Re: Aus Federal Politics thread (VII)

[skully]

MrK posted it yesty and I also complimented her on showing some signs of human-ness.

[lardbucket]

ah, mea culpa.

[skully]

Nice Tits is a bit yesty, and it was in the Doomsday thread, so no mea culpa required.

[skully]

The Goose ever so gracefully trying get the economy's head above water - and failing.

[lardbucket]

The Goose ever so gracefully trying get the economy's head above water - and failing.

Just wanted my kayak and edit too.

[Bradman]

Yer kidding me, h. The Aus economy was going gang-busters under LJH and Smirk. So much so that the excellent state of the Surplus (when just enough idiots decided it was time for a change - I bet they regret it now) allowed the idiot Pinkos to very wastefully spend their way through the GFC, something they have continued to do to the tune of $250 Billion, yet the economy is still so farked that even 8 rate cuts in 2012 has not brought any life to it. There are a million bogan tats out there with "Thanks Kruddy" in small print underneath. Get those Pink blinkers off for just once in your life.

Equally there were not 17,000 (yes that's this year's total) boat people flooding into Christmas Island costing tax-payers millions a day to accommodate. There were ZERO.

And can someone please tell me what this "excellent investment pipeline" the Goose keeps talking about is?

"Yawn". Mining boom mk! and totally wasted on middle classs welfare rather than infrastructure which would have seen us get through the GFC.

Howard and the smirk couldn't run a corner store or even a coffee plantation without some govt help and some brown paper bags.

[embee]

Middle Class welfare did get us through the GFC

The paid off debt was re-mortgaged ...if we'd infrastructured up during the Costello years with useless things like School Halls then there would have been no money to stimulate the economy

[horace]

imagine our politics if the French had been successful following is from ABC Online

More has emerged about a little-known French proposal to invade the British colony at Sydney Cove more than two centuries ago.University of Adelaide researchers have been investigating explorer Nicolas Baudin's travels of the early 1800s.

They have translated a document written by his expedition's chief zoologist and say the plan will now be published in full in English for the first time.

The confidential report was prepared for Napoleon's government in Paris and the official draft is now held by a French museum.

Associate Professor John West-Sooby said part of the document explained how the French could attack the colony and wrest it from the English.

"He considers two options, the first is just to destroy it, but he recommends that the French would actually then keep the colony once they've taken it because it would be useful for French interests and it would be a shame to waste all of the good work that the English or the British had done," he said.

[skully]

A Goose assessment from people who can run a business

"While Wayne Swan talks endlessly about Australia’s economic positioning compared with his G20 peers and others, the CEO’s give him 3.3 out of 10 for economic management – and this is an improvement on the number given just last quarter!

Only a third of respondents thought the economy was in good shape. Some 45 per cent thought it was bad. As for the future, well 71 per cent say unemployment will be higher at this time next year and 69 per cent say government debt will be higher."

And the punters aren't to chuffed with the Pinkos either

"The final Newspoll for the year, published in The Australian newspaper, shows Labor's primary vote has dropped from 36 per cent to 32 per cent, its lowest level in six months.

Support for the Coalition increased from 43 per cent to 46 per cent.

On a two-party preferred basis, the Coalition has opened up an election-winning lead of 54 per cent to Labor's 46 per cent."

------------------------------------------------

That fool Craig Emerson was on Sky this morning and was blaming the vicious smear campaign launched by the Libs at the Vulture for the bad NewsPoll result. When Kieran Gilbert said "but didn't the Pinkos start all this with their aggressive misogynist against Abbott" he blew bubbles for the next 5 minutes.

What an embarrassing hooman bean he is.

[Paul Keating]

Emerson is a try hard

[horace]

emerson is a dolt

[skully]

The Vulture is a twat to allow nongs like Emerson and Bradbury to front the media and do her bidding. They rarely fail to embarrass themselves and their party. They are obviously the biggest attention whores the Pinkos have on offer.

[horace]

nothing compared to the monk and his bishops

[JGK]

The Vulture is a twat to allow nongs like Emerson and Bradbury to front the media and do her bidding. They rarely fail to embarrass themselves and their party. They are obviously the biggest attention whores the Pinkos have on offer.

Neither are as bad as Pyne.

[horace]

...aah yes forgot the forgettable toothless yapping attack poodle

[skully]

The Vulture is a twat to allow nongs like Emerson and Bradbury to front the media and do her bidding. They rarely fail to embarrass themselves and their party. They are obviously the biggest attention whores the Pinkos have on offer.

Neither are as bad as Pyne.

IYHPO.

[JGK]

The Vulture is a twat to allow nongs like Emerson and Bradbury to front the media and do her bidding. They rarely fail to embarrass themselves and their party. They are obviously the biggest attention whores the Pinkos have on offer.

