Blogotariat

The really bizarre thing about calls for a UK-style windfall profits tax on gas is that Australia’s already got one.

A recession in the US usually brings on a recession in the rest of the world, although not always in Australia.

Australia has escaped such a recession twice in the past 50 years.

We avoided the early-2000s so-called tech-wreck recession, and we avoided the so-called “great recession” during the global financial crisis.

Amid ominous talk about yet another US-led global recession, there’s a chance we could escape for a third time.

The Victorian Labor government has done some fantastic work, but principles have to count for something.

Just for the record, I canceled my membership to the Victorian Labor Party on the 13th May.

Those of you who know me well will know that this hasn’t been a decision I’ve taken lightly, however under the circumstances, it’s a decision that was easy to make.

Stand by for something “reckless and dangerous”.

That’s what former prime minister Scott Morrison said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would be if he asked the Fair Work Commission to grant a wage rise big enough to cover inflation. It would make Albanese a “loose unit” on the economy.

The Reserve Bank is pushing up interest rates to take money out of our hands.

The first increase in the current round will add about A$65 a month to the cost of paying off a $500,000 mortgage.

The second will add a bit more. If, as the bank’s forecasts assume, there are another four such increases this year, that’s a further $275 a month, and so on.

There are four economic wildcards between now and the election, and we know exactly when each will be played.

When Labor leader Anthony Albanese couldn’t say whether the unemployment rate was 5% or 4% on Monday, he might have had a point.

It’s 4%. But for a decade – the entire decade leading up to COVID – it never strayed too far from five-point-something per cent.