The papers

Sitting on a plane, I have just absorbed the entirety of the Australian and the AFR.

I like to do this every now and again in order to calibrate my awareness of mainstream Australia.

All I can say is that, politically speaking, the current group of rent seeking managers are having a nice time, primarily because the papers are owned by their major donors.

There are hints of major cuts to government social spending, increases to GST, and further reductions in the power of unions so that the minimum wage can drop.

The business lobby appears very focused on growth in profits and not revenues. This can be easily achieved by a reduction of labour input costs.

Strange that they aren’t lobbying for massive cuts to the very costly red tape that we live with. This would go hand in hand with a smaller public service. But it looks like the public service is going to be out-sourced, and it is these contracts that the business community is really after.

The reserve bank gets a few billion so it can respond to the upcoming US default. This will cause the Australian dollar to spike and they need to be able to devalue the currency as well as provided liquidity to the economy when the lending market freezes.

Most importantly, it is very clear that Alex Ferguson is an arsehole. Probably a required characteristic for his former role.