Jacqui Lambie is right about Pauline Hanson. There’s only one way to stop her ascension
The country is feeling a creeping anxiety that we are going backwards financially. It needs a growth agenda. Easily said, much harder to achieve.
The first part of the solution, as discussed in this column last week, is for the government to help the Reserve Bank tame inflation. It needs to do that by cutting spending in a serious way, by around 1 per cent of GDP, to balance the budget.
And then it needs a growth agenda. Easily said, much harder to achieve. The Albanese government so far has operated on the assumption that the main economic task is a rebalancing, taking priority off economic efficiency and increasing equity.
But without healthy growth, we have neither. We are “rats in a cage fighting over shares of the pie,” in Chris Richardson’s delicate phraseology. The government needs to develop a growth agenda. It’s also the Coalition’s best hope of moving from defence to offence against One Nation and against Labor too.
The business sector has given up on trying to persuade political leaders of the need for pro-growth policies. Unable to motivate the country from the top down, a broad coalition of about 30 industry groups is developing a public campaign to motivate change from the bottom up.
