government’s draft regulation impact statement on “improving the efficiency of new light vehicles”.

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Today in The Australian: "NEG might be the answer but Turnbull needs to explain why"

 Experts agree that a steady diet of fudge, cream pies and french fries is far healthier than consuming grains and vegetables. Or at least they do in 2173, according to Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper (1973).

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Today in The Australian

That genius of modern politics, Edmund Blackadder, could have had Labor in mind when he said “we in the Adder Party are going to fight this campaign on issues, not personalities … because our candidate doesn’t have a personality”.

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Today in The Australian

Were there a prize for the slogan that best captures the spirit of the age, it would surely go to the ACTU’s “Change the Rules!”

Stingy bosses? “Change the Rules!” Mean-minded bankers? “Change the Rules!” Spiking electricity prices? “Change the Rules!”

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Today in The Australian

With NATO and Putin, Trump’s cleaning up after Obama

In a widely acclaimed column in last weekend’s The New York Times, Bret Stephens argued that Donald Trump’s foreign policy aimed at one result and one result only: “The collapse of the liberal international order”, even at the cost of leaving America hated, feared and alone.

Today in The Australian

As the EU’s heads of government gather to discuss policies towards asylum-seekers, migration is causing political turmoil throughout the developed world.

With Pauline Hanson deciding to support the government’s proposed tax changes, Australians now face a stark choice between competing visions of our fiscal ­future.

Well, that will teach senator ­Fraser Anning a lesson. And it should be a warning to us all. If you thought the ABC’s Fact Check was about checking facts, think again.

Today in The Australian

With the government having received the report of the religious freedom review, both Labor and the Coalition have promised at least to retain the protections that are now in place.

Today in The Australian
With planeloads of tourists descending on London for the royal wedding, and an expected television audience in the hundreds of millions, Britain’s royalty remains the greatest show on earth.

Today in The Australian
Even the innocent are lost to this virtual lynch mob

Eric Schneiderman, the attorney-general of New York who resigned on Monday just hours after being accused of sexual misconduct, apparently suffers from Portnoy’s Complaint, which Philip Roth defined, on the first page of his novel by that name, as “a disorder in which strongly felt ­altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse ­nature”.

Today in The Australian

Karl Marx, who was born on May 5, 1818, has not had much luck with centenaries.
When his first centenary was celebrated in 1918, the international socialist movement he had fought so tirelessly to create had been torn apart by World War I, with the revolutionary turmoil in Russia inducing further convulsions.

Today in The Australian


If there is a lesson to be drawn from the trail of horrors uncovered by the banking and financial ser­vices royal commission, it is the folly of forcing ever greater financial risk on to people who lack the skills to manage it.

Today in The Australian

It is true that Melbourne, with just half London’s population, covers six times London’s area, as Shaping a Nation, the research paper on migration released earlier this week by the Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs, claims. But it hardly follows that Melbourne should, or sensibly could, aim to achieve London’s population density.

Today in The Australian

Listening, on the eve of its 10th anniversary, to recordings of the Rudd government’s 2020 Summit, it was hard not to be reminded of Rossini’s quip about Wagner. “One cannot judge Wagner’s ­Lohengrin from a first hearing,” said the maestro, “and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.”

Today in The Australian

For all his bellicose rhetoric, ­Donald Trump’s trade policy is not a major departure from the traditional American stance. But with China mounting an aggressive response, the world trading system is under greater threat than it has been for decades.

Today in The Australian

After a week of taxation claim and counterclaim, 10 propositions are essentially uncontested.

First, Labor’s elimination of the full reimbursement of imputation credits will replace a system where dividends received by Australian residents are taxed at their personal income tax rates by one in which all dividends are taxed at no less than 30 per cent, even if that rate is well above the rate which would apply to any other taxable income that taxpayer might receive.

Today in The Australian

When imputation credits were made fully reimbursable, Labor wasn’t merely supportive — it was positively gushing.

Calling attention to the benefits full reimbursement would provide to a “low-income person who earns a little investment income”, Peter Cook, Labor’s then deputy leader in the Senate, claimed paternity for the policy, which Labor had taken to the previous election.

