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.

Originally published in the Australian.

When Josh Frydenberg sat down with his G20 counterparts in Fukuoka, Japan, last weekend, they would have been briefed on the weakened state of our economy.

Originally published in the Canberra Times

The Logan Entertainment Centre is 1177 kilometres away from the Department of Finance building in Canberra. Late last year, it played host to ChangeFest, an important event that encourages and inspires place-based social change in communities like mine that experience entrenched pockets of disadvantage.

Originally published in the Canberra Times

A decade ago, a solar and battery system that relies on machine learning to make intelligent decisions to optimise energy use in people’s homes might have seemed like something straight out of science fiction.

Originally published in the Australian

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer to the riddle, often attributed to US president Abraham Lincoln, is, of course, four.