You don't need the help of pollsters to determine that the budget has inflicted grave damage on the Abbott government. Broken promises are one reason, but greater factors in this self-inflicted damage are more simple: chaotic logic, clashing objectives and ill-defined problems
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Whatever sum is raised by visiting distress on the elderly and poor, rest assured it will not be much. A smarter, better and more politically astute policy would be to help those who need it and lack the means to pay
You notice the absence of complaints about unfair competition when businesses are doing well. They complain only when things are going badly. Unfortunately, a culture has been created in Australia of regulatory protection and taxpayers’ dollars being used to prop up businesses that should face only two options: get efficient or get out.
Panels of worthies can recommend all sorts of efficiencies and cuts, as the Audit Commission has just done, but what is the point when politicians decline to make unpopular decisions? An expanding economy is the only way to keep up with the growth in expenditure
These breathless reports about the planet never being hotter, take them with a truckload of salt. How can anyone place the slightest credence in claims being advanced by people who fail to grasp, or refuse to grasp, the simple truth about trend lines and temperature
It came to me in a dream: The same extraterrestrials who polished their English skills by monitoring the ABC on their long, intergalactic journey to Earth are now in charge of the national broadcaster. No wonder they still can't grasp the world the rest of us inhabit
Perhaps we really should lament our flaws and take steps to remedy them, as those self-help gurus urge. Then again, isn't it far more honest, not to mention therapeutic, to recognise one's human frailties and embrace them?
You may deem Norman Lindsay a mere artist, but the truth is that he ranks as one of the great economic theorists of our age. Governments should keep right on spending, his acolytes insist, because that line of credit will always be there to tap again tomorrow
There is legitimate room for debate about the extent and character of controlled immigration. People and politicians can have different views. But there should be no argument about stopping “illegal” immigration
When Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman talk economics, what we hear are two men lost in the euphoric fantasies of the demand-side creed. Pity them, scorn them, ignore them -- but never, ever mistake their reveries for reality
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