Malcolm should defect to Labor

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The path of true politics never did run smooth! Australia suddenly finds itself in the strangest of circumstances. Consider our developing political economy:

  • an historic mining boom turned bust and deepening global shock that requires major structural reform to improve competitiveness and productivity to avoid the worst outcomes;
  • blocked by a paralysed RBA and Treasury that have both horribly misjudged the cycle and are now engaged in desperately hiding the fact by defending a property bubble;
  • a developing policy platform from Labor that takes some major steps towards what is required in the reform of tax concessions (not perfect on super) to drive Budget repair, a transformational shift away from mis-allocated property investment, investment in education, and carbon policies to drive an energy revolution;
  • but lumbered with a dreadfully unpopular leader whose career of backstabbing is everything that polity wants to reject;
  • while the Coalition wrestles with rent-seeking demons that hold back just about everything that needs to be done including a Treasurer captured by the Property Council, carbon policies captured by its legacy of loon ponders, failed education liberalisation and no policy at all on wider tax concessions;
  • yet sporting a wildly popular leader who is perhaps the only rhetorician in the Parliament that can successfully sell a big reform agenda and who clearly hopes to drag his retrograde party towards the Labor policy platform.

Throw in pending questions over progressive social policy and it is quite clear that PMT is batting for the wrong team!

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.