NASA took clunkiness to a whole new level with the release of the Artemis 2 tracker app. The glitches app providers dismissed as “synchronisation and accuracy issues” made space buffs nervous. If NASA couldn’t stop some simple software from crashing, how could it be entrusted with the lives four astronauts on the dark side of the moon?

So, it was something of a relief to watch the Orion capsule’s parachute descent into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego in April, perfectly in sync with the schedule set at ignition nine days, 23 hours, and 7 minutes earlier.

After NASA’s recent misadventures into climate science, it had returned to its founding mission as a space pioneer, to boldly go where no man has gone before. There is no need to apologise for the split infinitive - arguably the most famous in the English language - nor accede to claims of patriarchal bias in the use of the word “man”. The prickly generation’s habit of obsessing over historical semantic grievances is a symptom of the very introspection that has curbed our appetite for space exploration.

The splashdown of the Orion after what appeared to be a near-perfect mission was a triumphant return to the Space Age after a gap of almost 54 years. NASA remains confident it will be able to return people to the moon in 2028, almost six decades after Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module and took the first giant step for mankind.

After years of ho-hum space travel in which the space rocket was downgraded to a mere shuttle carrying commuters on their way to an orbiting office, the Artemis 2 mission marked a return of the rocket men.

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Day 22 of the operation to salvage Jim Chalmers’ Budget gave Katy Gallagher her chance to prove her worth as Finance Minister.

She squandered it, stonewalling the Senate Economics Committee with the weaponised indifference of a surly teenager. Like Pauline Hanson, a serial absentee from Senate committees, she clearly didn’t want to be there. Unlike Hanson, however, she had no choice.

Matt Canavan began with an easy question: “What elements in your budget help increase productivity?”

Gallagher rolled her eyes dismissively. “There is a glossy A4 there,” she said. “There are 14, ah, 16 different measures. I was wondering whether or not you had read it?”

Gallagher is a former career public servant who climbed through the ranks to become a career politician.

Canavan, by contrast, is an intellectual policy wonk disguised as a straight-talking Queenslander, which makes him a particularly dangerous opponent for an unserious government led by a dissembling prime minister with little interest in economics.

Labor’s best hope is that no one cares about productivity anymore, that the TikTokification of the policy debate has robbed the word of any meaning it once had. Reform is anything you say it is, neither more nor less.

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Three weeks ago, Jim Chalmers was putting the final touches on what he evidently believed was a rather good Budget.

His post-Budget Press Club remarks began with a litany of gratitude reminiscent of the Oscars. Family, office staff, and Treasury officials thanked by name, including Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson, a public servant with a bigger salary than the Prime Minister.

Last week, Wilkinson returned the favour by lavishing praise on the fiscal brilliance and reforming flair in Chalmers’ Budget.

People were “understandably” sensitive about paying more tax. “But revenue needs to be raised from somewhere,” she said.

Wilkinson’s insensitive remark invites comparisons with “Let them eat cake”, the phrase attributed to Marie Antoinette that serves as shorthand for an elite that completely misunderstands the practical realities facing ordinary people.

Versailles in the 18^th century had more than a passing resemblance to contemporary Canberra, albeit with better furniture: a self-contained world of courtiers, officials and insiders, largely insulated from the lives of the people.

Wilkinson, like Chalmers, has risen to the top of their respective trees without ever staring at a cashflow spreadsheet and worrying how they’re going to settle payroll in a month, cover the cost of rising inputs, or find a lazy $20,000 to settle a spurious, unfair dismissal claim by a disgruntled former employee.

Revenue needs to come from somewhere if Wilkinson and her colleagues are to be spared the indignity of travelling in economy class, accept a cut in their

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Thanks to the efficiency of modern logistic chains, the parts to fix a damaged suspension can be ordered, dispatched, and fitted to your car in as little as 24 hours.

Filling in the pothole that trashed the suspension in the first place, however, will take somewhat longer, particularly in Victoria, where the crumbling tarmac has joined the list of inditements the Allen Labor government faces at the November election.

The digital revolution, which has transformed the delivery of goods and services, contrasts starkly with the growing incompetence of government.

Adam Smith would have marveled at the silicon chips that process millions of tiny signals emerging naturally from voluntary exchange in a competitive market.

Governments, by contrast, appear clunky, expensive and inefficient.

A private company that consistently frustrates customers rapidly loses market share. Yet a government department can remain dysfunctional for years without any threat to its funding.

One Nation thrives on the festering resentment towards the bureaucratic ineptitude of technocratic government and the unbearable arrogance of those who run it. The fury of populist movement which is gathering steam across the Western world is not directed at any particular party, but at the rotten system as a whole.

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History will tell if this year’s Budget is “the most important and ambitious in decades”, as Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on Budget night.

Thanks to Newspoll, we do know it was the least popular since John Dawkins’ 1993 tax-and-spend extravaganza, the budget that started Paul Keating’s rapid decline from hero to zero in the space of three years.

Yet if Chalmers’ fourth Budget merits a place in history, it won’t be because of its broken tax promises, fiscal desperation or for setting a new world record for the velocity of a falling lead balloon. It will be as the moment Australia reached peak net zero, the Budget in which the government gave up the foolish pursuit of a fossil-fuel free economy, and the long climb back to political and economic sanity began.

