crocodile wrote on Sep 30
th, 2014 at 7:59am:
Its time wrote on Sep 29
th, 2014 at 7:52pm:
crocodile wrote on Sep 29
th, 2014 at 7:38pm:
MBK wrote on Sep 29
th, 2014 at 5:06pm:
John S wrote on Sep 29
th, 2014 at 9:31am:
The worst treasurer in Australia history = Liberal (Hockey)
The best treasurer in Australia history = Labor (Keating)
Got that that a bit wrong old mate.
Hockey is not the worst YET, but should be moved elsewhere.
Costello as the best ever in history of nation.
Keating did us lots of favours but also some disastrous things like tacking us onto Singapore petrol prices for one and super when we had a pension fund for two and so on.
But why argue?
today is when we need action - let them stop playing politics and lets not encourage them.
Not a footy team as too many follow politics seem to behave as if.
Oh the rolling eyes of a Brian Ross. ha ha.
Just out of curiosity, what parameters does one use when assigning the mantle of best, 2nd, 3rd and worst treasurer ?
When your handed economic reforms in boom times on a platter you certainly don't need to sell 2/3rds of your gold reserves, that alone moves you well past position 7.
SoW, There is not much doubt that Costello presided over much less challenging times than most others but it hardly makes him a nuffy. He did suffer a couple of fires to put out, namely, the '97 Asian financial crisis and the '01 Tech wreck.
Doesn't really answer the question though. How does one parameterise individual performance given vastly different operational circumstances that are often beyond the control of the incumbent.
Just on a side note
Quote:Keating did us lots of favours but also some disastrous things like tacking us onto Singapore petrol prices for one
You will find that there was not much choice. At the time, Australia was a net oil exporter with the Tapis price higher than the local price. Without parity, the producers would simply export their product where the prices were higher rather than sell into the domestic market. The end result would mean that local prices would inevitably rise as supply shortened. Keating just pre-empted the outcome and acted first.
I rate Keating just in front of Costello and both very highly as the best I have seen.
They all make mistakes and I forgive one or two foibles from both as Mentioned the Gold thing was a clanger and Keating has a few good ones as well. I put Keating in front mainly because he took a very poor situation and turned it around with reform and he navigated a serious world recession. Costello never faced the same problems so is more difficult to measure, the dot com and Asian problems were in large isolated from us. He did in my view very well but he had a leader who undermined his achievements and in the end we were left with an economy geared to fail in anything but the best conditions.
They gave away the government income in tax reform that they were going to need in a normalised economy, they should have spent on infrastructure instead of vote buying. I suspect that this was Howards error that Costello was stuck with.
This was an easy mistake to make - they thought that the good times would go on forever and didn't understand the consequences of a more normal situation. When the economy is running at about 2% above the overall average economic performance and the budget is set at 0.8% above income then a return to average conditions puts us in deficit, a downturn below average as we faced puts us in trouble.
This was always going to be the outcome of the economic gearing which Costello left in place.
In the end I take a point or two away from Costello for this one even though he got away with it himself, I can not penalise him for being lucky in the time he served, in my view the only Issue I had with Keating was that he was too much like a conservative treasurer. Aspects of the accord and other policy hurt a lot of employees and started the lower level wages squeeze we still see in force today, Labor got control and then the Liberals squeezed real hard.
The actions of Keating left the unions vulnerable to the following Howard government.
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