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What a year its been for Italy, from the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinicis death to the collapse of the government.

As a new year and decade approaches, lets take a look at the biggest news to come out of Italy in 2019.

Two weeks into January, Italian authorities confirmed that fugitive left-wing militant and convicted murderer Cesare Battisti had been captured in Bolivia after almost three decades on the run.

Battisti (pictured below),who had been sentenced to life in prison for four murders in the 1970s, was arrested on January 14 after an international police squad tracked him tothe Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de La Sierra.

He had been living in Brazil for years, until the nations outgoing president signed a decree ordering his extradition.

Two months after he was brought back to Italy, Battisti confessed to four murders during the 1970s, after decades of denying any involvement in the homicides.

He confessed to killing a policeman and a prison guard, to taking part in the murder of a butcher and to helping plan the killing of a jeweller who died in a shootout which left his 14-year-old son in a wheelchair.

As people settled in to 2019, Italys migrant crisis became an even more pressing issue following the governments decision to block Italian ports to charity rescue ships.

On January 9, a weeks-long standoff came to an end when 49 migrants stranded at sea for weeks aboard two rescue ships arrived in Malta after eight EU member states, including Italy, agreed to take them in.

TheSea-Watch 3 had rescued 32 people from an unsafe boat off the coast of Libya on December 22, while another German charity, Sea-Eye, had rescued 17 others on December 29.

Both ships had been floating in Maltese watersfor weeks after all EU countries refused to offer them a safe port to dock.

This was the first standoff of the year, but certainly not the last.

On January 30, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that 47 migrants stranded aboard a rescue boat operated by German NGO Sea-Watch could finally disembark after Italy and six other countries had agreed to take them in.

The vessel had been stranded in Sicilian waters for over a week after Italy and other European nations had refused to let it dock.

Sea-Watchhad earlier filed an urgent case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against Italy for refusing to allow its ship to dock and the mainly sub-Saharan migrants, including 15 minors, to disembark.

Italys Interior Minister Matteo Salvini was later placed under investigation for alleged false imprisonment after refusing to allow the migrants to disembark.

In February, more than 10 million viewers tuned in to Italian state broadcaster Rai for theopening night of the Sanremo Music Festival.

Famous Italian singer Andrea Bocelli wowed crowds on the night, performing an evocative duet with his son Matteo.

Following five exciting evenings of performances, Mahmood (pictured below)was crowned the winner of the 69th edition of the festival, for his song Soldi (Money).

Born to an Egyptian father and Sardinian mother, Mahmood became a symbol of multiculturalism at a time when the nation was grappling with the anti-immigrant rhetoric of far-right League leader Matteo Salvini.

In Rome, flights were suspended and a terminal was evacuated at Ciampino airport on February 7, when three World War II bombs were discovered during construction work.

The bombs weighed a combined 150 kilograms, including around 75 kilograms of gunpowder.

Less than two weeks later, flights from Ciampino airport were delayed after the departures area was closed due to a fire in the terminal basement.

While the blaze was reportedly put out in less than a minute, it caused crowds and flight cancellations for most of the day.

In February, Pope Francis held alandmark summit on sexual abuse and paedophilia within the Church, calling for an all-out battle against the widespread scandal.

Over four days, 114 senior bishops listened to speeches about the outrage of the people and heard the horror stories of victims.

On the first day of the summit,Pope Francis called for concrete measuresto tackle clerical sexual abuse and paedophilia.

If in the Church there should emerge even a single case of abuse which already in itself represents an atrocity that case will be faced with the utmost seriousness, he said.

Just days before the summit, Pope Francis had defrocked a former archbishop and cardinal over sexual abuse accusations in a first for the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican banned AmericanTheodore McCarrick (pictured below)from practising as a priest after he was found guilty in January of sexually abusing a teenager 50 years ago.

He was the first ever cardinal to be defrocked for sexual abuse.

Just this week, the Pope made even more progress, announcing sweeping changes to the way the Roman Catholic Church deals with cases of sexual abuse of children, abolishing the rule of pontifical secrecy that previously covered them.

This is an epochal decision, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, the Vaticans most experienced sexual abuse investigator, told Vatican Radio.

The lifting of pontifical secrecy in sexual abuse investigations was a key demand by church leaders, including Scicluna and the German cardinal Reinhard Marx, at the summit held in February.

March began with the sad news that crews were searching for a missing Italian climber and his British climbing partner stuck on a treacherous peak known as Killer Mountain.

