Latest news with #BobHawke
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Labor's former ‘minister for good times' cashes in on election bet
During his stint in Bob Hawke's cabinet, John Brown became known as the 'minister for good times', a name that also formed the title of the 93-year-old's rollicking recent memoir. Technically, it was sport, recreation and tourism, and Brown certainly wishes he was better known for his policy accomplishments than for having sex with then-wife Jan Murray on his ministerial desk. Murray revealed the smutty story on 60 Minutes, and while Brown doesn't dispute the whole incident, he says it's not true that she left her knickers in the ashtray. The '80s were a different time. Anyway, the good times are still rolling for Brownie. CBD recently came into possession of a picture of the former minister at Royal Randwick receiving a bunch of $50 bills from Robbie Waterhouse, of the storied bookmaking family. It turns out Brown had taken a punt on Labor increasing its parliamentary majority in this month's federal election at $5.80 and won big. A good call, seeing as most betting markets (not to mention many pundits) were still leaning toward a Labor minority government as the campaign reached its final stretch. Waterhouse told us that Brown, who he described as 'a real man's man', had been betting with him for more than 40 years. Loading Brown was in the mood for a yarn when CBD came calling on Wednesday but wanted to instead discuss the Australian Turf Club's decision to block the sale of Rosehill racecourse (unlike the Waterhouses, he supported the sell-off). Turf war On Tuesday, members of the Australian Turf Club became the latest unrepresentative swill to decide that young Sydneysiders can't have nice things like home ownership, voting down the state government's plans to buy Rosehill racecourse and build much-needed housing.
West Australian
26-05-2025
- Politics
- West Australian
Editorial: A reconciled Australia is a unified Australia
Along Australia's long path towards reconciliation, we've seen many milestones. Some have had immediate and lasting legal consequences — the 1967 referendum to include Indigenous Australians in official population counts and the High Court's 1992 Mabo decision which finally extinguished the damaging myth of terra nullius among them. Then there are the milestones the importance of which were rooted in their symbolism — Charles Perkins' Freedom Rides in 1965, the presentation of the Barunga Statement to then prime minister Bob Hawke in 1988, Kevin Rudd's Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008. We wouldn't have achieved those 'practical' milestones if we didn't also see the 'symbolic' ones also. The two categories are indivisible, and both are integral if we are to achieve the long-held goal of a reconciled Australia. Rightly, when we talk about reconciliation, much of our focus is on tangible outcomes. And so it should be. It is a terrible truth that Indigenous Australians can expect to live significantly shorter lives than their non-Indigenous peers. They have fewer economic and educational opportunities. These are failures we must work hard to address with practical policies and public investment. But it will take more than money to achieve a truly reconciled Australia — one in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders can look forward to the same advantages as the rest of the population and in which Indigenous culture is respected and championed. In both of these goals we have made significant progress in decades past. However, addressing the impacts of 200 years of colonialism isn't an easy or quick task. The road to reconciliation isn't linear, and it's rarely smooth. The defeat of the Voice referendum was a blow to many Indigenous Australians who had hoped it would serve as a pivotal point in race relations. That wasn't to be. But the failure of the referendum shouldn't be read as proof Australians don't want reconciliation. According to the 2024 Australian Reconciliation Barometer, 85 per cent of Australians believe the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is important for our nation. And 80 per cent say that it is important to learn about the issues brought by European colonisation. That's important, because without understanding the causes of Indigenous disadvantage, we cannot hope to achieve meaningful change. Along with the tragic and the uncomfortable, we must also acknowledge the good. The history of Aboriginal Australia is a story of dispossession and disadvantage. It's also a story of survival and of a culture so rich and strong it has endured for 65,000 years. It's important that we recognise both aspects to achieve a reconciled, unified Australia
ABC News
25-05-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Affordability up, but access to housing market to worsen as interest rates fall
One of the four reasons house prices started rising at twice the rate of incomes and GDP around the turn of the century was that the Reserve Bank cut interest rates six times in 2001 without a recession. Now it's happening again: five cuts this time (probably) and no recession; in fact, unemployment is 4.1 per cent, not the 6.5 per cent it was in 2001. Interest rates were cut in 2001 because a recession in the United States had followed the dotcom crash of March 2000, and it was a fair enough precaution by the RBA, in part to stop the exchange rate rising too much. That didn't work — the Australian currency appreciated more than 50 per cent between 2001 and 2003 as global speculators took their money out of the US stock market and a commodity boom got started as China joined the global trading system. The other three things that happened around the same time were the 50 per cent capital gains discount at the end of 1999, the return of first home buyer grants in 2000 and the huge rise in immigration in the mid-2000s. The doubling and then tripling of immigration began with the removal on July 1, 2001, of the distinction between "gazetted" and "non-gazetted" countries in the issuing of foreign student visas. That system had been in place since 1990 as a way of controlling the influx of students from China (a non-gazetted country) following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1987 and Bob Hawke's subsequent granting of permanent residency to 40,000 Chinese students. The welcome end of discrimination against students from certain countries led to a boom in students from both China and India, which was further