It’s a truism that every child should be wanted. While there are plenty of exceptions, the birth of an unwanted child often turns out badly for both mother and child (and father, if they are present). Sometimes, once a child is born, the fact that they were initially unwanted fades into irrelevance, and the bond between parents and child is as strong as with a planned birth. But this isn’t true on average: children born after their mother was denied an abortion (due to time limits) experience, on average, more poverty and poorer maternal bonding The extreme case is that of Ceausescu’s Romania, where abortions were banned, and the resuling unwanted children received miserable upbringings in orphanages.

The birth of an unwanted child can be an economic as well as a personal catastrophe. This is crucial to understand when we are assessing claims that “the economy” would benefit if families had more children than they currently choose.

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My latest in The Guardian

Like millions of Australians, I shop at Coles. I’m not as careful as I should be, but I try to buy things advertised as being discounted, or on special. But after following a recent case before the federal court, I’ll be checking my old receipts before accepting such claims. In particular, I’ll be avoiding “Down Down” promotions. On the evidence before the court, such promotions are routinely used as a way of implementing price increases.

The facts of the case are simple and apparently uncontested. One example is particularly striking. Over a period of nearly a year, Coles offered a 1.2kg loaf of Nature’s Gift wet dog food for $4. Then, for seven days, the price rose by 50% to $6. On the eighth day the price was set at $4.50, more than customers had been paying for all but seven of the previous 303 days, with Coles labelling the product “Down Down”.

The only unusual feature of this path to higher prices was the short duration of the large increase. According to Coles’ lawyers, the more common pattern was to raise the price for six to 12 weeks, then partially reverse the increase and advertise “Down Down”. As the evidence regarding deals with Arnott’s makes clear, this strategy is planned in advance as a way of raising prices without upsetting consumers. In their defence, Coles claimed that Woolworths’ “Prices Dropped” program (the subject of a separate ACCC case) was even worse.

More broadly the defence was that consumers were incapable of understanding the many complexities of pricing decisions. But most of us are capable of understanding the idea that taking prices two steps up then moving them one step down still leaves them higher. Whatever the outcome of the court case, it’s hard to believe that Coles will be able to get away with “Down, Down” promotions in future, even if they are genuinely reducing prices.

In the long run, then, it seems as if this kind of sharp practice should be self-defeating. The banks, for example, have spent years trying to shake off the bad reputation they built up for hidden fees and charges in the years leading up to the financial services royal commission.

Woolworths and Coles are big companies that plan to stay around for a long time. Could not one or both of them commit to a policy of truthful advertising and stand by it long enough to establish a reputation that customers could trust?

This hasn’t happened – with supermarkets, or telecoms, or banks or anywhere else, at least in the absence of comprehensive public shaming driven by government action. But why not?

One explanation, apparent from the evidence in the Coles case, is that no one wants to be the first to move. Given the short-term pressure that decision-makers are under, it’s easy to imagine that any proposal of this kind will be put in the too-hard basket and left there.

Another possibility is that distrust is so widespread that no single company can break the pattern. The era of neoliberalism has certainly strengthened this distrust. There was a time when used car dealers were famously untrustworthy but financial institutions were pillars of probity. Today, when buying a second-hand car, the biggest risk is not that the speedo will be wound back but that you will be sold a loan with deceptively high interest. In this context, you just assume everyone is lying.

The final, gloomy, hypothesis is that Coles’ lawyers are right, and that we are proving the wisdom of HL Mencken’s observation that “No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people” (put more succinctly by PT Barnum as “there’s a sucker born every minute”).

Perhaps we are simply incapable of resisting an apparent bargain, even when we know there’s bound to be a catch. For years, we all fell for the illusion of items priced at $9.99 or similar, rather than the honest price of $10. Partly because of the digital economy, this particular trick seems to have faded away.

