Treasury leaders call out Chalmers for not having the intestinal fortitude to do what’s necessary: reduce this country’s massive debt. Isn’t our Treasurer expected to be tough, not just on the people who don’t vote Labor?
It’s one thing to be bagged by a subjective rival but when you get roundly castigated by people regarded as experts in their field, you really do need to think about your failings. This is what Treasurer Chalmers should be contemplating today after two former Treasury Secretaries have looked at the $265 billion worth of deficits over five years and have virtually said: “Not happy Jim. Not happy!”
Former Treasury bosses Ken Henry and John Fraser bothare shocked at the Treasurer’s apparent giving up on reducing his deficits that feed into an ever-growing pile of debt.
Here are the main points from a Budget report from the AFR’s John Kehoe:
- Our federal government debt is close to $1 trillion.
- By 2029-30, it will be $1.25 trillion.
- Interest paid on this debt is the second-fastest growing spending item behind the NDIS program.
- The interest cost is around $30 billion a year.
- Given our low unemployment, the people who know government numbers say we should have falling deficits and even surpluses!
- They say “spending restraint” is needed.
- Tax revenue collected is at 25.8% of our GDP or total national production of goods and services, which hasn’t been since 2000-01 when we had 10 years of surpluses.
- But this is trumped by Chalmers’s spending that’s now at 26.8%, the highest since the pandemic demanded a big spending government.
Ironically, Chalmers’ PhD was on Labor Treasurer Paul Keating, who actually did have the guts to cut spending alongside his Finance Minister, Peter Walsh, who really had guts.
Kehoe reminds us that it’s the 40-year anniversary of when Paul Keating told John Laws on 2UE that if we don’t get our economic story sorted, we could end up like a “Banana Republic.”
This is Keating in his own words in the AFR today: “It took four exhausting years to do, program by program, department by department – while the terms-of-trade shock followed the fundamental reform of the tax system the previous year, 1985 – very large income tax cuts, capital gains, fringe benefits, company tax cuts, imputation, etc.”
In those days, Keating had politicians who supported his efforts to beat down the deficits and inflation that were ruining the economy, a bit like today. In particular, Walsh even called Prime Minister Bob Hawke “old jelly back” because his boss would often bow to the political imperative and sidestep the some of the tougher decisions that Walsh and Keating wanted.
When Chalmers was asked why he couldn’t cut spending like his hero did, the Treasurer told the AFR: “Forty years have passed, our society is different. The demographic makeup of our country is different”.
While that might be true, I’ll tell you what else has changed — the courage of our politicians. In 1998, Prime Minister John Howard went to the polls promising a GST and just won. Now that took guts, Jim — real guts. And with Keating’s and Costello’s reforms, we had 20 years of no recession. No modern economy has done this.
That’s the pay off when your leaders have guts.
No doubt about it.
where is the productivity increase to pay for the debt?
The budget had nothing to do with the economy.
None of the policies espoused will have the economic effect JC tells us they will.
They are not designed to.
They are superfluous to the true intent of this supposed wealth rebalancing act.
This was a taxpayer funded couple of months of political advertising, by the end of which, budget night, every Australian of voting age had been bombarded and brainwashed by the new political catch cry of the Labor Party… “intergenerational inequality”.
Throughout this budget campaign The Government have not only confirmed what the young have always thought…”if I’m not successful, wealthy, or own a property, it can’t be my fault”… they’ve also shown them whose fault it is…THE BOOMERS.
And it doesn’t stop on budget night.
The reinforcement of this new political catch cry will rage on throughout the entire period the enabling legislation takes to make its way through the parliamentary process.
Any politician or party opposing this legislation will be branded pro-Boomer, anti-young trying to roadblock the young’s path to wealth.
This is the first shot in the Labor Party’s next election campaign where their aim is to divide the electorate on demographic grounds.
30% of the electorate are boomers, the rest are Gen Z and millennials.
So at the next election, the Labor Party will promote the choice at the ballot box as being between voting for;
(a) Parties who represent the 30% minority and want to keep the Boomers rich and maintain “intergenerational inequality” OR
(b) The Labor Party – the proven champion of the aspirations of the 70% young majority.
It is a political master stroke, the Coalition have no hope of countering it, and it will see Labor in government for ages.
My wife & I took in an elderly relative for almost two years. The relative was facing homelessness and we were all that prevented that from happening. We accepted below market rent for 1/2 our property which is basically a self contained flat. The relative got some support from centrelink to cover the rent.
This person had worked hard and paid tax all their lives but as they got older and their income fell, they simply could not find an affordable rental.
Anyway we got our taxes done this week and owe the ATO a few thousand bucks. Apparently we profited from subletting 1/2 our house and didn’t have enough expenses to offset the income, so we are now left with a tax bill for helping a family member out. All this while Anika Wells jet-sets around the country & brings her hubby to sports fixtures at the taxpayers expense. She then looks down her rather long nose at anyone who questions her. The sooner One Nation take the reins of this country the better, this government are a bunch of no-good Grifters who couldn’t run an applecart, never mind a country.
There’s no “Apparently” about it. You Absolutely profited from subletting 1/2 your house, and with taxpayer funded rent assistance contributing to some of the profit. If you didn’t want to pay tax you should have made it rent free, or collected the rent in cash and forgone the taxpayer funded component.
There’s no denying the current government are useless, but what can we do when the alternatives are worse?