Australia is beginning to feel the heat from the resources boom. Jobs are now being lost in the export-led manufacturing economy because ,driven ever upwards by the demand for and speculation around, its coal,iron copper,gold ,gas , uranium ,you name it , the dollar exchange rate has reached dizzy levels. It’s now at 1.05 to the US dollar when the historic average is just over 70 cents , and 1.55 to sterling when less than 3 years ago it was at 2.50 to the pound. This is a seismic shift in a short period. If only federal government economic policy had moved as quickly – and in the right direction.

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I haven’t said this in recent years and possibly ever:two cheers for Tony Blair.Come to think of it, possibly one and a half.His comments on the recent riots made some sense to me but were also typically self serving. Essentially, he thinks that blaming the riots on a general moral malaise is wrong and indeed leads to bad policy. Rather he blames a minority of disaffected youth who live lives ‘outside the social mainstream’. The best policy therefore is to target that minority with policy interventions – running from better policing through to welfare penalties on the harder side and parenting lessons on the softer side.

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It took a Riot. This was the name of possibly the best-entitled cabinet paper ever submitted to a government. It was drawn up by Michael Heseltine after the Toxteth and Brixton riots of the early 80s. It advocated not a policing response to an earlier version of the breakdown of law and order in UK cities but a political and economic response.
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