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Alan Kohler

Alan Kohler

The Australian

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What Albanese and Chalmers should do next

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...

09.09.2024 20

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Query remains on our future source of prosperity

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....

02.09.2024 50

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

How Fujiwara Effect may profoundly change world

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...

26.08.2024 100

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

How our immigration system caused housing crisis

One of the most important causes of Australia’s housing affordability crisis is excess immigration over many years, and the problem with immigration...

19.08.2024 60

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Kohler’s Housing ‘To Do’ list to tackle crisis

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...

12.08.2024 30

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Tech bubble ends as humanoid machines rise

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...

05.08.2024 30

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

There’s a lot at stake in Reno, Nevada

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...

29.07.2024 40

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

The week when decades happened in America

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”, said Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and so it was last week, starting...

22.07.2024 70

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Victoria’s suburban rail spend takes housing off track

Victoria’s $200 billion suburban rail loop (SRL) will be a horribly expensive white elephant that will get in the way of solving housing...

15.07.2024 60

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Low stakes in UK, but higher stakes in US

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...

08.07.2024 60

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Prepare for Trump presidency to bring global heat

One consequence of Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate, and arguably the most important one, is that the world will...

01.07.2024 60

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

The rise of AI is only just beginning

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,...

24.06.2024 40

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

AEMO for housing could match supply and demand

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...

18.06.2024 30

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Australia must follow Esperance, and get off gas

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...

10.06.2024 70

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Rise of the far right, and fall of Donald Trump

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...

03.06.2024 90

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Market and political failures, made in Australia

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...

27.05.2024 60

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Anything easy won’t solve housing affordability

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....

20.05.2024 60

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Risky, not responsible, plans could trigger rate hikes

14.05.2024 50

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Reliance on gas will burn climate change plans

The day before Resources Minister Madeleine King released the government’s strange Future Gas Strategy, the European Union’s climate change...

13.05.2024 100

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Builders integral to solving housing affordability

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...

06.05.2024 40

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Copper crucially important in net-zero world

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...

03.05.2024 20

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Done well so far, RBA … don’t lose your nerve

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...

29.04.2024 30

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

Our future rests on net-zero promises, carbon price

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...

22.04.2024 50

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

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 10

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 10

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 20

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 10

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 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

When the world burns, China will drive fire engine

17.12.2023 20

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 10

The New Daily

Alan Kohler

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