Memo to Coalition: maybe next time

At MacroBusinessalso The Australian, I've portrayed Election 2025 as a winning romp for the top 20% regardless of who becomes prime minister.

Meaning, little improvement across crucial indicators such as inequality, immigration and housing, energy and environment, education and taxation.

This comes through in parties' motherhood policies. Taken in alpha order, no hidden bias eh.

Coalition

Global-north discourse rues the backslide to inequality, under post-1970s neoliberal policies. Down Under, income inequalityand wealth inequalityare on a roll. Even the Coalitioncites collapsing real-income growth. Post-COVID- if not pre-COVID.

The intelligentsia, notably Treasury overlords, is relaxed and comfortable. Are we luckyor what? Look over there, chirps government ABC, wicked Donald Trump.

In January, Peter Dutton soft-launched his Back on Track policy booklet. Which mentions inequality once - as an Indigenous problem. Last year, the Coalition promised net-migration at 160,000, now they talk "rebalancing". What a squib, considering Labor's destructive 1.3 million immigration deluge over 2022-25.

For housing, they'd boost supply, fund infrastructure, fight inflation, "sensibly" reduce migration. These platitudes would deliver another 20 years of housing hunger-games.

Meantime, the guiding light of Labor's ideological and unaffordable energy-policy is UN fairytale, net-zero emissions. As "realised" by an alphabet-soupof federal climate-energy bailiwicks - AEMC, AEMO, AER, CCA, CSIRO, DCCEEW, EAP, ICEDS, ISP, NZEA, you name it.

Dutton too defers to net-zero, via nuclear not renewables. He offers an energy "plan" to lower energy bills and "unlock" more gas. Gas-export cartel has nothing to fear.

Education would go "back to basics", matching existing dollar-for-dollar funding agreements.

That won't budgethe past (coming) decade of increasing inequity, enrolments shifting to advantaged schools, disadvantage concentrating, diverging student achievement. You don't need a higher education, to cotton onto Australia's divisive church-versus-state system.