The old fashioned, but I think correct view, of spending public money is to approach it as no different from that of spending your own money. Amongst a myriad of quotes confirming this view, Franklin Roosevelt summed up the principle by saying “Any government, like any family, can, for a year, spend a little more than it earns. But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse.”
Government’s that do not manage costs end up costing the taxpayer. The pink batts disaster is the most prominent example. We are now paying to rip out or fix much of what has been installed.
The 19th century French economist, Frederic Bastiat, once suggested, in jest, that one way to stimulate the economy would be to break shop windows. At least the regulatory standards in the glazier industry may have been more up to scratch!
The Building the Education Revolution (BER) is turning into the B… Enormous Rip-off.
Mr Tanner was so correct when he said that he had to get the stimulus spending out without dotting the i’s and crossing and t’s.
Labor party management is an oxymoronic farce. Mr Tanner’s latest release of the monthly financial statements is so remarkable it is comical. The savings announced are because even they cannot manage to spend the absurd amounts of money fast enough. No increase in revenues, just that they cannot write the cheques quick enough.
The graph below shows that they are still writing them pretty damn fast, another $2.1 billion in the past fortnight.
The Murweh Shire Council in Charleville tells me that they can build a kilometre of sealed road for $200,000. So in the previous fortnight this Government has borrowed enough money to fund the construction of 10,000 kilometres of road in regional Australia.
Campbell Newman tells me that the Clem7 tunnel cost $2.2 billion, so the Labor party in the past fortnight has borrowed a little less than the cost of the biggest road tunnel ever built in Australia.
If we take the median price of a house at about $500,000, the Labor party in the past fortnight has borrowed enough to buy a third of your average suburb, and apparently this is all normal.
And what is so dangerous about this is that it is not a one-off. This is turning into rolling extensions of debt.
Their fig leaf is to say that we are not going to be $57 billion under water for 2009-10. Mr Tanner says $48 billion instead. Is this something to be celebrated?
It’s still, in raw numbers, the largest deficit in the history of Australia. We are supposed to take that as a good result. This is the Labor party’s panicked response to, in the Reserve Bank of Australia’s words, one of the mildest recessions we’ve had.
The excuse for everything from the Labor party is that spending money is a good thing. There is a vast difference between spending money well and wasting money. To go shopping is one thing, to wander home with 300 pounds of boiled tomatoes is something entirely different.
It is absurd to believe that these people can laud themselves as good economic managers, when they epitomise bad managers in all of its forms. In fact, chapter 1 in the book of How Not to Mange Your Business should give the current Labor government as a working example.
No control of costs, no control of delivery and no desire to change. This leopard can’t change its spots. The Labor party hasn’t delivered a budget surplus since 1989-90.
The Coalition delivered 10 surpluses in the last 12 budgets we delivered. The contrast is clear.
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