For those paying attention to the engineers - the people whose job is to apply science as opposed to dreaming it up - net zero was a non-starter from day one. The political class has taken longer to come to terms with the technical impossibility of ending global greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. Yet to the extent that the Treasurer’s annual Budget address remains a statement of a government’s priorities - rather than half an hour of hot air - Chalmers has confirmed that the political appeal of net-zero is over, even as the spending continues on multi-billion dollar legacy projects. Institutional rigidity means a policy error of this size takes longer to reverse than we might hope.

The narrative of Australia as an emerging green energy superpower, underpinned by veiled references to catastrophic global warming, was a consistent thread in Chalmers’ first four budgets.

He embellished Labor’s green credentials by appending multi-billion-dollar price tags to every spending measure.

In 2022, he announced “a $20 billion fund for energy transmission,” $800 million to cut taxes on electric cars, a national electric vehicle charging network and hydrogen refuelling stations on major highways, and subsidies for household batteries.

By the time of his second budget in May 2023, households had received at least 3 sets of power bills under Labor and a fourth was on its way. The Treasurer’s focus shifted accordingly to provide $3 billion in direct energy bill relief for households and small businesses, and $1 billion to subsidise household double-glazing and solar panel installations.

Yet the utopian vision of a clean, green Australia exporting renewable energy to benighted continents starved of wind and sun was very much alive. Chalmers announced that $2 billion would be pumped into the Hydrogen Headstart program to make Australia a world leader in producing and exporting green hydrogen. Another $4 billion was announced to realise Australia’s future as a renewable energy superpower, bringing total investment to more than $40 billion.

A year later, in his third budget, Chalmer’s opened the coffers again, announcing $3.5 billion in energy bill relief since power prices had still not begun to come down in line with Albanese’s election promise.

That little matter out of the way, Chalmers got into the big numbers: $22.7 billion for the clean energy-focused Future Made in Australia, $13.7 billion in production tax incentives for green hydrogen and processed critical minerals, $520 million “to deepen net zero trade and engagement with our region” (whatever that might mean), $625 million to help farmers and rural communities reduce emissions and better prepare for climate change and drought, $500 million in skills training in priority industries like clean energy.

In March 2025, with an election less than two months away, the subsidy ladle was pulled out of the drawer again, this time to distribute a relatively modest $1.5 billion to ease the cost-of-living squeeze from power bills.

It brought the government’s total spending on power bill subsidies to $8 billion in its first term. Yet not even this expensive charade of showering taxpayers with their own money could stop power bills rising. Albanese’s promise that average household power bills would fall by $275 was among the more egregious unfulfilled commitments of his first term.

Even so, the Treasurer was not yet ready to walk away from the fantasy of the great energy transition from hydrocarbons to wind, solar and hydro, or abandon the economic nonsense behind it. By now, it was abundantly clear that the capital investment alone would amount to hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

The technological path had become considerably less certain in the three years since the last election. The costs of green hydrogen and steel were commercial non-starters. Offshore wind was becoming too expensive for any corporate investor to consider. Transmission lines were rising in cost, and community opposition was growing. The boring machines for Snowy Hydro 2 had come to a stop.

Yet, with the Greens breathing down their necks, there was a strong political incentive to keep the green fantasy alive, at least until after the election.

Fast forward to this month’s Budget speech, the first for 14 months, and the first of Labor’s second term.

While attention was fixed on Labor’s audacious broken promises on Capital Gains Tax, negative gearing and trusts, the passing references to climate change and net zero were barely noticed.

In four years, action on climate change had been demoted from “the generational and economic imperative” that was the centrepiece of Chalmers’ first Budget address, to a mere footnote in his fifth.

The green boondoggles loomed large in a detailed breakdown of government spending, but most of it has been shifted off-budget.

How much? We can only guess, since the government has refused to cost the future liability of guaranteeing returns to renewable energy corporations - many, if not most, of them headquartered overseas, incidentally - that Chris Bowen has been obliged to put on the table to put projects over the line.

Chalmers’ silence in the Budget speech is further evidence that Labor is dumping, or at the very least watering down, its green energy rhetoric as quickly as it decently can. It knows that net zero has become poison among the majority of voters. At the Farrer by-election, for example, all four candidates in the Sky News pub debate - One Nation, Liberal, National and even independent Michelle Millthorpe told Paul Murray they were opposed to Net Zero. Millthorpe’s $1 million campaign was funded in part by the same renewable energy interests backing the teals.

Meanwhile, the green left movement is increasingly ignoring the green bit and concentrating on moving to the left. The new cause-”from the river to the sea”-is net zero with an anti-Semitic twist. The new goal is not the elimination of carbon emissions, but Israel, the Jewish homeland established in the wake of the Holocaust, rather than carbon emissions.

It is tempting to rejoice in the broken promises of an 82 per cent clean energy grid by 2030, and net zero emissions by 2050.

Yet celebration is a little premature. Commitments already locked in will drain countless billions from government finances for at least the next decade. Reckless government commitments to underwrite risky renewable energy investments, most of which are hidden from public scrutiny, could cost us even more.

Albanese - probably the most stubborn and disingenuous prime minister since Federation - will never admit he was wrong on anything, let alone the climate craze in which Labor has invested heavily for almost 20 years Rudd declared global warming to be the greatest moral and economic challenge of the decade.

