You have to give the ALP credit – they worked hard for this deficit, the worse ever recorded.
Their work and dedication in implementing the Carbon Tax has worked a treat. Companies looking to secure their bottom line are shedding workers and future investments to try and stay solvent; the Live Cattle Export industry mostly closed down until adults are in charge due to Ludwigs brilliant response to an unbalanced TV program has suffered an 86% drop in trade and Fair Work Australia has the government governing for maybe 18% of the population. (that part of the population that doesn’t invest billions and pay large taxes on their profits)
The Porous Border policy has added billions to the deficit just so Gillard can be different to Howard only to turn around and try and implement most of his answers. Being Gillard, of course she repeatedly stuffed it up costing hundreds of millions for every failure.
Laden with a huge deficit they are still talking about Gonski, National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and the NBN powers on, still without any published business plan.
MAJOR contractors handling the rollout of the National Broadband Network are charging the federal government up to 2 1/2 times the amount they are passing on to subcontractors who perform the work.
I don’t know about you but this statement from the Financial Times doesn’t fill me with confidence
With education the only point Gillard can still hang her hat on, she is adamant that Gonski goes ahead so she can have the word on her political epithat. Money is not the only answer to education problems – there is more to teaching than interactive whiteboards and quite frankly if the left wing Teachers Union support Gonski then I would look to question exactly how our kids will be better off with it’s implementation.
The NDIS, the only insurance scheme I’ve heard of without premiums, is certainly a feel-good idea and lends itself to guaranteed abuse if you don’t wholeheartedly support it. However it is tainted with the same problems as Gonski, NBN and a host of other programs – where’s the money, honey?
Henry Ergas in the Australian
Deconstructing Swan’s arguments is as challenging as picking a dead man’s wallet. Shop-worn tropes go round and round, like unclaimed bags on an airport carousel: Labor is the party of opportunity, a sentiment to which Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald and John Maitland are presumably living testimony; Tony Abbott, accused of every possible malfeasance short of starting a leprosy pandemic, would destroy what this country retains of good and true; and only Swan and his colleagues stand between Tony Abbott’s Visigoths and the “fair go”.
and just in case you don’t get the point;
As for Swan, he has become the Cheshire cat of Australian treasurers: his predecessors’ smirks linger, but their competence has vanished. Touchy, testy and tetchy, he scratches on; when he rises Tuesday fortnight, however, it will not be to grasp the future, but as the last gasp of the past.
The prize for missing the point has to go to Windsor who, in the middle of a biblical proportioned economic disaster demands a referendum to pacify the Rainbow activists. Tony, you have under 140 days to make your mark on the world that might compensate your electorate for your treachery – think it through man.