The old fashioned, but I think correct view, of spending public money is to approach it as if you were spending your own money, with immense care and prudence. There are a myriad of quotes from giants in history confirming this view, but the one that comes to mind is that from Franklin Roosevelt which 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.”
If you do not manage costs, you cannot manage debt and if you don’t manage debt, debt will manage you. Ask a housewife how much is in the bank and she will give you an answer. When Tim Lester from Fairfax Online asked Mr Tanner what the debt was, he was out by $6 billion dollars.
The Labor Party has become farcical in its management of the economy with a record debt in raw terms; a record deficit; a ceiling insulation national crisis; a School Halls Scheme; the BER which has turned into the Blatant, Enormous Rip-off; the largest capital infrastructure scheme initiated in the history of Australia; the NBN project, initiated without a cost benefit analysis; the Henry Tax Review hidden from sight like some mangy mongrel pet; the KPMG McKinsey Report being sat on by Senator Conroy; and the AGIMO’s data-centre Report being sat on by Minister Tanner. This crowd has the hide to talk about risk when their actions show, as far as risk goes, they are without peer. They have managed to create this much of a stuff up, topped up by $130 billion in Gross Debt and growing quickly and they are still only in their first term. The Labor Party now put on a new suit and earnest face, they look sternly down the barrel of the camera and say give us another three years, there is more we can do and I’m terrified that on this account, they are right.
Mr Tanner’s excuse for his lack of oversight on the ceiling insulation program was that he was in a kind of a rush so he “didn’t have time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.” Remember this is the Finance Minister of Australia speaking, not the child who forgot to do the drying up.
Labor party management is an oxymoron. Mr Tanner’s latest release of the monthly financial statements is so remarkable it is comical. The savings announced have reduced the size of the record deficit to a slightly less record deficit because even they do not have the capacity to spend these absurd amounts of money quickly enough. They are incompetent in delivering their own economic disastrous goals. Like the arsonist, who lauds as success that only 4/5ths of the house has burnt down. The reduction in the deficit is not because of an increase in revenues, just that they cannot write the cheques quick enough.
The graph below however, 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.
The Reserve Bank of Australia, said in its own words, this is one of the mildest recessions we have seen in Australia, yet it has been responded to by the biggest deficit on record.
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 as a successful afternoon in the aisles is something entirely different.
It is absurd to believe that these people can laud themselves as good economic managers, when they epitomise bad management in all its forms. Chapter 1 in the book of How Not to Manage Your Business should give the current Labor government as a premiere example.
The Labor Party snow job will be to continue to talk about wondrous things that are going to happen in the future, and then they will discuss problems in the present, and make excuses for the past. The Colation delivered 10 surpluses in the last 12 budgets we delivered. The contrast is clear.