Today in The Australian


Bill Shorten has a plan for dealing with union thuggery: he will make it legal. Addressing members of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union last October at Queensland’s Oaky North coalmine, where CFMEU protesters allegedly threatened to rape the children of non-striking workers, the Opposition Leader promised to tear up Australia’s industrial relations law.

Today in The Australian
 
Like Casablanca’s Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling was taking place at Rick’s nightclub, the Democrats on the US House of Representatives’ intelligence committee have barely been able to contain their outrage at evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Today in The Australian

Not content with proposing the largest tax hike in Australia’s peacetime history, Bill Shorten is edging ever closer to endorsing the ACTU’s call for an increase in the minimum wage that rivals the Whitlam government’s disastrous 27 per cent increase in 1973

Today in The Australian

The god of long reports makes sure no one reads them. Having released its 600-page draft report on competition in the Australian financial system, the Productivity Commission would do well to keep the candles at that god’s shrine burning

Today in The Australian

With Australians settling back into work after the summer break, last week’s release of the latest estimates of productivity growth suggests we are still struggling to increase the efficiency with which we use the nation’s resources.

Today in The Australian

With Donald Trump’s first year as 45th President of the United States drawing to a close, America’s economy is growing strongly, the unemployment rate is at an 18-year low (and that for black Americans is lower than at any time since data began to be collected in 1972), consumer and business confidence are high, and the stockmarket has reached new peaks.

Today in The Australian

With the politics of envy in full swing, it is worth remembering that the millions who came to these shores since the First Fleet arrived 230 years ago were driven not by the prospect of living at other people’s expense but by the aspiration to forge a better life for themselves and their children.

Today in The Australian

Shorn of its bombast, the argument for becoming a republic is that it would complete the “Australianisation” of the office of head of state without altering the ­substance of our constitutional ­arrangements.

Today in The Australian

Arriving in Australia many decades ago, the first thing I learned was that real Australians never complain. In this country, outrageous fortune seemed to be wasting her time: the cruellest slings and arrows were met with a stoicism that made Seneca look like a whingeing Pom.

Today in The Australian

 Paul Keating’s attack on Robert Menzies is merely the latest episode in the politicisation of Australian history. Lost in that attack, which seeks to portray Menzies as an appeaser who would have left Australia undefended in World War II, is even the slightest pretence of historical accuracy.

Today in The Australian

Not long ago, Andrew Leigh, the opposition assistant Treasury spokesman and spokesman on competition, told us that “Australia’s markets are more concentrated than those in comparable countries” — and, brace yourself, “the problem is getting worse”.

Today in The Australian


When the voters of Bennelong turfed John Howard out exactly 10 years ago, “Kevin 07” seemed to offer a fresh alternative to a government that was scarred and wearied after four terms in office.

Today in The Australian
Dual citizenship: this parliament of ‘foreigners’ is listing

As braces of bloodhounds scour Parliament House for dual nationals, section 44(i) of the Constitution has crippled the gov­ernment and, depending on the outcome in the seat of Bennelong, may make Bill Shorten prime minister.

In an age where the default approach is for people to yell at each other, Leith van Onselen prefers to bellow, as he did last week on the Macrobusiness blog with me as the target (https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/11/henry-ergas-jukes-stats-falling-workers-share-2/). I don’t know van Onselen, but he describes himself as ‘unconventional.’ Never was a truer word said. 

Today in The Australian

It is a truth universally acknow­ledged that we live in a post-truth age.

That Sally McManus’s speech on the 110th anniversary of the Harvester decision last week is ­replete with claims whose only ­relationship to reality is that they contradict it may therefore be par for the course.

Today in The Australian
 
“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” proclaimed the banners in the Moscow mausoleum as Lenin’s embalmed body was laid to rest; but 100 years after the storming of the Winter Palace, all that remains of the communist utopia the Bolsheviks promised when they seized power on November 7, 1917, is the dust and ashes of its victims.

Today in The Australian


Scott Morrison’s proposed Banking Executive Accountability ­Regime (BEAR) seems designed to neutralise Bill Shorten’s call for a royal commission into banking.

Today in The Australian

If there is a lesson from Australian energy policy, it is that it is far easier to make a fish soup out of an aquarium than vice-versa. But even though Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have not worked a miracle, their National Energy Guarantee could be a first step to reversing the harm caused to what was once a relatively well-functioning electricity market.