Daniele Nardi (pictured below) and Tom Ballard were attempting the 8126-metre climb in Pakistans Himalayas, one of the hardest mountaineering feats in the world, when they went missing.

The bodies of the two climbers were found almost two weeks after the pair went missing.

The nation was rocked again when eight Italians and several British and Irish UN employees based in Rome were among those killed in the tragic Ethiopian Airlines disaster on March 10.

Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 passengers and eight crew on board.

Italy was wrapped up in another international tragedy in March: the Christchurch mosque massacre.

The weapons and ammunition used in the mass shooting of 50 Muslims in the New Zealand city were emblazoned with the names of several violent white supremacists, including Italian mass shooter Luca Traini.

Traini is an Italian neo-Nazi sympathiser who injured six African migrants in a series of racially-motivated drive-by shootings in Macerata on February 3, 2017.

Meanwhile back home, Italians received the news that a bus driver had abducted 51 children and their chaperones outside Milan, ordering the childrens hands to be bound and threatening to kill all those on board before setting fire to the vehicle.

Twelve children and one adult were taken to hospital for low-level smoke inhalation and the hijacker himself was treated for burns.

Ousseynou Sy, the driver who carried out thehijackingto protest againstmigrant deaths at sea, claimed he acted after hearing the voices of children dying in the Mediterranean.

The interior ministry later announced it would speed up granting citizenship to a quick-thinking student who hid and called authorities when the bus was hijacked.

The Carabinieri police of Sandonato Milanese identified the student as 13-year-old Ramy Shehata (pictured below).

Ramy, who has been hailed a hero by classmates and authorities, was born in Italy but is not an Italian citizen.

Speaking of astounding teens, March 15 saw thousands of Italian students walk out of school as part of a global strike to demand action on climate change by world leaders.

The initiative was spearheaded by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who just this month was name Time magazines Person of the Year.

Thunberg later visited Italy to make her message loud and clear.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for the adults and politicians to tell us what they consider is politically possible in the society they have created, the 16-year-old told a crowd of around 25,000 demonstrators in Rome in April.

Teenage pedal power was used to charge the stage where Thunberg gave her speech.

Around 128 bicycles were rigged up to a dynamo and generator in Piazza del Popolo.

During her visit, Thunberg also met with the Pope, who encouraged her to carry on with her mission.

April 7 marked 10 years since LAquila was struck by an earthquake which killed 309 people, left at least 80,000 homeless and devastated around 56 villages in the area.

The bells of Santa Maria del Suffragio church in the citys historic centre chimed 309 times at 3:32 am on the day the time the tremor hit a decade ago in memory of the dead.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte were among those who joined local residents for a candlelit commemoration in the towns central Piazza Duomo.

The wound of a local community is a wound of the national community, Conte said.

We have a duty not to forget, but above all we have a duty to be constantly striving to relaunch this territory.

A few days later, the Stefano Cucchi murder case, which had gripped the country for a decade, had a major breakthrough when a police officer gave an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Cucchis death in 2009.

Francesco Tedesco, one of three military police officers charged with Cucchis murder, told a courtroom in Romethat his colleagueshad kicked and punched the 31-year-old (pictured below) in the face repeatedly, causing his death.

Tedesco also alleged he had been threatened by officials who told him to stay silent and conceal his report about the incident.

In November, Carabinieri officers Alessio di Bernardo and Raffaele dAlessandro were both found guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of 31-year-old Cucchi and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Speaking after the ruling, Cucchis sister Ilaria told local media: Stefano was killed. We knew that and weve been repeating it for 10 years. Now perhaps my brother can rest in peace.

It was an eventful year for Italian football, with Juventus winning a record-extending eighth straight Italian Serie A title with a 2-1 win over Fiorentina.

Juventus forward Cristiano Ronaldo was crowned this years best player in Italys Serie A competition at an awards ceremony in Milan this month.

Ronaldoscored 26 goals in his debut season inItalyand led Juventus towards another domestic title.

But it wasnt all good news.

Italian football saw a surge in racist incidents at matches this season, with Inter Milan strikerRomelu Lukakuhaving been the victim of monkey chants in Cagliari and Brescia starMario Balotelli threatening to walk off the pitch following abuse in Verona.

In September, Fiorentinas Braziliandefender Dalbert Henrique asked the referee to halt play when he was abused byfans.

In October, Roma issued an apology after its supporters racially abused Sampdorias English midfielder Ronaldo Vieira.

Meanwhile, Romas city rivals Lazio received a partial stadium ban from UEFA after racist chanting during a game with French outfit Rennes.