It will take a change of government to finally put this to bed and begin the expensive and lengthy job of repairing the damage, by reversing government policy to support coal, gas and nuclear - things that actually work, rather than things that appeal to the daft ideological fantasies of the intellectual left.

Last year’s UK Supreme Court ruling that sex means biological sex received wide coverage in Australia, raising hopes that the tide of transgender adventurism may have turned. The optimism was crushed last week by a ruling in the Australian Federal Court that might have come straight from the mouth of Humpty Dumpty. ‘When I use a word’, Humpty told Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’.

The case of Giggle for Girls Limited vs Roxanne Tickle is a contest over the meaning of words. The plaintiff, Roxanne Tickle, was born male. He alleges unlawful discrimination because he claims to be an actual woman who was excluded from an online platform reserved for females. The plaintiff, Giggle for Girls founder Sall Grover, holds that Tickle cannot become a woman simply by declaring himself to be one. She also holds that Giggle for Girls’ defining purpose – to serve as an online haven for women – would not be served if biological men were allowed in.

She barred Tickle from the site after examining a picture he had submitted and concluding he was a biological male. Based on Tickle’s appearance, the conclusion was not difficult to draw. Yet the court holds that judging a protected person’s identity from their appearance is also in conflict with the law.

Tickle would have lacked standing under Australia’s sex-discrimination laws in their original form. The case relies on an amendment that slipped through parliament in 2013, during the dying days of Julia Gillard’s Labor government. The amendment, redefining womanhood as a question of gender identity, received almost no media coverage. It was overshadowed by the drama of Australia’s first female prime minister fighting for political survival.

The case has brought the tangled muddle of competing claims to a head. The right of transgender people to be free of discrimination has trumped the right of biological women to preserve a safe space. In different circumstances, common sense might apply. This being a matter of law, however, common sense is irrelevant.

The greatest difficulty with the court’s reasoning lies not in its conclusion, but in the method by which it arrives there. The judgment abandons any attempt to ground words such as ‘woman’ and ‘female’ in objective reality. Instead, it insists that the terms be defined by evolving cultural norms, then seeks to adjudicate what those norms might be.

In other words, the ‘facts’ upon which the decision relies are not empirically grounded. They are merely subjective assessments by judges who draw on previous legal opinions to judge societal norms and determine which forms of language are becoming institutionally orthodox.

The Federal Court cites a previous judgement that claims there is ‘a growing awareness in the community’ that a person can be described ‘by the word appropriate to the person’s psychological sex’. A woman is an adult female, another judgement concludes. Nevertheless, it continues, the terms woman and female are ‘generally understood in Australia today’ to include an adult female who ‘has harmonised psychological and anatomical sex’ by undertaking reassignment surgery.

Ordinarily, when courts speak of facts, we imagine evidence drawn from documents, fingerprints or blood stains, things capable of external verification. Yet here, the Federal Court expressly says the meaning of ordinary language is determined by judicial intuition about the direction of cultural change.

The difficulty is obvious. If the meaning of foundational social terms depends upon shifting perceptions of contemporary usage, then legal meaning becomes inherently unstable. It rests upon contested assessments of social consensus.

Different judges, drawn from different generations, classes or ideological milieus, may reach radically different conclusions about what society supposedly accepts. We can virtually guarantee that none of those assessments will accord with consensus between patrons in any pub in Australia or among the tuck-shop volunteers at a suburban public school.

When semantics are surrendered to judicial capture, the courts can quickly lose touch with the thinking of the ordinary reasonable person, hypothetical observer and the ordinary member of the public. The very intensity of contemporary disagreement over these questions certainly suggests the meanings are not nearly as settled as the court implies.

More fundamentally, the judgement collapses the distinction between social courtesy and behaviour that can be reasonably proscribed by law. Members of a civilised society may generally agree that transgender individuals should be treated with dignity and referred to in ways that minimise distress and conflict. It does not follow, however, that words describing biological categories can be hijacked to serve a different semantic purpose. The court blurs this distinction by treating evolving conventions of politeness and inclusion as determinants of ordinary meaning itself.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the judgment is the decision to increase damages because Grover publicly defended her position in strong and politically contentious terms. By doing so, the court imposes a chilling effect on political and philosophical debate, particularly on questions involving sex, gender and identity where social consensus remains unsettled. Once litigants face increased financial penalties for public commentary deemed hurtful or inflammatory, the boundary between compensating for harm and punishing dissent becomes difficult to discern.

The battle between Giggle and Tickle is not yet over. Grover has the option of appealing to the High Court, which she is inclined to do, providing she can secure the funding to run another expensive case. As things stand, the intellectual elite has the upper hand. Its greater rhetorical dexterity, access to platforms and institutional status confer advantages galore. Language can easily become a weapon to impose the elite’s peculiar vision on the rest of us without ever having to put it to a vote.

A High Court ruling in Giggle’s favour matters not just because it re-anchors law in common sense. It matters because objective meaning, legal certainty and due respect for ordinary public understanding are crucial to upholding the rule of law.

Legal rights and obligations must be determined by objective rules consistently applied rather than political favour or personal discretion.

It was billed as the economic reckoning of the century. In the event, it was pure political stagecraft. Class conflict was performed as theatre—a spectacle of pulled punches, chest-slapping, and an unresolved plot.

Every generation of socialists generates its preferred class enemy. Maoism found them in landlords and the blood-sucking running dogs of capitalism.

