But sometimes at New Year,the past can seem little more than a cavalcade of fears about wars,climate change,social media,economics and pandemic. And while the old year is about to be lost,many 2023 moments linger that still shape our lives.
We elected a new Labor government in NSW;60 per cer cent of us did not wish to give Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders a Voice to Parliament;Charles III was crowned King;a Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith turned For Valour into dust when he lost a defamation action against theHerald,The Age and 60 Minutes in a court decision that found him complicit in the murder of four Afghans;with 2023 poised to become the hottest on record,the COP28 climate summit in Dubai reached a consensus to “transition away” from fossil fuels;artificial intelligence (AI) offered promise and peril;and the Matildas offered only joy at the 2023 FIFA Women’s Women’s World Cup.
A new generation of Australians fell in love with soccer after watching The Matildas.Getty
The Ukraine war dragged on and the Hamas attack on a music festival on the Jewish holiday of in October prompted Israel to formally declare war on the group in a conflict likely to sculpt 2024 not least because of the recent suspension of shipping in the Red Sea.
At home,the higher costs of groceries,fuel and housing became the new Australian reality.
Survey after survey showed households felt they were going backwards financially due to the combined pressures of high inflation and rising interest rates. A Resolve Political Monitor,published in theHerald last month,found 60 per cent of voters do not think incomes have kept up with inflation. The Ipsos Issues Monitor,a quarterly poll that asked respondents to select the most important challenges facing NSW,found more than 63 per cent identified the cost of living among their top concerns – way higher than any issue tracked by the survey since 2010.
TheHerald’s Matt Wade reports that despite the cost of living crunch,the NSW economy has been resilient in 2023. The state economy grew by a healthy 3.7 per cent in the year to June,unemployment fell to just 2.9 per cent in June,and last month 115,000 jobs were added,lifting the state’s workforce to a record 4.46 million.
Property prices are adding to the rosy picture for those lucky enough to own,but causing pain for everybody else. Sydney prices jumped 19 per cent during the past year despite rising interest rates,and we are now the second-least affordable city on Earth to buy a property,trailing only Hong Kong,according to the.
Independent economist Chris Richardson warned Sydney’s soaring house prices would hamper the NSW economy in 2024 and beyond. “If you pick the top three issues for NSW they are:housing,housing and housing,” he says. “Sydney is pricing itself out of being a competitive economy despite all the advantages that it has,” he says.
The Minns government is making a solid effort to confront the housing crisis,but there is no quick fix. Sydney’s house prices went into hyperdrive around the 2000 Olympics and never really calmed down – Richardson predicted it would be well over a decade before we had reasonable housing rents and prices relative to incomes.
While life could be better for many in NSW,the problems confronting Sydney are put into perspective each evening by the horrific Middle East war footage. We live in a beautiful,peaceful harbour city and tomorrow night,we stage a New Year celebration that reminds the planet there is a happy land. Let’s make the most of what we have and try hard to fix what is broken. And most of all,let’s have a Happy New Year.
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