Originally published by InQueensland.

A week before the Federal Budget I was in a Cairns coffee shop listening to Troy, a local business owner and employer, despair about Scott Morrison and the Federal LNP’s decision to start unwinding their support in the local economy.

Originally published by InQueensland.

There is rarely a single thing that turns an election; infrequently one defining insight into our leaders.  Campaigns are won on the accumulation of effort and perceptions building towards the decision voters make in a cramped cardboard booth holding a little stubby pencil.

Originally published by InQueensland.

When the Allman family laid the cornerstone for Warwick’s Criterion Hotel in 1917, Australia was on the cusp of what could be described as our first nationwide domestic disaster. Not long after, the Spanish flu pandemic would strike a nation still processing the trauma and loss of the First World War.

Originally published in the Australian Financial Review

In boardrooms right around Australia, well before most people had heard of the novel coronavirus, and now in Zoom rooms throughout the crisis itself, one issue has come up almost every time: our country’s longstanding energy policy paralysis and its consequences for business costs and investor certainty.

Originally published in the Australian

New numbers this month confirmed what most Australians knew — Australia has entered a recession and, with that, our remarkable run of three decades of uninterrupted growth has ended. This unparalleled period of continuous growth, which was set up by Labor and defended by Labor when it was last most at risk, has ended under the Liberals.

Originally published on the Guardian.

“We are all in this together” is more than a matter of saying we are all at risk from coronavirus, or that we all have a responsibility to follow the rules – we are, and we do. We are all in this together is also about what happens next. It’s about the Australia we want to live in when life is normal again.

Originally published in the Courier Mail

Our state’s home to some of the world’s premier tourist destinations but the empty cafes, half-full pubs, cut-price seafood and For Lease signs along the main drags of Cairns and Townsville tell a troubling story of local economies hit hard by the coronavirus.

Originally published in the Australian Financial Review

Already this summer’s devastating fires have cost 29 lives, almost 3,000 homes and around one billion animals. That’s before we get to all the other personal, social, environmental and economic costs including the psychological and physical harm, damage to infrastructure and other assets, disruption to essential services and effects on regional and national economies.

Originally published in the Australian

News this month that unemployment has risen, wages growth has slowed and consumer confidence has collapsed is a reminder that too many new pieces of economic data are telling the same disappointing story.

Originally published in the Australian. 

For three decades compulsory superannuation has afforded Australians the best chance of simultaneously providing a decent retirement for us all while building a fighting fund of capital for our nation to invest in its own future.