The Occupy Wall Street movement’s chosen villains were the one per cent, the billionaires, hedge-fund managers and oligarchic financiers allegedly responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

The Albanese government’s chosen moral antagonists are Australians who had the thrift and discipline to put aside portions of their after-tax income to save for retirement, hopefully with a little something left over for the kids.

The median wealth of Australians aged 55-65 - $877,000 in 2021-22 - may look high to a struggling graduate with a self-inflicted HECS debt.

As the return on three decades of compulsory superannuation payments and seemingly endless monthly mortgage payments, it is hardly excessive.

They have paid over a lifetime, and many of them are doing their best to address what the Treasurer calls intergenerational equity by chipping into their children’s mortgage deposits, helping with their grandchildren’s school fees, or unpaid childcare.

Australians aged 55-59 are the nation’s largest philanthropists, while the over-75s are the most generous, donating an average of $4331 a year in 2020-21, four times the national average.

Perhaps the greatest contribution self-funded retirees will make to future generations is paying their own way in retirement. They reduce demand for public pensions, Medicare and government-funded aged care, thereby reducing the burden on taxpayers.

These frugal, self-sacrificing, law-abiding Australians have been cast as the new class enemy by a Labor government searching for scapegoats for its own policy failures. Mum and Dad property investors are defamed in caricatures as grasping, selfish villains.

They are the mean older siblings of our childhoods, shuffling top-hatted figures around the Monopoly board, laying houses and hotels like landmines from Old Kent Road to Mayfair, greeting every bankruptcy with a smirk.

In Jim Chalmers’ imagination, the government is cast as the parent, confiscating cash and property titles and reallocating them to stop tears before bedtime.

As he’s discovering, the real economy, the one he makes a pretence of managing, is not a game governed by fixed rules. Alter one incentive and behaviour changes elsewhere. Unlike pieces on a board, human beings possess their own motives, strategies and reactions, each adjustment setting off chains of consequences no Treasury spreadsheet can entirely calculate.

That may be why Treasury has been so cautious in predicting the effect on the property market of the government’s changes to the taxation of capital gains and its removal of negative gearing concessions, sprung with little warning on Australians by a government that insisted only a year ago that such a move had been categorically ruled out.

Anecdotally, hints that changes were in the offing have already softened sectors of the property market. Residential property investors are questioning why on earth they should go through the pain and uncertainty of holding an asset that is time-consuming and expensive to manage when the potential returns can be slashed at a whim.

As Malcom Turnbull discovered at the 2016 election when he tried to tweak superannuation concessions, the effect of muted alterations to investment rules quickly spreads across other asset classes and to other cohorts of investors, as fear spreads that the government is scouting for other hollow logs.

It is impossible to tell where this flurry of activity in the asset markets leads. The secondary consequences of policy changes are seldom straightforward. Yet it is reasonable to forecast, as Treasury does, that there will be a net reduction in the stock of rental homes as landlords take flight forcing rental prices ups. That will be exacerbated by a reduction in the construction of dwellings for investors to buy because they will be less profitable to sell. As the attractiveness of the property market declines, it is unclear whether there will be a corresponding increase in houses on the market. Harry Triguboff, who has constructed more than 80,000 units on the eastern seaboard through his Meriton apartments group since the 1960s, thinks not. He says says looming tax changes will reduce apartment supply and push the economy further ­behind.

It catches Chalmers in a dilemma. Any claim that the government is making homes affordable is pure speculation. It must be balanced against the consequences of making rents less affordable, and for voters in the nation’s 2.8 million rental properties, that’s a big deal.

Hence, the Treasurer has moved cautiously, grandfathering many of the existing concessions and keeping them intact for investors in new-build property.

By doing so, Chalmers naively assumes new buildings will increase. That is unlikely, since the demand for new property is already high. The constraint is not demand, but the costs, red tape, and delays property developers encounter across the country.

At this point, Chalmers should have given up, telling us perhaps that he had come to a different viewpoint, different to the viewpoint he arrived at before, but consistent with the viewpoint he and the Prime Minister took to the last election.

Yet having declared intergenerational inequality to be one of the great injustices of our time, Chalmers feels compelled to press on. He has pledged to correct what he claims is an imbalance between the taxing of assets and income.

The scale of his difficulty is shown by the paltry size of the income tax cut he can deliver: $4.80 a week, or the price of a coffee or half a schooner of beer. Its fancy new name - the Working Australians Tax Offset - hardly helps. The reaction of most voters to WATO is likely to be “whatever”.

On the face of it, it seems incredible that Albanese and Chalmers were prepared to put their political reputation on the line for so little. Trust is a hard-won commodity in politics, yet Albanese seems willing to gamble it as rarely? as throwing chips on a roulette table.

He may yet win in an era when many voters, particularly young ones, gather their news from social media, a platform weak on context with a short attention span.

The breaking of an election commitment is bad enough. The most fraudulent element of this Budget, however, is that it will limit the horizons of the very cohort it purports to assist.

The tax incentives that allowed many older Australians to invest for a comfortable retirement have been denied to future generations.

They face the prospect of a smaller inheritance, a higher tax burden and fewer opportunities to accumulate wealth over their lifetimes.

Experience tells us that redistributing wealth does not make people rich. Their best hope is that they might be less poor than they otherwise might be, a paltry $250 less poor in 18 month’s time to be precise, a tax-cut that will have already been eroded by inflation.

