By Con George-Kotzabasis
June 28, 2016
Since the economically profligate Whitlam era, the
only Labor government that was bracketed off from Labor’s inveterate stupidity
was the Hawke-Keating government. The present leadership of Shorten-Bowen
taking a leftist turn in its politics, like the Rudd-Gillard administrations
had done, as adumbrated in its pre-electoral commitments of “big-government,”
is repudiating the prudent policies of Hawke-Keating and wilfully adopting,
retrogressively, the stupid and disastrous paradigm of European socialism that
had sunk Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Cyprus into the abyss of
bankruptcy, economic crisis, and political instability. Moreover, it is doing
so in the face when even the Scandinavian haven of the social democratic
Welfare state is severely clipped of its largesse, as at last has been realised
to be no longer economically viable. Anders Borg, the wunderkind as finance minister of Sweden, initiated the incremental
dismantling of the Welfare state, lowered taxes in the private sector, which has
galvanized the creation of new jobs.
Returning back home. The leftist political editor
of The Sydney Morning Herald, Mark
Kenny, is forecasting “dire trouble” for Labor on the debt and deficit front.
Terry McCrann, of The Daily Telegraph, ominously
declares “Shorten would plunge the country into greater debt”. And Henry Ergas,
of The Australian, claims that even
the latest backflips of Labor will not be sufficient to close the deficit gap
and its “mythmakers” will be tempted “to conjure revenue increases out of thin
air, just as the Rudd-Gillard governments did pointing to a golden future time
when receipts would soar.”
But to believe in myths and tales of future increases
in revenue, when The World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund slash
hopes of economic growth in the near future, is highly precarious, as it would
lead the country into complacency and prevent it from taking the necessary
measures to countervail a looming long recession. Furthermore, such a possibility
is strengthened with the present event of Brexit, which could ominously beget
both the dismemberment and the disintegration of the UK and the European Union,
whose widespread ramifications upon the geopolitical and economic spheres of
the world would devastate any prospects of economic growth for many years. And
it is most unlikely that there will be, like in 2008, another China to save
Australia from woeful economic distress.
Further, Labor with egregious lack of imagination and
foresight is not factoring-in such imponderables as a precipitous fall in world
prices of minerals in a context of world recession and the calamitous consequences
that would follow, hitting public finances to smithereens and engendering a
seriality of deficits with no hope of being reduced, with the outcome of
plunging the country into the abyss of bottomless debt and insolvency. Is Bill
Shorten going to be the “Maduro” of Australia, who, as the world price of oil
dropped to lower depths, as a socialist president of Venezuela, continued the
dissolute economic policies of his predecessor, Chavez, that turned the country
from contrived prosperity to real poverty, once the government coffers were
emptied, and indeed, into a hunting ground for dogs and cats to feed his
people?
It goes without saying, of course, that this is an
exaggeration and one could hardly imagine Australians shooting dogs and cats to
feed themselves. It is merely used as an example to emphasize the dangers overshadowing
an economy, when its Stewarts, the government, insouciantly do not take in
consideration future possible events that could dramatically affect the
economic course of a country and do not take prospective measures that would
shield the country from such catastrophic effects.
One asks the question why the smart as they come politicians
of Labor, such as Andrew Leigh, the assistant shadow treasurer of Labor, let
their guard down and are reluctant to prepare themselves for these
uncertainties of the future, believing that Australia somehow is protected by
divine mandate from the ills of world recession and that Australia’s “economy
is indestructible”, to quote Rex Connor, a minister in Whitlam’s government? For
people who have studied the policies of Labor over a number of years the answer
is simple and obvious. All their major policies are motivated by their
passionate belief in the socialist utopia. And the implementation of these
policies requires, according to this ideological schema, big and
interventionist government and hence, high taxes; and the redistribution of
wealth and not its greater increase are their priority. Despite the glaring evidence
showing that augmenting the size of wealth is the only and sure way to enhance
the standard of living of the ordinary people. The latter proposition has indisputable
historical precedents, as it was the flourishing and ever increasing wealth of
capitalism, that for the first time in history, pulled millions of people from
the hovels of poverty onto peaks of prosperity. But Labor is blind before this
historical fact. Like a drug addict Labor is fixed to its socialist doctrine and lives in a stupefied world of unreality
and wishful thinking.
The matchsticks foundations of socialism are collapsing
all over the world, especially in Europe, yet Bill Shorten’s Labor continues adamantly
to believe that from this wreckage one could still build the just and equal
society as envisaged by Labor’s quixotic visionaries. It is under this standard
of socialist ideology that Shorten undermines and repudiates the prudent and
pragmatic policies of the Hawke-Keating government, whose “Accord” between
employers and workers engendered a congenial milieu for investments and the
creation of new jobs with the consequence of increasing the living standard of
Australians. Bill Shorten’s silence about these productive structural reforms
and fiscal frugality of the Hawke-Keating era that had put Australia on a track
of prosperity is a contemptuous affront to the two architects of these reforms.
It was therefore rather surprising and amusing to have seen the two conductors
of this inimitable political and economic performance sitting on the front-row
of Shorten’s Launch of the Labor campaign, clapping at a leader who had
mockingly renounced their wise policies. For Paul Keating, especially, standing
next to Bill Shorten who had adopted and announced policies that would lead to
a “Banana Republic,” it must have been an exceedingly painful occasion. Perhaps
as painful as replacing Placedo Domingo with rock-and-roll.
I
rest on my oars: You turn now
