Budget deficit improvement 'looks like a rounding error', says CBA economist
The chief economist of the nation's biggest retail bank is forecasting a $12 billion improvement in the budget deficit over the next three years.
The chief economist of the nation's biggest retail bank is forecasting a $12 billion improvement in the budget deficit over the next three years.
The Turnbull government is prepared to further intervene in the housing market, Treasurer Scott Morrison says, if the federal budget's housing package fails to calm rising house prices.
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University leaders have lashed out at the Turnbull government's proposed cuts to higher education funding.
There is good and bad in the Turnbull government's measured university changes .
The package, designed to save the budget $2.8 billion, carries political risk for the Turnbull government.
Treasurer Scott Morrison has seized on a new report that shows house prices in Sydney and Melbourne are slowing to claim regulatory measures to easy Australia's housing affordability crisis are working.
Australian company directors are more positive than they've been in six years, but remain worried about inaction on housing affordability and tax reform ahead of the May federal budget.
Pain will be shared between universities and students under new reform package.
The budget will make it easier to complain about banks
The budget outlook will improve and then get worse, weighed down by spending says Deloitte Access Economcis
Every scheme being considered would push prices higher.
Leading economists have expressed unease about a budget reporting change.
Labor leader Bill Shorten says the federal government is moving the budget goal posts because it has failed to get debt under control, lashing its plan to divide the federal budget into "good" and "bad" debt.
Tuesday week, Morrison and Turnbull will no longer be as limited by concern about budget deficit.
Treasurer is preparing the ground for a big new spend on infrastructure in the May budget.
Work for the dole has been an expensive "demonstrable failure" that does nothing to lessen the nation's unemployment burden, one of Australia's biggest charities has said.
Prime Minister Turnbull has cooled expectations of an affordable housing "centrepiece" in the budget.
Foreign home buyers, vacant properties and self-managed super funds will be targeted in a pre-emptive strike.
A Caterpillar and Komatsu cavalry is arriving just in time to save the next two federal budgets.
The IMF changes tack as the budget approaches.
An overcooked housing market and rising interest rates are poised to plunge thousands of Australian families into mortgage stress.
Home internet services should be exempt from fringe benefits tax to take account of the fact that more Australians are working from home, telecommunications giant Telstra says.
One third of new mortgage owners have less than a month's buffer against financial instability, the Reserve Bank has warned.
Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne has chastised his Coalition colleagues for publicly debating whether the government should allow first-home buyers to raid their superannuation savings.
Australia is more exposed to the economy of a single nation - China - than at any time since the 1950s, when Britain was our major trading partner.
The Turnbull government's powerful budget razor gang is set to consider a reform package for the $10 billion PBS.
The former prime minister says there is nothing "sacrosanct" about Australia's immigration numbers.
Powerful expenditure review committee discusses axing one of Abbott's first major policy achievements.
Australia received the bulk of Rio Tinto's taxes over the past year, even as it remains locked in dispute with the tax office over tax shifting abroad.
The Turnbull government is considering new measures to encourage more migrants to settle in regional or remote areas to relieve pressure on house prices and infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne.
Government coffers will benefit from the "stronger for longer" spike in commodity prices.
Black economy is hard to tackle because Australians see cash-only payments as 'almost a national sport'.
Why do companies invest here? We mightn't have needed to cut that company tax much anyway.
There's still time to craft a budget that actually does something.
The nation's budget problem still won't be solved when, one day in the distant future, we get the federal budget back into surplus. Only a change in strategy is likely to produce a sustained solution.
There's no clearer sign that the Turnbull government is in deep political trouble than the never-ending saga of the Centrelink robo-debt stuff-up.
Australia's top economic bureaucrat has begged the government not to spend the coming windfall from soaring coal and iron ore prices, saying if it did it would repeat the mistakes of prime minister John Howard and treasurer Peter Costello in the early 2000s.
Australia has avoided a second consecutive quarter of negative economic growth, rising by 1.1 per cent in the December quarter and beating market expectations.
High earners are negatively gearing their way out of the Medicare levy.
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