Boris Johnson loses five votes on the floor of the House of Commons and now this.

The AGE reports: Boris Johnson broke the law by suspending Parliament, court rules

Boris Johnson suspended the UK Parliament illegally in order to stop it holding his government to account over its Brexit plans, a Scottish court has ruled, in bombshell new blow to the Prime Minister.

In a stinging ruling, the Court of Session in Edinburgh said the Johnson government had prorogued Parliament to allow it to “pursue a policy of a no-deal Brexit without further Parliamentary interference”, calling this an “egregious” failure of good governance.

They implied he had lied to, or at least misled the Queen over the reasons for suspending Parliament.

Poor Boris. He is turning out to be even worse than his worst critics imagined he would be. He hasn’t won a vote on the floor of the House of Commons. People are defecting from his party in droves and now his actions in advising the Queen to prorogue Parliament have been declared illegal.

Boris looks for his next big win

Frydenberg’s tax cuts prove to be a drag on the economy

The Age reports: “Billions of dollars in tax cuts and infrastructure spending have failed to kickstart the economy – tipped to be growing at its slowest rate since the last recession.

Shoppers closed their wallets in July, pocketing cash or paying off debt, leaving retailers watching on as sales fell across the country.

Despite the cash injection, which Treasury and analysts had expected to deliver a much-needed boost to the retail sector, consumers instead shied away from the nation’s shopping centres.

This is a double-edged sword. Not only is the money not flowing back into the economy as a short-term stimulus, is also foregone revenue for the government to use as long-term stimulus and infrastructure spending.

Add to this the foregone revenue in two specific areas that the government campaigned strenuously to defend: Franking credits and negative gearing.

Like the tax cuts, these two policies are regressive in that they favour the more wealthy who tend to save and reinvest.

If the government is serious about stimulating the economy in the short term, namely the so-called “sugar hit” then the way to do it is to direct money to the sectors economy that are likely to spend the money as they get It: pensioners, the unemployed, people on low incomes.

There another, bad sign in the economy

Gross domestic product has been trending downwards for the last two decades

With interest rates at 1%, the Reserve Bank is running out of options. With government policies targeting the wrong groups, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg may also be running out of options.

AMP chief economist Shane Oliver has gone further, predicting an official interest rate of 0.5 per cent by Christmas. “The RBA is still waiting to see what sort of boost to growth the rate cuts of June and July and the federal government’s tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners provide,” he said. “However, while these will help avoid recession, we doubt that they will be enough to generate decent growth and the evidence from July is not that encouraging.”