Today in The Australian


Faced with legitimate questions about the future submarine program, Christopher Pyne’s approach has been to mimic the great name-calling scene in Waiting for Godot: “Ceremonious ape!”, “Punctilious pig!”, “Moron!”, “Vermin!”, “Sewer-rat!”, “Curate!”, “Cretin!” — culminating in Estragon’s most devastating of insults to Vladimir: “Crritic!”

Today in The Australian


The continuing crisis in Catalonia highlights once again the dangers plebiscites pose to social coherence and stability. By reducing complex problems to simple questions, they can exacerbate divisions rather than build agreement, while worsening the tyranny of the majority.

Today in The Australian
Having won a fourth term, Angela Merkel has secured a place in the pantheon of German chancellors alongside her fellow conservatives Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. But there is no denying that the coalition she leads of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union has emerged battered and bruised from last Sunday’s election.

Today in The Australian

 Tomorrow “Jacindamania” could propel Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Labour Party’s 37-year-old leader, into the prime ministership. No doubt local factors will play a role: having been in gov­ernment almost a decade, the ­National Party, despite a solid ­record, has struggled to convince voters it has much to offer.

Today in The Australian

Australian citizenship is qualification enough to serve in parliament

If so many parliamentarians risk being disqualified under section 44(1) of the Constitution, it is ­because parliament’s composition broadly reflects that of Australian society. With 49 per cent of Australia’s population either born overseas or having a parent who was, dual nationality, or at least the entitlement to dual nationality, has become widespread.

Today in The Australian

On August 9, 2007, France’s biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas, froze €1.6 billion worth of funds backed by subprime mortgages, signalling the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Today in The Australian

  The problem with the National Broadband Network was always very simple. The project’s goals were worthy: to provide a new, albeit extremely costly, high-speed network, earn a reasonable return on taxpayers’ investment and charge readily affordable prices.

Today in The Australian

 When Bill Shorten says “tax reform” what he means is the largest peacetime increase in tax rates since federation.

Today in The Australian

A dogma, Groucho Marx might have said, is a man’s best friend. After all, no one could deny that a fixed set of beliefs can sustain good combat, soothe defeat and simplify hard choices.

Today in The Australian

It’s those wretched Catholics again. If you believe the press, they are spending substantially less than they should on Catholic schools in low-income areas, while using taxpayer dollars to subsidise the ones that compete with independent schools at the top end. Yet there they go, howling about the new school funding package.

Today in The Australian

French election: Macron’s huge majority a misleading guide to France

In Britain, voters split on left-right lines; in France, they moved to the centre. Little wonder the commentary has been all over the place, with some pundits claiming the swing to Jeremy Corbyn heralds a revival of the clash between left and right, while others have hailed Emmanuel Macron’s triumph as signalling a move away from the politics of division.

Today in The Australian

Let’s be clear: increasing taxes is not necessarily bad. After all, if we are genuinely unwilling to curb public spending, then we ought to pay for it rather than passing the bill to future generations.

Today in The Australian

If Macron beats Le Pen, he will still face a divided France

Like all populists, Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate in France’s presidential election, gives bad answers to good questions. And like so many of their opponents, Emmanuel Macron, her leading rival, would rather avoid those questions altogether.

Today in The Australian

It is easy to imagine what people thought as they heard the news from London: this will never end. But they will also have thought: this cannot be allowed to continue.

Today in The Australian

With the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decisively rejecting the Trump administration’s application for its executive order on immigration to be reinstated, the question of whether the checks and balances America’s system of government imposes on the new administration will remain effective has moved to the centre of the political debate.

Today in The Australian

Released just before Australia Day, the British Supreme Court’s decision on Brexit reminds us of a fundamental truth: the British system of government, which was Britain’s greatest gift to its former colonies, rests on the supremacy of parliament.

Today in The Australian

There was good news this week for Donald Trump, with a poll by Politico finding that the “America First” message of his inaugural address resonated with 65 per cent of Americans. Yet the new President’s bellicose economic nationalism is as dangerous for the US as it is for the world.

Today in The Australian

“Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” With those eight words, placed at the heart of his inaugural address, Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the US, ended America’s long-standing commitment to an open, rules-based, trading system.

