Like any other monetarily sovereign state, Australia never need incur debt for government spending, and should not balance its budget.

All Australian dollars are created by the Australian government, deciding (by passing law) that new money shall exist. Poof, now it exists, as a number in the central bank; from there it flows into the economy, until taxation destroys it again.

So younger people are quite right to be unconcerned by a deficit in the Australian budget. All of that is money that exists, and if there were no deficit then none of the rest of us would have any money: it would all have been returned to nonexistence by taxation.

Our government can fund any and all services they choose to, simply by passing law that says the money is available (thereby creating the money). We don’t want them to “balance” the budget, we want well-funded public services and (independent from government services) we want higher taxation on the wealthy, to reduce their spending power.

That they do not do this; that they pursue the phantom of a “balanced budget” for a monetarily sovereign state that creates its own money whenever it wants? Is a choice made by our government, every day, based on a flawed ideology that ignores the facts of the very system they govern.

Sorry for posting a paywalled article

Here is a Wayback Machine URL for the same post: https://web.archive.org/web/20250912020115/https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-death-fascism-america-united-states-donald-trump-australia-don-farrell/ in case you want to update the post to use that URL.

It takes continual effort to offset the Coriolis effect down under.

if they made their homes more energy efficient

Assertion misses the point: Most Australians whose homes need to be made more energy efficient, are renting and have no agency in doing anything like that to their homes.

Telling those people "you could save on your power bill by modifications to your home”, is just cruel. We know our homes are energy inefficient, we can’t make the changes required.

What’s needed is legislation that mandates the landlord must pay for those improvements, before they take any more money from the renter.

No. That is one question they ask. It is not how they define intimate partner violence.

The definition they use is right there in the report:

What is intimate partner violence? In this research, we adopt the definition of intimate partner violence set out in the National Plan as:

Any behaviour within an intimate relationship (including current or past marriages, domestic partnerships or dates) that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm … Intimate partner violence can occur outside of a domestic setting, such as in public, and between 2 people that do not live together. (DSS, 2022, p 37)

So if the behaviour does not (my emphasis) “cause physical, sexual or psychological harm”, it does not match their definition of intimate partner violence.