The roundup takes a break, a reflection, and the year ahead

This is the last roundup for 2022: back on Saturday 27 January

Housing

Under new management

We’ll be back after the nation re-emerges from what we may call its summer torpor or its well-earned rest after seven months of political and economic change.

It’s been a busy year for any observer of public policy, and we are having to adjust to a changed political and policy environment. Over the last few years, particularly since the Dutton- Morrison coup, we have become used to politics that is combative, chaotic, and corrupt. Now we are coping with the shock of a government that is taking a serious approach to public policy.

“There is a shift in the way the government is talking to us” says Laura Tingle on Late Night Live in a session where she and Niki Savva review the transition. This government is dealing with us as adults, and is behaving with dignity and responsibility on the world stage. Even those who disagree with the government’s policies have to admit that it is going about the business of public administration with a competence that has been absent for some time.  

The coming year promises to be no less busy, as the nation catches up on a decade of policy neglect. There is work to be done: managing a structural transformation necessitated by climate change; dealing with intolerable and destabilizing economic inequities that have arisen in what was once the land of the “fair go”; recognizing the rightful place of First Nations Australians; adjusting to a re-alignment of the world order as sources of economic and military power shift; repairing a broken economic system that has relied on small government and neoliberalism; and staying alert to ever-present threats to democracy and liberalism.