The country is asking if the rising cost of living, falling productivity and competitiveness have been worsened by the people in charge. The simple answer is yes.
Tax-and-redistributive politics cannot fix a productivity crisis; it merely distracts from it.
Australia is undertaking a 100 per cent renewables transition without its best players: those reliable old steam turbines that once gave cheap, steady power.
Federal support for Victoria’s Suburban Rail Loop East effectively asks the rest of Australia to bail out Premier Jacinta Allan’s broke government and rorts.
Electricity is not a policy construct. It is physics – and the physics have not changed since Michael Faraday and the steam engine.
The scheme can be fixed, but only if governments stop delaying solutions and confront the pricing rigidities that distort the disability support ecosystem.
When the Albanese government is the project’s anchor tenant, it signals that federal Labor will bail out Victoria, no matter how indebted it becomes.
Australia is held back by a special kind of leftism that is essentially an assault on the fundamental human rights that drive a free-market economy.
The Albanese-Chalmers government embodies a short-term and emotive response to wage stagnation, not a rational one.
This country doesn’t need more luck to drive productivity, it needs strategies to help finance SMEs, and to make better use of existing energy infrastructure.
In a federation, bad state governments do not go bankrupt. They look towards the federal government for handouts and bailouts.
The Victorian budget recalls an earlier time when the state permitted the forced confiscation of property – perhaps Spring Street’s most frightening legacy.
The rosy picture painted by the amazing short-term turnaround in the government’s fiscal fortunes can’t hide the slew of structural issues in public finances.
The focus on the reserve bank’s recent errors meant that bigger issues of how to make monetary policy work more positively were overlooked.
The AEMO is being asked to design a future energy system with too few options, and too many constraints on what it can do.
While the government’s economic team has hardly put a foot wrong since May, the treasurer has missed an opportunity to use his first budget to reimpose discipline and sensible priorities.
This must not be an insider review to endorse the choices of a central bank that has made policy mistakes. It matters too much.
Josh Frydenberg must take maximum advantage of the strong recovery to signal productivity-enhancing transmission, tax and superannuation structural reforms that can accelerate fiscal repair.
There are win-win reform gains to be had in industry policy, taxation, social spending and super. Why don’t we take them?
We really need to wake up now and start getting our fiscal house in order. Projections say we are surely living beyond our means.
