Corporate Australia is firmly behind the wheel of the Australian economy, while consumers have taken on the role of passengers in the current environment.

Australian consumers will have to tighten their budgets, spend less at the shopping mall and attempt to pare back existing debt.

The soaring price of petrol is now starting to pose a major threat to the Australian economy.

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

Consumers are increasingly feeling that they are being taken for a ride.