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Alan KohlerThe Australian |
It is, or should be, the solemn duty of a first-term government to take a program of reform to its first election as incumbent. The only time an...
The boom in immigration and the shift in the economy from goods to services has made the normal aggregate data that the ABS measures meaningless....
If you’re wondering how we got into this mess, Viktor Shvets explains it well in his new book, The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured...
One of the most important causes of Australia’s housing affordability crisis is excess immigration over many years, and the problem with immigration...
Australia has a new federal Housing Minister, Clare O’Neil, who is by all accounts energetic and open to new ideas. That’s good because we are in...
Fears of a recession in the United States have brought the great artificial intelligence boom/bubble to shuddering halt. The Nasdaq has dropped 10 per...
Imagine a world without Donald Trump and his mini me, James David Vance, and Rupert Murdoch and his mini me, Lachlan Murdoch. Can we even imagine...
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”, said Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and so it was last week, starting...
Victoria’s $200 billion suburban rail loop (SRL) will be a horribly expensive white elephant that will get in the way of solving housing...
In a way, the UK election highlights what a weird and terrible spot America finds itself in. Labour won a massive 290-seat majority in the UK after a...
One consequence of Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate, and arguably the most important one, is that the world will...
AI chip maker Nvidia was briefly the world’s most valuable company last week, having risen 40 per cent in a month, which is what small companies do,...
Here’s why nothing effective is being done about housing affordability. In the past 12 months, every Australian who owns a house or apartment, which...
Peter Dutton is absolutely right that Labor has little prospect of achieving its target of a 43 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. His...
It will be nowhere near as consequential, but the next battle in the war between the Right and the Left that started with the French Revolution...
Twelve years ago, Labor taxed Australia’s mining companies and now it wants to subsidise them with tax credits. The Coalition wants to repeal those...
So Peter Dutton wants to have a housing election, and his housing policy is to cut immigration to 140,000 a year and cap foreign student visas....
The day before Resources Minister Madeleine King released the government’s strange Future Gas Strategy, the European Union’s climate change...
The other day a young couple bought a nice three-bedroom house in Brady Road, Bentleigh East, 23 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD, for $1,263,000. I...
The copper price has surged 23 per cent since early February, and last week BHP launched a $60 billion takeover of copper producer (among other...
I suppose we should be grateful the Reserve Bank doesn’t pay much attention to the monthly inflation data, only the quarterly, so our emotions...
Last week I poured cold H2O on the prospects of hydrogen becoming a good business because it costs $7 to 10 per kilogram to make and the selling price...
If the Albanese Government is serious about getting solar panels made in Australia again, it had better start thinking about tariffs … big ones....
If the Albanese Government is serious about getting solar panels made in Australia again, it had better start thinking about tariffs … big ones....
A few years ago everybody was talking about Modern Monetary Theory, both ardently for and scornfully against, but nobody was doing it. Now everybody...
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...
Australia should ban TikTok like the United States is doing, except we shouldn’t give its Chinese parent, ByteDance, the option of selling the...
This week is the fourth anniversary of the World Health Organisation declaring Covid-19 a global pandemic. It’s also exactly four years since...
Australia’s household sector is in a long, deep recession, the worst in 40 years. “Household” is an economist’s word for “family”, so...
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...
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...
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...
Without a hint of irony this week, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton declared that “there’s been a catastrophic failure in the system” because a...
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...
On Tuesday, RBA governor Michele Bullock was asked if the interest rate hike last November was a mistake, given that inflation and economic growth...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...