Ross Gittins

Talk about the dog that didn’t bark. Cast your mind back to the distant days of the election campaign, and you’ll dimly remember how often we were told that polling revealed the only subject hard-pressed voters were interested in discussing was the cost of living.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers stuck to this rule relentlessly, repeatedly assuring us the economy had “turned the corner” (a focus-group-tested line if ever there was one), but Peter Dutton had trouble keeping to the script.

He was supposed to keep asking whether we felt better off than we did three years ago and, knowing our answer would be “no”, put all the blame for this regression onto Labor. But he couldn’t resist reminding us of the supposed rising tide of crime and risk of invasion.

Am I the only person to have noticed that, in all the many thousands of words commentators have spilled in explaining Labor’s landslide win, there’s been nary a mention of the cost of living? Had it been the only issue in voters’ minds, surely there’d have been a swing away from Labor, not towards it?

And what about all those outer-suburban seats full of families with massive mortgages? Why didn’t any of them think it was time to give the other side a try?

I think the explanation for the big swing to Labor was far simpler than the pundits think. People’s worries about the cost of living were forgotten after the arrival of a new and far more pertinent issue: voters got their first good look at Dutton and the kind of politician he was and, overwhelmingly, said “No thanks”. Come back Albo, all is forgiven.

So, what happened to the cost of living? Were the pollsters deluded in believing voters wanted to think about little else? Why were voters’ minds so easily diverted to another issue? Where are we at with the cost of living? Is it done and dusted, have we really turned the corner, and what are the prospects?

When people complain about the cost of living, they’re really saying they find it a struggle to balance the family budget from fortnight to fortnight. The trick is that, while in recent years they’ve been finding it particularly difficult, even in normal times it’s a fairly common occurrence.

So, complaining about the cost of living is like complaining about the weather – an ingrained habit. In summer, it’s always too hot; in winter, it’s always too cold. Complaining about the cost of living is our default setting.

If nothing too bad is happening, pollsters asking about the big problems the politicians should be dealing with will always be told the cost of living’s a worry. It’s always up near the top of the list. When household budgets are particularly tight, it’s always at the top.

But introduce some more novel causes for concern, and the cost of living is quickly supplanted.

The thing about the cost of living, however, is that it’s like an ailment. It’s the symptoms you complain about, not necessarily the root cause of those aches and pains.

When you ask people why they’re complaining about the cost of living, they usually reply that the rise in prices is shocking. How do they know? They see it at the supermarket every week.

It’s true. Overall, supermarket (and other) prices are always rising. But what matters is the rate at which prices are rising – that is, the rate of inflation. For about the past 30 years, governments, their econocrats (including the Reserve Bank) and economists generally have accepted that if the rate of inflation is averaging between 2% and 3% a year, that’s nothing to worry about.

When Labor came to power in May 2022, the annual inflation rate, as measured by the consumer price index, was 5.1%. By the end of that year, it reached a peak of 7.8%.

The rate has slowed continually since then. By the end of September last year, it had slowed to 2.8% – that is, back within the desired range. By March this year, it had slowed to 2.4%. The more demanding “underlying” or core measure of inflation has slowed to 2.9%.

So yes, in that sense, we have turned the corner, as Chalmers keeps telling us. But it’s not that simple. You have to ask why the rate of increase in consumer prices has slowed so much. A fair bit of it is the slowing — and, in some cases, actual falls — in overseas prices that are beyond our control.

But where home-grown prices are concerned, the main reason they’ve been rising more slowly is that the Reserve Bank has been raising interest rates to put the squeeze on households with mortgages, reducing their ability to keep spending so much on other goods and services, and so reducing the upward pressure on prices.

The Reserve made its first increase in the official interest rate just a few days before the May 2022 election – a clear signal to voters that the inflation problem got going under the previous, Coalition Government.

After the election, the Reserve raised interest rates a further 12 times, increasing the official rate by a total of 4.25 percentage points to a peak of 4.35% in November 2023.

See what happened? It’s not the pain of rapidly rising prices that’s caused people to keep complaining about living costs, it’s the pain from the high mortgage interest rates the Reserve has been using to get prices rising more slowly.

