menu_open
Alan Kohler

Alan Kohler

The Australian

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

Climate change is cost, not benefit, amid major lie

14.04.2024 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

For a local solar industry to restart there would have to be tariffs

If the Albanese Government is serious about getting solar panels made in Australia again, it had better start thinking about tariffs … big ones....

11.04.2024 9

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Alan Kohler: For a local solar industry to restart there would have to be tariffs

If the Albanese Government is serious about getting solar panels made in Australia again, it had better start thinking about tariffs … big ones....

08.04.2024 30

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Deficits? MMT has become modern fiscal practice

A few years ago everybody was talking about Modern Monetary Theory, both ardently for and scornfully against, but nobody was doing it. Now everybody...

31.03.2024 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Fossil fuel project pause vital amid labour shortage

27.03.2024 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

US tackling tech’s mysterious monopolies

24.03.2024 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Alan Kohler: The Coalition’s devotion to Abbottism is disastrous

To the extent that the Coalition’s nuclear energy waffle contains an actual policy, it is that Australia should have a capacity market which is...

20.03.2024 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Don’t just sell TikTok, ban it

Australia should ban TikTok like the United States is doing, except we shouldn’t give its Chinese parent, ByteDance, the option of selling the...

17.03.2024 6

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Alan Kohler: Long Covid’s devastating and glorious effect on the cost of housing

This week is the fourth anniversary of the World Health Organisation declaring Covid-19 a global pandemic.  It’s also exactly four years since...

13.03.2024 6

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

We’re already in a recession - a family recession

Australia’s household sector is in a long, deep recession, the worst in 40 years. “Household” is an economist’s word for “family”, so...

10.03.2024 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Our cost-of-living crisis is all about housing

Both major parties “lost” the Dunkley byelection because they don’t have an answer to the cost of housing. They both say they won of course, but...

03.03.2024 5

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Ban on nuclear power should be dropped

There’s no danger of a nuclear power plant being built in Australia, but it’s banned anyway. It’s an absurd, politically timid ban. There’s...

28.02.2024 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Milton Friedman’s doctrine loses its social licence

When Brad Banducci quit as CEO of Woolworths last week and a couple of days later Nvidia reached a value of $3 trillion, I was taken back to 1970. I...

25.02.2024 8

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Both sides agreeing about everything spoils politics

Without a hint of irony this week, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton declared that “there’s been a catastrophic failure in the system” because a...

21.02.2024 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Politician-free climate policies make sense

14.02.2024 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Revisit history to name and shame price gougers

In June last year I wrote a column for The New Daily headed: “Time to revisit the Allan Fels system of price control – naming and shaming”. It...

12.02.2024 30

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Dead people walking making interest rate decisions

On Tuesday, RBA governor Michele Bullock was asked if the interest rate hike last November was a mistake, given that inflation and economic growth...

07.02.2024 9

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Social media is rewiring humanity’s nervous system

Last week I tweeted: “I am not dead.” My tweet, or should that be my ‘X’, even prompted a news article in the Daily Mail (admittedly, it...

04.02.2024 90

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Evergrande collapse is a wake-up call for exports

31.01.2024 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Housing, not bracket creep, drives the living crisis

It is so dispiriting to watch Australian politics obsess over a small change in the way bracket creep is redistributed when the real cost-of-living...

28.01.2024 6

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Rich still laughing amid tax cuts change of heart

It would have been better for Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers to have fiddled with the stage-three tax cuts in their first budget last year, which...

25.01.2024 70

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

More rate rises? Not likely – and no cuts either

Happily, the Reserve Bank can and will quietly bin the International Monetary Fund’s instruction that interest rates in Australia need to go up some...

21.01.2024 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

When the world burns, China will drive fire engine

17.12.2023 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

How Australia helped fuel China car boom

As 2023 got under way, it looked like the year would be dominated by three big things: Recession in the United States, China’s real estate implosion...

13.12.2023 6

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Keating prescribes cure for Labor’s PTSD

After the farce over the release of 148 permanent detainees by the High Court, we must sadly conclude that the Labor Party is still traumatised by the...

10.12.2023 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Australia needs a viable post-fossil fuels export plan

06.12.2023 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

How Japan does nicely by simply printing money

Here’s a graph of the Bank of Japan’s key interest rate over the past five years: To be clear about what you’re looking at: Japan’s main...

