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1 week ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
Now the election is finally over and the parties and candidates have settled down to their new realities, national priorities must be afforded their proper place. The election campaign focused too much on short-term offerings for voters – there was little discussion of what the respective leaders wanted our country to be in the coming decades.
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2 weeks ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
The memes began with, “We need to talk.” Then the internet lit up with a flood of break-up staples providing a weary electorate with perhaps some much-needed comic relief. “We’ve grown apart.” “We want different things.” And of course, frighteningly, “I think we should start seeing other people.” By Thursday, the 80-year relationship could be best described as “off again, on again”. What does this all mean?
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3 weeks ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
Unfortunately, the old campaign funding laws mean we need to wait several months for details of the money involved in this month’s election. The promised real-time exposure will make a significant difference in the future. Voters will know where the money is coming from and where it’s being spent as the election campaign unfolds.
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4 weeks ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
As editor of the British tabloid rag The Sun in the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie had a favourite description of how to make the lives of public figures unpleasant – his journalists were instructed to “stick a ferret up their trousers”.
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4 weeks ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
As editor of the British tabloid rag The Sun in the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie had a favourite description of how to make the lives of public figures unpleasant – his journalists were instructed to “stick a ferret up their trousers”.
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1 month ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
One of the great disappointments of our election campaign has been the failure to focus more explicitly and substantively on the adequacy of our defence. The best we got was a repeated acknowledgement of the challenges in the prospective global environment, with the Coalition waiting until about five minutes to midnight to release their promised unfunded defence initiative. Without any detail, however, it came across as little better than another thought bubble.
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1 month ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
We don’t have a presidential election system in Australia and yet so much of this campaign and its media coverage has focused on the contest between the two major party leaders. It doesn’t need to be this way, nor should it be. The strategists on both the Coalition and the Labor side ought to broaden the frontline, by bringing the ministers and shadow ministers into the contest.
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1 month ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
As United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs unleash chaos and turmoil across global markets, financial authorities around the world are forced into the unenviable role of working out how to protect their economies.At such an unpredictable juncture, with the leader of the world’s largest economy going rogue, who would want to be a central banker? The risks of a recession in the US and globally are now very real, as are the prospects of increasing inflation, again both in the US and globally.
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1 month ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
As the major parties compete for the title of best economic manager, they are still ignoring the elephant in the room. Their future spending commitments, and voters’ expectations for further support, are not adequately funded by the prospective tax base. Many tax concessions, given initially in good faith, are no longer appropriate in light of today’s policy challenges. Many wealthy individuals and corporations are not meeting their tax obligations, indeed paying little or no tax.
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2 months ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | John Hewson
The launch of the campaign for the May 3 federal election brings back many memories, laughs and cautionary tales of my experiences on the trail in the 1990s. As opposition leader, I had embarked on a big-picture strategy. I released the Fightback policy package designed to deliver the kind of country and economy we would want in 2000. The pressure was really on – what I had to do was to sell it.
