Joshi

Peter Dutton has vowed to cut overall government spending if elected to government, reiterating his plans to scale back the public service. 

Labor has called on the opposition leader to reveal the details of his plan, warning that fewer public servants would mean longer wait times to access services.

Mr Dutton said he would not detail exactly where the spending cuts would come from until after the federal election.

Have you ever walked into an outlet like OPSM, Specsavers, Bailey Nelson, or Laubman & Pank for an eye test and left feeling like you’d been gently pressured into spending $500 on a pair of glasses?

...

[B]osses impose onto optometrists a variety of targets – whether its “converting” eye tests into sales or increasing rates of certain types of tests.

This type of pressure is reportedly causing many optometrists “significant moral distress” and some are starting to fight back.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is among many who are condemning the Coalition’s plan to slash 36,000 public service jobs if it wins the federal election. 

The ACTU said on February 25 the cuts would mean one in five public sector workers would be out of their job, badly affecting services from pensions and veterans’ payments, to the operation of regional weather stations.

In fact, virtually all significant economic indicators except gross domestic product (GDP) growth show Australia’s economy is among the world’s best-performed.

• record employment growth;
• record employment to population ratio at 64.6%;
• record job participation at 67.3%;
• inflation in the lower half of the RBA’s optimum band;
• wages growth above inflation for five straight quarters;
• median wealth per adult as the second highest in the world;
• ASX200 above 8,000 since last September;
• poverty and homelessness reducing, according to the Productivity Commission;
• emergency calls to the National Debt Helpline declining,
• record high new car sales in 2024;
• record sales of new private aircraft;
• overseas trips in 2024 at a new record high of 11.6 million;
• enrolments in fee-paying private schools at an all-time high;
• record manufacturing gross profits last financial year (2023-24) at $47.4 billion;
• record construction profits last year, at $31.1 billion;
• record profits in several other sectors;
• household spending at a record high.

The report’s central conclusions – rejected by the Coalition – are relatively unsurprising. It found nuclear power would be far more expensive than the projected path of shifting to mostly renewable energy. And delivering nuclear generation before the mid-2040s will be extremely challenging.

The Reserve Bank’s behaviour last week can only be described as bizarre. It’s a sign that it’s lost its bearings and isn’t sure what’s happening in the economy or where it’s headed. What has caused its befuddlement? Our unexpected return to near full employment.

Trumpism, whether full-strength or in the watered-down form seen in Australia, is not an answer to the failure of neoliberalism. But until centre-left parties can escape the mental prison built by decades of soft neoliberalism, it is what we are likely to get.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26355302

Includes a variety of statistics on the size, time, and nature of massacres, as well as an interactive map

As usual, 26 January has been marked by protests, denunciations of those protests, and further iterations. Even apart from the fact that it marks an invasion, the foundation of a colony that later became one of Australia’s states isn’t much of a basis for a national day.

Albo supports shifting from a PM called election within a 3 year term to a 4 year term of fixed length.

"If you've got a three-year cycle, in practice, that often means that you really only have a shorter window of perhaps a couple of years to bring about substantial reform, by which time you're looking at the next election," he said.

Having a fixed term of parliament would remove the ability for prime ministers to call early elections, as well, which typically favour the incumbent government.

Australia’s economy has gone from close to the worst-managed in the OECD, according to data from the IMF, the UBS, the World Bank, the OECD, Trading Economics and elsewhere, to near the top today.

The ABC’s unawareness of these major shifts is an indictment of its inability to monitor critical data.