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.

In The Australian today:
Here’s a disturbing fact: “Since 2008, the market share of Coles and Woolworths has risen from 60 per cent to 73 per cent.”

Or so Andrew Leigh, Labor’s spokesman on competition, tells us, in proposing yet more regulation.

Today in The Australian

Let’s start by clearing up the confusion which seems to have clouded even Judith Sloan’s usually razor-sharp insights. The government’s changes to superannuation, whatever one may think of them, are not retroactive: they do not seek to alter the state of the law at a time prior to their announcement.

Today in The Australian
In theory, putting your jewels in a safe protects them from theft. In practice, thieves know safes are where the jewels are kept. And if the thief has a key, you’re in ­trouble.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of super. There are, no doubt, many twists in the saga; but all the latest episode confirms is that when they are desperate for cash, governments can be trusted to breach whatever trust we have placed in them.

In The Australian today:

So it’s Trump. And what a win.

After all, the field was one of the strongest in Republican history, ranging from Jeb Bush, whose family had produced two presidents and who had a solid claim in his own right, through to heavy hitters such as Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Ted Cruz. And the losers were hardly short of cash, consistently outspending Donald Trump in critical contests. Yet the prize has gone to the man who seemed to come out of nowhere.

Today in The Australian

Did you realise “investors now account for more than half of new loans for housing, up from 29 per cent two decades ago”?

You would if you had read Hot Property, the Grattan Institute’s latest call to scrap negative gearing and increase capital gains taxes. Except that it isn’t true. Indeed, the statistical series the report cites as its source shows 35.8 per cent of new housing loans went to investors in February 2016.

Today in The Australian:
It is easy to understand why Labor wants to increase taxes on higher-income earners. And it does not take much nous to figure out why the government might feel under pressure to do so too. But what does require explaining is how the need to raise taxes in next month’s budget has become an unchallenged part of the conventional wisdom.

Today in The Australian
In an age of inclusivity, the least one can ask is to be included. Or so the University of Sydney Student Union — which has threatened to deregister the university’s evangelical union unless it drops the requirement that members be evangelical Christians — seems to believe.

Today in The Australian

COAG: more pressure needed to force reforms to tax regime

The premiers had a choice. They could simply demand more money, knowing that, with an election looming, Malcolm Turnbull would be hard pressed to refuse; or they could take responsibility for raising the revenues they claim they need and accept that voters would then hold them to account for the taxes they impose. That they chose as they did is no less disappointing for being utterly predictable.

Today in The Australian
It is a pity no government has thought to build a tomb of the unknown saver or a cenotaph for fallen superannuants. With the opportunities it offers for iconic memorials gracing our suburbs, a worthier use of public funds would surely be hard to find.

Today in The Australian

It’s rare that we’re on the same side as Chris Bowen. But he’s right: section 46
of the Competition and Consumer Act should remain unchanged.

Today in The Australian

Hillary Clinton ended Bernie Sanders’s dream of a “political revolution” this week, making it virtually impossible for the crusty socialist to win the Democratic nomination.

Today in The Australian

“In a society like ours,” Gore Vidal wrote some years ago, “politics is improvisation”: policies are announced, tactics invented and slogans launched with consequences “no one can foresee and everyone has to live with”. But if Labor’s proposed tax changes prove anything, it is the dangers that involves.

Today in The Australian

Donald Trump’s march to the Republican nomination took another leap forward this week as his Super Tuesday wins added 237 delegates to the 82 he had already gained. Having secured about 44 per cent of the GOP delegates chosen so far, Trump seems increasingly difficult to beat, heightening the tensions within the Republican Party.

Today in The Australian

With Labor spending last week denying the obvious about its proposed tax hikes, it was hard not to be reminded of writer Hannah Arendt’s warning, which ought to be emblazoned on every street corner, that “no one has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues”.

Today in The Australian

And then there were seven, ­Agatha Christie might have said. But even with 16 candidates leaving the field since the outset of the primary season, there is still a lot of blood to be spilled before the line-up for the US presidential election is finally determined.

Today in The Australian

His budget won’t promise taxpayers any unicorns, Scott Morrison assured the National Press Club last week. Good thing too, for they are ever harder to find.

Today in The Australian
Even for a political party with a pronounced death wish, it seems reckless to propose a clampdown on negative gearing just as an NAB survey shows the housing market slowing and the share of established properties sold to local investors dropping to record lows.

Today in The Australian

You may well ask why the government ever floated the idea of raising the GST, given that by far the best tax reform would be bringing public expenditure under control.

In The Australian today:

It happens every year. Just as the country has settled into the postprandial doze known as the ­Australian summer, swiftly and without warning, wrathfully and without mercy, stupidity strikes.

