The government has been rightly blamed for fuelling the inflation flames with too rapid growth of its own spending. This has come not just from the federal government but from several state governments as well.
The decisions that made higher rates unavoidable were taken in Canberra. If inflation is the fire, interest rates are the fire brigade. Labor lit the match.
Jim Chalmers doesn’t have a central bank governor to blame for his forward misguidance or for his complaint that monetary policy may be “smashing the economy”.
We’re not in danger of becoming a banana republic, like Paul Keating warned in 1986. But we are losing our exceptional prosperity and sliding back into the pack of other less prosperous developed economies.
Jacking up the price of a product usually ensures that less of it is sold. That can be a good …
Sometimes it takes outsiders to say the obvious but unwelcome things: high spending, low growth and red tape are hurting us. Why does Labor fail to see it?
Australian conservatives — however much they might be impressed by the way MAGA has fought back against woke ideas — would do well to understand that a successful movement cannot be defined forever by what it opposes.
A half-century on from stagflation, outdated workplace rules and union monopolies remain the biggest barrier to reversing the Australian economy’s slipping productivity and wealth.
The Labor government’s early surpluses now look like a flash in the pan and the budget is back to a deficit – which is set to deepen.
There is a long history of fiscal rules, but the overall record is patchy, with governments lacking the fortitude to stick to rules when the going got tough.