But in February this year, the Reserve cut interest rates by one click of 0.25 percentage points. This was a sign it regarded the job of getting the inflation rate down as almost done. It was also a pre-election signal that rates would be falling further in the next term of government.

Indeed, it’s likely to cut rates by another 0.25% click next week, with a further two or three clicks to come after that, greatly reducing the cost-of-living pain for households with mortgages.

Time for us to move on to other economic worries.

Republished from The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 2025

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/05/it-was-supposed-to-be-the-cost-of-living-election-but-then-dutton-showed-up/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Stephanie Dowrick

Apart from a slight uptick of hope when Malcolm Turnbull gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in September 2015, promising to bring “emotional intelligence” to the role, I have never wished the LNP anything but defeat and oblivion.

But Sussan Ley’s leadership win (and the welcome defeat of the twin Taylor/Price ticket) adds texture to this story, if not yet hope.

Gender justice — the recognition of structural disadvantaging and inequality — is one of several pivotal issues that Liberals have tried to manipulate, insult, trivialise or ignore. (The most egregious example surely is Bully Boy Abbott – the man who elected himself as minister for women in 2013, after hysterically insulting Australia’s first and only female prime minister, Julia Gillard, over the preceding three years.)

Having lived in Britain long before and through Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, then witnessing her rapid crushing of every social initiative that benefitted ordinary people and sustained communities, it has long frustrated me that even intelligent commentators kept insisting that Liberal fortunes would be turned around if only they had more women.

‘More women’, though, is not even half a solution

It was self-evidently pathetic to continue the farce favoured by conservatives that the far greater number of men in their ranks equalled far greater merit. Because while far more women were. and are. needed in all spheres of power and decision-making, what also matters — fiercely — are every candidate’s lived values: the quality and depth of their social and political analysis, their integrity, empathy, and character. Plus, a modicum at least of willingness to look around as they rise to see who is being left out. And why.

As a “1968” feminist, I was young and naive enough to assume that greater female opportunity and visibility would advance the progress we were seeking. But, as long ago as that, it was abundantly clear to all serious thinkers that changes in gender politics could, on their own, never be enough.

A decade later, in 1978, as the founding publisher and first managing director of the London-based feminist publishing house, The Women’s Press, I saw that while each of our distinguished writers had her own emphasis, to a woman each understood that race and social class above all, as well as sexuality, cultural conditioning, education and access to ideas plus the essential right to have ideas and express them, would inevitably be crucial to any understanding of gender. Conversely, that race and class cannot be fruitfully discussed without understanding their impact on individual and collective experiences of sexuality and gender.

In this global movement for change — inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and fiercely resisted by conservatives — there was significant impatience and intolerance for women who wished only to smash glass ceilings in a public world otherwise largely untransformed. The “pie” to be shared with (White) men under this paradigm was strictly capitalist. Even hyper-capitalist. And stridently, defensively, individualistic.

In that subdued, but increasingly popular version of feminism, White women have benefitted in stark disproportion to Black women, most especially those Black women who brought to the discussion their invaluable awareness of the ruthless structural disadvantaging that continues to play out in each drama about the gaining and sharing of power. Most of all, I’d suggest, when it comes to race, imperialism, colonialism, and the stubborn, unforgivable refusals of those who have gained most to see what it costs to those who have least.

How is any of this relevant to Ley’s victory in achieving the leadership of a deservedly shrunken parliamentary Liberal party? She is being hailed for the fact that she is a woman (hello, it’s 2025), but surely there’s more to it than that.

Ley comes to the role with a mixed history. She was deputy to a leader (Peter Dutton) who will rival Scott Morrison for the ignominious title of worst Liberal leader… although there’s Abbott, in whose cabinet she also served, so “worst” may be a crowded designation. As deputy to Dutton, Ley vigorously defended appalling policies. She also adopted the same negative tone on social progress as The Leader, and was reliably supportive of him.