In The Australian today:

Hearing Donald Trump, Groucho Marx’s comment springs to mind: he may look like an idiot and speak like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you — he really is an idiot. Yet with the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary only days away, Trump’s standing in the polls is similar to that Barack Obama had at this point in 2008, and is stronger than Mitt Romney’s was four years later.

Today in The Australian


With the world’s stock markets reeling after their worst-ever start to a year, it is important to remember that the adjustments at the heart of the current turmoil are inevitable and desirable. But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And as the threats mount, strengthening our economy’s capacity to withstand a global downturn becomes ever more urgent.

In today's The Australian

China’s leaders may not have a clue as to where they are going, but they seem determined to get there as soon as possible. The question is how much damage will be done to the world economy along the way. With world stockmarkets alternating between precipitous falls and short-lived rallies, commodity prices tumbling and economic growth forecasts slashed, the answer seems to be plenty.

In The Australian today

Political correctness, says Pierre Manent in his new book on France and Islam, is “the language of those who are terrified about what would happen if they stopped lying”.

In The Australian today


Australia’s industrial relations system, Justice Henry Bournes Higgins famously declared in 1915, had conquered “a new province for law and order”.

Today in The Australian

There are times when history ­escapes from the leash. And rarely has it done so more dramatically than in the past year.

In The Australian today

Today’s release of the 2015 Christmas Price Index should give consumers plenty to cheer about.

In The Australian today

 
With the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook only a sleep away, the Treasurer is facing his baptism of fire. But whatever the political risks involved in acknowledging the seriousness of our fiscal challenge, simply closing one’s eyes and wishing really hard for the deficit to disappear is hardly an option. Rather, while avoiding both alarmism and complacency, Scott Morrison must show the government has a credible strategy for budget repair.

Today in The Australian
With commodity prices plummeting, the pressures on our resource sector seem certain to intensify. But despite the damage that will inflict on commonwealth revenue, and hence on the forecasts of the budget bottom line in next week’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, it would be a serious mistake to write off mining’s contribution to the Australian economy.

In The Australian today:

 Speaking in Brisbane 10 days ago, the Treasurer called for a national conversation about what needs to be done to “ensure our superannuation system can provide higher standards of living for retirees”.

Today in The Australian

Another week, another call from the Grattan Institute to increase taxes. And yet again it is super­annuation in the crosshairs.

In The Australian today:

  After last week’s police raids in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, and in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, it is only natural for Australians to wonder whether it could happen here.

In The Australian today

Barack Obama is right to call Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris an attack on humanity. But they are first and foremost an Islamist ­attack on the West. And it is only by destroying radical Islam that we can end the ever-escalating savagery that threatens our cities, our culture and our way of life.

In The Australian today:
“People died last time you were in charge”, senator Stephen Conroy, mad-eyed as Ahab and trembling with fury, barked at Bill Morrow, the chief executive of NBN Co, when Morrow, at a parliamentary committee late last month, questioned Conroy’s assertions about the company’s performance.

In The Australian today

With tough economic choices looming, coming weeks will see the Turnbull government face its first real stress test. For all his weaknesses, Bill Shorten thrives on galvanising the frightened, the resentful and the ill-informed: and even the merest suggestion of any serious tax reform will offer him a feast of opportunities for mischief.

In The Australian today

 Widely cited claims by the International Monetary Fund that subsidies to fossil fuels amount to a staggering 6.5 per cent of global income have been savaged by David Henderson, former chief economist of the OECD, in a letter to London’s Financial Times published on Friday.

In The Australian today:

It may be symptomatic of that “instinctive distaste for the past” that historian Keith Hancock thought characterised Australians that there is no official history of the Treasury. Chris Bowen’s The Money Men doesn’t claim to fill that gap, but it does provide vivid and insightful portraits of some of our more prominent treasurers.

Today in The Australian
As he prepares to leave 24 Sussex Drive, the large, somewhat dilapidated, limestone house in the New Edinburgh neighbourhood of ­Ottawa that is the official residence of Canada’s prime ministers, Stephen Harper remains an enigmatic figure.

Today in The Australian

Like Portnoy, Tanya Plibersek has a complaint. And with all of Labor piling on to the psychiatrist’s couch, she isn’t alone. But there’s no need to call Dr Freud. The problem is simple enough: ­Malcolm envy.

Today in The Australian

 On this, let us be absolutely clear: Farhad Jabar, who shot police ­accountant Curtis Cheng, was not a victim but a murderer.

In The Australian today

According to senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs in the Turnbull government, the young Muslims who are being drawn into the extremism that led Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad to murder a NSW Police Force employee last Friday feel “disengaged” and “disenfranchised”.

