Coronation, what coronation?

How well I remember the coronation of Princess Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953. Then resident in Scotland, I was four years and seven months old and had just finished reading Das Kapital and was moving on to The Condition of the Working Class in England. I had also asked for Stories,Tales and Fables by the Marquis de Sade but faither said ‘Nae bairn should be reading that’ and offered instead ‘Noddy on the Runaway Train’….

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Submarines or social housing?

One of our readers commented that on the same day the media were banging on about the Federal Government’s $368 billion submarine plan, a lone SBS panel programme focused on the national housing crisis. It is tempting to compare spending on affordable housing with the capital cost of up to five nuclear-powered submarines. The Federal Government’s (annual) commitment to affordable housing (currently $1.6 billion), equates to about 13% of its annual submarine budget (ie if…

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Squeezed between inflation and interest rates

I just happened to be reading a novel set in the Edwardian era at the same time as the media was going bonkers (again) about the Reserve Bank raising interest rates by 0.25% to 3.6%. In Louis de Bernieres’s* book, The Dust That Falls from Dreams, one of the characters is holding forth about the sudden rise in the bank rate and subsequent collapse of the share market in 1914. Hamilton McCosh, a daring entrepreneur…

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JobSeeker and the $50 ‘bonus’

You know how it goes. You’ve finished ferrying 16 items down the checkout conveyor and the assistant says: $142.99 – cash or card? “How do the poor people get by?” I ask of no-one in particular. Later, I went to the butcher ($47) and the organic fruit and vegetable shop ($56), all up $245. She Who Pays the Bills said: “But we only needed a few things”. Now if we were on unemployment benefit, such profligacy…

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