While the Liberals look down rabbit holes like crime and refugees, Labor plans to claim vindication on economic policy.

The central bank is at great risk of overshooting its policy settings into higher unemployment and it is workers and small business who will cop it.

Except for Malcolm Turnbull, Liberal leaders have always scuppered tax overhauls that did not suit the direct interests of them and their outriders. 

In all the questions and comments following the announcement of my review of the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct between the major supermarkets and their suppliers, one was barely mentioned: If the review succeeds in getting a better deal for suppliers, won’t that necessarily force up prices for shoppers? The answer is no.

Political pundits are predicting a poor year for the Albanese government, but circumstances, serendipity and strategy suggest a different story. Who will be right?

A rational decarbonising energy policy offers a middle path between the absolutists and the denialists.

Neoliberalist theory and practice went so horribly wrong because governments that put their faith in markets forgot one word – competition.

As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese prepares to travel to San Francisco for the annual APEC leaders’ meeting, Australia can take a leading role in shaping the agenda for APEC 2024. An APEC agreement to digitise and streamline customs and quarantine clearance procedures can be the modern-day equivalent of the successful tariff reductions of the last three decades.

In a troubled world, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is using two overseas visits to strengthen Australia’s ties with rival superpowers, the US and China. While geostrategic differences will remain, a philosophy is available to bring all nations together – the philosophy of free trade.

Tuesday’s minutes of the Reserve Bank board’s October meeting provide a candid account of the deliberations led by its new governor, Michele Bullock, that resulted in a further pause in the cash rate. But they also highlight the risk that the board will lose its nerve and needlessly hike interest rates even further.

Soon the Australian people will have decided the referendum on the Voice. Media coverage thereafter will be dominated by what the result means for the nation. But most Australians will want the government to switch to dealing with the cost of living, the housing divide, and the energy transition.

The US-China trade war has triggered the start of a decoupling process between the two rival superpowers that is spreading to countries aligned with them. Reputable middle powers such as Australia must resist, and instead work on new approaches to liberalising regional and global trade.

The Productivity Commission estimates that productivity growth has been responsible for almost all the increase in Australia’s GDP per person since Federation. Yet after the worst decade of productivity performance in 60 years to 2020, productivity growth has declined even further in the past three years. It is little surprise, then, that the need for improved productivity growth in coming decades was signalled as a central tenet of Treasury’s recent Intergenerational Report.

This week’s resumption of the Australia-China High Level Dialogue is a further opportunity to stabilise and strengthen the relationship between our two countries. Nothing is lost and much can be gained by working with China to find common ground on issues relating to trade, investment, education and decarbonisation.

Fifteen years ago, Ross Garnaut described policy to deal with climate change as a diabolical problem. As the Albanese Labor government and the Labor-dominated state and territory governments grapple with emission reductions, decarbonisation policy dilemmas have become even more complex, more diabolical.

Australia has an opportunity to develop and share a simplified trade system that could be the new-generation equivalent of tariff reductions in the pursuit of free and open trade.

It is now unarguable that the Reserve Bank’s dubious economic models are driving its monetary policy decisions. Chillingly, if its models are wrong, so have been and will be its decisions on interest rates.

Here we go again: a chorus of economists and other critics calling for governments to increase the nation’s productivity growth. It’s a familiar cry but just as lacking in feasible government policy prescriptions as it has ever been.

Australia does not have to stand by helplessly while superpower tensions wreck the rules-based system of trade. There are things that like-minded allies can do.

It is an honour to have been asked to deliver the Stan Kelly lecture. Not because I knew Stan Kelly, but because I support his worldly philosophy – his advocacy of tariff reductions and open trade.