Neither are as bad as Pyne.

IYHPO.

IDKWTM

[skully]

I'll give you a hint. The Y is for Your and the P is for You.

[JGK]

IGU

[skully]

G

[JGK]

For the True Believers (and of course my Tory friends if they feel the need to be educated by someone other than me).

Christopher Pyne and the dangerous fantasy of surplus

BERNARD KEANE
Crikey Canberra correspondent

Christopher Pyne, yesterday: "Well if there had been a Coalition government for the last five years, Kieran, I think most people accept that we would have had continuing surpluses."

Whether "most people" accept that might be a matter for pollsters, but it's easy enough to use historical data from the budget papers to work out the maths for Pyne's claim.

Under the Howard government, spending rose an average of $14.5 billion a year between 2001-02 and 2007-08. Assuming this rate of growth had been maintained and there was no attempt to respond to the impacts of the global financial crisis (even though Malcolm Turnbull supported the Rudd government's first set of stimulus payments), the Coalition would have indeed recorded a surplus in 2008-09, but then sunk over $16 billion into the red in 2009-10 and nearly $14 billion into the red in 2010-11, due to the sluggish recovery in revenue growth -- something they've steadfastly refused to acknowledge in their attacks on Labor's fiscal management. In 2011-12, they would have managed a balanced budget.

So, for Christopher Pyne's statement to be even close to being right, the Coalition would have needed to find an extra $25.7 billion in revenue, or find $25.7 billion in cuts, between 2008-09 and 2011-12 just to get back to balance, let alone generate surpluses. And that's without a skerrick of stimulus.

So, pop quiz for Pyne: which new taxes would you have put in place, or which programs would you have cut, to address that $26 billion gap?

But wait: if there'd been no stimulus, the rate of unemployment would have gone up to perhaps 7% or 8%, significantly increasing transfer payments. Consumer and business confidence would have collapsed, with resulting falls in retail and other spending. In the resulting recession, more firms would have collapsed, sending still more people onto the dole queues. Personal income tax revenue would have fallen, GST revenue would have fallen, as would corporate profits, further slashing billions from Commonwealth and state budgets. Putting aside the inconvenience of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Australians, Pyne's Coalition would have had to have found billions more in revenue or cuts in order to keep their surplus.

And, of course, those resulting cuts or tax rises would have driven further economic impacts, slowing the economy further, undermining revenue further, necessitating more cuts or tax rises. You get the point.

The only means of stimulating the economy would have been monetary policy, even though interest rates went down to "emergency lows" under Labor and the majority of mortgage-holders didn't cut their payments, preferring instead to pay down their debt faster.

That's not a projection or a fantasy, that's the brutal reality of what is happening in Europe right now: in an effort to adhere to a particular fiscal policy regardless of its economic impact, the EU is in a depression -- yes, a real, 1930s-style depression -- that keeps pushing its fiscal targets further away, never mind the 50% youth unemployment and social dislocation. Austerity doesn't work even at its specific goal of curbing government debt. It's Sisyphean economics and it's destroying a generation of European workers.

What is a fantasy is Pyne's statement, of course, predicated on the broader fantasy peddled by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, that the election of a Coalition government next year will magically reset Australia to the Howard years, instantly returning us to a point before the GFC-cruelled revenues, before consumers returned to historical rates of savings and before mining companies began ramping up investment, when the principal task of the federal government was to figure out how to blow the windfall revenues that piled up every year.

That's a political fantasy and good luck to the Coalition in trying to sell it. Maybe enough voters will believe it, who knows. All's fair in love and politics.
The more dangerous fantasy, the one that can and will harm the economy, is the one that insists that budget surpluses are the key goal of economic policy, rather than a tool in the service of broader economic outcomes. Whether you believe it because you're stupid enough to think governments are just like households and must always "live within their means" or you believe it because you have a pathological hatred of debt and think government is always too large, not matter what size it is, it means substituting ideology for thinking, and substituting the means for the ends.

The result is a polity incapable of coherently responding to changing economic circumstances, of doing what the Rudd government did when face with the challenge of the GFC and retooling its economic approach to preserve jobs. Just ask the Europeans.

[embee]

26 bill over 4 years is 6.5 billion per year ...about the cost of the failed immigration policy of the pinkos

[skully]

PMSL@JGK quoting Crikey as a reliable source of unbiased political information. You have zero cred, man.

[JGK]

26 bill over 4 years is 6.5 billion per year ...about the cost of the failed immigration policy of the pinkos

It's the same policy as the other mob (who started the wars that give rise to the influx in the first place).

[JGK]

You have zero cred, man.

From you skulls, on political and economic matters, that is a compliment. Many thanks.

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