supercharged in 2006, when hairdressing and cooking were added to the tertiary courses that were given preferential treatment for visas. The combination of those four things — rate cuts, capital gains tax discount, first home buyer grants and a boom in immigration — produced a sustained lift in housing demand that was not matched by any increase in housing construction or infrastructure. It took house prices from around 3-4 times average income to 8-9 times over 25 years and led to the crisis that now dominates the economy, politics and, importantly, the relationship between generations. And now, population growth is back at 2 per cent a year, as it was in the late-2000s, first home buyer grants are back, tax is still payable on only half of any capital gain, and the RBA is once again in the middle of a cycle of interest rate cuts with no recession. The average increase in house prices in the two years following the start of the past 10 rate cutting cycles has been 20 per cent, although that's distorted by the massive 60 per cent rise in house prices when the cash rate was cut from 18 per cent to 7.5 per cent after January 1990. Remove that aberration and the average rise in house prices when interest rates are cut is still 15 per cent. What seems clear is that when interest rates are cut, home buyers add the savings in mortgage repayments onto the price they're prepared to pay for a house, but when interest rates rise again, they don't sell the house but cut back other spending, so there's little downward pressure on prices to offset the rise. The result is that the decline in house prices when rates are rising is always much less than the increase that accompanies rates being cut. So, what can we expect this time, given that housing is already "unaffordable"? Well, prices have increased 1.4 per cent in the past three months in anticipation of the rate cuts, which is 50 per cent more than the average increase in incomes of 0.9 per cent over the same period, even though housing was already apparently unaffordable in January. It obviously wasn't. The thing is that housing affordability is a function of both price and borrowing capacity, so it's probably better to describe the problem as one of accessibility rather than affordability, which rises and falls inversely with interest rates. After all, if housing was genuinely unaffordable, prices wouldn't rise … but they are! Obviously, it's affordable for some. They have increased by 17 per cent since April 2023, even as interest rates went up another three times. A better measure of the housing problem may be the time it takes to save a deposit, which has gone from six years to at least 12 years, which means housing ownership is now effectively accessible only to those who can get money from their parents or elsewhere. The share of 25- to 29-year-old owner-occupiers is declining — from 43 per cent in 2001 to 36 per cent now. And with affordability now improving again as interest rates come down, accessibility is likely to worsen further as prices rise some more. Here we go again. Note that the four things that happened around the year 2000 to make house prices rise faster than incomes and sow the seeds of the current crisis were all about demand, not supply. Yet, government policy, at both the state and federal level, to deal with the problem is now all about supply, not demand, apart from some (so far) ineffective attempts to reduce immigration. Will supply respond sufficiently to government efforts to increase it, and lead to an oversupply of housing so that prices don't rise? Doubtful. At best it's a long-term solution — there's none in the short-term. Removing the capital gains discount and negative gearing would probably lead to the sale of a lot of investment properties, but that won't increase the supply of housing — it will just mean a lot of tenants get booted out while the number of houses stays the same. In the meantime, consumer price inflation is under control so that the Reserve Bank feels comfortable cutting interest rates, which means that house price inflation is on the march again. Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist on ABC News and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
AU Financial Review
12-05-2025
- Politics
- AU Financial Review
Liberal Party going nowhere until a new leader is elected
Follow our live coverage of the fallout from the 2025 federal election Since Federation, the Labor Party has never won more than two federal elections in a row bar the Thatcher-esque government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, which won five.
ABC News
11-05-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Australia's economy is a basket case again. Will Jim Chalmers take it on?
In his 2004 thesis on Paul Keating's prime ministership, Treasurer Jim Chalmers wrote that Keating could not have "imagined the plethora of reforms" that marked his turn as treasurer without the electoral success and popularity of Bob Hawke as PM. "Hawke was the ALP's most electorally successful leader ever," Chalmers wrote, and he provided the "the public support which allowed Keating to indulge in his passion for bold policy." Anthony Albanese hasn't yet won as many elections as Hawke, but in his second election he has won more seats than Hawke ever did. So, the conditions should be right for another plethora of reforms. But there are three questions that must be answered first. Is Albanese up for it? Does Chalmers have a "passion for bold policy" to indulge? Does the country need it? Taking them in order, we don't know whether Albanese is up for big reform because he hasn't been pushed, but his first-term caution suggests he's not. Maybe that will change now that he has another two terms virtually guaranteed, but his decision to meekly allow the factions to push Mark Dreyfus and Ed Husic out of the Labor ministry is not a good start. Paul Keating certainly thinks so, releasing a statement calling the dumpings 'a showing of poor judgement, unfairness and diminished respect for the contribution of others' and describing the Victorian Right faction led by deputy prime minister Richard Marles as 'devoid of creativity and capacity'. Anyway, it's hard to imagine Albanese (or Marles) initiating bold policy – if it's going to happen, the Treasurer will have to do it. He has commissioned the Productivity Commission to do five big reports on productivity and on the morning after the election he told David Speers on Insiders: "I'm looking forward to receiving that