More gas exploration, pipelines, or imports are needed if the destruction of more swathes of Australian manufacturing is to be avoided.

Over the holiday period, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will be reflecting upon how to revive his standing with the Australian people and, with it, the electoral fortunes of his government. He will have no shortage of advice urging him to shift further to the right to appease his internal detractors and conservative media critics. The hard right is demanding he use the remnants of his popularity to implement their unpopular policies.

Monday's fiscal update confirms the Federal Parliament is not serious about retaining Australia's coveted AAA credit rating. Blaming Labor is no more a credible government plan to return the budget to surplus than is Labor's criticism of the prospective loss of our credit rating while refusing to countenance further spending reductions to retain it. While the three ratings agencies have confirmed their AAA rating for Australia, not much needs to go wrong before it is again at risk.

Growth is feeble, wages are flat, investment has fallen off a cliff, the budget is a mess and the car industry is shutting down, but apart from that the economy is doing just fine. Australia has always had a two-speed economy, with some parts hurtling ahead while others struggle in the slow lane. But now the two Australias comprise the fast-growing big cities of Sydney, Melbourne and to a lesser extent Brisbane, and the lagging regions. And regional Australians are disillusioned and angry about it – fertile ground for One Nation's nationalistic, protectionist policy prescriptions. It's time to get the band back together. Yes, it's time for a reconvened National Reform Summit.

Listen to the audio here: http://www.2gb.com/audioplayer/222166

Head over to http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/content/s4581599.htm for the audio.

What a spectacle: the government hurling abuse at Opposition Leader Bill Shorten for touring regional Queensland to announce that a Labor government would tighten the foreign work-visa system, only to reveal it has spent the last two months working on tightening the same system.

Last week’s debacle over guns for votes demonstrates the folly of the Coalition trying to govern with the support of nine out of 11 Senate crossbenchers. At a time when the Turnbull government should have been concentrating on a strategy for budget repair it was developing a political strategy that succeeded only in portraying it as a truckload of shotgun-toting yahoos hunting for feral pigs. 

As the blame game over the closure of Australia’s automobile assembly industry shifts into overdrive, we must learn the lessons of the history of the Australian manufacturing sector lest it be repeated. At one time or another, Australia has had at least 11 international auto assembly companies producing vehicles here. Not one has survived despite receiving billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies and tariff protection.

Amid more dark warnings from former central bankers and treasury secretaries about the need to rein in the budget deficit, Canberra’s spring session enjoyed a little ray of sunshine when parliament passed an omnibus savings bill on September 16. As suggested in these pages (“Budget bilateralism is the only way”, August 1), the Coalition and Labor got together and negotiated a set of measures to achieve savings of more than $6 billion over the four-year budget period. It’s an encouraging start but in the context of projected accumulated deficits of $84 billion, much more needs to be done. Whether the government likes it or not, further progress will require a combination of savings and revenue measures. 

In describing the inevitability of a disastrous ending to the insertion of an effects test into the competition laws, it is wise to be mindful of George Orwell’s advice never to use a cliché that commonly appears in print. But he didn’t say not to mangle two clichés into one, so here goes: the effects test is the elephant in the trainwreck. A Coalition government, knowing the effects test will not live up to the promises made to small business supporters, will amend it when it fails to protect them from competition. But it will take a decade for this trainwreck to come to its screeching end. 

It's hard not to feel that the new parliament will be defined by four Ps: political posturing and policy paralysis.

Australia's Reserve Bank is fast running out of monetary ammunition as it follows other central banks in lowering official interest rates towards zero. What happens, then, if our economy is hit by a new external shock of the magnitude of the Global Financial Crisis? What tools are available in the macroeconomic kitbag to help save us from recession? We should be designing them now instead of waiting for a crisis.

Now that the last votes have been counted, leaving the Coalition with the thinnest of majorities, it’s time for the Turnbull government to confront the budget’s structural deficit in earnest. Few independent economists consider the forecast pathway back to surplus laid out in this year’s budget papers to be credible. But with the new Senate likely to be at least as unruly as the last, how will the government get the necessary budget repair measures through the parliament? 

Greetings from Birmingham, Alabama, where few residents have heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and even fewer would consider it beneficial to their livelihoods. Yet their congressional representatives will be asked to pass a bill to bring it into law. Herein lies the problem for the agreement’s architects and advocates. The World Bank estimates that by 2030 the total effect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on US gross domestic product will be just 0.4 per cent. Not 0.4 per cent per annum but a total of 0.4 per cent after 15 years. It’s a rounding error and the American people instinctively know it. The estimated benefit for Australia is a tiny 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product.

A government of national unity might be too ambitious, but if Malcolm Turnbull is eventually sworn in again as prime minister he could do a lot worse than negotiate with Labor on the passage of important legislation. The alternative is to seek the agreement of up to six cross-benchers in the House of Representatives and 13 in the Senate, including the Greens on the left and One Nation on the nationalist right.

On these pages on election eve I warned soft voters were so disenchanted with ‘big politics’ that they would prefer a third candidate, and when voters rage against the machine, the incumbent is in the greater danger. That’s how the election panned out. Voters resoundingly rejected Malcolm Turnbull’s plea for the stability of a decisive Coalition victory, judging that neither the Coalition nor Labor had done enough to earn their trust.

In this last week of the election campaign, when the picture should be clearer, I have been asked by numerous inquisitors who I think will win on Saturday: Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten. Having been directly involved in more than 10 federal and state election campaigns, my considered response after examining the polls and the betting is: I don't know. While the sheer size of the Coalition's majority makes it favourite, in all walks of life and in all sports, favourites get beaten.