what is australias total debt?, page-46

MK "Your graph shows Australian Government debt up to 2008 which,
given what has happened in the interim, is about as good as tits on a bull."

There were 2x graphs, both showing Australia's debt in historical context. There is nothing extraordinary about the present v the past.

That is the reality, there is NO budget emergency.

The LNP's budget is dead, because treasury economists can NOT show that the budget cuts and reallocation of the government's existing resources is good for the Australian economy and people.

Why budget reforms are now in intensive care
By Laura Tingle


Australians will respond to an argument for change and reform but they have two requirements, former prime minister John Howard observed this week.

“They want to be satisfied it’s in the national interest”, he said. “They also want to be satisfied it’s fundamentally fair”.

His comment really encapsulates rather efficiently the problem the government is having with its budget.

We’ve had another week of the Coalition crawling through the mud of its budget sales job to a hostile electorate.

The government thought it was on to something with its argument that, of course, Labor had once advocated a medicare co-payment in 1991.

Strangely, it didn’t mention that at least Labor was proposing to exclude all federal health concession cardholders from the scheme, and boost the Medicare safety net.

But you wonder whether the Coalition would now be able to persuade that a co-payment, even on the Labor basis, was fair, or that anything in the budget is “fundamentally fair”.

What’s more, the more tyres that are being kicked on the budget car, the less persuaded people seem to be that it is in the national interest either.

That is, that the various “reforms” may produce a smarter, more productive country. You even have to wonder whether it can deliver the outcomes the government says it wants.

Here is just one example of how some unrelated policy shifts in the budget may interact with potentially disastrous implications for our health system.

The fastest growing area of the workforce is health. That’s not a bad thing, given our ageing population.

Health Workforce Australia forecasts a shortage of 109,000 nurses by 2025.

You’d think that made it a pretty good career option.

The only trouble is that nursing – along with a range of allied health professions – risks being priced out of the market for rational economic career decisions by the budget.

In the debate about cuts to government contributions to university course fees and, as a result higher student debts, the talk tends to be about students who may reap significant income returns for the cost of their university education.

Nurses are not such a group. Modelling released by Universities Australia this week suggest nurses’ uni debts will rise from $19,398 to as much as $37,390 under the budget proposals. This is for a job paying a starting income of $48,729.

A female nursing graduate who works full-time for six years, then works part- time for six years (say, to have children) before returning to full-time work, will take 22 years to repay a debt that balloons to $66,195.

The HELP debt system tends to hit women much harder than men because of the greater likelihood of interrupted work patterns, and because they are more often employed than men in lower-paying jobs like nursing.

(Just as well the Prime Minister, who is so concerned for women, wants to give them access to his great paid parental leave scheme .?.?. for six months.)

Even if someone makes the irrational economic decision to invest in such a financially unrewarding course of study, they could find further obstacles in their way thanks to the budget.

Federal cuts to hospital funding mean the states are looking for every form of income they can get to stay afloat.

One lucrative source of income for the states – and for private hospitals – is the so-called placement charges to universities for allowing nursing students to work in their hospitals. It is big business: more than 110,000 health students in 2011, according to a University of Sydney study.

The chair of the national committee of deans of nursing and midwifery, professor Wendy Cross, notes that her university, Monash, currently pays around $60 a day per student to public hospitals and slightly more to private hospitals.

These charges are expected to increase – and expand to hospitals that currently do not charge – as a result of the budget.

Facing their own funding shortfalls, some universities are now considering passing on some of these charges to students, on top of their fees, as well as charges for higher degrees.

Cross says placement charges are also likely to rise for allied health professionals – like physiotherapists – from around $35 to be in line with nursing charges.

Economists might argue that market demand could come into play to produce more student places and perhaps drop the charges, or that there can be an increase in the wages of nurses. But no. There is already a constraint in the number of clinical places in the system which cannot accommodate an increase in the number of nursing students in the past couple of years.

The great irony of all this is that attempts to get better planning in the health workforce date back to the Howard government, including one of its former health ministers, Tony Abbott.

Read the article in full - source: http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/why_budget_reforms_are_now_in_intensive_j1fK5bsqU7EQNG6UP8kWeI