All 20 of Italys Serie A clubs on November 29 signed a joint open letter to fans condemning racism in stadiums.

Just days after the letter was signed, Italian sports daily Corriere dello Sport was accused of fuelling racism and crossing the line of acceptability with the front-page headline Black Friday.

May 2 marked the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vincis death.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron came together to commemorate the historic event.

Many discoveries were made public during the year to mark the anniversary, including the DNA testing of a hair believed to be Leonardos and the proof the genius was ambidextrous.

On the fashion front, Prada announced in May that it would remove animal fur from its collections starting from their 2020 Spring/Summer Womens collections, becoming the latest brand to join the fur-free alliance.

June had an explosive start, when Mount Etna erupted on the first weekend of the month, spitting molten lava high into the sky and putting on a show for locals and tourists on the southern Italian island.

While no one was injured on that occasion, a hiker was killed the following month when Stromboli erupted(pictured below).

It was like being in hell because of the rain of fire coming from the sky, Italian news agencies quoted local priest Giovanni Longo as saying.

It was a year of wild weather for Italy, from a record-breaking heatwave in June, to severe storms in November which left Venice and many other parts of Italy under water.

One of the biggest stories to come out of Italy rocked the nation in July, when police officer Mario Cerciello Rega (pictured below) was stabbed to death on a street in Rome.

Hundreds of people attended Cerciello Regas funeral, including then deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio.

Two Americans, Gabriel Natale Hjorth, 18, and Finnegan Elder, 19, were charged with aggravated homicide and attempted extortion following the murder in Romes upmarket Prati neighbourhood.

Elder later confessed to stabbing Cerciello Rega with a US Marine partially-serrated, close-quarters combat knife, police said, as they gave a detailed account of what happened on the night of the attack.

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The biggest news from Italy in 2019 Italianmedia - Il Globo

Jon1979(View Comment):

The current Virginia gun control kerfuffle is an interesting preview of the situation progressives want, but arent quite sure how theyre going to get there in the real world. The Democrats know when Jan. 1 rolls around they want to take their first steps on banning guns on the way to gun confiscation, once they control the legislature in Virigina. But theyve already had the majority of the counties in the state either voice opposition or go through the Sanctuary County movement in declaring any state action to be in violation of Second Amendment rights.

In fantasy world, Gov. Northam sends out his robotic Imperial Storm Troopers and they simply do as theyre told and seize all the illegal weapons. Real world is a little messier, in that the governor is going to have to either order the removal of sheriffs and/or county officials, or mandate that Richmond put the financial screws to any county in non-compliance, and in either case, even if you got the top officials in those counties to go along with the plan, the lower level people in the law enforcement departments (or the National Guard) might not comply.

So how do the Elites tame the Savages? Up in New York State, Andrew Cuomos been content to virtue signal much of his draconian gun control law for downstate voters, while not taking it to the mat with the upstate sheriffs and voters/gun owners who oppose it. Northam may do the same thing, but more than any state other than possibly Maryland, Virginia Democrats power comes out of the federal mindset of the Washington D.C. area i.e., lots of the same people and mindsets that have brought you the past three years of the Trump investigation/impeachment farce live in Virginia, and may want their governor and legislators to use the same type of harball tactics they learned during the Obama years in D.C. on the non-complying gun-owning citizens in Virginia. Thats when the push-back really could get serious.

Excellent analysis and well written statements.

Hopefully the governor and his staff wont be as smart as Gov Jerry Brown was in Calif.

Brown went after segments within segments of the gun owning population. So hey every body: dont worry we will only take your guns if you are a veteran with a mental illness or a prescription for anti depressants.

Then a year later: dont worry we only want your guns if you have a drug conviction, even a misdemeanor drug conviction.

So since the whole populace of gun owners wasnt attacked all at once, Brown got away with more confiscation than he should have.

Read more:
Progressives, Fear the Return of the American Savage - Ricochet.com

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'Dithering' Over Medication Abortion Latest Evidence to Progressives of Buttigieg Reversing Previously-Held Position - Common Dreams

But the overarching theme of his speech, and the argument for his candidacy, I heard over and over from people who were there, was change. He could make that case partly because of something his friends had called The Proposal.

I remember there being a faction, said Heather Woodruff Grizzle, naming Sitaraman and Warrenand Joe Green, too, the gregarious, Hawaiian shirt-wearing roommate of then unknown Mark Zuckerberg. And then there was Buttigieg. Peter, Ganesh and Previn came forward with The Proposal, a student who also was heavily involved with the IOP told me.

