CALLS FOR TONY ABBOTT and his government to start taking tough remedial action where the state of Australia’s cesspit of governance and expenditure are concerned are gathering strength in the mainstream press; it may make 2014 a tough year in Australia, but the opportunity to fix the mess this country was left in by the Labor Party is there for the Coalition to take. If it doesn’t do this early in its term in office, it never will.
The legacy of six years of Labor government in Australia is everywhere; it is a cancer that needs to be cut out.
This is the job Tony Abbott and his Liberal government were elected to do, and whilst I think it’s premature to jump all over a few iffy poll findings — and only a complete fool would pay any heed to the frantic narrative of conservative incompetence the ALP and its “leader,” Bill Shorten, are desperately trying to pull together from a handful of teething problems — the clamour from more composed voices for tougher action to be taken is increasing in volume.
I’ve read the morning newspapers this morning, and the article that stands out is one from a favourite of this column, the Sydney Daily Telegraph‘s Piers Akerman, who calls for Abbott to upset the Left’s gravy train; whilst I agree completely with Piers’ sentiments and can’t fault his arguments or his logic, he doesn’t go far enough: far from merely upsetting the cart, Abbott has to drive it off the tracks once and for all.
The targets — so blindingly obvious they put anything the Whitlam government ever did to shame — are everywhere.
Akerman makes an extremely valid point in his assessment of the quality of economic “management” rendered by the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government and its utterly useless, self-important, cretinous specimen of a Treasurer in Wayne Swan, especially where its knee-jerk stimulus spending in the face of the so-called Global Financial crisis was concerned.
And his analogy of Labor “telling (its) followers that Australia was better off than Greece or Portugal when those countries were on their knees was insulting” is right on the money: readers will have heard me say often enough that to get debt levels to 100% of GDP and to achieve the basket case status some European countries now endure, those levels must first pass through 10%, 20%, 30%…the ALP inherited a debt to GDP position from the Howard government of -10% which it blew out to 20% by racking up $300bn in expenditures that the recent Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) found would increase to more than 35% purely on the strength of additional and recurrent spending initiatives legislated by the ALP before it was thrown out of office.
At some point, the line was always going to have to be drawn on how much money should be thrown at car manufacturers, and Akerman is correct to assert that throwing yet more good money after bad to basically blackmail Holden into delaying the inevitable “would have been adding to Labor’s waste and pandering to the featherbedding trade unions.” As I have said in this column before, also, increasing subsidies to the car industry is to subsidise union-crafted bargaining agreements and their capacity to suck in additional funds to increase the pay of their members faster than government can throw them.
Something had to give. And I would remind readers — again — that Holden’s decision to abandon manufacturing in Australia was made months ago (unless people really are gullible enough to believe PR from GMH to the contrary, as late as the day of the official announcement), a reality over which the Labor Party is nowhere to be seen when it comes to owning any responsibility for it.
To share a quick personal anecdote, in 2008 my wife and I drove a Vauxhall Vectra around the United Kingdom for a month, racking up some 2,300 miles in it. It was identical to the Vectras sold in Australia apart from the badge on the grille. I decided I wanted one, and so the day after we arrived back in Melbourne we went to the local Holden dealership in Brighton to buy one.
The “salesperson” at the dealership could scarcely have been more honest, succinct, or helpful: he told us the Vectra had been discontinued recently in Australia and showed us a new Holden Epica, told us it was made in Korea and that it was “a piece of shit,” and suggested we go next door to Brighton Toyota and buy a Camry. So we did. Whilst not disputing that a Camry is made in Australia (and isn’t the best vehicle on the road, either), the incident neatly encapsulates Holden’s approach to new vehicle sales in Australia, its emphasis on inferior imported product, and probably can be taken as a signpost to the company’s likely local sales profile in the not too distant future.
Why would we pay Holden more money to build cars here? The suggestion is outrageous.
And this is where Akerman and I accord on what he terms the “handout mentality”: even after shovelling all that money out to Holden, its strategy appeared to be a rationalisation of passenger models in favour of the lowest-cost imports that would maximise profits even in 2008. Locally made Commodores haven’t been the commercial success they once were for many years. But as long as the tap of government monies remained open, the unions could rip the system off for their mates members at the expense of every taxpayer and business in Australia.
It’s the same story over at the renewable energy industry, where tens of billions of dollars have been pissed up against a post in the euphemistic name of “clean energy” — with the result that selected and preferred industries have become rich and fat whilst the most abundant reserves in the world of cheap fuels lie untapped in the ground and whilst average households are forced to pay $2,000 and $3,000 per year for basic necessities like electricity and gas.
