Jobless rate remains high as more women look for work
Unemployed draftsman Michael Dempsey wants a piece of the multibillion-dollar infrastructure boom that's happening around him, and he's making himself impossible to ignore.
Josh Gordon is The Age's state political editor. After a brief period in the Sydney banking world and the federal bureaucracy, Josh spent six years working as The Age's economics correspondent at Parliament House in Canberra. After cutting himself adrift to travel the world, he was lured back to reporting early in 2007. Most recently he has worked as The Sunday Age's politcal editor, based in Canberra, and The Age's state economics correspondent in Melbourne.
Unemployed draftsman Michael Dempsey wants a piece of the multibillion-dollar infrastructure boom that's happening around him, and he's making himself impossible to ignore.
Prime Minister Turnbull has cooled expectations of an affordable housing "centrepiece" in the budget.
A leading national business group has called on Canberra and Victoria to consider an unprecedented "emergency intervention" to keep the Hazelwood coal power plant running.
The owners of the soon-to-be closed Hazelwood power station have conceded the bill to rehabilitate the mine and demolish the ageing plant will run to almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.
Alcoa's Portland's aluminium smelter has all but struck a generous new electricity supply deal with AGL, ensuring the troubled plant is likely to stay open.
Energy market traders are expecting prices to rise by 10 per cent if the plant shuts.
Victoria continues to be severely short-changed on infrastructure, with the Turnbull government pinning its Victorian electoral hopes on an Abbott-era promise to hand over $3 billion to the first government prepared to builld the East West Link.
The Abbott government is claiming the East West Link has merely been mothballed and is "delayed but not dead".
Tony Abbott is demanding Victoria hand back $1.5 billion of East West Link cash as a major saving to pad out his second budget, paving the way for a bitter federal-state showdown over infrastructure funding.