Australian election editorials

Was Crikey the only major news organisation in Australia to voice the opinion that Labor should win?

The booming economy is a false dawn with a policy-induced housing bubble and a debt-funded consumer binge leaving no great legacy for future generations.

The Howard years have coincided with the age of the Internet, yet we have not produced an IT company of any note or taken advantage of new technology to create greater diversity of ownership and choice in media. Our business sector has become an amalgam of gouging cartels, a service sector oligopoly which has delivered for shareholders but not for the nation. Look no further than the way bank profits have more than doubled since 1996.

For the first time in history, we have fallen below one per cent of world exports and those exports remain dominated by primary products and minerals.

Just as Bob Hawke benefited from the drought breaking in 1983, the Howard Government has taken credit for things over which it has no control, primarily low global interest rates and the our best terms of trades in many years thanks to the boom in China.