And whilst the real thrust of Piers’ piece is based on manufacturing and energy, the simple truth is that the malaise he alludes to is much, much wider than that in its scope: it affects virtually everything.
Speaking of the “handout mentality,” it’s long been an article of faith in some quarters on the Right (including here) that the welfare spend of the Commonwealth is another area infected by it; not everyone on welfare is a bludger or a crook, mind, but the numbers aren’t encouraging either.
In round terms, the number of people on the Disability Support Pension rose during Labor’s term of office, from 300,000 to 850,000; at the same time, unemployment ticked up from 4.9% when Labor took office in 2007 to just 5.8% when it was kicked out six years later. The appearance is one suspiciously suggestive of the DSP having been used as a tool by Labor to hide real unemployment from the official figures, especially at a time marked mostly by tenuous economic conditions.
Then again, with some leading disability advocates suggesting that 900,000 people living in Victoria alone are “disabled” in some way — well over 15% of the state’s total population — it’s not difficult to play connect-the-dots in terms of ulterior motives associated with Labor’s much trumpeted (and entirely unaffordable) National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Which, of course, falls to taxpayers (or foreign debt) to fund.
In fact, $16bn could be saved at a stroke by abolishing the NDIS and the Gonski educational reforms, which sound like a great idea like the NDIS does, but just like the disability scheme are unfunded and unaffordable.
We talked about education in this column yesterday; since then, one reader made the comment that education spending in dollar terms does not equate to results, whilst another commented that spending isn’t the problem — the curriculum and the competence of those charged with teaching it are key. It may enrage the Left to say it, but not every cut to a government budget will disadvantage those it seeks to frighten witless if a proper emphasis on value for money and outcomes is placed on those expenditures that remain in place.
I’ve recently said that Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme — fully funded and costed as it might be — is probably not a good look, and should either be scaled back or quietly dropped. (I think the First Home Buyers’ Grant is a Howard era program that has outlived its use-by date, too: it doesn’t cover rocketing stamp duty costs, it doesn’t cover the legals it was originally intended to cover, but it has succeeded in distorting the property market and contributed to driving house prices through the roof).
But returning to the monuments and citadels and tokens of the Left, I wrote a piece earlier this year about an odious and entirely unnecessary government-funded QANGO called FECCA, which runs at a loss and eats up at least a half a million dollars of taxpayer money each year whilst doing nothing more useful than churning out politically correct socialist propaganda designed to pander to minorities and crucify the majority.
It is the nature of the beast when it comes to Labor governments (and especially one held to ransom by the Greens) that where there is one of these contemptible propaganda factories subsisting on the taxpayer teat, there are dozens and dozens of others. Abbott and Hockey should not be sentimental in either shutting them down or forcing them to rattle the charity tin by withdrawing their funding in total.
The ABC — so blatantly a mouthpiece for the agenda of the Left to the point is simply fails to mention an increasing volume of news items prejudicial to that agenda — is ripe for reform, and I would go so far as to suggest that it be privatised: if the ABC’s output is indicative of what it thinks will attract the commercial support to sustain it, then I say it should be subjected to a market determination of the relevance and integrity of that output, which will end the burden on taxpayers of propping up what has become little more than an ideology factory.
Foreign aid budgets should not be abolished as some advocate, but should be trimmed to pre-2008 levels in real terms; with the damage done to the country’s finances, the kind of largesse set in train in this area by the Labor Party simply can’t be justified.
And it goes without saying that a serious reappraisal of Australia’s financial relationship with the United Nations — engorged and abused by the ALP to curry favour with unfriendly governments to secure a seat on the Security Council that will make no difference to UN outcomes by virtue of the sheer weight of numbers of the other 14 nations that sit on it — must be undertaken as a matter of urgency.
(In fact, a reappraisal altogether of some of the things this country’s obligations under United Nations treaties impose is also a long overdue exercise, but I digress).
I could continue, but the point is pretty obvious.
At the end of the day, every aspect of Australian governance, industry, business and society that was touched by the previous government has been afflicted: and as I said at the outset, this affliction is a cancer of mismanagement that must be excised if the country is to again emerge as the world-leading entity it so richly and rightly should be.
Abbott’s government must govern, and it must take the hard decisions required to correct these and other symptoms of the Labor disease. Properly communicated and sold to an electorate that installed the Liberal Party in office to do precisely that, the political benefits will flow in the longer run — even if the going gets rough early on.
Akerman is right. The Gravy Train of the Left should indeed be upset. But rather than stop there it must be derailed altogether, with a firm eye on ensuring any rescue mission in later years by a future ALP government is, by the nature of its intent and by the will of the public, irretrievably doomed to fail.
