There’s been a strange silence on matters economic from the Government since it was elected. Today, apparently, it is to be broken by Treasurer Morrison who is to say:
“Deficits are dismissed as temporary, cyclical and self-correcting. If it means services are maintained, then deficits are OK, just increase the taxes or increase the debt,” he will say in the first of a series of headline economic speeches planned over coming weeks.
A generation has grown up in an environment where receiving payments from the government is not seen as the reserve of the disadvantaged, but a common and expected component of their income over their entire life cycle, and not inconsistent with self-reliance.
There is a new divide – the taxed and the taxed nots.
There are some who seem to be wishing for a burning platform to bring about the changes that are necessary – as occurred in other jurisdictions, such as Europe and the UK – but I am not one of them.
I do not want my kids to know what a recession is and everything that goes along with that.
I recognise that in the absence of a ‘recession we have to have’, or the threat of ‘becoming a banana republic’, achieving necessary change will be more frustrating and more difficult. But it is no less necessary, and achieving it this way is far better than the alternative.
Having folded just yesterday to his own party on super reform this reads more like a plaintive whine rather than thundering sermon. Aside from anything else it is not really addressed at the Australian people but more his own party and Labor.
What Australia needs is a consistent narrative from the government for a post-mining boom reform agenda that envisions a freshly-minted competitive Australia that includes:
- mutual sacrifices from all on wages;
- mutual sacrifices from all on Budget repair;
- mutual sacrifice from all for genuine taxation reform, and
- mutual sacrifice from all for productivity, innovation and competition.
That of course flies in the face of most current Coalition policy which includes doing absolutely nothing that will upset household borrowing, protecting banks from scrutiny, giving in to super rent seekers, protecting miners from increased royalties and protecting real estate interests at all costs.
Mr Morrison’s speech sounds like the tactical decisions at a lamington drive run by a local church committee when what we need is some fire brimstone vision from pulpit.
It’s not all his fault. There’s no leadership coming from the PM. But Morrison’s lamington drive ain’t going to change squat.