Today in The Australian
There was good news late last year for governments struggling with soaring pension costs: according to a study published in the prestigious journal Nature, it may not be possible to extend the human lifespan beyond the ages already attained by the oldest people on record.

Today in The Australian

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we now live in a “post-truth” world. But the notion that there was a golden age in which political truth readily triumphed over falsehood is so fanciful as to exemplify the very phenomenon the term “post-truth” describes.

Today in The Australian

Little wonder Donald Trump swept the rural states: this year’s Christmas Price Index, which calculates the cost of buying the full basket of goods and services specified in The Twelve Days of Christmas, shows America’s milking maids are doing it tough, as are the country’s suppliers of swans, geese and partridges in pear trees.

In The Australian today:

Last Thursday, when he ­announced he would not stand for re-election, French President Francois Hollande became merely the latest victim of the year of political head-rolling. Hollande’s fall at the guillotine of politics follows a string of errors and miscalculations that saw his satisfaction rating plummet to barely 4 per cent. But with the ­National Front fracturing the political equilibrium, it also reflects the difficulties both France’s Socialist Party and its centre-right opponents have had in regaining their hold on the country’s political system.

Today in The Australian

You can, so to speak, count on the Italians. As opinion polls may not be published in the two weeks leading up to a vote but can still be taken, blog sites have sprung up that report the results in terms of entirely imaginary wagering opportunities, with names that allow readers to readily identify the yes and no sides in tomorrow’s constitutional referendum.

Today in The Australian

Recommending new taxes should not be done lightly. But while it is full of strong claims, last week’s Grattan Institute report proposing a tax on sugar-sweetened soft drinks ignores relevant evidence and is marred by serious errors of analysis.

Today in The Australian
Having promised to return manufacturing jobs to the US, Donald Trump’s macroeconomic policies may instead accelerate their ­demise.

Today in The Australian

According to a recent poll in the French daily Le Monde, 57 per cent of French voters believe demo­cracy works badly, more than a third would like to see it replaced by an alternative and one in five think that alternative should allow a “chief” to override the present checks and balances.

Today in The Australian

Having captured the presidency, retained control of both chambers of congress and secured majorities in states the Democrats considered their own, the Republicans have achieved far more than seemed possible six months ago. But this victory’s foundations are far from stable and leave the GOP’s future as uncertain as it has ever been.

Today in The Australian
 
That this year’s American presidential contest is unusual hardly needs to be said. What remains to be seen is just how far the outcomes diverge from the norm. To help you assess the results, here are five features of American presidential elections worth knowing. Two weeks ago, they were all going Hillary Clinton’s way; that is less clear today.

Today in The Australian
 Set against the turmoil that has racked Australian politics since 2007, John Howard’s masterly series on the Menzies era reminds us of what stability looked like.

Today in The Australian

When Walt Whitman, writing in 1856, observed that Americans aspire to a “democracy of manners”, he meant that they expect to be treated not only equally but also respectfully. Well, you don’t need to know much about politics to know that Donald Trump’s ­remarks about groping women don’t meet that standard.

Today in The Australian

Although it is unlikely to precipitate a broader crisis, the turmoil affecting Deutsche Bank — the biggest bank in Europe’s largest economy — highlights the risks still confronting the global financial system. And as markets struggle with those risks, there are serious questions to be asked about the decisions Australian regulators are taking to ensure the stability of our banking sector.

In The Australian today
William McChesney Martin Jr, who chaired the US Federal ­Reserve in the 1950s and 60s, ­famously observed that central bankers are the people who take away the punch bowl just as the party is heating up. Nowadays, his successors are the fellows who spike the drinks.

In The Australian today:

Stephen Conroy’s decision to quit the Senate so as to establish a red underwear business has been ­hailed by his colleagues.

In The Australian today:
There is a fundamental defect in the government’s superannuation proposals that has been entirely overlooked. Instead of growing in line with average earnings, the $1.6 million “transfer balance” cap, which limits the amount that can be held in the withdrawal phase, is only indexed to consumer prices.

Today in The Australian:
Finding anything good to say about Labor’s proposed royal commission on banking is a challenge. But no matter how ill-­conceived it might be, at least it will eventually fade away.

