The past year has been a bewildering one for Australians. On the one hand, their economy has boomed right through a world recession. On the other, some of their best-known companies have gone bust. In telecoms, it was One.Tel, a start-up backed by Australia's two most prominent business clans, the Murdochs and the Packers, whose collapse embarrassed both families. In aviation, it was Ansett, the junior partner in Australia's former airline duopoly, which folded last September quite independently of the effect on air traffic of the September nth attacks. The most serious collapse by far, indeed the largest in Australian history, was the demise last year of HIH, once the country's second-largest general insurer. The political fallout from the collapse continues. Together with the failure this month of another insurer, UMP, it has cast Australia into a crisis not only in insurance but in construction, medical practice and other activities that have got costlier and harder for lack of affordable liability insurance.
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