THE national interest – a factor of over-arching importance to most sensible Australians but not apparently to the Labor Party or its shallow leader, Bill Shorten – demands that the economic health of the country be given the utmost priority. 
 
Yet, in delivering the Opposition’s reply to the Budget, the national interest was wilfully ignored in favour of old-fashioned pie-in-the-sky populist politics.

Forget the elephant in the room, Labor is ignoring the blue whale that is thrashing around in the house, its tail in the backyard, its fins spreading across the bedrooms and its massive head in the living room sucking clouds of borrowed cash through the open front door. If it continues to lash about it will batter the home to bits leaving nothing but smashed foundations.

Even Labor stalwart Graham Richardson conceded in The Australian on Friday that “there is a crisis in the years towards the end of this decade that needs addressing”.

But Shorten and Opposition social services spokesman Jenny Macklin continue to be denialists.

Nine months ago, after five record Budget deficits delivered over six years of the most incompetent and deceitful governments this country has endured, Australia dumped Labor. The nation, sluggishly, was waking up to reality. With a Labor’s so-called Abbott-proofing of the economy, the ALP ensured that there would be a further $123 billion in deficits over the next four years and that, left unchecked, that debt would triple, soaring to at least $667 billion.

The interest bill this year alone is $12 billion. Instead of building new hospitals, schools, ports and roads, Labor blew at least $29 billion on its wasteful NBN program, $11 billion on its failed border protection program and $2.8 billion on lethal pink batts program.

Last week, summoned to testify at a royal commission, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, finally managed to accept “ultimate responsibility” for that disastrous project though he blamed the public service for failing to advise him of its deadly risks.

Shorten however still cannot admit that he and his party are responsible for the leviathan-sized debt that will burden generations of Australians unless remedial action is taken now. In his Budget reply, he did not offer a single solution. Instead, he played politics to a gallery packed with staffers and hangers-on who hope that Labor will regain power and keep shovelling the cash in their direction. No national interest, just political and personal interest.

“Where is the decency? Where is the honesty?” Shoren asked rhetorically. Certainly not on the Labor side of politics and not in the Green’s party room. An honest leader would admit that the problem is real and a decent leader would try and come up with some positive remedy not pander to those who still hanker for cloth cap trade unionism and a phoney class war.

Shorten, now locked in as Labor leader under the post-Rudd rules which make it more difficult for the ALP to dump incompetents, offers no hope for those who want a strong debt-free Australia but he does hold out the usual promises to those who have become accustomed to sucking from the public tit.

Delusional, and obviously hoping his audience was willing to be deluded, he reminded spectators: “We are the party that implemented the Gonski reforms for schools based funding based on need. A $14.7 billion additional investment in Australian schools.”

Let me jog the collective memory and note that, like so many of Labor’s claimed successes, the Gonski “investment” was never funded. It was yet another thought bubble charged to the national credit card because the world’s greatest treasurer Wayne Swan had run down the generous surplus left by the Howard-Costello government and was borrowing against the hard work of future generations to underwrite its fantasies.

Labor’s legacy, which Shorten and his party colleagues refuse to address is nothing more than a debt book of unsustainable, unaffordable spending commitments oozing red ink.

Former Labor climate change minister Greg Combet, who followed Rudd into the pink batts’ commission’s witness box, admitted the profligate program was flawed from the start. In time, other ministers from the Rudd and Gillard governments will cleanse their consciences and concede they were part of a catastrophic experiment, ruinous in scope with an ongoing and devastating repercussion.

But unless while Shorten and his cohorts maintain their deliberate blindness to the economic chaos they created, and while they perpetuate the fabrication that the economy is not only in good shape but can afford more of their extravagances, the national interest will continue to suffer.

Labor has irresponsibly committed Australia to spend faster than any of the 17 advanced economies it regularly tracks but Whining Willie refuses to even acknowledge the debt trap. Instead, he is trying to appeal to the selfish, not the selfless. To those for whom blatant self-interest trumps national interest. The nation deserves a lot better than an Opposition leader with no plans and no realistic blueprint for the future.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/labor-leader-deluded-and-fiscally-dangerou...

Frances wrote on May 22^nd, 2014 at 9:01am:


I agree - Bill is Short-on facts...

Daily Telegraph? Really?

Armchair_Politician wrote on May 22^nd, 2014 at 9:10am:


And yet people voted for him and look what we've got.....

John Smith wrote on May 22^nd, 2014 at 9:14am:


And how can Shorten know how much more damage Abbott and Hockey can do over the next couple of years?

The budget has produced an overwhelming negative response. It's not just the ALP that disagree. The problem is the solution is simply an ideological attack (on the poor, the sick the young, the old etc) to a problem that while important is hardly urgent.

If this is such an emergency then why are we still subsidising the coal industry? Why is he cutting other existing revenue sources? The reason is because it's all about ideology, and not about a spending problem.

Kytro wrote on May 22^nd, 2014 at 9:28am:


Do you know how much the coal industry provides this country, in terms of jobs, capital, coal for power generation, etc? Far more than the car industry ever did! You'd rather see the mining industry cease, eh? That's a sure-fire way of destroying the economy!

Frances wrote on May 22^nd, 2014 at 9:44am:


How about you read the article in the link and find out, eh?