The panic is clearly setting in at ALP HQ. After a bruising fortnight, on top of a year-long slide in the polls, Anthony Albanese is throwing money at every special-interest group his advisers can think of and hoping it sticks. His latest pork-barrelling is supposedly aimed at students.
Economists are warning Anthony Albanese against launching any more populist, pre-election, cost-of-living giveaways, arguing that a loosening of the government’s fiscal strategy will further delay interest rate cuts, keep inflation higher for longer and saddle Australia with higher debt.
With the Prime Minister coming under pressure in parliament over his pledge to wipe $16bn of student debts, education experts say wealthy professionals will benefit most from the plan.
Tell me this isn’t a Labor government. This is just a repeat of Labor’s socialist hero, Gough Whitlam, who made university free. Contrary to leftist mythology, though, the move did nothing to benefit the working class. The only beneficiaries were middle-class dullards who were too stupid to qualify for the scholarships and bursaries that funded 80 per cent of students under Menzies. Ultimately, Whitlam simply cemented generational middle-class privilege.
Once again, ‘the party of the worker’ are throwing money at middle-class professionals.
Australians who have completed postgraduate degrees in business and law could be $24,000 better off while doctors who paid full-fee for their medicine degrees may have about $35,000 of their debt slashed.
UNSW economics professor Richard Holden said the policy for a one-off cut of 20 per cent to student debt was “blatant vote-buying” in the vein of Queensland Labor’s strategy before the state election.
There’s an obvious political reason Labor is showering taxpayer money on well-off professionals: these are the very voters Labor has bled to the Teals. They’re university-indoctrinated enough to buy the left-wing nonsense of the Teals, but money-grubby enough to vote for anyone who’ll benefit their hip-pocket.
The move is also clearly aimed at buying off far-left university students who’ve fallen for the far-left poison of the Greens, but who aren’t smart enough to figure out that they’re being dudded.
It does nothing to help working-class voters, sinking under a twin housing and cost-of-living crisis. Now they’re watching their tax money get flushed down the gurgler of a desperate government on the nose.
“The government’s just acting like this doesn’t count, it’s just Monopoly money, of course it does count – it’s going to add up to another $16bn to net debt,” Professor Holden said.
“There’s going to be this strong temptation to do it, but anything that looks vaguely like the Queensland electoral strategy is going to be very inflationary” […]
[Professor Warwick McKibbin] labelled Labor’s student debt policy as “very problematic”, and was also concerned the government was loosening the fiscal purse strings in the lead-up to election.
“We saw in Queensland how much money the Queensland government was willing to put on the table to win the election and most politicians behave that way. Labor and Coalition,” Professor McKibbin said.
The Australian reported after the Queensland election, at which Labor lost power, that Mr Albanese was under internal pressure to mimic former premier Steven Miles’ cost-of-living strategy, which included 50c public transport fees, free school lunches and vehicle registration discounts.
All eyes will be on the Reserve Bank of Australia meeting today. Although an interest rate hike is judged to be unlikely, it’s not entirely off the cards. If rates go up again any time before the next election, Albanese is toast.
Following a string of big-spending state and federal budgets this year, the central bank’s board pointed to the strong growth in government expenditure – which hit a record 27.3 per cent of GDP in the June quarter – as one of the factors that is prolonging its fight against inflation.
Like Steven Miles in Queensland, too, it’s likely Albanese’s cash splurge will be wasted.
Nothing Albanese has announced for at least the past year has cut through with voters. Elected on a grotesquely low 32 per cent of the primary vote, Labor has been in a precarious position from the start. But it’s clear that Albanese blew what little political capital he had with the disastrous voice referendum. Labor have been sinking further and further in the polls ever since. Tax cuts, an amped-up Aussie version of KiwiBuild... nothing has done a thing to arrest the slide.
On the other hand, skyrocketing mass immigration, spiralling electricity prices, ever-increasing grocery prices and brutally unaffordable housing have voters ropeable.
