It’s common thought that politicians have worked exceptionally hard in the year of Covid, and if it wasn’t for them we would all be dead. Untrue. They have also pushed the fallacy that were it not for them doing those long tedious press conferences, we’d all be suffering from the WuFlu. People seem to think that Dan Andrews did his 200 press conferences in a row as some kind of higher personal sacrifice. I don’t think so. The idea that any politician didn't want to spend one to two hours a day, completely hogging the limelight, while completely drowning out the opposition, is ridiculous. This was a brilliant way to starve their opposition of oxygen, and you saw that manifest itself in WA where Mark McGown was re-elected absolutely overwhelmingly. Same thing happened in Queensland. Incumbency during a crisis means you get the cameras. And this crisis is a boon for incumbents no matter how ordinary or incompetent they happen to be.
Another myth that's taken hold is that they’ve had to make really tough decisions. In Australia they didn't because as soon as the rest of the world shut down, Australia could say “we’re following best practice”. But that was not a hard decision and of course then they say “we're doing this because what we want to protect you”. “We don't really want to take all of this power but we're doing it for your benefit”, and this is linked to the next myth that they had to make really tough economic decisions. Where? When? Spending lots and lots and lots of money is not a tough decision, especially when this is a government-made recession, and because it’s government-made, the government has a moral responsibility to compensate for the damage it's done. Of course this is not a traditional compensation case where you get money from the people who made the bad decisions. What we are doing is we are bribing ourselves with money that we just don't have. We are doing it today with the job keeper/job seeker government programs, and then it's going to occur in the future as we try to get out of the recession. And there’s little (or no) need for additional spending, because as the unemployment figures showed recently, Australia is not that badly off. Unemployment is actually pretty good. Government will not lead us to recovery, business will. But to show how much they care, show how much empathy they have, and how they feel just terrible about what they've done, politicians have been splashing our money at us. And because we're stupid, we all say “Thank you Sir, thank you, is it possible to have some more.” This shines golden light upon the incumbent, and their popularity goes up. The opposition can't give you that money, it’s all the wonderful government. Truth is, it is writing a check against your future. And somehow we're grateful to them for it. It's moronic. What politician has ever lost their jobs because they were splashing money about? Now of course smart people realise “hold on, that's my that's my money!” but it appears that there aren't enough smart people, so people get the checks from someone like Kevin Rudd in 2008/2009 and think “Wow! free money!” So they don't connect it with the tax rises or lack of services years later when the government has to pay it back. So politicians spend all the money, splurging it, and at the end there is nothing to show for it, except a whole lot of people asking “Where’d my money go?” Well that person asking “Where’d my money go?” will be you. Because we'll have to raise taxes to pay for these obscene splurges. About the only good thing that’s happened in Australia is that our splurge has not been as reckless or as large as the incredibly dangerous irresponsible splurge that's happening in the US at the moment, and apparently even though only two weeks ago they passed the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, they’ve got another $2trillion infrastructure bill lined up - even though the money from one of the Trump stimulus packages hasn't paid spent yet. So we should be grateful that our spendthrift drunken politicians are not as bad as other people's. However. That doesn't mean we're off the hook.
The thing about government debt is that the person who racks it up is very rarely the person who actually has to make the decision to pay it back. They could go for austerity, (reduce services), or increase taxes, or both, and usually they end up losing an election. So they don't care, and then some other poor bastard comes in and has to make the tough and unpopular decisions. This is what happened in 1996 when the liberals were saying the debt is too high. But by the time we paid it all off, by the time we had net assets, by the time we had actual cash reserves, Kevin Rudd came in and blew it all. And when Tony Abbott arrived in 2013 and said “we have to start paying this down” we squealed like stuck pigs because we thought the good times should keep going. We didn’t want to pay $7 to see a Doctor, for goodness sakes. Oonce you get on the cycle of spend, spend, spend, it is very hard to remain in government while you make tough decisions.
