Governments which win while promising not to do unpopular things frustrate themselves, and voters too.

If Barnaby Joyce supports an effects test you know it's anti-competitive. Small-business organisations also support the government's effects test because they want protection from competition. That's understandable from their perspective. But the objective of competition law should be to benefit consumers by protecting competition – not competitors.

You can tell an airline is in trouble when its management says it can't afford to buy a fleet of modern new jets that are more fuel efficient and comfortable for passengers. The company will quickly lose competitiveness against forward-looking rivals that are willing to invest money to make money. So it is with education. Australians are being told the federal government cannot afford the cost of a needs-based school funding system and of a demand-driven higher education system – ensuring as a nation we lose competitiveness against our forward-looking rivals in Asia and beyond. Yet the government seems willing to spare no expense in keeping almost all existing tax shelters wide open. 

In embarking upon the twin tasks of tax reform and budget repair, the Turnbull government’s insistence that tax revenue cannot rise from its current proportion of GDP has placed it into a straightjacket from which there is no escape. In a clash between ideology and the laws of arithmetic, the latter will win every time.

Day by day, political reality is ambushing the great tax debate of 2016. It will inexorably herd the government into a place where for policy reasons it should have been all along – sealing off holes in the income tax base to help fund reductions in the budget’s structural deficit without cutting social programs to pieces.

In the post-war era, Australia has held 49 royal commissions, including one into Aboriginal land rights, two into drugs, several into our national security agencies, five into trade unions and none into tax avoidance – well, not a planned one, anyway. One of the five trade union royal commissions – into the Painters and Dockers Union in the early 1980s – uncovered rampant tax avoidance implemented through the notorious bottom of the harbour schemes. More than three decades later, community trust in the tax system has again broken down.

The guiding principle should be that competition is good and more competition is better. For anyone wanting to participate in that debate, here's a piece of gratuitous advice from a former MP: conduct it without seeking to anticipate which way the cabinet and Senate might jump and leave the politics to the politicians. 

Evidence is mounting to support the proposition that the global economy has entered a period of secular stagnation.

Most Australians sitting down to Christmas dinner will reflect that since the change of Prime Minister in September Australia has taken a turn for the better.