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Is our fear of foreigners a result of evolution?
What has caused the rise in populism that's threatening the mainstream political parties around the developed world, including here?
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.
What has caused the rise in populism that's threatening the mainstream political parties around the developed world, including here?
The world has always been full of bulldust, which is why everyone should come equipped with a bulldust detector.
Talk about a slow burn. It's now 10 years since the beginnings of the global financial crisis, the greatest economic collapse any of us will ever see. Things ought to be back to normal by now, but they aren't.
The electricity market is such a mare's nest of stuff-ups and problems it's impossible to see the deeply divided Turnbull government making much progress in fixing it.
The soaring price of electricity is testament to the disastrous failure of a major item on the 1990s agenda of micro-economic reform, establishing a national electricity market.
The less academically inclined – of whom there'll always be many – would be better served going on to vocational education and training.
Of the many stuff-ups during the now-finished era of economic reform, one of the worst is the unending backdoor privatisation of Australia's universities.
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.
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