In justifying an increase in the age of pension eligibility to 70 years, the Government asserts that Australians are living longer.  But it is not necessarily true of the poor. The life expectancy of poor Americans has barely improved over two decades, leaving Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to ask why the poor should lose benefits as a consequence of better-off Americans living longer. This piece examines the assumptions implicit in the recent Federal Budget.

The official economic outlook for the next three years appears overly optimistic. Private investment is falling off a cliff as the expiring mining investment boom is not being replaced by new investment in productive capacity elsewhere. Mineral export values are being hammered by falling prices. Yet, confronted with a deteriorating job market and declining real wages, workers are implausibly assumed to spend much more of their incomes and to save less.

Competition policy should promote competition, not protect businesses from it.

Wise investment in infrastructure is essential to future productivity growth, but how do we ensure it's wise?

How can we avoid bubbles and create long-term economic growth?

It is said that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Australia’s economic history since the turn of the century has been one of bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: a housing bubble, a mining bubble, the toil of dealing with a global economic crisis and the trouble with relying on bubbles again.

Australia’s on-again, off-again Budget Emergency is on again. Not that you’d know it, with a $300 million drought package unveiled in late February lifting the net cost of post-election Coalition government policy commitments to $14 billion. Yet when Treasurer Hockey announced a forecast $47 billion deficit for this year in the December mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, he blamed it all on the previous government.

Australia has been assessed by the UN to have the second highest living standard in the world and by the OECD as the best on earth. When we ask who built this country, the right answer is the Australian people. Yet national governments can play a role in nation-building. They help create the economic environment and they influence the broader quality of life of the citizenry.

As Australia seeks to make the transition to a more diversified, competitive economy with the passing of the mining boom, a convergence of opinion is occurring around the idea of a big step-up in infrastructure investment. It would help maintain employment during the economic slowdown now underway while giving Australia a competitive edge in the Asian Century. Of all the infrastructure investment proposals for our nation, none is more important or pressing than a second airport for Australia’s tourist gateway city of Sydney.