Ross Gittins

China is the great contradiction. It’s the world’s biggest single emitter, accounting for about 30 per cent of global emissions, but it’s the country doing most to move to renewables.

One in four 70-year-old men are still working, up from one in ten 20 years ago. And about 10 per cent of men in their late 70s are still working.

Under the leadership of Anthony Albanese, Labor has lost its reforming zeal. It knows we have plenty of problems, and would like to do something about them, but not yet.

Virtually every economist attending last month’s economic pow-wow in Canberra agrees, so why is the federal government so afraid of locking in this measure?

In Norway, they tax their oil and gas industry heavily and give their kids free higher education. Here, we do the opposite.

The Business Council of Australia is unsurprisingly playing spoiler to any attempt by the federal government to improve our taxation system. It’s another sign of big business’ resistance to radical change.

Our tax and benefits system favours the old over the young. Then there’s our ridiculous housing market. No wonder young people feel dudded.

Repairing the budget and improving productivity aren’t easy, but there are measures the treasurer can look at that offer less political risk.

We’re told that our defence spending must be greatly increased. But if Trump and the gleeful defenceniks have their way, we’ll be poorer and no safer.

With its silly decision to hold rates, the Reserve Bank has shaken the faith of the financial markets, businesses and households.

Usually if a business isn’t improving its output, the managers aren’t doing their jobs. Lobbyists would have you believe it’s all the government’s fault.

If you want to govern effectively, you have to be prepared to stand up to powerful interest groups. It’s now clear Albanese isn’t prepared to do that.

Anthony Albanese’s opponent achieved something that Labor couldn’t. He helped voters forget about the cost-of-living crisis.

The present fashion of obsessing with productivity improvement for its own sake is counterproductive and probably won’t achieve much.

For an election dominated by cost-of-living sloganeering, neither Labor nor the Coalition has bothered to utter a word on wages.

When politicians are no longer game to appeal to the better angels of our nature, you know we’ve got a problem.

I think both sides of politics are treating us like mugs. Maybe like the mugs many of us have allowed ourselves to become.

When Jim Chalmers says Labor’s new tax cuts are “modest”, he’s not exaggerating. However, this is a budget we’ve wished on ourselves.

Shane Wright, Ross Gittins, Peter Hartcher, Jacqueline Maley and Matthew Knott break down the economic and political implications of the budget.

Neither the Labor government nor the opposition are truly interested in shutting down price gouging by the big two supermarkets – they would rather have the issue disappear.