peter rowe

@GrayConnolly It seems that we just accept poor governance from both sides now. We shrug our shoulders and watch our decline as if in a trance. Weird vibe at the moment.

We accept this poor standard of governance & so really we have only ourselves to blame

@shoebil57672266 This is so deranged that my brain refuses to believe it is happening. So I will just blissfully ignore it and get on with my day. There is nothing left that Labor can do to shock me any more as they march us headlong to the doom of our country. We deserve our fate.

They must think we are stupid . Albanese gifts Rio Tinto $2b to pretend that it’s possible to smelt aluminium with intermittent energy sources #Auspol2026

@JamesMelville Will you concede the military offensive, misguided in your view, was effective? It removed air defences and naval defences in days giving control of the skies in a few days. Quite extraordinary whatever one’s view of the rights or the end game.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth: “The air campaign we’ve conducted was one for the history books. We negotiate with bombs. Never in history has a modern military been so rapidly and historically obliterated, defeated, from day one with overwhelming firepower.” Massively over-promoted bloke who sounds like one of those delusional, soon to be fired candidates from The Apprentice.

@JulieCFrost Ha.

Think the writer swerved into something here, or did he do that on purpose?

@OMGTheMess To be fair Gen Z’s only hope for their future is large govt handouts. There is minimal chance otherwise of them ever getting ahead.

Gen Z needs to explain itself lol

@AshPolitik Yas 3.7% inflation is so much better than 3.8%.

So Inflation fell in February, Australia getting back on track, and then Trump started a war.

@TonyHWindsor Very good news. Some amazing treatments coming through I am told. All the best to your wife and to you.

Some personal news. My wife Lyn has been taken off chemotherapy after four years of treatment for AML leukaemia. Very proud of her and grateful to the Specialists and Staff at the amazing Haematology Unit at Newcastle Mater Hospital. Thankyou to everyone who have been so kind. Minister @Mark_Butler_MP it would be worthwhile to look at their regional delivery model.

@Mark_Graph I want a govt that does nothing.

I have been thinking about my list of worst Federal Government policy failures this century. What am i missing? What have I misclassified? #auspol #ausbiz #ausecon GFC second round stimulus – BER and HIP specifically. Unnecessary by time of delivery, structurally wasteful, never honestly audited as a failure because the first round success story absorbed it. Correct macro intent perhaps, but structurally poor micro design and governance. Owner: Labor (Rudd). NDIS – good intent, catastrophic scale, design assumptions that were always fantasy, a PC that gave itself a free pass, and a fiscal trajectory that may be genuinely uncontrollable. Open-ended eligibility creep, administrative pricing pretending to be a market, and direct competition with aged care and health for the same workforce. Once those dynamics lock in, cost control becomes politically radioactive. Owner: Labor conceived it (Gillard), both sides own the blowout. NBN – the original sin was the financing model, not just the technology choice – a commercial return requirement retrofitted onto what is essentially a natural monopoly utility with social pricing constraints. Turnbull's MTM shift solved political timing but entrenched long-term performance constraints without fixing the balance sheet logic. A bad model patched with a worse implementation, then frozen because reversal is too costly. Owner: Labor owns the foundation and broken business model (Rudd/Conroy), Coalition owns the technology degradation (Turnbull). WA GST deal – not a failed system but a deliberate redistribution distortion. Known to be inefficient, maintained for political reasons – entrenched political rent allocation at cumulative cost to every other state. Owner: Coalition (Morrison/Turnbull). Aged Care – billions spent, royal commission, systemic neglect. Not just neglect – a pricing model that cannot support the workforce it requires, underpaying labour while demand rises structurally. Now competing directly with the NDIS for the same workers at the same price caps. Reform attempts keep adding funding without fixing who does the work, at what wage, and in what numbers. Owner: Both, but Coalition owned it longest and most recently. Morrison's "not my job" during COVID is the defining moment. Murray-Darling Basin Plan – a genuine environmental crisis addressed with a decade of process and regulatory capture. The plan wasn't empty – it was gradually hollowed out: water recovery targets diluted, compliance weakened, buybacks politicised. Less a single policy failure and more a decade-long governance failure, which arguably makes it worse. Owner: Both. Labor legislated it (Wong), Coalition let irrigator capture run unchecked for a decade, Labor returned and hasn't meaningfully fixed it either. Climate policy – the failure wasn't Gillard introducing the carbon tax or Abbott repealing it. The failure was conducting an entire decade of policy debate as if pricing was the only instrument that mattered. A carbon price disincentivises electrification by making energy more expensive during the transition period when you most need people to switch. The real problem is an infrastructure and planning problem of the first order – grid investment ahead of demand, transmission before generation, industrial energy supply reliable and cheap enough to electrify everything. A price signal does none of that, and the actual transition infrastructure went unplanned and unbuilt while the politics consumed itself. Owner: Both. Bipartisan framework collapsed 2009-2014, a decade of investment uncertainty followed, and neither side has yet built the planning framework the transition actually requires. The common thread across all seven: systems built on incorrect economic or institutional assumptions – or in climate's case, the wrong instrument entirely – which became politically irreversible once their failures emerged. The Commonwealth consistently overpromises at announcement, produces weak or absent business cases, and faces political incentives to expand rather than constrain. Both sides own that pattern. Neither has been held to account for it.

