-
2 days ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
Business needs a more united and determined front to pressure Labor on the central national question the election avoided. Labor has a thumping mandate to restore living standards, even after breaking its pledge to reduce household power bills and to increase real wages, and can look forward to another six years in power. Loading...
-
4 days ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
The factional hit job on Ed Husic has exposed Labor’s lack of any serious agenda for reviving business investment, reversing Australia’s falling productivity and restoring living standards. It exposes how Treasurer Jim Chalmers rebuffed the dumped industry minister’s first-term push for business tax incentives to drive a technology-based upswing in manufacturing capital expenditure. Loading...
-
6 days ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
May 9, 2025 – 3.41pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Jim Chalmers has put fixing Australia’s sagging productivity on the agenda for Labor’s second term. But that will run straight into demands from the party’s trade union paymasters for their rightful share of the election spoils.
-
1 week ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
The election landslide has buried the policy consensus that delivered Australia’s exceptional modern prosperity. So we’ll likely drift back to the pack of unexceptional, moderately prosperous nations. It will be a future of relative decline unless triumphant Labor becomes more like Hawke-Keating and the vanquished Liberals become more like Howard-Costello. Loading...
-
1 week ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
Anthony Albanese’s bloodbath victory has avoided the worst case of a Labor-Green minority government. But Jim Chalmers now needs to use the authority of Albanese’s true believers’ win to embolden the needed policy reset that the cost-of-living election ignored. Loading...
-
1 week ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
May 2, 2025 – 4.47pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Like a big tech algorithm that stimulates dopamine in people’s brains, the political parties honed their campaign pitches on what most pleases financially stretched voters. That is, giving them borrowed government money to soothe the inflation hit to their immediate living standards.
-
2 weeks ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
Apr 29, 2025 – 6.09pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Woodside Energy has pressed go on the Louisiana investment set to make it a “global LNG powerhouse”. Not bad for the oil and gas start-up named after a Victorian Bass Strait town seven decades ago.
-
3 weeks ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
Apr 23, 2025 – 3.47pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Donald Trump is blowing up the global trading system. Now he may be doing the same with the global financial system by threatening to sack the head of the world’s most important central bank, Jerome Powell.
-
3 weeks ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
“Australia, we have a liar in the Lodge,” declared deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley in her warm-up to Peter Dutton at the party’s election campaign launch. Evidently, an opposition leader can brand the prime minister, in this case Anthony Albanese, a “liar”. Labor can go on and on about Dutton’s “lies”. Loading...
-
4 weeks ago | 
afr.com | Michael Stutchbury
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton made a big thing of housing at their duelling election launches last weekend because the threatened great Australian dream is the intergenerational pain point of the inflationary cost-of-living squeeze. The rival Labor and Liberal plans made headlines with their eye-opening demand-side fixes for first home buyers: Albanese’s 5 per cent deposit pledge backed by a government mortgage guarantee versus Dutton’s new tax break for mortgage interest payments. Loading...
