The media drivel about the election is as widespread as it is wrong. ScoMo is not a saviour of anything. He lost LNP votes and was fantastically fortunate to regain them through preferences from people voting for change. Moreover he did so by promising to do nothing so what now can he do?.
Let’s run through Australia’s critical challenges and see what ScoMo will do about them:
- climate change: zero;
- gas crisis to metastasise into LNG imports;
- electricity prices to rise further;
- over-population to worsen;
- infrastructure deficit to rise;
- wages growth to fall away;
- no tax reform;
- no structural reform to the Aussie economy away from houses and holes;
- no competition reform;
- no innovation reform;
- no productivity reform;
- no banking reform, indeed the opposite in regulatory wind back;
- no monetary reform;
- action on China’s silent invasion is zero so far but let’s hope…
- US alliance, see above;
- Asia, see above;
- Pacific, see above.
What we will get is a short term budget surplus based entirely on the good fortune of dirt, tax cuts for the rich over the horizon, plus anything and everything to lift house prices, which will fail to ignite any new boom, running headlong into the next leg of the Chinese structural slowdown and bulk commodity crash in 2020/21.
ScoMo is another kick of the can of the broken Coalition political economy model commenced under John Howard and Peter Costello. We already know where this leads.
Expect the polity to grow ever angrier as they are lied to about income growth that never comes, wealth inequality that only gets worse, utility prices that only rise, the crush loading of every road, train, hospital and school, and ever greater corruption in corporate Australia.
That’s the Messiah from The Shire.
Hallelujah!