But the same digital economy has far nastier tricks in mind for us. The trickery of “Down Down” seems childish compared to the wonders of personalised pricing, where sellers set a price specifically aimed at being the maximum you are willing to pay, and precisely when you are primed to buy. The only solution, it appears, is to build your own AI agents, to trick the company algorithm into seeing you as a desirable customer

I spoke last week at a meeting organised by the Brisbane Flight Paths Community Association to demand a curfew on planes flying over Brisbane. These are mostly either international flights (subsidised by the state government) to promote tourism) or overnight freight, for which there is a fairly modest convenience benefit

By contrast, the adverse health effects and sleep disruption associated with night-time airport noise have huge costs, running into the billions, whether you estimate these directly or via effects on land values.

Unfortunately, this cuts very little ice with our political class, most of whom are frequent fliers and only a few of whom are among the hundreds of thousands of Brisbane residents affected by noise. Only the Greens have stood on the side of residents, and only when voters desert Labor en masse will they win enough seats to influence policy here.

You can see my report for BFPCA here, and my slides here.

Not long after Trump took office, I observed that the status of the US as the “indispensable nation” could not be sustained. A year later, the US, considered strictly as a state actor, is already dispensable and has, in fact, been largely dispensed with, by Europe in particular. The standing ovation given to Rubio in Munich recently (made almost unavoidable when his retinue jumped to their feet in Stalinesque fashion) should not obscure the fact that almost no one interpreted it as anything more than a politer restatement of Vance’s tirade a year ago. At that time, Europe needed to keep Trump on-side to prevent a sudden collapse in support for Ukraine and to avoid an all-out trade war.

None of that is particularly relevant now. Europe (include Ukraine) has held Russia to a standstill for a year despite the complete cessation of US military aid. The US is still relevant as an arms exporter and as a patchy supporter of sanctions against Russia, but that’s about it. Trump has turned his attention to his desire to rule the Americas from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, as well as returning to the forever wars of the Middle East.

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One of the strangest features of the Australian political system over the last 80 years or so has been the permanent coalition between the Liberal and National (formerly Country) parties. It sometimes puzzles foreigners – I remember an American observer saying that the prevalence of coalition governments here was an indicator or political instability. And it takes different forms in different places. At the national level, until two weeks ago, there was a standing coalition agreement even when in opposition (this dates back to the 1970s, I think). There’s a similar arrangement in NSW and Victoria, but in WA the two parties operate independently. At the other extreme are merged parties – the LNP in Queensland [1] and the CLP in the NT. In SA, Tasmania and the ACT there’s no separate country party.

Until now, the usual convention in reporting polling results has been to aggregate these parties into a single grouping reported as “LNP” or “Coalition”. But the breakup of the federal coalition means it is better to report them separately as four groups: Liberals, Nationals, LNP and CLP. Combined with the resurgence of One Nation this yields the starting possibility that the Liberals (as well as the other three) may soon have polling support below 10 per cent.

This graph from Redbridge (kindly provide by Ben Messenger) illustrates the point. The Liberals alone were polling at nearly 30 per cent a year ago, before the 2025 election disaster, but are now barely in double digits

Regardless of the precise number, these results have dire implications for the project of a moderate centre-right urban Liberal party, split off from the rightwing and far-right majority and aiming to making some kind of common cause with community independents. Such a party would command less than half of the Liberal party’s supporters or maybe 5 per cent of the population (plus whatever it could draw from the Queensland LNP). It would start with seven or eight members in the House of Representatives, along with some Senators who would be unlikely to get a quota in a Senate election.

Of course, just about anything could come out of the current chaos. For example, a merger of One Nation and the Nationals could easily become the main opposition party. But on Hanson’s track record it probably wouldn’t last long. And even if it endured, the chance of such a party actually winning would be small. Hanson’s permanent support base (embittered middle-aged and older low-education regional voters) is not only small, but so different from the actual majority of Australians to whom they refer as “inner-city elites”.

More likely is continued division on the right, with the remaining urban seats being picked off by Labor and the independents. The dreary implication is that Labor will continue to roll up big majorities even as its primary vote falls to 30 per cent or less. And as long as Albanese is leader, those majorities will not produce any significant policy change, let alone the radical transformation this country needs to respond to the challenges of global heating, Trumpism and the information economy.

fn1. I got in trouble 20 years ago or so for a jokey post predicting that there would be no more Liberal PMs because the Libs and Nats had to merge. Happened in Queensland, but not nationally.