Australia became one of the wealthiest societies on earth because previous generations built a broad property-owning democracy of homeowners, investors and self-funded retirees. The task of government should be to help future generations become rich themselves, not merely redistribute the diminishing spoils of those who already did.

On Friday, the Treasurer’s staff went hunting for credulous journalists armed with a back-of-the-envelope calculation that Angus Taylor’s plan to abolish bracket creep would “cost” $35 billion in its first four years.

They received an eager reception at the Sydney Morning Herald, where Taylor’s alleged black hole led the paper’s Budget coverage on Saturday.

The placement of the story at the bottom of page 20 reflected the genteel exhaustion of a once-respectable masthead. Its reporters can no longer muster the energy to challenge Jim Chalmers’ spin by asking the obvious question: if Taylor’s tax cuts impose a cost, who will be obliged to pay?

Not taxpayers, obviously. Indeed, they’ll have $22.5 billion more disposable income after four years on the Coalition’s figure, or $35 billion according to Labor.

The greatest cost will be borne by politicians, who will be forced to spend political capital by cutting spending or adding to the debt.

Taylor’s conservative critics have been urging him to release his inner mongrel. Well, now he has, by unleashing the boldest economic reform since the introduction of the GST.

By committing to index thresholds, Taylor has drawn attention to bracket creep: a scam that has reaped countless billions of dollars over the years by creaming off cost-of-living pay rises.

The stage is set for a stand-up fight along fundamental philosophical lines. fight between collectivists and classical liberals. In one corner are socialists like Albanese and Chalmers, who believe governments were put on earth to raise money and then spend it. They believe the state has a moral claim over private income.

In the other corner is the party of Robert Menzies, under a leader who passionately believes that individuals should receive the fullest possible reward for their labour and deserve the fruits of their investment.

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At the 2013 Tony Abbott landslide election, four out of five voters in Farrer voted for the Coalition or Labor. On Saturday, the old normal was flipped as four out of five cast their votes for none of the above. Released from the discipline of choosing the next prime minister, voters were free to indulge emotions normally suppressed and tell the political elite what they really think. The message, written so large it was visible from space, could be summarised in seven syllables: we’re sick of the lot of you.

The scale and deliberateness of the Farrer insurgency suggest this was more than a knee-jerk reaction to the resignation of a sitting party leader.

It was the clearest expression yet of the political realignment that has ended the political duopoly that has held since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944. That also happened in Albury, as it happens, where the party convened for the first time in an unassuming room above the Mates department store.

That too was a revolt against the elite of sorts. The real life of this nation, Menzies maintained, was not to be found in great luxury hotels, the so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the Union movement.

“It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised,” he said, “who see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.”

Nameless and unadvertised people filed through the gates of Jindera Public School on the suburban fringes of Albury at the weekend with a peculiar sense of purpose.

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Over coffee at the inaugural Aspire conference earlier this year, a former Howard government minister offered a challenge.

Could anyone point to a single economic metric in Australia that is improving?

Six weeks later, I’ve finally managed to find one in the OECD data on public pensions. At around 2.5 per cent of GDP, Australia spends less on government pensions than any other developed country.

In France, Italy and Greece spending is 15 per cent or more. Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Germany are all above the 10 per cent mark. The UK and US spend around 7 per cent and Canada 6 per cent.

Spending as a proportion of wealth is expected to increase in many countries as the population ages. In Australia, it is expected to decline still further to 2.1 per cent by 2050.

Increasing financial independence in retirement was bi-partisan policy from the 1980s until the early 2000s. In a July 1991 speech to the Australian Graduate School of Management, then Treasurer Paul Keating argued that compulsory superannuation would end “the absurd relationship ... with the political system deciding how they will live and under what conditions”.

A 12 per cent compulsory superannuation contribution guarantee would allow retirees “to maintain the dignity and independence each have enjoyed in their pre-retirement years”.

“It will make Australia a more equal place, a more egalitarian place and, hence, a more cohesive and happier place.”

This article was first published by the Menzies Research Centre. Register here to become an MRC Watercooler subscriber

Those who grow independently wealthy are not to be admired but taxed. The reform-minded Labor administration of 1983 to 1996, which embraced aspiration, now appears as a brief interlude in the narrative of socialism.

We are well and truly back to the politics Robert Menzies criticised in the 1940s where the votes of the thriftless are used to defeat the thrifty, a world where “the provision made by a man for his own retirement and old age is not half as sacrosanct as the provision the State would have made for him had he never saved for it at all”.

It is no coincidence that support for the Prime Minister is lowest among those with long-memories, the baby boomers and gen xers who remember the conditions under which most people retired in the 1990s and appreciate the difference today.

In 1990, between 85 and 90 per cent of retirees had to survive on full or part pension. A single pension allowance was around $150 a week, and $240 for couples or $360 and $575 adjusted for inflation. Pensioners had meagre assets outside equity in the family home.

Today, 36 per cent of retirees are self-funded. The reduction in the portion reliant on state pensions has made it possible to increase the pension level without increasing spending as a proportion of GDP.

The full single and couple pensions today — $31,223 per year for individuals and $47,070 for couples — are around 60 per cent more in real terms than in 1990.

