The Conservatives Are About To Sort Out Labour's Deficit & Overspend - In Australia!

Tony Abbott’s controversial levy-not-a-tax is unlikely to survive in the May 13 Budget after conservative forces who usually back the Prime Minister today lined up to condemn it.

Mr Abbott also is facing private criticism from industry groups over what they see as the lack of Budget consultations, the sudden appearance in the media of possible measures affecting them, and weak planning.

But the central debate today is over the speculation the Budget will include a levy on those earning $80,000 a year and above, to last for four years.

Mr Abbott did not diminish the speculation when he took on the argument that the levy was not a tax.

The Institute of Public Affairs, the free market think tank normally an Abbott ally, was more savage than most in attacking the notion of a tax which could raise more than the carbon price, which the Prime Minister wants abolished.

a lot of academics have said as much in recent times, but the government ignore those jerks since they're eggheads in their ivory towers surrounded by their precious booky-wooks with no idea how things work out here in the real world. Talk to people who are out there hawkishly looking for a lean economy on the mean economic streets of Australia: they know we're in deep shit, right?

Nope.

“I don’t think you could make the case that there is a budget crisis… I don’t think we need to urgently get the budget back to surplus": HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham.

"Growth is below trend… But I don’t see any particular urgency about 2014-15 or 2015-16”: Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist Saul Eslake.

“Most countries would be envious of Australia’s public finances as they currently stand”: Barclays Australia chief economist Kieran Davies.

“We don’t need a surplus tomorrow. We don’t even necessarily need it in five years time”: Chris Richardson, economist and partner at Deloitte Access Economics.

These people are investment bankers, not community health advocates. When the profiteeringest of the profiteers are saying "hey, this is not the smart thing to do" then you can safely assume that we're not talking left/right bias affecting interpretation of real issues: we're talking about a government philosophy based entirely on vapour and lies.

Call me a relentless optimist if you must, but you know what? Abbott could yet be the figure that unifies the warm, fuzzy left and the cold, steely right, letting tree-hugger and corporate raider alike join hands, gaze into each others eyes and murmur "what the ever-loving fuck is our PM trying to do?"

BigAndy9 wrote:Call me a relentless optimist if you must, but you know what? Abbott could yet be the figure that unifies the warm, fuzzy left and the cold, steely right, letting tree-hugger and corporate raider alike join hands, gaze into each others eyes and murmur "what the ever-loving fuck is our PM trying to do?"


Make modern humans pay their way instead of taking everything on credit, the chav way?

Treasurer Joe Hockey is facing questions about whether or not he offered privileged access to business and industry lobbyists in return for annual political donations.

While the donors' identities remain confidential, Fairfax Media alleges he offered access to members of the North Sydney Forum, a campaign fundraising body run by the North Sydney Federal Electoral Conference which itself is linked to the Liberal party.

Except, at the risk of being a broken record, they didn't. In fact, in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP, Gillard hit the lowest (23.1%) and Rudd was equal to Howard on 24.1%, and it's been sitting at around 24% of GDP for decades. So the spendy spendfest argument only works if you want to redefine "crisis" as "maintaining a slightly lower percentage of spending".

The problem - and it's not, as we've gone on about at length, an urgent one - is revenue: Australians have had tax cut after tax cut for the last two decades, despite there being things like a Global Financial Crisis (you know, the one in 2009 that Labor negotiated us through with hardly any effect as the rest of the world came close to economic collapse - yeah, that one? The one for which they're now being blamed?).

Now, the Commission of Audit wasn't a government thing - their recommendations are not policy, and the government can therefore ignore them. And it's also worth remembering that the Commission was a hard-right razor gang specifically recruited to kill things it didn't like. Which is why it's happily recommending killing the CSIRO and Department of Meteorology's Australian Climate Change Science Program, which costs a bit over $7 million a year (which, in debt terms, is fucking nothing at all).

Not that the government was above ignoring recommendations from it's own organisations, of course, which is why the now-non-governmental Climate Council is asking for donations to keep its work up (which you can do right here).

Anyway, the takeaway here is that a) Labor didn't spend more than the Coalition, b) the problem isn't on the spending side: it's about revenue, and c) it's only an urgent problem if you assume that Australia won't be able to service its debt in the next decade. And yes, money spent on debt is money you can't spend on other things, but let's also keep things in perspective: if paying the mortgage off early means no longer feeding and clothing your kids for the next few years, people are more likely to think of you as as a monster than a prudent economic whiz for going down that path.

And since Australia is one of the lowest debtors in the entire world, and probably not going to disincorporate anytime soon, we're probably OK.

NewsPoll's latest opinion poll has echoed that of Fairfax's poll a month back: Labor are 52% to 48% on a two party preferred basis. It's mainly because support for the Greens and Palmer United has been rising - showing that the Coalition are losing ground with both the would-like-the-planet-to-not-kill us and just-taking-the-piss demographics.

Labor have not, however, turned their primary vote around: it's still on 37%, which suggests that maybe doing nothing about stuff for ages wasn't the killer strategy they apparently thought it was.

But that's just the stupid voting public who aren't worth thinking about for another couple of years at least. The important thing is that everyone in the front bench is on side, right?

Given that the one huge thing that helped the Coalition romp into power was their unity in the face of Labor's constant leadership stoushes, what's particularly interesting is who is lining up behind Abbott as we head to the budget and who is keeping their head down.

Education minister and living cartoon of a upper-class toff Christopher Pyne has been loudly and stridently praising the radness of Abbott when he's not arguing that privatising universities will lead to a nation of supergeniuses (and definitely not lead to a spate of private unis springing up, taking government money and international student fees, going bankrupt and then leaving the state-supported institutions to take on these fee-paying students for free, despite that being what happens in the US all the time and has already started happening in Australia).

And he's loudly braying that Abbott wanting to bring in a short term levy is definitely not a tax and therefore not a broken promise, while Gillard bringing in a short term levy was absolutely a tax and therefore unforgivable. When asked that very question, he said "No, it's not". Which is an incorrect answer.

Now, one thing that is important to remember about Pyne is that he cannot ever be leader of the party, much less PM, because no-one likes or respects him: no-one in the party, and no-one in the general public. It's hard to imagine that his own family don't mumble "dickheadsayswhat?" as they pass him in the kitchen. So he has nothing to lose by continuing to give Abbott his visible support.

BigAndy9 wrote:29th April 2014

Sound familiar?:

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https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/23039970/tax-cuts-possible-before-end-of-decade-pm/