Businesses that were supposed to be ruined have said they weren’t adversely affected – see BHP’s response to Abbott’s monumental Olympic Dam bugger-up. Whatever you thought of carbon pricing beforehand, removing it now only causes more headaches and instability. Then, rather than businesses paying for the carbon they emit, Abbott’s Direct Action policy has taxpayers directly funding billions in handouts to these same businesses, who will be asked nicely to spend it on emitting less. And to top it off, after the warnings of how taxes on business would ultimately ruin us all, Abbott plans to fund billions in unnecessary parental leave by… imposing an extra tax on business.
The fact that Abbott’s costings weren’t released until two days before the election should alone disqualify him from contention. No one pulls a bullshit stunt like that unless they have an army of skeletons to keep buried. Then there’s the fact that the costings were just a list of numbers with no indication as to how they were reached. A man who has talked endlessly about trust expects an electorate to accept his policies and promises based on pure faith.
But faith is what Abbott is all about. His work in opposition has been a simple matter of making statements. The carbon tax is toxic. Australia has too much debt. The cost of living is rising. It doesn’t matter how empirically this poo is disproved; somehow, like a smacking average horror movie, the same tiresome desiccated monster pops its reanimated head up and starts roaring once more. Like Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror, the mere act of saying something enough times calls it into being.
Take the question of debt. A deciding factor for many in this election will be a fear of national debt. In their minds, we had a budget surplus, now we don’t, this means things are bad and it has to be corrected. If you are one of those people, let me give you a really quick economics primer. In an economy with the risk of slow growth, government investment is an ideal form of stimulus. Investment in infrastructure is good because you purchase something that keeps being useful in the long term, while generating further revenue for the private individuals or companies who use it, which in turn helps raise government revenue via tax. So when my e-phone rings, I can hand-deliver one internet via the information superhighway on my cyberbike, and both me and my government benefit from the extra income.
These investments are funded by borrowing against the prospect of future benefit. Government capital is raised (and debt incurred) by routine issuing of bonds. There aren’t any loan sharks out there waiting to break our national knees. In boom times, when revenue is higher, there’s less need for government stimulus which means deficits reduce. And after all that, turns out Australia’s ratio of debt to GDP (the best indicator of troublesome debt) is one of the lowest of all developed nations. Well bugger me, it’s true.
In the meantime, after three years bemoaning Labor’s wasteful big-spending approach and promising to do better, Abbott’s costings – if all goes perfectly to his plan – have tweaked three budget lines to identify $6billion in savings over four years. That’s 0.3 percent of the budget. Over four motherbuggering years. In Federal terms, that’s change you find down the back of the couch. Deeper and uglier cuts will have to follow, but clearly he doesn’t want us to know what they are. Either that or he doesn’t know yet. The prospect that Abbott just spits raw mince at a brainstorm wall-chart and picks policies based on gristle-clusters has never left my mind. Even the firmly right-wing Economist, focusing specifically on finance and economics, has warned that Abbott’s policies are dangerously unclear and untested, and heralded the work of Labor’s last two terms. That’s like Choc Mundine volunteering at a library.
However he gets there, Abbott’s policy will be to cut spending and produce an austerity budget – for no other reason than ‘budget surplus’ sounding nice to uninformed voters. A quite plausible result will be a recession, as government spending drops, jobs are lost, community spending drops, welfare claims increase, and tax receipts fall. In many situations having a surplus is actually irresponsible policy – there’s nothing sensible about failing to invest when investment is required.
As well as downgrading the NBN, this will involve cutting clean energy investment at a time when even the great scapegoat of China is pumping unprecedented cash into the sector. Basically, Australia in global economic terms will become more isolated, more backwater, and increasingly left behind to scratch our nuts, chew grass stems, grow our front teeth long and head to the hayloft to fingerbang our sisters. Great work, buggeros.
But the talk on debt betrays the biggest problem of all. The biggest problem is Tony Abbott. Even ignoring the personal quirks, like his incessantly creepy weirdness with women, or the fact that he mostly looks like he’s about to slurp a fly out of midair, Abbott is a negative, uninspired, uninspiring, ruthless and mean-spirited person with a desire for power. Rudd loves the spotlight, but this occasionally has the side effect of him doing good things to get it. Abbott does not give a bugger what anyone thinks. Even if you do like Tony Abbott, Tony Abbott does not like you.
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The Heathen Nails it again (Read 874 times)