This proposal advocated essentially for more open, less cliquish elections and ramped-up student say-so and power within the structure of the IOPless busywork and fewer administrative chores, more reading and writing and assisting staff and professors on research. The manifesto, which had circulated to acclaim from some but the exasperation of others, contributed to the reputations of its authors. Ganesh, Previn and Joe were all sort of agents of change, so to speak, said Jason Semine. And Buttigieg, I was told, was with them.

As much as he was aligned, though, with the ringleaders of this reform effort, Buttigieg wasnt seen as an agitator. He was lauded by nearly everybody at the IOP, then and now, for his deliberative, understated nature. He was, though, a believer in a more head-down inside game. In the run-up to the vote for leadership of SAC, Buttigieg displayed his talent for that inside game by approaching Seminethe forum committee chair who by virtue of that role had a relationship with a lot of underclassmen. In other words: persuadables. And he wasnt hiding the ball here, Semine said of Buttigieg. He was pretty clear: Hey, Ive got this election, I need to drum up votes For Semine, who knew Buttigieg well, it was unexpected, and pretty savvy, he said.

This, people thought, was pretty savvy, too: When it came time to pick a running mate, Buttigieg pivoted away from the lefty, rabble-rousing connotations of The Proposal. Betsy Sykes was a Republican. The cross-party-lines pairing wasnt that unusualthese were nonpartisan elections, and Tuckers vice president was Woodruff Grizzle, also a Republicanbut what else Sykes brought was her status as the chair of the fellows committee, another one of the primary leadership feeders. Having Betsy as his running mate I think very much helped, said Jonathan Chavez. Now, in the rough contours of this tight-knit electorate, Buttigieg had the votes to his leftplus more than he would have had to his right.

Buttigieg, too, was liked by the staff. The adult professionals who ran the operations of the IOP didnt have SAC votes. But thats not to say their approval didnt carry some weight. And Buttigieg could be a measured intermediary between the two groups.

You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face.

- Dan Glickman, former Kansas congressman and director of Institute of Politics in early 2000s

You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face, Dan Glickman, the former congressman from Kansas who by then was the director of the IOP, told me. Cathy and I used to talk about that, said Glickman, referring to Cathy McLaughlin, then the executive director of the IOP, now the executive director for the Biden Institute. Whenever we had an issue, shed say, Well, go talk to Pete.

Buttigiegs opponent in the election, meanwhile, was Caroline Adler, kind of like a Hillary Clinton type, said Houseintelligent, industrious, ultra-prepared. Tracy Flick, said Chavez. Since Harvard, Adler, now Adler Morales, has worked for Clinton (on her 2008 presidential campaign and in the State Department) and for Michelle Obama (in the White House and still as her communications director). In December 2002, she was the favorite going in, Tucker said. But Buttigieg won, and Adler, according to a close friend, was devastated. Her allies stewed about unjust gender dynamics at work. She was ambitious, and showed it, and that was and remains, they said, dicier for a woman than for a man. Buttigieg, they said, along with pretty much everybody else I talked to for this story, was equally ambitious. He was just more subtle about it.

His first full month in his new position, at a forum with Senator Ted Kennedy, Buttigieg again approached the standing mic. Forum regulars had come to expect from Buttigieg a certain something.

I was responsible for a thousand graduate students, said Joseph McCarthy, a Kennedy School dean at the time, but I still noticed Peter, which is rare. He would ask very searching questions and yet do it very respectfully and thoughtfully and seemed older than his years.

You could hear the commas and the semicolons, said McCarthys wife, Marina McCarthy, a Democratic consultant.

Sen. Edward Kennedy during the Sept. 2003 dedication of the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum of Public Affairs at the Harvard JFK School of Government. | Getty Images

Here Buttigieg faced Kennedy. It feels like a lot of your colleagues have adopted a posture of being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less, he said (around 51:30). The tax cutsjust a smaller oneand the warjust maybe not quite as quick as the Republican war. And then there are voices like your own, which are more forceful in opposition. I wonder if you see this as a split in the Democratic Party, and how you think, politically speaking, in the next few years your partys going to sort out what it thinks the meaning of opposition is.

Well, Kennedy responded, I would certainly expect that those differences would be clearerI think they are getting cleareras time goes on, certainly with regards to the involvement in Iraq.

That certainly was true for Buttigieg. Opposition to him on this front meant standing up and speaking out. In the middle of March, a week before the invasion of Iraq, he gave a speech to some 350 people in front of the Science Center at an Emergency Anti-War Rally.

