Fairfax’s Jessica Irvine has returned with another puff piece hailing Australia’s miracle ‘ponzi’ economy:
Australia is on the cusp of achieving something truly remarkable – not to mention unprecedented in modern world history.
In 26 days, as the clock ticks over to April 1, Australia will likely have bested the Netherlands to lay claim to the title of the longest economic expansion on record, entering our 104th quarter of economic growth without recession…
The end of the end of the mining boom is almost here. We made it.
We’ve escaped the resources curse which has defined our economic history.
Not only will we beat the Dutch, we’ve beaten the economic curse which bears their name, “Dutch disease”.
…several other economic winds blow in our favour.
Most notably, the skies have opened on our agriculture sector. Unleashing havoc in our cities, the rains have breathed new life into our exports of cotton, wheat and sugar.
And Asia’s burgeoning middle classes continue to underpin a boom in education exports, with foreign student numbers only likely to benefit further…
Lastly, state governments have finally begun to address Australia’s yawning infrastructure gap, most notably in Sydney, which has turned into one giant, rain-soaked worksite of late.
Let’s be clear, the chief reason why Australia is about to claim title for the longest run without a recession is because of our world-beating immigration-fueled population growth, which for more than a decade has run 2.5 times faster than the OECD average:
Strip population growth out of the equation and Australia has in fact experienced two per capita recessions since the official early-1990s recession ended in September 1991 – in Q3 and Q4 2000 and Q3 2008 to Q1 2009:
Moreover, growth in GDP per capita has plummeted over the past 12 years as population growth has surged, with the 10-year annualised growth in GDP per capita falling to levels below even the 1980s and 1990s official recessions:
And real disposable income per capita, widely regarded as best guide to standards of living everywhere, hasn’t gone anywhere in a decade as the despised US and its evil Mr Trump gallop ahead of Australians:
Irvine has also failed to acknowledged the other unsustainable driver of Australia’s record economic run: the obscene growth in household debt. Since the early-1990s official recession, Australia’s household debt has grown faster and is now much bigger than the other English-speaking nations:
And this has left Australia with the legacy of an unprecedented housing bubble that is forever at risk of bursting, bringing down the economy with it:
Accordingly, our politicians are wedded to short-sighted productivity-destroying policies – like mass immigration, distorted tax policies, and subsidies – to prevent housing values from falling.
The truth of the matter is that Australia has a ponzi-based economy driven by the combination of unsustainable levels of immigration and forever rising household debt and housing values, which is masking structural imbalances and falling individual living standards.
Get with the program, Jessica, you’re betraying your readers, your generation and your country.