The Victorian budget has plunged further into debt after the state government spent big on infrastructure and stimulus grants to businesses in an attempt to keep people in jobs throughout the pandemic. Treasurer Tim Pallas said the state was surging towards a healthy recovery after he released a 2021 media fiscal report recently. The total value of goods and services sold in the state grew by 6.8 percent in the 3 months to December. Why? Because when government takes its boot off the neck of business the economy will grow. Because we haven't been able to go out across Australia and spend money on things, like in Victoria they haven’t been able to go out to restaurants, because government treated everybody like a child, because they didn't think people were smart enough to be sensible, because they locked everybody down, (remember 15 days to slow the spread?), when the government takes its boot off business’ neck, businesses grow.
My question to our leaders is: when the reserve bank says “stop spending”, are you going to listen to the reserve bank? When they say we have to raise interest rates because inflation is starting to become a concern, will you stop spending? Have you got the guts? Can you do it? Of course not, you don't want to be unemployed. Don't worry just create penury for the future generations.
Net government debt in Victoria (for example) increased by $17.4 billion in the last 6 months. The Victorian government has repeatedly expressed confidence in its ability to sustain the level of debt, which it says is relatively low compared with the federal government. So is their capacity to raise revenue, dramatically so. Idiots.
What governments have done is use covid as the camouflage just for being crap at what they do. They are using this to hide all of their sins. The truth is our governments across Australia have been spending madly for years. And now they’ve got an excuse to do it, and try to hide some stuff, which they can’t do, because there are consequences. For example, the two major credit ratings agencies which judge governments on how likely they are to be able to repay debt have both downgraded Victoria's rating in recent months. Moody's downgraded Victoria by two positions and said the decision was sparked by “...a marked erosion in Victoria's governance of its public finances”. That means debt becomes more expensive for Victoria. You cannot just keep spending without consequence. But of course, I can guarantee you that Dan Andrews will not be there when it comes to making the actual tough decisions. He will be remembered as the premier who got Victoria through covid, and it'll be some other poor bastard who's going to have to pick up the pieces.
Australia's unemployment rate has fallen to 5.8 percent according to the latest figures from the ABS, which the Prime Minister says means his plan is working. No, Mr Morrison, it’s because business is doing business. And they will do things and people get jobs. The number of Australians employed increased by 89,000 between January and February to reach over 13 million, the unemployment rate has declined by 0.5 percentage points to 5.8 percent with unemployment decreasing by 70,000 people according to the ABS. But Morrison said “In less than 12 months from when the recession began caused by the Covid pandemic there are now more jobs in the Australian economy than there were before the pandemic. (The recession was actually caused by government!). This is good news. This means the economy is growing. It's growing so much that he’s saying we need more people to fill the jobs. Jobs that pay more than being on the dole, which comes from productive people - idiots - like you - that have been at work the whole time.
So it is now time to withdraw the stimulus and compensation, so we can get back to work. But, will government have the courage to withdraw services, to withdraw money? No they won’t.
A couple weeks ago they increased jobseeker. Every single council of social services around the country has put in a claim for more money to reduce poverty. This is a myth. Throwing money at people does not reduce poverty. It makes them dependent on idiots like you that have jobs. What you need is people to get up in the morning and go to work. So they can invest, so they can build something for themselves. Just increasing money that they get for free from people who are productive does not decrease poverty. The best poverty reduction program as you've probably heard is a job. Good luck selling that at the moment. And because government didn't trust us to be adults, we have given ourselves, our children, our grandchildren and possibly beyond that, a massive debt, because government didn't trust us to assess risk on our own and do the right thing. So instead we overreacted with the shut downs, and then we overreacted with the response to it.
(Thanks to David Murtagh of The Daily Breakdown Podcast, who’s recent exploration on this issue is the basis of this article. Parts of his article have been reproduced here with his kind permission. https://dailybreakdown.com.au/ )
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