Bernard Keane, Crikey Journalist Profile

Articles

Theatre of the absurd: Labor and Liberals on a unity ticket on every key issue — and guess who benefits

2 days ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

If you change the government, you change the country, Paul Keating famously said. But how much change would there be on May 3 if there’s a change of government? On every major issue — both the big policy challenges facing the country, and the issues the parties insist are the really important ones — Labor and the Coalition are on a unity ticket, with only some trivial details over implementation separating them.
You can't get there from here: The diabolical complexity of housing policy

3 days ago | themandarin.com.au | Bernard Keane

Ever notice that, all that politicians of various kinds always promise to do something about housing, nothing ever really seems to get done? The issue has waxed and waned in priority over various elections at various levels of government as housing affordability has steadily grown worse. After years of affordability being undermined by government handouts to first-home buyers, Kevin Rudd went to the 2007 election promising to sell surplus Defence land for housing.
America's new golden age turns to tinfoil as investors run to the exit amid Trump chaos

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

The new American golden age is going swimmingly: investors are abandoning the United States at an increasing pace as Mad King Donald wreaks havoc on the nation’s economy. One of the few remaining adults in the room in US economic policymaking, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, laid it out on Wednesday in a speech in Chicago: The data in hand so far suggest that growth has slowed in the first quarter from last year’s solid pace.
Russia-Indo debacle reveals Australia is incompetent and racist

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

According to Peter Dutton, the government not knowing about a Russian request to Indonesia to station military aircraft in Papua was a “catastrophic failure”.
The RBA board hangs a lampshade: Please pretend there's a chance we won't cut rates in May

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

Memo to the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy board: publicly telling people not to say something is reliably one of the best ways to draw attention to what you don’t want said. The minutes of the board’s meeting on March 31-April 1 contained one of the more bizarre statements you’ll likely see from the Reserve Bank.
Three nightmare Donald Trump scenarios Australia must plan for

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

In a world suddenly less certain, and with basic elements of the global order on which our prosperity is based — free trade, the US security guarantee — wrenched away, it’s much harder to predict the future. But you can model different scenarios, and attach risk estimations to them, and assess the threats and opportunities they present. Smart policymakers within bureaucracies should be doing this as a matter of course.
Dutton tossed aside Liberal beliefs. Now his collapse leaves the party bereft

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

Peter Dutton is in heaps of trouble. Three polls were put out in the past 24 hours, all showing a growing swing to Labor. They’re just the latest in a growing list of polls indicating that at first the Coalition’s momentum had halted and then, point by point, has gone into reverse. When Anthony Albanese talked about kicking with the breeze in the last quarter, he wasn’t wrong. Worse, Dutton’s own personal numbers are declining while Albanese’s are improving.
Tech tariff trainwreck: Mad King Donald backflips on the backflip

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

The working rule for any major announcement by Donald Trump is that it will be reversed, modified or dismissed as never having happened within a matter of days. And that appears to apply as much to the reversals and modifications themselves.
is this the worst election campaign ever?

1 week ago | crikey.com.au | Bernard Keane

It’s rare to see all of Australia’s major media outlets in accord. Even more rare that they’re all correct. From The Australian to the Financial Review to the ABC to the Nine papers, commentators are united in damning the major parties’ spendathon campaign launches. Australia went into the weekend facing a decade of deficits and a persistent refusal to match what its federal government spends with what it taxes, with only commodity price-driven windfalls to spare our fiscal blushes.
Upstairs, downstairs: Reviewing houses of review for fun and profit

1 week ago | themandarin.com.au | Bernard Keane

What is an upper house for? From the point of view of most legislatures around the world, that’s a very good question — the majority are unicameral, as are the Queensland, Northern Territory, and ACT parliaments here. But some of us — including at the federal level in Australia — are stuck with paying for a whole second house of politicians. So what do they do?