This Month
Trump goes all-in for his biggest deal ever: China
Amid the ruins of the rules-based global trading system, the US president has bet the house on Xi Jinping playing along with his art of the deal.
Labor is giving the people what they want to hear
Peter Dutton is struggling to compete with Anthony Albanese’s promises to protect voters from the new Trump world challenges - as opposed to facing up to them.
Politicians are the problem behind the cost-of-living squeeze
Weak business investment and real wage growth is a design feature of the Albanese Labor’s care economy model that the Dutton Coalition is failing to challenge.
Cyberattack exposes Labor big super weakness
Cyber breaches and Donald Trump’s sharemarket rout have exposed further flaws in Labor’s compulsory super system and its union-aligned funds.
Australia is uniquely vulnerable to the Trump trade war
The country is being squeezed between the world’s two rival great powers: our traditional American security protector and our biggest export market in China.
Trump trade risks go back to the 1890s
The president’s American tariff hero William McKinley shows how this new trade war will go wrong.
Bipartisan illusion on pay rises
It’s the magic pudding pitch. Even Peter Dutton is joining Labor in pretending that real wages can increase while productivity is shrinking.
Higher wages without productivity? That’s what Labor reckons
Murray Watt’s claim that living standards are rising is a bold call amid an election being fought over one of the developed world’s biggest cost-of-living squeezes.
March
A cost-of-living election that risks missing the point
A minority government will lack the authority to supply the centre-ground policies needed to sustain the early 20th-century high-water mark of Australia’s prosperity.
The facts that burst Chalmers’ budget balloon
The treasurer has staked his claim of the “biggest ever” improvement in the budget bottom line on projections that proved to be wildly wrong.
The key change Dutton should make to bring back discipline
Something’s got to give. Indexing the tax scales would force budget discipline on the next government.
Labor isn’t even trying to fix the real problem
It’s a decade-of-deficits budget without a budget policy or agendas for tax reform or economic growth, just as Trump smashes the global order that has supported our prosperity.
Why Ross Gittins is wrong about supermarket price gouging
Who would have thought oligopolies can sustain competition? Woolies and Coles have increased grocery prices less than British supermarkets.
It’s time for the treasurer to stop treating us like mugs
Jim Chalmers’ crackdown on the supermarkets is an exercise in political blame-shifting that risks wrapping the economy in more red tape for no gain. But the Coalition is little better.
Let’s get real. Australia’s exceptionalism is being lost, not found
Tuesday’s budget will frame a narrow political contest in which the main parties avoid the decisions needed to secure what is slipping from the nation’s grasp.
ACCC fails to find smoking gun on supermarket price-gouging
After a 12-month inquiry, the regulator has not been able to support claims that Coles and Woolworths are to blame for the inflationary cost-of-living squeeze.
Super fund failures could cost you big
ASIC’s assault on big super’s failings points to a new phase that will determine whether the big industry funds are best placed to help retirees spend it.
Australia is trying to pretend the world hasn’t changed
Trump’s revolution has upended global politics. Neither Labor nor the Coalition has seriously confronted the difficult policy responses required.
We shouldn’t hit back on tariffs – it would just hurt us more
Despite the $1 billion hit, it would be self-defeating to retaliate in kind against Donald Trump’s refusal to exclude Australia from his 25 per cent global levy.
Inside the sudden exit of a central bank governor
The aggressively nationalist Kiwi central bank boss Adrian Orr deliberately pushed New Zealand into recession. Australian bankers hope his sudden exit will give them some relief.