03.12.2023 6

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Alan Kohler: Albanese and Chalmers must spend their first-term capital on housing

The beginning of the end of affordable housing in Australia happened in 2000. Before then, the median house price was 3.5 times average household...

26.11.2023 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

The dirty little secret that keeps Australian housing wildly unaffordable

Unaffordable housing has a political cause and a political solution, but its victims simply don’t have enough political clout to make it happen....

24.11.2023 10

WA Today

Alan Kohler

The dirty little secret that keeps Australian housing wildly unaffordable

Unaffordable housing has a political cause and a political solution, but its victims simply don’t have enough political clout to make it happen....

24.11.2023 30

The Sydney Morning Herald

Alan Kohler

The dirty little secret that keeps Australian housing wildly unaffordable

Unaffordable housing has a political cause and a political solution, but its victims simply don’t have enough political clout to make it happen....

24.11.2023 10

The Age

Alan Kohler

The dirty little secret that keeps Australian housing wildly unaffordable

Unaffordable housing has a political cause and a political solution, but its victims simply don’t have enough political clout to make it happen....

24.11.2023 20

Brisbane Times

Alan Kohler

Digital money means digital infrastructure

There was a sequence of three events in three days last week that added up to one big cautionary tale. On Wednesday in a speech in Singapore, the...

22.11.2023 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

No major party can afford to fix housing crisis

Harvesting resentment about the cost of living from opposition is Politics 101, and Peter Dutton is doing that with gusto and some success at the...

22.11.2023 70

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Rate rise or not, the banks will win on Cup day

The favourite for Melbourne Cup Day is now Rate Hike, sired by Reserve Bank out of September Quarter CPI. The most important price in the lives of...

29.10.2023 2

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Billionaires, multinationals tax unlikely to change

OPINION Anthony Pratt says his superpower is that he’s rich. (He was suggesting, in tape recordings published this week by Nine Entertainment, that...

25.10.2023 2

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Ozempic is helping companies to shed billions

The reason? Ozempic, the weight-loss drug, for both. Last year, CSL bought a Swiss company called Vifor for $18.2 billion, and one of the things it...

24.10.2023 5500

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Seduced by optimism, we’re scuttled by reality

You can read it here but the beginning, and the gist of it, was: “The main problem we have as a society is that all of our leaders – politicians...

24.10.2023 3

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Indigenous and Gazans both need jobs

Twenty seven major companies joined the Yes campaign, and in many cases gave some money. There were also countless not-for-profits on the supporters...

24.10.2023 3

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Indigenous Australians and Gazans both need jobs

If the companies that campaigned for the Voice to Parliament want to do something useful for Indigenous people they should move some of their...

22.10.2023 5

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Ozempic is helping companies to shed billions

19.10.2023 50

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Seduced by optimism, we’re scuttled by reality

15.10.2023 4

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Australia's lack of strikes is fundamentally unhealthy

11.10.2023 3

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

The fix is in for campaign finance reform

There’s talk that Labor and the Coalition are close to agreeing on new laws to reform election campaign finances. The Special Minister of State, Don...

08.10.2023 7

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

A ‘catastrophic’ overload may be very dangerous

The NSW Education Department recently closed 20 schools on the south coast of the state and told 3000 students to stay home after the Rural Fire...

05.10.2023 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Treasury at odds with RBA on unemployment

Last week’s employment white paper was the third in 80 years, but it was the first to define full employment. That might be a problem. The history...

01.10.2023 5

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Soil carbon cash is a trap for farmers

Australian farmers are starting to earn carbon credits from extra plant material buried in their paddocks; it’s called soil carbon. The Clean Energy...

28.09.2023 20

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

No mincing words. Move to renewables is giant mess

The Albanese government’s climate change policies are in danger of falling apart – they’re both inadequate and improbable. One way to rescue...

25.09.2023 40

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Housing builds fall even further behind immigration

In the year to March, Australia’s population increased by 563,200 and 171,721 houses and apartments were built. The population growth consisted of...

20.09.2023 6

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

How crazy rich banks and GFC stopped world

Saturday was the 15th anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the defining event of the 2008 global financial crisis, and a very big day in...

18.09.2023 40

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

6a3d83ea3a7bc2b6558305dce939c862