The Australian Financial Review’s 2023 Business Summit carried the theme of “crunch time for prosperity” as the inflation outbreak and rising interest rates squeezed household budgets. The urgent proposition of the Aspiration, Growth and Security theme of the 2024That requires aspiration to be restored at the centre of the nation’s politics to achieve the growth and prosperity needed to secure the nation’s place in a more threatening world.
The jobless rate is edging back up above 4 per cent. Australia’s resource-based “green superpower” hopes have been set back by the global nickel bust and bear lithium market. Our biggest export market, China, is struggling to reboot its post-COVID economy.While war continues to rage in Ukraine, the gruesome conflict in the Middle East has now spread to the Red Sea.
The truth is that there has been no major enduring, productivity-enhancing economic reform since the Howard-Costello GST package more than two decades ago.