In The Australian today:


In an update on Thursday, the Canberra-based economic modelling firm Cadence Economics estimated that each one percentage point fall in China’s long-term growth rate knocks $46.5 billion off the present value of Australia’s national income, making every Australian about $500 worse off in 2035 than they would otherwise have been.

In The Australian today:

Appearing last week on the ABC’s 7.30, former treasury secretary Ken Henry claimed Australia has a revenue problem, because the ratio of tax revenues to GDP is lower than in 2002, the implication being tax rates should rise. And that was only the highlight of a week-long “taxfest”, in which the media was crowded with like-minded pundits proposing ways of lightening taxpayers’ wallets.

In The Australian today

According to the Australian Election Study, which surveys voters at each federal
election, Tony Abbott won the 2013 election with the lowest approval rating ever for an
incoming prime minister. So despite gaining 53.5 per cent of the vote and delivering on a
broad range of commitments, he had little political capital on which to draw and never
found a way to secure the electorate’s goodwill.

Today in The Australian

Just as the government, in allocating the 12,000 places it has added to the humanitarian intake, has every right to screen out security threats, so it has every right to test whether applicants are capable of integrating peacefully and effectively into the community.

Today in The Australian

All the grief in the world about the death by drowning of Aylan and Galip Kurdi, aged 3 and 5, as they tried to cross from Turkey to Greece, cannot absolve Europe of its responsibility for the 2600 lives lost, this year alone, to the Mediterranean’s treacherous seas.

Today in the Australian

If there is an iron law of Australian public policy, it is that you can’t keep a bad idea down. And never was that clearer than in the ­National Reform Summit’s ­discussion of capital gains tax.

Today in The Australian:

“Every human benefit and enjoyment,” wrote Edmund Burke, “is founded on compromise.”

Today in The Australian
The sole objective of the industrial relations system should be to facilitate the process by
which employees and employers reach mutually advantageous agreements about the
terms and conditions of employment.

In The Australian today
 While the initial shock has eased, the reaction to the devaluation of the yuan highlights just how anxious world markets are about China’s economic prospects.

In The Australian today

After spending $6000 on chartering a corporate aircraft to fly her from Sydney to Nowra, Bronwyn Bishop had no option but to resign. There must still be questions, however, about why it took Tony Abbott so long to act

Today in The Australian

When Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, made the first recorded use of the term “reformare”, it meant the sudden rejuvenation of an old man — but for one day only.

Today in The Australian

The question is not whether Greece’s debt burden is sustainable; even on its current, highly concessional, terms, it isn’t. Rather, the real question is how the adjustment occurs — and who pays for it.

In The Australian today

It isn’t only for Greece that hope has proven the handmaiden to misery, as it always does in the classical tragedies. Rather, after the turmoil of the last month, what little remains of the European ­project also lies in tatters.

Today in The Australian
“The Guide says there is an art to flying, or rather a knack,” the gal­actic hitchhiker Ford Prefect explains in Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything: “The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

In The Australian today:
Let’s be clear: John Daley, who heads the Grattan Institute, is perfectly entitled to his obsessions, among which negative gearing seems to figure prominently. But Ogden Nash had a point when he warned that: “Of obligations, by far the solemnest / Burden the ­conscientious columnist.”

In The Australian today
Like every great tragedy, it is all about fate, but fate in the sense of the Greek word ananke, a force even more powerful and pitiless than the gods. Yet as the referendum that will decide Greece’s future looms, any ultimate resolution of the euro’s drama seems as remote and uncertain as ever.

In The Australian today:
Merely hours after the managing director of the ABC claimed Zaky Mallah had the same right to ­appear on Q&A as Charlie Hebdo had to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, the Islamists showed the world exactly how much use they have for freedom of expression.

Today in The Australian :
That Cleanevent and the EastLink consortium did very well out of their agreements with the AWU is beyond question.

In The Australian today:
"There’s an old Yiddish joke about a man whose job is to stand at the city gates and wait for the Messiah: it’s dull and badly paid, he explains, but at least it’s steady work."

Today in The Australian:

You have to feel for Joe Hockey. He was simply stating a truism: if the price of houses in Sydney is rising, it’s because people are buying them. As abundant demand chases scarce supply, he suggested, it doesn’t seem sensible to call Sydney’s housing “unaffordable”.

In The Australian today:

In the cartoons, before machines explode they start shaking violently, their shudders presaging the approaching conflagration.

In The Australian today:
Speaking in Senate estimates this week, Treasury secretary John Fraser may have been less eloquent than Jonathan Swift but his message was no less ominous.

