I am not exactly a greens fan, but they are making sense in a scenario that is starting to look Whitlamesque:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/530 ... ay-greens/The legislation includes a bill allowing the government to increase the limit it can borrow - from $75 billion to $200 billion - to service debt.
The Australian Greens meanwhile say, the Rudd government's economic stimulus package contains a $2.42 billion "typo".
It was an indication the $42 billion package was prepared in haste, leader Bob Brown said.
Senator Brown said there were errors in the legislation which highlighted the need for further scrutiny.
"A $252 million defence housing proposal turns up as $2.42 billion in the bill itself," he told reporters in Canberra.
"We're told it is a typo, but it's a multi-billion-dollar typo and it's an indication that this was done in haste."
Then there is Peter Costello in The Age:
“The Rudd you voted for is not the one you got.” by Peter Costello, MHR for Higgins.
The PM has been revealed as a Whitlamite in conservative clothing.
EVERY now and then you see a change in the political spin-cycle that is so audacious, so contradictory that you have to go back and check the facts — just to make sure you haven't imagined the whole thing.
That's what happened on the weekend.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd briefed the newspapers that "the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed" and "social democrats (will have) to save capitalism from itself". That's what he's saying now.
Go to the record. Twelve months ago, on January 21, 2008, Kevin Rudd laid out the path for his Government as follows: "Prior to the election, we ran as fiscal conservatives. With the election behind us, we now intend to govern as fiscal conservatives … Today I announce a fiscal target that will guide our decision making … a budget surplus of at least 1.5 per cent of GDP … This will require a determined, disciplined approach to spending."
You see, Rudd the fiscal conservative of 2008 was attacking the Coalition government because it hadn't cut spending enough.
He promised to do more. He wasn't worried about all those "neo-liberal" ideas on careful spending, balanced budgets and low debt. He was complaining it hadn't gone far enough.
And by the time of the May budget (Rudd's first and only budget to date) he was boasting how much better he had done.
The budget speech boasted a surplus of 1.8 per cent of GDP "built on disciplined spending with the lowest real increase … in nearly a decade".
In other words, forget about all those weak namby-pamby Liberal Party budget surpluses. Labor would show who was really the tough economic manager. Last year Labor was billing itself as the true apostle of expenditure restraint and smaller government.
A budget is only a projection of what a government intends to do. The budget outcome records what actually occurred.
The 2008 budget bears no relation to what will actually happen. It should be filed with Labor's budget of 1996 — in the fiction section of the Parliamentary library. It has no other use.
Then comes the change of the spin cycle. All those ideas of expenditure restraint and small government? Just a failed experiment; a load of nonsense. (And the biggest nonsense of all was the TV ad Labor ran before the 2007 election where a beaming Kevin Rudd declares: "A number of people have described me as an economic conservative. When it comes to public finance, it's a badge I wear with pride." You can still see it on YouTube.)
Late last year the Government delivered more than $10 billion (1 per cent of GDP, 4 per cent of Commonwealth outlays) to pensioners and families and asked them to spend it before Christmas. Many didn't. Very sensibly they thought they should pay off some debt or put away something for the future. The Government urged them to spend it all at once so it could massage the retail figures in the December National Accounts.
Last week Treasurer Wayne Swan claimed the payment was successful because Woolworths had good sales results in December. If the purpose of the payment was to boost Woolworths sales, the Government should have bought the goods itself and then distributed them to pensioners and families directly. This would have got all the money out the door. But it is low quality use of $10 billion.
Now we are in the March quarter and there is nothing lasting to show for that $10 billion. So the Government is looking at new ways to massage the current quarter's results.
But in case everything goes wrong, it's not the fault of Rudd or his Government. It's all the fault of a great neo-liberal conspiracy — and you guessed it — the Liberal government.
No Australian bank has suffered a run or collapse. In fact our major commercial banks are all in the top credit bracket of the world's banks. There has been no regulatory failure in Australia. The only institutions that have had trouble are those debenture funds that had to freeze redemption because of Rudd's ill-considered deposit guarantee.
Rudd inherited a government with no net debt and a budget surplus of $20 billion. Which socialist or social democratic government did better than the Coalition in Australia? Name a country in a stronger position in 2007.
Rudd claims there has been a 30-year failure — enough to cover the Howard-Costello government, the Hawke-Keating government and the Fraser government, taking us right back to which economic success story?
You guessed it. Gough Whitlam.
It is hard to tell if Rudd was always just a big spending Whitlamite who managed to con the public with all that stuff about being an economic conservative or whether his dexterity results from the fact he has no strong economic convictions one way or another. His about-face from last year to this is a matter of wonder and awe. By normal political standards it is media spin that stands in a class of its own.
Personally I think the Labor government is over-reacting, and magnifying the fear and panic.
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