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If I was to hop into a time machine, travel 20 years back and tell my past self that one day I’d look back on the Howard years as ‘the good old days’, my past self would think I’d lost my mind. Call it rose-coloured glasses if you will, but those long days were, from the high hill of hindsight, halcyon days of prosperity. After all, this was the time when Australia had no government debt.
Read that again: no government debt. Not a cent. It was exactly 20 years ago that the Howard government announced that the commonwealth had paid off all its debt.
Just two decades later, Australia is not just in debt, but in record debt: an unthinkable $1 trillion in gross debt. How did this happen?
Put simply, the adults on both sides of the political aisle left the room and the arts-law degree professional politician kiddies took over. Almost one of the first acts of the Rudd government was to literally give away money. Call it ‘stimulus’ if you will, but it was nothing more than giving voters thousands of dollars in up-front cash payments, to spend as they would. It’s only got worse since – $50 billion a year worse.
And now we have a finance minister who literally cannot understand what debt even is.
In a frankly jaw-dropping exchange in Senate Estimates, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher bragged that the Albanese government had made $114 billion worth of budget savings. On further questioning, the dumbfounded Gallagher clearly failed to comprehend that, by spending far more than that $114 billion, the government had actually increased debt. No, she insisted, they’d saved money.
Now, I’m not an economist’s arsehole, but even I know that spending more than you save is putting yourself in debt.
John Howard and Peter Costello, where are you when our country needs the likes of you again? […]
Because the Albanese government, especially but not exclusively, has fostered the growth of productivity-smashing union power, made new resource projects almost impossible, permitted low-skill mass migration and taken inordinate pride in growing what it terms the “care economy”, this express accumulation of new debt is a graphic symptom of our nation decline.
I’m reminded of listening to Julia Gillard bragging that her government was going to grow the economy by vastly expanding the public health and education sectors. It seemed to occur to none of the starry-eyed legacy media journalists listening that both of those are entirely taxpayer-funded.
Sure, some of our $1 trillion debt is offset by assets (such as the grossly overvalued NBN, supposedly worth $30bn, and the $200bn-plus Future Fund, another Howard government legacy) – leaving net debt at about $600bn but, as Costello said in my Sky interview with the former treasurer this week, you cannot trust Labor’s books or their creative accounting, meaning that gross debt is the only number with real integrity.
With a $997,000,000,000 debt comes big interest payments, with taxpayers now copping a $25bn a year bill – which is more than the commonwealth spends on public hospitals or childcare. And that’s forecast to rise to $37bn within three years as maturing bonds have to be rolled over at higher interest rates.
And, again, thanks to Gillard, Australia is saddled with the biggest debt-monster in its entire history.
In fact, the only government cost that’s growing faster than debt repayment is the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which the Albanese government is as yet unsuccessfully trying to restrain.
Hands up who thinks a socialist Labor government is going to actually cut the number of people already on the NDIS, or shrink their benefits, including taxpayer-funded gardeners, housekeepers, luxury cruises and even prostitutes?
Having voted to give themselves money, a great many people are clearly not going to be persuaded to stop. Notably, the highest rates of NDIS fraud are all in Labor electorates. Most of them dominated by Muslims, one of the most reliable voting blocs in Labor’s ever-dwindling core of voters (less than one-third of Australians, at the last election).
Given the Albanese government’s predilections, we all know what’s likely: government spending will continue to exceed receipts, debt will continue to grow, tomorrow’s taxpayers will continue to be burdened with higher taxes to fund ever higher interest repayments and our national decline will only accelerate […]
And don’t even get me started about the states, particularly Victoria, that if it weren’t for the implied commonwealth guarantee that ratings agencies tend to give, it would be declared belly-up bankrupt.
There’s no end in sight. Gallagher is just one of the cavalcade of dim bulbs running the clown-show Albanese government. Several of the most senior ministers, including the treasurer, are former students of a literal Marxist economist, at a time when the utter failure of Marxian economics was plain for all to see. Under the aegis of another of the Marxist’s proteges, Australian power prices have soared from among the lowest to the highest in the world. As a result, defence-critical and once-profitable industries, such as steel and aluminium, have either disappeared altogether or now rely on taxpayer-subsidised life support to survive.
Not since Whitlam appointed a communist as treasurer has Australia been so badly run. At least then, though, we had a John Howard to succeed Whitlam’s chaos.
Who is there we can turn to, now?
