With the announced closure of the automobile assembly industry and the inevitable flow-on effects to suppliers it’s clear that Australian manufacturing is rapidly shedding jobs. Add this week’s closure of a major mining supply company with the loss of 1100 jobs and the extreme pressure on the aluminium industry as electricity subsidies are being removed by power suppliers and it’s no surprise that the unemployment rate now exceeds levels reached during the global recession of 2008-10.

When anti-poverty advocacy group Oxfam released a report last month estimating the world’s 85 richest people possess more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion people, a wealthy business commentator responded that such inequality was “fantastic,” for it gave the masses the inspiration to look up to the top 1 per cent.

Education experts agree that extra school funding without reform won't improve student performance. But nor can the performance of disadvantaged students be improved without extra funding to pay for the support they need. Here's the irony: having called for reform and opposed extra funding for disadvantaged students the federal government has manoeuvred itself into a position of offering extra funding without reform.

Everything comes to an end. The Age of Reason that ushered in the period of the Enlightment is over. Public policy debate these days is conducted from preconceived ideological positions. To the extent that facts are used at all, they are deployed to bolster each side’s ideologically driven claims. Facts that contradict a position are dismissed as having emanated from a conspiracy of the left or the right. Australia’s society and economy have thrived on sound policy making. That, too, is coming to an end. Our country will be the poorer for it.

For more than a century, a national school curriculum has eluded Australia. In its place has been a version of the old rail-gauge widths, each state with its own curriculum, making life difficult for families wanting to move across borders in search of better opportunities. Among the 80,000 families who move interstate each year are defence force children, who often change states four or five times during their schooling. Now, in the year in which a national curriculum is to be fully implemented, it is to be reviewed on the grounds that the federal government has decided it is left-leaning. Christopher Pyne wants to take "politics out of the issue", seeking a curriculum "free of partisan bias". Bad people, it seems, put politics into the curriculum, causing it to contain the partisan bias of which it must be rid.

Tasmania is a stunningly beautiful place with unsurpassed natural assets yet since Federation has remained a mendicant state. No matter how much money is funnelled across Bass Strait, Tasmania's economic prospects scarcely seem to improve.

Australia’s system of national parks could do with a big makeover. Disputes over the conservation areas show no signs of abating and, with the federal government signalling its intention to delist areas of World Heritage in Tasmania, are set to escalate. And yet, much of Australia’s biological diversity is poorly represented in the national park system.

AS two icons of Australian manufacturing, Ford and Holden, wind up their operations, doubts inevitably will arise as to whether, with Australia's relatively high cost structure, we will be any good at making anything. Despite high costs, Australia seems to have some sort of future in manufacturing premium-quality foods and beverages such as cheese, infant formula and wine. And if one expert is right, we also may have a future in producing lots of a highly sophisticated manufactured good: submarines.

MOST market analysts have concluded the Abbott government is deliberately pessimistic in its economic forecasts underlying the mid-year fiscal and economic outlook. Then, when the economy does better than forecast, the budget deficit will be better than expected and the government will claim the credit. But what if the economy does worse?

ONE year ago I wrote in these pages that the world's trading nations must not give up on successfully completing the decade-long global trade talks.

FIVE minutes into the contest for the Coalition government's economic philosophy and it's already Nationalists 1, Rationalists 0. A government that declared Australia was open for business following the biggest investment boom in a half century has sent a shocking signal to global investors by blocking the acquisition of GrainCorp by US firm Archer Daniels Midland.