Even taking the fake inflation data at 4.6%.
Not included are rents @ >33% of income, mortgages >45%, and electricity is up 25%.
The 'average Australian' the ABS measures apparently lives in a tent and walks to work.
True inflation is about 11%
What paralysis of intellect has us channelling wages to banks through the financialisation of shelter while remaining beholden to foreign powers for the basics of modern life?
We export raw abundance, reimport finished dependence, and call it sophistication.
We ship coal overseas, buy back the carbon as solar panels, and congratulate ourselves on moral progress.
We have treated house prices as national success and productive capacity as an afterthought. We have built a system resilient neither to strategic rivalry nor to disruption in the Middle East.
Australia has spent years confusing asset inflation with prosperity, financial engineering with statecraft, and imported complexity with sovereign capacity.
We sell raw materials, buy back dependency, import people and call the margin prosperity.
We congratulated ourselves for efficiency while dismantling redundancy, resilience and national competence.
The class that calls itself the nation’s intelligence can inflate land, subsidise demand and recite targets, yet cannot secure fuel, rebuild industry or think beyond the next property cycle.
And then comes the NDIS, handled with the usual implied moral vulgarity, as though a serious country must choose between caring for the vulnerable and maintaining a productive base.
Social obligations can’t float above material reality .
It must eventually rest on that reality .
A country that hollows out energy, industry, logistics and housing will eventually discover that its promises exceed its capacity.
Our aging demographics guarantee it
You cant secure the vulnerable by dismantling the machinery that funds their support. The NDIS is threatened by the same order that hollowed out the real economy and then feigned surprise when the social contract became expensive.
Donald Horne was right. Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people. For a long time, distance, endowment and inertia concealed the fact. That cover is thinning. A nation that cannot tell the difference between wealth and extraction, between resilience and rhetoric, between civilisation and a housing bubble, will learn the lesson the hard way.
Americans: we rescued two airmen deep inside Iran and we only lost a couple of C130s
Russians: you guys rescue your own?
Europeans: you have more than two planes?
Australians: what does this mean for property prices?
Australia was handed one of the greatest starting positions of any country in history
Massive mineral wealth. Abundant energy. World-class beaches. Amazing climate. No fault lines... no earthquakes or tsunamis
If you gave a 12-year-old this setup in a civilisation-building game, they'd build a paradise
Instead, we got decades of useless politicians on both sides of the aisle who couldn't run a sausage sizzle at Bunnings without a $4 billion feasibility study and a royal commission
Australia isn't unlucky. It's grossly mismanaged
Australia is a poster child of political shambles...
48.5c in the dollar, pay for your own healthcare, your own retirement, your own education, 10% GST, 30% fuel tax.....
Houses are the most expensive in the world, we are a net exporter of coal, uranium, LNG and have expensive electricity
Remind me what we get for our 47-48c in the dollar?
@AlboMP
Lynch,
This reads less like a rag column and more like a prosecution brief with jokes stapled on. You dress it up in Gladwell and “outliers” language, then treat subjective disdain as if it’s the data. “Bootlickers”, “apologists”, “social media slurps” isn’t analysis. It’s a tell. You’re not testing a claim, you’re selecting targets and cueing the reader how to feel about them.
Your LIV section is built on a double standard that always favours the PGA Tour. Adelaide’s revenue being an outlier is an interesting business point, but you use it only to sneer at LIV fans, not to examine what it actually proves: that elite men’s golf can thrive outside the US when it’s staged properly and priced for the market. Cue LIV Golf South Africa in a few weeks, that could be bigger than Adelaide. Then you reach for a US TV number as a mic-drop without explaining the source, method, platform context, or like-for-like comparison. That’s not “evidence”. That’s a stat as a bludgeon.
The Kim section is the giveaway. You concede the hard truths, absence, addiction, rebuild, and then you cannot bring yourself to let the sporting achievement stand without reducing his return to a “desperate marketing stunt”. That’s not something you demonstrate; it’s something you assert because it flatters your priors. The inconvenient fact is that Kim’s place wasn’t protected: he was relegated, then earned his way back, then won. If you’re arguing LIV has no merit pathways, Kim is the counterexample in your own copy.
Your sweeping claims need receipts, not rhetoric. “More than 90%… by invitation.” “Contractually protected.” “Ejected based solely on national origin.” Those are allegations mis represented and half truths, with no context and no written rules cited, and no acknowledgement that the PGA Tour is also in parts a closed shop in practice: sponsor exemptions, medical extensions, major-category protections, reshuffles, and a system that has always mixed merit with status, money, and relationships. If you want to prosecute LIV for being curated, you need to apply the same standard to the Tour you’re implicitly defending.
In the end, the “outliers” framing is just a narrative trick: Player as your designated villain, Kim as your reluctant hero, LIV as your permanent defendant, and the PGA Tour as the unspoken baseline of virtue. You can dislike LIV, plenty do, but you don’t get to replace reporting with mockery and call it truth. If you want to persuade readers rather than rally your own side, drop the sneers, show all the sources and truths, and argue against the strongest version of the opposing case, not the caricature.
Of which you certainly are along with your pal Brandel, the two biggest Spitting Image caricatures in golf.
The dollar didn’t just weaken — it quietly robbed you. Down 28% in five years.
My parents bought their house in 1962 for $16,000.
Back then, gold was $35 an ounce. That house cost 457 ounces of gold.
Today, the house is “worth” $750,000. Gold is about $3,300 an ounce.
That same house is 227 ounces of gold — half the real value.
Everyone thinks they got rich. They didn’t. The measuring stick got warped.
That’s the scam of inflation. Prices go up, politicians get away with it.
People confuse bigger numbers with more wealth.
A million dollars today feels impressive — until you realize it’s the purchasing power of about eighty grand in 1970.
You’re not richer.
The currency is weaker.
Matilda.
She was 10 years old.
Our hearts go out to her family.
We are so deeply sorry for your tragic loss.
Push play.
Close your eyes.
Think of her.
Add your voice.
What is clear is that a brave hero saved lives in Australia. Who that hero is, is unclear, as there are various press reports on who he is.
Can anyone definitively identify who took down one of the Bondi terrorists?
Once that is determined, can someone please set up a verified @gofundme so we can reward him and his family?