@Mark_Graph Goodness. A long and extremely expensive list. Re NBN, just threw out my NBN router and got a 5G router instead. NBN is awful not just faults but the fact that you can’t deal with them direct to fix those faults. Disconnect between Telcos and NBN is a structural flaw.

@OMGTheMess Chalmers seems to be managing our headlong decline without riots in the street. God knows how. Death tax should be the final straw.

EV user tax Property tax Death tax What else will Chalmers introduce?

@Sauronlordking Politicians need special smoke proof suits these days I’m sure.

Australia has become the stupid country.

@DrewPavlou @matt_barrie And the quality of our housing in Australia is shockingly low.

The Australian housing market bubble now exceeds approximately 700% of GDP, a level higher than the Japanese property bubble at its peak in 1991.

@ausstockchick Hmmm. Only pain I think. Major banks have cut back drastically in recent weeks on loans to trusts and even companies. With huge rate increases if they do lend. Very tough times ahead I fear. Cost of business is terrifying.

I was walking towards a petrol station today and it really started to sink in… Even if the war ended right now, we have a lot of pain ahead. But through pain always comes opportunities. Most people will only focus on the pain.

@mtracey I am in permanent shock at Obama’s Iran deal. A billion dollars in cash. And you can enrich up to the cusp of military purpose. For civilian purposes of course. And you can use the billion dollars to finance Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah to kill you and your allies. Sound ok?

I admit I used to ridicule the idea that Trump was nobly constrained by "Adults in the Room" in the first term -- and a lot of that narrative really was contrived BS -- but still, it should be noted that Rex Tillerson and Gen. Mattis advocated remaining in the Iran Nuclear Deal

@mr_james_c So simple. No one answers me when I posit this. Silence. I will never understand this transition at any level.

What a lot of negative responses to this fail to understand: - If you want a functioning society, your grid CANNOT fail - If you need a gas backup renewables for your grid, you need it to be able to cover 100% capacity. - If that is the case then your backup isn't "backup", it is the basis of your grid - So why not just build nuclear instead? Does away with emissions from gas plus unreliability of renewables.

@cyberpunkdingo They were good pirates too.

Serious question: why are Somalis so good at fraud? Whether its the USA or Australia, they seem to be able to figure out how to defraud the government at a mass scale almost instantly.

@JamesMelville Iraq wars were utterly absurd. They had about two cap pistols and were zero threat. I think no comparison with Iran though. As revealed ironically in the occasional missile reaching further than thought possible. Other difference is massive military victory by Trump.

Usual trope smear of “who bought you?” when someone has a different opinion. I have spent decades being against military interventionism in the Middle East. Goes back to the first Gulf War.

@matt_barrie @JacintaAllanMP Yes the price risk will just be built into the first advertised price. Prices are more likely to go up than down to compensate for the additional price risk of not being able to drop prices later in that cycle.

@JacintaAllanMP this is utterly brain dead

Our anti-fuel price gouging laws are in force - and it means families can save up to $333 every year. Servos that don't comply with capping and publishing prices on Servo Saver can face fines of more than $24,000 for every breach. Because the last thing families need is to be ripped off at the pump.

@GeigerEmilyA They want no restrictions on abortion whatsoever. That is their aim. The family must be destroyed if govt is to be the sole source of care and truth. That’s what they think anyway.

If "my body, my choice" is true, then there can be no restrictions on abortion WHATSOEVER. "My body, my choice" is inherently an extremist argument.

@Katherine_deves He is a great politician. Which is not the same as a great leader obviously. Though he and Minns are probably the presentable face of the left.

He sees the ascendancy of One Nation and suddenly starts caring about Australian patriotism & our flag Do he think we don’t smell the opportunism & hypocrisy?