At the Press Club today Kevin Rudd will pay homage to Clint Eastwood’s Republican Convention “oration on an empty chair”, by debating Tony Abbott on the economy without Abbott actually being their.
I guess he will do a selfie of this performance to post to Instagram along with his homage of yesterday to Norman Gunston.
While Kevin’s done a lot to grow his social media audience using a range of impressions, you can’t say the same about the economy.
If any journalist wants to derail him today, they should ask him to name any economic policy of the last six years that has actually had the effect of growing the Australian economy.
I’m struggling to find one, but I’m sure the prolix Rudd won’t be caught that short, even if he’s likely to be caught without decent cover.
The sad fact is that the last government that positively contributed anything to economic growth was the Howard Government.
So while he’s likely to point to taxation “reform”, health “reform” and education “reform”, and “steering us through the GFC” as policies of growth, in fact none of them has done anything to make all of us richer.
When it comes to Labor governments of the last six years the term “reform” has been used as often as not to mask “redistribution”. And while redistribution is not necessarily bad, a government whose only claim to fame is robbing the rich to give to the poor is likely to be impoverishing us all at the same time.
Which is why voters aren’t prepared to give the Labor party any marks on the economy. They know that Labor inherited a very healthy animal and that rather than programming it for higher performance they’ve been doping it with ever increasing amounts of debt.
They know that without John Howard, and Paul Keating, and Bob Hawke, none of these “reforms” would have been possible and we wouldn’t have escaped the GFC unscathed.
Those of us who have invested in businesses know that you can pay any number of fancy experts to tell your bankers and investors how well your business is performing, but at the end of the day the only measures that count are what’s in your bank account, and how much you own, net of debt.
On those measures Labor has done nothing for Australia, and they are the measures, economically, that count.
The GFC was far and away the very worse financial crisis since the Great Depression. I’ve looked and can find no county able to report growth their economies throughout most of that time or event. In fact, just the opposite!
Some might say, it was war and war industries that finally turned the tide and or absorbed the unemployed?
I believe you give (economic illiterate) John Howard far more credit than he deserves, Graham.
It was mining boom mark one and the huge growth in the Chinese economy that underpinned his era and perceived economic success or growth.
In fact, some might even feel he squandered the rivers of gold from mining boom mark one, giving welfare to the rich and tax breaks to folks who didn’t need them.
Which in a normalised trend-line economy, became the structural deficit, we had to have?
The GFC is by no means over, nor are we isolated or quarantined from it! Nor is China, who we have become too dependant on, for our economic prosperity.
In fact the thing that caused the GFC, unrepayable debt,(64 trillion dollars worth of derivatives) is still percolating through and around many economies!
With our own terms of trade and export incomes declining as the first consequence of it and ongoing Chinese contraction.
That said, I believe we do need a change of Govt. If only to undo some of the worst excesses of the “green controlled” Gillard Govt.
Even so, credit where credit is due, and our own quite remarkable economic performance, in the face of the very worst financial crisis since the Great Depression!
Alan B. Goulding.
Comment by Alan B. Goulding — July 11, 2013 @ 11:26 am