Australian Politics

Ah yes, freedom Morrison Government style.

Hoocoodanode that unleashing a plague on an unsuspecting and unsupported polity would make you unpopular?

Anyone with a memory longer than a goldfish will know that the last time Australia was fighting a combined falling commodity price and rising wages outlook was in the late 1980s: The Prices and Incomes Accord was an agreement between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Labor Party government of Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer (later Prime Minister) Paul Keating in 1983.

Driving around Melbourne’s streets over the past fortnight has been an eerie experience.

Playing the Joker card worked a treat in the left and right weekend press for the Morrison Government: This immense distraction has only one purpose, to bury the lede of the collapse of government service delivery during Morrison’s “let it rip” recession.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to lay bear the problems inherent to “the Lucky Country”.

The Windsor’s know what to do when institutions are overwhelmed by sleaze: The Duke of York was stripped of all military titles and patronages by the Queen and agreed no longer to use the moniker “His Royal Highness”, in an attempt to protect the Royal family from the fallout of his sexual abuse case.

The arguments for an Australian Republic are very underwhelming: The steady stream of dramas and scandals emanating from the royal family continues apace.

The national economy is falling apart: Judo Bank chief executive Joseph Healy has warned the worst is still to come as omicron’s rapid spread and closed borders combine to stifle Australia’s economic recovery.

Like the astronomer scouring the heavens for new phenomena, the observer of economic history only very occasionally has the chance to put his name to something.

On every front, the Australian domestic economy is now in crisis.

You can always judge what is the truth by assuming the opposite of whatever Australia’s pathologically lying PM says.

In early December I visited Sydney for a week.

It’s about time the old goat stood up.

It’s amusing to watch, in the usual sense of not being amusing at all.

Labor last year announced that it will not make changes to the stage three income tax cuts if it wins the upcoming federal election.

Last month I reported testimony from the head of Transparency International Australia (TIA), Serena Lillywhite, to the Senate committee examining money laundering.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has extolled the ‘Mad Gladys’ line that it is ‘we’ who must ‘Learn to Live’ with the virus – including the latest Omicron variant sweeping the world.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is now testing a third vaccine dose in children under five, claiming two doses are not strong enough: Pfizer announced the change after preliminary analysis found the immune response to the very low-dose shots, the company is testing in the children, was not as strong as expected.

Ross Gittins argues today that Josh Frydenberg could cement his place in history as “one of our greatest treasurers” if he succeeds in getting unemployment down to 4% or below: Frydenberg’s strategy of forcing the pace of economic growth to get the rate of unemployment sustainably down to the low 4s or even lower.

Superb work by Friendly Jordies, who describes mass immigration as the “economic meth” of the property lobby.

In 2017, Daniel Andrews’ Victorian Government agreed to an unsolicited bid from toll giant Transurban to build the West Gate Tunnel Project – a four kilometre toll road currently under construction in Melbourne to link the West Gate Freeway at Yarraville with the Port of Melbourne and CityLink at Docklands.