Yes, she did have choices. But in this contest her rival was not only Angus Taylor, but also his running mate, Jacinta Nampijnpa Price, the First Nations woman who leapt in a single bound from the Nationals (where she has been promoted and feted) to the Liberals. There she self-evidently hoped for even more power, but as a voice — irony intended — for what are indisputably White-advantaging politics.

Clearly, we cannot hope for inclusively humane politics from all women, LGTBQI+, or people who come from economic disadvantage, or are Black

To do so would be an affront to a person’s right to tell and live their story in their own way. However, those of us who do wish to view politics through an intersectional lens — at the very least acknowledging the trinity of race, class, gender structural disadvantage — are equally entitled to question the motivation of someone, in this case Price, who identifies so openly with economic and environmental interests not shared by the vast majority of First Nations people.

Price has made no secret of her affiliations, nor the facts that she has been, or is, conspicuously supported by Gina Rinehart who attended her Senate “debut” and is one of the tiny few non-Indigenous people who may have possibly suffered a relative setback in her fortunes from a vigorous and effective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, the silencing of which was the peak “success “of Dutton’s shabby career, perhaps also of Price’s.

That leaves out key player Taylor who clearly thought that the Dutton-Price Voice “success” could be replicated with only a single name change. Perhaps not quite as bright as we might expect a former shadow treasurer to be, Taylor also has a string of watery, even sodden financial mysteries yet to be explained. Plus — and it is a mighty big plus — Taylor also carries in his very person that unabashed sense of entitlement (class, gender, race) that has buoyed every conservative leader in Australia. Up to now.

“Why should a wrecker be given a leadership position?” said someone close to Price’s work against the Voice on the day her bid for deputy Liberal leader was defeated. Which leaves the question of Ley, and her significance in breaking an exhausted mould.

Ley was health minister in Turnbull’s government and had also been in Abbott’s. When my paediatrician husband was getting the AMA’s President’s Medal for the second time, we were seated at the same table. Readers, Sussan was quick-witted and fun. Not a qualification for leadership, but 1000 times since, when I have witnessed her appalling politics and have publicly criticised them, I have remembered that evening and the woman I then met.

Perhaps we will soon discover that Ley has done nothing greater than defeating Taylor and Price and the nakedly self-interested politics each of them stands for. Perhaps Nigerian-born, former pilot, tough survivor Ley is not capable of moving Liberal politics away from the ugly, divisive negativity towards some of that “emotional intelligence” evoked by Turnbull a decade ago. Or, perhaps that party, like Thatcher so long ago, “…is not for moving”. But can we find out?

I could wish that the LNP will be in shrunken opposition for infinity. That’s not good, though, for our democracy. And while the continuing Opposition Leader in the Senate, Michaelia Cash, is already calling for the Coalition to focus on its “values and beliefs… based in freedoms”, we can continue to ask for evidence of what those freedoms are. And who, precisely, they are intended to benefit. Sussan: will you show us?

Dr Stephanie Dowrick (PhD, D.Min) is the author of more than 20 books including Forgiveness & Other Acts of Love, Intimacy & Solitude, Seeking the Sacred: Transforming Our View of Ourselves and One Another. Her most recent work includes Your name is not Anxious: A very personal guide to putting anxiety in its place; also, co-written with Mark S Burrows, You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke. A former publisher, and founder of The Women’s Press in London, and an ordained inter-faith minister, she has been a peace and social justice activist since her teens. She contributes widely to public and social media. She can be reached via social media or at stephaniedowrick.com

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/05/sussan-ley-and-gender-politics/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbMHScNaSY4

Australia’s most decorated soldier just lost his defamation appeal. The media’s response? Barely a whisper. But when Sussan Ley became Liberal leader, Murdoch’s mouthpieces went full meltdown — blaming the voters, the system, and even democracy itself. Meanwhile, influencers like Hannah Ferguson are rattling the media cage, and News Corp is terrified of losing control.

From war crime coverups to super tax tantrums and a full-blown narrative crisis, this week’s Scam of the Week is chaos with a press pass.

I’m Josh, filling in for Mick — if you like what we do, support us on Patreon. We’re 100% community funded and proudly independent.

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.