God spare us from PMs determined to make their ‘legacy’. Gough Whitlam saddled us with capital-M ‘Multiculturalism’. Malcolm Fraser set decades of social dislocation and terror threats in motion, with his 1975–76 “Lebanese concession”. Kevin Rudd’s policy brainfarts are too many and too costly to list, but let’s just use the NBN as an example: $70 billion (over double initial costs) and nothing like Rudd’s grandiose promises.
Julia Gillard really swept the pool, though, with the NDIS. While the basic idea of a National Disability Insurance Scheme is not an ipso facto bad one, with typical left-wing efficiency it was implemented in the worst possible way. Not least that its funding is demand driven: more cowboys and grifters have shoved their snouts in the trough and often to the detriment of the genuinely disabled. The NDIS is on a fast-track to become the single largest black hole of debt in the government’s budget.
‘Hold my shandy,’ says Anthony Albanese.
Almost every prime minister seeks to leave a legacy. It’s clear Anthony Albanese wants his legacy to be universal childcare – where everyone with preschool children will be able to access childcare at a low, flat daily fee.
First off: why? Does it strike no one that there is something very, very, wrong with a society that is apparently so determined to farm out its precious offspring to the state as early and for as long as possible? Why are so many parents apparently so keen on working shitty jobs that they hate and on missing out on the priceless joy of their children’s formative years? Why do feminists hate children so much?
And how are so many women bamboozled by the lie of ‘free stuff from the government’?
The facts that such an arrangement would be ruinously expensive, may not even be possible and will favour those parents in the top quartile of the earnings distribution don’t seem to concern him unduly. His close feminist pals are fully on board, and he is determined to deliver.
Childcare assistance is among the top 20 largest-spending programs. In the financial year, $16bn will be spent subsidising childcare fees. Fee subsidies are currently determined according to household income on a sliding scale up to a $533,000 limit. Any extension to a universal, flat-fee model would be extremely expensive.
The Productivity Commission estimates it would add another 60 per cent to the annual cost of childcare fee subsidies. By 2028–29, spending on childcare fee relief would be close to $30bn were the universal flat-fee arrangement to be in place. On the face of it, it looks like another NDIS in the making.
Interestingly, I read a recent piece claiming to be from a female Liberal voter ‘with right-leaning views’, listing what she claimed was the road to the coalition winning back women voters. Notably, it was little more than a list of shallow, petulant demands for ‘free stuff’: tax breaks for women, a year’s paid maternity leave, ‘free mental health sessions for new parents’ (which we just know really means ‘new mothers’) and ‘free women’s physiotherapy for new mums’.
And so it went on. With the added fatuous claim that “women will vote for other women” (as always, flip the script: try arguing that men will vote for men and wait for the deafening screeches of ‘misogyny!’).
And, of course, no bourgeois feminine list of demands is complete without a clamour for subsidised childcare.
Well, OK, Karen: who’s paying for it? Because someone has too, if you’re so keen on dumping your kids on strangers.
In the meantime, that yawning void of debt, caused by all the doling out of ‘free stuff’, is getting dangerously wide.
Of course, these annual losses must be covered by more government debt. By 2028–29, it is estimated government debt will be more than $1.2 trillion, or 37 per cent of GDP. Net debt will be about 23 per cent of GDP.
If voters are too greedy and stupid to notice, rating agencies very much are not. These are the people who determine how much it costs the government to borrow more money and pay off what it already owes.
The ratings agencies begin to worry when government debt rises above the 30 per cent mark in a small open economy such as Australia’s. It will be net debt that is more important, but adding in the rapidly increasing state government debt and this trigger figure is quickly arrived at.
A plausible assumption will be made that the commonwealth would bail out any state government that got into financial trouble. The fact S&P warned the government (and the opposition) of its unfunded spending plans prior to the election was highly consequential.
Much as he blithely dismissed S&P’s warnings during the election campaign, even Albanese knows the consequences of a lowered credit rating. So, very likely, he will try to avoid that happening. But he won’t dare go back on his childcare promises.
If you won’t cut spending, then there’s only one way out: raising more revenue. Which, when it comes to government, only means one thing: more and higher taxes.
Almost certainly, taxes on Australians’ hard-earned wealth, savings and superannuation.
This is where the stalled plan to levy a 30 per cent rate of tax on superannuation balances of more than $3m comes in, a dollar figure that would not be indexed. The key factor that has delayed this plan is the intention to tax unrealised capital gains as a means of operationalising the measure. This aspect of the new measure suits the Labor-aligned industry super funds, including the damage done to the self-managed superannuation sector […]
By failing to index the cut-off point, it will drag in more and more superannuation members over time.
The crying when harsh reality hits the fan will be epic.
But, hey, at least you got to dump those burdensome kids on strangers while you pursued your precious ‘career’ at that job you hate so much.
