Throughout the day I got to read Paul Kelly’s piece in the GG today. It’s titled “The boom that got away” and for anyone interested it’s here: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22732678-28737,00.html

Oddly enough I didn’t see any commentary about it here or elsewhere in the blogosphere, which is a pity because it really is a ‘must read’ piece. Kelly points out that the country is being lead by cowboys who gambled that they could ride back into power by throwing the surpluses of the last few electoral cycles into middle class welfare and endless tax cuts and not create inflation if their much heralded “Work Choices” could somehow drive up productivity (presumably by making unit labour costs lower, but I’ll leave that to the economically numerate to debate.) They gambled and they lost. But that’s not the worst of it, because they’ve now bequethed us such a corrupted political process, based on ignorance and greed, that this can go on forever. It can’t.

Of course we all know that once Howard charged out of the gate with thirty something billion to spray around Rudd had no choice but to do the same, or get wedged with ‘high taxing’ Labor. So puff, up it went in smoke, more plasma screens than we know what to do with, and p!ss the surplus up against the proverbial wall.

There are some of the best lines of newsprint in this entire campaign in Kelly’s piece today, and they bear thinking about:

“The core Howard-Costello strategic misjudgment this term looks stark. They fuelled too much demand with too little supply-side reform. They misjudged the strength of the boom (like many chief executives) and redistributed too much income from the surplus into households while relying on Work Choices to act as a productivity-raising and anti-inflation weapon. It never came together, and this miscalculation may prove fatal. ”

Of course Rudd gets tarred with the same brush, and I for one can only hope that he really (yes really!) is a fiscal conservative. Maybe we wake up on the 25th and he tells us we’ve been dreamin’ if we thought we’d be getting off with just spending our way to nirvhana.

It’s worth thinking about.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/rudd-n10.shtml

“A Rudd Labor government is shaping up to be the most right wing in post World War II history.” ”

Yes… This was from a Trotskist grouplet whose main claim to fame is that its one-time world leader, the late Gerry Healy, was the ugliest Trot thug ever, and yet managed to sh*g his way through the young female membership by telling them it was all for the revolution.

http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

One might have thought that these lefty parasites had thus excelled themselves in betraying the working classes, but Healy was replaced by an every more wretched character, whose main claim to fame is this:

http://community.livejournal.com/trotskyism/3890.html

Urrrhhhh…

If Kevin Rudd is elected PM in two weeks, he'll owe his high office in no small part to the effectiveness of his campaign to "ease the household squeeze".

Rudd has successfully left the impression with voters that he is the only political leader who's been listening to their concerns about cost-of-living pressures. He's also left the impression that, unlike John Howard, he'll do something about these pressures.

But will he? Or more importantly, can he?

Certainly Siobhan Turney thinks so. Siobhan and her husband Brad were interviewed on the ABC's AM program on the morning the Reserve Bank announced the sixth interest rate rise under the Howard Government since 2004.

Siobhan agreed she'd have interest rates on her mind on November 24: "For sure," she said. "While I understand that the Government isn't solely responsible for the increase in mortgages, I do believe that Labor may well have an impact on some of those extra expenses . . . and make some strategic differences so that the average person's cost of living is reduced."

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22737895-5005374,00.html

Well done Judy, it annoys me how media types comment on things they know nothing about nor even bother investigating.

For anyone wanting a simple and factual summary of Oz economic reform I recommend an article in the Age by Henry Haszler, research fellow in the School of Accounting, Economics and Finance at Deakin University.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/imbalanced-accounts/2007/11/07/1194329315407.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1