Beyond the Castle-like “vibe of the thing” it’s important to examine the material benefits China enjoys from its status and the damage it is inflicting on our two countries and the rest of the developed world.

A young professional woman who has left work to have children is penalised heavily when seeking to resume her career. Australia couldn’t have designed a more inequitable tax and transfer system for working mothers if we tried. 

Depending on how deeply the rivers of gold are flowing from China, the various policy options open to the government might put the political promise of a budget surplus at risk. But pursuing a surplus at the cost of jobs and wages would have its own political consequences and is likely to be economically irresponsible.

Government promises of lower electricity prices cannot be kept through popular, ad hocinterventions that will elevate levels of sovereign risk, killing off the new investments in electricity generation the country desperately needs to offer globally competitive electricity prices

It’s a tragedy that Trump and Johnson, both promising to make their nations great again at the expense of others, have not. Or worse, that they know the lessons, but their vanity drives them to ignore history at the world’s peril.

China is challenging the global, rules-based strategic system, which it considers is stacked against it, while America is challenging the global, rules-based trading system, which it considers is stacked against it. We are witnessing history in the making.

Bob Hawke’s memorial service last week reminds us not only of what was achieved by Hawke, Keating and their cabinets in fashioning Australia’s open, competitive economy, but what could be achieved for the future by building upon their model. Speeches delivered by prime minister Scott Morrison and opposition leader Anthony Albanese signalled a level of bipartisan support for the Hawke-Keating model, but self-evidently the reforms of three decades ago cannot simply be repeated.

By now, Treasury officials will be making their way to meet the Treasurer, carrying their blue book – the incoming government brief. It will contain Treasury’s economic and fiscal forecasts. They will confirm a slowing economy and a deteriorating budget bottom line, making it challenging for the government to keep all its election promises.

Bob Hawke told me he had lived a full life, full of love, and had achieved everything he could. He was ready to go, but we will miss him terribly. The Glee Club will never be the same.

“ I soon learned his secret. Bob worked hard and played hard, while always separating the two. Well, almost always, an exception being those midweek horse races in which he had bet on what he called ‘a conveyance.’ “

Those demanding that their tax shelters remain open have their usual allies in the Liberal and National parties. But this time they are joined by the once-serious mainstream media, which demands economic reform in the national interest while opposing measures designed to achieve it.

Australia’s major business organisations complain about the damaging effects of a decade of climate wars. A re-elected Coalition government would continue to wage those wars as the rest of the world moved on to curb its emissions. As Malcolm Turnbull warned on the weekend, the absence of a predictable policy framework, including a mechanism such as the National Energy Guarantee, would result in both higher emissions and higher energy prices.

With the most recent national accounts revealing Australians on average are just $2.50 per week better off than seven years ago, we need to identify what can be done to lift wages on a sustainable basis without risking jobs. 

While the government boasts daily about its record on job creation, its message doesn’t resonate with the working Australians who were already in jobs when it took office in 2013. For every unemployed person back then 17 were in work. It seems the government expects the already employed to be grateful they still have a job.

Amid the myriad political scandals of the recent parliamentary sitting fortnight, a report by the IMF on prospects for the Australian economy was released to a distracted Canberra press gallery. Among the IMF’s many economic projections was one measuring the material living standards of Australians. It received no coverage whatsoever. Yet in that official projection lays Australia’s economic challenge and the Morrison government’s immediate political challenge.