In today's The Australian
Oh, the poetry of economics! Exchange rates float, economies limp and tax brackets creep. No wonder the field attracts fertile minds. But it would be better if they kept their imaginations under control.

In The Australian today

“The taxation concession on superannuation earnings in retirement is unsustainable,” Chris Bowen said last week. And “someone has to show the courage to say it and to deal with it”.

In The Australian today

Joe Hockey’s second budget would have left many asking, as Peggy Lee did years ago, “Is that all there is?” As for Bill Shorten’s budget reply, it made Peggy Lee’s advice, faced with a disappointing answer to her question, to “break out the booze”, seem like sound common sense.

In The Australian today
"Aristotle opens the Metaphysics with one of his most striking phrases: “By their nature, all men desire to know.” Quite so. But not at the University of Western Australia."

In The Australian today
Whatever else last year’s budget may have achieved, it certainly placed fairness at the heart of the political battle. And whatever this year’s budget may bring, the ­government will be working overtime to ensure it is less vulnerable than its predecessor to being cast as unfair.

In The Australian today
"It’s hardly about negative gearing. Rather, what the Left really wants is to increase income tax on the middle class. As it lacks the courage to do that directly, fiddling the definition of income is the coward’s way of achieving the same goal."

In The Australian today:

You can’t step into the same river twice. But the bathwater is a different matter. It just gets colder and nastier each time.

Today in The Australian
"The trouble, it seems, is not that we spend too much: it’s that we tax too little. And the Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, chaired by Labor senator Sam Dastyari, is unlikely to leave much uncertainty about the culprits: those ­tax-dodging, revenue-shifting multinationals. "

In The Australian today

"As the search for budget savings focuses on the age pension, the challenge for the government is to reconcile rigour, fairness and sustainability. With the pension intended to help those who cannot reasonably help themselves, it seems absurd that public money is going to the well-off. But in a retirement income system that is struggling to meet its objectives, simply tightening access to the pension carries risks of its own. "

In The Australian today:

Thursday’s murder by Somali terrorists of 150 mainly Christian students at Kenya’s Garissa University College provided a horrific backdrop to the Easter weekend. And with more than 200 young Christian girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram still in captivity, the spotlight is once again on Africa and on the continent’s struggle to find peace and prosperity.

In The Australian today:
The good news is that Mike Baird has been re-elected Premier of NSW. The bad news is that there was a large swing to Labor, un­deserving though it was.

In The Australian today:
"As Singapore, arguably the most successful city-state in contemporary history, mourns the death of Lee Kuan Yew, it starts a new chapter in its history. And with Hong Kong also in the midst of a difficult transition, the “queens of the further east”, as an early British colonialist called them, face ­far-reaching economic, social and ­political challenges. "

In The Australian today:

"As things turned out, Malcolm Fraser’s prime ministership was not a fresh start; it was merely the final act in the long crisis of the 1970s."

In today's The Australian
"There is a direct link between the NSW election and Australia’s deteriorating international competitiveness. "

In The Australian today:
"Between 2008 and 2014, electricity transmission and distribution costs increased by some $400 per household in Queensland and New South Wales, where the poles and wires are government-owned, but by around $250 per household in the privatised systems of Victoria and South Australia."

In The Australian today:
"With jihadist violence continuing to escalate, the acid test of today’s national security statement will be the actions it proposes."

In The Australian today:
"With Joe Hockey warning that the imminent Intergenerational Report will knock people “off their chairs”, the cost of our retirement income system is unlikely to disappear from the front pages anytime soon. But reconciling fiscal sustainability and community expectations is every bit as politically challenging as it is technically complex. "

Today in The Australian
"It's the simplest measure of all: the cash the commonwealth spends each month compared to the cash it receives, stretching back to 1973."

In The Australian today
If the merest spark sufficed to set off the firestorm consuming the Abbott government, that is because so many grievances have been smouldering beneath the surface. No doubt, the circumstances the government has faced might defeat even the ablest leadership; but it is hard to deny that there have been many unforced errors, worsened by an apparent insensitivity to mounting concern in the party room, frustration among senior ministers and a deteriorating public mood.

In The Australian today:
"While Canberra focuses on the big issues, such as whether Prince Philip should have been awarded a knighthood, the Australian dollar burns."

In The Australian today:
"The voice of the people, the Romans used to say, is the voice of the gods. And on Saturday, that voice decisively rejected Queensland’s LNP government and the policies it stood for. "

In The Australian today
' “IN the ancient world,” Karl Marx famously wrote, “the class struggle took the form mainly of a contest between creditors and debtors.” Ever anxious to breathe new life into old theories, Greek voters on the one side and the EU on the other seem set to give Marx’s claim a fresh run. '