In The Australian today:
"Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence", Miss Prism instructs the young heiress in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. But, the prudish governess hastens to add, "the chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side."

In The Australian today:

"History may not teach us much, but it does show that you can't keep a bad idea down. And this bad idea resurfaces with a regularity that, if it applied to ageing human bodies, would deprive prune growers of their livelihoods."

In The Australian today:
"Australians are ambivalent about their cities. From AD Hope's Australia - with its denunciation of "her five cities, like five teeming sores,/ ... Where second-hand Europeans pullulate/ Timidly on the edge of alien shores" - to Barry Humphries' Gladiola Duchy of Moonee Ponds, the metropolis has been where Australians live, not where they dream. The result is a society profoundly uncertain as to what it wants its cities to do, and even more uncertain as to how they should do it. "

In The Australian today:
  
"Australian cities are suffering a double blow: despite ambitious project announcements, public investment has fallen as governments try to rein-in spending; but as infrastructure costs continue to climb each dollar of that investment is yielding less and less relief to frustrated commuters."

In The Australian today:
"The urgent need to repair the budget bottom line will dominate politics this year. After Labor's failure to blaze a path back to surplus following the global financial crisis, despite repeated promises to do so, it falls to Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey to demonstrate their fiscal prowess. "

In The Australian today:

"The news would have sent the champagne corks popping. Merely two days before Christmas, Ross Gittins, the sage of the Fairfax press, had crunched the numbers and the verdict was in: Rudd-Gillard-Rudd may not have been models of fiscal rectitude, but Howard was far worse."