Australian Economy

From Centre Alliance: After lengthy negotiations with the Government to address concerns that Centre Alliance has about rising energy costs, and particularly the high electricity costs in South Australia, Centre Alliance has agreed to support the Government’s personal tax cuts legislation.

ABC’s The Business did a great job last night of probing the what MB calls the “anus economy”.

Via AIG: Note employment.

From Eric Jensen, retired civil engineer, a life member of Engineers Australia, with years of professional engineering experience working on transport infrastructure. Autonomous Taxis will be Everyone’s Car Elon Musk has forecast that next year Tesla will be manufacturing cars that can be used as autonomous taxis (ATs).

The Guardian is a reservoir of cognitive dissonance on a scale rarely seen: Kazan Brown’s father helped build Warragamba Dam – under a kind of duress – after he was forced off his land by it.

Via Mark Latham today: The NSW government boasts of “building a city the size of Adelaide” in outer Western Sydney – that is, 1.3 million people in the districts west of the M7 motorway.

Via HIA: “New home sales in May bounced back to their highest monthly level in over a year,” stated HIA’s Chief Economist, Tim Reardon.

Via The American Interest: The West needs to focus on these fundamentals to achieve its overarching strategic objective: preventing China’s domination of Eurasia.

Remarkable parallels are suddenly afoot.

Via Peter Martin at  The Conversation.

And the trend is not nice: Expect worse as building goes bust.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has released its debt ratios for the March quarter, which revealed that Australian households’ debt loads have hit another all-time high.

According to the Australian Trucking Association (ATA), Australia is facing a serious shortage of truck drivers, which threatens the economy: An ageing workforce and preconceptions about the transport industry are helping create a nationwide truck driver shortage that has serious implications for Australia’s economy.

Because he is lying to himself in a speech today.

From Abul Rizvi, former Deputy Secretary in the Department of Immigration, at Inside Story: Morrison government’s $158 billion tax cuts.

Via the excellent Damien Boey at Credit Suisse: From the ABS’ engineering construction release, we learn that public work done fell by roughly 13% in the year-to-1Q.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released its Finance & Wealth data for the March quarter, which reported further falls in household wealth: Chief Economist for the ABS, Bruce Hockman, said: “Residential real estate experienced its fifth consecutive quarter of real holding losses.

Via Domain: Trade representatives from more than a dozen countries have flown into Australia to conduct highly secretive negotiations on a mega deal that will sideline the United States amid the ongoing economic fall-out from the US-China trade war.

In 2017, the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) revealed that migrant workers were involved in more than 75% of legal actions launched against unscrupulous employers.