Most Australians have been appalled by the cruelty shown to sheep on not one but five voyages from Fremantle to the Middle East. Yet these were not isolated incidents. Countless sheep have perished over several decades, but only occasionally has incriminating footage emerged. To his credit, new agriculture minister, David Littleproud, has ordered a review into the standards applying to such shipments. But how independent is the minister’s review?

The world has gone mad. Or at least Australia’s centre-right political parties and the Greens have gone mad. In scrambling to the right and the left in an effort to resolve their leadership tensions, the non-Labor parties are vacating the centre, where elections are won. Bill Shorten can position Labor as the party of the centre by demonstrating fiscal discipline, reassuring the electorate that Labor can manage the nation’s books. On this the election result will swing.

How refreshing it is that economists appear capable of having a debate about company tax rate cuts without resorting to political hyperbole. Well, almost. While alleging my analysis involves "nosedives" and "conspiracies", the government's preferred modeller, Chris Murphy at least traversed the theoretical economic arguments surrounding a cut in the company tax rate and acknowledges that I did too.

Last week the odds of the Senate passing the Turnbull government’s company tax cut dramatically shortened with One Nation coming on board. It is timely, then, to reflect on what it will mean not only for our economy but for the fabric of our society.

Ever since the Turnbull government announced its plan to cut the company tax rate and Labor pledged to oppose it for larger companies, business organisations have been calling on the opposition to come up with an alternative. On Tuesday, Labor did just that.

In grappling with Australia’s contemporary economic policy challenges, asking ‘what would Hawke and Keating do?’ should do no harm and might do some good. The modern methods of policy development seem so distantly removed from the successes of the 1980s and early 1990s. Fortunately, the recently aired two-part ABC documentary on the Hawke years offers some insights. Hopefully, so do my memoirs, The Boy from Baradine, relating my experience as an economic adviser in the Hawke office during the transformative economic reform period 1986-1990.

By definition, the global financial crisis and the great crash of 2009 were disorderly. Monetary authorities around the world deployed unprecedented measures to stimulate devastated economies, including cutting interest rates so far that they turned negative and injecting staggering amounts of liquidity through quantitative easing. Now, more than a decade after the crisis struck, the same authorities are beginning to unwind the stimulus. But will "The Great Unwinding" be orderly, or will it be disorderly, like the crisis it was designed to resolve?

The government’s insistence that Labor immediately endorse the Trans-Pacific Partnership minus the United States (TPP11), without knowing what’s in it, is an early reminder that politics will again dominate policy this year. Opposition leader Bill Shorten and shadow trade minister Jason Clare have suggested the pared-down agreement be subjected to Productivity Commission economic modelling. Treasurer Morrison has dismissed this idea as absurd. Yet he gleefully brandished BIS Shrapnel modelling he claimed was of the opposition’s negative gearing policy when, in fact, it had been conducted months before the policy’s release and on a different set of assumptions. In the treasurer’s world, consistency is the sign of a small mind.

Putting increased take-up of electric vehicles in Australia on the same level of disruption as the introduction of the iPhone, as Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg did on the weekend, is head-turning and welcome, but it needs to be backed by proactive government policies. High on the list should be support for the installation of fast-charging stations and an exemption of electric vehicles from the luxury car tax. As cost-effective carbon abatement policies, they should go straight to the pool room, to borrow a phrase from The Castle.

Get ready for lots of elections in 2018 – several by-elections, two state elections and, in all likelihood, a federal election. In election years, politicians go crazy, exaggerating even more wildly than usual, accusing their opponents of all manner of crimes and misdemeanours. With a large number of political careers on the line, all government policy thinking will be directed towards one goal – re-election. 

Judging by the recent pronouncements of federal ministers, politics seems set to dominate over policy again next year. If the government gets its way, the two by-elections of late-2017 will be followed by five more in the first half of 2018, four involving Labor MPs and the other an independent. The government will use its restored parliamentary majority to refer the five to the High Court while blocking the referral of any more of its own who remain under a citizenship cloud.

Last week’s civil debate in the Senate on same-sex marriage gives good people great heart that the Parliament can be better than it has been for most of the last seven years and much of its time since Federation. Rising above partisanship is easier said than done and, on issues on which the major parties have deeply different philosophies, it isn’t even desirable. But on matters where common ground could be found, it is time for a more collegiate approach to restore people’s faith in our democracy.

As the Turnbull government struggles with the citizenship fiasco, with more byelections in prospect for early 2018, and a looming party-room brawl over how to protect religious freedoms in the same-sex marriage legislation, now is the time to fill the policy vacuum by identifying a viable economic reform program for the new year.

Scoring political points against rivals is no substitute for governing. Yet this is the priority in Canberra: to try to damage opposition leader Bill Shorten. At a time when retail sales are feeble, wages growth is flat and private investment is faltering, the economic imperative should be to instil confidence through strong and decisive leadership. Instead, as if hooked on poker machines with a guaranteed losing result, the Turnbull government just can’t give up playing the game.

On Tuesday the treasurer will release a Productivity Commission report on the need for further economic reform. Judging from the terms of reference, the report will propose a new effort at federal-state reform. Yet public trust in our institutions – government, business and even non-governmental organisations – is collapsing. Any chance of a new round of socially desirable economic reform will rest on rebuilding the public's trust in our institutions.

Retail sales figures released last week add weight to my warnings as far back as 2014 that the Australian economy is a house of cards. The 2014 federal budget assumed consumers would dramatically increase their spending while real wages stagnated or fell. It predicted that home owners would spend up big on the back of their increased wealth from rising house prices. That hasn't happened and now, with house prices easing, consumers have become downright gloomy. Pull the house-price card out and the whole economy can collapse. Such is the folly of orchestrating a housing boom as a substitute for an economic strategy.

Friendly pet shop parrots keep squawking about the need for a new economic reform program, but their effort is a cacophony; they can't agree on what reform is. In the absence of any such agreement, it is entirely unreasonable to expect governments to implement reform.

A terrible rift has opened up within the Coalition: some ministers are accusing Bill Shorten of being an East German socialist while others are just as adamant that he is the Cuban variety. But listen not to what the Turnbull government says; watch what it does. While the Prime Minister seeks to distract the public by accusing Shorten of socialism he is demonstrating socialist tendencies on a regular basis.

Amid the ongoing controversies about discrimination against same-sex couples wanting to marry and the operation of the racial discrimination act, it is astounding that a grievous form of discrimination against the majority of Australians is being allowed to persist without remedy. That’s right, you don’t need to be in a minority to endure discrimination, you just need to be a woman. In this day and age, it should be unacceptable that women’s retirement incomes on average are at least 20 per cent beneath those of men.