Major events during Buttigieg's junior year at Harvard: the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the fall of Saddam Hussein. | Getty Images

Bush wants us to remember American security but forget that there might be consequences to American security if we alienate all of our allies, Buttigieg said, according to coverage in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. He pointed to the signature spire of nearby Memorial Church, where names of alums killed in action are carved in marble. They remind us of a time, he said, when we had to take up arms against another nation, and there may be a day we have to again, but that day isnt today.

It was a riskparticularly, perhaps, for anybody at all interested in a future run for elected office. It was not a consensus view on the campus, Semine said. A lot of our peers shared it, but it was not consensus.

What it was, too, was another something neweven for the people who knew Buttigieg the best.

That was probably the first time I saw him speak in public, roommate Pete Schwartzstein said. And he definitely took on a different personalike a very commanding tone.

The thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldnt, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.

- Brian Goldsmith, friend of Buttigieg at Harvard

He was able to kind of straddle two worlds, said Brian Goldsmith, a friend who was a year younger than Buttigieg (and popped up the other day on his list of bundlers). One world was the very academic, intellectual world but then the other thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldnt, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.

It was, thought Previn Warren, a watershed moment.

The summer before his senior year, Buttigieg was a research assistant for Harvard Kennedy School professor David King for a paper that would run in a book called Lights, Camera, Campaign! When I look back on the students I have had, King said when I met with him recently in his office, he stands out as one of a handful. Like its a very, very, very small number. Truly outstanding. Really something. And you knew it within the first few days of spending time with him. The paper Buttigieg helped King with dealt with Gores campaign in 2000 and specifically a whistle-stop bus-and-boat trip he took down the Mississippi River. Buttigieg crunched numbers from polls and campaign finance data that showed it helped Gore win Iowa and Wisconsin. Kind of interesting, King said with a smile, that we wrote a paper about traveling through Iowa and generating votes.

On and around campus that fall, Buttigieg and his roommates downed bottles of Sam Adams while rooting for the still-cursed Red Sox as they almost beat the hated Yankees in the baseball playoffs. At the same time, Buttigieg and his IOP mates followed along intently as Democrats mounted runs for president.

Onstage at a 2004 Democratic primary debate: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, Al Sharpton, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Dennis Kucinich. At right: Kerry and President Bush shake hands during a debate in the fall of 2004. | Getty Images

That years accelerating Democratic primary was not dissimilar to this years, a big, unwieldy fieldalbeit with only nine candidatesvying to oust an Oval Office occupant who had lost the popular vote and was seen by party aspirants and their supporters as inept and unfit. Buttigieg watched all the candidates come through the IOP for televised sit-downs with MSNBCs Chris Matthews, from John Edwards to John Kerry to Al Sharpton to Dick Gephardt to Howard Dean. Buttigeg asked Gephardt a question about the youth vote. He lamented in conversations with King in his office the mealy-mouthed way in which Kerry had talked about his faith in a debate. In spite of that, though, and even though his stance on the war might have made him more simpatico with Dean than with Kerry, Buttigieg opted nonetheless to support the Massachusetts senator.

He was liberal, Brian Goldsmith said, but he was an institutionalist. And he was pragmatic. And I do remember him thinking Kerry would be a much better choice for Democrats than Howard Dean in 2004.

In classrooms and libraries, Buttigieg worked to cap what would prove to be his Rhodes-worthy rsum, earning a perfect score on a project in professor Alyssa Goodmans class, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The title of his project? Young People and Politics. Goodman remembers Buttigieg well. Very serious, she told me. Very disciplined.

Read more:
How Harvard Made Pete Buttigieg the Moderate That Progressives Love to Hate - POLITICO

2019, it must be said, has been a pretty poor year for progressives, and given the need for action on climate change and to counter racist nationalism, it was a pretty poor one for the planet and for humanity.

The recent loss by Labour in the UK election has everyone scrambling to look for lessons that can be translated elsewhere such as to Australia and to the US for next years presidential election.

Mostly this involves very little logic and a lot of confirmation of previously held beliefs.

For Australians looking at the ALPs loss in the 2019 election things are pretty grim, and the standard talk about needing to reconnect with the centre is thrown around pretty easily. That Bill Shorten was never actually a left-winger or ever had a reputation for being overly progressive is just dismissed with a shrug. The centre shall hold!

For my part, the election only reminded me of the two rules of Australian federal elections governments win the close ones, and when a party starts trying to make it a contest between opposing frontbenches, they are lost.

