I guess the writing is on the wall. Following yesterday’s Alzheimer confessions by Ross Gittins and Robert Gottliebsen that we should be concerned about the sellout of Australian youth in mining and property, today we get The Pascometer covering his tracks with ladles of empathy.
For Gittins is the failing mining boom that has so betrayed our children:
Now we’re in the final throes of the decade-long mining resources boom, it’s a good time to reflect on how much we got out of it (not all that much, remembering it’s all our minerals) and how well we handled it.
…Was any effort made to assess whether attempting to build 180 resource projects in three years was in the national interest? Yes, but the economists left it to the lawyers… the macroeconomists were away at the time.
When it was he that was cheerleader-in-chief in the 2010-12 period:
We don’t have Dutch disease because that describes a situation where the resources boom soon subsides, leaving the economy marooned. In our case, the boom seems likely to run for decades because it’s built not on some cyclical surge in commodity prices, nor the exploitation of a single mineral deposit, but on our prime position as abundant supplier of resources to the Asian region – China, India and the rest – while those countries build the almost endless infrastructure needed to become developed economies.
For Gotti, it is the impossibility of house price falls owing to policy:
This chain of policies and events has been set up to benefit the baby boomers, plus those a little older or younger, to the disadvantage of the next generation. The youngsters take it on the chin — perhaps they don’t know any better.
Perhaps they take it on the chin because cheerleaders-in-chief like Gotti systematically disenfranchise them by perpetually defending the interests of chaps like Highrise Harry.
For The Pascometer it is supply that causes him woe:
Turns out that it might not be the reviled “1 per cent” – the vastly overpaid chief executives, investment bankers and corporate lawyers – who are driving greater social inequality in developed nations.
It’s more likely to be you.
That’s assuming you’re an owner-occupier, as roughly two-thirds of Australians still are. Now that you have your castle, you want to defend it.
You want to see it rise in value, and the best way to do that is to limit further housing in your neighbourhood.
Yet The Pascometer is both mining and real estate cheerleader-in-chief, with his famous “you ain’t seen noting yet” drivel at the peak of the boom, as well as being happy to appear in Lend Lease pamphlets to whip up demand in early 2012 as that prediction began to collapse.
It’s worth no more of yours and my time than that but we should neither forget nor forgive when these gentlemen’s brown stuff hits the fan.