Australia’s extraordinary expansion in household wealth over the past four decades was not an accident, nor merely the result of a speculative property boom. It was the product of deliberate institutional reforms that broadened capital ownership, encouraged long‑term saving, stabilised the economy and enabled ordinary households to accumulate assets at scale.

The language of “intergenerational inequality” implies that wealth accumulation by one generation necessarily impoverishes the next. It reflects a false zero‑sum understanding of economics, assuming wealth is fixed rather than created.

Australia’s experience since the 1980s suggests the opposite: mass household wealth can expand dramatically when economic institutions encourage productivity, saving, investment and asset ownership.

The real policy challenge is not how future generations reclaim existing wealth through redistribution, but how Australia recreates the conditions under which ordinary future generations can become wealthy themselves.

Their reforms differed in emphasis and political language, but together they built a wealth‑creating economic architecture.

The Hawke–Keating reforms focused on floating the Australian dollar, financial deregulation, tariff reductions, enterprise bargaining, inflation control, and compulsory superannuation. The stated goals were productivity, competitiveness, higher living standards and national savings. Yet the long‑term effect was much broader: ordinary households gained access to rising incomes, cheaper capital, deep investment markets and retirement assets.

Compulsory superannuation was particularly transformative. Before superannuation became universal, financial asset ownership outside a narrow affluent class was limited. The superannuation guarantee changed this fundamentally by converting part of wage income into long‑term invested capital.

It was one of the largest expansions of mass capital ownership in modern history. Millions of ordinary Australians thereby became indirect owners of banks, infrastructure, mining companies and global equity markets.

John Howard and Peter Costello consolidated this model through fiscal discipline, tax reform, private health incentives and support for asset ownership. Their language emphasised aspiration, self‑reliance and reward for effort. The implicit social contract became simple: Australians who worked, saved, bought homes and invested should be able to accumulate capital and economic security.

It is true that younger Australians face high housing costs and delayed asset accumulation. But it does not follow that wealth growth itself is the problem. Nor does it follow that one generation’s wealth necessarily prevents another generation from becoming wealthy.

Australia’s household wealth boom was not simply the transfer of a fixed stock of assets from young to old. It reflected rising productivity, expanding superannuation balances, growing participation in capital markets, and decades of uninterrupted economic growth.

There were public as well as private benefits. The capital stock was deepened and fewer demands were placed on the state. Every self-funded retiree is one less pension recipient future generations of taxpayers will be obliged to fund.

Historically, societies become more stable and prosperous when ordinary citizens own capital. Home ownership, retirement savings and long‑term investment create independence, resilience and reduced dependence on the state. Australia’s reform era expanded these forms of ownership dramatically.

Australia consistently ranks among the world’s highest countries for median household wealth. Median wealth matters because it measures the financial position of ordinary households rather than the fortunes of a tiny elite.

A striking counterexample is Argentina. Like Australia, Argentina possessed abundant natural resources and began the 20th century as one of the world’s wealthiest societies. Yet repeated inflation crises, institutional instability, pension failures and capital destruction prevented the broad accumulation of household wealth.

Australia followed the opposite path with stable property rights, credible monetary policy, compulsory long‑term savings, strong banking institutions, and deep investment markets. The result was sustained expansion in both household and retirement wealth.

Until the late 1980s superannuation coverage was limited. Public servants, politicians and professionals enjoyed lucrative defined benefit schemes, but financial asset ownership among ordinary workers was comparatively low. Private retirement wealth remained relatively flat for much of Australia’s history.

The structural break occurred from the late 1980s into the 1990s with the introduction of compulsory superannuation. The superannuation guarantee systematically channelled a portion of wages into invested retirement assets. Combined with rising property values, economic growth and expanding financial markets, this caused retirement wealth to accelerate sharply.

Australia subsequently developed one of the world’s largest pension asset pools relative to population size. Retirement savings moved from being the preserve of a minority to becoming a mass national institution. This was not merely a market phenomenon. It was the consequence of deliberate institutional design.

The central lesson of the reform era is not that future generations must inherit wealth from previous ones. It is that public policy can create the conditions under which ordinary households build wealth for themselves.

The challenge for the future is therefore not redistribution as an end in itself, but the renewal of the institutional settings that once allowed mass prosperity, asset ownership and retirement security to expand together.

As a senior advisor to Wayne Swan, Jim Chalmers was embedded in the fiscal engine room of a bad Labor administration.

Today, he’s wrestling with the consequences of the decisions that ratcheted up the size of government, condemning an exceptionally prosperous nation to years of economic decline.

Spare us the cant about intergenerational equity, Treasurer. The sin taxes on thrift you are about to impose are an act of desperation, not high-minded principle. The lavish policy programs in which you, as the former treasurer’s chief of staff, were complicit, increased recurrent spending by at least $100 billion.

Measures that might have seemed like a harmless indulgence in a high-growth, zero-debt economy now weigh heavily around the necks of taxpayers present and emerging.

The greatest contributor in modern times to intergenerational equity, if we are to adopt that loaded concept, was Peter Costello, a treasurer whose horizon stretched beyond the next election and the four-year forward estimates to the country his grandchildren might inherit in 20 years’ time.

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Like a dodgy taxi driver at a dimly lit third-world airport, Chris Bowen promises to drive us to our destination but refuses to disclose the fare.

He talks at length about targets, timelines, and technologies. He is less forthcoming, however, when it comes to the size of the bill.

