Archive

Denmark has a housing problem. Not Denmark the country, but Denmark Western Australia – population 2,375 – which happens to be the least affordable town in the state and “ one of the most inefficient communities in WA when it comes to the balance between large family homes and smaller dwellings, with a ratio of 1.22 bedrooms per resident”.

US President Joe Biden recently passed an executive order regulating artificial intelligence (AI), which was met with mixed reactions. A common criticism is that the order was highly prescriptive – it assumed a lot a about the future direction of AI, even though it’s a huge unknown.

Andrew Leigh delivered a great speech to the Economic Society of Australia in Canberra last week (alas I was not in attendance), in which he outlined his ‘Ten Lessons for Economic Policymakers’ in detail.

Rugby in Australia is at an all-time low: The Wallabies were knocked out of the Rugby World Cup in the group stages for the first time ever. Dave Rennie – hired to take the Wallabies to the World Cup – was sacked several months before the tournament even started, with Eddie Jones parachuted in, turning it into a clown show, and then walking out the door in less than a year. The Wallabies haven’t won the Bledisloe Cup in 22 years. An Australian Super Rugby club hasn’t won a title (or made a grand final) since 2014. The NSW Waratahs’ finances are so “perilous” that it may give up control to Rugby Australia (the central body). The game’s prospects are so poor that Rugby Australia couldn’t even come to terms with private equity to secure its financial future, electing instead to saddle the sport with $60m in new debt. I’ve probably missed some but it doesn’t matter; the situation is dire. The only question that remains is what can be done to fix it?

Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, gave his thirteenth speech on the “defining decade” this week, which he also calls the “turbulent twenties”. But other than those zingers, the speech was incredibly light on substance. So light that even a large language model was critical: