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Tom Switzer

January

Substantial productivity improvements in the economy are still possible, but the regulation of our economy is extraordinary.

Nicholas Moore: blame bigger government for falling living standards

Much of the cost-of-living malaise in Australia is the result of policies that have expanded the role of government at the cost of long-term productivity.

November 2024

Donald Trump at an election rally in North Carolina, the first crucial swing state that he won.

How Trump made the biggest political comeback possible

The sad thing about this dispiriting election campaign is that it hasn’t clarified America’s problems – it’s deepened them.

October 2024

Economist Friedrich Hayek and his famous book.

This book changed the world. The West needs to read it again

More than three-quarters of a century after Friedrich Hayek faced trenchant opposition, the ideals he championed must be fought for once more.

January 2024

Future Fund chairman Peter Costello says independence has been central to the fund’s success.

Future Fund critics owe Costello an apology

The former Coalition treasurer had to fend off critics when he set the fund up, and is right to defend it now.

December 2023

Kissinger in his heyday in 1973

Henry Kissinger was an inconsistent opportunist

America’s 20th century foreign policy giant and statesman was driven more by domestic considerations than he would ever have admitted.

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September 2023

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was the event that marked the depths of the financial crisis.

How Australia learnt the wrong lessons from the GFC

Kevin Rudd’s erroneous view that the catastrophe of 2008 was down to neoliberalism entered the political bloodstream here. We have been paying the price ever since.

July 2023

People born from 1981 onwards  have not enjoyed real wage growth because their leaders during the past 15 years – unlike Hawke, Keating, Howard and Costello – have failed to implement productivity-enhancing reforms.

Facts of life are conservative, but younger voters are lurching left

The problem for the Liberal Party is that, since the end of the Howard-Costello era, it has done very little to address the structural causes for the discontent of young Australians.

June 2022

The party of John Howard, right, and Peter Costello has drifted away from the economic policies they believed in.

Liberals have regressed to big government

During the recent era of Coalition rule, the party of Howard and Costello rarely explained how growth comes from the private sector, entrepreneurship and innovation.

August 2021

America’s 20 year nation-build ended in a week.

A realistic decision to quit Kabul

America’s attempt to remake Afghanistan was a liberal illusion. Washington needs to look to its core great power interests instead.

July 2021

China is the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

We cannot rebuild trust with China

Downplaying China’s objectives and underestimating US resolve will not help us navigate the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

March 2021

John Howard celebrates his election victory on March 2, 1996.

Does Morrison have Howard’s heart?

The PM’s reform challenges are harder than those of earlier decades. But he needs John Howard’s moral strength if he is to make a start.

January 2021

Can Biden really unite America? Probably not

During the past two decades, public life in the United States has undergone a terrible deterioration.

  • Updated

November 2020

China is a great power – but still aggrieved at its century of humiliation.

Critics of Australia's China policy don't have much to offer

Rebuild 'trust'. Appease Beijing. Spurn our allies. There is some pretty poor advice being given on how the Morrison government should deal with an assertive China.

Supporters outside a polling location for the 2020 Presidential election in Houston, Texas, U.S

One thing is clear: America remains bitterly divided

The more disturbing issue is not who wins the presidency, but how they will they govern when the US is more polarised than at any time since the Civil War.

July 2020

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan  were both free-market evangelists.

Thatcher, Reagan still point the way to a brighter future

The post-COVID years could be very grim without the transforming economic growth that the former British and US leaders became famous for creating.

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Biden's glitchy, homespun campaign struggles against the slick machinery of the Trump multi-platform approach

What would Owen Harries do?

Here's how one of the architects of Australia’s modern foreign policy would navigate the new and less benign strategic territory in the region.

June 2020

Julia Gillard's legacy is a dignified retirement.

History may be kinder to Julia Gillard

The country's first female prime minister achieved more than her conservative critics will acknowledge.

May 2020

Attempts to deny China a sphere of influence will be strongly resented, says Kishore Mahbubani.

The book you need if you want to understand China right now

As China-US relations deteriorate, a new book argues Washington and its allies should engage with Beijing instead of provoking it.

Scott Morrison has extraordinary leverage to shape Australia for good.

PM is a serious man for serious times

A year after his miracle win, Scott Morrison has the chance to become a rare transforming prime minister.

March 2020

The danger now is that the state gets permanently bigger again.

Let's put coronavirus to some good use

Bob Hawke and John Howard used crisis and shock to get things done that had waited too long. The Morrison government must turn this event into a platform for change as well.

Original URL: https://www.afr.com/by/tom-switzer-gqdv38