Happy to be of service to Australia's jobs growth
So much for our ailing economy. Did you see that 264,000 additional jobs have been created in the first eight months of this year, with 88 per cent of them full-time?
Ross Gittins is economics editor of the SMH and an economic columnist for The Age. His books include Gittins' Guide to Economics, Gittinomics and The Happy Economist.
So much for our ailing economy. Did you see that 264,000 additional jobs have been created in the first eight months of this year, with 88 per cent of them full-time?
You'd have to have been hiding under a rock not to know that 40 per cent of jobs in Australia – about 5 million of them – are likely to be automated in the next 10 to 15 years.
How the worm – and the world – turns. When the Abbott government came to power just four years ago, it claimed its arrival signalled the "end of the age of entitlement". Don't laugh, it's happening – but in the opposite way to what treasurer Joe Hockey had in mind.
We're all supposed to be equal before the law, but you ain't anything like equal if they can afford a lawyer and you can't.
Surveys show most people say they need a little bit more than their getting for a comfortable life. Trouble is, they say that no matter how much their income rises.
When the consumer price index is dissected, the real problem is the rate of increases.
It's never my policy to feel sorry for any politician, so let's just say I wouldn't like to be in Malcolm Turnbull's shoes when he meets the electricity retailers he's summoned to Canberra on Wednesday.
More Australians have died at the hands of police, lawfully or unlawfully, in 10 years, than from terrorist attacks in Australia in the past 20 years.
You can see it overseas in the electoral popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the anti-establishment revolts in the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.
I can't let one of the Coalition government's greatest achievements go without acknowledgement and explanation.
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