Should we worry? You bet we should. Financing is titanic project will have an exceptionally large impact on our economy. It will constrain the state’s capacity to pay for other services and absorb precious capital that could be invested more profitably elsewhere.

Credible modelling estimates that the energy transition will run into many trillions of dollars over the coming decades.

Its success or (more likely) failure will shape the economic path for future generations. Will they live in a wealthy, mid-sized, advanced economy, enjoying global influence beyond its size? Or, will they be trapped in a shrinking economy, sliding down the ladder, as Australia joins new-world nations like South Africa or Argentina—rich in natural resources but limited by institutional constraints and history?

Because the truth is simple: the government does not yet know what this unprecedented transformation of the economy will cost, let alone whether it will succeed.

In the scheme of things, the latest price tag of $42bn on the Snowy pumped hydro scheme will be chump change.

Yet the independent estimate published this week by energy executive Ted Woodley and economist Bruce Mountain is worth lingering over, since it is emblematic of the scant attention paid to the cost of projects so far.

Woodley and Mountain’s estimate is 950 per cent larger than Malcolm Turnbull’s original 2017 estimate. Even if we allow for inflation of 30 per cent over the past nine years, the cost is 6.8 times the original budget.

We can only assume the original estimates were outsourced to Pollyanna, the irrepressibly optimistic, freckle-faced heroine of Eleanor H. Porter’s eponymously titled novel.

None of this is accidental. It’s what happens when prime ministerial advisors resign themselves to the demeaning reality that the only acceptable response to their boss’s questions is yes. After all, as Pollyanna explained, there is always something to be glad about “if you just keep hunting long enough to find it.”

Renewable energy cost blowouts are partly explained by Flyvbjerg’s Law, the iron rule attributed to Danish economist Bent Flyvbjerg, which dictates that the benefits of infrastructure megaprojects are routinely overestimated.

Optimism bias is especially acute on government projects where political, rather than financial, rewards are sought.

Yet in his much-quoted 2003 paper, Flyvbjerg’s calculations of average cost overruns are comparatively modest: 45% for rail, 34 per cent for bridges and tunnels and 20 per cent for road projects.

The under-budgeting of Snowy Hydro is of a different order, compelling us to ask what gives?

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has made little serous attempt to set a budget. Neither the Prime Minister nor the mainstream media has applied any pressure on him to do so.

Labor’s 2022 net-zero climate policy relied on now discredited Reputex modelling. It claimed building an 82 per cent carbon-free grid by 2030 would cost $76 billion, of which $24 billion would be government-financed.

A mere four years later, few would dispute two facts. Reducing emissions to anywhere near the original target is impossible. The government will spend far more than $24 billion just trying. By 2030, capital investment in the grid alone will reach hundreds of billions, depriving the economy of resources that could yield greater returns elsewhere.

That is, if the returns one values most are economic growth and jobs, rather than the applause from the domestic green lobby and the pampered band of international bureaucrats who register as delegates at climate change conferences.

Yet climate and energy have been granted immunity from the established best-practice policy process to which a cost-benefit analysis is central. It is explicitly designed to avoid the embarrassing position in which Bowen now finds himself: committing excessive government revenue to a project that has little, if any, chance of achieving the desired outcome.

Governments, as we know, are inveterate wasters of other people’s money. They habitually respond to policy failures not by scrapping projects, as the private sector would, but by spending more money. In the minds of bureaucrats, policies fail not because they are ill-conceived, but because they’re underfunded.

Governments are especially prone to the sunk-cost fallacy: if they don’t fund budget overruns, they believe previously committed money has been wasted.

That error will ensure projects like Snowy Hydro stay alive, even if costs double again. Given current performance, that possibility is far from remote.

In effect, Turnbull wrote a blank cheque that the Albanese administration enthusiastically decided to honour.

The net-zero project as a whole represents an incalculable unfunded government liability.

It is hard to point to an equivalent bottomless financial commitment by an Australian government outside of wartime. Nobody expected a cost-benefit analysis from Robert Menzies before he declared war on Hitler’s Germany. Nor did anyone demand assurance that the military exercise would succeed. In an existential crisis, different rules apply.

This offers an insight into Labor’s current thinking and the extent to which sober judgment has been pushed aside by the climate mania that has gripped the developed world for the last two decades.

Albanese and Bowen are acting as if a warming planet presents an imminent prospect of extinction. The threat falls in the same category as German and Japanese expansionism in the early 1940s.

Just as sending Australian forces into battle was a moral imperative back then, Australia must now throw everything it has into a total war against climate change.

Some 13 years after Australia’s 27th Prime Minister led Labor to one of its worst electoral defeats, the party still abides by the Rudd doctrine, articulated in Kevin Rudd’s undergraduate-style 2007 essay in The Monthly : “Climate Change: The Great Moral Challenge of Our Generation”.

A decade after the Paris Agreement was adopted by the UN-backed cabal known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), the world has grown cold toward the net-zero emissions pledge for 2050.

The dreamy idea of a great energy transition that runs on a rigorous timetable has collided with hard reality. As the distinguished Sky News Australia commentator Chris Uhlmann is fond of pointing out, 91 per cent of Australia’s energy requirements are supplied by fossil fuels.

The Albanese government will eventually be forced to back away, too. Its climate policy is no longer the electoral meal ticket it once was. The Prime Minister is not averse to walking away from unpopular policy. Labor’s 2030 commitment to 82 per cent clean electricity has already been dropped from the party’s draft policy platform.

