The Labor Government's naive attempt to stimulate world economic malaise from an Australian retail spend-a-thon is soon to be judged as an outstanding success or as profligate waste of an opportunity to create a long-term boost to infrastructure, said Senator Barnaby Joyce, the Leader of The Nationals in the Senate.

“Today we have Government ministers behaving like spruikers at a bargain basement sale, exhorting recipients of $8.7 billion of payments to spend. They’ve got the boot full of vacuum cleaners and they are ready to sell, sell, sell. Instead of long-term employment on infrastructure projects we will have imported plasma TVs.

“Consumer spending in Australia is a miniscule stimulation of other economies that actually produce the products that we buy,” he said.

“Instead of a future asset to sell we will have an increase in the social disaster of certain vulnerable households exacerbating current social problems with the arrival of, not so much a solution, but a multiple-thousand-dollar problem. Instead of a long-term increase in pension payments we have a package that has plucked an amount out of thin air that squandered those funds for a long-term solution.

“The world is concentrating on infrastructure as it acknowledges that the peel-off in employment has to be absorbed into government infrastructure projects. The stock malaise is the harbinger for future unemployment and that is where the Government has to have the capacity to mitigate the serious effect of this crisis. Our Prime Minister has spent the money in the surplus on a project with no efficacy so we will have to borrow it back in the current economic credit crisis for the future real unemployment problem.”

Senator Joyce said the Australian political “aviator” unfortunately lacks the critical Howard Hughes quality of economic foresight. “There is going to be no increase in domestic capital, just a very brief increase in volume at established retail store tills. Unemployment is coming but the money will be gone.”