Since the 1949 every time the opposition won whether Menzies, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Howard, Rudd or Abbott they won big.

Aiming to win 76 seats might seem to be the way to victory, but it never has been the case for an opposition no opposition has ever won power with less than 54% of the seats (or at least 80 in the current parliament).

If youre not hearing the words the swing is on early in the broadcast, every time since the second world war that has meant the government has been re-elected.

And if you need to give your leader cover by trying to compare ministers, you are dead because barely anyone outside their immediate family knows who the minister for health is, let alone the shadow minister.

So get a leader who people like, and who has policies people like, and who is able to sell those likeable policies well.

Maybe that means go for the centre; maybe that means embrace an issue which has the most passion and which gets people excited.

But among the many problems for progressives is the need to also deal with the river of racism that now flows through our politics.

Conservatives here and in the UK and the US have decided white nationalism is the way forward and so devoid of soul are those within the conservative side of politics in the English speaking world that for the most part they care next to nothing that such an approach has racists viewing them as the best suited to lead.

For the philosophy of the conservatives is no longer of free markets or even traditional values; it is of annoying the left.

Ram a bill through parliament without debate? Use parliamentary committees to pursue a fraudulent partisan campaign? Do we care that such things are contrary to all established conventions that conservatives purport to hold dear? Pfft. If it annoys the left, then go for it. Even better if it involves picking on the powerless.

What this year has made clear is that there is no longer an actual political debate in this country, and barely one in the UK or US.

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This years election was not a contest of ideas, it was a contest of the ALPs polices and the Liberal partys lies about them.

Donald Trump showed that the media is helpless against a bald-faced lie proudly stated, and the Liberal party under Scott Morrison has applied the lesson so well you would almost suggest that lying was an innate ability of those within the party.

Tim Wilson told the ABC that it didnt matter that the ALP did not have a policy of a death tax, it was fair game because there are people within the party who want that policy.

The conservatives have realised such lies will be spread by the media, ever worried about being balanced, where every claim, no matter how discredited, deserves some debate even if it just to let it be debunked.

All the while on Facebook the lies are being spread, as some powerful journalists think their balance will provide any sort of counter.

And so, for example, we ask not which policy will best address climate change but which will cost the most, regardless of the impact on emissions.

To be honest, when you look at this year, you can understand why lying is a key part of the conservatives armoury it makes up for a lack of ability and achievement.

Take the now ongoing lie about best economic managers.

This past year the economy has been an utter cesspit. Just six times out of the 110 quarters since the 1990s recession has annual GDP growth been below 1.8% and half of them occurred this year.

There has not been a quarter of GDP trend growth above 1% since December 2011. That is nearly eight years. Before 2011 we used to average five such quarters of strong growth every three years.

Under the Liberal party, mediocrity has become the average, and previous averages have become mythical sighting ever over the horizon, like wages growth over 3% something we havent seen since March 2013.

The April budget did promise wages would get back to 3% growth by June 2021 but, as with every wage prediction made under this government, that was again pushed out, in this weeks midyear economic and fiscal outlook, to June 2023.

But hey, theyre going to deliver a surplus.

Woo. Hoo.

This year, real household incomes did not grow at all. OK, Im exaggerating they grew 0.05%. Enjoy.

Yes, household disposable income grew 0.9% due to the tax cuts. But that one-off hit is done, and given household consumption grew by the slowest amount since the GFC, its pretty clear were not feeling all that confident that the good times are about to start rolling.

And given the prospects for next year are so poor that the market currently is factoring in a 40% chance that by this time next year the Reserve Bank will have needed to cut the cash rate twice to 0.25%, people are right not to feel confident.

But we will probably have a surplus.

And we will endure yet another year of being told that the surplus matters, even as our living standards barely rise at all.

But let us not be too down-hearted. The fight continues. We shall continue to call out the lies, and we must remain willing to keep up the fight for better wages, better share of the national income and for action on climate change.

The 2010s were not a decade that will be looked back on fondly as a time of economic joy. Progressives must in the decade ahead be strong in acknowledging that this meagre allocation of joy is a purposeful outcome of the conservatives economic policies. They aim for weak wages growth, they prefer a larger share of income going to company profits and they continue to pretend a budget surplus matters, when really it is all about trying to reduce government services.

The 2010s was for the most part a decade lost for progressives in Australia, but we cannot allow the next decade to be surrendered.

Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia

Read more here:
It's been a lost decade for progressives and for the planet but the fight goes on - The Guardian