There is no telling how much irreparable economic damage will be inflicted while the government looks for a face-saving way out of this policy omni-shambles.

In the meantime, we are stuck with the fiscal version of the late Graham Richardson’s political philosophy, summed up by the title of his lively memoir, Whatever it Takes.

The monomaniacal pursuit of net-zero had to be abandoned sooner or later. Politically contaminated science, coupled with the requirement for a watertight global agreement, made it vulnerable to the lightest brush with reality.

Historians may well recall that its demise occurred between February 2022 and April 9, 2026, beginning with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that shut off Russian oil and gas supplies and destroyed the romance of decarbonisation for hundreds of millions of Europeans.

The second pivotal moment occurred on October 7, 2023, when the global left’s response to mass torture, rape, killing and kidnapping of Israeli men, women and children revealed that Palestine had replaced global warming as their cause de jour.

The US/Israel campaign against Iran that began on February 28, triggering the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, destroyed the delusion that the energy transition was making progress. It turned out that the world was even more dependent on hydrocarbons than it had been 53 years earlier during the last major supply crisis.

In Australia at least, historians will probably nominate Thursday, April 9, as the day the final nail was hammered into the coffin. It was the day Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese visited the Lytton refinery near the port of Brisbane, the first visit by a prime minister since May 2021, when Scott Morrison and his then energy minister, Angus Taylor, announced the deal to stop the Ampol refinery moving offshore.

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When Labor released its energy transition policy in 2021, Anthony Albanese claimed it was based on “the most comprehensive modelling ever done for any policy by any opposition in Australia’s history since Federation”.

A little more than four year’s later, the report commissioned from Reputex is utterly discredited. It’s interim target of a 43 per cent r…

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Two decades after Al Gore’s provocative movie An Inconvenient Truth propelled global warming into the mainstream, the Middle East oil shortage is a timely reality check on the indispensability of fossil fuels.

The raw numbers suggest the great energy transition has been a failure. In 2006, global CO2 emissions totaled 30.6 gigatonnes. In 2024, the most r…

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In the era of TikTokification politicians don’t talk to people any more. They talk to algorithm, the invisible hand of the digital communications market rewarding not what is true or important, but what is most likely to hold attention.

So anyone who expected Anthony Albanese’s address the nation last week to be imbued with the gravity of, say, Robert Menzies’ 1939 declaration of war, was bound to be disappointed.

Menzies declaration of war was broadcast live on radio at 9.15 pm on a Sunday evening as an unskipable and unclipable speech, marshalling facts and logic to establish a clear case for taking the country to war.

Albanese, by contrast, moved from media grabs to search-engine optimised conglomerations of words to establish precisely nothing. He failed to build a sustained case for doing anything, while leaving competing propositions unresolved.

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A minster’s response to a diary clash can tell us more about a government’s true priorities than a thousand scripted answers in Question Time.

Last month, Chris Bowen found himself torn between attending an emergency National Cabinet meeting to deal with the worsening fuel crisis and informal net-zero discussions with Pacific Climate Ministers.

He chose the latter. The Energy Minister prioritised attending an open-ended talkfest about the energy system of the future over addressing the crisis in the energy system we actually have.

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The subdivided suburb of Angle Vale in Adelaide’s northern growth corridor is home to the new working poor, families whose budgets are being stretched to breaking point by mortgage instalments and fuel bills.

On paper, they appear to be living the Australian dream: a home and a block of land to call their own, a ute and a car on the driveway and kids at …

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With diesel hovering around $3 a litre, the Prime Minister did what governments do when they have run out of answers: he appointed a task force.

Its head, Anthea Harris, is a career bureaucrat with a disturbingly vague mandate. The Prime Minister said she would ensure challenges from the Middle East are handled “in the Australian way—looking after each o…

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An SA State election is hardly a clean vehicle for examining what the end of Australian two-party politics looks like.

For much of the last 60 years, the SA Liberals have not been a party as such, more a punctuation mark between extended Labor governments.

Even without One Nation, the Liberals faced humilation after a term in Opposition best be described as “colourful”. Two Liberal members have received criminal convictions, and one has been charged, constraining the opportunity to campaign on crime.

Those caveats aside, Saturday’s result reaffirms the descent of the stable post-war order into a Hobbesian war of all against all, particularly, but not exclusively, on the centre right.

It is a reminder to the Party that it can no longer dodge the Arthur or Martha question. The Liberals must resolve the ambiguity embedded in its name. Is it a Liberal Party in the sense of being opposed to conservativism, like the governing Canadian Liberal Party? Or is liberal in a conservative, 19^th Century manner, accepting that while our institutions are not perfect, the last thing we should do is knock them down to clear the ground for the new utopia?

The tension between the two visions manifests itself in issues like climate change, hate speech laws, Aboriginal special privilege and immigration. More often than not, the Liberal Party has tried to smother the argument with polite silence. It hasn’t worked. Sooner or later, a One Nationey shaped thing was bound to fill the gap in the market for plain talking.

One Nation’s campaign line - “we say what you’re thinking” - is more than just a slogan. It’s the complete mission statement of a party that is strong on conviction but light on policy. All talk but no action.

When the Liberal Party was in the hands of solid-blue conviction

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