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Archived news for June 2009 | Recent news
Crisis? What crisis?
By now, we've all read the story, dozens of times. It goes like this: the financial crisis has brought down the Potemkin village of consumerism....
Profligate policies put us back in the firing line
World share markets took another nosedive this week triggered by the World Bank's publication of downbeat growth forecasts. For 2009, the World...
The real OzCar scandal
In a short book published in 1944 and titled Bureaucracy, one of the godfathers of "neo-liberalism", the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises,...
Australian authors on Clown Street over book prices
Tim Winton is the master of fiction. But his latest tirades prove he doesn't understand when reality kicks in. Last week Winton won a fourth Miles...
Automotive welfare
Just what is it about governments and cars? The political fallout from the OzCar affair continues unabated. The opposition has raised questions...
Local councils become instrument of nanny state
There is something intensely irritating about many modern-day local councils. Once upon a time citizens looked to the local council to provide a...
Stimulus (n): a huge sum of money spent on any old crap
What doesn't count as economic stimulus? Or, if we are to use the more formal term, is there any spending Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wouldn't...
Budget built on a loose foundation of beach sand
The past 12 months have been a time of Budget pain for Queenslanders, and the 2009-10 Budget continues the bad fiscal run. A year ago the Bligh...
Infrastructure spending unlikely to steer us out of doldrums
Over the past few weeks, federal government ministers have congregated in front of a selection of 35,000 construction sites around the country....
Red tape excess holds back State's progress
The Western Australian economy might be reeling from the impact of the global financial crisis and retreating commodities boom, but not everything...