because [although] we've got an agenda on productivity, we can do more, and we will do more." He could have done more already. The Productivity Commission gave him a report in February 2023 with 71 recommendations which will presumably be regurgitated in six months. Keating's first term was half as long as Chalmers's and was a flurry of reform, starting with the floating of the dollar; Chalmers's three years have been careful, his main achievement being two budget surpluses, now gone. But Australia was different in 1983, and Keating, after all, was unique. David Morgan, a Treasury official at the time and later chief executive of Westpac, described his performance driving the 1985 tax reforms through cabinet: "He used rationality, he used his intellect, he used humour, he used his anger, he used his theatrics, he used his spleen, he used his withering language, all of them turn and turnabout, and it was the most remarkable performance I've ever seen in my years inside a cabinet room." Keating himself told Kerry O'Brien in a series of interviews eventually published as a book: "I am a risk-taker. But the country had its leg pulled for 30 to 40 years. The place was massively uncompetitive, with declining terms of trade. Who else was going to blow the whistle and take this basket case on?" Does the country need the whistle to be blown again? Oh yes. These days Australia is not suffering declining terms of trade (the difference between the prices of exports and imports), although it might if Trump manages to destroy the Chinese economy, but it's a basket case again. Productivity is declining and housing is unaffordable. Economic growth depends entirely on government spending and immigration, and high immigration has not been matched with enough infrastructure and housing to support it; as a result, Australia is divided, defensive, low tech and uncompetitive. Keating told O'Brien: "My key point was that you could not bring the Australian economy back to growth off the back of public investment and public employment. The primary driver had to be private investment and private employment." In 2025 the contribution of private business investment to GDP growth has fallen to zero; the growth in real capital stock per person is zero; real per capita income growth is zero; mining investment growth is zero; non-mining business investment growth has halved since Keating was treasurer; the housing debt to household income ratio is five times what it was in 1985; the average house now costs eight times the average income versus three times then. So yes, Australia badly needs some bold policy again, some of which is obvious and all of which is hard, especially tax reform. In 1984, before that year's election, Bob Hawke announced a tax summit during an interview on Perth radio station 6PR, without telling anyone in cabinet — including Keating, which infuriated him. He and a Treasury team of eight then worked an average of 100 hours a week to produce a white paper for the tax summit in 1985, because, Keating said, they simply had to find more tax revenue. Commonwealth government spending had gone from 23.5 per cent of GDP before Whitlam took office to 30.5 per cent as Howard and Fraser finished in 1983, and the budget deficit was 5 per cent of GDP. Finding enough in spending cuts was impossible. In the end Keating didn't get the consumption tax he and Treasury wanted — that had to wait for John Howard to break a promise in 2000. But he did get a capital gains tax, fringe benefits tax and dividend franking. Tax reform is hard — it almost destroyed the relationship between Hawke and Keating, who told O'Brien: "He did everything to destroy that package. Bob got to shockingly low points of bad behaviour. But I could always engineer a better moment with him and kept the show rolling." He went on: "The public will never understand the value they got from Hawke and me. Eight-and-half years we were together, and the changes were revolutionary. I would kick and shove and gouge, and he would do the same but nevertheless both of us kept our eye on the main chance — the greater good of the place." Now the treasurer has to find more tax revenue again, not because the deficit is too high at 1.5 per cent of GDP, but because there has to be more spending on housing, infrastructure, technology and the energy transition, while at the same time the budget is being eaten alive by the NDIS. As for where that revenue will have to come from, there are no mysteries: ending negative gearing, reducing the capital gains tax discount, increasing the GST and/or reintroducing an inheritance tax, 50 years after it was abolished by Malcolm Fraser and Joh Bjelke-Petersen. And the reason more government spending is needed is immigration. The doubling of population growth from 1 per cent to 2 per cent a year is arguably essential to keep the place running as the birth rate declines, but it is causing profound structural changes in the economy because it is not matched by any serious planning for the extra people. The former head of Treasury Ken Henry says he was asked by Kevin Rudd what he thought the sustainable population of Australia was. At the time Australia's population was 22 million. "About 15 million, I told him. Rudd said: "Yeah I agree — 50 million." "No, no," said Henry. "Fifteen — one-five." "What?!" said Rudd. "It's already well over 15 million." "And you think this is sustainable?" Henry replied. Then he said: "I could imagine … a set of policies that would make a population of 50 million sustainable on this continent. Why don't we build a whole new city of 10 million people in a place that presently has nobody?" Only the government can build a new city for 10 million people, or do any of the work required to house more people, including building public housing. Is either controlling population growth or dealing with Australia's number one challenge in 2025, replacing the terms of trade crisis that confronted Hawke and Keating in 1983? Let's see what the Productivity Commission comes up with later this year, but it probably is. The cost of housing and over-burdened infrastructure and policing is sapping productivity while making life nasty and brutish, to quote Thomas Hobbes, although no longer short enough to keep population down. Final word to Paul Keating: "I was in the slaying business. I gave recalcitrants trouble, not the other way around." More of that, please. Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist at ABC News. He also writes for Intelligent Investor.
