from the Economist"The choice between a man with a defective...

from the Economist

"The choice between a man with a defective manifesto and one with a defective personality is not appealing—but Mr Rudd gets our vote, largely because of Labor’s decent record. With deficits approaching, his numbers look more likely to add up than Mr Abbott’s."

what was left unsaid IMO
(and a cut and paste effort from a blog on my part)

It is perfectly true that national governments have little or no influence over world markets and it is world markets that determine whether the economy is in a "down-cycle" or an "up-cycle". But it is not reasonable to conclude from this that national governments have no influence over how their domestic economy handles the fluctuations of world markets.

Take, for example, the "Oil Shock" recession of the mid-1970's which struck during the reign of the Whitlam government. Although unemployment did go up, targeted stimulus spending by the government, combined with rigid wage-price indexation maintained domestic demand and softened the effect of the global downturn on the domestic economy. In 1975 there was a change of government, wages were frozen, government spending was slashed and Australia fell into "stagflation". The US and European economies started to recover from the "Oil Shock Recession" in the late 1970's, but the "austerity" program instituted by the Fraser government (with Howard as treasurer) kept our economy in the doldrums until 1983, when there was a marked change in fiscal and monetary policy and, within a few years Australia was recording strong growth.

National governments have no control over whether the global markets are going up or going down and cannot necessarily protect their citizens from recessions and depressions affecting the world economy. But the choices made by national governments can have a big effect on the experience of citizens and enterprises, of these global fluctuations. Australia continued to grow through the GFC because our government applied the correct stimulus measures in the right places and at the right time. European economies are in deep and deteriorating recession because their governments attempted to protect the ultra-wealthy with vicious austerity measures directed squarely at the most vulnerable people in the economy.

Things are still awful on global markets. The GFC, far from being an isolated incident, is simply the first sign of the real, underlying problem and nothing that has been done so far will save us from full-blown global depression. Had other governments reacted with the speed and precision of the Australian government, it is just possible that we could have avoided the coming depression. But with wealth concentrated even more tightly than it was before the onset of the GFC, global demand will continue to decline, inventories will continue to build and, eventually the "tipping point" will be reached.

History shows that, under such circumstances, we do far better under progressive governments than under conservative ones.