Today in The Australian

To Australians, who are regularly told by the Cancer Council not to venture into the sun without being covered from head to toe, the ban on the burkini always seemed far-fetched. We may have to fight the terrorists on the beaches, but only the Gallic mind could believe that replacing liberte, egalite, fraternite by liberte, egalite, nudite would drive the Islamists, repelled by serried ranks of scantily clad women and men in budgie smugglers, into the sea.

Today in The Australian

As you ponder the census fiasco, take a moment to remember Matthew Gregson, Australia’s first statistician, whose story seems even more relevant today than when I recounted it five years ago. Transported for “feloniously embezzling Bills of Exchange and other Money”, Gregson, on arriving in 1824, promptly found work in the Colonial Secretary’s office, where his skills with numbers were desperately needed to compile the badly overdue Blue Book.

Today in The Australian
 
Perhaps the best that can be said for hauling the banks before the House of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Economics is that it is unlikely to do much harm. But rather than being dragged behind Labor’s populism, isn’t it time the government moved to reset the economic agenda?

Today in The Australian
If Labor has an ethical standard that guides its conduct it is no better than this: hurt your enemies, help your friends. Now, with the government’s refusal to nominate Kevin Rudd as a candidate for secretary-general of the UN, the ­Coalition risks sinking to its opponent’s level.

Today in The Australian


The trouble with voters in western Sydney, pollster Mark Textor appar­ently told the Liberal partyroom when it met last week to consider the election campaign, is their “entrenched cynicism”.

In The Australian today

France takes centre stage in the clash of civilisations

When the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille was celebrated on July 14, 1790 in an elaborate “Feast of the Federation”, the 20-year-old Wordsworth rhapsodised that “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” while an ageing Kant mused that humanity might finally have “matured”. Two centuries later, at least 10 children and 74 adults lie dead, mowed down as they celebrated Bastille Day on Nice’s iconic Promenade des Anglais.

In The Australian today:

As Republicans gather in Cleveland, Ohio, for next week’s Grand Old Party convention, a poll from the Pew Research Centre finds that just 38 per cent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters believe the party will “solidly unite” behind Donald Trump. And with Hillary Clinton estimated to have a four to 12 percentage point lead nationwide, it is scarcely surprising the Republican Party remains troubled and divided.

Today in The Australian
Coming after three years of protests by the Black Lives Matter movement, the horrific killings in Dallas have placed race at the centre of the turmoil gripping the United States.

Today in The Australian
 With Australians choosing paralysis at best, chaos at worst, our only answer to the challenges the country faces seems to be the hope that something will turn up.

In The Australian today

Britain joined the European Economic Community in the turmoil of the 1970s. As its entry occurred, Australia embarked on the Whitlam experiment, which crippled our ability to adjust to the shocks that hit the world economy and condemned us to two decades of misery.

In The Australian today:

From the moment it lost office, Labor set itself one and only one fiscal goal: to prevent the Coalition from achieving the surplus Labor had repeatedly promised and repeatedly failed to deliver. Now, as Bill Shorten struggles to develop a credible fiscal strategy, the consequences are coming home to roost.

In The Australian today

With Hillary Clinton securing the 2383 delegates needed to clinch her party’s nomination, the race for the Democratic nomination is finally over. Now, after a campaign that saw her move sharply to the left, the challenge Clinton faces is to broaden her base of support in an electorate that is fractured, polarised and distrustful. The question is whether she can do so given the positions she has adopted and the baggage she carries.

Today in The Australian
First there was the splurge on schools that will more than pay for itself (so long as you don’t mind waiting until your unborn grandchildren reach pension age). Then came the tertiary education spending that will boost GDP by $26 for every dollar spent (so long as the economic return on education rises twentyfold).

Today in The Australian
If you believe its opponents, the only thing cutting company income tax rates won’t do is cause cholera. Then again, absolute perfection, even in evil, is not of this world. As far as policy proposals go, however, this one apparently comes close, with the critics portraying it as a giveaway whose benefits, if any, are trivially small, long deferred and mainly for the “billionaire class”, while its costs are immediate and material.

In The Australian today:

This week’s gross domestic product figures, which showed our economy powering ahead, were no accident. Rather, they reflect the hard work Australia’s mining industry has put into cutting costs and boosting productivity.